Fear of Dying. Erica Jong
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ALSO BY ERICA JONG
FICTION
Fear of Dying
Sappho’s Leap
Inventing Memory
Any Woman’s Blues
Shylock’s Daughter
Parachutes & Kisses
Fanny: Being the True History of the
Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones
How to Save Your Own Life
Fear of Flying
POETRY
Love Comes First
Becoming Light: New and Selected
Ordinary Miracles
At the Edge of the Body
Loveroot
Half-Lives
Fruits & Vegetables
OTHER WORKS
A Letter to the President
Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life
What Do Women Want? Bread Roses Sex Power
Fear of Fifty: A Mid-Life Memoir
The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller
Megan’s Book of Divorce
Megan’s Two Houses
Witches
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2015 by Erica Mann Jong
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States in 2015 by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com
ISBN 978 1 78211 743 8
Export ISBN 978 1 78211 744 5
eISBN 978 1 78211 746 9
Designed by Kelly S. Too
For my BFF, Gerri
&
L’Ultimo Marito, Ken
Contents
1 Happily Married Woman, or Is There Sex After Death?
Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; Let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it!”
—Attributed to Mishkan Tefilah: A Reform Siddur
PART I
Fall
1
Happily Married Woman, or Is There Sex After Death?
I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
—Mae West (stealing from Oscar Wilde)
I used to love the power I had over men. Walking down the street, my mandolin-shaped ass swaying and swinging to their backward eyes. How strange that I only completely knew this power when it was gone—or transferred to my daughter, all male eyes on her nubile twentyish body, promising babies. I missed this power. It seemed that the things that had come to replace it—marriage, maternity, the wisdom of the mature woman (ugh, I hate that phrase)—weren’t worth the candle. Ah, the candle! Standing up. Burning for me. Full of sound and fury signifying everything. I know I should fade away like a good old girl and spare my daughter the embarrassments of my passions, but I can’t any more than I can conveniently die. Life is passion. But now I know what passion costs, so it’s hard to be quite so carefree anymore.
But