How to Save Your Own Life (7 page)

And with that I begin to cry. The dams break, and eight years of tears pour forth. Where had I been storing all these tears?

When I am utterly dissolved in my own tears, Bennett opens his arms to me and wants me to crawl in. All the way back to the womb. And I crawl. But I am raging within. I let him embrace me like a crab embracing its dinner—but inside I am furious. The marriage has begun to end.

A day in the life...

There is a rumor abroad in the land that women today leave their husbands at the drop of a hat—or some other appropriate garment. I am living proof that it isn't so. With no children to “tie me down” (or anchor me to reality), with a profession and livelihood of my own, leaving was still the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I tried everything I could think of to postpone the decision—or reverse it—and the very process of leaving took years, not months. Even the flings and affairs I had, even the rebellious things I wrote were, in reality, ways of postponing the actual terrifying decision to leave.

It was a far cry from what one overhears from a neighboring luncheon table or, fleetingly, on the crossed wires of the telephone:
“And then she just up and left him.”
That classic line is inevitably pronounced with a mixture of contempt and envy —but vicarious elation underlies them both. Another prisoner has escaped! Another bird has flown her gilded cage! The line stirs us, no matter how many times we have heard it repeated. Freedom, freedom is the theme.

I was not insensible to the call of freedom. Every time I heard of
any
woman who had left her husband—whether it was a friend, a friend of a friend, a distant acquaintance, or some media personality compounded of two parts rumor, two parts projection, and the rest wishful thinking—I yearned, palpably
yearned.
I became a ready customer for paperback originals with titles like
How to Do Your Own Divorce, The Joys of Divorce, The Natural Incompatibility of Love and Marriage,
or
The Challenge of Single Living.
I was obsessed with leaving, yet I could not leave. In the manner of psychotics who project their own delusions on the environment, I began to convince myself that the entire world was obsessed with leaving its husband, that leaving one's husband was the
only,
the cosmic, theme.

My friends were crucial to me then. In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.

I have always been blessed with friends. At no time in my life, no matter how miserable, have I lacked friends to share my misery with. Friends
love
misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.

Right after Bennett's revelations, I found myself calling on each of my friends in turn, as if they were healers, gurus, shamans. Each of them was a mirror that reflected only its own distortions—yet even this was comforting in its way.

That hot Monday morning post-Woodstock, I called them all: Gretchen Kendall, the feminist lawyer; Michael Cosman, my best friend and almost-lover in Heidelberg; Jeffrey Rudner, the shrink who cancelled sessions for me; Jeffrey Roberts, the WASP advertising man and poet who had wanted to marry me for years; Hope Lowell, my muse and fairy godmother; Holly, the perpetual loner whose paintings make it absolutely clear that she would rather be a plant than a person. The friends that I neglected to call somehow called me. Before eleven that morning, my entire week was booked solid. Not a sliver of time was left to see Bennett. It might even be said that I never saw Bennett again until long after I left him. Only then could I look at him without rage, and understand. But by then it was too late, what I understood made it absolutely clear to me that I could never go back.

 

Gretchen is five foot eight, blonde, has enormous boobs, a raunchy tongue, and professes Marxism, feminism, and a passion for baroque music. Two years ago, during the gay-chic phase of the Women's Movement, she and I talked a lot about having an affair—but, of course, we never did. We never really wanted to. It was only the
idea
that seemed appealing. Instead, we went to London together, when my novel was published there, and we had what can only be called a ten-day-long primal therapy session in our hotel room at the Dorchester. It was a pretty hellish experience, which convinced us both that we should never again attempt to live or travel together, but it left us fast friends. Secretly, I am a little intimidated by Gretchen. Her domineering nature (Leo, Leo ascendant), her professed radicalism, her fast mouth, her extraordinary beauty. She has so much life-force that she makes everyone else in the room feel drained. She overwhelms me.

Once, when I was being interviewed by a London women's magazine, Gretchen sat in the back of the room saying “bullshit” after nearly every one of my responses. “It's
my
goddamned interview!” I finally said in a rage—and of course the snotty journalist made
that
the headline of the piece. Our friendship nearly faltered over that, but it survived because, in some strange way, Gretchen and I are sisters, and need each other—even to yell at. I love her (and I think she loves me). The fact is—you can't really write about somebody you don't love. Even if the portrait is vitriolic, even if the pen is sharpened with old grudges, there has to have been love somewhere along the line, or the sheer, brute energy of pushing that pen across the page will not be there. And writing takes energy—more energy than you ever think you have. And energy comes from love. It takes a spasm of love to write a poem, and several spasms to write a short story, and hundreds of them to write a novel. A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage. From time to time, you get tired of your subject and your passion wanes—but you hang in there for the long haul. Occasionally, you succumb to temptations: a poem or two, an occasional short story; but the novel binds you with its long apron strings. You may stray—but never for good.

 

Gretchen runs her one-woman practice out of a tiny window-less office on Madison Avenue in the sixties. It's in the back room of another, more successful lawyer's suite. The walls are covered with political posters, the desk is heaped with briefs and feminist books, pictures of her kids are pasted up on the wall, and there's a large male nude hanging over her cluttered desk. It's a hard-edged painting of a naked black man holding a giant watermelon in front of (what we presume is) his penis, and grinning devilishly. To ward off any suspicion of racism, Gretchen tells you at once that the artist is a black woman client of hers. Her clients seldom can afford to pay, so they give Gretchen paintings, Christmas fruitcakes, original manuscripts, or, more often, nothing at all. She barely has enough to cover her rent and answering service—and money is always a sore point with her.

When I walk into her office, she's got her feet up on the desk, one welfare mother on hold, and an abortion reformer on the line.

“You look terrible. Sit down,” she says, and goes on talking. Sometimes I suspect that the phone conversations I overhear in Gretchen's office are partly performed for my benefit. Gretchen has a great sense of the theatrical. The female Clarence Darrow of feminism.

“Of course he's a pig. Who did you expect—John Stuart Mill?” A peal of infectious laughter follows. Gretchen has a delightful laugh—which is fortunate, since she often has a very sharp tongue. Without the laugh, she might be totally terrifying.

“Look—that bastard came into the hospital dressed up as a doctor and molested five women. But nobody gave a fuck until he molested a
white
woman. Then the shit hit the fan.”

I smile at Gretchen, her knee-jerk radicalism. She grins back.

“Well, what are we going to do? Let the fuckers get away with it? Believe me, he'll be out in six months and doing it again. Maybe to you or me. I'd give him a karate chop so fast he wouldn't know what hit him—the son of a bitch. Okay. Check it out and call me back. Good. I know. Bye.” She presses the other button on her phone. “Hello? Mrs. Brown? You're going to have to come down to my office and tell me the whole story in detail so we can nail the son of a bitch, okay? Do you know how to get here? You take the Lexington Avenue subway to Sixty-eighth Street and then you walk three blocks downtown and two blocks west. You have the address? Good. Tomorrow? Well, if I'm out to lunch, make yourself comfortable here. I should be back soon. Okay. Bye.” And then to me: “God—
you
look like the roof just caved in. What the fuck happened?”

“I'm leaving Bennett.”

“I've heard
that
before.”

“This time it's true.”

Gretchen laughs. “I'll believe it when you change the locks.”

“Do you know what the son of a bitch did?”

“Joined the Tong? Quit analysis? Took a male lover? Actually
talked
to you?”

“Very funny. Actually, he
did
talk for the first time in eight years and you know what he told me?”

“That he's actually a robot? I suspected it all along.”

“No, you idiot. He had a
lover
for years. In Heidelberg. And after. The sanctimonious son of a bitch. Remember all his outrage about
your
open marriage? Remember how guilty he tried to make us
both
feel about going to London? Well, it turns out he even got laid during the time we were away—even though
we
never did.

Gretchen laughs. “I always wondered why you were so sure he didn't. They're all pigs underneath, you know. Even my illustrious Alan—with his cute vasectomy scar and his men's c.r. group. You can take it as a rule of thumb. Pigs is pigs.”

“But Bennett was so straight.”

“Not straight. Just rigid, uptight, and boring. They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the
rest
of the time.”

“I guess.” I look down, about to cry.

“Look—don't flagellate yourself about it—at least you know now. At least you don't have to delude yourself anymore. You always did this
shtik
about how virtuous
he
was and how bad
you
were. At least you can cut
that
crap now.”

“What a colossal waste of energy. All that guilt.
Christ.”

“I know. But it's better this way, isn't it? Maybe you can leave the shmuck now. And that useless analyst you go to.”

“She's not so bad. She's pretty good in fact.”

“Then why are you so stuck? You've been going round and round with the same old Freudian garbage for years now. You'll never get
any
where with that. And you'll never move from A to B married to that
deadpan.”

“You know what kills me?”

“What?”

“The way I needed to see him as my daddy and protector, the way I needed the
illusion
of being protected. Why do we do that? We all do it, you know. Even you.”

“Well, I'm reconciled to the fact that I'll always be with men. I'll never make it as a lesbian—but at least I don't Uncle Tom it up the way you do.”

This hurts. “I don't think I Uncle Tom it up.”

“Bullshit. Of course you do. Whenever Bennett enters the room, you start
accommodating
him. It's sickening. What did
he
ever do for you? Treated you rotten until you got successful and now treats you like the goose that laid the golden egg. And he patronizes you like crazy. All that ‘woman artist' horseshit. As if being a writer were a
disease.
The sooner you get rid of that stiff, the better. I'd start your separation agreement right now, if you wanted. Only I can tell you're not really ready.” Gretchen gets up, stretches, retucks her shirt in her jeans, and begins making faces in the magnifying mirror on her desk. She unscrews a jar of vitamin E cream, massages a little of it into her neck, and starts dabbing herself with perfume out of a Youth Dew bottle. The best-smelling Marxist in New York. If you smell good, you can conquer the world.

“I'm so mad at the bastard, I'd like to castrate him, not divorce him. Divorce is too good for him.”

“You're mad at yourself, babe.” The room is beginning to reek of Youth Dew.

“Yeah. I guess. The thing is, why did I need that myth of having this glorious daddy and protector? That's what gets me so pissed. We're alone anyway—so why don't we just admit it from the outset? Bennett's function in my life was mostly imaginary, wasn't it? I've been making half the bread for the last few years. I don't have fun with him. He doesn't like most of my friends. And we practically never see each other. We don't have kids—so what am I
doing
there, really?”

“I thought he was a good fuck—though that's no reason to stay
either.”

“Well, he is. But Jeffrey Rudner does better back rubs and goes down on me with a lot more gusto. And I'm sure there are plenty of fucks as good as Bennett. For god's sake, he screws in his
socks and pajama-top.”

“You never told me that.”

“If I had, you'd have made fun of me even more.”

“You're damn right.”

“Do you know what he
did?”

“Are there any variations on cheating I don't know about?”

“That stinking hypocrite was having an affair the whole time he was being so pious about everyone else's sex life. On the army base. When he was going on about how
infantile
they all were. And how they were
acting out.
And he was so superior to you and Alan. He said your tolerating each other's affairs, baby-sitting for each other on nights out was unconscious oedipal something or other. God—I'd like to kill him.”