How to Save Your Own Life (20 page)

But I'd never dare say so. There was something about Rosanna that made one tactful, delicate—maybe scared? She seemed to be above anything so base as orgasm. She seemed to be made of pure spirit—like a stock-market rumor.

Then, one day in midsummer, I arrived at her house with a bottle of icy Dom Pérignon (to celebrate her thirty-third birthday). We drank the champagne, munched on Jarlsberg Swiss and
pâté de foie Strasbourg truffé.
By the time the tempting dark-green champagne bottle was empty, we were drunk enough to look at its furled lip and have the same thought instantaneously. We went to bed with the bottle, hugged and kissed, sucked each other's nipples, and stroked each other's thighs until finally, finally, after a month of bottles, vibrators, fruit, and pulsating water, I had the pleasure of seeing Rosanna Howard reach tumultuous orgasm with the bulging green base of a Dom Pérignon bottle protruding from her reluctant cunt.

She thanked me and thanked me. She wept tears of gratitude. The only other time she could come apparently was when her husband went down on her during her period. She attributed her miraculous orgasm to my skill. I attributed it to Moët et Chandon of Epernay. Would she have come with Paul Masson or Taylor's New York State?

I think the answer is clear.

The housewife poet...

In August, Rosanna left for Aspen without me. I was determined to make one last try with Bennett. However much I mistrusted him, however much I disrespected him, nevertheless I had a certain unshakable regard for marriage. We had been together eight years. We had shared all sorts of pains and pleasures. Eight years were not to be taken lightly. There must have been
something
to bind us together all that time—or so I supposed.

Why does my life always fall apart in the summer? Can it be the heat? It
does
seem to be true that in summer the glue binding up the ill-fitting fragments of my life tends to dissolve. The major crises in my life always happen between June and September, and I always meet the men I am going to marry in the fall.

 

All that summer, the marriage was dying. Between my desperate affair with Rosanna and my frantic consultations with friends, I replayed the jealousy scenes obsessively like a child setting out toy houses. Gradually, all the little pieces fell into place: the streets, the trees, the parked cars. Whose car was parked in front of whose house? I began to understand the missed innuendos, the fragmentary conversations, the overheard pieces of dialogue like dissolving puffs of smoke over the characters' heads.

Why did it anger me so? Why did it become such a total obsession? Perhaps because Bennett had always played saint while he cast me in the role of sinner. Perhaps because I had been so unhappy myself during all the early years of our marriage and because I had felt so guilty about even
thinking
of leaving or having an affair. In a happy marriage, jealousy is painful but not necessarily lethal, but in an unhappy marriage, jealousy is often the final straw. There had almost never been anything between me and Bennett but pain. And pain is a good adhesive only when you are young enough or foolish enough to believe it is somehow more virtuous than pleasure. I was no longer that young or that foolish.

From then on it was only a question of time. It was only a question of getting my feet to follow my heart. The shock of discovering that I had been living with a total stranger for eight years took a while to sink in. And I was not one to give up on a marriage easily. I tried hard to forgive Bennett. I tried hard to convince myself he was only human. He had betrayed all the things I believed in most—candor, honesty, openness. But I tried. We took an expensive vacation in Italy and attempted to repair our marriage. We took one of those vacations that never works: a honeymoon hotel in Capri with views of the Mediterranean and splits of champagne in a little refrigerator by the king-size bed. Everything plush and romantic and nothing to say to each other. All night I'd lie awake with my heart beating the same tattoo:
I want t
o
leave, I want to leave, I want to leave, I want
to leave. To which my head answered:
Coward, coward, coward,
coward. I felt that my entire soul was engaged in civil war. I'd smile forgivingly at Bennett—and then feel murder in my heart. I
wanted
to love him—but all I felt was guilt over the fact that I didn't. Love and guilt do not go together—although sometimes one simulates the other. How could I love someone that low and sneaky? How could I love someone that sadistic? “You should love him because he's your husband,” some nineteenth-century aunt kept repeating in my head. But I knew she was wrong. Having made one mistake at twenty-four hardly dooms you to keep repeating the mistake for the rest of your life. But it is not easy to unglue an eight-year marriage. There has to be more than betrayal. There has to be death.

 

Early October in New York. I am driving across town in a cab (to my analyst—again!) when suddenly I hear on the radio that Jeannie Morton, “the housewife poet”—as the announcer calls her—has died. A locked garage door. An idling car. A tipped glass of vodka in her hand. Her bloodstream full of lithium—or Valium—or some other contemporary chemical to combat fear, loathing, and the sickness unto death. The announcer says a few banalities about her “untimely death” (she was forty-five) and then goes on to quote some evil and envious literary guru about her “narrow, self-absorbed art” which “vacillated” between “the madhouse” and “the gynecologist's office.” The guru in question spends
his
life vacillating between AA and college symposia where he can fuck unsuspecting nineteen-year-olds—but no matter. He is judging her—not vice versa. And anyway Jeannie never had much desire to judge anyone but herself. She was the soul of generosity with everyone but Jeannie.

But she had no talent for happiness. It could be said she had a talent for misery, but I'd prefer to think of misery as the absence of joy rather than a deliberately cultivated condition. That's a moot point, however. Some poets cultivate misery the way banjo players cultivate long fingernails. But Jeannie was not one of these. Her misery was honest, and honestly come by. Death was her roommate, occasional lover, mother, and friend.

I had only met her a few times but ours was one of those instant friendships. We loved each other on sight. She addressed her letters “Dearest Isadora” from the first and she signed them “Love.” No “Fondly” or “Dear Heart.” She was not Jewish, but she was Whitmanic. Manic depressive too, alas. It was always clear she'd do herself in someday. Her poems were palliatives. Had she escaped suicide it would only have been by a knight's move. Through the looking glass, perhaps. Still, I was shocked when I heard the news. Shocked and guilty. I had owed her a letter for three months when she died.

Not just an ordinary letter, either—but a letter responding to the poems she sent me during the last summer of her life. They were strange poems. Not that all her poems weren't strange—but these were the strangest of all. In a godforsaken world, Jeannie dared to believe in God. In the midst of cynicism and materialism, Jeannie dared to affirm the spirit. In a world in which writers and critics make a cult of misery, hate fecundity, mistrust joy—Jeannie dared affirm joy, dared find God (and say so), dared lash out against misery—including her own.

It was easy enough to put her down. She was a woman—and her images (even of God) were kitchen images, plain aluminum utensils to serve the Lord, Pyrex casseroles to simmer the Holy Spirit. She was easy to mock. Where a male poet would have been taken seriously—even if he saw God in a hunting knife or the wound of a war buddy-she was mocked because it is hard for many people to understand that the womb (with its red blood) is as apt a vessel for the muse or for God as the penis (with its white sperm). Perhaps these are our contemporary wars of the roses. We live in an age that has forgotten how to honor Mary, forgotten how to love God, forgotten how to recite poetry, keep faith, kindle love. Greedy and envious, we doubt the existence of everything but greed and envy. And Jeannie had no use whatsoever for these two.

“Would you turn the radio up?” I asked the cab driver, a certain Seymour Asofsky.

“Whadjasay?”

“Would you turn it up?” The yellow taxi (a member of the Lucky Cab Corp. fleet) was only a year old, but it looked like a veteran of some desert tank campaign. It rattled and clattered up Madison Avenue and I scarcely caught the radio announcer's words. A sudden blast of hard-rock music. Jeannie's obituary was already over.

“A friend of mine just died,” I confided to Seymour.

We were twenty blocks from the analyst's office, and perhaps I had the desire to start my session early.

“Whadjasay?”

“My friend just died,” I shouted, wanting to share my grief —with him, with anyone. “That poet the radio just mentioned —Jeannie Morton—she
died.”

“Oh. Dat's a shame. I never hoida her. You a poetress too?”

“Yes,” I said, ashamed of confessing it to a cab driver. As if I were somehow boasting. And yet we were both manual labor ers.

“I don't read much poetry myself. I do remember one pome in school though—‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan'—Kipling I think. I
loved
dat pome. I shoulda read more... What's your book called?”

“Well, I wrote two books of poems, but my most well-known book is a novel.” Suddenly, I'm stumbling with shyness.

“Oh yeah?”

“It's called
Candida Confesses,”
I said.

Seymour wheels around in his seat and nearly collides with a Gristede's grocery cart being pushed by a now-terrorized Puerto Rican kid. He strains for a look at me through the scratched Plexiglas divider.

“You dat Happy Hooker chick?”

I laugh, deeply offended.

“Hey—I seen you on TV.”

I smile my book-autographing smile—but I am already miles, light-years away. I am in Cape Cod with Jeannie.

 

From the moment I heard of it, Jeannie's death had a strange effect on me. I was grieving, yes. I missed her palpably. But I was suddenly light. Light—in both senses of the word. The baggage of my summer-long depression dropped away. Sometimes people reach out from the grave to have a more powerful effect on us in death than they had in life. To tell the truth, Jeannie's effect on me was almost always a long-distance one. Poets relate to each other through inky pages, through words, through the mails, from the grave. We dream each other. We dream while waking.

Our meetings in life were few, but each one was a revelation. Other than that, we met on the page. I first read her poems when I was in Europe, reading everything during those grim years of marriage, surviving Bennett's silences through printed words.

Jeannie's poetry was brave in a way I had not encountered before. She dared to be a fool. She wrote about all the things we had been told in college were unfit subjects for poetry—blood, madness, excrement, the transmigration of souls. I don't know how my own college generation got such curiously tight-ass notions of what poetry should be. Perhaps it was the influence of all the little Eliotasters who taught us. We might have read Whitman or Blake or any of the other great Dionysiac spirits and realized that poetry was never meant to be a fastidious thing, that a certain kind of inspired insanity was the way into the unconscious and also the way into the cosmos. But these lessons have to be learned over and over again. One generation learns them, the next buries them. The generation after that unearths them as if it had invented them—and so it goes. But in this case, more was happening than just the usual gen erational Zeitgeist tango. There was the great upheaval of the female half of the species, the buried lives of women were suddenly surfacing, the earth was falling away from their faces as from the faces of the dead, and the Dionysiac spirit was reasserting itself through the breasts, the cunt, the womb.

It was time for women to lead and men to follow—at least in the spiritual realm. Lawrence had predicted it; so had Whitman and Mallarmé. Men who were wise and sure of themselves and willing to learn knew it and were not frightened. They felt no particular shame in taking spiritual instruction from women—any more than they would feel shame in taking spiritual instruction from other men. They would take wisdom wherever they found it and let it enrich them. But many men were terrified and reacted violently. Also, the women themselves had often made deep commitments to terrified men before they discovered their own strength. They had houses, children, lives of habit and habitation. They were trapped in an especially painful way. Their spirits free and yearning to travel, their bodies committed to men, to children, to houses. The classic conflict between freedom and duty. Jeannie was one who suffered from this.

We met on a couple of occasions at poetry readings. We exchanged passionate letters and phone calls—but our first long, live encounter came after she had left her husband.

She was staying at the Algonquin, preparatory to recording her poems for Bardic Records. Bardic was a classy outfit and Jeannie had fought for years to get her own solo record—like Yeats, like Dylan Thomas, like Auden.

“I'll only be the second living poet they've recorded,” she told me gaily when we met at the Algonquin. But not for long. By the time the record appeared, she was speaking from the grave.

She was thin, hysterical, wired that night at the Algonquin. She had lost twenty-five pounds since leaving Bumby, her husband of twenty-five years. Both her kids were away in college. She had just lost a beautiful married lover—one of those struggling, straggling poor-fessor-poets who falls in love with great lady poets, promises everything and then goes back to his wife, his dog, his tenure. Gutless.