How to Save Your Own Life (16 page)

So many marriages, so many deaths. People getting up in the morning and going to work, coming home at night, fucking, feeling dead. No wonder they left, ran off with their secretaries, smoked dope at forty-five, discovered sex as if they were Adam and Eve in the garden, and paid and paid and paid for it. Lawyers' bills, alimony, houses sold for half of what you paid for them, children going to therapists, looking up at you with wounded eyes, furniture carted away, family heirlooms kissed good-bye, wounded husbands, wounded wives—it was all worth it if it made you feel alive again. In a pinch, we all know the truth: survival is all. The life-force is the one thing you can't afford to lose. Bennett and I had lost the life-force.

Didn't he feel it? Was he satisfied with this half-life we were leading? Bennett was a man who could have steak and steamed rice for dinner every night of his life and never get tired of it, never want a taste of caviar, a taste of tropical fruit. He got up every morning at 6:30, came home every night at 9:00, worked all week like an automaton, played tennis all weekend on a similar schedule, even skied that way on ski vacations, and was content to spend every August in the same shrink-infested sea. Were they in Vienna? Very well, then, we would go to Vienna. Were they at Cape Cod? We would go to Cape Cod. Follow the shrinks! Every August for the next forty years would be like that. We would have children and Bennett would stand over me, coaching me on penis envy (for the little girls) and castration anxiety (for the little boys). When the kids were old enough (five?) we would put them in child analysis. (How could child psychiatrists remain in business without the children of other shrinks? Who but a shrink's wife would shlep a kid to a shrink's office five times a week at a cost of forty-five dollars per session?)
That
was something to look forward to! Once my own protracted analysis was over, I could look forward to my kids'. We'd all be getting bettah and bettah all the time, and life would slip by in fifty-minute hours.

New York from September through July, the Cape in August. Every few years a Psychoanalytic Congress in Europe—just to break the monotony. We'd buy a bigger co-op—maybe on the East Side. There'd be an
au pair
for the kids, a summer house in some kosher shrink community like Wellfleet or Truro, the proper progressive private schools. Mommy would write little books. She'd be shocking, but not so shocking that Daddy would leave her. She would not, for example, write that her husband was a complete hypocrite in his private life. Oh, he had made that quite clear. It was one thing for her to write a book about a runaway wife and take the rap for having sexual fantasies
herself.
Oh, he approved of that. Women were rapacious, incorrigible, “infantile.” They had to be tolerated, patronized, shrunk. Did they choose badly in the bedroom and fall in love with heartless bastards? That was natural enough; they were hung up on their Daddies. Oedipal problems. Back to the shrink with you, little girl. Five more years of analysis. At least it fills up the afternoons when you might be seeing a lover. But how about your husband, Dr. Know-it-all, Dr. Face-up-to-yourself? What's he doing in his spare time? He's just “forgiven” you for your sexual fantasies, remember? He's just told you it's okay to act them out every now and then (as long as you feel too guilty to enjoy them, repent at once, come home to Daddy and go immediately back into analysis; as long as you admit that sexual fantasies are “immature”). He's “mature.” He is fucking a housewife in your study on the nights you teach (even though he doesn't resent your writing one bit). Mysteriously enough, he begins this passionate affair just as you begin to write seriously, just as you begin to feel that finishing a paragraph is perhaps more important than cooking a soufflé. The timing is very interesting, isn't it, Doctor? And what about this past year in which everyone has been praising you for being such a patient husband? Your outrageous wife, the notorious Isadora White Wing, bestselling poet/novelist, wrote a book whose heroine, the notoriously candid Candida, confesses to actually experiencing lust! And doing something about it! How revolutionary! Men all over America are commiserating with you for having such a filthy-minded wife and yet bearing it all so manfully. The heroine of your wife's book actually runs off with another man—and everyone believes that's the whole story—but marriage is far more complicated than fiction gives it credit for being. Your wife may have taken a flier, but you knew how to turn it to your advantage. It only consolidated your hegemony, didn't it? Especially because you made her feel good and guilty for it, didn't you? Especially because you never thought of telling her
then
that long years before
her
little fling, her miniaffair with a man who couldn't get it up, you had been having a serious, passionate affair with someone you really loved. Now you have told her—but you have also told her that if she ever writes about
this,
if she ever dares to expose the fact that you have sexual fantasies too, you will surely leave her. Some things cannot be tolerated. It is one thing to demythicize women, to expose one's self—but it is quite another to demythicize men, to expose one's husband. A man's hypocrisy is his castle. Tread softly; you tread on my hypocrisy.

Good. We have set the ground rules. I lie here in bed on a New York summer morning, not wanting to get up, not wanting to be married to the man I'm married to, not able to write (because the most momentous event in my recent life has been declared off limits to me). Jealousy is what I want to write about. Jealousy is the subject of my new novel. But I have been told I cannot write it. Bennett has made it quite clear that if I write explicitly about jealousy, he will not tolerate it.

He wants to tell me what to write about! He wants to tell me and yet at the same time be seen as patient and long-suffering by all the husbands in America.

He points out to me frequently that he and I have the same name and that my writing might be an “embarrassment” to him in his professional career. How did we get the same name anyway? An interesting story. We are linked by this name as some people are linked by children. We are linked by a name embossed on the bindings of books.

My name. Isadora White Wing. I am stuck with the “Wing” forever—whether I leave Bennett or not. My
nom de plume:
Wing. Whoever else I marry, whoever else I love, my name is stamped in gold on those fine morocco presentation volumes publishers give authors for Christmas, emblazoned on all my luggage, stationery, bookplates. The name used to have a certain crude irony—when I was still afraid of flying. It pointed toward a future of flight. It was ambiguous: perhaps Oriental, perhaps not. It was a little odd; no other writer had that name.

My maiden name was counterfeit also. Isadora White. My father was born Weissmann, shortened it to Weiss, anglicized
that
to White. So neither White nor Wing is authentic. Neither father nor husband supplies me with an honest identity. I should have taken matters into my own hands and
invented
a
nom de plume.
I thought about it for quite some time. Isadora I would have to keep—farcical as it is. It tells so much about my mother and me. Isadora must be the heroine of a comedy. And yet there is something touching in actually having been named that. My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.

So I took Bennett's name—perhaps unconsciously realizing the appropriateness of the pun. I had begun to publish poems under my maiden name, my little-girl name, the name that got A's in school, the name that was mocked in camp. You'd think that Bennett, with all his Freudian claptrap about the formation of character in the first three years of life, would have respected my attachment to my childhood name—but he was adamant. He looked at one of my early poems, published in a literary quarterly, and said ominously: “The poet has no husband.”

“But lots of women poets use their maiden names. It's almost a
tradition,”
I protested. He only glowered and coughed nervously. (Bennett's nervous cough was always more of a put-down than someone else's “Fuck you.”) It was clear that he considered my attachment to my maiden name to be a sign of my “oedipal problem.” Greater loyalty to father than husband. Unmistakable proof of infantilism.

“Does anyone ask
men
to change their identities when they get married? Would you like to be Bennett
White?”
More nervous coughs and more silence. Bennett stalks out of the room, leaving me feeling guilty. Perhaps he's right, I think. Perhaps I should show my commitment to the marriage by taking his name. And yet, it seems so illogical. My maiden name
feels
right: an old shoe. It
is
my identity. To give it up seems like an amputation. I am
not
Chinese, after all. And though White may be a fake, it is my own
father's
fake—while Bennett's name is an accident of transliteration made up by some American embassy clerk in Hong Kong. Some members of his family are Wong, some Wang, some Weng, some Wing—depending on the capriciousness of immigration officials. Why should I take this fluke of history as my identity simply because I happen to go to bed with its bearer?

But Bennett was one of the great guilt-inflictors of all time. Whenever I showed him my work in print, he glowered at the name attached to it. So much so that I had no pleasure at all in showing him my published work. Quite the contrary, I would try to hide it. He wanted to assert possession of me, and of my poems. He would not rest until he had stripped me of my name.

I thought of using my grandfather's name—Stoloff. But that was wrong too. Papa was not my father. To use his name would be to suggest incest between him and my mother. (That the incest
is,
in fact, there in spirit made me less than anxious to betray it in print.) And then there were the invented names I contemplated.

Isadora Orlando, after Virginia Woolf's androgynous pro tagonist; Isadora Icarus, after Stephen Dedalus; or just plain Isadora, after Colette. But none of those were right either. Too affected—all of them. Underneath the portrait of the artist as a young woman there is a blank area of canvas.
You
fill in her name.

I was still vacillating about names when my first book was accepted for publication. Isadora White or Isadora Wing? Isadora Orlando or Isadora Icarus? Isadora Isadora? I felt the decision to be momentous and irrevocable. I was in great pain about it. I could either please Bennett and displease myself or risk his wrath and keep the identity I had been honing since childhood. What a cruel choice! Like cutting off a foot to stay out of the war. And yet I was so in need of his approval that I did it. I became Isadora Wing—and Bennett opened his arms to me and my poems, and never had anything but praise for my work after that. Not until
now,
at any rate. Not until I hinted I had bartered my birthright for approval. Women always do. Or girls do anyway. I was not a woman then or I wouldn't have done it. But I am now. And now it's too late to do anything about the name.

I was trapped. Now that I had made the name
Wing
famous, Bennett wanted to tell me what to write. Apart from that I wouldn't ever care about the name anymore. Sometimes, it's true, I look at my name on a book and remark on the strangeness of it all. My grandparents from Russia and Poland, my parents from Glasgow, London, and Brownsville, and me with a Chinese name. At times I feel I have no identity at all. I float in and out of different souls. And, who knows, perhaps that is the best state for a poet.

Yet at times I still feel bitter toward Bennett. What right did he have to confiscate my childhood like that? (And why did I let him? Why was I so desperate, so unable to stand my ground?) I needed his love so badly that I gave him the deepest part of myself: my work. Bennett, who read and wrote so haltingly, had secured his place in American literature. From Hong Kong to
Who's Who
in one generation—and none of it by his own efforts.

 

Bennett should have married Penny. It would have been better for all of us. I would still be Isadora White. She would be Penny Wing—and I would be free to fly. I could write about jealousy—or anything. I would not have to keep myself within certain approved limits of rebellion. Lying there in bed, thinking about names, marriages, the past, I suddenly had the desire to call Penny, confront her, commiserate with her, scream at her.

As if possessed by a demon, I leapt out of bed, raced into the living room, and began looking for Bennett's address book. I found an old Week-At-A-Glance and became entirely engrossed, reading the appointment schedules, trying to figure out which appointments were really perhaps trysts (now that I knew about Penny, I didn't trust Bennett at all), and remarking with considerable astonishment on the fact that Bennett had noted down none of our social engagements or weekend activities but only his work-appointments. The Week-At-A-Glance was a complete microcosm of his personality: all work, no play.

At the back of the book were telephone numbers. I looked up P for Penny Prather. She had remarried. Her new husband's name was Forbes. There it was, under F: Penny Forbes. A true patriarch, Bennett had crossed out the old name and lettered in the new. A woman keeps changing identities with each husband. She never has a last name she can count on. With my heart thudding, I dialed the number from Bennett's phone. It was an area code in Pennsylvania. Faintly, the phone rang—and with each ring I grew more and more terrified. Finally, there was a click and the phone spoke in a robotlike electronic voice: THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED IS NOT IN SERVICE OR TEMPORARILY DISCONNECTED. PLEASE BE SURE YOU ARE CALLING OR DIALING THE RIGHT NUMBER. THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED IS NOT IN ...