Fear of Flying (11 page)

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs.
That
was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

“I refuse to be impaled upon a pin,” Adrian said, unaware of the pun it immediately brought to mind. “I refuse to be categorized. When you finally do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an anti-hero, a bastard or a saint. You won’t be able to categorize me.”

And at that moment, I fell madly in love with him. His limp prick had penetrated where a stiff one would never have reached.

6

Paroxysms of

Passion or the Man

Under the Bed

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding. Otherwise there would be fewer marriages and still less of the wild ventures that override everything, even marriage. …
 

—Colette

Not that falling madly in love was at all unusual for me. All year I had fallen in love with everyone. I fell in love with an Irish poet who kept pigs on a farm in Iowa. I fell in love with a six-foot-tall novelist who looked like a cowboy and only wrote allegories about the effects of radiation. I fell in love with a blue-eyed book reviewer who had raved about my first book of poems. I fell in love with a surly painter (whose three wives had all committed suicide). I fell in love with a very courtly professor of Italian Renaissance philosophy who sniffed glue and screwed freshman girls. I fell in love with a UN interpreter (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek) who had five children, a sick mother, and seven unpublished novels in his sprawling apartment on Morningside Drive. I fell in love with a pale WASP of a biochemist who took me to lunch at the Harvard Club and had been married to two other women writers—both of them nymphomaniacally inclined.

But nothing came of anything. Oh there were cuddles in the backs of cars. And long drunken kisses in roachy New York kitchens over pitchers of warm martinis. And there were flirtations over fattening expense-account lunches. And pinches in the stacks of Butler Library. And embraces after poetry readings. And hand squeezes at gallery openings. And long meaningful telephone conversations and letters heavy with double entendres. There were even some frank and open propositions (usually from men who didn’t attract me at all). But nothing came of anything. I would go home instead, and write poems to the man I really loved (whoever
he
might be). After all, I had screwed enough guys to know that one prick wasn’t that different from the next. So what was I looking for? And why was I so restless? Maybe I resisted consummating any of these flirtations because I knew that the man I really wanted would continue to elude me and I would only wind up disappointed. But who was the man I really wanted? All I knew was that I had been desperately searching for him from the age of sixteen on.

When I was sixteen and called myself a Fabian socialist, when I was sixteen and refused to pet with boys who liked Ike, when I was sixteen and cried into the
Rubaiyat,
when I was sixteen and cried into the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—I used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable. He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like Michelangelo’s
David
(“with those rippling little marble muscles,” as I used to tell my best friend Pia Wittkin, whose favorite male statue was
Discobolus;
we were both avid students of art history). He had a mind like George Bernard Shaw (or, at least, what my sixteen-year-old mind
conceived
of as George Bernard Shaw’s mind). He loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” above all other mortal music. He shared my passion for unicorn tapestries,
Beat the Devil,
the Cloisters, Simone de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex,
witchcraft, and chocolate mousse. He shared my contempt for Senator Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley, and my philistine parents. I never met him. At sixteen, my not meeting him seemed unbearable. Later I learned to take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. The contrast between my fantasies (Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo’s
David
) and the pimply faced adolescent boys I knew was laughable. Only I cried. And so did Pia. We commiserated in her parent’s gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive.

“I imagine him as being very—you know—sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in
Hamlet
and Humphrey Bogart in
Beat the Devil
—with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body—sort of like the
Discobolus.
” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly.

“What are you wearing?” I asked.

“I see it as a sort of—you know—medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it—and a red velvet dress—maybe wine—and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit—an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves. It was being modeled by a gorgeous creature whose cleavage swelled up out of the gown voluptuously. (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.)

“I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.”

“Where would you live?”

“Well, I see this really weird old house in Vermont—an abandoned monastery or abbey or something. …” (Neither of us questioned the fact that there were abandoned monasteries and abbeys in Vermont.) “
…
With these extremely rustic floorboards and a skylight built into the roof. It would be sort of one big room which would be a studio and a bedroom with a big round bed under the skylight—and black satin sheets. And we’d have lots of Siamese cats—named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan—you know.”

I did, or at least I thought I did.

“Anyway …” she continued, “… I see myself sort of as a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. …” (Pia had dark hair.) “… What do you think?” She swept her greasy brown hair up on her head and held it there as she sucked in her cheeks and widened her large blue eyes at me.

“I sort of think you’re more the Anna Magnani type,” I said, “earthy and basic, but terribly sensual.”

“Maybe …” she said thoughtfully. She was posing in front of the mirror.

“Oh, it’s
disgusting,
” she said after a while. “We never meet anyone the least bit
worthy
of us.” And she made a hideous face.

During our senior year at Music and Art, Pia and I opened our hostile minority of two to include a few other selected misfits. That was the closest we ever came to having a crowd. The group included a bosomy girl named Nina Non-off whose claims to distinction were her necrophiliac passion for the ghost of Dylan Thomas, her supposed knowledge of Chinese and Japanese profanities, and her “contact” with a real Yalie (visions of football weekends for us all—but unfortunately the “contact” turned out to be a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of her brother’s). Nina’s mother also had a huge collection of “sex books” among which we included
Coming of Age in Samoa
and
Sex and Temperament;
any book with the word puberty in it was OK. And finally there was the sheer class of Nina’s father having created the Blue Wasp Series for radio in the 1940s. Jill Siegel, on the other hand, was a member of the group not so much for class as out of charity. She had little to contribute in the way of sophistication, but made up for this by means of her blind loyalty to us and the flattering way in which she aped our most florid affectations. An on-and-off member was Grace Baratto—a music major whose intellect we did not respect but who told fantastic stories about her sexual exploits. Though she denied it, we secretly told each other that she had probably “gone all the way.” “At the very least, she’s a
demi-vierge,
” Pia said. I nodded knowingly. Later I looked it up.

There were only two boys who were allowed into the group, and we treated them as scornfully as possible to make sure they understood they were only there on sufferance. Since they were our classmates and not “college men,” we wanted it clear that we would only consider them as “pla-tonic” friends. John Stock was the son of old friends of my parents. He was chubby and blond and wrote short stories. His favorite phrase was “paroxysms of passion.” It cropped up at least once every story he wrote. Ron Perkoff (whom we, of course, called Jerkoff) was in love with me. Tall, skinny, with a huge hooked nose and a truly incredible assortment of blackheads and pimples (which I longed to squeeze), he was an Anglophile. He subscribed to
Punch
and the airmail edition of the
Manchester Guardian,
carried a tightly rolled umbrella (in all kinds of weather), pronounced “banal” (one of his favorite words) with the accent on the second syllable, and peppered his speech with phrases like “bloody rotter” and “mucking about.”

After the agony of college boards and waiting for letters of acceptance was over, the six of us mucked about chiefly in my parents’ apartment as we whiled away the long idle spring term waiting impatiently for graduation. Sitting on the floor of the living room, we consumed tons of fruit, cheese, peanut-butter sandwiches and cookies, listened to Frank Sinatra albums, and wrote communal epics which we tried to make as pornographic as our limited experience would allow. We composed on my portable Olivetti which we passed around from lap to lap. Whenever John was there, paroxysms of passion were the order of the day.

Not many of these communal creations survived, but recently I came across a fragment which more or less conveys the spirit of all those other lost masterpieces. It was our habit to plunge into the action with as few preliminaries as possible, so the texture of the narrative was always somewhat choppy. One of the rules was that each author was allowed three minutes before having to pass the typewriter along to the next person, and this naturally increased the spastic quality of the prose. Since Pia usually started, she was the one who had the privilege of sketching the outlines of the character we would all have to tolerate:

Dorian Fairchester Faddington IV was a promiscuous poetaster of whom even his best friends declared that he “went from bed to verse.” Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman—or so she liked to assume—and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses.

“The skin is the largest organ of the body,” she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush. “Speak for yourself,” he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion. “Out, out of my damned twat!” she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector. “I take it you want me to reflect on what I’m doing,” he quipped. “Jesus Christ,” she said crossly, “men are only interested in women in spurts.”

At the time, we all thought this was the funniest piece of prose ever written. There was a continuation of this dialogue, too—something about a traffic observation helicopter with two radio announcers appearing on the roof and the whole scene turning into an orgy—but this has not survived. The fragment, however, does convey something of the mood of that period in our lives. Beneath the wise-ass cynicism and pseudo-sophistication was the soupiest romanticism since Edward Fitzgerald impersonated Omar Khayyam. Pia and I both wanted someone to sing in the wilderness with, and we knew that John Stock and Ron Perkoff were not exactly what we had in mind.

We were both bookworms, and when life disappointed us we turned to literature—or at least to the movie version. We saw ourselves as heroines and couldn’t understand what had become of all the heroes. They were in books. They were in movies. They were conspicuously absent from our lives.

History and Literature Subjectively

Considered at Sixteen

I

Dorian Gray had locks of gold.

Rhett Butler was dashing and handsome and bold. …

Julien Sorel knew all about passion.

Count Vronsky was charming in the Russian fashion.

I’d say that there’s a handful to whom I’d gladly grovel—

And everyone of them is—quite busy in a novel.

II

 
Before Juliet was sixteen, she’d reconciled two feuding houses.

And Nana had done all the Paris bars with drunks and tramps and souses. Helen’s face, they say, launched a good many ships. Salome had only to shed her seven slips. Esther’s beauty saved her people. Mary’s feat is praised from every steeple. Louis’ shepherdess wife caused a nation to riot. But here I am, past sixteen, and the world’s fairly quiet.

The meter was bumpy, but the message was plain. We would have gladly groveled if only we could have found men worth groveling
to.

The boys we met in college were, in a way, worse. At least John and Ron were good-natured creeps who adored us. They didn’t have minds like G.B.S. and bodies like Michelangelo’s
David,
but they were devoted to us, and regarded us as creatures of glittering wit and sophistication. But in college the war between the sexes began in earnest and our minds and bodies drifted farther and farther apart.

I found my first husband during my freshman year and married him after graduation four years later with occasional sidetrips and experiments in between. By the time I was twenty-two, I was a veteran of one marriage which had fallen apart under the most painful circumstances. Pia found a succession of bastards who fucked her and disappointed her. From college, she wrote long epistolary epics in her tiny baroque handwriting and described each bastard in detail, but somehow I could never tell them apart. They all seemed to have hollow cheekbones and lank blond hair. She was hung up on the midwestern
shagetz
the way certain Jewish guys are hung up on
shikses.
It was as if they were all the same guy. Huck Finn without a raft. Blond hair, blue denim, and cowboy boots. And they always wound up walking all over her.

Progressively the two of us got more and more disillusioned. This was inevitable, of course, given the absurd fantasies we’d started out with, but I don’t think we were that different from other adolescent girls (though we were more literary and certainly more pretentious). All we wanted were men we could share everything with. Why was that so much to ask? Was it that men and women were basically incompatible? Or just that we hadn’t yet found the right ones7