Fear of Flying (3 page)

Japanese:

Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen. (
Cf.
Suzuki.)

It was after twelve when we finally got to our hotel and we found we had been assigned a tiny room on the top floor. I wanted to object, but Bennett was more interested in getting some rest. So we pulled down the shades against the noonday sun, undressed, and collapsed on the beds without even unpacking. Despite the strangeness of the place, Bennett went right to sleep. I tossed and fought with the feather comforter until I dozed fitfully amid dreams of Nazis and plane crashes. I kept waking up with my heart pounding and my teeth chattering. It was the usual panic I always have the first day away from home, but it was worse because of our being back in Germany. I was already wishing we hadn’t returned.

At about three-thirty we got up and rather languidly made love in one of the single beds. I still felt that I was dreaming and kept pretending Bennett was somebody else. But who? I couldn’t get a clear picture of him. I never could. Who was this phantom man who haunted my life? My father? My German analyst? The zipless fuck? Why did his face always refuse to come into focus?

By four o’clock, we were on the
Strassenbahn
bound for the University of Vienna to register for the Congress. The day had turned out to be clear with blue skies and absurdly fluffy white clouds. And I was clumping along the streets in my high-heeled sandals, hating the Germans, and hating Bennett for not being a stranger on a train, for not smiling, for being such a good lay but never kissing me, for getting me shrink appointments and Pap smears and IBM electrics, but never buying me flowers. And not talking to me. And never grabbing my ass anymore. And never going down on me, ever. What do you expect after five years of marriage anyway? Giggling in the dark? Ass-grabbing? Cunt-eating? Well at least an occasional one. What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much. How do you ladies like to be laid? A man who’ll go down on you when you have your period? A man who’ll kiss you before you brush your teeth in the morning and not say
Yiiich?
A man who’ll laugh with you when the lights go out?

A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that
their
obsession was
our
obsession.

Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.

And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. Throughout all of history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood. Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley’s and wondered what was
wrong
with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?

Phallocentric. The trouble with men and also the trouble with women. A friend of mine recently found this in a fortune cookie:

THE TROUBLE WITH MEN IS MEN,
THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN, MEN.

Once, just to impress Bennett, I told him about the Hell’s Angels initiation ceremony. The part where the initiate has to go down on his woman while she has her period and while all the other guys watch. Bennett said nothing.

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” I nudged. “Isn’t that a gas?” Still nothing. I kept nagging.

“Why don’t you buy yourself a little dog,” he finally said, “and train him.”

“I ought to report you to the New York Psychoanalytic,” I said.

The medical building of the University of Vienna is columned, cold, cavernous. We trudged up a long flight of steps. Upstairs, dozens of shrinks were milling around the registration desk.

An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl was giving everyone trouble about their credentials for registration. She spoke painstakingly schoolbook English. I was positive she must be the wife of one of the Austrian candidates. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but she smiled with all the smugness of a
Frau Doktor.

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,

Goodfleisch, Goodfriend, Goodgame, Goodhart,

Goodhue, Gooding, Goodlet, Goodson,

Goodridge, Goodspeed, Goodtree, Goodwine.

You can’t be named Isadora White Wing (née Weiss—my father had bleached it to “White” shortly after my birth) without spending a rather large portion of your life thinking about names.

Adrian Goodlove. His mother had named him Hadrian and then his father had forced her to change it to Adrian because that sounded “more English.” His father was big on sounding English.

“Typical tight-ass English middle class,” Adrian said of his Mum and Dad. “You’d hate them. They spend their whole lives trying to keep their bowels open in the name of the Queen. A losing battle too. Their assholes are permanently plugged.”

And he farted loudly to punctuate. He grinned. I looked at him in utter amazement.

“You’re a real primitive,” I sneered, “a natural man.”

But Adrian kept on grinning. Both of us knew I had finally met the real zipless fuck.

OK. So I admit my taste in men is questionable. Plenty more evidence of that will follow. But who can debate taste anyway? And who can convey an infatuation? It’s like trying to describe the taste of chocolate mousse, or the look of a sunset, or why you can sit for hours and make faces at your own baby. … Who is there who adds up to all that much on paper? We take Romeo on faith, and Julian Sorel and Count Vronsky, and even Mellors the gamekeeper. The smile, the shaggy hair, the smell of pipe tobacco and sweat, the cynical tongue, the beer spilling, the exuberant public farting. … My husband has a beautiful head of black hair and long thin fingers. The first night I met him, he also grabbed for my ass (while discussing new trends in psychotherapy). In general, I seem to like men who can make that quick transition from spirit to matter. Why waste time if the attraction is really there? But if a man I didn’t like made a grab for me, I’d probably be outraged and maybe even disgusted. And who can explain why the same action disgusts you in one case and thrills you in another? And who can explain the basis for selection? Astrology nuts try. So do psychoanalysts. But their explanations always seem to lack something. As if the essential kernel had been left out.