Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [45]
Dart says this with a mixture of pride and disgust—a unique combination he has mastered in emulation of his father.
Leila: “You’re not a pimp, darling—you’re my lover.”
Dart (tears rolling down his cheeks): “Yes, I am, I am, I am. Unless you marry me, I’m just your pimp, your gigolo. Everybody knows that—I wish you did!”
By now I am almost in tears myself. I know that “pimp” is how Dart sees himself, but what can I do? I can’t remake this man’s self-image, make him healthy, whole, sound. He has to do that for himself.
He takes me by the hand and drags me back to the bedroom. He locks the door. In the white iron bed, with the sun flooding the coverlet, he begins to make love to me, licking and teasing me and making me come and come. My orgasms are strangely cold and unfeeling. Pure reflex. Robotics, not passion. “Love always increases or diminishes,” I hear my sane mind saying. I try to reciprocate, but Dart won’t let me touch his cock. “No, baby—I have my hand on the joystick.” Whereupon he makes me come again and again—until coming is almost painful and I beg him to stop.
Isadora: Stop!
Leila: You used to like this sort of thing.
Isadora: I like it tender and sweet, not merely massage!
Leila: You must have changed since the last book!
Then he pulls me to my knees, asks me to clutch a pile of pillows, and fucks me maniacally from behind.
Suddenly he stops, feeling my diaphragm with his hard hooked cock, reaches inside me, and pulls it out—sailing it across the room like a Frisbee. I let out a scream and try to run to retrieve it, but he holds me fast, fucking and fucking me until he comes in a mad convulsion, filling me with his seed.
“Baby, baby, baby,” he moans, pulling me down with him on the bed, covering me with his body, wet with sweat and come. I lie there with him, mastered, taken, spent—at once hoping I won’t conceive and that I will, for my ambivalence is now total. With my newfound clarity, I see that sex is a weapon for him, but some vestigial part of me accepts this as the fate of womanhood.
Dart falls into a deep sleep, and so do I. In my dream I am giving suck to a newborn baby, who looks up at me, turning suddenly into a little porcelain cow. The elements of my still life dance through the dream—eggs, roses, lilies, maenads, crystal bow, and cow—and I am immobilized beneath the weight of Dart, unable to get up and paint. This will be my version of hell, I think: immobilized beneath some man—unable to get up and paint—for all eternity.
I drift into a quirky dream about Professor Max Doerner, whose book The Materials of the Artist was much touted by a professor of mine at Yale—the same professor who introduced me to “The Rules of Love.” In the dream it is not this professor but Max Doerner himself who lectures me:
“Your paintinks are disintegratink,” Professor Doerner is saying. “You haff abandoned za teknik off za Old Masters.” He struts about the studio. “Pigments! Gesso! Old linen!” he shouts. “Old fat slaked lime aged in za pit! Benozzo Gozzoli! Benozzo Gozzoli! Benozzo Gozzoli!”
Professor Doerner is a dwarf. He opens his fly and waves his cock at the class. “Old fat lime!” he shouts.
At some point in this tirade (the bright sunlight tells me it must be almost noon) I awaken beside the sleeping Dart, hoping the result of last night’s mad sexual power struggle will not be pregnancy. The twins are enough to handle. Any notion that I could juggle Dart, twins, another baby, and my art is a delusion. Every canvas I have seized from chaos has been done at the expense of the chthonic deities who cry out for blood, blood, female blood, and childbirth at any price. Any woman producing any painting should get combat pay—for that battle waged in the sky between Rhea and Zeus. I would never have had an abortion, because, despite my political beliefs, I see every egg as an incipient human life, and I could no more destroy one than I could rip apart my own canvas. But in a way I have been lucky, because I am not a terribly fertile woman, so I haven’t been