How to Save Your Own Life (6 page)

 

No need to detail the rest of this. Finally I shrieked at Bennett until the car echoed with my voice. I shrieked that at least he had loved someone and that was better than no love at all. I had thought him incapable of love and surely this revelation -painful as it was-was better than that verdict. I shrieked until my throat hurt and my eyes teared and I forgot what I was shrieking about.

You can demand deceit, I suppose, but not fidelity-and yet this revelation seemed spectacularly badly timed. He could have told me so many other times and it would have been a bond between us. He could have told me when I came back to him from my European adventure or when he read the finished manuscript of Candida Confesses or when I begged him to tell me about the Woodstock weekend. But no. He'd saved it up. Saved it until I was ready to have a child with him, saved it until I needed his affirmation most, saved it for the year of my sudden visibility, saved it to remind me of how dependent I'd been on him then, how helpless, how lonely, how unloved.

 

“So you were with Penny the weekend I was in Woodstock?”

“I really only went to say good-bye.”

“But why did you torture me so about ‘my fantasies!' when I was right all along? What a cruel thing to have said!”

Bennett isn't aware of this. “I didn't think it had anything to do with you. It was my problem.”

“To discuss with your analyst, right?”

Bennett says nothing.

“Right?”

“Yes, Isadora, it was my problem.”

“Bullshit. I happen to disagree. For seven years we've lived with a major falsehood between us and I happen to think it concerns both of us. I don't give a shit what Doctor Steingesser thinks. The vibes were there, the withholding was there, and a whole pattern of falsehood was set. You went to your analyst. I went to mine and we both continued to lead separate lives, drifting farther and farther apart. I think it stinks- ”

“I didn't see any point in hurting you ...”

“So you hurt me now-the worst possible time.”

“Now you're stronger. You can take it.”

At home, we fucked with more passion than we had in years.

From then on, we had a third person living with us ...

In
any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated
lover? Oneself
, oneself, and no one but oneself!

From then on, we had a third person living with us in our house. I went to sleep with Penny at night, and woke up with her in the morning. I dreamed about Penny night after night. I remembered things I hadn't thought of in seven years: Penny's stretch bikini underpants hanging on the towel rack in the bleak bathroom of her bleak army apartment in Heidelberg. Penny sitting in the living room of that same apartment, pushing the thin strands of copper hair away from her freckled forehead and saying “After you've had six children, it takes a lot of cock to fill you up ...” and then smiling lasciviously-first at her own husband, then at mine. Penny calling me up when I was in the hospital with a broken leg and asking me what she could do for Bennett. And me saying how considerate she was and thanking her, thanking her, thanking her.

I was plunged into the past. Time reeled backward. I was in the army again—that sad rainy army base, that sad, rainy second year of marriage.

Penny's face obsessed me: her ski-jump nose, her washed out shiksa eyes, her Norman Rockwell freckles. I was unable to concentrate on anything. At my desk in the morning, all I could do was reconstruct our apartment in Heidelberg, and my little gray-walled study-in which Bennett's cock is entering Penny's stretched-out shiksa cunt, while a stack of my early writing looks on....

I was obsessed with details. How long did their assignations last and how often did they meet? How many times in a row did they fuck and in what positions? Did they moan or scream or whisper terms of endearment? Did they speak of their spouses afterward? Did they compare notes on our sexual techniques? Did they fall into each other's arms laughing about how clever they were at deceiving us? Did they give each other gifts, exchange tokens of love?

But mostly it was the sexual organs I focused on. Again and again and again, I saw Bennett's cock enter Penny's cunt. I would wake up screaming at three in the morning after I had dreamed of this. And Bennett would comfort me, in the kindest words he knew.

Now that my life had stopped dead in its tracks and was nothing but a museum to my jealousy, Bennett became enormously sympathetic. He had reestablished himself at the center. Nothing could rival him now-not my career, nor my friends, nor my lovers.

Bennett didn't know about my lovers-at least not until the weekend he told me about Penny. Then in desperation I told him. It was all I had left.

 

Sunday number one, post-Woodstock: I have begun dating my life pre- and post-Woodstock. Bennett and I are at home. We have fucked all night-like thieves who don't know each other's names. And I have dreamed of Penny and awakened screaming. In the morning Bennett brings me breakfast in bed: a perfect cheese omelet and
café au lait.
He is smiling with the inner peace of a man who has demolished his wife and can now afford to be generous. I have only been up a few minutes and I am already weeping into my omelet. Eight years of tears! I never knew I had so many.

“I'm sorry I hurt you,” Bennett says.

I choke on the eggs and tears.

“I am. I really am.”

I pick at my omelet.

The coppery color of the cheddar cheese is Penny's hair. The blue of the china is her eyes. The white of the napkin is her bikini underpants.

“Have you had any other affairs?” I ask, not wanting to know the answer.

“Only one,” Bennett says smugly, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Last night you told me none!”

“It was when you were so immersed in writing your book,” he says. “I guess I felt shut out. I had no one to turn to.”

“So who did you turn to?” I ask, bitter.

“Robin McGraw,” he says, naming a blonde social worker from his hospital clinic.

And suddenly I spin off into the past. Robin and Penny. Intuitively, I knew about both of them. I remember the time Robin came skiing with us in Vermont. One afternoon we were having drinks in the hotel room and I looked at Robin, registered the resemblance between her and me, and had a sudden flash: my husband is fucking her. That's why she looks at him with such mournful blue eyes. The blue of her eyes, the blue of Penny‘s, the blue of mine. Three women refracting off each other.

“You certainly run to type,” I snap.

“Robin is really terrified of men,” Bennett says matter-of-factly. “She practically has dyspareunia.”

“What's that?” I ask.

“Spasms in the vagina that make intercourse painful.”

I marvel at his colossal chutzpa. First he fucks them; then he annihilates them with analysis. Inorgastic,
dyspareunia.
The depth of his hatred for women is just becoming apparent to me. I am starting to hate him. I married a monster, I think. And all those years, it was
I
who felt so guilty.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

“What a monster you are.”

Bennett is incredulous. He has so convinced himself that his unhappy childhood makes him a perpetual victim that he cannot fathom himself as a monster.

“Why did you bother with them if you felt such contempt?”

“What contempt?”

“Inorgastic, dyspareunia,” I say mockingly.

“That's not contempt. It's just factual.”

“Sounds pretty contemptuous to me.”

“Robin came into my office crying one day,” he goes on. “She was terribly upset about some patient who had yelled at her, and I had to comfort her. That was when you were so engrossed in your own things-I began seeing her every other week or so. I guess I always knew she had the hots for me. I remember telling Doctor Steingesser about that months before. ‘Why does it surprise you so that a handsome woman should be attracted to you?' he asked ...”

A handsome woman, I think. I turn the antiquated phrase over in my mind like an old coin. Why do analysts cultivate these Jamesian locutions? Can't they join the rest of us in the twentieth century?

“Anyway, I was flattered,” Bennett continues. “She was pretty, and obviously crazy about me—and you were working so hard ...”

“What a marvelous muse you are!” I say with considerable fury. My anger is bubbling to the surface again like boiling mud in a region of volcanos. Once again this long-suffering patient husband is acting out his rage against my success. Fucking Penny in Heidelberg, fucking Robin in New York.

“I'm human too,” Bennett says, unconvincingly.

“Then why did you always make yourself out to be such a saint?”

“Did I?”

“You certainly fucking well did! You let me writhe in guilt and fantasies, thinking myself a bad little girl, while you pretended to be above it all, above sexual peccadillos, above lust. It's that I can't forgive you for. Letting me sweat it out and pretending to be so pure yourself! If only you had shared it with me.... If only you had said, ‘Okay, don't feel so guilty-I' ve done it myself.' But you pretended you never even had such
fantasies. I
was the only one. You could have leveled with me instead of letting me feel like some sort of freak.”

“What was the point? It was my problem ...”

“I've heard that before and it's pretty goddamn self-serving. You simply didn't want me to feel free to have affairs too-that's what I think. But you know what?—I had them anyway ...” I feel sick about the revelations I am about to make, but I can't help myself. The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to remain in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

“Who with?”

“Oh Jeffrey Rudner, for one, and Jeffrey Roberts.”

“Jeffrey
Rudner?”
Bennett is stung by this. Jeffrey—his fellow shrink, his tennis partner. I am delighted to have this additional dart up my sleeve: “He used to cancel a whole afternoon of patients for me—something you'd never do.”

Bennett looks crestfallen. “I thought that English asshole was the last.... I thought when I took you back you
promised...”

“I promised nothing.”

“I thought your analysis...”

“Ah analysis—the universal panacea... The cure for lust, for restlessness, for every sexual itch... As a matter of fact Jeffrey and I used to bump into each other
after
our analytic sessions. That was how it started. I'd be walking out of 940 Park and he'd be walking out of 945 Park. We'd collide in the middle of the avenue, and go for coffee. After a while, we'd spend the odd Friday afternoon in his office, making love...”

I say this coolly—as if it had been easy, as if there had been no angst, no misgivings, no anxiety. Not true at all. The whole silly little affair had been fraught with guilt and misgivings. The only good thing about it was being able to pull it out now, like a rabbit out of a hat. Talking about it was far more fun than living it had ever been. But I don't intend to tell Bennett this. For his sake, I embellish:

“Jeffrey happens to be a great fuck. I even think he's
orgastic
—to use your jargon. And he would try things you'd never
consider
—like eating apple butter out of my cunt...”

“In the office? On the analytic couch?” Bennett goes from incredulity to contempt: “Boy, you two were certainly acting out against your analysts weren't you?—doing it on the
couch
...”

I suddenly remember that we never actually
did
it on the couch (Jeffrey was too superstitious)—but I won't give Bennett the satisfaction of knowing that.

“It's great fun on the couch,” I say gleefully; “you ought to try it.”

“I have,” he retaliates. “With Robin.”

“And I suppose you don't call
that
acting out?”

“I certainly do. And I certainly spent
hours
on it with Doctor Steingesser.”

“I guess that makes it kosher, huh? Fuck first, analyze later.”

“Have it your way,” Bennett says. “At least I didn't do it with a
friend
of yours...”

“I think it's kind of nice that Jeffrey was willing to cancel patients for me, don't you? An extremely gallant gesture—especially for a shrink.”

I look at Bennett, his face set in anger, his eyes hard and narrow. I wish I had even more peccadillos to display. I wish I had fucked his entire medical school class, all his colleagues, every doctor in New York. I scrape the bottom of the barrel: “Jeffrey Roberts was in love with me for years, and then there was Bob Lorrillard when I went to Chicago to do his TV show, and Amos Kostan, the Israeli poet.” (The last isn't even true; Amos and I once embraced in the kitchen, but never had an affair. Still, I know it will get Bennett mad.) I am feeling as helpless as a child who suddenly realizes that dirty things are going on behind locked doors and that she is left out in the cold. I would do anything to inflict the same feeling on Bennett. But he isn't biting.

“I suspected all of those,” he says defensively—“and I'm prepared to forgive you.”

“Forgive me! Forgive me! And what if I don't
want
forgiveness? What if I want the right to my own anger?”

“I understand that artists tend to be a bit unstable and I understand that you—”

This enrages me still further. “Don't give me that patronizing shit, goddamn you. I had one or two dumb fucks—and you had a serious passionate affair—for which you nearly left me. Don't give me that artist crap. It's insulting and condescending. Once again you're playing the big daddy who deigns to take me back. No thanks! Can't you see how controlling you are? Don't you
realize?”