Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [80]
“Tea? Coffee?” asks Sybille.
“Mouton ’45,” I say, laughing.
Sybille gives me a wry look and sweeps off to the kitchen in her long black silk dress. I follow.
While she clatters teapots and cups, I talk.
“Well, Danny Doland certainly was a disappointment. I hear he’s left for Hampshire, where hurricanes hardly happen.”
“You were never meant to marry a civilian,” says Sybille. It’s not clear whether she’s using the term in the show business sense or in the military. Much as she liked Danny’s money, it now appears she regarded him as an interloper because he was “in trade.”
“You don’t even know it, darling,” she goes on, “but you are on the verge of a totally new life. You’re struggling being born, like any baby. Dart and Danny are incidental.”
I heave a deep sigh. “Well, there goes my last chance for normality. . . .”
“Darling, the antiques business—like the art business—is the eighties equivalent of real estate. Any little grubber yung with a glib tongue can do it. They think they’re so smart because they are selling art, but they are, after all, still selling. The airs they give themselves! You’d think they made the stuff. You are not meant to be part of anyone’s collection. You are your own collection.”
Sybille turns her elegant profile to me. At six feet tall and a hundred and twenty pounds, she could still play Cleopatra or Gertrude or Lady Macbeth and have the whole audience riveted.
“Sybille, I think I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life—I mean without a man. I scare them. And they’re all so scared to begin with.”
“Most, but not all.”
“But their fear makes me so sad. All our lives, we’re taught to look to them for guidance and support. And then we reach middle age and realize how terribly frail they are. It’s cosmically sad, I see the game of it, and it makes me weep. I want a partner, and all I find are gigolos or terrified middle-aged babies.”
“You are meant to be alone right now, with your girls. Being alone isn’t so terrible. Look at me!”
“We’re always alone. And they always go on to the next nymphet. There are just too damn many of us and too few of them. We can’t make demands, because then they run. We’re meant to make all the compromises. It’s bloody unfair.”
“An opportunity.”
“Some opportunity!”
“It’s an opportunity to find your sane mind,” says Sybille, “to establish its beachhead inside you so that even alone, you’re never alone. To learn to talk to yourself kindly and gently, to learn to nurture yourself. No matter how alone I am, I always have my sane mind as a companion. I want to give you that.”
I look at Sybille helplessly, an old habit. But I am starting to comprehend what she means.
“Leila, it takes courage to lead a life,” Sybille says, pouring tea. “It takes more courage to lead a great life. It’s not easy to do what you’ve undertaken. You were singled out somehow to make pictures of the world. In another age, you’d be dead in childbirth, you’d be stoned as a witch. You were given a rare talent. All you have to do is protect it—even when you least want to.”
“And then?”
“You can’t lead a courageous life without making these leaps of faith. Sometimes everything looks terribly bleak and you think you know the end of the story. But you don’t. And by writing the end of the story, in some sense you doom it to happen. Or you hypnotize yourself with negative thoughts. The most important thing you could possibly learn is not to do that—but to affirm the positive even when you don’t know the outcome. Do you know what has been learned about people who excel in every field?”
“No, what?”
“That they have a high tolerance for not-knowing, for ambiguity, for not being in control. Because it’s only when we can tolerate not being in control that we make a place for the miraculous to happen. Art, falling in love, magic. Not-knowing makes a window for the miraculous. Not-knowing makes it possible to know.”
“I want