Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [86]
You missed herpes. You missed—thank the Goddess—AIDS. You lucked out, fucked out. And now sex is such a sometime thing that you’d be lucky to even have something to worry about. But your period—your “monthly flowers,” as they called them in the days of Vigée-Lebrun and Adelaide Labille-Guiard, your “perennial visitor,” your fall from the roof—is long overdue. And your nipples feel a bit tender and surely are more brown than pink. And a faint ribbon of brownish pigment runs from your navel to your pussy. Can you be—at forty-four—pregnant?
Mongoloid twins!
And are they Dart’s or Danny’s? One of each? One blond Adonis? One bald antiques dealer? Stranger things have happened in the annals of ob-gyn!
My God! Pregnant! You are secretly elated. Terror and gladness commingle in your blood.
“Whose baby is it?” they’d ask.
“Mine,” you’d say, smiling like Mona Lisa. The singleton you long for, the pal to equalize your tender battle with the twins—can he finally be here? For it is, you know, if not mongoloid twins, then a little boy. You have seen mothers with their little boys, and you envy their lifelong love affair. Girls you cherish—sisters, little women, clone of your bone and blood and uterus. But boys you lust for—peg o’ your heart, little penis astride your maternal hip, erect manhood in a diaper—your little boy.
Happy. There’s no mistaking how happy you are. The womb, in the eleventh hour of its life, chiming like a cuckoo clock.
People telephone. Not Dart or Danny, but André, Lionel, your old friend Julian from L.A. You burst to tell them, but hold back. You tell no one. Not even Emmie. Not even Sybille. Nor do you go to see the ob-gyn. Good old Dr. Letitia Hyman, M.D., the jokily named lesbian gynecologist, who practices in Bridgewater. She wears Space Shoes and has frizzy orange hair. She’s built like a sack of grapefruits and lives with an oncologist named Dr. Eleanor Q. Oliphant. You wonder what the “Q” stands for. Questa, Quintana, Quisling, Quixote? You wish them luck. And love. Two old dames living free lives in a world not made for women. You’ve reached the point in life where you admire every woman who hasn’t given up and died. Who hasn’t drunk herself to death. Who grows old roses (Musk, Bourbon, Alba) amid her hybrid teas and doesn’t give a fuck what the world thinks of her or how she makes it through the night. Let the lesbians flourish! Let the womb flower! If women ruled the world, there’d be medals for every baby a woman bore and medals for every menopausal milestone! (There’d surely be medals for every menopause that didn’t end in suicide.) Hard enough to be a good girl and a pretty young woman—but try being old and female in a culture that hates the latter even more than the former. Here’s to Quixotic Letitia and her darling Quintana! But still I did not drive to Bridgewater. Perhaps I suspected the worst.
Then one night—I was expecting Lionel the next day, in fact, to chopper up to my neck of the woods—the worst happened.
I was standing in the silo, staring at a sketch of the twins (who had grudgingly consented to pose on the floor amid flocks of pastel-colored little toy ponies), and a sudden cramping in my gut told me I was in trouble. I willed the cramp away, but it returned. I ran to the bathroom mirror, stripped off my skirt, and took another admiring look at my big, round, brown-nippled tits, my brown-striped belly. And then I broke down and cried.
By 3:00 A.M. it was all over. I was sitting on the toilet seat, hemorrhaging into the bowl, the bright-red arterial blood mingling with the darker clots, the tears falling with the blood.
Fascinated, horrified, I captured a large clot on a piece of white toilet tissue and probed it, looking for my lost son. I put on a Maxipad and went out in the moonlight to bury my never-to-be-begotten male heir.
Full moon again. Blue moon. The hillside sloping down from the silo, the