Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“What do you do?”

The odd intimacy of waiting outside a camper while our partners fucked each other called for some kind of confession, so I gave out.

“New Yorker, Jewish, from a very neurotic upper-middle-class family, married for the second time to a shrink, no children, twenty-nine-years old, just published a book of supposedly erotic poems which caused strange men to call me up in the middle of the night with propositions and prepositions, and caused a big fuss to be made over me-college reading tours, interviews, letters from lunatics, and such-I nipped out. Started reading my own poems and trying to become one with the image presented in them. Started trying to live out my fantasies. Started believing I was a fictional character invented by me.”

“Weird,” said Marty, impressed.

“The point is that fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.”

Wasn’t I sounding like Bennett? The irony of it!

“I wish you’d tell Judy that,” Marty said.

“Nobody can tell anyone anything,” I said.

Later, when Adrian and I were in the tent together, I asked him about Judy.

“Boring cunt,” he said. “It just lies there and doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.”

“How’d she like you?”

“How do I know?”

“Don’t you care?”

“Look-I fucked Judy as one might have coffee after dinner. And not very good coffee at that.”

“Then why bother?”

“Why not?”

“Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.”

“So?”

“So you wind up with the opposite of what you wanted. You wanted intensity, but you get numbness. It’s self-defeating.”

“You’re lecturing me,” Adrian said. “You’re right,” I said without apology.

The next morning Judy and Marty were gone. They had packed up and fled in the night like gypsies. “I lied to you last night,” Adrian said. “About what?”

“I actually didn’t fuck Judy at all.”

“How come?”

“Because I didn’t feel like it.” I laughed nastily.

“You mean you couldn’t.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t want to.”

“It doesn’t matter at all to me,” I said, “whether you did or didn’t.”

“That’s shit.”

“That’s what you think.”

“You’re just furious because I’m the first man you’ve met that you can’t control, and you can’t put up for long without anyone or anything you can’t control.”

“Crap. I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game. I agree with you about spontaneity and existentialism-but this isn’t spontaneity at all-it’s desperation. You said it about me the first day we screwed and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom. It isn’t even pleasurable. It’s pathetic. Even this trip is pathetic.”

“You never give anything a chance,” Adrian said.

Later we swam in the pond and dried ourselves in the sun. Adrian stretched out on the grass and squinted up into the sunlight. I lay with my head on his chest smelling the warm odor of his skin. Suddenly a cloud passed in front of the sun and rain began to fall lightly. We didn’t move. The rain cloud passed, leaving us sprinkled with large drops. I could feel them evaporating when the sun came out and shone on our skin again. A daddy longlegs walked over Adrian’s shoulder and through his hair. I sat bolt upright.

“What’s wrong?”

“Disgusting bug.”

“Where?”

“Your shoulder.”

He looked sideways across his chest for it and grabbed it by one leg. He dangled it, watching it tread the air like a swimmer treading water.

“Don’t kill it!” I pleaded.

“I thought you were scared of it.”

“I am, but I don’t want to see you kill it.” I shrank back.

“How about this?” he said, pulling off one of its legs.

“Oh God-don’t! I hate it when people do that.”

Adrian went on plucking off the legs like daisy petals.

“She loves me, she loves me not…” he said.

“I hate that,” I said, “please don’t”

“I thought you hated bugs.”

“I don’t like them crawling on me-but I can’t stand to see them killed either. And it makes me sick to see you mutilate it like that. I can’t watch,” and I got up and ran back to the swimming hole.

“I don’t understand you!” Adrian shouted after me. Why are you so bloody sensitive?”

I ducked under the water.

We didn’t speak again until after lunch.

“You’ve ruined it,” Adrian said, “with your fretting and worrying and hypersensitivity.”

“OK, then drop me off in Paris and I’ll fly home from there.”

“With pleasure.”

“I could have told you that you’d get sick of me if I ever displayed any human feelings. What kind of plastic woman do you want, anyway?”

“Don’t be daft. I just want you to grow up.”

“As defined by you.”

“As defined by both of us.”

“Aren’t you democratic,” I said sarcastically.

We began packing the car, banging tent poles and gear. It took about twenty minutes, during which we didn’t exchange a word. Finally we got in the car.

“I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you that I cared enough about you to shake up my whole life for you.”

“You didn’t do it for me,” he said, “I was just the excuse.”

“I never would have been able to do it without feeling as strongly about you as I did.” And then with a shudder that went through my whole body, I remembered my longing for him in Vienna. The weakness in the knees. The churning guts. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. All the things he stirred in me which had made me follow him. I longed for him as he was when I first met him. The man he had become was disappointing.

“The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed,” I said. “They’re mutually exclusive. Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“My theory of the zipless fuck,” I said. And I explained it as best I could.

“You mean I disappoint you?” he asked, putting his arms around me and pulling me down until my head was in his lap. I smelled the gamy smell of his dirty trousers.

“Let’s get out of the car,” I said.

We walked over to a tree and sat down under it. I lay with my head on his lap. Aimlessly, I began fiddling with his fly. I half unzipped it and took his soft penis in my hand.

“It’s little,” he said.

I looked up at him, his green-gold eyes, the blond hair over his forehead, the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth, his sunburned cheeks. He was still beautiful to me. I longed for him with a yearning that was no less painful for being part nostalgia. We kissed for a long time, his tongue making dizzying circles in my mouth. No matter how long we went on kissing his penis stayed soft. He laughed his sunny laugh and I laughed too. I knew he’d always hold back on me. I knew I’d never really possess him, and that was part of what made him so beautiful. I would write about him, talk about him, remember him, but never have him. The unattainable man.

We drove toward Paris. I insisted I wanted to go home, but Adrian tried to prevail on me to stay. He was afraid of losing my loyalty now. He sensed I was drifting away. He knew I was already filing him in my notebook for future reference. As we approached the outskirts of Paris, we began seeing graffiti scrawled under the highway bridges. One of them read: