Fear Of Flying

12 The Madman

You have to imagine him: short, dark, heavy brown beard-a combination of Peter Lorre, Alfred Drake, and Humphrey Bogart (as Pia and I would have said), or at times Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar. He liked to talk tough in the manner of the movie heroes of his youth. He was, as he put it, a movie-coholic, and even in college would sometimes go to two or three movies a day, preferably at (what he called) “the Vomit-houses”-those beat-up theaters on 42nd Street where derelicts went to sleep and perverts (Brian’s mother called them “preverts”) went to drool, and there were double or even triple bills of war movies, Westerns, or Roman Forum epics.

Despite his penchant for bad movies and Edward G. Robinson gestures, Brian was a genius, a genuine 200-plus IQ kid who arrived at Columbia with a record-breaking history of College Board scores, debating society trophies, “citizenship” awards (whatever they are) from every school in California he’d gone to, and an impressive history of psychotic breakdowns from age sixteen on. Except that I did not know about these until much later, after we were married and he was hospitalized again. This oversight was not so much due to deception on his part as to the fact that he never regarded himself as crazy. The world was. About that I certainly agreed with him-right up until the time he tried to fly out the window and take me with him.

It was probably Brian’s brilliance and his verbal pyrotechnics which made me fall in love with him in the first place. He was a great mimic, a spellbinding talker, one of those gifted raconteurs who seems like something out of a Dublin pub or a J. M. Synge play. He had the gift of gab; he was the Playboy of the Western World (straight from Los Angeles). I’ve always set a high value on words and have often made the mistake of believing in words far more than in actions. My heart (and my cunt) can be had for a pithy phrase, a good one-liner, a neat couplet, or a sensational simile. Did you ever hear that American rock song called Baby Let Me Bang Your Box which appeared briefly on the air waves before being banned into Broadcasting Limbo forever? It went something like this:

Baby let me bang your box

Baby let me play

on your pianer…

Well, in my case it should go:

Sweetheart let me screw your simile

Sweetheart let me sleep in your

caesura…

It was definitely Brian’s braininess I flipped for. You don’t know what the other brainy boys at Columbia were like in those days: flannel shirts with twenty-five leaky ballpoint pens in their breast pockets, flesh-colored frames on their thick glasses, blackheads in their ears, pustules on their necks, pleated trousers, greasy hair, and (sometimes) hand-knitted yarmulkes held on by one lonely bobby pin. They commuted by subway from their mothers’ matzoh-ball soup in the Bronx to the classrooms of Moses Hadas and Gilbert Highet on Morningside Heights, where they learned enough literature and philosophy to get straight A’s, but never seemed to lose their gawkiness, their schoolboy defensiveness, their total lack of appeal.

Brian got straight A’s too, but he had what they lacked: style. He never appeared to spend any time studying. When he had a ten-page paper to write, he would take ten sheets of Corrasable bond out of the packet and type directly on them until he produced, in one sitting, an A paper. Often he would write these ten-page wonders on the very morning they were due. And he knew and knew and knew about things. Not just medieval history and Roman history, not just Renaissance philosophers and early church fathers, not just lay and investiture, pipe rolls and Political Augustinianism, Richard the Lionhearted and Rollo, Duke of Normandy, not just Abelard and Alcuin, Alexander the Great and Alfred the Great, not just Burckhardt and Beowulf, Averroës and Avignon, Goliardic poetry and Gregorian reform, Henry the Lion and Heraclites, the nature of heresy and the works of Thomas Hobbes, Julian the Apostate and Jacopone da Todi, the Nibelungenlied and the history of nominalism-but also wine vintages and restaurants, the names of all the trees in Central Park, the sexes of the ginkgos on Morningside Drive, the names of birds, the names of flowers, the dates when Shakespeare’s children were born, the exact spot where Shelley drowned, the chronology of Charlie Chaplin’s movies, the exact anatomy of cows (and consequently how to choose cuts of meat in the supermarket), the lyrics to every song Gilbert and Sullivan ever wrote, the Köchel listing of every Mozart composition, the Olympic champions in every sport for the past twenty years, the batting averages of every leading American baseball player, the characters in every novel by Dickens, the date the Mickey Mouse watch was first introduced, the dates and styles of vintage cars and how many of each were left and who owned them (Bugattis and Hispano-Suizas were his favorites), the kind of armor worn in the sixteenth century (and how it differed from armor of the thirteenth century), the way frogs fornicate and conifers mate, all the positions of sex in the Kama Sutra, the names of all the torture devices of the Middle Ages, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Am I making him sound repulsive? Some people found him that. But everyone found him entertaining. He was a born clown, a vaudevillian, a nonstop talker. He gave the illusion of always bursting with energy. He could do more things in a day than most people can do in ten, and he always seemed to be jumping out of his skin. Naturally that appealed to me-with my own hunger-thump, my ravenous appetite for experiencing everything. We met in the second week of my freshman year (and his sophomore) and from then on we were almost inseparable. Oh, I reserved the right to go out with other people from time to time, but he saw to it that I was so inundated with his presence, his talk, his gifts, his typing of my papers, his ransacking the stacks for books I needed, his letters and phone calls and flowers and poems vowing eternal devotion-that inevitably the other boys seemed like very pale imitations.

In those days, there were Jocks and Intellectuals, Fraternity

Boys and Independents. Brian fell into no category and all categories. He was an original, a character, an encyclopedia of information on every subject except perhaps sex where his knowledge was more theoretical at first than practical. We lost our virginity together. Or almost. I say, “almost” because it is doubtful that I had much left after all those years of strenuous finger-fucking and regular masturbation, and Brian had been to a whorehouse in Tijuana once when he was sixteen-a birthday present from his dad, who drove him with a carload of buddies as a sort of Jock Sweet-Sixteen Party.

As Brian described it, the experience was a fiasco. The whore kept saying “Hurry up, hurry up!” and Brian lost his erection, and his father (as Oedipus would have it) had screwed her first, and his buddies were knocking at the door. It wasn’t much of an initiation; penetration, as they say in the sex books, was not completed. So I guess you could say we lost our virginity together. I was seventeen (still jail bait, as Brian quaintly reminded me) and he was nineteen. We had known each other two months-two months of doing violence to our instincts in Riverside Park, under the tables of the Classics Library where we “studied together” (beneath the watchful blank eyes of Sophocles, Pericles, and Julius Caesar), on the couch in my parents’ living room, in the stacks at Butler Library (where I later was shocked to hear some sacrilegious students actually screwed). We finally had each other’s “final favor” (to use that charming eighteenth-century term) in Brian’s basement apartment on Riverside Drive where the roaches (or perhaps they were water bugs) were bigger than my fist (or his penis) and Brian’s two roommates kept knocking on the door on the pretext of wanting The Sunday Times “if we were through with it yet.”

Brian’s room-one of six in that sprawling pied à terre-shared one wall with the boiler. That was the only heating facility. One wall was perpetually hot as blazes; the other was colder than a witch’s tit (Brian’s expression), You regulated the temperature only by opening the window (which faced on a kind of cement ravine one floor below sidewalk level) and letting the cold air in. Since the wind blasted in from the river, it was sufficiently frigid to counteract the heat of the boiler-but not our heat.

It was in this romantic setting that we first enjoyed each other. We squeaked the springs of the secondhand bed which Brian, with trembling anticipation, had bought two weeks earlier from a Puerto Rican junk dealer on Columbus Avenue.

In the end, of course, I had to seduce him. I’m sure that from Eden onward it has never been any different. Afterward I cried and felt guilty and Brian comforted me as men have probably comforted the virgins who seduced them throughout the centuries. We lay there in the candlelight (in his romanticism or perhaps innate sense of symbolism, Brian lit a taper on the night table before we undressed each other) and listened to the whining of alley cats in the cement well beyond the soot-blackened window. Sometimes one of the cats would leap on an overfull can of garbage and knock an empty beer can to the ground, and the sound of the hollow tin on the pavement would echo through the room.

In the beginning our romance was fine and spiritual and adolescent. (In later times we were to sound more like the dialogue from a Strindberg play.) We used to read poetry to each other in bed, discuss the difference between life and art, ponder whether or not Yeats would have become a great poet if Maud Gonne had, in fact, married him. Spring found us taking a Shakespeare course together as I suppose all young lovers should One brilliant but slightly chilly day in April we read The Winter’s Tale aloud to each other sitting on a bench in Riverside Park.

Brian was busy playing Florizel to my Perdita (“These your unusual weeds to each part of you/ Do give a life-no shepherdess, but Flora/ Peering in April’s front…”) when a whole tribe of urchins-black and Puerto Rican kids about eight or nine years old-were attracted by our reading and distributed themselves on the bench and the grass near us, seemingly entranced by our performance.

One of the kids sat at my feet and looked up at me worshipfully. I was thrilled. So poetry was, after all, the universal voice! There was something in Shakespeare which could appeal to even the most naive, untutored ear. All my beliefs seemed vindicated. I read with new inspiration:

Yet nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean. So o’er that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scion to the wildest stock

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of noble race. This is an art

Which does mend nature-change it rather; but

The art itself is nature.

(Shakespeare’s plea for open enrollment and/or miscegenation?)

The kids began to get restless a few pages later and by then it was getting too cold to sit in one place anyway, so we packed up and moved on shortly after they did.

“Wasn’t that great, darling?” I asked as we made our way out of the park.

Brian laughed. “Vox populi is, in the main, a grunt,” he said. It was one of his favorite maxims; I don’t know where he got it. Later I discovered that my wallet was missing from the handbag which had lain open on the bench as we read. I wasn’t sure whether the kids lifted it or whether I’d lost it earlier and not noticed. For one mad moment I thought that maybe Brian took it to prove a point about “the common man.” Like my mother. Brian was a Hobbesian. At least until he discovered he was Jesus Christ and underwent a conversion of character and belief.

His madness? What were the first signs of it? It’s hard to say. An old college friend recently told me that she knew from the start there was something odd about Brian and “would never have gotten involved with him.” But it was precisely Brian’s strangeness that I liked. He was eccentric, he was not like anyone else, he saw the world through a poet’s eyes (though he had little talent for writing poetry). He saw the universe as animated, as inhabited by spirits. Fruit spoke to him. When he peeled an apple he would make it seem to cry by means of ventriloquism. He used the same ventriloquist’s routine on tangerines and oranges and even bananas-making them sing and speak and even declaim in verse.

He transformed his voice and his face to suit his moods.

Sometimes he was Edward G. Robinson as Al Capone, sometimes Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, sometimes Grimfalcon the Elf (a character we invented together), sometimes Shakewoof (another imaginary friend: part Shakespeare, part snuggly sheepdog-a sort of poetry-writing hound)… Our long days and nights together were a series of routines, impersonations, playlets-with Brian doing most of the playing. I was such a good audience! We could walk and walk and walk and walk-from Columbia to the Village, across the Brooklyn Bridge (reciting Hart Crane, of course) and then all the way back to Manhattan-and never be bored. We never sat at a restaurant table in silence like grim young married couples do. We were always talking and laughing.

Until we got married that is. Marriage ruined everything. Four years of being lovers and best friends and Shakespearean scholars together-and we blew it by getting married. I never wanted to. Marriage always seemed to be something I’d have plenty of time for in the future. The distant future. But Brian wanted to own my soul. He was afraid I’d fly away. So he gave me an ultimatum. Marry me or I’ll leave you. And I was scared of losing him, and I wanted to get away from home, and I was graduating from college and didn’t know what the hell else to do-so I married him.

We had no money to live on, really. My fellowship to graduate school, a small trust fund I couldn’t touch for several years, and a few rapidly falling stocks my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Brian had dropped out of graduate school in a fit of fury with the establishment, but now he found himself having to take a job. Our life changed radically. We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl into the bourgeois box. Our idyll was over. The long walks, the studying together, the lazy afternoons in bed-all these belonged to a golden age that had passed. Brian now spent his days (and most of his nights) toiling away in a small market-research firm where he sweated over the computers, anxiously awaiting their answers to such earthshaking questions as whether or not women who have had two years of college will buy more detergent than women who have graduated from college. He threw himself into market research with the same manic passion that he had for medieval history or anything else. He had to know everything; he had to work harder than anybody else, including his boss-who sold the business for several million dollars in cash not long after Brian checked into the psycho ward. The whole operation was later shown to be a fraud. But by that time, Brian’s boss was living in an old castle in Switzerland with a new young wife and Brian had been ‘certified.’ For all his brilliance, Brian didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) what a con man his boss was. He often used to sit watching the computers until twelve o’clock at night. Meanwhile I sweated in the stacks of Butler Library writing a ridiculous thesis on dirty words in English poetry (or, as my uptight thesis adviser had titled it: “Sexual Slang in English Poetry of the Mid-eighteenth Century”). Even then I was a pedantic pornographer.

Our marriage went from bad to worse. Brian stopped fucking me. I would beg and plead and ask what was wrong with me. I began to hate myself, to feel ugly, unloved, bodily odoriferous-all the classic symptoms of the unfucked wife; I began to have fantasies of zipless fucks with doormen, derelicts, countermen at the West End Bar, graduate students-even (God help me!) professors. I would sit in my “Prosemi-nar in Eighteenth-Century English Lit.” listening to some creepy graduate student drone on and on about Nahum Tate’s revisions of Shakespeare’s plays, and meanwhile I would imagine myself sucking off each male member (hah) of the class. Sometimes I would imagine myself actually fucking Professor Harrington Stanton, a fiftyish proper Bostonian with a well-connected New England family behind him-a family renowned for politics, poetry, and psychosis. Professor Stanton had a wild laugh and always called James Boswell Bozzy-as if he drank with him nightly at the West End (which, indeed, I suspected him of doing). Somebody once referred to Stanton as “very brilliant but not quite plugged in.” It was apt. Despite being well-connected socially, he flickered on and off between sanity and insanity, never staying in one state long enough for you to know where you stood. How would Professor Stanton fuck? He was fascinated with eighteenth-century dirty words. Perhaps he would whisper “coun,” “cullion,” “crack” (for “cunt,” “testicles,” “pussy”) in my ear as we screwed? Perhaps he would turn out to have his family crest tattooed on his foreskin? I would be sitting there chuckling to myself at these fantasies and Professor Stanton would beam at me, thinking I was chuckling at one of his own wisecracks.

But what was the use of these pathetic fantasies? My husband had stopped fucking me. He thought he was working hard enough as it was. I cried myself to sleep every night, or else went into the bathroom to masturbate after he fell asleep. I was twenty-one and a half years old and desperate. In retrospect, it all seems so simple. Why didn’t I find someone else? Why didn’t I have an affair or leave him or insist on some sort of sexual freedom arrangement? But I was a good girl of the fifties. I had grown up finger-fucking to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I had never slept with any man but my husband. I had petted “above the waist” and “below the waist” according to some mysterious unwritten rules of propriety. But an affair with another man seemed so radical that I couldn’t even consider it. Besides, I was sure that Brian’s failure to fuck me was my fault, not his. Either I was a nymphomaniac (because I wanted to be fucked more than once a month) or else it was just that I was so unattractive. Or maybe it was Brian’s age that was the problem. I had been raised on the various sexual myths of the fifties like:

A. There is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute.

(The girls in my high school actually used to repeat this piously to each other. God only knows where we got it. It was the received wisdom, and like robots, we passed it on.)

B. There are two kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. One is “mature” (i.e. good). The other is “immature” (i.e. evil). One is “normal” (i.e. good). The other is “neurotic” (i.e. evil).

This pseudohip, pseudopsychological moral code was more Calvinistic than Calvinism.

C. Men reach their sexual peak at sixteen and decline thereafter…

Brian was twenty-four. No doubt he was over the hill. Eight years over the hill. If he only fucked me once a month at twenty-four-imagine how little he’d fuck me at thirty-four! It was terrifying to contemplate.

Maybe even the sex wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been an indication of all the other things wrong with our marriage. We never saw each other. He stayed in the office until seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve at night. I kept house and moldered away in the library over my eighteenth-century sexual slang. The ideal bourgeois marriage. Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

Things went on like this for several months. I got increasingly depressed. I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I was usually comatose until noon. I started cutting nearly all my classes, except the holy of holies: the Proseminar. Graduate school seemed ridiculous to me. I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. You were supposed to keep all the names of the professors and all the theories straight so that you could pass exams on them. Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading Tom Jones as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. All the books of criticism had names like The Rhetoric of Laughter or The Comic Determinants of Henry Fielding’s Fiction or Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire. Fielding would have been rolling over in his grave. My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

The fact was that I was always a compulsive A-student and tests were easy for me, but in graduate school the bullshit was so high you simply couldn’t overlook it. So I slept through it I slept through the comprehensive exams in May. I slept instead of working on my thesis. On the rare occasions when I made it to class, I sat there scribbling poems in my notebooks. One day I worked up the guts to pour out my troubles to Professor Stanton.

“I don’t think I want to be a professor,” I said, trembling in my purple suede boots. It was sacrilege. My Woodrow Wilson Fellowship committed me to college teaching. It was almost like abjuring God, country, and flag.

“But you’re such an excellent student, Mrs. Stollerman, what else could you do?”

(What else indeed? What else might there be in life but Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire?

“Well, er, I think I want to write.” I said it as apologetically as if it were: “I think I want to kill my mother.”

Professor Stanton looked troubled. “Oh that,” he said, vexed. Students were probably always coming to him with futile ambitions like wanting to write.

“You see, Professor Stanton, I started studying eighteenth-century English literature because I love satire, but I think I want to write satire not criticize it. Criticism doesn’t seem very satisfying somehow.”

“Satisfying!” he exploded.

I gulped.

“What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun,” he said.

“Yes,” I said meekly.

“You come to graduate school because you love to read, because you love literature-well, literature is hard work! It’s not a game!” Professor Stanton seemed to have found his true subject.

“Yes, but if you’ll excuse me Professor Stanton, it does seem that all this criticism is out of keeping with the spirit of Fielding or Pope or Swift. I mean I always imagine them lying there in their graves and laughing at us all. This is just the sort of thing they’d find funny. I mean I read Pope or Swift or Fielding and it makes me want to write. It starts my mind going on poems. The criticism seems sort of silly to me. I’m sorry to say this, but it does.”

“Who made you the guardian of the spirit of Pope? Or Swift? Or Fielding?”

“No one.”

“Then what the hell are you complaining about?”

“I’m not complaining. I just think I may have made a mistake. I think I really want to write.”

“Mrs. Stollerman, you’ll have plenty of time to write after you get you Ph.D. under your belt. And then you’ll always have something to fall back on just in case you’re not Emily Dickinson.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, and went home to sleep.

Brian woke me up with a bang in June. I’m not exactly sure when the onset of it was, but sometime in mid-June, I noticed that he had become more manic than usual. He had stopped sleeping entirely. He wanted me to sit up all night with him and discuss heaven and hell. Not that this was so unusual for Brian. He’s always been extraordinarily interested in heaven and hell. But now he began talking about the Second Coming quite a lot and he talked about it in a new way.

What if (he asked) Christ came back to earth as an obscure market research executive?

What if nobody believed Him again?

What if He tried to prove his identity by walking across the water on Central Park Lake? Would CBS Evening News cover the occurrence? Would it be billed as a human interest story?

I laughed. Brian laughed too. It was only an idea for a science fiction novel, he said. It was only a joke.

In the days that followed, the jokes multiplied.

What if he were Zeus and I were Hera? What if he were Dante and I Beatrice? What if there were two of each of us- matter and antimatter, three-dimensional and no-dimensional? What if the people on the subway were really communicating with him telepathically and asking him to save them? What if Christ came back and liberated all the animals in the Central Park Zoo? What if the yaks followed Him down Fifth Avenue and birds sat and sang on His shoulders? Would people believe who He was then? What if He blessed the computers and instead of spewing out printed sheets about which housewives buy the most detergent, they suddenly started spewing out loaves and fishes? What if the world was really controlled by a gigantic computer and nobody knew it except Brian? What if this computer ran on human blood? What if, as Sartre said, we were all in hell right now? What if we were all controlled by complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines? What if we had no freedom at all? What if man could only assert his freedom by dying on the cross? What if you walked across the streets of New York against red lights with your eyes closed for a whole week and you weren’t even grazed by a car? Did that prove you were God? What if every book you opened at random had the letters GOD somewhere in every paragraph? Wasn’t that proof positive?

Night after night the questions continued. Brian repeated them at me like a catechism. What if? What if? What if? Listen to me. Don’t fall asleep! Listen to me! The world is ending and you’re going to sleep through it! Listen to me!

In his frenzy to have a constant audience he even slapped my cheek once or twice to awaken me. Dazed and bleary-eyed, I listened. And listened. And listened. After the fifth night, it was no longer possible to doubt that Brian had no plans for science fiction. He himself was the Second Coming. The recognition was slow to dawn. When it did, I wasn’t actually sure he wasn’t God. But, according to his logic, if he was Jesus, then I was the Holy Ghost. And bleary-eyed as I was, I knew that was crazy.

On Friday, Brian’s boss left town for the weekend and delegated him to close an important deal with the makers of an oven-cleaning product called Miracle Foam. Brian was supposed to meet with the Miracle Foam people in the computer center on Saturday, but he never made it there. The Miracle Foam people waited. Then they called me. Then they called me again. Brian did not come. I phoned everyone I could think of and finally just sat at home chewing my nails and knowing something dreadful was going to happen.

At five o’clock Brian called to read me a “poem” he claimed to have written while walking across Central Park Lake. It went:

“How do you like it, honey?” he asked, all naiveté.

“Brian-do you realize that the Miracle Foam people have been trying to reach you all day?”

“Isn’t it brilliant? It really sums the whole thing up, I think. I’m planning to send it to The New York Times. The only thing is I wonder whether The Times will print a poem with the word ‘damned’ in it. What do you think?”

“Brian-do you realize that I’ve been sitting here all day answering calls from Miracle Foam? Where in hell have you been?”

“That’s precisely where I’ve been.”

“Where?”

“In hell. Just as you’re in hell and I’m in hell and we’re all in hell. How can you worry about a mere bubble like Miracle Foam?”

“What in God’s name are you going to do about the contract?”

“Just that.”

“Just what?”

“In God’s name, I’m going to forget about it. I’m not going to do anything about it. Why don’t you come downtown and meet me and I’ll show you my poem.”

“Where are you?”

“In hell.”

“OK, I know you’re in hell, but where should I meet you?”

“You ought to know. You sent me here.”

“Where?”

“To hell. Where I am now. Where you are now. You’re pretty slow, baby.”

“Brian, please be reasonable-”

“I’m perfectly reasonable. You’re the one who cares about a mere bubble You’re the one who thinks it matters if there are calls from Miracle Foam.”

“Just tell me what corner to meet you on in hell and I’ll come. I swear I will. Just tell me what corner.”

“Don’t you know?”

“No. Honestly I don’t. Please tell me.”

“I think you’re trying to make a fool of me.”

“Brian, darling, I only want to see you. Please let me see you.”

“You can see me right now in your mind’s eye. Your blindness is of your own making. You and King Lear.”

“Are you in a phone booth? Or a bar? Please tell me.”

“You already know!”

The conversation went on like this for some time. Brian hung up on me twice and then called back. Finally he agreed to identify the phone booth he was in, not by name but by a sort of guessing game. I had to participate in it by eliminating the possibilities. This took another twenty minutes and several nickels. Finally it turned out he was at the Gotham Bar. I dashed out and took a cab down to meet him. I learned that he had spent the day taking Puerto Rican and black kids for boat rides on Central Park Lake, buying them ice cream, giving money away to people in the park, and planning his escape from hell. He had not actually walked on the water but he had thought about it quite a lot. Now he was ready to change his life. He had discovered he was possessed of a fund of superhuman energy. Other mortals needed sleep. He did not. Other mortals needed jobs and degrees and all the paraphernalia of everyday life. He did not. He was going to embark on the destiny which had always awaited him-saving the world. I was to help him.

To tell you the truth, none of this talk really displeased me very much. It rather excited me. The idea of Brian quitting market research and my quitting graduate school and our going off together to save the world was perfectly OK with me. I had always urged him to quit market research, in fact. I had tried to lure him to go off to Europe with me and just wander for a while. But Brian had always protested. He had gone into market research as if it were the last great crusade.

As we walked through the city that Saturday night, it was his behavior which disturbed me far more than his wild talk. He wanted us both to close our eyes and cross streets against the lights (to prove we were gods). He would go into stores and ask the storekeepers to take down various items, then handle each one, talk elatedly about each one, and then walk out. He would go into a coffee shop and play with the sugar pourer on every table before he sat down. People kept staring at him. Sometimes the storekeepers or waiters would say, “Take it easy buddy, relax buddy” or sometimes they’d throw him out. Everyone sensed that something was wrong. His agitation jangled the air. To Brian, this was only proof of divinity.

“You see,” he said, “they know I’m God and they don’t know how else to react.”

It was doubly hard for me because I half believed Brian’s theory. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. If God did come back, he would probably wind up in the psycho ward. I was a Laingian way before Laing began publishing. But I was also scared to death.

When we finally got home at 2 a.m., Brian was still frantic and wide-awake, though I was exhausted. He wanted to show me his power. He wanted to prove he could satisfy me. He hadn’t screwed me in about six weeks, but now he wouldn’t stop. He fucked like a machine, refusing to succumb to an orgasm himself but urging me to come again and again and again. After the first three times I was sore and wanted to stop. I begged him to stop but he wouldn’t. He kept banging away at me like an ax murderer. I was crying and pleading.

“Brian, please stop,” I sobbed.

“You thought I couldn’t satisfy you!” he screamed. His eyes were wild.

“You see!” he said, lunging into me. “You see! You see! You see!”

“Brian, please stop,”

“Doesn’t that prove it? Doesn’t that prove I’m God?”

“Please stop,” I whimpered.

When he stopped at last, he withdrew from me violently and thrust his still-hard penis into my mouth. But I was crying too hard to blow him. I lay on the bed sobbing. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay alone with him, but where could I go? For the first time I really began to be convinced he was dangerous.

Suddenly Brian broke down and started to cry. He wanted to castrate himself, he said. He wanted our marriage to be purified of all carnality. He wanted to be like Abelard, and me to be like Heloise. He wanted to be purified of all fleshly desires so that he could save the world. He wanted to be soft like a eunuch. He wanted to be soft like Christ. He wanted to be shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He threw his arms around me and sobbed in my lap. I stroked his hair, hoping he’d finally fall asleep. I fell asleep instead.

I’m not sure what time I awakened, but Brian had been up for hours-probably the whole night. I staggered to the bathroom and the first thing I saw was a crude drawing Scotch-taped to the mirror. It depicted a short man with a halo and an enormous erect penis. Another man with a long beard was about to blow him. Behind them both was a huge eagle (resembling the American eagle) except that it had a very obvious and human-looking erection. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” Brian had scrawled above the picture.

I went to my desk in the bedroom. Pieces of my index cards (containing all the notes for my thesis) were scattered on the floor beneath the desk like confetti. On the desk top was a display of books: the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton were propped open and certain words, phrases and letters were circled in various colored inks. I could make out no system or code at first glance, but there were furious notes in the margins. Phrases like “Oh Hell!” or “The Beast with Two Backs!” or “Womankind is too unkind!” Sprinkled over Shakespeare and Milton were the remains of a carefully torn-up twenty-dollar bill. Elsewhere on the desk were reproductions ripped from art books. They all depicted God or Jesus or Saint Sebastian.

I ran into the living room to look for Brian and found him adjusting the amplifier on the hi-fi. He was playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, and he began turning the volume up loud and then suddenly turning it down soft, to create a sort of siren effect.

“How loud can you play Bach in this society?” he demanded. “This loud?” He turned it up. “This soft?” He turned it down so that it was barely audible. “You see! There’s no way to play Bach in this society!”

“Brian, what did you do with my thesis?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew perfectly well what he had done with it.

Brian was fiddling with the hi-fi and pretending he hadn’t heard me.

“What did you do with my thesis?”

“How loud do you think you can play Bach in this society without the police coming?”

“What did you do with my thesis?”

“This loud?” He turned the volume up.

“What did you do with my thesis?”

“This soft?” He turned the volume down.

“What did you do with my thesis?”

“This loud?”

“Brian!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. It was no use. I went to my desk and sat there staring at the “display” he’d left. I wanted to kill him or myself. Instead I cried.

Brian walked in.

“Who do you think will go to heaven?” he asked. I didn’t answer.

“Will Bach go? Will Milton go? Will Shakespeare go? Will Shakeswoof go? Will Saint Sebastian the Bastard go? Will Abelard the Gelding go? Will Sinbad the Sailor go? Will Tin-bad the Tailor go? Will Jinbad the Jailor go? Will Norman Mailer go? Will Whinbad the Whaler go? Will Finbad the Failer go? Will Rinbad the Railer go? Will Joyce go? Will James go? Will Dante go or has he been already? Will Homer go? Will Yeats go? Will Hardy go with a hard-on? Will Rabelais go with the Rabble? Will Villon go vilely? Will Raleigh go royally? Will Mozart go lightly? Will Mahler go heavily? Will El Greco go in a clap of lightning? Will the light bulbs go?” I turned and looked at him. He was waving his arms wildly and jumping up and down.

“The lights bulbs will go to heaven!” he shouted. “They will! They will!”

“You’re driving me crazy!” I yelled in utter exasperation.

“You’ll go to heaven!” he screamed, and then he grabbed my hand and started leading me toward the window. “Let’s go to heaven! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He threw open the window and leaned out.

“Stop it!” I screamed hysterically. “I can’t stand this anymore!” and with that I began to shake him. He must have gotten really frightened because he put his hands around my throat and started choking me.

“Shut up,” he yelled. “The police will come!” But I wasn’t screaming anymore. He tightened his grip. I started to black out.

Why he let me go before he killed me, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was plain dumb luck on my part. I don’t know how to account for it. All I know is that when he finally let go, I was shaking all over and gasping for breath (and I remember later finding big blue bruises on my neck). I ran into the hall closet and sat there in the dark biting my knees and sobbing. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I gasped. And then somehow I collected myself and called my family doctor. He was in East Hampton. I called my mother’s psychiatrist. He was in Fire Island. I called my current psychiatrist. He was in Wellfleet. I called a friend of my sister Randy’s who was a psychiatric social worker. She told me to send for the police or a doctor- any doctor. Brian was psychotic, she said, and possibly dangerous. I was not to stay alone with him.

A Sunday in June and if you want to get sick, you’d better do it at a beach resort. No doctor to be found. I finally reached the guy who was pinch-hitting for my internist. He would be over right away, he said. Five hours later, he arrived. During all that time Brian was astonishingly subdued. He sat in the living room listening to Bach, seemingly in a trance. I sat in the bedroom trying to absorb what had happened. We pretended to ignore each other. The calm after the storm.

At least Brian’s problem had a name now. It was the next best thing to a cure. Being told he was “psychotic” had given me a strange sense of relief. Here was a disease to be treated, a problem to be solved. Naming the thing made it less frightening. Also, it diminished my guilt. Insanity was no one’s fault. It was an act of God. There was something very comforting about that. All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

We endured the afternoon together with Johann Sebastian Bach. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” quoth Congreve (who surely is in heaven playing cards with Mozart). When I think of all the bad times that Bach has helped me get through I’m sure he’s in heaven too.

Dr. Steven Pearlmutter walked in at five-all apologies and sweaty palms. From then on our life was in the hands of the doctors and their smug little categories. My husband Brian, Dr. Pearlmutter assured me, was “a very sick young man.” He was going to “try to help him.” He began by trying to give him a shot of Thorazine-at which point Brian bolted and ran down the back stairs (all thirteen floors) and into Riverside Park. The doctor and I chased him, found him, stopped him, cajoled him, watched him bolt again, chased him again, cajoled him again and so on. The rest of the details are as sordid as they are common. From then on hospitalization became inevitable. Brian was now completely panicked and his delusions became more and more colorful. The days that followed were nightmarish. Brian’s parents flew in from California and promptly declared that Brian was perfectly OK but that I was crazy. They tried to prevent him from taking any medication and they constantly made fun of the doctors (which, admittedly, wasn’t very hard to do). They urged him to leave me and come home to California-as if being away from me would automatically make him all better. Dr. Pearlmutter had referred Brian to a psychiatrist who tried for five gallant days to keep him out of the hospital. It was no use. Between Brian’s mother and father, Brian’s boss, the Miracle Foam people, Brian’s well-meaning former professors and the doctors, our lives were no longer our own. Brian was hounded by his would-be caretakers and each day he flipped out more.

On the fifth morning after Dr. Pearlmutter’s visit, Brian took all his clothes off near Belvedere Tower in Central Park. Then he tried to climb on King Jagiello’s bronze horse along with bronze King Jagiello (crossed swords and all). The police finally took him to the psycho ward at Mount Sinai (sirens screaming, Thorazine flowing like wine), and except for a few weekend passes, we never lived together again.

It took another eight months or so for our marriage to sputter out completely. After Brian got to Mount Sinai, his parents moved in with me, denounced me day and night, went to the hospital with me every evening, and never allowed us more than ten minutes alone together. Visiting hour was only from six to seven anyway, and they were determined to keep us apart even then. Besides, when I was alone with Brian, all he did was attack me. I was a Judas, he said. How could I have locked him up? Didn’t I know that I would go to the Seventh Circle-the circle of the traitors? Didn’t I know that mine was the lowest crime in Dante’s book? Didn’t I know I was already in hell?

Hell couldn’t have been much worse than that summer anyway. The Diem regime had just fallen and Buddhists kept immolating themselves in a funny little country whose name was growing more and more familiar-Vietnam. Barry Gold-water was running for President on the platform of sawing off the entire Eastern seaboard and floating it out to sea. John F. Kennedy was not yet one year dead. Lyndon Johnson was the nation’s one hope for defeating Goldwater and preserving peace. Two young white men named Goodman and Schwerner went south to Mississippi to work for voter registration, teamed up with a young black man named Chaney, and all three of them ended up in a ghastly common grave. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant erupted in the first of many long, hot summers. Brian, meanwhile, was in the hospital raving about how he was going to save mankind. Certainly mankind had never needed it more.

We drifted apart. Not all at once, and not through my meeting someone else. I didn’t go out at all while Brian was in the hospital. I was shellshocked and needed time to recover. But gradually I began to realize how much happier I was without him, how his frantic energy had sapped my life, how his wild fantasies had deprived me of any fantasy life of my own. Slowly I began to prize hearing my own thoughts. I began to listen to my own dreams. It was as if I had been living in an echo chamber for five years and then suddenly someone let me out.

The rest of the story is mostly denouement. I loved Brian and it made me feel terribly guilty to realize that I liked living without him better than living with him. Also, I think that I never quite trusted him again after the attempt he made to strangle me. I said I forgave him, but something inside me never did. I was afraid of him and that was what killed our marriage in the end.

The end dragged on. Money, as usual, was a precipitating factor. After three months at Mount Sinai, the Blue Cross coverage ran out and Brian had to be transferred. Either he had to go to a state hospital (something which terrified us both) or to a private hospital (where fees were about $2,000 a month). We were up against a money-green wall.

His parents stepped in then, not to help but to harass. If I’d let him go to California, they’d pay the cost of private treatment. Otherwise, not a penny. I lived with this ultimatum for a while and then finally decided I had no choice.

In September we made the pilgrimage to California. We “lit out for the territory” not by covered wagon, but by 707, and we had my father and a shrink in tow. The airline would not fly Brian home without an attendant psychiatrist-which also meant that the four of us had to travel first class, munching macadamia nuts in between Libriums.

It was a memorable flight. Brian was so agitated that I forgot my own fear of flying. My father was popping Libriurns by the minute and admonishing me to be brave, and the shrink (a sweet-faced twenty-six-year-old resident who identified with us to the point of total incompetence) was jittery and needed my constant reassurance. Mother Isadora-I took care of all of them. All the gods, the daddies, who had failed.

At the Linda Bella Clinic in La Jolla, the illusion of voluntarism was rigidly maintained. All the nurses wore bermuda shorts, and the doctors wore sport shirts and corduroy pants and golfing hats. The patients were in similarly casual attire and wandered around in a setting which resembled a deluxe motel, complete with swimming pool and Ping-Pong tables. Everyone on the staff was determinedly cheerful and tried to pretend that Linda Bella was a kind of spa, rather than the place you went when nobody knew what to do with you at home anymore. The doctors advised against long parting scenes. Brian and I saw each other for the last time in the deserted O.T. room where he was viciously pounding a piece of clay into one of the table tops.

“You’re not part of me anymore,” he said. “You used to be part of me.”

I was thinking how painful it was to be part of him, and how I had almost come to the point of forgetting who I was, but I couldn’t say that.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“Why?” he snapped.

“Because I love you.”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have brought me here.”

“That’s not true, Brian, the doctors said-”

“You know the doctors don’t know anything about God. They’re not supposed to. But I thought you knew. You’re like all the rest. How many pieces of silver did you sell me for?”

“I only want you to get better,” I said feebly.

“Better than what? And if I were better, how would they know-sick as they are. You’ve forgotten everything you knew. They’ve brainwashed you too.”

“I want you to get better so you won’t have to take medication…” I said.

“That’s shit and you know it. They give you medication to start with and then they use it as an index of your health. When the medication is high-you’re worse. When it’s low-you’re better. The reasoning is circular. Who needs the damned medication in the first place?” He socked the clay savagely.

“I know,” I said.

The thing was-I agreed with him. Certainly the doctors’ categories of health and sickness were almost crazier than Brian’s. Certainly their banality was such that if Brian were God, they wouldn’t know it.

“It’s all a question of faith,” he said. “It has always been a question of faith. My word, or the word of the multitude? You chose the multitude. But that doesn’t make it right. And what’s more-you know it. I feel sorry for you. You’re so damned weak. You never did have any guts.” He pounded the clay into a thin pancake.

“Brian-you have to try to understand my position. I felt I was going to crack under the strain. Your parents were screaming at me all the time. The doctors were preaching. I stopped knowing who I was-”

“You were under a strain? You! Who got locked up-you or me? Who got dosed with Thorazine-you or me? Who got sold down the river-you or me?”

“Both of us.” I said crying. Great big salty drops were running down my face and into the corners of my mouth. They tasted good. Tears have such a comforting taste. As if you could weep a whole new womb and crawl into it. Alice in her own sea of tears.

“Both of us! That’s a laugh!”

“It’s true,” I said, “we both got hurt. You don’t have the monopoly on pain.”

“Go,” he said, picking up the flattened clay and beginning to roll it into a snake, “get thee to a nunnery, Ophelia. Drown yourself for all I care-”

“You never seem to remember that you made an attempt on my life, do you?” I knew I shouldn’t say this, but I was just so angry.

“Your life! If you loved me-if you knew the goddamned meaning of sacrifice-if you weren’t such a spoiled brat, you wouldn’t give me this shit about your life!”

“Brian, don’t you remember?”

“Remember what? I remember how you got me locked up-that’s what I remember-”

Suddenly it dawned on me that there were two versions of the nightmare we had been through-his version and my version-and that they coincided in no way at all. Brian not only had no empathy for my unhappiness; he had no awareness of it.

He didn’t even remember the events which had sent him to

the hospital. How many other versions of our reality were there? My version, Brian’s, his parents’, my parents’, the doctors’, the nurses’, the social workers’… There were an infinite number of versions, an infinite number of realities. Brian and I had been through a nightmare together, and now it turned out that we had been through nothing together. We had entered an experience through the same door, but then wandered off into separate tunnels, staggered through separate darknesses alone, and emerged finally at opposite ends of the earth.

Brian stared at me coldly as if I were his sworn enemy. For the life of me, I cannot remember our parting words to each other.

My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana where we bought a slightly soiled pifiata-a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches.

My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence-as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake”… but if there was more-a childhood seduction or a primal scene-my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle-spaceship or submarine or poem-which will take us to them.

It’s for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.

My marriage to Brian probably ended on that day when I walked through the streets of Tijuana with my wisecracking father. My father was trying with all his might to be cheerful and helpful, but I was sunk deep into my own guilt. It was a dilemma: if I stuck by Brian and tried to live with him again, I’d go crazy, or at the very least give up most of my own identity. But if I left him alone with his madness and the ministrations of the doctors, I was abandoning him-just when he needed help the most. In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still. Somewhere deep inside my head (with all those submerged memories of childhood) is some glorious image of the ideal woman, a kind of Jewish Griselda. She is Ruth and Esther and Jesus and Mary rolled into one. She always turns the other cheek. She is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him. When the children are sick, she nurses them. She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems, visits the cemetery, weeds the graves, plants the garden, scrubs the floors, and sits quietly on the upper balcony of the synagogue while the men recite prayers about the inferiority of women. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her. A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.

But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism-good, healthy, “normal female masochism”-you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.”