Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [95]
My hair is wildly teased by the ride down from the country, and I don’t brush it. I have that crazed, semihysterical feeling that overtakes me when I’ve been working like a maniac and what passes as real life interrupts. (As usual, I don’t know whether I’m painting or living.)
“Kiss me,” says Wayne. I kiss him, smelling the booze. Horny as I am, it turns me off. I tell myself I’m still bleeding a little, so it’s dangerous to have sex. Since I stopped drinking, my sexual signals are slower to switch on. My sane mind seems more and more in charge. What a crock of shit sobriety is! It makes everything that used to be easy suddenly so hard.
Wayne walks me through the teeming summer night to the East Village. We enter what looks like a meat-packing warehouse, go through double metal doors, and find ourselves in a large room with folding chairs. Every chair is filled. Wayne and I stand against the wall near the door.
The audience is a mixed bag of artistic East Village types, uptown suits, and thrill seekers from abroad. I hear Japanese spoken, and German—the Axis has invaded New York. (And guess who’s winning?) The show begins.
A leather-masked man walks to the front of the room, steps up on the makeshift stage (covered with tarpaulins), unzips his mouth, and asks: “Who wants to leave before the doors are locked?”
Nobody gets up to go.
“Let’s leave,” I say to Wayne.
“We just got here,” he says. “You won’t regret this, I swear. It will inspire you.”
I look into his squinty green eyes, smell his booze breath. I want a drink, I think. And then I tell myself: You only think you want a drink, because you’re scared. Feel the fear—but don’t let it make you drink. It will pass, like weather. Feelings are not facts.
The room suddenly blacks out, and I hear metal doors slam and lock.
Here goes. The room hushes. People shift in their seats. I can smell the fear.
Music begins. Electronic music, a Moog synthesizer or a Kurzweil. A science-fictiony sound that could have been made by my friend Julian. Then a spot finds a young woman in black, with a huge pregnant belly. And another spot picks out a menacing masked male figure brandishing a samurai sword. (The same man who made the announcement?)
The samurai swordsman pursues the young woman around the stage in a stylized dance, whipping the air with his sword. He seems to lash at her neck, her ankles, her wrists—pale stalks of flesh compared to her bulging, black-shrouded belly. With a whoosh, he brings the sword down on her belly and slices her open. A dozen rats tumble out, clawing the air, and scamper over the raised floor of the stage. Claws skitter on the tarp.
The woman screams, “My babies! My babies!”
The masked man pursues the rats, feinting at them, decapitating one (a gush of blood), stabbing and dismembering others. The woman is screaming, loud ear-piercing bursts. I’m covering my eyes, my belly cramping, my gut heaving as if I’m about to be sick.
The audience is riveted, silent. Nobody breathes. The room grows hotter and hotter.
I peek between my fingers. The stage is spattered with blood. Some rats are twisting in their death agonies.
Still others are dead, disemboweled on the stage. Others have skittered away God knows where.
The masked man stands center stage with one still-wriggling rat in his hands. He unzips his mask, opens his mouth, and bites the rat’s head off. He spits it out, then squirts the girl with the rat’s blood.
I bolt up and begin beating on the metal door like a crazed claustrophobe. Wayne tries to restrain me, but I’m flailing, terrified I’ll never get out of this nightmare.
Time slows to a crawl, dream time, slow motion, nightmare to a nine-year-old. After what seems an eternity of beating on the metal door, I feel it yield. Wayne and I are released into the cool anteroom of the charnel house.
I rush out into the street. Wayne pursues.
“Baby, baby, you really freaked out,” he says, holding me.
“I don’t want to live in a world where people consider that entertainment!”
I am shaking all over, bleeding from the womb, my knees