The fact was that neither one of these attitudes made any sense and I knew it. Neither dominating nor being dominated. Neither bitchiness nor servility. Both were traps. Both led nowhere except toward the loneliness both were designed to avoid. But what could I do? The more I hated myself, the more I hated myself for hating myself. It was hopeless.

I kept scanning the faces in the crowd for Adrian. No face but his contented me. Every other face looked gross and ugly to me. Bennett knew what was going on and was maddeningly understanding.

“You’re like something out of Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “Did it happen or didn’t it? Only her analyst knows for sure.”

He was convinced that Adrian “only” represented my father, and in that case it was kosher. Only! I was merely, in short, “acting out” an Oedipal situation as well as an “unresolved transference” toward my German analyst, Dr. Happe, not to mention Dr. Kolner, whom I’d just left. Bennett could understand that. As long as it was Oedipus, not love. As long as it was transference, not love.

Adrian was worse, in a way.

We met on the side stairs under a Gothic arch. He was full of interpretations too.

“You keep running back and forth between the two of us,” he said. “I wonder which of us is Mummy and which Daddy?”

I had a sudden mad impulse to pack my bags and get away from both of them. Maybe it wasn’t a question of choosing between them but just of escaping both entirely. Released in my own custody. Stop this nonsense of running from one man to the next. Stand on my own two feet for once. Why was that so terrifying? The other options were worse, weren’t they? A lifetime of Freudian interpretations or a lifetime of Laingian interpretations! What a choice! I might as well join forces with a religious fanatic, a Scientology freak, or a doctrinaire Marxist. Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn’t believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one’s self. In laughing even at one’s own need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn’t feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts. (I told some of this to Adrian.)

“Life as a fruitcake! You are awfully oral, aren’t you?” Adrian said, more with an air of a statement than question.

“So what else is new-you want to make something of it?”

And he gave me a wet, sloppy kiss, his tongue one of the plums in the fruitcake.

“How long are you going to go on hurting me this way?” Bennett asked when we got back to the hotel. “I won’t go on taking it forever.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded so lame.

“I think we ought to get out of here, get the next plane back for New York. We can’t keep on with this insanity. You’re in a state, bewitched, out of your mind. I want to take you home.”

I started to cry. I wanted to go home and I never wanted to go home.

“Please Bennett, please, please, please.”

“Please what?” he snapped.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t even have the guts to stay with him. If you’re in love with him-why don’t you commit yourself to it and meet his kids and go to London. But you can’t even do that. You don’t know what you want.” He paused. “We ought to go home right now.”

“What’s the use? You’ll never trust me again. I’ve ruined it. It’s hopeless.” And I think I really believed it.

“Maybe if we go home and you go right back into analysis, if you understand why you did this, if you work it through, maybe we can salvage our marriage.”

“If I go back into analysis! Is that the condition?”

“Not for my sake-but for yours. So you won’t be doing this sort of thing forever.”

“Have I ever done it before? Have I? Even when you were horrible to me, even that time in Paris when you wouldn’t speak to me, even those years in Germany when I was so unhappy, when I needed someone to turn to, when I felt so lonely and shut out by you and your constant depression-I never got involved with anyone else. Never. You certainly provoked me then. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to me. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to a writer. You used to say you had no empathy for my problems. You never said you loved me. And when I cried and felt miserable because all I wanted was closeness and affection you sent me to an analyst. You used the analyst as a substitute for everything. Whenever any kind of closeness threatened, you sent me to a goddamned analyst.”

“Where the hell would you be now without the analyst? You’d still be rewriting one poem over and over. You’d still be unable to send work anywhere. You’d still be terrified of everything. When I met you, you were running around like a lunatic, never working steadily at anything, full of a million plans that never got finished. I gave you a place to work, encouraged you when you hated yourself, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, paid for your goddamned analyst so you could grow and develop as a human being instead of floundering around with all the other members of your crazy family. Go blame me for all your problems. I was the only one who ever gave you support and encouragement and this is all you can do in return-go running after some asshole Englishman and whining to me about not knowing what you want. Go to hell! Follow him wherever you want, I’m going back to New York.”

“But I want you,” I said, crying. I wanted to want him. I wanted it more than anything. I thought of all the times we’d spent together, the miserable times we’d come through together, the times when we’d been able to comfort each other and encourage each other, the way he’d stood behind my work and steadied me when I looked as if I was ready to hurl myself off some cliff. The way I’d endured the army with him. The years put in. I thought of all we knew about each other, the way we’d worked to stay together, the stubborn determination that had held us together when all else failed. Even the misery we’d shared seemed a greater bond than anything I had with Adrian. Adrian was a dream. Bennett was my reality. Was he grim? Well then, reality was grim. If I lost him, I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name.

We put our arms around each other and began to make love, crying.

“I wanted to give you a baby there,” he said, thrusting deeper and deeper into me.

The next afternoon I was back with Adrian, lying on a blanket in the Vienna woods, the sun coming down through the trees.

“Do you really like Bennett or do you just enumerate his virtues?” Adrian asked.

I picked a long green weed and chewed it. “Why do you ask such incisive questions?”

“I’m not incisive at all. You’re just transparent.”

“Great,” I said.

“I mean it. Don’t you think fun figures at all in life? Or is it all this sickly stuff about ‘my analysis-his analysis,’ ‘love-me-love-my-disease.’ You and Bennett do seem to whine an awful lot. And apologize an awful lot. You’re all full of obligations and duties and what he’s done for you. Why shouldn’t he do for you? Are you some kind of monster?”

“Sometimes I mink so.”

“For God’s sake why? You’re not ugly, not stupid, you’ve a lovely cunt, a beautiful pot belly, loads of blond hair, and the biggest arse between Vienna and New York-pure lard-” He slapped it for emphasis. “What have you got to worry about?”

“Everything. I’m very dependent. I fall apart regularly. I go into horrible depressions and hardly come up for air. Besides, no man wants to be stuck with a lady writer. They’re liabilities. They daydream when they’re supposed to be cooking. They worry about books instead of babies. They forget to clean the house…”