Fear of Flying (10 page)

Me: “Will you carry my briefcase?”

Adrian: “As long as you agree not to carry anything for me just yet”

OR:

Me: “I divorced my first husband principally because he was crazy.”

Adrian (furrowing his Laingian brows): “That would seem to me to be a good reason to
marry
someone, not divorce him.”

Me: “But he watched television every night.”

Adrian: “Oh, then I
see
why you divorced him.”

Why had May Pei fucked up Adrian’s life?

“She left me in the lurch and went back to Singapore. She had a child there living with its father and the child was in a car crash. She
had
to go back, but she could have at least written. For months I walked around feeling that the world was made up of mechanical people. I’ve never been so depressed. The bitch finally married the pediatrician who took care of her kid—an American bloke.”

“So why didn’t you go after her if you cared so much?”

He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him.

“Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.)

“Because you loved her.”

“I never used that word.”

“But if you
felt
that way, why didn’t you go?”

“My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “
Someone’s
got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.”

“Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.”

“Not very funny,” I said, laughing.

After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.”

“A what?”

“A bin—you know, a madhouse. In mental hospital, I mean.”

Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics.

“I knew you wanted something from me,” I said.

“Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.”

“Up yours.”

We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection.

Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin.

“Molly Bloom?” I asked.

“Who?”

“You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of
Ulysses
too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise
Tristram Shandy.
)

“I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education.

Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake.

Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom—not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.” A sort of Jewish princess from Dublin.

“And your wife—what was she like?” (We were so hopelessly lost by now that we pulled over and stopped the car.)

“Catholic,” he said, “a Papist from Liverpool.”

“What did she do?”

“Midwife.”

This was a strange bit of information. I didn’t know quite how to react to it.

“He’d been married to a Catholic midwife from Liverpool,” I imagined myself writing. (In the novel, I’d change Adrian’s name to something more exotic and make him much taller.)

“Why did you marry her?”

“Because she made me feel guilty.”

“Great reason.”

“Well it
is.
I was a guilty son of a bitch in medical school. A real sucker for the protestant ethic. I mean, I remember there were certain girls who made me feel good—but feeling good scared me. There was one girl—she used to hire this huge barn and invite everyone to come fuck everyone. She made me feel good—so, of course, I mistrusted her. And my wife made me feel guilty—so, of course, I married her. I was like you. I didn’t trust pleasure or my own impulses. It frightened the hell out of me to be happy. And when I got scared—I got married. Just like you, love.”

“What makes you think I got married out of fear?” I was indignant because he was right.

“Oh, probably you found yourself fucking too many guys, not knowing how to say no, and even liking it some of the time, and then you felt guilty for having fun. We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer—and the trouble is: you believe it. Well, it’s bullshit. It took me thirty-six years to realize what a load of bullshit it is and if there’s one thing I want to do for you it’s teach you the same.”

“You have all kinds of plans for me, don’t you? You want to teach me about freedom, about pleasure, you want to write books with me, convert me. … Why do men always want to convert me? I must
look
like a convert.”

“You look like you want to be saved, ducks. You ask for it. You turn those big myopic eyes up at me as if I were Big Daddy Psychoanalyst. You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human. You sit there the whole time keeping tabs, making mental notes, imagining people as books or case histories— I know that game. You tell yourself you’re collecting material. You tell yourself you’re studying human nature. Art above life at all times. Another version of the puritanical bullshit. Only you have a new twist to it. You think you’re a hedonist because you take off and run around with me. But it’s the bloody old work ethic all the same because you’re only thinking you’ll write about me. So it’s actually work,
n’est-ce pas?
You can fuck me and call it poetry. Pretty clever. You deceive yourself beautifully that way.”

“You really are a great one for unloading two-bit analyses, aren’t you? A real television shrink.”

Adrian laughed. “Look, ducks, I know about you from
myself.
Psychoanalysts play the same game. They’re just
like
writers. Everything’s at one remove, a case history, a study. Also, they’re terrified of death—just like poets. Doctors hate death: that’s why they go
into
medicine. And they have to stir things up all the time and keep bloody busy just to prove to themselves they’re not dead. I know your game because I play it myself. It’s not such a mystery as you think. You’re really quite transparent.”

It infuriated me that he saw me more cynically than I saw myself. I always think I’m protecting myself against other people’s views of me by taking the most jaundiced view of myself possible. Then suddenly I realize that even this jaundiced view is self-flattering. When wounded, I lapse into high-school French:

“
Vous vous moquez de moi.
”

“You’re damned right I do. Look—you’re sitting here with me right now because your life is dishonest and your marriage either dead or dying or riddled with lies. The lies are of your own making. You have to bloody well save yourself. It’s your life you’re fucking up, not mine.”

“I thought you said I wanted
you
to save me.”

“You do. But I’m not going to be trapped like that. I’ll fail you in some major way and you’ll start to hate me worse than you hate your husband. …”

“I
don’t
hate my husband.”

“Right. But he bores you—and that’s worse, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer. Now I was really depressed. The champagne was wearing off.

“Why do you have to start converting me before you’ve even fucked me?”

“Because it’s that you really want.”

“Bullshit, Adrian. What I really want is to get laid. And leave my bloody mind alone.” But I knew I was lying.

“Madam, if you want to get laid, then you’ll get laid.” Me started the car. “I rather like calling you madam, you know.”

But I had no diaphragm and he had no erection and by the time we finally made it to the pension, we were all wrung out from having gotten lost so many times.

We lay on his bed and held each other. We examined each other’s nakedness with tenderness and amusement. The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known. All the smells and tastes of it, the lines, the hairs, the birthmarks. But Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy— unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time. His muscular thighs. His sunburned knees. His feet. (Which I did not kiss.) His dirty toenails. (Ditto.) Then I started all over again. At his lovely wet mouth.

“Where did you get those little pointed teeth?”

“From the stoat who was my mother.”

“The what?”

“Stoat.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t care. We were tasting each other. We were upside down and his tongue was playing music in my cunt.

“You’ve a lovely cunt,” he said, “and the greatest ass I’ve ever seen. Too bad you’ve got no tits.”

“Thanks.”

I kept sucking away but as soon as he got hard, he’d get soft again.

“I don’t really want to fuck you anyway.”

“Why?”

“Dunno why—I just don’t feel like it.”

Adrian wanted to be loved for himself alone, and not his yellow hair. (Or his pink prick.) It was rather touching, actually. He didn’t want to be a fucking machine.

“I can fuck with the best of them when I feel like it,” he said defiantly.

“Of course you can.”

“Now you’ve got your bloody social worker voice on,” he said.

I had been a social worker on a couple of occasions in bed. Once with Brian, after he’d been released from the psycho ward and was too full of Thorazine (and too schizoid) to screw. For a month we’d lain in bed and held hands. “Like Hansel and Gretel,” he said. It was rather sweet. What you’d imagine Dodgson doing with Alice in a boat on the Thames. It was also something of a relief after Brian’s manic phase when he’d come very close to strangling me. And even before he cracked up, Brian’s asexual preferences were somewhat odd. He only liked sucking, not fucking. At the time, I was too inexperienced to realize that all men weren’t that way. I was twenty-one and Brian was twenty-five, and remembering what I’d heard about men reaching their sexual peak at sixteen and women at thirty, I figured that Brian’s
age
was to blame. He was in decline. Over the hill, I thought. I did get very good at sucking, though.

I’d also played social worker to Charlie Fielding, the conductor whose baton kept wilting. He was dazzlingly grateful. “You’re a real find,” he kept saying that first night (meaning that he expected I’d throw him out in the cold and I didn’t). He made up for it later. It was only opening nights that wilted him.

But Adrian? Sexy Adrian. He was supposed to be my zipless fuck. What happened? The funny thing was, I didn’t really mind. He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. Back in my days of worshipping the Woolfs and the Webbs it had seemed inconceivable to me, but now I understood it. Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky. I had been a feminist all my life (I date my “radicalization” to the night in 1955 on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary), but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies. It wasn’t easy. Besides, the older you got, the clearer it became that men were basically terrified of women. Some secretly, some openly. What could be more poignant than a liberated worn an eye to eye with a limp prick? All history’s greatest issues paled by comparison with these two quintessential objects: the eternal woman and the eternal limp prick.

“Do I scare you?” I asked Adrian.

“
You?
”

“Well some men claim to be afraid of me.”

Adrian laughed. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said, “a pussycat—as you Americans say. But that’s
not
the point.”

“Do you usually have this problem?”

“
Nein,
Frau Doktor, and I bloody well don’t want to be interrogated further. This is
absurd.
I do
not
have a potency problem—it’s just that I am
awed
by your stupendous ass and I don’t
feel
like fucking.”