Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

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.