The Pygmalion story has been told and retold many times—but never with the woman as artist and the man as Galatea! Eliza Doolittle becomes a lie-dy, but she is still, after all, a good girl (“I’m a good girl, I am”), and whether in Shaw’s version (where she rebels against Higgins) or in Lerner and Loewe’s, where she abandons Freddy Eynsford-Hill for the Rex Harrison daddy figure, she still winds up loyal to one man at the end—in short, toeing the mark for any female in society.
But what happens to Pygmalion when our creator is a woman and her creation is a man? Simple: the creation betrays the creator with as many nubile young groupies as possible.
It was not that Trick/Dart
wanted
to betray me. It was just that, having become a star through my loving recreations of him, he was now besieged by young cuties. The sexuality I had found in him exuded from those C prints, from those cowboy canvases, and every spectator could feel it. Dart had become the property of the world, and everyone wanted to fuck him. It was my own damn fault. As an aficionado of Bessie Smith, I should have known enough to heed the advice she proffers in “Empty-Bed Blues.”
When you git good lovin’
Never go and spread the news—
Gals will double-cross you
And leave you with them empty-bed blues. . . .
But I was hoist on my own petard: the artist in me was stronger than the woman. A fierce lover would have kept her beautiful man under wraps. A fierce artist instead made a star of him—and chaos ensued.
Art reshapes life even more than life shapes art. Imagine if Helga had walked off the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
and into the arms of every young man who lusted for her? What would Wyeth have done? Gone mad? Taken to drink and drugs? But he was tended by women—both wived and modeled, cushioned, cosseted. And time, that great softener, had intervened. He had Helga (in whatever sense he had her), and he also had Mrs. Wyeth. Not so the fate of the woman artist. I had my twins, I had Dart, and now I had all these bimbos calling up and asking for Dart. It struck me as a wee bit unfair.
Well, I was strong, I thought. I would ride out the crises. Sexual infidelity was not the worst thing in the world. Let Dart fuck bimbos, as long as he always comes home to me. Or so I thought. This proved to be easier to say than to do.
Which brings us to the summer in question, in which Leila (I talk about myself in the third person only in jest—or in extreme crisis) is waiting by the phone for Dart to appear on his motorcycle. The twins are in California with their father (who is teaching at UCLA). And I am in Connecticut, trying to get together some paintings for a new show. But my concentration is utterly blasted—my muse has flown the coop. I tell myself the muse is within me and I should be able to work, but in reality all I do is listen for the sound of Dart’s motorcycle on the gravel pathway, for the sound of the telephone announcing his arrival.
Connecticut is greenly beautiful, as only Connecticut can be—and I am utterly wretched. Alone with my dog in my studio-silo, without even Mike and Ed to distract me, all I can do is listen for the crushed gravel under Dart’s motorcycle wheels, which seem to ride right over my heart.
4
Playing Penelope
The meanest things he could say would thrill you through and through,
The meanest things he could say would thrill you through and through,
And there wasn’t nothing too dirty for that man to do.
P
enelope knew this, loving Ulysses: years of waiting for a man to come home makes a woman mad.
I wait. I wait. And as I wait, I try to paint. Unable to paint, I drink. And having drunk, I plunge into despair. It is midnight on a Friday night when he comes back. He has been in the city one, two, or three days—I have lost track. I have gotten through the time talking to Emmie on the phone, which is where I am right now.
“He’s back,” I say, scratching Boner’s belly with one bare toe. (The dog, mirroring my mood as dogs do, seems as depressed as I am.) “What do I do? And what do I do about the
guns
?”
“He has
guns?
” Emmie asks.
“Emmie,” I say, “goyim have guns.”
“Well,
I
don’t,” says Emmie.
“I never think of you as goyim,” I say.
“Thanks,” says Emmie, understanding the compliment. “Just promise me you’ll tell him to take the guns out of the house. Okay?”
Strange, isn’t it, the way all relationships unroll backward? When I met Dart nearly five years ago, he rode a motorcycle, which he abandoned for the blood-red Mercedes I bought him. Now, for some reason, he is using the motorcycle again and leaving the Mercedes (DART—his alter ego) in the garage. He is terribly guilty about something—even he who feels so little guilt, compared with real people.
The motorcycle stops with a roar and a put-put-putter, and I hear his boots on the gravel path.
I spray myself with Lumière, fluff my hair, and run to the door. I don’t want him to see I’ve been on the phone with Emmie, whom he resents because he knows (all men know this instinctively) that we talk about him. That this talk is a matter of survival is something no man understands (or perhaps they do—and that’s why they resent it: how dare we survive them?). All they know is that we have something they can’t touch or enter: a sisterhood of shared affection, a safety net to catch us when they drop us and we fall.
“Baby,” says Dart, taking off the Darth Vader helmet and grabbing my ass.
“Hello, darling,” I say, looking up at him to be kissed. No “Where the hell have you been?” or “Why didn’t you call me?” If a woman wants an animal like Dart, she has to be disciplined and clever, never betray jealousy, never show possessiveness.
Alas, this is impossible. Even women are only human.
No kiss is forthcoming. “Have you been working?” he asks, almost as though he knows he has blasted my concentration and is glad of it.
“Yes,” I lie. “A new series of paintings.”
“Of me?” he asks, greedy to be my muse even though he is no longer keeping his part of the bargain.
“Of course, darling.”
“Are you lying?” he asks. “I feel you are lying. You know what happens when you lie, bad girl, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say, very gamine, very excited.
“Come into the studio. I want to see what you’ve done.”
And he strides out the back door, across the grass, and into my studio-silo, giving off a goatish whiff of black leather and dust of the road.
In my studio, all is chaos. Blank canvases stacked against the walls, rejected C prints from the film-stills show (on some of these I have doodled in acrylic, covering the photographic images with Warholesque scrawls), rejected canvases from the Cowboy show, one canvas of the twins for a double portrait titled
Doppelgänger Daughters,
which I have abandoned as not good enough, and the usual self-portraits I begin when no other model comes to hand.
The chaos in my studio mirrors the chaos in my mind—a million things begun and nothing finished—a wild casting about to find inspiration in the past, in my children, in myself.
“So—you are lying,” he says. “You know the punishment.”
“I know,” I say, growing very excited.
“Bend over the easel,” he says, “and take down your jeans.”
Isadora: I can’t really believe that Leila would do this. After all, she’s an artist, a heroine, a feminist. Why would she let this
putz
abuse her?
Leila: Love. Surely you remember love?
Isadora: What’s love got to do with it?
Leila: Everything. This is a story about the fine line between love and self-annihilation. We’re talking skinlessness here. Surely you yourself have sometimes sought it—or am I dreaming?
Isadora: I’ve read
Story of O,
but I’m not French enough to buy it.
Leila:
Wait.
He starts to unzip me, and I, anticipating this moment, have worn black lace bikini pants under my jeans. He tears the denims away from my behind but leaves the lace drawers in place. Then, extracting a black riding crop from one high black leather boot, he begins to sting my bottom teasingly, taking special pleasure from the fact that I am leaning over my own easel, on which is perched an unfinished portrait of myself.
The rain of leather hailstones on my buttocks excites me beyond my power to resist him. The humiliation is more mental than physical, since it is not so much the crop that is hurting me as it is my knowledge that he has been with another woman for however many days he has been gone. I urge him on with cries and apologies as he stings my rear. (I am apologizing to him for
his
fault—as women in love are wont.) As he whips me—first lightly, then harder and harder—my cunt begins to ache for him, heat for him, swell for him. Not a moment too soon does he pull me to the floor and cover me, black leather against black lace, cold metal zipper against warm white belly, and at last his hard pronged cock probing inside me, finding my center, finding his home.
“Witch,” he hisses.
“My man, my fit, my mate,” I moan.
I bite his ear, draw blood, bite his lip, growl, claw his back beneath the lipstick-stained white turtleneck he wears under his motorcycle jacket.
When he is deep within me, he stops, holds me very tight, bites my neck, draws blood, then starts moving in me again.
“My witch, my mate,” he mutters, plunging into me again and again and again. And I see that contorted look his face gets just before he comes.
“Give me all of it, baby, all of it,” I moan, and he comes inside me in a convulsion so strong it shakes the canvas above us.
“I love you, Leila.”
“I know.” I cup his head, like a baby’s. And I do. I know I will always be his lady, his love, his Guinevere. But whether I can bear the pain of that, I do not know.
And a small part of me—the part that is still Louise Zandberg, perhaps, the part my analyst would call my sane mind—is standing off at a distance, saying, This must stop or I will not survive.
He stays with me all weekend. And it is a weekend as devilishly sweet as weekends were at the very start of our idyll. We spend hours in bed listening alternately to Mozart and Tom Waits, with the dog—now not so depressed—nestled at our feet. We cook together, take long walks—only to stop by a stream and fuck in the woods. We swim in a beautiful lake near my property. We picnic. We talk. We commune.
I am starting to unwind, to feel loved again, to feel that life is not so bad, that I can work again, feel again. The clenched fist of my mind begins to relax.
And just as that begins to happen, Dart picks it up with his warlocky sixth sense. He feels me opening to him, loving him, loving myself—and so he looks at the gold Rolex I bought him (we have just made tender love on the couch in the living room before an open fire, and it is ten o’clock on a Saturday night) and says, “Baby—I have to go.”
Wrenched out of myself, whipped and whiplashed, I get up with him—my face as contorted with pain as his was at the moment of coming—and walk with him to the bathroom, where I watch him shave (admiring his own face through my eyes as I watch him), splash on Vetyver (a scent I introduced him to—which suits him), and gird his loins in black leather to leave me again.
I offer no protest. I am determined to open my hand to let him go, because I know that only if I do not hold him may he be drawn back of his own free will.
He is waiting for me to beg and plead with him, but I will not give him the satisfaction. He is waiting for me to ask him where he’s going, but I will not. My jaw clenched, my brow knotted, I merely attend him in his toilette, helping him dress, knowing he will in all probability be undressed by somebody else.
All my considerable will and discipline is focused on letting him go, on not showing my pain (though how he could fail to see it, knowing me as he does, is a mystery to me). Boner howls in pain, as if on my behalf. “Shh, puppy,” says Dart, nuzzling him as I wish he would nuzzle me.
I watch Dart dress in black leather jeans with no underwear. (“I hate underwear—the restriction of it,” he once told me. Oh, beware of men who wear no underwear—your mother warned you about men like that!) I watch him pull on a black silk turtleneck (he has left the lipstick-stained white one for me to wash). And I focus on my own courage in not restraining him. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to let somebody go.
At the last possible moment, when he is kissing me goodbye and donning the helmet, some imp inside me, some creature not of my own making, some dybbuk possessing me, blurts out: “But if I need you, where can I find you?” The words are no sooner out than I regret them, than I long to take them back, than I despair like one of the wretched in Dante’s
Inferno,
endlessly replaying the fatal act.
And he turns to me and nearly spits out these words: “You didn’t expect that after you threw me out you’d be able to find me!” And he is off, revving up the motorcycle and taking off for New York—or wherever—again.
I pour myself another glass of wine and call Emmie. I have forgotten even to
mention
the guns.
My best friend, Emily Quinn, has been saving my life for more years than I like to remember. The product of convent schools and an upper-class childhood in Manhattan and Virginia, she now earns her living as a writer of nonfiction books on trendy subjects.
Joy of Woman
made her rich in the seventies. A meticulously researched biography of Victoria Woodhull made her respected in the eighties; and now she is writing the first no-holds-barred book on menopause for the nineties.
“Did you ever think we’d live to see
menopausal chic
?” she asked me a couple of days—it now seems a couple of years—ago.