Any Woman's Blues (40 page)

Authors: Erica Jong

Tags: #Psychological, #Psychological fiction, #Relationship Addiction, #Romance, #Self-Esteem, #General, #Literary, #Love Stories, #Self-Help, #Personal Growth, #Fiction, #Women

Sparks flew between us. Zing. Zing. Bim. Bam. Crackle. We escaped. To his silver limo with the smoked windows and the fax machine. I sucked his cock, escaped, knowing that men will do anything to have you—even though they then seem not to want you when you decide you want them. (Ah, the mystery of men and women: why do they chase us so relentlessly when they
are
eventually
appalled
that we stop running away?)

We began an affair full of garlic, blues, and butter. And come. And come again. (I will not spell it “cum.”) He was intelligent, funny, psychic (he could read my mind anyway). He had my grandmother’s eyes. In two months, I was hopelessly in love. And he was hopelessly married. Having it both ways, like the rest of the male sex, and helplessly unable to do otherwise. He loved me; he fretted about me. He wanted to take care of me, but being a man, he was weak about choices. They never have to make many of them, do they? At least about women. They just lack practice.

One weekend, alone, I went out with an old beau to break the trance.

This old beau was a drunk. From my drinking days. So we drank. We drank in Roxbury, in Cornwall, in Bethel, in Redding, and in Darien. We drank in Rye and Harrison and Bedford. He threw up. I passed out. Romantic, eh?

The next morning I awoke in a strange bed, under a pile of coats. Music playing in the other room. A thin Indian girl winding and unwinding her sari in front of a mirror. A pale young man asleep beside me on the bed.

Panic. Desolation. The throbbing head. The dry mouth. Unable to move. Nuclear war coming and financial collapse. Cancer, AIDS, paralysis. Contact lenses stuck to my lids. I woke up sobbing. But without tears.

Suddenly I realized that all my days and months of dryness were conditional: God, I will be dry if you make this book a success. God, I will be dry if you get me this lover. God, I will be dry if you bring me love, lust, loot. Of course I didn’t think I was being conditional with God. But here’s the proof. The work or the love affair would somehow disappoint, and in fury I would drink again.

I stumble out of bed and to my knees. I am shaking. Tears are streaming down my face. I want to get sober because I want to get sober, I say. I want it because I want it. Above a book. Or a man. Above everything. I want it because I want it. Because I want it like life itself. I am
entirely
ready.

With that burst came a lightness I had never known and a light I had never known, as if God took my heart and flung it like a Frisbee over the moon. As if my whole body were made of light. I have not had a drink since. Or a married man.

Yes, my fourth husband and I
did
go flying in the South Pacific, and we did crash, but the story does not quite end there. Flying over the atolls and the coral reefs, the violence of the earth’s core thrust up through the glittering waters, I learned that because we are the first civilization to see the clouds from both sides—
literally
to fly—we have a special responsibility. We are nearer to God than people were in other ages, yet farther away.

The Icarus age, I call this. The age of waxen wings. No wonder we are looking to fill up our emptiness with drugs, with food, with sex. We are longing for spirit, so we turn mistakenly to spirits. We are longing for God, so we turn mistakenly to man.

We can drop ourselves out of one culture and into another—faster, in fact, than our consciousness has time to catch up. From stone age to space age. Time is compressed for us. All ages exist at once.

What I will remember always about the South Pacific is the wetness, the feel of humidity on my skin. My body felt different there. I knew it was made of water. And air. And the smell of the South Pacific: frangipani, copra, sago, mud, and blood. And the din of insects at night. And the utter darkness of the villages. The lure of stone age culture—living out of time. Rising with the sun. Going to sleep with the moon. The days are eons long. The eons but days.

The sounds of the rain forest—the din of cicadas. The newspaper in Port Moresby:
Nu Gini Tok Tok.
Is pidgin the language of the future? A mélange of languages. The sawtooth mountains against the blue blue sky. “Women and children do not carry spears.”

When the plane crashed into the Solomon Sea (it was not, alas, a Beaver, but a Grumman Goose), I was not scared. All my anticipation of fear—and when the crash came, I was calm.

The stall. The spin. The altimeter unwinding. The cloud castles. The radio crackling. My husband laughing. The plummet seaward. The blue water. The suspension of time. My life. The cosmos. The oneness of the two.

I found in myself a calm beyond calm—as if I had gone to hell and come back singing.

Adrenaline took over—the old animal part of the brain. Calmly, I disengaged from the wreckage. Calmly, I pushed open the door. Calmly, I swam past sharks.

Like childbirth, I can barely remember it. But what I did was the right thing. I am alive.

I was well aware that I was covering Amelia Earhart’s territory when I crossed the cloud cities between Port Darwin and Port Moresby. The cloud castles she described—full of misty gargoylish figures leering at a woman brazen enough to brave the skies—surmount strange rocky islands with stony digits pointing to the stars.

A woman who has her hand on the joystick, in effortless accord with the will of wind—or so it seems till the wind turns—has nothing to fear from any man. “I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart wrote to her husband from what proved to be her last flight. “Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.”

A challenge to others!

The words rang in my ears as I spun downward through the cloud castles, centrifugal force pinning me to my seatbelt, my gyro instruments tumbling wildly.

My husband was laughing. He had always wanted a laughing death—as kuru is called in these parts—and he was all too delighted. He did not want to be saved.

This is what I have not said heretofore about “Julian” or “Sebastian” (call him what you will): he wanted desperately to die before decrepitude claimed him. That was one of the reasons the South Pacific lured him, why he was drawn inexorably to headhunters and cannibals. And why he was disappointed when no one ate us.

He was hoping for death, hoping to catch up with it before it caught up with him. The opera about the search for paradise was the merest excuse: he was seeking no opera, no film; he was seeking the last flickering light show of his life.

“Let it go!” he cried as we went into the spin. And he tried to wrestle my hand from the joystick, hoping to prevent me from recovering. Laughing madly, his white hair blowing in the wind, he began to toss things, life preservers, rations, fuel, out of the plane.

It was then and only then that panic seized me. Alone, I could have endured it—but the madness of a man would doom me, that much I knew. With one fell swoop (surely the only one fate would grant me), I brought a flashlight down on Julian’s snowy head and—amazingly—I knocked him cold!

He muttered and dozed and dreamed as I brought the plane out of its spin just before we hit the slanting water—but too late to prevent crashing. We splashed down, skipped, began to sink. I clambered out in time. Sebastian/Julian, against all his wishes, allowed me to pull him into the sea. Reluctantly he realized that God, not he, was in charge.

We swam away, watched the sinking craft out of an eye’s corner, and kept on swimming till coral snagged our knees and carved our toes.

The island beckoned. Was it a mirage? Is this my blazing hillside? Is everything? Yes.

About nine months later, we were rescued by an American billionaire and his Polish-born wife, sailing a schooner full of celebrities, a sort of ship of fools, into which we were welcomed as into one of “André McCrae”’s parties. You can imagine the culture shock—toasting in Tiffany champagne flutes with Krug ’61 for
People
and
Time,
after eating grubs and slugs, raw fish and rotted roots, for what seemed like a decade. (In the stone age you lose track of time.) I needed a dentist as much as a manicure or pedicure. And I came to realize with a vengeance why longevity was not a feature of early human life. (It’s not all that much fun to outlive your teeth anyway.)

Now I live my life like a warrior. I know it is a pastime, not a hardship; play, not work.

Back in blazing autumnal Connecticut, on the edge of eternity, back with my child, my (dormant) rosebushes, my dog, my poems, my kitchen garden of herbs and spices, I know I am utterly blessed. And not alone.

I am moving toward the light.

Like a moth fluttering my wings, if only to die in a blaze. Writing, painting, praying, making love, dying in the interstices between the light.

As Leila says, “As long as flesh exists, someone will rise from the warmth of the huddle and struggle to her knees to scribble pictures—words—on the side of the cave to please—or irk—the gods.”

My tale has no end. Like Chinese boxes within boxes, like Russian dolls within dolls, like an onion peeling back its skin, we go on revealing our hearts in the hope that they may never stop beating.

Vain hope!

My heart beats in these words.

I (whoever that is) imagine Leila, who imagines you, dear reader, looking for home, for peace, for mother, for father, for God, for Goddess, and hoping to find the key to serenity between the covers of this book. As I did, writing it.

Take your pen or brush and paint yourself out of your own corner. Breathe in. Breathe out. Sit still.

I will help you.

This is both my prayer and my love letter to you.

credits and permissions

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

From the following songs by Bessie Smith: “Blue Blues” © 1931 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1959 Frank Music Corp.; “Dirty No-Gooder’s Blues” © 1929 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1957 Frank Music Corp.; “It Makes My Love Come Down” © 1929 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1957 Frank Music Corp.; “Long Road” © 1931 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1959 Frank Music Corp.; “Please Help Me Get Him off My Mind” © 1928 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1956 Frank Music Corp.; “Reckless Blues” © 1925 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1953 Frank Music Corp.; “Shipwreck Blues” © 1931 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1959 Frank Music Corp.; “Sorrowful Blues” © 1924 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1952 Frank Music Corp.; “Wasted Life Blues” © 1929 Frank Music Corp. © Renewed 1957 Frank Music Corp. International Copyrights Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

From “Love Is Here to Stay” by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Copyright © 1938 by Gershwin Publishing Corporation. Copyright Renewed, Assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

From “Down-Hearted Blues” by Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin. © Copyright 1922 by Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin. © Copyright renewed 1949 and assigned to MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA, Inc. © Copyright 1963 by MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA Inc. Rights administered by MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA Inc. Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved.

From “Gimme a Pigfoot” by Leola B. Grant and Wesley Wilson. © Copyright 1962 by Northern Music Company. Rights administered by MCA Music Publishing, A Division of MCA Inc. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.

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