Fear of Fifty (26 page)

But I hardly knew these things when
Fruits
&
Vegetables
was published in 1971.

It came out the same spring as Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch.
With a new burst of feminism in the air, it was warmly received. For a book of poems, that is.

My publisher made a party at a fancy fruit and vegetable stand, a place called Winter's Market on Third Avenue. The bright bins of fruit stepped out onto the sidewalk. The lemons and oranges gleamed in the sunlight.

I wore purple lace hotpants and a matching shirt with pockets strategically placed over the nipples. With purple granny glasses and purple shoes, I hoped I looked properly improper—as was de rigueur in 1971.

Poets and publishers milled about, eating fruit kabobs and skewering one another with their witticisms.

I sat on a crate of oranges, reading a poem about an onion:

The party noises drowned out my peelings. Karen Mender, the pretty young publicist who had organized the party, had amazingly succeeded in getting an evening news team to come. (A slow day in Vietnam, I guess.)

I was videotaped on the crate of oranges, mouthing inaudible lines about onions. My thighs were showcased. So were my high-heeled fuck-me sandals.

“It could only happen in New York,” said the voice-over, “a book party in a fruit and vegetable market.”

“What do you think of poetry?” a reporter asked the butcher.

He chomped a big cigar and said: “Frankly, I prefer
meat.”

“Is that so?” asked the reporter, egging him on.

“Fruit is nice, but you can't beat a good brisket.”

When the choice is between meat and poetry, meat always has the last word.

The evening news ran the piece twice, failing to mention the name of the book, the publisher's name, or the author's name.

The poems went out into the world anyway, bringing back their own news. I began getting letters, invitations, reviews, Polaroids of naked men, baskets of fruit, of onions, of eggplants. Readings were proposed, poetry awards proffered. Little magazines that had formerly snubbed me now
invited
me to submit. I was asked to teach poetry at my shrine, the 92nd Street Y.

My students and I met around my dining room table in the West Side apartment I shared with Allan Jong. Poems were begun, poems rewritten, love affairs blossomed, marriages died. My students taught me about poetry and life.

I collected my new poems into a volume called
Half-Lives.

“Where's the novel?” Aaron asked.

“Coming,” I swore. But I was still noodling over
The Man Who Murdered Poets
and I knew I couldn't show him
that.
(Eventually he did me the great favor of rejecting it, encouraging me to write a novel in the voice my poems had discovered.)

In July of 1971, Allan and I took off for a congress of psychoanalysts in Vienna—the first time analysts had returned to Vienna since Freud had fled the Nazis in 1939. Anna Freud would be there; so would Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Alexander Mitscherlich.

A handsome young shrink from England arrived wearing love beads and an Indian
kurta.
I fell for him like a ton of psychiatric books.

He was to become the muse of my first novel.

Ambition was my idol, which was broken,
Before the shrines of sorrow and of pleasure ...

—George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Don Juan

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to
Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have
come.

—Raymond Chandler,
Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler,
edited by Frank MacShane

Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.

—Goethe

 

 

Vienna was a dip into the Nazi past again. And
going
to
Europe
had always been my family's excuse for diving into the primal ooze of their creation. They were all great travelers and great malcontents. Europe was the place for the culling of memory, for rekindling dreams, ideals, stories, sex. My grandfather had dreamed of turn-of-the-century Paris his whole New York life; my mother had dreamed of the 1931 Paris Exposition with its models of Angkor Wat, and of the handsome boys who chased her in her rolled silk stockings and cute cloche hat. She and my aunt raved on about the
Bremen
(later called the
Liberté,
the first tub I also crossed the ocean on), where Nazi boys with patent leather hair and violet-smelling cologne pursued them through Deco lounges, not knowing they were
Jewesses.
(My mother had the most admirers always.) From
Bremen
to
Liberté,
we followed in their sea-steps.

It was a family tradition: Europe was sex to us—the place where guilt retired, can-can dancers flashed, and boys you kissed under bridges melted into the Seine, or Thames, or Arno, with no consequences. Europe was one-night stands with guys who barely spoke your language and therefore could not tell. Europe was poetry and Bacchic flings and wine and cheese and the land of the twelve dancing princesses. Nothing counted there. After all, we had got out in time. The Holocaust did not consume us. But we played with danger at the edge of the flame, licking at sex, the invitation to the conflagration. The fact of having narrowly escaped the greatest pogrom in history made Europe sexier for American baby boom Jews. God made only two forces—love and death—and wherever they were closest the heat was greatest.

Asked, “Don't you want to go to Europe, Nana?” my present husband's hundred-and-one-year-old grandmother replied (as she had for years), “I been.”

But my family
never
turned its back on the old country. The summer I was thirteen, I went to Europe on the
Liberté
with my parents, lugging a makeup case filled with fifteen lipsticks, twenty nail polish colors, through the Grosvenor House, the George V, and the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles. I flirted with all those midget elevator operators in their ascending golden cages. I danced with pursers and called them “pursuers.” The summer I was nineteen, I was packed off to the Torre di Bellosguardo in Florence to study Italian, and the summer I was twenty-three, I went back to do the same without the feeble excuse of summer school.

I fell in love with Italy as if it were a man—a man with many
campanili.
Forever after, Italy was the country of love. It still is—even though plastic bottles and condoms wash up on the tarnished shores and VIP now means visite
in prigione.

Willkommen in Wien,
the sign said. This was not Italy, but it was close. Right across the Alps lay the Land of Fuck, a furiously dancing boot, kicking Sicily into an azure sea. And Vienna was enchanting even if it
was
crammed with Nazis and analysts and even if I
was
with my husband.

I soon took care of that, laying eyes on and simultaneously falling in love with a properly unsuitable protagonist—a radical Langian hippie shrink with gorgeous green eyes (one of them wall), shaggy blond hair, and abundant pheromones. I only wanted a fling to ease the boredom of marriage, but I had picked myself a psychopath who liked nothing better than to mess with lives—and other analysts' wives.

His real name was so absurd that I couldn't possibly use it in a book. I called him “Goodlove” instead—hoping to evoke Clarissa's Mr. Lovelace. Otherwise I have got him mostly skewered. Falling instantly in lust leads to skewering. Being out of control leads the lover to play darts with the object of her emotional chaos. Darts go with love. Even Cupid used them. Stabbed through the heart, I retaliated in kind.

At all the public functions—dinners on the Danube, banquets at the Rathaus, conferences of luminous analytic stars in headsets—we flaunted our flirtation. Everyone noticed. They were meant to. It gave us the needed kick. We didn't so much want to fuck each other as to fuck with everyone else's head—particularly my husband's and my analyst's. But my analyst wasn't watching. Only my husband was.

After a preliminary poke in the Wiener boardinghouse where all the Brits stayed, I knew he was unreliable in bed. I was nuts for him anyway. His talk seduced me. He wanted nothing less than to take me to the bottom of myself. And I was tempted. He was the tempter I had been looking for.

My first book of poems had come out that spring and I was looking for my reward. Publishing a book has always made me hungry for chaos. A book orders and puts an end to one section of a life. That phase is over; another is about to begin. I look for a raft to help me cross the Rubicon. The raft has always been a man.

I came, I saw, I was conquered. My knack for turning a slave into a master did not fail me. My heart and my cunt pounded that old tattoo:
Take me, take me, take me or I'll die.

My husband and I stayed up all night analyzing the attraction. This was meant to quash it, but it only made it more keen. Since every book is a peeling away of skin, I was raw now. I wanted to grow new flesh to cover the blood.

A love affair does that—grows new wrapping, if only scar tissue. Love doesn't even have to be involved. The man was beautiful only to me. But he provoked me, and provocation felt like love.

After two weeks of this, we took off together in his MG, having no destination. A brazen act, an act of regicide. Allan was king, and I was the assassin. I wanted to kill the king inside my head. Chess would not do. The man had to be flesh. And he had to talk, to philosophize, to challenge, not just to fuck. Like all my lovers, he had to rouse the daredevil in my breast. He said, “You won't, you can't.” I said, “I can! I will!”

What a fool way to start a journey! We took off for the Alps and zigzagged through alpine passes. Salzburg, St. Gilgen, Berchtesgaden, Hitler's nest. We stopped in modest bed and breakfasts. We were destined never to like each other again as much as that first day we met.

Panic set in. To appease it, I told the story of my life. “Adrian Goodlove” egged me on, provoked me into candor. By the time we came to Paris, I'd heard my own story—though it had been a Scheherazade act to keep him interested. Of course, I embellished, exaggerated, and invented extra relatives. That's what storytellers do.

He dumped me in Paris without a car. He was going to meet his girlfriend and kids. I raged. I bit his lips. I bit his neck. He laughed and asked for an autographed poetry book. After a Left Bank descent into Hades à la Miller, Orwell, Hemingway, and other fallen idols, I reclaimed my soul, and reclaimed my husband shortly after.

The hippie shrink and I met again in London, on Hampstead Heath. We sat in Keats's garden and waited for the nightingale to sing. Adrian, my muse, gave me a kick to start the book: “Write it,” he said. “You won't be sorry.”

“And after that?” I asked.

“You'll write another and another one,” he said.

“That's all?”

“That's all there is. You finish and then you start again.”

“What if it's not successful?”

“What's that to do with you? You're the writer, not the critic of your book.”

“What if I can't do it?”

“You can. You know you can conquer your fears. That's what a writer is—a conqueror of fears.”

So I went home and began. Whenever I faltered, I'd play a recording of his voice. Made on the Autobahn outside Munich, it sounded like trucks whizzing and horns blasting. But under the roar of traffic, I heard his voice provoking me.

I can still hear it. It got me on my way. I wrote the story like a vagabond in flight. My Scheherazade act was the frame. Every day, every night, I wrote with a thudding heart. It was half-confession, half-defiance. I wrote it because I thought I couldn't. I was driven by the power of fear.

I began the book in September and had a draft—but for the ending—in June. The ending cost me more pain than all my other books combined. I knew that
whatever
I had my heroine do at the end, it would be wrong for
someone's
politics. So I left her in the bathtub, being reborn.

Rebirth is the real point. Divorce, marriage, death can all lead there or not. Novels today usually favor divorce. In the last century, they favored marriage. Neither ending matters as much as the heroine's rebirth. Because so many heroines had died, I wanted mine reborn.

When I had four hundred pages or so, I dashed into my publisher's office and dumped it on the desk. Perhaps he had come to feel there was no novel. I flew out the door and left for Cape Cod, where the shrinks summered.

When Aaron called me to tell me how he loved the book, I was far away and almost afraid to listen. I dimly remember his saying, “It's got everything—feminism, sex, satire, ambivalence, it tells the story from a unique point of view.” Could this be
my
book? Then I plunged into the six-month process of dealing with the ending.

What I remember most is wanting to take back the book from the printers. I had terrors and night sweats as I anticipated my doom. I knew this book was an emancipation proclamation. But I didn't know whether I would know
how
to be free.