by Erica Jong
The dumpy frumpy lady mayor of Vienna bestowed herzliche Grüsse upon Anna Freud and the other analysts, and spewed out endless German bullshit about how glad the city of Vienna was to have them all back. No mention was made of the way they’d left in 1938, of course. No fifty-piece orchestra was playing The Blue Danube Waltz for them then, or plying them with herzlichen Grüssen and free Schnaps.
When the food was brought out, herds of analysts in formal dress mooed and grunted toward the tables.
“Hurry-they’re pushing ahead to the front of the line!” bleated one matron in accents redolent of Flatbush, overlaid with Scarsdale and the New School.
“They’re already being served cake in the next room,” said another, a two-hundred-pound beauty in a canary-yellow satin pants suit, twinkling with rhinestones. “Don’t push!” said a distinguished- (or perhaps extinguished-) looking older analyst in an outdated tux and plaid cummerbund. He was being crushed between a woman lunging toward the turkey platter and a man lunging toward the antipasto. All up and down the tables, you could see nothing but long arms clawing at food with silver serving forks.
Throughout this astonishing performance, the schmaltzy violins played on from their balconied perch above the main ballroom. The pseudo-Gothic arches of the high ceilings were illumined by thousands of pseudocandles, and a few die-hards kept revolving on the dance floor in a halting Viennese waltz. Ah travel, adventure, romance! I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she’s been fucked four times in one day by two different men, but my mind was a welter of contradictions. I couldn’t make sense of all the contradictions I felt.
At times I was defiant and thought I had every right to snatch whatever pleasure was offered to me for the duration of my short time on earth. Why shouldn’t I be happy and hedonistic? What was wrong with it? I knew that the women who got most out of life (and out of men) were the ones who demanded most, that if you acted as if you were valuable and desirable, men found you valuable and desirable, that if you refused to be a doormat, nobody could tread on you. I knew that servile women got walked on and women who acted like queens got treated that way. But no sooner had my defiant mood passed than I would be seized with desolation and despair, I would feel terrified of losing both men and being left all alone, I would feel sorry for Bennett, curse myself for my disloyalty, despise myself utterly for everything. Then I wanted to run to Bennett and plead forgiveness, throw myself at his feet, offer to bear him twelve children immediately (mainly to cement my bondage), promise to serve him like a good slave in exchange for any bargain as long as it included security. I would become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.
The fact was that neither one of these attitudes made any sense and I knew it. Neither dominating nor being dominated. Neither bitchiness nor servility. Both were traps. Both led nowhere except toward the loneliness both were designed to avoid. But what could I do? The more I hated myself, the more I hated myself for hating myself. It was hopeless.
I kept scanning the faces in the crowd for Adrian. No face but his contented me. Every other face looked gross and ugly to me. Bennett knew what was going on and was maddeningly understanding.
“You’re like something out of Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “Did it happen or didn’t it? Only her analyst knows for sure.”
He was convinced that Adrian “only” represented my father, and in that case it was kosher. Only! I was merely, in short, “acting out” an Oedipal situation as well as an “unresolved transference” toward my German analyst, Dr. Happe, not to mention Dr. Kolner, whom I’d just left. Bennett could understand that. As long as it was Oedipus, not love. As long as it was transference, not love.
Adrian was worse, in a way.
We met on the side stairs under a Gothic arch. He was full of interpretations too.
“You keep running back and forth between the two of us,” he said. “I wonder which of us is Mummy and which Daddy?”
I had a sudden mad impulse to pack my bags and get away from both of them. Maybe it wasn’t a question of choosing between them but just of escaping both entirely. Released in my own custody. Stop this nonsense of running from one man to the next. Stand on my own two feet for once. Why was that so terrifying? The other options were worse, weren’t they? A lifetime of Freudian interpretations or a lifetime of Laingian interpretations! What a choice! I might as well join forces with a religious fanatic, a Scientology freak, or a doctrinaire Marxist. Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn’t believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one’s self. In laughing even at one’s own need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn’t feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts. (I told some of this to Adrian.)
“Life as a fruitcake! You are awfully oral, aren’t you?” Adrian said, more with an air of a statement than question.
“So what else is new-you want to make something of it?”
And he gave me a wet, sloppy kiss, his tongue one of the plums in the fruitcake.
“How long are you going to go on hurting me this way?” Bennett asked when we got back to the hotel. “I won’t go on taking it forever.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded so lame.
“I think we ought to get out of here, get the next plane back for New York. We can’t keep on with this insanity. You’re in a state, bewitched, out of your mind. I want to take you home.”
I started to cry. I wanted to go home and I never wanted to go home.
“Please Bennett, please, please, please.”
“Please what?” he snapped.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t even have the guts to stay with him. If you’re in love with him-why don’t you commit yourself to it and meet his kids and go to London. But you can’t even do that. You don’t know what you want.” He paused. “We ought to go home right now.”
“What’s the use? You’ll never trust me again. I’ve ruined it. It’s hopeless.” And I think I really believed it.
“Maybe if we go home and you go right back into analysis, if you understand why you did this, if you work it through, maybe we can salvage our marriage.”
“If I go back into analysis! Is that the condition?”
“Not for my sake-but for yours. So you won’t be doing this sort of thing forever.”
“Have I ever done it before? Have I? Even when you were horrible to me, even that time in Paris when you wouldn’t speak to me, even those years in Germany when I was so unhappy, when I needed someone to turn to, when I felt so lonely and shut out by you and your constant depression-I never got involved with anyone else. Never. You certainly provoked me then. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to me. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to a writer. You used to say you had no empathy for my problems. You never said you loved me. And when I cried and felt miserable because all I wanted was closeness and affection you sent me to an analyst. You used the analyst as a substitute for everything. Whenever any kind of closeness threatened, you sent me to a goddamned analyst.”
“Where the hell would you be now without the analyst? You’d still be rewriting one poem over and over. You’d still be unable to send work anywhere. You’d still be terrified of everything. When I met you, you were running around like a lunatic, never working steadily at anything, full of a million plans that never got finished. I gave you a place to work, encouraged you when you hated yourself, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, paid for your goddamned analyst so you could grow and develop as a human being instead of floundering around with
all the other members of your crazy family. Go blame me for all your problems. I was the only one who ever gave you support and encouragement and this is all you can do in return-go running after some asshole Englishman and whining to me about not knowing what you want. Go to hell! Follow him wherever you want, I’m going back to New York.”
“But I want you,” I said, crying. I wanted to want him. I wanted it more than anything. I thought of all the times we’d spent together, the miserable times we’d come through together, the times when we’d been able to comfort each other and encourage each other, the way he’d stood behind my work and steadied me when I looked as if I was ready to hurl myself off some cliff. The way I’d endured the army with him. The years put in. I thought of all we knew about each other, the way we’d worked to stay together, the stubborn determination that had held us together when all else failed. Even the misery we’d shared seemed a greater bond than anything I had with Adrian. Adrian was a dream. Bennett was my reality. Was he grim? Well then, reality was grim. If I lost him, I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name.
We put our arms around each other and began to make love, crying.
“I wanted to give you a baby there,” he said, thrusting deeper and deeper into me.
The next afternoon I was back with Adrian, lying on a blanket in the Vienna woods, the sun coming down through the trees.
“Do you really like Bennett or do you just enumerate his virtues?” Adrian asked.
I picked a long green weed and chewed it. “Why do you ask such incisive questions?”
“I’m not incisive at all. You’re just transparent.”
“Great,” I said.
“I mean it. Don’t you think fun figures at all in life? Or is it all this sickly stuff about ‘my analysis-his analysis,’ ‘love-me-love-my-disease.’ You and Bennett do seem to whine an awful lot. And apologize an awful lot. You’re all full of obligations and duties and what he’s done for you. Why shouldn’t he do for you? Are you some kind of monster?”
“Sometimes I mink so.”
“For God’s sake why? You’re not ugly, not stupid, you’ve a lovely cunt, a beautiful pot belly, loads of blond hair, and the biggest arse between Vienna and New York-pure lard-” He slapped it for emphasis. “What have you got to worry about?”
“Everything. I’m very dependent. I fall apart regularly. I go into horrible depressions and hardly come up for air. Besides, no man wants to be stuck with a lady writer. They’re liabilities. They daydream when they’re supposed to be cooking. They worry about books instead of babies. They forget to clean the house…”
“Jesus Christ! You’re some fine feminist.”
“Oh I talk a good game, and I even think I believe it, but secretly, I’m like the girl in Story of O. I want to submit to some big brute. ‘Every woman adores a fascist,’ as Sylvia Plath says. I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking. I feel guilty for everything. You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. That’s Isadora Wing’s first principle of the war between the sexes. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture. Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said?”
“No.”
“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”
“Teddy Roosevelt never said that.”
“No, but I did.”
“You’re just scared of him-that’s what you are.”
“Who? Teddy Roosevelt?”
“No-you idiot-Bennett. And you won’t admit it. You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.”
“You’ve never seen me when I’m ready to fall apart.”
“Piffle.”
“You should see. You’d run miles away.”
“Why? Are you so unbearable?”
“Bennett says so.”
“Then why hasn’t he run? Actually that’s just bullshit to keep you in line. Look-I lived with Martine once when she fell apart. I’m sure you couldn’t be worse. You have to take a lot of shit from people to get the good bits too.”
“Hey, that’s pretty good-can I have that on tape?”
“How about videotape?” And we kissed for a long time. When we stopped Adrian said, “You know, for an intelligent woman, you’re an idiot.”
“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.”
“What I mean to say is, you can have anything you want-only you don’t know it. You could have the world by the balls. You should come along with me and see how little you’ll miss Bennett. We’ll have an odyssey. I’ll discover Europe-you’ll discover yourself.”
“Is that all? When do we start?”
“Tomorrow or the day after, or Saturday. Whenever the Congress is over.”
“And where do we go?”
“That’s just the point. No plans. We just take off. It’ll be like The Grapes of Wroth. We’ll be migrants.”
“The Grapes of Wrath.”
“Wroth.”
“Wrath, as in wrath of God.”
“Wroth.”
“You’re wrong, sweetie pie. You’re illiterate by your own admission. Steinbeck is an American writer-The Grapes of Wrath.”
“Wroth.”
“OK, you’re wrong, but let it go.”
“I already have, love.”
“You mean we’ll just take off without any plans?”
“The plan is for you to find out how strong you are. The plan is for you to start believing you can stand on your own two feet-that ought to be plan enough for anyone.”
“And what about Bennett?”
“If he’s smart, he’ll just piss off with some other bird.”
“He Will?”
“That’s what I’d do, anyway. Look-it’s clear that you and he are due for a bit of a reshuffle. You can’t go on whining at each other like this all your lives. People may be dying in Belfast and Bangladesh but that’s all the more reason why you ought to learn to have fun-life’s supposed to be fun at least some of the time. You and Bennett sound like a couple of fanatics: ‘Abandon all hope: the end is nigh.’ Don’t you do anything but worry? It’s such a bloody waste.”
“He called you the worst name possible,” I said laughing.
“Did he?”
“He called you a ‘part object.’ ”
“Did he really? Well he’s a bloody ‘part object’ as well. The psychologizing bastard.”
“You do your share of psychologizing too, sweetheart. Sometimes I think I should get away from you both, woman smothers in jargon. lover and husband held for questioning.”
Adrian laughed and fondled my ass. No jargon about that. That was a whole object. An ass and a half, in fact. Never had I felt happier about my fat ass than when I was with Adrian. If only men knew! All women think they’re ugly, even pretty women. A man who understood this could fuck more women than Don Giovanni. They all think their cunts are ugly. They all find fault with their figures. They all think their asses are too big, their breasts too small, their thighs too fat, their ankles too thick. Even models and actresses, even the women you think are so beautiful that they have nothing to worry about do worry all the time.
“I love your fat ass,” Adrian said. “All the food you had to gobble to get such a fat ass. Yum!” And he sank his teeth in. The cannibal.
“The trouble with your marriage is,” he said to my ass, “that it’s all work. Don’t you ever have fun together?”
“Sure we do… hey-that hurts.”
“Like when?” He sat up. “Tell me about when it was fun.”
I racked my brains. The fight in Paris. The car crash in Sicily. The fight in Paestum. The fight about which apartment to take. The fight about my quitting analysis. The fight about skiing. The fight about fighting.
“We
’ve had lots of fun. You don’t have to grill me.”
“You’re a liar. All your analysis is really a waste if you still go on lying to yourself all the time.”
“We have fun in bed.”
“Only thanks to my not fucking you properly, I’ll bet.”
“Adrian, I think you really want to break up my marriage. That’s your game, isn’t it? That’s your kick, that’s what you’re hooked on. I may be hooked on guilt. Bennett may be hooked on jargon. But you’re hooked on triangles. That’s your speciality. Who was Martine living with that made her so attractive to you? Who was Esther fucking? You’re a marriage ghoul, that’s what you are. You’re a vulture.”
“Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.”
“I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.”
“Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.”
“Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.”
“If I take off, I’ll lose him.”
“Only if he’s not worth having.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.”
I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave).
