“I’m leaving,” I said crying. “I was just writing you a letter but now I don’t need to.” I started tearing up the letter.

“Don’t!” he said, snatching it from me. “It’s all I have left of you.”

Then I really began to cry in long awful sobs. “Please, please, forgive me,” I pleaded. (Executioner asks condemned’s forgiveness before the ax falls.)

“You don’t need forgiveness,” he snapped. He began throwing his things into a suitcase we had gotten as a wedding present from the friend who’d introduced us. A long and happy marriage. Many travels down the road of life.

Had I engineered this whole scene just for the intensity of it? Never had I loved him more. Never had I longed to stay with him more. Was that why I had to go? Why didn’t he say “Stay, stay-I love you?” He didn’t.

“I can’t stay in this room anymore without you,” he said, dumping guidebooks and all sorts of junk into his suitcase. We went downstairs together, lugging our suitcases. At the desk, we lingered, paying the bill. Adrian was waiting outside. If only he’d go! But he waited. Bennett wanted to know if I had traveler’s checks and my American Express card. Was I all right? He was trying to say “Stay, I love you.” This was his way of saying it, but I was so bewitched that I read it to mean “Go!”

“I have to get away for a while,” I said again, wavering.

“You’re not going to be alone-I am.” It was true. A really independent woman would go to the mountains alone and meditate-not take off with Adrian Goodlove in a battered Triumph.

I was desolate. I lingered and lingered.

“What the hell are you waiting for? Why don’t you go already?”

“Where are you going? Where can I find you?”

“I’m going to the airport. I’m going home. Maybe I’ll go to London and see if I can cash in the charter flight ticket or maybe I’ll go right home. I don’t care. What do you care?”

“I care. I care.”

“I’ll bet.”

And with that I picked up my suitcase and walked out of the hotel. What else could I do? I had painted myself into a corner. I had written myself into this hackneyed plot. By now it was a bet, a dare, a game of Russian roulette, a test of Womanhood. There was no way to back out. Bennett stood there very calmly, saving face. He was wearing a bright red turtleneck. Why didn’t he run out and sock Adrian in the jaw? Why didn’t he fight for what was his? They might have had a duel in the Vienna woods using volumes of Freud and volumes of Laing as shields. They might have dueled with words at least. One word from Bennett and I would have stayed. But nothing was forthcoming. Bennett assumed it was my right to go. And I had to seize that right even if by now it sickened me.

“You’ve been over an hour, ducks,” Adrian said, putting my suitcase into the trunk of the car, which he called “the boot.” And we beat it out of Vienna like a couple of exiles escaping from the Nazis. On the road past the airport I wanted to say “Stop! Leave me there! I don’t want to go!” I thought of Bennett standing alone in his red turtleneck, waiting for some plane or other to some place or other. But it was too late. I was in this adventure for better or worse and I had no idea where it would land me.

11 Existentialism Reconsidered

When I threw in my lot with Adrian Goodlove, I entered a world in which the rules we lived by were his rules-although, of course, he pretended there were no rules. It was forbidden, for example, to inquire what we would do tomorrow. Existentialists were not supposed to mention the word “tomorrow.” It was to be banished from our vocabulary. We were forbidden to talk about the future or to act as if the future existed. The future did not exist. Only our driving existed and our campsites and hotels. Only our conversations existed and the view beyond the windshield (which Adrian called the “windscreen”). Behind us was the past-which we invoked more and more to pass the time and to amuse each other (in the way that parents make up games of geography or identify-the-song-title for their bored children during long car rides). We told long stories about our pasts, embellishing, embroidering, and dramatizing in the manner of novelists. Of course, we pretended to be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but nobody (as Henry Miller says) can tell the absolute truth; and even our most seemingly autobiographical revelations were partly fabrications-literature, in short. We bought the future by talking about the past. At times I felt like Scheherazade, amusing my king with subplots to keep the main plot from abruptly ending. Each of us could (theoretically) throw in the towel at any point, but I feared that Adrian was more likely to do it than me, and that it was my problem to keep him amused. When the chips are down and I’m alone with a man for days on end, then I realize more than ever how unliberated I am. My natural impulse is to toady. All my high-falutin’ rebelliousness is only a reaction to my deep-down servility.

It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer. Take it away and there is only the past-and a windshield spattered with dead bugs.

Adrian made the rules, but he also had a tendency to change them frequently to suit himself. In this respect, he reminded me of my older sister Randy when she and I were kids. She taught me to shoot craps when I was seven (and she was twelve) but she used to change the rules around from minute to minute depending on what she rolled. After a ten-minute session with her, I would be divested of the entire contents of my carefully hoarded piggybank, while she (who started out broke) wound up as flush as Sky Masterson. No matter how Lady Luck had smiled on me, I always ended up a loser.

“Snakes eyes-I win!” my sister would yelp.

“You do?” (I used to hoard my dollar allowance like the ant while she spent hers like the grasshopper-but she always wound up flush and I wound up bankrupt.) The perils of primogeniture. And I the perennially second-born. Adrian, in fact, was born in the same year as Randy (1937) and also had a younger brother he’d spent years learning how to bully. We quickly picked up the threads of these old patterns of behavior as we made our way through the labyrinth of Old Europe.

We came to know the meager Austrian pension with its white lace curtains in the parlor, its windowsill full of cactuses, its red-cheeked proprietress (who always asked how many children we had-as if she had forgotten what we told her double some kilometers back), its peculiar king-sized bed with a mattress divided into three horizontal parts (the valleys coming at strategic bodily landmarks-like the breasts and genitals-so that you invariably awoke in the middle of the night with one nipple, or one testicle I suppose, wedged between part I and part II or between part II and part III). We came to know the Austrian feather beds which drench you with sweat during the early hours of the night, slither to the floor by means of witchcraft just as you fall into a deeper sleep, cause you to spend the whole night retrieving them, and then finally awaken you with monstrously puffy lips and eyes from the centuries of old dust (and other more sinister allergens) trapped within them.

We came to know pension breakfasts of cold hard rolls, factory-packaged tinlets of apricot jam, meager curls of butter, and gargantuan cups of café au lait with diseased-looking skins on top. We came to know the humbler sort of campsite, with its pervasive sewer smell, long tin trough for face-washing and tooth-brushing, stagnant mosquito-breeding swimming hole (where Adrian invariably swam), and jolly German citizens who made brilliant conversation about Adrian’s English pup tent (in whose electric-blue nylon glow we slept) and interrogated us about our lives like horribly experienced spies. We came to know the German Autobahn automats with their plates of sauerkraut and knockwurst, their blotting-paper coasters advertising beer, their foul-smelling pay toilets, their vending machines for soap and towels and condoms. We came to know the German beer gardens with sticky tables and middle-aged buxom waitresses in dirndls, and drunken truck drivers who made obscene remarks to me as I made my way unsteadily to the bathroom.