by Erica Jong
He loved me, he said, he adored me, he said, and yet, he kept holding back. I sensed something funny in his declarations of love, something tentative and insincere. I was wild because it was the first time anyone had ever held back on me. I was used to having the upper hand and his tentativeness incensed me. It made me more and more crazy about him, which in turn made him more and more tentative. The old, old story.
I knew there was another girl in Paris, an old girlfriend from Radcliffe now studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. According to Charlie, they were just friends. It was over, he said.
She was plump and dark-haired and (according to him) had this most annoying habit of falling into a dead sleep after getting laid. She had gone to Paris to get away from him, and had a French boyfriend who lived with her on the Rue de la Harpe (Charlie seemed to know the particulars pretty well for someone who no longer gave a damn). But if all that was true, then why did she sign her letters to him “I love you”? Was it just to keep an ace in the hole? And how about him? Was she his ace (or ass) in the hole? Or was I?
I’ve always felt that reading other people’s mail is the lowest of the low, but jealousy drives you to strange things. One sad morning in the East Village, when Charlie left early to teach his music students, I snuck out of bed like a spy and (with my heart booming like one of Saul Goodman’s kettle drums) I searched his apartment. I was looking, of course, for Paris postmarks-and I found them, right under Charlie’s tattle-tale gray jockey shorts.
Judging from her letters, Salome Weinfeld (named for her grandpa Sol?) was a literary type. She was also involved in the game of driving Charlie wild with jealousy while holding onto him with little doles of affection.
Cher Charles [she wrote]:
We [we!] are living here on the sixth floor (seventh to you) of a charming seedy dump called the Hotel de la Harper while we look for cheaper digs. Paris is divine-Jean-Paul Sartre practically around the corner, Simone de Beauvoir, Beckett, Genêt-tout le monde, in short.
Darling, I love you. Don’t think that just because I’m living with Sebastien (who, incidentally, makes superb couscous)-I have stopped caring for you. It’s just that I need time to experiment, to breathe, to live, to stretch, to flex my muscles [guess which!] without you.
I miss you day and night, think of you, even dream of you. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is to live with a man who doesn’t know what a B.L.T. is, who never ate a blintz, who thinks The Charles is a former king of England! Nevertheless he (Sebastien) is sweet and devoted and [a whole line was inked out blackly here] makes me realize daily how much I still love you.
Attends-moi, chéri
Sally
Attends-moi yourself!
But how could I confront Charlie with a letter which I had ferreted out from among his not-too-clean underwear? So instead I adopted a Fabian policy of watchful waiting. I kept my resentment secret. I was determined to win him, gradually, from his secret pen pal.
In June, we left for Europe together. Charlie was going to a conducting competition in Holland; I had friends to visit in Yorkshire, was due to meet my old buddy Pia in Florence for a jaunt through southern Europe, and was going to see my sister Randy in the Middle East. Charlie and I planned to stay in Holland together for two weeks and then part company. He was supposedly going home to conduct an oratorio at some arts festival, but this was still uncertain. I secretly hoped we’d both agree to cancel all our other plans and just travel together for the rest of the summer.
We sailed on the old Queen Elizabeth, tourist class. Stuffy Cunard would not give us a cabin together unless we produced written proof of matrimony (which, of course, we didn’t have). Besides, Charlie was stingy. For economy’s sake, he took one bunk in a four-bedded cabin with three old men, and I had no choice but to take one bunk in a four-bedded female cabin. Windowless, naturally, and right over the engines. My companions were a German lady who looked and talked like the Bitch of Buchenwald, a skinny French nurse who snored, and a fifty-year-old English schoolmistress in cardigans and tweeds and ripple-soled shoes. She used Yardley’s English Lavender and the whole cabin reeked of it. Our problem for the duration of the five-and-a-half-day crossing was where to fuck. My cabin was out, since the French nurse seemed to sleep all day and the English and German ladies retired at nine. Once we tried skipping lunch so as to have Charlie’s cabin while all three old codgers were out eating, but one of them came back and rattled the door angrily just as we were getting started. So we began scouring the ship for places to fuck. We were that determined. You’d think it would be easy on an old ship as full of nooks and crannies as the Queen Elizabeth, but it wasn’t. The linen closets were locked, the lifeboats were too high to climb into, the public rooms were too public, the nursery was full of toddlers, and we couldn’t find any empty cabins. I suggested using one of the first-class cabins while the people were out, but Charlie was chicken.
“What if they come back?” he asked.
“They’d probably be too embarrassed to say anything anyway-or else they’d automatically think they were in the wrong cabin and by the time they searched around and found the steward, we’d be gone.”
Jesus, was I a pragmatist compared to Charlie! What a scaredy cat he was! My fear of flying, after all, lets me ride on planes as long as I agree to suffer through the whole flight in terror, but his fear of flying was so bad that he wouldn’t even go near a plane. That was how we wound up in this predicament in the first place.
But we finally found a place. The only deserted place on board. An absolutely perfect place-both symbolically and practically (except that it had no bed): the Jewish Chapel in tourist class.
“This is fantastic!” I yelled when we fumbled for the light and realized what room it was we had found. What a setting! Pews! A Star of David! Even a Torah-for Christ’s sake! I was really turned on.
“I’ll just pretend I’m a vestal virgin or something,” I said, starting to unzip Charlie.
“But there’s no lock on the door!” he protested.
“Who’s going to come in here anyway? Certainly not all bur WASP fellow-travelers and Anglican crewmen. Besides, we can just turn out the light again. Anyone who stumbles in will think we’re davining or something. What do they know about Jewish services?”
“They’ll probably mistake you for the burning bush,” he said snidely.
“Very funny.” I was stepping out of my underpants and switching off the light.
But we only got to screw in the sight of God once, because the next day when we returned to our little temple of love, we found it padlocked. We never knew why. Charlie, of course, was sure (in his paranoid fashion) that somebody (God?) had photographed our vigorous coupling and also tape recorded all our moans. He spent the rest of the trip panicked. He was positive we’d be met in Le Havre by an Interpol vice squad.
The remainder of the crossing was pretty dull for me. Charlie sat in one of the lounges studying his scores and conducting imaginary musicians, while I watched him, seething with resentment about Sally, who I was sure he intended to see in Paris. I tried to put it out of my mind but it kept popping up like a candy wrapper which refuses to sink into Central Park Lake. What could I do? I tried writing but concentration was beyond me. All I could think of was Sally-that super-phony. She was keeping Charlie on the hook like Charlie was keeping me on the hook. All the problems of love are problems of maldistribution, goddamn it. There’s plenty to go around, but it always goes to the wrong people, at the wrong times, in the wrong places. The loved get more love and the unloved get more unloved. The closer we got to France, the more I included myself among the latter.
Of course, Charlie lost the conducting competition. And in the first round. Despite his ostentatious studying, he never could remember scores. He was not cut out to be a conductor, either. On the podium, he always seemed to go as limp as he had that first night in bed. His whole body sagged. His shoulders curled over and his back arched like an overcooked cannelloni which had lost its
stuffing. Poor Charlie had no charisma. The opposite of Brian exactly. I often thought (while watching Charlie perform) that if only he could have had a little of Brian’s charisma he would have been phenomenal. Brian, of course, had no talent for music. But if only I could have combined them! Why do I always wind up with two men who would make one great man? Is that somehow the secret of my Oedipal problem? My father and my grandfather? My father who always goes off to play the piano when things get hot and my grandfather who hangs in there like the fireball he is, arguing Marxism, Modernism, Darwinism or any other ism-as if his life depended on it?
Am I doomed to spend my life running between two men?
One diffident and mild and almost indifferent and one so fiery and restless that he uses up all my oxygen?
A typical scene at the White-Stoloff dinner table. My mother Jude, screaming about Robert Ardrey and territoriality. My grandfather Stoloff (known to everyone as Papa) quoting Lenin and Pushkin to prove that Picasso is a phony. My sister Chloe telling Jude to shut up, Randy screaming for Chloe to shut up. Bob and Lalah upstairs nursing the quints, Pierre arguing economics with Abel. Chloe baiting Bennett about psychiatry, Bennett coughing nervously and being inscrutable, Randy attacking my poetry, my grandmother (Mama) sewing and admonishing us not to “talk like truck drivers,” and me thumbing through a magazine to shield myself somehow (always with the printed word!) from my family.
chloe: Isadora’s always reading something. Can’t you putdown the goddamned magazine?
me: Why? So I can yell along with everyone else?
chloe: Well it would be better than reading a goddamned magazine all the time.
my father (humming Chattanooga Choo Choo): “Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore…”
chloe (eyes heavenward as if in supplication): And Daddy’s always humming or making wisecracks. Can’t we ever have a serious conversation around here?
me (reading): Who wants a serious conversation?
chloe: You’re a hostile bitch.
me: For someone who hates psychiatry, you go pretty heavy on the jargon.
chloe: Fuck you.
mama (looking up from her sewing): You should be ashamed. I never brought up my granddaughters that they should talk like truck drivers.
papa (looking up from his debate with Jude): Disgusting.
chloe fat the top of her lungs): WILL EVERYONE SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE AND LISTEN TO ME!
The sound of a piano is heard in the living room. It’s my father playing his own rendition of Begin the Beguine, which he. played years ago in the first Broadway production of Jubilee. “When they begin… the… Beguine… It brings back the thrill of music so tennn-derrr…”
His voice wafts to me over the chords of the slightly out-of-tune Steinway baby grand. But Papa and Jude don’t even notice his departure.
“In this society,” Jude is saying, “the standards of art are set by press agents and public relations men-which means that there are no stan-”
“I’ve always said,” Papa interrupts, “that the world is divided into two types of people: the crooks and the semicrooks…”
And my father answers them both with a broken chord.
Charlie and I parted tearfully in Amsterdam. The central train station. He was off to Paris and Le Havre (to go right back to the States he said). But I didn’t believe him. I was off to Yorkshire-whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t like it at all. A tearful goodbye. We are eating Amsterdam herrings and weeping-both of us.
“It’s best for us to be apart for a while, darling,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, lying through my teeth (which are full of herring). And we kiss, exchanging oniony saliva. I board the train to the Hook of Holland. I wave one herring-scented hand. Charlie blows kisses. He stands on the platform, round-shouldered, a conductor’s baton protruding from his trench-coat pocket, a battered briefcase full of orchestral scores and Dutch herrings in his hand. And the train pulls out. On the steamer from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea.
In Yorkshire, I get a letter from Charlie who is still (of course) in Paris. “Darling,” he writes, “don’t think that just because I’m with Sally that I’ve stopped loving you…”
I am staying in a big, draughty English country house with crazy English friends who drink gin all day to keep warm and make Oscar Wilde-ish conversation and I spend the next ten days in a drunken stupor. I cable Pia to meet me in Florence sooner than planned, and the two of us take revenge on our faithless lovers (hers is in Boston) by sleeping with every man in Florence except Michelangelo’s David. Only it is no good. We are still desperately unhappy. Charlie calls me in Florence to beg forgiveness (he is still in Paris with Sally) and that precipitates another joyless orgy… Then Pia and I repent and decide to purify ourselves. We douche with Italian white chianti vinegar. We kneel before the statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and ask forgiveness. We go to the top of Giotto’s Campanile and pray to the ghost of Giotto (any famous old ghost will do, really). We give up food for two days and drink only San Pellegrino. We douche with San Pellegrino. Finally, as the ultimate act of expiation, we decide to mail our diaphragms to our faithless lovers and try to make them feel guilty instead. But what to wrap them in? Pia has an old Motta Panetone box under the bed of our hurricane-struck pensione room. I look and look but can’t find an appropriate box to mail my diaphragm in, so I abandon the project rather hastily. (What good would it do to send my diaphragm to Charlie and Sally in a panetone box anyway?) But Pia is undeterred. She is bustling around looking for brown paper and tape. She is scrawling addresses and return addresses. She reminds me of myself at thirteen furtively sending away for Kotex booklets in “plain brown wrappers.”
We troop off to American Express (where we have slept with half the leering Florentine mail clerks). We are told to make out a customs declaration. But what to put on the customs declaration? “One diaphragm, used?” “One diaphragm, much abused?” “Used clothing” perhaps? Can a diaphragm be considered an article of clothing? Pia and I debate this. “You do wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt?
“Fuck him!” Pia says. “Let him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag-valuation $100.”
Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties.
14 Arabs amp; Other Animals
I’m the sheik of Araby.
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep…
– from “The Shiek of Araby,” by Ted Snyder,
Francis Wheeler, and Harry B. Smith
From Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut.
I was pretty panicky, as I recall-about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish-since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had f
orfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much-admittedly) by my terrible act of deception.
I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncir-cumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma… The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how well I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were. The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris-but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave,, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within.
As it turned out, the flight to Beirut was designed to stir all my various paranoias. We flew into art epic storm over the Mediterranean, with rain beating against the windows and food slopping around inside the plane and the pilot coming on every few minutes with reassurances which I didn’t believe for a second. (Nothing sounds quite believable in Italian anyway-not even Lasciate Ogni Speranza.) I was fully prepared to die for having put “Unitarian” on my visa. That was, in fact, just the sort of transgression Jehovah would get you for-that and fucking heathens.