How to Save Your Own Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

manuscripts, and inhabit a beautiful bungalow by the lake. For this I’m actually to get money. Bennett has, for the first time in our history, consented to go with me. He has consented because everyone at the conference has told us that this will be more of a vacation than a teaching stint. The bungalows are said to be luxurious and the countryside beautiful.
    We leave for the airport in the morning, but we never get to Pastoral U. In the car, it becomes clear that Bennett resents going. He is still mad at me for having been to Chicago and he picks a fight on the way to the airport.
    BENNETT: You said you were going to cut down on all these activities, but I don’t see you doing it.
    ME: Bennett, please, I’m so tired and beat anyway, don’t make it harder by nagging me. This is the very last appearance, I swear. In August we’ll go away together.
    BENNETT (snidely): Sure.
    His mouth is tense under the Fu Manchu mustache he has grown in honor of my newfound fame, and he stares at the road in an almost-mean way. I look at him and am overcome with guilt. This poor man, shlepping his wife on literary junkets. What a sacrifice. I decide to sacrifice too.
    ME: We don’t have to go at all. I’ll cancel right now.
    BENNETT: That’s ridiculous.
    ME: No it’s not. We’ll have a weekend in the country, together, be alone.... You’re always complaining we’re never alone.
    BENNETT: You can’t cancel ...
    ME: Of course I can-you’re more important than any conference ... (Lies, lies.)
    BENNETT: We planned to go and we’re going. I gave up a tennis tournament to do this with you.
    ME: What a sacrifice! This is the first fucking time you’ve come with me at all—and it ought to be fun. A free weekend in the country. Which we get paid for. (I always refer to the money I make as “ours” — though secretly I regard it as mine.)
    Bennett looks ahead in silence. I stare at his profile. Something is seething behind his set mouth but I can’t tell what. My having gone away to Chicago for three days? Something older than that? Something borrowed?
    Suddenly it explodes.
    BENNETT: For a whole year you’ve done nothing but run around being nice to everyone but me. Any idiot who calls you in the middle of the night gets your time. You spend hours answering letters and hours with all your friends and students and hangers-on, but I never get to see you ...
    That’s because I feel depressed when I’m alone with you, I want to say, but don’t. I SAY THE OPPOSITE: I’d rather be with you-it’s just that I find it hard to say no to people.
    BENNETT: You don’t find it hard to say no to me.
    ME: I do-really I do.... Look, let’s not go to Pastoral U. Let’s cancel.
    By this time, we have entered the road to the airport. JFK.
    BENNETT (angrily): Where’s the sign to the Pan Am terminal? I missed it.
    ME (crying by now): We won’t go.
    BENNETT: Yes we will. We have to.
    ME: No-we’ll call and cancel.
    BENNETT: And then you’ll hate me for sacrificing.
    ME: No I won’t.
    BENNETT (brightening): You really would cancel?
    ME: If you want it.
    BENNETT: And what do you want?
    ME (hysterical and no longer knowing what I want): Anything you want.
    BENNETT: Bullshit. We’re going. We said we’d go and we’re going.
    We park the car near the Pan Am terminal (the flight to Albany which connects with a smaller plane to upstate New York takes off from there) and begin taking out our bags. I look at Bennett’s angry face—all the accumulated hurts of forty years-and I sob uncontrollably.
    BENNETT: What the hell is the matter with you? Cut it out.
    I am sobbing and shaking and speechless, suddenly terrified of the tiny plane, the students who will thrust manuscripts at me, the obligation to be on, on, on for another three days. I simply haven’t the energy. And I can’t stop crying.
    BENNETT: Will you cut it