Fear Of Flying

But Charlie surprised me. He looked scrawny and unwashed and hook-nosed when he came to my door, but in the restaurant he displayed his gigantic knowledge of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin: all the songs my father had played on the piano when I was a kid. Even the obscure Cole Porter songs, the almost-forgotten Rodgers and Hart songs from obscure musicals, the least-known Gershwin songs-he knew them all. He knew even more of them than me-with my total recall for catchy lines. It was then that I fell absurdly in love with him, transformed him from an unwashed hook-nosed frog-into a prince-a piano-playing Jewish prince at that. As soon as he recited the last stanza of “Let’s Do It” and got the words all right, I was ready to do it with him. A simple case of Oedipussy.

We went home to bed. But Charlie was so overwhelmed by his good luck that he wilted. “Conduct me,” I said. “I seem to have lost my baton.”

“Well then, do it like Mitropoulos-with your bare hands.”

“You’re a real find,” he said, thrashing around under the covers. But, hand or baton, it was hopeless. His teeth were chattering and great shudders were shaking his shoulders. He was gasping for breath like an emphysema patient.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It’s just that you’re such a find, I can’t believe it” He seemed to be sobbing and choking alternately.

“Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?”

“What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?”

“The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.”

“Darling,” I said, rocking him.

I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering-but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement.

In the morning he woke up smiling and fucked me like a stud. I had passed the test. I had not thrown him out. This was my reward.

For the next eight months or so we went together, usually spending nights either at his place or mine. I was in the process of getting an a

He loved me, he said, he adored me, he said, and yet, he kept holding back. I sensed something fu

I knew there was another girl in Paris, an old girlfriend from Radcliffe now studying philosophy at the Sorbo

She was plump and dark-haired and (according to him) had this most a

I’ve always felt that reading other people’s mail is the lowest of the low, but jealousy drives you to strange things. One sad morning in the East Village, when Charlie left early to teach his music students, I snuck out of bed like a spy and (with my heart booming like one of Saul Goodman’s kettle drums) I searched his apartment. I was looking, of course, for Paris postmarks-and I found them, right under Charlie’s tattle-tale gray jockey shorts.

Judging from her letters, Salome Weinfeld (named for her grandpa Sol?) was a literary type. She was also involved in the game of driving Charlie wild with jealousy while holding onto him with little doles of affection.

Cher Charles [she wrote]:

We [we!] are living here on the sixth floor (seventh to you) of a charming seedy dump called the Hotel de la Harper while we look for cheaper digs. Paris is divine-Jean-Paul Sartre practically around the corner, Simone de Beauvoir, Beckett, Genêt-tout le monde, in short.

Darling, I love you. Don’t think that just because I’m living with Sebastien (who, incidentally, makes superb couscous)-I have stopped caring for you. It’s just that I need time to experiment, to breathe, to live, to stretch, to flex my muscles [guess which!] without you.

I miss you day and night, think of you, even dream of you. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is to live with a man who doesn’t know what a B.L.T. is, who never ate a blintz, who thinks The Charles is a former king of England! Nevertheless he (Sebastien) is sweet and devoted and [a whole line was inked out blackly here] makes me realize daily how much I still love you.

Attends-moi, chéri

Sally

Attends-moi yourself!

But how could I confront Charlie with a letter which I had ferreted out from among his not-too-clean underwear? So instead I adopted a Fabian policy of watchful waiting. I kept my resentment secret. I was determined to win him, gradually, from his secret pen pal.

In June, we left for Europe together. Charlie was going to a conducting competition in Holland; I had friends to visit in Yorkshire, was due to meet my old buddy Pia in Florence for a jaunt through southern Europe, and was going to see my sister Randy in the Middle East. Charlie and I pla

We sailed on the old Queen Elizabeth, tourist class. Stuffy Cunard would not give us a cabin together unless we produced written proof of matrimony (which, of course, we didn’t have). Besides, Charlie was stingy. For economy’s sake, he took one bunk in a four-bedded cabin with three old men, and I had no choice but to take one bunk in a four-bedded female cabin. Windowless, naturally, and right over the engines. My companions were a German lady who looked and talked like the Bitch of Buchenwald, a ski