by Erica Jong
“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.
He hadn’t left without offering help, either. We had inquired together about airline tickets to London and found that all the planes were booked for the next two days. I could wait till Wednesday or inquire about boat-trains the following day. Or I could go to the airport and wait to be called as a stand-by. I had options. All I had to do was endure the insane pounding of my heart until I could find Bennett again-or someone. Perhaps myself.
I dragged my suitcase back to the café on. the Place St. Michel. Suddenly, being without a man, I realized how heavy it was. I had not packed with the expectation of traveling alone. My suitcase was full of guidebooks, a small tape recorder for the article I’d never written, notebooks, my electric hair-setter, ten copies of my first book of poems. Some of these were to be given to a literary agent in London. Others were simply carried out of insecurity; badges of identity to put on for anyone I might meet. They were designed to prove that I was not just an ordinary woman. They were designed to prove that I was exceptional. They were designed to prove that I was to be given safe conduct. I clung pitifully to my status as an exception, because without it, I would be just another lonely female on the prowl.
“Do I have your address?” Adrian asked before he took off in the Triumph.
“It’s in the book I gave you. On the last endpaper.”
But he’d lost the book. The copy I’d inscribed for him in shocking-pink ink. Needless to say, he’d never finished it.
“Here-let me get you another.” And I began unzipping my huge canvas suitcase in the middle of the street. Jars of cosmetics rolled out. Loose papers, notes for poems I was working on, tape cassettes, film, lipsticks, paperback novels, a dog-eared Michelin Guide. I shoved all this junk back into the squashy Italian suitcase and dug out one of my own books. I cracked the virgin spine.
To careless Adrian [I wrote]
who loses books.
With love and many kisses,
your friendly social worker
from New York-
And I wrote my New York address and telephone number on the endpaper again, knowing he’d probably lose this copy too. That was how we parted. Loss piled on loss. My life spilling out into the street, and nothing but a slim volume of verse between me and the void.
In the café, I sat next to my suitcase and ordered another beer. I was dazed and exhausted-almost too exhausted to be as miserable as I knew I ought to be. I would have to look for a hotel. It was getting dark. My suitcase was terribly heavy and I might have to wander the streets dragging it behind me and climb all those spiral staircases to inquire about rooms which would turn out to be occupied. I put my head down on the table. I wanted to weep out of sheer exhaustion, but I knew I couldn’t make myself that conspicuous. Already I was attracting the kind of quizzical glances a woman alone attracts. And I was too tired and harassed to react with subtlety. If anyone tried to pick me up now, I would probably scream and begin swinging with my fists. I was beyond words. I was tired of reasoning and arguing and trying to be clever. The first man who approached me with a cynical or flirtatious look would get it: a knee in the balls or a punch in the jaw. I would not sit there cowering in fear as I had at age thirteen when exhibitionists started unzipping their pants at me on the deserted subway to high school. I actually used to be afraid they’d be insulted and take terrible revenge unless I remained rooted to my seat. So I stayed, looking away, pretending not to notice, pretending not to be terrified, pretending to be reading and hoping somehow that the book would protect me. Later, in Italy, when men followed me in the ruins or pursued me in cars down the avenues (opening their doors and whispering vieni, vieni), I always wondered why I felt so sullied and spat upon and furious. It was supposed to be flattering. It was supposed to prove my womanliness. My mother had always said how womanly she felt in Italy. Then why did it make me feel so hunted? There must be something wrong with me I thought. I used to try to smile and toss my hair to show I was grateful. And then I felt like a fraud. Why wasn’t I grateful for being hunted?
But now I wanted to be alone, and if anybody interpreted my behavior differently, I’d react like a wild beast. Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my “availability”-as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: There is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You ladies.
I nursed my beer. As soon as I looked up, a man at a nearby table caught my eye. He had that swaggering look which says, I know what you want, baby… It was the same flirtatiousness that I had fallen for in Adrian, but now it sickened me. All I saw in it at this point was bullying and sadism. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed it were really concealing impotence. I didn’t care to test that hypothesis either.
I furrowed my brows and looked down. Couldn’t he see I didn’t want anyone? Couldn’t he see I was tired and dirty and beat? Couldn’t he see I was clinging to my beer glass as if it were the Holy Grail? Why was it that whenever you refused a man, refused him sincerely and wholeheartedly, he persisted in believing you were being coquettish?
I thought back to my days of having fantasies of men on trains. It’s true that I never did anything about these fantasies and wouldn’t have dared to. I wasn’t even brave enough to write about them until much later. But suppose I had approached one of these men, and suppose he had rejected me, looked away, shown disgust or revulsion. What then? I would have immediately taken the rejection to heart, believed myself in the wrong, blamed myself for being an evil woman, a whore, a slut, a disturber of the peace… More to the point, I would have immediately blamed my own unattractiveness, not the man’s reluctance, and I would have been destroyed for days by his rejection of me. Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension.
Suddenly-with the leering eyes of that strange man on me-I knew what I had done wrong with Adria
n and why he had left me. I had broken the basic rule. I had pursued him. Years of having fantasies about men and never acting on them-and then for the first time in my life, I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a water-logged noodle and refuses me.
Men and women, women and men. It will never work, I thought Back in the days when men were hunters and chest-beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid… They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild-and what happened? The men wilted. It was hopeless. I had desired Adrian as I had never desired anyone before in my life, and the very intensity of my need canceled out his. The more I showed my passion, the cooler he became. The more I risked to be with him, the less he was willing to risk to be with me. Was it really that simple? Did it all come down to what my mother had told me years ago about “playing hard to get”? It did seem to be true that the men who had loved me hardest were the ones I was most casual about. But what was the fun of that? What was the point? Couldn’t you ever bring philos and eros together, at least for a little while? What was the point of this constant round of alternating losses, this constant cycle of desire and indifference, indifference and desire?
I had to find a hotel. It was late and dark and my suitcase was not only a great encumbrance, but it increased my air of availability. I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone-the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?
I dragged my albatross of a suitcase around the corner into the Rue de la Harpe (shades of Charlie’s girlfriend Sally) and surprisingly found a room in the first hotel I tried. The prices had gone up steeply since the last time I’d been there and I was given the last remaining room on the very top floor (a painfully long climb with that suitcase). The place was a firetrap, I remarked to myself with masochistic pleasure, and the top floor was where I was most likely to be trapped. All sorts of images rushed into my mind: Zelda Fitzgerald dying in that asylum fire (I had just read a biography of her); the seedy hotel room in the movie, Breathless; my father warning me gravely before my first unescorted trip to Europe at nineteen that he had seen Breathless and knew what happened to American girls in Europe; Bennett and I fighting bitterly in Paris five Christmases ago; Pia and I staying in this same hotel when we were both twenty-three; my first trip to Paris at thirteen (a posh suite at the Georges V with my parents and sisters, and all of us brushing our teeth with Perrier); my grandfather’s stories about living on bananas in Paris as a penniless art student; my mother dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said)…
I had been temporarily cheered by my luck in finding a place, but when I actually saw the room and realized I’d have to spend the night alone there, my heart sank. It was really half a room with a plywood partition across it (God knows what was on the other side) and a sagging single bed covered by a very dusty chintz spread. The walls were old striped wallpaper, very splotched and discolored.
I pulled my suitcase in and closed the door. I fiddled awhile with the lock before being able to work it. Finally, I sank down on the bed and began to cry. I was conscious of wanting to cry passionately and without restraint, of wanting to weep a whole ocean of tears and drown. But even my tears were blocked. There was a peculiar knot in my stomach which kept making me think of Bennett. It was almost as if my navel was attached to his so that I couldn’t even lose myself in tears without wondering and worrying about him. Where was he? Couldn’t I even cry properly until I found him?
The strangest thing about crying (perhaps this is a carryover from infancy) is that we never can cry wholeheartedly without a listener-or at least a potential listener. We don’t let ourselves cry as desperately as we might. Maybe we’re afraid to sink under the surface of the tears for fear there will be no one to save us. Or maybe tears are a form of communication-like speech-and require a listener.
You have to sleep, I told myself sternly. But already I could feel myself moving into a panic which recalled my worst childhood night terrors. I felt the center of myself slipping backward in time even as my adult, rational self protested. You are not a child, I said aloud, but the insane pounding of my heart continued. I was covered with cold sweat. I sat Tooted to the bed. I knew I needed a bath, but would not take one because of my fear of leaving the room. I had to pee desperately, but was afraid to go out to the toilet. I did not even dare to take off my shoes (for fear the man under the bed would grab me by the foot). I did not dare wash my face (who knew what lurked behind the curtain?). I thought I saw a figure moving on the terrace outside the window. Phantom cars of light crossed the ceiling. A toilet flushed in the hall and I jumped. There were footsteps down the hall. I began to remember scenes from Murders in the Rue Morgue. I remembered some nameless movie I had seen on television at about the age of five. It showed a vampire who could fade in and out of walls. No locks could keep him out. I visualized him pulsating in and out of the dirty, splotched wallpaper. I appealed again to my adult self for help. I tried to be critical and rational. I knew what vampires stood for. I knew the man under the bed was partly my father. I thought of Groddeck’s Book of the It. The fear of the intruder is the wish for the intruder. I thought of all my sessions with Dr. Happe in which we had spoken of my night terrors. I remembered my adolescent fantasy of being stabbed or shot by a strange man. I would be sitting at my desk writing and the man would always attack from behind. Who was he? Why was my life populated by phantom men?
“Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath asked in one of her desperate last poems. If I was trapped, I was trapped by my own fears. Motivating everything was the terror of being alone. It sometimes seemed I would make any compromise, endure any ignominy, stay with any man just so as not to face being alone. But why? What was so terrible about being alone? Try to think of the reasons, I told myself. Try.
me: Why is being alone so terrible?
me: Because if no man loves me I have no identity.
me: But obviously that isn’t true. You write, people read your work and it matters to them. You teach and your students need you and care about you. You have friends who love you. Even your parents and sisters love you-in their own peculiar way.
me: None of that makes a dent in my loneliness. I have no man. I have no child.
me: But you know that children are no antidote to loneliness. me: I know.
me: And you know that children only belong to their parents temporarily.
me: I know.
me: And you know that men and women can never wholly possess each other.
me: I know.
me: And you know that you’d hate to have a man who possessed you totally and used up your breathing space…
me: I know-but I yearn for it desperately.
me: But if you had it, you’d feel trapped.
me: I know.
me: You want contradictory things.
me: I know.
me: You want freedom and you also want closeness.
me: I know.
me: Very few people ever find that.
me: I know.
me: Why do you expect to be happy when most people aren’t?
me: I don’t know. I only know that if I stop hoping for love, stop expecting it, stop searching for it, my life will go as flat as a cancerous breast after radical surgery. I feed on this expectation. I nurse it. It keeps me alive.
me: But what about liberation?
me: What about it?
me: You believe in independence?
me: I do.
me: Well then?
me: I suspect I’d give it all up, sell my soul, my principles, my beliefs, just for a man who’d
really love me…
me: Hypocrite!
me: You’re right.
me: You’re no better than Adrian!
me: You’re right.
me: Doesn’t it bother you to find such hypocrisy in yourself? me: It does.
me: Then why don’t you fight it?
me: I do. I’m fighting it now. But I don’t know which side will win.
me: Think of Simone de Beauvoir!
me: I love her endurance, but her books are full of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre.
me: Think of Doris Lessing!
me: Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love… what more is there to say?
me: Think of Sylvia Plath!
me: Dead. Who wants a life or death like hers even if you become a saint?
me: Wouldn’t you die for a cause?
me: At twenty, yes, but not at thirty. I don’t believe in dying for causes. I don’t believe in dying for poetry. Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.
me: Well-think of Colette.
me: A good example. But she’s one of very few.
me: Well, why not try to be like her?
me: I’m trying.
me: The first step is learning how to be alone…
me: Yes, and when you learn that really well, you forget how to be open to love if it ever does come.
me: Who said life was easy?
me: No one.
me: Then why are you so afraid of being alone?
me: We’re going round in circles.
me: That’s one of the troubles with being alone.
Hopeless. I cannot reason myself out of this panic. My breath is coming in short gasps and I am sweating profusely. Try to describe the panic, I tell myself. Pretend you’re writing. Put yourself in the third person. But it’s impossible. I am sinking into the center of the panic. It seems I am being torn asunder by wild horses and that my arms and legs are flying off in different directions. Horrible torture fantasies obsess me. Chinese warlords flaying their enemies alive. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. French Protestants broken on the wheel. Resistance fighters having their eyes plucked out. Nazis torturing Jews with electric shocks, with needles, with unanes-thetized “operations.” Southerners lynching blacks. American soldiers cutting the ears off Vietnamese. Indians being tortured. Indians torturing. The whole of history of the human race running with blood and gore and the screams of victims.
