Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [25]
Less and less did we sing “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” More and more did we find excuses to go to dinner parties alone, to complain of each other to our friends, to snap at each other in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the nursery.
Who can say why a marriage breaks down? The reasons for it are as ineffable as the reasons a couple is created in the first place. We live in a world in which all the rules of love and marriage have changed drastically and continue to change in ever-shortening cycles. Marriage used to be for the having and growing of children; now there are few marriages that can withstand the pressures of those events. Children are pesky interruptions to addiction and narcissism, the twin obsessions of our age. If one child is an interruption—imagine two! For the fact is that nature has made human beings too complex and too intelligent for their own good. We are creatures desperately in need of priorities in order to thrive, even survive, and in the modern age, our priorities have grown too murky. Love is too mutable a thing to live for. And art is too lonely. Love and art are sufficient. But when one artist is a woman and the other is a man, whose work shall come first? The male ego, the rush of testosterone, and most of society’s rules dictate that the man must be central, or he will sulk. But what if, for the moment, the woman’s work is in the ascendancy? And what if it is she who puts the food on the table as well as the tits into the babies’ mouths? Can she also pretend, for his ego’s sake, that she is not doing these things even as she continues to do them? Reader, I tried. But I could not maintain the illusion. When the babies were two, I had my most successful show ever, in the same year that Elmore had a fight with his dealer and left his gallery, and it was those twin events that delivered the coup de grace to the marriage.
Elmore moved out, leaving me with my success, the terrible twos times two (for Mike and Ed were not easy babies), the big brown standard poodle Boner (named for both Michelangelo Buonarroti and Rosa Bonheur), and the easy anodynes of gin, vodka, wine, and dope. For it was then that I began to get into trouble with drink and drugs.
I was alone with my babies and my work, and my sense of abandonment was fierce. I felt I had been punished for my success (and, in fact, I had). For the first time in my life, I found it hard to cope. In other words, for the first time in my life, I (who had thought myself exempt) submitted to the fate of most women: I began to feel like a victim.
How I hated that feeling! All my life, I had despised women who whined, women who cursed woman’s lot, women who claimed to be through with love. I had never called myself a feminist. I abhorred the label. But motherhood had radicalized me in a strange new way. And abandonment with two female babies had opened up feelings so terrifying I did not know what to do with them. So I drank.
On the surface, life went on. My life was hardly destitute. I had a glorious loft, a house in the country, an assistant, a nanny. If I felt abandoned with this support system in place, imagine what other women must feel! A deep blow had been struck to the heart of my humanity. I had fulfilled my destiny as an artist and a woman, and to punish me for it, Elmore had left.
Let’s be fair. Elmore had problems of his own. It should be a plank in the NOW platform that men turning fifty ought to be given special dispensation, and Elmore was already turning fifty-five. He worried a lot. His heart, his penis, his career, all were failing—and there was I, at thirty-six, on the top of the world (or so it seemed). He couldn’t bear it, and neither, it seemed, could I.
So to make it all that much worse, we split. And we both drank more and more. And we both fucked around. And none of these things made us feel anything but worse