Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

Am I doomed to spend my life running between two men?

One diffident and mild and almost indifferent and one so fiery and restless that he uses up all my oxygen?

A typical scene at the White-Stoloff dinner table. My mother Jude, screaming about Robert Ardrey and territoriality. My grandfather Stoloff (known to everyone as Papa) quoting Lenin and Pushkin to prove that Picasso is a phony. My sister Chloe telling Jude to shut up, Randy screaming for Chloe to shut up. Bob and Lalah upstairs nursing the quints, Pierre arguing economics with Abel. Chloe baiting Bennett about psychiatry, Bennett coughing nervously and being inscrutable, Randy attacking my poetry, my grandmother (Mama) sewing and admonishing us not to “talk like truck drivers,” and me thumbing through a magazine to shield myself somehow (always with the printed word!) from my family.

chloe: Isadora’s always reading something. Can’t you putdown the goddamned magazine?

me: Why? So I can yell along with everyone else?

chloe: Well it would be better than reading a goddamned magazine all the time.

my father (humming Chattanooga Choo Choo): “Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore…”

chloe (eyes heavenward as if in supplication): And Daddy’s always humming or making wisecracks. Can’t we ever have a serious conversation around here?

me (reading): Who wants a serious conversation?

chloe: You’re a hostile bitch.

me: For someone who hates psychiatry, you go pretty heavy on the jargon.

chloe: Fuck you.

mama (looking up from her sewing): You should be ashamed. I never brought up my granddaughters that they should talk like truck drivers.

papa (looking up from his debate with Jude): Disgusting.

chloe fat the top of her lungs): WILL EVERYONE SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE AND LISTEN TO ME!

The sound of a piano is heard in the living room. It’s my father playing his own rendition of Begin the Beguine, which he. played years ago in the first Broadway production of Jubilee. “When they begin… the… Beguine… It brings back the thrill of music so tennn-derrr…”

His voice wafts to me over the chords of the slightly out-of-tune Steinway baby grand. But Papa and Jude don’t even notice his departure.

“In this society,” Jude is saying, “the standards of art are set by press agents and public relations men-which means that there are no stan-”

“I’ve always said,” Papa interrupts, “that the world is divided into two types of people: the crooks and the semicrooks…”

And my father answers them both with a broken chord.

Charlie and I parted tearfully in Amsterdam. The central train station. He was off to Paris and Le Havre (to go right back to the States he said). But I didn’t believe him. I was off to Yorkshire-whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t like it at all. A tearful goodbye. We are eating Amsterdam herrings and weeping-both of us.

“It’s best for us to be apart for a while, darling,” he says.

“Yes,” I say, lying through my teeth (which are full of herring). And we kiss, exchanging oniony saliva. I board the train to the Hook of Holland. I wave one herring-scented hand. Charlie blows kisses. He stands on the platform, round-shouldered, a conductor’s baton protruding from his trench-coat pocket, a battered briefcase full of orchestral scores and Dutch herrings in his hand. And the train pulls out. On the steamer from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea.

In Yorkshire, I get a letter from Charlie who is still (of course) in Paris. “Darling,” he writes, “don’t think that just because I’m with Sally that I’ve stopped loving you…”

I am staying in a big, draughty English country house with crazy English friends who drink gin all day to keep warm and make Oscar Wilde-ish conversation and I spend the next ten days in a drunken stupor. I cable Pia to meet me in Florence sooner than planned, and the two of us take revenge on our faithless lovers (hers is in Boston) by sleeping with every man in Florence except Michelangelo’s David. Only it is no good. We are still desperately unhappy. Charlie calls me in Florence to beg forgiveness (he is still in Paris with Sally) and that precipitates another joyless orgy… Then Pia and I repent and decide to purify ourselves. We douche with Italian white chianti vinegar. We kneel before the statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and ask forgiveness. We go to the top of Giotto’s Campanile and pray to the ghost of Giotto (any famous old ghost will do, really). We give up food for two days and drink only San Pellegrino. We douche with San Pellegrino. Finally, as the ultimate act of expiation, we decide to mail our diaphragms to our faithless lovers and try to make them feel guilty instead. But what to wrap them in? Pia has an old Motta Panetone box under the bed of our hurricane-struck pensione room. I look and look but can’t find an appropriate box to mail my diaphragm in, so I abandon the project rather hastily. (What good would it do to send my diaphragm to Charlie and Sally in a panetone box anyway?) But Pia is undeterred. She is bustling around looking for brown paper and tape. She is scrawling addresses and return addresses. She reminds me of myself at thirteen furtively sending away for Kotex booklets in “plain brown wrappers.”

We troop off to American Express (where we have slept with half the leering Florentine mail clerks). We are told to make out a customs declaration. But what to put on the customs declaration? “One diaphragm, used?” “One diaphragm, much abused?” “Used clothing” perhaps? Can a diaphragm be considered an article of clothing? Pia and I debate this. “You do wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt?

“Fuck him!” Pia says. “Let him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag-valuation $100.”

Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties.

From Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut.

I was pretty panicky, as I recall-about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish-since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much-admittedly) by my terrible act of deception.