Fear of Dying. Erica Jong
time I played Sade’s Justine, the twelve-year-old serving maid whose virtu is tested by nuns, monks, cavaliers, comtes—et cetera. Someone had adapted Sade’s Justine into a filthy French movie.
Sade was a revolutionary, of course, with a revolutionary’s detestation of the establishment. Did the monks preach virtue? Then he would preach sin. He was, we know, a member of the National Convention and hated hypocrisy as much as he hated its chief purveyor, the Catholic Church. For which he spent five years in the Bastille and thirteen years in Charenton, the insane asylum. Most of his books were written in jail—a terrific place for a libertine to write. Freedom, after all, is distracting.
In the only known portrait of him—done when he was twenty—he has such a sweet face. Jail may have saved his life in that bloody period when aristocrats were being guillotined. It certainly increased his literary output.
Oh, I had done S&M with the director of that movie—a certain Christian Fleuvier d’Anjou, who claimed to be a comte himself, descended from a distant cousin of Sade. It was a big bore to me—and dangerous to boot. Maybe the girls who’d never heard of “the Divine Marquis” or even L’Histoire d’O were turned on by it—especially if they got cash and prizes along with the stinging butt and reddened clit. But I much preferred soft lights and sweet music—tenderness, even if fake tenderness.
We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in.
“I think it’s not my cup of tea,” I say softly.
“Oh, just try it on,” David pleads. “You never know till you try.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing human is alien to me, but I don’t want to wear that suit. God only knows what the matching headgear is. And I had already tried S&M—as a young actress—with a director who turned out to be a horse’s ass. And violent besides.
“I think I know,” I say, getting up to go. “Thank you so much for the drink.”
“You bitch,” he hisses. “How could you lead me on like this?”
“I thought this was just lunch.”
“I thought you were serious.”
“I thought so too, but I never made any promises.”
He grabs my arm and squeezes it painfully. “I can get younger chicks than you.”
“I’m sure you can—let me go!”
“You’re fifty if you’re a day.”
“Thanks, I’ll tell my plastic surgeon. I’m sure he’ll be pleased.”
And somehow I make it to the door without his touching me again. I run to the elevator in a sweat. He doesn’t follow. I descend to the lobby. I walk several blocks at a trot, always thinking there is a stretch limousine following me. My high heels clatter over the pavement. I am already out of breath.
How could you be so stupid? You know the world is full of crazy people who have learned how to temporarily hide their craziness. Scratch a lover and find a lunatic! And then I flag down a cab and go to see my parents.
“I’m a hundred and ninety-three and half dead!” my father raves. “Same old story.”
Veronica has made him get up and sit at the table for tea and he is pissed off.
“What is the matter with your father?” my mother asks me.
“You married him, I didn’t,” I say.
“But he is so grouchy,” she says. “He’s never been this grouchy.”
I go and kiss my father on his head. “Same old story,” he says dismissively. “I know what you’re here for.”
“What?”
“Money.”
“I am not. I don’t want your money.”
“Bullshit,” my father says, and begins fiddling to turn off his hearing aid.
“Don’t you dare turn off that hearing aid, Mr. Wonder-man,” Veronica says. “Vanessa is here to see you.”
“What for? I’m half dead. I ought to jump out the window.” He gets up and walks toward the dining room window, but Veronica restrains him.
“You ought to count your blessings,” she says. “Look down the street at the homeless people. You got it good. You got to get you some gratitude.”
“Gratitude, platitude,” my father growls.
“At least he can still rhyme,” says my mother.
“Let me go back to bed!” my father screams. “I’ve been awake long enough!” He is Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light, Ivan Ilyich in his black sack.
“He sleeps all the time,” my mother says. “I don’t understand it.”
In movies the dying have long, intense conversations before parting, but it’s not like that in real life—or is it? My father escaped from my mother the only way he could. He was escaping from her in sleep as he had once escaped from her in work.
“I do,” I say. I have only been there five minutes and already I’m longing to leave.
I think of the rubber suit and suddenly begin to laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” my mother asks as my father is frog-marched down the hall to his bedroom, a prisoner in striped pajamas.
“Nothing.”
“Some nothing. Tell me.”
“I’m thinking that if we have to see the world as a tragedy or a comedy, we might as well see it as a comedy. It’s more fun.”
“I agree with you,” my mother says. I long to tell her about the rubber suit. She would see the absurdity of it. Even in her present condition.
My phone vibrates then. I sneak a peek. It’s from my swain with the rubber suit—or at least I think it is.
“You bitch!” he’s texted; the creep now has my cell phone number.
“Are you happy, darling?” my mother suddenly asks. She has become as angelic as my father was demonic.
“Don’t I look happy?” I ask.
“You look worried,” my mother says. “A mother can always tell.”
I go into the other room and call my friend Isadora. “I’m visiting my parents and I need a drink,” I say over the phone.
“That’s the last thing you need. What’s happening?”
“My parents are dying and I met a man who wants me to wear a rubber suit for him.”
Isadora breaks into gales of laughter. “I must have met him too once upon a time—or his twin brother. He’ll do you as little good as a drink.”
“Come—meet me for coffee. We can compare notes.”
When Isadora bounces into the espresso place where we always meet, I’m struck again by her curly blond hair and big smile, as if she is thirty, not sixty. Seeing her makes me feel that getting older is not so terrible.
Isadora and I like to meet in a tiny coffee shop where the espresso is supposed to be the best in the city. It’s a hole in the wall on the Upper East Side but the coffee is indeed extraordinary. We both order lattes.
“Rubber suit?” asks Isadora.
“Rubber suit,” I say.
“How do you know you wouldn’t like it?”
“I know,” I