How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong

registered the resemblance between her and me, and had a sudden flash: my husband is fucking her. That’s why she looks at him with such mournful blue eyes. The blue of her eyes, the blue of Penny‘s, the blue of mine. Three women refracting off each other.
    â€œYou certainly run to type,” I snap.
    â€œRobin is really terrified of men,” Bennett says matter-of-factly. “She practically has dyspareunia.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” I ask.
    â€œSpasms in the vagina that make intercourse painful.”
    I marvel at his colossal chutzpa. First he fucks them; then he annihilates them with analysis. Inorgastic, dyspareunia. The depth of his hatred for women is just becoming apparent to me. I am starting to hate him. I married a monster, I think. And all those years, it was I who felt so guilty.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” he asks.
    â€œWhat a monster you are.”
    â€œMe?”
    Bennett is incredulous. He has so convinced himself that his unhappy childhood makes him a perpetual victim that he cannot fathom himself as a monster.
    â€œWhy did you bother with them if you felt such contempt?”
    â€œWhat contempt?”
    â€œInorgastic, dyspareunia,” I say mockingly.
    â€œThat’s not contempt. It’s just factual.”
    â€œSounds pretty contemptuous to me.”
    â€œRobin came into my office crying one day,” he goes on. “She was terribly upset about some patient who had yelled at her, and I had to comfort her. That was when you were so engrossed in your own things-I began seeing her every other week or so. I guess I always knew she had the hots for me. I remember telling Doctor Steingesser about that months before. ‘Why does it surprise you so that a handsome woman should be attracted to you?’ he asked ...”
    A handsome woman, I think. I turn the antiquated phrase over in my mind like an old coin. Why do analysts cultivate these Jamesian locutions? Can’t they join the rest of us in the twentieth century?
    â€œAnyway, I was flattered,” Bennett continues. “She was pretty, and obviously crazy about me—and you were working so hard ...”
    â€œWhat a marvelous muse you are!” I say with considerable fury. My anger is bubbling to the surface again like boiling mud in a region of volcanos. Once again this long-suffering patient husband is acting out his rage against my success. Fucking Penny in Heidelberg, fucking Robin in New York.
    â€œI’m human too,” Bennett says, unconvincingly.
    â€œThen why did you always make yourself out to be such a saint?”
    â€œDid I?”
    â€œYou certainly fucking well did! You let me writhe in guilt and fantasies, thinking myself a bad little girl, while you pretended to be above it all, above sexual peccadillos, above lust. It’s that I can’t forgive you for. Letting me sweat it out and pretending to be so pure yourself! If only you had shared it with me.... If only you had said, ‘Okay, don’t feel so guilty-I’ ve done it myself.’ But you pretended you never even had such fantasies. I was the only one. You could have leveled with me instead of letting me feel like some sort of freak.”
    â€œWhat was the point? It was my problem ...”
    â€œI’ve heard that before and it’s pretty goddamn self-serving. You simply didn’t want me to feel free to have affairs too-that’s what I think. But you know what?—I had them anyway ...” I feel sick about the revelations I am about to make, but I can’t help myself. The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to remain in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.
    â€œWho with?”
    â€œOh Jeffrey Rudner, for one, and Jeffrey Roberts.”
    â€œJeffrey Rudner?” Bennett is stung by this. Jeffrey—his fellow shrink, his tennis partner. I am delighted to have this additional dart up my sleeve: “He used to cancel