by Erica Jong
It’s for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.
My marriage to Brian probably ended on that day when I walked through the streets of Tijuana with my wisecracking father. My father was trying with all his might to be cheerful and helpful, but I was sunk deep into my own guilt. It was a dilemma: if I stuck by Brian and tried to live with him again, I’d go crazy, or at the very least give up most of my own identity. But if I left him alone with his madness and the ministrations of the doctors, I was abandoning him-just when he needed help the most. In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still. Somewhere deep inside my head (with all those submerged memories of childhood) is some glorious image of the ideal woman, a kind of Jewish Griselda. She is Ruth and Esther and Jesus and Mary rolled into one. She always turns the other cheek. She is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him. When the children are sick, she nurses them. She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems, visits the cemetery, weeds the graves, plants the garden, scrubs the floors, and sits quietly on the upper balcony of the synagogue while the men recite prayers about the inferiority of women. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her. A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.
But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism-good, healthy, “normal female masochism”-you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.”
13 The Conductor
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail-this feeling of joy,
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
Have I the right hunch or have I the wrong?
Will it be Bach I shall hear or just a Cole Porter song?
– Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love,” (1938)
Charlie Fielding (“Charles” when he signed his name) was tall and stoop-shouldered and looked like the Wandering Jew. His nose was enormously long and hooked and had flaring nostrils, and his small down-turned mouth always wore a sour expression, somewhere between contempt and melancholy. His skin was sallow and unhealthy-looking, and had been ravaged by acne which still troubled him from time to time. He wore expensive tweed sport coats which hung on his shoulders as if on wire hangers and the knees of his trousers bagged. The pockets of his old Chesterfield were distended with paperback books. From his worn pigskin briefcase, the point of a conductor’s baton protruded.
If you had seen him on the subway or eating a solitary dinner in Schrafft’s (where he charged the bills to his father’s account), you would have supposed, from his expression, that he was in mourning. He was not-unless he was mourning in advance for his father (whose money he was due to inherit).
Sometimes, while waiting for his dinner to arrive (creamed chicken, hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream), he would take an orchestral score from his briefcase and, holding his baton in his right hand, would begin to conduct imaginary musicians. He did this with perfect unselfconsciousness and apparently without any desire to be conspicuous. He was simply oblivious to the people around him.
Charlie (his mother had named him for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Charlie was, after all, a Jewish prince) lived alone in a one-room apartment in the East Village. The same neighborhood his poor ancestors had lived in two generations before. The Venetian blinds were laden with greasy black soot, and grit crunched under your feet as you walked across the bare floor. The surroundings were Spartan: a pullman kitchen whose cupboards were always bare except for boxes of dried apricots and bags of hard candy, a rented piano, a single bed, a tape recorder, a portable record player, two cartons of records (which had never been unpacked since he brought them from his parents’ house two years before). Outside the window was a fire escape overlooking a sooty courtyard and across it lived two middle-aged lesbians who sometimes neglected to draw the blinds. Charlie had that defensive contempt for homosexuals which people often have when their own sexuality is an embarrassment to them. He was horny all the time, but he was terribly afraid of being vulgar. His Harvard education had been designed to extinguish all the vulgarity glowing deep down in his genes, and though he wanted to get laid, he did not want to manage it in a way that would make him appear crude-either to himself or to the girls he tried to seduce.
I’ve noticed, anyway, that unless a man is a bona fide genius, a Harvard education is a permanent liability. Not so much what they learn there, but what they presume about themselves ever after-the albatross of being a Harvard man: the aura, the atmosphere, the pronunciation problems, the tender memories of the River Charles. It tends to infantilize them and cause them to go dashing about the corridors of advertising agencies with their ties flapping behind them. It causes them to endure the dreadful food and ratty upholstery of the Harvard Club for the sake of impressing some sweet young thing with the glorious source of their B.A.
Charlie had this Harvard impediment. He had graduated with a straight C- average and yet he always felt incredibly superior to me with my Phi Beta Kappa from grubby déclassé Barnard. He felt that at Harvard he had been touched with the brush of refinement, that despite all his failures in the world, he was still (a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus should sing out this phrase) a Harvard Man.
Most mornings, Charlie slept until noon, then got up and had breakfast at one of the dairy restaurants left over from the old immigrant-neighborhood days. But two mornings a week he dragged himself out of bed at nine and took the subway uptown to a music school where he taught piano and conducted a choral group. The money he earned from this work was negligible, but he lived mainly on the income from a trust fund his father had set up for him. He was terribly furtive about the amount of his income, as if it were a dirty secret. Still, I always assumed that if it hadn’t gone against the grain of his stinginess, he could have lived somewhat less grubbily than he did.
There was, however, a dirty family secret and maybe that was what made the money so embarrassing. Charlie’s family had met with money by way of Charlie’s Uncle Mel-the famous pseudo-WASP ballroom dancer who glided through the 1930s with patent-leather hair and a fixed nose and a dancing shikse wife. Mel Fielding had made a life-long career of keeping his Jewishness secret, and he agreed to share his wealth with the family only on the condition that they fix all their noses too and change their names from Feldstein to Fielding. Charlie refused to comply with the nose, but took the name. Charlie’s father, however, did amputate half his nose (with the result that he wound up looking like a Jew with an absurdly small nose). But the main thing was that the Feldsteins left Brooklyn and turned up in the Beresford (that gilded ghetto, that pseudocastle) on Central Park West.
The family business was a worldwide chain of dancing schools which sold life memberships to lonely old people. It wasn’t exactly a racket any more than psychoanalysis or religion or encounter groups or Rosicrucianism can be said to be rackets, but, like them, it also promised an end to loneliness, powerlessness, and pain, and of course it disappointed many people. Charlie had worked in the dance-studio business for a few summers during college, but this was only a token gesture. He hated any kind of everyday job-even if
it consisted of gliding across the dance floor with an eighty-year-old lady who had just become a life member to the tune of several thousand dollars. When I knew him, Charlie was very sensitive on the subject of ballroom dancing. He did not want it generally known that this was what his father did for a living. Nevertheless, he dropped his famous uncle’s name frequently among his friends and mine. Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
But what did Charlie do? He prepared himself for greatness. He daydreamed about his conducting debut-which otherwise he did nothing much to hasten-and he began symphonies. They were-every one of them-unfinished symphonies. He also began sonatas and operas (based on works by Kafka or Beckett). These were unfinished bars (but which he always promised to dedicate to me). Perhaps to others he was a failure, but to himself he was a romantic figure. He spoke of “silence, exile, and cunning.” (Silence: the unfinished symphonies. Exile: he had left the Beresford for the East Village. Cunning: his affair with me.) He was going through the initial trials of all great artists. As a conductor, he had not yet had his break and was further handicapped, he thought, by the fact of not being a homosexual. As a composer, it was a question of learning to cope with the crisis of style which bedeviled the age. That too would come in time. One had to think in decades, not years.
Dreaming at the piano bench or over a plate of cherry blintzes in Ratner’s, Charlie thought of himself as he would be when he finally made it-graying at the temples, suave, and eccentrically dressed. After conducting his own new opera at the Met, he would not be above running down to the Half Note for a jam session with aspiring jazz musicians. College girls who recognized him there would besiege him for autographs, and he would put them off with witty remarks. In the summers he would retire to his country house in Vermont, composing at a Bechstein under a slanting skylight, emerging from his studio to make clever conversation with the poets and young composers who followed him there. He would devote three hours a day to writing his autobiography-in a style he described as somewhere between Proust and Evelyn Waugh (his favorite authors). And then there would be women. Wagnerian sopranos with great dimpled asses out of Peter Paul Rubens. (Charlie had a great partiality for plump-even fat-women. He always thought I was too skinny and my ass too small. If we’d stayed together I probably would have become elephantine.) After the fat sopranos came the literary ladies: women poets who dedicated books to him, women sculptors obsessed with having him pose in the nude, women novelists who found him so fascinating they made him the central figure in their romans à clef. He might never marry, not even for the sake of having children. Children (as he often said) were boring. Boring (pronounced as if in italics) was always one of his favorite words. But it was not his ultimate condemnation (nor was banal though he favored that too). Vulgar was his ultimate word of scorn. People, of course, could be vulgar, as could books and music and paintings-but food could also be vulgar with Charles. As he once said when his famous uncle took him to Le Pavilion: “These crepes are vulgar.” He pronounced it with a great gap between the two syllables-as if between vul and gar he was trembling on the brink of a revelation. Pronounciation was also a big thing with Charles.
After all this, I have neglected to say the most important thing of all-namely, that I was madly in love with him (with the accent on the mad). The cynicism came later. To me he was not a pompous, pimply young man, but a figure of legendary charm, a future Lenny Bernstein. I knew that his family (with their champagne-silk, decorator-decorated living-room-under-plastic-covers) was a hundred times more vulgar even than mine. I sensed that Charlie was more snobbish than he was intelligent. I knew he never bathed, never used deodorant, and wiped his ass inadequately (as if he were still hoping his Mommy would come to the rescue), but I was crazy about him. I let him condescend to me. After all, he was a devotee of the most universal of the arts: music. I was a lowly, literal-minded scribe. Most important, he was a piano player like my piano-playing father. When he sat down at the keyboard, my underpants got wet. Those continuos! Those crescendos! Those sharps! Those flats!
You know that awful expression “tickle the ivories”? That was how Charlie drove me wild. Sometimes we even used to fuck on the piano bench with the metronome going.
We met in a funny way. On television. What can be funnier than a poetry reading on television? It isn’t poetry and it isn’t television. It’s “educational”-if you’ll excuse the expression.
The program was on Channel 13 and it was a kind of salad of the seven arts-none of them lively. Why it was considered educational was anyone’s guess. There were seven young “artists” each of whom had four minutes to do his (or her) stuff. Then there was a puffy-eyed, pipe-smoking old fart with a name like Phillips Hardtack who interviewed each of us, asking us incisive questions like “what, in your opinion, is Inspiration?” or “what influence did your childhood have on your work?” For these questions (and about ten others) another four minutes was allotted. Apart from hosting shows like this Hardtack hacked out his living writing book reviews and posing for whiskey ads-two occupations which have more in common than appears on the surface. The Scotch Was always “light” and “mild” and the books were always “stark” and “powerful.” All you had to do was crank Hardtack up and out came the adjectives. Sometimes, however, he got them confused and called a book “light” and “mild” while he called the Scotch “stark” and “powerful.” For twenty-year-old Scotch and geriatric authors who had published memoirs, Hardtack reserved the word “mellow.” And for young authors and Brand X’s Scotch, Hardtack had this automatic response: “Lacks smoothness.”
Most of the “artists” on that show deserved Hardtack. There was a young fool who called himself a “cinemaker” and showed four minutes of shaky, overexposed film of what looked like two (or possibly three) amoebas dancing pseudo-pod to pseudopod; a black painter who called himself an activist-painter and only painted chairs (a strangely pacifist subject for an activist-painter); a soprano with very yellow, very buck teeth (Charlie was there to accompany her four minutes of trembling Puccini); a one-man percussion section named Kent Blass who jumped around spastically, playing drums, xylophones, glass fish tanks, pots and pans; a modern dancer who never said the noun “dance” without using the definite article; a social-protest folksinger whose native Brooklynese had been laced with elocution lessons, with the bizarre result that he pronounced God, “Garrd”; and then there was me.
They had rigged me up inside a gray plywood picture frame for my four minutes of poetry, and in order to reach it, I had to perch on a kind of scaffolding. Charlie was right below, sitting at the piano and staring up my skirt. While I read my poetry, his eyes were burning holes in my thighs. A day later he called me up. I didn’t remember him. Then he said that he wanted to set my poems to music, so I met him for dinner. I’ve always been very naive about ploys like that. “Come up to my apartment and let me set your poems to music” and I always come. Or at least go.
But Charlie surprised me. He looked scrawny and unwashed and hook-nosed when he came to my door, but in the restaurant he displayed his gigantic knowledge of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin: all the songs my father had played on the piano when I was a kid. Even the obscure Cole Porter songs, the almost-forgotten Rodgers and Hart songs from obscure musicals, the least-known Gershwin songs-he knew them all. He knew even more of them than me-with my total recall for catchy lines. It was then that I fell absurdly in love with him, transformed him from an unwashed hook-nosed frog-into a prince-a piano-playing Jewish prince at that. As soon as he recited the last stanza of “Let’s Do It” and got the words all right, I was ready to do it with him. A simple case of Oedipussy.
We went home to bed. But Charlie was so overwhelmed by his good luck that he wilted. “Conduct me,” I said. “I seem to have lost my baton.”
“Well then, do it like Mitropoulos-with your bare hands.”
“You’re a real find,” he said, thrashing around under the covers. But
, hand or baton, it was hopeless. His teeth were chattering and great shudders were shaking his shoulders. He was gasping for breath like an emphysema patient.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s just that you’re such a find, I can’t believe it” He seemed to be sobbing and choking alternately.
“Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?”
“What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?”
“The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.”
“Darling,” I said, rocking him.
I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering-but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement.
In the morning he woke up smiling and fucked me like a stud. I had passed the test. I had not thrown him out. This was my reward.
For the next eight months or so we went together, usually spending nights either at his place or mine. I was in the process of getting an annulment from Brian, and was teaching at CCNY while finishing my M.A. at Columbia. I was still living in the same apartment where Brian had cracked up and I hated to stay alone nights, so when Charlie couldn’t stay with me, I followed him to the East Village and shared his narrow bed.