Fear Of Flying

by Erica Jong

  As in a dream (I never would have believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years had I been lying there?), picked up my pocketbook, and walked (no, I did not quite “saunter”-though I wish I had) out the door. I closed it gently. No Nora-slamming-the-door routine to undercut the effect. Goodbye Kolner. For a moment in the elevator I nearly cried.

  But by the time I’d walked two blocks down Madison Avenue I was jubilant. No more eight o’clock sessions! No more wondering was-it-helping as I wrote out the gargantuan check each month! No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free! And think of all the money I didn’t have to spend! I ducked into a shoestore and immediately spent $40 on a pair of white sandals with gold chains. They made me feel as good as fifty minutes with Kolner ever had. OK, so I wasn’t really liberated (I still had to comfort myself with shopping), but at least I was free of Kolner. It was a start anyway.

  I was wearing the sandals on the flight to Vienna, and I looked down at them as we trooped back into the plane. Was it stepping on with the right foot or with the left that kept the plane from crashing? How could I keep the plane from crashing if I couldn’t even remember? “Mother,” I muttered. I always mutter “Mother” when I’m scared. The funny thing is I don’t even call my mother “Mother” and I never have. She named me Isadora Zelda, but I try never to use the Zelda. (I understand that she also considered Olympia, after Greece, and Justine, after Sade.) In return for this lifetime liability, I call her Jude. Her real name is Judith. Nobody but my youngest sister ever calls her Mommy.

  Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed.

  We arrived at 9 a.m.-just as the airport was opening up. willkommen in wien, it said. We shuffled in through customs dragging our suitcases and feeling dopey from the missed night of sleep.

  The airport looked scrubbed and gleaming. I thought of the level of disorder, dirt, and chaos New Yorkers get used to. The return to Europe was always something of a shock. The streets seemed unnaturally clean. The parks seemed unnaturally full of unvandalized benches, fountains, and rose bushes. The public flowerbeds seemed unnaturally tidy. Even the outdoor telephones worked.

  The customs officials glanced at our suitcases, and in less than twenty minutes we were boarding a bus which had been booked for us by the Vienna Academy of Psychiatry. We boarded with the naive hope of making it to our hotel in a few minutes and going to sleep. We didn’t know that the bus would snake though the streets of Vienna and stop at seven hotels before coming to ours almost three hours later.

  Getting to the hotel was like one of those dreams where you have to get somewhere before something terrible happens but, inexplicably, your car keeps breaking down or going backward. Anyway I was dazed and angry and everything seemed to irritate me that morning.

  It was partly the panic I always felt at being back in Germany. I lived longer in Heidelberg than in any city except New York, so Germany (and Austria, too) was a kind of second home to me. I spoke the language comfortably-more comfortably than any of the languages I had studied in school-and I was familiar with the foods, the wines, the brand names, the closing times of shops, the clothes, the popular music, the slang expressions, the mannerisms… All as if I had spent my childhood in Germany, or as if my parents were German. But I was born in 1942 and if my parents had been German-not American-Jews, I would have been born (and probably would have died) in a concentration camp-despite my blond hair, blue eyes, and Polish peasant nose. I could never forget that either. Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised, in fact, for being so familiar.

  I looked out the bus window at the red-cheeked old ladies in their “sensible” beige shoes and lumpy Tyrolean hats. I looked at their lumpy legs and lumpy asses. I hated them. I looked at an advertising poster which read

  SEI GUT ZU DEINEM MAGEN

  (Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit-as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere. (I say this as a seasoned world traveler.) Then there’s the filthy rag of a public towel, hanging over a tiny wash basin which has only a cold water tap (for you to dribble cold water over your right hand-or whichever hand you happen to use).

  I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets.

  “The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???”

  British:

  British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda.

  The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, amp; you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again.

  The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays).

  German:

  German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.

  Italian:

  Sometimes you can read bits of Corriere della Sera before you wipe your ass on the news. But in general the toilets run swift here and the shit disappears long before you can leap up and turn around to admire it. Hence Italian art. Germans have their own shit to admire. Lacking this, Italians make sculptures and paintings.

  French:

  The old hotels in Paris with two Brobdingnagian iron footprints straddling a stinking hole. Orange trees planted in Versailles to cover cesspool smell. Il est défendu de faire pipi dans la chambre du Roi. Lights in Pans toilets which only go on when you turn the lock.

  I somehow cannot make sense of French philosophy amp; literature vis à vis the French approach to merde. The French are very abstract thinkers-but they could also produce a poet of particularity like Ponge, who writes an epic poem on soap. How does this connect with French toilets?

  Japanese:

  Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen. (Cf. Suzuki.)

  It was after twelve when we finally got to our hotel and we found we had been assigned a tiny room on the top floor. I wanted to object, but Bennett was more interested in getting some rest. So we pulled down the shades against the noonday sun, undressed, and collapsed on the beds without even unpacking. Despite the strangeness of the place, Bennett went right to sleep. I tossed and fought with the feather comforter until I dozed fitfully amid dreams of Nazis and plane crashes. I kept waking up with my heart pounding and my teeth chattering. It was the usual pan
ic I always have the first day away from home, but it was worse because of our being back in Germany. I was already wishing we hadn’t returned.

  At about three-thirty we got up and rather languidly made love in one of the single beds. I still felt that I was dreaming and kept pretending Bennett was somebody else. But who? I couldn’t get a clear picture of him. I never could. Who was this phantom man who haunted my life? My father? My German analyst? The zipless fuck? Why did his face always refuse to come into focus?

  By four o’clock, we were on the Strassenbahn bound for the University of Vienna to register for the Congress. The day had turned out to be clear with blue skies and absurdly fluffy white clouds. And I was clumping along the streets in my high-heeled sandals, hating the Germans, and hating Bennett for not being a stranger on a train, for not smiling, for being such a good lay but never kissing me, for getting me shrink appointments and Pap smears and IBM electrics, but never buying me flowers. And not talking to me. And never grabbing my ass anymore. And never going down on me, ever. What do you expect after five years of marriage anyway? Giggling in the dark? Ass-grabbing? Cunt-eating? Well at least an occasional one. What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much. How do you ladies like to be laid? A man who’ll go down on you when you have your period? A man who’ll kiss you before you brush your teeth in the morning and not say Yiiich? A man who’ll laugh with you when the lights go out?

  A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession.

  Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.

  And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. Throughout all of history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood. Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley’s and wondered what was wrong with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?

  Phallocentric. The trouble with men and also the trouble with women. A friend of mine recently found this in a fortune cookie:

  the trouble with men is men,

  the trouble with women, men.

  Once, just to impress Bennett, I told him about the Hell’s Angels initiation ceremony. The part where the initiate has to go down on his woman while she has her period and while all the other guys watch. Bennett said nothing.

  “Well, isn’t that interesting?” I nudged. “Isn’t that a gas?” Still nothing. I kept nagging.

  “Why don’t you buy yourself a little dog,” he finally said, “and train him.”

  “I ought to report you to the New York Psychoanalytic,” I said.

  The medical building of the University of Vienna is columned, cold, cavernous. We trudged up a long flight of steps. Upstairs, dozens of shrinks were milling around the registration desk.

  An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl was giving everyone trouble about their credentials for registration. She spoke painstakingly schoolbook English. I was positive she must be the wife of one of the Austrian candidates. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but she smiled with all the smugness of a Frau Doktor.

  I showed her my letter from Voyeur Magazine, but she wouldn’t let me register.

  “Why?”

  “Because we are not authorized to admit Press,” she sneered. “I am so sorry.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  I could feel the anger gather inside my head like steam in a pressure cooker. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut.

  Bennett shot me a look which said: calm down. He hates it when I get angry at people in public. But his trying to hold me back only made me more furious.

  “Look-if you don’t let me in I’ll write about that, too.” I knew that once the meetings got started I could probably walk right in without a badge-so it really didn’t matter. Besides, I scarcely cared all that much about writing the article. I was a spy from the outside world. A spy in the house of analysis.

  “I’m sure you don’t want me to write about how the analysts are scared of admitting writers to their meetings, do you?”

  “I’m zo sorry,” the Austrian bitch kept repeating. “But I really haff not got za ausority to admit you…”

  “Just following orders, I suppose.”

  “I haff instructions to obey,” she said.

  “You and Eichmann.”

  “Pardon?” She hadn’t heard me.

  Somebody else had. I turned around and saw this blond, shaggy-haired Englishman with a pipe hanging out of his face.

  “If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you,” he said. He was smiling at me the way a man smiles when he’s lying on top of you after a particularly good lay.

  “You’ve got to be an analyst,” I said, “nobody else would throw the word paranoid around so freely.”

  He grinned.

  He was wearing a very thin white cotton Indian kurtah and I could see his reddish-blond chest hair curling underneath it

  “Cheeky cunt,” he said. Then he grabbed a fistful of my ass and gave it a long playful squeeze.

  “You’ve a lovely ass,” he said. “Come, I’ll see to it that you get into the conference.”

  Of course he turned out to have no authority whatsoever In the matter, but I didn’t know that till later. He was bustling around so officiously that you’d have thought he was the head of the whole Congress. He was chairman of one of the preconferences-but he had absolutely nothing to say about Press. Who cared about Press, anyway? All I wanted was for him to press my ass again. I would have followed him anywhere. Dachau, Auschwitz, anywhere. I looked across the registration desk and saw Bennett talking seriously with another analyst from New York.

  The Englishman had made his way into the crowd and was grilling the registration girl in my behalf. Then he walked back to me.

  “Look-she says you have to wait and talk to Rodney Lehmann. He’s a friend of mine from London and he ought to be here any minute so why don’t we walk across to the café, have a beer, and look for him?”

  “Let me just tell my husband,” I said. It was going to become something of a refrain in the next few days.

  He seemed glad to hear that I had a husband. At least he didn’t seem sorry.

  I asked Bennett if he’d come across the street to the café and meet us (hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come too soon) and he waved me off. He was busy talking about counter-transference.

  I followed the smoke from the Englishman’s pipe down the steps and across the street. He puffed along like a train, the pipe seeming to propel him. I was happy to be his caboose.

  We set ourselves up in the café, with a quarter liter of white wine for me and a beer for him. He was wearing Indian sandals and dirty toenails. He didn’t look like a shrink at all.

  “Where are you from?”

  “New York.”

  “I mean your ancestors.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Why are you dodging my question?”

  “I don’t have to answer your question.”

  “I know.” He puffed his pipe and looked off into the distance. The corners of his eyes crinkled into about a hundred tiny lines and his mouth curled up in a sort of smile even when he wasn’t smiling. I knew I’d say yes to anything he asked. My only worry was: maybe he wouldn’t ask soon enough.

  “Polish Jews on one side, Russian on the other-”

  “I thought so. You look Jewish.”

  “And you look like an English anti-Semite.”

  “Oh come on-I like Jews…”

  “Some of your best friends…”

  “It’s just that Jewish girls are so bloody good in bed.”

  I couldn’t think of a single witty thing to say. Sweet Jesus, I thought, here he was. The real z.f. The zipless fuck par excellence. What in God’s name were we waiting for? Certainly not Rodne
y Lehmann.

  “I also like the Chinese,” he said, “and you’ve got a nice-looking husband.”

  “Maybe I ought to fix you up with him. After all, you’re both analysts. You’d have a lot in common. You could bugger each other under a picture of Freud.”

  “Cunt,” he said. “Actually, it’s more Chinese girls, I fancy-but Jewish girls from New York who like a good fight also strike me as dead sexy. Any woman who can raise hell the way you did up at registration seems pretty promising.”

  “Thanks.” At least I can recognize a compliment when I get one. My underpants were wet enough to mop the streets of Vienna.

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thought I looked Jewish,” I said, trying to get the conversation back to more neutral territory. (Enough of sex. Let’s get back to bigotry.) His thinking I looked Jewish actually excited me. God only knows why.

  “Look-I’m not an anti-Semite, but you are. Why do you think you don’t look Jewish?”

  “Because people always think I’m German-and I’ve spent half my life listening to anti-Semitic stories told by people who assumed I wasn’t-”

  “That’s what I hate about Jews,” he said. “They’re the only ones allowed to tell anti-Semitic jokes. It’s bloody unfair. Why should I be deprived of the pleasure of masochistic Jewish humor just because I’m a goy?”

  He sounded so goyish saying goy.

  “You don’t pronounce it right.”

  “What? Goy?”

  “Oh, that’s OK, but masochistic.” (He pronounced the first syllable mace, just like an Englishman.) “You’ve got to watch how you pronounce Yiddish words like masochistic,” I said. “We Jews are very touchy.”

  We ordered another round of drinks. He kept making a pretense of looking around for Rodney Lehmann and I came on with a very professional spiel about the article I was going to write. I nearly convinced myself all over again. That’s one of my biggest problems. When I start out to convince other people, I don’t always convince them but I invariably convince myself. I’m a complete bust as a con woman.