How to Save Your Own Life (4 page)

P.S. I love the Book!!! My Girlfriend also does too.

P.P.S. My husband told me I better not read it or he would beat the shit out of me but I read it anyway!!! He thought it might give me idears!!!

But of course I never sent such a reply. Nor did I phone. I sent a card, with no return address, which read: “Dear Celia Laffont, Thank you so much for your beautiful letter about my book. I wish I could answer all your questions, but I am hard at work on a new book which I hope will be more help than the first. Warmest wishes, Isadora W.”

Salvation. Everyone in the world wanted salvation. Candida had stated the problem but hadn't begun to solve it. And who could solve it? I had everything, supposedly, and couldn't solve my own dilemma; what on earth could I possibly do for Celia Laffont? If I ever get the time to write another book, I thought, I am going to call it How to Save Your Own
Life-
a sort of how-to book in the form of a novel. Hah. That was ridiculous. Imagine me saving lives when I couldn't save my own. Actually, How to Save Your Own Life was the title of a notebook given to me by Jeannie Morton, who'd encouraged me to use it as a journal. But I had stopped keeping a journal. Keeping a journal implies hope, and in the last year I had given up hope. Was it because I had gotten everything I thought I wanted?

 

Bennett's key clicked in the lock at 6:15. I was still sitting at the round dining-room table pondering my stack of letters. Mooning over it. Not knowing how to go on after my per functory answer to Celia Laffont. There were forty-five calls to return (from the three days I'd been away) and a dozen bills to pay and ten book-length manuscripts by my writing students, and a stack of galleys to read. Three were friends' novels; I would have to read each one with care and think of tactful things to say. But the others were by strangers and could be put aside for the moment. Reading was becoming more and more of a chore. I yearned for the days when I could sit down with a copy of Bleak House or Tom Jones without thinking guiltily of the galleys on the floor by my desk. Besides, the books I was sent always seemed to reflect badly on my writing-or my character. I felt misunderstood by the galley-senders. Typecast somehow.

One was the sexual journal of a man who'd left his wife to jeep through California with two nubile teen-agers. One was a treatise on male superiority, tricked out as a “breakthrough book” and “the first cogent male response to the Women's Movement.” And one was a young woman poet's attempt to write a porn novel with literary pretensions. There were any number of novels about couples who had discovered swapping or about runaway wives or “Jewish Princesses”—whatever they are. (I had used the term ironically in Candida and everyone had taken it literally, and thrown it back in my face.)

All the galleys came with sycophantic letters from editors tucked in. Some were the same editors who wouldn't return my calls before I'd had a best seller. I remembered their names. It was human enough, I guessed, but nonetheless depressing. People had to set priorities somewhere. I could certainly use a few more of those myself.

The only thing was: I knew Celia Laffont was more important than all the blurb requests put together. But how could I begin to help her with her problems? She needed nothing short of total salvation—and that was what I needed myself.

 

The door opens and Bennett appears. I continue to stare at my mail. Though we haven't seen each other in three days, I somehow have no desire to get up and face him. I force myself.

“Hi, darling,” I say, embracing him in the foyer. He pecks me on the mouth and moves away, unable to give himself to the greeting. He has missed me, but he hasn't yet seen his mail. It must be gotten out of the way like a bowel movement before screwing.

His rigidity angers me. Embracing him is like embracing a tailor's dummy.

“Aren't you really going to kiss me?” I ask.

He returns dutifully and kisses me very wetly (as he has ever since I ran off with a man whose kisses were wetter than his). He presses his pelvis against mine with consummate technique. I feel he is using craft. The Craft of
Fucking
or The Well-Tempered Penis by Bennett Wing. Our greetings and kisses seem rehearsed, unfresh somehow. Like actors who have been in the same Broadway play for eight years. The longest run in history. With the original cast still playing.

“How was your day?” I ask. (We speak to each other like parodies of married people.)

“Oh, okay, I suppose. Auerback is fighting me on hiring Sy Kelson for the adult department ...” He wanders off to go through his mail and play back his Record-O-Fone. God forbid he should miss a single phone message or pay his shrink later than the tenth of any month.

Vaguely pissed, I drift away into my study and sit down to look at the galleys. I open the top set—a novel by my friend Jennifer about her Hollywood childhood. I read with apprehension, lest it be dreadful. But it's not. It's beautifully written. Delighted, I get up and run into the living room, where Bennett is....

“Jennifer's book is marvelous,” I say, “really well-written.”

He is writing a check to his analyst, Dr. Herschel W. Steingesser of 1148 Fifth Avenue, a building at Ninety-sixth and Fifth where you apparently cannot buy an apartment unless you have graduated from medical school, residency, and some accredited psychoanalytic institute or other.

“What's it about?” Bennett asks, absently.

“Oh, Hollywood, her father, her marriage ...”

“The whole oedipal drama, huh?”

At this, I become enraged. Bennett can never react to any book, any movie, or any play without using the words
oedipal,
anal, or primal scene.

“Could we have a moratorium on the word
oedipal
for about forty-eight hours?”

Bennett wheels around in his chair: “What are you so goddamned hostile about? I haven't seen you in three days.”

“Yes. And you don't even bother to kiss me.” I say this automatically and then realize it isn't true. He has kissed me. Why then do I feel so unkissed?

“What did you call that thing out in the foyer?”

“A kiss, I suppose.” I bury my anger, and go back to reading Jennifer's book.

 

The next day we are supposed to leave for a writers' conference at, let's call it, Pastoral U. I'm to teach the Craft of Writing for three days, read student manuscripts, and inhabit a beautiful bungalow by the lake. For this I'm actually to get money. Bennett has, for the first time in our history, consented to go with me. He has consented because everyone at the conference has told us that this will be more of a vacation than a teaching stint. The bungalows are said to be luxurious and the countryside beautiful.

We leave for the airport in the morning, but we never get to Pastoral U. In the car, it becomes clear that Bennett resents going. He is still mad at me for having been to Chicago and he picks a fight on the way to the airport.

BENNETT: You said you were going to cut down on all these activities, but I don't see you doing it.

ME: Bennett, please, I'm so tired and beat anyway, don't make it harder by nagging me. This is the very last appearance, I swear. In August we'll go away together.

BENNETT
(snidely):
Sure.

His mouth is tense under the Fu Manchu mustache he has grown in honor of my newfound fame, and he stares at the road in an almost-mean way. I look at him and am overcome with guilt. This poor man, shlepping his wife on literary junkets. What a sacrifice. I decide to sacrifice too.

ME: We don't have to go at all. I'll cancel right now.

BENNETT: That's ridiculous.

ME: No it's not. We'll have a weekend in the country, together, be alone.... You're always complaining we're never alone.

BENNETT: You can't cancel ...

ME: Of course I can-you're more important than any conference ...
(Lies,
lies.)

BENNETT: We planned to go and we're going. I gave up a tennis tournament to do this with you.

ME: What a sacrifice! This is the first fucking time you've come with me at all—and it ought to be
fun.
A free weekend in the country. Which we get paid for.
(I
always refer to the money
I
make as
“ours”
—
though
secretly I regard it as mine.)

Bennett looks ahead in silence. I stare at his profile. Something is seething behind his set mouth but I can't tell what. My having gone away to Chicago for three days? Something older than that? Something borrowed?

Suddenly it explodes.

BENNETT: For a whole year you've done nothing but run around being nice to everyone but me. Any idiot who calls you in the middle of the night gets your time. You spend hours answering letters and hours with all your friends and students and hangers-on, but I never get to see you ...

That's because I feel depressed when I'm alone with you, I want to say, but don't. I SAY THE OPPOSITE: I'd rather be with you-it's just that I find it hard to say no to people.

BENNETT: You don't find it hard to say no to me.

ME: I do-really I do.... Look, let's not go to Pastoral U. Let's cancel.

By this time, we have entered the road to the airport. JFK.

BENNETT (angrily): Where's the sign to the Pan Am terminal? I missed it.

ME (crying by
now):
We won't go.

BENNETT: Yes we will. We have to.

ME: No-we'll call and cancel.

BENNETT: And then you'll hate me for sacrificing.

ME: No I won't.

BENNETT (brightening): You really would cancel?

ME: If you want it.

BENNETT: And what do you want?

ME (hysterical and no longer knowing what
I want):
Anything you want.

BENNETT: Bullshit. We're going. We said we'd go and we're going.

We park the car near the Pan Am terminal (the flight to Albany which connects with a smaller plane to upstate New York takes off from there) and begin taking out our bags. I look at Bennett's angry face—all the accumulated hurts of forty years-and I sob uncontrollably.

BENNETT: What the hell is the matter with you? Cut it out.

I am sobbing and shaking and speechless, suddenly terrified of the tiny plane, the students who will thrust manuscripts at me, the obligation to be on, on, on for another three days. I simply haven't the energy. And I can't stop crying.

BENNETT: Will you cut it out? It's not as if I hit you or something.

We lock the car and drag our bags into the terminal. The flight is in fifteen minutes. While Bennett gets the tickets confirmed, I run down to the ladies' room, splash cold water on my face, and try to stop crying. I can't. The year has dissolved me: Celia Laffont, perverts propositioning me through the mail, hotel rooms, Bennett ...

“There's nothing to cry about,” I tell myself in the mirror, but everything seems worth crying about. My whole life seems unmanageable; a disaster.

I race upstairs to the phone and call the director of the conference at Pastoral U., trying to sound sane. I've never cancelled anything before in my life. And for a thousand dollars. Sacrificial.

The director sounds nice. He calms me and starts persuading me to come. Bennett gesticulates madly that the plane is about to leave. Let it leave, I think, but I listen to the director's siren song about beautiful views, twelve to fifteen carefully chosen students, and luxurious bungalows. I have just been convinced when I see through the large glass windows that the only plane for Albany that day has just taken off.

 

On the way back from the airport, Bennett and I discuss what to do with the weekend, which suddenly belongs to us alone. Instead of being exhilarated about it, we are depressed. Now that the conflict between us has been removed, there is nothing at all connecting us. Dead air. And my remorse at having cancelled something I had been looking forward to. How had that happened? His anger? My exhaustion?

“Woodstock,” Bennett suggests. “Let's go to Woodstock for the weekend.”

 

Now, Woodstock was a curious place to choose. Ominous almost. I can't hear the name
Woodstock
without thinking of that terrible August weekend in the third year of our marriage when Bennett was studying for his psychiatry boards and I was obsessing over the manuscript of my first book of poems (due to go into production the following week), and I went up to Woodstock in search of some reassurances from my friends Ronald and Justine (both writers)—while Bennett (who had refused to go with me, because he was supposedly studying) disappeared elsewhere for the entire weekend and would never tell me where.

We went through one of our familiar emotional hassles before I left. I begged Bennett to come. He refused. I told him Ronald would give him his guest-house study to work in. He still refused. He wanted me to stay in New York with him so he could rage at me periodically about his boards. But I was anxious too and desperately wanted Ronald and Justine to look at the manuscript before I turned it in. It was my first book and I reconsidered every punctuation mark hundreds of times before I let it go to press. I read every word into a tape recorder and played the tapes back over and over again, crossing out words, putting them back, crossing them out again.

Bennett refused to understand why I had to go. I refused to understand why he had to stay. Finally, I offered to sacrifice my interests to his and I called up Ronald and Justine and said I wasn't coming. Then Bennett mocked me for my indecisive-ness, so I called them up and said I was.