Fear Of Flying

Toward the end of our idyll, Steve (who was then seventeen and I fourteen) wanted me to take “it” in my mouth. “Do people really do that?”

“Sure,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He went to my parents’ bookshelf in search of Van de Velde (carefully hidden behind Art Treasures of the Renaissance). But it was too much for me. I couldn’t even pronounce it. And would it make me pregnant? Or maybe my refusal had something to do with the continuing social education which my mother was instilling in me along with Art History. Steve lived in the Bronx. I lived in a duplex on Central Park West. If I was going to worship a “phallos” it was not going to be a Bronx phallos. Perhaps one from Sutton Place?

Ultimately, I said goodbye to Steve and took up masturbation, fasting, and poetry. I kept telling myself that masturbation at least kept me pure.

Steve continued to woo me with bottles of Chanel No. 5, Frank Sinatra records, and beautifully lettered quotations from the poems of Yeats. He called me whenever he got drunk and on every one of my birthdays for the next five years. (Was it just jerking him off which inspired such loyalty?)

But meanwhile I repented for my self-indulgence by undergoing a sort of religious conversion which included starvation (I denied myself even water), studying Siddhartha, and losing twenty pounds (and with them, my periods). I also got a Joblike rash of boils and was sent to my first dermatologist-a German lady refugee who said, memorably, “Za skeen is za meeroar of za zoul” and who referred me to the first of my many psychiatrists, a short doctor whose name was Schrift.

Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vie

Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head.

He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother. What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery.

“Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because if s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist. Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nu

Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman.

I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.

Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves.

“Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.”

10 Freud’s House

It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home.

– Sigmund Freud

Adrian dropped us off at the hotel without a word and roared off in the Triumph to get lost. We went upstairs to wash away the sins of the night before. Since there was no meeting Be

Vie

Be

We walked up the stairs to Freud’s consulting room like two patients going for marital therapy.