Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [125]
He sucks my lips, my breasts, calls me his Piccola Pittrice, and without knowing how, we are inside and outside each other, legs akimbo, legs together, he saying, “Piano, piano,” and moving, moving, moving slowly inside me to make it last. Whenever I start to come, he stops, makes me relax completely, so that at last I do not care whether I come or not, feeling him inside me, totally entered, wholly taken, given back to myself, given back to nature.
It’s strange, isn’t it, that we humans so distance ourselves from nature even in our lovemaking that the expectation of orgasm, the push for it, makes even loving teleological, a thing of expectations, anxieties, pressures. Renzo makes me totally enter the moment because he does, because his sex is free from an agenda, from pressure or expectation of any sort.
And so, having decided not to do anything but feel the moment, be in the moment, my body, of its own sweet will-less will, begins its crescendo. He moves and moves, stops and stops. But I have begun to come and then I scream and he covers my mouth (the maid, the maid) and begins to come himself, emerald eyes half closed, his face faunlike, brown, slanting, laughing, serious on the edge of orgasm and then liquid again, relaxed.
We lie together, Pan and Ceres, the god of the woods and the goddess of grain, smelling our own musk, our love odor—and then the bells ring and it is noon and we must go, we two daytime Cinderellas, turned to pumpkins by the stroke of noon.
I strip off my mask. Leila, Louise, Luisa slips away and there is only a woman, propelled by an unseen muse, her pen scratching in her sketchbook, her body aching with love, her heart high and happy because she knows she has done nothing to be so blessed and she knows that divine love is unconditional. She is in a state of grace. She wants to skip, to kneel before the Madonna, to invent drawings and paintings that will communicate joy to the joyless, faith to the unbeliever, and love to the loveless. She wants everyone to savor and celebrate life because it is a feast. It is there for the taking. You have only to open your mouth, open your hand, love one another, thank God, and rejoice.
At its most simple, life is a prayer. We pray in many ways. This is mine.
I cover pages and pages with pictures and words before I fall asleep that night.
Sleeping at Julian’s side, I dream I am carrying a wheelchair on my back through Venice. The city consists of snowy alps and jagged ravines, with a shimmering lagoon far below. I am carrying this backbreaking wheelchair up and down icy slopes because I am afraid that someday I won’t be able to walk. I am cursing the weight of it.
Throw down the wheelchair! I tell myself. You can walk! It was only your fear that crippled you.
I clamber into the wheelchair and race madly down a ravine. The wheelchair seems to fly, then rolls to a stop at the bottom. Miraculously, I stand, clothed in light, and throw the wheelchair into the lagoon.
I wake up. Naked, I walk into the bathroom and stand before the mirror. I am bathed in radiance. My heart is glowing.
Ah, I say, this is it, this is it. This is what we are meant to know. We need never be lonely. We are built around the godspark. Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it and pass on. I hold that certainty all day as I explore Venice alone.
The next morning, I venture by myself to an exhibit of Old Master drawings on the beautiful little island where the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore stands in the middle of the basin of St. Mark. With its green-hatted campanile, its halcyon cloister, its abandoned theater, this island is the sweetest spot in all Venice.
I leave Julian puttering with his score in our hotel room, and I dodge Renzo’s two-o’clock pass with his boat past the terrace of the Gritti. (It astonishes me that I can be so detached. Am I becoming a man—or only a wise woman?)
Alone and elated, I go to look