Any Woman's Blues (27 page)

Little girl clones, you will do for this life. I love you. The withered penis in the moonlight wasn’t meant to be.

—
Piano Red

 

 

F
rom a spiritual awakening to a visit from Lionel Schaeffer—how literally can you take the phrase “the sublime to the ridiculous”?

The chopper lands. The twins, Natasha, Boner, Lily, and I all run out to greet this cosmic apparition, this voyager from another galaxy—the galaxy of Mammon! A UFO on our property! Wall Street comes to Litchfield County!

The air churns. The eggbeater whirs. I fear the twins will be decapitated and hold them back.

Lionel jauntily descends from his helicopter, wearing a Turnbull and Chung suit. He carries a handmade briefcase from Cellerini of Firenze.

“Pussycat!” is the first word out of his mouth.

The twins titter and pretend to be shy. Natasha tugs on the safety pin in her ear. Lily announces that there will be roast chicken for lunch in fifteen minutes. And I stand amazed, wearing a rhinestone-studded Lily Farouche T-shirt, skin-tight jeans, and a maxipad soaked with the blood of the Zandbergs.

“Come to the silo,” I say, leaving Lily and Natasha to cosset the pilot with coffee and doughnuts. The twins scamper off, giggling and elbowing each other. Another swain. A suitor. They find it immensely funny. In my sane mind, so do I.

Into the silo we go. I invite Lionel to take off his jacket and tie, but he refuses, perhaps wanting this formality, this contrast between Litchfield and Wall Street.

I offer him a seat on the red velvet Victorian chaise I keep for posing sitters, or—in the past—for fucking visiting swains. (It was important to make love in the studio—I used to feel—in order to keep the creative vibes energized.)

The red velvet chaise is not without its white markings, and these Lionel immediately notices.

“Naughty girl,” he says.

“That’s what you like about me,” I toss off, though my womb is aching.

“True,” says Lionel. “You give good dialogue,” he says. “I wonder if you give good head.”

“How can you doubt it?”

“Okay,” says Lionel, “show me the latest mistress-pieces.”

I begin moving canvases—the twin portrait of the twins, the rejected film stills of Dart—and set out the three best of the maenads and crystal series. Funny how it takes a stranger in my studio to make me appreciate my own work. Alone, I molder in my creative compost heap, thinking nothing of my gifts, enjoying the process but not being able to rate the product. With a stranger in my studio, I am able to feel the value of the work. I show Lionel the maenads and crystal, suddenly wishing there were more to show.

Lionel steps back and looks at the canvases. “
Mamma mia,
” he says. “You wanna sell me one now, without telling André? C’mon, baby, I’ll give you a hundred grand—McCrae’ll never know.”

“He’s your best friend, Lionel—and
my
dealer. That’s immoral.”

“You show your age when you use words like ‘immoral. ’ Immoral, schmimmoral—this is
bus
iness. André’ll take—what? fifty percent? I’ll give you
two
hundred grand—green. You can put it in a safe-deposit box for a rainy day. Or we could do a barter. Who’s to know?”

“André will know when you hang it in your apartment—and Lindsay will too.”

Lionel raises his eyebrows lasciviously.

“Babe—I’ll tell André you
gave
it to me in a fit of passion. How can he claim fifty percent of the come? Huh? You’re
allowed
to give away your own work as a love gift, aren’t you? And as for Lindsay, fuck ’er, or rather, don’t fuck ’er. All she cares about is whether she gets invited to parties with those skeletons she worries about—Mrs. Remson, Mrs. Basehoar, that fucking fake Princess Tavola-Calda . . . Which reminds me: we have two extra tickets for that Viva Venezia Ball in Venice next month; want to come? I bought a whole table for ten grand—
had
to—Lindsay’s one of the chairladies. You might as well have the tix. Meet me in a gondola and all that jazz. Whaddya say?”

“I
hate
Venice,” I say. “It makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s line about traveling through sewers in a coffin. . . .”

Lionel laughs.

“Oh, yeah,” he goes on, “the painting. Two fifty in a brown paper bag, and André’ll never be the wiser. If you prefer, I’ll get you a diamond worth two fifty. C’mon, Leila, babe, what’s the harm in it?”

“No harm, but . . .”

I can’t say I’m not tempted. And I can’t say I don’t need the bread. The IRS is breathing down my neck on account of some phony shelters my old accountant waltzed me into, and I’m experiencing the cash-flow problems all artists experience now and then. Also, I’m creatively blocked. As usual. I don’t know where my next canvas is coming from. Or my next show. Lionel is offering me twice my fee for a painting—and with no commission and a nice little chance to beat the IRS. I’m tempted. But somehow I can’t. I wish I could tell you it was morality or patriotism, but it’s really something else—cussedness, the stubborn Zandberg genes. I know that Lionel’s using me to beat André, that once again I’m caught in a male power play, and the truth is I don’t want to give Lionel the satisfaction. I’m sick of the way men use women as pawns in their battles with each other—and I don’t want to be manipulated even if it puts money in my own pocket.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I hear myself saying. “But the tickets to Viva Venezia I’ll take.”

“Boy, are you
meshuga,
” says Lionel, “but talented. These are
some
paintings.”

“You’ve barely even looked at them.”

“Paintings that good you don’t
have
to look at,” says Lionel.

And Lily announces lunch.

Lunch is served on the greensward, on a rustic log table Dart built at the start of our idyll. (It has rusty nails sticking up through the dining surface—a typical Dart creation—and legs made of birch logs still clad in bark. As an object, it’s aesthetically confused—just like Dart—and at this moment, when I’m sitting here with a short little billionaire who doesn’t stir my blood, it makes me sad.)

This rustic feast Lily has set out is lovely: roast chicken with its skin all crackly, puréed carrots (to make the twins eat veggies), new potatoes in their skins, fresh tomatoes and basil from our garden. The meal is placed on handwoven rainbow-colored mats, with periwinkle-blue linen napkins, and served on French country earthenware decorated with a hot-air-balloon motif and topped with the motto “Je Suis Libre” in fine brush strokes. (I bought these plates in France once, when I was high on my courage in divorcing Elmore and they seemed to embody all my bravado—which now has fled, my hot-air balloon punctured by Dart and drugs and alcohol.) The table centerpiece is blazing blue cornflowers. I am aware, as Lily puts out the feast and calls the twins and Natasha, of how idyllic all this must look—especially to a traveler from the galaxy of Mammon. The artist in her native habitat: Georgia O’Keeffe on her mesa, Romaine Brooks with Natalie Barney at Villa Gaia in Florence, Louise Nevelson in Little Italy. There is also in me the desire to make my life into a work of art—and that’s a trap for every woman artist. I’d rather serve the feast than paint it.

We sit down to chow.

Lionel kids with the twins.

Suddenly there is a loud
beep beep beep
from the handmade Florentine briefcase, and Lionel runs to it, snaps it open, and extracts a portable phone.

“What’s up?” he asks the unknown caller.

A pause, then he says: “Tell that bastard we’ll give him fifty-six dollars a share—not a penny more. I’m not scared of a proxy fight. This is a guts play, pure and simple.”

Lionel is talking partly for me and partly for the caller on the other end of the phone. He’s an addict too—addicted to taking over companies. I recognize the intensity, the adrenaline high; I have been trying to learn to live in another state: moderation, the golden mean. It feels boring to me, but I know it’s the secret of life. In a society that worships addiction, how can you find a non-addicted life?

Lionel paces, walks down the hill with his telephone, turns and paces back. I see that his face is contorted with rage. He has been about to enjoy this feast—and now he is plugged into his addiction again. What a destructive implement the telephone is! More destructive than a machine gun or a bullwhip. Suddenly the feast has turned to gall.

He sits down, wolfs his chicken, but is utterly preoccupied, tasting nothing.

“What’s a proxy fight?” asks Ed, who misses nothing.

“That’s a good question, young lady,” says Lionel, when the phone beeps.

He curses, gets up, answers it, and paces down the greensward again, muttering into it.

I watch him, thinking that the telephone is about to cut short his visit and wondering if I care. At one time I had nursed fantasies of an affair with Lionel as the answer to my problems—but I see that Lionel is, in his own way, less able to sit still than Dart, whom I am missing again in my fingertips, in my gut. That baby boy was
his
—I’m sure of it.

Whenever I get going on the fantasy of a man to protect me, to nurture me, I see that he’s in more trouble than I am, more desperate, more frantic, more full of
spilkes.
Dart was forever darting. And Danny too, in his own way. And now Lionel. I will have to learn to sit still alone. Nobody knows how to teach it to me. Even I—with my crackpot semisobriety—seem to have more serenity than any of the men I know.

Lionel stomps back, muttering and cursing.

“Those fucking bastards say the stock is worth seventy-five dollars a share—they’re fucking crazy. . . .” I see in him the male madness to win, win, win, and I wonder whether any woman would or
could
care about this the way he does. Women just don’t give a shit about winning in that way—or at least, I don’t. I love the fruits of money as well as anyone—houses, cars, clothes, power, autonomy—but somehow I feel freer and happier when I am working without a commission, for love, not money, than when I am working for money. I’m happy to have turned down Lionel’s two fifty. I may be crazy, but it makes me glad to know that acquiring things is not first on my agenda.

And yet I know that my passion for Dart is not so different from Lionel’s passion to take over companies or André’s to take over artists. Consume, consume, consume. The bottomless pit of wanting. These are our values, and this is the world we’ve made. Never have we needed nonattachment more.

Lionel rushes through lunch, with one ear out for the phone.

When we’ve stuffed our faces, we go back to the silo, always with that potentially beeping briefcase in attendance. The mood of the day is smashed. I feel the static of New York here on my green hillside. I’m wishing Lionel would leave and let me get back to sitting by my pond, doing nothing, doing everything.

Lionel loosens his tie, at last takes off his jacket.

“Lie down, I think I love you,” he says, putting an arm around me. I giggle. It’s all so silly—the bid for a painting behind André’s back, the proxy fight, the obligatory pass. I am looking for love in all the wrong places.

“Why’re you laughing, babe?” says Lionel.

“Because it’s all so silly.”

“What is?” asks Lionel, hurt.

“Life.”

I’m thinking that when a man and a woman lie down together, he’s thinking of winning and she’s thinking of love, and it will never work. Never. The two sexes might as well be separate species.

“Tell me what’s in your head,” says Lionel.

“Just that we don’t have enough time to do this right. Your briefcase will beep. My twins will run in. We need a whole weekend, a whole week.”

Lionel rubs my neck. I am thinking like a woman. Men like nothing better than to fuck and run—leave the primordial cave and return to the proxy fight. It’s the woman who wants the weekend or the week.

Lionel kisses me. His kiss is surprisingly wet and warm, passionate, deep. He fondles my breasts.

“I want to give you everything,” he says, “everything.”

He reaches down and starts to unzip his fly, when the briefcase beeps.

“Goddamn,” he says, lunging for it.

With one hand on his fly and the other on the telephone, he continues his proxy fight.

This is the world they’ve made, a world in which sex is always interrupted by proxy fights, and they love it. Even men like Dart are demoralized by it. They live to fuck but feel like gigolos because of men like Lionel. What’s the answer? Who knows?

“Tell the bastard I’ll have his balls on a platter,” Lionel is saying, perhaps to his lawyer, or to the proxy solicitor, or
some
one.

As he speaks, his erection subsides. I have the fantasy of blowing him as he talks on the phone, female power against male, but I resist—and not only because of my aching innards. Trying to get sober has made such games less attractive to me than they once were. I see my own hunger for power and dominance in my sexual play. I see myself in Dart—Donna Juan, Donna Giovanna. I am getting wise to my own tricks. A lot of sex is just vanity, isn’t it? The thrill of making someone fall in love with you, the narcissism of being desired. I never saw this before, but I am certainly seeing it now. When the fuck works, nature’s narcissism wins. Another baby for her team. Yay, team. By outwitting her, we have probably outwitted ourselves. God gave human beings too much brain power and not enough judgment and compassion—that’s the sad truth. Balls on a platter, indeed.

Lionel sputters, zips up with one hand and holds the telephone with the other.

“Be there inside an hour,” he grunts.

“Baby, got to go,” he says to me, needlessly. “Catch you later.”