Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [52]
Nobody prepared my generation of women—we baby boomers, we pregnant bulge in the population curve—for the changes that have overtaken us as women. We wanted to have it all—work and love, paintings and babies—and we have had it, but we have paid a price: the price of loneliness and isolation. Nobody prepared us for all this because nobody knew how to prepare us. We were caught in a strange historical moment. The lives of our mothers and grandmothers simply did not apply. If it were 1920 or 1945, I would never have left Thom Winslow to pursue twins and twin careers in Chianti. And if it were 1930 or 1955, I would never have left Elmore and wound up with Dart. My generation of women was experimenting with a new life pattern, one never tried by women before in all of history. No wonder we felt so lost, alternatively like pariahs or like pioneers. We were breaking every female taboo—putting our creative lives, our self-expression, ahead of the demands of the species.
Isadora: Where is Margaret Mead, now that we need her?
Leila: Why don’t you go to the Trobriands and leave me alone?
Isadora: Because you’ll never get out of this mess without me!
No wonder we felt like traitors to our mothers and grandmothers and, often, to our children and to our men. There were no rituals for us. We had smashed the old and not built the new. There were no patterns. We had unraveled the past and not woven the future. How to do that? Ah—the question of the century.
And the men? The men were just as lost and lonely as we. They expected nurturance and got a kick in the balls. They expected us to be warm bodies in bed, cups and cup bearers, baby bearers—and then they had to listen to us kvetch about our blasted creativity. They wanted what they had always had: a warm tush in bed. How could a still life of maenads and crystal ever replace a warm tush in bed?
The Warm Tush Theory: All of history could be traced to the longing for the warm tush in bed. I thought this and laughed and laughed aloud to myself.
Good, Leila, good, I thought. At least you’re laughing—that’s an improvement.
It was comforting to see my life as part of a historical process—comforting and possibly even true. I was partly the victim of my own addiction, partly the victim of my own talent and fame, but I was partly also a casualty of history: too many women born and not enough men, no life patterns for any of us to live by, the family breaking down and being replaced by—what? Nothing.
We tried to re-create it with group love: AA, OA, Al-Anon, therapy. We were all group groping desperately toward the apocalypse. We were searching for a new way to be communal animals. We needed new tribal identities, because the old ones could not hold us. We were trying to reinvent the human species in church basements, with coffee instead of sacramental wine. Oreos instead of holy wafers. The blood and the body: instant coffee and chocolate cream cookies. A caffeine-and-sugar rush to lift us toward God.
I drive down to SoHo, park in my garage, toy with going to my loft, and then decide that I am not going to do that until after supper. Perhaps I’m postponing being brave, but procrastination is not the worst sin in the world—as long as I recognize it. Then I walk through lower Manhattan to meet Emmie at our appointed place: Da Silvano.
The city has that gloriously dirty reek it has in midsummer—the opposite of verdant Connecticut. Overflowing garbage cans, water bugs leisurely crossing the streets as if they owned them, blaring radios, honking traffic, bums, beggars, handsome gay hunks in shorts, and gorgeous young women in T-shirts and minis flashing their bosoms and knees in vain. I am exuberant with the energy of New York. This is the Imperial City—Rome at the end of the empire, Paris at the fin de siècle, Hogarth’s London. This is the red-hot center of the action, and for once the live current of New York is feeding me, charging me, giving me power rather than draining it away.
I walk past a particularly odoriferous heap