Today, for example, I began to give in, the first step in an incrementally eroding process I recognize from other times. I slept away the morning, right through my midday therapy session, and rolled out of bed at two in the afternoon, hating myself for it. The apartment seemed hollow and shadowy, but even as I thought this I recognized the perception as a projection of my mood; it was the same apartment it had been yesterday, an apartment other people find warm and welcoming, an apartment I have lavished attention on. How everything goes askew when depression sets in, mislaid plans and all. I want to kill myself again because everything seems hopeless and loaded with pain everywhere I turn. Most of all I am tired of myself and my battles. All my choices seem wrong and now it’s too late to undo most—any—of them.
First there was the confinement of my childhood, like an incessantly replayed loop of film, and now there is my adulthood, which seems like a prison of a different kind. Nothing makes sense to me. Everything seems permeated with meaninglessness, from the people filling their grocery carts at Fairway to the magazines I get in the mail. I’ve lost track of what used to keep me going, what made me agree to meet a friend for dinner at the Mexican restaurant on Hudson Street or how I am capable of taking an almost childish delight in the search for a new shade of lipstick. I could go on and explain further but the truth is that no one is interested in why you want to kill yourself, no one really believes that you will, until you’ve already done it, and then it becomes morbidly intriguing to try and map it backward. I think of the British fashion editor and stylist Isabella Blow, who apparently talked about killing herself forever, boring her stylish friends in their designer duds, only to surprise them all by eventually going through with it.
Yesterday in therapy I described my life as “horrific,” which I realize is subjective and self-dramatizing. I know I lead a privileged existence, I know there are people hanging on by a thread in Haiti and the Congo and elsewhere across the globe, I know, I know, I know. There are earthquakes and plane crashes and famines and droughts and terrorist attacks everywhere. But I still can’t get out of being me, a desperado from way back, an eight-year-old who cried so much they stuck me in a hospital for observation, a person who doesn’t know how to feel good in the present. In the background Leonard Cohen sings “Ain’t No Cure for Love” in his growly, jaded voice. Make that “Ain’t No Cure for Life,” I think to myself, and call it a day.
17
I am lying naked in bed with a man who is making me feel good, in a box-like apartment somewhere east of Third Avenue in the Eighties—the kind of apartment an aspirational lawyer might rent for himself in the late 1970s. I am twenty-five, still fiercely self-conscious about my large breasts, and still a technical virgin. I have been sexually intimate with men for a few years now, since my early twenties, kissing and groping, on rare occasions shedding myself of clothes, feeling the touch of skin against skin, but I have held on to my virginity as though it were a medal—or, perhaps, a spoil of war—worth keeping against all incursions.
I recognize that my attachment to my virginity at this relatively late age has something to do with my Orthodox upbringing but it has even more to do with my attachment to my mother, some irrational sense of safekeeping I assign to her. Do I imagine myself to be my mother’s lover, not able to give myself fully to someone else for fear of “betraying” her? The thought isn’t fully formed, yet I feel it pressing against me in an inchoate fashion, rendering me resistant to men. For a while I worry there is something wrong with me in this area as in so many others, some piece of female anatomy that is incorrectly formed, making it impossible for a man to enter me.
And then finally on a night in late spring, so late it is almost morning, I yield to the careful, persistent ministrations of this particular man, and the deed is done. I am exhausted and he is even more so; we have climbed Mount Everest together and now look down on ourselves, spread against the messy sheets, triumphant. The next morning as I walk back to my apartment I stop at a phone booth to call my mother, who has recently told me to stop acting like the Virgin Mary, and deliver the news.
I bring my mother everything, inappropriately, all the details of my sexual life; it is a natural extension of my belief that I belong to her. “Mazel tov,” she says now, on the other end of the line, her messages confusing as always. I had expected a different kind of response—more heated, somehow, not so la-di-da. Why isn’t she making more of this, asking more questions? She is the Keeper of Modern Orthodoxy, a lighter of Friday night candles, but she is also selectively open-minded when she chooses. Unless she’s something else, something less enlightened and appealing, something more perverse. She is—dare I think it even now?—a voyeur in disguise, peeking through the keyhole as a man plays with my nipples, then leans over to kiss me. We are involved in a virtual three-way; I bring her places she would not go on her own and in return I have her with me, always.
* * *
Those were the years my body spoke for itself, although I walked around in relative ignorance of my own nubile allure. Or it might be truer to say that I walked around in studied obliviousness of my own effect, unable to put together the me that was attractive—the me that came with high cheekbones, long legs, and almond-shaped “bedroom eyes,” as someone once described them—with the me that was unacceptable, the me that was ashamed of shitting, that was stuck forever back in childhood with Jane commenting on the stink in the bathroom after one of us went.
The fall after I graduated college I worked in The New Yorker typing pool, consisting of a select group of young women who could tap out text at the rate of ninety words per minute; during the lunch hour we took turns sitting at the receptionist’s desk on the eighteenth floor. In the summer months, I wore T-shirts and cotton pants, never anything more revealing, but years later one of the editors there told me that he and his colleague used to take a detour expressly to check me out. It is impossible for me to conceive of myself in this light, as a showcase of female sex appeal, and I often wonder if I would have acted differently if I had known my own value in that arena. Surely I would have flirted with some of the handsome cartoonists as my friend J. did, perhaps even ended up in bed with one or more of them only to have my heart broken.
As it was, I acted like a startled fawn around men, shy beyond telling until such time as I felt comfortable enough to let fly with my biting observations and undoting, ungirlfriend-like behavior. My breasts never failed to elicit male attention, whether from my young nephews, who ogled them unabashedly when we were in the pool together, or from Anatole Broyard, the New York Times book critic who taught a writing class at the New School, which I attended in my early twenties. Although I regularly disguised my chest by wearing large, man-tailored shirts and other androgynous fashions, Broyard once referred to me in class as a “Jewish Sophia Loren.” I must have been pleased on some level to be compared to the buxom actress but another part of me felt like an imposter. (I would eventually have a brief affair with Broyard, as did several other women in the class. I remember his agile, scentless body and his recalcitrant penis, and how we talked companionably afterward in a small bed in an Upper East Side apartment he borrowed from a friend for just such trysts.)
The reality was that I didn’t feel like a girl, or whatever it was I imagined girls were supposed to feel like to themselves, and my breasts were a symptom of that discrepancy. They seemed to belong to someone else, a brassier kind of creature than myself, and I would eventually, after much hesitation, have them surgically reduced in my early forties, from a double D to a small C, a decision I have pondered the wisdom of to this day. Part of me wonders whether I reduced them as a sort of penance—so as not to be in competition with other women, beginning with my mother and my sisters.
The almost complete lack of fatherly attention didn’t help my confidence, either, from a man who saw me in passing every day of my childhood but never seemed to take me in. I have memories of myself as a little girl trying to sit on my father’s lap and sliding of
f, like water. At some point I stopped trying to attach myself to him in a demonstrably affectionate way and resigned myself to being the pliant object of his odd gestures, like the one in which he would take my index finger and place it inside one of his nostrils, primed to pick his snot. I never knew what to make of this, how to read it for its underlying message. Was it a sign of love or, as seemed more likely, of contempt? Did it suggest a comforting familiarity or a debased objectification, with me reduced to a stand-in for his own finger?
These considerations, needless to say, would only occur to me years later and they still remain incompletely processed, despite all my efforts to examine them. (Even today, observing a father being tender with a daughter on a playground or in the supermarket can put me in an off mood for hours, reminding me of an absence that will never be filled.) What I do recognize is that I have both tremendous yearnings and an almost equivalent amount of animus toward men, which together render me a bad candidate for successful heterosexual romance.
* * *
The man I lose my virginity to is bearded and casually funny, both pluses in my book. He acts more like a boyfriend than any man I’ve known, helping me assemble bookcases from Conran’s in my subterranean little apartment way over east on Seventy-ninth Street—a gesture I find endearingly and competently male and one that I can imagine none of my three klutzy brothers managing. We have an impassioned time in bed, so much so that he deems it wise to invest in a pair of pajamas so that we won’t be up all night.
All the same, our relationship lurches rather than sails forward. The truth is that I don’t know how to act around a man, what to do with my own near-rabid interest. I have tended toward an obsessional style in love from the moment I became sexually involved. Although I am riddled with doubts about anyone I actually date, I am paradoxically unable to move on with any ease if a relationship doesn’t work out. I am always bereft, convinced that I have lost the one person who not only understands me in all my complexities but accepts me in all my neurotic behavior. Like the Orthodox medical student (bearded, again), who had praised my body as “Amazonian” when we took our clothes off one night on my parents’ living room floor, only to then go off to Israel and get engaged to a first cousin. I still shudder to think of the ornately entreating notes I wrote him, trying to lure him back.
Always, I am afraid I will be found out for what I know myself to be: an abject creature, waiting, with legs wide open. I act one way—sharp and gleaming—but inside I am Bobbie, the aching character Ann-Margaret plays in Carnal Knowledge, yearning for more of her man, feeding on lovesickness. Perhaps in unconscious response to this tendency in myself—or perhaps because the master/slave dynamic is encoded in my neurons, something I’ve absorbed from watching the interactions between my mother and Jane, something I’ve experienced myself at the hands of my mother, who is forever hardening her heart, like Pharaoh against the Israelites—I am drawn inexorably to starting fights, to upping the ante. I am excited by displays of hostility, by the chasms they open up in the smooth flow of intimacy, and by the opportunities for dramatic reconciliations they bring with them.
So it is that in between our ardent lovemaking, which is better than any antidepressant medication I know of, I bait the bearded lawyer, poke at his vulnerabilities, make fun of what I insist are his irrevocably suburban ways (wearing a gold necklace under his shirts, owning three different ski outfits, hanging out with his male friends watching football games). Instead of rising to the bait as I hope he will—one argument after another leading to torrid sessions of makeup-sex, an endless stop-start trail—he is at first puzzled and then increasingly annoyed by my tactics.
One Saturday evening, as we are barreling our way down Second Avenue to dinner, I criticize him for some failure of sensibility and he brings the affair to a precipitous end by demanding that I get out of his car. I can recall with the sort of pained immediacy that I associate with only the most traumatic events phoning him for several nights in a row and proceeding to play Linda Ronstadt singing “Heart Like a Wheel” into the earphone, saying nothing but trusting that the lyrics will speak for me. I eventually inveigle one of my brothers into calling him up to explain that my acid tongue has always gotten the better of me but didn’t mean anything. Needless to say, my now-ex-boyfriend listens politely to my brother’s salesman spiel but remains unpersuaded.
After that, my taste irrevocably darkened. Instead of backing off when I sniffed a seductive misogynist, I went straight for the flame. I picked men who were drawn to my body but distrusted everything else about me, from my Park Avenue background to my bookishness. One of them, an expert in sexual maneuvers that left me breathless, drove out with me to Atlantic Beach one day in early summer when no one was there and proceeded to swim naked in the swimming pool, as if to leave his mark.
Years later, when I am involved with a man—another lawyer—with whom I finally play out my long-standing interest in sadomasochism, I show my mother the bite marks I have all over my body, deep purple-green bruises on my breasts, arms, and stomach. It is a Friday night, after Shabbos dinner; she is lying in her bed, in one of her short-sleeved cotton nightgowns, reading the latest issue of The New Yorker, and I want her to be disturbed by what I have undergone—spring to my defense, shed tears for what I have become—but she refuses, as always, to come through on my behalf. “I hope you enjoyed it,” she says dryly. I feel defenseless and unprotected, the girl whose head Jane banged now grown into a woman who seeks out pain in the name of pleasure, a costly trade-off of my own devising. The circle closes around me; there is no way out, no friendly onlooker standing on the sidelines, shouting, trying to warn me off.
18
I was in my late twenties, working at McCall’s as a writer of what was called service copy for features on fashion, beauty, and food (“Ground meat again? That old staple of the dinner table…”), as well as the occasional piece on subjects such as love addiction and what your voice said about you, when I received a message out of the blue that someone named William Jovanovich had called. It turned out that Diana Trilling had shown Jovanovich, a book publisher, a sheaf of my reviews for The New Leader and The New Republic as well as the two short stories I had published, and they had piqued his interest. I had been feeling understimulated at McCall’s and was putting my energies into an emotionally warped but sexually fevered love affair when I wasn’t batting away the despair that continued to plague me. I remember feeling wrung out on the day I was scheduled to meet Jovanovich, and that I had to make a herculean effort to put on something presentable and apply a bit of makeup. I knew it was important to make a good impression, but I also felt that Jovanovich would see through my efforts to charm him to the mess of anxieties that lurked within.
I don’t know what kind of man I was envisioning, but Jovanovich wasn’t at all what I was expecting. He was tall and handsome—he looked a bit like a smarter William Holden—with clear blue eyes that didn’t miss a thing, and a rancher’s rolling way of walking. I couldn’t place him, but almost despite myself I felt an immediate rapport.
In a discussion over a champagne lunch at Le Périgord, on East Fifty-second street—Jovanovich’s favorite French restaurant—he quizzed me as to what kind of novel I had in mind to write. I wasn’t sure I had in mind any kind of novel, but I said it was to be about a sexual obsession. How many characters would be involved? he wanted to know. Three, I said, but two of them were me. He liked the answer and we struck a deal. I left my job writing copy for McCall’s with the book advance Jovanovich gave me ($20,000, more than I was making annually at McCall’s) and set off to try and write a novel.
Three years and many misspent days later, I published Enchantment with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, at the age of thirty-one. The book came garlanded with endorsements from writers I admired to whom I’d suggested galleys be sent on a whim, with no expectation of their actually weighing in: Walker Percy, Frederick Exley, Stanley Elkin. There was also an ambivalent quote from Mary McCarthy, one of Jovanovi
ch’s authors, expressing astonishment at the novel’s “lack of shame,” although she did concede that “the book fascinates one by its openness.” In the end, the sexual obsession peg had dwindled down to one scene late in the novel and the main drama revolved around my relationship with my mother and my inability to separate from her.
In many ways the book reenacted my habit of self-sabotage, placing the blame for my feeling of having been unloved on my insatiability rather than on my mother’s incapacity. All the same, it caused a small stir in the incestuous Orthodox Jewish community from which I came, in part because my family was a fairly prominent one and in part because the book appeared to spill the beans with an almost embarrassing candor. In truth, I was torn between exposing my family and protecting it, and left out as much as I put in; in this sense the book was collusive, albeit unconsciously so. In the larger literary world, the reviews were mostly glowing and saw beyond the lighthearted aspects of Enchantment to its pained reality, but I will never forget the one in the Sunday Book Review that referred to the novel as a “strange, disembodied suicide.” The reviewer was Southern and the world I was invoking must have seemed totally alien to her; all the same I wondered uneasily if she knew more than the other reviewers, if she had managed to read past my attempt to shape a compelling fictional narrative into the stark truth of my inner reality.
This Close to Happy Page 12
