Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [49]
I would get all dressed up and go to AA meetings and sit there, crossing my legs in a miniskirt for my plumber, the old lady who sold antiques on Route 7, the former actress who ran a gourmet shop in town. I would look longingly at the spacey thirty-year-old equine veterinarian who made barn visits all over the country (I was hoping he would visit my stall) and at the balding guy who sold nails in the hardware store and at the raspberry-nosed limo driver who now called me Leila rather than Ms. Sand because we were both in the Program. I would be thinking about fucking all these guys, but instead we would go out for coffee and talk Program.
I became a regular in the coffee shop in town where everyone went after meetings, and I even got to like the feeling of sitting and talking with a man without sizing him up as a sex object. I started to listen to men, hear what they had to say about their lives, their wives and ex-wives, their fathers, their frustrations, their cocks. I learned that if you stopped looking at a man as someone to give you an orgasm or a baby or save your life, you could really be friends with him and find him quite as human as yourself. I realized that my whole life I had regarded men as both enemy and prey—entirely without being aware of it—so therefore they must have regarded me the same way. I also realized that life without sex was not the worst thing in the world. It was like fasting. The first three days were wretched, but after a while you got high and even came to like it. As I gave up expectations from men, I found myself learning things I never could have anticipated.
The highs were high—and the lows were lower than low. Sometimes I would drive through the countryside in DART, singing at the top of my lungs, and other times I would collapse in my bed feeling like holy shit, looking desperately for my sane mind and not being able to find it. I would look at myself in the mirror, pinch the skin under my chin, and decide that I was going through menopause and was drying up for want of a good fuck. I am not the sort of woman who goes without sex without a protest. I will not go gentle into that good night. I have always regarded a stiff cock as a health and beauty aid—and here I was, living without my main beauty treatment, health food, and sleeping potion. I considered suicide in various forms—self-immolation with my paintings, carbon monoxide poisoning, driving off a cliff in Dart’s car. (I couldn’t do sleeping pills or tranquilizers, because I was in the Program!) But then I would see in my mind’s eye the distraught expressions on the faces of my sweet little twins—their horror, their betrayal, their lostness—and I would change my mind. There was no way I would do that to my girls. I was beginning to understand that all my actions had consequences.
Understanding the consequences of one’s actions is not the same thing as guilt. Guilt is useless. So is self-flagellation. But understanding that your acts have consequences and that you have choices is another matter altogether. This was the main thing the Program was starting to teach me. I began to realize that I was an energy field, whose motions left reverberations through the universe. And I began to take the responsibility—and the credit—for those reverberations, to realize that I was not a victim of “fate.” Yes, God, Goddess, the Higher Power, the Holy Ghost, worked through me; I was a human vessel for a divine energy force. But to be a vessel was not the same as to be a victim or a pawn. Life flowed through me, and therefore my body and mind had to be respected. They were temples of spirit. They could not lightly be thrown away.
Isadora: I must admit I get very itchy when you fall into all this Shirley Malarkey stuff about Higher Powers, Temples of Spirit, healing crystals, und so weiter. The sex slop is bad enough, but all that spiritual shit adds insult to injury! Do you think it’s what the age demands?
Leila: Millions of women are seeking spiritual solutions