Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [50]
Isadora: In other words, “It’s what’s happenin’, baby”? Leila: For one who started the whole thing, you really are close-minded.
Isadora: I’m sorry I started it, really I am. I think we’d all be better off in crinolines and chastity belts.
Leila: You don’t really. . . .
Isadora: No comment.
Leila: Then may I continue?
Isadora: Your spiritual search for newer and better skinlessness? Be my guest.
I began to meditate—my own form of meditation, in which I sat alone on my hillside (the grass blades tickling my knees and ass, the little ants crawling harmlessly over my immobilized legs) and focused on the middle distance (a humpbacked cloud, a silver silo glinting in the sun) and blessed God for my life.
I began to notice things I had never noticed before: the red raspberry brambles growing alongside my driveway, the water lilies in my clogged pond, the golden lichen covering the stones at the perimeter. I began to thank God for the lichen, for the raspberries, for the clouds. I began to praise.
One day, sitting in the grass, gazing into the middle distance, I began to repeat like a mantra: thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you, and with each phrase I felt more and more grateful, more and more alive.
I knew that the praising breath was both within me and without me and that God had put me here for a purpose, which didn’t have to be clear to me at every moment. I had merely to honor the breath within me and to carry it forward into the universe. To destroy it would be as great a heresy as destroying my paintings or strangling my twins. Life had been given to me. I had only to say yes to the gift.
And then Dart came home. He came home stoned, bearing gifts bought with my money and credit cards. There is nothing more unsettling than that. W. H. Auden says that it is more morally confusing to be goosed by a bishop than by a traveling salesman. But receiving gifts that you will soon get bills for is more confusing even than that.
Dart hands me a Tiffany box in which there is a large sapphire engagement ring, surrounded by diamond baguettes.
“Marry me,” he says, “or I’ll leave again.”
Now, this is not the sort of proposal one dreams of. Much as I think I love Dart, much as I cannot imagine my life without him, I know that to marry him is to wed my life to the kind of wretchedness and upheaval I am experiencing now: it is a kind of sentence. Things will be this way always—abrupt arrivals and painful departures, serenity smashed, tranquillity taxed to the breaking point, and no hope of anything else in the future.
“Dart, darling,” I say, “let’s get married when we’ve been in the Program a year, okay?”
Dart scowls at me. “You’re putting me off,” he says.
And maybe I am. The phone in the kitchen rings. We both run for it. I get there first.
“Hello?” I say. Someone breathes and hangs up. I imagine the blond girl whose pictures I found, and the redhead whose letters I found, and the brunette whose makeup I found in DART.
“Who is it?” Dart asks.
“You tell me. I don’t have friends who call and hang