Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [117]
I look at Cordelia, suddenly despising her. She’s just jealous, I think. How could Renzo not care about me, at least a little? Could anyone fuck like that and really not care?
Isadora: Reader, you know the answer.
Leila: Stop leading the witness.
Just then he walks over with the principessa and their entourage.
“The noted painter Leila Sand,” he says to the princess, who looks me over coldly, assessing the risk. Then Renzo kisses my hand in that dizzying Continental manner in which lips touch skin only in your wildest fantasy. From the way he looks at me—knowing she is assessing the way he is looking at me—I see he is a practiced dissembler. He seems to look through me, as though he had no wish to penetrate any part of me, body even less than soul. But just before they walk away, Renzo turns and looks at me again, his oceanic eyes glittering. “Leila, apri, apri, apri.”
Julian and I lie awake all night, talking about how we might remake our lives.
“We’ll go to Bali,” he says, “or Fiji. Or the Trobriands. We’ll buy a little island.”
“Can you really buy islands?”
“Absolutely. We can live the rest of our lives without ever writing another bar of spooky space music or painting another canvas. I’ll get you two beautiful Balinese boys to service you—and we’ll drink coconut milk, eat tropical fruits, and read Proust.”
“Lovely,” I say, neglecting to point out that I’d go crazy if I didn’t paint—and that I don’t do it for money. Nor do I want to be “serviced.”
I don’t say this. All I say is: “Julian, you forget that your religion is room service.”
“I can convert to coconuts,” says Julian. “The point is, I’ll never have to work for Hollywood again. I’ll write fugues or symphonies, even poetry. . . . Do you know that before I became a Hollywood hooker, I used to write poetry?”
“I think I knew that. Recite me a poem.”
“Okay—here’s one I wrote once in Florence, when I was a mere pup:
In the poplars’ lengthening shadows on this hill, Amid the rows of marigolds and earth, and through the boxhedge labyrinth we walk, together to the choiring twilight bells. . . .”
“Lovely. Can you say the rest?”
Julian thinks. His intelligent agate eyes roll skyward. He is communicating with his planet. E=mc4. “No.”
“Julian, I love you with all my heart—but do you know how neglected poets are? You say you hate Hollywood, but you’re used to the limousines, the private jets, the secretaries; you don’t know what it’s like to be ignored. You haven’t even been on the subway in thirty years. I bet you don’t know what a token costs.”
“Fifty dollars?”
“I’m not going to tell you! The fact is, you’re always running from your agent, your business manager, your lawyers, the phone, the phone, the phone. Do you know what it’s like when the phone never rings?”
“We won’t have phones; we’ll have palm fronds.”
“When the palm frond never rings?”
“Palm fronds are not supposed to ring.”
“Yes—but you go crazy when they don’t.”
“We’re crazy already.”
“True. And how do we educate the twins?”
“Tutors, private tutors. School is a crock. It’s just a way of getting kids socially indoctrinated, breaking them in to the values of their parents’ social class. Private tutors are much better. We’ll raise them like the Trobriand islanders—the only people who have the perfect answer to love and sex.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, the kids are totally sexually free from prepuberty till the age of eighteen or so. They fuck each other like mad, get all their curiosity out of their systems. Then, at the age of eighteen, they marry and remain monogamous—except for the three-day-a-year Yam Festival, when all bets are off!”
“What if you have the flu during the Yam Festival?”
“In the Trobriands, you don’t get the flu.”
“Do you think Mike and Ed would be ready for civilized