Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong [Jong, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Psychological, Erotica, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781453222089
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 1974-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vienna with us) was a follower of Wilhelm Stekel and he tucked his shoelaces under the toes of his shoes. (I am not sure whether or not this was part of the Stekelian method.) His apartment building on Madison Avenue had very dark and narrow halls whose walls were covered with gold, sea-shell-spotted wallpaper, such as you might find in the bathroom of an old house in Larchmont. Waiting for the elevator, I used to stare at the wallpaper and wonder if the landlord had gotten a good deal on a bathroom wallpaper close-out. Why else paper a lobby with gold seashells and tiny pink fishes?

Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head.

He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother.

What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery.

“Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because if s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist.

Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery.

So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night.

Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman.

I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art.

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