Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [70]
Dart gone. I won’t go into detail about the week between his final departure and the arrival of the twins. The utter amputation of it. The way I attempted to follow every helmeted man on a motorcycle and very nearly creamed myself on various ancient deciduous trees; the hopeless suitors who called—old boyfriends, friends from the fellowship, those first bedraggled ones who stagger in during Week I, postamputation: the walking wounded, raging over their divorces, their teen-addict children, their business collapses, their Chapter 11s . . . bellying up to your bar to partake of your nonalcoholic warmth. Mostly they come to mope and talk, sensing another lost soul who hates to be alone at sundown, and they eye you and you eye them, thinking sexual thoughts but deciding that it is just too much trouble—this being after all the second summer of heterosexual-AIDS hysteria—and not knowing whether to hand them a Kinsey questionnaire or a condom, or both, you finally do nothing, escort them to the door, and offer a chaste cheek for them to kiss, and so to bed.
You have your trusty old white plastic vibrator—capped with an Excita condom to make it trendy—and you have your life-size marble cock, that ten-inch circumcised specimen sent by a famous Japanese sculptor when your film stills of Dart opened in Tokyo.
The marble cock is of white Carrara marble as pure as Michelangelo’s early Pietà—the one in the Vatican, which was not long ago defaced by some thug. Its cold white purity—half Brancusi bird, half Marini horse cock—takes forever to get warm within your cold abandoned cunt. You warm it and warm it, feeling the marble heat on the surface but stay cold inside, like your heart. Wax to receive and marble to retain. This is the pleasure of it—making these connections. Sex, even self-sex, is a question of completing some circle, making some synapses snap, some cosmic synapses that link your nerve ends to the stars.
How hard it is, and how hard it is to connect with another person, or with one’s self, or, finally, with God. To crash through that wall of flesh into spirit, to open yourself to the cosmos in the neon flashings of the orgasm.
My God, my God. Dart, Dart, Dart, Dart. I convulse around the Michelangelo-Brancusi-Marini marble, shouting Dart’s name and God’s name as if they were one. Tears run down my cheeks. I am all liquid. And the marble? The marble at last is warm.
Thank God the twins came home and I could lose myself in motherhood. The whole household drifted back in to greet them—my raw-boned dykey assistant, Natasha, with her black punk crew cut, her safety pin earrings, her big shoulders, her horsey face, her glittering green eyes. The “executive housekeeper,” Lily, once upon a time the nanny, now chief Amazon in our Amazon commune—soft-spoken, Scottish, and serene. Even my shrink came home from Europe and was suddenly available for counsel—from her little thatched cottage in Cornwall Bridge—my shrink, the incredibly brilliant Dr. Sybille Panoff, who gave Freudian-Jungian-Reichian analysis as well as tarot card readings, medical referrals, and healing crystals. Dr. Panoff had studied with Melanie Klein in London, Wilhelm Reich in New York, and Henry Miller in Big Sur. She was eclectic, to say the least.
I had for some time believed that her healing powers would have been as strong in the Middle Ages as in the twentieth century. Sybille was ferociously psychic, almost to the point of being telepathic. A poet in her soul, she dispensed a form of analysis that was two parts chicken soup, one part metempsychosis, and the rest wise-woman-of-the-woods. Sybille, as her name indicated, was a witch. Her black eyes and long black hair said so. Her saffron robes said so. And her little