Was it different in the beginning? I think so. I was dazzled by his silence then as I had once been overwhelmed by Brian’s astonishing torrent of speech. Right before Bennett, there had been that conductor who loved his baton (but never wiped his behind), a Florentine philanderer (Alessandro the Gross), an incestuous Arab brother-in-law (later, later), a professor of philosophy (U. of Cal.), and any number of miscellaneous lays in the night. I’d followed the conductor across Europe watching him perform, carrying his scores, and finally he took off and left me for an old girlfriend in Paris. So I had been wounded by music, madness, and miscellaneousness. And silent Bennett was my healer. A physician for my head and a psychoanalyst for my cunt. He fucked and fucked in ear-splitting silence. He listened. He was a good analyst. He knew all Brian’s symptoms before I told him. He knew what I’d been through. And most astonishing of all-he still wanted to marry me after I told him about myself.
“Better find a nice Chinese girl,” I said. It wasn’t racism, just my skittishness about marriage. Such permanence terrified me. Even the first time, with Brian, it had terrified me, and I had married against my better judgment.
“I don’t want a nice Chinese girl,” Bennett said. “I want you.”
(It turned out Bennett had never taken out a Chinese girl in his whole life-much less screwed one. He was all hung up on Jewish girls. Men like that seem to be my fate.)
“I’m glad you want me,” I said. Grateful. I was really grateful.
At what point had I started pretending Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that.
q: “Dear Dr. Reuben: Why does the fucking always become like processed cheese?”
A: “You seem to have a food fetish, or what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as an oral fixation. Have you ever considered seeking professional help?”
I shut my eyes tightly and pretended that Bennett was Adrian. I transformed B into A. We came-first me, then Bennett-and lay there sweating on the awful hotel bed. Bennett smiled. I was miserable. What a fraud I was! Real adultery couldn’t be worse than these nightly deceptions. To fuck one man and think of another and keep the deception a secret- it was far, far worse than fucking another man within your husband’s sight. It was as bad as any betrayal I could think of. “Only a fantasy,” Bennett would probably say. “A fantasy is only a fantasy, and everyone has fantasies. Only psychopaths actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don’t.”
But I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads.
What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts-and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing.
Maybe Bennett was pretending I was someone else, too. But so what? That was his problem. And doubtless 99 percent of the people in the world were fucking phantoms. They probably were. That didn’t comfort me at all. I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself. I was already an adulteress, and was only holding off the actual consummation out of cowardice. That made me an adulteress and a coward (cowardess?). At least if I fucked Adrian I’d only be an adulteress (adult?).
3 Knock, Knock
Sex, as I said, can be summed up in three P’s: procreation, pleasure, and pride. From the long-range point of view, which we must always consider, procreation is by far the most important, since without procreation there could be no continuation of the race… So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations… and as such it is a comparative luxury from nature’s point of view. It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.
– Madeline Gray,
The Normal Woman (sic), 1967
In my dream Adrian and Bennett were going up and down on a seesaw in the playground in Central Park where I used to go as a child.
“Maybe she ought to be analyzed in England,” Bennett was saying as his end of the seesaw swung up in the air. “I’ll turn her passport and shot record over to you.”
Adrian had his feet on the ground now and he began shaking the seesaw like a big kid unloosed in the little kids’ playground.
“Stop that!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him!” But Adrian kept grinning and shaking the seesaw. “Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!” I tried to scream, but, as always in dreams, my words became garbled. I was terrified that Adrian was going to bounce Bennett to the ground and break his back. “Please, please stop!” I pleaded.
“What’s wrong?” Bennett mumbled. I had awakened him. I always talked in my sleep, and he always answered.
“What happened?”
“You were on a seesaw with someone. I got scared.”
“Oh.” He rolled over.
Normally Bennett would have put his arms around me, but we were in narrow beds on opposite sides of the room and instead he went back to sleep.
I was wide awake now and could hear birds making a racket in the garden behind the hotel. At first they comforted me. Then I remembered that they were German birds and I got depressed. Secretly, I hate traveling. I’m restless at home, but the minute I get away I feel the threat of doom hanging over my most trivial actions. Why had I come back to Europe anyway? My whole life was in pieces. For two years I had lain in bed with Bennett and thought of other men. For two years I had debated whether to get pregnant or strike out on my own and see some more of the world before settling down to anything that permanent. How did people decide to get pregnant, I wondered. It was such an awesome decision. In a way, it was such an arrogant decision. To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like. I assumed that most women got pregnant without thinking about it because if they ever once considered what it really meant, they would surely be overwhelmed with doubt. I had none of that blind faith in chance which other women seemed to have. I always wanted to be in control of my fate. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life. I had been compulsively using a diaphragm for so long that pregnancy could never be accidental for me. Even during the two years I took the pill, I never missed a day. Slob that I was about everything else, I had never messed up on that score. I was virtually the only one of my friends who’d never had an abortion. What was wrong with me? Was I unnatural? I just hadn’t the normal female compulsion to get knocked up. All I could think of was me with my restlessness, with my longings for zipless fucks and strangers on trains-being tied down with a baby. How could I wish that on a baby?
“If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious red-headed mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast-drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the tzatzka business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille.