Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [53]
The whole city seems to be melting! It has that special liquescent feeling it gets on certain ninety-eight-degree days. The air itself an animal—gamy, full of life. I love the feel of the humidity on my skin, the way my sweat is making my gauzy shirt stick to my back. I am delighting in the day rather than being irritated by it—another gift of AA.
Every day is a good day, I think, even bad days. Every day is a gift. The smell may be bad, but we should rejoice in having noses at all. Nobody promised us a nose. Nobody promised us a nose garden.
I am staring at the garbage heap and thinking of a garden. The garbage heap is beautiful in its way—cans overflowing with all the wretched refuse of our lives: orange halves glowing like split suns, aluminum cans gleaming like Christmas tree ornaments, crushed bags in all the colors of the rainbow, beer bottles in every shade of grass green and earth brown.
I am seeing this garden in the garbage heap because, suddenly, I am feeling a garden inside me. Always before, I would imagine my chest as a tangle of chopped veins and severed arteries. Always before, there was the howling emptiness inside, the emptiness that needed a cock to make it feel whole, the emptiness that demanded another glass of wine, another joint, another mad departure to Hong Kong on the next flight. But now I am starting to experience a taste of serenity, a soupçon of serenity—and it is utterly transforming. Where did it come from?
Grace, I guess.
I envision the inside of my chest, and suddenly I see a garden filled with sunflowers bending their heads, heavy with seeds. And zinnias in brilliant pinks and oranges and reds. And baskets of fuchsias hanging their reddish-purplish bells, and rambling red roses, and pruned trees of white roses, and musky marigolds blazing out of the earth. This is my garden, and nobody can take it away, no matter what betrayals are practiced on my flesh. This garden is totally mine; this garden sustains me; it grows because I grow. Suddenly I want to paint it. I want to drive right home and paint it now.
Instead I meet Emmie for supper at Da Silvano. Walking in, I recognize and nod to half a dozen people from my business—artists, dealers, designers of catalogs, hangers of shows, and people hoping to be mistaken for same.
There’s an elegant blonde in her fifties whose husband is a mafioso, who founded her gallery on West Broadway as a money-laundering scheme—none of which stops her from being the toast of New York. The stories I wish I didn’t know about art dealing in New York. Dart and his devastations seem suddenly very far away.
Emmie is sitting at a front table drinking a Tab with lime and looking radiant.
“You look great,” I say. (As the joke goes, there are two stages of life: youth and “you look great.”)
“You too,” says Emmie. “Losing Dart has made you lose all the stress lines in your face.”
“I feel wonderful,” I say. “It suddenly seems as if my life is beginning, not ending.”
“Odd, isn’t it?” says Emmie, laughing her twinkly laugh. “Remember how in The Golden Notebook the two women keep saying, ‘Odd, isn’t it’?”
“I haven’t read that in years,” I say. “When I was a teenager I forced myself to, but it seemed very heavy to me.”
“Well, read it now. It’s the story of our lives. ‘Free Women’—in inverted commas, of course.”
“Funny you should say that, because, driving down, I’ve been thinking that we represent an entirely new form of woman.”
“In the Middle Ages, they burned us as witches,” Emmie says.
We order the Italian supper that now passes as echt New York fare—figs and prosciutto, pasta, veal, arugula salad. I am amused by the way the cute young waiter—with the ponytail and the emerald earring in his left ear—reels off the specials as if he were auditioning for a Broadway musical. Only