Authors: Erica Jong
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Sexuality, #Literary Collections, #Essays
When I moved to another city at the end of that year, I purposely did not leave a forwarding address registered with the post office or a new phone number with PacBell, because I didn’t want him to be able to find me. I didn’t want to hear again that the best sex I’d ever had would probably never be repeated—at least not with that particular and willing partner. I sensed that most of the men I would eventually meet would not be interested in the kind of sex that had taken me the farthest. It was too far out on the edge, too dangerous. That, of course, was what had made it the most thrilling sex ever.
Rosemary Daniell
You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.
—ISADORA DUNCAN
R
ecently, a friend suggested that I cleanse myself—as she had—of former lovers by burning a candle for everyone I’d ever slept with, and then writing prayers for them and scattering or burning the ashes. “You
must
do it!” she exhorted, her face glowing. “It’s so freeing—and until you do, they’re still zapping your energy, taking up room inside your head!”
“I couldn’t possibly do that—there would be too many,” I said, recalling the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s after my third divorce when I spread my legs and my affections, briefly, to many. What I didn’t add was that I
liked
their spirits inside me—it’s cozy in there, a delicious mush, and getting rid of them would feel like losing riches.
Call me a slut—and I’m sure many have—but I’m one of those women who literally can’t remember all the men I’ve slept with (and barely all the women). And that, on reflection, should cause me to flush with shame. But it doesn’t. Instead, when I do—rarely—look back on my many lovers, I’m suffused instead with a feeling of wealth—of having won the memory jackpot; like an aquarium full of exotic fish, I see them swimming, a school of beautiful creatures, flashing by so fast I can hardly catch a glimpse of any certain one.
So instead, considering myself, as actress Catherine Deneuve said, to be “too young for regrets,” I stick to my credo that says it’s the things we
don’t do
we regret. Guilt is one of those useless emotions I refuse to indulge. Nor was I one of those women who repents, giving up freedom for the security of home and hearth. During that period between my third and fourth marriages, I got a lot of “strange,” as we say in the South. And, as southern men always chivalrously add, “The worst I ever had was wonderful.”
On those occasions today when I actually run into one of my former lovers—the literary community is a small town—I feel the flash of our special bond. When I hear that one or another of them has died, I experience a sudden sadness, a pang that goes deep. We shared something real—even if not “love.”
In addition to sleeping with men, I’ve also married a lot of them. I married for the first time at sixteen, my excuse being that I had to escape my abusive, alcoholic father. At sixteen, I didn’t notice that I was exchanging one raging man for another. Next came the staid-to-the-point-of-boring young architect my grandmother called “good husband material.” He excelled at laying neat squares of zoysia grass in our suburban front yard. The third, an Ivy league-educated poet-cum-Boston Jewish Prince, could turn his back in bed with the best of them.
At first, during the years following my third divorce—my three kids had left home and I was living alone for the first time—the men I chose were artists, with an occasional psychologist thrown in, men I thought reflected my interests in truth and beauty, but who, I quickly learned, were also skilled at wounding me. (Once, a psychiatrist canceled our date, saying that after reading my first book, which was full of feminist rage and sexuality, he was afraid to go out with me. After our failed rendezvous, a semi-famous poet said he couldn’t get it up because of my “rhetoric.” I was tired of the clash of egos, the competition, among my male peers. Indeed I was discovering the truth of biographer Judith Thurman’s statement about Colette, that “a man who was worthy of her would have been the road to perdition.” It would have led to submission.
I left the so-called spiritually evolved men behind, and with the one goal of getting laid, began choosing from among the Others—those totally outside my class and experience. They were Too Young. They were like the decades-younger man who heard my adult daughter call me Mother and asked if that were my nickname. Or Too Dumb—like the hunky oil rigger who had seduced me on my second night aboard the oil rig where I had gone to work and clearly to get laid. Too Incomprehensible, as in the Yugoslavian ship captain with whom I learned it wasn’t really necessary to be able to exchange a word of English. When I took him to a gay women’s bar, he exclaimed: “Just like Yugoslavia!” Too Shady, too outside the law, like The Pirate, who conducted strange business in Belize and sometimes showed up with Hispanic bodyguards. Too Uneducated, like the swarthy younger man, exotic as a black orchid, who worked in a porn shop by day and as a male stripper at night, then sweetly cooked me meals, waiting for my approval—the one my women friends scorned, then went to see perform, stuffing dollar bills into his G-string.
The rules of seduction with these men were simple—look good, smell good—perfume, a low-necked blouse, a flower in my hair would do it—and listen, endlessly listen. It should have made my feminist heart cringe but it didn’t. (Though recently, viewing
The Girl Friend Experience,
in which real-life escort and porn star Sasha Grey listens, and listens and listens to one man after another, never revealing anything about herself, I winced. I remembered myself listening to endless talk about Vietnam, Iraq, vengeful ex-wives, and ungrateful children, my eyes riveted on theirs in order meet my ends.)
After all, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, I didn’t have to live with them; I didn’t even have to make them dinner, and being a good dancer was right up there on my list with great sex. Indeed I considered my new approach to be a form of simplification. Besides, as a writer, I could chalk it up to “research,” just like the gig on the oil rig. During that period, I said I was a schoolteacher instead of a writer, not wanting to intimidate them. And even when they did find out about my rarefied occupation, they appeared unfazed. It was as though they didn’t even know what a writer was—I could have said I was a peacock or from Mars—or better yet, a stripper—and they would have remained as undeterred as I was.
And believe me—some of those who were best, the most imaginative, in bed had
none
of the qualities a more sensible woman might look for in a man. But that didn’t matter—in fact, the more inappropriate they were, the better. Besides retaining my personal freedom, my one goal was excitement. Without even meaning to, I had become a risk taker, a camoufleur. My erotic life was my own Mount Everest, and I wanted adventure above all.
But in the midst of these escapades, something strange happened. The delectable lifestyle I had devised for myself began to feel wearing, repetitive. Unbelievably—this was something I had never imagined—I began to feel an ennui setting in during sex with each new man.
Then, as the Goddess would have it, along came Zane.
Zane was also one of the “inappropriate” ones—a sexy, hard-drinking paratrooper fifteen years my junior. When our gaze met across a bar in 1981, I was riveted by his steel blue eyes, the Marlboro Man crinkles around them, his happy, inebriated grin. With his red-gold hair, he looked like a bronze god, or one of the muscular angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His ragged T-shirt and cutoffs, his flip-flops, only enhanced his masculine charm, and as we talked, then danced, my hand caressing his hard, tattooed bicep, he sang “When a man loves a woman” in my ear. I quickly sized him up as a great one-night stand. When he invited me to go to his nearby apartment, where he could change in order to take me somewhere nicer, I murmured yes into his warm chest. Once there, I lay back on the waterbed, and he fell on top of me, where, with variations, he stayed until morning.
The next day, Zane visited my little Victorian flat and, wandering into my study, found the title page for my next book,
Sleeping with Soldiers,
stuck into my Hermes manual typewriter. I considered the title to be metaphorical, a play on the men I’d met—and fucked—on the oil rig. But now, it was about to be made manifest.
That night we sat on my couch, drinking Jamaican rum and talking without turning on the lights. He told me about his pending divorce, his psychotherapy, how much he loved his family in North Carolina. He had been the star football player in high school. He described his desire to join the French Foreign Legion, but he had become a paratrooper instead, and how he had wanted to go to Vietnam, only to be talked out of it by his dad—something he still regretted, and that was unimaginable to me, a war protester. A week later, he called to say he’d read my memoir,
Fatal Flowers,
the book I’d written about my southern mother’s life and suicide, and my own life as an unrepentant rebel. It was a book that had scared the pants off lesser men—but not Zane. And though I still believed that whatever happened between us, I would be able to keep him at arm’s length, something in my armored heart moved.
Little did I know that I’d just met a man with at least as much, if not more, determination than I had, as well as the one who would teach me just how powerless I really was.
First came his desire to live with me, whether or not I wanted a man around. We were already sleeping with each other every night, he reasoned, and within weeks, when he said he didn’t want to sign another year’s lease on his place, I gave in, still in the first flush of our passion.
After a few glowing months, we embarked on what would become years of drinking, fucking, and rage. Our fights, which, fueled by the booze we both drank in quantity, were like World War III and were about everything from how he could possibly be in the U.S. military to whether I had insulted all the housewives in America—e.g, his mother—by abhorring the character Valerie Perrine played in
The Border,
whether I would wear the stockings and garter belts he preferred me in, and often our fights led to bruises and broken furniture. (When I took the footboard of my maple bed in to be repaired for the second time, the carpenter was tactful enough not to ask how this had happened again.)
No longer being able to fuck around felt weird, like an infringement on my personal bill of rights. But, on the other hand, I was as jealous of him as he was of me. Later, when he was deployed to Germany for three years, my sister Anne—privy to my previous life—was amazed that I was faithful to him. She didn’t know that he called me every Saturday morning at 9
A.M.
, undoubtedly thinking there was no way I was going to talk to him with another man in the room.
Then there was our mutual desire for sensation, even sleaze. When I visited him in Europe, we delighted in an uncensored exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, a live sex show in Hamburg, and visiting the red light district in Amsterdam, where he bought me a pair of red stilettos. Like me, he loved art, and we walked in awe through Käthe Kollwitz’s house in Berlin, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.
And through it all we fought—on the Kurfurstendam in Berlin, on a street corner in Amsterdam, and on a boat ride up the Seine. Apparently, that night our eyes met in that bar we had seen the potential not only for great sex but also for venting the rage we had both brought into the relationship with us.
“If you ever want to marry again, you’d better do it before that book comes out,” a woman friend warned me in 1984, just before
Sleeping with Soldiers,
the story of my years of sexual freedom, was published. But Zane was unfazed, despite the fact that I had told the less-than-flattering truth about him and our relationship. Three years after the book came out, and six years into all this fun, like a snake coiled and ready to strike at the proper moment, he gave me the ultimatum: either marry or give up him, his beautiful body. So, despite my determination to remain free, I let him—after weeks of anxiety—put the ring on my finger. I even allowed him to lead me into a pretty little cottage no longer within walking distance of the bars where I once liked to hang out, and where I daily fought a losing battle against being domesticated. Soon I was thinking about what was in the refrigerator for dinner, looking out the window in amazement to see my sex
objet
mowing our lawn. I was losing every battle about visiting his blue-collar family in North Carolina, where the TVs in every room and the low ceilings made me realize almost to the point of nausea what I had gotten myself into.
Underlying all this—every argument, every separation—was the sex and rage to which we had both become addicted. Our relation-ship was like a postcard I had once read—
Having you helps me deal with the problems you bring me
. By then, I could no more think of doing without him or his passion for me, than cutting off my own hand.
Yet as all this was going on, another story was unfolding, one that, even more than our relationship, would wreak havoc on my treasured freedom: I discovered that my daughter Lily, living in New York, was addicted to heroin. A few years later I faced the fact that my son David was paranoid schizophrenic. For the next two decades—a period that will take another book to recount—not once did Zane protest my caring for them, taking them in when they needed us. A Taurus and a family animal, he became the one person in my family who supported my efforts to save them. Despite all, Zane had passed The Test, a test that was more important to me than any other.
Just when I thought I had a sex object for life—after all, he was fifteen years younger!—Zane’s hard-driving life began to take its toll. In 1991, he was an infantry platoon sergeant in Desert Storm, with friendly fire deaths and suicides in his unit. Back in Germany, he began the drinking unto oblivion that would lead to the first of four rehabs, and later, to inpatient treatment for PTSD. In 1999, at age forty-eight, he had a heart attack, and then, six months later, a quadruple bypass for a triple blockage called a Widow Maker. As I sat beside his hospital bed, the love I felt for him surpassed the simple passion we had known through the years. At one point, when a staph infection invaded the site of his incision, he lay for a week with his chest open, his heart exposed, the wound cleaned and the dressings changed every six hours. I would press my cheek against his when he called out to me, and sit beside him as he endured the claustrophobia of the hyperbaric chamber he was slid into to have his infection bombarded with pure oxygen. His body and soul were mine, and I wanted to protect, enfold them.