Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [58]
I look at her in disbelief. She’s insulting me and guilt-tripping me at the same time. “Networking” at a meeting! Is there any lower a person can sink!
“You’re so pretty. You always have men. You always have the critics in the palm of your hand. You’ve no idea how hard it’s been for me. . . .”
Now she’s really pushing my buttons. I want to scream at her, to denounce her for her kvetching and self-absorption, tell her that she’s probably driven away everyone who’s ever tried to help her, but then I realize that this reaction is exactly why I was meant to come to this meeting: to see myself reflected in this woman—to see what I could become if I don’t pull myself together and get tough with myself, to see an example of a woman squandering her life by playing the victim.
“Rivka,” I say gently, “if you want me to help you get sober, I’ll try. I’m not having an easy time myself. Perhaps I can help you in some way—but please don’t insult me by trying to guilt-trip me into selling your work. That’s not what the Program’s about, and all you’re doing is driving me away.”
She looks at me, uncomprehending.
“Don’t you want to help me?”
“I do, I want to help you, but I don’t want you to insult me and manipulate me. I’m struggling too. I drank tonight after not drinking for a month, and feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my life. I am still trying to take things one step at a time. I am still trying to learn how to lead my life. All my success led me to pressures of a different sort from the ones you’ve had—but they are pressures just the same. There’s no competition between us. We’re all stumbling human beings. The Program led me to see my life in spiritual terms, and I blew it—maybe because I couldn’t take my life actually getting better. I wanted the pain back. I made a little bargain with God that I would get sober if I could have my lover back, and I got him back for a while, and that misled me. But God doesn’t play by our rules. And we can’t be like petulant little kids and say, ‘Well, if God doesn’t play by my rules, I’m not playing, I’ll destroy myself—so there!’ We really haven’t got that option. We can choose to live or choose to die—but we can’t straddle the fence. And if we want to live we have no choice but to submit—not to our own will, to God’s.”
“Oh, Her,” said Rivka.
“Right,” I said. “Her. Or Him. It doesn’t even matter; it’s a sort of vanity even to argue about the sex of God. We’re talking about spirit here, the gift of life—and whether you choose to affirm it or deny it. That’s all this is about.”
Was I trying to convince Rivka—or myself?
Rivka’s eyes blinked. A flicker of intuition.
“I almost see,” she said.
“Of course you do; you’re a painter.” I hugged her. I couldn’t even get my arms around her, but I hugged her.
Isadora: My skin gets crawly when our heroine launches into sermons about drink and drugs. She’s barely sober, after all.
Leila: It’s those of us who are barely sober who preach the hardest. When you’re really beyond addiction, you don’t need to preach.
Isadora: And I don’t know where you’re going with this chapter. I sniff an epiphany at hand. Epiphany on the Bowery. God—I hate epiphanies.
Leila: You’ve gotten so cynical in your old age. What became of the old Isadora, who was afraid but flew anyway?
Isadora: Don’t ask. It would take another book to tell you.
The meeting was called to order by the secretary, who looked like a street hooker in her black leather micro-mini, red halter top, huge red hair bow, and red spike-heeled sandals. It was difficult to tell how old she was. Anywhere between eighteen and thirty, I guessed. But she had a hard look, the look that a life on the streets leaves you with. I knew that compared with mine, her life was tough. Just seeing her spirited, cocky little body and hearing her jaunty reading of the preamble made me cry. I was so glad to be back here, in the meeting,