Any Woman's Blues (20 page)

Lionel opens his jacket to show me something. Inside, on the paisley silk, I see his initials, “LS,” and below that a little label that says, in silk script, “Turnbull and Chung.” Lionel laughs.

“Whaddya think? I had thirty-seven cashmere suits made in Hong Kong, and I got ’em to make up these labels—Turnbull and Chung. Jeezus, they fought me on it—but I prevailed.” He makes the universal money gesture by rubbing thumb and forefinger together.

I laugh and hug Lionel. He sees the game of it all, and for that I like him.

“If you
dare
do that at the Principessa Tavola-Calda’s in Venice, I’ll
kill
you,” says Lindsay, a former stewardess from K.C., who doesn’t see the game of it and never will.

“Leila, baby,” says Lionel, “if you ever get rid of that stud, don’t go to strangers—okay, babe?” He looks down my dress and raises his eyebrows. “
Mamma mia,
what a
poitrine.”
He does this in front of Lindsay to keep her in line. She pretends not to care, but she glares at me briefly before wandering off.

“She hates doing it,” Lionel says. “And you know me—can’t get enough, pussycat. Where are you gonna be this summer?”

“In Connecticut. Painting.”

“In your famed phallic silo?”

“The same.”

“Where’s the stud?”

“He went out.”

“Lissen—I’ll call you when I get back from Europe, okay? Maybe I’ll take the chopper up to your neck of the woods.”

“Call me,” I say. And I go off to find Wayne. Maybe what I need is a vulgar billionaire in Turnbull and Chung suits. Could it possibly be worse than Dart?

Where is Wayne? I haven’t seen him since he took off for the loo.

I make my way through the sprawling apartment, which has recently been redone by some hot new decorator much addicted to Concordeing back and forth to London. All the latest trends are represented: one room in Biedermeier fruitwood and Impressionist paintings; another room full of Important Pieces in seventeenth-century japanning and gilt, with seventeenth-century Dutch still lives of dead birds and fruit on the walls; another room full of Victoriana—chairs with leopard legs, chandeliers and tables made out of antlers and that sort of thing, Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The place is a hodgepodge. Sally often jokes that she moved next door because she and André couldn’t agree on decor. She is into Bauhaus-minimalist-modern, he into excess with a vengeance.

His bed, for example, which I come upon in the master bedroom overlooking leafy Central Park, once belonged to Henry VIII. A taller tycoon than André would never fit. But this hideous regal Tudor four-poster has been outfitted with an inner mirrored canopy, a sound system built into the four posts, and a television that rises ominously from a steel-banded antique sea truck at its foot. (This media
boîte
once belonged to a sailor in the Armada.)

When I come into the bedroom, Wayne is stretched out half naked in André’s bed, moving the television up and down and giggling maniacally. The sweet smell of sinsemilla fills the room.

“Join me?”

“You’re crazy, Wayne. I’m going to call André.”

“Call him. He
expects
us to act like maniacs. That’s why we’re here. ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ he tells his secretary. ‘See if the tsatskeleh will drive down from Connecticut and the biker will bike up from SoHo.’ We’re the sideshow to his Barnum. You know what Barnum said?”

“No. What did Barnum say?”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That’s why I sell them money. I
used
to do sensitive nudes and still lives, Turneresque luminescent skies, mad Pollockian abstractions. Now I give ’em what they already know the value of—money. Fuck ’em. The whole business makes me sick. Come to bed.”

“No, Wayne.”

“What the fuck are you standing there for? Come to bed.”

“Get your clothes on, and let’s blow this dump.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Nell’s. The garbage scow. Connecticut.”

“Will you fuck me if I wear a rubber?”

“No.”

“If I don’t?”

“Maybe.”

Wayne laughs and bounces out of bed. I check out his shlong, but who can tell under those circumstances?

“I see you’re checking out my shlong,” Wayne says.

“Yep.”

“And. . . ?”

“Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.”

“You cunt,” says Wayne, laughing again.

We head for Connecticut, out of the city and into the hills of the Nutmeg State. Leaving the city, one feels the head clear, the heart leap.

Wayne, Mr. Macho Man, drives like a drunk. Actually, he
is
drunk, but he won’t let me drive, denying it. I keep telling him I want to drive, and he keeps telling me no. Every time he turns to tell me no, I get a blast of booze breath. His whole body reeks of alcohol and dope—something I never smelled before I got sober, but now it is overwhelming.
Sickening.

“Let me drive, Wayne,” I say. “It’s my fucking car.”

“Baby, I’m fine,” he says, nearly careening into a side barrier as he takes the curving ramp up to the Triborough Bridge.

“Let me drive the car. . . . You’re drunk.”

“I am
not
drunk,” he says drunkenly, turning to me and nearly hitting the toll booth. Wayne has those funny little teeth that are three-quarters gums. They look like Chiclets. His hair is sandy, his green eyes squinty, and he has the flattened, turned-up-tip nose of an Irishman. A drunken leprechaun. I think of all the times I used to get drunk and stoned with Dart so that we could do mad sex together, and I realize that I am outside that world now, isolated from men and sex by sobriety. Possibly I will never get laid again. I can’t stand the way this man smells. His pores reek of alcohol and dope. Why have I never smelled this before?

I never much liked coke; sinsemilla and wine were my drugs of choice. Actually, it was not sinsemilla and wine so much as sex—sex was my drug of choice. Sex was what blotted out the world for me. Sex was my opium, my anodyne, my laudanum, my love. Sex was what I used to kill the pain of life—the pot and the wine were just my avenues to bed. Open your mouth and close your eyes. Open your legs and close your eyes. Open your heart and close your eyes.

A line comes back to me from a poem I read in college: “Wax to receive and marble to retain.” Don Juan’s heart. Byron’s
Don Juan.
Dart’s heart. Wax to receive and marble to retain. I don’t want to fall in love with Don Juan again.

I imagine a piece based on this insight, using the materials of marble—faux marble—and real wax. It would be called
Don Juan,
and it would deal with all the many possibilities of this theme. The marble heart. The wax heart. The heartless heart.

But I myself am Donna Giovanna, I think, and Dart was a sort of karmic revenge—the revenge of my own philandering. I lived for sex, for falling in love with love, for breaking (or at least collecting) hearts—and Dart was the gods’ revenge. What goes around comes around, they say in the Program. Dart was the visible manifestation of my own addiction.

Jesus. Wayne has nearly careened into another lamppost. The open car, the drunken driver . . . I could be killed! Worse still, I could be creamed and crippled. I have twins to raise, work to do.

“Stop the car this instant.” (Ah, my sane mind has not deserted me utterly.)

“Oh, baby—don’t be a drag,” Wayne says, nearly hitting the side barrier again. “I’m perfectly okay.”

I clutch the seat in terror. We are careening from side to side, making lazy snakes around the white lines in the middle of the road.

I am paralyzed. Here is the voice of male authority telling me “don’t be a drag.”

Don’t
be a drag, Leila. This used to be fun. Drunk, I got in a lot of careening cars and thought it was fun. This is not fun.

“Stop the car, Wayne.”

“I know a place,” Wayne says. “Just let me take you to the place I know.”

He careens on. I try to take the wheel, but he jerks it away. The car veers from side to side as we struggle.

I’m not sure whether it’s more dangerous to resist or not to resist.

“Take me to your place,” I say.

Wayne drives like a maniac to Westchester, where he burns rubber along the back roads until he finds a little roadhouse buried in the foliage of the summer night.

He parks the car at a rakish angle, pockets the keys, puts his arm around me, and steers me inside.

Blaring jukebox. People drinking. Girls at the bar looking us over as we enter.

“Hi, girls!” says Wayne sloppily. “Wanna fuck a real artist?”

They don’t seem impressed.

Wayne finds a barstool amid the pulchritude—three young women whose combined ages, I think with a stab of pain, don’t even total mine. (It’s not true, of course, but sober, I feel like the Ancient Mariness.)

I head for the ladies’ room, leaving Wayne with the pulchritude. There, I pee, wash up, fix my makeup. I take a good look at myself in the mirror. My chin is starting to get a bit loose, and the circles under my eyes are deepening. I feel
old.
My bravado has carried me through a lot, but now I’m beginning to wonder if bravado is enough. I
long
for someone to nurture me. I seem to have been bouncing around alone for
years.
Ah, for a nurturing man, a daddy to tell my troubles to—wouldn’t that be sweet for a change? Someone to buy
me
a gold Rolex, or a cowboy suit, or a car.

My daddy was never like that, even when I had him. The tenderest moment I have of Dolph is of him making me origami birds or pulling silver like taffy to make me jewelry.

When my mother died, I found one of his brooches gathering dust in her jewelry box. My initials in silver script interlaced in a silver heart. Louise Zandberg aka Leila Sand. Wax to receive and marble to retain. Like the memory of my daddy. Oh, how our daddies hook us on all our addictions, pressing the packet of junkie love into our little-girl hands. Daddy! He comes and goes. He runs. He leaves Mommy and baby girl, and she longs ever after for the man who darts.

Out of the bathroom, back to the bar. Wayne surrounded by cuties, flirting. Arm around an eighteen-year-old curly redhead, who laughs and laughs and clinks glasses with him, not caring that he smells of booze and drives like the red menace.

I saunter over, sit at the bar, to hear Wayne telling the girl to call him in the city, then scribbling his phone number on a damp napkin for her. Another girl, next to her, looks at me avidly, then says: “Hey, I saw you on TV! Didn’t you do those big pictures of your boyfriend or somethin’?”

“You must be mistaking me for someone else.”

“Nah. I never forget a face. You had that cute boyfriend, and you photographed him. There was this show about you on TV! Hey—that’s really neat. Hey, Liza—hey, Jennifer.” She turns to her two friends. “This chick is really neat. She photographed this dude in
costumes.
Where is he? He was
cute.
”

“Gone the way of cute men.”

“Then it
was
you. Jeez. You’re neat. I wish I was an artist.”

Wayne seems discomforted by no longer being the center of attention.

“Don’t you love me anymore, girls?” He sulks.

“Can I ask you somethin’?” The girl called Jennifer, with long black hair down her back and a gauze minidress, is speaking.

“Sure,” I say.

“Why do we always fall in love with the bastards? I mean is there somethin’ about their bein’ nasty that turns us on?”

I laugh. “The first woman who figures out the answer to
that
is gonna be
sainted.
”

“Do
you
fall in love with the bastards?” asks her friend Liza, with the flaxen blond hair and the face of a Scandinavian angel.

“She just
said
so,” Jennifer interrupts. “She’s just
like
us.”

“It’s what one of my English friends calls ‘The Great Nasty Man Question,’ ” I say in my mock-English accent. “ ‘The
nahst
ier they are, the hotter we get,’ she says.”

The young women look up at me, waiting for an answer.

“Don’t you
ever
get smart?” asks Jennifer.

“That depends,” I say.

“On what?” asks Liza.

“On whether or not you finally realize that Big Daddy is
not
coming home and you have to be your own Big Daddy.”

The girls look at me, wide-eyed and full of reverence.

“How do you get to
that
point?” asks Jennifer.

“When I get to it, I’ll tell you,” I say, slipping my hand in Wayne’s pocket and retrieving my car keys.

He thinks I’m feeling him up, so he gets a sort of Lucky Pierre expression on his face. Then it dawns on him that I’m just retrieving my keys.

“I want to get something out of the glove compartment,” I say. “Or the
love
compartment, as I’d prefer to call it.”

“Okay, babe,” says Wayne, thinking something sexual is in the offing.

I take the keys, leave the roadhouse, get into DART, start up the motor, and take off for Connecticut alone. Wayne can find his way home with the cuties or not. It’s up to him.

Maybe I’ll never get laid again as long as I live, but at least I’ll live—and for the moment, that seems like enough.

—
“Down Hearted Blues”

 

 

L
istening to Bessie Smith and painting stone-cold sober. The locks are changed. Dart’s gone. I don’t expect to hear from him, and the twins aren’t coming back for another week.

I’m in the silo alone, looking out over the hills of Connecticut and painting. Good old Boner would bark to alert me if Dart’s motorcycle drove up. I am working on another version of the maenads and crystal. Sometimes in bliss, sometimes in despair. The loneliness of being an artist is something you cannot communicate to another living soul. Me, at my easel, overlooking the hills, smelling the primal turpentine smell, stoned on my own solitude and the woodsy aroma of the solvent, the hydrocarbon high of painting alone and the low of knowing I may be alone for the rest of my life.