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Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong and Fay Weldon
Ratings:
311 pages7 hours
Summary
The blockbuster novel of female freedom and empowerment that launched a sexual revolution
After five years, Isadora Wing has come to a crossroads in her marriage: Should she and her husband stay together or get divorced? Accompanying her husband to an analysts’ conference in Vienna, she ditches him and strikes out on her own, crisscrossing Europe in search of a man who can inspire uninhibited passion. But, as she comes to learn, liberation and happiness are not necessarily the same thing. A literary sensation when first published in 1973, Fear of Flying established Erica Jong as one of her generation’s foremost voices on sex and feminism. Nearly four decades later, the novel has lost none of its insight, verve, or jaw-dropping wit. This ebook features a new introduction by Fay Weldon, as well as an illustrated biography of Erica Jong, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
Publisher: Open Road MediaReleased: Sep 3, 2013ISBN: 9781453222089Format: book
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Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
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Fear of Flying
Erica Jong
For
Grace Darling Griffin
And for my grandfather,
Samuel Mirsky
Thanks to my intrepid editors: Aaron Asher and Jennifer Josephy. And thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant which helped. And thanks to Betty Anne Clark, Anita Gross, Ruth Sullivan, Mimi Bailin, and Linda Bogin. And thanks especially to the live-in muse who gave me a room of my own from the start.
Contents
Introduction to the Fortieth-Anniversary Edition
For Bette, on Flying, When She Is Older
1 / En Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck
2 / Every Woman Adores a Fascist
3 / Knock, Knock
4 / Near the Black Forest
5 / A Report from the Congress of Dreams or Congressing
6 / Paroxysms of Passion or the Man Under the Bed
7 / A Nervous Cough
8 / Tales from the Vienna Woods
9 / Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers
10 / Freud’s House
11 / Existentialism Reconsidered
12 / The Madman
13 / The Conductor
14 / Arabs & Other Animals
15 / Travels with My Anti-Hero
16 / Seduced & Abandoned
17 / Dreamwork
18 / Blood Weddings or Sic Transit
19 / A 19th-century Ending
A Biography of Erica Jong
Introduction to the Fortieth-Anniversary Edition
Let me take you back forty years to 1973, when this novel was first published. Women trembled between the old world and the new. Men still ruled the roost and women still wanted to please them. Women had won their sexual freedom, thanks to the Pill, and revelled in it, but were still dependent on men for their income. In spite of all the theories, guilt and grief remained. Female lust had a nasty habit of turning into love, as male lust did not. Broken hearts littered the highways down which the powerful and lordly men of the new generation strode. Women could not look to literature for an answer about how to navigate this new world. Novels with any literary credibility were written by men about men; women wrote about romantic heroes. And what women knew about their own bodies, their own emotions, their own sexuality was still surprisingly little.
It was into this puzzled but still patriarchal world that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying exploded, a sudden exhilarating blast of intelligence, wit, scandal, and information in fictional form. The eruption was so powerful that it pushed feminism into its second stage
—in which women were to lose so much of their automatic deference to men. The book was an instant international bestseller. It was fun and it was funny and it explored not the myth of sex, but the reality of sex.
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them,
goes the opening sentence. How could a reader not be instantly engaged? There’s nothing rational about Isadora Wing’s fear of flying, according to the men who surround her; it is her fear of sex.
Afraid of guilt, yes. Afraid of sex, no. Isadora is off over Europe in search of the zipless fuck—the perfect, guiltless, spontaneous sexual encounter. Amazingly, she finally finds it, and what happens? Well, read to the end of the book and you will find out. You will also find out, perhaps to your alarm, how little has changed between then and now in what today we call gender relations. But then the sexual act doesn’t change; it throws up the same emotions in men and women as it always did—and it’s just how we’re prepared to face our reactions that differs. Erica’s Isadora bleeds all over the place at the most inconvenient times; men leave streaks of shit and sperm on the sheets—yet the book remains erotic. Fifty Shades of Grey this is not; it contains fifty times more worldly wisdom.
What so shocked and alarmed at the time Fear of Flying was published can still seem scandalous today—even read in electronic form, in a world of Facebook, Twitter, the iPad, and internet porn. But porn shows everything and tells nothing. Isadora, poet and intellect in search of the flying fuck, tells us everything, and we must be grateful to Erica Jong, through whom Isadora speaks, that she does. Truth and actuality can be uncomfortable, and today’s writers still shy away from it. The novel, to me, still exhilarates, still feels fresh and new even forty years later.
Isadora—clever, lively, savvy, free thinking—is traveling to a conference with her psychoanalyst husband, Bennett: Chinese, hairless, handsome—the perfect lover. She meets and has an affair with psychoanalyst Adrian: English, hairy, ruthless—the imperfect lover. She finds herself torn between the two men and ponders why she risks her marriage in the way she does. Perhaps because Bennett knows everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis.
But when she is with Adrian she feels she can conquer anything by laughing.
This is all familiar to me, but perhaps strange to the Facebook generation. Through the sixties and into the seventies, Freudian psychoanalysis was all the rage. With hindsight, one can see it as an ingenious way of keeping women docile. Female discontent was the result of penis envy; their jealousies were neurotic and obsessive, and any desire for personal freedom was just acting out. All were disorders. Freudian terms flew around every bedroom and dinner party in the land. A properly balanced woman adored her husband, let him do what he wanted, and never argued. (My own husband, as it happened, would only marry me if I went into treatment.
Otherwise I would never understand what he was talking about. He stayed in analysis four days a week for twenty-five years, at enormous expense. I did eight. It cured me of nothing, but I learned quite a lot.) Isadora, who has been treated by seven psychoanalysts, and married the latest one, finally gets out from under it.
Is it true?
the reader may well ask. In other words: Is Erica Isadora? To a large extent, perhaps, yes. Erica, like her character, is Jewish, well brought up, funny, intelligent, savvy, and radically minded. Her first husband was a Chinese psychiatrist. Isadora’s is a psychoanalyst. Similar, but not the same. Isadora may speak out of Erica’s understanding and some of her experiences, but she is fantasy nonetheless, an invented character with her own hopes and fears. Isadora’s family is not Erica’s. So yes and no is the answer, and probably more no than yes. Distilled, perhaps, is better. Distilled through the novelist’s mind, as a wine might end up distilled into spirit, to everyone’s advantage.
It is a delight to reread about those innocent days, when parking was not a problem and one cooked with cream and brandy and didn’t see it as murder; when one flirted for fun and smoked without guilt; when the Pill had separated sex from procreation, and sex seemed to be the cure for all the world’s troubles. And most of all, before the advent of AIDS, when the zipless fuck could be pursued without fear of consequence.
The intelligence with which the novel is written still shines through, the wit is timeless, and the story holds good. I envy those who are reading it for the first time.
FAY WELDON
July 2013
FOR BETTE, WHEN SHE IS OLDER, ON FLYING*
By
ERICA JONG
Dearest Bette,
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
When Fear of Flying was published, nearly forty years ago, the world was a different place for girls and women.
There were few women studying law and medicine in America, no female secretaries of state like Hillary Clinton or Madeleine Albright, no women on the Supreme Court, few women in Congress—even fewer than now—and few women poets writing in English who were not considered laughable.
Even girls thought Edith Sitwell risible. And nobody had heard of Marianne Moore, who famously called poetry a make-believe garden with real toads. Sappho was known as a freak who liked girls better than boys, rather than as the 2,600-year-old inventor of love poetry. And even though Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf had already come and gone, even though Doris Lessing was writing her revolutionary novels, most published women novelists wrote mysteries and mad-housewife novels as they now write mysteries and chick lit. Their book covers were often, as now, pink.
Of course, we were not totally in the pink ages. I wanted to be both a doctor and a poet—like Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams—and I might have done it had not dissecting the fetal pig in Zoology 1-2 during my first year at Barnard done me in. Zoology labs were required for premeds, but I swooned and nearly fainted from the formaldehyde smell and ended up dissecting the wrong aorta.
Both my parents had supported my ambitions completely. My artist mother, your great-grandmother, had read me poetry throughout my childhood. Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker were as dear to me as Winnie-the-Pooh and Madeline. And my father, your great-grandfather, a pop and jazz musician turned importer, pledged happily to pay for my medical education. Omar Khayyam was a family obsession, as were Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin.
Doctors and poets have a similar mission—tikkun olam, or healing the world—so my ambitions were actually quite similar.
But it was not to be—all because of that inconvenient fetal pig. So I stuck with writing, becoming a poet and then a novelist, and utterly surprised myself in 1974 when I woke up, like George Gordon, Lord Byron, to find myself famous.
And famous for being naughty—as Byron was before me. I was supposed to be one hot chick who hopped between the sheets as soon as zippers fell. The reason for this misconception was a phrase that came into my head while writing: the zipless fuck.
My editor had tried to expunge it, but I kept the phrase because I loved it. What was ziplessness anyway? A sort of platonic ideal—fantasy instantly realized because of the sheer force of attraction. I wrote Fear of Flying, or that book
(as nearly everyone called it), all through my twenties—writing and rewriting, tearing it up and starting over in first person or third person—until I was sure the voice was right for a mock memoir by a smart, wisecracking, half-analyzed New York girl in the 1970s. Of course, I had no idea whether that book
was publishable or if it would even be around for more than five minutes. I only knew I had to write it, or die. (Always an excellent way to start a novel.)
In my other life then, I was a lapsed graduate student in English literature of the eighteenth century at Columbia University as well as a lapsed instructor in literature from Chaucer to Pope at the City College of New York. Poetry was my first love, but novels were actually read in America as poems were not and, like all writers, I desperately wanted to be read.
I was certainly inspired to begin the novel by the burgeoning interest in what women said and did and needed. The so-called second wave
of women’s struggle for equal rights had begun in the late 1960s with the civil rights movement. (The first wave, from the 1880s to 1920, had won American women the vote in 1920.) The second wave won us the right to birth control, safer childbirth, and the pregnant woman’s privilege of consulting an obstetrician/gynecologist rather than a politician or a priest.
Some waggish Catholic women came up with the slogan Get Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries
to describe the previous period, and the majority of us—Catholic or not—felt relieved to be able to consult doctors rather than the Vatican in matters of our health.
Actually, the movement for English-speaking women to be able to attend to our unique needs—bodily and otherwise—had begun during the Enlightenment with a manifesto called A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), which was written by a brilliant Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth at thirty-eight. The daughter who emerged from that wounded womb was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. As a teenager, she ran off and married poet and revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley, and later published her most popular book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Some scholars and critics have speculated that losing many babies (as women did then) led her to write a fable of reanimating a corpse. I leave that to your fierce intelligence.
Mary Wollstonecraft had not concerned herself with childbirth—fatal as it often was to women and children in those days. And still is in much of the world. She had focused purely on the rights of women to education, political participation, and marital equality. The women’s health movement came two centuries later. Still, it was built upon Enlightenment ideals of social and political equality for women.
Like so many eighteenth-century intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft had spent her twenties in France, falling in love with revolutionary ideas and a certain Gilbert Imlay, who became the father of her first child, Fanny. Mary W. was a single parent when she met and fell in love with William Godwin, author, philosopher, and minister. The lovers, of course, met at a London dinner party for Thomas Paine, the American author and revolutionary.
William Godwin (1756–1836) was the founder of something called philosophical anarchism: the idea that government is a corrupting force in society, fostering dependence and ignorance.
If that sounds familiar, it is. Even today the idea has currency in the USA—a country very much grounded in Enlightenment ideas. Those who claim we pledge allegiance under God
are blissfully ignorant of our revolutionary Deist history. Puritan settlers had fled religious wars and vowed never to fight them, and the men who wrote our Constitution fervently wanted to get away from bloodshed in the name of God. They dreamed of a country wholly without kings and priests, where men would not kill each other over differences of religious opinion. America gave the world religious freedom—however much our holy rollers may wish to forget it.
Like so many adolescent girls, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin became enthralled to a poet with a handsome face. The Romantic movement was just beginning, and Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley were to become two of its greatest avatars.
However, Shelley died extremely young—drowned off the coast of Lerici in Italy, leaving Mary with orphans and a writing desk. She was the keeper of his flame—while also having managed to write the book that started the entire Frankenstein tradition. Mary Shelley has kept publishers and movie studios in the black for centuries.
No book is born out of solid rock. It has precursors and parents. Fear of Flying could never have emerged without a complex screed about the rights of women (an answer to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.) All women writers in English stand on the backs of two Marys, whether we know it or not.
But my novel was hardly a treatise on the rights of women, though some readers have seen it as that. My rule was always: Make the reader turn the page. So I wrote a funny, outrageous novel about rebellion and sex.
No book is any good if it doesn’t make the reader think it is real. Readers thought the book so real that they showed up at my doorstep after leaving their husbands. I became the writer as sexual guru—the advisor to the lovelorn and frustrated—both female and, later, male.
Fear of Flying was despised by prudes, beloved by rebels and rabble-rousers. It was claimed by Henry Miller to be the female answer to Tropic of Cancer. It was said by John Updike to be another Catcher in the Rye. Through the years, it was blamed and praised in equal measure. It was said to be the book that gave women a wandering eye and made adventurous rogues get lucky.
Even today readers stop me in the street to thank me. When I give readings, I see copies of my own book so marked with asterisks and stars that they are almost unreadable. This is perhaps the best compliment an author can get.
Now Fear of Flying will appear for the first time in zeroes and ones. It is about to take me on another journey and teach me new things. I certainly hope it does the same for you when you are old enough to read it.
Because you are blood of my blood and bone of my bone, I hope it inspires you to seize your own life. Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Everyone makes them. Don’t be afraid of risk. It teaches us more than safety. Be true to your dream, whatever it may be, even if it wasn’t mine. Be proud of all the great women who came before you. And remember you are the daughter of a daughter of a woman who made her own luck—even when she had no idea what on earth or heaven she was doing.
ERICA JONG
Shanghai, China
October 2011
* Erica Jong is writing to her granddaughter Beatrice Jong-Fast Greenfield, only daughter of her only daughter Molly Jong-Fast, also a novelist and essayist.
Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing;
For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if ’tis lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone,
And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real
Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel.
They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,
Is always so to women; one sole bond
Awaits them—treachery is all their trust;
Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond
Over their idol, till some wealthier lust
Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond?
A thankless husband—next, a faithless lover—
Then dressing, nursing, praying—and all’s over.
Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers,
Some mind their household, others dissipation,
Some run away, and but exchange their cares,
Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;
Few changes e’er can better their affairs,
Theirs being an unnatural situation,
From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:
Some play the devil, and then write a novel.
—Lord Byron (from Don Juan)
1 / En Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Anonymous (a woman)
THERE WERE 117 PSYCHOANALYSTS on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier.
My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.
Christ—it’s like ice,
he said. He ought to know the symptoms by now since he’s held my hand on lots of other flights. My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case dress—since I’m not wearing a bra), and for one screaming minute my heart and the engines correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics are not the flimsy superstitions which, in my heart of hearts, I know they are. Never mind the diabolical INFORMATION TO PASSENGERS, I happen to be convinced that only my own concentration (and that of my mother—who always seems to expect her children to die in a plane crash) keeps this bird aloft. I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it’s also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really relax about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Constant vigilance, that’s my motto. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. But actually my mood is better described as cautious pessimism. OK, I tell myself, we seem to be off the ground and into the clouds but the danger isn’t past. This is, in fact, the most perilous patch of air. Right here over Jamaica Bay where the plane banks and turns and the No Smoking
sign goes off. This may well be where we go screaming down in thousands of flaming pieces. So I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot (a reassuringly midwestern voice named Donnelly) fly the 250-passenger motherfucker. Thank God for his crew cut and middle-America diction. New Yorker that I am, I would never trust a pilot with a New York accent.
As soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see who’s on board. There’s a big-breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isn’t, mercifully, in evidence). There’s Dr. Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexia Nervosa, who was my husband’s first analyst. There’s kindly, rotund Dr. Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. There’s compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named Nanci
) as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would ackzept being a vohman.
) There’s smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. There’s foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly brilliant theoretician
whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. There’s black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called Cross-Country Group Ski-Therapy.
There’s Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them—and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Rose’s meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created.
Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts who’d come along for the ride. Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teen-ager and always trying to pretend they weren’t with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris café and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not—though clearly they were—my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me. Stranded in midair over the Atlantic with 117 analysts many of whom had heard my long, sad story and none of whom remembered it. An ideal beginning for the nightmare the trip was going to become.
We were bound for Vienna and the occasion was historic. Centuries ago, wars ago, in 1938, Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family. During the years of the Third Reich any mention of his name was banned in Germany, and analysts were expelled (if they were lucky) or gassed (if they were not). Now, with great ceremony, Vienna was welcoming the analysts back. They were even opening a museum to Freud in his old consulting room. The mayor of Vienna was going to greet them and a reception was to be held in Vienna’s pseudo-Gothic Rathaus. The enticements included free food, free Schnaps, cruises on the Danube, excursions to vineyards, singing, dancing, shenanigans, learned papers and speeches and a tax-deductible trip to Europe. Most of all, there was to be lots of good old Austrian Gemütlichkeit. The people who invented scmaltz (and crematoria) were going to show the analysts how welcome back they were.
Welcome back! Welcome back! At least those of you who survived Auschwitz, Belsen, the London Blitz and the co-optation of America. Willkommen! Austrians are nothing if not charming.
Holding the Congress in Vienna had been a hotly debated issue for years, and many of the analysts had come only reluctantly. Anti-Semitism was part of the problem, but there was also the possibility that radical students at the University of Vienna would decide to stage demonstrations. Psychoanalysis was out of favor with New Left members for being too individualistic.
It did nothing, they said, to further the worldwide struggle toward communism.
I had been asked by a new magazine to observe all the fun and games of the Congress closely and to do a satirical article on it. I began my research by approaching Dr. Smucker near the galley, where he was being served coffee by one of the stewardesses. He looked at me with barely a glimmer of recognition.
How do you feel about psychoanalysis returning to Vienna?
I asked in my most cheerful lady-interviewer voice. Dr. Smucker seemed taken aback by the shocking intimacy of the question. He looked at me long and searchingly.
"I’m writing an article for a new magazine called Voyeur," I said. I figured he’d at least have to crack a smile at the name.
Well then,
Smucker said stolidly, "how do you feel about it?" And he waddled off toward his short bleached-blond wife in the blue knit dress with a tiny green alligator above her (blue) right breast.
I should have known. Why do analysts always answer a question with a question? And why should this night be different from any other night—despite the fact that we are flying in a 747 and eating unkosher food?
The Jewish science,
as anti-Semites call it. Turn every question upside down and shove it up the asker’s ass. Analysts all seem to be Talmudists who flunked out of seminary in the first year. I was reminded of one of my grandfather’s favorite gags:
Q: Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?
A: "And why should a Jew not answer a question with a question?"
Ultimately though, it was the unimaginativeness of most analysts which got me down. OK, I’d been helped a lot by my first one—the German who was going to give a paper in Vienna—but he was a rare breed: witty, self-mocking, unpretentious. He had none of the flat-footed literal-mindedness which makes even the most brilliant psychoanalysts sound so pompous. But the others I’d gone to—they were so astonishingly literal-minded. The horse you are dreaming about is your father. The kitchen stove you are dreaming about is your mother. The piles of bullshit you are dreaming about are, in reality, your analyst. This is called the transference. No?
You dream about breaking your leg on the ski slope. You have, in fact, just broken your leg on the ski slope and you are lying on the couch wearing a ten-pound plaster cast which has had you housebound for weeks, but has also given you a beautiful new appreciation of your toes and the civil rights of paraplegics. But the broken leg in the dream represents your own mutilated genital.
You always wanted to have a penis and now you feel guilty that you have deliberately broken your leg so that you can have the pleasure of the cast, no?
No!
OK, let’s put the mutilated genital
question aside. It’s a dead horse, anyway. And forget about your mother the oven and your analyst the pile of shit. What do we have left except the smell? I’m not talking about the first years of analysis when you’re hard at work discovering your own craziness so that you can get some work done instead of devoting your entire life to your neurosis. I’m talking about when both you and your husband have been in analysis as long as you can remember and it’s gotten to the point where no decision, no matter how small, can be made without both analysts having an imaginary caucus on a cloud above your head. You feel rather like the Trojan warriors in the Iliad with Zeus and Hera fighting above them. I’m talking about the time when your marriage has become a menage à quatre. You, him, your analyst, his analyst. Four in a bed. This picture is definitely rated X.
We had been in this state for at least the past year. Every decision was referred to the shrink, or the shrinking process. Should we move into a bigger apartment? Better see what’s going on first.
(Bennett’s euphemism for: back to the couch.) Should we have a baby? Better work things through first.
Should we join a new tennis club? Better see what’s going on first.
Should we get a divorce? "Better work through the unconscious meaning of divorce first."
Because the fact was that we’d reached that crucial time in a marriage (five years and the sheets you got as wedding presents have just about worn thin) when it’s time to decide whether to buy new sheets, have a baby perhaps, and live with each other’s lunacy ever after—or else give up the ghost of the marriage (throw out the sheets) and start playing musical beds all over again.
The decision was, of course, further complicated by analysis—the basic assumption of analysis being (and never mind all the evidence to the contrary) that you’re getting better all the time. The refrain goes something like this:
Oh-I-was-self-destructive-when-I-married-you-baby-but-I’m-so-much-more-healthy-now-ow-ow-ow.
(Implying that you might just choose someone better, sweeter, handsomer, smarter, and maybe even luckier in the stock market.)
To which he might reply:
Oh-I-hated-all-women-when-I-fell-for-you-baby-but-I’m-so-much-more-healthy-now-ow-ow-ow.
(Implying that he might just find someone sweeter, prettier, smarter, a better cook, and maybe even due to inherit piles of bread from her father.)
Wise up Bennett, old boy,
I’d say—(whenever I suspected him of thinking those thoughts), you’d probably marry someone even more phallic, castrating, and narcissistic than I am.
(First technique of being a shrink’s wife is knowing how to hurl all their jargon back at them, at carefully chosen moments.)
But I was having those thoughts myself and if Bennett knew, he didn’t let on. Something seemed very wrong in our marriage. Our lives ran parallel like railroad tracks. Bennett spent the day at his office, his hospital, his analyst, and then evenings at his office again, usually until nine or ten. I taught a couple of days a week and wrote the rest of the time. My teaching schedule was light, the writing was exhausting, and by the time Bennett came home, I was ready to go out and break loose. I had had plenty of solitude, plenty of long hours alone with my typewriter and my fantasies. And I seemed to meet men everywhere. The
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