Free Seducing the Demon by Erica Jong Page B

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