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

race. This amazed no one more than it did the weeper in question—for I had never been religious in the least (it was, in fact, an article of my sort of Jewish faith to be faithless). But where having babies is concerned, all our conservatism seems to burgeon. Pregnant, I became hyper-Jewish, hyperartistic, hypersensitive. Pregnancy, in short, brought out my true Buddha nature. I only became more myself.
    Was my marriage to Elmore good? At the beginning, it was heavenly. At the end, it was purgatorial—if not quite hellish (hell would come later, with Dart). What could be more joyful than two artists living together, doing their work, nurturing their babies, cooking, loving, walking through the churches and art galleries of Italy?
    We lived in a friend’s farmhouse in Chianti, looked out on fields of silvery olive trees and vines that danced crookedly across the hillsides. We slept every night in each other’s arms—until my pregnancy made that impossible—and then we slept spoonlike, Elmore’s chest to my back and his cock to my buttocks, nudging me from the rear and often waking up inside me.
    Oh, how sweet love is when it is sweet! Two salty, sweaty lovers waking up in a shared bed that is rutted with love. And how rare it is! At the times in our lives when we have it, we scarcely appreciate it. It is appreciated more in the loss than in the having—like so many things we reckless humans have, including our lives.
    I remember us as we were then: Elmore was fifty-two to my thirty-four and as besotted with me as I with him. He wore his dark hair long, his graying beard long, and his red lips poked out of it like a cunt. (Bearded men often have cuntlike mouths; perhaps that is why they so love to eat pussy: it is like kissing themselves in a mirror.)
     
     
    We lived that year in a tangle of thighs, art history, and extra-virgin olive oil. We drank the wine of our own campagna; we slathered olive oil on our own tomatoes. We puttered down to Florence in our old Fiat to stroll arm in arm through the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Pitti; we ate bistecca alla fiorentina (for the sake of the babies) and huge grilled porcini (for the sake of ourselves); and we painted our hearts out in the same drafty studio, Vivaldi and Monteverdi blaring out of the radio.
    We lived for love, for art, for bed, for babies. It is easy to do that in Italy, a country whose priorities are in order—in that order, in fact. I can still remember the rapture in Elmore’s dark eyes as he lay listening to my belly as if to the sound of the sea in a nautilus shell. Our work prospered, our babies grew, our love grew. Our song was “Our Love Is Here to Stay”—and we never doubted for a moment that it was. Ah, the Rockies might crumble, Gibraltar might tumble (“They’re only made of clay . . .”), but our love was here to stay. Or so we thought at the time. Actually, it was our babies who were here to stay.
    I remember the day in July when we loaded up the Fiat with food, clothes, radio, and dog to begin our drive to Switzerland and to the clinic in Lausanne where we had decided the twins should be born. We were both singing (we were often both singing). Life, we thought, held nothing sweeter—and we were right.
    It took us three days to get to Switzerland. We were not racing the clock, because it had long since been decided that when I was eight months pregnant we would drive to Switzerland and stay in a hotel near the clinic—twins are often born prematurely (I might live and paint in Italy, but I would, like Sophia Loren, have my babies born in Switzerland). As it happened, a week or so after we arrived, I started leaking amniotic fluid, and it proved prudent to put me to bed at the clinic to preserve the pregnancy. Elmore and Boner (our German shepherd) just about moved into the clinic with me (the rules being bent, as usual, for the famous), and Elmore read to me while we waited to see whether I should have a caesarean or wait to go into