by Erica Jong
“You have all kinds of plans for me, don’t you? You want to teach me about freedom, about pleasure, you want to write books with me, convert me… Why do men always want to convert me? I must look like a convert.”
“You look like you want to be saved, ducks. You ask for it. You turn those big myopic eyes up at me as if I were Big Daddy Psychoanalyst. You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human. You sit there the whole time keeping tabs, making mental notes, imagining people as books or case histories- I know that game. You tell yourself you’re collecting material. You tell yourself you’re studying human nature. Art above life at all times. Another version of the puritanical bullshit. Only you have a new twist to it. You think you’re a hedonist because you take off and run around with me. But it’s the bloody old work ethic all the same because you’re only thinking you’ll write about me. So it’s actually work, n’est-ce pas? You can fuck me and call it poetry. Pretty clever. You deceive yourself beautifully that way.”
“You really are a great one for unloading two-bit analyses, aren’t you? A real television shrink.”
Adrian laughed. “Look, ducks, I know about you from myself. Psychoanalysts play the same game. They’re just like writers. Everything’s at one remove, a case history, a study. Also, they’re terrified of death-just like poets. Doctors hate death: that’s why they go into medicine. And they have to stir things up all the time and keep bloody busy just to prove to themselves they’re not dead. I know your game because I play it myself. It’s not such a mystery as you think. You’re really quite transparent.”
It infuriated me that he saw me more cynically than I saw myself. I always think I’m protecting myself against other people’s views of me by taking the most jaundiced view of myself possible. Then suddenly I realize that even this jaundiced view is self-flattering. When wounded, I lapse into high-school French:
“Vous vous moquez de moi. ”
“You’re damned right I do. Look-you’re sitting here with me right now because your life is dishonest and your marriage either dead or dying or riddled with lies. The lies are of your own making. You have to bloody well save yourself. It’s your life you’re fucking up, not mine.”
“I thought you said I wanted you to save me.”
“You do. But I’m not going to be trapped like that. I’ll fail you in some major way and you’ll start to hate me worse than you hate your husband…”
“I don’t hate my husband.”
“Right. But he bores you-and that’s worse, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. Now I was really depressed. The champagne was wearing off.
“Why do you have to start converting me before you’ve even fucked me?”
“Because it’s that you really want.”
“Bullshit, Adrian. What I really want is to get laid. And leave my bloody mind alone.” But I knew I was lying.
“Madam, if you want to get laid, then you’ll get laid.” Me started the car. “I rather like calling you madam, you know.”
But I had no diaphragm and he had no erection and by the time we finally made it to the pension, we were all wrung out from having gotten lost so many times.
We lay on his bed and held each other. We examined each other’s nakedness with tenderness and amusement. The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known. All the smells and tastes of it, the lines, the hairs, the birthmarks. But Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy- unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time. His muscular thighs. His sunburned knees. His feet. (Which I did not kiss.) His dirty toenails. (Ditto.) Then I started all over again. At his lovely wet mouth.
“Where did you get those little pointed teeth?”
“From the stoat who was my mother.”
“The what?”
“Stoat.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t care. We were tasting each other. We were upside down and his tongue was playing music in my cunt.
“You’ve a lovely cunt,” he said, “and the greatest ass I’ve ever seen. Too bad you’ve got no tits.”
“Thanks.”
I kept sucking away but as soon as he got hard, he’d get soft again.
“I don’t really want to fuck you anyway.”
“Why?”
“Dunno why-I just don’t feel like it.”
Adrian wanted to be loved for himself alone, and not his yellow hair. (Or his pink prick.) It was rather touching, actually. He didn’t want to be a fucking machine.
“I can fuck with the best of them when I feel like it,” he said defiantly.
“Of course you can.”
“Now you’ve got your bloody social worker voice on,” he said.
I had been a social worker on a couple of occasions in bed. Once with Brian, after he’d been released from the psycho ward and was too full of Thorazine (and too schizoid) to screw. For a month we’d lain in bed and held hands. “Like Hansel and Gretel,” he said. It was rather sweet. What you’d imagine Dodgson doing with Alice in a boat on the Thames. It was also something of a relief after Brian’s manic phase when he’d come very close to strangling me. And even before he cracked up, Brian’s asexual preferences were somewhat odd. He only liked sucking, not fucking. At the time, I was too inexperienced to realize that all men weren’t that way. I was twenty-one and Brian was twenty-five, and remembering what I’d heard about men reaching their sexual peak at sixteen and women at thirty, I figured that Brian’s age was to blame. He was in decline. Over the hill, I thought. I did get very good at sucking, though.
I’d also played social worker to Charlie Fielding, the conductor whose baton kept wilting. He was dazzlingly grateful. “You’re a real find,” he kept saying that first night (meaning that he expected I’d throw him out in the cold and I didn’t). He made up for it later. It was only opening nights that wilted him.
But Adrian? Sexy Adrian. He was supposed to be my zipless fuck. What happened? The funny thing was, I didn’t really mind. He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. Back in my days of worshipping the Woolfs and the Webbs it had seemed inconceivable to me, but now I understood it. Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky. I had been a feminist all my life (I date my “radicalization” to the night in 1955 on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary), but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies. It wasn’t easy. Besides, the older you got, the clearer it became that men were basically terrified of women. Some secretly, some openly. What could be more poignant than a liberated worn an eye to eye with a limp prick? All history’s greatest issues paled by comparison with these two quintessential objects: the eternal woman and the eternal limp prick.
“Do I scare you?” I asked Adrian.
“You?”
“Well some men claim to be afraid of me.”
Adrian laughed. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said, “a pussycat-as you Americans say. But that’s not the point.”
“Do you usually have this problem?”
“Nein, Frau Doktor, and I bloody well don’t want to be interrogated further. This is absurd. I do not have a potency problem-it’s just that I am
awed by your stupendous ass and I don’t feel like fucking.”
The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.
“I refuse to be impaled upon a pin,” Adrian said, unaware of the pun it immediately brought to mind. “I refuse to be categorized. When you finally do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an anti-hero, a bastard or a saint. You won’t be able to categorize me.”
And at that moment, I fell madly in love with him. His limp prick had penetrated where a stiff one would never have reached.
6 Paroxysms of Passion or the Man Under the Bed
Among all the forms of absurd courage,
the courage of girls is outstanding.
Otherwise there would be fewer marriages
and still less of the wild ventures
that override everything, even marriage…
– Colette
Not that falling madly in love was at all unusual for me. All year I had fallen in love with everyone. I fell in love with an Irish poet who kept pigs on a farm in Iowa. I fell in love with a six-foot-tall novelist who looked like a cowboy and only wrote allegories about the effects of radiation. I fell in love with a blue-eyed book reviewer who had raved about my first book of poems. I fell in love with a surly painter (whose three wives had all committed suicide). I fell in love with a very courtly professor of Italian Renaissance philosophy who sniffed glue and screwed freshman girls. I fell in love with a UN interpreter (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek) who had five children, a sick mother, and seven unpublished novels in his sprawling apartment on Morningside Drive. I fell in love with a pale WASP of a biochemist who took me to lunch at the Harvard Club and had been married to two other women writers-both of them nymphomaniacally inclined.
But nothing came of anything. Oh there were cuddles in the backs of cars. And long drunken kisses in roachy New York kitchens over pitchers of warm martinis. And there were flirtations over fattening expense-account lunches. And pinches in the stacks of Butler Library. And embraces after poetry readings. And hand squeezes at gallery openings. And long meaningful telephone conversations and letters heavy with double entendres. There were even some frank and open propositions (usually from men who didn’t attract me at all). But nothing came of anything. I would go home instead, and write poems to the man I really loved (whoever he might be). After all, I had screwed enough guys to know that one prick wasn’t that different from the next. So what was I looking for? And why was I so restless? Maybe I resisted consummating any of these flirtations because I knew that the man I really wanted would continue to elude me and I would only wind up disappointed. But who was the man I really wanted? All I knew was that I had been desperately searching for him from the age of sixteen on.
When I was sixteen and called myself a Fabian socialist, when I was sixteen and refused to pet with boys who liked Ike, when I was sixteen and cried into the Rubaiyat, when I was sixteen and cried into the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay-I used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable. He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like Michelangelo’s David (“with those rippling little marble muscles,” as I used to tell my best friend Pia Wittkin, whose favorite male statue was Discobolus; we were both avid students of art history). He had a mind like George Bernard Shaw (or, at least, what my sixteen-year-old mind conceived of as George Bernard Shaw’s mind). He loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” above all other mortal music. He shared my passion for unicorn tapestries, Beat the Devil, the Cloisters, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, witchcraft, and chocolate mousse. He shared my contempt for Senator Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley, and my philistine parents. I never met him. At sixteen, my not meeting him seemed unbearable. Later I learned to take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. The contrast between my fantasies (Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo’s David) and the pimply faced adolescent boys I knew was laughable. Only I cried. And so did Pia. We commiserated in her parent’s gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive.
“I imagine him as being very-you know-sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil-with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body-sort of like the Discobolus.” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
“I see it as a sort of-you know-medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it-and a red velvet dress-maybe wine-and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit-an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves. It was being modeled by a gorgeous creature whose cleavage swelled up out of the gown voluptuously. (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.)
“I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.”
“Where would you live?”
“Well, I see this really weird old house in Vermont-an abandoned monastery or abbey or something…” (Neither of us questioned the fact that there were abandoned monasteries and abbeys in Vermont.) “… With these extremely rustic floorboards and a skylight built into the roof. It would be sort of one big room which would be a studio and a bedroom with a big round bed under the skylight-and black satin sheets. And we’d have lots of Siamese cats-named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan-you know.”
I did, or at least I thought I did.
“Anyway…” she continued, “… I see myself sort of as a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren…” (Pia had dark hair.) “… What do you think?” She swept her greasy brown hair up on her head and held it there as she sucked in her cheeks and widened her large blue eyes at me.
“I sort of think you’re more the Anna Magnani type,” I said, “earthy and basic, but terribly sensual.”
“Maybe…” she said thoughtfully. She was posing in front of the mirror.
“Oh, it’s disgusting,” she said after a while. “We never meet anyone the least bit worthy of us.” And she made a hideous face.
During our senior year at Music and Art, Pia and I opened our hostile minority of two to include a few other selected misfits. That was the closest we ever came to having a crowd. The group included a bosomy girl named Nina Non-off whose claims to distinction were her necrophiliac passion for the ghost of Dylan Thomas, her supposed knowledge of Chinese and Japanese profanities, and her “contact” with a real Yalie (visions of football weekends for us all-but unfortunately the “contact” turned out to be a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of her brother’s). Nina’s mother also had a huge collection of “sex books” among which we included Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament; any book with the word puberty in it was OK. And finally there was the sheer class of Nina’s father having created the Blue Wasp Series for radio in the 1940s. Jill Siegel, on the other hand, was a member of the group not so much for class as out of charity. She had little to contribute in the way of sophistication, but made up for this by means of her blind loyalty to us and the flattering way in which she aped our most florid affectations. An on-and-off member was Grace Baratto-a music major whose intellect we did not respect but who told fantastic stories about her sexual exploits. Though she denied it, we secretly
told each other that she had probably “gone all the way.” “At the very least, she’s a demi-vierge,” Pia said. I nodded knowingly. Later I looked it up.
There were only two boys who were allowed into the group, and we treated them as scornfully as possible to make sure they understood they were only there on sufferance. Since they were our classmates and not “college men,” we wanted it clear that we would only consider them as “pla-tonic” friends. John Stock was the son of old friends of my parents. He was chubby and blond and wrote short stories. His favorite phrase was “paroxysms of passion.” It cropped up at least once every story he wrote. Ron Perkoff (whom we, of course, called Jerkoff) was in love with me. Tall, skinny, with a huge hooked nose and a truly incredible assortment of blackheads and pimples (which I longed to squeeze), he was an Anglophile. He subscribed to Punch and the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian, carried a tightly rolled umbrella (in all kinds of weather), pronounced “banal” (one of his favorite words) with the accent on the second syllable, and peppered his speech with phrases like “bloody rotter” and “mucking about.”
After the agony of college boards and waiting for letters of acceptance was over, the six of us mucked about chiefly in my parents’ apartment as we whiled away the long idle spring term waiting impatiently for graduation. Sitting on the floor of the living room, we consumed tons of fruit, cheese, peanut-butter sandwiches and cookies, listened to Frank Sinatra albums, and wrote communal epics which we tried to make as pornographic as our limited experience would allow. We composed on my portable Olivetti which we passed around from lap to lap. Whenever John was there, paroxysms of passion were the order of the day.
Not many of these communal creations survived, but recently I came across a fragment which more or less conveys the spirit of all those other lost masterpieces. It was our habit to plunge into the action with as few preliminaries as possible, so the texture of the narrative was always somewhat choppy. One of the rules was that each author was allowed three minutes before having to pass the typewriter along to the next person, and this naturally increased the spastic quality of the prose. Since Pia usually started, she was the one who had the privilege of sketching the outlines of the character we would all have to tolerate: