Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [129]
I was sick of Eurotrash and longing for Brooklyn. He had Brooklyn in his soul. Like Daddy.
Sparks flew between us. Zing. Zing. Bim. Bam. Crackle. We escaped. To his silver limo with the smoked windows and the fax machine. I sucked his cock, escaped, knowing that men will do anything to have you—even though they then seem not to want you when you decide you want them. (Ah, the mystery of men and women: why do they chase us so relentlessly when they are eventually appalled that we stop running away?)
We began an affair full of garlic, blues, and butter. And come. And come again. (I will not spell it “cum.”) He was intelligent, funny, psychic (he could read my mind anyway). He had my grandmother’s eyes. In two months, I was hopelessly in love. And he was hopelessly married. Having it both ways, like the rest of the male sex, and helplessly unable to do otherwise. He loved me; he fretted about me. He wanted to take care of me, but being a man, he was weak about choices. They never have to make many of them, do they? At least about women. They just lack practice.
One weekend, alone, I went out with an old beau to break the trance.
This old beau was a drunk. From my drinking days. So we drank. We drank in Roxbury, in Cornwall, in Bethel, in Redding, and in Darien. We drank in Rye and Harrison and Bedford. He threw up. I passed out. Romantic, eh?
The next morning I awoke in a strange bed, under a pile of coats. Music playing in the other room. A thin Indian girl winding and unwinding her sari in front of a mirror. A pale young man asleep beside me on the bed.
Panic. Desolation. The throbbing head. The dry mouth. Unable to move. Nuclear war coming and financial collapse. Cancer, AIDS, paralysis. Contact lenses stuck to my lids. I woke up sobbing. But without tears.
Suddenly I realized that all my days and months of dryness were conditional: God, I will be dry if you make this book a success. God, I will be dry if you get me this lover. God, I will be dry if you bring me love, lust, loot. Of course I didn’t think I was being conditional with God. But here’s the proof. The work or the love affair would somehow disappoint, and in fury I would drink again.
I stumble out of bed and to my knees. I am shaking. Tears are streaming down my face. I want to get sober because I want to get sober, I say. I want it because I want it. Above a book. Or a man. Above everything. I want it because I want it. Because I want it like life itself. I am entirely ready.
With that burst came a lightness I had never known and a light I had never known, as if God took my heart and flung it like a Frisbee over the moon. As if my whole body were made of light. I have not had a drink since. Or a married man.
Yes, my fourth husband and I did go flying in the South Pacific, and we did crash, but the story does not quite end there. Flying over the atolls and the coral reefs, the violence of the earth’s core thrust up through the glittering waters, I learned that because we are the first civilization to see the clouds from both sides—literally to fly—we have a special responsibility. We are nearer to God than people were in other ages, yet farther away.
The Icarus age, I call this. The age of waxen wings. No wonder we are looking to fill up our emptiness with drugs, with food, with sex. We are longing for spirit, so we turn mistakenly to spirits. We are longing for God, so we turn mistakenly to man.
We can drop ourselves out of one culture and into another—faster, in fact, than our consciousness has time to catch up. From stone age to space age. Time is compressed for us. All ages exist at once.
What I will remember always about the South Pacific is the wetness, the feel of humidity on my skin. My body felt different there. I knew it was made of water. And air. And the smell of the South Pacific: frangipani, copra, sago, mud, and blood. And the din of insects