Fear Of Flying

“I think I’d love you,” he said while he was fucking me, “if I believed in love.”

At midnight, I suddenly remembered Be

For about an hour I lay awake in anguish, listening to

Adrian snore, hating myself for my disloyalty, and unable to get relaxed enough to sleep. At 1 a.m. the door opened and Be

Be

I have told these events as plainly as possible, because nothing I might say to embellish them could possibly make them more shocking. The whole episode was wordless-as if the three of us were in a pantomime together and each had rehearsed his part for so many years that it was second nature. We were merely going through the motions of something we had done in fantasy many times. The whole episode -from my leaving the address with the switchboard operator to Adrian’s stroking Be

In the morning we disowned each other. Nothing had happened. It was a dream. We walked down the baroque steps of the pension as if we all happened to be separate lodgers meeting for the first time on the winding stairs.

Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily-especially Reuben Finkel, a red-headed, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars.

“Hello Rueben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Be

Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Be

9 Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers

A woman is her mother.

That’s the main thing.

– A

Of course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which co

When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother-easily pigeonholed and filed away-a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.)

My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo, and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this:

1. Above all, never be ordinary.

2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular-we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear.

“No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy-stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual.

“I can’t stand that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of Seventeen Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.” Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But ordinary. Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an unca