Read How to Save Your Own Life for Free Online

out? It’s not as if I hit you or something.
    We lock the car and drag our bags into the terminal. The flight is in fifteen minutes. While Bennett gets the tickets confirmed, I run down to the ladies’ room, splash cold water on my face, and try to stop crying. I can’t. The year has dissolved me: Celia Laffont, perverts propositioning me through the mail, hotel rooms, Bennett ...
    â€œThere’s nothing to cry about,” I tell myself in the mirror, but everything seems worth crying about. My whole life seems unmanageable; a disaster.
    I race upstairs to the phone and call the director of the conference at Pastoral U., trying to sound sane. I’ve never cancelled anything before in my life. And for a thousand dollars. Sacrificial.
    The director sounds nice. He calms me and starts persuading me to come. Bennett gesticulates madly that the plane is about to leave. Let it leave, I think, but I listen to the director’s siren song about beautiful views, twelve to fifteen carefully chosen students, and luxurious bungalows. I have just been convinced when I see through the large glass windows that the only plane for Albany that day has just taken off.
    Â 
    On the way back from the airport, Bennett and I discuss what to do with the weekend, which suddenly belongs to us alone. Instead of being exhilarated about it, we are depressed. Now that the conflict between us has been removed, there is nothing at all connecting us. Dead air. And my remorse at having cancelled something I had been looking forward to. How had that happened? His anger? My exhaustion?
    â€œWoodstock,” Bennett suggests. “Let’s go to Woodstock for the weekend.”
    Â 
    Now, Woodstock was a curious place to choose. Ominous almost. I can’t hear the name Woodstock without thinking of that terrible August weekend in the third year of our marriage when Bennett was studying for his psychiatry boards and I was obsessing over the manuscript of my first book of poems (due to go into production the following week), and I went up to Woodstock in search of some reassurances from my friends Ronald and Justine (both writers)—while Bennett (who had refused to go with me, because he was supposedly studying) disappeared elsewhere for the entire weekend and would never tell me where.
    We went through one of our familiar emotional hassles before I left. I begged Bennett to come. He refused. I told him Ronald would give him his guest-house study to work in. He still refused. He wanted me to stay in New York with him so he could rage at me periodically about his boards. But I was anxious too and desperately wanted Ronald and Justine to look at the manuscript before I turned it in. It was my first book and I reconsidered every punctuation mark hundreds of times before I let it go to press. I read every word into a tape recorder and played the tapes back over and over again, crossing out words, putting them back, crossing them out again.
    Bennett refused to understand why I had to go. I refused to understand why he had to stay. Finally, I offered to sacrifice my interests to his and I called up Ronald and Justine and said I wasn’t coming. Then Bennett mocked me for my indecisive-ness, so I called them up and said I was.
    â€œGo already,” he said. “I can see you have to go.”
    Weeping, I left for Woodstock. On the bus, I thought of Bennett with sudden empathy. He was nervous and upset; I should never have left him. As soon as I got to Woodstock I called. He was out. I called and called all night. He was never there. I called all weekend and he was never there. I became terrified. Bennett never did anything unpredictable. He must have been mugged in the elevator or axe-murdered in the living room. There was no other explanation.
    And yet, somehow, as the weekend wore on, I was sure he was with another woman.
    I never found out. When I returned on Sunday night, Bennett was there, looking mournful and