Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [123]
“My sister’s bedroom has a glass door covered with muslin curtains, and late every afternoon she goes in alone to take a nap. This must have been a weekend afternoon, since I wasn’t at school. I was doing homework downstairs, and suddenly I had a question to ask her. I went upstairs and down the hall to her room, but something stopped me from bursting in. The muslin curtain was slightly pushed aside at the edge—it was one of those curtains with a brass rod at the top and bottom—and I stood very still and guiltily peeked in.
“My sister lay on the bed in her peach peignoir, which was parted at her thighs. And there was a peach silk scarf over the lamp. The whole room was bathed in a rosy glow.
“She was moving one delicate hand in the vicinity of her open peignoir. A sense of disorientation overtook me. My heart began to pound. My penis stood straight up. My whole being seemed to throb. I knew I should not be watching, but I could not stop myself. And then her fingers disappeared inside her, and lovingly, sweetly, she drew them in and out. I could bear no more. My penis and her fingers were one—and I came with an explosion that made me cry aloud. My sister looked up, saw me, understood, and came to the door to let me in.
“‘Julie,’ she said—she called me Julie—‘don’t be afraid.’ I was trembling. She led me to her bed. We lay down together and held each other, legs and arms entwined. ‘Julie—if you know that this is beautiful, you will know something very few people know.’ And gently, gently, she brought my hand to her vagina and let me explore every part of her, telling me what to do, and how to touch her, and presently beginning to touch me as well. It was the sweetest and most beautiful interlude of my life. Utterly innocent, the sex of the Garden of Eden before the serpent came. And afterward, we lay together, entwined as you and I are now.
“Now comes the part I don’t want to talk about, the part I blocked for forty years and only retrieved under hypnosis.
“Two days later, she was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. I only remember standing outside her room and hearing a nurse say to another nurse, ‘That whore isn’t long for this world.’ I never saw her alive again.”
“What did she die of?” I ask lamely, as one does when one is overwhelmed by emotion and trying therefore to pin down the “facts,” as if facts could save us.
“For years I didn’t really know. Appendicitis, they say, but I knew it was wrong. I now think it must have been an ectopic pregnancy. Of course I was sure I killed her.”
“Of course.” I hug him. My eyes are streaming with tears.
“The worst is yet to come. My parents never came home. They were killed in a car crash somewhere in the Midwest. I don’t even know if they knew about their daughter. I was left with my aunt and cousin. One night I heard them discussing me. ‘I don’t want him,’ my aunt said. ‘He’s too weird.’ ‘I don’t want him, either,’ said my cousin. ‘He gives me the creeps.’ I packed my bag and hit the road.”
“You were ten?”
“I was ten. In some ways I’m still ten.”
“In some ways, we all are,” I say.
“That’s why I don’t think we should lie about sex,” Julian said. “Life’s too short.”
“And sex can’t be divorced from the rest of life, can it? We thought it could be, but it can’t. That’s the tragedy of our generation—that we thought sex could save us.”
“Nothing can save us,” says Julian, “not even love. But we can make the world less lonely for each other—sometimes. And sometimes we can’t even do that.”
“All my life,” I say, “I’ve wanted nothing but to bring sex and friendship together—and I seem to be farther from it than ever.”
“Me too,” says Julian. “That’s why the Trobriands fascinate me so. I want to know if there’s really a society in which people have solved the problem of guilt.”
“What do you think?”
“To read Malinowski, you’d think so—but he’s way out of date. The Isles of Love, they called them in the twenties, but I think it’s just another noble-savage myth. Gauguin, Robert Louis