Seducing the Demon (9 page)

In the morning I crept out of Stewart’s room hoping not to be seen by anyone. But the deed had been done. My one-night stand must have gone home and immediately told the wife he’d slept with me—which was apparently the whole point of the exercise.

From then on she never lost an opportunity to tell the world: ERICA JONG RUINED MY MARRIAGE. ERICA JONG RUINED MY LIFE. She told mutual friends, trashy journalists, Barnard alumnae who had gathered to celebrate her. Sometimes she said, “That woman ruined my life!” Whenever she saw me, she gave me a killing look.

And who could blame her? I was wrong. My demon made me do it. Sleeping with married men is always trouble. I have forsworn it.

If I could take this incident back, I would. My regret is Dantean—and not just because Martha keeps telling tabloid journalists about this twenty-six-year-old gaffe and denouncing me as if she had no faults herself. But I accept the blame. I was always besotted by books and anyone who made them. Remember the story of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s
Inferno
?

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover. Whitman knew that.

I pick up my facsimile edition of
Leaves
of Grass, given to me by the previous publisher. This is the same edition Whitman sent to Emerson.

I read:

The writer’s job is to absorb. Plenitude and amplitude are our watchwords. We are “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.” We know that mistakes are part of wisdom and wisdom is made of plenty of foolishness.

If you learn to loaf and invite your soul, you will make mistakes you wish you could cancel with a word. You cannot. You can only confess and hope for the mercy of heaven.

“Oh, come on,” my editor says. “You don’t regret any of those things, Without them, you wouldn’t be the person you are today. You might not want to do them now, but those adventures were part of your life. Don’t disown them. You are a seductress. You always wanted to be a seductress.”

“O.K.,” I say. I realize he’s right—which is why he’s the editor for me. The most uncomfortable things I did, I did knowing in my gut that I would write about them.

“Amen!” says my demon. “Amen!”

And thunder breaks and lightning flashes because demons aren’t allowed to say “Amen.”

 

 

Whenever I see Martha on TV, in tabloids, in magazines, I think, Does she trust anyone? It’s hard to trust, and I didn’t make it any easier for her. When you can’t trust anyone, there’s no choice but to wind up alone. A blasted marriage can also blast your heart.

 

 

When I met Ken, my fourth husband, I was not good at trusting men. I had been hurt too many times—even though I now see that a lot of the pain was self-inflicted. I had made what I thought was a lifelong commitment to Molly’s father, Jonathan, and when we both blew that (open marriage is a crock), I developed a headache that lasted for six months. I couldn’t imagine ever trusting anyone—or myself—again.

Ken struck me as the smartest man I’d ever met and the most anxious. When he tipped his chair back in the restaurant we first dined in together, I thought, He’s going to smash his head open and then where will I be?

“Don’t do that!”

“Do what?” he asked in a total fog. He rattled on describing his life to me—how he got kicked out of Brown for not going to class because he was doing drugs, how he made movies for a while with Brian De Palma, how he went back to school and law school and fell in love with his métier, how he married twice, then lived with someone for ten years and helped raise her daughter, how he initially didn’t want to meet me because I was “famous” but was glad he did. All his feelings tumbled out. He was not playing games. He was all there.

When you have been dating the sort of withholding men who go for well-known women, this is refreshing. Besides, he was really cute—big and bearish and bearded with warm brown eyes and shaggy brown hair. But what I really liked was his openness. On our second date, he took me to a Yiddish play and watched me intently to see how much
mamaloschen
I got.

“This is a test, isn’t it?”

He nodded yes.

“Well, did I pass?”

He nodded yes again.

If you had asked me whether I knew Yiddish, I would not have said yes, but apparently I knew more than I thought.

When I told him I could never marry again because it would interfere with my writing, he swore it would not. When I hesitated, he offered me a written release. He scribbled on a napkin: “Write anything you want about me!”

He knew who I was and loved me. But still I found it hard to trust. For ten years we kept our property separate—except for the apartment we bought together. But little by little, separate stashes seemed a waste of time. Inevitably, things got mixed and muddled. Then, on our tenth anniversary, we burned our prenup in a wok with all our dearest friends watching.

Shortly after that, Ken nearly died of an aortic aneurysm. I rushed him to New York Hospital where he was lucky enough to find on duty a surgeon who specialized in aortic repair. It wasn’t his time. He survived. The least important thing was whether our assets were mixed. By the time he recovered, our relationship had gone to another level. I knew I didn’t want to wake up or go to sleep without him. Money was the least of it.

Even Barbra Streisand remarried not long after she asked me at a party, “How come you always remarry?”

“You gotta trust somebody,” I said.

“But where do you meet men?”

“I don’t know. I just like men.”

“Is that all there is to it?” she asked.

“Who knows?”

But trusting yourself to trust somebody is key.

 

 

For me, poetry always comes fast and furiously when I’m in love—or at least lust. It’s notoriously hard for poets to tell the difference. When I first fell in love with my husband Ken, I wrote poems for him.

A Venetian cad even inspired me to attempt love poems in Italian. Since he used to call me
pane caldo
(hot bread), I already had the central metaphor.

The point is—lust provokes poetry. It can be lust for a man, a woman, a child or God, but it’s hard to propel the recalcitrant pen along the recalcitrant page without it. Think of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Petrarch’s, or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s.

Why is lust so critical? I really don’t know. Our bodies may not last forever, but while we have them, they are heat-seeking missiles. We are hot-blooded mammals and whatever makes us hotter inspires us to poetry, song, fiction, fecundity. I don’t suppose reptiles write love poetry. But maybe they do and we just can’t understand it. When the sun shines on the crocodile’s skin, perhaps she sings strange songs of love with her toothy mouth. She loves the sun the way I love men. I tried women a couple of times, but it just seemed too cozy. It was like hot cocoa and angel food cake. Men are more like pungent hunks of meat. Their bulk, their smell, their muscles turn me on. Women are too delicate, too sweet, too (dare I say it?) empathic. There—I have said it. My lust is politically incorrect. Whenever I had sex with a woman, I liked it fine—but without the fierce drive to do it again. As you age, heterosexual men grow scarce (your contemporaries die off), but there are so many lovable women. Who knows what the future holds? I have learned never to say never.

Once I was in lust with a poet I cannot name. He was and is married. I was not at the time. He wrote me the sexiest letters full of black garter belts and rosy rumps and black stockings and dirty poems and references to
Story of O
—which we both found sexy—even though I am not a masochist (though he may well be a sadist). Of course I hardly knew him, but I knew his work. It was also highly erotic, enormously yearning—both the poems and the novels. I made plans to meet him in London while I was promoting a book for my British publisher, who put me up at a circular-bedroomed suite at the Ritz on Piccadilly.

Waiting for this assignation, I ruminated about the poet. I had made the date with him six months before during a lull in my erotic life. I had just spent most of the summer in Venice, where I fell in love with an adorable Italian who sailed his vintage sailboat down the Dalmatian coast but would never take me along. (Did he have a Croatian cookie on the side?)

So I met the sexy British poet in the sexy hotel suite in London. His letters had been erotic masterpieces, but in life he had an ugly little cardboard suitcase and he was so nervous he shook. His teeth were Englishly crooked, his shoulders were hunched and he smelled of moth-balled tweed and cheap pipe tobacco. His eyes were intensely black and his hair was white. Whenever I looked at him, all I could think of was that he was not the sailing Italian.

The hotel intimidated the poet with its elegance, so, at his suggestion, we went out to dinner in a cruddy restaurant in the neighborhood where he ordered sour plonk. (Not that they had any other kind at that dive.) He couldn’t eat, but he drank a lot. The food was awful, so I suggested we go back to my suite where we ordered champagne and hors d’oeuvres.

He suggested we read each other poems since that was how we met—through poetry. But he couldn’t stop trembling even after all that booze.

He read. I read. We talked a little. He spoke of his son, who had been accused of rape “by a rich Jewish girl, with a posh Hampstead house and family connections.”

“You know, of course, that I am Jewish. You seem not to like my tribe much.”

“Oh, no,” he protested. “It was just this girl who tried to put my son in jail.”

“You’re sure he didn’t rape her?”

“Of course. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

I decided he was an anti-Semite and I that wouldn’t sleep with him. I protested that I felt ill and would he leave?

“There’s no train till tomorrow. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Why don’t you find another hotel?”

“I can’t afford it. My wife will know if I put it on a credit card. She’s a schoolteacher and she pays the bills.”

“Where did you
say
you went?”

“Not here,” he said pathetically. “I said I had to meet my publisher in London. I said I was staying in his guest room. Please let me stay here. We’re poets, after all. We’re not bourgeois.”

Speak for yourself, I wanted to say. As for me, I got them “Bourgeois Blues”—with apologies to Leadbelly.

I went into my circular bedroom and locked the heavy concave paneled door. I removed my make-up and washed my face. Why the hell wouldn’t he leave? I put on a bathrobe and thought about him. Was I being too cruel? Was he perhaps just depressed about his son possibly going to jail? Was I seeing anti-Semitism where it was not? Was I being oversensitive? I can be very oversensitive when it comes to anti-Semitism. And England —as my English cousins can tell you—is rife with it. As for the poet, I no longer even
liked
him, let alone lusted for him. But here he was.

I read for a while, then grew upset about his presence in the other room. I wanted him to leave. He made me anxious. I imagined him on the couch, wrapped in his cheap imitation Aquascutum raincoat. I felt like La Belle Dame sans Merci.

I peeked out the door. He looked wretched on the couch, still shivering. Men are so quick to take trains or planes hoping to cheat on their wives, but they really can’t cope. When we decide to cheat, we do it. They just get pathetic or impotent or trembly.

“How are you?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Lonely. Can I sleep with you? I promise nothing will happen.”

Nothing will happen, they say, stepping out of their pants. Nothing will happen, they promise, sticking in their cocks. Nothing will happen, they say, “I’ll take it out before I come.”

So I relented. He got into my bed. Within seconds he had stopped shaking, had an erection and was covering it with a brand-new condom.