by Erica Jong
“I’ve never met an ass to rival yours,” he says. And that remark makes me feel better than if I’d just won the National Book Award. The National Ass Award-that’s what I want. The Transatlantic Ass Award of 1971.
“I feel like Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” I say.
“You are Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” he says, “and I want to love you as hard as I possibly can and then leave you.”
Forewarned is forearmed, supposedly. But who was listening? All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart.
The rest of the evening was a dream of reflections and champagne glasses and drunken psychiatric jargon. We wended our way back through the hallway of mirrors. We were so excited that we scarcely bothered to make any plans about when we’d meet again.
Bennett was smiling with the red-headed candidate from Argentina on his arm. I had another champagne and made the rounds with Adrian. He was introducing me to all the London analysts and babbling about my unwritten article. Would they consent to be interviewed? Could he interest them in my journalistic effort? The whole time he had his arm around my waist and sometimes his hand on my ass. We were nothing if not indiscreet. Everybody saw. His analyst. My ex-analysts. His son’s analyst. His daughter’s analyst. My husband’s ex-analyst. My husband.
“Is this Mrs. Goodlove?” one of the older London analysts asked.
“No,” Adrian said, “but I wish it were. If I’m very, very lucky, it may be.”
I was floating. My head was full of champagne and talk of marriage. My head was full of leaving dull old New York for glamorous trendy London. I was out of my mind. “She just ran off with some Englishman,” I could hear my friends in New York saying, not without envy. They were all sandbagged down with children and babysitters, with graduate courses and teaching jobs and analysts and patients. And here I was flying through the purple skies of Vienna on my borrowed broomstick. I was the one they counted on to write out their fantasies. I was the one they counted on to tell funny stories about her former lovers. I was the one they envied in public and laughed at in private. I could imagine the reporting of these events in Class News:
Isadora White Wing and new hubby Doctor Adrian Goodlove are living in London near Hampstead Heath-not to be confused with Heathcliff, for the benefit of all you Math majors. Isadora would love to hear from fellow Barnardites abroad. She is busily engrossed in writing a novel and a new book of poems, and in her spare time attends the International Psychoanalytic, where she congresses…
All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisioned myself tying up with another. I was like a boat that always had to have a port of call. I simply couldn’t imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined.
But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I’ve no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn’t have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn’t automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah.
Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family. I think of them living in places where they can’t work, where they can’t speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and thinks herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right?
A grim picture. Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs?
I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.
We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party-she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing-something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent-but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke.
We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube.
I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable.
Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth-like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.
When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported t
o some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere.
In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected.
“Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.”
“Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.”
“We could look,” he said.
But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind.
On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm.
This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted.
At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there-in a room full of clues.
But now I couldn’t scream. And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car.
A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique-not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important
“I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave.
“Good,” he said, fondling my knee. So instead, he proceeded to tell me about the other women he’d fucked. Some bargain.
First there was May Pei, the Chinese girl Bennett reminded him of.
“She may pay and then she may not pay,” I said.
“Don’t think that wasn’t thought of.”
“I’m sure it was. But the question is-did she pay?”
“Well, I did. She fucked me up for years after that.”
“You mean, after she stopped seeing you, she still fucked you. Some trick. The phantom fuck. You could patent that, you know. Arrange to get people fucked by famous figures of the past: Napoleon, Charles II, Louis XIV… sort of like Dr. Faustus fucking Helen of Troy…” I loved being silly with him.
“Shut up, cunt-and let me finish about May…” and then, turning to me amid a screeching of brakes: “God-you’re beautiful…”
“Keep your fucking eyes on the road,” I said, delighted.
My conversations with Adrian always seemed like quotes from Through the Looking Glass. Like:
Me: “We seem to be going around in circles.”
Adrian: “That’s just the point.”
or:
Me: “Will you carry my briefcase?”
Adrian: “As long as you agree not to carry anything for me just yet”
or:
Me: “I divorced my first husband principally because he was crazy.”
Adrian (furrowing his Laingian brows): “That would seem to me to be a good reason to marry someone, not divorce him.”
Me: “But he watched television every night.”
Adrian: “Oh, then I see why you divorced him.”
Why had May Pei fucked up Adrian’s life?
“She left me in the lurch and went back to Singapore. She had a child there living with its father and the child was in a car crash. She had to go back, but she could have at least written. For months I walked around feeling that the world was made up of mechanical people. I’ve never been so depressed. The bitch finally married the pediatrician who took care of her kid-an American bloke.”
“So why didn’t you go after her if you cared so much?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him.
“Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.)
“Because you loved her.”
“I never used that word.”
“But if you felt that way, why didn’t you go?”
“My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “Someone’s got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.”
“Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.”
“Not very funny,” I said, laughing.
After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.”
“A what?”
“A bin-you know, a madhouse. In mental hospital, I mean.”
Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics.
“I knew you wanted something from me,” I said.
“Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.”
“Up yours.”
We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection.
Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin.
“Molly Bloom?” I asked.
“Who?”
“You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of Ulysses too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise Tristram Shandy.)
“I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education.
Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake.
Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom-not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.” A sort of Jewish princess from Dublin.
“And your wife-what was she like?” (We were so hopelessly lost by now that we pulled over and stopped the car.)
“Catholic,” he said, “a Papist from Liverpool.”
“What did she do?”
“Midwife.”
This was a strange bit of information. I didn’t know quite how to react to it.
“He’d been married to a Catholic midwife from Liverpool,” I imagined myself writing. (In the novel, I’d change Adrian’s name to something more exotic and make him much taller.)
“Why did you marry her?”
“Because she made me feel guilty.”
“Great reason.”
“Wel
l it is. I was a guilty son of a bitch in medical school. A real sucker for the protestant ethic. I mean, I remember there were certain girls who made me feel good-but feeling good scared me. There was one girl-she used to hire this huge barn and invite everyone to come fuck everyone. She made me feel good-so, of course, I mistrusted her. And my wife made me feel guilty-so, of course, I married her. I was like you. I didn’t trust pleasure or my own impulses. It frightened the hell out of me to be happy. And when I got scared-I got married. Just like you, love.”
“What makes you think I got married out of fear?” I was indignant because he was right.
“Oh, probably you found yourself fucking too many guys, not knowing how to say no, and even liking it some of the time, and then you felt guilty for having fun. We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer-and the trouble is: you believe it. Well, it’s bullshit. It took me thirty-six years to realize what a load of bullshit it is and if there’s one thing I want to do for you it’s teach you the same.”
