“Look-I don’t see what’s so super about the sort of hypocrisy you live with. Pretending to all that crap about fidelity and monogamy, living in a million contradictions, being kept by your husband as a sort of spoilt talented baby and never standing on your own two feet. At least we’d be honest. We’d live together and fuck everyone openly. Nobody would exploit anyone and nobody would have to feel guilty for being dependent…”

“Poets and schizophrenics and shrinks?”

“Well there’s not much difference is there?”

“None whatsoever.”

Adrian had been taught existentialism in the course of one week in Paris by Martine, the French actress who’d been in a bin.

“That’s fast,” I said. “Existentialism made simple. Sort of like the souped-up Berlitz course. How’d she manage it?”

He described how he’d gone to Paris to see her and Mar-tine had surprised him by meeting him at Orly with two friends: Louise and Pierre. They were to spend the whole week together, never be apart, tell each other everything, fuck each other in all possible combinations, and never make any “silly moral excuses.”

“Whenever I spoke of my patients or my children or my girlfriend at home, she said: ‘of no interest.’

“Whenever I protested about needing to work, needing to earn a living, needing to sleep, needing to escape from the intensity of the, experience, she said: ‘of no interest.’ None of the usual excuses held. Actually, it was terrifying at first.”

“Sounds fascistic. And all in the name of freedom.”

“Well, I see your point, but it wasn’t fascistic because actually her idea was that you had to stretch the boundaries of what you could endure. You had to go to the bottom of your experience even if the bottom turned out to be terror. Mar-tine had been mad. She had been hospitalized and she came through it herself with all sorts of new illuminations. She put herself back together again and was much stronger than before. And that’s what that week did for me. I had to cope with the terrifying feeling of having no plans, not knowing where we were going next, having no privacy at all, being dependent on three other people for everything all the time. It revived all sorts of childhood problems for me. And the sex-the sex was terrifying at first. Fucking in groups is harder than you think. You have to confront your own homosexuality. It was illuminating, I think.”

“Was it any fun? It doesn’t sound like much fun.” Still, I was intrigued.

“After the first few days of trauma, it was splendid. We went everywhere together arm in arm. We sang in the streets. We shared food, money, everything. Nobody worried about work or responsibilities.”

“What about your kids?”

“They were with Esther in London.”

“So, she worried about responsibilities while you played at being an existentialist like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.”

“No-actually it wasn’t like that at all because it has always worked both ways. Esther has bloody well pissed off with other blokes from time to time and left me holding the kids. It isn’t a one-way thing.”

“Well, they’re your kids, aren’t they?”

“Possession, possession, possession,” he said, resenting my line of inquiry. “All you Jewish princesses are alike.”

“I teach you the term ‘Jewish princess’ and then the first thing you do is use it against me. My mother warned me about men like you.”

He put his head in my lap and nuzzled my cunt. A couple of fat Germans under another tree snickered. I didn’t care.

“Slimy,” he said.

“Your slime,” I said.

“Our slime,” he corrected me.

And then he said suddenly: “I want to give you an experience like the one Marline gave me. I want to teach you not to be afraid of what’s inside you.” He sank his teeth into my thigh. They left marks.

When I got back to the hotel at five-thirty Bennett was waiting. He didn’t ask me where I’d been, but he put his arms around me and started undressing me. He made love to me, to Adrian’s slime, to our triangle in all senses of the word. He had never been as passionate and tender, and I had rarely been so excited. That he was a much better lover than Adrian was clear. It was also clear that Adrian had made a difference in our lovemaking, had made us appreciate each other in a new way. We touched each other completely. Suddenly I was as valuable to Bennett as if he had fallen in love with me for the very first time.

We took a bath together and splashed water at each other. We soaped each other’s backs. I was a little appalled at my own promiscuity, that I could go from one man to another and feel so glowing and intoxicated. I knew I would have to pay for it later with the guilt and misery which I alone know how to give myself in such good measure. But right now I was happy. I felt properly appreciated for the first time. Do two men perhaps add up to one whole person?

One of the most memorable occasions of the Congress was the reception at the Rathaus of Vienna. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch 2,000 or more analysts gorging themselves as if they had been starving in Biafra for a year. Memorable because it provided the unparalleled opportunity to watch several sedate old analysts doing the frug-or what they thought was the frug. Memorable because I waltzed through the whole experience in a red paisley gown covered with sequins and kept leaving a trail of them on the ground as I went from one ballroom to the other, now dancing with Bennett and now with Adrian and still not being able to make up my mind. I left a trail of evidence everywhere I went.

The dumpy frumpy lady mayor of Vienna bestowed herzliche Grüsse upon Anna Freud and the other analysts, and spewed out endless German bullshit about how glad the city of Vienna was to have them all back. No mention was made of the way they’d left in 1938, of course. No fifty-piece orchestra was playing The Blue Danube Waltz for them then, or plying them with herzlichen Grüssen and free Schnaps.

When the food was brought out, herds of analysts in formal dress mooed and grunted toward the tables.

“Hurry-they’re pushing ahead to the front of the line!” bleated one matron in accents redolent of Flatbush, overlaid with Scarsdale and the New School.

“They’re already being served cake in the next room,” said another, a two-hundred-pound beauty in a canary-yellow satin pants suit, twinkling with rhinestones. “Don’t push!” said a distinguished- (or perhaps extinguished-) looking older analyst in an outdated tux and plaid cummerbund. He was being crushed between a woman lunging toward the turkey platter and a man lunging toward the antipasto. All up and down the tables, you could see nothing but long arms clawing at food with silver serving forks.

Throughout this astonishing performance, the schmaltzy violins played on from their balconied perch above the main ballroom. The pseudo-Gothic arches of the high ceilings were illumined by thousands of pseudocandles, and a few die-hards kept revolving on the dance floor in a halting Viennese waltz. Ah travel, adventure, romance! I was glowing with health and well-being, as a woman will glow when she’s been fucked four times in one day by two different men, but my mind was a welter of contradictions. I couldn’t make sense of all the contradictions I felt.

At times I was defiant and thought I had every right to snatch whatever pleasure was offered to me for the duration of my short time on earth. Why shouldn’t I be happy and hedonistic? What was wrong with it? I knew that the women who got most out of life (and out of men) were the ones who demanded most, that if you acted as if you were valuable and desirable, men found you valuable and desirable, that if you refused to be a doormat, nobody could tread on you. I knew that servile women got walked on and women who acted like queens got treated that way. But no sooner had my defiant mood passed than I would be seized with desolation and despair, I would feel terrified of losing both men and being left all alone, I would feel sorry for Bennett, curse myself for my disloyalty, despise myself utterly for everything. Then I wanted to run to Bennett and plead forgiveness, throw myself at his feet, offer to bear him twelve children immediately (mainly to cement my bondage), promise to serve him like a good slave in exchange for any bargain as long as it included security. I would become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.