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phone in, Lil's mother sent him a telegram:
"Lil
wants to try again.
Please call." Ben called. Possessed with the idea of effecting a moral
sacrifice-he wanted it desperately-he persuaded
Lil
to a reconcilia–
tion. That night, Ben told me later with embarrassing ingenuousness,
they got into bed, and he couldn't get an erection. He cried.
Lil
laughed at him, and he hit her in the face, once, a short, open-handed
slap. She .screamed at him, "You can punch, but you can't screw,
you lousy fat louse."
Shortly after that at a gathering at Marsha Weinstein's house
she told me in a drawn voice that she had given up sex for yogurt
and
carrot juice. Marsha, her best friend, was a ballet dancer when
she was not working part-time for Secretaries Anonymous. Marsha's
three
abortions had taken the limber out of her legs, which were
running to fat, and she had recommended the Health Shoppe on
Madison Avenue right around the corner from her analyst.
Lil
had de–
cided
to move in with Marsha, the reconciliation with Ben a washout.
Larry
Jonas, Marsha's new man, was in Washington doing a study of
pressure groups and would not be back for a while. Larry had been
LiI's boy friend, so she felt a vicarious renewal with Larry in staying
at Marsha's. Larry had been good to her, but after two years of
indecision, she found Ben at a party given by Murray Abramson,
whose book,
Existential Psychodynamics,
had stirred the psychological
community. Murray had studied at the W.A. White school with Ben
before Ben decided to go into
his
father's medical supply business.
LiI
told me that Ben was the warmest, brightest, tenderest man she
had
ever met. "I never knew about social consciousness before I met
Ben,"
she said. Ben had admired Larry's work with the American
Civil
Liberties Union and knew too that Larry was sleeping with Lil,
10
that he found the usurpation of Larry's girl a moral problem
painful
enough to engage him full time. "I knew something was
wrong,"
LiI
said, "the night Ben took me home from Murray's party,
but
he told me later that he was discussing the problem with his
doctor. He had a premature ejaculation; he came all over my dress
before I had time to take it off. He said the Larry problem was a
projection of an infantile regression, a kind of Oedipal return, since
be
had
always thought of Larry as a kind of father figure."
The marriage had gone on like that for four years, deteriorating
lteadily. Toward the end, I was having dinner at the Cookery with
Merle
Jonas, Larry's kid brother. We had just come from Max
