How to Save Your Own Life (8 page)

“Don't. I couldn't get you out of
that
one.”

“When I think that I was ready to have a baby with that son of a bitch. When I think of it! I'd be stuck with that hypocrite forever.”

“You could still leave, but it would be harder. Anyway, I'll believe you're leaving when I see it. I still don't think you're ready. All this
rage.
When you're ready, you'll walk out calmly.”

“You know what the oddest thing is?”

Gretchen fixes me with her large blue eyes and then starts to laugh. “I know what you're going to say.”

Me, defiantly: “What?”

“You're going to tell me that since he laid his sexual history on you, you've been fucking more and better than since you first met.”

“How'd you know?”

“Kendall's first law of jealousy: jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter. It's so common you wouldn't believe it. Also, just when you've finally made up your mind to split, the sex gets great, to stop you. But, you know what? It doesn't last.
Thank
God.”

I put my feet up on Gretchen's desk too. “You know the weirdest thing? I don't believe I'll ever find anyone else.”

“You should only be so lucky,” Gretchen laughs.

 

When Gretchen leaves for her lunch date, I drift on up Madison Avenue. It's one of those hot June days when the air feels slightly wet, and you feel like you're swimming, not walking. I linger, gaze in shop windows, stop in a fancy Italian boutique to try on a pair of expensive sandals I know I won't buy, stop in a drug store to buy contraceptive jelly and a bottle of perfumed body oil (I am going to see Jeffrey Rudner later), stop at a florist's to buy a long-stemmed rose for Hope, my fairy godmother.

 

Hope is exactly twenty years older than me, born on March 26, 1922, and ours is one of those curious old family connections. Her mother, now a terrifically bouncy old lady named Selma (who also appears to have cornered the market on
kvetching),
had an affair with my grandfather, circa 1908. Both of them deny it—but Hope found the letters to prove it. When pinned down, Papa will only say, “Well, Selma was an anarchist, a follower of Emma Goldman,” and Selma will say: “Ach—Stoloff—all he ever does is talk, talk, talk. Believe me, if you want to know from affairs, I could tell you better ones than
that.”
And she could. But the fact is, Hope and I are convinced that, cosmically speaking, we are sisters. There are too many coincidences. The same birthday, a mother and grandfather who were lovers, identical taste in poetry, jokes, food. All the really important things. And, of course, sex. Unlike my mother, who seemed to regard sex as a barterable commodity, Hope always understood that there's nothing wrong with being an easy lay. Except that she's also a romantic, and when she falls in love (as she is now with a second husband she met at the age of fifty) she is completely, delightedly monogamous. We have that in common too: being romantics. And yet through all the crazy, guilty little affairs I had during the denouement of my marriage to Bennett, she was immensely comforting. I would come to her with my guilt, my misgivings, my constant chafing to leave, and she would say: “Let it be. Float. When you're ready to leave, you'll leave. Don't punish yourself.” She knows me like she knows herself. All that Jewish guilt. That constant appeasing of the evil eye. If something good happens, something bad is right around the corner. If you have pleasure, watch out for pain. If sex is good, you're going to get clap or pregnant or caught.

Hope had been a background figure in my life throughout my childhood. I heard about her from my grandparents and parents, but never really got to know her. She was referred to as “Poor Hope,” apparently because she married a musician who “never made a leeving,” as my grandmother said. But instead of dumping him—as any sensible Jewish girl would have done—she stayed with him and supported him. This was thought to be a sign of great foolhardiness. Hope was extremely attractive to men, was highly thought of as an editor, and made a good living. My grandparents clucked their tongues over her guilelessness. How could she stay married to that bongo drummer from Rego Park? Love is love, but marriage is an investment. And for an attractive woman to squander her “best years” on a bongo drummer from Rego Park could only be a sign of weakness. “Poor Hope. She's too good.”

But poor Hope knew more than any of them. She understood that the cornucopia returns upon itself. She was always immensely generous with her money, her love, her time. The result was thousands of friends, a life crammed with lovers, and, at mid-century, an idyllic romance with a man who turned out to be her mental and emotional double. My mother and grandmother, who hoarded and calculated their love, my sisters, who chose their husbands at eighteen and never budged, wound up with less than Hope, who gave everything away. She was a human potlatch. Gifts dropped from her like fruit from a tree. You dared not admire anything in her home or office or on her person for fear she would give it to you. Anything at all: a painting, a first edition, a piece of jewelry. She gave and gave and gave. Things fell out of her pockets. And everything eventually came back. Doubled, usually. Or tripled.

Hope and I became really close friends during the summer of 1968, when I came back to New York from Heidelberg for a week to watch my grandmother die of cancer. I walked into her office and felt I had come home. It was a sunny room with thick gold carpeting and a large desk covered with trinkets, photographs, flowers. People were always sending Hope flowers.

“Let me look at you,” Hope said. I looked at her while she looked at me, and it was love at first sight. Hope was plump, gray-haired, and gave off warmth like an open fireplace. Her presence had a way of smoothing out all one's lumps and bumps, of making one feel
mellow.
My mother always made me feel nervous; Hope made me feel calm.

She sat there reading my unpublished poems while I looked around the room, mostly for something to do. I was terrified whenever anyone read my poems, convinced they were dreadful, convinced I was going to be revealed as a fraud. At the time, I had an unpublished book of poems about living in Europe, Germany, Nazis, and the silences in my marriage. Hope read. I pretended not to be terrified. After a page or two, she looked up and said: “Poetry manuscripts always knock me out. Such simple white pages—and someone's entire soul behind them.” Then she went back to reading.

Well, I could always go back to graduate school.
That
path was open to me. Or I could find a job in a publishing house. It was not such an awful thing to have
tried
to be a poet and failed. It was worse never to have tried at all. Wasn't it? But then I thought of all those pompous bores who thought themselves poets and weren't. The hopeful boobs who mailed off their sentimental effusions to
Writer's Digest,
who signed up for correspondence courses at the Famous Writers' School, who went hopefully to vanity presses with eight-hundred-page poetry manuscripts in hand and the firm conviction that somehow their vanity-press books would “catch on,” would become word-of-mouth best sellers. What if I were one of
those?
It was one thing to be a mediocre prose-writer. Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was as simple as that.

I thought of my grandmother, from whose house I had just come. She was jaundiced, cadaverous, eaten away by cancer of the pancreas and beaten down by the side effects of the chemotherapy she was being given. For as long as I could remember, she had had a cancer phobia, but now that she actually had cancer she never breathed the word. She sat in a chair by the window, sewing, taking in her clothes. “They're all too big,” she said, “and I want to have something to wear when they let me go out again.” Of course, they never did let her go out again. She was dead two months later. But before she died she sent me to Hope. It was she who was responsible for my going over there, poems in hand. I never would have done it without her prodding and without wanting to please a dying old lady. In those days I was afraid to show my poems to anyone. Especially an
editor.
Editors were deities to me. They
knew.

“You're going to be the most famous woman writer of your generation,” Hope said to me, looking up.

The woman is mad, I thought; gushy, overenthusiastic, wholly lacking in any critical judgment. She is just being nice to an old family friend.

“You don't really mean it,” I said.

“I never say anything I don't mean,” Hope said. “I may seem gushy to you—”

I lie: “Never.”

“But I care too much about poetry to lie. People bring me manuscripts all the time. And most of them stink. I say so, in the nicest words I know—but this book is something special. I want to send it around to publishers. May I have this copy?”

“Oh god—that's not a good copy. It isn't ready. I have to revise it—and have it retyped. My typist is in Heidelberg—I'll have to send you a good copy. I will. I swear I will.”

Hope looked at me and read my mind. “I think I want to have this xeroxed right now—so I can keep it. What with Mama dying, and you going back to Germany in two weeks, I don't want them out of my sight that long.” She smiled mischievously.

While the poems were being xeroxed, she asked me about my marriage. She had never met Bennett, wanted me to describe him. I thought for a while. There was nothing I could say. His dour face, our fights, his urging me to come to New York and stay with my grandmother while she died, his insistence that I go alone, “face her dying” alone, his insistence that I remain in analysis, his sullenness, his lack of humor.

“He's very supportive of my work,” I said.

“But do you love him?” she asked.

“What's love?”

“If you have to ask,” she said, “you don't.”

 

Now, six years later, I am back in Hope's office to tell her what she's known all along.

“Remember the summer we met? Remember when I brought you my poems?” I am sitting in the chair opposite Hope's desk, just as I did that summer. “Remember when Bennett insisted that I come to New York to ‘face Mama's dying'? Do you know why he did that?”

Hope is clairvoyant, as usual. “Another lady?”

“How did you know?”

Hope makes one of her characteristic hand gestures that indicate parabolas, infinity, circles within circles. “I just know.”

I start to cry. “Oh Hope, I'm so mad at him I want to kill him. I can't see an Oriental on the street without wanting to murder him. Sometimes I lie in bed with Bennett, thinking I'll get a kitchen knife and cut him up. I feel like such an idiot. All those years of obsessing about sex, sex, sex—and all the while he was
doing
it. And making me feel guilty. I'll never trust him again. I know it. And you know the worst part? He doesn't even know why I'm mad. He doesn't understand that it's the
hypocrisy
that makes me crazy. He doesn't begin to grasp it.”

“Look, darling, you know what I always tell you. Take it if you can take it, and if you can't take it, get out.”

“I can't take it.”

“So get out. But don't sit on the razor's edge and cut your beautiful pussy.”

And so on up Madison Avenue to the analyst's office. Oh god. This is your life, Isadora Wing. Still living on the West Side street where you grew up. Dividing your life between the writing desk and the telephone table and the analyst's couch. Is
this
the woman everybody envies? Is this the woman who's supposed to have the answer? Ask Kathryn Kuhlman. Or Clare Boothe Luce. Or Helen Gurley Brown. Start your own religion. Become a faith healer. Marry money. Start a magazine.
Those
people have answers. But not writers. We are paid for our pain. And our nightmares. We are paid to drift foggily from the typewriter to the kitchen stove (where we make still another pot of coffee and remark to ourselves irresolutely that
one
of these days we really
ought
to mop the kitchen floor). Then we drift back. We get paranoid from too much solitude and believe our publishers are ripping us off or our readers pestering us. We get a dozen raving mash notes and one unsigned, illiterate hate letter and remember only the hate letter. We spend so much time alone, brooding, that we become obsessed with sex, with fame, with chimerical business deals. We hunger for love, ache for sex—and yet, when we get it, dispose of it quickly so as not to let it interfere with our writing. Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.

 

The analyst's office. There is the constant hum of the “white-sound” machine, thick wall-to-wall carpets, bokhara rugs over them, crystal chandeliers, velvet chairs, prints that are neither obscenely banal nor lewdly avant-garde. The proper Piranesis and Picassos: the two P's. I go from my husband's home to my analyst's office and the sounds are the same. A whole life spent on the couch. A whole life blurred into the “white-sound” machine.

The first time I entered the office of Abigail Schwartz, M.D., I thought: How can
she
help me? This slender brunette with her Kimberly knits and her Evins shoes, with her Oriental rugs, and her inoffensive art, with her crystal chandeliers and her Irish maid who shops in Gristede‘s, and her children in private school. She probably never leaves the East Side—except to take a Caribbean cruise. I had been to plenty of analysts, and with the exception of my German mentor, Dr. Happe, they were all paralyzed by their banality. Not that they didn't help me. Every one of them made some contribution, made me a little less afraid (or else life did it; I will never know for sure). But at some point, every one of them became trapped in the method itself. It became a solipsism:
I analyze, therefore you are a perpetual patient.
At times, I could hear Dr. Schwartz's technique actually
creak.
I would say something about Bennett—something critical usually. And she would say, inevitably, “Didn't your mother do something like that?” or “Didn't your father do?” or “Didn't your sister do do do do do?” I told her I could make a tape and play it to myself—for all the good she was doing me. I told her she bored me. And yet I liked her, her mildness, her gentle sense of humor. I kept coming back. In all the boredom, there was something good happening. We went on and on and on about my marriage to Bennett. Why was I so restless? Why was I so ambivalent? Why did I always want to leave? For a long time I'd believed that that was
my
failing. For a long time I'd believed I couldn't love any way but ambiv alently. I had come back into analysis to overcome a writer's block. That accomplished, I stayed because I wanted to leave my husband and didn't know how.