Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

So Bennett, a child psychiatrist with half his analytic training done, was drafted at the age of thirty-one. We had known each other three months. We had come to each other from other unhappy love affairs-and on my part a disastrous first marriage. We were sick of being single; we were terrified of being alone; we were happy together in bed; we were frightened of the future; we were married one day before Bennett had to leave for Fort Sam Houston.

From the first, the marriage was strange. We’d both expected rescue. And there we were both clawing at each other and drowning together. Things turned hostile in a matter of days. We quickly went from verbal assaults to utter silence, punc-tuated by lovemaking that kept on, amazingly enough, being good. Neither of us quite knew what we had gotten into, or why.

Before we came to Heidelberg, the setting for the first two months of our marriage was as strange as our reason for getting married. There we were, two terrified, transplanted Manhattanites, plunked down in San Antonio, Texas. Bennett was shorn of his hair, stuffed into army greens, forced to sit through hour after hour of army propaganda on how to be an army doctor-something he detested with his whole heart.

I stayed “home” in a sterile motel outside San Antonio, watched television, tinkered with my poems, felt enraged and powerless. Like most native New York girls, I had never learned to drive. I was twenty-four and stranded in a Texas motel facing a sun-parched strip of highway between San Antonio and Austin. I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all.

Instead, I had allowed myself to be shunted into graduate school. Graduate school was supposed to be safe. Graduate school was supposed to be the thing that you got “under your belt” (like a baby?) before you settled down to writing. What an obvious swindle it now seems! But then it seemed prudent, wise, and responsible. I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to-so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education.

Marrying Bennett sprung me from graduate school. I took a leave of absence to follow him into the army. What else could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted to give up my fellowship-it was History giving me a boot in the ass. Marrying Bennett also got me away from New York and away from my mother and away from the Graduate English Department at Columbia and away from my ex-husband and away from my ex-boyfriends-all of whom had come to seem identical in my mind. I wanted out. I wanted escape. And Bennett was the vehicle for it. Our marriage began under that heavy burden. That it survived at all is rather a miracle.

In Heidelberg, we set up house in a vast American concentration camp in the postwar section of town (a far cry from the beautiful old section near the Schloss, which tourists see). Our neighbors were mostly army captains and their “dependents.” With a few notable exceptions they were the most considerate people I’ve ever lived among. The wives welcomed you with coffee when you moved in. The children were maddeningly friendly and polite. The husbands would spring gallantly to help you dig your car out of a snowbank or carry heavy boxes upstairs. It was all the more astonishing then when they announced to you that life was cheap in Asia, that the U.S. ought to bomb the hell out of the Viet Cong, and finally, that soldiers were only there to do a job but not to have political opinions. They regarded Bennett and me as creatures from outer space, and that was rather how we felt ourselves.

Across the way were our other neighbors, the Germans. In 1945, when they were still militarists, they had hated Americans for winning the war. Now, in 1966, the Germans were pacifists (at least where other nations were concerned) and they hated the Americans for being in Vietnam. The ironies multiplied so fast you could hardly absorb them. If San Antonio had been strange, Heidelberg was a thousand times stranger. We lived between two sets of enemies and we were both so unhappy that we were enemies to each other as well.

I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways. The Armed Forces Radio Network blaring out the football scores and the (inflated) number of Viet Cong killed on the other side of the world. Children screaming. Twenty-five-year-old freckle-faced matrons from Kansas wandering about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes. Instead come the salesmen who stalk the hallways, ringing doorbells, selling everything from mutual funds to picture encyclopedias (in simplified vocabulary) to Oriental rugs. Besides the American strays and British dropouts and Pakistani students selling “on the side,” there is a veritable Bundeswehr of gnomelike Germans, peddling everything from “handpainted” oils of sugared Alps under honeyed sunsets to beer steins which play “God Bless America” to Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks which chime perpetually. And the army people buy and buy and buy. The wives buy to fill up their empty lives, to create an illusion of home in their drab quarters, to spread the grease of American money around. The kids buy helmets and war toys and child-sized fatigues so that they can play their favorite games of VC’s versus Green Berets and prepare for their future. The husbands buy power tools to counteract their own sense of impotence. They all buy clocks as if to symbolize the way the army is ticking away their lives.

Someone had started a rumor in Mark Twain Village that German clocks brought fortunes in “the land of the big PX,” so every captain or sergeant or first lieutenant made it his business to bring home at least thirty. They collected on his walls for two years, chiming and cuckooing at odd intervals, driving his wife and children as crazy as the army was driving him. And since the walls in those buildings were paper thin, even noncuckooing tenants (like us) heard a steady barrage of cuckoos all day long. When it wasn’t cuckoos next door, it was someone’s unmusical kid playing the unplayable “Star Spangled Banner” on the Hammond organ (paid for in easy monthly installments-it was the listening to it that was hard) or some chief warrant officer howling across the quadrangle for his kids (twin boys named Wayne and Dwayne-otherwise referred to as his “varmints”). When the cuckooing itself wasn’t infuriating me, the symbolism of the clocks amused me. Everyone in the army was always counting the days and minutes: eight more months before you rotate, three more months before your husband goes to Vietnam, two more years before you’re eligible for promotion, three more months before you can send for your wife and child… The cuckoos recorded every minute of every hour in that long march toward oblivion.