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Authors: Erica Jong
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shocks down his spine—as if the kundalini were rising. And I could feel them in my spine too—so connected are we. When we were able to have genital sex after that, he said, “It feels so localized compared to before.” Intercourse produces an orgasm in the pelvic area, but other kinds of sex produce it all over the body—and mind. Or maybe it is just our desire to merge that is so strong. In bed we laugh and argue and have fun. We talk about everything. He provokes me with his jokes. I provoke him with mine. By the time we go skin to skin, we are so close already that we have no boundaries.
We need to take days out of our “normal” lives. We need to go to Venice or India or Machu Picchu. We need to dock our sailboat in an unknown port. We need to touch each other riding on waves.
Before Martha Stewart was a convicted felon or had sprouted synthetic angel wings from going to jail for a few months, she was a college classmate of mine who became a caterer who became a conglomerate and who was famous in Connecticut for treating her employees like disposable paper plates. I have no idea whether she still goes around telling everyone I ruined her marriage, but I do wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me. Actually, I believe I had very little to do with the problems in her marriage. I was just a pawn in a power struggle, a spear-carrier in her opera.
Simone de Beauvoir, one of my literary heroines, once wrote that when she embarked on writing about her life, she felt she had begun “a somewhat rash adventure.” It cannot be otherwise. One’s life is full of mortifications, blind fumblings in the dark. It is terrible to have to write them down—especially when you have pledged honesty—to the point of embarrassment.
Martha Kostyra was very pretty when I first saw her at Barnard. I knew she “had made” Glamour magazine’s college issue, an envied desideratum of my day. She was blond and tall and had married while still in school. Like most Barnard girls, she was fiercely independent and had a life apart from the college. Barnard was no bubble. In those days it was a commuter college. Lots of students were married and some had kids. It was a college for smart outsiders—which is probably why it has produced so many writers.
I didn’t meet her again until she had become a caterer in Connecticut. I was living in the next town, and we had several friends in common whose sons’ bar mitzvahs she catered, with elegant hors d’oeuvres like caviar wasted on thirteen-year-olds. She had a rare attention to detail. Her food was delicious. It was also extremely expensive.
Her husband was a publisher of illustrated books, who was just then enjoying a great success with a book called Gnomes. It had humorous illustrations of all sorts of little creatures—gnomes, elves, sprites and fairies. Each of these creatures satirized a recognizable contemporary creature complete with his or her accoutrements.
Gnomes was the sort of book no one could have predicted would be a blockbuster. Both the author and the illustrator were obscure, but somehow the satire and fantasy worked. And now there were gnome dolls, gnome cereals, gnome clothes, gnome pop-up books.
One night Martha, her husband, Andy Stewart, and my third husband, Jonathan Fast, and I were at the same dinner party in the country. Her husband began talking about doing a sequel to Gnomes — a book about witches. I had just published Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, in which Fanny becomes a witch, a pirate, a highwaywoman and a high-class eighteenth-century London hooker. I had steeped myself in research about witchcraft and paganism for Fanny. I was convinced that most of the things written about witches and witch hunts were dead wrong. In my research notebook for Fanny, I’d written:
Witchcraft—another name for the survival of paganism under the cover of Christianity in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.
We need to take days out of our “normal” lives. We need to go to Venice or India or Machu Picchu. We need to dock our sailboat in an unknown port. We need to touch each other riding on waves.
Before Martha Stewart was a convicted felon or had sprouted synthetic angel wings from going to jail for a few months, she was a college classmate of mine who became a caterer who became a conglomerate and who was famous in Connecticut for treating her employees like disposable paper plates. I have no idea whether she still goes around telling everyone I ruined her marriage, but I do wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me. Actually, I believe I had very little to do with the problems in her marriage. I was just a pawn in a power struggle, a spear-carrier in her opera.
Simone de Beauvoir, one of my literary heroines, once wrote that when she embarked on writing about her life, she felt she had begun “a somewhat rash adventure.” It cannot be otherwise. One’s life is full of mortifications, blind fumblings in the dark. It is terrible to have to write them down—especially when you have pledged honesty—to the point of embarrassment.
Martha Kostyra was very pretty when I first saw her at Barnard. I knew she “had made” Glamour magazine’s college issue, an envied desideratum of my day. She was blond and tall and had married while still in school. Like most Barnard girls, she was fiercely independent and had a life apart from the college. Barnard was no bubble. In those days it was a commuter college. Lots of students were married and some had kids. It was a college for smart outsiders—which is probably why it has produced so many writers.
I didn’t meet her again until she had become a caterer in Connecticut. I was living in the next town, and we had several friends in common whose sons’ bar mitzvahs she catered, with elegant hors d’oeuvres like caviar wasted on thirteen-year-olds. She had a rare attention to detail. Her food was delicious. It was also extremely expensive.
Her husband was a publisher of illustrated books, who was just then enjoying a great success with a book called Gnomes. It had humorous illustrations of all sorts of little creatures—gnomes, elves, sprites and fairies. Each of these creatures satirized a recognizable contemporary creature complete with his or her accoutrements.
Gnomes was the sort of book no one could have predicted would be a blockbuster. Both the author and the illustrator were obscure, but somehow the satire and fantasy worked. And now there were gnome dolls, gnome cereals, gnome clothes, gnome pop-up books.
One night Martha, her husband, Andy Stewart, and my third husband, Jonathan Fast, and I were at the same dinner party in the country. Her husband began talking about doing a sequel to Gnomes — a book about witches. I had just published Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, in which Fanny becomes a witch, a pirate, a highwaywoman and a high-class eighteenth-century London hooker. I had steeped myself in research about witchcraft and paganism for Fanny. I was convinced that most of the things written about witches and witch hunts were dead wrong. In my research notebook for Fanny, I’d written:
Witchcraft—another name for the survival of paganism under the cover of Christianity in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.
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