The Amises had inspired a whole year of husband- and wife-swapping in Princeton before we moved there, and I didn’t know whether to be sorry I’d missed it or glad. There was no scandal left in who had slept with Kingsley. Who hadn’t? The Amises were so very English, and yet not at all like the English revered by the English Department and mocked for all time by Lucky Jim. I tried to imagine resisting Kingsley’s irresistible combination of comedy and sex, as he single-mindedly put one in the service of the other, and I longed to be put to the test. Laughter is the most powerful seduction of all, and for these English, America, with her straitlaced Puritans, was one big laugh-in. They would as soon fuck as say the word; they seemed to have no verbal or sexual inhibitions at all.
In Princeton the Amises lived out scenes Kingsley had already written in Lucky Jim. They accidentally burned a bed-sheet in their rented house and tried to cover it up by cutting a hole in the sheet; Kingsley went off to Yale to deliver a lecture and forgot his briefcase with his speech inside. They were also living out scenes that would appear shortly in One Fat Englishman, like the infamous barge party on the Delaware River by New Hope, in which drunken revelers who’d been screwing in dark corners of the barge kept falling off the boat and having to be fished out of the water half naked. A lot of the time Kingsley couldn’t remember whom he’d screwed, it meant so little and he drank so much.
Another pair of Brits doubled the charge the Amises had ignited. Al Alvarez was an explosive nonfiction writer and his wife, Ursula, distantly connected to D. H. Lawrence, was a ripe raven-haired beauty who wore her hair long and her bosom full. Men flocked to Ursula the way women flocked to Kingsley, but for sex in the opposite mode. Ursula was pure romanticism à La Belle Dame sans Merci, silent to the point of being sullen. When she placed a white rose in her bosom, you could hear the room heave a sigh. Not much later, she ran off with an Irish poet. The poet’s wife committed suicide and Al later attempted the same, then wrote a book about it. The Alvarezes played out tragedy while the Amises played out comedy in our small university town of Anglophiliacs.
Adultery was in the air like wood smoke, only no one called it adultery. It was called Letting Go, and Letting It All Hang Out, in the jargon of that prefeminist era. Now that Freud and Kinsey and Joyce Brothers had told us that women were as sexual as men, now that Marx and Marcuse and Norman O. Brown had told us that sexual morality was the opiate of the masses, it was a liberated woman’s duty not to go out there and get a job, but to go out there and fuck. We were not at war with men. Men were our heroes, and we wanted to love them all, in the high style of Simone de Beauvoir. French women of a certain class had always had lovers, just as their husbands had. So had the English. Why shouldn’t we?
In food as in sex, America was slipping behind us as Europe beckoned. The moment classes were over, we all hopped boats for Europe, often the same boat so that we could continue partying at sea, wallowing in the three large meals a day, wine included free of charge, plus morning bouillon and afternoon tea, provided by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. In France, the simplest casse-croûte, a sandwich jambon, in the lowliest bar was a revelation of sensuality that put our picnic sandwiches to shame. We were like amateur painters discovering Picasso. We couldn’t wait to get home to marinate fat shrimp and grill them in the shell so that everyone could peel his own the way the French did it along the Côte d’Azur.
Food was an index of how far we’d moved into the fleshpots of Dionysus, leaving behind the restraints of Apollo. On our backyard grills we’d long since graduated from hot dogs to elephantine sirloin steaks, crusty outside and rare within, to be quilted in garlic butter and served with roasted corn and potatoes wrapped in foil. Now we advanced to butterflied legs of lamb, marinating them in olive oil scented with herbs from Provence, before we seared them on the grill with thick slices of eggplant. Even the men participated when we spit-roasted a whole lamb for Greek Easter in the American-Greek couple’s backyard. Preparing kokoretsi of spiced innards or creamy moussaka topped with béchamel and thick yogurt required ethnic know-how, but anyone could take turns basting the naked lamb before we sliced off smoking hot gobbets to wash down with carafes of pine-flavored wine.
When we moved indoors, everything had to be French. We women were discovering with excitement how to upgrade our Irish stews into boeuf bourguignonne and boeuf en daube. My old fondness for Depression tongue translated into langue au madère, brains were cervelles au beurre noir, and discarded innards like sweetbreads and tripe were now costly ris de veau and tripes à la mode de Caen. Now we planned our dinner parties like surveyors exploring new land. When a hostess set forth a salmis de faisan, she supplied footnotes on what a salmis was. Presenting a poulet chaud-froid, she held a seminar to explain how each layer of white sauce was chilled before the next; and how the whole was decorated with medallions of chicken and topped with truffle cutouts before it was shellacked with layers of clear aspic. The ritual of presentation required responsive aaaahs.
We were discovering what the French had known forever, that food was like literature and art, and that sex was above all like food. But the subtext was always sex. We wanted to have our cake and eat it too, but we didn’t want Betty Crocker cake mix anymore. We wanted dacquoise and génoise and baba au rhum at the end of a Rabelaisian banquet flowing with still wines and sparkling conversation. Every new food opened up new sexual analogues. To explore the interstices of escargots with the aid of fork and clamp, each shell in its place on the hot metal round, each dark tongue hidden deep within the whorls and only with difficulty teased out and eased into the pool of garlic-laden butter—what could be sexier than that? Foods we had known as American but now cooked French revealed a world of innuendo we had missed in our own language. Asparagus that might have gone limp in a steamer stayed stiff with a quick dip in boiling water. Artichokes that had seemed tedious to unleave took on vulvate meaning when the tops of the leaves were cut off and the pith removed and the center made wet with vinaigrette, so that each leaf brought the mouth a step closer to consuming the heart. The canned peach halves that were a staple of my father’s table didn’t at all resemble the glossy operatic breasts of pêches Melba, cushioned on velvet ice cream and rosied by raspberry coulis.
On one climactic occasion it all came together—food, literature, sex, and art. Paul and I staged a dinner to honor Muriel Spark, who was giving a lecture series at Rutgers she called “L’Amour de Voyage.” She appeared at our little cottage in a chauffeured limo, which impressed us and our neighbors no end. She wore a bright red wig and fake eyelashes that nearly swept her plate and entertained us with bawdy stories while we stoked her with course after course: oeufs en cocotte avec caviar, consommé à la reine, blanquette de veau, haricots verts, riz à l’impératrice. By the end of the evening her wig was askew and so were we, but it was all in the cause of Art.
At Princeton, apart from visiting writers, men and women were even more segregated than at Harvard or Yale, where women had infiltrated the graduate schools at least. But if we were excluded from the classrooms, we were all the more valued for our sex. In this atmosphere, I capitulated at last. From now on, I’d be sexy. I made my own clothes, because that way I could afford expensive fabrics and make a good show. I cut the tops of my dresses lower and made the waists tighter. I put tissue in the bottom half of my bras to push my cleavage up. I could feel men buzz around me like drones to the honey pot, and I liked that feeling.
I discovered that all I had to do was ask intelligent questions, and men of all ages would find me intelligent. I could wrap my arm in the arm of the distinguished Eric Kahler, a fellow émigré and friend of Thomas Mann, and while we strolled across campus feel his pleasure as he discoursed learnedly on the relation between Klimt and Freud in the Vienna Circle. I could feel the drama theorist Francis Fergusson glow when I sat at his feet by the fireplace in his Victorian parlor and asked questions about Sophocles. I was only half aware that I was adding new weaponry to my arsenal, the weapon
ry of flattery and adoration and argument, not as an intellectual exercise but as a form of sex.
If I couldn’t use logic professionally, I’d use it for fun. With the lights on, I would engage one or another young male instructor in heated argument over the superiority of Whitman to Milton, say—the more outrageous the thesis, the better, because it required more skill to defend. It was a fencing match, the thrust oblique and the parry direct, designed to challenge, provoke, and parry other thrusts when, lights out, we danced close and closer to old recordings of “Sunrise Serenade” and “How High the Moon.” So blatantly sexual was argument to us that the wife of one instructor, a trained nurse, rose from her chair one night and said, “I know I can’t discuss la-de-da poetry or the works of Emerson, but I can do this … and this … and this,” and she executed a couple of bumps and a grind that put my mental gyrations to shame.
Dancing, we made love standing up and swaying slow, the way we had in high school and college, teased by the same urges and the same prohibitions, only now it was not virginity we were protecting but marriage. In effect, these were licensed petting parties and there were subtle, unspoken rules about what was and was not permitted. Sitting on laps was okay, dancing so close you could feel each other’s body parts was okay. Fondling in public was not, nor was disappearing into bedrooms, but disappearing outside into nature was. Once I sat on our picnic table out back, huddled under a blanket with a vet who’d seen a lot of action in both military and marital wars, a man whose heroism I much admired and whose horniness when drunk was commanding. He got drunk compulsively, as we all did, and when I indicated kissing was fine but that was it, he didn’t argue, he simply masturbated while we kissed.
Decades before Bill Clinton’s equivocations, we were looking for a presidential solution to the semantics of sex. One evening after a great deal of brandy in front of the fire, Paul and I traded partners with this same vet and his wife. Paul was delighted when we took off clothes, because the vet’s wife had unusually large breasts. I hated to be naked because mine had diminished to nonpregnancy flatness, and I was ashamed of them. I was not surprised when the vet proved to be less interested in kissing them than in kissing parts further south, at which point his wife came alive and hit him on the head with her shoe to make him stop. Nudity was permitted, kissing below the belly was not.
Still, when I was cast as the courtesan Bellamira in a student production of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, I didn’t have a clue how to play her. As a noted Elizabethan drama critic said kindly after seeing the performance, “Oh, I see, you’re playing it like Margaret Dumont with the Marx Brothers.” Later, I graduated to a full-fledged stripper as the young Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy. Blinded by a spotlight as I descended a long staircase without a rail in stiletto heels while singing “Let Me Entertain You,” I was thoroughly credible as a young girl terrified because she was about to strip down to nothing but a flesh-colored body suit with embroidery in the appropriate spots. That rather summed up the make-believe quality of the sexual games we were playing then. Only years later did Paul confess that during that time he’d been screwing one of his single colleagues at Rutgers for real.
Another visiting writer and his wife became the catalyst for further explosion. Philip Roth’s breakup with his first wife, Maggie, left a wild and hungry girl on the loose. She was, as we used to say, dynamite. Roth had not yet written Portnoy’s Complaint, but he clearly had sex on the brain just as Maggie had it on the body. Maggie, born into the hardscrabble poor of the Midwest, had been a teenage mother and bride in that order. She’d left her children with relatives in order to work and get herself educated, and at the University of Chicago she’d had the good and bad fortune to team up with a manic young writer on the rise.
As a couple, the Roths were far too absorbed in each other to bother with any genteel hanky-panky with the rest of us. They seemed to make war and love simultaneously and with equal violence. But when Roth abruptly left his wife and moved to New York, Maggie was a loose cannon. She was less restrained, repressed, or undamaged than the rest of us, and in her language as in her actions she called a spade a spade. “Come on, I’ve seen the way you dance with Dave, why don’t you fuck him, for chrissake?” she’d ask me. “Who do you think you are, the Great White Ice Queen?” She called me IQ for short. She loved to spar with Paul and me, pitting her energy and despair against our underdeveloped emotions and overeducated brains. The three of us became close, and when Kennedy was assassinated, we took her in to share that long Thanksgiving week glued to our TV, bonded by popcorn and tears.
It was a couple of weeks after Ruby’s assassination of Oswald that I saw my first ghost in the cottage. I was asleep in bed with Paul when I woke with a start. In the doorway was a woman in a flowing white nightgown with long sleeves and high neck, her hair loose to her waist, rushing toward me with speed, her face distressed. She came so fast I cried out and hit at her with my foot. It was not until she vanished that I recognized the face of my mother. She came again a few weeks later when we were sharing a log cabin with two other couples and our assorted children at a state park in southern New Jersey. I was sleeping in a lower bunk beneath Tucky when I once again woke with a start. There was someone by my bed. I could feel her, but it was too dark to see. I reached out my hand and whispered, “Mother?” She didn’t answer but she didn’t seem distressed, and this time she simply disappeared.
Maggie too appeared one night in the doorway of our bedroom, naked. Paul was away and Maggie had come over for supper but was too drunk to drive home, so I opened the sofa bed in the living room for her. It had been an emotional night as the drink took hold, with her trying to call “that fucker” in New York, leaving alternately tearful and threatening messages on his answering machine. I was exhausted when she finally went to bed. But before I could get to sleep upstairs, there she was. “Can I come in?” she whispered. She was crying. Oh Lord, I thought. But I was a mother after all, so I took her in. She immediately took my hand and put it between her legs. “Oh no, Maggie, no, I can’t do that,” I said. “Please,” she begged. I sat up, feeling desperate because I couldn’t do what she wanted, but my instinct for survival was as strong as hers. “Go back to bed, Maggie,” I said. By that time she’d finished what she came for without any help from me. She thanked me for “being there” and tottered back through the doorway, down the stairs, and into bed.
For a long time, that was my image of Maggie, a long, thick torso on short but sturdy legs, silhouetted against a backlight of trouble. When she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills in New York, I was heart-struck but not surprised. Someone found her in time, but a couple of years later a car she was in plowed into a tree in Central Park. The driver was unhurt, but Maggie was dead.
There were no limits to Maggie’s hunger, and there was no assuaging her hurt. I had always said to her, “Whatever you do, pal, don’t screw Paul.” “I promise,” she’d said. And laughed. I felt the current running between them, just as I felt it running between me and Dave McFarlane, a writer who was one of our close friends. But I couldn’t explain to Maggie why he and I didn’t just do it and get it over with, as she constantly advised. She was talking about sex and I was hankering for love. My hunger for tenderness, for intimacy, for just plain arm-around-the-shoulder affection was too wide and too deep to be appeased by mere sex.
Maggie broke her promise, of course. Sex would win out over friendship every time, as any Guinevere could have told me. Paul and I had spent a spring vacation week with our children and the McFarlanes in a beach house at Nags Head, which was no more than a long stretch of sand ending in a refuge for wild ponies. Paul and I had driven down in two cars, his Volkswagen and my Renault, because he had to return early while I stayed on with the kids for a few more days of sun and sea air and longing to make love to Dave without actually doing so.
I planned to take two days to drive back from North Carolina with the kids, stopping at some funny motel with Magic Fingers mattresses where we could ea
t popcorn and pizza and french fries in front of the TV. But we’d started early and made such good time that it was clear we could be home by dusk and surprise Paul. When we got home, surprise. No Paul, no car. But oddly and alarmingly a teakettle was on the stove with a gas flame under it that had all but burned the bottom out. It would seem that Paul had left the house hurriedly and hadn’t returned. Had he had some kind of accident? I called a couple of friends, but they hadn’t seen him. I was more puzzled than worried, so we went to bed, and the children, at any rate, got a good night’s sleep.
At nine the next morning Paul pulled into the driveway and got his surprise. He’d spent the night in New York, he explained, after Maggie had called to ask us both to dinner. She was feeling very depressed, so he went alone. And then he drank too much and didn’t want to drive and stayed overnight because I wasn’t due until today. He had no memory of leaving a teakettle on the fire.
“You mean you stayed overnight at Maggie’s?” Maggie was living then in a tiny apartment in New York.
“Yeah, but nothing happened, it was absolutely innocent. I slept on the couch.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“What about you and Dave at Nags Head?”
“Absolutely nothing happened.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
Around noon I telephoned Maggie and told her I’d come home early and found Paul missing. “Poor baby,” she said without thinking, although she assured me that nothing had happened. I could tell from her tone that the reason it hadn’t was that Paul had been too drunk. I reminded Maggie of her promise.
It was the thought of that hot teakettle that finally melted the Ice Queen. A couple of weeks later, Dave’s wife was called home to Italy when her mother took sick. I called up Dave and asked if I could come over for lunch.
My Kitchen Wars Page 12