Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong Page A

Dart. Dolph was a Marxist in the thirties, a war resister in the forties, a heavy user of weed, alcohol, mushrooms, in the fifties, and a Village legend in the psychedelic sixties. He knew everyone—from Edmund Wilson to Ken Kesey, from Henry Miller to Jackson Pollock. On the fringes of every fringe movement of the twentieth century, he could (like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man) say of any counterculture heroine from Louise Nevelson to Margaret Mead: “Honey—I went with her.” He and my mother, Theda (named for Theda Bara, natch), had one of the first “open marriages.” Theirs didn’t work any better than the later ones did. It was patched together with the dubious glue of alcohol, Marxist theory, and me—the lonely only, born when my father was forty-four and my mother twenty-nine, almost an old maid for her generation.
    Oh, I know that Dolph and Theda must have adored me, even as I adore my own twin girls, Edwina and Michaela, but that didn’t make them automatically know how to love me into health. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t even know what health was. Narcissists that they were, absorbed in the drama of their own stormy marriage, they alternately ignored me and treated me like the Wunderkind of the Western world.
    From the time I was four, I was sketching, sketching, sketching; I almost don’t remember a time when I didn’t draw. I could always “get a likeness”—as my father called it. And from the start I picked up all his tricks: origami paper sculpture, bending silver wire as if it were saltwater taffy, making collages of cloth and paper, newsprint, plastic, and silk.
    By the time I took the test for Music and Art, when I was twelve, I was a better artist than most of the teachers and they knew it. The oohing and aahing over my portfolio was fierce. I went to M&A in the mythic old days, when my schoolmates were legends-to-be like Charlie Gwathmey, Isadora Wing, and Tony Roberts. I wasn’t particularly happy there—but who is happy at fifteen?
     
    Isadora: Better get this right, kiddo, if you are going to do the unspeakable thing of introducing me into the book as a real character!
    Leila: Who, then, is the potter and who the pot?
    Isadora: When in doubt, quote Omar Khayyám! But the fact is you know damn well you have given Our Heroine an upside-down version of your own high school years. You were the good girl, so you made her bad. Any reader can spot these fictional reversals a mile away. You’ll have to do better than that.
    Leila: Just wait, it gets better.
     
    M&A stood then at the top of a wino-studded hill at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, and I took the exhibitionist-studded subway down from Dyckman Street to get there. The school was enveloped in a gemütlich haze of marijuana and black jazz.
    At M&A I learned four things: that Bessie Smith knew all there was to know about womanhood; that blacks had the secret key to America’s heart of darkness; that The Land of Fuck was expensive but worth the price; and that an artist was always an outcast and a rebel in bourgeois America—no matter what anyone said.
    At M&A I dressed all in black (stockings to stocking cap), smoked Gauloises, and had a tall boyfriend from Harlem called Snack—a saxophone player who taught me all about jazz and weed and sex. I changed my name from Louise Zandberg to Leila Sand (to my father’s horror and my mother’s delight—George Sand was one of her heroines), and I learned how to ring my eyes with kohl, rouge my nipples (not that my pink fifteen-year-old nipples needed rouging), and cut my hair in a shiny helmet à la Louise Brooks (one of my early idols). The hair was Pre-Raphaelite red (Venetian, as Mr. Donegal would have it), but the style was pure 1920s. I was the Greenwich Village kid—a regular at the Peacock, the White Horse, the Lion’s Head—as I shuttled between Dyckman Street, where my mom lived (in increasing chaos and squalor), and Eighth Street, where my dad lived over the