How to Save Your Own Life (29 page)

“I object,” I said weakly. “If you take Cliff, I take Josh—”

“Babe,” Britt said, staring at me with her cold eyes, “the budget can't afford Josh. And besides, you've got a husband in New York, remember?” And then, like a merciful executioner, she offered me a deep drag on her joint.

“I need it,” I muttered.

“Keep the whole joint,” Britt said munincently—and flounced off to say her good-byes.

 

Josh and I said our stoned good-byes in the car on the way to the airport, in the airport, and even at the boarding ramp.

“Write me,” I said.

“But where?”

And we both suddenly remembered that I was a married lady who couldn't exactly receive love letters at her own address.

“Two friends,” I said, “both extremely trustworthy and dear.” I gave Josh Hope's address and Rosanna Howard's.

“I love you,” I said, “and I don't want to go home.”

“I love you too,” he said, “but is that
enough?”
And he stood forever smiling his crooked smile and waving at the entrance to the boarding ramp, while I walked through it backward, unable to take my eyes off him until the boarding ramp turned its inevitable corner and Josh, now tiny at the end of the tunnel, disappeared from sight.

 

The plane took off. The lights of Los Angeles flickered through the smog. I seemed to be fighting the motion of the plane. Every time we gained altitude, my fingertips ached, missing Josh. The walls of the plane appeared to be closing in as we turned and banked over the Pacific and then headed eastward, straining against all my willpower to stay there, to stand still, not to leave.

I was furious with myself for allowing Britt to railroad me into going, for signing the option form, for boarding the plane. Britt was so definite and bossy that she could muster all kinds of support for the most absurd projects.

One simply never thought of questioning her authority. How else would I have wound up—stoned—on the Red-Eye with this weird cast of characters? We were a comical caravan, a bevy of buffoons, a coven of con men, a troupe of trollops—and Britt was our leader. Our strange group appeared to have taken over the whole first-class section. Sonny and Danny, Britt and Cliff, Shelley Granowitz and her Yorkie named Bogart (whom she had hidden under her raccoon coat and who peed on me almost immediately after boarding), and two extremely faggy-looking producers named Sam Fink and Dan Fox (of Fox-Fink productions), who worked together, lived together, and just happened to join the party —though they assured me they had no interest whatsoever in horning in on
Candida!
One of them (Sam) conducted his entire analysis by telephone from Beverly Hills to New York, he told me. Every afternoon at 1:00 (4:00 for his analyst), he'd simply dial her number long-distance, lie down on the couch of his Beverly Hills office, and free-associate by phone. At 1:50 for him, 4:50 for her, the session was over. This cost him about five hundred dollars a week—but, of course, the production company paid. His analyst was known to the tax man as a “story consultant” in New York.

“That's why I appreciate your book so much,” he told me lispingly, “because I've been through the whole analytic
shtik
myself.”

“It's always comforting to meet a kindred soul,” I said.

The street where I lived ...

The flight from Los Angeles to New York takes only five hours, but the real distance should be measured in light-years. Los Angeles is more different from New York than New York is from London or Stockholm or Paris. Someday scientists will discover the invisible gas that fills the air in Southern California, making the most uptight, cynical Easterners relax, take off their clothes, lie in the sun, divorce their spouses, build swimming pools, take up Zen meditation, visit spiritualists, and in general behave as if they've found God through sex, nudity, and sun-worship.

To return to New York from Los Angeles is always to experience a profound psychic shock. Suddenly the streets are narrow, bodies are hidden, the sky has shrunk to a gray strip wedged between the tops of buildings—and that peculiar frenzy of chiefly useless activity (which New Yorkers call Life) returns with a rush. There is noise, dirt, hustle. People frown and guard their bodies with crossed arms, with sharp words, with heavy clothes. Women clutch their handbags. Porters and taxi drivers and washroom attendants are churlish and bristling. The sky is pressing down on them. The buildings are pressing in on them. They are indignant because of the lack of space. They have no room to move or breathe. They are all wishing they were out West.

It was only when our strange party had disembarked and we were all waiting for our baggage that I suddenly realized how cold it was in New York. I'd left Los Angeles in the same thin cotton caftan and sandals I had worn at the party. My sandals had been pissed on by Shelley's obstreperous Yorkie and my feet felt at once sticky and cold. Britt and her party were laughing and joking among themselves and I felt like a kid in camp, left out of the main clique.

They were all bound for the Sherry-Netherland. I was bound for Seventy-seventh Street, where I would have to face the remains of the life I'd left behind. I still missed Josh palpably, with aching fingers and a tightness in my chest. Every ten years, I go to California and my life changes utterly, I thought, commenting to myself at the same time that that wasn't a bad first line for a book. And then I
cursed
myself inwardly for that thought. It wasn't another
book
I wanted—it was Josh. I
refused
to write another book in which the heroine reaches out for love and settles for cynicism. I had already told that story over and over again. I had told it in poems, in a novel, in a screenplay, even—and there was no point in telling it again.

Everything in me mistrusted my feelings for Josh. The Beverly Hills Hotel seemed like a dream. The long hours in bed, the funny room-service orders in the middle of the night (“Strawberry jam with no toast,” Josh had demanded so we could lick it off each other), the hours spent talking about everything under the sun, giggling, learning that for all our differences in years, we were really doubles under the skin—all this I mistrusted. It was too good, too happy. It
had
to be ephemeral. It
had
to wear off in a month—or two. But so what? What was the alternative? To go back to Bennett and write still another cynical book proving that love is an illusion? The world had more than its share of such books. All of the greatest fiction of the modern age showed women falling for vile seducers and dying as a result. They died under breaking waves, under the wheels of trains, in childbirth.
Someone
had to break the curse,
someone
had to wake Sleeping Beauty without ultimately sending her to her destruction,
someone
had to shout once and for all: fly and live to tell the tale!

“C‘mon kiddies,” said Britt. “This way to the Big Apple!” And we all piled into the limo after her.

The gray streets of Queens and a sinking heart. Usually, the sight of the Queensboro Bridge fills me with elation. It means New York, Home, a certain kind of excitement available nowhere else in the world. But this time New York just seemed dismal. It was a prison three thousand miles away from Josh. New York was the past and California was the future. I had no business being here at all. I had no business returning to the past.

Seventy-seventh Street on a chilly October morning. The museum of Natural History looming like a brownstone nightmare, the leaves blowing in the wind, the dog-walkers watching their dogs shit. This was home—but it no longer seemed like home. Home was where Josh was.

I thought of my return to Seventy-seventh Street with Bennett during the summer of ‘69. It was the summer of the moon shot, the summer after my grandmother died, the summer my grandfather had a major coronary and didn't seem to want to live anymore.

What drew me back to Seventy-seveuth Street? On some level, it was certainly Bennett's intimidation (he threatened to leave me if we didn't accept my grandfather's co-op), but perhaps there was something deeper operating too: a need to reclaim my roots after the alienating time in Germany, a need to recapture my childhood so that I could write about it and that way transcend it, a need to make sense of my past. Maybe, too, the writer in me needed to go back to the scene of my childhood.

I had lived on Seventy-seventh Street from age two to age twelve. (Later, we moved into another rambling triplex on Central Park West—an apartment not so unlike the first—but I was older.) Seventy-seventh Street was where I got my first tricycle, where I learned to ride a “two-wheeler,” where I first learned to cross streets on the way to school.

I came to West Seventy-seventh Street as a toddler and remember no earlier home. I remember Columbus Avenue when the bars were Irish instead of Puerto Rican; when the buses ran in two directions and cost five cents, then seven cents, then fifteen cents; when there were transfers both eastbound and westbound, costing nothing at first, then two cents, then they vanished. Nothing costs two cents on Seventy-seventh Street anymore—not even a postcard. In fact the mailbox around the corner quite frequently disappears, leaving no trace except four bolts in the cement sidewalk. It turns up, weeks later, in some tenement basement, divested of welfare checks. The idea of someone stealing a whole mailbox seems to me the ultimate symbol of urban anarchy. Muggings can be understood as a fact of city life; dogshit and blaring transistor radios can be borne or ignored, but the mail is sacred—particularly to a writer. Awaiting the mail is one of the main tasks in a writer's day. When mailboxes can be stolen from the streets in broad daylight, nothing is safe.

I remember Seventy-seventh Street during the great snow of 1947. The cars buried in snowdrifts, the museum steps obliterated, and all the local children shouting through the deep snow, making boot-holes in the white silence.

I remember trick-or-treating on Seventy-seventh Street at Halloween, watching spring return through the blossoming fruit trees in front of the museum—and of course the Thanksgiving Eve ritual, the blowing up of the giant balloons.

As a child, living on Seventy-seventh Street was like belonging to a privileged club.
Other
kids watched from a distance as the balloons floated through the air;
we
saw them being blown up! Other kids came by subway to see the dinosaurs; we
lived
with them. We felt like insiders, inhabitants of a country of titans. We might be small, but we lived in intimacy with legendary giants. We might be children, but we consorted with gods.

In adolescence, of course, I disowned the old block. I wanted to live in the Village, in Gramercy Park, in Paris, in Rome. Anyplace was better. My family did, in fact, move out of their crumbling artist's apartment on Seventy-seventh Street and into a somewhat less crumbling artist's apartment on the uptown side of the museum. Not very far away—but another world. Now we were on the side of the Planetarium rather than the dinosaurs: a quantum leap.

Whatever it was that drew Bennett and me back to Seventy-seventh Street in ‘69 is not easy to account for. Call it fear—or call it synchronicity. Call it a longing for roots. Southern writers had their magnolia blossoms and decaying plantations, I had my dog shit and disappearing mailboxes. It might have smelled like garbage—but it was home. The tourist might see the eye-sore of a welfare hotel, the bags of uncollected trash, the giant water bugs blithely crossing the street in broad daylight, the Puerto Rican stoop-loungers whining “Hey, chickie, wanna fuck?”—but I saw my childhood. What the rue des Vignes and the rue des Hospices were to Colette, Seventy-seventh Street and Central Park West were to me. My friends mocked me for still living on the street where I grew up, but I knew that at a certain point in my life, at least, it was nourishing for me to stay there.

That point had passed. Seventy-seventh Street now seemed strangling compared to California and the big western sky. My whole life there was an artifact. Josh's warm, funny smile was where I lived now.

I dragged my suitcases into the lobby and rang up on the intercom to my apartment. Bennett was there. Miraculously enough, Bennett (who never changed his schedule for anyone) had stayed home to wait for me. The farther I drifted from him, the more committed he became to me. In the early years of our marriage, when I was trying everything to make it work, he disdained me, fell silent, attacked me, turned to Penny and sent me to a shrink instead of taking me in his arms. Now he wanted to make it work—but the timing was wrong. It was already too late.

He heard my keys in the door and opened it before I could.

“Darling,” he said, and took me in his arms. After so many years of coldness, his warmth seemed counterfeit to me. His body felt strange, cold, reptilian. It wasn't the body I belonged with. I had shifted into a new sphere. I touched Bennett without somehow touching him at all—as if there were an invisible skin between us.

He had cut his hair, trimmed his drooping mustache, and had grown, in addition, a Freudian beard. A scraggly one, to be sure, but the influence of the Master was clear. His ears stuck out—or had they always stuck out? It was impossible to tell.

“Let me look at you,” he said. “You look great.”

Couldn't he see Josh all over me? Was he blind?

“Why did you cut your hair?” I asked, drawing away from him. “And why did you grow that silly beard?”

“Oh, I discussed it with Doctor Steingesser. I looked too much like a kid.”

“I loved your long hair.”