Read Online Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong - Free Book Online

there’s no stopping her. That was me precisely. Unsinkable, unbeatable, unstoppable.
    After breaking the requisite number of hearts in high school and college, I did in graduate school what no one expected me to do: I married an heir. Thomas Winslow was the scion of a family just as alcoholic as mine but a lot richer. He was studying English lit at Yale, with a special interest in Romantic poetry, and I don’t know whether I married him because he was the tallest guy I’d ever dated (six-feet-six) or because he was blond and blue-eyed (with eyes the color of faded denim) or because he declared his intentions to leave the whole of his legacy to SNCC—there’s an acronym out of the past—or because he could recite “Ode to a Nightingale” on cue. (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains”—how’s that for a premonition?) It could have been any of these reasons. Or perhaps I was just tired of fighting off men, and getting married seemed like the answer. At least it would allow me to concentrate on my work.
    Thom and I were set up by his parents in a mansion in Southport, which we proceeded to fill with radicals, black militants, and war resisters. We painted the windows black, filled the rooms with pop art, and set about drinking and drugging our way out of the good graces of a community that had sheltered Thom’s family for nearly a century. We took a glorious Greek Revival mansion and turned it into a slum—all in the name of art and social revolution. For these were the days of the Beatles, the Vietnam war, happenings, peace marches, and Summers of Love. Thom, like every man I ever loved, was too weak for me, but he adored my work and would do anything to further it. At that time my style was eclectic, to say the least. I produced happenings with Yoko Ono (when she was still with Tony Cox, before she snagged her Beatle)—dubious performances at which the bourgeois participants were forced to strip naked and crawl through canvas tubes or drop their drawers to be photographed mooning at old-fashioned cameras. (Even then I was interested in film stills—which later figured so prominently in my relationship with Dart, as you will presently hear.)
    Thom Winslow aided and abetted me in all these ventures: buying the art, supporting the radicals and their movements, renting the lofts, financing all my brash, harebrained schemes. Because he was so complaisant, I was fairly contemptuous of him. I knew he was hopelessly in love with me—and it made me careless. But then the sixties were careless days. Everyone knew the priceless-ness of everything and the value of nothing. Unlike our younger siblings the yuppies, we claimed contempt for money—but what we really had contempt for was struggle and pain. We expected the world to be handed to us on a silver (albeit graffiti-covered) platter—and for a while it was.
    Thom Winslow was a good, nice, stoned guy. I was his anger—the rebellion he didn’t have the nerve to act out himself. Once, before we split, I overheard him telling a famous art dealer at a dinner party: “All my life, I went to the right schools, the right clubs, the right debutante cotillions, and then I married Leila Sand, née Louise Zandberg!” Thom said this with considerable pride—it was in fact the great achievement of his life at that point—but I was pissed off because he gave away my original name. (Maybe I also heard the undertone of anger that was soon to sunder us.)
     
     
    What a difference twenty years can make! Thom is now married to a lockjawed debutante of his own faith (godless Protestantism) and social class (trust-fund radicalism), who might even have gone to dancing school with him in Southport. They live in Vermont and produce environmentally sound toilets that turn your shit into compost for roses. Heartbroken as he was when I bolted with Elmore Dworkin, the abstract