How to Save Your Own Life (25 page)

I knew that eventually we'd have to make a decision—to bed or not to bed (with all its concomitant possibilities of disappointment, pain, unrequited love, unrequited lust), but right now I was enjoying the suspension, the feeling that sleep would never come, that the journey, not the arrival, mattered.

It was three in the morning, then it was four, then it was five. Still we were driving around, not knowing what to do, not wanting to part, but not wanting to join ourselves yet either, wanting above all to prolong this delicious tingling sense of brinkmanship.

And then I blew it—blew it characteristically with my goddamn need to put everything into words.

“I feel there's something unspoken here,” I blurted out (as we were riding down the deserted Strip for what must have been the tenth time).

“Unspoken?” Josh said, vaguely.

“Possibly you want to take me to bed?” (My heart started pounding with astonishment at my own
chutzpa.)

“Bed?” he said, as if he'd never heard the word before, as if the object itself were unfamiliar to him, an archeological find, a household item from early Greece no longer in use today and unknown except to specialists. “Bed?” he repeated, with the same stupefied air. “Oh—in New York, I'd be hustling you, but in L.A. everything's so
laid back.”

“So
what?”

“Laid back.
An L.A. term meaning ‘relaxed.' Do you want to come to my apartment? It's very pretty—1920s Spanish L.A. architecture. Very
Day of the Locust
and nostalgic.”

I panicked. If I went to his apartment, it would be clear I wanted to go to bed. (It was clear anyway, but I wanted to go on deluding myself.)

“How about the Polo Lounge?”

“Okay,” Josh said.

He double-parked his car in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel, as if tentative about the whole venture, or perhaps he was just being polite, trying to show me he wasn't cocksure of being asked to stay.

We went into the Polo Lounge and found it closed.

“Where can we get drinks?” I naively asked the weary desk clerk. (Josh and I were two babes in the woods, Hansel and Gretel in search of bread and water.)

“Room service,” he leered. So the decision was made, made by an impartial stranger.

We went obediently to my suite, chastely ordered Tab and ginger ale, and sat far apart, clothes on, with our feet up and our shoes on the bed. I was thinking, What a fling to seduce “a boy.” He was perhaps thinking how he wasn't going to make the mistake of confusing me with Candida (thus branding himself forever in my eyes as an illiterate boob, a person who could not tell the difference between literature and life, art and illusion, fiction and autobiography). Perhaps he was determined to be cool, in deference to my authorial sensitivity. Perhaps he figured that men had been hustling me all year, and he wasn't going to join the ranks of the hustlers. But none of those speculations consoled me. All I knew was: I couldn't bear to let him out of my sight. That left it up to me.

We nursed our meager, teetotaling drinks. The ice cubes clinked, meltingly.

“Don't worry, I'm a gentleman,” Josh said ambiguously, with an unambiguous nod toward the bed. Awkward conversation as we contemplated it—that mass of king-size upholstery separating us. His sneakers were dirty and, touchingly, had torn laces. The laces on one (the right) were undone. The presence of the bed between us had stopped our bantering conversation. Ice cubes clinked. I coughed. We smoked. Finally, perhaps not knowing what else to do, Josh got up to go.

I can't let him out of my life, I thought. So I looked up, asking to be kissed. And when our tongues touched, it was somehow all decided.

“Please stay the night.” (I shocked myself by saying this. So brazen. So woman-the-aggressor.) “Go park your car.”

He kissed me again. We clung like two people who had just found life rafts.

ME: Park your car.

HE
(boyish):
Promise you won't change your mind.

ME
(womanly, reassuring):
I won't. Silly.

 

He went off to park and I (putting on diaphragm and filmy caftan and perfume) thought: I'm crazy. I'm married. He's only twenty-six and I'm his
parents'
friend. God—robbing the cradle.

He came back, he knocked, we hugged for dear life.

Then there were jeans on the floor, and his sneakers with torn laces, and I discovered his chest covered with reddish fuzz soft as mohair, his thick cock, his gentle wit in bed. He fucked as if he wanted to get back inside the womb. My heart was beating so hard I couldn't come. Our rhythms were not in synch yet. He came, groaning for me across forever. And then I slept in his arms as if I'd come home for the first time.

 

Breakfast in the Land of Oz. Crisp bacon. Orange juice in a bucket of ice. Cube-shaped metal heaters bearing Sterno and eggs. I was under the covers, being naked. Josh was striding around in jeans and no shirt, answering the door.

One wilted rose on the room-service table. Josh took off his jeans to keep me company. In mutual nakedness we ate breakfast.

I was astonished at how comfortable he was in his skin. Bennett, who had a beautiful body too, was always hiding it. Pajama-tops, socks, shorts. He was always retreating from nakedness into clothes. But Josh filled the room with his suntanned skin.

Over the eggs and orange juice, he read me the funnies.

A fling, I was thinking, and then I'll go home to Bennett. I told myself all kinds of lies about how important it was to have this “experience” with “a younger man.” I was very pompous and self-important about it. I was doing research for life, not living. Next incarnation, when I knew all there was to know, I'd live. This was just a warm-up.

“You know what's astounding?” I said.

“What?”

“The way I slept last night. I've never slept that well before —with a stranger.”

Hurt, Josh said, “Do you do this all the time—take men to bed the first night?” He didn't understand what I meant—that he was a stranger but didn't
feel
like a stranger. I had never before been able to sleep in the arms of a man I didn't know well. I would toss and turn, wake up panicked at 6:00 A.M., thinking: What am I doing? What have I done? But Josh felt like kin to me, my long-lost brother. How could I say that without sounding corny? So I held my tongue.

“Do you do this all the time?” he demanded again.

He was insecure, thought me an easy lay. I had to find some words to reassure him. It was premature, it would have scared him away. He was six years younger, my friends' young son, tender shoot. There was a husband at home, a life, a career, that curious houseguest, Fame. I had the feeling my whole life was about to change, but he was broke, young, another generation.

How could I have known that a year later, we both would miraculously become the same age?

Winging it...

Wing it, I thought, waking up with Josh the morning after that. He was asleep, his light-brown lashes curled against his cheeks. I felt such tenderness for him that my fingertips ached. (Where do you feel love? In the chest, as a straining of the heart against the rib cage? In the fingers, as if the blood were reaching out beyond the skin?) For me, love had always been a battle—a battle with myself—or with a male adversary. A battle not to care too much, or not to
show
I cared. A battle against my own cynicism—or my own naïveté. Something was different here. I felt at home. This was no adversary, no opponent, no tyrant, no bully, and no victim either. This was my brother, my other half.

Even his body felt right to me. We locked together like two pieces of a puzzle. I slept in his arms as if I had never known the meaning of sleep before. And I woke up happy—as if I were understanding happiness for the first time.

But I wasn't going to look ahead or plan anything. I wasn't going to think of the future. Wing it, I kept saying to myself. Don't think. Just fly.

The telephone bell pierced our nest like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. I startled and grabbed the phone. Josh awoke to hear my half of a conversation with Bennett.

“I don't know when I'll leave. I'm still waiting for Britt to get back.... No, I don't know when. She hasn't been heard from in days.... Of course I miss you... Of course...”

Couldn't he hear in my voice that I didn't miss him at all, that he had never even existed, that he was a ghost, a shadow? I supposed not. Though Bennett was a psychiatrist, he was spectacularly tuned out to the nuances of human feeling. He was the easiest husband in the world to deceive because he was so self-deceiving. But I didn't like that either. What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to deceive? I knew most people lived that way —marital hypocrisy, “white” lying, “discreet” afternoon affairs that didn't tear the fabric of one's life. But of course they did tear it. And if they
didn‘t,
then why have them at
all?
What other point was there in bringing a man and woman together
except
to stretch the soul and expand the imagination, except to tear things apart and put them back together in new ways? Beyond a certain point in life, the mere rubbing that sooner or later results in orgasm was not all one looked for. A vibrator could do that.

But it was still not easy to let myself get close to Josh. I kept looking for snags, looking for him to show signs of being ex ploitive or manipulative, looking for failure, looking for disillusionment.

“This will never work,” I muttered, as he began stroking me, kissing me, and starting to make love to me again.

“But will it play?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye. “Can this love affair be saved?”

I laughed. His cock was sliding inside me, filling me up, making me forget my cynicism. It was big and hot and made me think of all-day suckers, candy canes, impossible melting sweetness. I love this man, I thought, feeling totally entered, totally his; and then I got so carried away with his pleasure, his puppyish exuberance, his excitement, his moaning happiness—that I went right to the edge of orgasm and wasn't able to come. This had happened the night before. And the night before that. And the oddest part of it was: I didn't care. We would both come together in time—or else we wouldn't. All my judgments were suspended. So was my need to control the future. All I knew was that I loved this funny face, this furry red-bearded bear. Loving someone that way was in itself such a miracle and such a gift that I wasn't going to think beyond just being grateful we had met.

“Do you know how lucky we are?” Josh said, kissing my eyes, the furrow between my brows, my chin, my nose.

“Yes,” I said. But I was still afraid to say “I love you”—though we both knew.

 

That night Kurt Hammer invited us to join him at a Japanese restaurant for dinner. He was holding court at a table in the corner, surrounded by two ex-wives, a current lady friend, his secretary, his male nurse, and the struggling young actress who served as his
au pair
girl and cook.

She was a ravishing redhead named Liane (with Cherokee cheekbones and a terrific giggle)—and she had brought a current boyfriend of hers—a silly fellow named Ralph Battaglia, who was a self-made millionaire with a weakness for trendy self-improvement and a tendency to sound like a California Kahlil Gibran. He was tall, slim, gray-haired, had a mustache, and wore a dashiki (which I somehow deeply resented—almost as if I were black and proud).

“I no longer call my ex-wife my ‘ex-wife,' ” Ralph explained earnestly (over sashimi), “because that would imply she was an ex-person.”

“Not to me it wouldn‘t,” Kurt said. “I got two ex-wives right here.” Two very young-looking Japanese girls tittered. They couldn't possibly have been as young as they looked.

“Twisting the English language into pretzels doesn't mean you've found a new religion,” Kurt said. “Ex-person—what the hell is an ex-person?”

“I mean she's entitled to her identity as an individual even though she's no longer my wife...” Ralph said, fatuously.

“Maybe
more,
eh?” Kurt said, laughing. “It could be the best thing that ever happened to her. You know, sometimes women
blossom
when they get rid of men. I've seen that a million times. It's the men who go to pieces dontcha know? There's no doubt in
my
mind they're definitely the weaker sex. Hmm.” He took another slug of sake.

“I don't like to use the words
stronger
and
weaker.
They're judgmental. Let's just say: different,” Ralph said.

“What the hell is
wrong
with
stronger
and
weaker?”
Kurt thundered. “Do you want to cut the balls off the English language?”

Ralph seemed suddenly stymied, at a loss for another cliché. He excused himself to go to the men's room (perhaps to check whether or not his balls were still there).

“He's the dumbest one you've ever brought home,” Kurt told Liane as soon as Ralph was out of earshot.

“Brains are not his strong suit,” she admitted. “But he
loves
picking up checks”—which Ralph returned and dutifully did.

“Thank you,” said Kurt, grinning. In his Paris bohemian days, Kurt had made sponging meals into a fine art. Now that he was old and not terribly mobile—except on rare occasions like this—he most often fed others at his house. In Ralph's case, however, he was willing to make an exception.