I knew that the praising breath was both within me and without me and that God had put me here for a purpose, which didn’t have to be clear to me at every moment. I had merely to honor the breath within me and to carry it forward into the universe. To destroy it would be as great a heresy as destroying my paintings or strangling my twins. Life had been given to me. I had only to say yes to the gift.
And then Dart came home. He came home stoned, bearing gifts bought with my money and credit cards. There is nothing more unsettling than that. W. H. Auden says that it is more morally confusing to be goosed by a bishop than by a traveling salesman. But receiving gifts that you will soon get bills for is more confusing even than that.
Dart hands me a Tiffany box in which there is a large sapphire engagement ring, surrounded by diamond baguettes.
“Marry me,” he says, “or I’ll leave again.”
Now, this is not the sort of proposal one dreams of. Much as I think I love Dart, much as I cannot imagine my life without him, I know that to marry him is to wed my life to the kind of wretchedness and upheaval I am experiencing now: it is a kind of sentence. Things will be this way always—abrupt arrivals and painful departures, serenity smashed, tranquillity taxed to the breaking point, and no hope of anything else in the future.
“Dart, darling,” I say, “let’s get married when we’ve been in the Program a year, okay?”
Dart scowls at me. “You’re putting me off,” he says.
And maybe I am. The phone in the kitchen rings. We both run for it. I get there first.
“Hello?” I say. Someone breathes and hangs up. I imagine the blond girl whose pictures I found, and the redhead whose letters I found, and the brunette whose makeup I found in DART.
“Who is it?” Dart asks.
“You tell
me.
I don’t have friends who call and hang up when I answer. Do you?”
“You don’t trust me!” Dart shouts, stomping off into the bedroom.
“How can I trust you when you leave for days and come back smelling of someone else’s perfume, with someone else’s lipstick on your shirt? How can I trust you when you buy me presents with my own money and expect me to thank you, when you rage and stomp about the house because I won’t be grateful for that sort of behavior? How can I trust you when you’re not trustworthy!”
“That’s it!” screams Dart. “The last straw! I can’t stay with a woman who can’t trust me—it’s too demeaning! I’m leaving!” and he throws the ring at me and leaves (taking my credit card with him). As if in the grip of some habit, I fall to the floor and weep, feeling my life utterly over. I listen as the motorcycle putters up the driveway and out of my life again.
Isadora: Couldn’t she weep in a chair for once?
Leila: Could you?
As I lie there on the floor, with my tears falling to the oaken floorboards, some glimmer of light begins to dawn, my sane mind is returning. I don’t have to live like this. I don’t have to have my self-esteem shattered every other day just to get skinless sex. Even the sex has become not what it once was. As I begin to
see
what Dart is doing with sex, it becomes less and less alluring. I see the game of it. And with vision comes freedom. I get up from the floor, dry my tears, and call Emmie—who is, mercifully, home.
“Dart’s gone, again.”
“Thank God,” says Emmie.
“And I’m almost glad.”
“Thank God for that too,” says Emmie.
“I almost feel exhilarated. I’m almost wishing he’ll never come back.”
“I’m going to remind you of that,” says Emmie, “when you least expect it.”
“I know.”
“Look—why don’t you drive into the city and be with me? The fact is, you’re not going to work. We could go to a meeting in New York or go see the tarot reader or just have dinner in the city. . . .”
“But what if Dart calls and I’m not here?”
“So let him call. . . . It will be good for him,” says Emmie. “Anyway, instead of worrying about Dart, you could be doing what’s best for Leila. Make
yourself
your first priority—you don’t have to be at the affect of someone else.
Seize
your life. Dart’s incidental—and
boring. You
give him all the power he has.”
Panic grips me at the thought of going into the city and leaving the telephone, that household god, unattended. I could go to my own loft in the city, but somehow I am afraid of what I’ll find there.
“Come on,” says Emmie. If you drive into the city, I’ll treat you to supper.”
“You’re on,” I say, feeling I am making the most courageous decision of my life.
I put on the engagement ring Dart bought me and say to myself: “Marry me!” It’s the one solution to my marital dilemma I’ve never tried.
It’s glorious midsummer in Connecticut, and I have taken possession of the car I bought for Dart. With its oxblood exterior, its white leather seats, its new sound system, and its rebuilt engine, it drives like a wet dream. But Dart has made a mess of the interior, as he makes a mess of everything. Broken tools on the floor, crushed Kleenex boxes, banana peels, peach pits. He treats the car the way his father treats the house on Rittenhouse Square: as a sort of elegant Dumpster. A rebuke to his woman’s money, because he didn’t earn it. His mess infuriates me, and the fury gives me the power to drive to New York. The gas is incidental.
I zoom down to the city with the Bessie Smith blaring. (I have two sets of the complete Bessie Smith—records for home, cassettes for the car.) I am singing along with “Kitchen Man,” one of her most evocative songs:
Mad about his turnip tops,
Love the way he warms my chops,
I cain’t live without my kitchen man. . . .
Driving, my head clears, and I start to think about my situation—honestly, I hope. I wanted the freedom to do my work, and it led me to this lonely pass. I left Thom to have babies with Elmore, and I left Elmore because eventually he sulked every time I put brush to canvas. I let Dart peel off because I wouldn’t do drugs with him anymore. He found others to do drugs with. Can it possibly be that simple?
Nobody prepared my generation of women—we baby boomers, we pregnant bulge in the population curve—for the changes that have overtaken us as women. We wanted to have it all—work and love, paintings and babies—and we have had it, but we have paid a price: the price of loneliness and isolation. Nobody prepared us for all this because nobody knew
how
to prepare us. We were caught in a strange historical moment. The lives of our mothers and grandmothers simply did not apply. If it were 1920 or 1945, I would never have left Thom Winslow to pursue twins and twin careers in Chianti. And if it were 1930 or 1955, I would never have left Elmore and wound up with Dart. My generation of women was experimenting with a new life pattern, one never tried by women before in all of history. No wonder we felt so lost, alternatively like pariahs or like pioneers. We were breaking every female taboo—putting our creative lives, our self-expression, ahead of the demands of the species.
Isadora: Where is Margaret Mead, now that we need her?
Leila: Why don’t you go to the Trobriands and leave me alone?
Isadora: Because you’ll never get out of this mess without me!
No wonder we felt like traitors to our mothers and grandmothers and, often, to our children and to our men. There were no rituals for us. We had smashed the old and not built the new. There were no patterns. We had unraveled the past and not woven the future. How to do that? Ah—the question of the century.
And the men? The men were just as lost and lonely as we. They expected nurturance and got a kick in the balls. They expected us to be warm bodies in bed, cups and cup bearers, baby bearers—and then they had to listen to us kvetch about our blasted creativity. They wanted what they had always
had:
a warm tush in bed. How could a still life of maenads and crystal
ever
replace a warm tush in bed?
The Warm Tush Theory: All of history could be traced to the longing for the warm tush in bed. I thought this and laughed and laughed aloud to myself.
Good, Leila, good, I thought. At least you’re laughing—that’s an improvement.
It was comforting to see my life as part of a historical process—comforting and possibly even true. I was partly the victim of my own addiction, partly the victim of my own talent and fame, but I was partly also a casualty of history: too many women born and not enough men, no life patterns for any of us to live by, the family breaking down and being replaced by—what? Nothing.
We tried to re-create it with group love: AA, OA, Al-Anon, therapy. We were all group groping desperately toward the apocalypse. We were searching for a new way to be communal animals. We needed new tribal identities, because the old ones could not hold us. We were trying to reinvent the human species in church basements, with coffee instead of sacramental wine. Oreos instead of holy wafers. The blood and the body: instant coffee and chocolate cream cookies. A caffeine-and-sugar rush to lift us toward God.
I drive down to SoHo, park in my garage, toy with going to my loft, and then decide that I am not going to do that until after supper. Perhaps I’m postponing being brave, but procrastination is not the worst sin in the world—as long as I recognize it. Then I walk through lower Manhattan to meet Emmie at our appointed place: Da Silvano.
The city has that gloriously dirty reek it has in midsummer—the opposite of verdant Connecticut. Overflowing garbage cans, water bugs leisurely crossing the streets as if they owned them, blaring radios, honking traffic, bums, beggars, handsome gay hunks in shorts, and gorgeous young women in T-shirts and minis flashing their bosoms and knees in vain. I am exuberant with the energy of New York. This is the Imperial City—Rome at the end of the empire, Paris at the fin de siècle, Hogarth’s London. This is the red-hot center of the action, and for once the live current of New York is feeding me, charging me, giving me power rather than draining it away.
I walk past a particularly odoriferous heap of garbage, and in my newfound state I find it beautiful—quite as beautiful as my Connecticut hillside. This must be Zen wisdom, I think, to find the garbage as beautiful as the raspberry bramble. This must be joy—to see the world in a garbage heap as well as in a silver silo.
The whole city seems to be melting! It has that special liquescent feeling it gets on certain ninety-eight-degree days. The air itself an animal—gamy, full of life. I love the feel of the humidity on my skin, the way my sweat is making my gauzy shirt stick to my back. I am delighting in the day rather than being irritated by it—another gift of AA.
Every day is a good day, I think, even bad days. Every day is a gift. The smell may be bad, but we should rejoice in having noses at all. Nobody promised us a nose. Nobody promised us a nose garden.
I am staring at the garbage heap and thinking of a garden. The garbage heap is beautiful in its way—cans overflowing with all the wretched refuse of our lives: orange halves glowing like split suns, aluminum cans gleaming like Christmas tree ornaments, crushed bags in all the colors of the rainbow, beer bottles in every shade of grass green and earth brown.
I am seeing this garden in the garbage heap because, suddenly, I am feeling a garden inside me. Always before, I would imagine my chest as a tangle of chopped veins and severed arteries. Always before, there was the howling emptiness inside, the emptiness that needed a cock to make it feel whole, the emptiness that demanded another glass of wine, another joint, another mad departure to Hong Kong on the next flight. But now I am starting to experience a taste of serenity, a soupçon of serenity—and it is utterly transforming. Where did it come from?
Grace, I guess.
I envision the inside of my chest, and suddenly I see a garden filled with sunflowers bending their heads, heavy with seeds. And zinnias in brilliant pinks and oranges and reds. And baskets of fuchsias hanging their reddish-purplish bells, and rambling red roses, and pruned trees of white roses, and musky marigolds blazing out of the earth. This is
my
garden, and
no
body can take it away, no matter what betrayals are practiced on my flesh. This garden is totally mine; this garden sustains me; it grows because I grow. Suddenly I want to paint it. I want to drive right home and paint it now.
Instead I meet Emmie for supper at Da Silvano. Walking in, I recognize and nod to half a dozen people from my business—artists, dealers, designers of catalogs, hangers of shows, and people hoping to be mistaken for same.
There’s an elegant blonde in her fifties whose husband is a mafioso, who founded her gallery on West Broadway as a money-laundering scheme—none of which stops her from being the toast of New York. The stories I wish I didn’t know about art dealing in New York. Dart and his devastations seem suddenly very far away.
Emmie is sitting at a front table drinking a Tab with lime and looking radiant.
“You look great,” I say. (As the joke goes, there are two stages of life: youth and “you look great.”)
“You too,” says Emmie. “Losing Dart has made you lose all the stress lines in your face.”
“I feel wonderful,” I say. “It suddenly seems as if my life is beginning, not ending.”
“Odd, isn’t it?” says Emmie, laughing her twinkly laugh. “Remember how in
The Golden Notebook
the two women keep saying, ‘Odd, isn’t it’?”
“I haven’t read that in
years,
” I say. “When I was a teenager I forced myself to, but it seemed very heavy to me.”
“Well, read it now. It’s the story of our lives. ‘Free Women’—in inverted commas, of course.”
“Funny you should say that, because, driving down, I’ve been thinking that we represent an entirely new form of woman.”