Fear Of Flying

14 Arabs amp; Other Animals

From Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut.

I was pretty panicky, as I recall-about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish-since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much-admittedly) by my terrible act of deception.

I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncir-cumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma… The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how well I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were. The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris-but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave,, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within.

As it turned out, the flight to Beirut was designed to stir all my various paranoias. We flew into art epic storm over the Mediterranean, with rain beating against the windows and food slopping around inside the plane and the pilot coming on every few minutes with reassurances which I didn’t believe for a second. (Nothing sounds quite believable in Italian anyway-not even Lasciate Ogni Speranza.) I was fully prepared to die for having put “Unitarian” on my visa. That was, in fact, just the sort of transgression Jehovah would get you for-that and fucking heathens.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

The rest of the people on the plane were also not my idea of a fun group to die with, When things really got messy and we were being buffeted around like aphids clinging to a paper glider, some drunken idiot started yelling “Ooopsy-Daisy” every time we took a dive, and a few other fools kept laughing hysterically. The thought of dying with all these comical assholes and then arriving in the underworld with a visa marked “Unitarian” kept me praying avidly throughout the flight. There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

Amazingly enough, the storm subsided (or we left it behind) by the time we flew over Cyprus. There was a greasy Egyptian (is there any other kind?) sitting next to me, and once he realized he was going to survive the flight, he began flirting with me. He told me that he published a magazine in Cairo and was going to Beirut on business. He also insisted that he hadn’t been scared at all because he always wore this blue bead against the evil eye. Blue bead or not, he’d looked pretty goddamned scared to me. He went on to reassure me that both he and I had “lucky noses” and therefore the plane couldn’t possibly crash while we were on it. He touched the tip of my nose and then touched his and said: “See-lucky.”

“Christ-I’ve run into a nose freak,” I thought. And I wasn’t exactly flattered by the idea that our nose3 looked alike either. He had a huge nose, like Nasser’s (all Egyptians look like Nasser to me), while my nose, though not exactly retroussé, is at least small and straight. It may not be a plastic surgeon’s dream, but it’s not a Nasser nose either. If anything, its stubby tip betrays the genetic contribution of some pig-faced Polish thug who raped one of my great-grandmothers during some long-forgotten pogrom in the Pale.

My Egyptian’s conversational interests, however, went beyond noses. He looked down, at a copy of Time Magazine which had lain open (and unread) on my lap during the storm, pointed to a picture of (then) UN Ambassador Goldberg, and said historically: “He’s Jewish.” That was ail he said, but his tone and look implied that that was all he had to say.

I looked at him very hard (over my Polish nose), and for two cents I would have said, “Me too,” but nobody offered me two cents. Just then our Italian pilot announced the descent into Beirut Airport.

I was still shaking from that little interchange when I spotted a hugely pregnant Randy behind the glass barricade in the airport. I’d expected the worst going through customs, but there was no trouble at all. My brother-in-law, Pierre, seemed to be best friends with all the airport personnel and I was whisked through like a VIP. It was 1965 and things were not as spastic in the Middle East as they became after the Six Day War. As long as you didn’t come via Israel, you could travel in Lebanon as if it were Miami Beach-which, in fact, it somewhat resembles, down to the abundance of yentas.

Randy and Pierre drove me from the airport in the hearse-black, air-conditioned Cadillac which they’d shipped over from the States. On the road to Beirut, we passed a refugee camp where people were living in packing boxes and lots of dirty children were walking around half-naked sucking their fingers. Randy immediately made some high-handed comment about what an eyesore it was.

“An eyesore? Is that all?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t be such a goddamned liberal do-gooder,” she snapped. “Who do you think you are-Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“I just get sick and tired of everyone bleeding about the poor Palestinians. Why don’t you worry about us instead?”

“I do,” I said.

The city of Beirut itself is all right, but not as gorgeous as you’d think, to hear Pierre talk about it. Nearly everything is new. There are hundreds of white cornflakes-box-shaped buildings with marble terraces, and everywhere the streets are being ripped up for new construction. It’s unbearably hot and humid in August and whatever grass there is has turned brown in the sun. The Mediterranean is blue (but not bluer than the Aegean-no matter what Pierre says). From some angles, the city looks a little like Athens-minus the Acropolis. A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined-looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the back seats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in mini-skirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs.

The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment-all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack-including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping wound the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre-who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits- wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me:

“The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.”

“Poetic license,” he said solemnly.

“Let’s go to the beach!” I’d suggest, but everyone was too tired, too hot, too lethargic. It was obvious I’d never get them to Baalbek or the Cedars either. Damascus, Cairo-forget it. Israel was right across the border but we would have to fly via Cyprus and that seemed unthinkable after the last flight. Then there would be the problem of getting back into Lebanon again. All I did was lounge around Randy’s apartment with the rest of them and wait for letters from Charlie-which rarely came. Instead I kept hearing from all those other clowns: the married Florentine who liked me to whisper dirty words, the American professor who claimed I had changed his life, one of the mail clerks at American Express who had convinced himself I was an heiress. It was Charlie I wanted, or no one. And Charlie wanted Sally. I was in despair. I spent half the time in Beirut nursing my clap phobia, inspecting my cunt in the mirror, and douching in Randy’s white marble bidet.

When my parents arrived laden with gifts from the supposedly mysterious East, the situation deteriorated still further. Randy was glad to see them for the first three days and then she and Jude got into one of their marathon fights in which they both began dredging up event? which took place twenty or twenty-five years ago. Randy blamed my mother for everything: from not changing her diaper often enough to changing it too often; from giving her piano lessons too young to not letting her go skiing young enough. They went at each other like a couple of trial lawyers, cross-examining the past. I kept wondering-why on earth had I come back to them for a rest? I was raring to get away again. I felt like a human Ping-Pong ball. I kept finding men to escape from my family and then running back to my family to escape from the men. Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away I wanted to go home again. What do you call that? An existential dilemma? The oppression of women? The human condition? It was unbearable then and it’s unbearable now: back and forth I go over the net of my own ambivalence. As soon as I touch ground, I want to bounce up and fly right back. So what do I do? I laugh. It only hurts when I laugh-though nobody knows that but me.

My parents only stuck around for a week or so and then they were off to Italy to check up on an ice-bucket factory.

Fortunately, they have an import-export business which permits them to pick up and fly away whenever the internecine family warfare escalates to the bombing level. They fly in full of gifts and good feelings and fly out when the shit hits the fan. The whole process takes about a week. The rest of the year they pine for their far-flung children and wonder why most of them live so far from home. During the years I was in Germany and Randy was in Beirut, my mother wondered wistfully why two of her brood had chosen to live (as she put it) “in enemy territory.”

“Because it seemed more hospitable than home,” I said, winning her everlasting enmity. It was a bitchy remark-I’ll grant that-but what have I ever had to protect me against my mother except words?

It was still pretty crowded after my parents left: four sisters, Pierre, six kids (there were only six in 1965), a nursemaid, and a cleaning lady.

It was so hot that we scarcely left the air-conditioned apartment. I kept wanting to go sightseeing, but the family lethargy was contagious. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll leave for Cairo, but I was really scared to go to Cairo alone and neither Lalah nor Chloe would go with me.

Things went on in this depressing vein for another week. On one occasion, we all went to a cabana club where the beach was rocky and Pierre poeticized about the blue Mediterranean until you felt like puking. (He was always lecturing us about the good life in Beirut and how he had come to get away from “the commercialism of America.”)

At the club he introduced us to one of his friends as his “four wives,” and I had such a creepy feeling that I wanted to go home then and there. But where was home? With my family? With Pia? With Charlie? With Brian? Alone?

Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris Herald-Tribune around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited-as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch Bonanza on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street.

On some occasions our afternoon debate was interrupted by the arrival of Pierre’s mother and aunts-three ancient ladies in black (with gigantic bosoms and fuzzy mustaches) who looked so much alike you could hardly tell them apart. They would have made a great singing group except that they only had one song. It went: “How you like Lebanon? Lebanon better than New York?” And they played it over and over just to make sure you got the words. Oh they were nice enough, but not terribly easy to converse with. As soon as they arrived, Louise (the maid) would appear with coffee, Pierre would suddenly remember a business engagement, and Randy (pleading her delicate condition) would disappear into the bedroom for a nap. Lalah and Chloe and I were left to cope, ringing endless changes on the refrain “Yes-Lebanon is better than New York.”

I don’t know whether it was the heat, the humidity, the presence of my family, the effect of being “in enemy territory,” or my depression over Charlie-but I seemed to have no will to pet up and do anything at all. I felt as if I had been transported to the land of the Lotus Eaters and would die in Beirut of sheer inertia. One day segued into the next, the weather was oppressive, and there didn’t seem to be any point in fighting the desire to sit around, bicker with the family, think about having clap, and watch TV. It finally took a crisis to lurch us all into action.

It was a minor crisis admittedly-but any crisis would have served. It began simply. One day, Roger, the six year old, said “ibn sharmuta” to Louise. Roughly translated, this means “your mother’s a whore” (or, by extension, “you’re a bastard”) and however you translate it, it is the insult of insults in the Middle East.

Louise had been trying to give Roger a bath and he had been screaming. Meanwhile Pierre was arguing with Randy, saying that only Americans had the crazy notion of taking a bath every day. that it wasn’t natural (his favorite word), and that it dried up all your wonderful skin oils.

Randy yelled back that she didn’t want her son to stink to high hell like his illustrious father, and she pointed out that she wasn’t fooled by his dirty habits.

“What the hell dirty habits do you mean?”

“I mean I know perfectly well that when I say I won’t sleep with you unless you take a shower, you go into the bathroom and turn on the water and just sit there smoking a cigarette on the goddamned toilet seat.” She said this very bitchily and it touched off a real brawl.

Roger naturally understood what the argument was about and refused to let Louise corner him in the bathroom until this case had been appealed and the verdict handed down. But Louise was very persistent, and in a rage, Roger threw a wet washcloth in her face, yelling “ibn sharmuta!”

Of course, Louise began to cry. Then she said she was quitting and went to her room to pack. Pierre put on his French movie-star manners and tried to sweet-talk her into staying. But to no avail. This time she was adamant. Pierre promptly took it out on Roger-which really wasn’t fair, since Roger hears Pierre veiling “ibn sharmuta” constantly whenever they go out driving. (There are no traffic regulations in Beirut but lots of cursing.) Besides, Pierre usually thinks it’s very cute when the kids curse in Arabic.

Naturally the afternoon wound up with everyone yelling or crying and water all over the floor, and once again we did not go sightseeing or even to the beach. The incident, however, provided us with a mission. We had to take Louise back to her village in the mountains (Pierre’s “ancestral village,” as he called it) and find a still more naive mountain girl to replace her.

The next morning, we put in the obligatory few hours of yelling and then piled into the car and headed along the Mediterranean for the hills. We stopped at Byblos to admire the Crusader castle, reflected torpidly on the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks, ate at a nearby seafood restaurant, and then proceeded into the sun-baked mountains along a road which looked and felt like another archaeological find.

Karkabi, Pierre’s much-vaunted “ancestral village,” is a town so small you could easily pass it without noticing. The town only got electricity in ’63 and the electricity tower, in fact, dominates the village. (It is also the point of interest which the villagers are most avid to show you.)

When we arrived in the main square (where a skinny donkey was pulling a stone around in a circle to grind wheat), everyone practically fell over themselves touching the car, breaking their necks for a look at us, and being generally depressingly obsequious. You could tell Pierre loved this. It was his car, and he probably also wanted everyone to think we were his four wives (though, of course, they knew we weren’t). All this seemed even more depressing when you considered that nearly everyone in town was Pierre’s cousin at least and that they all were illiterate and went barefoot-and what the hell was so difficult about impressing them?

Pierre slowed the ridiculous tank of a car to a crawl as we drove past (to let all the rubberneckers get a good look). Then he pulled up in front of the “ancestral home”-a small, white-washed adobe house with grapes growing on the roof and no windowpanes or screens but only small square windows with wrought-iron grills over them (and flies zooming freely in and out-but inevitably more in than out).

Our arrival sent everyone into a frenzy of activity. Pierre’s mother and aunts began preparing tabuli and humus with a vengeance and Pierre’s father-who is about eighty and drinks Arak all day-went out to shoot birds for supper and nearly shot himself. Meanwhile Pierre’s English Uncle Gavin-a displaced cockney who married Aunt Françoise back in 1923 (and has been in Karkabi regretting it ever since) -produced a rabbit he’d shot that morning and started cleaning it.

Inside the house, there were only about four rooms, with whitewashed walls and crucifixes over all the beds (“Pierre’s family are Maronite Catholics) and kissed-over pictures of various saints ascending to heaven on slick magazine paper. There were also numerous tattered magazine photos of the Royal Family of England; and then there was Jesus Himself, wearing a toga, his face barely visible under a hail of kiss-prints.

While supper was being made, Pierre led us out to show us “his domain.” Randy insisted on staying in the house with her feet up, but the rest of us trooped obediently over the rocks (followed by an entourage of barefoot cousins who kept pointing enthusiastically to the electricity tower). Pierre snapped at them in Arabic; he was after something more pastoral. And he found it, just over the next rocky hill, where a real live shepherd was guarding real live sheep under a wormy apple tree. That was all Pierre needed to see. He began spouting “poetry” as if he were Kahlil Gibran and Edgar

Guest rolled into one. A shepherd! Sheep! An apple tree! It was charming. It was pastoral. It was Homer and Virgil and the Bible. So we walked over to the shepherd-a pimply kid of about fifteen-and found him listening to a little Japanese transistor radio which played Frank Sinatra followed immediately by a bunch of singing commercials in Arabic. Then saftig seventeen-year-old Chloe took out one of her menthol cigarettes and offered him one-which he accepted, trying to look as cool and sophisticated as possible. And then this charming shepherd reached into his charming pocket and pulled out a charming butane lighter. When he lit Chloe’s cigarette, you just knew he had spent practically his whole life at the movies.

After supper, all the relatives in town (i.e. practically the whole town) came over. A lot of them came over to watch TV (since Pierre’s aunt is one of the few people in Karkabi who has one) but that night they came over to watch us too. Mostly they stood around and stared at us and looked embarrassed, but sometimes they’d touch my hair (or Chloe’s or Lalah’s) and make noises to indicate that they were really crazy about blondes. Or else they’d pat us everywhere as if they were blind. God-there’s nothing to compare with being patted by a dozen two-hundred-pound Lebanese women with mustaches. I was panicky. Could they tell by patting that we were Jewish? I was sure they could. But I was wrong. Because when it came time to give us presents, I got a silver rosary, a hand-knitted pink angora sweater in size 46 (it came down to my knees), and a blue bead on a chain (for the old evil eye). I wasn’t about to turn down any amulet at that point. All intercessions with all deities were gratefully accepted.

When the gift-giving was over, everyone sat down to watch television-mostly reruns of ancient American programs. Lucille Ball batting her false eyelashes, Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and the whole screen a blizzard of subtitles. You could hardly see the actors for the letters.

It really made you believe in the universality of art to see all these pastoral types loving Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr. I was looking forward to the day when America extends its glorious civilization to other solar systems. There they’ll be-all those intergalactic types-watching Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr in rapt attention.

The relatives stayed and stayed. They drank coffee and wine and Arak until Aunt Françoise was wringing her pudgy hands. We were all exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, so instead of actually throwing them out, Pierre’s Uncle Gavin quietly left the room, climbed up on the roof, and began monkeying with the TV antenna until the picture turned into a mass of zigzags. Within a few minutes, the visitors departed. I was given to understand that Uncle Gavin climbs up on the roof quite frequently.

Sleeping arrangements were difficult. Randy and Pierre and the kids were to be put up at Pierre’s father’s house down the hill. Lalah and Chloe were to share a double bed in another aunt’s house next door. And I drew a single in a tiny annex of Aunt Françoise’s house. I’d really have preferred to be with Lalah and Chloe than to be alone in that creepy room, sleeping under a crucifix and grubby pictures of the illustrious queen. But there was no space for three in bed, so I sacked out alone, amusing myself before sleep with thoughts of scorpions scampering up the wall, and fatal spider bites, and visions of breaking my neck during the night when I needed to find the outdoor toilet without a flashlight. Oh there was plenty to keep the most phobic mind thoroughly occupied for many busy hours of insomnia.

I had been lying there in full phobic flower for about an hour and a half when the door creaked open.

“Who is it?” I said, my heart thudding.

“Shhhh.” A dark shadow moved toward me. The man under the bed.

“For God’s sake!” I was terrified.

“Shhh-it’s only me-Pierre,” Pierre said. And then he came over and sat down on the bed.

“Jesus-I thought it was some rapist or something.” He laughed. “Jesus wasn’t a rapist.”

“I guess not… What’s up?” It was a poor choice of words under the circumstances.

“You seem so depressed,” he said, full of counterfeit tenderness.

“I guess I am. All that craziness with Brian last summer and now Charlie…”

“I hate to see my little sister depressed,” he said, stroking my hair. And for some reason that “little sister” sent chills through me.

“You know I always think of you as my little sister, don’t you?”

“Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter…” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me. But what should I say? What was the etiquette in a situation like this?

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said weakly. Pierre’s hands were under my nightgown, stroking my thighs. I wasn’t as unaroused as I wanted to pretend.

“What isn’t a good idea?” he asked nonchalantly. “After all, it’s natural for a brother to love his little sister…” And he went on doing what comes naturally.

“What did you say?” I asked, sitting up.

“Just that it’s perfectly natural for a brother to love his little sister…” He might have been Albert Ellis giving a lecture.

“Pierre,” I said gently, “haven’t?you ever read Lolita?”

“I can’t stand that phony prose style of his,” Pierre said, annoyed with me for distracting him.

“But this is incest,” I said emphatically.

“Shhh-you’ll wake everyone… Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant. We’ll do it the Greek way, if you like…”

“It wasn’t pregnancy I was worried about for God’s sake-it was incest!” My reasoning didn’t seem to make a dent in Pierre’s resolve.

“Shhhh,” he said, pushing me down on the pillow. He was like some of the guys I’d met in Italy. If you resisted because you really weren’t interested, they thought it was fear of pregnancy and kept suggesting other alternatives-anal intercourse, sucking, mutual masturbation-anything except “NO.” Pierre inched up to the head of the bed and offered his erect penis to my mouth… The showdown. A battle was raging within me. It would have been so damned easy to oblige. To suck him and be done with it. It was so simple really. What difference could one more blow job make to my life?

“I can’t,” I said.

“Come on,” Pierre said, “I’ll teach you.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant I can’t; morally, I can’t…”

“It’s easy,” he said.

“I know it’s easy,” I said.

“Here,” he said, “all you do is…”

“Pierre!” I screamed. Pierre gathered his pajama bottoms around him and beat it out of the room.

I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again.

I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband-and good grief-that’s Daddy!

But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear?

I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teen-age Incest; Swapping; Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust.

Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival.

His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…

… Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark.

“Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded.

“Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.

“Listen kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears…” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know.

“Well-what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially.

“Come on you idiots-tell me!”

“You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling.

“How the fuck did you know?”

“Because he tried it with me,” she said.

“And me,” said Chloe.

“You’re kidding.”

“We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “Would that we were…”

“So what happened?”

“Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too… but I’m not entirely sure I believe her…”

“You bitch!” Chloe yelled.

“OK… OK… I believe you.”

“And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?”

“Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless… He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.”

“A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.”

“Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law… It isn’t really incest.”

“It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed.

“It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.)

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks.

Arabs, I thought, goddamned Arabs. What a disproportionate sense of guilt I had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it-as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses do for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom-as my sister Randy always reminds me-they are so closely related)? Is it any wonder that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did they sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were worth the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What-me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody?

Back in Beirut, we made plans to go home. Lalah and Chloe had a charter flight to New York, so they had to leave together, and I had my old Alitalia roundtrip from Beirut to Rome to JFK.

I stopped in Rome as I’d planned and took one more week in Florence before going home to face the music with Charlie. Even in hot, crowded August, Florence remained one of my favorite cities in the world. There I took up with Alessandro again and this time we had an almost perfect, if loveless, six-day affair. At my request, he forsook his mania for dirty words, and we found a charming room at an inn in Fiesole where we could make love from one to four every afternoon (a very civilized lunch-hour custom). Maybe it was because of my fury at Charlie, or perhaps Pierre had really turned me on, but my lovemaking with Alessandro was inspired. It was the only time in my life when I was able to have exuberant, affectionate sex with someone without convincing myself that I was in love. A kind of six-day truce between my id and superego.

When Alessandro went home to his wife in the evenings, I was on my own. I attended concerts at the Pitti, saw a few of the other characters from my previous visit and was hotly pursued once more by Professor “Michelangelo” (Karlinsky) of the flaming beard. Despite the heat and the motley assortment of boyfriends, I loved Florence and there were moments when I hardly wanted to leave at all. But a depressing teaching job and a Ph.D. program I hated were waiting for me in New York, and I was still too much of a superego-ridden schoolgirl not to choose something I hated over something I loved. Or maybe it was really Charlie: I was outraged by his betrayal, but I couldn’t wait to see him again.

Charlie and I broke up soon after our reunion. It seems I could never forgive his ambivalence, though, in fact, I now see it was very like my own, and perhaps I should have been more understanding. Alessandro kept writing from Florence with talk of “divorzio,” but I had seen too many Italian movies to believe him. “Michelangelo” turned up once and looked so much worse in the polluted sunlight of New York that I hadn’t the heart to continue. The brown and amber shades of Florence had done wonders for him-as any E. M. Forster fan can readily understand. September and October were grim and dreary. I went out with a depressing assortment of divorces, mama’s boys, neurotics, psychotics, and shrinks. I was only able to keep my spirits up by describing them all in bitchy detail in my letters to Pia. Then, in November, Bennett Wing waltzed into my life looking like the solution to all my problems. Silent as the Sphinx and very gentle. Savior and psychiatrist all in one. I fell into marriage the way (in Europe) I had fallen into bed. It looked like a soft bed; the nails were underneath.