How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

married.”
    No.
    â€œWhy not? You apparently had a rapport with her you never had with me.”
    Bennett concedes part of this. He is torn between boasting and contrition.
    â€œShe said she’d leave her kids for me. It was flattering, but after a while it began to bug me. It seemed unmotherly somehow...”
    â€œAnd you didn’t want a cold bitch shiksa with six kids ...”
    â€œIf you want to shut me up—keep using that tone of voice, okay? I won’t say another word.”
    â€œI don’t give a shit. Don’t say a word. You haven’t for eight years anyway.”
    We ride for a while in silence. My tears are blurring the approaching headlights into nebulae. But Bennett has opened a Pandora’s box sealed for too long. He cannot not talk now.
    â€œShe did other things that bugged me too. Like calling men ‘creatures.’ She always referred to her ex-lovers as ‘those creatures.’ ”
    Out of my hurt, I invent something to hurt him with: “You don’t suppose you were the only one in Heidelberg she was screwing, do you?”
    â€œI thought so. Why?”
    â€œShe bragged to me and Laura about screwing Eichen the cellist and also two colleagues of Robby’s on the army base.”
    Bennett doesn’t rise to the bait. He continues steadily: “Well, I can only say that I thought I was the only one.”
    Me, goading: “You weren’t.”
    â€œWell, I thought I was and I suppose that’s all that counts. I thought I made a deep impression on her. She was interested in my work with children-and she went into analysis.”
    â€œHow convenient! What did you do? Screw in the child-guidance clinic? Or on the couch in your office?”
    I know I sound inane. The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach. How you stoop to conquer! I hate my words even as they tumble out.
    â€œWe used to meet on the nights you taught. In your study.”
    â€œI thought you didn’t remember.”
    â€œI thought it would hurt you.”
    â€œYou thought right.”
    And it’s true. Somehow the fact that he was screwing a housewife while I was working makes it all worse. My driven-ness. My need to teach, have a career, make money, not be dependent. And whom does he seek out? An army officer’s wife who never finished college, has no career, and spends her day between the PX and her various lovers. No. Not various. I’d better not begin believing my own lies. I don’t know for sure that she had various lovers. But it seems to fit. And in my study.
    â€œLook,” Bennett goes on, “when I got to Germany, I panicked. It was a terrible idea, really-doing three years there-but I was terrified of going to Vietnam, and I thought I could stand it, conquer my paranoia about the army. Well I was wrong. I freaked out, cut myself off from you entirely-and you were deep into your own thing: your writing, your teaching, your own paranoia about Germany.... Penny was so goyish, so American. The wife of an army officer ... she seemed so Aryan-dumb as that sounds-and she was a mother, American as apple pie ...”
    â€œWhat an original phrase!”
    â€œIsadora, I’m trying to explain.... I was terrified. I wanted someone un-Jewish, cool. But after a while I realized I didn’t want that either. It was just a reaction to my feeling so trapped in the army. It reevoked my childhood—suddenly being trapped in Hong Kong and not speaking Chinese. You never took that part of me seriously. Penny did. She’d never had an Oriental lover before-and I was exotic to her. She made me feel special. Really. She did.”
    I am moved. I know that what Bennett is saying is true, that he is trying to be honest. I should be sympathetic, but I am just so hurt. I was terribly lonely during those three years in Heidelberg and there were many occasions when I turned down affairs which might have solaced me. Now I