How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong Page B

that I begin to cry. The dams break, and eight years of tears pour forth. Where had I been storing all these tears?
    When I am utterly dissolved in my own tears, Bennett opens his arms to me and wants me to crawl in. All the way back to the womb. And I crawl. But I am raging within. I let him embrace me like a crab embracing its dinner—but inside I am furious. The marriage has begun to end.

A day in the life...
    Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t....
    There is a rumor abroad in the land that women today leave their husbands at the drop of a hat—or some other appropriate garment. I am living proof that it isn’t so. With no children to “tie me down” (or anchor me to reality), with a profession and livelihood of my own, leaving was still the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I tried everything I could think of to postpone the decision—or reverse it—and the very process of leaving took years, not months. Even the flings and affairs I had, even the rebellious things I wrote were, in reality, ways of postponing the actual terrifying decision to leave.
    It was a far cry from what one overhears from a neighboring luncheon table or, fleetingly, on the crossed wires of the telephone: “And then she just up and left him.” That classic line is inevitably pronounced with a mixture of contempt and envy —but vicarious elation underlies them both. Another prisoner has escaped! Another bird has flown her gilded cage! The line stirs us, no matter how many times we have heard it repeated. Freedom, freedom is the theme.
    I was not insensible to the call of freedom. Every time I heard of any woman who had left her husband—whether it was a friend, a friend of a friend, a distant acquaintance, or some media personality compounded of two parts rumor, two parts projection, and the rest wishful thinking—I yearned, palpably yearned. I became a ready customer for paperback originals with titles like How to Do Your Own Divorce, The Joys of Divorce, The Natural Incompatibility of Love and Marriage, or The Challenge of Single Living. I was obsessed with leaving, yet I could not leave. In the manner of psychotics who project their own delusions on the environment, I began to convince myself that the entire world was obsessed with leaving its husband, that leaving one’s husband was the only, the cosmic, theme.
    My friends were crucial to me then. In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
    I have always been blessed with friends. At no time in my life, no matter how miserable, have I lacked friends to share my misery with. Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
    Right after Bennett’s revelations, I found myself calling on each of my friends in turn, as if they were healers, gurus, shamans. Each of them was a mirror that reflected only its own distortions—yet even this was comforting in its way.
    That hot Monday morning post-Woodstock, I called them all: Gretchen Kendall, the feminist lawyer; Michael Cosman, my best friend and almost-lover in Heidelberg; Jeffrey Rudner, the shrink who cancelled sessions for me; Jeffrey Roberts, the WASP advertising man and poet who had wanted to marry me for years; Hope Lowell, my muse and fairy godmother; Holly, the perpetual loner whose paintings make it absolutely clear that she would rather be a plant than a person. The friends that I neglected to call somehow called me. Before eleven that morning, my entire week was booked solid. Not a sliver of time was left to see Bennett. It might even be said that I never saw Bennett again until long after I left him. Only then could I look at him without rage, and understand. But by then