Fear Of Flying

8 Tales from the Vienna Woods

From then on the merry-go-round began. I would go to meetings with Bennett, fully expecting to stay, swearing to myself that I’d never see Adrian again, that it was over, that I’d had my fling and it was finished-then I’d see Adrian and fall apart. I found myself acting out the vocabulary of popular love songs, the clichés of the worst Hollywood movies. My heart skipped a beat. I got misty whenever he was near. He was my sunshine. Our hearts were holding hands. If he was in a room with me, I was in such a state of agitation that I could hardly sit still. It was a kind of madness, a total absorption. I forgot the article I was supposed to write. I forgot everything but him.

None of the ploys I had used on myself in the past seemed to work anymore. I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery,” by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

After lunch on that first day of the Congress, I told Bennett I was taking off to go swimming and I cut out with Adrian. We drove to my hotel where I got my bathing suit, put on my diaphragm, took my other gear, and then left with Adrian for his pension.

In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed.

“Pretty desperate, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“For God’s sake, why? We have plenty of time.”

“How long?”

“As long as you want it,” he said, ambiguously. If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there.

Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true.

“You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.”

I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admit it.”

“That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.”

I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t, they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy.

“I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it-”

“Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly-especially when it’s bloody true.”

“I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.”

He smiled delightedly. “No you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again. I told you I’m an anti-hero. I’m not here to rescue you-and carry you away on a white horse.”

What was he here for then, I wondered? It certainly wasn’t fucking.

We went swimming at a huge public Schwimmbad on the outskirts of Vienna. I had never in my life seen so much sunburned fat. In Heidelberg, I had deliberately avoided the public swimming pools and saunas; and when we traveled we had always avoided the beach resorts frequented by Germans. We made a point of bypassing Ravenna and the other Teutonic encampments. Instead, I used to gaze enviously at the beautiful concave navels of the French Riviera, the moneyed, exercised midriffs of Capri. But here we were surrounded by mountains of Schlag and Sacher Torte metamorphosed into fat.

“It’s like The Last Judgment by Michelangelo,” I told Adrian. “The one at the end of the Sistine Chapel.”

He stuck his tongue out at me and made a face.

“Here are all these people just enjoying themselves and having a good swim, and you’re turning your satirical gaze upon them, seeing depravity and corruption all around you. Madam Savonarola, I ought to call you.”

“You’re right,” I said meekly. Couldn’t I ever stop looking and dissecting and tearing everything down? I couldn’t.

“But they do look like The Last Judgment,” I said. “God’s revenge on the Germans for being such pigs is making them look like pigs.”

And, by God, they did: not just fat, not just rolling bellies, and flabby arms, and double chins, and shimmering thighs- but all of it bright pink. Crackling. Burnt. Redder than Chinese pork. They looked like suckling pigs. Or like the fetal pig I had to dissect in Zoology II-nearly the Waterloo of my college career.

We swam and kissed in the water among all the other damned souls. I was wearing a black tank suit with a V-neck cut down to my navel, and everyone kept staring at me: the women in disapproval and the men in lechery. I could feel Adrian’s semen slimy between my legs and leaking out into the chlorinated pool. An American donating English semen to the Germans. A sort of cockeyed Marshall Plan. Let his semen bless their water and baptize them. Let it cleanse them of their sins. Adrian the Baptist. And me as Mary Magdalene. But I also wondered if swimming right after screwing would get me pregnant. Maybe the water would push the semen up behind my diaphragm. I was suddenly terrified of getting pregnant. I suddenly wanted to get pregnant. I kept imagining the beautiful baby we’d make together. I was really hooked.

We sat on the lawn under a tree and drank beer. We discussed our future-whatever that was. Adrian seemed to think I ought to leave my husband and settle in Paris (where he could fly over and visit me periodically). I could rent a garret and write books. I could come to London and write books with him. We could be like Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre: together yet apart. We’d learn to do away with silly things like jealousy. We’d fuck each other and all our friends. We’d live without worrying about possessions or possessiveness. Eventually someday, we’d establish a commune for schizo-phrenics, poets, and radical shrinks. We’d live like real existentialists instead of just talking about it. We’d all live together in a geodesic dome.

“Sort of like a Yellow Submarine,” I said.

“Well, why not?”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Adrian… Walden Pond and all that.”

“Look-I don’t see what’s so super about the sort of hypocrisy you live with. Pretending to all that crap about fidelity and monogamy, living in a million contradictions, being kept by your husband as a sort of spoilt talented baby and never standing on your own two feet. At least we’d be honest. We’d live together and fuck everyone openly. Nobody would exploit anyone and nobody would have to feel guilty for being dependent…”

“Poets and schizophrenics and shrinks?”

“Well there’s not much difference is there?”

“None whatsoever.”

Adrian had been taught existentialism in the course of one week in Paris by Martine, the French actress who’d been in a bin.

“That’s fast,” I said. “Existentialism made simple. Sort of like the souped-up Berlitz course. How’d she manage it?”

He described how he’d gone to Paris to see her and Mar-tine had surprised him by meeting him at Orly with two friends: Louise and Pierre. They were to spend the whole week together, never be apart, tell each other everything, fuck each other in all possible combinations, and never make any “silly moral excuses.”

“Whenever I spoke of my patients or my children or my girlfriend at home, she said: ‘of no interest.’

“Whenever I protested about needing to work, needing to earn a living, needing to sleep, needing to escape from the intensity of the, experience, she said: ‘of no interest.’ None of the usual excuses held. Actually, it was terrifying at first.”

“Sounds fascistic. And all in the name of freedom.”

“Well, I see your point, but it wasn’t fascistic because actually her idea was that you had to stretch the boundaries of what you could endure. You had to go to the bottom of your experience even if the bottom turned out to be terror. Mar-tine had been mad. She had been hospitalized and she came through it herself with all sorts of new illuminations. She put herself back together again and was much stronger than before. And that’s what that week did for me. I had to cope with the terrifying feeling of having no plans, not knowing where we were going next, having no privacy at all, being dependent on three other people for everything all the time. It revived all sorts of childhood problems for me. And the sex-the sex was terrifying at first. Fucking in groups is harder than you think. You have to confront your own homosexuality. It was illuminating, I think.”

“Was it any fun? It doesn’t sound like much fun.” Still, I was intrigued.

“After the first few days of trauma, it was splendid. We went everywhere together arm in arm. We sang in the streets. We shared food, money, everything. Nobody worried about work or responsibilities.”

“What about your kids?”

“They were with Esther in London.”

“So, she worried about responsibilities while you played at being an existentialist like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.”

“No-actually it wasn’t like that at all because it has always worked both ways. Esther has bloody well pissed off with other blokes from time to time and left me holding the kids. It isn’t a one-way thing.”

“Well, they’re your kids, aren’t they?”

“Possession, possession, possession,” he said, resenting my line of inquiry. “All you Jewish princesses are alike.”

“I teach you the term ‘Jewish princess’ and then the first thing you do is use it against me. My mother warned me about men like you.”

He put his head in my lap and nuzzled my cunt. A couple of fat Germans under another tree snickered. I didn’t care.

“Slimy,” he said.

“Your slime,” I said.

“Our slime,” he corrected me.

And then he said suddenly: “I want to give you an experience like the one Marline gave me. I want to teach you not to be afraid of what’s inside you.” He sank his teeth into my thigh. They left marks.

When I got back to the hotel at five-thirty Bennett was waiting. He didn’t ask me where I’d been, but he put his arms around me and started undressing me. He made love to me, to Adrian’s slime, to our triangle in all senses of the word. He had never been as passionate and tender, and I had rarely been so excited. That he was a much better lover than Adrian was clear. It was also clear that Adrian had made a difference in our lovemaking, had made us appreciate each other in a new way. We touched each other completely. Suddenly I was as valuable to Bennett as if he had fallen in love with me for the very first time.

We took a bath together and splashed water at each other. We soaped each other’s backs. I was a little appalled at my own promiscuity, that I could go from one man to another and feel so glowing and intoxicated. I knew I would have to pay for it later with the guilt and misery which I alone know how to give myself in such good measure. But right now I was happy. I felt properly appreciated for the first time. Do two men perhaps add up to one whole person?

One of the most memorable occasions of the Congress was the reception at the Rathaus of Vienna. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch 2,000 or more analysts gorging themselves as if they had been starving in Biafra for a year. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch several sedate old analysts doing the frug-or what they thought was the frug. Memorable because I waltzed through the whole experience in a red paisley gown covered with sequins and kept leaving a trail of them on the ground as I went from one ballroom to the other, now dancing with Bennett and now with Adrian and still not being able to make up my mind. I left a trail of evidence everywhere I went.

The dumpy frumpy lady mayor of Vienna bestowed herzliche Grüsse upon Anna Freud and the other analysts, and spewed out endless German bullshit about how glad the city of Vienna was to have them all back. No mention was made of the way they’d left in 1938, of course. No fifty-piece orchestra was playing The Blue Danube Waltz for them then, or plying them with herzlichen Grüssen and free Schnaps.

When the food was brought out, herds of analysts in formal dress mooed and grunted toward the tables.

“Hurry-they’re pushing ahead to the front of the line!” bleated one matron in accents redolent of Flatbush, overlaid with Scarsdale and the New School.

“They’re already being served cake in the next room,” said another, a two-hundred-pound beauty in a canary-yellow satin pants suit, twinkling with rhinestones. “Don’t push!” said a distinguished- (or perhaps extinguished-) looking older analyst in an outdated tux and plaid cummerbund. He was being crushed between a woman lunging toward the turkey platter and a man lunging toward the antipasto. All up and down the tables, you could see nothing but long arms clawing at food with silver serving forks.

Throughout this astonishing performance, the schmaltzy violins played on from their balconied perch above the main ballroom. The pseudo-Gothic arches of the high ceilings were illumined by thousands of pseudocandles, and a few die-hards kept revolving on the dance floor in a halting Viennese waltz. Ah travel, adventure, romance! I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she’s been fucked four times in one day by two different men, but my mind was a welter of contradictions. I couldn’t make sense of all the contradictions I felt.

At times I was defiant and thought I had every right to snatch whatever pleasure was offered to me for the duration of my short time on earth. Why shouldn’t I be happy and hedonistic? What was wrong with it? I knew that the women who got most out of life (and out of men) were the ones who demanded most, that if you acted as if you were valuable and desirable, men found you valuable and desirable, that if you refused to be a doormat, nobody could tread on you. I knew that servile women got walked on and women who acted like queens got treated that way. But no sooner had my defiant mood passed than I would be seized with desolation and despair, I would feel terrified of losing both men and being left all alone, I would feel sorry for Bennett, curse myself for my disloyalty, despise myself utterly for everything. Then I wanted to run to Bennett and plead forgiveness, throw myself at his feet, offer to bear him twelve children immediately (mainly to cement my bondage), promise to serve him like a good slave in exchange for any bargain as long as it included security. I would become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.

The fact was that neither one of these attitudes made any sense and I knew it. Neither dominating nor being dominated. Neither bitchiness nor servility. Both were traps. Both led nowhere except toward the loneliness both were designed to avoid. But what could I do? The more I hated myself, the more I hated myself for hating myself. It was hopeless.

I kept scanning the faces in the crowd for Adrian. No face but his contented me. Every other face looked gross and ugly to me. Bennett knew what was going on and was maddeningly understanding.

“You’re like something out of Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “Did it happen or didn’t it? Only her analyst knows for sure.”

He was convinced that Adrian “only” represented my father, and in that case it was kosher. Only! I was merely, in short, “acting out” an Oedipal situation as well as an “unresolved transference” toward my German analyst, Dr. Happe, not to mention Dr. Kolner, whom I’d just left. Bennett could understand that. As long as it was Oedipus, not love. As long as it was transference, not love.

Adrian was worse, in a way.

We met on the side stairs under a Gothic arch. He was full of interpretations too.

“You keep running back and forth between the two of us,” he said. “I wonder which of us is Mummy and which Daddy?”

I had a sudden mad impulse to pack my bags and get away from both of them. Maybe it wasn’t a question of choosing between them but just of escaping both entirely. Released in my own custody. Stop this nonsense of running from one man to the next. Stand on my own two feet for once. Why was that so terrifying? The other options were worse, weren’t they? A lifetime of Freudian interpretations or a lifetime of Laingian interpretations! What a choice! I might as well join forces with a religious fanatic, a Scientology freak, or a doctrinaire Marxist. Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn’t believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one’s self. In laughing even at one’s own need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn’t feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts. (I told some of this to Adrian.)

“Life as a fruitcake! You are awfully oral, aren’t you?” Adrian said, more with an air of a statement than question.

“So what else is new-you want to make something of it?”

And he gave me a wet, sloppy kiss, his tongue one of the plums in the fruitcake.

“How long are you going to go on hurting me this way?” Bennett asked when we got back to the hotel. “I won’t go on taking it forever.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded so lame.

“I think we ought to get out of here, get the next plane back for New York. We can’t keep on with this insanity. You’re in a state, bewitched, out of your mind. I want to take you home.”

I started to cry. I wanted to go home and I never wanted to go home.

“Please Bennett, please, please, please.”

“Please what?” he snapped.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t even have the guts to stay with him. If you’re in love with him-why don’t you commit yourself to it and meet his kids and go to London. But you can’t even do that. You don’t know what you want.” He paused. “We ought to go home right now.”

“What’s the use? You’ll never trust me again. I’ve ruined it. It’s hopeless.” And I think I really believed it.

“Maybe if we go home and you go right back into analysis, if you understand why you did this, if you work it through, maybe we can salvage our marriage.”

“If I go back into analysis! Is that the condition?”

“Not for my sake-but for yours. So you won’t be doing this sort of thing forever.”

“Have I ever done it before? Have I? Even when you were horrible to me, even that time in Paris when you wouldn’t speak to me, even those years in Germany when I was so unhappy, when I needed someone to turn to, when I felt so lonely and shut out by you and your constant depression-I never got involved with anyone else. Never. You certainly provoked me then. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to me. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to a writer. You used to say you had no empathy for my problems. You never said you loved me. And when I cried and felt miserable because all I wanted was closeness and affection you sent me to an analyst. You used the analyst as a substitute for everything. Whenever any kind of closeness threatened, you sent me to a goddamned analyst.”

“Where the hell would you be now without the analyst? You’d still be rewriting one poem over and over. You’d still be unable to send work anywhere. You’d still be terrified of everything. When I met you, you were running around like a lunatic, never working steadily at anything, full of a million plans that never got finished. I gave you a place to work, encouraged you when you hated yourself, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, paid for your goddamned analyst so you could grow and develop as a human being instead of floundering around with all the other members of your crazy family. Go blame me for all your problems. I was the only one who ever gave you support and encouragement and this is all you can do in return-go running after some asshole Englishman and whining to me about not knowing what you want. Go to hell! Follow him wherever you want, I’m going back to New York.”

“But I want you,” I said, crying. I wanted to want him. I wanted it more than anything. I thought of all the times we’d spent together, the miserable times we’d come through together, the times when we’d been able to comfort each other and encourage each other, the way he’d stood behind my work and steadied me when I looked as if I was ready to hurl myself off some cliff. The way I’d endured the army with him. The years put in. I thought of all we knew about each other, the way we’d worked to stay together, the stubborn determination that had held us together when all else failed. Even the misery we’d shared seemed a greater bond than anything I had with Adrian. Adrian was a dream. Bennett was my reality. Was he grim? Well then, reality was grim. If I lost him, I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name.

We put our arms around each other and began to make love, crying.

“I wanted to give you a baby there,” he said, thrusting deeper and deeper into me.

The next afternoon I was back with Adrian, lying on a blanket in the Vienna woods, the sun coming down through the trees.

“Do you really like Bennett or do you just enumerate his virtues?” Adrian asked.

I picked a long green weed and chewed it. “Why do you ask such incisive questions?”

“I’m not incisive at all. You’re just transparent.”

“Great,” I said.

“I mean it. Don’t you think fun figures at all in life? Or is it all this sickly stuff about ‘my analysis-his analysis,’ ‘love-me-love-my-disease.’ You and Bennett do seem to whine an awful lot. And apologize an awful lot. You’re all full of obligations and duties and what he’s done for you. Why shouldn’t he do for you? Are you some kind of monster?”

“Sometimes I mink so.”

“For God’s sake why? You’re not ugly, not stupid, you’ve a lovely cunt, a beautiful pot belly, loads of blond hair, and the biggest arse between Vienna and New York-pure lard-” He slapped it for emphasis. “What have you got to worry about?”

“Everything. I’m very dependent. I fall apart regularly. I go into horrible depressions and hardly come up for air. Besides, no man wants to be stuck with a lady writer. They’re liabilities. They daydream when they’re supposed to be cooking. They worry about books instead of babies. They forget to clean the house…”

“Jesus Christ! You’re some fine feminist.”

“Oh I talk a good game, and I even think I believe it, but secretly, I’m like the girl in Story of O. I want to submit to some big brute. ‘Every woman adores a fascist,’ as Sylvia Plath says. I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking. I feel guilty for everything. You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. That’s Isadora Wing’s first principle of the war between the sexes. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture. Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said?”

“No.”

“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

“Teddy Roosevelt never said that.”

“No, but I did.”

“You’re just scared of him-that’s what you are.”

“Who? Teddy Roosevelt?”

“No-you idiot-Bennett. And you won’t admit it. You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.”

“You’ve never seen me when I’m ready to fall apart.”

“Piffle.”

“You should see. You’d run miles away.”

“Why? Are you so unbearable?”

“Bennett says so.”

“Then why hasn’t he run? Actually that’s just bullshit to keep you in line. Look-I lived with Martine once when she fell apart. I’m sure you couldn’t be worse. You have to take a lot of shit from people to get the good bits too.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good-can I have that on tape?”

“How about videotape?” And we kissed for a long time. When we stopped Adrian said, “You know, for an intelligent woman, you’re an idiot.”

“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.”

“What I mean to say is, you can have anything you want-only you don’t know it. You could have the world by the balls. You should come along with me and see how little you’ll miss Bennett. We’ll have an odyssey. I’ll discover Europe-you’ll discover yourself.”

“Is that all? When do we start?”

“Tomorrow or the day after, or Saturday. Whenever the Congress is over.”

“And where do we go?”

“That’s just the point. No plans. We just take off. It’ll be like The Grapes of Wroth. We’ll be migrants.”

“The Grapes of Wrath.”

“Wroth.”

“Wrath, as in wrath of God.”

“Wroth.”

“You’re wrong, sweetie pie. You’re illiterate by your own admission. Steinbeck is an American writer-The Grapes of Wrath.”

“Wroth.”

“OK, you’re wrong, but let it go.”

“I already have, love.”

“You mean we’ll just take off without any plans?”

“The plan is for you to find out how strong you are. The plan is for you to start believing you can stand on your own two feet-that ought to be plan enough for anyone.”

“And what about Bennett?”

“If he’s smart, he’ll just piss off with some other bird.”

“He Will?”

“That’s what I’d do, anyway. Look-it’s clear that you and he are due for a bit of a reshuffle. You can’t go on whining at each other like this all your lives. People may be dying in Belfast and Bangladesh but that’s all the more reason why you ought to learn to have fun-life’s supposed to be fun at least some of the time. You and Bennett sound like a couple of fanatics: ‘Abandon all hope: the end is nigh.’ Don’t you do anything but worry? It’s such a bloody waste.”

“He called you the worst name possible,” I said laughing.

“Did he?”

“He called you a ‘part object.’ ”

“Did he really? Well he’s a bloody ‘part object’ as well. The psychologizing bastard.”

“You do your share of psychologizing too, sweetheart. Sometimes I think I should get away from you both, woman smothers in jargon. lover and husband held for questioning.”

Adrian laughed and fondled my ass. No jargon about that. That was a whole object. An ass and a half, in fact. Never had I felt happier about my fat ass than when I was with Adrian. If only men knew! All women think they’re ugly, even pretty women. A man who understood this could fuck more women than Don Giovanni. They all think their cunts are ugly. They all find fault with their figures. They all think their asses are too big, their breasts too small, their thighs too fat, their ankles too thick. Even models and actresses, even the women you think are so beautiful that they have nothing to worry about do worry all the time.

“I love your fat ass,” Adrian said. “All the food you had to gobble to get such a fat ass. Yum!” And he sank his teeth in. The cannibal.

“The trouble with your marriage is,” he said to my ass, “that it’s all work. Don’t you ever have fun together?”

“Sure we do… hey-that hurts.”

“Like when?” He sat up. “Tell me about when it was fun.”

I racked my brains. The fight in Paris. The car crash in Sicily. The fight in Paestum. The fight about which apartment to take. The fight about my quitting analysis. The fight about skiing. The fight about fighting.

“We’ve had lots of fun. You don’t have to grill me.”

“You’re a liar. All your analysis is really a waste if you still go on lying to yourself all the time.”

“We have fun in bed.”

“Only thanks to my not fucking you properly, I’ll bet.”

“Adrian, I think you really want to break up my marriage. That’s your game, isn’t it? That’s your kick, that’s what you’re hooked on. I may be hooked on guilt. Bennett may be hooked on jargon. But you’re hooked on triangles. That’s your speciality. Who was Martine living with that made her so attractive to you? Who was Esther fucking? You’re a marriage ghoul, that’s what you are. You’re a vulture.”

“Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.”

“I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.”

“Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.”

“Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.”

“If I take off, I’ll lose him.”

“Only if he’s not worth having.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.”

I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave).

Bennett knew about part objects and whole objects, Oedipus and Electra, school phobia and claustrophobia, impotence and frigidity, patricide and matricide, penis envy and womb envy, working through and free association, mourning and melancholia, intrapsychic conflict and extrapsychic conflict, nosology and etiology, senile dementia and dementia praecox, projection and introjection, self-analysis and group-therapy, symptom formation and symptom exacerbation, amnesiac states and fugue states, pathological weeping and laughter in dreams, insomnia and excessive sleeping, neurosis and psychosis until they were coming out of your ears, but he did not seem to know about laughing and joking, wisecracking and punning, hugging and kissing, singing and dancing-all the things, in short, which made life worthwhile. As if you could will life to be happy through analysis. As if you could get along without laughter as long as you had analysis. Adrian had laughter, and at that point I was ready to sell my soul for it.

The smile. Who was it who said that the smile is the secret of life? Adrian had an antic grin. I too laughed all the time. When we were together we felt we could conquer anything merely by laughing.

“You have to get away from him,” Bennett said, “and back into analysis. He’s not good for you.”

“You’re right,” I said. What was that I had just said? You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. Bennett was right and Adrian was also right. Men have always liked me because I agree with them. Not just lip service either. At the moment I say it, I really do agree.

“Let’s go back to New York right after the Congress is over.”

“OK,” I said, meaning it.

I looked at Bennett and thought how well I knew him. He was serious and sober almost to the point of madness at times, but it was also that which I loved about him. His utter dependability. His belief that life was a puzzle which could ultimately be figured out through hard work and determination. I shared that with him as much as I shared laughter with Adrian. I loved Bennett and knew it. I knew my life was with him, not with Adrian. Then what was tugging so hard at me to leave him and go off with Adrian? Why did Adrian’s arguments speak to my very bones?

“You could have had an affair without my knowing,” he said. “I gave you plenty of freedom.”

“I know.” I hung my head.

“You really did it for my benefit, didn’t you? You must have been terribly angry with me.”

“He’s impotent most of the time anyway,” I said. Now I had betrayed them both. I had told Adrian Bennett’s secrets. And Bennett Adrian’s. Carrying tales from one to the other.

And myself the most betrayed of all. Shown up for the traitor I was. Had I no loyalty at all? I wanted to die. Death was the only suitable punishment for traitors.

“I’d have thought he’d be impotent, or else homosexual. At any rate, it’s clear he hates women.”

“How do you know?”

“From you.”

“Bennett, do you know I love you?”

“Yes, and that only makes it worse.”

We stood looking at each other.

“Sometimes I just get so tired of being serious all the time. I want to laugh. I want to have fun.”

“I guess my somberness drives everyone away in the end,” he said sadly. And then he enumerated all the girls it had driven away. I knew them all by name. I put my arms around him.

“I could have had affairs without your knowing. I know lots of women who do that…” (Actually, I knew only three who made a constant habit of it.) “But that would be even worse, in a way. To lead a secret life and go home to you as if nothing had happened. That would be even harder to take. At least, I couldn’t bear it.”

“Maybe I should have understood how lonely you were,” he said. “Maybe it was my fault.”

Then we made love. I didn’t pretend Bennett was anyone but Bennett. I didn’t have to. It was Bennett I wanted.

He was wrong, I thought later. The marriage was my failure. If I had loved him enough, I would have cured his sadness instead of being engulfed by it and longing to escape from it.

“There’s nothing harder than marriage,” I said.

“I really think I drove you to it,” he said.

We fell asleep.

“His being so goddamned understanding only makes me feel worse, in a way. Jesus, I feel guilty!”

“So what else is new?” Adrian said.

We had found a new swimming pool in Grinzing, a small charming one, with relatively few fat Germans. We were sitting at the edge of the pool drinking beer.

“Am I a bore? Do I repeat myself?” Rhetorical questions.

“Yes,” said Adrian, “but I like being bored by you. It’s more amusing than being amused by somebody else.”

“I like the flow of conversation when we’re together. I never worry about making an impression on you. I tell you what I think.”

“That’s a lie. Just yesterday you made a big deal about what a good lay I was when I wasn’t.”

“You’re right.” That was fast.

“But I know what you mean. We talk well. Without lumps and bumps. Esther goes into these long gloomy silences and I never know what she’s thinking. You’re open. You contradict yourself all the time, but I rather like that. It’s human.”

“Bennett goes into long silences too. I’d almost rather he contradicted himself, but he’s too perfect. He won’t commit himself to a statement unless he’s sure it’s definitive. You can’t live that way-trying to be definitive all the time-death’s definitive.”

“Let’s have another swim,” Adrian said.

“Why were you so angry at me?” Bennett asked later that evening.

“Because I felt you treated me like a piece of property. Because you said you had no empathy for me. Because you never said you loved me. Because you’d never go down on me. Because you blamed me for all your unhappiness. Because you lapsed into these long silences and would never let me comfort you. Because you insulted my friends. Because you closed yourself off from any kind of human contact. Because you made me feel as if I were strangling to death.”

“Your mother strangled you, not me. I gave you all the freedom you wanted.”

“That’s a contradiction in terms. A person’s not free if their freedom has to be ‘given.’ Who are you to ‘give’ me freedom?”

“Show me one person who’s completely free. Who? Is anyone? Your parents choked you-not me! You’re always blaming me for what your mother did to you.”

“Whenever I criticize you in any way, you throw another psychoanalytic interpretation at me. It’s always my mother or my father-not something between us. Can’t we just keep it between us?”

“I wish it worked that way. But it doesn’t. You’re always reliving your childhood whether you admit it or not-what the hell do you think you’re doing with Adrian Goodlove? He looks exactly like your father-or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

“I hadn’t noticed. He doesn’t look anything like my father.”

Bennett snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

“Look-I’m not going to argue with you about whether or not he looks like my father, but this is the first goddamned time you’ve ever showed any interest in me or acted as if you loved me at all. I have to bloody well fuck someone before your very eyes or you don’t give a damn about me. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Doesn’t your psychoanalytic theory tell you anything about that? Maybe it’s your Oedipal problem now. Maybe I’m your mother and Adrian resembles your father. Why don’t we all sit down and have a group grope about it? Actually, I think Adrian’s in love with you. I’m just the go-between. It’s you he really wants.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I told you I think he’s queer.”

“Why don’t we all sleep together and find out?”

“No thanks. But don’t let me stop you if that’s what you want.”

“I won’t.”

“Go ahead,” Bennett screamed with more passion than I had ever heard him muster. “Go off with him! You’ll never do any serious work again. I’m the only person in your life who’s held you together this long-but go ahead and leave! You’ll screw yourself up so thoroughly that you’ll never do anything worthwhile again.”

“How can you expect to have anything interesting to write about if you’re so afraid of new experiences?” Adrian asked. I had just told him that I wouldn’t go with him but had decided to return home with Bennett instead. We were sitting in Adrian’s Triumph, parked on a back street near the university. (Bennett was at a meeting on “Aggression in Large Groups.”)

“I plunge into new experiences all the time. That’s just the trouble.”

“Bullshit. You’re a scared little princess. I offer you an experience that could really change you, one you really could write about, and you run away. Back to Bennett and New York. Back to your safe little marital cubbyhole. Christ-I’m glad I’m not married anymore if this is what it leads to. I thought you had more guts than this. After reading all your ‘sensual and erotic’ poems-in inverted commas-I thought better of you than this.” He gave me a disgusted look.

“If I spent all my time being sensual and erotic, I’d be too tired to write about it,” I pleaded.

“You’re a fake,” he said, “a total fake. You’ll never have anything worthwhile to write about if you don’t grow up. Courage is the first principle. You’re just scared.”

“Don’t bully me.”

“Who’s bullying you? I’m just leveling with you. You’ll never know fuck-all about writing if you don’t learn courage.”

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“I know that I’ve read some of your work and that you give out little bits and pieces of yourself in it. If you don’t watch out, you’ll become a fetish for all sorts of frustrated types. All the nuts in the world will fall into your basket.”

“That’s already happened to some extent. My poems are a happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance.” I was cribbing from Joyce, but Adrian wouldn’t know, being illiterate. In the months since my first book had appeared, I had received plenty of bizarre phone calls and letters from men who assumed that I did everything I wrote about and did it with everyone, everywhere. Suddenly, I was public property in a small way. It was an odd sensation. In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but then when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced for all the wrong reasons. Or are they the right reasons? Do all the nuts in the world really have your number? And not just your telephone number either.

“I thought we really had a good thing going,” Adrian said, “but it’s over now, because you’re so bloody terrified. I’m really disappointed in you… Well, I guess it won’t be the first time I’ve been disappointed in a woman. That first day, when I saw you arguing at registration, I thought: that really is one splendid woman-a real fighter. She doesn’t take life lying down. But I was wrong. You’re no adventuress. You’re a princess. Forgive me for trying to upset your safe little marriage.” He turned the key in the ignition and started the car for emphasis.

“Fuck you, Adrian.” It was lame but it was all I could think of.

“Don’t fuck me-go home and fuck yourself. Go back to being a safe little bourgeois housewife who writes in her spare time.”

That was the unkindest cut of all.

“And what do you think you are-a safe little bourgeois doctor who plays existentialist in his spare time?” I was almost shouting.

“Go ahead and scream, ducks, it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t have to account to you for my life. I know what I’m doing. You’re the one who’s so bloody indecisive. You’re the one who can’t decide whether to be Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Marjorie Morningstar.” He raced the engine dramatically.

“Take me home,” I said.

“Gladly, if you’ll just tell me where that is.”

We sat for a while without speaking. Adrian kept racing the motor but made no move to pull out, and I just sat there in silence being torn apart by my twin demons. Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time? Was that my fate? Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Was I going to go on living my life as a lie? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?

“What if I change my mind?” I asked.

“It’s too late. You’ve already ruined it. It will never be the same. I don’t know now whether I want to take you, quite honestly.”

“You really are a hard man, aren’t you? One little moment of indecision and you give up on me. You expect me to give up everything-my life, my husband, my work-without a moment’s hesitation and just follow you across Europe in accordance with some half-baked Laingian idea of experience and adventure. If at least you loved me-”

“Don’t bring love into it and muck everything up. That’s a copout if I ever heard one. What does love have to do with it?”

“Everything.”

“Bullshit. You say love-but you mean security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband-there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.”

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“That’s how much you know.” He stared at the steering wheel.

“Adrian, you’re right about everything except love. Love does matter. It matters that Bennett loves me and you don’t.”

“And who do you love? Have you ever let yourself think about it? Or is it all a question of who you can exploit and manipulate? Is it all a question of who gives you more? Is it all a question, ultimately, of money?”

“That’s crap.”

“Is it now? Sometimes I think it’s just that you know I’m poor, that I want to write books and don’t give a damn about practicing medicine-unlike your rich American doctors.”

“On the contrary, your poverty appeals to my reverse snobbery. I like your poverty. Besides, if you do as well as old Ronnie Laing, you won’t be poor. You’ll go far, my boy. Psychopaths always do.”

“Now you sound like you’re quoting Bennett.”

“We do agree that you’re a psychopath.”

“We, we, we-the smug editorial ‘we.’ My-it must be awfully cozy to be boringly married and use the editorial we. But is it conducive to art? Isn’t all that coziness stultifying? Isn’t it high time you changed your life?”

“Iago-that’s what you are. Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”

“If what you have is paradise-I thank God I’ve never had the experience.”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“Back where?”

“To Paradise, to my cozy little marital boredom, to my editorial we, to my stultification. I need it like a fix.”

“Just as you need me like a fix when you get bored with Bennett.”

“Look-you said it-it’s over.”

“So it is.”

“Well, then drive me back to the hotel. Bennett will be back soon. I don’t want to be late again. He’s just heard a paper on ‘Aggression in Large Groups.’ It might give him ideas.”

“We’re a small group.”

“True, but you never can tell.”

“You’d really like him to beat the shit out of you-wouldn’t you? Then you’d feel properly martyred.”

“Perhaps.” I was aping Adrian’s cool. It was infuriating him.

“Look-we might just do a communal thing-you and me and Bennett. We could drive across the Continent à trois.”

“Fine with me, but you’ll have to convince him. It won’t be easy. He’s just a bourgeois doctor married to a little housewife who writes in her spare time. He doesn’t swing-like you do. Now please take me home.”

He started the car in earnest this time and pulled out. We began our familiar meandering way through the back streets of Vienna, getting lost at every turn.

After about ten minutes of this we were laughing and in high spirits again. Our mutual ineptitude never failed to make us delighted with each other. It couldn’t last, of course, but it was intoxicating for the moment. Adrian stopped the car and leaned over to kiss me. “Let’s not go back-let’s spend the night together,” Adrian said.

I debated with myself. What was I-some scared housewife?

“OK,” I said (and instantly regretted it). But after all, what difference could one night make? I was going back to New York with Bennett.

The evening which followed was another one of those dreamy blurs. We started drinking at a working man’s café off the Ringstrasse, kissed and kissed between beers, passed beer from his mouth to mine, from mine to his, listened avidly to an elderly female lush criticize the expenditures of the American space program, and how they should spend that money on earth (to build crematoria?) instead of wasting it on the moon, then ate (kissing throughout dinner) at an outdoor garden restaurant, fed each other Leberknodel and Bauernschnitzel in passionate bites, and very drunkenly made our way back to Adrian’s pension where we made love adequately for the first time.

“I think I’d love you,” he said while he was fucking me, “if I believed in love.”

At midnight, I suddenly remembered Bennett who had been waiting six hours at the hotel, and I got out of bed, padded downstairs to the pay phone, borrowed two schillings from the sleepy concierge and phoned him. He was out. I left a cruel message saying, “See you in the morning,” and then let the switchboard operator copy down my phone number and address. Then I went back to bed where Adrian was snoring like a pig.

For about an hour I lay awake in anguish, listening to

Adrian snore, hating myself for my disloyalty, and unable to get relaxed enough to sleep. At 1 a.m. the door opened and Bennett burst in. I took one look at him and knew that he was going to dispatch us both. In my secret heart, I was glad-I deserved to be killed. Adrian, too.

Bennett stripped instead, and fucked me violently right there on the cot adjoining Adrian’s. In the midst of this bizarre performance, Adrian awoke and watched, his eyes gleaming like a boxing fan’s at a particularly sadistic fight. When Bennett had come and was lying on top of me out of breath, Adrian leaned over and began stroking his back. Bennett made no protestation. Entwined and sweating, the three of us finally fell asleep.

I have told these events as plainly as possible, because nothing I might say to embellish them could possibly make them more shocking. The whole episode was wordless-as if the three of us were in a pantomime together and each had rehearsed his part for so many years that it was second nature. We were merely going through the motions of something we had done in fantasy many times. The whole episode -from my leaving the address with the switchboard operator to Adrian’s stroking Bennett’s beautiful brown back-was an inevitable as a Greek tragedy-or as a Punch and Judy show. I remember certain details: Adrian’s wheezing snore, the enraged look on Bennett’s face when he entered the room (and, in rapid succession, me), the way we three slept entangled in each other’s arms, the large mosquito which fed off our mingled blood and kept awakening me with bites. In the blue early-morning twilight, I awoke to find that I had rolled over and crushed it sometime during the night. It made a bloody Rorschach on the sheet, like the menstrual stain of a tiny woman.

In the morning we disowned each other. Nothing had happened. It was a dream. We walked down the baroque steps of the pension as if we all happened to be separate lodgers meeting for the first time on the winding stairs.

Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily-especially Reuben Finkel, a red-headed, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars.

“Hello Rueben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Bennett said nothing. He walked on ahead as if in a trance. Adrian followed him. It momentarily occurred to me that perhaps something more had happened between the two men during the night, but I quickly put it out of my mind. Why?

Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Bennett stiffly refused. But then when we were unable to get a taxi, Bennett finally gave in-without even the courtesy of a word or a nod in Adrian’s direction. Adrian shrugged and took the wheel. I doubled myself up in the midget-sized back seat. This time Bennett directed and we did not get lost. But throughout the whole ride, there was a terrible silence between us, except for the directions Bennett offered. I wanted to talk. We had been through something important together and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. This might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us, but instead Bennett was hellbent on denying it. Adrian wasn’t much help either. All their talk about analysis and self-analysis was pure bullshit. Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless. They both faced straight ahead like Siamese twins joined at a crucial but invisible spot on the side of the neck. Blood brothers. And I the sister who had loused them up. The woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box.