by Erica Jong
I did all this in a cold sweat to the thumping accompaniment of my heart. What terrified me was the possibility of finding a poem or story or article by someone I knew. Someone who had been an idiot in college, or a known nose-picker, or who (in combination with one or both of these things) was younger than me. Even by one or two months.
It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world (located somewhere east of Westport and west of the Cotswolds) where Peter de Vries (punning softly) was forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolo Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master’s Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly (repeating all the while that Nabokov was the best writer of English currently holding American citizenship). Meanwhile, the Indian writers clustered in a corner punjabbering away in Sellerian accents (and giving off a pervasive odor of curry) and the Irish memorists (in fishermen’s sweaters and whiskey breath) were busy snubbing the prissily tweedy English memorists.
Oh, I had mythicized other magazines and literary quarterlies, too, but The New Yorker had been my shrine since childhood. (Commentary, for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites-all of whom were named Irving-worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirees amused me, but it was for The New Yorker that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages.
I had, anyway, an altogether exalted notion of what it meant to be an author. I imagined them as a mysterious fraternity of mortals who walked around more nimbly and lightly than other people-as if they somehow had invisible wings on their shoulders. They smiled wryly, recognizing each other by means of a certain something-maybe like the radar bats are said to possess. Certainly nothing so crude as a secret handshake.
Bennett was indirectly involved with my writing too, though he seldom read a word I wrote. I did not really need anyone to read my work at that point (because the work was mostly a preparation for the work to come) but I very much needed someone to approve of the act of writing. He did that. At times it was not clear whether he approved of my writing just so that I would not bother him in his depression or whether he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. But the fact was that he believed in me long before I believed in myself. It was as if during that long bad time in our marriage we reached each other indirectly through my writing. Though we did not read it together, we were united by it in our retreat from the world.
We were both learning how to fish the unconscious. Bennett was sitting almost motionless in the living room pondering his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, all the deaths that had been heaped on his shoulders when he was barely old enough to grasp his own life. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed.
I began two novels in Heidelberg. Both of them had male narrators. I just assumed that nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: “clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.” I wanted to write about the whole world. I wanted to write War and Peace-or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights and jungle safaris. Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine”-while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing. I was paralyzed.
Thanks to my luck, my sadness, my strange relationship with my husband, my stubborn determination (which I did not at all believe in then), I managed to write three books of poems in the next three years. I scrapped two and the third was published. Then a whole new set of problems began. I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing, and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure.
If I had learned how to write, mightn’t I also learn how to live? Adrian, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to live. Bennett, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to die. And I didn’t even know which I wanted. Or maybe I had pegged them wrong. Maybe Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death. Manichean though I was, I couldn’t even tell the players without a score card. If I could tell good from evil, maybe I could choose, but I was more baffled now than I’d ever been.
8 Tales from the Vienna Woods
The bonds of wedlock are so heavy
that it takes two to carry them-
sometimes three.
– Alexandre Dumas
From then on the merry-go-round began. I would go to meetings with Bennett, fully expecting to stay, swearing to myself that I’d never see Adrian again, that it was over, that I’d had my fling and it was finished-then I’d see Adrian and fall apart. I found myself acting out the vocabulary of popular love songs, the clichés of the worst Hollywood movies. My heart skipped a beat. I got misty whenever he was near. He was my sunshine. Our hearts were holding hands. If he was in a room with me, I was in such a state of agitation that I could hardly sit still. It was a kind of madness, a total absorption. I forgot the article I was supposed to write. I forgot everything but him.
None of the ploys I had used on myself in the past seemed to work anymore. I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery,” by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.
After lunch on that first day of the Congress, I told Bennett I was taking off to go swimming and I cut out with Adrian. We drove to my hotel where I got my bathing suit, put on my diaphragm, took my other gear, and then left with Adrian for his pension.
In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed.
“Pretty desperate, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake, why? We have plenty of time.”
“How long?”
“As long as you want it,” he said, ambiguously. If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there.
Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true.
“You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.”
I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admi
t it.”
“That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.”
I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t, they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy.
“I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it-”
“Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly-especially when it’s bloody true.”
“I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.”
He smiled delightedly. “No you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again. I told you I’m an anti-hero. I’m not here to rescue you-and carry you away on a white horse.”
What was he here for then, I wondered? It certainly wasn’t fucking.
We went swimming at a huge public Schwimmbad on the outskirts of Vienna. I had never in my life seen so much sunburned fat. In Heidelberg, I had deliberately avoided the public swimming pools and saunas; and when we traveled we had always avoided the beach resorts frequented by Germans. We made a point of bypassing Ravenna and the other Teutonic encampments. Instead, I used to gaze enviously at the beautiful concave navels of the French Riviera, the moneyed, exercised midriffs of Capri. But here we were surrounded by mountains of Schlag and Sacher Torte metamorphosed into fat.
“It’s like The Last Judgment by Michelangelo,” I told Adrian. “The one at the end of the Sistine Chapel.”
He stuck his tongue out at me and made a face.
“Here are all these people just enjoying themselves and having a good swim, and you’re turning your satirical gaze upon them, seeing depravity and corruption all around you. Madam Savonarola, I ought to call you.”
“You’re right,” I said meekly. Couldn’t I ever stop looking and dissecting and tearing everything down? I couldn’t.
“But they do look like The Last Judgment,” I said. “God’s revenge on the Germans for being such pigs is making them look like pigs.”
And, by God, they did: not just fat, not just rolling bellies, and flabby arms, and double chins, and shimmering thighs- but all of it bright pink. Crackling. Burnt. Redder than Chinese pork. They looked like suckling pigs. Or like the fetal pig I had to dissect in Zoology II-nearly the Waterloo of my college career.
We swam and kissed in the water among all the other damned souls. I was wearing a black tank suit with a V-neck cut down to my navel, and everyone kept staring at me: the women in disapproval and the men in lechery. I could feel Adrian’s semen slimy between my legs and leaking out into the chlorinated pool. An American donating English semen to the Germans. A sort of cockeyed Marshall Plan. Let his semen bless their water and baptize them. Let it cleanse them of their sins. Adrian the Baptist. And me as Mary Magdalene. But I also wondered if swimming right after screwing would get me pregnant. Maybe the water would push the semen up behind my diaphragm. I was suddenly terrified of getting pregnant. I suddenly wanted to get pregnant. I kept imagining the beautiful baby we’d make together. I was really hooked.
We sat on the lawn under a tree and drank beer. We discussed our future-whatever that was. Adrian seemed to think I ought to leave my husband and settle in Paris (where he could fly over and visit me periodically). I could rent a garret and write books. I could come to London and write books with him. We could be like Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre: together yet apart. We’d learn to do away with silly things like jealousy. We’d fuck each other and all our friends. We’d live without worrying about possessions or possessiveness. Eventually someday, we’d establish a commune for schizo-phrenics, poets, and radical shrinks. We’d live like real existentialists instead of just talking about it. We’d all live together in a geodesic dome.
“Sort of like a Yellow Submarine,” I said.
“Well, why not?”
“You’re an incurable romantic, Adrian… Walden Pond and all that.”
“Look-I don’t see what’s so super about the sort of hypocrisy you live with. Pretending to all that crap about fidelity and monogamy, living in a million contradictions, being kept by your husband as a sort of spoilt talented baby and never standing on your own two feet. At least we’d be honest. We’d live together and fuck everyone openly. Nobody would exploit anyone and nobody would have to feel guilty for being dependent…”
“Poets and schizophrenics and shrinks?”
“Well there’s not much difference is there?”
“None whatsoever.”
Adrian had been taught existentialism in the course of one week in Paris by Martine, the French actress who’d been in a bin.
“That’s fast,” I said. “Existentialism made simple. Sort of like the souped-up Berlitz course. How’d she manage it?”
He described how he’d gone to Paris to see her and Mar-tine had surprised him by meeting him at Orly with two friends: Louise and Pierre. They were to spend the whole week together, never be apart, tell each other everything, fuck each other in all possible combinations, and never make any “silly moral excuses.”
“Whenever I spoke of my patients or my children or my girlfriend at home, she said: ‘of no interest.’
“Whenever I protested about needing to work, needing to earn a living, needing to sleep, needing to escape from the intensity of the, experience, she said: ‘of no interest.’ None of the usual excuses held. Actually, it was terrifying at first.”
“Sounds fascistic. And all in the name of freedom.”
“Well, I see your point, but it wasn’t fascistic because actually her idea was that you had to stretch the boundaries of what you could endure. You had to go to the bottom of your experience even if the bottom turned out to be terror. Mar-tine had been mad. She had been hospitalized and she came through it herself with all sorts of new illuminations. She put herself back together again and was much stronger than before. And that’s what that week did for me. I had to cope with the terrifying feeling of having no plans, not knowing where we were going next, having no privacy at all, being dependent on three other people for everything all the time. It revived all sorts of childhood problems for me. And the sex-the sex was terrifying at first. Fucking in groups is harder than you think. You have to confront your own homosexuality. It was illuminating, I think.”
“Was it any fun? It doesn’t sound like much fun.” Still, I was intrigued.
“After the first few days of trauma, it was splendid. We went everywhere together arm in arm. We sang in the streets. We shared food, money, everything. Nobody worried about work or responsibilities.”
“What about your kids?”
“They were with Esther in London.”
“So, she worried about responsibilities while you played at being an existentialist like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.”
“No-actually it wasn’t like that at all because it has always worked both ways. Esther has bloody well pissed off with other blokes from time to time and left me holding the kids. It isn’t a one-way thing.”
“Well, they’re your kids, aren’t they?”
“Possession, possession, possession,” he said, resenting my line of inquiry. “All you Jewish princesses are alike.”
“I teach you the term ‘Jewish princess’ and then the first thing you do is use it against me. My mother warned me about men like you.”
He put his head in my lap and nuzzled my cunt. A couple of fat Germans under another tree snickered. I didn’t care.
“Slimy,” he said.
“Your slime,” I said.
“Our slime,” he corrected me.
And then he said suddenly: “I want to give you an experience like the one Marline gave me. I want to teach you not to be afraid of what’s inside you.” He sank his teeth into my thigh. They left marks.
When I got back to the hotel at five-thirty Bennett was waiting. He didn’t ask me where I’d been, but he put his arms around me and started undressing me.
He made love to me, to Adrian’s slime, to our triangle in all senses of the word. He had never been as passionate and tender, and I had rarely been so excited. That he was a much better lover than Adrian was clear. It was also clear that Adrian had made a difference in our lovemaking, had made us appreciate each other in a new way. We touched each other completely. Suddenly I was as valuable to Bennett as if he had fallen in love with me for the very first time.
We took a bath together and splashed water at each other. We soaped each other’s backs. I was a little appalled at my own promiscuity, that I could go from one man to another and feel so glowing and intoxicated. I knew I would have to pay for it later with the guilt and misery which I alone know how to give myself in such good measure. But right now I was happy. I felt properly appreciated for the first time. Do two men perhaps add up to one whole person?
One of the most memorable occasions of the Congress was the reception at the Rathaus of Vienna. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch 2,000 or more analysts gorging themselves as if they had been starving in Biafra for a year. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch several sedate old analysts doing the frug-or what they thought was the frug. Memorable because I waltzed through the whole experience in a red paisley gown covered with sequins and kept leaving a trail of them on the ground as I went from one ballroom to the other, now dancing with Bennett and now with Adrian and still not being able to make up my mind. I left a trail of evidence everywhere I went.
