How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US

The Corniche glides up, a chariot from another planet; Valerian genuflects; and off we go in a cloud of musk and carbon monoxide. At lunch we talk about men, jealousy, marriage, mothers, poetry, Bloomsbury, the vintages of wines. We consume two bottles of Mouton-Cadet—Rosanna’s favorite. Or rather, she consumes them and I help a little. Not being Jewish, she has a hollow leg. As I spill out my story of Bennett’s betrayal —again!—she takes my hand. I feel mothered, cared for, vulnerable, understood. And I go on drinking wine.

And then the chauffeur is waiting and we go back to her “studio.” How easy everything is with a waiting chauffeur! How little one has to think, to consider, to obsess.

More wine, more talk, hot rock-music at first, then Cole Porter. Rosanna has the situation well in hand. Her face betrays no emotion but calm, and understanding. I am the child again, coming to mother with my scraped knee. Suddenly Bennett is nothing more than a scraped knee! A little injury on the smooth skin of my life.

Rosanna excuses herself, goes to the bedroom, comes back wearing a caftan slit to the waist and lots more musk. The top of the caftan opens when she sits down next to me on the couch. I see her small pointed breasts and want to touch them. She sees me looking and reads my mind. She takes my hand and guides it to her breast. The nipple is bumpy and wrinkled, but the underside is smooth, cool, sleek. Rosanna strokes my hair, then my cheek, then she tilts my chin upward so she can kiss me. I feel I am kissing my mirror-image, smooth womanlips, a trifle thin, cool, safe.

Here is a woman who addresses her letters “Dear Heart” and signs them “Fondly”; she makes love the same way—as if it were a course taught at boarding school. Does my heart pound and my cunt drip because of the exhilaration of breaking a taboo? Because I am hot for Rosanna? Who can possibly tell? My husband is a Freudian analyst who takes a harsh line on bisexual shenanigans. That’s certainly part of the thrill. He’d kill me if he knew. Bennett has never much liked going down on me; Rosanna loves it. I lie there trying to think and trying not to think, trying to suspend judgment and judging like crazy, trying to justify and feeling no need to justify.... All these feelings rush at me at once. Meanwhile, she is gently nibbling my clitoris with her perfect, capped teeth, sliding one manicured finger in and out of my cunt, and stroking my nipples with her other hand, on whose fourth finger she wears a seal ring with her family crest. “Rush-Poland” meets the DAR! Brownsville meets Lakeshore Drive! Central Park West meets Beekman Place!

I shut my eyes and try to feel nothing but sensation, wine blurriness, and the concentric rings of pleasure in my cunt—but, inevitably, there is something more. She is probing the center of my Jewishness; I am being raped by old money.

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