Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [21]
From my father I inherited immense skill in making things: craftsman’s hands, an eye that could immediately see the right juxtaposition of shapes and colors. All this I believe is inborn. We are not taught it but merely grow into our real selves if our real selves are not blocked. From my mother I inherited a gift for theatrics that bordered on madness. I was a bad girl in high school and an even badder girl in college. I had a gift for publicity even then. Once, long before Charlotte Moorman wrapped herself in Saran Wrap to play the cello, I wrapped myself in tinfoil to attend the Halloween party of an M&A classmate. At Yale, years before the advent of the Guerrilla Girls, I railed against the male-dominated art world (this was in the early sixties, before feminism was chic, let alone tolerated), yet I was not at all against wooing art critics with my sex appeal if it would help my career. I felt even then—perhaps the spectacle of my mother’s victimization by my father inspired this—that women were so discriminated against as a class that all was fair in love and war. I continued to think so until Dart.
Because I was so strong in my integrity against the opposite sex, skinlessness was what I sought. Most boys were too weak for me. I could manipulate them too easily. A young woman who knows her own sexual powers is a rarity indeed, but she is unbeatable. And if she happens also to be smart and talented and has the crazed bravado—I cannot call it self-confidence—that a mad mother and an alcoholic father inspire, then there’s no stopping her. That was me precisely. Unsinkable, unbeatable, unstoppable.
After breaking the requisite number of hearts in high school and college, I did in graduate school what no one expected me to do: I married an heir. Thomas Winslow was the scion of a family just as alcoholic as mine but a lot richer. He was studying English lit at Yale, with a special interest in Romantic poetry, and I don’t know whether I married him because he was the tallest guy I’d ever dated (six-feet-six) or because he was blond and blue-eyed (with eyes the color of faded denim) or because he declared his intentions to leave the whole of his legacy to SNCC—there’s an acronym out of the past—or because he could recite “Ode to a Nightingale” on cue. (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains”—how’s that for a premonition?) It could have been any of these reasons. Or perhaps I was just tired of fighting off men, and getting married seemed like the answer. At least it would allow me to concentrate on my work.
Thom and I were set up by his parents in a mansion in Southport, which we proceeded to fill with radicals, black militants, and war resisters. We painted the windows black, filled the rooms with pop art, and set about drinking and drugging our way out of the good graces of a community that had sheltered Thom’s family for nearly a century. We took a glorious Greek Revival mansion and turned it into a slum—all in the name of art and social revolution. For these were the days of the Beatles, the Vietnam war, happenings, peace marches, and Summers of Love. Thom, like every man I ever loved, was too weak for me, but he adored my work and would do anything to further it. At that time my style was eclectic, to say the least. I produced happenings with Yoko Ono (when she was still with Tony Cox, before she snagged her Beatle)—dubious performances at which the bourgeois participants were forced to strip naked and crawl through canvas tubes or drop their drawers