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

expressionist, he was able to turn it into compost. It takes merde to grow roses, as the French say.
    Which brings us back to skinlessness—which I was seeking when I fell in love with Elmore, who was older, far more established, and knew everything there was to know about cunnilingus (tongue tricks he had learned during his salad days, to mix a metaphor, in Paris). I met Elmore, fell in love with his paintings and his tongue (though perhaps not in that order). It was 1974; I had received enough recognition as a painter to be earning a good living from my work, be written up in The New Yorker and Vogue ( People and Architectural Digest would come later). It was not the household-word sort of fame but a classier, more discreet variety—fame in the art world before the art world became a total media circus.
    I met Elmore at a dinner party in New York that Thom had not come to because he had a terrible case of the flu. What a wife I was! At seven o’clock I left my husband alone on Park Avenue coughing his guts out, and at eleven I left a dinner party with a hirsute artist twenty years my senior. By midnight I was having my pussy licked into purring ecstasy in a loft on John Street. By 3:30 A.M. I was home in bed on Park Avenue again, embracing my soon-to-be ex-husband, without even the good grace to feel guilty. In the meantime I had admired, from the windows of Elmore’s loft, that pink-as-a-baby’s-bottom look the sky gets during a snowstorm, and I had equally admired Elmore’s cock and paintings. In one evening I was introduced to the New York School’s most promising younger artist, multiple orgasms, and Humboldt County sinsemilla.
    “Have a good time, honey?” Thom asked, rolling over and coughing convulsively.
    “Mmmmm,” I said, and he drew my hand to his penis. We fucked like mad then, our coupling made more passionate by the unmistakable—if ghostly—presence of a third person in our bed. Never had I enjoyed Thom more. But still I had not come to skinlessness.
    My marriage to Elmore, the birth of the twins, our inevitable parting, cannot be given short shrift. I always feel that when the parents-to-be of extraordinary children meet—whether at a dinner party, at a health spa, at AA, or wherever it is fashionable for the young and nubile to meet nowadays—angels, fates, and sibyls (painted by Michelangelo, or at least by Tiepolo or Veronese) are hovering on clouds above them and nudging them toward the most convenient counterpane. All of nature is in a fury to reproduce. Why should human beings think themselves exempt? Elmore’s loft, Elmore’s tongue, and Elmore’s drugs (not to mention Thom’s flu) were merely snares to get the twins out of the ether and onto the planet as soon as possible.
    At the moment one’s children are conceived, one ceases to be an ego and becomes merely a cosmic tube, a funnel into timelessness. That, I suspect, is why having children is such a critical stage in one’s development. With parenthood comes our first taste of egolessness, our joining of the cosmic dance. From the moment I opened my thighs to Elmore Dworkin in that loft on John Street, my marriage to Thom Winslow was doomed. Perhaps it was doomed anyway—for the twins were dying to be born—and it was the twins as much as I who picked their father.
    Looking back now that the twins are ten (they were my bicentennial babies, born in the bicentennial year), I realize that they had to be fathered by a hirsute Jew of my blood and bone—another dark-eyed anarchist whose ancestors hailed from the Ukraine. I could no more have brought WASP babies into the world than I could have stopped drawing and painting. I remember once when I was pregnant with Mike and Ed (Elmore and I lived that year in Tuscany, in a farmhouse in Strada in Chianti), watching an RAI documentary on Auschwitz, which showed the destruction of Jewish babies like the two I was carrying, and weeping with joy and pain to be replenishing the Jewish