Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [22]
Thom Winslow aided and abetted me in all these ventures: buying the art, supporting the radicals and their movements, renting the lofts, financing all my brash, harebrained schemes. Because he was so complaisant, I was fairly contemptuous of him. I knew he was hopelessly in love with me—and it made me careless. But then the sixties were careless days. Everyone knew the priceless-ness of everything and the value of nothing. Unlike our younger siblings the yuppies, we claimed contempt for money—but what we really had contempt for was struggle and pain. We expected the world to be handed to us on a silver (albeit graffiti-covered) platter—and for a while it was.
Thom Winslow was a good, nice, stoned guy. I was his anger—the rebellion he didn’t have the nerve to act out himself. Once, before we split, I overheard him telling a famous art dealer at a dinner party: “All my life, I went to the right schools, the right clubs, the right debutante cotillions, and then I married Leila Sand, née Louise Zandberg!” Thom said this with considerable pride—it was in fact the great achievement of his life at that point—but I was pissed off because he gave away my original name. (Maybe I also heard the undertone of anger that was soon to sunder us.)
What a difference twenty years can make! Thom is now married to a lockjawed debutante of his own faith (godless Protestantism) and social class (trust-fund radicalism), who might even have gone to dancing school with him in Southport. They live in Vermont and produce environmentally sound toilets that turn your shit into compost for roses. Heartbroken as he was when I bolted with Elmore Dworkin, the abstract expressionist, he was able to turn it into compost. It takes merde to grow roses, as the French say.
Which brings us back to skinlessness—which I was seeking when I fell in love with Elmore, who was older, far more established, and knew everything there was to know about cunnilingus (tongue tricks he had learned during his salad days, to mix a metaphor, in Paris). I met Elmore, fell in love with his paintings and his tongue (though perhaps not in that order). It was 1974; I had received enough recognition as a painter to be earning a good living from my work, be written up in The New Yorker and Vogue (People and Architectural Digest would come later). It was not the household-word sort of fame but a classier, more discreet variety—fame in the art world before the art world became a total media circus.
I met Elmore at a dinner party in New York that Thom had not come to because he had a terrible case of the flu. What a wife I was! At seven o’clock I left my husband alone on Park Avenue coughing his guts out, and at eleven I left a dinner party with a hirsute artist twenty years my senior. By midnight I was having my pussy licked into purring ecstasy in a loft on John Street. By 3:30 A.M. I was home in bed on Park Avenue again, embracing my soon-to-be ex-husband, without even the good grace to feel guilty. In the meantime I had admired, from the windows of Elmore’s loft, that pink-as-a-baby’s-bottom look the sky gets during a snowstorm, and I had equally admired Elmore’s cock and paintings. In one evening I was introduced to the New York School’s most promising younger artist, multiple orgasms, and Humboldt County sinsemilla.
“Have a good time, honey?” Thom asked, rolling over and coughing convulsively.
“Mmmmm,” I said, and he drew my hand to his penis. We fucked like mad then, our coupling made more passionate by the unmistakable—if ghostly—presence of a third person in our bed. Never had I enjoyed Thom more. But still I had not come to skinlessness.
My marriage to Elmore, the birth of the twins, our inevitable parting, cannot be given short shrift. I always feel that when the parents-to-be of extraordinary children meet—whether at a dinner party, at a health spa, at AA, or wherever it is fashionable