How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong

intrigue.
    â€œNot necessary,” I say. “In fact, I rather hope Bennett sees us.”
    â€œBut what about Roxanne?” he asks nervously. His wife. Like all adulterous husbands he assumes she’s pure. And unsuspecting.
    â€œOh you’re right.”
    â€œAnyway, why are you so cool about Bennett?” Jeffrey asks. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”
    My heart leaps. God—I did. And after promising Jeffrey I would never.
    â€œOf course I didn’t tell Bennett, silly, but after what Bennett told me, I don’t suppose it matters much if he finds out.”
    â€œWhat is it, pumpkin?” Jeffrey asks sympathetically.
    â€œI’ll tell you when we get to your office.”
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    Once there (having risked the one cab) I spill out the whole sad story of the Woodstock weekend to Jeffrey, who is immensely understanding.
    â€œI always thought Bennett was a sadist at tennis,” he says. “What are you going to do?”
    â€œLeave him,” I say, decisively. “I can’t go on living with a hypocrite. I mean fucking around occasionally is one thing, but Bennett was immensely cruel. That time I came back from Woodstock, you know what he told me?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI repeatedly asked him if he had been with another woman and you know what he said?”
    Jeffrey shakes his head. “No. What?”
    â€œHe said, ‘Your fantasies are better than anything I could tell you.’ Can you imagine? I mean if he had said, ‘Look, I fucked someone else, I’m fallible too.’ Or even told a lie about where he was, it would have been human at least. But to lay it off on me and my fantasies... I call that sa dis tic. I had enough problems with my fantasies without his tormenting me about them further. He made me feel that I was crazy. Like in Gas- light. That seems to me the cruelest thing anyone can do—making the other person feel crazy. It’s almost kinder to beat someone up.”
    â€œPoor pumpkin,” Jeffrey says, coming over to my chair and putting his arms around me. “The guy really is a bastard, isn’t he?” And he begins gently easing off my shoes, kissing the soles of my feet as he does, and unzipping my green-and-white voile dress (under which I am wearing nothing but flesh-colored bikini panties). And then his hands are cascading over my body, cooling my anger, soothing my hurt. We move down to the floor (we have always been superstitious about fucking on the analytic couch) and he gives me one of his expert back rubs, massaging each vertebra separately, concentrating for a long time on my coccyx and then on my shoulder blades. When Jeffrey makes love to me, I relax entirely—maybe because I have never felt the slightest stirrings of romantic love for him and therefore feel wholly safe. It is just sensation. Sensation and friendship. In friendship now, he buries his head between my legs and begins eating me—something he does as if he really enjoyed it, unlike the majority of men. Perhaps it is just a virtuoso performance—a species of male narcissism—but what do I care, lying back, being teased and licked and probed and licked again, being made to come and come again until I am weak in the knees and shaking all over. I try to reciprocate, take his cock in my mouth and begin teasing it with my tongue, but he won’t let me. “This is your day,” he says, and begins massaging my back again.
    By the time he looks at his watch and declares it time for the seven o‘clock analytic patient—the one he can’t cancel—I have come five times, and still he won’t let me reciprocate.
    â€œWomen’s Lib,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.
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    I leave Jeffrey’s office and wander out onto Central Park West. It’s still light out, with those warm breezes wafting up under my voile dress where my cunt is wet and throbbing from all that attention.