Fear of Flying (26 page)

Charlie and I parted tearfully in Amsterdam. The central train station. He was off to Paris and Le Havre (to go right back to the States he said). But I didn’t believe him. I was off to Yorkshire—whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t like it at all. A tearful goodbye. We are eating Amsterdam herrings and weeping—both of us.

“It’s best for us to be apart for a while, darling,” he says.

“Yes,” I say, lying through my teeth (which are full of herring). And we kiss, exchanging oniony saliva. I board the train to the Hook of Holland. I wave one herring-scented hand. Charlie blows kisses. He stands on the platform, round-shouldered, a conductor’s baton protruding from his trench-coat pocket, a battered briefcase full of orchestral scores and Dutch herrings in his hand. And the train pulls out. On the steamer from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea.

In Yorkshire, I get a letter from Charlie who is still (of course) in Paris. “Darling,” he writes, “don’t think that just because I’m with Sally that I’ve stopped loving you. …”

I am staying in a big, draughty English country house with crazy English friends who drink gin all day to keep warm and make Oscar Wilde-ish conversation and I spend the next ten days in a drunken stupor. I cable Pia to meet me in Florence sooner than planned, and the two of us take revenge on our faithless lovers (hers is in Boston) by sleeping with every man in Florence except Michelangelo’s
David.
Only it is no good. We are still desperately unhappy. Charlie calls me in Florence to beg forgiveness (he is still in Paris with Sally) and that precipitates another joyless orgy. … Then Pia and I repent and decide to purify ourselves. We douche with Italian white chianti vinegar. We kneel before the statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and ask forgiveness. We go to the top of Giotto’s Campanile and pray to the ghost of Giotto (any famous old ghost will do, really). We give up food for two days and drink only San Pellegrino. We douche with San Pellegrino. Finally, as the ultimate act of expiation, we decide to mail our diaphragms to our faithless lovers and try to make
them
feel guilty instead. But what to wrap them in? Pia has an old Motta Panetone box under the bed of our hurricane-struck
pensione
room. I look and look but can’t find an appropriate box to mail my diaphragm in, so I abandon the project rather hastily. (What good would it do to send my diaphragm to Charlie and Sally in a panetone box anyway?) But Pia is undeterred. She is bustling around looking for brown paper and tape. She is scrawling addresses and return addresses. She reminds me of myself at thirteen furtively sending away for Kotex booklets in “plain brown wrappers.”

We troop off to American Express (where we have slept with half the leering Florentine mail clerks). We are told to make out a customs declaration. But what to
put
on the customs declaration? “One diaphragm, used?” “One diaphragm, much abused?” “Used clothing” perhaps? Can a diaphragm be considered an article of
clothing?
Pia and I debate this. “You
do
wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt?

“Fuck
him!
” Pia says. “
Let
him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag—valuation $100.”

Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties.

14

Arabs & Other

Animals

 
 
 
 
I’m the sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep. …

—from “
The Shiek of Araby
,”

by Ted Snyder, Francis Wheeler, and Harry B. Smith

From Florence I took the
rapido
to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut.

I was pretty panicky, as I recall—about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what
that
meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish—since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much—admittedly) by my terrible act of deception.

I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncir-cumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma. … The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how
well
I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were. The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris—but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave,, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within.

As it turned out, the flight to Beirut was designed to stir all my various paranoias. We flew into art epic storm over the Mediterranean, with rain beating against the windows and food slopping around inside the plane and the pilot coming on every few minutes with reassurances which I didn’t believe for a second. (Nothing sounds quite believable in Italian anyway—not even
Lasciate Ogni Speranza.
) I was fully prepared to die for having put “Unitarian” on my visa. That was, in fact, just the sort of transgression Jehovah would get you for—that and fucking heathens.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to
terra firma
in one piece.

The rest of the people on the plane were also not my idea of a fun group to die with, When things really got messy and we were being buffeted around like aphids clinging to a paper glider, some drunken idiot started yelling “Ooopsy-Daisy” every time we took a dive, and a few other fools kept laughing hysterically. The thought of dying with all these comical assholes and then arriving in the underworld with a visa marked “Unitarian” kept me praying avidly throughout the flight. There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

Amazingly enough, the storm subsided (or we left it behind) by the time we flew over Cyprus. There was a greasy Egyptian (is there any other kind?) sitting next to me, and once he realized he was going to survive the flight, he began flirting with me. He told me that he published a magazine in Cairo and was going to Beirut on business. He also insisted that he hadn’t been scared at all because he always wore this blue bead against the evil eye. Blue bead or not, he’d looked pretty goddamned scared to me. He went on to reassure me that both he and I had “lucky noses” and therefore the plane couldn’t possibly crash while we were on it. He touched the tip of my nose and then touched his and said: “See—lucky.”

“Christ—I’ve run into a nose freak,” I thought. And I wasn’t exactly flattered by the idea that our nose3 looked alike either. He had a huge nose, like Nasser’s (all Egyptians look like Nasser to me), while my nose, though not exactly
retroussé,
is at least small and straight. It may not be a plastic surgeon’s dream, but it’s not a Nasser nose either. If anything, its stubby tip betrays the genetic contribution of some pig-faced Polish thug who raped one of my great-grandmothers during some long-forgotten pogrom in the Pale.

My Egyptian’s conversational interests, however, went beyond noses. He looked down, at a copy of
Time
Magazine which had lain open (and unread) on my lap during the storm, pointed to a picture of (then) UN Ambassador Goldberg, and said historically: “He’s Jewish.” That was ail he said, but his tone and look implied that that was all he
had
to say.

I looked at him very hard (over my Polish nose), and for two cents I would have said, “Me too,” but nobody offered me two cents. Just then our Italian pilot announced the descent into Beirut Airport.

I was still shaking from that little interchange when I spotted a hugely pregnant Randy behind the glass barricade in the airport. I’d expected the worst going through customs, but there was no trouble at all. My brother-in-law, Pierre, seemed to be best friends with all the airport personnel and I was whisked through like a VIP. It was 1965 and things were not as spastic in the Middle East as they became after the Six Day War. As long as you didn’t come via Israel, you could travel in Lebanon as if it were Miami Beach—which, in fact, it somewhat resembles, down to the abundance of
yentas.

Randy and Pierre drove me from the airport in the hearse-black, air-conditioned Cadillac which they’d shipped over from the States. On the road to Beirut, we passed a refugee camp where people were living in packing boxes and lots of dirty children were walking around half-naked sucking their fingers. Randy immediately made some high-handed comment about what an eyesore it was.

“An eyesore? Is that all?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t be such a goddamned liberal do-gooder,” she snapped. “Who do you think you are—Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“I just get sick and tired of everyone bleeding about the poor Palestinians. Why don’t you worry about us instead?”

“I do,” I said.

The city of Beirut itself is all right, but not as gorgeous as you’d think, to hear Pierre talk about it. Nearly everything is new. There are hundreds of white cornflakes-box-shaped buildings with marble terraces, and everywhere the streets are being ripped up for new construction. It’s unbearably hot and humid in August and whatever grass there is has turned brown in the sun. The Mediterranean is blue (but not bluer than the Aegean—no matter what Pierre says). From some angles, the city looks a little like Athens—minus the Acropolis. A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined-looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the back seats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in mini-skirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs.

The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment—all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack—including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping wound the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre—who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits— wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me:

My
love is like a sheaf of wheat
bursting into flower.
Her eyes are topazes in space …

“The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.”

“Poetic license,” he said solemnly.

“Let’s go to the beach!” I’d suggest, but everyone was too tired, too hot, too lethargic. It was obvious I’d never get them to Baalbek or the Cedars either. Damascus, Cairo—forget it. Israel was right across the border but we would have to fly via Cyprus and that seemed unthinkable after the last flight. Then there would be the problem of getting back into Lebanon again. All I did was lounge around Randy’s apartment with the rest of them and wait for letters from Charlie—which rarely came. Instead I kept hearing from all those other clowns: the married Florentine who liked me to whisper dirty words, the American professor who claimed I had changed his life, one of the mail clerks at American Express who had convinced himself I was an heiress. It was Charlie I wanted, or no one. And Charlie wanted Sally. I was in despair. I spent half the time in Beirut nursing my clap phobia, inspecting my cunt in the mirror, and douching in Randy’s white marble bidet.

When my parents arrived laden with gifts from the supposedly mysterious East, the situation deteriorated still further. Randy was glad to see them for the first three days and then she and Jude got into one of their marathon fights in which they both began dredging up event? which took place twenty or twenty-five years ago. Randy blamed my mother for everything: from not changing her diaper often enough to changing it
too
often; from giving her piano lessons too young to not letting her go skiing young
enough.
They went at each other like a couple of trial lawyers, cross-examining the past. I kept wondering—why on earth had I come back to them for a rest? I was raring to get away again. I felt like a human Ping-Pong ball. I kept finding men to escape from my family and then running back to my family to escape from the men. Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away I wanted to go home again. What do you call that? An existential dilemma? The oppression of women? The human condition? It was unbearable then and it’s unbearable now: back and forth I go over the net of my own ambivalence. As soon as I touch ground, I want to bounce up and fly right back. So what do I do? I laugh. It only hurts when I laugh—though nobody knows that but me.

My parents only stuck around for a week or so and then they were off to Italy to check up on an ice-bucket factory.

Fortunately, they have an import-export business which permits them to pick up and fly away whenever the internecine family warfare escalates to the bombing level. They fly in full of gifts and good feelings and fly out when the shit hits the fan. The whole process takes about a week. The rest of the year they pine for their far-flung children and wonder why most of them live so far from home. During the years I was in Germany and Randy was in Beirut, my mother wondered wistfully why two of her brood had chosen to live (as she put it) “in enemy territory.”

“Because it seemed more hospitable than home,” I said, winning her everlasting enmity. It
was
a bitchy remark—I’ll grant that—but what have I ever had to protect me against my mother except words?

It was still pretty crowded after my parents left: four sisters, Pierre, six kids (there were only six in 1965), a nursemaid, and a cleaning lady.

It was so hot that we scarcely left the air-conditioned apartment. I kept wanting to go sightseeing, but the family lethargy was contagious. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll leave for Cairo, but I was really scared to go to Cairo alone and neither Lalah nor Chloe would go with me.

Things went on in this depressing vein for another week. On one occasion, we all went to a cabana club where the beach was rocky and Pierre poeticized about the blue Mediterranean until you felt like puking. (He was always lecturing us about the good life in Beirut and how he had come to get away from “the commercialism of America.”)

At the club he introduced us to one of his friends as his “four wives,” and I had such a creepy feeling that I wanted to go home then and there. But where was home? With my family? With Pia? With Charlie? With Brian? Alone?

Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris
Herald-Tribune
around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited—as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch
Bonanza
on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street.