How to Save Your Own Life (26 page)

“Good night,” he said, waving his beret and being led to the car by his two Japanese ex-wives. “Come again soon!
Bonne chance!”

“What a grand old man,” Ralph said, seeing Kurt depart, and obviously having no idea how he'd been made a fool of. (I've always mistrusted people who use the word
grand—unless
they are referring to hotels.)

And then he turned to Josh and me. “I want to give you a special experience,” he said. “Judging from your poetry, I
know
you'll appreciate it...”

Josh and I looked at each other gamely.

“What the fuck,” said Josh.

 

So we followed Ralph back to where he lived. Chez Ralph. What can I call it? Ralph's “house”? No. That would imply a certain hominess it did not possess. Ralph's “bachelor pad”? Ralph's “emporium”? But it was a mansion. There are certain kinds of people who would willingly live in a model room at Bloomingdale's if it could be proven this was the smart thing to do. Ralph was one of these. His “home” was a special sort of dwelling existing particularly in California and inhabited by trendy middle-aged divorced bachelors with hair transplants. Future archeologists will marvel over such places and will probably wonder what they were used for.

We emerged from Josh's MG into a garage whose door closed electronically behind us. Around us were Ralph's cars: a 1936 Cord Phaeton (supercharged, of course), a recent Rolls-Royce Corniche in Mediterranean blue with white leather seat-covers and a license plate that said ZEN, a silver Jaguar XKE with a license plate that said PEACE, and a gold dune buggy with a license plate that said, coyly, BUGGY.

A chrome-and-steel elevator (with glass walls) took us to the upper floors on which Ralph “lived” (or perhaps one should say on which Ralph “Ralphed”). We entered a very dark hallway with cocoa-brown velvet walls, cocoa-brown carpeting, and cocoa-brown suede benches along the walls. (Someone must have told Ralph that cocoa-brown was a “masculine” color.) Spotlights (imbedded in a cocoa-brown ceiling) picked out certain
objects
(“objectionables d‘art,” Josh called them): the head of a Siamese Buddha (who must have been appalled at the company in which he found himself); a rubbing from a medieval tombstone; a parchment scroll on which some funky California calligrapher had hand-lettered Fritz Perls's Gestalt prayer: “You do your thing, I do my thing....” (I would like to be around to see what future archeologists make of
that.)

Ralph invited us into his cavernous cocoa-brown living room, drew up a cocoa-brown suede footstool, and lit a fire (in that distressing California way of merely lighting gas jets under the logs). Then he turned on the quadraphonic sound (taped chants from some Oriental monastery), passed around some joints (which he must have spent the whole afternoon rolling—or perhaps he had them prerolled at a hip tobacconist's), and then went off into his cocoa-brown electronic kitchen to make some Irish coffee and confer with the Oriental houseman.

“Wait'll you guys see the Jacuzzi,” Liane said, dragging deeply on a joint and passing it to us.

“What's a Jacuzzi?” I asked.

Pretty soon we were all naked and simmering in a great redwood tub of bubbling water—like
kreplach
bobbing in a vat of chicken soup. Above us were the stars, seen through a trellis over which bougainvillea had been trained. Below us were water jets, which made the hot, scented water of the Jacuzzi bubble up between our legs provocatively. We were all getting more and more stoned, the quadraphonic Oriental monks were getting more and more stoned, and our host was passing around more joints and more Irish coffee. This must be heaven, I thought—or California.

Meanwhile, Ralph had begun to make speeches—the sort of woozy, unfinished speeches people make when they're stoned; but then I was too stoned to know if it was him being woozy—or me.

“The important thing,” Ralph said in pulpit tones, “is to conquer possessiveness, to give and to take, to feel pleasure and to feel pain as if we were all flowing together, parts of one organism—because we all
are
parts of one organism, and...”

“I think he means this to turn into an orgy,” Josh whispered, “and I don't know what the
etiquette
is in a situation like this. I mean, are we being
bad guests
if we refuse?”

Everything Josh said was like a voice speaking out of my guts.

“I don't know what we're supposed to do,” I whispered back, “but he sounds like the type you could jolly along with a dose of his own Gestalt rhetoric.”

“Become one with the water, the bubbles, the steam rising to the stars,” Ralph intoned.

“I feel like a chicken bubbling in a cauldron of chicken soup,” Josh said wryly.

Ralph was delighted.
“Be
the chicken soup!” he exclaimed, full of Gestalt enthusiasm.

Josh made bubbling noises in the back of his throat, and punctuated them with a gurgly
oy vay.

Ralph was delirious. This was not only Gestalt—it was
ethnic.

“Now you be the carrots,” he instructed me.

“I don't know
how
to be a carrot.”

“Try,” said Ralph, condescendingly. “Don't
resist.”

“What does a carrot
do?”

“A carrot,” said Ralph, “merely
carrots.”

“Aha,” I said, “I see.”

“So do it,” said Ralph.

“Wait a minute, let me get into it.” I sat in silence for a minute or so, feeling the steamy water bubble up between my legs.

“Well?” said Ralph, growing impatient.

“I'm
doing
it,” I said.

“But you're just
sitting
there,” said our host.

“I'm carroting,” I said, “in my own
pers
onal way. Who are you to
judge
my way of carroting? Who are you to be so judgmental? Everyone has a right to carrot in their own way, don't they?”

Josh was cracking up. So was Liane. I continued carroting solemnly.

“Food for thought,” Ralph said ponderously.

When we were all so waterlogged that our fingertips looked like bleached raisins and our knees were weak from the steamy water, Ralph rang for the Japanese houseman, who brought us towels and more refills of the Irish coffee.

“He's not only my houseman,” Ralph explained with embarrassment. “He also teaches me Zen.”

“What a handy combination,” said Liane. “Perhaps we should invite him in.”

“Hates water,” Ralph said hastily.

 

In the living room, the lights were turned down low and we were all so stoned that we lay in front of the fire and gazed into it without speaking. Josh and I were stroking each other's backs in that dreamy way pot makes possible.

“Do you think we'll be invited back?” I whispered. “I mean, I think I got water stains on the
suede.”

“Just what I was thinking myself, Pooh,” said Josh. “God—here we are at a potential
orgy
and all we think about is the
upholstery.
Boy—are
we
ever uptight and Jewish.”

“True-ish,” I said.

Presently, Ralph and Liane got the idea we didn't want to mingle and they slipped away to the bedroom without us. We were left alone by the fire. Hours, years, decades went by. The fire flickered. I stroked Josh's back. He stroked mine. Eventually, Ralph emerged naked to say: “By the way, there's another bedroom down the hall you can use. Let me show you.”

We were led to still another cocoa-brown room with a vast fur-covered waterbed built into a platform under a skylight. LOVE, DON'T LOVE, flashed a neon sign “sculpture” on the table beside the bed. Right under the sign was a half-used tube of K-Y jelly and a lethal-looking French tickler with spiky pink rubber bumps. Conspicuous consumption of sexuality.

The waterbed had the obligatory black satin sheets, somewhat rumpled from what must have been Ralph and Liane's predinner fuck. Josh and I climbed into it, got under the fur covers and hugged. The Love, Don't Love sign kept flashing.

“I wonder if we can disconnect that monstrosity,” Josh said.

“I doubt it,” I said. Actually, I didn't want to let go of him and get out of bed. We resigned ourselves to the garish presence Of LOVE, DON'T LOVE.

“You know, all my life,” said Josh, “people have been saying, ‘Possessions don't matter'—yet would we be spending the night here if it weren't for the Jacuzzi, the pot, the fancy furniture? Probably not.”

I laughed and hugged him. Josh's vision of things was so clear, so dear. He managed to be honest in a world where no one was, where honesty itself had gone out of style.

It was not that I failed to feel guilty about Bennett. There was nothing to feel guilty for. I was not “committing adultery,” or “having an affair.” My marriage to Bennett had become the faintest of memories.

 

We talked all night. Under the flashing Love, Don't Love sign, above the sloshing of the waterbed, Josh held onto me for dear life and told me about himself. He didn't want to fuck that night; he wanted to talk. “I lose the other person when I fuck,” he said. “I go into my own pleasure and become autistic.” I understood. I understood everything he said. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be a man, to grow up with a throbbing cock between your legs, to be scared of women and want them at the same time, to be told that men were supposed to be strong and yet to feel weak and vulnerable, to want shelter and protection in a woman's arms and yet to fear being trapped. I had always somehow assumed that men were insensitive—perhaps because the men I knew had always found it so hard to articulate their feelings. I had also felt contemptuous toward men—contemptuous toward their arrogance, their strutting, their need to deny their emotions. Women, at least, were in touch with their feelings. For all their faults, they were tuned-in to their own needs. But here was a man who seemed to know himself a little, and would share that knowledge with me. Was this a new thing, a genera tional thing? Were men under thirty an improvement on the older models, or was it just Josh? Whatever it was, I liked it. Suddenly there was no pretense, no playacting. We were just two friends, staying up all night, telling each other the stories of our lives.

We talked about growing up, about camp, about school, about parents. We talked about the way Jewish parents make their kids feel so breakable, so fragile. And then, having filled them with neurotic anxiety about perfectly ordinary things, they can seem to rescue them from all evil and harm. If you get the toast out of a toaster with a knife, you'll surely be electrocuted. If you pop popcorn over a fire, fat will fly in your eye and surely blind you. If the fat doesn't blind you, you'll die of botulism from eating rancid butter. If you don't die of botulism from eating rancid butter, you'll die of botulism from eating contaminated tuna fish. If you don't die of botulism from tuna fish, you'll get mercury poisoning and die. And if you don't get mercury poisoning and die, you'll surely cut your finger on the edge of a tuna fish can—so you better have a tetanus shot immediately! We talked about how we had internalized all our parents' (twice removed) ghetto terrors and then spent our lives, paralyzed with fear, craving adventure.

It turned out we both had had precisely the same dialogues with our families about how babies are made.

“How does your body
know
you're married so it can make a baby?” Josh asked his mother and sister when he was six. And they had laughed at him—just as my mother and sister laughed at me when I asked exactly the same question.

“The middle-
class
ness of it!” I laughed. “I guess neither of us
knew
anybody who had had a baby without being married.”

“I guess,” said Josh. “I mean, I used to sit around for
hours
saying to myself,
How do their bodies know
? I was really
puzzled.
”

“Me too,” I said, astounded at the similarity. “Me too. Me too. Me too.”

It was as if I had found a misplaced twin in Josh. Everything we said to each other found a knowing response; sometimes we even seemed to flash on the same things without speaking—until it seemed we had never
not
known each other, had never been apart. Oh, maybe someday I would feel bored living with my double—but right now it was such a welcome change from the silences and hostility I had known for eight years that I was willing to risk it, to risk everything. It seemed that I had spent the whole rest of my life being lonely.

“You know, there's one thing I really should tell you,” Josh said at about five-thirty in the morning.

“What?”

“I'm a secret male chauvinist.”

“Who isn't? Most of them, in fact, aren't so secret.”

“No—I mean it,” he persisted. “I'm not trying to give you a more-raised-consciousness-than-thou number, but the first time a girl said to me, ‘Look, I don't come unless you mess with my clitoris,' I felt one wall of my masculinity crumbling. I had thought that the insertion of the penis was
enough.
I never
knew.
And it upset me
terribly
to be told.”

I lay there dumbstruck, thinking of our last couple of nights in bed and how I hadn't been able to come—and I panicked. Isadora, old girl, I thought, you've done it
again,
thrown yourself headlong into the arms of another helpless, hopeless male....

Silence. The waterbed sloshes.

JOSH (
gloomily
): Reassure me. Tell me it doesn't matter.