How to Save Your Own Life (5 page)

“Go already,” he said. “I can see you have to go.”

Weeping, I left for Woodstock. On the bus, I thought of Bennett with sudden empathy. He was nervous and upset; I should never have left him. As soon as I got to Woodstock I called. He was out. I called and called all night. He was never there. I called all weekend and he was never there. I became terrified. Bennett never did anything unpredictable. He must have been mugged in the elevator or axe-murdered in the living room. There was no other explanation.

And yet, somehow, as the weekend wore on, I was sure he was with another woman.

I never found out. When I returned on Sunday night, Bennett was there, looking mournful and mysterious.

“Where were you all weekend?” I demanded. “I was frantic with worry.”

“Your fantasies are better than anything I can tell you,” he said aloofly. It was my problem, in other words.
I
was the neurotic, the daydreamer, the inventor of imaginary adulteries.

“Who is she?” I asked over and over again, but Bennett was mute. He smugly repeated the line about “my fantasies.” But in my bones I knew I was right.

 

Woodstock.

We ride up in virtual silence. Something is brewing between us. Some marital thunderstorm. I try to make conversation and pretend I'm having a good time. I feed Bennett fruit I've brought. I try to draw the words out of him as I feed the fruit in. But he is hard to talk to. Every conversation ends on the second exchange. We are like two ill-matched tennis players, unable to maintain a rally. Finally, I pull out a book and begin to read. Side by side but apart, we drive to Woodstock.

 

Once there, we simulate companionship. We stop at an antiques fair, a hamburger joint, an old quarry. We walk in the woods.

“Did you ever fuck in the woods?” I ask him.

Bennett smiles secretively.

“Well, did you?”

“Not with you,” he says, putting his arm around me.

“I
know
that. We never did anything romantic like that.”

“I think this is romantic,” he says.

And I think, Yes, everything is romantic but the way I feel.

 

At six, we decide we're hungry. We have walked and browsed and shopped, but time hangs heavy on our hands. We drive back to the main drag and ask a local hippie about restaurants. He recommends one nearby, an outdoor pub, with tables on the grass.

Just as we are about to sit down, a young girl comes up to me and asks tentatively, “Are you Isadora?”

“Yes.”

“I loved your book! I think you're so brave!”

I blush, half pleased, half embarrassed. Part of me wants to hug her and the other part to shrink away.

“Thank you. I know that's hard to say. Thank you so much.”

We sit down at a table. After salad and wine, our attention wanders to another table where four adults are sitting with two children. The children are about five and seven and they are both very restless. They finally nag the adults into letting them go play on the grass. But Bennett and I can't seem to figure out which are the parents and which the parents' friends. We make a game of it. Not having children ourselves (and both longing for them), we always make much of other people's children, theorize about them, discuss them, philosophize about child-rearing. It is a shoddy substitute for parenthood, like nursing the myth of one's unhappy childhood.

“I think the woman in the Mexican shawl must be the mother, because she seems so blase about the kids. The other woman keeps humoring them—obviously an aunt or friend ...” I say this, thinking of my own nieces and nephews, whom I adore. How stupid it is of me to deprive myself of children. I'd probably love them. I vow to myself to get pregnant as soon as possible.

“You know, when Penny broke up with Robby, she let her kids decide which parent they wanted to stay with. That's important. That way the kids don't feel powerless and pushed around ...”

I look at Bennett. Penny. Penny was an army officer's wife we knew in Heidelberg seven years ago. Why bring up Penny at a time like this? And Bennett is always so tender and concerned when he mentions her. He never sounds like that when he speaks of me.

A flash. Suddenly it all comes together. Penny, Woodstock, Heidelberg, now.

“Bennett, did you have an affair with Penny?” My heart is pounding. I seem to know the answer already.

“Do you really want to know, or ...”

“Yes, I really want to know.”

“ Well—I did ...” A knife twists in my heart with the utterance of that simple monosyllable. And the pain is not undone by his continuing, “But I haven't seen her for three years at least.”

“You seem to know a lot about her kids ...” My heart is galloping now: a wounded runaway horse.

“
I
spoke to her while you were in Chicago.”

“Oh.” I am overcome; I stare hard at him, obviously getting pleasure from his own revelation. Seven years
ago!
Three years ago! This is ridiculous. Ancient history. Why should it come
between
us now?

“Did you love her? Whenever you mention her name, I feel you still love her ...”

Bennett hedges: “What's love?”

“When you speak of someone's kids in that tone of voice.” I am choking on my words. My salad sits on my plate dying in its vinegar. “You never speak of me in that tone of voice.”

Bennett shrugs.

“You loved her, didn't you?” I hate the sound of my voice, saying this. So plaintive, so betrayed.

“Why does that matter?”

“That means the answer is yes.”

He shrugs again.

“Oh come on, Bennett, tell
me.
It's worse if you hedge like that. At least you loved someone if you didn't love me.... At least you loved ...”

“Don't raise your voice like that. People know who you are...”

“And why not?” I scream. “I don't care who knows. I really don't.”

“Shut up,” Bennett says, his voice a steel trap.

 

Later, in the car going back to New York (what point is there staying in Woodstock when the purpose for our trip has already been fulfilled?), I interrogate him about Penny, that cold copper bitch. I hear myself sounding just like a betrayed wife in a novel-and I hate it. But I'm unable to stop. Some demon speaks through my mouth while my body looks on, amazed, ashamed.

“How often did you see her?”

“I don't remember.”

“How can you not remember?”

“I just can't.”

I think of my two part-time lovers (both of them named Jeffrey) who seem totally irrelevant to my life, but still I can remember everything. Every meeting, every meal, every mouthful.

 

“Was she good in bed?”

“I refuse to go into detail.”

“Was she?”

Bennett hesitates. He has unleashed something he cannot now control. He wants to take it all back. Salvage begins.

“I don't think she ever came. She moaned and writhed a lot, but I think she was inorgastic.”

Inorgastic. I recognize the voice of Dr. Herschel W. Steingesser prompting from behind the couch.

“How did you know?”

“I never knew for sure.”

“Didn't you
care?”

“Look, Isadora, not all women are like you. Some of them get a lot out of sex without coming. They like being held, stroked, fondled.”

Snidely: “Tell me about all those other women.”

“There
weren't
any others.”

“Sure.”

“It's true. There was just Penny. I felt I was dying and she saved my life. It was mostly that I needed someone to talk to. I couldn't talk to you in those days.”

“Saved your life? That's pretty strong stuff. We'd only been married a year. Why didn't you leave me if you felt so trapped? I was miserable too. It might have been a blessing.”

“Because I was conflicted. I knew you were warm and cuddly. That you came and she didn‘t, that my need for her was probably all my unresolved oedipal problem ...”

“That word again.”

Bennett bristles: “Look—do you want to hear or don't you?”

“I do. I do.”

“She had six children—like my mother-and a husband she hated. I saw her as a damsel in distress—the mother I could save ...”

“I thought she saved you.”

“It was mutual.”

“It sounds great. It sounds like you should have gotten married.”

No.

“Why not? You apparently had a rapport with her you never had with me.”

Bennett concedes part of this. He is torn between boasting and contrition.

“She said she'd leave her kids for me. It was flattering, but after a while it began to bug me. It seemed unmotherly somehow...”

“And you didn't want a cold bitch
shiksa
with six kids ...”

“If you want to shut me up—keep using that tone of voice, okay? I won't say another word.”

“I don't give a shit. Don't say a word. You haven't for eight years anyway.”

We ride for a while in silence. My tears are blurring the approaching headlights into nebulae. But Bennett has opened a Pandora's box sealed for too long. He cannot not talk now.

“She did other things that bugged me too. Like calling men ‘creatures.' She always referred to her ex-lovers as ‘those creatures.' ”

Out of my hurt, I invent something to hurt him with: “You don't suppose you were the only one in Heidelberg she was screwing, do you?”

“I thought so. Why?”

“She bragged to me and Laura about screwing Eichen the cellist and also two colleagues of Robby's on the army base.”

Bennett doesn't rise to the bait. He continues steadily: “Well, I can only say that I thought I was the only one.”

Me, goading: “You weren't.”

“Well, I thought I was and I suppose that's all that counts. I thought I made a deep impression on her. She was interested in my work with children-and she went into analysis.”

“How convenient! What did you do? Screw in the child-guidance clinic? Or on the couch in your office?”

I know I sound inane. The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach. How you stoop to conquer! I hate my words even as they tumble out.

“We used to meet on the nights you taught. In your study.”

“I thought you didn't remember.”

“I thought it would hurt you.”

“You thought right.”

And it's true. Somehow the fact that he was screwing a housewife while I was working makes it all worse. My driven-ness. My need to teach, have a career, make money, not be dependent. And whom does he seek out? An army officer's wife who never finished college, has no career, and spends her day between the PX and her various lovers. No. Not various. I'd better not begin believing my own lies. I don't know for sure that she had various lovers. But it seems to fit. And in my study.

“Look,” Bennett goes on, “when I got to Germany, I panicked. It was a terrible idea, really-doing three years there-but I was terrified of going to Vietnam, and I thought I could stand it, conquer my paranoia about the army. Well I was wrong. I freaked out, cut myself off from you entirely-and you were deep into your own thing: your writing, your teaching, your own paranoia about Germany.... Penny was so goyish, so American. The wife of an army officer ... she seemed so Aryan-dumb as that sounds-and she was a mother, American as apple pie ...”

“What an original phrase!”

“Isadora, I'm trying to explain.... I was terrified. I wanted someone un-Jewish, cool. But after a while I realized I didn't want that either. It was just a reaction to my feeling so trapped in the army. It reevoked my childhood—suddenly being trapped in Hong Kong and not speaking Chinese. You never took that part of me seriously. Penny did. She'd never had an Oriental lover before-and I was exotic to her. She made me feel special. Really. She did.”

I am moved. I know that what Bennett is saying is true, that he is trying to be honest. I should be sympathetic, but I am just so hurt. I was terribly lonely during those three years in Heidelberg and there were many occasions when I turned down affairs which might have solaced me. Now I feel like a damned fool. So much needless suffering. So much guilt for my fantasies. And he was actually doing it. On the nights when I taught. And in my study! This saintly Leonard Woolf who never resented my work actually screws in my study!

“Did you read my manuscripts too?”

“What?”

“When you screwed in my study—did you also read my manuscripts?”

“What a bizarre idea.” “Not at all-I think that was partly the point, wasn't it? Getting even with my writing.”

Bennett says nothing. Then he says: “That's absurd. Penny admired you enormously. She was actually quite jealous of you. Spoke of you constantly, envied you your talent, your degrees, loved your poems, your short stories ...”

“I never published any of the stories-remember? How could she have read them if you didn't show them to her? What a pretty picture! The two of you, post coitus, reading my short stories aloud to each other and sipping
Spätlese!”

“It wasn't like that. We both loved those stories. I told you you should have published them ...”

“You both! You both! Oh how terrific to know that Penny was honing her powers as a postcoital literary critic on my first attempts at fiction! I didn't want to publish those stories. I thought they were timid. And derivative! Just right for you and Penny.”