Fear Of Flying

18 Blood Weddings or Sic Transit

I awakened at noon to find the blood welling up between my legs. If I parted my thighs even a little, the blood would gush down and stain through to the mattress. Foggy and half-dazed as I was, I knew to keep my legs together. I wanted to get up to search for a Tampax, but it was hard to get out of that sagging bed without parting my legs at least a little. I stood suddenly and blackish-red rivulets began to inch their way down the inside of my thighs. A dark spot of blood glistened on the floor. I ran to my suitcase leaving a trail of glistening spots. I felt that heavy and familiar pull in my lower belly.

“Fuck,” I said, fumbling for my glasses so I could see to rummage for a Tampax. But I couldn’t even find my goddamned glasses. I thrust my hand into my suitcase and began feeling around. In exasperation, I started tossing the clothes out onto the floor.

“Damn it to hell,” I screamed. The floor was beginning to look like the aftermath of a car wreck. How was I ever going to clean up all that blood? I wasn’t. I was going to beat it out of Paris before the management got wise.

What a bunch of useless junk I had in my suitcase. I could use my poems as sanitary napkins, couldn’t I? Charming symbolism. But unfortunately not very absorbent.

Ah-what’s this? One of Bennett’s T-shirts. I folded it into a sort of diaper and dug up one (only one!) safety pin to keep it on me-after a fashion. How was I going to get out of Paris wearing a diaper? I’d just have to walk knock-kneed. Everyone would think I had to pee. Oh God-crime definitely does not pay. Here I had been wondering if my penalty for running off with Adrian was going to be a whole pregnancy of not knowing what color the baby was going to be and instead I’m the one in diapers. Why can’t my suffering at least be dignified? When other writers suffer it’s epic or cosmic or avant garde, but when I suffer it’s slapstick.

I hobble out to the hall in my trench coat holding my knees together to keep my diaper in place. Then suddenly I remember that everything which stands between me and destitution is in my handbag: passport, American Express card, traveler’s checks-and I hobble back to the room. Then out into the hall again, knock-kneed, barefoot, clutching my bag, and I seize the doorknob of the toilet and begin rattling.

“Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” comes an embarrassed male voice. American accent. It’s August, after all, and there probably aren’t any French people within miles of Paris.

“It’s ok,” I say, holding my diaper in place with my thighs.

“Pardon?” He hasn’t heard me. He’s still trying to come up with French phrases as he squeezes out the last dollop of shit.

“It’s ok,” I yell, “I’m American.”

“Je viens, je viens,” he mutters.

“Je suis américaine!”

“Pardon?”

This is getting embarrassing. At this rate neither one of us will know what to do when he finally emerges. I decide to hotfoot it down to the next floor and try that toilet. So I hobble down the winding stairs again. The toilet on the floor below isn’t locked, but there’s no paper at all, so it’s down still another flight. Actually, I’m beginning to get pretty good at this. What adaptability we show in moments of stress! Like when I had my broken leg and devised all those ingenious positions for screwing with a long leg cast.

Voilà! Paper! But what atrocious paper! Talk about the history of the world through toilets-this toilet resembles nothing so much as an oubliette, and the paper seems to have dead bedbugs embedded in it. I lock the door, heave open the tiny window, toss Bennett’s bloody T-shirt out into the courtyard (thinking momentarily about sympathetic magic and all those tribal customs mentioned in The Golden Bough… will some evil sorcerer find Bennett’s T-shirt drenched with my blood and use it to cast a spell on both of us?) Then I sit down on the pot and begin devising a sort of sanitary napkin for myself with layers of toilet paper.

The absurdities our bodies subject us to! Other than being doubled over with diarrhea in some stinking public toilet, I know of nothing more ignominious than getting your period when you have no Tampax. The odd thing is that I didn’t always feel this way about menstruation. I actually looked forward to my first period, longed for it, wanted it, prayed for it. I used to pore over words like “period” and “menstruation” in the dictionary. I used to recite a little prayer which went: please let me get my period today. Or, because I was afraid someone would hear me, I said: P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. I used to chant this on the toilet seat, wiping myself again and again and hoping to find at least a tiny spot of blood. But nothing. Randy had her period (or “got unwell,” as my liberated mother and grandmother said) and so did all the girls in my seventh-grade class. And my eighth-grade class. What big bosoms and C-cup Maidenform bras and curly pubic tendrils! What stirring discussions of Kotex and Modess, and (for the very, very daring) Tampax! But I had nothing to contribute. At thirteen I had only a “training bra” (training for what?) I didn’t fill, a few sparse brownish-red curls (not even blonde, for all that I was a natural blonde), and information about sex gleaned from all-night marathons with Randy and her best friend Rita. So the prayers on the pot continued. P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T.

And then, when I was thirteen and a half (ancient compared to Randy’s ten and a half), I finally “got it” on the Île de France in Mid-Atlantic, as we returned en famille from that disastrously expensive (though tax-deductible) European jaunt.

There were the four of us sharing an inner stateroom near the din of the engines (while our parents had an outer cabin on the Boat Deck) and suddenly I reached womanhood two and a half days out of Le Havre. What to do? Lalah and Chloe (who are sharing one set of bunks) are not supposed to know-being, my mother thinks, too young-so Randy and I engage in some conspiratorial trips to the drugstore for supplies and go sneaking around the cabin looking for places to hide them. Of course I am so delighted with my new toy and my new sense of distinction in the adult world that I change my Kotex no less than twelve times a day, using them up almost faster than we can buy them. And the moment of truth arrives when the steward (a beleaguered Frenchman with a face like Fernandel and a temper like Cardinal Richelieu) finds the toilet stuffed to the top and overflowing. Until then I had not felt particularly oppressed by menstruation. It was only when the steward (who was certainly not thrilled about having to tend a cabin which resembled a girls’ dormitory) started yelling at me that I joined the ranks of potential radicals.

“What ave you poot in ze commode?” he shrieked (or something to that effect). And then he made me watch while he pulled out the disintegrating Kotex glob by glob. Is it possible he really didn’t know what it was? Or was he trying to humiliate me? Was it really a language problem? (Comment dit-on Kotex en français?) Or was it just that he was taking his frustration out on my menarche? I stood there turning red and muttering drugstore, drugstore, which (I am now given to understand) is a French word.

Meanwhile, Lalah and Chloe were giggling to beat the band. (They knew it was dirty, even if they didn’t understand all the details. They certainly knew something was wrong or else why would I be running to the bathroom a dozen times a day and why would that scary man be yelling at me?) We steamed toward New York leaving a trail of bloody Kotex for the fishes.

In my thirteen-year-old mind, the Île de France was the most romantic ship in the world because it made a cameo appearance in “These Foolish Things”-that dreamily romantic song (played by my dreamily romantic father on the piano):

(The poetry I was raised on!) Somewhere in the song, “The Île de France with all the gulls around it…” is dreamily mentioned. Little did I know that the gulls would be diving after my bloody Kotex. And little did I know that by the time I got to sail on it, the Île de France would be much the worse for wear and would rock and roll like an old tub, making nearly all the passengers seasick. The stewards were losing their minds. The dining room was practically empty at every sitting and the room-service bells kept ringing. I see my pudgy thirteen-year-old self clutching my clutch bag full of Kotex on the dipping and weaving decks and bleeding my way all the way home to Manhattan.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my menarche.

A year and a half later, I was starving myself to death and my periods had stopped dead in their tracks. The cause? Fear of being a woman, as Dr. Schrift put it. Well, why not? OK.

I was afraid of being a woman. Not afraid of the blood (I really looked forward to that-at least until I got yelled at for it), but afraid of all the nonsense that went along with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary! I was determined never to learn to type. (And I never have. In college Brian typed my papers. Later I pecked with two fingers or paid to have things typed. Oh, it has greatly inconvenienced me and it has cost me ridiculous sums of money-but what are money and inconvenience where principle is concerned? The principle of the thing was: I was not and never would be a typist. Even for myself, no matter how much that would have eased my life.)

So, if menstruating meant you had to type, I would stop menstruating! And stop typing! Or both! And I wouldn’t have babies! I would cut off my nose to spite my face. I would literally throw out the baby with the bath water. And that, of course, was another reason I was in Paris. I had cut myself off from everything-family, friends, husband-just to prove I was free. Free as a misfired satellite in outer space. Free as a hijacker parachuting down into Death Valley.

I swiped the remains of the roll of toilet paper, stuffed it into my bag, and started back toward my room. But which floor was it on anyway? My mind was blank. All the doors seemed identical. I ran up two nights and blindly headed for the corner door. I flung it open. A fat middle-aged man sat naked on a chair cutting his toenails. He looked up in mild surprise.

“Excuse me!” I said and slammed the door in a hurry. I raced up another flight, found my own room and bolted the door. I couldn’t get over the expression on the man’s face. Amusement, but not shock. A tranquil Buddhalike smile. He was not alarmed at all.

So there were people who got up at noon, pared their toenails, and sat naked in hotel rooms without regarding each day as an apocalypse. Amazing! If someone had burst into my room and found me naked and paring my nails, I would have died of shock. Or would I? Maybe I was stronger than I thought.

But I was also dirtier than I thought. Despite what Auden says about all people loving the smell of their own farts, my reek was beginning to offend my nostrils. Since I had no

Tampax, a bath was out of the question, but I’d have to do something about my hair which hung in limp and greasy strings. It had begun to itch as if I had fleas. A new start. I’d wash my hair at least, douse myself with perfume like the smelly courtiers at Versailles, and set out. But where was I headed? In search of Bennett? In search of Adrian? In search of Tampax? In search of Isadora?

“Just shut up and wash your hair,” I said. “First things first”

Luckily, I had plenty of shampoo, and even though the sink was small and the water cold, washing my hair gave me a sense of being in command.

An hour later, I was packed, dressed, made up, and had tied a scarf over my wet hair. I put on my sunglasses to further protect me from the evil eye. I had improvised another sanitary napkin with toilet paper and pinned it to my underpants. It wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement, but still, I was ready to pay my bill, lug my suitcase, and face the world.

Thank God for sunlight, I thought, as I came out on the street. Former Druid that I was, I knew to thank the gods for small favors. I had survived the night! I had even slept! For one moment I allowed myself the luxury of thinking everything would be all right.

No thinking, I said to myself. No thinking, no analyzing, and no worrying… Just concentrate on getting to London and pulling yourself together. Just get through the goddamned day.

I lugged my suitcase to a drugstore, bought Tampax, and then schlepped back to last night’s café on the Place St. Michel. I left the suitcase just standing by a table while I went downstairs to the bathroom to put in a Tampax. I had a momentary pang of worry about leaving the suitcase, but then I decided to say the hell with it. It would be an omen. If the suitcase was still there when I got back (appropriately plugged up with Tampax), then everything would be all right.

It was.

I sat down next to the suitcase and ordered a cup of cappuccino and a brioche. It was almost one o’clock and I felt calm, almost euphoric. How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on street corners for you to admire them. It looked as if the whole Latin Quarter had been taken over by Americans. To the right of me and to the left of me, I heard conversations about course requirements at the University of Michigan and the perils of sleeping on the beaches of Spain. There was a tour group of middle-aged black women in flowered hats heading across the Place St. Michel toward the Seine and Notre Dame. There were young American couples with babies and backpacks. “Picasso certainly had a breast fetish…” one lean, body-shirted Oscar Wilde type said to his companion (who was all decked out in the latest everything by Cardin). Little C’s on his bikini-jock too, I imagined. What a scene! Like Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. The Wife of Bath as a black American lady making a pilgrimage to Notre Dame; the Squire as a gentle-faced blond-bearded college kid carrying The Prophet; the Prioress as a lovely student of art history fresh from Miss Hewitt’s, a cotillion or two, and Sarah Lawrence (and dressing in dirty jeans to live down her aristocratic past and profile); the lascivious monk as a street-corner preacher for macrobiotics and natural life-styles; the Friar as a top-knotted convert to Krishna-consciousness; and the Miller as a former political activist from the University of Chicago who now distributes literature for French women’s lib… (“Why are you a feminist?” I recently asked a guy I know who is very hot for the movement. “Because it’s the best damned way of getting laid nowadays,” he said.) Chaucer would be right at home here. Nothing he couldn’t cope with.

I felt so cool and level-headed for the moment that I was determined to enjoy myself before my panic returned. So I wasn’t pregnant after all. In a sense that was sad-menstruation was always a little sad-but it was also a new beginning. I was being given another chance.

I ordered more coffee and watched the passing parade. All those innocents abroad! A couple was kissing on the street corner and I watched them, thinking of Adrian. They were gazing into each other’s eyes as if the secret of life were to be found there. What do lovers see in each other’s eyes anyway? Each other? I thought of my crazy notion that Adrian was my mental double and how wrong it had turned out to be. That was what I had originally wanted. A man to complete me. Papageno to my Papagena. But perhaps that was the most delusional of all my delusions. People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.

I knew I wouldn’t run after Adrian to Hampstead. I knew I wouldn’t screw up my life for the sake of a great self-destructive passion. There was a part of me that wanted to and another part of me that despised Isadora for not being the kind of woman who gives her all for love. But there was no use pretending. I was not that sort of woman. I hadn’t the taste for total self-annihilation. I would never be a romantic heroine maybe, but I would stay alive. And that was all that mattered at the moment. I would go home and write about Adrian instead. I would keep him by giving him up.

It was true I missed him desperately at times. I watched that couple kiss and I could almost feel Adrian’s tongue in my mouth. And I had all the other corny symptoms too: I kept thinking I saw his car across the street and maybe later I would even run over to inspect the license plates. I thought for an instant that I saw the back of his head in the café and then I found myself peering suddenly into some stranger’s face. I kept remembering, at odd moments, his smell, his laugh, his jokes…

But it would pass in time. It always did, unfortunately. The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then when it happens again we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think: “this one is stronger, this one is better…” because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

“Why don’t you forget about love and just try to lead your own life?” Adrian had asked. And I had argued with him. But maybe he was right after all. What had love ever done for me but disappoint me? Or maybe I looked for the wrong things in love. I wanted to lose myself in a man, to cease to be me, to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings. Isadora Icarus, I ought to call myself. And the borrowed wings never stayed on when I needed them. Maybe I really needed to grow my own.

“You have your work,” he’d said. And he was right about that too. Oh he was right for all the wrong reasons. At least I had a life-long commitment, a calling, a guiding passion. It was certainly more than most people had.

I took a cab to the Gare du Nord, checked my suitcase, changed money, and inquired about trains. It was already almost four o’clock and there was a boat train that night at ten. It wasn’t one of the fast trains with a fancy name, but it was the only train to London I could get. I bought my ticket, still not really knowing why I was going to London. All I knew was that I had to get out of Paris. And there were things to do in London. That agent to see and various people to look up. Other people lived in London besides Adrian.

How I lost the rest of the afternoon I’m not entirely sure. I read the paper and walked and had a meal. When it got dark, I returned to the station and sat writing in my notebook while I waited for the train. I had spent so much time writing in train stations when I lived in Heidelberg that I was almost beginning to feel at home in the world again.

By the time the train pulled in, little clots of people coagulated on the platform. They had that forlorn look which travelers have when they are departing from somewhere at their usual bedtime. An old woman was crying and kissing her son. Two bedraggled American girls pulled their suitcases on ball bearings. A German woman was feeding her baby out of a jar and calling him Schweinchen. They all looked like refugees. Me too.

I lugged my enormous suitcase into the train and dragged it along the corridor looking for an empty compartment. Finally I found one which smelled of old farts and decomposing banana peels. The stink of humanity. And I was doing my part to help that stink. What I wouldn’t have given for a bath!

I heaved my suitcase upward and just missed getting it high enough to slip into the rack. My arm sockets were aching. Just then a young train attendant in a blue uniform appeared and took the suitcase out of my hands. With one swing he slid it into the overhead rack.

“Thank you,” I said, reaching for my purse. But he walked past me without acknowledging this.

“You will be alone?” he asked ambiguously. It wasn’t clear whether he meant “do you want to be alone?” or “will you be alone?” Then he began pulling down all the shades. How kind of him, I thought. He wants to show me how to keep other people from disturbing me, how to have the compartment to myself. Just when you were about to give up on people, someone appeared and did you a favor out of the blue. He was pushing the armrests up to make a bed for me. Then he ran his hand along the seats to indicate that this was a place to lie down.

“I really don’t know if this is fair to the other people,” I said, feeling suddenly guilty to be hogging a whole compartment. But he hadn’t understood me and I couldn’t explain myself in French.

“You are seule?” he asked again, flattening his palm on my belly and pushing me down toward the seat. Suddenly his hand was between my legs and he was trying to hold me down forcibly.

“What are you doing?” I screamed, springing up and pushing him away. I knew very well what he was doing, but it had taken a few seconds to register.

“You pig!” I spat out. He smiled crookedly and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say “no harm in trying.”

“Cochon!” I yelled, translating for his benefit. He laughed weakly. He wasn’t exactly about to rape me, but neither did he understand my outrage. After all, I was alone, wasn’t I?

With a burst of energy I leaped up on the seat and grabbed my suitcase, nearly bringing it down on my own head. I stormed out of the compartment while he just stood there smiling his crooked smile and shrugging.

I was furious with myself for my credulity. How could I have thanked him for his consideration when any idiot would have known that he planned to grab me by the snatch as soon as the shades were drawn? I was really a fool-despite all my pretensions to worldliness. I was about as worldly as a goddamned eight year old. Isadora in Wonderland. The eternal naif.

“Boy, are you stupid,” I said to myself as I stepped down the corridor in search of another compartment. I wanted a crowded one this time. One with nuns, or a family of twelve, or both. I was wishing I’d had the nerve to belt him one. If only I were one of those wise women who carry aerosol cans of Mace or study karate. Or maybe I needed a guard dog. A huge dog trained for every sort of service. It was likely to come in handier than a man.

It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group-mother, daddy, baby-that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me!

Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains. Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all?

The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks.

It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!”

“Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?”

I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken?

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face.

Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment.

“Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly.

They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle… The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up… shut up… shut up…

The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America-didn’t I agree?

“Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself.

“Really?” This gave me new status. I might be a curious lone female, but at least I was not a bottle-washer like his wife.

“Don’t you agree that our American educational system has misconstrued the meaning of democracy?” he asked, all pomposity and bile.

“No,” I said, “I don’t agree.”

Oh Isadora, you are getting crusty. When was the last time you said “I don’t agree…” and said it so calmly? I’m beginning to like me quite a lot, I thought.

“We haven’t really figured out how to make democracy work in the schools,” I said, “but that isn’t reason enough to go back to an elitist system like they have here…” (and I gestured briefly to the dark countryside beyond the window) “… after all, America is the first society in history to confront these problems with a heterogeneous population. It isn’t like France or Sweden or Japan…”

“But do you really think increased permissiveness is the answer?’

Ah, permissiveness-the puritan’s key word.

“I think we have too little genuine permissiveness,” I said, “and too much bureaucratic disorganization masquerading as permissiveness. Real permissiveness, constructive permissiveness is another story altogether.” Thank you, D. H. Lawrence Wing.

He looked puzzled. What did I mean? (The wife was rocking the baby and keeping silent. There seemed to be this unspoken agreement between them that she should shut up and let him appear to be the intellectual. It’s easy to be an intellectual with a mute wife.)

What did I mean? I meant myself, of course. I meant that genuine permissiveness promotes independence. I meant that I was determined to take my fate in my own hands. I meant that I was going to stop being a schoolgirl. But I didn’t say that. Instead I nattered on about Education and Democracy and all sorts of generalized garbage.

This crashingly boring conversation got us half the way to Calais. Then we shut out the light and went to sleep.

The conductor awakened us at some ungodly hour to catch a steamer. When we got off the train it was so misty and I was so sleepy that if someone had marched me into the Channel I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to resist. After that I remember dragging my suitcase down endless corridors, trying to sleep in a folding chair on a pitching deck, and waiting on line in the early morning damp while the immigration officials inspected our papers. I stared at the white cliffs of Dover for two bleary-eyed hours while we lined up waiting to have our passports stamped. Then there was a cement passageway about a mile long which I dragged my suitcase down to get to the train. When the British Railways came to the rescue at last, the train crawled and stopped and stopped and crawled for four hours to Waterloo. The countryside was bleak and filmed with grime. I thought of Blake and Dark Satanic Mills. I knew I was in England by the smell.