How to Save Your Own Life (11 page)

 

Normally I would be high after those hours with Jeffrey Rudner, but on this occasion despair very quickly sets in. I suddenly realize that I could fuck a different man every weekday afternoon and still not feel contented. Adultery is no solution, only a diversion.

To clear my head, I walk all the way to my dinner date with Jeffrey Roberts (almost forty blocks downtown), and all the way across town to Madison Avenue again. Jeffrey is working late and waiting for me in his office. He knows nothing of the existence of the other Jeffrey, has no idea that he is the other half of what is, in fact, a double Jeffrey.

Not that they are at all alike. Jeffrey Rudner is brown, long, and lean. Jewish and tawny, bearded. Jeffrey Roberts is fattish, porcine, and pink. WASPish, Southern, clean-jawed. Whereas Jeffrey Rudner is fucking me to stave off death, Jeffrey Roberts practically never fucks me at all, but loves me with a tenacity which would put Pyramus and Thisbe to shame. For years I thought we'd wind up together. Right after we met, he went to live in South America with his family and we wrote each other long, literate letters. Almost love letters. Or love-for-literature letters. Jeffrey is a frustrated poet who works in an advertising agency writing cosmetics ads. Those beautiful goos they sell at Bloomingdale's are his poems. Not that he creates them. Only God (or Elizabeth Arden) does that. But he names them. He is the Adam of hormone creams and lipsticks, the primal poet of eyeliner and false lashes. Barefoot boy with cheek gloss.

I fell in love with his letters. He wrote so well I thought him handsome (in a way I used to think certain radio announcers handsome because they had such handsome
voices).
Of course I had seen him—his pinkish mottled skin, his stubby white lashes, his beady blue eyes—before he left for Brazil. But his letters were so beautiful I forgot his face. We conducted a whole love affair on paper for two years. An epistolary novel almost. An eighteenth-century Richardsonian romance. And then he returned. Face-to-face with that piglike face, I could not love him. Oh I was sorry. Very sorry. It was not at all democratic of me—but when was love ever democratic? There is, in this imperfect world, the sheer irreducibility of looks. We love for funny reasons: a slightly crooked smile, front teeth that are a trifle too long, the way the chest hair feels to the cheek that lies on it. Sorry. I did not invent the system. Next time, I will try to improve on it.

But nevertheless I
tried.
Old I.W.W. never gives up on
any
man without a struggle. I hang in there year after year trying to make the unlovable lovable. I believe the imperfections of the system are all my fault. I
want
the world to be democratic when it obviously isn't. So I tried with Jeffrey. Every morning at eleven we checked in on the phone. Long literate conversations. We were both immensely lonely and married to people we couldn't talk to. I think we may have saved each other's lives. Those conversations were lifelines to us both. I was writing poems and novels at home. He was writing haiku on hand cream and sonnets on suntan lotion at the office. We lunched together once a week at least, getting drunk and merry, eating too much, giving each other books and manuscripts, cards, gifts, furtive propositions. Eventually bed reared its ugly headboard. Another six months went by. (I suspect Jeffrey was really scared of me.) Then it reared again. We met at my house, ate lunch and then each other on the old velvet couch in my study that used to belong to my grandparents. Jeffrey belched after eating me as if I were a mug of beer. I couldn't bring myself to touch him for another six months.

That was pretty much the course of our “affair.” Six months of letters, phone calls, and lunches for every fuck—or even every naked lunch. After every physical encounter, I vowed, No
more.
The physical attraction simply was not there. But then the months would go by and I would forget. I would forget what a terrible lover he was. And then six months later I'd try again. And suddenly I'd remember. “We never really gave it a chance,” Jeffrey would say. He was thinking technique, the joy of sex, foreplay, foreskin—all that jazz. I was thinking,
Never.
But I loved him. He was my
friend.
I thought him terrifically funny and clever, found him affectionate, witty, charming, intelligent, a great critic of my work. So I always tried just this one more time—and every one more time was just as terrible as the time before. That was the interesting thing about my double Jeffrey: one half I loved but couldn't fuck. The other half I couldn't love but loved to fuck. Fragmentation, I thought. The dichotomy between lovers and friends. I blamed myself, as usual, for the inability to bring them both together.

 

Now I am striding into Jeffrey's office at 8:00 P.M., to see him sitting, and
davening
over story boards for a suntan lotion commercial.

“Tan-tan makes you feel like a
shvartzeh,”
I say, entering laughing. “Don't be merely tan—be
Black.
Get the benefit of Equal Opportunity Employment without being traumatized by your peers. Or by your early years.”

“You really want to get me fired, don't you?” Jeffrey says. And then: “Hi, beauty. You look smashing.”

Jeffrey may be ugly, but he knows how to make women feel beautiful. That and a little phony feminism can get any man laid in two minutes flat.

“How are things?” I ask.

“What can I tell you that you don't already know about suntan lotion?”

“Does chicken fat really work?”

“Only if you're Jewish,” he says.

I sit down in an armchair, relieved to be in Jeffrey's office. My friends' offices—up and down the isle of Manhattan—are havens for me, homes away from home, places I can go to escape from Bennett or writing or myself.

“How's Rebecca?” I ask. Rebecca is Jeffrey's wife, born a Southern Baptist, now a Seventh-Day Adventist and confirmed schizophrenic.

“Crazier than ever. She made me take down the picture of Flannery O‘Connor I had over my writing desk because—get this—O'Connor is an Irish name, and the Irish are the enemies of the English—and her family was English. That kind of logic is abundant around our house. I'm really ready to move out.”

“Funny. So am I.”

Jeffrey brightens. “If you ever need a roommate...”

I feel a terrible pang of guilt for not loving him that way.

“Oh Jeffrey, I
wish
it could be—”

“Nonsense. We've just never given it half a chance. I honestly think it would save both our skins. You keep saying you're leaving Bennett, but you really don't want to live alone. We could take care of each other, not get married or anything, just see if it would work out. I'm a terrific cook, honey.”

“I know it.” For a moment I let myself drift into a fantasy of living with Jeffrey. Shelves laden with Flannery O‘Connor criticism, the comforting sound of two typewriters going against a background of Scriabin, bouillabaisse simmering in a huge enamel kettle (Jeffrey is a great maker of bouillabaisse), cats with silly literary names like Percy Bysshe, Childe Harold, Frankenstein. But then I would have to fuck Jeffrey. At least once in a while, out of politeness. If only I cared less about that aspect of life, I could do it. I really could. Who in the world would I rather read books aloud with, cook with, browse in the Gotham Book Mart with, travel with, observe the passing scene with, laugh with, drink with? No one but Jeffrey.
Damn
sex. If only one could lobotomize it out of one's system. Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.

“You know I love you, don't you?” Jeffrey says.

I nod. “I love you too.”

“But not the same way I love you.”

“Nonsense.”

“Nonsense to
you.
You know goddamn well what I mean. We've been friends too long. And I know you too well. Miss Transparency. I read your mind. If I looked like Robert Redford, we'd have been cooking together and waking up together for the last four years.”

I look down at the floor. What in god's name have I just been doing with Jeffrey
Rudner?
I don't love him
at all.
Perhaps I should try again with Jeffrey Roberts. I do love him. I
do.

“Love,” says Jeffrey, “is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus...”

“Carson McCullers?”

“You read the book! You actually read one of the books I gave you! I was beginning to give up hope.”

“Look,” I say, “I
wish
we inhabited the same country.”

“Me too.”

“I had a hell of a weekend with Bennett, and I really feel I'm ready to leave.”

“I've heard that before.”

“This time I mean it.”

“I've heard that before too. What kind of a hold does he have on you? You can't really believe you'll wind up alone. It's so
obvious
you won't.”

I thought about it. From Jeffrey's point of view it must seem bizarre, but each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's. I
was
sure I'd wind up alone. I was certain I'd fall apart without Bennett. What held me? Panic. Panic was the glue. Besides, I didn't see myself as Jeffrey saw me. To him I was confident, sane, strong, beautiful, with a million choices before me. To myself I was a bundle of indecisions, crazies, irresoluteness, overweight. I was also over the hill, too old, too set in my ways, too used to having a keeper and feeling kept. To be told that I was a young woman with myriad possibilities before me made me laugh. At least
then.
I would have to get considerably older to realize how young I was.

Jeffrey walked over to me, lifted me out of my chair, and gave me a bear hug. Out of friendship, I hugged back. Soon he was panting, pressing his cock against me and asking, asking for my reassurance that he wasn't ugly, wasn't unhappy, wasn't trapped in a job he hated, a marriage he hated, a whole way of life he hadn't bargained for. And soon I was down on my knees sucking his cock to prove to him that somewhere in all that unfulfillment and unhappiness he had a friend.

My mouth was in it, but not my heart. I couldn't wait for him to come and for the thrusting and gagging to be over. It was a Good Samaritan gesture—like taking a blind person across the street or giving blood—but it was somehow also loathsome to me because sex is too powerful a force to misuse it that way. I was being dishonest with him—as I'd been dishonest with Jeffrey Rudner. Doing it out of pity was not much better than doing it out of selfish lust. They were both sides of the same counterfeit coin. That Jeffrey Roberts sighed and moaned and thanked me profusely later only made it worse. What was he thanking me for? Pity was no gift.

“Let
me
buy you dinner tonight,” I said. And we left his office and headed up Park Avenue to the Trattoria, where we gorged ourselves on pizza and
zuppa inglese.
We were always more comfortable together at table than at sex.

After I'd insisted on paying for dinner and walked him to his 10:10 train to Greenwich, I called Holly from a phone booth.

“Christ,” she said sleepily, “what time is it? I've already had three Valiums.”

“Can I come over?”

“Of course, love. Of course you can always come over. I ought to be insulted by the question—but I'm too tired. Where the hell are you?”

“Grand Central Station.”

“Crossroads of a million private lives?”

“You said it.”

“What time is it?”

“It's only ten-twenty.”

Holly groaned. “Come on. I'll get out the mint tea and we can take our midnight Valiums together.”

 

Holly's apartment is the sanctuary the analyst's office should be but isn't. Another loft (this one on lower Fifth Avenue), reached by a dark staircase. But when you enter the apartment, there is a sudden revelation of lights, plants, air, space. There is a skylight with a jungle of ferns growing up toward it. There are numerous stands of African violets, flourishing under fluorescent lights that go on and off on timers. An artificial pebble walkway between the sleeping area and the cooking area is flanked with potted avocados, lemon trees, gardenias, kumquat trees. How she makes all this tropical stuff grow in dreary, sooty New York is nothing short of a miracle. But I guess Holly makes it grow because making things grow keeps her alive. That and her painting, numerous examples of which cover the walls.

How to describe her style? Georgia O‘Keeffe crossed with Francis Bacon? No. Holly is herself alone. But she does have this tendency to zero in on the everyday objects we don't usually bother to look at, enlarge them to heroic size, and force us to see them as if through the eyes of Blake—if not God. Holly is the painter I would be if I had three times as much talent to paint as I was ever born with and hadn't given up at the age of twenty for fear of competing with my mother. Every canvas of Holly's is a vision out of one of my nightmares. I have never had this sort of relationship with an artist friend before. Friends of
mine
have told me that my poems spoke their thoughts and feelings, but I have never before felt, as I do with Holly, that every new canvas of hers is a revelation of my own inner life.

Holly is tall, thin, buxom, with a mop of curly brown hair, and a small mouth that usually has a rather wry expression. She is one of those odd people who has never had a weight problem, who, when she gets depressed, stops eating and gets thinner and thinner until her analyst threatens to hospitalize her. She and her plants nourish each other. She lives on oxygen, herb tea, and Valium. She has often explained to me, with considerable passion, that the fern, that ancient botanical specimen, has the ideal life situation. It is self-nourishing, self-fertilizing, contains sexual and asexual life-styles within its own lifetime, and it is actually immortal. Or at least some part of it is always alive. I have never before met anyone who clearly wanted to be a plant, but Holly makes it seem extremely attractive.