Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

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?