How to Save Your Own Life (15 page)

“I thought we had. Apparently,
I
discussed everything. Bennett didn't. That's one of the things that makes me so mad. I was always cast as the bad girl. He had to have
that.”

“God,” Michael said.

“Why didn't
you
tell me?”

Michael sucked on his pipe: “The same reason you didn't tell me about DeeDee, I guess. I knew about Penny and Bennett almost from the very beginning—just like you knew about DeeDee and her hippie. Why didn't
you
tell
me?”

“I thought it would hurt you. And I didn't want the responsibility for breaking up your marriage. Probably it was a way of shucking responsibility as much as anything else. I plead guilty.”

“Me too.”

We sat and contemplated each other, thinking how different things could have been if we both had known. Would we have had an affair, gotten together, left our spouses sooner? We were both momentarily silenced by the unreeling of the years.

“When did you find out about Bennett and Penny, anyway?” I asked.

“Almost at the very start of their affair. You remember where Penny and Robby's apartment was?”

“Right upstairs from you?”

“No. It was one stairwell over. But anyway, one afternoon, I came home for an alert, and because our stairwell was full of kids, I ran up the next stairwell and thought I'd take a shortcut through the maids' rooms. Who do I see at the top of the stairs —looking like a commercial for strychnine—but Bennett. He looks at me. I look at him. He averts his eyes. I think immediately: Penny and Bennett? Holy shit! He says ‘Hello Michael' with that psychiatric snideness of his. I want to say
'You motherfucker!‘
—I, always thought he treated you like dirt anyway—but I don't, of course, being a professional coward, and he trots down the stairs. After that I knew. Then DeeDee confirmed it. Penny told her everything in lurid detail, it seems. Everybody knew.”

This reopens my wounds. They bleed invisibly.

“Everybody?”

“Yeah. It used to kill me when I saw you and Bennett and Penny jogging around the track in your sweatshirts. Everybody knew about it but you. And Robby, I think. But then, he was having an affair with his secretary.... Frankly, I thought Bennett was immensely cruel to you.”

“Why didn't you say?”

“Nobody in their right mind messes with anyone else's marriage. You know that.”

I hung my head. “I thought DeeDee treated you cruelly too.”

“And you didn't tell me either. In fact, you drove her into town to meet her lover on one occasion.”

“I
had
to, she ...”

“Don't explain. I'm not blaming you. Really, it's just ironic. You had such a need to rationalize your relationship with Bennett, to tell yourself it was all okay. I don't think that even I—with all my conflicts about breaking up—hung in there as long as you did. You really tried.” He took my hand. I was beginning to weep very steadily, very quietly.

“Why do you think I hung on so?”

“Oh I don't know. We all have this peculiar need to rationalize our choices. Partly it's an inability to admit mistakes. Partly it's to present a united front to the rest of the world. If we admit our marriages are for shit, we're in part saying our lives are for shit. That's very hard. All those years committed to a mistake? Very hard to admit. So we defend the marriage, we rationalize. Until something jolts us really hard. In my case it was my father dying. You can't live with a person you despise —even if you're terrified of living alone. Life is too precious to spend it being contemptful.”

“I know. It's terrible to have contempt for the person you're married to—isn't it? That's the way I've felt for years. It's corrosive.”

“Remember the fall after we got back from Germany?” I nodded. “That was the closest we ever came to having an affair. You even seemed to want it—and I was ready for it in a way I just wasn't in Heidelberg. I was
incapable
of having an affair then—even though I knew about DeeDee's. Anyway, do you know why I didn't press it?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I knew that if we got that close, I'd have to tell you about Bennett and Penny—and I didn't have the heart to.”

“Oh Michael,” I said, springing out of my chair and hugging him. I was grateful to be reminded, after eight long years of marriage to a robot, that there
are
men in the world for whom sex and intimacy are related.

Michael rocked me in his arms and we both cried a little over the past, the miserable years in Germany, our broken marriages, the love affair we never had. Then he moved out of my arms decisively, but tenderly.

“I'm going to make you chicken livers for lunch, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, somewhat disappointed. “I was rather hoping you'd fuck me—after all these years.”

Michael stood in the doorway smiling. “Listen. If a month from now you still want it, I promise I will. But I don't want to do it when you're in this state. I don't want to exploit your hysteria.”

“Who's hysterical?” I said, licking the tears from the corners of my mouth.

 

In the kitchen, he told me Polish jokes and recounted the anecdotes generated by a West Side clap practice. The livers were sizzling in the pan, my heart was aching, and all was wrong with the world. Except that, at such times particularly, it's nice to have friends. Especially friends who cook you chicken livers.

“Do you remember my broken leg?”

“How could I forget it? You were so fucking sexy in that cast. One time, I remember, you wore a black net stocking over it—and a red velvet rose at your knee. You were always hot for me, weren't you?”

“You
know
you're irresistible,” I said, not altogether mockingly. I was thinking of all the men I knew with whom I had tender, bantering, good-humored friendships. Why was I married to the one man in the world I couldn't talk to?

“You know the worst thing about Bennett's affair with Penny?”

“I don't know if I want to hear.”

There was a pause, during which we both listened to the livers sizzling.

“Well, do you?”

“No ... Yes, I do. I want to hear
everything.”
I wanted to open my wounds again, rub salt in them, and shriek my pain until I got it all out of my system.

“Her car was parked outside your apartment practically the whole time you were in the hospital.”

His words had the desired effect. I was crying again, long, choking sobs that seemed born out of my gut, my womb, my cunt. Michael put his arms around me and rocked me for a long time.

“Leave the bastard,” he said, “and then come back to me. Okay?”

 

That night, at home, I asked Bennett how he could have raged at me for breaking my leg when he was fucking Penny the whole time I was in the hospital. He looked impassive. At first he didn't seem to know what I meant. He was brushing his teeth methodically. I was sitting on the toilet seat cover staring at him hatefully. Finally, he took the toothbrush out of his mouth.

“You were always getting into accidents to deprive me ...” he said, as if he hadn't the slightest idea what he was implying psychologically.

“To deprive you! You! We were skiing on
ice,
if you remember. And it was
your
idea!”

“So I had an affair—big deal. Doctor Steingesser doesn't think that's any reason to break up our marriage.”

“What marriage?” I shrieked. “What marriage are you talking about? Your marriage to Doctor Steingesser or my purgatory with you?”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, I'm not being funny at all.” I got up from the toilet, marched into bed, and pulled the covers over my head. I lay there, savoring my rage. After a while, I could hear Bennett methodically turning off all the lights, locking the doors, padding down the hall in his scuffs. Finally he climbed into bed beside me. There was a moment of silence during which we lay side by side like two sarcophagus sculptures. The king and the queen. Both dead. Cathedral-cold marble.

Finally my lips moved. They were saying:

“I think you ought to get out of bed this instant because if you stay here a minute longer, I swear I'm going to go into the kitchen, get a knife, and cut your balls off. I don't want a divorce, I want to castrate you—simple as that. And you don't even have to interpret anything because I'm saying it straight out.
GET OUT OF THIS BED!”

Bennett grabbed his pillow and scurried into the guest bedroom.

 

Minutes went by. The clock ticked. My lips trembled and tears slid down my cheeks and into my ears. I remembered a song we used to sing in high school.
“I have tears in my ears from lying on my back in my bed while crying over yoooooo
...” but it didn't seem funny anymore. Someone walked by, down Seventy-seventh Street, carrying a transistor radio loud enough to pierce the hum of the air conditioner.

This was the bottom, the lowest point in marriage. Sleeping alone in the same house, unable to comfort each other. More alone than if we'd never met. Better to live in a cave like a hermit or to haunt singles' bars, cruising for one-night stands. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage. The bed might as well be a raft in a shark-infested sea. You might as well have landed on a dead planet with no atmosphere. There is nowhere to go. Nowhere. The soul sinks like a stone.

And out of that stony coldness, the flesh stirs—as if to affirm its own tentative life-force. The woman, degraded past all degradation, gets up out of bed, tiptoes down the carpeted hall, and slides into the narrow guest bed occupied by that stranger, her lawful wedded husband. The blue moonlight creeps in past the blackout shades. The old air conditioner whirs like a gardenful of crickets, and she presses herself to his still-warm body.

They might as well be strangers who met in a bar for all the intimacy between them—and yet it is also oddly exciting.

“Hey—what are you doing?” he asks.

“Feeling you up,” she answers.

“I thought you wanted to castrate me.”

“I do.”

The seriousness of her voice makes him hard immediately. It is their old familiar dance. Her broken bones, her accident-proneness, his sadism, his familiar cruelty. It excites her. He might as well be a rapist, a night prowler, a deliveryman invited in for a quickie. They are ice-cold and expert. She opens his pajama-bottoms. He feels for her cunt. He savagely stabs a finger in. It hurts, but somehow hurt feels right on this particular night. He stabs another finger in. She pivots on the bed, swiveling on his fingers, and takes his hard cock in her mouth, wanting to bite it off and seeing nothing but a bleeding root, a fountain of blood spurting all over the moon-blue sheets. But she teases it with her tongue instead. She nibbles around the root with her teeth, almost letting herself hurt him, but not quite. He moans. He is frightened but aroused. It would be so easy to hurt him—but still, she can't bring herself to. She would sooner hurt herself. Now he is rubbing her clitoris rather roughly and she wants him. She hates him, she despises him, but she wants his strange root-shaped cock inside her. It waits there for her, dark as an old tree stump, gnarled, almost inanimate—or dead. The sight of it excites her still more. He lies motionless, silent, the man who died with an erection and then grew harder as rigor mortis set in. She climbs on his upraised penis, swiveling on it, rhythmically rocking, using it as a dildo, coldly. Her orgasm comes in great concentric rings like the water in a still lake when a heavy rock is dropped from a great height. And then he is suddenly thrusting, thrusting, in search of his own. It is as if his orgasm were somewhere deep inside her and he had to find it, fish for it, hook it, reel it in like a wriggling fish. There. It catches. No, not quite. There. A nibble. He gropes blindly, then establishes a rhythm again.
Now.

She observes all this as if from a great distance, as if she were reading a book—and yet it also excites her. Reading often excites her. And often she does not know if she is writing or living.

There.
He's got it.
There, there, there, there, there....
The thrusting stops and he lies still again. No words. No grunts. Fisherman and fish both gasping at water's edge. What kind of a man is it who makes no noise at all when he comes? A dead man?

She feels tainted, ashamed, slightly necrophiliac. She climbs off his dead penis and lies there at his side, thinking. How could two people couple for eight years and yet be so far apart? They might as well be freight trains, locking together for a time, and then going off to opposite ends of the earth. And yet
he could woo me with words, she thinks, words would warm me....
But he doesn't know any words. Words are the only language he cannot speak.

Bennett left early the next morning. He was already gone when I awoke, alone in the big bed. What had happened? I dimly remembered creeping back into the bedroom to sleep alone. I wanted to fuck him, but I didn't want to see him afterward. After eight years, our marriage had all the intimacy of a one-night stand.

What was I doing there? I lay in bed, thinking of my posthumous life. Keats had been twenty-five and dying of TB when he used that term. I was thirty-two and dying of deadlocked wedlock. An incurable disease? I thought of a man I knew who had come home and told his wife he was in love with another woman. “I'm in love with her, but I haven't fucked her,” he said, thinking to spare her feelings. Incredibly enough, she seemed to believe him. “Can't you fall in love with me again?” she asked.