Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

I had been lying there in full phobic flower for about an hour and a half when the door creaked open.

“Who is it?” I said, my heart thudding.

“Shhhh.” A dark shadow moved toward me. The man under the bed.

“For God’s sake!” I was terrified.

“Shhh-it’s only me-Pierre,” Pierre said. And then he came over and sat down on the bed.

“Jesus-I thought it was some rapist or something.” He laughed. “Jesus wasn’t a rapist.”

“I guess not… What’s up?” It was a poor choice of words under the circumstances.

“You seem so depressed,” he said, full of counterfeit tenderness.

“I guess I am. All that craziness with Brian last summer and now Charlie…”

“I hate to see my little sister depressed,” he said, stroking my hair. And for some reason that “little sister” sent chills through me.

“You know I always think of you as my little sister, don’t you?”

“Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter…” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me. But what should I say? What was the etiquette in a situation like this?

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said weakly. Pierre’s hands were under my nightgown, stroking my thighs. I wasn’t as unaroused as I wanted to pretend.

“What isn’t a good idea?” he asked nonchalantly. “After all, it’s natural for a brother to love his little sister…” And he went on doing what comes naturally.

“What did you say?” I asked, sitting up.

“Just that it’s perfectly natural for a brother to love his little sister…” He might have been Albert Ellis giving a lecture.

“Pierre,” I said gently, “haven’t?you ever read Lolita?”

“I can’t stand that phony prose style of his,” Pierre said, annoyed with me for distracting him.

“But this is incest,” I said emphatically.

“Shhh-you’ll wake everyone… Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant. We’ll do it the Greek way, if you like…”

“It wasn’t pregnancy I was worried about for God’s sake-it was incest!” My reasoning didn’t seem to make a dent in Pierre’s resolve.

“Shhhh,” he said, pushing me down on the pillow. He was like some of the guys I’d met in Italy. If you resisted because you really weren’t interested, they thought it was fear of pregnancy and kept suggesting other alternatives-anal intercourse, sucking, mutual masturbation-anything except “NO.” Pierre inched up to the head of the bed and offered his erect penis to my mouth… The showdown. A battle was raging within me. It would have been so damned easy to oblige. To suck him and be done with it. It was so simple really. What difference could one more blow job make to my life?

“I can’t,” I said.

“Come on,” Pierre said, “I’ll teach you.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant I can’t; morally, I can’t…”

“It’s easy,” he said.

“I know it’s easy,” I said.

“Here,” he said, “all you do is…”

“Pierre!” I screamed. Pierre gathered his pajama bottoms around him and beat it out of the room.

I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again.

I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband-and good grief-that’s Daddy!

But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear?

I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teen-age Incest; Swapping; Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust.

Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival.

His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…

… Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark.

“Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded.

“Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.

“Listen kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears…” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know.

“Well-what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially.

“Come on you idiots-tell me!”

“You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling.

“How the fuck did you know?”

“Because he tried it with me,” she said.

“And me,” said Chloe.

“You’re kidding.”

“We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “Would that we were…”

“So what happened?”

“Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too… but I’m not entirely sure I believe her…”

“You bitch!” Chloe yelled.

“OK… OK… I believe you.”

“And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?”

“Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless… He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.”

“A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.”

“Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law… It isn’t really incest.”

“It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed.

“It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.)