Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [20]
Isadora: Better get this right, kiddo, if you are going to do the unspeakable thing of introducing me into the book as a real character!
Leila: Who, then, is the potter and who the pot?
Isadora: When in doubt, quote Omar Khayyám! But the fact is you know damn well you have given Our Heroine an upside-down version of your own high school years. You were the good girl, so you made her bad. Any reader can spot these fictional reversals a mile away. You’ll have to do better than that.
Leila: Just wait, it gets better.
M&A stood then at the top of a wino-studded hill at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, and I took the exhibitionist-studded subway down from Dyckman Street to get there. The school was enveloped in a gemütlich haze of marijuana and black jazz.
At M&A I learned four things: that Bessie Smith knew all there was to know about womanhood; that blacks had the secret key to America’s heart of darkness; that The Land of Fuck was expensive but worth the price; and that an artist was always an outcast and a rebel in bourgeois America—no matter what anyone said.
At M&A I dressed all in black (stockings to stocking cap), smoked Gauloises, and had a tall boyfriend from Harlem called Snack—a saxophone player who taught me all about jazz and weed and sex. I changed my name from Louise Zandberg to Leila Sand (to my father’s horror and my mother’s delight—George Sand was one of her heroines), and I learned how to ring my eyes with kohl, rouge my nipples (not that my pink fifteen-year-old nipples needed rouging), and cut my hair in a shiny helmet à la Louise Brooks (one of my early idols). The hair was Pre-Raphaelite red (Venetian, as Mr. Donegal would have it), but the style was pure 1920s. I was the Greenwich Village kid—a regular at the Peacock, the White Horse, the Lion’s Head—as I shuttled between Dyckman Street, where my mom lived (in increasing chaos and squalor), and Eighth Street, where my dad lived over the store.
By the time I was a teenager, Theda’s craziness had long since driven Dolph away. He had a mistress named Maxine, who sometimes stayed with him above the store and who tried in vain to woo me with pseudomaternal affection. But I was intransigent and must have given her a terrible time—almost as terrible as the time I gave my mother. Much as I hated my mother, I was fiercely loyal to her around Dolph and Maxine.
Sullen, silent, dressed all in black, squired by a black boyfriend—I was every parent’s nightmare of a teenager. I walked down Eighth Street in a cloud of Gauloise smoke, clutching a copy of Being and Nothingness under the arm that wasn’t twined around Snack, while he, in turn, carried his saxophone and a switchblade. Snack was six feet, three inches (I have always liked tall men), and I was then, as now, a mere five feet four (like Elizabeth Taylor, another heroine of mine). My tits were big, my hips big, and my waist almost as tiny as Scarlett O’Hara’s. Considered sexy in a gamine sort of way, I never really thought I was pretty, but boys flocked to me because apparently I had “It.” The scent of sex is a powerful aphrodisiac, and some girls have it, while others—even very pretty ones—most emphatically do not. It has less to do with looks than with smell, for human beings are closer to the insect and invertebrate worlds than their hubris lets them know. With all that sex appeal from my teen years on, I was usually more concerned with protecting myself against the opposite sex than with attracting it. (Oh, nature is cruelly unfair when it comes to love.)
I fought the white boys off with my wicked sarcasm and my prodigious talent—which I flaunted like a cock—and turned instead to the rebels, outcasts, and blacks. I had no penis envy; I really thought I had a penis. I graduated from M&A in ’61, went to Yale School of Fine Arts, and the summer of ’64 (the summer of