How to Save Your Own Life (32 page)

“Well, I certainly need to do
something,”
I said. “This is no way to get a new book written.”

“We could go off to my place in Aspen,” Rosanna said. “It's very peaceful. I even have an electric typewriter there.”

I thought about it. Though Rosanna had proposed this before, we had never gone because, somehow, I was sure that so much time alone with Rosanna was more than I could take. I liked her friendship, but I felt it had been marred by the sex. Not that I was sorry about the affair or had anything against women making love to women. It was just that there was a slight sense of compulsion in our sexual scenes just as there was a slight sense of pity with Jeffrey Roberts and a slight sense of contempt with Jeffrey Rudner. Sex had come to puzzle me. There was all sorts of sex in my life and not very much intimacy. It seemed I was forever standing outside of the experience thinking about it critically—with everyone but Josh. When I was with Josh, I was utterly and absolutely with Josh—whether I came or not. We lived inside each other's brains. We knew each other by heart from the first moment we met. I could be alone anywhere with Josh and not be bored. But what was the point of thinking about Josh? He hadn't written a word.

“Well,” I said finally, “maybe we
should
go to Aspen and try to work right after this movie nonsense gets straightened out.”

“That's the most intelligent thing I've heard you say all week,” Rosanna said. And she poured me another glass of Mouton-Cadet.

The doorbell rang. There was much noise and commotion outside, and Rosanna trotted to open the door. Who should appear but a rather drunken Robert Czerny and two friends, acquired on the plane from Washington. Robert was large, paunchy, gray-haired, and addicted to slapping people on the back. He didn't much approve of poetry, but he liked me in spite of this. And I liked him. He was unpretentious and absolutely up-front about his opportunism. No sneakcracy for him. You could take him or leave him. His politics were neoredneck and his voice was loud and booming. He actually pronounced
American
“Amurrican.”

On the plane he had picked up two sex doctors who wrote books and collected erotic art and were old orgy-hands. They were an attractive couple in their forties—the woman a Swedish blonde named Kirsten who had grown up in the United States and had enormous tits (between which dangled a gold pendant shaped like an erect penis, only it was pointing down—poor thing), and the man a slender Viennese named Hans who had grown up in Paris. They were terribly amiable and jolly—sexual missionaries, really (or emissionaries, as I came to call them)—and had apparently followed Robert home in the hopes of having an orgy or getting a millionaire patron for their erotic art collection—or both.

The frosty Rosanna had, at least, the intuition to surround herself with bouncy, warm people.

“Well,” said Rob, rubbing his hands together and taking off his sheepskin coat, “what'll you have to drink?”

Hans and Kirsten were happy with the wine and cheese Rosanna and I had been working on all afternoon, but Rob wanted Scotch—a twenty-year-old variety which slid down the gullet like honey.

Then we all got around to the serious business of discussing erotica and art. Hans and Kirsten had a collection of erotic art so extensive it included everything from Hokusai to Georg Grosz. They had exhibited this collection all over the world at their own expense—but now they were low on funds and they needed a backer to provide them with the money for renting a gallery, insuring the art, mounting the exhibition (which somehow seems like more of a pun in this instance than it usually does). They were willing to share the glory and the profits with their mounters. The glory of being associated with such a business was actually rather dubious. For no apparent reason—other than Hans's and Kirsten's not particularly prurient connection with sexual matters—they had been the subjects of FBI harassments, wire-tapping, yearly audits by the IRS. As they described this, Rosanna looked extremely nervous. Much as she would have wanted to be associated with such a venture for the prestige of it, she could hardly let herself get involved with the sort of thing that might be dangerous to her tax position. Hans, who was a psychoanalyst—albeit an unorthodox one—and who picked up on people's feelings much more quickly than most of the orthodox psychoanalysts I know, said: “Don't worry, Rosanna, that's cool. You can see the art and
then
decide. In the meantime, why don't we just have a party?”

“Terrific!” said Rob, who'd been hoping for an orgy all along.

 

Now, there are times when the very air is sexual, when it's dusk and the moon is hanging low over the rooftops, and the temperature of your blood is the same temperature as the air and you look at a man—any halfway decent-looking man—and you know you could go right to bed with no questions asked at all. This was
not
that sort of night.

It was cold, the participants were all rather constrained and strange to each other, and sex was not in the air. But here we all were together—and Rob was a practical fellow. An opportunity like this might not arise again. At such times, pot is invaluable. Pot and the Beatles. How many orgies might have faltered without pot and the Beatles! That clitoral trill, that thumping bass. And sweet smoke filling the lungs, the head, the cunt ... and the Beatles singing “
because the world is round ... it turns me onnn.”

Goddamn,
I
missed
the sixties. When everyone was dropping acid and their pants every two minutes, I was in Germany with boring Bennett being a “good wife,” cooking gourmet meals, breaking my leg in penance for wanting the most natural thing in the world—my freedom. I wanted to go to parties in town with the students at the University of Heidelberg. I wanted to get stoned and fuck and act my age. But Bennett, who was routinely fucking Penny in my study twice a week, pronounced all that
“infantile”
and sent me to a shrink to “work it out.” Then, at the dangerous age of twenty-nine I took one fling with Adrian Goodlove and came back—not dutiful this time—but, worse, cynical. Formerly submissive, I was now independent—independent but resigned to never communicating with my husband, to never finding any love that lasted, to patching up my aching emptiness with silly meaningless midday affairs....

Damn, damn, damn—if only I hadn't missed the sixties! If only I had sown some wild oats like Josh did.

Josh. I shut my eyes and saw Josh. I was lying on the couch, wineglass in one hand, joint in the other, when Josh's funny, warm, furry face swam into my field of vision. “I love you too—but is it
enough?”
he was saying. He was standing at the airport, at the end of the boarding ramp. And I would never get back through that tunnel and into his arms again. Like Alice, having drunk the wrong potion, I was too big, too old, too sad, too disillusioned....

“Want to dance?” Hans said, taking me by the hand. He had a nice bony European face—but it wasn't Josh's.

What the hell,
I thought. Hans pulled me up out of the deep couch. The music had now changed to 1967 psychedelic—Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Heart
s
Club
Band—and it was taking me back, back, back to those years in Germany when I felt so guilty for being young, for being horny, for wanting what
everyone
wants at twenty-five-while my middle-aged husband (who was born middle-aged) had his cake and ate it too, telling me all the while I was “infantile.” Unforgivable!

Damn.
It wasn't too late to be twenty-five! I would rather be twenty-five at thirty-two than never be twenty-five at all!

Dancing. I had almost forgotten how much I loved dancing. With a little pot and some good music and a pinch of despair as the kicker, I can get into dancing as if dancing were the only thing I ever did. My body moves right into the music as if the music were its home. And I dance-not like someone who thinks and frets and worries all the time, not like someone who analyzes and re-analyzes everything-but like someone who listens to no beat but the beat between her legs. And in a way I
become
that person.

Hans and I danced and danced until we danced into the bedroom. “Someone has to start an orgy,” I said to him, “and it might as well be us.”

“Agreed!” he said, laughing. Hans said
everything
laughing. Hans was jolly and clever and if I closed my eyes and forgot his bony body, his strange face, his strange laugh, his death‘s-head skull, his funny accent—I could almost pretend it was Josh taking off my clothes, Josh running a slick finger between the wet lips of my cunt, Josh unzipping his fly, Josh's big cock coming into me, Josh's face covering mine with kisses.... I looked up at Hans and through his face I could see—in that special way only possible to the very stoned—all the faces of the men I had loved or lusted for blending into each other. Josh melted into Bennett, Bennett into Adrian, Adrian into Charlie, Charlie into Brian, Brian into my father. They were all one man. There was no difference between them at all. I dug my nails into Hans's back and came screaming and crying and shrieking at the top of my lungs, “It isn't fair, it isn't fair, it isn't fair!”

Hans had gentle instincts. He didn't get angry or frightened. He stroked my hair.

“What
isn't fair, Isadora?” he asked.

But I was too stoned to explain, and by now my screams had attracted the rest of the party, who appeared, dancing like bac chantes—some wishing to comfort me, others to join in the fun. I was bleary-eyed and stoned. The music was loud
(“I'd love to turn you on
...”) and I scarcely remember who inaugurated the first combination or the second or the third—or indeed how one could tell one from the other.

Somewhere at the hazy beginning of it all, I was being fucked in the ass by Hans while Rosanna ate me and Rosanna's husband sucked my nipples. (Then Kirsten of the gigantic knockers appeared and preempted me in the breast department.) At a later, wetter, and sweatier point in the evening, Robert was fucking me and Rosanna was behind him encouraging him and holding his balls helpfully. I couldn't help but notice that Robert never did get very hard—and it momentarily flickered through my mind that maybe this was really the secret of
most
of the sex people—the sexual emissionaries; they really weren't very potent without (what you might call) all this peer-group pressure. At some point Robert fucked Rosanna—and I had the distinct sense that it took all the rest of us being there as observers for them to accomplish the simplest missionary mating.

“But was it
fun?”
my friends always ask. And the truth is, I can hardly even
remember.
Of course it was engrossing. And of course there were lots of orgasms—mine, his, hers, theirs, everybody's. And there was the added pleasure of feeling superior, liberated, special—above the common bourgeois run of uptight people, fucking two by two.

I kept thinking, Oh gee, I'm eating a
woman
while another woman eats
me,
while a man fucks her, while a man sucks him! Oh
golly,
this is certainly a first! And yet the dominant feeling of it all was that we should have had someone there directing traffic, possibly with a megaphone—because it was all so much like
rush hour.
There was a good deal of rearranging bodies so that our various human chains would be unbroken, and the positions we found were not the kind that were easy for your average amateur nonpracticing yogin or yogina to master. But we persevered—valiantly. A kind of group greediness took over —and those of us who were normally sated after one, two, three orgasms felt it incumbent upon us to have dozens of orgasms—in all positions, with everyone present.

I was astounded at my own stamina. This (by now) virtually anonymous pile of bodies became like one organism, stretching, contracting, eating, excreting, moving onto drier ground when we had soiled the last. It had ten arms, ten legs, two penises, three vaginas and six breasts—of assorted sizes—not to mention ten eyes, ten ears, and five mouths (that were practically always full). Something was always in eruption—as in a region of volcanos. Something was always being gobbled by some orifice or other. When at last Kirsten got up and went into the living room to bring wine for us, it felt like an amputation.

And yet there was also a wonderful feeling of closeness, of sheer physicalness, of being nothing but a body and that being
enough.
It was almost like the way I'd felt in California, looking at the waves roll in, feeling the balmy air, and thinking that nothing could possibly be wrong with the world if the sky was so clear you could see all the way to Japan—or Catalina.

Thinking of California made me fix on Josh again, and I was overcome with sadness. I felt I'd betrayed him. I remembered the orgy we hadn't had with Ralph Battaglia, and I felt incredibly guilty to have participated in this one. These weren't people I loved—they were
bodies.
The closeness I'd felt a minute before shifted to revulsion. The others were drifting off to sleep in various positions on the bed and floor. I got up and wandered into the bathroom, where I stared at myself for a long time in the mirror over the sink, wondering what on
earth
to do now.

I must have been there for some time, hypnotizing myself with my own gaze. The bathroom door was half open, so at first I didn't even see Hans when he slid past me and seated himself on the closed toilet seat.

“Fascinating, isn't it?” he said.

I started. “What?”

“Staring into the pupils.” He pronounced it “poopeels.”

“Yes—you begin to think you can climb right down into those holes. Actually, I like flicking the light on and off and watching the irises contract.”