Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [24]
I remember the day in July when we loaded up the Fiat with food, clothes, radio, and dog to begin our drive to Switzerland and to the clinic in Lausanne where we had decided the twins should be born. We were both singing (we were often both singing). Life, we thought, held nothing sweeter—and we were right.
It took us three days to get to Switzerland. We were not racing the clock, because it had long since been decided that when I was eight months pregnant we would drive to Switzerland and stay in a hotel near the clinic—twins are often born prematurely (I might live and paint in Italy, but I would, like Sophia Loren, have my babies born in Switzerland). As it happened, a week or so after we arrived, I started leaking amniotic fluid, and it proved prudent to put me to bed at the clinic to preserve the pregnancy. Elmore and Boner (our German shepherd) just about moved into the clinic with me (the rules being bent, as usual, for the famous), and Elmore read to me while we waited to see whether I should have a caesarean or wait to go into “natural” labor.
It was the most glorious time of my life! I lay in bed like a queen, waiting to bear my princesses (amniocentesis had informed me of their health and sex), while Elmore read Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. We both kept notebooks. And we both drew. I kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of Elmore reading to me, listening to my belly, painting in his studio, and he kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of me in differing degrees of pregnancy. (I have both notebooks back to back—or belly to belly—on a shelf in my studio in Connecticut, and I still cannot look at them without a twinge. What a blessed, blissed time that was! How could it have ended?)
It began to end on August 1, when, the pregnancy having been endangered by the rupturing of the amniotic sac, it was decided by us and by our surrealistic doctor—Dr. Breton, believe it or not!—to bring the little sweeties into the world by caesarean.
I went into the OR an artist and a lover and came out an artist and a mother. From the moment those little pink twins were delivered to me in their little pink blankets, the universe of love began to shift—irrevocably.
Or perhaps it was not only parenthood that began to erode the marriage. Perhaps it was the fact that my star was in the ascendancy while Elmore’s was in eclipse. On the crest of the interest in women’s art generated by the women’s movement, my paintings (which at that time were erotic canvases of ordinary objects—shells, flowers, stones, bones, made into monumental icons in a manner reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s) began to generate a great amount of interest, at a time when Elmore’s Hans Hofmann-like abstractions were beginning to seem passé. Or perhaps it was alcoholism, for Elmore was drinking more and more heavily. Or else he was drinking the same as always, yet had crossed that invisible line. It is hard to say just which of these three factors delivered the coup de grace.
We moved back to New York, set up house, studio, and nursery in the loft Dart now uses for his liaisons, and began the challenge of raising twins, managing twin careers, and battling the New York art world.
Suddenly I was the token woman artist of the moment, the exception that proved the rule, the flavor of the month. Vaginal art was in, and my forms—shells or bones, flowers or stones—seemed to be what everyone required. The fact that I had two beautiful twin daughters didn’t hurt, either. Photographed like a double madonna in my studio