How to Save Your Own Life (24 page)

I nodded.

“I
love
him. For me, nobody touches my heart like Chopin. I'd give up every book—every book dontcha know—if I could just have written one prelude like Chopin. That's the truth.”

I stayed with Kurt for hours, talking about his writing, my writing, feminism, poetry, my marriage, his marriages. He had the intense interest in the young that comes to writers when they are beyond competition, when their life's work is a completed thing, when they know for sure that all books constitute a communal enterprise. I told him how painful it was to read vicious things about myself in the press, and he blew up at me.

“I never want to hear you use that word
painful
again,” he said. “Do you know what they said about Whitman?”

“No,” I conceded.

“ ‘A pig rooting among garbage.' That was the review when
Leaves of Grass came
out.
Do you read Leaves of Grass?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“And have you ever heard of that review?”

“No,” I confessed.

“So don't let me catch you saying ‘painful.' Pain is not something you waste on newspaper hacks. In fact, I've never seen the point of pain at all. The trick is not how much pain you feel—but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses. When you wind up in bed at the age of eighty-seven like me, the only pain you'll feel is for all the
useless
pain you felt, all the times you let yourself not do something because of fear and cowardice, all the times you let the bastards and the kib bitzers and the life-shrinkers hold you back. Watch out for the death-people, do you see what I mean? The people who want to die and want everyone else to die with them. They're the ones to avoid. If you can learn to avoid them, you'll be fine. And in your writing too, don't listen to them. They don't know what they're doing, only how to destroy, to silence everyone—including
themselves
after a while. They
need
you—or they have nothing to write about—but you don't need them. Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I hate this word
painful?”

Outside the window of Kurt's bedroom, the Pacific was about to swallow the sun. In New York, it was already night—if New York still existed. I was beginning to doubt it.

What was this myth, I wondered, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, that literacy ended when you crossed the George Washington Bridge? Certainly no one could have been more chauvinistic about New York than I, who had spent nearly my entire life in the same neighborhood, so it was all the more exhilarating to discover that there was intelligent life west of the Rockies. I was thinking of my afternoon with Kurt as I raced back to the Beverly Hills Hotel to change for a party being held in my honor by friends from the East. Kurt made me feel that it was okay to be eighty-seven—as long as you got there with as few regrets as possible.

There would always be arthritis and arteriosclerosis and all the other mortal diseases of the flesh—but your spirit didn't have to die an untimely death. For the first time, I had a vision of myself at eighty-seven—a faint vision, perhaps, but a vision nonetheless. I was going to be a terrific old lady someday! I was going to be surrounded by students, disciples—maybe even grandchildren. My life—which a month ago had seemed over —was just beginning. What was thirty-two compared to Kurt's eighty-seven? Where did I get off talking to
him
about pain? I may have been born into this world against my better judgment—but I was staying as a matter of choice, and nobody was going to kick me out until I was good and ready.

I left my rented car in the lot and sprinted, skipped, and ran back to my suite, itching to put some words on paper. I slammed the door, kicked off my shoes, sprawled out on the bed with the notebook Jeannie had given me, opened to the first page and wrote, giggling all the while:

By 6:30 that evening, I was standing outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, not wearing my glasses and consequently not seeing the bleach-haired beachboys who valet-park the Rolls-Royces (with their poetic license plates), the tanned male agents in jeans by Fred Segal and loafers by Gucci, the yentas hoping to be mistaken for starlets, the starlets hoping to be mistaken for stars, the talk-show hosts, the ghostwriters, the screenwriters, the ghosts.

“Ms. Wing?” a young man asked, apparently wanting to be politically correct (like my pal Gretchen in Gristede‘s, hefting lettuces of various political hues).

“Call me Isadora,” I said (amazingly not laughing at this ridiculous line because I was studying the furry, warm, odd, likable face that had just swum into my myopic line of vision).

“Josh Ace,” he said, putting out his hand to shake mine and leading me to a double-parked pea-green MG with the top down. (That much I could register even without my glasses.) Josh was the son of Robert and Ruth Ace, who were hosting the party for me that night. They were a well-known team of screenwriters from the thirties, blacklisted in the fifties, surviving McCarthyism by writing spaghetti Westerns in Rome for a dozen years, and now happily back in California, being honored by all the chic radicals—radical sheep, I liked to call them—in the film industry. I had met the Aces through writer friends in New York (where they had been living for the last five years). I never even knew they
had
a son until this moment.

Josh was tall, slim, red-bearded, and had a very gentle manner. I generalized at once: “Flower child.” He closed the door of the MG and climbed back in behind the wheel.

“Fasten your seat belt,” he said (which I interpreted as an immediate sign of concern for me, but actually it was a new car which wouldn't start unless I locked myself in). And we were off to his parents' house in the Hills, where I, like other literary exiles from New York, was to be given a visiting fire-man's welcome.

“It's really nice of your parents to make this party,” I said.

“They love you,” Josh said. “They really
want
to do it. My father would have picked you up himself, but I insisted.”

“Why?”

“Because I was curious. I've read your poetry and I think it's neat. Actually, from your image in the press, I expected you to be eight feet tall, wearing steel breastplates, and carrying a spear. I'm glad you're not.”

“I
write
tall,” I said.

“Yes, but I sort of expected you to be
scary.”

“How do you know I'm not?” I asked, not knowing whether to be pleased or insulted.

“I
don‘t,
really, but my first impressions of people are usually pretty accurate. This may be the first time my father's ever been right about anyone. He's usually a
terrible
judge of character.”

“People always confuse writers with their ideas,” I said, “especially lady writers.”

“Hmmm,” Josh said. “It must be hard being a lady writer.”

“It's nice of you to say so. I usually encounter a lot more resistance.”

“I don't know how anyone could resist you,” he said.

What a gas, I thought, looking at his warm face, his aquiline nose, his freckles, his furry beard, his rabbit-toothed smile, what a gas to seduce a kid.

“You probably think I'm a kid,” he said, startling me by reading my mind.

“Not at all,” I lied. “Why? How old are you?”

“Twenty-six, but I have a very old soul.”

God, I thought,
twenty-six.
“I haven't been twenty-six for about half a century,” I said. He looked at me as if to say I was mad.

We drove to a gas station, where I gathered up the courage to ask him what he “did.” The question seemed absurd. Why did he have to do anything besides be so charming?

“The family racket,” Josh said. “I just wrote a screenplay for De Laurentiis—a real turkey for which I did what may have been the twenty-ninth rewrite. If I'm lucky, it'll never be released. Don't think I'm a hotshot screenwriter or anything. I have no credits at all. That job was gotten through sheer nepotism.”

When he said “nepotism” I wanted to hug him. It was the honesty that was so endearing, especially after all the time I'd spent with Britt. Britt—who knew nothing and claimed everything. Josh claimed nothing at all—and knew plenty. I could tell by the modesty.

“Actually,” Josh said, paying for the gas, “I haven't worked since then. I spend a lot of time waiting in line at Unemployment.”

“Work is much overrated,” I said.

“Only to your generation. I spent four years in college majoring in LSD. I can't think of anything I'd rather do than work—if somebody would hire me.”

“They'd be mad not to,” I said. Oh Brave New World, to have such gentle
men.
Why, I wonder, feeling increasingly like an old bawd or the Wife of Bath, why hadn't I looked into the underthirties
before?

 

The Party. I had been looking forward to the party, but now it just seemed like a mob of irritating people, separating me from Josh. Even though he was the only one there I wanted to talk to, I pretended to ignore him and circulated dutifully, as if to undo the fantasies I was already having about him.

“Some house for communists,” I said to Robert Ace, inspecting the forty-foot living room, with four-inch shag carpeting, the seemingly Olympic-size swimming pool, the black servants gliding by with trays of hors d‘oeuvres. And Robert explained to me (gesticulating with a large cigar) that he wasn't a communist anymore but a Zen Buddhist and that meditation was neither abetted nor undone by large rooms. He was a slight man with a Groucho Marx mustache and glasses that kept slipping down his nose.

“He's a Zen Judist,” Josh said, lurking close behind me, and smiling that rabbit-toothed smile. The smile said everything. Affection for his father mingled with an infallible bullshit detector—an absolute refusal to be conned.

Meanwhile, there was this agent hustling me—a man named Greg Granite (possibly changed from Greenberg?)—who wanted to take me home that night, and failing that wanted to take me home the next night, and failing that, wanted me to write television scripts he could sell to the networks. Ah Hollywood —where pleasure is business and business is pleasure, where communists live in $400,000 mansions with Olympic-size swimming pools, and where agents change their names to igneous rocks and pursue writers through the landscaped Hills on balmy October nights! It was all worth it—the misery with Britt, the misery with Bennett, the fame crazies—if it had brought me here, here, to the Land of Oz, where this sweet-faced munchkin was flickering his green-gold eyes at me across the room and saying, Let me take you away from all this and into the funny, ticklish, warm world of my beard.

I was lionized, lambified, tigerated until two in the morning. Meditating Buddhist movie stars, affable agents (who studied Tai Chi) and wary writers (who practiced TM and
est)
monopolized me by turns. There is a certain kind of grayish, stoop-shouldered, beaten screenwriter one meets in Hollywood, a man with an income of a half-million a year and no hope. And I conversed for an hour with one of these—a certain Herman Kessler who said he
knew
he could never write a novel. Perhaps he could have once, but by now it was too late. And besides, how could he work three years for a $20,000 advance on a novel when he made that much in two months, writing screenplays?

“You have a problem,” I conceded.

He was rich, but he was not happy. He had seen his lifework rewritten by illiterate producers, his best aphorisms mangled by arrogant actors, his philosophical nuggets crushed by directors, mushed by assistant directors, and trampled to dust by the Italian-leather soles of executive producers' shoes. He was a beaten man, an intellectual derelict, a Bowery bum of letters. They had taken away his words and given him money instead. And it was a lousy bargain. He spent an hour wishing he were me.

Josh rescued me at 2:00 A.M., mumbling something about taking me on a tour of Mulholland Drive—whatever that was.

We exited to the disguised sneers and polite smirks of the other characters who had offered to take me home.

What the fuck am I getting myself into? I thought, climbing into Josh's MG. I knew something was up—but I was pretending to myself it wasn't. I thought of Jeannie's notebook, which I had started keeping after my afternoon-long talk with Kurt. What would
Kurt
have done at a time like this? How would
he
have gotten ready to be eighty-seven? The same way Jeannie would, if she were here: by being a fool.

And yet I was also strangely shy with Josh. I was determined not to act like the heroine for whose sake I had become so fatally famous.

Josh and I drove around for hours. First we parked on Mulholland Drive and watched the lights that outlined the map of Los Angeles winking through the smog like tiny UFOs. Then we drove to the Strip, where he pointed out the Institute of Oral Love (a massage parlor) the Fantasy Fulfillment Center (another massage parlor), the Kosherama (a perfectly ordinary delicatessen), the Nosh on Wry (ditto), and various grotesque, enormous signs advertising Brobdingnagian rock stars. The air was still unbelievably balmy and I was calm and nervous at the same time, as if on some psychic form of Dexamyl. I wanted the ride never to end, just for us to keep on circling the city this way, talking, talking, talking, being together, side by side, close.