Fear of Flying (17 page)

“Fuck you, Adrian.” It was lame but it was all I could think of.

“Don’t fuck me—go home and fuck yourself. Go back to being a safe little bourgeois housewife who writes in her spare time.”

That was the unkindest cut of all.

“And what do you think
you
are—a safe little bourgeois doctor who plays existentialist in his spare time?” I was almost shouting.

“Go ahead and scream, ducks, it doesn’t bother me
at all.
I don’t have to account to
you
for my life. I know what
I’m
doing. You’re the one who’s so bloody indecisive.
You’re
the one who can’t decide whether to be Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Marjorie Morningstar.” He raced the engine dramatically.

“Take me home,” I said.

“Gladly, if you’ll just tell me where
that
is.”

We sat for a while without speaking. Adrian kept racing the motor but made no move to pull out, and I just sat there in silence being torn apart by my twin demons. Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time? Was that my fate? Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Was I going to go on living my life as a lie? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?

“What if I change my mind?” I asked.

“It’s too late. You’ve already ruined it. It will never be the same. I don’t know now whether I
want
to take you, quite honestly.”

“You really are a hard man, aren’t you? One little moment of indecision and you give up on me. You expect me to give up everything—my life, my husband, my work—without a moment’s hesitation and just follow you across Europe in accordance with some half-baked Laingian idea of experience and adventure. If at least you loved me—”

“Don’t bring love into it and muck everything up. That’s a copout if I ever heard one. What does love have to do with it?”

“Everything.”

“Bullshit. You
say
love—but you
mean
security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband—there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.”

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“That’s how much you know.” He stared at the steering wheel.

“Adrian, you’re right about everything except love. Love
does
matter. It matters that Bennett loves me and you don’t.”

“And who do
you
love? Have you ever let yourself think about it? Or is it all a question of who you can exploit and manipulate? Is it all a question of who
gives
you more? Is it all a question, ultimately, of money?”

“That’s crap.”

“Is it now? Sometimes I think it’s just that you know I’m poor, that I want to write books and don’t give a damn about practicing medicine—unlike your rich American doctors.”

“On the contrary, your poverty appeals to my reverse snobbery. I like your poverty. Besides, if you do as well as old Ronnie Laing, you won’t be poor. You’ll go far, my boy. Psychopaths always do.”

“Now you sound like you’re quoting Bennett.”

“We
do
agree that you’re a psychopath.”

“We, we, we—the smug editorial ‘we.’ My—it must be awfully cozy to be boringly married and use the editorial we. But is it conducive to art? Isn’t all that coziness stultifying? Isn’t it high time you changed your life?”

“Iago—that’s what you are. Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”

“If what you have is paradise—I thank God I’ve never had the experience.”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“Back where?”

“To Paradise, to my cozy little marital boredom, to my editorial we, to my stultification. I need it like a fix.”

“Just as you need
me
like a fix when you get bored with Bennett.”

“Look—you said it—it’s over.”

“So it is.”

“Well, then drive me back to the hotel. Bennett will be back soon. I don’t want to be late again. He’s just heard a paper on ‘Aggression in Large Groups.’ It might give him ideas.”

“We’re a small group.”

“True, but you never can tell.”

“You’d really like him to beat the shit out of you—wouldn’t you? Then you’d feel properly martyred.”

“Perhaps.” I was aping Adrian’s cool. It was infuriating him.

“Look—we might just do a communal thing—you and me and Bennett. We could drive across the Continent
à trois.
”

“Fine with me, but you’ll have to convince him. It won’t be easy. He’s just a bourgeois doctor married to a little housewife who writes in her spare time. He doesn’t swing—like you do. Now please take me home.”

He started the car in earnest this time and pulled out. We began our familiar meandering way through the back streets of Vienna, getting lost at every turn.

After about ten minutes of this we were laughing and in high spirits again. Our mutual ineptitude never failed to make us delighted with each other. It couldn’t last, of course, but it was intoxicating for the moment. Adrian stopped the car and leaned over to kiss me. “Let’s not go back—let’s spend the night together,” Adrian said.

I debated with myself. What was I—some scared housewife?

“OK,” I said (and instantly regretted it). But after all, what difference could one night make? I was going back to New York with Bennett.

The evening which followed was another one of those dreamy blurs. We started drinking at a working man’s café off the Ringstrasse, kissed and kissed between beers, passed beer from his mouth to mine, from mine to his, listened avidly to an elderly female lush criticize the expenditures of the American space program, and how they should spend that money on earth (to build crematoria?) instead of wasting it on the moon, then ate (kissing throughout dinner) at an outdoor garden restaurant, fed each other
Leberknodel
and
Bauernschnitzel
in passionate bites, and very drunkenly made our way back to Adrian’s pension where we made love adequately for the first time.

“I think I’d love you,” he said while he was fucking me, “if I believed in love.”

At midnight, I suddenly remembered Bennett who had been waiting six hours at the hotel, and I got out of bed, padded downstairs to the pay phone, borrowed two schillings from the sleepy concierge and phoned him. He was out. I left a cruel message saying, “See you in the morning,” and then let the switchboard operator copy down my phone number and address. Then I went back to bed where Adrian was snoring like a pig.

For about an hour I lay awake in anguish, listening to

Adrian snore, hating myself for my disloyalty, and unable to get relaxed enough to sleep. At 1
A.M
. the door opened and Bennett burst in. I took one look at him and knew that he was going to dispatch us both. In my secret heart, I was glad—I deserved to be killed. Adrian, too.

Bennett stripped instead, and fucked me violently right there on the cot adjoining Adrian’s. In the midst of this bizarre performance, Adrian awoke and watched, his eyes gleaming like a boxing fan’s at a particularly sadistic fight. When Bennett had come and was lying on top of me out of breath, Adrian leaned over and began stroking his back. Bennett made no protestation. Entwined and sweating, the three of us finally fell asleep.

I have told these events as plainly as possible, because nothing I might say to embellish them could possibly make them more shocking. The whole episode was wordless—as if the three of us were in a pantomime together and each had rehearsed his part for so many years that it was second nature. We were merely going through the motions of something we had done in fantasy many times. The whole episode —from my leaving the address with the switchboard operator to Adrian’s stroking Bennett’s beautiful brown back—was an inevitable as a Greek tragedy—or as a Punch and Judy show. I remember certain details: Adrian’s wheezing snore, the enraged look on Bennett’s face when he entered the room (and, in rapid succession, me), the way we three slept entangled in each other’s arms, the large mosquito which fed off our mingled blood and kept awakening me with bites. In the blue early-morning twilight, I awoke to find that I had rolled over and crushed it sometime during the night. It made a bloody Rorschach on the sheet, like the menstrual stain of a tiny woman.

In the morning we disowned each other. Nothing had happened. It was a dream. We walked down the baroque steps of the pension as if we all happened to be separate lodgers meeting for the first time on the winding stairs.

Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily—especially Reuben Finkel, a red-headed, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars.

“Hello Rueben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Bennett said nothing. He walked on ahead as if in a trance. Adrian followed him. It momentarily occurred to me that perhaps something more had happened between the two men during the night, but I quickly put it out of my mind. Why?

Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Bennett stiffly refused. But then when we were unable to get a taxi, Bennett finally gave in—without even the courtesy of a word or a nod in Adrian’s direction. Adrian shrugged and took the wheel. I doubled myself up in the midget-sized back seat. This time Bennett directed and we did not get lost. But throughout the whole ride, there was a terrible silence between us, except for the directions Bennett offered. I wanted to talk. We had been through something important together and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. This might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us, but instead Bennett was hellbent on denying it. Adrian wasn’t much help either. All their talk about analysis and self-analysis was pure bullshit. Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless. They both faced straight ahead like Siamese twins joined at a crucial but invisible spot on the side of the neck. Blood brothers. And I the sister who had loused them up. The woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box.

9

Pandora’s Box

or My Two Mothers

A woman
is
her mother. That’s the main thing.
 

—Anne Sexton

Of course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly
see
her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen.

When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a
real
Jewish mother—easily pigeonholed and filed away—a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.)

My mother smelled of
Joy
or
Diorissimo,
and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this:

1.
Above all, never be
ordinary.

2.
The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular—we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear.

“No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy—stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual.

“I can’t
stand
that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of
Seventeen
Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.” Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But
ordinary.
Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an uncanny sense of coming fashions (or did I only imagine this, conned as I was by her charisma?). She did the house in antique gold just before antique gold became the most popular color for drapes and rugs and upholstery. Then she screamed that everyone had “stolen” her ideas. She installed Spanish porcelain tiles in the foyer before it caught on “with all the
yentas
on Central Park West”—from whose company she carefully excluded herself. She brought white fur rugs home from Greece before they were imported by all the stores. She discovered wrought-iron flowered chandeliers for the bathroom in advance of all the “fairy decorators”—as she contemptuously called them.

She had antique brass headboards and window shades that matched the wallpaper and pink and red towels in the bathrooms when pink and red was still considered an avant-garde combination. Her fear of ordinariness came out most strongly in her clothes. After the four of us got older, she and my father traveled a lot for business, and she picked up odd accessories everywhere. She wore Chinese silk pajamas to the theater, Balinese toe-rings on her sandaled feet, and tiny jade Buddhas mounted as dangling earrings. She carried an oiled rice-paper parasol in the rain and had toreador pants made out of Japanese fingernail tapestries. At one point in my adolescence it dawned on me that she would rather look weird and ugly than common and pretty. And she often succeeded. She was a tall, rail-thin woman with high cheekbones and long red hair, and her strange get-ups and extreme make-up sometimes gave her a Charles Addamsy look. Naturally, I longed for a bleached-blond, mink-coated Mama who played bridge, or at least for a dumpy brunette PTA Mom in harlequin glasses and Red Cross shoes.

“Couldn’t you please wear something
else?
” I pleaded when she was dressing for Parents’ Day in tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape. (My memory must be exaggerating—but you get the general idea.) I was in seventh grade, and at the height of my passion for ordinaries.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

What wasn’t wrong with it! I shrank back into her walk-in closet, looking in vain for something ordinary. (An apron! A housedress! An angora sweater sett Something befitting a mother in a Betty Crocker ad, a Mother with a capital M.) The closet reeked of
Joy
and mothballs. There were cut velvet capes and feather boas and suede slacks and Aztec cotton caftans and Japanese silk kimonos and Irish tweed knickers, but absolutely nothing like an angora sweater set.

“It’s just that I wish you’d wear something more plain,” I said sheepishly, “something people won’t stare at.”

She glowered at me and drew herself up to her full height of five feet ten inches.

“Are you ashamed of your own mother? Because if you are, Isadora, I feel sorry for you. I really do. There is nothing good about being
ordinary.
People don’t respect you for it. In the last analysis, people
run after
people who are different, who have confidence in their
own
taste, who don’t run with the herd. You’ll find out. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity. …” And we left for school in a cab trailing whiffs of
Joy,
and with Mexican fringes flapping, figuratively, in the wind.

When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead. Three generations of frustrated artists: my grandfather fucking models and cursing Picasso and stubbornly painting in the style of Rembrandt, my mother giving up poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering, my sister Randy taking up pregnancy as if it were a new art form she had invented (and Lalah and Chloe following after her like disciples).

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing cruder or more vain than a failed artist. My grandfather, as I’ve said, used to paint over my mother’s canvases instead of going out to buy new canvas. She switched to poetry for a while, to escape him, but then met my father who was a song writer and stole her images to use in lyrics. Artists are horrible. “Never, never get involved with a man who wants to be an artist,” my mother used to say, who knew.

Another interesting sidelight is that both my mother and my grandfather have a way of dismissing the efforts of anybody who seems to be having a good time working at something or having a moderate success at it. There is, for example, a middling-to-good novelist (whose name I won’t mention) who happens to be a friend of my parents. He has written four novels, none of them distinguished in style, none of them best sellers, and none prize-winners, but nevertheless, he seems fairly pleased with himself and he seems to be enjoying the status of resident sage at cocktail parties and writer-in-residence at some junior college in New Jersey whose name escapes me. Maybe he actually likes writing. Some strange people do.

“I don’t know how he keeps grinding them out,” my mother will say, “he’s such an ordinary writer. He’s not stupid, he’s nobody’s fool. …” (My mother never calls people “intelligent”; “not stupid” is as far as she will commit herself.) “… But his books are so ordinary … and none of them has really even made money yet. …”

And there’s the rub! Because while my mother
claims
to respect originality above all, what she really respects is money and prizes. Moreover, there is the implication in all her remarks about other artists that there is scarcely any point in their persevering just for the piddling rewards they get. Now if her novelist-friend had won a Pulitzer or an NBA—or sold a book to the movies—that would be something. Of course, she would put that down, too. But the respect would be written all over her face. On the other hand, the humble
doing
of the thing means nothing to her; the inner discoveries, the pleasure of the work. Nothing. With an attitude like that, no wonder she turned to upholstery.

Re: her interest in predation. She started out, I think, with the normal Provincetown-Art Students League communism of her day, but gradually, as affluence and arteriosclerosis overtook her (together, as is often the case), she converted to her own brand of religion composed of two parts Robert Ardrey and one part Konrad Lorenz.

I don’t think either Ardrey or Lorenz intended what she extracted in their names: a sort of neo-Hobbesianism in which it is proven that life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short; the desire for status and money and power is universal; territoriality is instinctual; and selfishness, therefore, is the cardinal law of life. (“Don’t twist what I’m saying, Isadora; even what people call a truism is selfishness by another name.”)

How all this clogged up every avenue of creative and rebellious expression for me is clear:

1.
I couldn’t be a hippy because my mother already dressed like a hippy (while believing in territoriality and the universality of war).

2. I couldn’t rebel against Judaism because I hadn’t any to rebel against.

3. I couldn’t rail at my Jewish mother because the problem was deeper than Jewishness or mothers.

4. I couldn’t be an artist on pain of being painted over.

5. I couldn’t be a poet on pain of being crossed out.

6. I couldn’t be anything else because that was
ordinary.

7. I couldn’t be a communist because my mother had been there.

8. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate,
not
ordinary.”

What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all.

And yet … I also have another mother. She is tall and thin, but her cheeks are softer than willow tips, and when I nuzzle into her fur coat on the ride home, I feel that no harm can come to me ever. She teaches me the names of flowers. She hugs and kisses me after some bully in the playground (a psychiatrist’s son) grabs my new English tricycle and rolls it down a hill into the playground fence. She sits up nights with me listening to the compositions I have written for school and she thinks I am the greatest writer in history even though I am only eight. She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one. She takes me and Randy and Lai ah and Chloe ice-skating on Central Park Lake with ten of our friends, and while all the other mothers sit home and play bridge and send maids to call for their children, she laces up all our skates (with freezing fingers) and then puts on her own skates and glides around the lake with us, pointing out danger spots (thin ice), teaching us figure eights, and laughing and talking and glowing pink with the cold. I am so proud of her!

Randy and I boast to our friends that our mother (with her long flowing hair and huge brown eyes) is so young that she never has to wear make-up. She’s no old fuddy-duddy like the other mothers. She wears turtlenecks and ski pants just like us. She wears her long hair in a velvet ribbon just like us. And we don’t even call her Mother because she’s so much fun. She isn’t like anyone else.

On my birthday (March 26, Aries, the Rites of Spring), I awaken to find my room transformed into a bower. Around my bed are vases of daffodils, irises, anemones. On the floor are heaps of presents, wrapped in the most fanciful tissue papers and festooned with paper flowers. There are Easter eggs, hand painted by my mother to look like Faberge eggs. There are boxes of chocolates and jelly eggs (“for a sweet year,” she says, hugging me), and there is always a giant birthday card, painted in water colors and showing me in all my glory: the most beautiful little girl in the world, long blond hair, blue eyes, and masses of flowers in my arms. My mother flatters me, idealizes me—or is that how she really sees me? I am pleased and I am puzzled. I am really the most beautiful girl in the world to her, aren’t I? Or aren’t I? Then what about my sisters? And what about the way she screams at me loud enough to make the roof fall in?

My other mother never screams, and I owe everything I am to her. At thirteen I follow her through all the art museums of Europe, and through her eyes I see Turner’s storms and Tiepolo’s skies and Monet’s haystacks and Rodin’s monument to Balzac and Botticelli’s
Primavera
and da Vinci’s
Madonna of the Rocks.
At fourteen I get the
Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
for my birthday, at fifteen e.e. cummings, at sixteen William Butler Yeats, at seventeen Emily Dickinson, and at eighteen my mother and I are no longer on speaking terms. She introduces me to Shaw, to Colette, to Orwell, to Simone de Beauvoir. She furiously debates Marxism with me at the dinner table. She gives me ballet lessons and piano lessons and weekly tickets to the New

York Philharmonic (where I am bored and spend much time in the ladies’ room applying Revlon’s
Powder Pink
Lustrous Lipstick to my thirteen-year-old lips).