Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [23]
At the moment one’s children are conceived, one ceases to be an ego and becomes merely a cosmic tube, a funnel into timelessness. That, I suspect, is why having children is such a critical stage in one’s development. With parenthood comes our first taste of egolessness, our joining of the cosmic dance. From the moment I opened my thighs to Elmore Dworkin in that loft on John Street, my marriage to Thom Winslow was doomed. Perhaps it was doomed anyway—for the twins were dying to be born—and it was the twins as much as I who picked their father.
Looking back now that the twins are ten (they were my bicentennial babies, born in the bicentennial year), I realize that they had to be fathered by a hirsute Jew of my blood and bone—another dark-eyed anarchist whose ancestors hailed from the Ukraine. I could no more have brought WASP babies into the world than I could have stopped drawing and painting. I remember once when I was pregnant with Mike and Ed (Elmore and I lived that year in Tuscany, in a farmhouse in Strada in Chianti), watching an RAI documentary on Auschwitz, which showed the destruction of Jewish babies like the two I was carrying, and weeping with joy and pain to be replenishing the Jewish race. This amazed no one more than it did the weeper in question—for I had never been religious in the least (it was, in fact, an article of my sort of Jewish faith to be faithless). But where having babies is concerned, all our conservatism seems to burgeon. Pregnant, I became hyper-Jewish, hyperartistic, hypersensitive. Pregnancy, in short, brought out my true Buddha nature. I only became more myself.
Was my marriage to Elmore good? At the beginning, it was heavenly. At the end, it was purgatorial—if not quite hellish (hell would come later, with Dart). What could be more joyful than two artists living together, doing their work, nurturing their babies, cooking, loving, walking through the churches and art galleries of Italy?
We lived in a friend’s farmhouse in Chianti, looked out on fields of silvery olive trees and vines that danced crookedly across the hillsides. We slept every night in each other’s arms—until my pregnancy made that impossible—and then we slept spoonlike, Elmore’s chest to my back and his cock to my buttocks, nudging me from the rear and often waking up inside me.
Oh, how sweet love is when it is sweet! Two salty, sweaty lovers waking up in a shared bed that is rutted with love. And how rare it is! At the times in our lives when we have it, we scarcely appreciate it. It is appreciated more in the loss than in the having—like so many things we reckless humans have, including our lives.
I remember us as we were then: Elmore was fifty-two to my thirty-four and as besotted with me as I with him. He wore his dark hair long, his graying beard long, and his red lips poked out of it like a cunt. (Bearded men often have cuntlike mouths; perhaps that is why they so love to eat pussy: it is like kissing themselves in a mirror.)
We lived that year in a tangle of thighs, art history, and extra-virgin olive oil. We drank the wine of our own campagna; we slathered olive oil on our own tomatoes. We puttered down to Florence in our old Fiat to stroll arm in arm through the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Pitti; we ate bistecca alla fiorentina (for the sake of the babies) and huge grilled porcini (for the sake of ourselves); and we painted our hearts out in the same drafty studio, Vivaldi and Monteverdi blaring out of the radio.
We lived for love, for art, for bed, for babies. It is easy to do that in Italy, a country whose priorities are in