by Erica Jong
After supper, all the relatives in town (i.e. practically the whole town) came over. A lot of them came over to watch TV (since Pierre’s aunt is one of the few people in Karkabi who has one) but that night they came over to watch us too. Mostly they stood around and stared at us and looked embarrassed, but sometimes they’d touch my hair (or Chloe’s or Lalah’s) and make noises to indicate that they were really crazy about blondes. Or else they’d pat us everywhere as if they were blind. God-there’s nothing to compare with being patted by a dozen two-hundred-pound Lebanese women with mustaches. I was panicky. Could they tell by patting that we were Jewish? I was sure they could. But I was wrong. Because when it came time to give us presents, I got a silver rosary, a hand-knitted pink angora sweater in size 46 (it came down to my knees), and a blue bead on a chain (for the old evil eye). I wasn’t about to turn down any amulet at that point. All intercessions with all deities were gratefully accepted.
When the gift-giving was over, everyone sat down to watch television-mostly reruns of ancient American programs. Lucille Ball batting her false eyelashes, Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and the whole screen a blizzard of subtitles. You could hardly see the actors for the letters.
It really made you believe in the universality of art to see all these pastoral types loving Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr. I was looking forward to the day when America extends its glorious civilization to other solar systems. There they’ll be-all those intergalactic types-watching Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr in rapt attention.
The relatives stayed and stayed. They drank coffee and wine and Arak until Aunt Françoise was wringing her pudgy hands. We were all exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, so instead of actually throwing them out, Pierre’s Uncle Gavin quietly left the room, climbed up on the roof, and began monkeying with the TV antenna until the picture turned into a mass of zigzags. Within a few minutes, the visitors departed. I was given to understand that Uncle Gavin climbs up on the roof quite frequently.
Sleeping arrangements were difficult. Randy and Pierre and the kids were to be put up at Pierre’s father’s house down the hill. Lalah and Chloe were to share a double bed in another aunt’s house next door. And I drew a single in a tiny annex of Aunt Françoise’s house. I’d really have preferred to be with Lalah and Chloe than to be alone in that creepy room, sleeping under a crucifix and grubby pictures of the illustrious queen. But there was no space for three in bed, so I sacked out alone, amusing myself before sleep with thoughts of scorpions scampering up the wall, and fatal spider bites, and visions of breaking my neck during the night when I needed to find the outdoor toilet without a flashlight. Oh there was plenty to keep the most phobic mind thoroughly occupied for many busy hours of insomnia.
I had been lying there in full phobic flower for about an hour and a half when the door creaked open.
“Who is it?” I said, my heart thudding.
“Shhhh.” A dark shadow moved toward me. The man under the bed.
“For God’s sake!” I was terrified.
“Shhh-it’s only me-Pierre,” Pierre said. And then he came over and sat down on the bed.
“Jesus-I thought it was some rapist or something.” He laughed. “Jesus wasn’t a rapist.”
“I guess not… What’s up?” It was a poor choice of words under the circumstances.
“You seem so depressed,” he said, full of counterfeit tenderness.
“I guess I am. All that craziness with Brian last summer and now Charlie…”
“I hate to see my little sister depressed,” he said, stroking my hair. And for some reason that “little sister” sent chills through me.
“You know I always think of you as my little sister, don’t you?”
“Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter…” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me. But what should I say? What was the etiquette in a situation like this?
“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said weakly. Pierre’s hands were under my nightgown, stroking my thighs. I wasn’t as unaroused as I wanted to pretend.
“What isn’t a good idea?” he asked nonchalantly. “After all, it’s natural for a brother to love his little sister…” And he went on doing what comes naturally.
“What did you say?” I asked, sitting up.
“Just that it’s perfectly natural for a brother to love his little sister…” He might have been Albert Ellis giving a lecture.
“Pierre,” I said gently, “haven’t?you ever read Lolita?”
“I can’t stand that phony prose style of his,” Pierre said, annoyed with me for distracting him.
“But this is incest,” I said emphatically.
“Shhh-you’ll wake everyone… Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant. We’ll do it the Greek way, if you like…”
“It wasn’t pregnancy I was worried about for God’s sake-it was incest!” My reasoning didn’t seem to make a dent in Pierre’s resolve.
“Shhhh,” he said, pushing me down on the pillow. He was like some of the guys I’d met in Italy. If you resisted because you really weren’t interested, they thought it was fear of pregnancy and kept suggesting other alternatives-anal intercourse, sucking, mutual masturbation-anything except “NO.” Pierre inched up to the head of the bed and offered his erect penis to my mouth… The showdown. A battle was raging within me. It would have been so damned easy to oblige. To suck him and be done with it. It was so simple really. What difference could one more blow job make to my life?
“I can’t,” I said.
“Come on,” Pierre said, “I’ll teach you.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant I can’t; morally, I can’t…”
“It’s easy,” he said.
“I know it’s easy,” I said.
“Here,” he said, “all you do is…”
“Pierre!” I screamed. Pierre gathered his pajama bottoms around him and beat it out of the room.
I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again.
I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband-and good grief-that’s Daddy!
But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear?
I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teen-age Incest; Swapping; Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Enter
ed in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust.
Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival.
His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…
… Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark.
“Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded.
“Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.
“Listen kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears…” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know.
“Well-what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially.
“Come on you idiots-tell me!”
“You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling.
“How the fuck did you know?”
“Because he tried it with me,” she said.
“And me,” said Chloe.
“You’re kidding.”
“We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “Would that we were…”
“So what happened?”
“Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too… but I’m not entirely sure I believe her…”
“You bitch!” Chloe yelled.
“OK… OK… I believe you.”
“And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?”
“Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless… He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.”
“A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.”
“Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law… It isn’t really incest.”
“It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed.
“It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.)
“I’ll work on it,” I said.
On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks.
Arabs, I thought, goddamned Arabs. What a disproportionate sense of guilt I had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it-as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses do for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom-as my sister Randy always reminds me-they are so closely related)? Is it any wonder that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did they sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were worth the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What-me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody?
Back in Beirut, we made plans to go home. Lalah and Chloe had a charter flight to New York, so they had to leave together, and I had my old Alitalia roundtrip from Beirut to Rome to JFK.
I stopped in Rome as I’d planned and took one more week in Florence before going home to face the music with Charlie. Even in hot, crowded August, Florence remained one of my favorite cities in the world. There I took up with Alessandro again and this time we had an almost perfect, if loveless, six-day affair. At my request, he forsook his mania for dirty words, and we found a charming room at an inn in Fiesole where we could make love from one to four every afternoon (a very civilized lunch-hour custom). Maybe it was because of my fury at Charlie, or perhaps Pierre had really turned me on, but my lovemaking with Alessandro was inspired. It was the only time in my life when I was able to have exuberant, affectionate sex with someone without convincing myself that I was in love. A kind of six-day truce between my id and superego.
When Alessandro went home to his wife in the evenings, I was on my own. I attended concerts at the Pitti, saw a few of the other characters from my previous visit and was hotly pursued once more by Professor “Michelangelo” (Karlinsky) of the flaming beard. Despite the heat and the motley assortment of boyfriends, I loved Florence and there were moments when I hardly wanted to leave at all. But a depressing teaching job and a Ph.D. program I hated were waiting for me in New York, and I was still too much of a superego-ridden schoolgirl not to choose something I hated over something I loved. Or maybe it was really Charlie: I was outraged by his betrayal, but I couldn’t wait to see him again.
Charlie and I broke up soon after our reunion. It seems I could never forgive his ambivalence, though, in fact, I now see it was very like my own, and perhaps I should have been more understanding. Alessandro kept writing from Florence with talk of “divorzio,” but I had seen too many Italian movies to believe him. “Michelangelo” turned up once and looked so much worse in the polluted sunlight of New York that I hadn’t the heart to continue. The brown and amber shades of Florence had done wonders for him-as any E. M. Forster fan can readily understand. September and October were grim and dreary. I went out with a depressing assortment of divorces, mama’s boys, neurotics, psychotics, and shrinks. I was only able to keep my spirits up by describing them all in bitchy detail in my letters to Pia. Then, in November, Bennett Wing waltzed into my life looking like the solution to all my problems. Silent as the Sphinx and very gentle. Savior and psychiatrist all in one. I fell into marriage the way (in Europe) I had fallen into bed. It looked like a soft bed; the nails were underneath.
15 Travels with My Anti-Hero
I want! I want!
– William Blake
I told Adrian everything. My whole hysterical history of searching for the impossible man and finding myself always right back where I started: inside my own head. I impersonated my sisters for him, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my husband, my friends… We drove and talked and drove and talked. “What’s your prognosis?” I asked, ever the patient in search of the perfect doctor.
“You’re due for a bit of a reshuffle, ducks,” Adrian kept saying, “you have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life.”
Wasn’t I already doing that? What was this crazy itinerary anyway if not a trip back into my past?
“You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” he said. “You have to hit rock bottom and then climb back up.”
“Jesus! I feel like I already have!”
Adrian smirked his beautiful smirk with the pipe tucked between his curling pink lips. “You haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” he said, as if he knew some of the surprises in store.
“Are you going to take me there?” I asked.
“If you insist, love.”
It was his magnificent indifference which infuriated me, turned me on, made me wild with frustration. Despite his cuddling and ass-grabbing, Adrian was so cool. I used to stare and stare at that beautiful profile wondering what in the world was happening in his head and why I couldn’t seem to fathom it.
“I wan
t to get inside your head,” I said, “and I can’t. It’s driving me crazy.”
“But why do you want to get inside my head? What do you think that will solve?”
“It’s just that I want to really feel close to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone.”
“What makes you think love solves anything?”
“Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.”
“But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.”
“Brian was crazy.”
“Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.”
“I guess…”
“Look-why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?”
“Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?”
“You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends…”
Drab, drab, drab, I thought.
“All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.”
“You lose,” Adrian said.
“I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever change anything?”
Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down).