Any Woman's Blues (17 page)

“In the Middle Ages, they burned us as witches,” Emmie says.

We order the Italian supper that now passes as
echt
New York fare—figs and prosciutto, pasta, veal, arugula salad. I am amused by the way the cute young waiter—with the ponytail and the emerald earring in his left ear—reels off the specials as if he were auditioning for a Broadway musical. Only in New York, I think, where every waiter is an actor. In Italy, waiters are waiters.

“Maybe we should take a trip together,” I say, “to Europe.”

“What? And leave Dart here?”

“Fuck Dart,” I say, with a bravado I really, for the moment, feel.

“What’s that ring?” Emmie asks. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I’m engaged,” I say.

“You’re
what
?”

“I’m engaged to Louise Zandberg. Leila Sand is engaged to marry Louise Zandberg.”

“
Mazel tov,
” says Emmie, with a convent school accent.

We drink our Tabs and happily eat our food, looking around the restaurant to nod and wave to various amiable presences from my thoroughly corrupt world. Just getting into the city has cheered me and made me happy. I belong somewhere other than on the floor of my foyer, weeping. My sane mind is back, and welcome to it!

“I don’t know why I don’t do this more often,” I say.

“Because you’re alone in Connecticut, drinking and waiting for Dart to fuck you,” says Emmie.

We gossip about friends, about Emmie’s menopause book, about the imminent return of my twins, about my new paintings. Life seems good again—even without Dart. At some point, I get up and go to pee.

Walking toward the ladies’ room, I see, at a bad table, in the Siberia reserved for the unknown or nonfamous, the face of the trashy little blonde whose pictures I found among Dart’s things. She is sitting there, smiling smugly and reading
The New York Times.
On the chair next to her is a white linen jacket I remember buying for Dart.

My heart skips at least ten beats. I break out in a sweat. I can hardly breathe.

The girl looks up, focuses on me for a moment, seems not to recognize me at first, and then goes back to reading the paper.

Seeing the face from those photographs come alive fills me with panic. Where is Dart? He must be in the men’s room.

I go to the ladies’ room, try to pee and can’t, knowing he is right across the wall. I sit on the can with my head in my hands. At once despairing and utterly confused, I finally force myself to pee, get up, fix my makeup, and open the door. Outside is the trashy blonde, leaning against the men’s-room door, whispering something into its wood. Then she looks at me, this time with recognition, and turns and goes back to the table.

I rap on the men’s room door loudly.

“I know you’re in there, you coward—come on out!”

No answer. Just the sound of the toilet flushing.

“You bastard!” I yell. “Stop hiding from me! Come on out!”

The lock turns, and a very sheepish-looking Dart emerges from the men’s room.

“The trouble with lying,” I blurt out, “is that it leaves you terribly lonely. You lie to the one person who really loves you, and then you have no one to trust and no one who really trusts you!”

 

 

He’s edging back toward the men’s room, this big macho guy who always made such a big deal of protecting me and protecting the twins.

He looks at me pleadingly, as if to say: “Mommy, I’m sorry.” He shrugs. “I
tried,
” he says. The trouble is, I know it’s true. The girl comes up behind us.

“I hope you can afford him. He’s
very
expensive,” I say.

“There’s more to life than money,” she answers, snippily, in a way that tells me he has complained to her of me, of my not spending enough on him. Ha! What I spent on that man would buy a nice medium-size villa in the south of France!

“You’re getting more like your father every day,” I say.

“That’s a low blow,” the girl counters.

“Low, but true.”

Dart says nothing. Let the women fight it out, his silence screams.

“I feel
sorry
for you,” she says, with all the contempt a woman of twenty-five can have for a woman of forty-four—a contempt born of blissful ignorance. “Come on, darlin’,” she says.

And she takes him by the hand to the table where the Amex slip awaits—along with the platinum card whose bills come to me.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I say. “I’ve paid for your last meal!” And I snatch the card and tear up the Amex slip, fluttering it over my head like confetti.

“How
petty,
” the girl spits contemptuously, producing, out of her shabby wallet, a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Ohio.

“Here,” she says to the maître d’hotel (who by now has appeared to see whether a fight’s in the offing). “I’ll pay for this one.”

“You certainly will,” I say, before stomping off and rejoining Emmie at our table. “You’ll pay and pay.”

“What on earth
happened
to you?” says Emmie.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“There was some commotion in the other room, but I couldn’t tell what it was.”

I am sweating and out of breath.

“I just played my last scene with Dart,” I say. “Next thing I do is cut this in half and change the locks.” And I give Emmie the credit card that reads: Darton Venable Donegal IV.

“It’s all yours,” I say. “Why don’t we have a witches’ sabbath and burn it? We could sprinkle the ashes into our cauldron. . . .”

“What
happened?
” asks Emmie.

“See that couple?” I ask. “That’s Dart and my replacement. I hope her credit’s good—she’s going to need it.”

—
Leola P. Wilson and Wesley Wilson

 

 

I
t doesn’t really matter who breaks up a relationship. Whether it’s you or him, the pain is the same.

You sleep with a man for almost five years, smelling his sweat, feeling his hairy legs brush you in the night, and you are bonded to him. His leaving has to feel like an amputation. And you go out looking for a wooden stump, knowing it will do no good at all.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you know the man is bad for you. It doesn’t matter whether or not you know the man is bad. At the end of a love affair, you subscribe to the Stella Kowalski school of logic: there are things that happen in the dark between two people that make everything that happens in the light seem all right.

The first night was the worst. I forced myself to sleep alone at the loft, which was littered with Dart’s things—and with the little bimbo’s. She was some piece of work. Her tatty wired bras and stained bikini panties were hanging insolently over my sink; her half-used birth control pills were on my dresser; her perfume (Charlie!) was on the night table.

I went through her things with rage and curiosity. Her dirty makeup bag, filled with broken bits of cheap cosmetics I would never use, her curled snake of a rubber douche tucked in a nylon pouch in her club bag. Her polyester dressing gown, festooned with pink and aqua flowers. Her scuffed bedroom slippers, in filthy aqua terry cloth.

I contemplated making a collage of all these found objects (and the photos from before) and entitling it
Dart’s Bimbo
—but the pain was too great, so I let anger triumph over art and tossed them all out the window. The big window of the loft had to be cranked open and turned around sideways. (It had been made in Germany at great cost and shipped here.) When you opened it, you figured you might as well jump down all six stories—but I resisted the temptation. From the loft I could feel the heat of the street, the singing of the car tires on the wet pavement (it had started to rain), the lure of the open window.

I threw all the nameless bimbo’s shit out into the street: birth control pills, douche bag, makeup kit—all. The makeups cracked and scattered on the street below, a million bits of broken mirror bringing bad luck (to her, I hoped, and not to me—though who could tell?). The douche bag seemed to bounce a little, and then it burst its pouch and lay in the street like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a football. (I hate girls who are always deodorizing their pussies; I thought Dart knew better than to hook up with one of those; I thought he understood the value of natural smells.) I threw all the rest of the stuff out, and then I cranked shut the window and collapsed on the bed, too desolate even to cry.

There is no worse betrayal than having a lover bring another woman to your bed; the very mattress vibrates with their sex, interrupting your sleep: your dreams are infected with their treacherous lovemaking. You know how central you were to their love, how much a participant you were, and the thought curdles your blood. No use telling yourself that their love is now diluted and weakened by no longer being secret. No use telling yourself that they, too, are experiencing a sort of loss. You lie in bed unable to find any position that invites sleep. Your back, your side, your stomach, your other side—all are itchy with their sex, crawly with it, as if bedbugs had infested the bed.

The city boils around you. The great, steaming Rome-at-the-end-of-the-empire city. Police cars screaming, ambulances tearing through the streets, garbage pail lids bouncing noisily on pavement, bottles breaking, ghetto blasters blaring endless songs about the flood of hormones, the crescendo of testosterone seeking estrogen and estrogen seeking testosterone—the pulse of the universe.

Everyone has someone, and you are alone. Everyone is grinding pelvis to pelvis, hip to hip, and you are all alone.

Suddenly the love comes to attack you. You want to summon bad memories, but all the good ones come flooding back. You want to hate him, but the love is still there, pulsing like a severed heart. You want to forget, but you can do nothing but remember.

The Dalmatian coast in summer, and Dart lying in the sun like a young god. The tender purple veins in his lids. The gold of his chest. The trace of a crack in his forehead where the windshield stopped him once on his way to a coke-propelled car crash in Bucks County. Dart killing a copperhead by blasting its head off with a shotgun. Dart fucking you on the floor of the Connecticut house. Dart darting. Dart gone. Dart back. Surely Dart is coming back.

This time I doubt it. The con man needs the mark to feel real. The drunk needs the drink. The addict the needle. The prick the pussy. Where have all my gratitude and grace gone now?

I get up, snap on the light, and go to the bar. There, in a mirrored cabinet designed by Ettore Sottsass himself especially for this loft, I admire the parade of bottles: Chivas Regal, Jack Daniel’s, Stolichnaya, Beefeater, Canadian Club, Pernod, Lillet, Cinzano, Noilly Prat. . . . The bottles confront me with their amber and crystal lights. The bottles goad me and tease me.

What’s the difference? I think. Why not?

I uncork the Chivas (though Scotch was never my drink) and dare myself to take a slug. I do. And another. And another. As soon as my head starts to get fuzzy, I know I’m in trouble. I pour the liquor down the sink and smash the bottle on the floor.

The meetings have ruined my drinking. I used to drink, waiting for the click in my head (as Brick says in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
), and now I
hate
it when my head gets fuzzy. The minute the fuzziness starts, I know I’m doomed: doomed to a week of depression and sadness and self-hate. Doomed to the long and winding fall to the bottom of the rabbit hole.

I toss and turn on my bed, waiting for the booze to work its way out of my system. Dart’s sheepish look haunts me. I remember how the bimbo did all the talking for him, and I am desolate. I want to comfort Dart, not blame him. Somehow I know that Dart is the victim of his own weakness and despair—and far more lost than I am. He hates his dependency even more than I hate it, and yet he doesn’t know any other way to be.

The hell of my condition is that I understand Dart so bloody well. He is my baby, my darling, my man, and I want to nurture and protect him even as he is slaughtering me. If Dart were to write his side of the story, what would he say? That big, bad Leila emasculated him and made him feel weak? That big bad Leila took all his marbles away? I appreciate the problem of being the model, not the artist.

Once, when I was in art school, I was the model for a friend of mine—a figurative painter names Mikhailovich, who painted me for a month (out of love, I believe) but who made me look a way that was not at all to my liking. I remember the sense of being under another’s spell, of bad magic, and I remember, too, the feeling of being out of control. Dart feels this way all the time. Dart is trying to control me by bringing the bimbo to my loft, by darting, by fucking her in my bed.

Impossible. I switch on the light, get dressed, flip through my AA booklet, and go out in search of an all-night meeting. My loins girded in denim, I venture out, searching for a refuge from my pain. As I walk, indifferent to danger, I seem to see the book of my life riffling before my eyes. How many years do I have left to paint? I could die tonight on these streets, or I could have one, two, ten, twenty, thirty years. My life is more than half over. Already the small print swims on the page when I try to read. Already my periods are either too long or too short. Already my knees ache and my elbow joints pain me in the rain. I have no time to suffer over Dart. I have work to do.

I find the meeting (in a shabby church a few blocks from the loft) and meet my people—the bums, the street people, the homeless.

The all-night meeting is as much a shelter as it is a place of prayer and guidance. Old men and women who have nothing to eat but these sugary cookies, nothing to drink but this tepid coffee or tea.