Free Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong

“natural” labor.
    It was the most glorious time of my life! I lay in bed like a queen, waiting to bear my princesses (amniocentesis had informed me of their health and sex), while Elmore read Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. We both kept notebooks. And we both drew. I kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of Elmore reading to me, listening to my belly, painting in his studio, and he kept a pregnancy notebook in which there are many sketches of me in differing degrees of pregnancy. (I have both notebooks back to back—or belly to belly—on a shelf in my studio in Connecticut, and I still cannot look at them without a twinge. What a blessed, blissed time that was! How could it have ended?)
    It began to end on August 1, when, the pregnancy having been endangered by the rupturing of the amniotic sac, it was decided by us and by our surrealistic doctor—Dr. Breton, believe it or not!—to bring the little sweeties into the world by caesarean.
    I went into the OR an artist and a lover and came out an artist and a mother. From the moment those little pink twins were delivered to me in their little pink blankets, the universe of love began to shift—irrevocably.
    Or perhaps it was not only parenthood that began to erode the marriage. Perhaps it was the fact that my star was in the ascendancy while Elmore’s was in eclipse. On the crest of the interest in women’s art generated by the women’s movement, my paintings (which at that time were erotic canvases of ordinary objects—shells, flowers, stones, bones, made into monumental icons in a manner reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s) began to generate a great amount of interest, at a time when Elmore’s Hans Hofmann-like abstractions were beginning to seem passé. Or perhaps it was alcoholism, for Elmore was drinking more and more heavily. Or else he was drinking the same as always, yet had crossed that invisible line. It is hard to say just which of these three factors delivered the coup de grace.
    We moved back to New York, set up house, studio, and nursery in the loft Dart now uses for his liaisons, and began the challenge of raising twins, managing twin careers, and battling the New York art world.
    Suddenly I was the token woman artist of the moment, the exception that proved the rule, the flavor of the month. Vaginal art was in, and my forms—shells or bones, flowers or stones—seemed to be what everyone required. The fact that I had two beautiful twin daughters didn’t hurt, either. Photographed like a double madonna in my studio before a fuchsia lily’s painted lips, I represented the perfect image of the artist for that vaginal age. I blossomed and Elmore sulked. Less and less was his tongue felt on my clit or his cock on my buttocks.
    Less and less did we sing “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” More and more did we find excuses to go to dinner parties alone, to complain of each other to our friends, to snap at each other in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the nursery.
     
     
    Who can say why a marriage breaks down? The reasons for it are as ineffable as the reasons a couple is created in the first place. We live in a world in which all the rules of love and marriage have changed drastically and continue to change in ever-shortening cycles. Marriage used to be for the having and growing of children; now there are few marriages that can withstand the pressures of those events. Children are pesky interruptions to addiction and narcissism, the twin obsessions of our age. If one child is an interruption—imagine two! For the fact is that nature has made human beings too complex and too intelligent for their own good. We are creatures desperately in need of priorities in order to thrive, even survive, and in the modern age, our priorities have grown too murky. Love is too mutable a thing to live for. And art is too lonely. Love and art are sufficient. But when one artist is a woman and the other is a man, whose work shall come