Fear Of Flying Page 4

  “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 th
is 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?).

  3 Knock, Knock

  Sex, as I said, can be summed up in three P’s: procreation, pleasure, and pride. From the long-range point of view, which we must always consider, procreation is by far the most important, since without procreation there could be no continuation of the race… So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations… and as such it is a comparative luxury from nature’s point of view. It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.

  – Madeline Gray,

  The Normal Woman (sic), 1967

  In my dream Adrian and Bennett were going up and down on a seesaw in the playground in Central Park where I used to go as a child.

  “Maybe she ought to be analyzed in England,” Bennett was saying as his end of the seesaw swung up in the air. “I’ll turn her passport and shot record over to you.”

  Adrian had his feet on the ground now and he began shaking the seesaw like a big kid unloosed in the little kids’ playground.

  “Stop that!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him!” But Adrian kept grinning and shaking the seesaw. “Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!” I tried to scream, but, as always in dreams, my words became garbled. I was terrified that Adrian was going to bounce Bennett to the ground and break his back. “Please, please stop!” I pleaded.

  “What’s wrong?” Bennett mumbled. I had awakened him. I always talked in my sleep, and he always answered.

  “What happened?”

  “You were on a seesaw with someone. I got scared.”

  “Oh.” He rolled over.

  Normally Bennett would have put his arms around me, but we were in narrow beds on opposite sides of the room and instead he went back to sleep.

  I was wide awake now and could hear birds making a racket in the garden behind the hotel. At first they comforted me. Then I remembered that they were German birds and I got depressed. Secretly, I hate traveling. I’m restless at home, but the minute I get away I feel the threat of doom hanging over my most trivial actions. Why had I come back to Europe anyway? My whole life was in pieces. For two years I had lain in bed with Bennett and thought of other men. For two years I had debated whether to get pregnant or strike out on my own and see some more of the world before settling down to
anything that permanent. How did people decide to get pregnant, I wondered. It was such an awesome decision. In a way, it was such an arrogant decision. To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like. I assumed that most women got pregnant without thinking about it because if they ever once considered what it really meant, they would surely be overwhelmed with doubt. I had none of that blind faith in chance which other women seemed to have. I always wanted to be in control of my fate. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life. I had been compulsively using a diaphragm for so long that pregnancy could never be accidental for me. Even during the two years I took the pill, I never missed a day. Slob that I was about everything else, I had never messed up on that score. I was virtually the only one of my friends who’d never had an abortion. What was wrong with me? Was I unnatural? I just hadn’t the normal female compulsion to get knocked up. All I could think of was me with my restlessness, with my longings for zipless fucks and strangers on trains-being tied down with a baby. How could I wish that on a baby?

  “If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious red-headed mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast-drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the tzatzka business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille.