Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [4]
Friends come to me and urge me to give him up, fill me with reasons, all of which I agree with. They do no good. What I feel is something that does not respond to reason. Older than Pan and the dark gods and goddesses lurking in the shadows behind him, this burning I feel is in fact the primordial force of the universe. Who can explain that I have chosen to attach it to a blond boy-man who pours his lies in my ear as he pours his seed in that other place? Who would believe the addiction, the obsession, the degradation, or even the love? Only one who has felt its fire. Only one who has also been burned in that fire and whose skin has crackled like the skin of medieval martyrs.
But most women do not have the luxury to feel that fire. Nor, in fact, do I. In my waking life, I am a successful woman (does it matter for the moment what I do?), known as a tough deal-maker, an eagle-eyed reader of contracts, a good negotiator. All that I know of life from the other sphere does me no good whatsoever here. You might even say that it makes me more vulnerable. For the tougher I am in the lawyer’s office, the more I desire to be tender here where the thought of his cock reduces me to ash.
Let me tell you about his cock. It is clawlike and demonic, a true prong. It has a curve where it should be straight, and in repose it lists to one side, the left. His politics, if he had any, would be the opposite. For he is the fascist, the boot in the face, the brute. All men worth having in bed are partly beasts. Every myth we have tells us this: Pan with his animal legs and human mouth; the beast that Beauty left her father for; the devil himself, with the wild witches—the bacchantes of Salem—cavorting about his puckered anus. And kissing it. Part of the lure is the degradation, the fact that we are creatures born between piss and shit, and in our darkest moments we obsessively recall that dilemma.
If twenty men were lined up before me with full erections and sacks put over their heads and torsos, I could identify my love (may I call him that?) by the curve of his cock. Angry and red in erection, circumcised (not because of his religion but because of the age in which he was born), curving like a boomerang which always returns to its owner, is it beautiful only because it leaves me? Is it just because I can possess it merely for brief interludes that it holds me in such thrall? Would I love it less if it were there all the time?
No danger of that. For I love a runner. No sooner does he call me his witch, his bacchante, his lady, his love, than he has to flee.
Oh, I think there is some of this in all men—however they express it. The longing to return to the womb, to be engulfed, to be totally passive between the huge breasts of the mother goddess, is so strong that no sooner do they feel themselves yielding to our primordial power than they have to run. Hence the battle between the sexes: she wants him safe between her legs forever; he, being afraid he wants to stay there, flees.
Where he flees is immaterial. War. The Office. Golf. The salt mines. Tennis. Outer space. Deep-sea diving. Basketball. Las Vegas. Another woman. It’s all the same flight.
The man I love has constructed a museum to macho in my garage. Power saw. Punching bag. Motorcycle. Barbells. I love him in part because I cannot tame the wild creature that dwells inside him. For this is another paradox of the sexes: whatever we love in the other we seek to kill.
My love is a con man, a hustler, a cowboy, a cocksman, an addict, an artist, a fancy dancer, a dandy. He has no fixed address. Sometimes he’ll give a P.O. box, sometimes an answering service, sometimes a number that no one answers, sometimes an address he’s just made up. I once heard him tell his mother she could write him in Paris at the Charles de Gaulle Hotel.
“But you know there is no Charles de Gaulle Hotel,” I said.