How to Save Your Own Life (30 page)

He dismissed this with a shrug. His analyst's opinion was what mattered, not mine.

“Anyway, what's
wrong
with looking young?”

“Not good for the patients,” he said.

“Oh, that's silly. Patients don't come to you because of your
hair.
Or because of your Freudian beard.”

“That's what you think,” he said disdainfully. “I don't
want
to look like a kid anymore. Dr. Steingesser pointed out my unconscious desire to look young. I'm forty, after all.”

“I've never understood why looking like a complete conformist helps in dealing with the unconscious. I frankly think it's a lot of shit. There's no reason why dullness and sobriety should help in interpreting people's
dreams.”

Bennett looked irritated, but he was determined to hold it in. He had stayed home to wait for me, had cancelled patients for me—all the things that would have melted my heart had they been done years ago, even months ago. But I was indifferent. Hard, even. All I experienced in my reunion with Bennett was a painful feeling of hypocrisy. How could I convey this to him? How could I express it. I could hardly express it to myself.

He put his arms around me, ground his pelvis against mine. I could feel his erection and it only filled me with repugnance, followed by a wave of incredible sadness. Every time I had been separated from Bennett in the past, I had worried about him screwing around or finding somebody else or just deciding he didn't want me. This was the first time I was utterly sure of his loyalty to me, his missing me—and now it was just too late.

“Let's go to bed,” he said, taking me by the hand to the bedroom.

“What time is it? Don't you have to go to the office?”

“I have another half-hour or so,” he said, utterly oblivious to my reluctance. Ordinarily, I was never reluctant to go to bed. Bennett was the reluctant one; Bennett was the one who complained of my hot pants, my eagerness to screw anywhere, everywhere.

“There's so much mail piled up,” I said as we passed my study. “Just looking at it makes me nervous ...”

“The mail can wait,” said Bennett—who
never
thought the mail could wait before. We had switched personalities, it seemed; he had become like me.

He tore off my clothes with great eagerness, began nibbling my nipples dutifully, massaging my clitoris, and thrust his cock into me, moaning about how beautiful I was, how tight my cunt was, how
good
I felt to him. My body responded in its accustomed way, almost against the will of the mind that lived in it. My cunt moistened for him, my heart raced, my nipples hardened, I came-thinking of Josh (with whom it was so hard to come). Oh Doris Lessing, my dear—your Anna is
wrong
about orgasms. They are no proof of love—any more than that other Anna's fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural
mishegoss,
conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing.

What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms—like every family has color TV-and we can all get on with the real business of life.

“What are you thinking?” asked Bennett.

“About Tolstoy and Doris Lessing,” I said.

Bennett chuckled. This was the Isadora he knew, the Isadora he could live with, the Isadora he could control. This was the woman who cared about literature, not life. He was comfortable with that woman. I had never been more
un
comfortable with her in my life.

But in the days that followed, there were plenty of misgivings. No letters from Josh arrived. Rosanna Howard tried to talk me out of Josh, saying I was mad to get involved with another man just when I was on the verge of “breaking my dependency on men,” just when I could leave Bennett and live with her. But how could I explain to her that Josh had nothing to do with “Dependency on Men” or feminist politics or any doctrinal disputes whatsoever? Josh was merely the best friend I'd ever found. Then why wasn't he writing? Had I been wrong again? Had I picked another winner? The letters must have gotten lost. I believed that for one, two, three days, and then I seriously began to wonder.

Britt meanwhile was giving me grief. Installed at the Sherry-Netherland with her entourage, she was wheeling and dealing, calling me periodically to report on her various negotiations, and telling me all sorts of confusing things.

It now appeared that Spinoza and Dante were out of the picture, that she was “in negotiation with a major studio,” that she was “talking to directors,” that she would “let me know what developed.” She was now speaking cavalierly of playing the lead in the picture herself. Even though she had absolutely no experience as an actress, even though her voice resolutely seemed to issue from her nose, she had decided that she and she alone was the real Candida—and she had somehow convinced a major director to agree with her.

Incredibly enough, the book was selling better and better. It was everywhere. My phone never stopped ringing. Mail never stopped flooding in—and Britt was holding press conferences and interviews at the Sherry-Netherland, talking up the picture she was going to star in, riding to glory on
Candida's
coattails, even claiming in one interview to have “made Isadora Wing what she is today ... ” Her
chutzpa
enraged me. Britt had never written a book or made a movie. She had never done anything but toot her own horn and order people around. Her whole reputation was based on one Western which she'd conned her husband (who was the heir to a brokerage firm) into investing in. Through no fault of theirs, this movie became a huge financial success, and, in the Hollywood manner, people who put up money got producer credits. Thus Britt became a “producer” without ever having made a movie at all.

When I calmed down enough to realize what I had signed away, and how binding it was, I was desperate. On Britt's side, nothing was binding. All her talk of making a quality movie, on private financing and artistic control were conveniently forgotten as soon as she had a piece of paper from me. It turned out there had never been any private financers at all, that Paradigm Pictures had been her partner all along, and that Sonny and Danny were just a couple of guys she'd happened to pick up. They were as much Mafiosi as she was an actress. Had they been real Mafiosi, they probably would have been more honorable.

My agent was no help at all. She was young and inexperienced and employed by a giant agency to whom Britt was the important client, not me. Ten percent of what I made was nothing compared with ten percent of a movie—any movie—and Britt's last movie had grossed millions.

“You need a good lawyer,” Rosanna Howard said. “The difference in making money and being rich is having a lawyer.”

“What about Gretchen?” I asked.

Rosanna was amused. “You don't go to a feminist lawyer for a film deal,” she said. “What you need is the kind of lawyer they'll be afraid of. The essence of using the law to your own advantage is intimidation. Most cases never get to court anyway (and if they do, what happens has nothing to do with justice), so the question is: how much can you scare the other side? I think you were clearly intimidated and defrauded into signing something you, one, didn't want to sign and, two, didn't understand. You need a tough lawyer. And you need him
now.”

I thought of the mansion in Bel Air where Britt's lawyer lived, of the Rolls-Royces, and the vermeil service plates, and the Tiffany glass goblets—all acquired in lieu of fees. If movie stars couldn't pay their legal bills, how could I?

“I'm not sure I can
afford
a lawyer,” I said to Rosanna.

“You can't afford
not
to,” she said.

Intuition, extuition ...

For the next week or so, my life was a constant round of lawyers' appointments, phone calls, interviews, and growing panic over not hearing from Josh alternating with a growing conviction that I loved him. Just thinking of Josh made me happy. I would skip to my appointments, skip to the Sherry-Netherland (where Britt kept assuring me to trust her, not to panic about the film, not to listen to my lawyers), run to my analyst's office (where my analyst was absolutely stumped because she couldn't seem to find anything oedipal or self-destructive about my feelings for Josh), waltz down Madison Avenue to Rosanna's house (where Rosanna tried to convince me to forget about Josh and live with her), race to Hope's office (where I would look in vain for letters from Josh and would spend hours sitting and telling Hope how absolutely wonderful he was).

I was in love. My skin glowed. I lost ten pounds in a week because I didn't seem to need food anymore. I skipped and ran and sang in the streets. Strangers smiled at me, dogs followed me, both my Jeffreys asked me what had
happened
in California, who
was
it? They knew. The only person who was resolutely deaf and dumb was Bennett. The only person who suspected nothing was my awful wedded husband. I had gone from lying in bed all morning staring at the ceiling and wanting to die—to waking up at six and skipping into the bathroom singing Cole Porter songs—and Bennett didn't notice at all! And how could I tell him? He would only tell me to go to my analyst and talk about it till I talked myself out of it.

After a day of frantic activity, I would come home at night and write love poems. Bennett would go to sleep and I would stay up until two and write. The poems tumbled out as if by ghostly dictation. There was no stopping them. In the morning I would bound out of bed—not tired in the least—and mail the poems off to Josh. I sent him books, photographs, letters, and poem after poem after poem. I was so certain I'd somehow wind up with Josh that I didn't even bother to make copies of some of the poems. I—who am usually so punctilious about carbon copies, xeroxes, the paraphernalia of literary immortality—just sent my scrawled copies off into the blue, with an absolute conviction they would catch somewhere, like the filaments of Whitman's noiseless, patient spider.