Notice the cupids and doves hovering around Tannhäuser who reclines on a gray plaster rock leaning his painted satin elbow on the overmodeled drapery which flows from Venus’ overfed haunches. But notice especially how in this castle, these paintings, this country (as in Disneyland)-nothing is left to the imagination. Each leaf is crisply outlined and shaded; each breast points its literal nipple at you like an idiot’s eye; each feather in Cupid’s wing is quiveringly palpable. No imagination-that’s what makes a beast.
After Munich and its environs, we drove north as far as Heidelberg (stopping, looping and zigzagging along the way), took the Autobahn to Basle (Swiss chocolate, Schwitzer-deutsch and a dour sandstone cathedral overlooking the Rhine), then on to Strasbourg (home of stuffed goose livers and great beer), a wild zigzagging tour of back roads leading more or less toward Paris, then down through the South of France, into Italy (via the Riviera), south as far as Florence, then north again to Verona and Venice, across the Alps, through the Ticino and into Austria again, then north up through Germany once more, then into France, and finally to Paris, for the last time, where the truth (or one of them) was revealed to me but did not (not yet) make me free.
Incredible as this inefficient itinerary may sound, it is still more incredible when you realize that the whole thing took only two and a half weeks. We saw almost nothing. We were driving most of the time and talking. And fucking. Adrian was impotent when I wanted him in private, but he became voraciously virile in the most public places: in beach cabanas, in parking lots, in airports, in ruins, monasteries and churches. Unless he could break at least two taboos with one act, he wasn’t interested at all. What really would have turned him on would have been the opportunity to bugger his mother in church. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, et cetera.
We talked. We talked. We talked. Psychoanalysis on wheels. Remembrance of things past. We made lists to pass the time: my former boyfriends, his former girlfriends, the various kinds of fucks (group-fucks, love-fucks, guilt-fucks, etc.), the various places where we had fucked (in the bathroom of a 707, in the deserted Jewish chapel of the old Queen Elizabeth, in a ruined abbey in Yorkshire, in row-boats, in graveyards… I must admit that I made some of these up, but the main thing was entertainment, not literal truth. Surely you don’t suppose that I’m telling the literal truth here either?
Adrian, like every other shrink I’ve ever known or fucked, wanted to find patterns in my past. Repetitive, self-destructive patterns preferably-but any sort of pattern would do. And, of course, I tried to oblige. It wasn’t hard either. Where men are concerned I have always lacked a simple quality known as caution, or perhaps you might call it common sense. I meet a guy any other self-respecting women would automatically run miles from, and I manage to find something endearing about all his questionable characteristics, something rivetingly attractive about his manias. Adrian loved to hear this. Of course he excluded himself from the company of the other neurotics I had known. It never occurred to him that he was part of any pattern.
“I’m the only man you’ve ever met you can’t categorize,” he said triumphantly. And then he waited for me to categorize the others. And I obliged. Oh I knew I was making my life into a song-and-dance routine, a production number, a shaggy dog story, a sick joke, a bit. I thought of all the longing, the pain, the letters (sent and unsent), the crying jags, the telephone monologues, the suffering, the rationalizing, the analyzing which had gone into each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners. I knew that the way I described them was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books, wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. And no writer can tell the truth about people-which is that they are much more interesting than any characters.
“So stop philosophizing about bloody writing and tell me about your first husband,” Adrian said.
“OK. OK.”
12 The Madman
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name…
– Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
You have to imagine him: short, dark, heavy brown beard-a combination of Peter Lorre, Alfred Drake, and Humphrey Bogart (as Pia and I would have said), or at times Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar. He liked to talk tough in the manner of the movie heroes of his youth. He was, as he put it, a movie-coholic, and even in college would sometimes go to two or three movies a day, preferably at (what he called) “the Vomit-houses”-those beat-up theaters on 42nd Street where derelicts went to sleep and perverts (Brian’s mother called them “preverts”) went to drool, and there were double or even triple bills of war movies, Westerns, or Roman Forum epics.
Despite his penchant for bad movies and Edward G. Robinson gestures, Brian was a genius, a genuine 200-plus IQ kid who arrived at Columbia with a record-breaking history of College Board scores, debating society trophies, “citizenship” awards (whatever they are) from every school in California he’d gone to, and an impressive history of psychotic breakdowns from age sixteen on. Except that I did not know about these until much later, after we were married and he was hospitalized again. This oversight was not so much due to deception on his part as to the fact that he never regarded himself as crazy. The world was. About that I certainly agreed with him-right up until the time he tried to fly out the window and take me with him.
It was probably Brian’s brilliance and his verbal pyrotechnics which made me fall in love with him in the first place. He was a great mimic, a spellbinding talker, one of those gifted raconteurs who seems like something out of a Dublin pub or a J. M. Synge play. He had the gift of gab; he was the Playboy of the Western World (straight from Los Angeles). I’ve always set a high value on words and have often made the mistake of believing in words far more than in actions. My heart (and my cunt) can be had for a pithy phrase, a good one-liner, a neat couplet, or a sensational simile. Did you ever hear that American rock song called Baby Let Me Bang Your Box which appeared briefly on the air waves before being banned into Broadcasting Limbo forever? It went something like this:
Baby let me bang your box
Baby let me play
on your pianer…
Well, in my case it should go: