Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [7]
We had arrived at our grand hotel in MOCKBA, and we were about to fall into bed and reassert our primal connection (it had, after all, been seven hours since we made love in Copenhagen, and we were both in a state of deprivation that prisoners of war may know), when Dart smiled at me with his shy “love me” smile (practiced from childhood on his mother, his nannies, his sisters, and any other females he might meet) and extracted from under the insole of his cowboy boots two flattened joints of purest Humboldt County sinsemilla. I remembered where we were, searched the ornate golden room for hidden TV cameras and mikes, looked at my child lover, and my blood literally ran cold. I had never said a cross word to him till now.
“Get rid of them,” I said.
“You mean we’re not going to smoke them?” said my incredulous little boy.
“Get rid of them, and now.”
“Just a puff?”
“Not even one.” And then I watched as he flushed them down the Soviet john (shall we call it an ivan?), a tear in the corner of his bright blue eye for the dope, which he still did not realize might have been our passport to Siberia forever.
Furious as I was at his defection from my welfare, his incomprehension of the danger, I was powerless to yell at him, and this was not only because the room was bugged. My heart was bugged as well. I was so tied to him body and soul that yelling at him would have been like yelling at the little child in myself. What an odd combination of manly power and childlike credulity he was! He thought he could light up a joint and make the Gulag disappear!
We did not make love that afternoon. And for two who made love on arrival in every hotel room, that was a sort of sundering, the first of many. It had to do with drugs, which we thought joined us but which really sundered us—that being, of course, the paradox of drugs.
Dart’s history was as deprived as any ghetto child’s. He grew up rich, in Philadelphia, in a town house on Rittenhouse Square filled with Chippendale antiques, Chinese porcelain, seventeenth-century bedwarmers, threadbare Oriental rugs, rooms of unused shoes, piles of 1930s magazines, that sort of thing. His mother drank sherry and abused Seconal; his father drank bourbon and seduced debutantes. The nannies drank gin and seduced Dart. He was born with an erection, his mother always said (with her smoky, boozy laugh), and from then on no one who took care of him ever let him forget that they considered his cock the most important organ of his body. Once, I thought this was cute, but now I find it exceedingly sad that a young man should be valued above all for that appendage which he has in common with all other men—even if his is bigger and better shaped. Sometimes, when I think of this, I want to weep for Dart and change his name to something real—Daniel perhaps—and give him a real life, such as I would have wanted for my son.
But I have no son. I have twin daughters, Michaela and Edwina. Dart became my lover and my son, a dangerous (and perhaps impossible) combination.
This Wanderjahr continued after MOCKBA. Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok, Borobudur, Singapore, Bombay, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Baghdad, Jidda, Cairo, Athens, Tunis, Nice, Lisbon, Bahia, Rio—but life in bed at a deluxe hotel (whether the Okura, the Ritz, the Peninsula, the Oriental, the Shangri La, the Goodwood Park, the Cipriani, the Bel Air, the Plaza Athénée or the Vier Jahreszeiten) is much the same everywhere.
My friend Emmie once remarked that a deluxe hotel is like a hospital, what with food being wheeled in and out and flowers being dutifully sent by business acquaintances (and never by the lovers you wish had sent them) and polite notes or mass-produced “greeting” cards appearing at irregular