Fear Of Flying

5 A Report from the Congress of Dreams or Congressing

Dr. Goodlove is chairing the meeting. In the damp cellar of the university, in a windowless basement amphitheater with clattery wooden seats, Adrian has put on his official English manners (and his same old holey shirt) and is enunciating syllables (English) to the candidates (polyglot) scattered through the tiers of seats.

He looks like Christ at the Last Supper. To the right of him and to the left of him are somberly dressed analysts in ties and jackets. He is earnestly leaning toward the microphone, sucking his pipe, and summing up the earlier portion of the meeting-which we missed. One bare foot swings back and forth toward the audience while its tattered sandal rests under the table.

I indicated to Bennett that I want to sit in the back row, near the door-and as far as possible from the heat generated by Adrian. Bennett gives me a sour look implying that that doesn’t suit him and marches to the front of the room where he sinks down next to some henna-haired candidate from Argentina.

I sit in the last row staring at Adrian. Adrian stares back at me. Me sucks on his pipe as if he were sucking on me. His hair falls over his eyes. He brushes it back. My hair falls over My eyes. I brush it back. He drags on his pipe. I drag on his phantom prick. Little rays seem to connect our eyes-as in some cosmic comic. Little heat waves seem to connect our pelvises as in some pornographic comic.

Or maybe he isn’t looking at me at all?

… of course there is still the problem of the candidate’s utter dependency on his analyst,” the analyst to the left of Adrian is saying. Adrian grins at me.

“… utter dependency tempered only by the candidate’s reality-testing which, considering the Kafkan atmosphere of the Institute, may, indeed, be quite poor…”

Kafkan? I always thought it was Kafkaesque.

I must be the first case of a twenty-nine year old’s menopause on record. I am having a hot flash. My face feels as if it’s turned bright pink, my heart is racing like the motor of a sports car, my cheeks feel as though they’ve been pricked by tiny needles for an acupuncture operation. The entire lower half of my body has liquefied and is slowly dribbling down on the floor. It’s no longer just a question of creaming in my pants-I’m dissolving.

I reach for my notebook and start scribbling.

“My name is Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing” I write, “and I wish it were Goodlove.”

I cross that out.

Then I write:

Adrian Goodlove

Dr. Adrian Goodlove

Mrs. Adrian Goodlove

Isadore Wing-Goodlove

Isadore White-Goodlove

Isadora Goodlove

A. Goodlove

Mrs. A. Goodlove

Dame Isadora Goodlove

Isadora Wing-Goodlove, M.B.E.

Sir Adrian Goodlove

Isadora and Adrian Goodlove

wish you

an

ecstatic

Christmas

Ghanuk a

Winter Solstice

Isadora White Wing and Adrian Goodlove

are absolutely

freaked out

to announce

the birth of their

love-child

Sigmunda Keats

Whitewing-Goodlove

Isadora and Adrian

invite you

to

a housewarming

at

their new digs

35 Flask Walk

Hampstead

London NW3

bring your own hallucinogens

I hastily cross all that out and turn the page. I haven’t indulged in this sort of nonsense since I was a lovesick fifteen year old.

After the meeting I was hoping to talk to Adrian, but Bennett whisked me away before Adrian extricated himself from the crowd around the stage. The three of us were already involved in a baroque trio. Bennett sensed my explosive feelings and did his best to get me away from the university as soon as possible. Adrian sensed my explosive feelings and kept looking at Bennett to see what he knew. And I already felt as if I were being torn apart by the two of them. It was not their fault, of course. They only represented the struggle within me. Bennett’s careful, compulsive, and boring steadfastness was my own panic about change, my fear of being alone, my need for security. Adrian’s antic manners and ass-grabbing was the part of me that wanted exuberance above all. I had never been able to make peace between the two halves of myself. All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expense of the other. I had never been happy with the bourgeois virtues of marriage, stability, and work above pleasure. I was too curious and adventurous not to chafe under those restrictions. But I also suffered from night terrors and attacks of panic at being alone. So I always wound up living with somebody or being married.

Besides I really believed in pursuing a longstanding and deep relationship with one person. I could easily see the sterility of hopping from bed to bed and having shallow affairs with lots of shallow people. I had had the unutterably dismal experience of waking up in bed with a man I couldn’t bear to talk to-and that was certainly no liberation either. But still, there just didn’t seem to be any way to get the best of both exuberance and stability into your life. The fact that greater minds than mine had pondered these issues and come up with no very clear answers didn’t comfort me much either. It only made me feel that my concerns were banal and commonplace. If I were really an exceptional person, I thought, I wouldn’t spend hours worrying my head about marriage and adultery. I would just go out and snatch life with both hands and feel no remorse or guilt for anything. My guilt only showed how thoroughly bourgeois and contemptible I was. All my worrying this sad old bone only showed my ordinariness.

That evening the festivities began with a candidates’ party at a café in Grinzing. It was a highly inelegant affair. Great phallic knockwursts and sauerkraut were the Freudian main course. For entertainment the Viennese analytic candidates, who were hosting the party, sang choruses of “When the Analysts Come Marching In…” (to the tune of “When the Saints…”). The lyrics were in English, presumably-or at least in some language a Viennese candidate might regard as English.

Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere.

Bennett was discussing training with another candidate from the London Institute and I eventually struck up a conversation with the guy across from me, a Chilean psychoanalyst studying in London. All I could think of when he said he was from Chile was Neruda. So we discussed Neruda. I get myself worked up into one of my enthusiastic snow jobs and told him how lucky he was to be South American at a time when all the greatist living writers were South American. I was thinking what a total fraud I was, but he was pleased. As if I’d really complimented him. The conversation went on in that absurd literary-chauvinist vein. We were discussing surrealism and its relation to South American politics-which I know nothing whatever about. But I know about Surrealism. Surrealism, you might say, is my life.

Adrian tapped me on the shoulder just as I was spouting something about Borges and his Labyrinths. Talk about the minotaur. He was right there behind me-all horns. My heart catapulted up into my nose.

Did I want to dance? Of course I wanted to dance and that wasn’t all.

“I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” he said. “Where were you?”

“With my husband.”

“He looks a bit wet, doesn’t he? What have you been making him miserable with?”

“You, I guess.”

“Better watch that,” he said. “Don’t let jealousy rear its ugly head.”

“It already has.”

We talked as if we were already lovers, and, in a sense, we were. If intent is all, we were as doomed as Paolo and Francesca. But we had no place to go, no way to sneak out of there and away from the people who were watching us, so we danced.

“I can’t dance very well,” he said.

And it was true, he couldn’t. But he made up for it by smiling like Pan. He shuffled his little cloven hooves. I was laughing a bit too hysterically.

“Dancing is like fucking,” I said, “it doesn’t matter how you look-just concentrate on how you feel.” Wasn’t I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear.

I closed my eyes and gyrated inside the music. I bumped and ground and undulated. Somewhere back in the ancient days of the Twist, it had suddenly occurred to me that nobody knew how to do these dances-so why feel self-conscious? In social dancing, as in social life, chutzpah is all. From then on I became a “good dancer,” or at least I enjoyed it. It was like fucking-all rhythm and sweat.

Adrian and I danced the next five or six sets-until we were exhausted, soaked, and ready to go home together. Then I danced with one of the Austrian candidates for the sake of appearances-which were getting harder and harder to keep up. And then I danced with Bennett who is a marvelous dancer.

I was enjoying the fact that Adrian was watching me dance with my husband. Bennett danced so much better than Adrian anyway, and he had just the kind of grace that Adrian lacked. Adrian sort of bumped along like a horse and buggy. Bennett was all sleek and smooth: a Jaguar XKE. And he was so damned nice. Ever since Adrian had appeared on the scene, Bennett had become so gallant and solicitous. He was wooing me all over again. It made things so much harder. If only he would be a bastard! If only he would be like those husbands in novels-nasty, tyrannical, deserving of cuckoldry. Instead he was sweet. And the hell of it was that his sweetness didn’t diminish my hunger for Adrian one bit.

My hunger probably had no connection with Bennett. Why did it have to be either-or like that? I simply wanted them both. It was the choosing that was impossible.

Adrian drove us back to our hotel. As we were coming down the winding hill from Grinzing, he talked about his children, poetically named Anaïs and Nikolai, who lived with him. They were tea and twelve. The other two, twin girls he didn’t name, lived with their mother in Liverpool.

“It’s hard on my kids not having a mother,” he said, “but I’m a pretty good Mum to them myself. I even like cooking. I make a damned good curry.”

His pride in being a housewife both charmed and amused me. I was sitting in the front of the Triumph next to Adrian. Bennett was sitting in the small seat in the back. If only he’d just disappear-float out of the open car and vanish into the woods. And of course I was also hating myself for wishing that. Why was it all so complicated? Why couldn’t we just be friendly and open about it. “Excuse me, darling, while I go off and fuck this beautiful stranger.” Why couldn’t it be simple and honest and unserious? Why did you have to risk your whole life for one measly zipless fuck?

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.

The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg-one of Vienna’s eighteenth-century palaces. The inside of the building had been renovated so that the public rooms exuded all the institutional charm of American motel dining rooms, but the courtyard was still back in the mists of the eighteenth century.

We arrived at that purple hour-eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt, it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lame. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet dinner jacket and a large azalea-pink satin bow tie. And Dr. Frommer was in tails and a top hat.

Bennett and I moved through the crowd looking for someone we knew. We wandered aimlessly until a waiter dispensing champagne gently dipped his tray to us and gave us something to do. I drank fast hoping to get drunk immediately-no trick at all for me. In about ten minutes I was wandering through the still more purple mist seeing champagne bubbles in the corners of my eyes. I was supposedly in search of the ladies room (but really, of course, in search of Adrian). I found thousands of him stretching back into infinity in a long mirrored baroque hallway outside the ladies room.

He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye… how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?)

“Hello ducks,” he says, turning to me.

“I have something for you,” I say, handing him the inscribed book I’ve been carrying around all day. The edges of the pages are beginning to fray from my sweaty palms.

“You sweetheart!” He takes the book. We link arms and start walking down the mirrored hall. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” as my old buddy Dante would say. The poems pimped for love, and their author too. The book of my body was open and the second circle of hell wasn’t far off.

“You know,” I say, “we’ll probably never see each other again.”

“Maybe that’s why we’re doing this,” he says.

We make our way out of the palace and into another courtyard which is now chiefly used as a parking lot. Amid the ghosts of Opels and Volkswagens and Peugeots we embrace. Mouth to mouth and belly to belly. Adrian must have the wettest kiss in history. His tongue is everywhere, like the ocean. We are sailing away. His penis (bulging under his corduroy pants) is the tall red smokestack of an ocean liner. And I am moaning around it like the ocean wind. And I am saying all the silly things you say while necking in parking lots, trying somehow to express a longing which is inexpressible-except maybe in poetry. And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you. Because this is almost too good to be love. Too yummy and delicious to be anything as serious and sober as love. Your whole mouth has turned liquid. His tongue tastes better than a nipple to an infant. (And don’t throw me any psychiatric interpretations, Bennett, because I’ll throw them right back. Infantile. Regressed. Basically Incestuous. No doubt. But I’d give my life just to go on kissing him like this and how are you going to analyze that?) Meanwhile, he’s got my ass and is cupping it with both hands. He’s put my book on the fender of a Volkswagen and he’s grabbed my ass instead. Isn’t that why I write? To be loved? I don’t know anymore. I don’t even know my own name.

“I’ve never met an ass to rival yours,” he says. And that remark makes me feel better than if I’d just won the National Book Award. The National Ass Award-that’s what I want. The Transatlantic Ass Award of 1971.

“I feel like Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” I say.

“You are Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” he says, “and I want to love you as hard as I possibly can and then leave you.”

Forewarned is forearmed, supposedly. But who was listening? All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart.

The rest of the evening was a dream of reflections and champagne glasses and drunken psychiatric jargon. We wended our way back through the hallway of mirrors. We were so excited that we scarcely bothered to make any plans about when we’d meet again.

Bennett was smiling with the red-headed candidate from Argentina on his arm. I had another champagne and made the rounds with Adrian. He was introducing me to all the London analysts and babbling about my unwritten article. Would they consent to be interviewed? Could he interest them in my journalistic effort? The whole time he had his arm around my waist and sometimes his hand on my ass. We were nothing if not indiscreet. Everybody saw. His analyst. My ex-analysts. His son’s analyst. His daughter’s analyst. My husband’s ex-analyst. My husband.

“Is this Mrs. Goodlove?” one of the older London analysts asked.

“No,” Adrian said, “but I wish it were. If I’m very, very lucky, it may be.”

I was floating. My head was full of champagne and talk of marriage. My head was full of leaving dull old New York for glamorous trendy London. I was out of my mind. “She just ran off with some Englishman,” I could hear my friends in New York saying, not without envy. They were all sandbagged down with children and babysitters, with graduate courses and teaching jobs and analysts and patients. And here I was flying through the purple skies of Vienna on my borrowed broomstick. I was the one they counted on to write out their fantasies. I was the one they counted on to tell funny stories about her former lovers. I was the one they envied in public and laughed at in private. I could imagine the reporting of these events in Class News:

Isadora White Wing and new hubby Doctor Adrian Goodlove are living in London near Hampstead Heath-not to be confused with Heathcliff, for the benefit of all you Math majors. Isadora would love to hear from fellow Barnardites abroad. She is busily engrossed in writing a novel and a new book of poems, and in her spare time attends the International Psychoanalytic, where she congresses…

All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisioned myself tying up with another. I was like a boat that always had to have a port of call. I simply couldn’t imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined.

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I’ve no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn’t have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn’t automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah.

Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family. I think of them living in places where they can’t work, where they can’t speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and thinks herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right?

A grim picture. Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs?

I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.

We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party-she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing-something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent-but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke.

We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube.

I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable.

Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth-like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.

When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere.

In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected.

“Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.”

“Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.”

“We could look,” he said.

But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind.

On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm.

This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted.

At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there-in a room full of clues.

But now I couldn’t scream. And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car.

A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique-not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important

“I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave.

“Good,” he said, fondling my knee. So instead, he proceeded to tell me about the other women he’d fucked. Some bargain.

First there was May Pei, the Chinese girl Bennett reminded him of.

“She may pay and then she may not pay,” I said.

“Don’t think that wasn’t thought of.”

“I’m sure it was. But the question is-did she pay?”

“Well, I did. She fucked me up for years after that.”

“You mean, after she stopped seeing you, she still fucked you. Some trick. The phantom fuck. You could patent that, you know. Arrange to get people fucked by famous figures of the past: Napoleon, Charles II, Louis XIV… sort of like Dr. Faustus fucking Helen of Troy…” I loved being silly with him.

“Shut up, cunt-and let me finish about May…” and then, turning to me amid a screeching of brakes: “God-you’re beautiful…”

“Keep your fucking eyes on the road,” I said, delighted.

My conversations with Adrian always seemed like quotes from Through the Looking Glass. Like:

Me: “We seem to be going around in circles.”

Adrian: “That’s just the point.”

or:

Me: “Will you carry my briefcase?”

Adrian: “As long as you agree not to carry anything for me just yet”

or:

Me: “I divorced my first husband principally because he was crazy.”

Adrian (furrowing his Laingian brows): “That would seem to me to be a good reason to marry someone, not divorce him.”

Me: “But he watched television every night.”

Adrian: “Oh, then I see why you divorced him.”

Why had May Pei fucked up Adrian’s life?

“She left me in the lurch and went back to Singapore. She had a child there living with its father and the child was in a car crash. She had to go back, but she could have at least written. For months I walked around feeling that the world was made up of mechanical people. I’ve never been so depressed. The bitch finally married the pediatrician who took care of her kid-an American bloke.”

“So why didn’t you go after her if you cared so much?”

He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him.

“Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.)

“Because you loved her.”

“I never used that word.”

“But if you felt that way, why didn’t you go?”

“My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “Someone’s got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.”

“Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.”

“Not very funny,” I said, laughing.

After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.”

“A what?”

“A bin-you know, a madhouse. In mental hospital, I mean.”

Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics.

“I knew you wanted something from me,” I said.

“Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.”

“Up yours.”

We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection.

Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin.

“Molly Bloom?” I asked.

“Who?”

“You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of Ulysses too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise Tristram Shandy.)

“I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education.

Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake.

Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom-not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.” A sort of Jewish princess from Dublin.

“And your wife-what was she like?” (We were so hopelessly lost by now that we pulled over and stopped the car.)

“Catholic,” he said, “a Papist from Liverpool.”

“What did she do?”

“Midwife.”

This was a strange bit of information. I didn’t know quite how to react to it.

“He’d been married to a Catholic midwife from Liverpool,” I imagined myself writing. (In the novel, I’d change Adrian’s name to something more exotic and make him much taller.)

“Why did you marry her?”

“Because she made me feel guilty.”

“Great reason.”

“Well it is. I was a guilty son of a bitch in medical school. A real sucker for the protestant ethic. I mean, I remember there were certain girls who made me feel good-but feeling good scared me. There was one girl-she used to hire this huge barn and invite everyone to come fuck everyone. She made me feel good-so, of course, I mistrusted her. And my wife made me feel guilty-so, of course, I married her. I was like you. I didn’t trust pleasure or my own impulses. It frightened the hell out of me to be happy. And when I got scared-I got married. Just like you, love.”

“What makes you think I got married out of fear?” I was indignant because he was right.

“Oh, probably you found yourself fucking too many guys, not knowing how to say no, and even liking it some of the time, and then you felt guilty for having fun. We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer-and the trouble is: you believe it. Well, it’s bullshit. It took me thirty-six years to realize what a load of bullshit it is and if there’s one thing I want to do for you it’s teach you the same.”

“You have all kinds of plans for me, don’t you? You want to teach me about freedom, about pleasure, you want to write books with me, convert me… Why do men always want to convert me? I must look like a convert.”

“You look like you want to be saved, ducks. You ask for it. You turn those big myopic eyes up at me as if I were Big Daddy Psychoanalyst. You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human. You sit there the whole time keeping tabs, making mental notes, imagining people as books or case histories- I know that game. You tell yourself you’re collecting material. You tell yourself you’re studying human nature. Art above life at all times. Another version of the puritanical bullshit. Only you have a new twist to it. You think you’re a hedonist because you take off and run around with me. But it’s the bloody old work ethic all the same because you’re only thinking you’ll write about me. So it’s actually work, n’est-ce pas? You can fuck me and call it poetry. Pretty clever. You deceive yourself beautifully that way.”

“You really are a great one for unloading two-bit analyses, aren’t you? A real television shrink.”

Adrian laughed. “Look, ducks, I know about you from myself. Psychoanalysts play the same game. They’re just like writers. Everything’s at one remove, a case history, a study. Also, they’re terrified of death-just like poets. Doctors hate death: that’s why they go into medicine. And they have to stir things up all the time and keep bloody busy just to prove to themselves they’re not dead. I know your game because I play it myself. It’s not such a mystery as you think. You’re really quite transparent.”

It infuriated me that he saw me more cynically than I saw myself. I always think I’m protecting myself against other people’s views of me by taking the most jaundiced view of myself possible. Then suddenly I realize that even this jaundiced view is self-flattering. When wounded, I lapse into high-school French:

“Vous vous moquez de moi. ”

“You’re damned right I do. Look-you’re sitting here with me right now because your life is dishonest and your marriage either dead or dying or riddled with lies. The lies are of your own making. You have to bloody well save yourself. It’s your life you’re fucking up, not mine.”

“I thought you said I wanted you to save me.”

“You do. But I’m not going to be trapped like that. I’ll fail you in some major way and you’ll start to hate me worse than you hate your husband…”

“I don’t hate my husband.”

“Right. But he bores you-and that’s worse, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer. Now I was really depressed. The champagne was wearing off.

“Why do you have to start converting me before you’ve even fucked me?”

“Because it’s that you really want.”

“Bullshit, Adrian. What I really want is to get laid. And leave my bloody mind alone.” But I knew I was lying.

“Madam, if you want to get laid, then you’ll get laid.” Me started the car. “I rather like calling you madam, you know.”

But I had no diaphragm and he had no erection and by the time we finally made it to the pension, we were all wrung out from having gotten lost so many times.

We lay on his bed and held each other. We examined each other’s nakedness with tenderness and amusement. The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known. All the smells and tastes of it, the lines, the hairs, the birthmarks. But Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy- unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time. His muscular thighs. His sunburned knees. His feet. (Which I did not kiss.) His dirty toenails. (Ditto.) Then I started all over again. At his lovely wet mouth.

“Where did you get those little pointed teeth?”

“From the stoat who was my mother.”

“The what?”

“Stoat.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t care. We were tasting each other. We were upside down and his tongue was playing music in my cunt.

“You’ve a lovely cunt,” he said, “and the greatest ass I’ve ever seen. Too bad you’ve got no tits.”

“Thanks.”

I kept sucking away but as soon as he got hard, he’d get soft again.

“I don’t really want to fuck you anyway.”

“Why?”

“Dunno why-I just don’t feel like it.”

Adrian wanted to be loved for himself alone, and not his yellow hair. (Or his pink prick.) It was rather touching, actually. He didn’t want to be a fucking machine.

“I can fuck with the best of them when I feel like it,” he said defiantly.

“Of course you can.”

“Now you’ve got your bloody social worker voice on,” he said.

I had been a social worker on a couple of occasions in bed. Once with Brian, after he’d been released from the psycho ward and was too full of Thorazine (and too schizoid) to screw. For a month we’d lain in bed and held hands. “Like Hansel and Gretel,” he said. It was rather sweet. What you’d imagine Dodgson doing with Alice in a boat on the Thames. It was also something of a relief after Brian’s manic phase when he’d come very close to strangling me. And even before he cracked up, Brian’s asexual preferences were somewhat odd. He only liked sucking, not fucking. At the time, I was too inexperienced to realize that all men weren’t that way. I was twenty-one and Brian was twenty-five, and remembering what I’d heard about men reaching their sexual peak at sixteen and women at thirty, I figured that Brian’s age was to blame. He was in decline. Over the hill, I thought. I did get very good at sucking, though.

I’d also played social worker to Charlie Fielding, the conductor whose baton kept wilting. He was dazzlingly grateful. “You’re a real find,” he kept saying that first night (meaning that he expected I’d throw him out in the cold and I didn’t). He made up for it later. It was only opening nights that wilted him.

But Adrian? Sexy Adrian. He was supposed to be my zipless fuck. What happened? The funny thing was, I didn’t really mind. He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. Back in my days of worshipping the Woolfs and the Webbs it had seemed inconceivable to me, but now I understood it. Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky. I had been a feminist all my life (I date my “radicalization” to the night in 1955 on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary), but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies. It wasn’t easy. Besides, the older you got, the clearer it became that men were basically terrified of women. Some secretly, some openly. What could be more poignant than a liberated worn an eye to eye with a limp prick? All history’s greatest issues paled by comparison with these two quintessential objects: the eternal woman and the eternal limp prick.

“Do I scare you?” I asked Adrian.

“You?”

“Well some men claim to be afraid of me.”

Adrian laughed. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said, “a pussycat-as you Americans say. But that’s not the point.”

“Do you usually have this problem?”

“Nein, Frau Doktor, and I bloody well don’t want to be interrogated further. This is absurd. I do not have a potency problem-it’s just that I am awed by your stupendous ass and I don’t feel like fucking.”

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

“I refuse to be impaled upon a pin,” Adrian said, unaware of the pun it immediately brought to mind. “I refuse to be categorized. When you finally do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an anti-hero, a bastard or a saint. You won’t be able to categorize me.”

And at that moment, I fell madly in love with him. His limp prick had penetrated where a stiff one would never have reached.