Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [48]
8
White Nights and After
Gypsy, don’t hurt him,
fix him for me one more time.
Oh, don’t hurt him, gypsy,
fix him for me one more time.
Just make him love me,
but please, ma’am, take him off my mind.
—Bessie Smith
Dart got sober with a vengeance—at least for a little while. The Program became his raison d’être. He stayed in the country with me all week, going to at least two meetings a day, talking Program, Program, Program—like a convert to some new religion—and neither drinking nor drugging.
He also milked it for all it was worth. In the name of his new “conversion,” he got me to put him on the payroll of my company for a thousand dollars a week and to get him an American Express platinum card in his own name. It was not that he actually asked me for these things openly—it was that in my new delirium about his actually being there, I offered them, and he, at first reluctantly, accepted.
I was thrilled about our new life. We were going to meetings together, working together, reading AA books together. We were not, however, sleeping together. Or rather, we were sleeping together, but we were not fucking. In sobriety, Dart’s indefatigable cock went limp. In sobriety, Dart, who never was listless (or lustless), became both. In sobriety, Dart wept and raged and screamed and soul-searched, but he did not screw.
Dart impotent was not a pretty sight. He was convinced his life was over. All men perhaps identify themselves with their cocks, but in Dart’s case the identification was total. He lay on the bed as limp as his organ. He cried real tears. He blamed me.
I tried everything. Black garter belts with bikini underwear; black garter belts with no underwear. Tongue tricks, finger grips, baby oil. Erotic videos, erotic books, magazines from Hustler to Puritan—there really is such a magazine!—from Penthouse to Screw. Nothing availed. In my mouth, Dart’s cock felt limper than my tongue. I held my baby boy in my arms and rocked him.
“It happens to everyone from time to time,” I said, starting to feel bored with my role.
“Never to me,” said Dart, “not even when I was a baby.”
“I promise you, darling, it will get better.”
“How do you know?” Dart asked petulantly.
And in my heart I was more on his side than on my own. If I could have “cured” him by bringing home a bimbo, I would have.
He hung in with me—so to speak—for a week, and by the end of it he was off on the motorcycle again, taking the platinum card, the paycheck, and his limp cock with him.
That was when I really crashed. That was when I wanted to drink, to throw myself under the wheels of a train, to incinerate the cowboy canvases and the film stills. Emmie reappeared to prevent me.
“I don’t want to live anymore,” I told her. “Sobriety has taken everything from me that I care about—sex, my work, Dart. . . .”
“That simply isn’t true,” she says. “You only feel that way now. Feelings are not facts.”
“Emmie, I hate my life. My life sucks. I am totally fucked. Or not fucked. I hate the dumb meetings. I hate the crummy smoke-filled basements and the stale Oreos and the Styrofoam coffee. The best thing about the Program was giving me Dart back, and now it has even taken Dart away. I can’t bear it. I am in such pain.”
“I know you are,” says Emmie. “Nothing can eradicate that pain, but if I tell you that a year from now your whole life will look different, will you believe me?”
“No.”
“Well—it will. I can only ask you to go to meetings and wait. Try to live one day at a time. Try not to anticipate. All of this will change you in ways that are so amazing you won’t believe them. Remember your maenads and crystal? It will be maenads and crystal from now on.”
But it wasn’t. It was horniness and emptiness and tears. I felt like an orphan. I missed Dart in my gut. He was a part of me—the crazy, irresponsible part maybe—the part that wanted to run, to bolt, to drink, to drug, to be Donna Giovanna, Doña Quixota, the madcap picara with no fixed address and a million aliases. Dart was precious to me because he was me. Or at least