Any Woman's Blues (14 page)

“What’s the matter, baby, don’t you like to sleep in my arms anymore?”

I turn and look at him, at the purplish lids, that tousled blond hair, that six feet two inches of macho masculinity—and I am slightly annoyed to be interrupted. I am also slightly scared.

“What do you think?” I say, pointing to my new canvas.

Dart staggers backward (is he somewhat stoned?).

“Do you really want to know, baby?”

“Yes,” I say, lying.

“Well,” he says. “You know I think you’re the greatest painter since Michelangelo, but I still remember the time when you slept all night in my arms and nothing could tear you away.” He pouts prettily, knowing I am stung with guilt—as if this chaos of broken connections were all my doing. And he turns and strides out of the room, letting me admire the shape of his beautiful calves.

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

E
mmie and Dart and I have an uneasy breakfast. Emmie makes it—toasted bagels, jam, eggs, fresh coffee, peaches. Though she doesn’t impose her presence between me and Dart, I feel it, and so does he. Emmie is on my side. She says nothing, does nothing (but feed us a delicious breakfast), and yet Dart, especially, resents her because he senses that she loosens his hold on me. He would like to tell her to go, but of course he cannot. If I am alone in the house, waiting for him to come and go at will, I am wholly at his mercy. With Emmie there, I am not.

This is the paradox of weak men and strong women: they drain us of our strength in the hopes of equalizing the struggle. But since they cannot absorb our strength, they accomplish only the negative goal of draining us. In a society that gives the
official
power to men, the line between mental and physical abuse is a very fine one. Who can discover where one ends and the other begins? Dart never beat me (except in sexual play) nor put a gun to my head, but the weapons he kept in the house, and his wholly unpredictable comings and goings, accomplished the same end.

Emmie: “So how’s New York, Dart?”

Dart (sullen): “The same.”

Emmie: “What have you been up to?”

Dart (resentful): “Oh, this and that.”

Leila: “Tell Emmie about your new project, Dart.”

Dart (looking up): “The show of new artists? The building we’re buying?” (Dart always has a dozen projects, none of which reach fruition and all of which require infusions of capital—my capital.)

Leila: “Whichever.”

Dart: “Well—the building is a giant pain in the ass. None of the workmen show up on time, the building inspectors expect bigger and bigger bribes, and the city harasses us with summonses. I’d only do this for you, baby.” (A soulful look.)

Leila: “I know—and don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” (This absurd statement should have remained stuck in my throat, because I know the whole project for the sham it is: a futile attempt to buck up Dart’s self-esteem.)

Emmie: “But isn’t it exciting that you’re renovating the building?”

Dart: “Exciting to you, exciting to
her
—since neither of you has to be there.”

Emmie: “I thought you enjoyed construction.”

Dart: “Sure. I love thankless work. . . .” (A reproachful look—to which I actually react with guilt. Dart wanted me to buy the building he now complains of so bitterly. I end up responsible for both his idleness and his labor, his stardom and his obscurity, his success and his failure.)

Leila: “But, darling, you’re so
good
at what you do.”

Dart: “I want to be the best man for you, but you’re never satisfied. Whatever I do, it’s not enough—I can’t win for losing!”

Leila: “That’s
not
true.”

Dart: “Yes it is—you’re so critical of me. You don’t say it, but I feel it. It’s always there.”

Emmie: “Think I’ll go back to osteoporosis.” (Slipping away to the guest room.)

Leila: “What on earth are you talking about?”

Dart: “I try to do everything I can for you—pose for you, renovate your property—and it’s never enough. Never. You don’t take me seriously. For years I’ve been begging you to marry me, and you won’t do it. How can I take myself seriously if you won’t marry me? You treat me like your gigolo, not your man. No wonder I feel like a pimp, like a stud, like a fucking consort. You deball me—and then you waltz off and paint another still life.”

I get up and put my arms around him. “The Rules of Love” are thundering in my head: “It is unseemly to love those whom one would be ashamed to marry.” As if he could hear this, Dart pushes me away.

Dart: “Do you know what happened to me yesterday? I was walking through Harlem, on my way to get some building supplies”—read: drugs—“and a big black man yells out at me: ‘You a pimp, boy, and you don’t even know it. Hey, white boy—you a born pimp!’ ”

Dart says this with a mixture of pride and disgust—a unique combination he has mastered in emulation of his father.

Leila: “You’re not a pimp, darling—you’re my
lover.
”

Dart (tears rolling down his cheeks): “Yes, I am, I am, I am. Unless you marry me, I’m just your pimp, your gigolo. Everybody knows that—I wish
you
did!”

By now I am almost in tears myself. I know that “pimp” is how Dart sees himself, but what can I do? I can’t remake this man’s self-image, make him healthy, whole, sound. He has to do that for himself.

He takes me by the hand and drags me back to the bedroom. He locks the door. In the white iron bed, with the sun flooding the coverlet, he begins to make love to me, licking and teasing me and making me come and come. My orgasms are strangely cold and unfeeling. Pure reflex. Robotics, not passion. “Love always increases or diminishes,” I hear my sane mind saying. I try to reciprocate, but Dart won’t let me touch his cock. “No, baby—I have
my
hand on the joystick.” Whereupon he makes me come again and again—until coming is almost painful and I beg him to stop.

 

Isadora:
Stop!

Leila: You used to
like
this sort of thing.

 

Then he pulls me to my knees, asks me to clutch a pile of pillows, and fucks me maniacally from behind.

Suddenly he stops, feeling my diaphragm with his hard hooked cock, reaches inside me, and pulls it out—sailing it across the room like a Frisbee. I let out a scream and try to run to retrieve it, but he holds me fast, fucking and fucking me until he comes in a mad convulsion, filling me with his seed.

“Baby, baby, baby,” he moans, pulling me down with him on the bed, covering me with his body, wet with sweat and come. I lie there with him, mastered, taken, spent—at once hoping I won’t conceive and that I will, for my ambivalence is now total. With my newfound clarity, I see that sex is a weapon for him, but some vestigial part of me accepts this as the fate of womanhood.

Dart falls into a deep sleep, and so do I. In my dream I am giving suck to a newborn baby, who looks up at me, turning suddenly into a little porcelain cow. The elements of my still life dance through the dream—eggs, roses, lilies, maenads, crystal bow, and cow—and I am immobilized beneath the weight of Dart, unable to get up and paint. This will be my version of hell, I think: immobilized beneath some man—unable to get up and paint—for all eternity.

I drift into a quirky dream about Professor Max Doerner, whose book
The Materials of the Artist
was much touted by a professor of mine at Yale—the same professor who introduced me to “The Rules of Love.” In the dream it is not this professor but Max Doerner himself who lectures me:

“Your paintinks are disintegratink,” Professor Doerner is saying. “You haff abandoned za teknik off za Old Masters.” He struts about the studio. “Pigments! Gesso! Old linen!” he shouts. “Old fat slaked lime aged in za pit! Benozzo Gozzoli! Benozzo Gozzoli! Benozzo Gozzoli!”

Professor Doerner is a dwarf. He opens his fly and waves his cock at the class. “Old fat lime!” he shouts.

At some point in this tirade (the bright sunlight tells me it must be almost noon) I awaken beside the sleeping Dart, hoping the result of last night’s mad sexual power struggle will not be pregnancy. The twins are enough to handle. Any notion that I could juggle Dart, twins, another baby, and my art is a delusion. Every canvas I have seized from chaos has been done at the expense of the chthonic deities who cry out for blood, blood, female blood, and childbirth at any price. Any woman producing
any
painting should get combat pay—for that battle waged in the sky between Rhea and Zeus. I would never have had an abortion, because, despite my political beliefs, I see every egg as an incipient human life, and I could no more destroy one than I could rip apart my own canvas. But in a way I have been lucky, because I am not a terribly fertile woman, so I haven’t been plagued with pregnancy like some. One pregnancy produced two beautiful daughters, who have given me, thus far, mostly joy and laughter—pain no doubt to come, which I hope I will be ready for.

I know that the struggle between art and life is a never-ending one. Difficult enough for a man, who is not indentured to the species’ very survival. But for a woman, a true dilemma and conundrum, never to be resolved—until, perhaps, the freedom of menopause that Emmie talks about. Do I believe her? Emmie, after all, has never been a mother and does not know how motherhood reshapes the heart. But am I Dart’s mother—or the twins’? Or somebody else’s that I have never met? If I had a son, Dart would never have been in my life this long. The notion starts to turn the gyres of my brain.
Stop it,
I tell myself, and doze off for a while, hoping that sleep will knit this particular raveled sleeve of care.

By the time Dart awakens, it’s lunchtime. Terrified of what new stunt he will pull today, I awake suddenly, with a lurch of terror, wanting a drink, a meeting,
any
thing but Dart.

Dart rolls over and smiles his bogus blue-eyed smile.

“Baby, you look beautiful.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.” He nuzzles my hair, my breasts, my navel. “God—I have a headache, cottonmouth, got to brush my teeth.”

And he lurches up and into the bathroom to make his ablutions.

Torn between waiting for him to come back and fuck me and bouncing up out of bed, I lie there, totally lost to myself, admitting that the last few days without him have been easier than most days with him.

Suddenly I have this terrible thought: What if women all admitted to themselves that men are more trouble than they’re worth? Think of how free we could be! But that admission opens such abysses of terror! If a self-supporting woman with as many children as she wants is
still
dependent on men, then the need must be deep and unfathomable. Nor is it only a sexual need. Can it be the need for validation in a world in which being a woman is not in itself enough validation? And when will we learn to validate
ourselves?

Dart comes back to bed. He dives into the covers as I have so often watched him dive into the Caribbean.

He kisses my neck, my ears, my breasts. He seems about to make love to me again, but both of us hold back, as if a decision has been made. I am remembering Dart once saying to me, “You’ve got it on tap, baby.” There was considerable resentment in his tone, as if his “I can’t give you anything but love, baby” stance troubled even him. He has always used sex as a weapon, all the while resenting the fact that it’s the only weapon he has.

When the only place a relationship wholly works is in bed, both people eventually get nervous. They get nervous because they never want to get out of bed. They get nervous because they
have
to get out of bed. They get nervous because The Land of Fuck is a place where you lose all your boundaries. Skinlessness is what you seek, yet skinlessness terrifies.

Dart and I seem to have come to the end of a long and winding road. The sex is starting to pall. (“A lover cannot tire of the favors of his beloved.”)

“Baby,” says Dart, playing his final trump card, “we
have
to stop drinking and drugging. I’m ready to try AA—are you?”

Now, this is a subject Dart and I have talked about from time to time but not lately. It’s as if Dart has intuited my conversations with Emmie and is ready to try anything to keep our danse macabre going. Only I am not quite so cynical in my response.

“Oh, darling,” I say like a robot, “how wonderful!” And the sad fact is, I mean it.

 

 

Which is how Dart and Emmie and I end up at the same meeting in the same Greek Revival church.

Dart is uncomfortable, sits stiffly on his chair, looking desperately around.

I am uncomfortable, feeling responsible somehow for his reaction to the Program. What if he doesn’t like the meeting? What if he quits the Program? Will I then be tempted to quit? Emmie is right. I think I can control everything.

Somewhere deep in this anxiety lies the key to the mess I have made of my life. If only I could just
be
and stop worrying the same old sad bone of my responsibility for everyone’s feelings. Surrender is what I seek. I thought I was seeking skinlessness; what I was really seeking was surrender. Acceptance of the universe. Acceptance of the fact that God, not Leila, is in charge.

 

 

The meeting begins with the preamble and the introduction of the speaker, a white-haired man of about fifty, who smokes compulsively and whose right eye twitches. I wonder if Dart has noticed the man’s disturbing resemblance to his father.

Dart paws the ground like a colt. He seems terribly anxious. Well, why
shouldn’t
he be? Wasn’t
I
at my first meeting?