Fear of Flying (4 page)

After the infatuation is over, you rationalize. I once adored a conductor who never bathed, had stringy hair, and was a complete failure at wiping his ass. He always left shit stripes on my sheets. Normally I don’t go for that sort of thing—but in him it was OK—I’m still not sure why. I fell in love with Bennett partly because he had the cleanest balls I’d ever tasted. Hairless and he practically never sweats. You could (if you wanted) eat off his asshole (like my grandmother’s kitchen floor). So I’m versatile about my fetishes. In a way, that makes my infatuations even less explicable.

But Bennett saw patterns in everything.

“That Englishman you were talking to,” he said when we were back in the hotel room, “he was really crazy about you—”

“What makes you think that?”

He gave me a cynical look.

“He was slobbering all over you.”

“I thought he was the most hostile son of a bitch I’ve ever met.” And it was partly true too.

“That’s right—but you’re always attracted to hostile men.”

“Like you, you mean?”

He was drawing me toward him and starting to undress me. I could tell he was turned on by the way Adrian had pursued me. So was I. We both made love to Adrian’s spirit. Lucky Adrian. Fucked from the front by me, from the rear by Bennett.

The History of the World Through Fucking. Lovemaking. The old dance. It would make an even better chronicle than The History of the World Through Toilets. It would subsume everything. What doesn’t come to fucking in the end?

Bennett and I had not always made love to a phantom. There was a time when we made love to each other.

I was twenty-three when I met him and already divorced. He was thirty-one and never married. The most silent man I’d ever met. And the kindest. Or at least I thought he was kind. What do I know about silent people anyway? I come from a family where the decibel count at the dinner table could permanently damage your middle ear. And maybe did.

Bennett and I met at a party in the Village where neither of us knew the hostess. We’d both been invited by other people. It was very mid-sixties chic. The hostess was black (you still said “Negro” then) and in some fashionable sell-out profession like advertising. She was all gotten up in designer clothes and gold eye shadow. The place was filled with shrinks and advertising people and social workers and NYU professors who looked like shrinks. 1965: pre-hippie and pre-ethnic. The analysts and advertising men and professors still had short hair and tortoise-shell glasses. They still shaved. The token blacks still pressed their hair. (O remembrance of things past!)

I was there through a friend and so was Bennett. Since my first husband had been psychotic, it seemed quite natural to want to marry a psychiatrist the second time around. As an antidote, say. I was not going to let the same thing happen to
me
again. This time I was going to find someone who had the key to the unconscious. So I was hanging out with shrinks. They fascinated me because I assumed they knew everything worth knowing. I fascinated them because they assumed I was a “creative person” (as evidenced by the fact that I had appeared on Charmed 13 reading my poems—what more evidence of creativity could a shrink need?).

When I look back on my not yet thirty-year-old life, I see all my lovers sitting alternately back to back as if in a game of musical chairs. Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.

Brian Stollerman (my first lover and first husband) was very short, inclined to paunchiness, hairy and dark. He was also a human cannonball and a nonstop talker. He was always in motion, always spewing out words of five syllables. He was a medievalist and before you could say “Albigensian Crusade” he’d tell you the story of his life—in extravagantly exaggerated detail. Brian gave the impression of never shutting up. This was not quite true, though, because he
did
stop talking when he slept. But when he finally flipped his cookies (as we politely said in my immediate family) or showed symptoms of schizo-phrenia (as one of his many psychiatrists put it) or woke up to the real meaning of his life (as he put it) or had a nervous breakdown (as his Ph.D. thesis adviser put it) or became-exhausted-as-a-result-of-being-married-to-that-Jewish-princess- from-New York (as his parents put it)—then he never stopped talking
even
to sleep. He stopped sleeping, in fact, and he used to keep me up all night telling me about the Second Coming of Christ and how this time Jesus just might come back as a Jewish medievalist living on Riverside Drive.

Of course we were living on Riverside Drive, and Brian was a spellbinding talker. But still, I was so wrapped up in his fantasies, such a willing member of a
folie à deux
that it took a whole week of staying up every night listening to him before it dawned on me that Brian
himself
intended to be the Second Coming. Nor did he take very kindly to my pointing out that this might be a delusion; he very nearly choked me to death for my contribution to the discussion. After I caught my breath (I make it sound simpler than it was for the sake of getting on with the story), he attempted various things like flying through windows and walking on the water in Central Park Lake, and finally he had to be taken forcibly to the psycho ward and subdued with Thorazine, Compazine, Stelazine, and whatever else anyone could think of. At which point I collapsed with exhaustion, took a rest cure at my parent’s apartment (they had become strangely sane in the face of Brian’s flagrant craziness), and cried for about a month. Until one day I woke up with relief in the quiet of our deserted apartment on Riverside Drive, and realized that I hadn’t been able to hear myself think in four years. I knew then that I’d never go back to living with Brian—whether he stopped thinking he was Jesus Christ or not.

Exit husband
numero uno.
Enter a strange procession of opposite numbers. But I knew at least what I was looking for in
numero due:
a good solid father figure, a psychiatrist as an antidote to a psychotic, a good secular lay as an antidote to Brian’s religious fervor which seemed to preclude fucking, a silent man as an antidote to a noisy one, a sane gentile as an antidote to a crazy Jew.

Bennett Wing appeared as in a dream. On the wing, you might say. Tall, good-looking, inscrutably Oriental. Long thin fingers, hairless balls, a lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed—at which he seemed to be absolutely indefatigable. But he was also mute and at that point his silence was music to my ears. How did I know that a few years later, I’d feel like I was fucking Helen Keller?

Wing. I loved Bennett’s name. And he was mercurial, too. Not wings on his heels but wings on his prick. He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvelous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever, and he was the only man I’d ever met who was never impotent—not even when he was depressed or angry. But why didn’t he ever kiss? And why didn’t he speak? I would come and come and come and each orgasm seemed to be made of ice.

Was it different in the beginning? I think so. I was dazzled by his silence then as I had once been overwhelmed by Brian’s astonishing torrent of speech. Right before Bennett, there had been that conductor who loved his baton (but never wiped his behind), a Florentine philanderer (Alessandro the Gross), an incestuous Arab brother-in-law (later, later), a professor of philosophy (U. of Cal.), and any number of miscellaneous lays in the night. I’d followed the conductor across Europe watching him perform, carrying his scores, and finally he took off and left me for an old girlfriend in Paris. So I had been wounded by music, madness, and miscellaneousness. And silent Bennett was my healer. A physician for my head and a psychoanalyst for my cunt. He fucked and fucked in ear-splitting silence. He listened. He was a good analyst. He knew all Brian’s symptoms before I told him. He knew what I’d been through. And most astonishing of all—he still wanted to marry me after I told him about myself.

“Better find a nice Chinese girl,” I said. It wasn’t racism, just my skittishness about marriage. Such permanence terrified me. Even the first time, with Brian, it had terrified me, and I had married against my better judgment.

“I don’t want a nice Chinese girl,” Bennett said. “I want you.”

(It turned out Bennett had never taken out a Chinese girl in his whole life—much less screwed one. He was all hung up on Jewish girls. Men like that seem to be my fate.)

“I’m glad you want me,” I said. Grateful. I was really grateful.

At what point had I started pretending Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that.

Q
: “Dear Dr. Reuben: Why does the fucking always become like processed cheese?”

A: “You seem to have a food fetish, or what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as an oral fixation. Have you ever considered seeking professional help?”

I shut my eyes tightly and pretended that Bennett was Adrian. I transformed B into A. We came—first me, then Bennett—and lay there sweating on the awful hotel bed. Bennett smiled. I was miserable. What a fraud I was! Real adultery couldn’t be worse than these nightly deceptions. To fuck one man and think of another and keep the deception a secret— it was far, far worse than fucking another man within your husband’s sight. It was as bad as any betrayal I could think of. “Only a fantasy,” Bennett would probably say. “A fantasy is only a fantasy, and
everyone
has fantasies. Only psychopaths actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don’t.”

But I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads.

What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts—and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing.

Maybe Bennett was pretending I was someone else, too. But so what? That was
his
problem. And doubtless 99 percent of the people in the world were fucking phantoms. They probably were. That didn’t comfort me at all. I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself. I was already an adulteress, and was only holding off the actual consummation out of cowardice. That made me an adulteress
and
a coward (cowardess?). At least if I fucked Adrian I’d only be an adulteress (adult?).

3

Knock, Knock

Sex, as I said, can be summed up in three P’s: procreation, pleasure, and pride. From the long-range point of view, which we must always consider, procreation is by far the most important, since without procreation there could be no continuation of the race. … So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations … and as such it is a comparative luxury from nature’s point of view. It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.

—Madeline Gray,
The Normal Woman
(sic), 1967

In my dream Adrian and Bennett were going up and down on a seesaw in the playground in Central Park where I used to go as a child.

“Maybe she ought to be analyzed in England,” Bennett was saying as his end of the seesaw swung up in the air. “I’ll turn her passport and shot record over to you.”

Adrian had his feet on the ground now and he began shaking the seesaw like a big kid unloosed in the little kids’ playground.

“Stop that!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him!” But Adrian kept grinning and shaking the seesaw. “Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!” I tried to scream, but, as always in dreams, my words became garbled. I was terrified that Adrian was going to bounce Bennett to the ground and break his back. “Please, please stop!” I pleaded.

“What’s wrong?” Bennett mumbled. I had awakened him. I always talked in my sleep, and he always answered.

“What happened?”

“You were on a seesaw with someone. I got scared.”

“Oh.” He rolled over.

Normally Bennett would have put his arms around me, but we were in narrow beds on opposite sides of the room and instead he went back to sleep.

I was wide awake now and could hear birds making a racket in the garden behind the hotel. At first they comforted me. Then I remembered that they were German birds and I got depressed. Secretly, I hate traveling. I’m restless at home, but the minute I get away I feel the threat of doom hanging over my most trivial actions. Why had I come back to Europe anyway? My whole life was in pieces. For two years I had lain in bed with Bennett and thought of other men. For two years I had debated whether to get pregnant or strike out on my own and see some more of the world before settling down to anything that permanent. How did people decide to get pregnant, I wondered. It was such an awesome decision. In a way, it was such an
arrogant
decision. To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like. I assumed that most women got pregnant without thinking about it because if they ever once considered what it really meant, they would surely be overwhelmed with doubt. I had none of that blind faith in chance which other women seemed to have. I always wanted to be in control of my fate. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life. I had been compulsively using a diaphragm for so long that pregnancy could never be accidental for me. Even during the two years I took the pill, I never missed a day. Slob that I was about everything else, I had never messed up on that score. I was virtually the only one of my friends who’d never had an abortion. What was wrong with me? Was I unnatural? I just hadn’t the normal female compulsion to get knocked up. All I could think of was me with my restlessness, with my longings for zipless fucks and strangers on trains—being tied down with a baby. How could I wish
that
on a baby?

“If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious red-headed mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast-drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the
tzatzka
business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille.

Was any of that my fault?

I had spent my whole life feeling that it was. And maybe I was responsible, in a way. Parents and children are umbili-cally attached and not only in the womb. Mysterious forces bind them. If my generation is going to spend its time denouncing our parents, then maybe we should allow our parents equal time.

“I would have been a famous artist except for you kids,” my mother said. And for a long time I believed it.

There was always, of course, the problem of her own father: an artist too and fanatically jealous of her talent. She had gone to Paris to escape him, so why did she come back to New York, move in with him, and live with him until she was forty? They shared a studio, and from time to time he painted over her canvases (only, of course, when he had no clean canvas). She had become a cubist in Paris and was on her way to developing a style of her own in some contemporary vein, but Papa, for whom painting began and ended with Rembrandt, mocked her until she gave up trying; she just kept getting pregnant.

“Damned modern smudging,” Papa said. “Phony baloney.”

Why didn’t she move out? I say this with the full weight of ambivalence behind it, knowing that then I might never have been born.

We grew up in a sprawling fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. The roof leaked (we lived on the top floor), the fuses all blew when you pushed the toast down in the toaster, the bathtubs were claw-footed and the plumbing rusty, the stove in the kitchen looked like something out of a TV commercial for old-Grandma-something-or-other’s-pre-serves, and the window frames were so old and cruddy that the wind whistled right through them. But it was a “Stanford White building” and there were “two studios with north light” and the library had “paneled walls” and “leaded windows” and the “forty-foot ceiling” in the living room was “real gold leaf.” I remembered these real-estate phrases echoing through my childhood. Gold leaf. I imagined a maple leaf which was made of gold. But how did they stick the leaves on the ceiling? And why didn’t they look like leaves? Maybe they ground them up and made them into paint? Where, I wondered, could you pick a “real gold leaf”? Did they grow on real gold trees? On real gold boughs? (I was the sort of kid who knew words like “bough.”)

There was, in fact, a fat, darkly printed book in my parents’ library called
The Golden Bough.
I used to look in vain through its pages for any mention of “real gold leaf.” But there was plenty of sexy stuff in there. (Those were also the days when I used to hide
Love Without Fear
in my dresser drawer—beneath my undershirts.)

So we stayed with Mama and Papa for the sake of “good north light” and “real gold leaf—or at least my mother said so. And meanwhile my father traveled around the world for his
tzatzka
business and my mother stayed home and had babies and screamed at her mother and father. My father was designing ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets. He was designing families of ceramic animals chained together with tiny gold chains. And he was making quite a fortune at it—amazingly enough. We could easily have moved away, but obviously my mother would not or could not. A little gold chain chained my mother to her mother, and me to my mother. All our un-happiness was strung along the same (rapidly tarnishing) gold chain.

Of course my mother had a rationalization for it all—a patriarchal rationalization, the age-old rationalization of women seething with talent and ambition who keep getting knocked up.

“Women cannot possibly do both,” she said, “you’ve got to choose. Either be an artist or have children.”

With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and had passed up.

How could I possibly take off my diaphragm and get pregnant? What other women do without half thinking was for me a great and momentous act. It was a denial of my name, my destiny, my mother.

My sisters were different. Gundra Miranda called herself “Randy” and married at eighteen. She married a Lebanese physicist at Berkeley, had four sons in California, and then moved her family to Beirut where she proceeded to have five daughters. Despite the seeming rebelliousness of a nice Jewish girl from Central Park West marrying an A-Rab, she led the most ordinary family life imaginable in Beirut. She was almost religiously in favor of
Kinder, Küche,
and
Kirche
—especially the Catholic Church which she attended in order to impress the Arabs with her non-Jewishness. Not, of course, that they liked Catholicism that much, but it was better than the other alternative. Both she and Pierre, my brother-in-law, believed in Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Lionel Tiger as if they were Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. “Instinct!” they snorted, “pure animal instinct!” They came to hate the Berkeley beatniks of their college days and to preach territoriality, the immorality of contraception and abortion, and the universality of war. At times they honestly seemed to believe in the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings. And meanwhile, they just kept on breeding.

(“Why should people with
superior
genes use contraception when all the
undesirables
are breeding the world into extinction?”—the old refrain whenever Randy was announcing a new pregnancy.)

Lalah (the other middle daughter after me) was four years younger and had married a Negro. But as in Randy’s case, the unconventionality of the choice was misleading. Lalah went to Oberlin where she met Robert Goddard, easily the whitest white Negro in the history of the phrase. My brother-in-law Bob is actually cocoa brown, but his mind is white as a Klan member’s member. I don’t know about his member. How he got to a school like Oberlin rather perplexes me, as it perhaps perplexed him. After college, he went to medical school at Harvard and quickly decided to head where the bread was: orthopedic surgery. He now spends four days a week setting legs and pinning hips (and collecting huge fees from insurance companies). The other three days are spent jumping horses at an exclusive club in the fashionable but integrated Boston suburb where he and Lalah live.

And how they live! Surrounded by the most extensive array of electrical gadgets outside of Hammacher-Schlemmer: electronic ice crushers, wine coolers, bedside machines which make synthesized sea noises, automatic egg-decapitators, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, automatic cocktail shakers, lawn mowers which move by remote control, hedge clippers programmed to make topiary designs, whirlpools which whirl the bathwater around, bidets which swirl the toilet water around, lighted shaving mirrors which pop out of the wall, color TV sets concealed behind framed copies of the most banal modern graphics, and a bar which pops out of the wall in the foyer when the front doorbell rings. The doorbell, by the way, plays the first few bars of “When the Saints Come Marching In”—Bob’s one and only concession to negritude.

With all these gadgets and horses and three cars (one for each of them, and one for their white .South American housekeeper), we all assumed that they hadn’t time even to
consider
having children—to my parents’ relief, I suppose. Arab grand-children are one thing, but at least they have straight hair.

However we were wrong. Lalah was, in fact, on fertility pills for two years (as she later informed us and all the newspapers), and last year gave birth to quintuplets. The rest (as they say) is history. You may even have seen the
Time
Magazine article about the “Goddard Quints” in which they were described as “cute, coffee-colored, and quite an armload.”

“Wow!” reacted Mother Lalah Justine Goddard (née White), twenty-four, when told she had given birth to quints.

And now Lalah and Bob have their hands full with broken bones, gadgets, horses, social climbing, and the quints (who, incidentally, they named the most ordinary names they could think of: Timmy, Susie, Annie, Jennie, and Johnnie). And Dr. Bob is making more money than ever, since it appears that having mulatto quints is the greatest way of building up a medical practice since Vitamin B shots. As for Lalah, she writes me once a year to ask why I don’t stop “farting around with poetry” and “do something meaningful” like have quints.

After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s conviction that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget

That only leaves Chloe Camille, born in 1948 and six years my junior. The baby of the family. Chloe with her sharp wit, sharp tongue, and utter lassitude about doing anything with it. Plump, beautiful Chloe, with her brown hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. With the only really gorgeous set of knockers in a fairly flat-chested family. Chloe, of course, married a Jew. Not a domestic Jew, but an import. (Nobody in the family would stoop to marrying the boy next door.) Chloe’s husband, Abel, is an Israeli of German-Jewish ancestry. (Members of his family once owned the gambling casino at Baden-Baden.) And Abel, of course, went into my father’s
tzatzka
business. To a business dominated by former Catskill Mountain comedians, he brought lessons learned at the Wharton School. My parents rebelled at first and then virtually adopted him as everyone got richer. Abel and Chloe had one son, Adam, who was blond and blue-eyed and obviously the favorite grandchild. At Christmas reunions, when the whole family regrouped at my parents’ apartment, Adam looked like the sole Aryan in a playground of Third World children.

So I was the only sister
ohne kinder,
and I was never allowed to forget it. When Pierre and Randy last visited New York with their brood, it was just during the time my first book was being published. In the midst of one of our usual noisy fights (about something unmemorably idiotic), Randy called my poetry “masturbatory and exhibitionistic” and reproached me with my “sterility.”