Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [85]
(Laughter in the room.)
“How’s that for denial? I feel grateful that you let me speak today, because the love in this room tells me that I don’t have to do it all alone. I don’t even deserve to qualify. I’m barely on the first step.”
I stopped, looked down, and saw that the palms of my hands were open on the trestle table in the way they are when I am praying.
“Well,” I added, “I guess I finally got to the first step. I admit I’m powerless. I surrender.” And there was a loud burst of applause in the room.
I came back to myself from the land of trance.
A forest of raised hands waving in the smoky air. “Yes,” I said, recognizing the pretty blue-eyed woman I always stared at.
“I’m Mary, an alcoholic. I always identify with battered women too. You know those pictures in the paper of that woman—what’s her name?—who let her little girl be beaten to death by her lover? I identify with her too.”
One by one, the waving hands were translated into little volleys of words. Whatever I had felt was kinkiest, strangest, most shameful about what I had said, was seized on by a member of the group as a familiar feeling. Nothing human was alien. Nothing human could not be forgiven. We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.
I thought of Christ’s message of forgiveness, of Job’s message of humility, of Thomas Merton’s assertion that the deepest religious experience is essentially incommunicable. Impossible to convey what goes on in “the Rooms.” The banality of it. The transcendence of it. The transcendent banality.
And yet it works. If you say why it works, how it works, your tongue stops in the cavity of your mouth and you utter platitudes.
Perhaps it is finally a question of acceptance. Of being loved unconditionally. The Rooms are one place where you do not have to deserve to be loved. Because none of us really deserves to be loved. And all of us deserve to be loved. Loved unconditionally.
The summer wore on—green, leafy, celibate. Full of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, Thoreau, meetings, sessions with Sybille, and berry picking with the twins.
I tried to paint but hadn’t much luck. My motor was gone. The group love could not power me as Dart had done. I was becalmed.
Always in my life, men had appeared as if by magic. Bad magic. Black if not white magic. Now they did not. Dart did not call. Danny did not call. The force of my wishing for Dart was diminished. I could not make him call anymore by wishing. Anyway, the first woman who perfects that technique is going to win the Nobel Prize for Women. How to create dynamite by the sheer force of longing. Waiting by the phone—that old female pastime—has got to be of all distaff griefs the worst. It is the powerlessness, the sense of being out of control, that annihilates. Breathe on the phone. Make it ring. Pull on the old umbilicus and make it pulse.
Of course you could call him—if you knew where he was. But he has departed to another country, a country to which you have no visa, the country of regrets.
And then suddenly you realize with a pang, with a missed heartbeat, that another telephone call has not come in a long time—a red telephone has not rung, a certain heavy earthward pull has not been felt: your period is late.
At forty-four, your periods anyway are not so reliable as once they were. You used to be able to set your clock by them, keep your travel diary by them: a month-long trip began and ended with a period—that red marker, that crimson blot on the white pages of your Filofax. “P-1” you used to write for the first day. And “I” for you-know-what. (Odd that you didn’t write “F.” Was it residual prudery?) And then the number of times. And then the initials of the prick in question.
You long since gave that up, feeling your fertility is not so foolproof by now. Five years with an IUD (after the birth of the twins) spoiled you rotten. Sex with Dart six and seven times a day did not have to be recorded. (Who