Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [60]
His slate-colored face takes on an utterly peaceful expression, and he is gone into some forgotten summer on some forgotten lake, with some never to be forgotten companion. Perhaps they are together now. Then all the muscles in his face relax. He is entirely ready. And then his bladder lets go, and I am kneeling in a pool of piss that spreads from his reeking trousers.
The calm in his bluish face as the urine spreads around him, wetting even my knees and calves, makes me think I am watching a tiny baby returning to Mama. Life is so hard for some people. They never can get the hang of taking care of themselves. Death must be such a relief. No more pretense. No more holding on. The warm pool of pee in the bed turning cool and sticky on the legs. Back to Mommy, back to the big breast.
The members of the meeting are standing around us now.
In astonishment at the rapidity with which life passes to death, I can only say: “God, God.”
“Amen,” says Lenore, coming up behind me.
Several members of the meeting are crying. Someone has gone to call the ambulance (although it is clear that our friend is beyond ambulances now). And Rivka has fled. She is not entirely ready. Perhaps someday she will be.
10
Blue Blues
When I get home
I gonna change
my lock and key.
—J. C. Johnson
So I changed the locks. I had no choice, really. I didn’t do it gleefully. When the locksmith came, I cried. But there was no way I was letting the bimbo into my bed again. It was insupportable. I had lost Leila somewhere between New York and Connecticut, and I had to get her back. Changing the locks was the first step.
It wasn’t easy. I would think about Dart all the time. His cock. His sweet half-crooked smile. His beautiful calf muscles. His tight buns. His cock.
I would lie in bed at night missing him viscerally, missing him in my gut, my heart, my fingertips. When I loved Dart, I loved him so hard that often my fingertips ached, and now my fingertips missed him. They could still feel the texture of his skin. And my nostrils. My nostrils could still smell him.
It’s no easy thing to give up booze and a lover at the same time. One addiction is hard enough. But what choice did I have? There was nothing left in the bottle for me. Nothing but depression and sadness and pain. I couldn’t kid myself that drinking would make anything better. It always made everything worse.
So I turned to Pop Lit. Femme 101. Women Who Love Too Much; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them; Smart Women, Foolish Choices . . . all the books that promise relief from man addiction. I drew the line at man-addiction groups, as I drew the line at Sexoholics Anonymous. For one mad moment, I thought of going to Sexoholics Anonymous to meet men, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to. The very notion made my sane mind giggle.
The books were something. They told you everything that was wrong with your relationship (heavily implying that it was all your fault), but they didn’t tell you how to find a good relationship. Were you masochistic? A doormat? A sexoholic? Did you use sweets to assuage your loneliness? Wine? Dope? Coke? Well, just follow these simple twelve steps, and it would all get better. You had to focus on your own recovery. You had to be entirely ready.
Nobody seemed to be writing these books for men. It was women who had to be entirely ready to give up their addictions. It was women who were hooked on heartless bastards. (Could that be because of the percentages: seven million more women than men, so why should men behave?) At times, I thought these books were part of a conspiracy of female authors to get other women’s men. Because if every female reader followed the hard-nosed suggestions in these books, a lot of men would come loose and be on the open market again. That was my theory for a while—until I realized that it didn’t account for the fact that some of these books were written by men! Were they homosexuals, hoping to spring loose