How to Save Your Own Life (34 page)

“You're wonderful,” I said to Hans through the steamy air.

“What happened?”

“I called him—and just as I was calling him, mysterious cosmic forces transported all his letters into my hands . . .”

“What?” he said, sticking out his dripping head.

“I found the letters, and he loves me, and I spoke to him, and I'm going there, and you're right about everything!” I dropped my clothes, leapt into the shower, and hugged him under the spray. “You're
wond
erful!”

Hans looked absolutely baffled for a minute, and then he smiled at me rather mischievously. “So the letters materialized right here in Rosanna's apartment, eh? This can only point to one conclusion, Holmes . . .”

“What, Doctor Watson? . . .”

“You need a thorough scrubbing with Vitabath, courtesy of your favorite psychiatrist in the whole world.”

“That's a dubious distinction,” I said, “but I'd love to come clean.” And we washed each other all over, giggling deliriously.

“I really should be furious at Rosanna,” I said to Hans as we were drying off, “but I'm so relieved to have found the letters.”

“Clearly an act of desperation,” Hans said. “Rosanna knows she can't keep you and she's grasping at straws. She's probably ashamed of hiding the letters—but it's the sort of compulsive act jealousy drives people to. I wouldn't rub it in if I were you. ‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord . . .' ”

“I love you, Hans,” I said, meaning it.

 

My hair was still wet (and crammed into my floppy purple hat) when I sneaked into my own apartment at 1:00 A.M. and, to my astonishment, found Bennett waiting up for me—Ben—nett who never waited up for me, particularly on a “school night.”

He was sitting on the white couch in the living room reading
Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process.

“You had a call,” he said ominously.

“Oh? Who?” I was trying to act nonchalant and at the same time hide the fact that my hair was wet. I came into the living room and sat down with all my clothes on—hat, coat, boots, bag crammed with love letters. I hoped he wouldn't notice the straggly ends of hair dripping into my fur collar.

“I didn't know it was raining,” he said coldly.

“Oh, is it?” I must have sounded like some sort of dumb blonde out of Anita Loos, but I was just so astonished that ordinarily deaf-and-dumb Bennett noticed
any
thing. “Who called?”

“Who do you think?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. Really, I haven't.”

“A friend of yours from Los Angeles.”

My heart pounded at the very mention of the words
Los Angeles.

“Britt?”

“I thought Britt was in New York.”

“Oh, that's right. She is.”

“You seem pretty flustered tonight. Where the hell have you
been
?”

“At Rosanna's.”

“In the shower? Or was it just a wild party where everyone sprayed champagne around?”

“If you wanted to know so much, why didn't you come? I invited you ...” I said with massive insincerity.

“I don't happen to like your millionaire friends. Or your hippie ones.”

“Who do you mean?”

“Isadora, who the hell is
Josh
?”

The name went through me like lightning. “Didn't I tell you? He's the son of Robert and Ruth Ace. I met him on the Coast at his parents' house. He wants me to help him with his short stories. He's just a kid, very sweet, very star-struck about writers. I promised to read his work and tell him what I thought.”

“Oh,” said Bennett, “I was sure he was your lover.”

“Why? What on earth did he say?”

“Only that he wanted to speak to you. He seemed surprised you were out, distressed somehow and awkward.”

“Well, he's very young.”

“How young?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And what are you going to do for him—teach him about love?”

This infuriated me for some reason. My secret was pressing against my rib cage like a trapped bird that had to fly out. I had almost gotten away with my lie, but I suddenly realized that I didn't
want
to get away with it.

“Actually, he could teach
me
a thing or two. Not to mention
you.
”

“Oh?” Bennett said, raising his eyebrows. And he smiled secretively, got up in total silence, and turned out the lights.

“Good night, Isadora. Pleasant dreams.” And he disappeared down the hall to the bedroom.

I stood there
furious,
wearing my hat, my coat, my boots, my wet hair. I wanted Bennett to
know,
I wanted to read him the letters, tell him that there were people in this world who
could
love, who
could
be warm, who didn't sit home every night reading about neurotic distortion and feeling superior to the entire world.

I ran down the hall to the bedroom after him and shouted into the darkness: “Okay! He is my lover! He makes me happy and I'm going to
leave
you for him! We get up in the morning giggling and we talk to each other about everything! He doesn't lay guilt numbers on me and he doesn't sit around nursing his unhappy childhood and he isn't hypocritical and cynical and superior to everything in the whole goddamn world!”

Bennett sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said: “So leave. You'll never write another book as long as you live.” Then he turned off the light and went to sleep.

 

I locked myself in the bathroom and wept for what seemed like an hour. Then I took two Valiums and fell asleep with all my disheveled clothes on, clutching the bag with Josh's letters to my chest, on the black leather chair in my study.

Bullwinkle's wrinkles ...

Thanksgiving Day and I am leaving Seventy-seventh Street forever. The day is cold and gray, with billowy white clouds materializing here and there on the china-blue plate of the sky. Bullwinkle and the other balloons are netted down to the street, their big bellies swelling pregnantly toward those sumptuous, sailing clouds. In two hours the parade will begin without me. I will be flying.

A street of fallen giants held down by nets and sandbags, and me dragging my beige linen luggage with the violets on it, dragging it down to the corner where I hail a cab and tell the cabbie I'm headed for Kennedy Airport.

I wave good-bye to my balloons, which are straining upward on their helium wings, trying to break free, trying, it seems, to soar. But however it may appear to credulous little children, the balloons don't really fly at all. In an hour or two, they will be tethered to tiny people in clown suits, and will be dragged along the avenues of New York like captured beasts of the wild, like Gullivers through a Lilliput of skyscrapers.

Once, only once, when I was not above three feet tall myself, the Panda balloon broke free and took off over the Museum of Natural History, over the park, over the obelisk—which we kids called Cleopatra's needle—where it hovered for a while on the verge of an explosion, perhaps, and then drifted on up up up through the clouds.

Very few New Yorkers remember that occurrence, but it is fixed forever in my memory—even if I only dreamed it, when I was very young.

They had fought. A terrible fight in which he said she was a ravenous, insatiable cunt, and she said he had never satisfied her, never, and he said she might as well go out and find other men to fuck because he couldn't satisfy her, couldn‘t, wouldn't, didn't care, and turned with his back to her in bed.

He would not fuck her. She could beg and plead for it and he would not. It was his power over her, over her fame, her blondeness, her money, her being older than him, and wiser (hah) and hornier—she being thirty-three and always throbbing at the cunt, he being a cool twenty-seven with a huge cock which he could give and take away at will. He was not her dildo, her plaything, her vibrator; he was her man.

He had the cock. She could cry and whimper and press herself to his hard back, but he still had the cock. He was reading, preserving his dignity, his manhood, exercising his mind, pretending he didn't know that her cunt was wet for him, that her arms and legs ached and her pelvis felt like someone had knotted the bones.

She could go into the bathroom and masturbate with the end of a douche nozzle or a bottle or a handheld shower head—but he would lie there coolly in bed reading, a young river god with reddish hair on his long body, with his small red mouth meditative above his copper beard and his greenish hazel eyes dreamy behind his glasses.

She wanted to weep and tear her hair and masturbate over and over and bite him and pummel him and sink her perfect white teeth into his neck and bite until she opened the jugular vein. But she held back. Instead she composed herself and said: “You have never satisfied me, never, you make me so nervous that I come and feel nothing, or I don't come, or I don't come at all.”

Then he was hurt. The red mouth quivered like a wound. The hazel-green eyes looked as if they would fill with tears. Even the copper beard looked defeated. And she was triumphant having hurt him, her baby, her love, and she opened her arms to him and took him in. “I love you,” she said. They both hugged, shaking with sobs.

But still he would not fuck her, not that night. That was his power, not to be lightly yielded. He held her and hugged her and rocked her, but the cock belonged to him.

She was wet for him. She took his hand and brought it between her legs to the place where the lips were slippery as rock covered with moss at the edge of a lake, and said, “This is for you,” and he drew his hand away.

She wanted to bite him, kill him, draw blood, but instead she hugged him tighter and tighter, thinking of the man up the beach whom she thought of when she masturbated, whom he was jealous of, the actor with the sea-blue eyes and the cadlike ways with women, and the broad shoulders, and the (probably) enormous cock. She didn't even want him. That was the thing; that was what made her so mad. She wanted
this
one, this copper-colored lover,
this
pink cock. The cunt is a very selective organ. It had settled on this man, it had molded itself to this cock, it had come home to this particular embrace, these arms, this big bearish hairy hug. Her eyes squeezed shut and tears broke out as if they should shriek as they did.

She fell asleep with her head on his chest, with his fleecy chest hairs tickling her nostrils, and the tears slipping, trickling down from her cheeks into the fleece on his chest.

Nightmares, apparitions, the waves stacking up to crash, crashing, stacking up again, the black cat from next door stalking rabbits, field mice, lizards, other pulsating small creatures he could torture for a long time before he killed.

In the morning, she still wanted him. He had a headache, hugged her briefly, saying so, got up out of bed almost brusquely and stomped into the bathroom to the shower. For a long time the water cascaded, faucets squeaked, bottles rattled, she lay in the water bed, masturbating with a sticky finger, circling round and round on her clitoris, sticking another two fingers deep, deep inside, and thinking of the blue-eyed actor up the beach whom she didn't like.

He drove into town with the top down. He was wearing the cap she gave him the first week and pressing his foot down to the floor on the accelerator and thinking of a girl in town he used to go with and maybe ought to go back and fuck. She was no threat, adored him, was nice and homey and ordinary, a librarian with lascivious tastes in bed and a small son, not yet quite housebroken, who used to surprise them in bed. Women liked him. Too much sometimes. They fell in love with his boyishness, his baby face, his wounded eyes, his vulnerability. He could leave her, he could always leave her. He was not yet a complete captive. He was still his own man.

Later, missing her, he called her from town. “I love you,” he said. “I love you immensely,” she said.

He came home. She was writing letters with her secretary, another lady who obviously liked him. All afternoon, the three of them worked together in the beach house, writing, making coffee, marinating things for dinner, telephoning. She wrote in the sun for a while, letting the sound of the waves screen out her secretary's typing. The hot sun on her back made her horny and she went into his study, where he too was writing and she straddled his knees and tickled his balls, gave him a hard-on, and then skipped away.

The secretary left and the dinner guests had not yet arrived. They were to come any minute. She stood in the kitchen peeling a ripe avocado for the salad, feeling the outside of the slimy green fruit, slippery like her cunt that had throbbed for him all day. She had masturbated once, twice, three times, but still she needed him. Only his cock inside her could give her peace. The rest were just spasms.

Her fingers were slippery on the green fruit, and she called to him to help her slice it. He came, took over the slippery slicing, while she rinsed her hands, dried them on a paper towel, and then slid them under the waistband of his jeans, into his crotch, around his balls, which were so perfectly rounded, so smooth, so tenderly pink. Then she darted her tongue in and out of his ear and she licked the avocado from his fingers. “I'm so hard for you,” he whispered, “do we have time to fuck?” “They're coming any minute,” she teased him. She was perfumed, powdered, her hair brushed out, and wearing high-heeled sandals and a half-buttoned caftan with nothing underneath. He felt for the soft mound over her cunt. “Fleecy pudenda,” he said, repeating an old phrase from the first delicious month they'd lived together. “God I'm hard for you—don't we have
time
?” “Not now,” she said, enjoying teasing him. His cock was bulging under the copper buttons of his jeans, making her think of high school, finger-fucking in the living room, all the delectable lore of guilty adolescent sex. “I can't answer the door like this,” he said, pointing to his impressive erection, which she squeezed again, to feel its hardness. “Stop,” he said, but not sternly.