Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [124]
“Do you really want to know about the gondolier?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hearing you talk about your sister, it’s clear to me that my gondolier, like Dart, is just another version of the impossible lover—Daddy, in short: the taboo man, the demon lover, the dybbuk, the incestuous incubus. He’s beautiful, but wet dreams are always beautiful. And he’s unhavable. He belongs to another, to mamma. . . .”
“Don’t we all,” says Julian, dreamy-eyed.
“And when we make love, all barriers between us vanish—like when you and I talk. Why can’t we have both—flesh and words?” I ask.
“Ah,” says Julian, “because then why would we compose or paint? We compose and paint to resurrect the fallen world, and it’s only because the world is fallen that it needs the beauty we make. In heaven, we’d be so filled with God’s beauty that we wouldn’t have to create.”
“Sophistry.”
“Not really. Which is easier to paint—heaven or hell?”
“Hell,” I say.
“And which is more fun to read—Inferno or Paradiso?”
“Inferno.” inferno.
“So we were given a fallen world to draw forth our human potential. In paradise we’d all be bored to death.”
“And yet you still want to go to the South Pacific? Do you want to be the Gauguin of electronic music?”
“I want to write an opera about all this,” Julian says. “And I’m a sort of method composer, in my own way. I want to start with a little boy watching his sister through a curtain—then sail off to Polynesia with a grown man in search of paradise. I want to write the great panoramic opera of man’s search for paradise.”
“We’re all looking for paradise,” I say. “And we never seem to know that we have it right here, right now, with our legs and arms around each other in this hotel room sailing through the universe. . . .”
“I know it,” Julian says. “But paradise, by definition, is always there, not here. Even if you marry your perfect lover, before long you’re both worrying about the contractor, the housepainter, parents’ night, the IRS. . . . Your impossible he would become all too possible. Better to have him for sex and me for talk.”
“But I want sex and talk in one person. Surely that’s not so much to ask.”
“I’ve never found it,” says Julian, “except in my chords, so why should you?”
“Because you don’t believe in it, and I do. Somehow, against all the evidence, I finally do. And I finally believe I deserve it.”
“Then you shall surely have it,” says Julian, “someday. But first you must practice believing it for a year or two. And oh, yes—you must get rid of that gondolier.”
We hug and drift off to sleep.
The next day, with Julian’s blessing, I go by water taxi to see Renzo on his curious island in the lagoon.
The house is deserted except for the chirping canaries and an unseen maid. The two princesses have gone to Milan for the day, to have their winter clothes fitted. Sunlight streams in the windows. Water from the lagoon dapples us with sequins of light as we make love.
With us, the lovemaking is so much in the present that it is a kind of meditation. Utterly fluid, with no beginning and no end, it seems not sex but a fleshly paradigm for nonattachment.
We know each other, body by body, soul by soul. We have known each other from the first moment we met and from the first time we made love. There has never been any question about it, never any doubt that it would work totally. Whether we talk or not, eat or not, we are always, always in harmony, joined, touching.
He touches my breast. The water ripples over us, spangling the ceiling. I touch his hair, his nipples. He sucks my lower lip. He strips off his linen shirt and linen slacks. I lie in his arms, smelling his armpit, content to hold him, touch him, not seeking more, not seeking orgasm. We are under the water, swimming through light. Just the smell of his skin, the touch of his velvet, his musk, is enough to satisfy me.
The fluidity of his body