Authors: Erica Jong
“I
can’t,
” I said.
“Come on,” Pierre said, “I’ll teach you.”
“I didn’t mean
that.
I meant I
can’t; morally,
I
can’t. …
”
“It’s easy,” he said.
“I
know
it’s easy,” I said.
“Here,” he said, “all you do is …”
“Pierre!” I screamed. Pierre gathered his pajama bottoms around him and beat it out of the room.
I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again.
I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but
I
just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your
mother’s
husband—and good grief-that’s Daddy!
But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really
want.
So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you
should
blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear?
I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called
Orgy Girls.
On the bed were about ten other books with titles like
Teen-age Incest; Swapping; Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World;
and
Letters of Lust.
Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival.
His hips began to move faster
[Lalah read in a histrionic voice]
as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily. …
… Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark.
“Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded.
“Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.
“Listen kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears. …” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know.
“Well—what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially.
“Come on you idiots—tell me!”
“You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you …” Lalah said, still giggling.
“How the fuck did
you
know?”
“Because he tried it with me,” she said.
“And me,” said Chloe.
“You’re kidding.”
“We are
not
kidding,” Lalah said. “
Would
that we were. …”
“So what happened?”
“Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe
says
she did, too … but I’m not entirely sure I believe her. …”
“You bitch!” Chloe yelled.
“OK … OK … I believe you.”
“And you mean you just stuck around here
after
that happened?”
“Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless. … He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.”
“A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.”
“Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law. … It isn’t
really
incest.”
“It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed.
“It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.)
“I’ll work on it,” I said.
On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks.
Arabs,
I thought,
goddamned Arabs.
What a disproportionate sense of guilt
I
had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it—as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses
do
for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom—as my sister Randy always reminds me—they are so closely related) ? Is it any
wonder
that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did
they
sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were
worth
the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What—me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody?
Back in Beirut, we made plans to go home. Lalah and Chloe had a charter flight to New York, so they had to leave together, and I had my old Alitalia roundtrip from Beirut to Rome to JFK.
I stopped in Rome as I’d planned and took one more week in Florence before going home to face the music with Charlie. Even in hot, crowded August, Florence remained one of my favorite cities in the world. There I took up with Alessandro again and this time we had an almost perfect, if loveless, six-day affair. At my request, he forsook his mania for dirty words, and we found a charming room at an inn in Fiesole where we could make love from one to four every afternoon (a very civilized lunch-hour custom). Maybe it was because of my fury at Charlie, or perhaps Pierre had really turned me on, but my lovemaking with Alessandro was inspired. It was the only time in my life when I was able to have exuberant, affectionate sex with someone without convincing myself that I was in love. A kind of six-day truce between my id and superego.
When Alessandro went home to his wife in the evenings, I was on my own. I attended concerts at the Pitti, saw a few of the other characters from my previous visit and was hotly pursued once more by Professor “Michelangelo” (Karlinsky) of the flaming beard. Despite the heat and the motley assortment of boyfriends, I loved Florence and there were moments when I hardly wanted to leave at all. But a depressing teaching job and a Ph.D. program I hated were waiting for me in New York, and I was still too much of a superego-ridden schoolgirl not to choose something I hated over something I loved. Or maybe it was really Charlie: I was outraged by his betrayal, but I couldn’t wait to see him again.
Charlie and I broke up soon after our reunion. It seems I could never forgive his ambivalence, though, in fact, I now see it was very like my own, and perhaps I should have been more understanding. Alessandro kept writing from Florence with talk of “
divorzio,
” but I had seen too many Italian movies to believe him. “Michelangelo” turned up once and looked so much worse in the polluted sunlight of New York that I hadn’t the heart to continue. The brown and amber shades of Florence had done wonders for him—as any E. M. Forster fan can readily understand. September and October were grim and dreary. I went out with a depressing assortment of divorces, mama’s boys, neurotics, psychotics, and shrinks. I was only able to keep my spirits up by describing them all in bitchy detail in my letters to Pia. Then, in November, Bennett Wing waltzed into my life looking like the solution to all my problems. Silent as the Sphinx and very gentle. Savior and psychiatrist all in one. I fell into marriage the way (in Europe) I had fallen into bed. It looked like a soft bed; the nails were underneath.
15
Travels with My
Anti-Hero
I want! I want!
—William Blake
I told Adrian everything. My whole hysterical history of searching for the impossible man and finding myself always right back where I started: inside my own head. I impersonated my sisters for him, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my husband, my friends. … We drove and talked and drove and talked. “What’s your prognosis?” I asked, ever the patient in search of the perfect doctor.
“You’re due for a bit of a reshuffle, ducks,” Adrian kept saying, “you have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life.”
Wasn’t I already
doing
that? What was this crazy itinerary anyway if not a trip back into my past?
“You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” he said. “You have to hit rock bottom and then climb back up.”
“Jesus! I feel like I already have!”
Adrian smirked his beautiful smirk with the pipe tucked between his curling pink lips. “You haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” he said, as if he knew some of the surprises in store.
“Are you going to take me there?” I asked.
“If you insist, love.”
It was his magnificent indifference which infuriated me, turned me on, made me wild with frustration. Despite his cuddling and ass-grabbing, Adrian was so
cool.
I used to stare and stare at that beautiful profile wondering what in the world was happening in his head and why I couldn’t seem to fathom it.
“I want to get inside your head,” I said, “and I can’t. It’s driving me crazy.”
“But
why
do you want to get inside my head? What do you think that will solve?”
“It’s just that I want to really feel
close
to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone.”
“What makes you think love solves anything?”
“Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.”
“But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.”
“Brian was crazy.”
“Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.”
“I guess …”
“Look—why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?”
“Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?”
“You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends. …”
Drab, drab, drab, I thought.
“All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.”
“You lose,” Adrian said.
“I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever
change
anything?”
Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down).
“In the mornings,” Adrian finally said, “I never can remember your name.”
So that was my answer. It went through me like a knife. And there I was lying awake every night next to him trembling and saying my own name over and over to myself to try to remember who I was.
“The trouble with existentialism is” (I said this as we were driving down the
autostrada
) “that you can’t stop thinking about the future. Actions
do
have consequences.”
“
I
can stop thinking about the future,” Adrian said.
“How?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. I feel glorious today, for example.”
“Why do I feel so lousy when you feel so glorious?”
“Because you’re bloody Jewish,” he laughed. “The Chosen People. You may be mediocre at other things, but at suffering you’re always superb.”
“
Bastard.
”
“Why? Just because I tell you the truth? Look—you want love, you want intensity, you want feeling, you want closeness—and what do you settle for? Suffering. At least your
suffering
is intense. … The patient
loves
her disease. She doesn’t
want
to be cured.”
The trouble with me was that I always wanted to be the greatest in everything. The greatest lover. The greatest hun-gerer. The greatest sufferer. The greatest victim, the greatest fool … If I got myself into scrapes all the time, it was my own damn fault for always wanting to be the greatest. I had to have the craziest first husband, the most inscrutable second husband, the most daring first book, the most reckless post-publication panic. … I could do nothing by halves. If I was going to make a fool of myself by having an affair with an unfeeling bastard, I had to do it in front of the whole psychoanalytic community of the world. And I had to compound it by taking off with him on a drunken jaunt that might get us both killed. The transgression and the punishment all wrapped up in one neat little package. If undeliverable, return to sender. But who was the sender? Me. Me. Me.
And then, on top of everything else, I began to be convinced I was pregnant. That was all I needed. My life was in an uproar. My husband was God knows where. I was alone with a strange man who did not give a damn about me. And pregnant. Or so I thought. What was I trying to prove? That I could endure anything? Why did I have to keep making my life into such a test of stamina?
I had no real reason to think I was pregnant. I had not missed a period. But I never need a real reason to think anything. And I never need a real reason to panic. Every time I took off my diaphragm I would feel my cervix, searching for some clue. Why did I never know what was going on inside me? Why was my body such a mystery to me? In Austria, in Italy, in France, in Germany—I felt for my cervix and considered the possibilities. I would discover I was pregnant. I would go through the whole pregnancy not knowing if the baby was going to be blond and blue-eyed like Adrian or Chinese like Bennett. What would I do? Who would take me in? I had left my husband and he would never forgive me and take me back. And my parents would never help me without extracting an emotional price so great that I would have to turn into a child again to count on them. And my sisters would think it served me right for my dissolute life. And my friends would laugh behind their false commiseration. Isadora bites the dust!
Or else I would get an abortion. A botched abortion which would kill me. Blood poisoning. Or else permanent sterility. Suddenly I wanted a child with my whole heart. Adrian’s child. Bennett’s child. My child. Anyone’s child. I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted to be
big with child.
I was lying awake in Adrian’s pup tent and crying. He went on snoring. We were sleeping by a roadside somewhere in France that night and it might as well have been the moon. That was how lonely I felt, how utterly bereft.
“No one, no one, no one, no one …” I moaned, hugging myself like the big baby I was. I was trying to rock myself to sleep. From now on, I thought, I will have to be my own mother, my own comforter, my own rocker-to-sleep. Perhaps this is what Adrian meant about going down into the bottom of yourself and pulling yourself back up. Learning how to survive your own life. Learning how to endure your own existence. Learning how to mother yourself. Not always turning to an analyst, a lover, a husband, a parent.
I rocked myself. I said my own name to try to remember who I was: “Isadora, Isadora, Isadora, Isadora … Isadora White Stollerman Wing … Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing … B.A., M.A., Phi Beta Kappa. Isadora Wing, promising younger poet. Isadora Wing, promising younger sufferer. Isadora Wing, feminist and would-be liberated woman. Isadora Wing, clown, crybaby, fool. Isadora Wing, wit, scholar, ex-wife of Jesus Christ. Isadora Wing, with her fear of flying. Isadora Wing, slightly overweight sexpot, with a bad case of astigmatism of the mind’s eye. Isadora Wing, with her unfilla-ble cunt and holes in her head and her heart. Isadora Wing of the hunger-thump. Isadora Wing whose mother wanted her to fly. Isadora Wing whose mother grounded her. Isadora Wing, professional patient, seeker of saviors, sensuality, certainty. Isadora Wing, fighter of windmills, professional mourner, failed adventuress. …”
I must have slept. I woke up to see the sunlight streaming in through the brilliant blue of the pup tent Adrian was still snoring. His hairy blond arm had fallen heavily across my chest and was pressing down on it, making me uncomfortably conscious of my breathing. The birds were chirping. We were in France. By some roadside. Some crossroads in my life. What was I doing there? Why was I lying in a tent in France with a man I hardly knew? Why wasn’t I home in bed with my husband? I thought of my husband with a sudden wave of tenderness. What was he doing? Did he miss me? Had he forgotten me? Had he found someone else? Some ordinary girl who didn’t have to take off on adventures to prove her stamina. Some ordinary girl who was content with making breakfast and raising kiddies. Some ordinary girl of car pools and swimming pools and cesspools. Some ordinary American girl out of
Seventeen
Magazine?
I suddenly had a passion to
be
that ordinary girl. To be that good little housewife, that glorified American mother, that mascot from
Mademoiselle,
that matron from
McCall’s,
that cutie from
Cosmo,
that girl with the Good Housekeeping Seal tattooed on her ass and advertising jingles programmed in her brain.
That
was the solution! To be ordinary! To be unexotic! To be content with compromise and TV dinners and “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” I had a fantasy then of myself as a happy housewife. A fantasy straight out of an adman’s little brain. Me in apron and gingham shirtwaist waiting on my husband and kiddies while the omnipresent TV set sings out the virtues of the American home and the American slave-wife with her tiny befuddled brain.
I thought of how homeless and rootless I had felt the night before and the answer to it all suddenly seemed clear:
be ordinary!
Be a safe little wife in her safe little house and you’ll never wake up desolate by the side of a road in France again.
But then the fantasy exploded. It burst like the bubble it was. I thought of all those mornings in New York when I had awakened with my husband and felt just as lonely. All those lonely mornings we stared at each other across the orange juice and across the coffee cups. All those lonely moments measured out in coffee spoons, in laundry bills, in used toilet paper rolls, in dirty dishes, in broken plates, in canceled checks, in empty Scotch bottles. Marriage could be lonely too. Marriage could be desolate. All those happy housewives making breakfasts for husbands and kiddies were dreaming of running off with lovers to sleep in tents in France! Their heads were steeped in fantasy. They made their breakfasts, their beds, their brunches, and then they went off shopping to buy the latest installment of Jackie Onassis’ life in
McCall’s.
They constantly dreamed of escape. They constantly seethed with resentment. Their lives were pickled in fantasy.
Was there no way out? Was loneliness universal? Was restlessness a fact of life? Was it better to acknowledge
that
than to keep on looking for false solutions? Marriage was no cure for loneliness. Children grew up and went away. Lovers were no panacea. Sex was no final solution. If you made your life into a long disease then death was the only cure. Suddenly, it was all so clear. I lay there in that tent, in that double sleeping bag next to that snoring stranger and thought and thought and thought. What next? How do I lead my life? Where do I go from here?
By afternoon, we were drunk and jolly. We were soused on beer. We stopped to buy peaches from a roadside farmer and found that he’d only sell them by the box, so we drove off with the Triumph loaded with peaches. A huge crate of them filling the back of the car. I began eating them greedily and discovered that nearly all of them had worms. I laughed and I ate around the worms. I tossed the wormy peach halves out into the countryside. I was too drunk to care about worms or pregnancy or marriage or the future.
“I feel great!” I said to Adrian.
“That’s the idea, ducks. Now you’ve got the idea.”
But by evening, when the beers wore off, I was depressed again. There was something so aimless about our days, our driving, our drinking. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I hadn’t seen a newspaper since Vienna. I had hardly even bathed, or changed my clothes. And what I missed most of all was my writing. I hadn’t written a poem in weeks and I began to feel that I never would be able to again. I thought of my used red electric typewriter sitting in New York, and a pang of yearning went through me. That was who I loved! I could see myself going back to Bennett for the sake of having custody of the typewriter. Like people who stay together “for the children” or because they can’t decide who’ll get the rent-controlled apartment.
That night we found a real campsite rather than a roadside. (Le
Camping,
as they say in France.) It wasn’t fancy, but it had a swimming hole, a snack bar, a place where you could shower. I was dying for a shower and as soon as Adrian had staked out our parcel of ground, I made off to the shower house. As the dirt was rolling off me, I spoke to Bennett telepathically. “Forgive me,” I said to him wherever he was (and to myself, wherever I was).
When I got back to the tent, Adrian had made a friend. Two friends, in fact. An American couple. She, coarsely pretty, red-haired, freckled, bosomy, Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. He, bearded, brown-haired, fuzzy, fattish, with a Brooklyn accent. He was a swinging stockbroker who dabbled in hallucinogens. She was a swinging housewife who dabbled in adultery. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a Volkswagen camper, three kids in camp, and the fourteen-year itch. Adrian was wowing the wife (Judy) with his English accent and Laingian theories (which had already worn thin with me). She looked just about ready to tent down with him.
“Hi,” I said brightly to my compatriots and co-religionists.