Thanks to my luck, my sadness, my strange relationship with my husband, my stubborn determination (which I did not at all believe in then), I managed to write three books of poems in the next three years. I scrapped two and the third was published. Then a whole new set of problems began. I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing, and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure.

If I had learned how to write, mightn’t I also learn how to live? Adrian, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to live. Bennett, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to die. And I didn’t even know which I wanted. Or maybe I had pegged them wrong. Maybe Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death. Manichean though I was, I couldn’t even tell the players without a score card. If I could tell good from evil, maybe I could choose, but I was more baffled now than I’d ever been.

8 Tales from the Vienna Woods

The bonds of wedlock are so heavy

that it takes two to carry them-

sometimes three.

– Alexandre Dumas

From then on the merry-go-round began. I would go to meetings with Bennett, fully expecting to stay, swearing to myself that I’d never see Adrian again, that it was over, that I’d had my fling and it was finished-then I’d see Adrian and fall apart. I found myself acting out the vocabulary of popular love songs, the clichés of the worst Hollywood movies. My heart skipped a beat. I got misty whenever he was near. He was my sunshine. Our hearts were holding hands. If he was in a room with me, I was in such a state of agitation that I could hardly sit still. It was a kind of madness, a total absorption. I forgot the article I was supposed to write. I forgot everything but him.

None of the ploys I had used on myself in the past seemed to work anymore. I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery,” by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

After lunch on that first day of the Congress, I told Bennett I was taking off to go swimming and I cut out with Adrian. We drove to my hotel where I got my bathing suit, put on my diaphragm, took my other gear, and then left with Adrian for his pension.

In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed.

“Pretty desperate, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“For God’s sake, why? We have plenty of time.”

“How long?”

“As long as you want it,” he said, ambiguously. If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there.

Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true.

“You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.”

I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admit it.”

“That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.”

I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t, they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy.

“I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it-”

“Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly-especially when it’s bloody true.”

“I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.”

He smiled delightedly. “No you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again. I told you I’m an anti-hero. I’m not here to rescue you-and carry you away on a white horse.”

What was he here for then, I wondered? It certainly wasn’t fucking.

We went swimming at a huge public Schwimmbad on the outskirts of Vienna. I had never in my life seen so much sunburned fat. In Heidelberg, I had deliberately avoided the public swimming pools and saunas; and when we traveled we had always avoided the beach resorts frequented by Germans. We made a point of bypassing Ravenna and the other Teutonic encampments. Instead, I used to gaze enviously at the beautiful concave navels of the French Riviera, the moneyed, exercised midriffs of Capri. But here we were surrounded by mountains of Schlag and Sacher Torte metamorphosed into fat.

“It’s like The Last Judgment by Michelangelo,” I told Adrian. “The one at the end of the Sistine Chapel.”

He stuck his tongue out at me and made a face.

“Here are all these people just enjoying themselves and having a good swim, and you’re turning your satirical gaze upon them, seeing depravity and corruption all around you. Madam Savonarola, I ought to call you.”

“You’re right,” I said meekly. Couldn’t I ever stop looking and dissecting and tearing everything down? I couldn’t.

“But they do look like The Last Judgment,” I said. “God’s revenge on the Germans for being such pigs is making them look like pigs.”

And, by God, they did: not just fat, not just rolling bellies, and flabby arms, and double chins, and shimmering thighs- but all of it bright pink. Crackling. Burnt. Redder than Chinese pork. They looked like suckling pigs. Or like the fetal pig I had to dissect in Zoology II-nearly the Waterloo of my college career.

We swam and kissed in the water among all the other damned souls. I was wearing a black tank suit with a V-neck cut down to my navel, and everyone kept staring at me: the women in disapproval and the men in lechery. I could feel Adrian’s semen slimy between my legs and leaking out into the chlorinated pool. An American donating English semen to the Germans. A sort of cockeyed Marshall Plan. Let his semen bless their water and baptize them. Let it cleanse them of their sins. Adrian the Baptist. And me as Mary Magdalene. But I also wondered if swimming right after screwing would get me pregnant. Maybe the water would push the semen up behind my diaphragm. I was suddenly terrified of getting pregnant. I suddenly wanted to get pregnant. I kept imagining the beautiful baby we’d make together. I was really hooked.

We sat on the lawn under a tree and drank beer. We discussed our future-whatever that was. Adrian seemed to think I ought to leave my husband and settle in Paris (where he could fly over and visit me periodically). I could rent a garret and write books. I could come to London and write books with him. We could be like Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre: together yet apart. We’d learn to do away with silly things like jealousy. We’d fuck each other and all our friends. We’d live without worrying about possessions or possessiveness. Eventually someday, we’d establish a commune for schizo-phrenics, poets, and radical shrinks. We’d live like real existentialists instead of just talking about it. We’d all live together in a geodesic dome.

“Sort of like a Yellow Submarine,” I said.

“Well, why not?”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Adrian… Walden Pond and all that.”