Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

I showed her my letter from Voyeur Magazine, but she wouldn’t let me register.

“Why?”

“Because we are not authorized to admit Press,” she sneered. “I am so sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

I could feel the anger gather inside my head like steam in a pressure cooker. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut.

Bennett shot me a look which said: calm down. He hates it when I get angry at people in public. But his trying to hold me back only made me more furious.

“Look-if you don’t let me in I’ll write about that, too.” I knew that once the meetings got started I could probably walk right in without a badge-so it really didn’t matter. Besides, I scarcely cared all that much about writing the article. I was a spy from the outside world. A spy in the house of analysis.

“I’m sure you don’t want me to write about how the analysts are scared of admitting writers to their meetings, do you?”

“I’m zo sorry,” the Austrian bitch kept repeating. “But I really haff not got za ausority to admit you…”

“Just following orders, I suppose.”

“I haff instructions to obey,” she said.

“You and Eichmann.”

“Pardon?” She hadn’t heard me.

Somebody else had. I turned around and saw this blond, shaggy-haired Englishman with a pipe hanging out of his face.

“If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you,” he said. He was smiling at me the way a man smiles when he’s lying on top of you after a particularly good lay.

“You’ve got to be an analyst,” I said, “nobody else would throw the word paranoid around so freely.”

He grinned.

He was wearing a very thin white cotton Indian kurtah and I could see his reddish-blond chest hair curling underneath it

“Cheeky cunt,” he said. Then he grabbed a fistful of my ass and gave it a long playful squeeze.

“You’ve a lovely ass,” he said. “Come, I’ll see to it that you get into the conference.”

Of course he turned out to have no authority whatsoever In the matter, but I didn’t know that till later. He was bustling around so officiously that you’d have thought he was the head of the whole Congress. He was chairman of one of the preconferences-but he had absolutely nothing to say about Press. Who cared about Press, anyway? All I wanted was for him to press my ass again. I would have followed him anywhere. Dachau, Auschwitz, anywhere. I looked across the registration desk and saw Bennett talking seriously with another analyst from New York.

The Englishman had made his way into the crowd and was grilling the registration girl in my behalf. Then he walked back to me.

“Look-she says you have to wait and talk to Rodney Lehmann. He’s a friend of mine from London and he ought to be here any minute so why don’t we walk across to the café, have a beer, and look for him?”

“Let me just tell my husband,” I said. It was going to become something of a refrain in the next few days.

He seemed glad to hear that I had a husband. At least he didn’t seem sorry.

I asked Bennett if he’d come across the street to the café and meet us (hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come too soon) and he waved me off. He was busy talking about counter-transference.

I followed the smoke from the Englishman’s pipe down the steps and across the street. He puffed along like a train, the pipe seeming to propel him. I was happy to be his caboose.

We set ourselves up in the café, with a quarter liter of white wine for me and a beer for him. He was wearing Indian sandals and dirty toenails. He didn’t look like a shrink at all.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“I mean your ancestors.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why are you dodging my question?”

“I don’t have to answer your question.”

“I know.” He puffed his pipe and looked off into the distance. The corners of his eyes crinkled into about a hundred tiny lines and his mouth curled up in a sort of smile even when he wasn’t smiling. I knew I’d say yes to anything he asked. My only worry was: maybe he wouldn’t ask soon enough.

“Polish Jews on one side, Russian on the other-”

“I thought so. You look Jewish.”

“And you look like an English anti-Semite.”

“Oh come on-I like Jews…”

“Some of your best friends…”

“It’s just that Jewish girls are so bloody good in bed.”

I couldn’t think of a single witty thing to say. Sweet Jesus, I thought, here he was. The real z.f. The zipless fuck par excellence. What in God’s name were we waiting for? Certainly not Rodney Lehmann.

“I also like the Chinese,” he said, “and you’ve got a nice-looking husband.”

“Maybe I ought to fix you up with him. After all, you’re both analysts. You’d have a lot in common. You could bugger each other under a picture of Freud.”

“Cunt,” he said. “Actually, it’s more Chinese girls, I fancy-but Jewish girls from New York who like a good fight also strike me as dead sexy. Any woman who can raise hell the way you did up at registration seems pretty promising.”

“Thanks.” At least I can recognize a compliment when I get one. My underpants were wet enough to mop the streets of Vienna.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thought I looked Jewish,” I said, trying to get the conversation back to more neutral territory. (Enough of sex. Let’s get back to bigotry.) His thinking I looked Jewish actually excited me. God only knows why.

“Look-I’m not an anti-Semite, but you are. Why do you think you don’t look Jewish?”

“Because people always think I’m German-and I’ve spent half my life listening to anti-Semitic stories told by people who assumed I wasn’t-”

“That’s what I hate about Jews,” he said. “They’re the only ones allowed to tell anti-Semitic jokes. It’s bloody unfair. Why should I be deprived of the pleasure of masochistic Jewish humor just because I’m a goy?”

He sounded so goyish saying goy.

“You don’t pronounce it right.”

“What? Goy?”

“Oh, that’s OK, but masochistic.” (He pronounced the first syllable mace, just like an Englishman.) “You’ve got to watch how you pronounce Yiddish words like masochistic,” I said. “We Jews are very touchy.”

We ordered another round of drinks. He kept making a pretense of looking around for Rodney Lehmann and I came on with a very professional spiel about the article I was going to write. I nearly convinced myself all over again. That’s one of my biggest problems. When I start out to convince other people, I don’t always convince them but I invariably convince myself. I’m a complete bust as a con woman.

“You really have an American accent,” he said, smiling his just-got-laid smile.

“I haven’t got an accent-you have-”

“Ac-sent,” he said mocking me.

“Fuck you.”

“That’s not at all a bad idea.”

“What did you say your name was?” (Which, as you may recall, is the climactic line from Strindberg’s Miss Julie.)

“Adrian Goodlove,” he said. And with that he turned suddenly and upset his beer all over me.

“Terribly sorry,” he kept saying, wiping at the table with his dirty handkerchief, his hand, and eventually his Indian shirt-which he took off, rolled up and gave me to wipe my dress with. Such chivalry! But I was just sitting there looking at the curly blond hair on his chest and feeling the beer trickle between my legs.

“I really don’t mind at all,” I said. It wasn’t true that I didn’t mind. I loved it.

Goodlove, Goodall, Goodbar, Goodbody,

Goodchild, Goodeve, Goodfellow, Goodford,