Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong

take me again. Now the images are starting to unravel, like the woolen sleeves of a sweater let slip from the circular knitting needles. I try to crawl back inside the dream, if only to understand it—but the dream is gone. I am alone in my bed in the green hills of Connecticut, and where Dart is, God alone knows.
    I imagine my bed as an intergalactic starship. In this white iron bed, in this white clapboard house, I am sailing through the universe. Below me, stars are twinkling in black space. All around me, on asteroids, are the people who have touched my life: my twins, waving like two little princesses drawn by Saint-Exupéry; my mother, Theda, waving from her intergalactic funny farm; my father, making origami birds to sail off across space to the twins (the twins he never saw, yet of course sees ). Snack, Thom, Elmore, Dart—each waving from his own asteroid. Emily planting a rose garden on her asteroid and praising the astounding energy of postmenopausal women.
    The earth, I see, is a tiny spore hurtling through deep space. From my vantage point in the intergalactic bed—which has now left the earth and is sailing effortlessly through the cosmos alone, with me in it—I see not only the smallness of the earth but its astonishing vulnerability. Earth, moon, and stars all can be snuffed in a second by a whiff of cosmic breath. And I in my bed hurtling through space-time, with only a dog to comfort me. Solitude is the final abode, some wise old roshi said. And yet it is a populous solitude, a solitude peopled by both ghosts and flesh. From my bed I wave to everyone I’ve ever loved. This vision soothes me. I stagger up and out of bed, let out Boner, and rub my eyes.
    Off to the kitchen—with a pit stop at the stereo system to put on another Bessie Smith record, Any Woman’s Blues. As Bessie sings “My Sweetie Went Away,” I clatter my pots and pans, making coffee, starting a pot of oatmeal for myself that I don’t really feel like eating.
    My sweetie went away,
but he didn’t say where,
he didn’t say when,
he didn’t say why,
or bid me goodbye—
I’m blue as I can be. . . .
I know he loves another one
but he didn’t say who. . . .
I know I’ll die.
Why don’t he hurry home?
    Listening to Bessie Smith makes it all seem so simple. The voice of female pain predicting male unpredictability, declaring in song that nothing between men and women is new under the sun. You think your heart is breaking, you think no one has ever felt this way before? Well, here’s Bessie to remind you that millions of women—black, white, yellow, and brown—have cried this way before you, have turned these griefs into rich, resonant song. Does it comfort me? Not much.
    In the kitchen, on the counter, is an array of empty bottles that strike terror into my heart. Did I drink all these bottles of Pomerol, Meursault, Pinot Grigio? It hardly seems possible. Surely Dart and I drank them together. But the pounding in my head and the dryness in my mouth convince me I must have had a little something to do with these empty bottles. My head throbs, my coordination is none too good. I drink my coffee as if it were the elixir of life, then stumble into the bathroom to brush my teeth. On the way, I slosh the coffee over the oak floorboards, almost slip on it, kneel down to mop it up with my bathrobe, and carry on.
    I confront my face in the bathroom mirror. I don’t like what I see. My face is full of pain, rings under my eyes, mouth pouty and sad, cheeks puffy and white. My face is the mirror of my life; more even than most faces, it conceals nothing. This is the face of a woman in deep trouble.
    Always, I have looked ten years younger than my chronological age—but now I wonder. I seem to look ten years older. Whatever this man is doing to me, it is not making me more beautiful.
    My face is like my palette. I know every inch of it—every enlarged pore, every birthmark, every sag of skin, every discoloration. My once hazel-green eyes