Authors: Erica Jong
“Hi,” they said in one voice.
“Now what?” said Adrian. “Bed first or booze?”
Judy giggled.
“Don’t mind me,” I said. “We don’t believe in posses-siveness or possession.” I thought I was doing a pretty good imitation of Adrian.
“We’ve got a steak we were about to grill,” the husband (Marty) offered nervously. “Would you like to join us?” When in doubt, eat. I knew his type.
“Super,” said Adrian. The man who came to dinner. I could see he was really turned on by the prospect of screwing Judy with her husband looking on. That was his thing. Since Bennett was off the scene, he’d somewhat lost interest in me.
We sat down to steak and the story of their lives. They’d decided to be reasonable, Marty said, instead of getting divorced like three-quarters of their friends. They’d decided to give each other plenty of freedom. They’d done a lot of “group things,” as he put it, on Ibiza, where they’d spent the month of July. Poor bastard, he didn’t look very happy. He was repeating some swinging sexual catechism like a bar mitzvah boy. Adrian was grinning. Converts already. He could just take it from there.
“How about you?” Judy asked.
“We’re not married,” I said. “We don’t believe in it. He’s Jean-Paul Sartre and I’m Simone de Beauvoir.”
Judy and Marty looked at each other. They’d heard those names somewhere, but couldn’t remember where.
“We’re famous,” I said snidely. “Actually, he’s R. D. Laing and I’m Mary Barnes.”
Adrian laughed, but I could see I’d lost Judy and Marty. Pure self-protection. I felt a showdown coming on, and I had to throw my intellectual weight around. It was all I had left.
“Right,” said Adrian. “Why don’t we just swap for starters?”
Marty looked crestfallen. It wasn’t very complimentary to me, but the truth was I didn’t much want him either.
“Be my guests,” I said to Adrian. I wanted to see him hoist on his own petard—whatever the hell that means. (I never have been sure.) “I think I’ll sit this one out. If you want me to, I’ll watch.” I had decided to outdo Adrian at his own game. Cool. Uninvolved. All that crap.
Marty then leapt up to protest his virility. “I think we should swap or nothing,” he stammered.
“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but I’m just not in the mood.” I was about to add, “Besides I may have clap …” but I decided not to ruin it for Adrian. Let him do his thing. I was tough. I could take it.
“Don’t you think we should reach a group decision?” Judy said.
Boy, was she ever the ex-girl scout!
“I’ve already made my decision,” I said. I was awfully proud of myself. I knew what I wanted and I wasn’t going to back down. I was saying no and liking it. Even Adrian was proud of me. I could tell by the way he was grinning. Character building, that’s what he was doing. He’d always been interested in saving me from myself.
“Well,” I said, “shall we watch you or just sit near the swimming hole and talk? I’m amenable to either.”
“The swimming hole,” Marty said desperately.
“I hope that’s not a pun,” I said.
I waved cheerily to Adrian and Judy as they climbed into the Volkswagen camper and drew the curtains. Then I took Marty by the hand and led him to the old swimming hole where we sat down on a rock.
“Do you want to tell me the story of your life, or just describe Judy’s affairs?”
He looked glum.
“Do you always take things so casually?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the camper.
“I’m usually a terrific worrywart, but my friend there has been building my character.”
“How do you mean?”
“He’s trying to teach me to stop agonizing, and he may succeed—but not for the reasons he thinks.”
“I don’t understand,” Marty said.
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m jumping ahead. It’s a long, sad story, and not the most original plot in the world.”
Marty looked wistfully in the direction of the camper. I took his hand.
“Let me tell you a secret—the chances are that not much action is taking place in there. He’s not the stud he thinks he is,” I said.
“Impotent?”
“Often.”
“That doesn’t make me feel much better, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”
I looked at Marty. He wasn’t bad looking. I thought of all the times I’d yearned for strange men, strange places, strange enormous cocks. But all I felt was indifference. I knew that screwing Marty would not take me any nearer the truth I was seeking—whatever that was. I wanted some ultimate beautiful act of love in which each person becomes the other’s prayer wheel, toboggan, rocket. Marty was not the answer. Was anyone?
“How’d you get here?” he asked. “Aren’t you American?”
“Those two things don’t cancel each other out. … Actually, I left my perfectly nice husband for this.”
Now Marty perked up. A faint shock wave passed over his face. Was that why I had done it after all—just to be able to say brazenly, “I left my husband” and see the shock waves pass between me and some stranger? Was it no more than exhibitionism? And a pretty seedy sort of exhibitionism at that.
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“What do you do?”
The odd intimacy of waiting outside a camper while our partners fucked each other called for some kind of confession, so I gave out.
“New Yorker, Jewish, from a very neurotic upper-middle-class family, married for the second time to a shrink, no children, twenty-nine-years old, just published a book of supposedly erotic poems which caused strange men to call me up in the middle of the night with propositions and prepositions, and caused a big fuss to be made over me—college reading tours, interviews, letters from lunatics, and such—I nipped out. Started reading my own poems and trying to become one with the image presented in them. Started trying to live out my fantasies. Started believing I was a fictional character invented by me.”
“Weird,” said Marty, impressed.
“The point is that fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.”
Wasn’t I sounding like Bennett? The irony of it!
“I wish you’d tell Judy that,” Marty said.
“Nobody can tell anyone anything,” I said.
Later, when Adrian and I were in the tent together, I asked him about Judy.
“Boring cunt,” he said. “It just lies there and doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.”
“How’d she like you?”
“How do I know?”
“Don’t you care?”
“Look—I fucked Judy as one might have coffee after dinner. And not very good coffee at that.”
“Then why bother?”
“Why not?”
“Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.”
“So?”
“So you wind up with the opposite of what you wanted. You wanted intensity, but you get numbness. It’s self-defeating.”
“You’re lecturing me,” Adrian said. “You’re right,” I said without apology.
The next morning Judy and Marty were gone. They had packed up and fled in the night like gypsies. “I lied to you last night,” Adrian said. “About what?”
“I actually didn’t fuck Judy at all.”
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t feel like it.” I laughed nastily.
“You mean you couldn’t.”
“No. That’s
not
what I mean. I mean I didn’t
want
to.”
“It doesn’t matter at all to
me,
” I said, “whether you did or didn’t.”
“That’s shit.”
“That’s what
you
think.”
“You’re just furious because I’m the first man you’ve met that you can’t control, and you can’t put up for long without anyone or anything you can’t control.”
“Crap. I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game. I agree with you about spontaneity and existentialism—but this isn’t spontaneity at all—it’s desperation. You said it about me the first day we screwed and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom. It isn’t even pleasurable. It’s pathetic. Even this trip is pathetic.”
“You never give anything a chance,” Adrian said.
Later we swam in the pond and dried ourselves in the sun. Adrian stretched out on the grass and squinted up into the sunlight. I lay with my head on his chest smelling the warm odor of his skin. Suddenly a cloud passed in front of the sun and rain began to fall lightly. We didn’t move. The rain cloud passed, leaving us sprinkled with large drops. I could feel them evaporating when the sun came out and shone on our skin again. A daddy longlegs walked over Adrian’s shoulder and through his hair. I sat bolt upright.
“What’s wrong?”
“Disgusting bug.”
“Where?”
“Your shoulder.”
He looked sideways across his chest for it and grabbed it by one leg. He dangled it, watching it tread the air like a swimmer treading water.
“Don’t kill it!” I pleaded.
“I thought you were scared of it.”
“I am, but I don’t want to see you kill it.” I shrank back.
“How about this?” he said, pulling off one of its legs.
“Oh God—
don’t!
I
hate
it when people do that.”
Adrian went on plucking off the legs like daisy petals.
“She loves me, she loves me not …” he said.
“I
hate
that,” I said, “please don’t”
“I thought you hated
bugs.
”
“I don’t like them
crawling
on me—but I can’t stand to see them killed either. And it makes me sick to see you mutilate it like that. I can’t watch,” and I got up and ran back to the swimming hole.
“I don’t understand you!” Adrian shouted after me. Why are you so bloody sensitive?”
I ducked under the water.
We didn’t speak again until after lunch.
“You’ve ruined it,” Adrian said, “with your fretting and worrying and hypersensitivity.”
“OK, then drop me off in Paris and I’ll fly home from there.”
“With pleasure.”
“I could have told you that you’d get sick of me if I ever displayed any human feelings. What kind of plastic woman do you want, anyway?”
“Don’t be daft. I just want you to grow up.”
“As defined by you.”
“As defined by both of us.”
“Aren’t you democratic,” I said sarcastically.
We began packing the car, banging tent poles and gear. It took about twenty minutes, during which we didn’t exchange a word. Finally we got in the car.
“I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you that I cared enough about you to shake up my whole life for you.”
“You didn’t do it for me,” he said, “I was just the excuse.”
“I never would have been able to do it without feeling as strongly about you as I did.” And then with a shudder that went through my whole body, I remembered my longing for him in Vienna. The weakness in the knees. The churning guts. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. All the things he stirred in me which had made me follow him. I longed for him as he was when I first met him. The man he had become was disappointing.
“The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed,” I said. “They’re mutually exclusive. Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“My theory of the zipless fuck,” I said. And I explained it as best I could.
“You mean I disappoint you?” he asked, putting his arms around me and pulling me down until my head was in his lap. I smelled the gamy smell of his dirty trousers.
“Let’s get out of the car,” I said.
We walked over to a tree and sat down under it. I lay with my head on his lap. Aimlessly, I began fiddling with his fly. I half unzipped it and took his soft penis in my hand.
“It’s little,” he said.
I looked up at him, his green-gold eyes, the blond hair over his forehead, the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth, his sunburned cheeks. He was still beautiful to me. I longed for him with a yearning that was no less painful for being part nostalgia. We kissed for a long time, his tongue making dizzying circles in my mouth. No matter how long we went on kissing his penis stayed soft. He laughed his sunny laugh and I laughed too. I knew he’d always hold back on me. I knew I’d never really possess him, and that was part of what made him so beautiful. I would write about him, talk about him, remember him, but never have him. The unattainable man.
We drove toward Paris. I insisted I wanted to go home, but Adrian tried to prevail on me to stay. He was afraid of losing my loyalty now. He sensed I was drifting away. He knew I was already filing him in my notebook for future reference. As we approached the outskirts of Paris, we began seeing graffiti scrawled under the highway bridges. One of them read:
FEMMES! LIBÉRONS-NOUS!
16
Seduced & Abandoned
The vote, I thought, means nothing to women. We should be armed.
—Edna O’Brien
Paris, again.
We arrive coated with the dust of the road. Two migrants out of John Steinbeck, two dusty vaudeville performers out of Colette.
Peeing by the side of the road is all very charmingly Rous-seauian in theory, but in practice, it leaves your crotch sticky. And one of the disadvantages of being a woman is peeing in your shoes. Or on them.
So we arrive in Paris, sticky, dusty, and slightly pissed upon. We are back in love with each other—that second stage of love which consists of nostalgia for the first stage. That second stage of love which comes when you desperately feel you are falling out of love and cannot stand the thought of still another loss.
Adrian fondles my knee.
“How are you, love?”
“Fine, love.”
We no longer know how much is real and how much fake. We are one with our performance.
I am determined by now to find Bennett and try again if he’ll take me back. But I haven’t the slightest idea where Bennett is. I decide to attempt phoning him. I assume that he’ll have gone back to New York. He hates knocking around Europe almost as much as I do.
At the Gare du Nord, I find a telephone and try to place a person-to-person call. But I’ve forgotten every word of French I ever knew and the operator’s English leaves much to be desired. After an absurd dialogue, many mistakes, bleeps and wrong numbers, I am put through to my own home number.
The operator asks for “le Docteur Wing,” and far off, as if under the whole Atlantic Ocean, I hear the voice of the girl who has sublet our apartment for the summer.
“He’s not here. He’s in Vienna.”
“
Madame, le Docteur est à Vienne,
” the operator echoes.
“
Ce n’est pas possible!
” I yell—but that’s the extent of my French. As the operator begins to argue with me, I become increasingly tongue-tied. Once, years ago, when I traveled here as a college student, I could speak this language. Now I can hardly even speak English.
“He must be there!” I shout. Where is he if not at home? And what on earth will I do with my life without him?
I quickly put through a call to Bennett’s oldest friend, Bob, who has our car for the summer. Bennett would be sure to contact him first. Surprisingly, Bob is home.
“Bob—if s me—Isadora—I’m in Paris. Is Bennett there?”
Bob’s voice comes back faintly, “I thought he was with you.” And then silence. We’ve been cut off. Only it is not quite total silence. Is that the sound of the ocean I’m hearing—or do I imagine it? I feel a tiny rivulet of sweat trickle down between my breasts. Suddenly Bob’s voice surfaces again.
“What happened? Did you have a …” Then gurgling interference. Then silence. I envision some giant fish gnawing on the Atlantic cable. Every time the fish chomps down, Bob’s voice goes dead.
“Bob!”
“I can’t hear you.
I
said: did you have a fight?
”
“Yes. It’s too hard to explain. It’s awful. It’s all my …”
“
What?
I can’t hear you. … Where’s Bennett?”
“That’s why I’m
calling
you.”
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
“
Shit.
I can’t hear you either. … Listen, if he calls, tell him I love him.”
“
What?
”
“Tell him I’m looking for him.”
“
What?
I can’t hear you.”
“Tell him I want him.”
“
What?
I can’t hear you.”
“Tell him I want him.”
“
What?
Would you repeat that?”
“This is impossible.”
“I can’t
hear
you.”
“Just tell him that I love him.”
“What? This is a horrible conn …”
We are cut off for the last time. The operator’s voice intervenes with the news that I owe 129 new francs and 34 centimes.
“But I couldn’t hear anything!”
The operator insists that I owe it anyway. I go to the telephone cashier, look in my wallet and find I have no francs at all, old or new. So I have to go through the hassle of changing money and fighting with the cashier, but finally I pay. It’s just too much trouble to protest further.
I begin peeling off francs as if in penance. I’d pay anything just to be home now recollecting this whole thing in tranquillity. That’s the part of it all I really do like best. Why kid myself? I’m no existentialist. Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down—revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.
“What happened?” Adrian says, appearing from the men’s room.
“All I know for sure is that he’s not in New York.”
“Maybe he’s in London.”
“Hey—maybe he is.” My heart is pounding at the thought of seeing him again.
“Why don’t we drive to London together,” I suggest, “and part good friends?”
“Because I think you have to face this on your own,” says Adrian the Moralist.
I see nothing sinister in his proposal. In a way, he’s right. I got myself into this mess—why count on him to get me out?
“Let’s go have a drink and think things over,” I say, stalling for time.
“Right.”
And we take off in the Triumph, a map of Paris on my lap, the top down, and the sun gleaming on the city—as in the movie version of our story.
I direct Adrian toward the Boul’ Mich and am delighted to find that I remember the avenues, the landmarks, and the turns. Gradually, my French is coming back.
“
Il pleure dans mon cœur/ Comme il pleut sur la ville!
” I shout, thrilled to be able to remember two lines of the one poem I managed to memorize in all those years of French classes. Suddenly (and for no reason, except the sight of Paris) I’m flying higher than a kite. “She was born with a shot of adrenalin,” my mother used to say. And it was true—when I wasn’t horribly depressed, I was bursting with energy, giggles, and wisecracks.
“What do you mean
il pleut?
” says Adrian. “It’s the sunniest bloody day I’ve seen in weeks.” But he’s catching the giggles from me and even before we get to the café we’re both high. We park the car on the Rue des Écoles (the nearest parking place we can find) and leave all our gear in the car. For a moment I hesitate because there’s no way to lock up our things—the Triumph only has a canvas flap—but after all, what do I care about permanence or possessions?
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
—right?
We make for a café on the Place St. Michel, babbling to each other about how great it is to be back in Paris, how Paris never changes, how the cafés are always right where you left them, and the streets are always right where you left them, and Paris is always right where you left it.
Two beers each and we are kissing ostentatiously in public. (Anyone would think we were the world’s greatest lovers in private.)
“The superego is soluble in alcohol,” says Adrian, becoming again the self-confident flirt he was in Vienna.
“
My
superego is soluble in Europe,” I say. And we both laugh rather too loudly.
“Let’s never go home,” I propose. “Let’s stay here forever and be delirious every day.”
“The grape is the only true existentialist,” Adrian answers, holding me close.
“Or the hops. Is it hops or hop? I’m never sure.”
“Hops,” he says authoritatively, taking another belt of beer.
“Hops,” I say, doing the same.
We skip through Paris in a beery blur. We eat couscous for lunch and oysters for supper, and in between we drink innumerable beers and make innumerable stops to pee; we skip through the Jardin des Plantes and around the Pantheon and through the narrow streets near the Sorbonne. We skip through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Finally we rest on a bench near the Fontaine de l’Observatoire. We are happily stewed. We watch the great bronze horses rearing out of the fountain. I have that strange sense of invulnerability which alcohol gives and I feel that I am living in the midst of a romantic movie. I feel so relaxed and loose and giddy. New York is farther away than the moon.
“Let’s find a hotel room and go to bed,” I say. Not a strong wave of lust, but just a friendly wish to consummate this romantic giddiness. We might try once more. Just one perfect fuck to remember him by. All our attempts have been somehow disappointing. It seems such a shame that we’ve been together all this time and have risked so much for so little. Or maybe that’s the whole point?
“No,” says Adrian, “we haven’t time.”
“What do you mean we haven’t time?”
“I’ll have to set out tonight if I expect to get to Cherbourg tomorrow morning.”
“
Why
do you have to get to Cherbourg tomorrow morning?” Something horrible is beginning to dawn through the alcoholic euphoria.
“To meet Esther and the children.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding.” He looks at his watch. “They’ll be leaving London about now, I expect. We’re supposed to have a little holiday in Brittany.”
I stare at him, calmly consulting his watch. The enormity of his betrayal leaves me speechless. Here I am—drunk, unwashed, not even knowing what day it is—and he’s keeping track of an appointment he made over a month ago.
“You mean you’ve known this all along?”
He nods.
“And you let
me
think we were just being existentialists while you knew all along you had to meet Esther on a certain day?”
“Well—have it your way. It wasn’t as evilly planned as you seem to think.”
“Then
what
was it? How could you let me think we were both just wandering where the whim took us—when all along you had an appointment with Esther?”
“It was your reshuffle, ducks, not mine. I never said I was going to reshuffle
my
life to keep you company.”
I felt like I’d been socked in the jaw. It was like being six and having your bicycle smashed by your supposed best friend. It was the worst betrayal I could think of.
“You mean you sat there the
whole
time talking about freedom and unpredictability and you
knew
you had plans to meet Esther? I’ve never
met
such a hypocrite!”
Adrian began laughing.
“What’s so goddamned funny?”
“Your fury.”
“I’d like to
kill
you,” I screamed.
“I’ll bet you would.”
And with that I began swinging at him and pummeling him. He grabbed me by the wrists and held me.
“I only wanted to give you something to write about,” he laughed.
“You
bastard!
”
“Doesn’t this make the perfect end to your story?”
“You really are a
pig.
”
“Come on, love, don’t take it so hard. The moral of the story is the same anyway, isn’t it?”
“Your morals are like roads through the Alps. They make these hairpin turns all the time.”
“I seem to have heard
that
somewhere before too,” he said.
“Well, I’m going
with
you.”
“Where?”
“Cherbourg. We’ll just have to drive through Brittany
à cinq.
We’ll all have to fuck each other and not make any silly moral excuses—as you said way back in Vienna.”
“Nonsense, you’re not going.”
“I am too.”
“You
are not.
I won’t permit it.”
“What do you mean you
won’t permit it?
What kind of shit is that? You flaunted everything in front of Bennett. You encouraged me to shake up my life and go off with you and now you’re busy keeping
your
safe little household intact! What kind of shit do you think I’ll stand for?
You
were the one who sold me a bill of goods about honesty and openness and not living in a million contradictions. I’m damn well going to Cherbourg with you. I want to meet Esther and the kids and well all just play it by ear.”
“Absolutely not. I
won’t
take you. I’ll physically throw you out of the car if need be.”
I looked at him in disbelief. Why was it so hard for me to believe that he would be so callous? It was clear he meant what he said. I knew he
would
throw me out of the car if need be. And perhaps even drive off laughing.
“But don’t you
care
about being a
hypocrite?
” The tone of my voice was tinged with pleading as if I already knew I’d lost
“I refuse to upset the kids that way,” he said, “and that’s final.”
“Obviously you don’t mind upsetting me.”
“You’re grown up. You can take it. They can’t.”
What answer could I make to that? I could scream and yell that I was a baby too, that I’d fall apart if he left me, that I’d crack up. Maybe I would. But I wasn’t Adrian’s child, and it wasn’t his business to rescue me. I was nobody’s baby now. Liberated. Utterly free. It was the most terrifying sensation I’d ever known in my life. Like teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon and hoping you’d learn to fly before you hit bottom.
It was only after he’d left that I was able to gather my terror in my two hands and possess it. We did not part enemies. When I knew I was truly defeated, I stopped hating him. I began concentrating on how to endure being alone. As soon as I ceased expecting rescue from him, I found that I could empathize with him. I was not his child. He had a right to protect his children. Even from me—if he conceived me to be a threat to them. He had betrayed me, but I had sensed all along that this would happen and in some way I had used him as a betrayer just as surely as he had used me as a victim. He was, perversely, an instrument of my freedom. As I watched him drive away, I knew I would fall back in love with him as soon as the distance between us was great enough.