Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [77]
Porn is very innocent, really. It presumes that there is a sort of sexual justice in the world. And whenever the scriptwriters get stumped, they up the number of participants in bed: the numerical phallacy.
Danny was turned on by Cherry. I wasn’t. Not much. But I was turned on by Danny being turned on. Usually it took me forever, teasing with tongue and fingers, saliva and baby oil, to get him—sort of—hard. But this time he sprang into action. And entered me. And went soft.
Back to Cherry. Back to baby oil. Back to back and belly to belly. Danny and I kept trying—until finally, exhausted, we fell asleep.
I became an expert on porn videos. I began to think of doing a porn video piece as a tribute to my love affair with Danny. I wasn’t about to give up, but it seemed he was.
“I feel overwhelmed by you, sugar,” he finally said one night at Lunabella. “All your pressure for connubial bliss—”
“All my what?”
“Your pressure for marriage. And all your sexual pressure, sugar. I feel overwhelmed.”
At that moment, I felt pretty overwhelmed myself.
“Danny,” I said, “you’ve been the one pressuring for marriage, not me. And you’ve been the one making a big deal about the sex. I’m quite contented with you. I love you . . .”
“Inadequate though I am . . .”
“I love you. And I don’t find you inadequate. Perhaps you think you’re inadequate.”
“Don’t give me that psychological hooey, sugar.”
“Darling,” I said, “I don’t want to fight with you. Stop. Please stop now before we both say things we’ll regret.”
“You think sex is important, sugar, and I, quite simply, do not.” Every couple has one argument they return to over and over. And that was ours. We found it early and never deviated.
“Well, sex is important,” I said, “but it’s not the only important thing between two people. Please don’t let’s fight.”
“You think sex is the most important thing between people, sugar. You do. Admit it. And I’ll never be the stud you’re used to. I shoulda met you when I was twenty.”
“I don’t want the stud I’m used to, Danny. That’s why I threw him out.”
“You miss him, sugar. Admit it. You miss him.”
“This is a ridiculous conversation.”
“Admit it, sugar.”
“I won’t have this conversation.”
“Admit it.” Danny stood up, changed the videotape, put on his underwear, and sank down on the bed. He just lay there, under the weight of his great jiggling belly. A new videotape came on the screen: Las Vegas Lust. One of the croupiers looked like Dart. I could have sworn it was Dart. But how on earth could he have launched his movie career that soon? But someday I would be lying in bed with an impotent Danny watching Dart make love to bimbos in a porn flick. It was inevitable. Poetic justice.
I watched Las Vegas Lust as if my life depended on it. Was it Dart or was it delusion? Granada or As-bury Park? Was I going mad? What had happened to my sane mind?
Danny meanwhile began to masturbate, using baby oil—and the image of Dart (or his doppelgänger) as a visual aid. A fine romance, indeed. What would Fred Astaire make of this? He jerks off; she sits riveted by the video image of her former lover (or his look-alike); and the whole world thinks they’ve got it made.
Danny jerks off defiantly, as if to say: Who needs you? When he is finished, he looks up at me for approval.
“Safe sex,” I say, and go downstairs to the wine cellar.
The wine cellar is a wonder. Photographed by Architectural Digest, with limelight on the wine bins and perfectly controlled humidity, the wine cellar sits under Lunabella as the diamond as big as the Ritz sat beneath Scott Fitzgerald’s mythical mountain mansion. I wander in, Theseus into the Labyrinth, examine several bottles of rare Bordeaux, and choose a Mouton ’45 to get drunk on. With a racing heart, I open the wine the way Danny has taught me, take a glass from the wine cellar