Fear Of Flying

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: Be

We zigzagged through the streets of Vie

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.

Be

When we began searching for the table with Be

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. Be

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 Be

A fu

“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 Be

“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.”

“So why didn’t you go after her if you cared so much?”

He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him.

“Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.)

“Because you loved her.”

“I never used that word.”

“But if you felt that way, why didn’t you go?”

“My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “Someone’s got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.”

“Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.”

“Not very fu

After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.”

“A what?”

“A bin-you know, a madhouse. In mental hospital, I mean.”

Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics.