How to Save Your Own Life (2 page)

A booksellers' convention in Chicago in early June. There were thousands of people surging through the lobby of the Sheraton and every third one seemed to know my face. I was grabbed by the hand, jostled, yoo-hooed, asked for advice, and solicited to read the budding literary efforts of nephews in Schenectady. I was smiling so hard I felt my face would crack as I plowed through the masses of booksellers, agents, editors, publicists. The air conditioning seemed to have given up the ghost. There was a line at the registration desk, a long line at the coffee shop entrance, and a still longer one at the taxi stand outside. All I could think about was somehow plowing back to my room. I tucked my chin under as if I were about to dive, seized firm hold of my shoulder bag, and marched, wove, waltzed, and sidestepped through the crowds that attempted to block my way on every side. I was not wearing a name tag, but my face had become public property.

Back in my room-with its two double beds (awaiting some mysterious
ménage à
quatre, no doubt), its gigantic color TV, its funereal flower arrangements sent by my publisher—I kicked off my sandals, stripped off my clothes, ran the bath, double-locked the door (so I wouldn't be killed like the lady in
Psycho),
and stepped into the steaming water. Whenever my life seems most unmanageable, I take a bath. I leaned back in the tub and let the water fill my ears. My hair flowed out around me.

What the hell did I want, anyway? I had everything I'd worked so hard for-and it somehow all seemed like ashes in my mouth. I had lusted after fame, notoriety, adulation all my life. From the moment my father saw me in the hospital and asked my mother “Do we have to take it home? ...” my life had been a constant struggle to get attention, not to be ignored, to be the favored child, the brightest, the best, the most precocious, the most outrageous, the most adored. And now I had it-not from my parents or my husband, maybe, but from the rest of the world. And now it all seemed like some sort of nightmare.

Perversity. Three years before I would have been ready to kill for what I had now. I had envied published writers, envied and adored them. I had imagined them to be demigods, invulnerable to pain, blessed with a constant supply of love and self-assurance. Now I was learning about the other side of the fun-house mirror of fame. It was as if I had entered a room which very few are allowed to enter and which everyone on the outside believes to be incredibly beautiful, opulent, and magical. Once inside, you discover it is a hall of mirrors and all you see are myriad distortions of self, self, self.

There are the distortions of the press, the distortions of strangers who project their fantasies and frustrations on you, the distortions of all those people who envy you and imagine they would like to replace you. If you tell them that you are trapped in a hall of mirrors, they don't want to hear it. They need to believe in the magic of that locked room. They need it in order to justify their own envy, their own climbing.

I thought of my marriage to Bennett and of the past year. I wished I were home with him. Our marriage could be dead at times and dreary, but on some level it seemed we were working ourselves closer and closer together. And after all our ambivalence about it, we were finally talking about having a baby.

Why not? The time had come. I was thirty-two and panicked about getting older. I had written three books, knew that my vocation as a writer was firmly established, and we had enough money for housekeepers and baby-sitters, even a nanny-if I wanted one.

Then why did it all seem so wrong? Something kept stopping me. I'd yearn for a child all day when Bennett was off at the hospital, and then when he came home at night and I saw his glum and sorrowful face, I'd rebel. Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever. There had to be something better, something lighter and more joyful than that. Bennett was hooked on the myth of his unhappy childhood. He had been in analysis for seven years and he regarded life as a long disease, alleviated by little fifty-minute bloodlettings of words from the couch. He was a horizontal man, and I was beginning to suspect I was a vertical woman. But I felt so guilty about my misgivings. He was a perfectly nice man. A bit sad and self-absorbed, but perfectly nice. Loyal to me, supportive of my career. All year people had been telling me how lucky I was to have him: a husband who'd put up with my success.

Put up
with-those
were the words they used. And, though the words bothered me, I never really questioned them. I felt grateful to Bennett, grateful and obligated. He was my Leonard Woolf, I thought. My soothing live-in muse. After all, he hadn't left me when my novel Candida Confesses (which everyone but me seemed to think was so outrageous) became a best seller. And he hadn't left me when all his patients asked whether he was a character in the book. And he hadn't left me when I did the unpardonable thing of becoming a public figure whose mail he had to help answer and whose escort he had to be at literary parties.

All my friends and acquaintances seemed to think of him as long-suffering, patient, and terribly secure-for a man. Didn't they realize what that implied? Didn't they realize how condescending that was to both of us? And to all men-if you wanted to stretch the implications? Was my success some sort of allergy that had to be tolerated? In my position, a man would be crowing; I was forever apologizing. Thanking my husband for “putting up with” my fame. Apologizing to less successful friends by telling them how awful it really was to have what I had. And I felt apologetic. And obligated. The least I could do for Bennett was make it up to him by producing a child.

But there was his glum face, his nervous cough, and his perpetual analyzing. Though psychiatry was his vocation, his real passion seemed to be for his unhappy childhood. He nurtured its myth the way he might have nurtured the child we never had. And he Was forever trying to convince other people to nurture their unhappy childhoods too.

Though I'd had more than my share of therapy myself, I'd begun to regard his attitude toward his childhood as a species of vanity. All people believe their suffering is greater than others'. Just as they secretly believe they are smarter, and more deserving of fame.

Everyone except me, it seems.

Bennett's childhood was worse than most, actually. A widowed mother who had to go on welfare, and numerous brothers and sisters, two of whom died of rare childhood diseases. It was harsh-but not as harsh as the fates of some of the other kids growing up during the Second World War. Besides, there is suffering even in castles. Hamlet is troubled by his bad dreams. And some people survive even concentration camps without forgetting how to laugh.

Humor is a survival tool. Perhaps that was why Bennett's childhood oppressed him so. He had no sense of humor. This showed up even in his practice of psychiatry—which was earnest, bookish, but essentially blocked by his lack of access to his feelings. He'd tried to establish full-time private practice but finally gave up all but a few patients and went into institutional psychiatry. His passion for security had led him to shelter in a hospital job.

In a way, I disrespected him for this and my disrespect had begun to eat away at whatever love I'd once had for him. But all this was semiconscious. I told myself, Marriage is ever thus, and men and women never really speak the same language. My friends pronounced me lucky to have such a supportive spouse, and I believed it myself. Who was happy? Where was it written that I ought to have fun with my husband as well as be tolerated, fucked, and supported in my creative ambitions? Most creative women had had it much worse. Bullying husbands, lovers who drove them to suicide, tyrannical fathers who forced them into lives of sexual renunciation and daughterly dutiful-ness. At least I was blessed with a household saint-boring as that might be. And the fact was: Bennett barely intruded on my consciousness at all in either a positive or negative way. I used up no psychic energy on him at all. He was increasingly a sort of fixture in the house—like an oven or a dishwasher or a hi-fi set.

How had we drifted so far apart? Or were we apart from the very beginning? Does eight years of marriage erode all points of contact between two people-or weren't they ever there? I no longer knew. I only knew that I never looked forward to going on a vacation with him—or being alone with him at night-and that I filled my life with frenetic activity, hundreds of friends, casual affairs (which, of course, I felt guilty about) because being alone in his company was so curiously sterile. Even when we were home together, I was forever retreating to my study to work. Surely some of this was my fierce ambition (or, as my astrology-nut friends would say, typical Aries woman married to a typical Cancer man); but surely some of it was a desire not to be with Bennett. His presence depressed me. There was something life-denying about his very manner, carriage, and monotonous way of speaking. How could one create life with someone who represented death?

I got up out of the bath and started drying myself, applying perfume and powder, blowing out my hair. Then I made up my face carefully—as much to hide from the world as anything else. Hide! This was a hell of a time to start hiding! Yet, it wasn't
I
who was famous, it was Candida-Candida, whom I'd modeled after myself as painters do self-portraits or depict their children as cherubim, their wives as seraphim, their neighbors as devils.

I came from a family of portraitists and still-life painters. It was family wisdom that you painted what you had at home. The reason was obvious. What you had at home was what you knew best, what you could study at leisure, learn from, dissect, analyze. You could learn chiaroscuro, color, composition as well from an apple or an onion or your own familiar face as from the fountains of Rome or the storm clouds of Venice.

I had modeled Candida after myself, yet she was both more and less than the real Isadora. Superficially, the likeness was easy enough to spot: a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side, a writer of poems and stories, a compulsive daydreamer. Yet Candida was frozen in a book, while I was, I hoped, growing. I had outgrown many of the desires that motivated her, many of the fears that trapped her. Yet my public insisted on an exact equivalency between her and me—because my heroine, astoundingly enough, had turned out to be amanuensis to the Zeitgeist.

This amazing development surprised no one more than me. When I invented Candida Wong (with her wise-ass manner, her outspokenness about sex, and her determined bookishness), I was convinced that she was either unfit for print or else so precious that no one but a few other wise-ass Jewish girls from the Upper West Side could relate to her. But I was wrong. As Candida felt, so felt the nation. And no one could have been more surprised than her creator.

Millions of copies later, I began to wonder whether I had created Candida or whether she had, in fact, created me.

 

My mask completed, I ventured out into the teeming lobby again.

That night I was to attend a cocktail party for an aging stripper who had written an autobiography, another cocktail party for a chimpanzee TV star for whom a human had ghost-written an autobiography, and a dinner for a convicted felon who had just been paid a million dollars to write a memoir about his adventures as a high government official in the Nixon administration. Of the three authors, I found the chimpanzee the most honest and engaging—yet all evening I seemed to be conversing with animals and humans alike across a black hole in space.

Oh, I was on when I had to be: chatting everyone up, being delightful to book salesmen, embracing the public-relations game with what might have appeared to be my whole heart. I'm a born performer and I play the smiling celebrity while anxiety pumps away in my gut. But inside I felt that I might as well have sent a wind-up doll to the party as to have gone myself. Instead of bringing me closer to people, those millions of books had separated me from everyone-even, it seemed, from myself.

Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.

A vicious woman columnist waltzed up to me, told me that she wrote poetry too, but unlike me did not write “commercial poetry,” and then confided that she had only read the first three pages of Candida before throwing it against the wall-because she couldn't stand “pornography.”

Though Candida would have had an immediate snappy comeback, I was tongue-tied. I stood there dumbly for a minute or two reeling from all I'd had to drink, and then said “Excuse me” and headed in the direction of the ladies' room, where I collapsed on the can and dozed a little with my cheek against the cool ceramic-tile wall.

Eventually, I forced myself to get up and go back to my double-double-bedded room with six gin and tonics in my blood and at least a half-bottle of wine pulsing through my temples.

I was even lonelier and sadder than I'd been when I'd left the room before dinner. Men I didn't want to sleep with had propositioned me, and I got into bed alone, mourning the waste of both those mattresses, masturbating over and over again in the hopes of putting myself to sleep.

Alcohol has a strange effect on me: wide-eyed insomnia. The feeling that my heart will fly out of my chest on its own wings. My mouth felt like the inside of a sand trap, my headache was monumental, and I realized that, short of three Valiums (which I didn't have), I was doomed to consciousness for the duration of the night.

What was I going to do? I knew I had a standing invitation to press my psychic wounds against the fleshly bandages of an aging editor who had repeatedly made his affectionate lust for me plain, but that was hardly what I wanted. Perhaps Candida would have done it, but I wasn't about to. If anything, I knew it would only depress me more.

I revolved in the bed like a chicken on a spit, hoping to discover one more side to my torso than the mere four I'd already tried to span the abyss with. My back seemed camel-humped. My right side teetered over the edge of the hideous chartreuse-carpeted chasm between the two hotel beds. My left side was suddenly riddled with cramps, pins and needles, ancient aches. My beloved belly, usually so comfortable for sleeping on sleepless nights, also betrayed me. It sank down into the too-soft mattress as into quicksand, and it seemed that my mouth and nose would soon follow and asphyxiation would set in. I rolled over on my back once more, studied the ceiling, reached down to fondle my breasts, felt for lumps, thought-or did I imagine it?—that I found one, was perversely glad to have a real worry to occupy me, then reached lower down to fondle my cunt. I began to masturbate again desultorily, but quickly lost interest. Nothing so mundane would tranquilize me on this particular night. Black, winged presences were already gathering in the clammy air-conditioned hum of the hotel-room torture chamber: my Greek chorus had come to visit me.