How to Save Your Own Life Read Free

without forgetting how to laugh.
    Humor is a survival tool. Perhaps that was why Bennett’s childhood oppressed him so. He had no sense of humor. This showed up even in his practice of psychiatry—which was earnest, bookish, but essentially blocked by his lack of access to his feelings. He’d tried to establish full-time private practice but finally gave up all but a few patients and went into institutional psychiatry. His passion for security had led him to shelter in a hospital job.
    In a way, I disrespected him for this and my disrespect had begun to eat away at whatever love I’d once had for him. But all this was semiconscious. I told myself, Marriage is ever thus, and men and women never really speak the same language. My friends pronounced me lucky to have such a supportive spouse, and I believed it myself. Who was happy? Where was it written that I ought to have fun with my husband as well as be tolerated, fucked, and supported in my creative ambitions? Most creative women had had it much worse. Bullying husbands, lovers who drove them to suicide, tyrannical fathers who forced them into lives of sexual renunciation and daughterly dutiful-ness. At least I was blessed with a household saint-boring as that might be. And the fact was: Bennett barely intruded on my consciousness at all in either a positive or negative way. I used up no psychic energy on him at all. He was increasingly a sort of fixture in the house—like an oven or a dishwasher or a hi-fi set.
    How had we drifted so far apart? Or were we apart from the very beginning? Does eight years of marriage erode all points of contact between two people-or weren’t they ever there? I no longer knew. I only knew that I never looked forward to going on a vacation with him—or being alone with him at night-and that I filled my life with frenetic activity, hundreds of friends, casual affairs (which, of course, I felt guilty about) because being alone in his company was so curiously sterile. Even when we were home together, I was forever retreating to my study to work. Surely some of this was my fierce ambition (or, as my astrology-nut friends would say, typical Aries woman married to a typical Cancer man); but surely some of it was a desire not to be with Bennett. His presence depressed me. There was something life-denying about his very manner, carriage, and monotonous way of speaking. How could one create life with someone who represented death?
    I got up out of the bath and started drying myself, applying perfume and powder, blowing out my hair. Then I made up my face carefully—as much to hide from the world as anything else. Hide! This was a hell of a time to start hiding! Yet, it wasn’t I who was famous, it was Candida-Candida, whom I’d modeled after myself as painters do self-portraits or depict their children as cherubim, their wives as seraphim, their neighbors as devils.
    I came from a family of portraitists and still-life painters. It was family wisdom that you painted what you had at home. The reason was obvious. What you had at home was what you knew best, what you could study at leisure, learn from, dissect, analyze. You could learn chiaroscuro, color, composition as well from an apple or an onion or your own familiar face as from the fountains of Rome or the storm clouds of Venice.
    I had modeled Candida after myself, yet she was both more and less than the real Isadora. Superficially, the likeness was easy enough to spot: a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side, a writer of poems and stories, a compulsive daydreamer. Yet Candida was frozen in a book, while I was, I hoped, growing. I had outgrown many of the desires that motivated her, many of the fears that trapped her. Yet my public insisted on an exact equivalency between her and me—because my heroine, astoundingly enough, had turned out to be amanuensis to the Zeitgeist.
    This amazing development surprised no one more than me. When I invented Candida