How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong Page A

Sure enough, every man I pass looks me over, and one even starts to follow me. It never fails. After making love for three hours, I must walk with a special lilt or exude some odor like a cat in heat.
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    It used to astonish me that men followed me in the streets after sex, that they grinned and winked as if they knew. I’d be coming from Jeffrey’s office (or Gretchen’s loft downtown) and before long I had a retinue, a string of chorus boys, a following of tomcats.
    Usually I felt wonderful after an assignation. Before, I would be tense, obsessive, terrified. I’d call Bennett at the hospital and be exceedingly sweet to him and also set up my alibi for the afternoon. Somehow it was always shopping. “I’m going to Bloomingdale‘s, darling,” I’d say, quite unconsciously affirming the deep connection between sex and shopping, between bloom and Bloomingdale’s.
    Ah Bloomingdale‘s! Would it be as crowded as it is if every woman in New York had two lovers named Jeffrey? One afternoon, I had the brainstorm of strolling through Blooming-dale’s main floor after walking all the way back uptown from the loft on Nineteenth Street. I looked around me like a dreamer and suddenly understood. All those women promiscuously spending money, stuffing shopping bags with things, charging, charging, charging to their husbands’ accounts, were starved for sex! So many holes to fill! So much misplaced passion!
    The only difference between the shoppers and me was that they failed to recognize their hunger for what it really was while at least I admitted it. They scarcely knew why they cared about a new gloss stick for the lips, a free sample-kit of wrinkle creams for the face. They wanted their wrinkles plumped out, their valleys filled, their pores plugged. They would pay any thing for that. They were excited when some vapid model on the main floor handed out cards saying FREE CUSTOMIZED PERSONALIZED MAKEUP BY MR. X or LEARN TO LOVE THE FARM-FRESH FACE or FIND A NEW YOU. Suddenly I had a vision of a whole world of women starved for sex and making do with all sorts of buyable substitutes. Making up.
    A woman who spent her afternoons with a lover would never again find herself in Bloomingdale’s fingering Mary Cunt or lusting after Elizabeth Ardent. She’d go barefaced as a baby and throw her charge plate in the nearest sewer. Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? The main floor of Bloomingdale’s by Hieronymus Bosch!
    All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?
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    Normally I would be high after those hours with Jeffrey Rudner, but on this occasion despair very quickly sets in. I suddenly realize that I could fuck a different man every weekday afternoon and still not feel contented. Adultery is no solution, only a diversion.
    To clear my head, I walk all the way to my dinner date with Jeffrey Roberts (almost forty blocks downtown), and all the way across town to Madison Avenue again. Jeffrey is working late and waiting for me in his office. He knows nothing of the existence of the other Jeffrey, has no idea that he is the other half of what is, in fact, a double Jeffrey.
    Not that they are at all alike. Jeffrey Rudner is brown, long, and lean. Jewish and tawny, bearded. Jeffrey Roberts is fattish, porcine, and pink. WASPish, Southern, clean-jawed. Whereas Jeffrey Rudner is fucking me to stave off