Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

In the café, I sat next to my suitcase and ordered another beer. I was dazed and exhausted-almost too exhausted to be as miserable as I knew I ought to be. I would have to look for a hotel. It was getting dark. My suitcase was terribly heavy and I might have to wander the streets dragging it behind me and climb all those spiral staircases to inquire about rooms which would turn out to be occupied. I put my head down on the table. I wanted to weep out of sheer exhaustion, but I knew I couldn’t make myself that conspicuous. Already I was attracting the kind of quizzical glances a woman alone attracts. And I was too tired and harassed to react with subtlety. If anyone tried to pick me up now, I would probably scream and begin swinging with my fists. I was beyond words. I was tired of reasoning and arguing and trying to be clever. The first man who approached me with a cynical or flirtatious look would get it: a knee in the balls or a punch in the jaw. I would not sit there cowering in fear as I had at age thirteen when exhibitionists started unzipping their pants at me on the deserted subway to high school. I actually used to be afraid they’d be insulted and take terrible revenge unless I remained rooted to my seat. So I stayed, looking away, pretending not to notice, pretending not to be terrified, pretending to be reading and hoping somehow that the book would protect me. Later, in Italy, when men followed me in the ruins or pursued me in cars down the avenues (opening their doors and whispering vieni, vieni), I always wondered why I felt so sullied and spat upon and furious. It was supposed to be flattering. It was supposed to prove my womanliness. My mother had always said how womanly she felt in Italy. Then why did it make me feel so hunted? There must be something wrong with me I thought. I used to try to smile and toss my hair to show I was grateful. And then I felt like a fraud. Why wasn’t I grateful for being hunted?

But now I wanted to be alone, and if anybody interpreted my behavior differently, I’d react like a wild beast. Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my “availability”-as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: There is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You ladies.

I nursed my beer. As soon as I looked up, a man at a nearby table caught my eye. He had that swaggering look which says, I know what you want, baby… It was the same flirtatiousness that I had fallen for in Adrian, but now it sickened me. All I saw in it at this point was bullying and sadism. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed it were really concealing impotence. I didn’t care to test that hypothesis either.

I furrowed my brows and looked down. Couldn’t he see I didn’t want anyone? Couldn’t he see I was tired and dirty and beat? Couldn’t he see I was clinging to my beer glass as if it were the Holy Grail? Why was it that whenever you refused a man, refused him sincerely and wholeheartedly, he persisted in believing you were being coquettish?

I thought back to my days of having fantasies of men on trains. It’s true that I never did anything about these fantasies and wouldn’t have dared to. I wasn’t even brave enough to write about them until much later. But suppose I had approached one of these men, and suppose he had rejected me, looked away, shown disgust or revulsion. What then? I would have immediately taken the rejection to heart, believed myself in the wrong, blamed myself for being an evil woman, a whore, a slut, a disturber of the peace… More to the point, I would have immediately blamed my own unattractiveness, not the man’s reluctance, and I would have been destroyed for days by his rejection of me. Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension.

Suddenly-with the leering eyes of that strange man on me-I knew what I had done wrong with Adrian and why he had left me. I had broken the basic rule. I had pursued him. Years of having fantasies about men and never acting on them-and then for the first time in my life, I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a water-logged noodle and refuses me.

Men and women, women and men. It will never work, I thought Back in the days when men were hunters and chest-beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid… They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild-and what happened? The men wilted. It was hopeless. I had desired Adrian as I had never desired anyone before in my life, and the very intensity of my need canceled out his. The more I showed my passion, the cooler he became. The more I risked to be with him, the less he was willing to risk to be with me. Was it really that simple? Did it all come down to what my mother had told me years ago about “playing hard to get”? It did seem to be true that the men who had loved me hardest were the ones I was most casual about. But what was the fun of that? What was the point? Couldn’t you ever bring philos and eros together, at least for a little while? What was the point of this constant round of alternating losses, this constant cycle of desire and indifference, indifference and desire?

I had to find a hotel. It was late and dark and my suitcase was not only a great encumbrance, but it increased my air of availability. I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone-the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?

I dragged my albatross of a suitcase around the corner into the Rue de la Harpe (shades of Charlie’s girlfriend Sally) and surprisingly found a room in the first hotel I tried. The prices had gone up steeply since the last time I’d been there and I was given the last remaining room on the very top floor (a painfully long climb with that suitcase). The place was a firetrap, I remarked to myself with masochistic pleasure, and the top floor was where I was most likely to be trapped. All sorts of images rushed into my mind: Zelda Fitzgerald dying in that asylum fire (I had just read a biography of her); the seedy hotel room in the movie, Breathless; my father warning me gravely before my first unescorted trip to Europe at nineteen that he had seen Breathless and knew what happened to American girls in Europe; Bennett and I fighting bitterly in Paris five Christmases ago; Pia and I staying in this same hotel when we were both twenty-three; my first trip to Paris at thirteen (a posh suite at the Georges V with my parents and sisters, and all of us brushing our teeth with Perrier); my grandfather’s stories about living on bananas in Paris as a penniless art student; my mother dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said)…

I had been temporarily cheered by my luck in finding a place, but when I actually saw the room and realized I’d have to spend the night alone there, my heart sank. It was really half a room with a plywood partition across it (God knows what was on the other side) and a sagging single bed covered by a very dusty chintz spread. The walls were old striped wallpaper, very splotched and discolored.