Authors: Erica Jong
“Brian—do you realize that the Miracle Foam people have been trying to reach you all day?”
“Isn’t it brilliant? It really sums the whole thing up, I think. I’m planning to send it to
The New York Times.
The only thing is I wonder whether
The Times
will print a poem with the word ‘damned’ in it. What do you think?”
“Brian—do you realize that I’ve been sitting here all day answering calls from Miracle Foam? Where in hell have you been?”
“That’s precisely where I’ve been.”
“Where?”
“In hell. Just as you’re in hell and I’m in hell and we’re all in hell. How can you worry about a mere bubble like Miracle Foam?”
“What in God’s name are you going to do about the contract?”
“Just that.”
“Just what?”
“In God’s name, I’m going to forget about it. I’m not going to do anything about it. Why don’t you come downtown and meet me and I’ll show you my poem.”
“Where are you?”
“In hell.”
“OK, I know you’re in hell, but where should I
meet
you?”
“You ought to know. You sent me here.”
“Where?”
“To hell. Where I am now. Where you are now. You’re pretty slow, baby.”
“Brian, please be reasonable—”
“I’m perfectly reasonable. You’re the one who cares about a mere bubble You’re the one who thinks it matters if there are calls from Miracle Foam.”
“Just tell me what corner to meet you on in hell and I’ll come. I swear I will. Just tell me what corner.”
“Don’t you
know?
”
“No. Honestly I don’t. Please tell me.”
“I think you’re trying to make a fool of me.”
“Brian, darling, I only want to see you. Please let me see you.”
“You can see me right now in your mind’s eye. Your blindness is of your own making. You and King Lear.”
“Are you in a phone booth? Or a bar? Please tell me.”
“You already know!”
The conversation went on like this for some time. Brian hung up on me twice and then called back. Finally he agreed to identify the phone booth he was in, not by name but by a sort of guessing game. I had to participate in it by eliminating the possibilities. This took another twenty minutes and several nickels. Finally it turned out he was at the Gotham Bar. I dashed out and took a cab down to meet him. I learned that he had spent the day taking Puerto Rican and black kids for boat rides on Central Park Lake, buying them ice cream, giving money away to people in the park, and planning his escape from hell. He had not actually walked on the water but he had thought about it quite a lot. Now he was ready to change his life. He had discovered he was possessed of a fund of superhuman energy. Other mortals needed sleep. He did not. Other mortals needed jobs and degrees and all the paraphernalia of everyday life. He did not. He was going to embark on the destiny which had always awaited him—saving the world. I was to help him.
To tell you the truth, none of this talk really displeased me very much. It rather excited me. The idea of Brian quitting market research and my quitting graduate school and our going off together to save the world was perfectly OK with me. I had always urged him to quit market research, in fact. I had tried to lure him to go off to Europe with me and just wander for a while. But Brian had always protested. He had gone into market research as if it were the last great crusade.
As we walked through the city that Saturday night, it was his behavior which disturbed me far more than his wild talk. He wanted us both to close our eyes and cross streets against the lights (to prove we were gods). He would go into stores and ask the storekeepers to take down various items, then handle each one, talk elatedly about each one, and then walk out. He would go into a coffee shop and play with the sugar pourer on every table before he sat down. People kept staring at him. Sometimes the storekeepers or waiters would say, “Take it easy buddy, relax buddy” or sometimes they’d throw him out. Everyone sensed that something was wrong. His agitation jangled the air. To Brian, this was only proof of divinity.
“You see,” he said, “they know I’m God and they don’t know how else to react.”
It was doubly hard for me because I half believed Brian’s theory. Exceptional people
are
often called crazy by the ordinary world. If God did come back, he
would
probably wind up in the psycho ward. I was a Laingian way before Laing began publishing. But I was also scared to death.
When we finally got home at 2
A.M
., Brian was still frantic and wide-awake, though I was exhausted. He wanted to show me his power. He wanted to prove he could satisfy me. He hadn’t screwed me in about six weeks, but now he wouldn’t stop. He fucked like a machine, refusing to succumb to an orgasm himself but urging me to come again and again and again. After the first three times I was sore and wanted to stop. I begged him to stop but he wouldn’t. He kept banging away at me like an ax murderer. I was crying and pleading.
“Brian, please stop,” I sobbed.
“You thought I couldn’t satisfy you!” he screamed. His eyes were wild.
“You see!” he said, lunging into me. “You see! You see! You see!”
“Brian, please
stop,
”
“Doesn’t that prove it? Doesn’t that prove I’m God?”
“Please stop,” I whimpered.
When he stopped at last, he withdrew from me violently and thrust his still-hard penis into my mouth. But I was crying too hard to blow him. I lay on the bed sobbing. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay alone with him, but where could I go? For the first time I really began to be convinced he was dangerous.
Suddenly Brian broke down and started to cry. He wanted to castrate himself, he said. He wanted our marriage to be purified of all carnality. He wanted to be like Abelard, and me to be like Heloise. He wanted to be purified of all fleshly desires so that he could save the world. He wanted to be soft like a eunuch. He wanted to be soft like Christ. He wanted to be shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He threw his arms around me and sobbed in my lap. I stroked his hair, hoping he’d finally fall asleep. I fell asleep instead.
I’m not sure what time I awakened, but Brian had been up for hours—probably the whole night. I staggered to the bathroom and the first thing I saw was a crude drawing Scotch-taped to the mirror. It depicted a short man with a halo and an enormous erect penis. Another man with a long beard was about to blow him. Behind them both was a huge eagle (resembling the American eagle) except that it had a very obvious and human-looking erection. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” Brian had scrawled above the picture.
I went to my desk in the bedroom. Pieces of my index cards (containing all the notes for my thesis) were scattered on the floor beneath the desk like confetti. On the desk top was a display of books: the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton were propped open and certain words, phrases and letters were circled in various colored inks. I could make out no system or code at first glance, but there were furious notes in the margins. Phrases like “Oh Hell!” or “The Beast with Two Backs!” or “Womankind is too unkind!” Sprinkled over Shakespeare and Milton were the remains of a carefully torn-up twenty-dollar bill. Elsewhere on the desk were reproductions ripped from art books. They all depicted God or Jesus or Saint Sebastian.
I ran into the living room to look for Brian and found him adjusting the amplifier on the hi-fi. He was playing Glenn Gould’s
Goldberg Variations,
and he began turning the volume up loud and then suddenly turning it down soft, to create a sort of siren effect.
“How loud can you play Bach in this society?” he demanded. “This loud?” He turned it up. “This soft?” He turned it down so that it was barely audible. “You see! There’s no way to play Bach in this society!”
“Brian, what did you do with my thesis?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew perfectly well what he had done with it.
Brian was fiddling with the hi-fi and pretending he hadn’t heard me.
“What did you
do
with my thesis?”
“How loud do you think you can play Bach in this society without the police coming?”
“What did you
do
with my thesis?”
“This loud?” He turned the volume up.
“What did you
do
with my thesis?”
“This soft?” He turned the volume down.
“What did you
do
with my thesis?”
“This loud?”
“Brian!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. It was no use. I went to my desk and sat there staring at the “display” he’d left. I wanted to kill him or myself. Instead I cried.
Brian walked in.
“Who do you think will go to heaven?” he asked. I didn’t answer.
“Will Bach go? Will Milton go? Will Shakespeare go? Will Shakeswoof go? Will Saint Sebastian the Bastard go? Will Abelard the Gelding go? Will Sinbad the Sailor go? Will Tin-bad the Tailor go? Will Jinbad the Jailor go? Will Norman Mailer go? Will Whinbad the Whaler go? Will Finbad the Failer go? Will Rinbad the Railer go? Will Joyce go? Will James go? Will Dante go or has he been already? Will Homer go? Will Yeats go? Will Hardy go with a hard-on? Will Rabelais go with the Rabble? Will Villon go vilely? Will Raleigh go royally? Will Mozart go lightly? Will Mahler go heavily? Will El Greco go in a clap of lightning? Will the light bulbs go?” I turned and looked at him. He was waving his arms wildly and jumping up and down.
“The lights bulbs
will
go to heaven!” he shouted. “They will! They will!”
“You’re driving me crazy!” I yelled in utter exasperation.
“You’ll go to heaven!” he screamed, and then he grabbed my hand and started leading me toward the window. “Let’s go to heaven! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He threw open the window and leaned out.
“Stop it!” I screamed hysterically. “I can’t stand this anymore!” and with that I began to shake him. He must have gotten really frightened because he put his hands around my throat and started choking me.
“Shut up,” he yelled. “The police will come!” But I wasn’t screaming anymore. He tightened his grip. I started to black out.
Why he let me go before he killed me, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was plain dumb luck on my part. I don’t know how to account for it. All I know is that when he finally let go, I was shaking all over and gasping for breath (and I remember later finding big blue bruises on my neck). I ran into the hall closet and sat there in the dark biting my knees and sobbing. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I gasped. And then somehow I collected myself and called my family doctor. He was in East Hampton. I called my mother’s psychiatrist. He was in Fire Island. I called my current psychiatrist. He was in Wellfleet. I called a friend of my sister Randy’s who was a psychiatric social worker. She told me to send for the police or a doctor— any doctor. Brian was psychotic, she said, and possibly dangerous. I was not to stay alone with him.
A Sunday in June and if you want to get sick, you’d better do it at a beach resort. No doctor to be found. I finally reached the guy who was pinch-hitting for my internist. He would be over right away, he said. Five hours later, he arrived. During all that time Brian was astonishingly subdued. He sat in the living room listening to Bach, seemingly in a trance. I sat in the bedroom trying to absorb what had happened. We pretended to ignore each other. The calm after the storm.
At least Brian’s problem had a name now. It was the next best thing to a cure. Being told he was “psychotic” had given me a strange sense of relief. Here was a disease to be treated, a problem to be solved. Naming the thing made it less frightening. Also, it diminished my guilt. Insanity was no one’s fault. It was an act of God. There was something very comforting about that. All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
We endured the afternoon together with Johann Sebastian Bach. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” quoth Congreve (who surely is in heaven playing cards with Mozart). When I think of all the bad times that Bach has helped me get through I’m sure he’s in heaven too.
Dr. Steven Pearlmutter walked in at five—all apologies and sweaty palms. From then on our life was in the hands of the doctors and their smug little categories. My husband Brian, Dr. Pearlmutter assured me, was “a very sick young man.” He was going to “try to help him.” He began by trying to give him a shot of Thorazine—at which point Brian bolted and ran down the back stairs (all thirteen floors) and into Riverside Park. The doctor and I chased him, found him, stopped him, cajoled him, watched him bolt again, chased him again, cajoled him again and so on. The rest of the details are as sordid as they are common. From then on hospitalization became inevitable. Brian was now completely panicked and his delusions became more and more colorful. The days that followed were nightmarish. Brian’s parents flew in from California and promptly declared that Brian was perfectly OK but that I was crazy. They tried to prevent him from taking any medication and they constantly made fun of the doctors (which, admittedly, wasn’t very hard to do). They urged him to leave me and come home to California—as if being away from me would automatically make him all better. Dr. Pearlmutter had referred Brian to a psychiatrist who tried for five gallant days to keep him out of the hospital. It was no use. Between Brian’s mother and father, Brian’s boss, the Miracle Foam people, Brian’s well-meaning former professors and the doctors, our lives were no longer our own. Brian was hounded by his would-be caretakers and each day he flipped out more.
On the fifth morning after Dr. Pearlmutter’s visit, Brian took all his clothes off near Belvedere Tower in Central Park. Then he tried to climb on King Jagiello’s bronze horse along with bronze King Jagiello (crossed swords and all). The police finally took him to the psycho ward at Mount Sinai (sirens screaming, Thorazine flowing like wine), and except for a few weekend passes, we never lived together again.