Free Inventing Memory by Erica Jong Page B

to say. "But it takes a genius to sell a picture."
    I took him at his word—not recognizing for a very long time that it was my contribution to our partnership that was being maligned.

    One day, I was due to meet Sim down on Orchard Street for one of our sketching and note-taking jaunts, and he did not arrive. I waited for him, got a penny coffee from a vendor, and looked anxiously along the street. But still Sim did not come.
    "I know where he is," said a small voice.
    I wheeled around. It was Tyke, the street Arab, who had trailed me, looking for a tip, some food, errands to run, a mother, a friend.
    "Follow me," he said.
    He led me along Orchard Street, which in those days was a riotous old-country market, almost impassable, with pushcarts, horse-drawn carts, boys carrying towers of tagged garments, dancing street speilers with flying pigtails, frenziedly following the hurdy-gurdy man, market women trundling baskets and barrels. Orchard intersected such streets as Hester and Delancey—all of them lined with tenements, whose roofs and fire escapes held as much teeming humanity in these hot summer days as their crowded railroad flats.
    Tyke led me into a groaning tenement on Delancey. The stairs were dark and garbage-littered. Hungry cats roamed the halls, turning up their clean cat noses at the rotting refuse. The smell made you reel. On the top floor, several curtains had been improvised as doors.
    We entered a darkened room furnished with pillows and opium pipes and crumpled bodies seeking such oblivion as could be found there. Deeper into the den we went, and when our eyes adjusted to the gloom, we saw a warren of little cubbyholes and in each one a waiting girl (or boy—who could tell?), painted like a woman and trussed in corsets, lace, and high button boots.
    Sim was caressing one of these creatures.
    I stood and watched, my eyes burning a hole in his back, as Sim parted the child's legs.
    Suddenly he turned. His face went pale. He started to cough convulsively.
    I pulled money out of my pocket and gave it to the little girl (I had decided it was a girl). Taking Sim's arm, I led him back to my studio.
    Levitsky was not there. To Tyke (who had trailed us home) I gave some pennies and had him guard the front door. Then I locked the door to my studio and led Sim to the Turkish corner.
    It was then that I entered Sim's fantasy and did all the things he dreamed of when he sat with Lucretia, sipping tea, at Fontana di Luna.
    How I knew his fantasies I cannot say, but they rushed into my head as if I knew. I loosened my corset, played with my own breasts, tweaked my nipples, then presented them to his mouth like ripe berries. In a tangle of clothes, we fell back on the scratchy wool of my carpeted couch. His breeches open, my petticoat over my head, he slowly fed on me as if I were all the nourishment he needed. When the throbbing was so intense I thought I'd scream, he entered me and pressed his hardness into the Garden of Eden I had never known existed inside me. I was in blossom. I knew now why I had come to America.

    From then on, Sim became our boarder. Strangely, Levitsky never questioned it. Outwardly, the two men became the greatest of friends. Whenever we could, Sim and I would stoke the fires of our obsessive passion—though never flaunting it before Levitsky. And yet he knew . I told myself it comforted him—as if he were my lover himself—but I was wrong. Surely sex is the province of imps and dybbuks , but the need for possession cannot be eradicated from the human heart.
    Levitsky appeared to cede the field to Sim and seemed content to do so as long as people thought the three of us were lovers. I told myself it was as if Sim relieved him of a burden, as if this strange mé nage à trois fulfilled his own sexuality, as if Sim were somehow his lover too. The truth was, I needed to believe in the two men sharing me and becoming great friends. Since my idol was Emma Goldman—"If I can't dance to it, it's