Fear Of Flying

That evening the festivities began with a candidates’ party at a café in Grinzing. It was a highly inelegant affair. Great phallic knockwursts and sauerkraut were the Freudian main course. For entertainment the Vie

Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere.

Be

Adrian tapped me on the shoulder just as I was spouting something about Borges and his Labyrinths. Talk about the minotaur. He was right there behind me-all horns. My heart catapulted up into my nose.

Did I want to dance? Of course I wanted to dance and that wasn’t all.

“I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” he said. “Where were you?”

“With my husband.”

“He looks a bit wet, doesn’t he? What have you been making him miserable with?”

“You, I guess.”

“Better watch that,” he said. “Don’t let jealousy rear its ugly head.”

“It already has.”

We talked as if we were already lovers, and, in a sense, we were. If intent is all, we were as doomed as Paolo and Francesca. But we had no place to go, no way to sneak out of there and away from the people who were watching us, so we danced.

“I can’t dance very well,” he said.

And it was true, he couldn’t. But he made up for it by smiling like Pan. He shuffled his little cloven hooves. I was laughing a bit too hysterically.

“Dancing is like fucking,” I said, “it doesn’t matter how you look-just concentrate on how you feel.” Wasn’t I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear.

I closed my eyes and gyrated inside the music. I bumped and ground and undulated. Somewhere back in the ancient days of the Twist, it had suddenly occurred to me that nobody knew how to do these dances-so why feel self-conscious? In social dancing, as in social life, chutzpah is all. From then on I became a “good dancer,” or at least I enjoyed it. It was like fucking-all rhythm and sweat.

Adrian and I danced the next five or six sets-until we were exhausted, soaked, and ready to go home together. Then I danced with one of the Austrian candidates for the sake of appearances-which were getting harder and harder to keep up. And then I danced with Be

I was enjoying the fact that Adrian was watching me dance with my husband. Be

My hunger probably had no co

Adrian drove us back to our hotel. As we were coming down the winding hill from Grinzing, he talked about his children, poetically named Anaïs and Nikolai, who lived with him. They were tea and twelve. The other two, twin girls he didn’t name, lived with their mother in Liverpool.

“It’s hard on my kids not having a mother,” he said, “but I’m a pretty good Mum to them myself. I even like cooking. I make a damned good curry.”

His pride in being a housewife both charmed and amused me. I was sitting in the front of the Triumph next to Adrian. Be

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.

The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg-one of Vie

We arrived at that purple hour-eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt, it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lame. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet di

Be

He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye… how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?)