“Hello ducks,” he says, turning to me.

“I have something for you,” I say, handing him the inscribed book I’ve been carrying around all day. The edges of the pages are beginning to fray from my sweaty palms.

“You sweetheart!” He takes the book. We link arms and start walking down the mirrored hall. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” as my old buddy Dante would say. The poems pimped for love, and their author too. The book of my body was open and the second circle of hell wasn’t far off.

“You know,” I say, “we’ll probably never see each other again.”

“Maybe that’s why we’re doing this,” he says.

We make our way out of the palace and into another courtyard which is now chiefly used as a parking lot. Amid the ghosts of Opels and Volkswagens and Peugeots we embrace. Mouth to mouth and belly to belly. Adrian must have the wettest kiss in history. His tongue is everywhere, like the ocean. We are sailing away. His penis (bulging under his corduroy pants) is the tall red smokestack of an ocean liner. And I am moaning around it like the ocean wind. And I am saying all the silly things you say while necking in parking lots, trying somehow to express a longing which is inexpressible-except maybe in poetry. And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you. Because this is almost too good to be love. Too yummy and delicious to be anything as serious and sober as love. Your whole mouth has turned liquid. His tongue tastes better than a nipple to an infant. (And don’t throw me any psychiatric interpretations, Bennett, because I’ll throw them right back. Infantile. Regressed. Basically Incestuous. No doubt. But I’d give my life just to go on kissing him like this and how are you going to analyze that?) Meanwhile, he’s got my ass and is cupping it with both hands. He’s put my book on the fender of a Volkswagen and he’s grabbed my ass instead. Isn’t that why I write? To be loved? I don’t know anymore. I don’t even know my own name.

“I’ve never met an ass to rival yours,” he says. And that remark makes me feel better than if I’d just won the National Book Award. The National Ass Award-that’s what I want. The Transatlantic Ass Award of 1971.

“I feel like Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” I say.

“You are Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” he says, “and I want to love you as hard as I possibly can and then leave you.”

Forewarned is forearmed, supposedly. But who was listening? All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart.

The rest of the evening was a dream of reflections and champagne glasses and drunken psychiatric jargon. We wended our way back through the hallway of mirrors. We were so excited that we scarcely bothered to make any plans about when we’d meet again.

Bennett was smiling with the red-headed candidate from Argentina on his arm. I had another champagne and made the rounds with Adrian. He was introducing me to all the London analysts and babbling about my unwritten article. Would they consent to be interviewed? Could he interest them in my journalistic effort? The whole time he had his arm around my waist and sometimes his hand on my ass. We were nothing if not indiscreet. Everybody saw. His analyst. My ex-analysts. His son’s analyst. His daughter’s analyst. My husband’s ex-analyst. My husband.

“Is this Mrs. Goodlove?” one of the older London analysts asked.

“No,” Adrian said, “but I wish it were. If I’m very, very lucky, it may be.”

I was floating. My head was full of champagne and talk of marriage. My head was full of leaving dull old New York for glamorous trendy London. I was out of my mind. “She just ran off with some Englishman,” I could hear my friends in New York saying, not without envy. They were all sandbagged down with children and babysitters, with graduate courses and teaching jobs and analysts and patients. And here I was flying through the purple skies of Vienna on my borrowed broomstick. I was the one they counted on to write out their fantasies. I was the one they counted on to tell funny stories about her former lovers. I was the one they envied in public and laughed at in private. I could imagine the reporting of these events in Class News:

Isadora White Wing and new hubby Doctor Adrian Goodlove are living in London near Hampstead Heath-not to be confused with Heathcliff, for the benefit of all you Math majors. Isadora would love to hear from fellow Barnardites abroad. She is busily engrossed in writing a novel and a new book of poems, and in her spare time attends the International Psychoanalytic, where she congresses…

All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisioned myself tying up with another. I was like a boat that always had to have a port of call. I simply couldn’t imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined.

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I’ve no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn’t have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn’t automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah.

Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family. I think of them living in places where they can’t work, where they can’t speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and thinks herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right?

A grim picture. Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs?

I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.