How to Save Your Own Life Read Free Page B

sank down into the too-soft mattress as into quicksand, and it seemed that my mouth and nose would soon follow and asphyxiation would set in. I rolled over on my back once more, studied the ceiling, reached down to fondle my breasts, felt for lumps, thought-or did I imagine it?—that I found one, was perversely glad to have a real worry to occupy me, then reached lower down to fondle my cunt. I began to masturbate again desultorily, but quickly lost interest. Nothing so mundane would tranquilize me on this particular night. Black, winged presences were already gathering in the clammy air-conditioned hum of the hotel-room torture chamber: my Greek chorus had come to visit me.
    They assembled one by one and hovered near the ceiling; I called the roll and each of them answered (in the most acerbic words he knew).
    The first to arrive was an aging midget- cum -literary critic who combed his hair over his bald spot, wore elevator shoes to reach the willowy college girls he seduced at writers’ conferences, had owed five different first novels to five different publishers for the past twenty years, and once, many years ago, had paid a visit to my college writing class, where he told the tender, pre-Fem-Lib sophomore maidens that women were biologically incapable of writing either poetry or prose. He now reviewed books for a magazine of awesome influence and he had broken pub date to call Candida “a mammoth pudenda.” He also hated Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, and Isaac Bashevis Singer-so it was almost an honor to be attacked by him, but still, on a night like this, his words rang in my ears like the thundering voice of Truth: “a mammoth pudenda,” “spoiled by success,” and, finally, “Ms. Wing would do well to realize that popularity, too, may be a form of purgatory.” I didn’t know, really, what the last thundering judgment meant, but it terrified me. The hostile tone was riveting—and so very final somehow. Why were my bad reviews so irresistibly mnemonic, my good ones so instantly forgettable? A mystery. The bad reviews all had the authoritative sound of my mother’s voice.
    Herbert Honig checked in with his jaunty black eyepatch, his auburn goatee, his psoriasis (and the heartbreak that accompanies it), his penchant for “borrowing” his graduate students’ original research, and his half-dozen remaindered novels. He pronounced me “a polemical pornographer” and left immediately for Yaddo (with an adoring female Ph.D. candidate for whom he had craftily obtained a fellowship there concurrent with his own). Next, I heard from Darryl W. Vaskin (the gray-bearded professor of seventeenth-century literature at Harvard) that my poetry was not as good as George Herbert’s (with whom I had not realized, till that moment, I was competing). After that, Reah Taylor Carnovsky appeared (behind her shelflike bosom and her mustachioed upper lip) to pronounce me “a piddling poetaster.” (Reah made her living putting other women writers down, so it could not be said she was biased toward her own sex. She had studied with Herbert Honig at Yale and shared his fondness for pontifical judgments.) She too immediately left for Yaddo to complete her new book on adumbrations of the Industrial Revolution in the imagery of Keats.
    When the critics had all checked in, reassuring me that I was totally talentless, an egregious exhibitionist, and a panting publicity hound, my fans followed. Not my rational, well-beloved fans, my faithful readers who wrote me notes of gratitude—but the crazies: the proctologist from Mississippi who wanted me to send him my soiled underthings in a plastic bag and who enclosed a check for fifty-three dollars (a mysteriously arrived-at figure) so that I might replace them; the “pastor” from New Jersey who said I sounded like “a very broadminded individual” and