Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [81]
“The cards say yes,” Sybille says, and laughs. “But the cards also say you’ll have to pay your analyst ten dollars every time you do.”
She takes out a red cookie tin with the name “Amaretti di Saronno” lettered on the side.
“Ten dollars for every lay,” she says. “And when we have enough money, we’ll go out and celebrate.”
And she enfolds me in her huge motherly embrace.
I went back to meetings, my work, my twins. No more dating. No more searching for the holy grail of cock. Enough already. I would wean myself away from love, deliver myself from sex, learn to scratch the itch myself or cease to feel it. I would transcend sex and become a nun.
Never mind that for years I had thought it the life force. Never mind that I thought sex and creativity were one. I could not get involved with a man without wanting (eventually) to drink, and not wanting to drink, I would not get involved with men.
I went for an AIDS test, was terrified for a week and then vastly relieved when the nurse called with the following euphemism: “Your viral studies are negative.” It was a brave new world we’d made—and sex was a casualty of modernity.
Eventually we’d all live in space capsules anyway, communicate digitally, and wear silver space suits in which our genitals were so far from view that we forgot they existed. Sex would go the way of the appendix or the nusiform sac, and we’d all be, probably, much happier. That great motor of fertility and yearning which God had given us would now be turned over to the techies and translated into computer language. Bytes instead of bites, input instead of intercourse, file instead of fuck. We’d all change directories and become dissolving blips on a flickering screen. Which we were anyway. In God’s computer of starry blue. In vitro fertilization, central hatcheries, Skinnerian training of infants. Instead of mothers, we’d have “surrogates.” Instead of fathers, we’d have “donors.” Instead of children, we’d have—what? There was the rub. Human beings were too little too long. That was the crux of our evolutionary dilemma: the glory and the pity. In twenty-five years of dependency, we certainly learned some strange habits.
My twins, at ten, were so self-sufficient that I often felt like an interloper. (One mother of twins once told me: “Until they’re three you can’t even brush your teeth; after that, they don’t need you at all because of their bond with each other.”)
Often I envied them—their self-sufficiency, the fact that they were never lonely. United against the world, they went to school, to camp, to Daddy’s, to Mommy’s. United against the world, they rode their Appaloosa ponies—Heaven and Hash. United against the world, they went berrying, climbing, biking.
One is the indivisible number. But one is lonely. Two is divisible but unafraid. As their mother, I was glad for their connection. But it left me out in some deeply painful way. Sometimes I wished I had a singleton for company.
One day at a time, the green summer stretched out in Connecticut. The trees turned dark and leafy. The crickets’ singing and the bullfrogs’ basso filled the nights. I read Thoreau, Lao-tzu, Suzuki. I tried to cultivate a beginner’s mind.
“We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence,” said Suzuki. “We should find perfection in imperfection.” “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep,” said Thoreau. “The sage puts his person last and it comes first,” said Lao-tzu, “treats it as extraneous to himself and it is preserved. Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends?”
I tried to cultivate the art of taking no action. I tried to regard life as a pastime, not a hardship. I tried to do nothing, because nothing is the hardest of all things to do. I tried to teach myself to sit still.
I would sit at the edge of my pond and watch the surface ripples of the water, the blue of the sky within