Any Woman's Blues (4 page)

Where did he go during all that time away—zooming off in the car I bought him, refusing to be tied down to a specific time for dinner, refusing to tell me where he was going? My imagination immediately leapt to the worst conclusions: other women, hustling, drug smuggling, gambling, other men.

“I’ll call you,” he’d say, climbing into the blood-red Mercedes (bought with my blood), and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t.

When I complained of this, he flew into a rage and said: “But I always come home to
you.”
Or else he would accuse: “You never
trust
me! You always question me!”
You always . . . you never
—the language of male bondage.

 

 

So I would pace my studio-silo, trying to work, my peace of mind destroyed: listening for the phone; listening for his/my car; wondering if he would or wouldn’t be home for dinner; wondering whether to ask or (since asking only made him madder) whether to ignore it, and having another glass of wine. I began working drunk.
Never
had I done this before. For all my indulgence in pot, peyote, hash, coke, wine, I had never mixed it with my work. My work was sacred. But now my silo, my obvious phallic symbol, which had been my freedom, had become my prison. I paced and paced, tied to that silent phone as if it were a household god, afraid to go out lest he call, afraid to get in my car and drive to New York lest I find him with another woman in my loft, afraid to invite a friend over lest he suddenly come in and want me to himself, afraid to move, to paint, to pick up the phone and call for help.

I felt like that girl in
Story of O
chained by her labia to her lover, never allowed to forget her bondage and loving it even as she hated it, for the clanking of her chains made a woman of her. Did he deliberately plan this reduction, this destruction of me? Or was it something he did by instinct, learned at his father’s knee, the fine art of reducing powerful women to ash?

And then he would come in, always when you had given up and stopped expecting him. And he would scoop me in his arms, never uttering a harsh word. “My love, my witch, my bacchante, my darling,” he would murmur, the softness of the words cutting deeper than a dagger. And then he would turn me over and give it to me from behind with his hard, pronged, demonic cock. And I would whimper with the sheer relief of his being back, his being safe, his being deep inside me, and we would fuck the night away, no questions asked, until the next time.

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

D
art was sweet. Had Dart been sour or mean, it would have been much easier. I would have fled at once. But in the beginning he rarely said anything that wasn’t loving, sweet, and dear. He spoke, in fact, like a Hallmark greeting card. It was just that his actions belied his words. He was like some actors or politicians—full of reassurances and good words, yet
doing
things that made you terribly mistrustful. “I’ll always be there for you,” he said. Yet the fact was that often you could not reach him.

I used to try to think up ways of keeping him with me. On trips it was relatively easy; he was always at my side (hence our compulsive traveling). But at home it was harder. If the studio I gave him did not suffice—that wonderful old barn, pierced with skylights, with the hayloft made into a sleeping balcony, and its own bathroom and little kitchen—then I would rack my brains to think up other things: joint projects we could work on (which
I
always wound up doing, because he was out God knows where—I realize now with a shock that I never actually
saw
him paint or sculpt), portraits and photographs I would do of him, brunches and dinners with important people who might help his career. All these things worked only for a little while. He was adamant that we should work together (which is hard for artists who have their own visions), and I would do anything to keep him near, so I attempted that folly.

I am looking now at one of the paintings I painted to his design (he had scribbled a rough sketch on a napkin; I, of course, had painted it), and there is no denying that it’s an abortion. Not my style at all. I had painted (as if bewitched) a rather sappy rendition of our first meeting in the Tetons: cowboy and cowgirl riding beneath the sunset through fields of flowers, an image more suitable for one of those pseudo-hippie greeting cards than for a show of new works by Leila Sand. No danger of that, for when I look at how the painting is signed, I see no trace of my name but only “Darton Venable Donegal IV,” in large vermilion letters.

In the name of our shared life, I even went so far as to buy a building on Greene Street and establish a gallery for new artists so that he could exhibit there (he’d had rotten luck, he said, in finding a gallery of his own). He worked devilishly hard renovating the building, setting up the first group show and launching the gallery—called, in honor of our liaison, the Grand Teton Gallery—but as soon as it began to show signs of actually succeeding, he lost interest, as he eventually lost interest in everything that promised him the success he claimed to want. Somehow he never got together the work for his projected one-man show, though he was always promising to. (He claimed
my
success blocked him.) Nor would he run the gallery, as he had said he would. Eventually I hired a pretty young thing to do this—and eventually he seduced her—but he never even
began
the work for his own show.

And yet he could be so tender with me at times and so
loving.
I remember his searching the city for a certain kind of gesso I wanted. I remember the time he waited a whole day at JFK because I had a shipment of supplies coming from Italy and he knew how worried I was about their safe arrival. I remember the way he nursed me when I was sick, bringing me tea, bringing me consommé, arguing with doctors about my possible allergy to this or that antibiotic. I don’t want to think of these things now in my anger—but they happened, and I can’t make them un-happen.

If only I could time-travel back to the beginning of our affair and relive the sweetness of it, I would mortgage my soul to the devil. It’s easy enough to let the end poison the beginning when you are disaffected by all the betrayals. But in the beginning, when you hope you have found your One True Love, the world is full of sweetness, you walk with a winged step, and your heart seems a helium balloon that will never spring a leak.

“I’m only your mirror,” Dart used to say in the mad, passionate beginning of our affair, when we would fuck the nights away all over the world—but I suppose I did not realize how true that was.

Dart was a moon who required a sun in order to gleam. He had a certain smile—head cocked to one side, blue eyes flashing, mouth turned up in a sort of antique crescent that could melt anyone’s heart. On one of our very first trips, when we were sitting side by side in a haze of champagne and limerance in the first-class section of an airplane, I remember remarking to myself upon the way Dart was smiling at me: it seemed
rehearsed.
It seemed he had been told what charms lay in his smile and that he had practiced it in front of the mirror. I thought this in the early days and then, of course, promptly forgot it. Once I was gathered into his heart, beaten out of my common sense by the indefatigability of his cock, I did not look at him critically at all—and his smile became my smile, his causes my causes, his pains my pains.

If I had a lovers’ time machine and I could drop myself back into the past at will and relive one of our trips, which trip would I pick? Hong Kong Harbor at sunset and our mad fucking in a king-size bed at the Mandarin? Vivaldi pouring out of the radio as we made passionate love in Hemingway’s room at the Gritti in Venice? That tumbledown cabin (built of lodgepole pine) at the Lazy C Ranch in Wyoming, where we fucked the nights away in coltish wonder at having actually found our sexual mates? (Dart was the first man I’d ever met who was as mad for sex as I was, as unsqueamish about tastes and odors, as puppy-playful, as dark and kinky and wild.)

No—I would not pick any of the grand hotels we littered with our towels and sheets and slime and sperm and saliva. Nor would I go back to the first time in that Wyoming paradise of fly-tying and horseback riding and homemade honey muffins, broiled trout, and scrambled eggs. I would pick, oddly enough, a trip to Yugoslavia we once took to spend all the blocked dinars that had accumulated from sales of my paintings there.

I see him lying on a beach somewhere along the Dalmatian coast (between Dubrovnik and Split, I suppose). Above us is a corniche road cut into the limestone. It crumbles and falls away in places, like the odyssey of our lives. Below us, lapping, is the Adriatic. The beach is rocky, and we have spread blankets and towels, which are littered with snorkel gear and the remains of our peasant picnic of grapes, plums, cheese, bread, and homemade red wine in a wavy green glass bottle innocent of any label. The beach is deserted and we are both naked (not nude—that more polite cousin of nakedness) in the blinding sunlight. We are greasing each other’s bodies in tandem: first he does my back with infinite tenderness; then I do his. Then he does my lips, my nipples, my thighs, my knees—and then he has plunged his sweet, tousled boyish head between my knees and he is slowly licking up one side of my clitoris and down the other, darting his tongue in and out of that cavity he would like to climb back into, making me come resoundingly again and again and again before he will deign to pull me to my knees and fuck me brutally, almost painfully, from behind, the heat of his cock corresponding to the heat of the sun that bakes us. When we are spent, we lie in each other’s arms on that rocky beach, my head in his armpit, where I smell the odor that links my menstrual cycles to the moon, his sweet sweat clinging in trembling drops to the honey-blond ringlets in the curve of his armpit.

I can remember the curl of each hair in the sunlight, the tendency his armpit hair had to tangle in little knots—which later I would tenderly cut away with a nail scissors—the faint whorls of ashen-blond hair around his nipples, the curve of his warm belly (not as flat as he wished it, dammit—
his
dammit, not mine), and his battering ram of a cock deceptively sweet in repose, a little rosebud listing to the left and weeping one glistening dewdrop tear.

I remember the shape of his loins, the blue vein that pulsed where his leg joined his groin, the golden hair on his calves, the shape of those calves, the length of the tendons. And then I remember a slightly funny, moth-eaten odor his mouth had—not unpleasant but hinting faintly of corruption—“the moth-eaten odor of old money,” he called it (for he could also be funny in a self-mocking sort of way). I noticed that odor in the beginning and then I stopped noticing it—only to notice it again right at the end.

We drove through Yugoslavia in a tiny cheap Yugoslavian car called a Zastava—the only car we could rent. The engine must have been made of plastic, and somewhere in the mountains of Macedonia it gave up the ghost. The car puttered to a halt on a mountain road in a region of infernal factories and mines, where leathery-faced peasants in sweaty bandannas seemed to be mining lead. Of course it wasn’t lead, but it hung in the sky like a grayish haze, making one think of gnomes in the lands of Oz and Ev, underground factories, and regions of infernal gloom.

Not a soul spoke English in that infernal land, and there were no garages.

“Do you have a wire coat hanger, baby?” Dart asked, looking under the hood of the car, then strutting over to me as if he wanted to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur.

I knew better than to ask why. In fact, I didn’t really
want
to know why. From my expensive leather-trimmed tapestry suitcase I produced the hanger as if I were the nurse at one of those kitchen-table abortions of my youth. I was full of admiration for his WASP knack of fixing things . . . I who had grown up poor in Washington Heights with Jewish men who thought that when something broke, you “called the guy”—inevitably a Polack, Irishman, or Latino, or some other member of that under-class that exists for the sole purpose of sparing Jewish men manual labor. Something about Dart’s ability to fix things like throttle linkages got me hot. It seemed to have a sexual dimension.

And fix the Zastava he did. As we puttered off into the Yugoslavian sunset, I thought I had found my fixer at last: my mate, my addictive substance, my pusher, my love.

Love is the sweetest addiction. Who would not sell her soul for the dream of the two made one, for the sweetness of making love in the sunlight on an Adriatic beach with a young god whose armpits are lined with gold? I thought we were pals, partners, lovers, friends. I, who had always—even in my marriages—maintained my obsessive separateness, now let myself relax into the sweetness of coupling, the sweetness of partnership, the two who are united against a world of hostile strangers.

It must be admitted: famous women attract con men and carpetbaggers. The sweeter men, the normal men, are shyer and hesitate to come close. So one looks around and sees a world filled with Claus von Bülows, Chéris, and Morris Townsends, in short, a world of heiress-hunters, gigolos, and grifters. The nice men, being nice, hesitate—and in love, as in war, he who hesitates is lost.

 

 

The real key to Dart was his father, though I resisted seeing that for nearly five years. Darton Venable Donegal III was a fortune-hunting scoundrel of the old school. Henry James could have done him justice—or Dickens. He was six-feet-six, white-haired, red-faced, and totally out of touch with human emotions. He spoke like a person, looked like a person, ate like a person—but the better you got to know him (which was a contradiction in terms, since he was basically unknowable), the more you realized that he was impersonating a human being in the way that certain malevolent life forms of stock science fiction impersonate human beings.