Thy Neighbor's Wife (21 page)

When he returned from the office in the evening, usually late and with a whiff of liquor on his breath, he seemed to be internalized, dwelling within himself, detached from his surroundings. He was no more interested in his infant daughter than he had been in his son. After dinner, he stayed up late reading books on philosophy, religion, psychology, and science fiction paperbacks, which he devoured by the dozen.

Shortly before Christmas in 1962, he became completely engrossed in a long novel that suddenly and inexplicably seemed to revive his spirit. The novel was
Atlas Shrugged
, by Ayn Rand, and after he had finished it and Lilo expressed curiosity about it,
he discussed some aspects of it with her. The main characters are strong-willed American industrialists and idealists who are opposed by a group of Washington politicians and bureaucrats anxious to reduce them to government-approved standards of mediocrity and conformity, and thereby control them. The individualists not only rebel against this pressure but finally remove themselves and their considerable talent from the nation and form their own idealized community in a place that only they can recognize. The hero of the book is a strange, elusive, intellectual misfit named John Gait; the heroine is a dynamic railroad heiress named Dagny Taggart; and the book’s cynical view of the federal bureaucracy was in harmony with the way Williamson had been feeling for at least two years.

Like the hero of the book, Williamson felt that one way to change society for the better was to become temporarily removed from it, to carefully create a more idealized mode of life in a private place, and then gradually to enlarge that place and its purpose by luring into it certain people who are not only willing to change but are worthy of change. Williamson had long been eager to change and be changed, but so far he saw himself as merely a misdirected migrating man who had moved from the Alabama woods to the Pacific islands to the technical tribes of Cape Canaveral in search of a compatible place he had yet to find. Perhaps he would discover, as did the hero in the book, that the place could not be found; it had to be created. Though he had no idea how to begin, he decided that he could no longer work for the government.

He resigned his position at Cape Canaveral and planned to leave within the week for Los Angeles, where for the time being he would accept a high-paying job that had already been offered him as an engineer with a firm that manufactured magnetic recording equipment. He told Lilo that he hoped she would follow him to California within the month, driving at a leisurely pace with the child, and that he would have a house waiting for her when she arrived. She wondered to herself what she should do, doubting that the marriage could last; but having no reason to
remain in Florida, nor the desire to find one, she agreed that she would join him.

Lilo arrived with their two-year-old daughter in February 1963, spent a quiescent year living with Williamson in the Los Angeles suburbs, and was more relieved than surprised when he finally recommended that they get a divorce. Where there was no passion there was also no hostility. She quietly agreed with him that they should go their separate ways and she had no quarrel with the divorce terms he suggested. She would continue for the present to live in the Los Angeles house and acquire the rent-producing property in Florida, and also receive $650 a month in child support. Williamson said, too, that he wanted to provide her with a better life insurance policy, and one day before the divorce was final, he brought home an agent to explain the terms. The agent was Barbara Cramer.

B
ARBARA CRAMER
had first met John Williamson while attempting to sell a group-insurance policy to the Los Angeles electronics firm where he worked as the general manager. He was remote, almost rude to her after she had arrived; having forgotten about their appointment, and irritated that she could not reschedule it for the following day, he relegated her to the reception room for a long wait before finally admitting her into the grim, sparsely furnished office where he sat behind a steel gray desk, chain smoking and barely attentive, as she proceeded to explain the particulars of the policy.

It was early afternoon and, despite his aloofness, she was very relaxed and confident. She had driven here from a pleasant motel meeting with Bullaro, and she had also enjoyed the ride later alone through the Valley, humming in the car to music from the radio, her body still refreshed from the shower. She often found automobile driving a sensual experience, an opportunity to be briefly removed from other people to ponder private thoughts while moving with music over smooth wide roads, and she had no doubt that thousands of other Californians also sought daily solace and the benefits of self-reflection from behind the windshields of their cars—Los Angeles was a city of motorized meditators, of interior travelers fantasizing along freeways, and the blissful mood that had encapsulated her on this sunny afternoon
could not be disturbed by the ungracious atmosphere of Williamson’s office.

If anything, she was merely curious about this man who seemed to be trying hard to create the impression that he did not care what impression he was creating. His office was so conspicuously austere as to suggest that he had carefully arranged it. Instead of personal mementos or photographs on his desk, there were two ashtrays filled to the brim with his cigarette butts. There was no rug on the floor, the chairs were uncomfortable. The gray office walls were completely bare except for the one large picture behind his desk that showed two empty roads extending through a desert and converging in the distance, going nowhere. His replies to most of her questions were monosyllabic; his comments were always brief, his attitude indifferent. And yet she sensed that close to his surface there was an almost desperate need. He was perhaps a man who had built a wall hoping that someone would climb it.

When she had finished explaining about the policy, he abruptly stood, signifying that their meeting was over. He said that if she would leave the documents he would study them and telephone her within the week with his reaction. After a week had passed and he had not contacted her, she called him asking if he would have lunch with her. He said that he was not interested in lunch; instead he proposed that they have dinner. She accepted and, contrary to her expectations, she had a delightful evening.

They dined at an oriental restaurant in the Hollywood Hills, later going to a nightclub. They drank a good deal, spoke easily and openly about their private lives, and she could not believe that this interesting, soft-spoken man was the same disgruntled individual that she had met in the office. Either he had a dual personality or she had merely encountered him on an unusually bad day. Now she sensed that he was completely relaxed with her; he seemed to be compatible with her background: They were both country people living in the nation’s largest city, they were exiles from white rural poverty trying to succeed in corpora
tionland without the usual credentials and connections—although Williamson acknowledged during the evening that he was about to quit his firm to begin a smaller business of his own. While Barbara quickly saw that he would now be of no use to her in pushing her insurance policy with his colleagues, she did not really care. Her interest in him was suddenly strictly personal, and when they left the club together, arm in arm, he impulsively suggested on this Friday evening that they go away for the weekend.

She agreed, and three hours later, somewhat fatigued but still exuberant, they were in San Francisco, standing in front of a hotel registration desk.

“Two rooms,” Williamson announced to the clerk, who, after looking at the couple, asked, “Why two rooms?”

“Because,” Williamson said, “we’re two people.”

Sleeping separately the first night was a decision that Barbara found very romantic, and it was one of several small and pleasant surprises that would make John Williamson more intriguing to her. They abstained from sex on the second night, too, and when they finally did make love, after they had returned to Los Angeles and spent the evening in her apartment, it was an exciting culmination to a weekend of deepening familiarity and intensified desire.

His effect upon her was immediate and agreeably bewildering. With him she felt oddly coy, unaggressive, feminine, yet no less liberated. She felt as free as ever to pursue her whims and aspirations, and she knew from their conversations that he perceived and admired her independent spirit and style, and that it had been his awareness of these qualities that had quietly attracted him to her, despite his curtness, during their first meeting. Submissive and dependent women did not appeal to him, he told her, nor did the double standard that exists between the sexes, nor the conventional roles that predominate in nearly all marriages, including his own failed marriage. If he married again, he told Barbara, he wanted not a subservient wife but a strong equal partner in a relationship that would be advanced and adventurous.

As Barbara spent more time with him in Los Angeles, seeing him nearly every evening and sometimes visiting his bachelor apartment in Van Nuys, she gradually realized that the many books he owned dealing with psychology, anthropology, and sexuality represented not only intellectual curiosity on his part but also a growing professional interest.

John Williamson’s career ambitions seemed to be shifting from mechanical engineering to sensual engineering, from the wonders of electronics to the dynamics of cupidity, and although his concerns were with contemporary society, his knowledge extended back to ancient times and early religions, to the first prophets and heretics, the scientists and dissenters of the Middle Ages as well as the freethinkers and founders of rural Utopias in the industrial age. He was particularly interested in the work of the controversial Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who was opposed to the double standard between the sexes but recognized it, and the general repression of women, as society’s venal way of preserving the family unit that it considered necessary for the maintenance of a strong government. In a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay. “Owing to the economic dependence of the woman on the man and her lesser gratification in the processes of production,” Reich once observed, “marriage is a protective institution for her, but at the same time she is exploited in it.”

The average woman’s early social conditioning was described by Reich as “sex-negating” or at best “sex-tolerating” but in view of the conservative morality advocated by governments and religious institutions, this sexual passivity made women more faithful wives if not more daring lovers. Men meanwhile indulged their unfulfilled lust in what Reich called “mercenary sexuality” with prostitutes, mistresses, or other women that respectable society held in low esteem. Largely from the lower classes,
these women were the sexual servants in a system that scorned them and punished them, but could not eliminate them because, as Reich wrote: “Adultery and prostitution are part and parcel of the double sexual morality which allows the man, in marriage as well as before, what the woman, for economic reasons, must be denied.”

While Reich himself did not personally favor prostitution or promiscuity, he did not believe that the law should seek to prevent acts of sexuality between consenting adults, including homosexuals, nor would he restrain expressions of sexual love between adolescents. “The statement is made,” he wrote, “that the abstinence of adolescents is necessary in the interest of social and cultural achievement. This statement is based on Freud’s theory that the social and cultural achievements of man derive their energy from sexual energies which were diverted from their original goal to a ‘higher’ goal. This theory is known as that of ‘sublimination.’…It is argued that sexual intercourse of youth would decrease their achievements. The fact is—and all modern sexologists agree on this—that all adolescents masturbate. That alone disposes of that argument. For, could we assume that sexual intercourse would interfere with social achievement while masturbation does not?”

Throughout his professional career, which began in the 1920s when he worked as a clinical assistant to Freud in Vienna, Wilhelm Reich’s daring defense of sexual pleasure brought misery to his life and would finally lead him into the American prison where he died in 1957. Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.”

He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of the earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare—the 1960s’ slogan of the Vietnamese war protestors, “Make Love, Not War,” reechoed a Reichian theme—and he blamed the antisexual moralism of religious homes and schools, along with the “reactionary ideology” of governments, for their part in producing citizens who feared responsibility and savored authority.

Reich further believed that people who cannot achieve sexual gratification in their own lives tended to regard expressions of sexuality in society as vile and degrading, which were the symptoms of Comstock and other censors, and Reich also suggested that the religious tradition of sex as evil had its origin in the somatic condition of its celibate leaders and early Christian martyrs. People who deny the body can more readily develop concepts of “perfection” and “purity” in the soul, and Reich deduced that the energies of mystical feelings are “sexual excitations which have changed their content and goal,” adding that the God-fixation declined in people who had found bliss in sex.

Such sexually satisfied people possessed what Reich called “genital character,” and he considered it the goal of his therapy to achieve this in his patients because it penetrated the armor and converted the energy that nourished neurotic numbness and destruction into channels of tenderness and love that released all “damned-up sexual excitation.” An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with his body, his drives, his environment—he possessed “orgastic potency,” the capacity to “surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibitions…free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccom
panied by phantasies”; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing.

Partly because Reich suggested healthy sexual intercourse as an antidote to many ailments, his critics often saw him as espousing nothing but pleasure, whereas in fact Reich claimed that his purpose was to allow his patients to feel pain as well as pleasure. “Pleasure and
joie de vivre
,” he wrote, “are inconceivable without fight, without painful experiences and without unpleasurable struggling with oneself; although he asserted that the capacity to give love and gain happiness is compatible with “the capacity of tolerating unpleasure and pain without fleeing disillusioned into a state of rigidity.”

Reich assuredly did not believe, as did many therapists who had followed Freud, that culture thrived on sexual repression, nor would he quietly condone what he saw as a church-state alliance that sought to control the masses by denigrating the joys of the flesh while presumably uplifting the spirit. Control, not morality, was the central issue, as Reich perceived it; organized religion, which in Christian countries fostered among the faithful such traits as obedience and acceptance of the status quo, strived for conformity, and its efforts were endorsed by governments that passed illiberal sex laws that reinforced feelings of anxiety and guilt among those lawful God-fearing people who sometimes indulged in unsanctioned sex. These laws also gave governments additional weapons with which to embarrass, harass, or to imprison for their sexual behavior certain radical individuals or groups that it considered politically threatening or otherwise offensive. The writer Ayn Rand went even further than Reich in suggesting that at times a government hoped that citizens would disobey the law so that it could exercise its prerogative to punish: “Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?” asks a government official in Rand’s novel
Atlas Shrugged
; “What’s there in that for anyone?…Just pass the kind of laws that can neither be ob
served nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers and then you cash in on guilt…. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.”

Among those upon whom it cracked down, making him a martyr of the sexual revolution, was Wilhelm Reich, whose words and ideas aroused conflict in every country in which he lived and worked. As a Communist in Germany, Reich was expelled from the party for his writings on sexual permissiveness and “counter-revolutionary” thinking, while the Nazis denounced him as a “Jewish pornographer.” In Denmark the attacks on him by orthodox psychiatrists in 1933 hastened his departure for Sweden, but the hostility he encountered there led him in 1934 to Norway. In 1939, after two years of adverse publicity in the Norwegian press, he left for the United States, where he resumed his psychiatric practice in New York, trained other psychiatrists, and lectured at the New School for Social Research. In 1941, a week after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the FBI, which had a dossier on Reich as a possible enemy alien, held him on Ellis Island for three weeks before releasing him.