“If I spent all my time being sensual and erotic, I’d be too tired to write about it,” I pleaded.

“You’re a fake,” he said, “a total fake. You’ll never have anything worthwhile to write about if you don’t grow up. Courage is the first principle. You’re just scared.”

“Don’t bully me.”

“Who’s bullying you? I’m just leveling with you. You’ll never know fuck-all about writing if you don’t learn courage.”

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“I know that I’ve read some of your work and that you give out little bits and pieces of yourself in it. If you don’t watch out, you’ll become a fetish for all sorts of frustrated types. All the nuts in the world will fall into your basket.”

“That’s already happened to some extent. My poems are a happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance.” I was cribbing from Joyce, but Adrian wouldn’t know, being illiterate. In the months since my first book had appeared, I had received plenty of bizarre phone calls and letters from men who assumed that I did everything I wrote about and did it with everyone, everywhere. Suddenly, I was public property in a small way. It was an odd sensation. In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but then when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced for all the wrong reasons. Or are they the right reasons? Do all the nuts in the world really have your number? And not just your telephone number either.

“I thought we really had a good thing going,” Adrian said, “but it’s over now, because you’re so bloody terrified. I’m really disappointed in you… Well, I guess it won’t be the first time I’ve been disappointed in a woman. That first day, when I saw you arguing at registration, I thought: that really is one splendid woman-a real fighter. She doesn’t take life lying down. But I was wrong. You’re no adventuress. You’re a princess. Forgive me for trying to upset your safe little marriage.” He turned the key in the ignition and started the car for emphasis.

“Fuck you, Adrian.” It was lame but it was all I could think of.

“Don’t fuck me-go home and fuck yourself. Go back to being a safe little bourgeois housewife who writes in her spare time.”

That was the unkindest cut of all.

“And what do you think you are-a safe little bourgeois doctor who plays existentialist in his spare time?” I was almost shouting.

“Go ahead and scream, ducks, it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t have to account to you for my life. I know what I’m doing. You’re the one who’s so bloody indecisive. You’re the one who can’t decide whether to be Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, or Marjorie Morningstar.” He raced the engine dramatically.

“Take me home,” I said.

“Gladly, if you’ll just tell me where that is.”

We sat for a while without speaking. Adrian kept racing the motor but made no move to pull out, and I just sat there in silence being torn apart by my twin demons. Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time? Was that my fate? Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Was I going to go on living my life as a lie? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?

“What if I change my mind?” I asked.

“It’s too late. You’ve already ruined it. It will never be the same. I don’t know now whether I want to take you, quite honestly.”

“You really are a hard man, aren’t you? One little moment of indecision and you give up on me. You expect me to give up everything-my life, my husband, my work-without a moment’s hesitation and just follow you across Europe in accordance with some half-baked Laingian idea of experience and adventure. If at least you loved me-”

“Don’t bring love into it and muck everything up. That’s a copout if I ever heard one. What does love have to do with it?”

“Everything.”

“Bullshit. You say love-but you mean security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband-there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.”

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“That’s how much you know.” He stared at the steering wheel.

“Adrian, you’re right about everything except love. Love does matter. It matters that Bennett loves me and you don’t.”

“And who do you love? Have you ever let yourself think about it? Or is it all a question of who you can exploit and manipulate? Is it all a question of who gives you more? Is it all a question, ultimately, of money?”

“That’s crap.”

“Is it now? Sometimes I think it’s just that you know I’m poor, that I want to write books and don’t give a damn about practicing medicine-unlike your rich American doctors.”

“On the contrary, your poverty appeals to my reverse snobbery. I like your poverty. Besides, if you do as well as old Ronnie Laing, you won’t be poor. You’ll go far, my boy. Psychopaths always do.”

“Now you sound like you’re quoting Bennett.”

“We do agree that you’re a psychopath.”

“We, we, we-the smug editorial ‘we.’ My-it must be awfully cozy to be boringly married and use the editorial we. But is it conducive to art? Isn’t all that coziness stultifying? Isn’t it high time you changed your life?”

“Iago-that’s what you are. Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”

“If what you have is paradise-I thank God I’ve never had the experience.”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“Back where?”

“To Paradise, to my cozy little marital boredom, to my editorial we, to my stultification. I need it like a fix.”

“Just as you need me like a fix when you get bored with Bennett.”

“Look-you said it-it’s over.”

“So it is.”

“Well, then drive me back to the hotel. Bennett will be back soon. I don’t want to be late again. He’s just heard a paper on ‘Aggression in Large Groups.’ It might give him ideas.”

“We’re a small group.”

“True, but you never can tell.”

“You’d really like him to beat the shit out of you-wouldn’t you? Then you’d feel properly martyred.”

“Perhaps.” I was aping Adrian’s cool. It was infuriating him.

“Look-we might just do a communal thing-you and me and Bennett. We could drive across the Continent à trois.”

“Fine with me, but you’ll have to convince him. It won’t be easy. He’s just a bourgeois doctor married to a little housewife who writes in her spare time. He doesn’t swing-like you do. Now please take me home.”

He started the car in earnest this time and pulled out. We began our familiar meandering way through the back streets of Vienna, getting lost at every turn.

After about ten minutes of this we were laughing and in high spirits again. Our mutual ineptitude never failed to make us delighted with each other. It couldn’t last, of course, but it was intoxicating for the moment. Adrian stopped the car and leaned over to kiss me. “Let’s not go back-let’s spend the night together,” Adrian said.

I debated with myself. What was I-some scared housewife?

“OK,” I said (and instantly regretted it). But after all, what difference could one night make? I was going back to New York with Bennett.

The evening which followed was another one of those dreamy blurs. We started drinking at a working man’s café off the Ringstrasse, kissed and kissed between beers, passed beer from his mouth to mine, from mine to his, listened avidly to an elderly female lush criticize the expenditures of the American space program, and how they should spend that money on earth (to build crematoria?) instead of wasting it on the moon, then ate (kissing throughout dinner) at an outdoor garden restaurant, fed each other Leberknodel and Bauernschnitzel in passionate bites, and very drunkenly made our way back to Adrian’s pension where we made love adequately for the first time.