Authors: Erica Jong
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s just that you’re such a find, I can’t believe it” He seemed to be sobbing and choking alternately.
“Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?”
“What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?”
“The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.”
“Darling,” I said, rocking him.
I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering—but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement.
In the morning he woke up smiling and fucked me like a stud. I had passed the test. I had not thrown him out. This was my reward.
For the next eight months or so we went together, usually spending nights either at his place or mine. I was in the process of getting an annulment from Brian, and was teaching at CCNY while finishing my M.A. at Columbia. I was still living in the same apartment where Brian had cracked up and I hated to stay alone nights, so when Charlie couldn’t stay with me, I followed him to the East Village and shared his narrow bed.
He loved me, he said, he adored me, he said, and yet, he kept holding back. I sensed something funny in his declarations of love, something tentative and insincere. I was wild because it was the first time anyone had ever held back on me. I was used to having the upper hand and his tentativeness incensed me. It made me more and more crazy about him, which in turn made him more and more tentative. The old, old story.
I knew there was another girl in Paris, an old girlfriend from Radcliffe now studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. According to Charlie, they were just friends. It was over, he said.
She was plump and dark-haired and (according to him) had this most annoying habit of falling into a dead sleep after getting laid. She had gone to Paris to get away from him, and had a French boyfriend who lived with her on the Rue de la Harpe (Charlie seemed to know the particulars pretty well for someone who no longer gave a damn). But if all that was
true,
then why did she sign her letters to him “I love you”? Was it just to keep an ace in the hole? And how about
him?
Was
she
his ace (or ass) in the hole? Or was
I?
I’ve always felt that reading other people’s mail is the lowest of the low, but jealousy drives you to strange things. One sad morning in the East Village, when Charlie left early to teach his music students, I snuck out of bed like a spy and (with my heart booming like one of Saul Goodman’s kettle drums) I searched his apartment. I was looking, of course, for Paris postmarks—and I found them, right under Charlie’s tattle-tale gray jockey shorts.
Judging from her letters, Salome Weinfeld (named for her grandpa Sol?) was a literary type. She was also involved in the game of driving Charlie wild with jealousy while holding onto him with little doles of affection.
Cher Charles [she wrote]: We [we!] are living here on the sixth floor (seventh to you) of a charming seedy dump called the Hotel de la Harper while we look for cheaper digs. Paris is divine—Jean-Paul Sartre practically around the corner, Simone de Beauvoir, Beckett, Genêt—
tout le monde,
in short. Darling, I love you. Don’t think that just because I’m living with Sebastien (who, incidentally, makes superb couscous)—I have stopped caring for you. It’s just that I need time to experiment, to breathe, to live, to stretch, to flex my muscles [guess which!] without you.
I miss you day and night, think of you, even dream of you. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is to live with a man who doesn’t know what a B.L.T. is, who never ate a blintz, who thinks
The Charles
is a former king of England! Nevertheless he (Sebastien) is sweet and devoted and [a whole line was inked out blackly here] makes me realize daily how much I still love you.
Attends-moi, chéri
Sally
Attends-moi
yourself!
But how could I confront Charlie with a letter which I had ferreted out from among his not-too-clean underwear? So instead I adopted a Fabian policy of watchful waiting. I kept my resentment secret. I was determined to win him, gradually, from his secret pen pal.
In June, we left for Europe together. Charlie was going to a conducting competition in Holland; I had friends to visit in Yorkshire, was due to meet my old buddy Pia in Florence for a jaunt through southern Europe, and was going to see my sister Randy in the Middle East. Charlie and I planned to stay in Holland together for two weeks and then part company. He was supposedly going home to conduct an oratorio at some arts festival, but this was still uncertain. I secretly hoped we’d both agree to cancel all our other plans and just travel together for the rest of the summer.
We sailed on the old
Queen Elizabeth,
tourist class. Stuffy Cunard would not give us a cabin together unless we produced written proof of matrimony (which, of course, we didn’t have). Besides, Charlie was stingy. For economy’s sake, he took one bunk in a four-bedded cabin with three old men, and I had no choice but to take one bunk in a four-bedded female cabin. Windowless, naturally, and right over the engines. My companions were a German lady who looked and talked like the Bitch of Buchenwald, a skinny French nurse who snored, and a fifty-year-old English schoolmistress in cardigans and tweeds and ripple-soled shoes. She used Yardley’s
English Lavender
and the whole cabin reeked of it. Our problem for the duration of the five-and-a-half-day crossing was where to fuck. My cabin was out, since the French nurse seemed to sleep all day and the English and German ladies retired at nine. Once we tried skipping lunch so as to have Charlie’s cabin while all three old codgers were out eating, but one of them came back and rattled the door angrily just as we were getting started. So we began scouring the ship for places to fuck. We were that determined. You’d think it would be easy on an old ship as full of nooks and crannies as the
Queen Elizabeth,
but it wasn’t. The linen closets were locked, the lifeboats were too high to climb into, the public rooms were too public, the nursery was full of toddlers, and we couldn’t find any empty cabins. I suggested using one of the first-class cabins while the people were out, but Charlie was chicken.
“What if they come back?” he asked.
“They’d probably be too embarrassed to say anything anyway—or else they’d automatically think they were in the wrong cabin and by the time they searched around and found the steward, we’d be
gone.
”
Jesus, was
I
a pragmatist compared to Charlie! What a scaredy cat he was! My fear of flying, after all, lets me
ride
on planes as long as I agree to suffer through the whole flight in terror, but
his
fear of flying was so bad that he wouldn’t even go
near
a plane. That was how we wound up in this predicament in the first place.
But we finally found a place. The only deserted place on board. An absolutely perfect place—both symbolically and practically (except that it had no bed): the Jewish Chapel in tourist class.
“This is fantastic!” I yelled when we fumbled for the light and realized what room it was we had found. What a setting! Pews! A Star of David! Even a Torah—for Christ’s sake! I was really turned on.
“I’ll just pretend I’m a vestal virgin or something,” I said, starting to unzip Charlie.
“But there’s no
lock
on the door!” he protested.
“Who’s going to come in here anyway? Certainly not all bur WASP fellow-travelers and Anglican crewmen. Besides, we can just turn out the light again. Anyone who stumbles in will think we’re
davining
or something. What do they know about Jewish services?”
“They’ll probably mistake you for the burning bush,” he said snidely.
“Very funny.” I was stepping out of my underpants and switching off the light.
But we only got to screw in the sight of God once, because the next day when we returned to our little temple of love, we found it padlocked. We never knew why. Charlie, of course, was
sure
(in his paranoid fashion) that somebody (God?) had photographed our vigorous coupling and also tape recorded all our moans. He spent the rest of the trip panicked. He was
positive
we’d be met in Le Havre by an Interpol vice squad.
The remainder of the crossing was pretty dull for me. Charlie sat in one of the lounges studying his scores and conducting imaginary musicians, while I watched him, seething with resentment about Sally, who I was sure he intended to see in Paris. I tried to put it out of my mind but it kept popping up like a candy wrapper which refuses to sink into Central Park Lake. What could I do? I tried writing but concentration was beyond me. All I could think of was Sally—that super-phony. She was keeping Charlie on the hook like Charlie was keeping
me
on the hook. All the problems of love are problems of maldistribution, goddamn it. There’s plenty to go around, but it always goes to the wrong people, at the wrong times, in the wrong places. The loved get more love and the unloved get more unloved. The closer we got to France, the more I included myself among the latter.
Of course, Charlie lost the conducting competition. And in the first round. Despite his ostentatious studying, he never could remember scores. He was not cut out to be a conductor, either. On the podium, he always seemed to go as limp as he had that first night in bed. His whole body sagged. His shoulders curled over and his back arched like an overcooked cannelloni which had lost its stuffing. Poor Charlie had no charisma. The opposite of Brian exactly. I often thought (while watching Charlie perform) that if only he could have had a little of Brian’s charisma he would have been phenomenal. Brian, of course, had no talent for music. But if only I could have combined them! Why do I always wind up with two men who would make one great man? Is that somehow the secret of my Oedipal problem? My father and my grandfather? My father who always goes off to play the piano when things get hot and my grandfather who hangs in there like the fireball he is, arguing Marxism, Modernism, Darwinism or any other ism—as if his life depended on it?
Am I doomed to spend my life running between two men?
One diffident and mild and almost indifferent and one so fiery and restless that he uses up all
my
oxygen?
A typical scene at the White-Stoloff dinner table. My mother Jude, screaming about Robert Ardrey and territoriality. My grandfather Stoloff (known to everyone as Papa) quoting Lenin and Pushkin to prove that Picasso is a phony. My sister Chloe telling Jude to shut up, Randy screaming for Chloe to shut up. Bob and Lalah upstairs nursing the quints, Pierre arguing economics with Abel. Chloe baiting Bennett about psychiatry, Bennett coughing nervously and being inscrutable, Randy attacking my poetry, my grandmother (Mama) sewing and admonishing us not to “talk like truck drivers,” and me thumbing through a magazine to shield myself somehow (always with the printed word!) from my family.
CHLOE
: Isadora’s always
reading
something.
Can’t you putdown the goddamned magazine?
ME
: Why? So I can yell along with everyone else?
CHLOE
: Well it
would
be better than reading a goddamned
magazine
all the time.
MY FATHER
(humming
Chattanooga Choo Choo
)
:
“Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore. …”
CHLOE
(eyes heavenward as if in supplication): And Daddy’s always humming or making wisecracks. Can’t we ever have a
serious
conversation around here?
ME
(reading) : Who wants a serious conversation?
CHLOE
: You’re a hostile bitch.
ME
: For someone who hates psychiatry, you go pretty heavy on the jargon.
CHLOE
: Fuck you.
MAMA
(looking up from her sewing): You should be ashamed. I never brought up my granddaughters that they should talk like truck drivers.
PAPA
(looking up from his debate with Jude):
Disgusting.
CHLOE
fat the top of her lungs) : WILL EVERYONE SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE AND LISTEN TO ME!
The sound of a piano is heard in the living room. It’s my father playing his own rendition of
Begin the Beguine,
which he. played years ago in the first Broadway production of
Jubilee.
“
When they begin … the … Beguine … It brings back the thrill of music so tennn-derrr. …
” His voice wafts to me over the chords of the slightly out-of-tune Steinway baby grand. But Papa and Jude don’t even notice his departure. “In
this society,
” Jude is saying, “the standards of art are set by press agents and public relations men—which means that there
are
no stan—” “I’ve
always said,
” Papa interrupts, “that the world is divided into two types of people: the crooks and the semicrooks. …” And my father answers them both with a broken chord.