Free How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong Page B

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?”
    â€œOh 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.
    â€œHe’s very supportive of my work,” I said.
    â€œBut do you love him?” she asked.
    â€œWhat’s love?”
    â€œIf you have to ask,” she said, “you don’t.”
    Â 
    Now, six years later, I am back in Hope’s office to tell her what she’s known all along.
    â€œRemember 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?”
    â€œHow 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.”
    â€œLook, darling, you know what I always tell you. Take it if you can take it, and if you can’t take it, get out.”
    â€œI can’t take it.”
    â€œSo 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