A grim picture. Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs?
I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.
We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party-she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing-something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent-but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke.
We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube.
I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable.
Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth-like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.
When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere.
In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected.
“Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.”
“Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.”
“We could look,” he said.
But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind.
On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm.
This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted.
At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there-in a room full of clues.
But now I couldn’t scream. And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car.
A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique-not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important
“I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave.
“Good,” he said, fondling my knee. So instead, he proceeded to tell me about the other women he’d fucked. Some bargain.
First there was May Pei, the Chinese girl Bennett reminded him of.
“She may pay and then she may not pay,” I said.
“Don’t think that wasn’t thought of.”
“I’m sure it was. But the question is-did she pay?”
“Well, I did. She fucked me up for years after that.”
“You mean, after she stopped seeing you, she still fucked you. Some trick. The phantom fuck. You could patent that, you know. Arrange to get people fucked by famous figures of the past: Napoleon, Charles II, Louis XIV… sort of like Dr. Faustus fucking Helen of Troy…” I loved being silly with him.
“Shut up, cunt-and let me finish about May…” and then, turning to me amid a screeching of brakes: “God-you’re beautiful…”
“Keep your fucking eyes on the road,” I said, delighted.
My conversations with Adrian always seemed like quotes from Through the Looking Glass. Like:
Me: “We seem to be going around in circles.”
Adrian: “That’s just the point.”
or:
Me: “Will you carry my briefcase?”
Adrian: “As long as you agree not to carry anything for me just yet”
or:
Me: “I divorced my first husband principally because he was crazy.”
Adrian (furrowing his Laingian brows): “That would seem to me to be a good reason to marry someone, not divorce him.”
Me: “But he watched television every night.”
Adrian: “Oh, then I see why you divorced him.”
Why had May Pei fucked up Adrian’s life?
“She left me in the lurch and went back to Singapore. She had a child there living with its father and the child was in a car crash. She had to go back, but she could have at least written. For months I walked around feeling that the world was made up of mechanical people. I’ve never been so depressed. The bitch finally married the pediatrician who took care of her kid-an American bloke.”