Any Woman's Blues (10 page)

“We’re going to live long enough to see
every
thing,” I told her. Now I’m not so sure. Dart’s departure has devastated me in a new way. I thought I was a survivor—to use that much overused word. Tonight I wonder.

Emmie is tough but soothing; she is walking me through this parting from Dart with infinite tenderness. As I ring her phone, I imagine Emmie with her shoulder-length auburn hair crowned with a black velvet bow, her astounding cheekbones, her slender waist and lovely high bosom. She looks the way everyone should look at fifty. Serene, wise, willowy, clear-eyed, just crinkly enough to be womanly—and infinitely kind. Emmie has a will of iron. She is also funny. We often say we are laughing our way toward the apocalypse. At seventy, we both expect to be working, giggling, and getting laid.

But Emmie is not home tonight, writing, as she so often is on Saturday nights. (Emmie has a married lover in Paris, a Greek shipping tycoon who sails into New York Harbor just often enough to keep her happy and goes away just often enough to let her write—a new arrangement not entirely unpleasing to the working woman of the fin de siècle.)

The phone rings and rings. At last it clicks, and Emmie’s answering machine picks up.

A blast of Bach and then: “You have reached 798- 2727. Please leave a message after the dumb little beep.”

“Help!” I scream into the phone, and as an afterthought: “I’m in Connecticut!” I hang up the phone.

The exquisite cruelty of Dart’s leaving on a Saturday night is not lost on me. Nor is the cruelty of his fucking me, cosseting me, and then disappearing. I think of all the crises we have endured in the last six months—and it is clear to me that I will have to break with Dart and break completely if I am to survive. The pain is too great. Every time I accept some behavior of his—last week I received credit card bills for a hotel he stayed in with another girl; the week before, pictures of some trashy little blonde who looked like a waitress in a B-movie diner; the week before that, love letters from a redhead who used to work at the gallery—he ups the ante. I know it is his own sense of inadequacy—always the model, never the artist—that leads him to these excesses. I know that in his own way he loves me. But that isn’t any longer enough. I have to love myself. The good ship Leila must sail on, and how can it sail, with this pirate down in the hold punching holes in the hull? Between forgiveness and self-protection, where does one draw the line? I wish I had a penny for every woman in love who has ever asked that question.

Alone with the silent telephone, my bottle, my dog, and my chaos of a studio, I collapse. I seem to lose control of the rest of my life. All my success is worth nothing beside this devastation. Children pull you out of it—and my children are not even here.

I think of Dart: he is his own finest creation. If he cannot paint and sculpt, it is because all his artistic ability has gone into the creation of his own persona, a not inconsiderable feat. He is always inventing him
self
—how can he invent mere paintings? An artist must be a funnel from the muse into matter. Dart is both muse himself and self-creation. I merely photographed what I saw. Protean, changing—now the Lone Ranger, now Harlequin, now Elvis Presley—Dart was infinitely inspiring, infinitely bewitching, infinitely alluring. It was not just his cock—it was his fantasy. And the way it locked into my fantasy. The best lovers know how to use their fantasies as well as their cocks. The former being rarer than the latter.

I collapse in my bed with all the lights on—the bed so lately anointed by Dart. I think of all the cruel things he has done lately, the lies—useless lies about small things and big lies about big things. I think of seeing his motorcycle parked at the railroad station on a day he said he was going to a neighbor’s to help paint her house. I think of all the times I answered the phone, only to hear the caller listen to my voice, then hang up. I think of the photos of other women left around, the bills, the love letters, the credit card charges. Dart turns thirty next weekend. Will all this stop—or has it only just begun? Shall I wait it out or shall I change the locks and give him the boot? Who can advise me—who but the voice within myself?

This
is the voice that Sybille, my shrink, calls the voice of my sane mind. “But in your sane mind, what do you think?” she always asks. And I know precisely what she means. She means the voice of that fierce advocate within myself, the sane, centered part of me that is on my
own
side, that shining nugget of self-love surrounded by fathomless darkness. I listen in vain for the voice of my sane mind—but I can hear it only intermittently, through the static of obsession.

I crawl into my big disheveled bed and pull up the covers. Boner settles in at my feet and heaves a big, doggy sigh. My bed is my sanctuary. A monument to passion and celibacy both. It’s a white-lacquered antique iron bed-stead with curlicues of steel and brass, covered with a brilliant Amish quilt emblazoned with a kaleidoscopic star, festooned with pillows of all sizes covered in antique cream and white lace.

I feel
safe
in this bed. Climbing into it, I often think, She took to her bed, and I understand perfectly the sense of refuge in that phrase. Outside the big picture window (punched into this seventeenth-century wall) is dreamy green Connecticut, now shrouded in darkness. In my mind’s eye I see its mammary humps of hills, its red barns, its silver silos, nestled below the golden gibbous moon half-veiled by scudding clouds.

I love this state. I feel safe and mothered in these hills. I love to work here: far enough from Monster Gotham not to hear its mental static, near enough to catch its lightning charge. But then I am a sucker for gentle mammary hills—whether in Tuscany or Litchfield County, Umbria or the Veneto. The only thing I like better is the sea. The Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Aegean, the Caribbean—any sea will do.

The sea, the sea. Dart and I used to dream of sailing in the “sugar isles,” as the eighteenth-century pirates called them. We loved the Caribbean, and at the height of our idyll would often run away to Barbados, Jamaica, Tortola, Saint Kitts, or Saint Barts. Dart taught me to swim in Jamaica, off a white sandy beach near Port Antonio. In Tortola he taught me to sail and snorkel. When I think of him I still see him swimming like a blond merman—a big tall blond WASP (raised on tennis and swimming and shooting) teaching a little flame-haired Jewish girl (raised on physical cowardice) how not to wince at hammerhead sharks, how to be physically brave, how to treat nature as your friend and the sea as your natural element; how to expand in the water rather than contract in fear.

He taught me a lot. He gave me a lot. It was not an uneven exchange. I gave him gifts, made him a star, but he also gave me gifts—chief among them bringing me back from the dead. Lovers give each other life. That is what makes love so irresistible—no matter what the killjoys say. Who can resist the one who makes you feel alive? Who can resist salt and sperm and sea and shakti? For love is nothing less than the gift of life. (Though sometimes you have to pay for it with your death.) And if artists love so often and so hard, it is because they have a rage to live.

I drink my wine and weep. The loss of Dart seems deep, abysmal, fatal. If I had the number of the little waitress, I would call, humiliate myself, offer him anything to come back. Thank God, I don’t have her number.

I get up and put on Bessie Smith. As she belts out blues after blues, I cry myself to sleep with all the lights on.

—
Bessie Smith and Clarence Williams

 

 

I
am back at Yale—or somehow it is a cross between Yale and Music and Art. High above the park at Convent Avenue someone has built a cage that stands upon crossed steel girders like the old Third Avenue el, which thundered past Bloomingdale’s when I was a child. There, up in the sky, is a special cagelike room where lovers meet when they wish to enter The Land of Fuck.

I have gone there—cutting all sorts of classes, risking losing my credits for the year—and when I arrive, the first thing I do is pull the blinds—venetian blinds they are: what other kind of blinds would The Land of Fuck have?

In a state of high excitement, I wait for my lover—Dart—to arrive.

In the dream, I am wet, throbbing, terribly excited. I know somehow that my whole life depends upon this meeting.

He arrives, dressed not in black leather but in white silk. He really
is
Elvis Presley and not Dart—dark hair, a pudgy, bloated face, a pair of Kewpie doll’s lips, which open and shut mechanically like plastic Dr. Dentons. Maybe he really
is
a giant Kewpie doll and not a person. And yet I want him—how I want him! I am unzipping the white silk jeans, unbuttoning the white silk cowboy shirt, holding him, stroking him, murmuring words of encouragement and love. And then, as I open the fly of his satin jeans, I see that in place of a penis he has a deep gash, which is crawling with earthworms, slugs, snails. Disgusted—yet also oddly aroused—I try to rezip his fly, but I cannot. The worms and slugs are wriggling out. One snail is making its slow, slime-trailed way down a shiny white trouser leg. Earthworms are beheaded by the zipper I tug. I look up at Dart’s face and see that the Kewpie doll face has peeled away. Beneath it is blankness—white blankness. Featureless eyes, nose, mouth, like a wooden doll’s head washed clean by the sea.

Bitterly disappointed, I push the doll-man aside and look for the way out of The Land of Fuck. There is no door. Just this cage high above the city—New York? New Haven?—where I am trapped forever. I hear my mother’s voice saying: “Louise, you always think the rules that apply to other people don’t apply to you!” And my sane mind is nowhere in sight.

 

 

I wake up in greenly docile and benign Connecticut, with all the shades up and the lights and the stereo on. Outside my picture window, poplars and hemlocks sway. Below my hilltop are the red barns and silver silos of halcyon Litchfield County. I am in my white iron bed, sailing through the cosmos as in an iron ship, but the aftertaste of the dream will not go away.

I stretch out in the middle of the bed and let the dream 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.

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.