How to Save Your Own Life (9 page)

But that Monday something strange happened in my analysis. After years and years on various couches I refused to lie down. I sat in a chair facing Dr. Schwartz, unwilling to be horizontal anymore. Of course she interpreted this—but gently, as was her fashion.

“Do you think it could be because unconsciously you're afraid of things happening behind your back?”

“Damn right I do,” I said.

Analysis: the apotheosis of the obvious! If some of the banalities spoken to one by one's analyst were uttered at a dinner party, everyone would think:
how moronic.
Yet we pay for them. Often at a dollar a minute. I was just about to tell Dr. Schwartz how banal she was, again, when suddenly, I spun off into the past....

I see myself lying asleep on a spare mattress on the floor of my study in Heidelberg. It is about 8:30 A.M. and Bennett has already left for the hospital. His bed—I gave him the one extra bed and slept on a mattress on the floor—is tossed. We are sleeping in the study because friends from the States, a couple and their two children, are occupying our bedroom. As I struggle to wake up, I hear them talking in the kitchen.

More breakfast noises. A siren going
derdee derdee derdee derdee
down Panoramastrasse and all the little American army brats in Holbeinring imitating it
derdee derdeee derdeeeeeeee.
Sirens like the Nazis used. All those old movies. People being awakened in the middle of the night....

Does he realize what he's?
...

I don't know. I only told him that he had to make a choice
...

My heart is racing, my ears burning. I feel sick. I try to hear and not to hear at the same time. I could leap up out of bed and confront them, but wouldn't they be embarrassed? Wouldn't I? The last thing I'd ever want is to embarrass them. Rhoda and Lionel. Bennett's old friends from New York. Both on their second marriages. Both having been through hell and come back. They
know
they want to be married to each other. Bennett and I are only hanging on with our fingernails.

I roll over and bury my head in the pillow, cover my ears as I used to when I was a child. I try to pretend that what I heard is not in the kitchen but in an adjoining chamber of a dream. And then I fall asleep again.

Dreams of Bennett, Penny, and my friend Michael Cosman. We are all on skis, skiing endlessly down to some beautiful little Austrian town, smaller than Kitzbühel, bigger than Lech. I am skiing as I never ski in life: effortlessly shifting my weight, paralleling around bumps and boulders,
wedeln,
and actually circumnavigating fir trees. Penny and Bennett are skiing arm in arm, smiling at each other, and oddly using only two poles between them. They are going to get married, but I don't care because Michael Cosman is following close behind me, grinning from under his bushy blond mustache, and he is going to marry me. I turn around to smile at him and fail to notice a fir tree right in front of me. Suddenly I am so close upon it that there's no time to avoid it. I am zooming head-on into the fir tree. I am surely going to be killed. I try to scream, to wake up, to fall backward, or to change the dream, but I am as stuck in the dream as I am in my marriage to Bennett. When you are stuck like that, you either bend or break. And then—as if by magic—the tree becomes substanceless and I ski straight through it. And Michael follows me. And Bennett and Penny are nowhere to be seen. “Where are Benny and Pennett?” I ask Michael. “That's terrific,” he says. “What's terrific?” “Pennett and Benny,” he laughs. And the dream fades.

When I wake up an hour or so later, Lionel and Rhoda are still puttering around the kitchen. I have consciously forgotten everything I heard earlier, but it lingers—like an aftertaste of onion, or a bad dream. All day I am fogged, off-key, unable to concentrate on the smallest task. When it's time for me to go to my analyst in Frankfurt, I drive to the railroad station and somehow manage to miss my train even though it's standing right there on the platform. I look straight at it—the same train I always take—and am convinced it's the wrong train. Another train pulls in, and I'm convinced that too is the wrong train. I miss two trains in a row to Frankfurt, and go home weeping, having missed my only session with Dr. Happe in all my years of analysis with him.

“Do you understand now why you missed those trains that day?” Dr. Schwartz asks.

“Of course—it's all so infuriatingly obvious—if I'd gone, I'd have had to discuss what I knew about Bennett and Penny.”

Dr. Schwartz nods. “Why do you think you didn't want to know?”

I look down at my green sandals, then up at her bland, pleasant face leaning on her bland, pleasant palms over the bland, pleasant French provincial desk on which she has rested her bland, pleasant elbows.

“Oh, I suppose it's something disgustingly oedipal. Mommy, Daddy, locked doors—all that.”

“What does it remind you of?”

I think terribly hard, as if my brain would break with the strain and a crimson stream of blood shoot out of my forehead. This is it, the dead center of analysis, the point where, after years and years of paying in your money, you are finally supposed to have a blinding vision of Mummy and Daddy fucking in the clouds and be cured of your neurosis forever. That great parental bed up in the sky. Those cosmic bedsprings creaking.

My mind is utterly blank.

Oh, when I was fifteen, I
did
accidentally open the door on my mother and father in a thigh-lock in bed—but fifteen doesn't count. Too old. Not formative years. And then there was my older sister Randy necking in the studio of the crazy gothic triplex we moved into on Central Park West—our “step up” from West Seventy-seventh Street. Did she go “all the way”? I thought so. But do older sisters
count
as primal-scene material?

“What are you thinking?”

“Oh, just a lot of junk I've told you before.... Seeing my parents in bed that time I was fifteen and Randy necking in the studio when I was a kid.”

“What about Randy?...”

“What about Randy? What about Randy! She was always up there in the studio playing records and necking with her various boyfriends, while I was studying away to get A's in school like a little jerk. She was the rebel, had temper tantrums, never studied, had millions of boyfriends. And there
I
was—flat chested, skinny legs, potbelly, long stringy blonde hair, little smocked dresses and knee socks, leather leggings—no, that must have been earlier... But the point is: I was forever a child and she was
born
a woman. She was tall, had breasts, pubic hair, her periods... And she knew about things like diaphragms and condoms and saltpeter and Spanish fly... I was the little jerk trying to please, please,
please
everybody by being a damned overachiever and she was getting more attention for necking in the studio. She drove me crazy. I wanted to
be
her. But I was five inches shorter and looked like a little kid. All I could do, for god's sake, was get A's in school. And that's all I still can do! While the whole world is fucking away behind closed doors, all I do is write, write, write!”

“Didn't you do that in Heidelberg too?”

“Exactly. While Penny and all the other army wives amused themselves by playing
Peyton Place,
I was writing. For all the good it did me!”

“It did you plenty of good.”

“Oh sure. Fame. Books on the shelf. Crazy people sending me love letters. What I wanted was a man to love me. I
didn't
get that.”

“Well, why does that make you so bitter? You got everything else you wanted.”

“Everything else is nothing without that. Empty. Meaningless.”

“I don't think so. Your work is very important...”

Suddenly I laugh. “Hey, Doctor Schwartz—you know what? Our roles are reversed. You're supposed to be the Freudian saying
‘The love of a man is all'
and I'm supposed to be the feminist saying
‘Work is all.' Arbeit macht frei.
What they had over the gates at Auschwitz. Did you know that?”

She shakes her head.

“Well, they did. Funny, isn't it. The Nazis coming up with that. Was it ironic, do you think? A cruel joke on the prisoners?”

“Let's get back to Penny. When was she born?”

“Why?”

“I'm just curious to know her age. She was older than you, wasn't she?”

“Yes. I think she was... Let's see, I married Bennett in 1966. I was twenty-four—boy, was that dumb!—and the next year I had my twenty-fifth birthday. Penny was thirty that year. Five years older... God—she must have been born the same year as my sister Randy, 1937. Jesus.”

“Do you see why it makes you so mad?”

“My older sister fucking in the studio all over again. While I play the little good girl and
write
about my fantasies instead of acting them out. Sublimation and its discontents. Christ, Doctor Schwartz, I hate to admit it, but sometimes you really know what you're doing.”

She laughs. “Your fury isn't so mysterious, is it?”

“No. But do you really mean to imply that because it's all a reenactment of me and Randy, that explains away my anger at that creep I married—what's his name—Bennett?”

“It doesn't explain it away, but at least you understand some of the ingredients of the anger.”

“Are they always from the past? Can't I just be furious about being duped?”

“Both. But if the component from the past weren't there, you wouldn't forget things, blank them out like you did when you overheard your friends talking in the kitchen. You would have taken it all in and done something about it then instead of getting angry now, do you see?”

“You mean I would have left Bennett then?”

“I can't really say. I know I don't know for sure. But at least if you had discussed it with Doctor Happe, you would have had a choice in the matter—instead of feeling so trapped.”

I mull this over. It's really true. I deliberately deprived myself of the choice of leaving Bennett. Every jailor requires a prisoner to continue being a jailor. I was my own jailor, my own prisoner.

“The thing that interests me, you see, is your blanking out. If you can get to the bottom of
that,
you'll be a lot freer. You don't have to be Hear-No-Evil.”

“True.”

And then the time is up. I wander out onto Park Avenue thinking,
analysis isn't so bad.
The point is well-taken: if I can unscramble the tricks my unconscious plays on me—the blanking out, the not hearing—I can be a lot freer. In my life. In my writing. Not bad, huh? But analytic insights are like Chinese food. Two hours later, I'll feel hungry again.

 

Jeffrey Rudner, M.D., is striding toward me along Park Avenue. When I see him loping along from his analytic session (just as I have completed mine) I always think of how he looked to me the summer I first met him at the Cape: a little foolish, an overgrown hippie with a manic giggle. He affects a beard and stringy Mexican ties and walks as if he had springs under his soles—a sort of pogo-stick bounce along the pavements of New York. He is always contemplating psychoanalytic studies of Euripides or Sophocles—which, of course, he never writes.

“Hello, pumpkin,” he says, grinning at me. If eyes could salivate, his would.

“Hi,” I say brightly. I always feel like something of a fraud with Jeffrey because secretly I think him not very bright. Likable enough, but slightly puerile. Would I ever have fucked him in the first place if he hadn't told me he had lupus?

There we were on the nude beach at Truro, drinking white wine under the sun and smoking dope and pretending not to be examining each other's bodies nor interviewing each other preliminary to an affair—when suddenly he injected a note of solemnity into the proceedings by talking about his rare, incurable disease. Our spouses were not along (they both disapproved of nudity). But we were not going to let
that
bother us. We were free spirits, after all, tra la. We did not have to be governed by our stuffy spouses. I was getting the first sunburned nipples of my life. He seemed to be getting quite a lot of infrared rays on his circumcised but otherwise unsurprising
shlong.
We were joking and bantering and generally pretending not to be undressed—when Jeffrey declared that he might die any month, year, or decade. “So might I,” I joked, looking down and admiring my snatch-hair (which I hoped was beginning to bleach in the sun). But no, he was serious; he had learned to live with his incurable disease and it had liberated him. Formerly an uptight psychiatrist, he was now a hedonist. Once, in fact, on this very beach, he had come swimming at 6:00 P.M. (when the dunes were empty of kids and the naked matrons and beachboys had all gone home) and coming out of the water he had spotted a “mermaid,” a teenybopper of fifteen or so, who apparently wanted a back rub, which became a front rub, which became a fuck, and they parted without exchanging names.

“Very
Last Tangoesque.”

“Unzipped, as you say.”

I scowled. I hate being misquoted. “Zipless, you mean.”

“Unzipped,” he persisted.

“Well anyway, it sounds nice. Was it a good fuck—apart from the excitement of the
idea?”

“I don't remember, actually.”

And then he went on to detail the other elements of his liberation: an affair with a young male painter (so that he would not die without having experienced homosexuality), an affair with a radical feminist (so that he would not die without having experienced radical feminism), an affair with his Swedish
au pair
girl—