Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [93]
“You sound like me when I’m locked in, with a deadline. I sleep for three hours, take a cold shower, and fiddle with the synthesizer for three hours. Fiddle, sleep, sleep, fiddle, until I don’t know who I am—a chord or a person—and I don’t even care. It’s bliss. It’s torture. Anyway, we have no choice in the matter. It’s what we have to do. At least you’re an artist. I’m just an old hooker, turning out scores on the synthesizer to earn my paltry two million a year. A well-paid whore. Not as well paid as the stars who flicker to my music—but what’s a boychick to do?”
Just hearing Julian’s voice makes me feel I’m back in my sane mind. He understands me—my work, my obsessions. What a blessing to have a friend like that.
“Leila—you’ve got to expect to mourn Dart at least a little. You were with him for five years.”
“ ‘A dead lover must be mourned by the survivor for two years,’ ” I say, quoting “The Rules of Love.”
“He’s not dead, is he?” Julian asks.
“No. I was just quoting from this code of courtly love put together by the troubadours in the thirteenth century.”
“You would,” says Julian. “When in doubt, quote from the troubadours. That’s why I love you.”
“Will you be my escort at the Viva Venezia Ball, Julian?” I blurt, out of the blue. I had thought I was going to ask Dart, but now it strikes me that I must ask Julian.
Julian hesitates. He is afraid to plunge in, lest he be hurt. Julian protects himself from life with his wit, with his wisecracks, with his isolation in the house, composing. He almost never goes out.
“Julian, you owe me one—in exchange for that shopping list.”
“What shopping list?”
“The shopping list I gave you when you were starving after Cristina left.”
“Oh—that.”
“I want you to take me to the ball in exchange for the shopping list. I mean it.”
“Some hard bargain you drive,” says Julian, laughing.
“I mean it. I want you to promise.”
“Let me think about it,” says Julian, “and call you back.” He plays a spooky chord and hangs up.
I return to my collage of Dart—Pandora’s Box. Do I imagine it, or is Dart winking at me? He seems to be winking. “Call me,” he seems to say. “Call me.”
What is it about creating that makes you simultaneously want to destroy? The Indians were right about Kali—the creative principle and the destructive principle joined in one terrible mother goddess. Snipping, pasting, and rearranging bits of my life, I feel like Kali. I would even add the stained Maxipad to the collage if I dared, along with Dart’s snipped (and restituted) cock.
How else dare to create, if you do not dare to destroy? The madness is the same madness, the fever in the blood, the pride of creating a world out of nothingness. Fevered, maddened, I look at the snippets and pieces I have been playing with all day, and my head throbs. The veins in my temples twitch. My throat pains me. My neck aches. It is nothing that could not be cured by a night in bed with the right man.
I put down my scissors, go over to the Rolodex, and start flipping through. What a testament to mutability my Rolodex is! Half the phone numbers are obsolete; people who have not divorced or married have died! What a mortality rate the Rolodex reflects! I take the Filofax (where I keep the names of special, intimate friends: “close personal friends,” as they say in Hollywood—as opposed to what? “impersonal” friends?) and flip through that: old boyfriends, estranged husbands of dear friends, or estranged husbands of estranged friends! Unpromising stuff! I make a little list of the possibly fuckable men in my Rolodex and Filofax—and my heart sinks. What problems lurk behind each of those names! What untold depths of fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, fear of falling, fear of flying, fear of fucking!
A nice first dinner date, a return engagement, movies, theater, safe condomized sex on the fourth date, without exchange of bodily fluids, and back into the Filofax they go, as if laid between the fresh clean sheets of a hospital bed. Why bother? Why not just stay here in the country, collaging my life?
I begin