Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [68]
I think of the scene last night in the bar. All the young pulchritude gathered around Wayne. The difference between forty-four and twenty-two in a woman’s life is not just a question of looks. I don’t look worse than a twenty-two-year-old—to some men I look better—but I know too much. I am less easily conned. I don’t beam up at them with those eager eyes. I don’t smell the bullshit and call it roses.
Is it all a matter of hormones? Estrogen über alles? Nature gives us thirty years of blindness to male bullshit so we can make the maximum number of babies. And then the estrogen begins to wane, and we come back to ourselves again. We return to the bliss we knew as nine-year-olds, coloring in our coloring books. We get our lives back, our autonomy back, our power back. And is that the moment when we become witches to be stoned in the marketplace? Not because we are ugly but because we know too much. We are onto their game, and they don’t like it.
“I love my man better than I love myself,” sings Bessie, “and if he don’t have me, he won’t have nobody else. . . .” Ah, the estrogen talking. The wail of female fertility. “I love my man better than I love myself.” Do we have to feel that way to take them into our bodies and make babies, putting the future of the species above our own ease, our own rest, our own peace of mind?
Yes, apparently.
I break down and cry. Fall at the foot of the easel and cry salty tears, which slide into the corners of my mouth. The dog comes up and licks my face. “I shall get myself a mastiff bitch,” said Enid Bagnold. Ladies of a certain age always wind up with animals and gardening as their consolations. Is that where I’m headed? Is that what my sane mind wants for me?
I get up and pace. Think of going to a meeting and reject that. Think of going for a walk with the dog but postpone that. Think of a drink but tell myself I won’t drink today—one day at a time.
The telephone. That’s what I need to do—call people. The last addiction I’m allowed.
So I start phoning. My friend Maria in Paris, where it is almost midnight and raining. My friend Lorelei in Venice, where it is almost midnight and also raining. My ex-boyfriend Stan in New York, where it is the same time and weather as here. My old friend Julian in Los Angeles, where it is midafternoon and sunny with yellow smog.
Julian is locked in his house in Hollywood hills, playing with his synthesizer. Through his Kurzweil, Julian communes with the music of the spheres.
“What do people eat?” Julian asks across the continental divide.
“What do people what?”
“Eat,” says Julian. “What do they eat?”
I think of Julian, who is slender and small, with shoulder-length white hair. Julian has the most astonishing eyes—the eyes of an alien from another planet, where everyone’s IQ is 503.
“I don’t know what people eat,” he says. “Since Christina left, I’ve only eaten pizza—but now I want real groceries. But for the life of me I don’t know what people eat. Give me a list of stuff to stock the house.”
“Okay—got a pen? Raisin bran, milk, bananas, coffee, apples, sliced turkey, rye bread, mayonnaise, mustard, a barbecued chicken, tuna fish, butter cookies, chocolate ice cream, aspirin, Valium, yogurt. That should hold you for a while.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Julian says, really sounding grateful. “I’ll never know how to thank you.”
“Don’t worry—I’ll think of something,” I say. On Julian’s planet, they have astral observatories but no supermarkets.
“So what else is new?” I ask Julian.
“Listen,” he says. “It’s the mating song of the quarks.”
Unearthly sounds fill my ear. The sound of Julian’s Kurzweil mating the quarks.
“What’s that for?” I ask.
“A major motion picture called Thrust,” says Julian.
“You’re making that up,” I say.
“I wish,” says Julian.
In my present mood, the strangeness of this web of friendship strikes me. How close yet how alienated we all are—alone in our houses painting or writing or composing and phoning each other