How to Save Your Own Life (22 page)

She would not let them go, but held them captive in the lobby, ordering drink after drink, swallowing her sleeping pills with vodka, waiting for the pills to take effect, to quiet the panic, keep down the demons.

Jeannie clutched Bob's wrist with hysterical tightness, growing tighter and tighter as her fear of going upstairs to her room increased. She tried to convince them to stay with her—but when, at 3:00 A.M., they pleaded exhaustion, she downed another Valium—and leaned back in the lobby armchair to doze. They finally left her there, not knowing what else they could do short of both getting into bed with her.

 

In October she was dead. Already she was laid out in the funeral parlor, her children were called home from college, her husband and lovers all remarried her in death, and, the whole world over, schoolgirl poets were using her as the subject of their poems. She was ossifying into myth. Another suicidal lady poet. She, who had been so funny, so outrageous, so pure in her intuition and so warm, was being frozen into cult.

The weekend after her death, I was having my picture taken in Central Park by a fellow named Rod Thomas, who is a photographer and a poet and also a devoted fan of Jeannie's. Rod took me wandering through the park, where we reminisced about her and took pictures of me under trees, on rocks, in row-boats. They were supposed to be pictures for a new book of poems—but in all of them I looked so haunted that something kept us from using them. I'll never know whether or not the decision was wise. In none of the pictures did I look quite like myself—nor did I look like Jeannie, really—but some transmigration had taken place. Whether of the soul or of some other part is not for me to say.

Photographs, anyway, are the most curious indicators of reality. They are said to convey the exact nature of the material world, but actually, what they convey is spiritual and only partly the result of the masses of light and shadow in the world of rocks and trees and flesh. Things happen in photographs that do not happen in life. Or else we perceive in photographs what we cannot perceive in life. Is perception equivalent to existence? That is the premise on which we base our lives, yet it may well be a false premise. In these photographs, something new had entered my face: a special sort of daring, the courage to be a fool.

All this is retrospect, hindsight. “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards” it said in the notebook which, in the months after Jeannie gave it to me, I had found too beautiful (and had been too depressed) to use. Of course I was not completely without the fool's daring before Jeannie's death. I had done plenty of dumb things, and suffered for them, and learned from them. But with her death, some new element entered my chronic, anguishing indecision. “Live or die,” she seemed to be saying to me from the grave, “but for god's sake don't poison yourself with indecision.”

Throughout our lives, we are brought in contact with spiritual advisors; the trick is not in meeting them, but in recognizing them when we do. I recognized Jeannie from the start, but if she had not died, would I have acted upon that recognition? I wonder.

It was Sunday, the day we took pictures in the park. Back at the apartment, Bennett was loafing around in slippers, listening to the same Bach cantatas over and over again and reading the same psychoanalytic journals. He had already played his obligatory tennis early that morning.

When Rod and I returned with our rolls and rolls of haunted film, all three of us had tea together. In the midst of tea, the phone rang.

A blizzard of static on the line told me it was sunny California calling.

“Hello? Isadora. This is Britt.” (She scarcely had to identify herself—since the nasal voice said it all.)

“Hi,” I said, my heart pounding with the terror Britt always inspired in me.

“Hi,” she said, racing on to the point of her call. “Listen, I don't have time to talk because Paul Newman is waiting for me at the Polo Lounge—but I think I can get you a fabulous deal. The only thing is—you'll have to come out to the Coast.”

The fortune-telling power of waves...

The “Coast.” I dreaded going to the “Coast.” That was where writers went to die, where poets went to have their words snuffed out, where producers and promoters and parasites sapped the life out of flourishing talent, killed off dying talent, and made mincemeat of the fledgling talent that happened to get caught in their jaws.

Producers. They ate writers for breakfast, directors for lunch, and actors for their seven-course dinners. And yet, despite all my misgivings, and despite the fact that I already knew I feared and mistrusted Britt, I was strangely elated by her call. There was deadlock between me and Bennett. This was an excuse to fly.

 

The last sight of Bennett at the airport. In some way, this was the last sight of him forever. His hair looked black and glossy, his eyes sad and small behind the reflections of his thick glasses, his posture frozen.

No—wait. There is another tableau preceding that one. The last time Bennett and I made love.

It was the afternoon before I left for California on the 7:00 P.M. flight. We had gotten up early, both nervous about my departure. He made my breakfast. I began to pack. He went to play tennis. I made lunch for his return. He returned. I was already packed. We went to bed.

But now there is a strange blank in my memory—a whitish blur like sheets over the eyes of a fearful dreamer just awakening at sunrise. Then a glassy, silvery object glitters up from the bottom of the pond of memory. What is it? Shaped like a small baton. Bright, brittle, moon-silvery, it is the silver baton of an elfin twirler—only it has glittering facets and numbers on its edge.

It is an Ovulindex thermometer! One of those things you use to find out when you're fertile—and it is on my bed table because (in the midst of my terrible despair about my marriage to Bennett and my constant chafing to leave) I have begun taking my temperature to figure out my fertile days, and from time to time I have been omitting my diaphragm in an attempt to “accidently” get myself knocked up.

These furtive attempts to create an “accident” fill me with ambivalence and panic. On the one hand, I know that babies cannot patch up sundered marriages, but, on the other hand, I want a baby to keep my life company in the desolation and loneliness that will surely overtake me when I do finally leave Bennett. Or else maybe the baby will transform us, give us back the will to live, make us love each other. Jeannie's death also points to procreation. I will have a girl and name her Jeannie.

And yet, on this occasion, because I am going to California, and because some extraordinary new fate perhaps awaits me, I find my diaphragm (deep in my suitcase where I have packed it) and put it on before Bennett gets home from tennis.

In bed, we talk.

“Are you pissed off at my going?” I ask, seeing Bennett's glum face.

“I'll miss you,” he says.

And I am touched. He is trying, for the first time in the whole of our marriage, to express tenderness toward me. It is still stinting, stingy, far from being unstoppered—but it is tenderness. I cry.

“I don't want anyone else,” I say, weeping.

And yet, why is everything between us always so grim? Even the tender moments are grim. We have never once laughed in bed.

He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly. Neither savagely—as during our summer of jealous rage—nor really warmly. He is pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.

On the plane, something is missing. Fear. I sit back in my seat waiting for that familiar panic, that old friend fear, that certain knowledge that I am about to die. Yet I clasp my seat belt and feel completely calm. The takeoff is natural, uneventful. The plane rises as if on the power of Jeannie's death. I have the sense that my life is being fueled by her death, and whatever happens next is meant to happen. I am no longer responsible for holding up the plane. Either Jeannie will do it or it will fall—and one way or the other, I am given over into hands stronger and steadier than my own.

Flying is suddenly miraculous! We dip and turn over the flats of Queens, where the inflated backyard swimming pools of the working-class row houses gleam like round blue eyes. I wish Leonardo da Vinci could be here beside me! If only he could ride in a 747! If only Jeannie could be here beside me, going off across the Rockies, going toward the big western sky, starting over, starting life over again.

Was it really Jeannie's death that suddenly released me from the fear of flying I'd had for years—or was it something else? Was it some new understanding of how uncontrollable life is, how little our anxieties influence our futures? Or was it suddenly growing up, growing unafraid of leaving home, leaving Mother, leaving the earth, leaving the street I grew up on, leaving Bennett, the man who made me “Wing” and then tried to keep me from flying?

It was true, oddly enough, that even during all my worst panics about flying I dreaded takeoff and almost always enjoyed the landing. This was absurd because landing was, in fact, the most dangerous time. But perhaps what I really dreaded was leaving home—and suddenly leaving home was no longer terrifying. Home was wherever I was. And right now I was flying.

I struck up a conversation with the man next to me—a record-company executive in classy California clothes. A medley of Gucci, Hermes, and Cardin—and his silk shirt unbuttoned to his breastbone, revealing beads, chains, and plenty of curly hair over tanned skin.

We talked for three hours—through drinks, hors d‘oeuvres, dinner, brandy—and we never exchanged names. Then, shortly before the flight was over, he asked me, “Was your last name White? and did you have a big apartment with a circular staircase?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised. And then it flashed: this is the first guy who felt you up, who put his hand under your skirt when you were twelve! Christ! Isadora goes to Hollywood! Is this what Hollywood is—a bunch of kids you grew up with on the Upper West Side, now metamorphosed into walking testimonials to Gucci, Hermes, Cardin, and the tanning power of the southern sun? Suddenly Hollywood didn't seem threatening at all.

“Your father had drums,” my old pal said. “I remember playing them.”

“I remember you feeling me up,” I said brazenly.

“Funny, I don't remember
that
part at
all.”

“How insulting!”

“But your father's drums were
terrific.”
He thought a moment. “I wonder why we only went out twice. You were considered an unusual girl...”

Then I remembered what I'd thought of
him
(apart from being aroused yet terrorized by the speed with which his hand darted under my skirt): another snotty Horace Mann boy, another Jewish prep-school prince! I'd felt
superior.
But of course I felt superior to
everyone
when I was twelve.

 

My plane was thirty minutes late, and to her chagrin, chronically late Britt had arrived at the airport only twenty minutes late. When I spotted her she was smoking like the Camel sign in Times Square, chewing gum at the same time, and pacing like a caged tiger. She was wearing patched jeans that had been tapered to her every curve (not many) and a blouse made of old silk handkerchiefs and a little ring that said LOVE in gold block letters. Her hard mouth did not say love, and her woolly orange hair had been freshly fluffed out into the Beverly Hills equivalent of an Afro. A halo of frizz surrounded her small, determined head, and a saddle of caramel-colored freckles spattered her nose and cheeks.

“C‘mon,” she said as soon as we found my luggage on the carrousel, “I have to drop you at your hotel
fast
because I have a heavy date later tonight.”

“What about your
husband?”
I asked, surprised.

“I left him as a direct result of your book. I
told
you how much your book meant to me. And you should
see
the guy I'm seeing tonight. God—is
he
beautiful. You'd love him. And I'm not going to let you meet him...” She paused, looked me over critically, and said: “Oh I don't know. Maybe I
could
let you meet him—as long as you promise not to lose any weight.”

That was Britt exactly—competition and put-down at the same time. She'd never do a nice thing (coming to the airport) without simultaneously asserting how one-up she was.

Skinny. She certainly was skinnier than I was. Sheer meanness kept her skinny. That—and an assortment of hypochon driacal disorders that would fill the Merck manual.

 

The Beverly Hills Hotel. Who can do justice to a New Yorker's first glimpse of the Beverly Hills Hotel? It loomed before us, pink as a little girl's birthday cake, with slender, swaying palms instead of candles, and mysterious floodlights picking out the foliage. The scripted name of this pink stucco emporium was outlined in eerie greenish lights.

Rolls-Royces with curious license plates glided up to the door to be met by princely young men with platinum hair. If these were the parking attendants, what must the guests be like? Oh unimaginable splendor! I thought of the Land of Oz, of Alice's looking-glass world—and there was Britt as my Red Queen, leading me furiously into the lobby with its huge, unnecessary fireplace, past the smiling desk clerks, down the long halls (where a maintenance man was actually repainting the white sky between the jungle-green palm fronds of the wallpaper). Painting the roses red! This is Beverly Hills, where real grass has been made to look like Astroturf, where real palms have been made to look like plastic ones, where tropical flowers have no odor, and where lawyers ride around in Rolls-Royces with Vuitton briefcases on their knees.