I had been temporarily cheered by my luck in finding a place, but when I actually saw the room and realized I’d have to spend the night alone there, my heart sank. It was really half a room with a plywood partition across it (God knows what was on the other side) and a sagging single bed covered by a very dusty chintz spread. The walls were old striped wallpaper, very splotched and discolored.
I pulled my suitcase in and closed the door. I fiddled awhile with the lock before being able to work it. Finally, I sank down on the bed and began to cry. I was conscious of wanting to cry passionately and without restraint, of wanting to weep a whole ocean of tears and drown. But even my tears were blocked. There was a peculiar knot in my stomach which kept making me think of Bennett. It was almost as if my navel was attached to his so that I couldn’t even lose myself in tears without wondering and worrying about him. Where was he? Couldn’t I even cry properly until I found him?
The strangest thing about crying (perhaps this is a carryover from infancy) is that we never can cry wholeheartedly without a listener-or at least a potential listener. We don’t let ourselves cry as desperately as we might. Maybe we’re afraid to sink under the surface of the tears for fear there will be no one to save us. Or maybe tears are a form of communication-like speech-and require a listener.
You have to sleep, I told myself sternly. But already I could feel myself moving into a panic which recalled my worst childhood night terrors. I felt the center of myself slipping backward in time even as my adult, rational self protested. You are not a child, I said aloud, but the insane pounding of my heart continued. I was covered with cold sweat. I sat Tooted to the bed. I knew I needed a bath, but would not take one because of my fear of leaving the room. I had to pee desperately, but was afraid to go out to the toilet. I did not even dare to take off my shoes (for fear the man under the bed would grab me by the foot). I did not dare wash my face (who knew what lurked behind the curtain?). I thought I saw a figure moving on the terrace outside the window. Phantom cars of light crossed the ceiling. A toilet flushed in the hall and I jumped. There were footsteps down the hall. I began to remember scenes from Murders in the Rue Morgue. I remembered some nameless movie I had seen on television at about the age of five. It showed a vampire who could fade in and out of walls. No locks could keep him out. I visualized him pulsating in and out of the dirty, splotched wallpaper. I appealed again to my adult self for help. I tried to be critical and rational. I knew what vampires stood for. I knew the man under the bed was partly my father. I thought of Groddeck’s Book of the It. The fear of the intruder is the wish for the intruder. I thought of all my sessions with Dr. Happe in which we had spoken of my night terrors. I remembered my adolescent fantasy of being stabbed or shot by a strange man. I would be sitting at my desk writing and the man would always attack from behind. Who was he? Why was my life populated by phantom men?
“Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath asked in one of her desperate last poems. If I was trapped, I was trapped by my own fears. Motivating everything was the terror of being alone. It sometimes seemed I would make any compromise, endure any ignominy, stay with any man just so as not to face being alone. But why? What was so terrible about being alone? Try to think of the reasons, I told myself. Try.
me: Why is being alone so terrible?
me: Because if no man loves me I have no identity.
me: But obviously that isn’t true. You write, people read your work and it matters to them. You teach and your students need you and care about you. You have friends who love you. Even your parents and sisters love you-in their own peculiar way.
me: None of that makes a dent in my loneliness. I have no man. I have no child.
me: But you know that children are no antidote to loneliness. me: I know.
me: And you know that children only belong to their parents temporarily.
me: I know.
me: And you know that men and women can never wholly possess each other.
me: I know.
me: And you know that you’d hate to have a man who possessed you totally and used up your breathing space…
me: I know-but I yearn for it desperately.
me: But if you had it, you’d feel trapped.
me: I know.
me: You want contradictory things.
me: I know.
me: You want freedom and you also want closeness.
me: I know.
me: Very few people ever find that.
me: I know.
me: Why do you expect to be happy when most people aren’t?
me: I don’t know. I only know that if I stop hoping for love, stop expecting it, stop searching for it, my life will go as flat as a cancerous breast after radical surgery. I feed on this expectation. I nurse it. It keeps me alive.
me: But what about liberation?
me: What about it?
me: You believe in independence?
me: I do.
me: Well then?
me: I suspect I’d give it all up, sell my soul, my principles, my beliefs, just for a man who’d really love me…
me: Hypocrite!
me: You’re right.
me: You’re no better than Adrian!
me: You’re right.
me: Doesn’t it bother you to find such hypocrisy in yourself? me: It does.
me: Then why don’t you fight it?
me: I do. I’m fighting it now. But I don’t know which side will win.
me: Think of Simone de Beauvoir!
me: I love her endurance, but her books are full of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre.
me: Think of Doris Lessing!
me: Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love… what more is there to say?
me: Think of Sylvia Plath!
me: Dead. Who wants a life or death like hers even if you become a saint?
me: Wouldn’t you die for a cause?
me: At twenty, yes, but not at thirty. I don’t believe in dying for causes. I don’t believe in dying for poetry. Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.
me: Well-think of Colette.
me: A good example. But she’s one of very few.
me: Well, why not try to be like her?
me: I’m trying.
me: The first step is learning how to be alone…
me: Yes, and when you learn that really well, you forget how to be open to love if it ever does come.
me: Who said life was easy?
me: No one.
me: Then why are you so afraid of being alone?
me: We’re going round in circles.
me: That’s one of the troubles with being alone.
Hopeless. I cannot reason myself out of this panic. My breath is coming in short gasps and I am sweating profusely. Try to describe the panic, I tell myself. Pretend you’re writing. Put yourself in the third person. But it’s impossible. I am sinking into the center of the panic. It seems I am being torn asunder by wild horses and that my arms and legs are flying off in different directions. Horrible torture fantasies obsess me. Chinese warlords flaying their enemies alive. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. French Protestants broken on the wheel. Resistance fighters having their eyes plucked out. Nazis torturing Jews with electric shocks, with needles, with unanes-thetized “operations.” Southerners lynching blacks. American soldiers cutting the ears off Vietnamese. Indians being tortured. Indians torturing. The whole of history of the human race running with blood and gore and the screams of victims.