How to Save Your Own Life (31 page)

All my life, I had written in the hope of finding my lover, my double, my friend through the printed word. Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them. Josh had read my poems two years before because his parents and I had a friend in common and the books had been passed along. Cosmic forces guide such passings-along. The fingertips of the book-lenders are as charged with cosmic energy as the fingertips of people at a seance. The book propels itself from hand to hand by the transmitted energy of the author's long-distance wishing. When you find a book in a rented beach house or the library of an old ocean liner, it is hardly by chance. The book is waiting there, waiting summer after salty summer, perhaps, to change your life. And the author (who may be dead by now) is still hovering somewhere in the ether to watch.

When Josh read my poems originally he'd thought, This sounds like someone I could talk to. It had flashed through his mind that perhaps I was the woman for him, but he cast this out as wishful thinking. There is intuition and extuition. Intuition is the voice of one's spiritual counselors, and extuition is the work of the evil eye. The evil eye told Josh: “She'd never be interested in you.” So he tucked the poems in some attic of his brain and went on fucking his current girl friend, whose tits he loved but whose mind he couldn't seem to locate. “I discovered that you can't base a relationship on tits,” he told me.

But can you base one on poems? Or on a few days in bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Or on having the same childhood experiences? Or on both being born under the same sign of the zodiac? Who knows?

I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give. Poems are the greatest proof of this. Again and again I've noticed that my poems predict my future, that I write a detailed poem about some event in my life months before it occurs. This was the case with some of the love poems I sent Josh. They referred to events that would not happen until later. It was almost as if I wrote first and then waited for my life to catch up. I, who was so indecisive about almost everything else, was utterly convinced from the moment I met Josh that this was the man who would make my life whole. Even though our fucking was not quite perfected, even though my friends considered it the sheerest madness for a “successful” New York lady like me to join my life with a “hippie kid” who was an unemployed screenwriter to boot, I knew it was right. My poems knew it, at any rate.

And yet, having poured out all my gut-level convictions in the small hours of the morning, my daily waking self (the self that listens to extuition, not intuition) began to falter. A week had gone by and Josh had not sent me a single letter.

“Maybe he's just not a letter-writer,” Hope said, encourag ingly.

“But he's a
writer.
All writers love writing letters. It's such a great excuse for not writing whatever they're
supposed
to be writing.”

“Well, maybe they got lost somehow.”

“But how, Hope? They wouldn't get
lost here.”
(Even the mail-room lady in Hope's office was on the lookout for them.)

“Darling, I've been looking for them every day. Did you ask Rosanna?”

Hope hated Rosanna, thought she was cold and opportunistic —but it was not Hope's method to interfere with anything I felt I had to experience. I needed a lesbian experience? Well then, I should have it. Hope saw life as process, not end; therefore she was infinitely patient.

“Rosanna hasn't seen any letters either. She keeps telling me to forget Josh. She thinks he's a loser—not that she'd say so in so many words. She thinks that if I need a part-time male lover —because I still haven't completely committed myself to women —it ought at least to be someone in New York, someone rich, someone famous. She rather accepts the idea of my having a part-time lover and still having her. She says I can even get married if I want. But it ought to be
her
sort of marriage—lots of separations and houses all over the place. And that takes money.”

“You'll have money,” Hope said. “The less you worry about it and do your work, the better off you'll be.”

“But I can't work at all now. And the movie thing is all screwed up and the lawyers' bills are already adding up—and I still haven't seen the royalties from this great best seller everyone assumes is making me so rich. If I leave Bennett, I'll be broke, and Josh has no money at all. I'm not sure I can start living like a student again at this point in my life.”

“Trust me,” Hope said. “Have I ever been wrong about anything?”

“No,” I conceded.

 

But I went away and once again dismissed Hope as gushy and sentimental, because by then I was in a funk to end all funks. The week had passed. The poems were written, and the other side of my nature asserted itself. Panic returned. Panic and despair. All my feelings for Josh, all my poems, all my cheeriness I now dismissed as just another infatuation, another zipless fuck. Bennett was grim, but he was stable. Josh was a mere chimera.

 

“Why don't you call him?” Holly asked when I went to her greenhouse loft to cry on her shoulder.

“Because I feel like a fucking asshole. I've been sending him poems and letters all week and he hasn't written a word. It's the same old shit I've done so many times before—falling in love with a bastard and
inventing
him for myself. Who is Josh? A hippie version of Adrian Goodlove, maybe. Who knows. I thought I was past that—but I'm sure as hell not going to make an idiot of myself by calling him. I did that once before.”

“When? Who?” Holly asked.

“Oh, that time Gretchen and I went to London. We called Adrian in Hampstead, even drove out to his house to witness his domestic bliss with Esther. They had gotten married after all, and had a baby, a daughter with the same squint as Daddy. Adrian laughed and called me the baby's godmother. It seems she was conceived right after he dumped me in Paris. Then Adrian flirted with Gretchen intolerably—making both me and Esther miserably jealous. And finally when I asked him if we could have lunch alone—just to talk over what had happened in our lives as a result of each other—he became incredibly distant, evasive, clearly rejecting. I absolutely refuse to subject myself to
that
again. I've already made an imbecile of myself sending all those poems to him. I'll probably never even see the manuscripts again. At least with Adrian, I got a book out of my idiocy. This time, the notes are lost forever.”

“There's nothing wrong with living alone, love,” Holly said. “You don't have to bounce from one man to another. And you don't have to fall into bed with Ms. Vampira Howard, either.
Some
of us live alone ...”

“With plants,” I said.

“What the hell have you got against
plants?”
Holly yelled.

 

Bennett remained the only person in my life who was oblivious to the changes I had gone through during the week. He had not noticed either my manic or my depressed phase. It was true that we practically never saw each other, but even when we accidentally happened to run into each other in the apartment, he was utterly blind to what was going on with me. Superficially, our life went on. I divided my time among friends, lawyers, interviews, poetry readings, hassling with Britt about the film. Nothing was resolved on that score. The lawyers were in consultation at a hundred dollars an hour, plus long-distance phone bills; Britt was telling me to disregard them, that she was my friend, that she would never cheat me; Rosanna Howard was telling me that Britt was lying to me; Hope was telling me not to worry, it would all work out; Holly was telling me to live alone and like it; and both my Jeffreys were offering what they had always offered: a little lunchtime diversion, with promises of more to come. Both of them seemed so silly to me now. I was disgusted with all those people who took up the fine art of marital compromise and defended it with religious zeal. Both Jeffreys had wives they couldn't talk to; I had a husband I couldn't talk to. We were all supposed to go on forever, having our midday infidelities, our five-to-seven blow jobs in empty offices, and talking vaguely about leaving our spouses someday. But neither Jeffrey would ever leave. That was clear enough. Each of them rather liked the fragmented life he had chosen. They never had to make a commitment this way. They were not committed to their wives, not committed to their lovers, and above all not committed to themselves. They were doing precisely what Bennett had done with Penny and me, vacillated between two women, causing both of them pain—and through secrecy (or
sneakcracy-to
be exact) avoiding the responsibility of ever making a decision.

At least I had been open about Adrian Goodlove. Bennett was free to take me back or leave me. That he chose to stay—that he realized that one summer's fling was not much compared with his long, passionate, sneaky love affair with Penny —was his decision. It also strengthened his power in the marriage because I didn't know about Penny and was consequently dazzled by his generosity and magnanimity. Also, there was his famous indulgence in “letting me write”—letting me write a book that would ultimately change my life, by leading me out of fear. I had felt so guilty throughout the writing of
Candida Confesses.
And so panicky. I had felt that I'd no right to tell the truth about my life, but some other demon drove my pen onward as I told myself, promised myself even, that I would never try to publish it. I had to get it all down, I had to get it on paper—even if it was ultimately only for my own eyes.

And then it was published—and, astoundingly enough, millions of women all over the world felt exactly as Candida felt! What a revolution it would be if all the people who led fragmented, lying, sneaking lives—justifying themselves with talk of realism, compromise, homage to the superego, civilization and its discontents—finally decided to throw off their self-imposed shackles and live according to their honest feelings! They would not immediately start fornicating in the streets and killing each other promiscuously. Not at all. But they would have to face the responsibility for their own happiness or unhappiness. They could no longer blame their wives, their husbands, their children, their parents, their shrinks, their bosses. And what a loss that would be! No one to blame! That was the real reason my two Jeffreys stayed with wives they didn't like—to assure themselves of always having someone to blame. That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. That was why Bennett didn't level with me and leave me for Penny. That was why I stayed with Bennett long after I knew the marriage was dead. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

My feelings for Josh had shown me the possibility of a life that wasn't fragmented. I had glimpsed it briefly, foretold it in poems, written to him about it, and then—silence. He didn't write back. Now I was nowhere. I couldn't go back to my old life with Bennett, with my double Jeffrey, leading the luncheon life, wasting time, flip-flopping from one silly affair to another, hating my husband, flirting with an accidental pregnancy to somehow make my decision for me, to change my life without my having to take the responsibility for changing it. Where
could
I go?

 

For the moment, I seemed to be spending an awful lot of time with Rosanna.

Rosanna had a way of appearing whenever I felt lowest and whisking me off to lunch or dinner or drinks in her Corniche. Everything (with the possible exception of making her come) was easy with Rosanna. She was as cool as I was passionate, as measured as I was excessive, as stable as I was ambivalent. Her studio apartment was full of poetry books and cases of red wine. There was always music on the stereo and lots of new books on the coffee table and fresh coffee in the astonishingly beautiful copper espresso-maker that took up one whole wall of the kitchen. And always there was the scent of Rosanna's musk perfume in the air.

There was even a genuine friendship between me and Rosanna. It certainly wasn't her fault that, like most people, she couldn't see beyond her own experience and wanted to justify it by pushing it on everyone else. Rosanna had been married before—to an uptight lawyer she identified with Bennett and now had found a measure of contentment in a very loose, very open marriage to a guy who liked to be away a lot and fuck around a lot. It suited both their temperaments. Rosanna was left alone with her writing, her women friends, her cool studio with hot espresso. Robert had the freedom he wanted, openly—without having to lie—and he also had the use of her fortune. I'm sure they loved each other in a sort of Harold-and-Vita way, and I know they felt terribly superior to all those poor benighted souls who couldn't get it together to have an open marriage. Rosanna naturally assumed that since this arrangement worked for her, a similar arrangement might work for me. She was hardly wishing me ill in wishing that for me. She loved me and wanted what was best for me. I think she also thought it would be great for us to live together, and she knew how to get to me—my writing.

“I
know
you'd get more writing done if we lived together,” she said. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were lounging in her apartment, drinking wine, reading poems together, talking. The chauffeur had gone off to the airport to get Robert, who was supposed to be coming in that night. Bennett was playing tennis. I had told him that I planned to spend the evening at Rosanna's and had invited him to join us, knowing he would never do it because he didn't much like Rosanna, and anyway he had lots of reading to do for a course he was teaching at the hospital.