Fear Of Flying

2 “Every Woman Adores a Fascist”

At 6 a.m. we landed at Frankfurt Flughafen and shuffled out into a rubber-floored lounge which, for all its gleaming newness, made me think of death camps and deportations. We waited an hour there while the 747 refueled. All the analysts sat stiffly on molded fiberglass chairs arranged in inflexible rows: gray, yellow, gray, yellow, gray, yellow… The joylessness of the color scheme was matched only by the joylessness of their faces.

Most of them were carrying expensive cameras, and despite their longish hair, tentative beards, wire-rimmed glasses (and wives dressed with an acceptably middle-class whiff of bohemia: cowhide sandals, Mexican shawls, Village silversmith jewelry), they exuded respectability. The sullen essence of squareness. That was, when I thought about it, what I had against most analysts. They were such unquestioning acceptors of the social order. Their mildly leftist political views, their signing of peace petitions and decorating their offices with prints of Guernica were just camouflage. When it came to the crucial issues: the family, the position of women, the flow of cash from patient to doctor, they were reactionaries. As rigidly self-serving as the Social Darwinists of the Victorian Era.

“But women are always the power behind the throne,” my last analyst had said when I tried to explain how dishonest I felt for always using seductiveness to get what I wanted from men. It was just a few weeks before the trip to Vienna that we had our final blow-up. I’d never quite trusted Kolner anyway, but I’d kept on going to see him on the assumption that that was my problem.

“But don’t you see,” I shouted from the couch, “that’s just the trouble! Women using sex appeal to manipulate men and suppressing their rage and never being open and honest-”

But Dr. Kolner could only see anything which vaguely smacked of Women’s Lib as a neurotic problem. Any protestation against conventional female behavior had to be “phallic” and “aggressive.” We had haggled over these issues for a long time, but it was his “power behind the throne” pitch which finally showed me how I’d been taken.

“I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m straggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by. I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards. I also don’t think you understand a thing about women.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what it means to be a woman,” he countered.

“Oh God. Now you’re using the final ploy. Don’t you see that men have always defined femininity as a means of keeping women in line? Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn’t I listen to myself for once? And to other women? I talk to them. They tell me about themselves-and a damned lot of them feel exactly the way I do-even if it doesn’t get the Good Housekeeping Seal of the American Psychoanalytic.”

We went back and forth like that for a while, both of us shouting. I was hating myself for sounding so damned much like some sort of tract and for being forced into simple-mindedly polarized positions. I knew I was neglecting the subtleties. I knew that there were other analysts-my German analyst, for instance-who didn’t pull this misogynous routine. But I was also hating Kolner for his narrowness and for wasting my time and money with warmed-over clichés about woman’s place. Who needed that? You could get that out of a fortune cookie. And it didn’t cost $40 for fifty minutes either.

“If you really feel that way about me, I don’t know why you don’t quit right now,” Kolner spat out. “Why stick around and take this shit from me?”

That was Kolner exactly. When he felt he’d been attacked, he became nasty and threw in a four-letter word to show how hip he was.

“Typical small-man complex,” I muttered.

“What was that?”

“Oh nothing.”

“Come on, I want to hear it. I can take it.” Big brave analyst. “I was just thinking, Dr. Kolner, that you have what is known in psychiatric literature as a ‘small man complex.’ You get feisty and start hurling four-letter words around when somebody points out that you aren’t God Almighty. I know it must be tough on you to be only five foot four-but supposedly you were analyzed and that should make it easier to bear.”

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Kolner snarled. He had regressed all the way to second grade. He thought he was being very witty.

“Look-why is it that you can throw stale clichés at me- and I’m supposed to be grateful for your superior insight and even pay you for it-but if I do the same to you-which surely is my right, given all the bread I push in your direction-then you get furious and start talking like some spiteful seven year old.”

“I simply said you ought to quit if you feel that way about me. Leave. Walk out. Slam the door. Tell me to go to hell.”

“And admit that the past two years and the thousands of dollars that have passed between us have been a total loss? I mean maybe you can write it off that way-but I have a somewhat greater stake in deluding myself that something positive went on here.”

“You can work it all out with your next analyst,” Kolner said. “You can figure out what went wrong from your point of view…”

“My point of view! Don’t you see why so many people are getting so fucking fed up with analysis? It’s all the fault of you stupid analysts. You make the process like some sort of Catch-22. The patient goes and goes and goes and keeps paying in her money and whenever you guys are too dense to figure out what’s going on or whenever you realize that you can’t help the patient, you simply up the number of years they have to keep going or you tell them to go to another analyst to figure out what went wrong with the first analyst. Doesn’t the absurdity of it even strike you?”

“The absurdity of my sitting here and listening to this tirade certainly does strike me. So I can only reiterate what I said before. If you don’t like it, why don’t you just get the hell out?”

As in a dream (I never would have believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years had I been lying there?), picked up my pocketbook, and walked (no, I did not quite “saunter”-though I wish I had) out the door. I closed it gently. No Nora-slamming-the-door routine to undercut the effect. Goodbye Kolner. For a moment in the elevator I nearly cried.

But by the time I’d walked two blocks down Madison Avenue I was jubilant. No more eight o’clock sessions! No more wondering was-it-helping as I wrote out the gargantuan check each month! No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free! And think of all the money I didn’t have to spend! I ducked into a shoestore and immediately spent $40 on a pair of white sandals with gold chains. They made me feel as good as fifty minutes with Kolner ever had. OK, so I wasn’t really liberated (I still had to comfort myself with shopping), but at least I was free of Kolner. It was a start anyway.

I was wearing the sandals on the flight to Vienna, and I looked down at them as we trooped back into the plane. Was it stepping on with the right foot or with the left that kept the plane from crashing? How could I keep the plane from crashing if I couldn’t even remember? “Mother,” I muttered. I always mutter “Mother” when I’m scared. The funny thing is I don’t even call my mother “Mother” and I never have. She named me Isadora Zelda, but I try never to use the Zelda. (I understand that she also considered Olympia, after Greece, and Justine, after Sade.) In return for this lifetime liability, I call her Jude. Her real name is Judith. Nobody but my youngest sister ever calls her Mommy.

Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed.

We arrived at 9 a.m.-just as the airport was opening up. willkommen in wien, it said. We shuffled in through customs dragging our suitcases and feeling dopey from the missed night of sleep.

The airport looked scrubbed and gleaming. I thought of the level of disorder, dirt, and chaos New Yorkers get used to. The return to Europe was always something of a shock. The streets seemed unnaturally clean. The parks seemed unnaturally full of unvandalized benches, fountains, and rose bushes. The public flowerbeds seemed unnaturally tidy. Even the outdoor telephones worked.

The customs officials glanced at our suitcases, and in less than twenty minutes we were boarding a bus which had been booked for us by the Vienna Academy of Psychiatry. We boarded with the naive hope of making it to our hotel in a few minutes and going to sleep. We didn’t know that the bus would snake though the streets of Vienna and stop at seven hotels before coming to ours almost three hours later.

Getting to the hotel was like one of those dreams where you have to get somewhere before something terrible happens but, inexplicably, your car keeps breaking down or going backward. Anyway I was dazed and angry and everything seemed to irritate me that morning.

It was partly the panic I always felt at being back in Germany. I lived longer in Heidelberg than in any city except New York, so Germany (and Austria, too) was a kind of second home to me. I spoke the language comfortably-more comfortably than any of the languages I had studied in school-and I was familiar with the foods, the wines, the brand names, the closing times of shops, the clothes, the popular music, the slang expressions, the mannerisms… All as if I had spent my childhood in Germany, or as if my parents were German. But I was born in 1942 and if my parents had been German-not American-Jews, I would have been born (and probably would have died) in a concentration camp-despite my blond hair, blue eyes, and Polish peasant nose. I could never forget that either. Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised, in fact, for being so familiar.

I looked out the bus window at the red-cheeked old ladies in their “sensible” beige shoes and lumpy Tyrolean hats. I looked at their lumpy legs and lumpy asses. I hated them. I looked at an advertising poster which read

SEI GUT ZU DEINEM MAGEN

(Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit-as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere. (I say this as a seasoned world traveler.) Then there’s the filthy rag of a public towel, hanging over a tiny wash basin which has only a cold water tap (for you to dribble cold water over your right hand-or whichever hand you happen to use).

I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets.

“The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???”

British:

British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda.

The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, amp; you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again.

The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays).

German:

German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.

Italian:

Sometimes you can read bits of Corriere della Sera before you wipe your ass on the news. But in general the toilets run swift here and the shit disappears long before you can leap up and turn around to admire it. Hence Italian art. Germans have their own shit to admire. Lacking this, Italians make sculptures and paintings.

French:

The old hotels in Paris with two Brobdingnagian iron footprints straddling a stinking hole. Orange trees planted in Versailles to cover cesspool smell. Il est défendu de faire pipi dans la chambre du Roi. Lights in Pans toilets which only go on when you turn the lock.

I somehow cannot make sense of French philosophy amp; literature vis à vis the French approach to merde. The French are very abstract thinkers-but they could also produce a poet of particularity like Ponge, who writes an epic poem on soap. How does this connect with French toilets?

Japanese:

Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen. (Cf. Suzuki.)

It was after twelve when we finally got to our hotel and we found we had been assigned a tiny room on the top floor. I wanted to object, but Bennett was more interested in getting some rest. So we pulled down the shades against the noonday sun, undressed, and collapsed on the beds without even unpacking. Despite the strangeness of the place, Bennett went right to sleep. I tossed and fought with the feather comforter until I dozed fitfully amid dreams of Nazis and plane crashes. I kept waking up with my heart pounding and my teeth chattering. It was the usual panic I always have the first day away from home, but it was worse because of our being back in Germany. I was already wishing we hadn’t returned.

At about three-thirty we got up and rather languidly made love in one of the single beds. I still felt that I was dreaming and kept pretending Bennett was somebody else. But who? I couldn’t get a clear picture of him. I never could. Who was this phantom man who haunted my life? My father? My German analyst? The zipless fuck? Why did his face always refuse to come into focus?

By four o’clock, we were on the Strassenbahn bound for the University of Vienna to register for the Congress. The day had turned out to be clear with blue skies and absurdly fluffy white clouds. And I was clumping along the streets in my high-heeled sandals, hating the Germans, and hating Bennett for not being a stranger on a train, for not smiling, for being such a good lay but never kissing me, for getting me shrink appointments and Pap smears and IBM electrics, but never buying me flowers. And not talking to me. And never grabbing my ass anymore. And never going down on me, ever. What do you expect after five years of marriage anyway? Giggling in the dark? Ass-grabbing? Cunt-eating? Well at least an occasional one. What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much. How do you ladies like to be laid? A man who’ll go down on you when you have your period? A man who’ll kiss you before you brush your teeth in the morning and not say Yiiich? A man who’ll laugh with you when the lights go out?

A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession.

Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.

And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. Throughout all of history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood. Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley’s and wondered what was wrong with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?

Phallocentric. The trouble with men and also the trouble with women. A friend of mine recently found this in a fortune cookie:

the trouble with men is men,

the trouble with women, men.

Once, just to impress Bennett, I told him about the Hell’s Angels initiation ceremony. The part where the initiate has to go down on his woman while she has her period and while all the other guys watch. Bennett said nothing.

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” I nudged. “Isn’t that a gas?” Still nothing. I kept nagging.

“Why don’t you buy yourself a little dog,” he finally said, “and train him.”

“I ought to report you to the New York Psychoanalytic,” I said.

The medical building of the University of Vienna is columned, cold, cavernous. We trudged up a long flight of steps. Upstairs, dozens of shrinks were milling around the registration desk.

An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl was giving everyone trouble about their credentials for registration. She spoke painstakingly schoolbook English. I was positive she must be the wife of one of the Austrian candidates. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but she smiled with all the smugness of a Frau Doktor.

I showed her my letter from Voyeur Magazine, but she wouldn’t let me register.

“Why?”

“Because we are not authorized to admit Press,” she sneered. “I am so sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

I could feel the anger gather inside my head like steam in a pressure cooker. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut.

Bennett shot me a look which said: calm down. He hates it when I get angry at people in public. But his trying to hold me back only made me more furious.

“Look-if you don’t let me in I’ll write about that, too.” I knew that once the meetings got started I could probably walk right in without a badge-so it really didn’t matter. Besides, I scarcely cared all that much about writing the article. I was a spy from the outside world. A spy in the house of analysis.

“I’m sure you don’t want me to write about how the analysts are scared of admitting writers to their meetings, do you?”

“I’m zo sorry,” the Austrian bitch kept repeating. “But I really haff not got za ausority to admit you…”

“Just following orders, I suppose.”

“I haff instructions to obey,” she said.

“You and Eichmann.”

“Pardon?” She hadn’t heard me.

Somebody else had. I turned around and saw this blond, shaggy-haired Englishman with a pipe hanging out of his face.

“If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you,” he said. He was smiling at me the way a man smiles when he’s lying on top of you after a particularly good lay.

“You’ve got to be an analyst,” I said, “nobody else would throw the word paranoid around so freely.”

He grinned.

He was wearing a very thin white cotton Indian kurtah and I could see his reddish-blond chest hair curling underneath it

“Cheeky cunt,” he said. Then he grabbed a fistful of my ass and gave it a long playful squeeze.

“You’ve a lovely ass,” he said. “Come, I’ll see to it that you get into the conference.”

Of course he turned out to have no authority whatsoever In the matter, but I didn’t know that till later. He was bustling around so officiously that you’d have thought he was the head of the whole Congress. He was chairman of one of the preconferences-but he had absolutely nothing to say about Press. Who cared about Press, anyway? All I wanted was for him to press my ass again. I would have followed him anywhere. Dachau, Auschwitz, anywhere. I looked across the registration desk and saw Bennett talking seriously with another analyst from New York.

The Englishman had made his way into the crowd and was grilling the registration girl in my behalf. Then he walked back to me.

“Look-she says you have to wait and talk to Rodney Lehmann. He’s a friend of mine from London and he ought to be here any minute so why don’t we walk across to the café, have a beer, and look for him?”

“Let me just tell my husband,” I said. It was going to become something of a refrain in the next few days.

He seemed glad to hear that I had a husband. At least he didn’t seem sorry.

I asked Bennett if he’d come across the street to the café and meet us (hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come too soon) and he waved me off. He was busy talking about counter-transference.

I followed the smoke from the Englishman’s pipe down the steps and across the street. He puffed along like a train, the pipe seeming to propel him. I was happy to be his caboose.

We set ourselves up in the café, with a quarter liter of white wine for me and a beer for him. He was wearing Indian sandals and dirty toenails. He didn’t look like a shrink at all.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“I mean your ancestors.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why are you dodging my question?”

“I don’t have to answer your question.”

“I know.” He puffed his pipe and looked off into the distance. The corners of his eyes crinkled into about a hundred tiny lines and his mouth curled up in a sort of smile even when he wasn’t smiling. I knew I’d say yes to anything he asked. My only worry was: maybe he wouldn’t ask soon enough.

“Polish Jews on one side, Russian on the other-”

“I thought so. You look Jewish.”

“And you look like an English anti-Semite.”

“Oh come on-I like Jews…”

“Some of your best friends…”

“It’s just that Jewish girls are so bloody good in bed.”

I couldn’t think of a single witty thing to say. Sweet Jesus, I thought, here he was. The real z.f. The zipless fuck par excellence. What in God’s name were we waiting for? Certainly not Rodney Lehmann.

“I also like the Chinese,” he said, “and you’ve got a nice-looking husband.”

“Maybe I ought to fix you up with him. After all, you’re both analysts. You’d have a lot in common. You could bugger each other under a picture of Freud.”

“Cunt,” he said. “Actually, it’s more Chinese girls, I fancy-but Jewish girls from New York who like a good fight also strike me as dead sexy. Any woman who can raise hell the way you did up at registration seems pretty promising.”

“Thanks.” At least I can recognize a compliment when I get one. My underpants were wet enough to mop the streets of Vienna.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thought I looked Jewish,” I said, trying to get the conversation back to more neutral territory. (Enough of sex. Let’s get back to bigotry.) His thinking I looked Jewish actually excited me. God only knows why.

“Look-I’m not an anti-Semite, but you are. Why do you think you don’t look Jewish?”

“Because people always think I’m German-and I’ve spent half my life listening to anti-Semitic stories told by people who assumed I wasn’t-”

“That’s what I hate about Jews,” he said. “They’re the only ones allowed to tell anti-Semitic jokes. It’s bloody unfair. Why should I be deprived of the pleasure of masochistic Jewish humor just because I’m a goy?”

He sounded so goyish saying goy.

“You don’t pronounce it right.”

“What? Goy?”

“Oh, that’s OK, but masochistic.” (He pronounced the first syllable mace, just like an Englishman.) “You’ve got to watch how you pronounce Yiddish words like masochistic,” I said. “We Jews are very touchy.”

We ordered another round of drinks. He kept making a pretense of looking around for Rodney Lehmann and I came on with a very professional spiel about the article I was going to write. I nearly convinced myself all over again. That’s one of my biggest problems. When I start out to convince other people, I don’t always convince them but I invariably convince myself. I’m a complete bust as a con woman.

“You really have an American accent,” he said, smiling his just-got-laid smile.

“I haven’t got an accent-you have-”

“Ac-sent,” he said mocking me.

“Fuck you.”

“That’s not at all a bad idea.”

“What did you say your name was?” (Which, as you may recall, is the climactic line from Strindberg’s Miss Julie.)

“Adrian Goodlove,” he said. And with that he turned suddenly and upset his beer all over me.

“Terribly sorry,” he kept saying, wiping at the table with his dirty handkerchief, his hand, and eventually his Indian shirt-which he took off, rolled up and gave me to wipe my dress with. Such chivalry! But I was just sitting there looking at the curly blond hair on his chest and feeling the beer trickle between my legs.

“I really don’t mind at all,” I said. It wasn’t true that I didn’t mind. I loved it.

Goodlove, Goodall, Goodbar, Goodbody,

Goodchild, Goodeve, Goodfellow, Goodford,

Goodfleisch, Goodfriend, Goodgame, Goodhart,

Goodhue, Gooding, Goodlet, Goodson,

Goodridge, Goodspeed, Goodtree, Goodwine.

You can’t be named Isadora White Wing (née Weiss-my father had bleached it to “White” shortly after my birth) without spending a rather large portion of your life thinking about names.

Adrian Goodlove. His mother had named him Hadrian and then his father had forced her to change it to Adrian because that sounded “more English.” His father was big on sounding English.

“Typical tight-ass English middle class,” Adrian said of his Mum and Dad. “You’d hate them. They spend their whole lives trying to keep their bowels open in the name of the Queen. A losing battle too. Their assholes are permanently plugged.”

And he farted loudly to punctuate. He grinned. I looked at him in utter amazement.

“You’re a real primitive,” I sneered, “a natural man.”

But Adrian kept on grinning. Both of us knew I had finally met the real zipless fuck.

OK. So I admit my taste in men is questionable. Plenty more evidence of that will follow. But who can debate taste anyway? And who can convey an infatuation? It’s like trying to describe the taste of chocolate mousse, or the look of a sunset, or why you can sit for hours and make faces at your own baby… Who is there who adds up to all that much on paper? We take Romeo on faith, and Julian Sorel and Count Vronsky, and even Mellors the gamekeeper. The smile, the shaggy hair, the smell of pipe tobacco and sweat, the cynical tongue, the beer spilling, the exuberant public farting… My husband has a beautiful head of black hair and long thin fingers. The first night I met him, he also grabbed for my ass (while discussing new trends in psychotherapy). In general, I seem to like men who can make that quick transition from spirit to matter. Why waste time if the attraction is really there? But if a man I didn’t like made a grab for me, I’d probably be outraged and maybe even disgusted. And who can explain why the same action disgusts you in one case and thrills you in another? And who can explain the basis for selection? Astrology nuts try. So do psychoanalysts. But their explanations always seem to lack something. As if the essential kernel had been left out.

After the infatuation is over, you rationalize. I once adored a conductor who never bathed, had stringy hair, and was a complete failure at wiping his ass. He always left shit stripes on my sheets. Normally I don’t go for that sort of thing-but in him it was OK-I’m still not sure why. I fell in love with Bennett partly because he had the cleanest balls I’d ever tasted. Hairless and he practically never sweats. You could (if you wanted) eat off his asshole (like my grandmother’s kitchen floor). So I’m versatile about my fetishes. In a way, that makes my infatuations even less explicable.

But Bennett saw patterns in everything.

“That Englishman you were talking to,” he said when we were back in the hotel room, “he was really crazy about you-”

“What makes you think that?”

He gave me a cynical look.

“He was slobbering all over you.”

“I thought he was the most hostile son of a bitch I’ve ever met.” And it was partly true too.

“That’s right-but you’re always attracted to hostile men.”

“Like you, you mean?”

He was drawing me toward him and starting to undress me. I could tell he was turned on by the way Adrian had pursued me. So was I. We both made love to Adrian’s spirit. Lucky Adrian. Fucked from the front by me, from the rear by Bennett.

The History of the World Through Fucking. Lovemaking. The old dance. It would make an even better chronicle than The History of the World Through Toilets. It would subsume everything. What doesn’t come to fucking in the end?

Bennett and I had not always made love to a phantom. There was a time when we made love to each other.

I was twenty-three when I met him and already divorced. He was thirty-one and never married. The most silent man I’d ever met. And the kindest. Or at least I thought he was kind. What do I know about silent people anyway? I come from a family where the decibel count at the dinner table could permanently damage your middle ear. And maybe did.

Bennett and I met at a party in the Village where neither of us knew the hostess. We’d both been invited by other people. It was very mid-sixties chic. The hostess was black (you still said “Negro” then) and in some fashionable sell-out profession like advertising. She was all gotten up in designer clothes and gold eye shadow. The place was filled with shrinks and advertising people and social workers and NYU professors who looked like shrinks. 1965: pre-hippie and pre-ethnic. The analysts and advertising men and professors still had short hair and tortoise-shell glasses. They still shaved. The token blacks still pressed their hair. (O remembrance of things past!)

I was there through a friend and so was Bennett. Since my first husband had been psychotic, it seemed quite natural to want to marry a psychiatrist the second time around. As an antidote, say. I was not going to let the same thing happen to me again. This time I was going to find someone who had the key to the unconscious. So I was hanging out with shrinks. They fascinated me because I assumed they knew everything worth knowing. I fascinated them because they assumed I was a “creative person” (as evidenced by the fact that I had appeared on Charmed 13 reading my poems-what more evidence of creativity could a shrink need?).

When I look back on my not yet thirty-year-old life, I see all my lovers sitting alternately back to back as if in a game of musical chairs. Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.

Brian Stollerman (my first lover and first husband) was very short, inclined to paunchiness, hairy and dark. He was also a human cannonball and a nonstop talker. He was always in motion, always spewing out words of five syllables. He was a medievalist and before you could say “Albigensian Crusade” he’d tell you the story of his life-in extravagantly exaggerated detail. Brian gave the impression of never shutting up. This was not quite true, though, because he did stop talking when he slept. But when he finally flipped his cookies (as we politely said in my immediate family) or showed symptoms of schizo-phrenia (as one of his many psychiatrists put it) or woke up to the real meaning of his life (as he put it) or had a nervous breakdown (as his Ph.D. thesis adviser put it) or became-exhausted-as-a-result-of-being-married-to-that-Jewish-princess- from-New York (as his parents put it)-then he never stopped talking even to sleep. He stopped sleeping, in fact, and he used to keep me up all night telling me about the Second Coming of Christ and how this time Jesus just might come back as a Jewish medievalist living on Riverside Drive.

Of course we were living on Riverside Drive, and Brian was a spellbinding talker. But still, I was so wrapped up in his fantasies, such a willing member of a folie à deux that it took a whole week of staying up every night listening to him before it dawned on me that Brian himself intended to be the Second Coming. Nor did he take very kindly to my pointing out that this might be a delusion; he very nearly choked me to death for my contribution to the discussion. After I caught my breath (I make it sound simpler than it was for the sake of getting on with the story), he attempted various things like flying through windows and walking on the water in Central Park Lake, and finally he had to be taken forcibly to the psycho ward and subdued with Thorazine, Compazine, Stelazine, and whatever else anyone could think of. At which point I collapsed with exhaustion, took a rest cure at my parent’s apartment (they had become strangely sane in the face of Brian’s flagrant craziness), and cried for about a month. Until one day I woke up with relief in the quiet of our deserted apartment on Riverside Drive, and realized that I hadn’t been able to hear myself think in four years. I knew then that I’d never go back to living with Brian-whether he stopped thinking he was Jesus Christ or not.

Exit husband numero uno. Enter a strange procession of opposite numbers. But I knew at least what I was looking for in numero due: a good solid father figure, a psychiatrist as an antidote to a psychotic, a good secular lay as an antidote to Brian’s religious fervor which seemed to preclude fucking, a silent man as an antidote to a noisy one, a sane gentile as an antidote to a crazy Jew.

Bennett Wing appeared as in a dream. On the wing, you might say. Tall, good-looking, inscrutably Oriental. Long thin fingers, hairless balls, a lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed-at which he seemed to be absolutely indefatigable. But he was also mute and at that point his silence was music to my ears. How did I know that a few years later, I’d feel like I was fucking Helen Keller?

Wing. I loved Bennett’s name. And he was mercurial, too. Not wings on his heels but wings on his prick. He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvelous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever, and he was the only man I’d ever met who was never impotent-not even when he was depressed or angry. But why didn’t he ever kiss? And why didn’t he speak? I would come and come and come and each orgasm seemed to be made of ice.

Was it different in the beginning? I think so. I was dazzled by his silence then as I had once been overwhelmed by Brian’s astonishing torrent of speech. Right before Bennett, there had been that conductor who loved his baton (but never wiped his behind), a Florentine philanderer (Alessandro the Gross), an incestuous Arab brother-in-law (later, later), a professor of philosophy (U. of Cal.), and any number of miscellaneous lays in the night. I’d followed the conductor across Europe watching him perform, carrying his scores, and finally he took off and left me for an old girlfriend in Paris. So I had been wounded by music, madness, and miscellaneousness. And silent Bennett was my healer. A physician for my head and a psychoanalyst for my cunt. He fucked and fucked in ear-splitting silence. He listened. He was a good analyst. He knew all Brian’s symptoms before I told him. He knew what I’d been through. And most astonishing of all-he still wanted to marry me after I told him about myself.

“Better find a nice Chinese girl,” I said. It wasn’t racism, just my skittishness about marriage. Such permanence terrified me. Even the first time, with Brian, it had terrified me, and I had married against my better judgment.

“I don’t want a nice Chinese girl,” Bennett said. “I want you.”

(It turned out Bennett had never taken out a Chinese girl in his whole life-much less screwed one. He was all hung up on Jewish girls. Men like that seem to be my fate.)

“I’m glad you want me,” I said. Grateful. I was really grateful.

At what point had I started pretending Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that.

q: “Dear Dr. Reuben: Why does the fucking always become like processed cheese?”

A: “You seem to have a food fetish, or what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as an oral fixation. Have you ever considered seeking professional help?”

I shut my eyes tightly and pretended that Bennett was Adrian. I transformed B into A. We came-first me, then Bennett-and lay there sweating on the awful hotel bed. Bennett smiled. I was miserable. What a fraud I was! Real adultery couldn’t be worse than these nightly deceptions. To fuck one man and think of another and keep the deception a secret- it was far, far worse than fucking another man within your husband’s sight. It was as bad as any betrayal I could think of. “Only a fantasy,” Bennett would probably say. “A fantasy is only a fantasy, and everyone has fantasies. Only psychopaths actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don’t.”

But I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads.

What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts-and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing.

Maybe Bennett was pretending I was someone else, too. But so what? That was his problem. And doubtless 99 percent of the people in the world were fucking phantoms. They probably were. That didn’t comfort me at all. I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself. I was already an adulteress, and was only holding off the actual consummation out of cowardice. That made me an adulteress and a coward (cowardess?). At least if I fucked Adrian I’d only be an adulteress (adult?).