“Jesus Christ! You’re some fine feminist.”

“Oh I talk a good game, and I even think I believe it, but secretly, I’m like the girl in Story of O. I want to submit to some big brute. ‘Every woman adores a fascist,’ as Sylvia Plath says. I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking. I feel guilty for everything. You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. That’s Isadora Wing’s first principle of the war between the sexes. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture. Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said?”

“No.”

“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

“Teddy Roosevelt never said that.”

“No, but I did.”

“You’re just scared of him-that’s what you are.”

“Who? Teddy Roosevelt?”

“No-you idiot-Bennett. And you won’t admit it. You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.”

“You’ve never seen me when I’m ready to fall apart.”

“Piffle.”

“You should see. You’d run miles away.”

“Why? Are you so unbearable?”

“Bennett says so.”

“Then why hasn’t he run? Actually that’s just bullshit to keep you in line. Look-I lived with Martine once when she fell apart. I’m sure you couldn’t be worse. You have to take a lot of shit from people to get the good bits too.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good-can I have that on tape?”

“How about videotape?” And we kissed for a long time. When we stopped Adrian said, “You know, for an intelligent woman, you’re an idiot.”

“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.”

“What I mean to say is, you can have anything you want-only you don’t know it. You could have the world by the balls. You should come along with me and see how little you’ll miss Bennett. We’ll have an odyssey. I’ll discover Europe-you’ll discover yourself.”

“Is that all? When do we start?”

“Tomorrow or the day after, or Saturday. Whenever the Congress is over.”

“And where do we go?”

“That’s just the point. No plans. We just take off. It’ll be like The Grapes of Wroth. We’ll be migrants.”

“The Grapes of Wrath.”

“Wroth.”

“Wrath, as in wrath of God.”

“Wroth.”

“You’re wrong, sweetie pie. You’re illiterate by your own admission. Steinbeck is an American writer-The Grapes of Wrath.”

“Wroth.”

“OK, you’re wrong, but let it go.”

“I already have, love.”

“You mean we’ll just take off without any plans?”

“The plan is for you to find out how strong you are. The plan is for you to start believing you can stand on your own two feet-that ought to be plan enough for anyone.”

“And what about Bennett?”

“If he’s smart, he’ll just piss off with some other bird.”

“He Will?”

“That’s what I’d do, anyway. Look-it’s clear that you and he are due for a bit of a reshuffle. You can’t go on whining at each other like this all your lives. People may be dying in Belfast and Bangladesh but that’s all the more reason why you ought to learn to have fun-life’s supposed to be fun at least some of the time. You and Bennett sound like a couple of fanatics: ‘Abandon all hope: the end is nigh.’ Don’t you do anything but worry? It’s such a bloody waste.”

“He called you the worst name possible,” I said laughing.

“Did he?”

“He called you a ‘part object.’ ”

“Did he really? Well he’s a bloody ‘part object’ as well. The psychologizing bastard.”

“You do your share of psychologizing too, sweetheart. Sometimes I think I should get away from you both, woman smothers in jargon. lover and husband held for questioning.”

Adrian laughed and fondled my ass. No jargon about that. That was a whole object. An ass and a half, in fact. Never had I felt happier about my fat ass than when I was with Adrian. If only men knew! All women think they’re ugly, even pretty women. A man who understood this could fuck more women than Don Giovanni. They all think their cunts are ugly. They all find fault with their figures. They all think their asses are too big, their breasts too small, their thighs too fat, their ankles too thick. Even models and actresses, even the women you think are so beautiful that they have nothing to worry about do worry all the time.

“I love your fat ass,” Adrian said. “All the food you had to gobble to get such a fat ass. Yum!” And he sank his teeth in. The cannibal.

“The trouble with your marriage is,” he said to my ass, “that it’s all work. Don’t you ever have fun together?”

“Sure we do… hey-that hurts.”

“Like when?” He sat up. “Tell me about when it was fun.”

I racked my brains. The fight in Paris. The car crash in Sicily. The fight in Paestum. The fight about which apartment to take. The fight about my quitting analysis. The fight about skiing. The fight about fighting.

“We’ve had lots of fun. You don’t have to grill me.”

“You’re a liar. All your analysis is really a waste if you still go on lying to yourself all the time.”

“We have fun in bed.”

“Only thanks to my not fucking you properly, I’ll bet.”

“Adrian, I think you really want to break up my marriage. That’s your game, isn’t it? That’s your kick, that’s what you’re hooked on. I may be hooked on guilt. Bennett may be hooked on jargon. But you’re hooked on triangles. That’s your speciality. Who was Martine living with that made her so attractive to you? Who was Esther fucking? You’re a marriage ghoul, that’s what you are. You’re a vulture.”

“Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.”

“I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.”

“Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.”

“Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.”

“If I take off, I’ll lose him.”

“Only if he’s not worth having.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.”

I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave).

Bennett knew about part objects and whole objects, Oedipus and Electra, school phobia and claustrophobia, impotence and frigidity, patricide and matricide, penis envy and womb envy, working through and free association, mourning and melancholia, intrapsychic conflict and extrapsychic conflict, nosology and etiology, senile dementia and dementia praecox, projection and introjection, self-analysis and group-therapy, symptom formation and symptom exacerbation, amnesiac states and fugue states, pathological weeping and laughter in dreams, insomnia and excessive sleeping, neurosis and psychosis until they were coming out of your ears, but he did not seem to know about laughing and joking, wisecracking and punning, hugging and kissing, singing and dancing-all the things, in short, which made life worthwhile. As if you could will life to be happy through analysis. As if you could get along without laughter as long as you had analysis. Adrian had laughter, and at that point I was ready to sell my soul for it.