Authors: Roberta Latow
His words were a soothing balm to her jagged emotions. They gave her strength. Ben always gave her strength, made her feel whole, something special. They had known each other for years. He was obsessed with Gideon’s work and had showed him many times in group exhibitions at his galleries. His greatest ambition was to be Gideon’s sole agent, something Gideon would never allow. He already had the best dealer in the world who suited him perfectly.
Ben Borgnine was a young fifty-year-old who looked more the Steve McQueen man of action than the smooth, erudite, fiercely clever art dealer he in fact was. He had been Dendre’s first lover. She had been seduced by Ben many years before and the two had kept up an on/off affair that had given Dendre an escape from the reality of her life and her overwhelming love for her husband. It had saved her marriage by allowing her a secret life of sexual
fantasy and adoration. Her fragile ego had needed that and it had been no threat to her marriage. It had nothing to do with Gideon and her love for him.
Ben Borgnine had a knack for appearing when she most needed him. Dendre’s heart lifted as she told Orlando and Adair, ‘You two go ahead, we’ll follow.’ With that she poured two glasses of champagne and handed one to Ben.
‘Some night, Dendre,’ he told her as he touched the rim of his glass to hers. ‘Not only
are
you a marvel, but you
look
marvellous.’
‘Do I?’
He laughed. ‘Every inch the grand dame, painter’s wife.’
She laughed. ‘I did try! If you only knew what this dress cost. More than my whole wardrobe.’
‘Dendre! Your husband sold a painting to the Tate last week for four million dollars, and you’re still penny pinching? Darling, you left Brooklyn a long time ago, hasn’t anyone told you that?’
‘My daughters, every day. But then they can afford to laugh at my penny pinching – they have a wealthy mother and father.’
It was just that sort of light banter that had made her take notice of Ben Borgnine, all those years ago. She had watched him with beautiful young women whom he wore on his arm like trophies and been flattered when he paid her attention, when he seduced her to his bed. There was sexual heat between them right from their first clandestine liaison and after fifteen years it had not wavered.
Whenever Ben saw her naked, the many studies Gideon had painted of his wife over the years flashed before his eyes. He had wanted the woman in those portraits long before he ever met and bedded Dendre. And he wanted her now just as much. Not only her body but her appearance of passivity added something more to his lust for Dendre. In sex one reached into the heart and very soul of Dendre Palenberg. He always marvelled how few people could see that. They never seemed to get past the interesting but not beautiful face. Ben was one of the few who could understand Gideon’s attraction to her, why his paintings of her were as erotic and powerful as they were. Why people stood crowded in front of pictures in museums all of which bore the same title: ‘Woman’, by Gideon Palenberg.
Love never came into it because of her obsession with Gideon.
But sex did. Ben and the circumstances of their affair had served Dendre well. He was only the second man she had ever slept with, Gideon having been the first, and he, like her husband, could turn off the outside world for her, make her feel like the Empress Erotica whom any man would want. With Ben, as with Gideon, she could give herself up sexually and ride her orgasms into an ecstasy that was more powerful and sublime than anything else she had experienced. In sex she was able to run wild, live fully, in a way she denied herself otherwise, caught up in her love for Gideon.
Dendre’s adultery had been hard for her to accept at first. That was why their affair had been on/off yet remained a constant in her life. She listened to the hum of the crowd, the string quartet playing Vivaldi, then she focused her attention on the table where Gideon was holding court. She watched him lean across to whisper something in Adair’s ear. Adair smiled seductively, nodded and moved away from the table, followed closely by Gideon. Dendre reached for Ben’s hand and held it tightly as she watched them leave.
It was only a short distance from the Guggenheim down Fifth Avenue to Adair’s spacious flat overlooking Central Park. The lift opened directly into her own private hall. From there Adair slid open a pair of oversized sixteenth-century wooden Japanese doors whose painted tigers looked ready to pounce, so skilled was their execution. The vast drawing room was in darkness with a view of the New York skyline, the moon and stars, as backdrop. Together, arm in arm, Gideon and Adair turned away from it and walked to the bedroom.
Gideon never found Adair as attractive with clothes on as he did naked. It was not only because of her spectacularly sensuous and near-perfect body: high, full and rounded breasts, provocative nipples made even more so by the large plum-coloured nimbus surrounding them, the slender waist and hint of roundness at her hips, the curve of her back and high bottom. She had kind of slender lusciousness. Her patch of pubic hair intrigued, excited him to want to explore that inner, most private part of Adair: her lust.
Adair’s long slender arms, those perfect thighs and legs that seemed to go on forever, long slender feet …
Both naked now, Gideon took Adair in his arms and carried her to the bed where he lay her down on her side. She made no move towards him, not a kiss. She never fondled him. It was she who wanted to be caressed, made love to. It was she who wanted to be wakened, to be made to come alive. Gideon kissed her breasts, licked her nipples, nibbled and sucked on them, slipped his fingers along the slit between her legs to fondle her soft and seductive hidden lips. She whimpered.
He turned her on her stomach and raised her on to her knees; he placed a pillow under her head. For a few seconds he watched her make herself ready for him: she leaned upon her forearms and moved her legs further apart the better for him to get between them. Then he mounted her and took her slowly from behind. Sank himself deep inside her, and with his hands round her waist fucked her with long, easy strokes. She clung to him with her cunt, hungry for more. Her body tensed, her heart raced, and she came in a strong and copious orgasm. She called out in her moment of ecstasy for more and more and Gideon took her again and again until he went quite mad with lust for her. He wanted to fuck her into oblivion which he did. When he came he had taken possession of her totally.
They
had taken possession of each other. Yes, in her own seductive way, in sex, she could do that to Gideon. It always surprised them, this sexual power she had over them.
Lust and sex, all things erotic, were the norm for Adair. She had been taught that by Gideon and so craved sex such as she was having now: where her every orifice was ready to receive male lust in its most rampant and exciting form. To hold the seed, the taste of a man, to be filled by him, was for her the most sublime of all the passions that can happen between a man and a woman.
When they returned to the museum no more than half an hour had passed. People were roaming up and down the ramp that wound round the exhibition. The tables had been cleared away but there was no sign of the evening breaking up.
Dendre, who had been searching the galleries for Gideon, caught sight of Orlando and her three daughters and felt very proud of them. They were the beauties she had never been; they had the poise and charm of their father, even a touch of his arrogance.
They would fare well in this world they adored, giving it a run for its money as she had never done.
At last she saw that Gideon had returned. He was standing with several other people, his arm round Adair, caressing her bare shoulder.
‘He has achieved more in his lifetime than most men and he is still comparatively young. He’s belonged to the world for a very long time and it’s admirable how you’ve managed to handle that,’ said Orlando as he slipped an arm round his sister’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head.
Ben and Dendre had found him standing in front of a portrait of Dendre that was on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris for the Guggenheim’s retrospective. His arms had been folded across his chest and he had been contemplating the image before him when he felt his sister’s presence next to him.
Dendre looked at her portrait. How Gideon had loved her then! She leaned against her brother and told him, ‘I was Dendre Moscowitz, a nineteen-year-old innocent, when I sat for that portrait. Only tonight do I realise that after all those years since I first set eyes on Gideon, and with everything we have been through together, I have in many ways never stopped being that innocent – that is, until tonight.’
There was something in the tone of her voice that neither Ben nor Orlando had ever heard before. Was it sorrow, regret, even self-pity? Ben could have understood any of those emotions, knowing what life had been like married to Gideon. But no. This passionate woman had none of those things in her tone of voice. It was instead flat, icy indifference he heard. For the first time in all the years he had known her he realised she had seen it all, the reality of her relationship with Gideon. Every day, every hour of her life with him. Dendre had deliberately blinded herself to the battle she had been fighting all her married life – her obsessive love for her husband and his tyranny. Now a crisis was looming and Ben sensed there was nothing he could do to help her. It was time to retreat.
He raised her hand and kissed it. ‘Not all that innocent, I think. Maybe an innocence of convenience. We’ve most of us at one time or another used that to get us by. There are the Bettles – I must have a word with them. Will you excuse me? Come and have lunch with me as soon as you can,’ he told her, and then he was gone.
Orlando too picked up on the strangeness of her behaviour: not being with Gideon at a time like this, that tone in her voice, her sudden avowal of how very naive she had been. Orlando, a very clever doctor, had hinted through the years about obsessive love, how she had found a way to control Gideon through it. But she had never taken those hints on board, had always been too lost in her obsession, too rapt in the fantasy she had created for herself as Mrs Dendre Palenberg, wife of one of the world’s greatest living artists.
‘Dendre, is something happening that I should know about?’ asked Orlando.
‘I think you do know about it. I imagine the whole world knows about it. It’s always the wife who’s the last to hear,’ was her reply.
‘Let’s go over there away from this crowd,’ he suggested.
As Orlando walked with his sister to a bench just inside the entrance to the museum he was aware of other men’s eyes upon her and saw her as a sensuous creature, sexy yet incredibly controlled. She had never seemed that way to him before. It quite shocked him. He was used to seeing his sister as a loving woman, a solid nourisher of her husband and family who obsessed over her man in spite of his many adulterous relationships, his at times despotic behaviour. Orlando had always thought her a proud woman who could endure everything Gideon could put her through because she believed her husband loved her more than any of his conquests. How many times had she told him that? He could not help but wonder if tonight she still believed it.
Once sitting on the bench, Dendre turned to her brother and said, ‘You always knew, didn’t you?’
‘Knew what, Dendre?’
‘That he didn’t love me in the same way I love him. He didn’t feel about our marriage as I have always done.’
‘All your married life I’ve tried to tell you that, my dear,’ said Orlando, taking her hand in his to comfort her. ‘But why are we talking about this now, on this glittering occasion? Not exactly the right time and place, I think.’
‘Because this evening, for the first time, as Gideon walked away from me to receive his Medal of Honour, I realised that he
never
loved me more than the others. That our marriage is no more than a convenient arrangement for him.’
‘I would have put it differently, and will at another time.’
‘No, Orlando, now. I need to know, to try and understand what Gideon and I were all about before he leaves me for Adair.’
‘Dendre! Do you know he will?’
‘In the marrow of my bones. So, how would you describe it? This marriage that became my life and is ebbing away?’
Orlando saw no point in being evasive. At last she was prepared to listen and hear, to look and see, through the window that had opened into her obsession.
‘Dendre, it’s arrogant of you to think that a husband must love a wife in the same way as she loves her husband. Arrogant more than naive, my dear. The ego rather than the heart making demands. It’s very rarely that husbands and wives love in the same way. You mustn’t do anything rash about Gideon or your marriage. You claim you can see it now for what it has always been. I’m not so sure you do.’
Dendre was about to speak but he stopped her. ‘Please let me finish. That Gideon loves you there is no doubt. That he is happy in his marriage, I have no doubt about that either. But … as much as he loves those two aspects of his life, he also hates them. Gideon has a love-hate relationship with you and marriage. He always has had. And if you would take the time to think about that, you would realise you’ve always known it.’
‘Is that what people think?’ she asked, a note of astonishment in her voice.
‘A few, possibly, but I wouldn’t have thought it was common knowledge. He’s covered up his feelings pretty well. Or, more to the point, your actions always made sure it was something you never recognised, and you saw to it that no one else did either.’
‘Am I that clever?’
‘People lost in their obsession can become very clever, devious even, to sustain their fantasy world.’
‘I never dreamed Gideon hated me and our marriage as much as he loved it. That is, not until our eyes met tonight when he rose from his chair to walk away from me. I saw it again when he turned away from me to the applause and that standing ovation. It was as if he was screaming at me, “In spite of you, love, marriage!” I waited for him to acknowledge me from that dais, one word of any sort for the world to hear. Nothing. Just nothing. In a way that was the cruellest blow he’s ever delivered to me.
‘He beamed for the recognition of his life’s work. It was a look of love and passion such as he has never had for me. He has them for himself, his work, his daughters and Adair, but never for me. You are quite right, he hates me and marriage even though he also loves me. Why? What have I ever done to him to generate such feelings?’
‘You trapped him in a bourgeois life – the death knell for a great artist who has to be free. You took him over with your love and possessiveness, became a tyrant with a wooden ladle, a martyr to nappies. You were a bodyguard who kept the world at bay. You held him prisoner, darling, and still from within the cage you kept him in, he learned to fly away from you anyway.’
‘Are you telling me that throughout all those good and bad times down the years, I have been deluding myself? That he has never loved me as he now does Adair?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry to say.’
‘I can’t accept that, Orlando.’
‘I know. But eventually you will and then it will be all right again for both of you,’ he told her.
Her laugher was bitter. Orlando caressed her hair and told her, ‘This night is going to go down in art history. It was a mistake to ruin it for yourself.’
‘I won’t bear the brunt of that accusation. Gideon ruined it for me.’ And, having said that, she rose from the bench, trembling.
Orlando was on his feet at once, comforting her. ‘It will do you no good to have people see you in this state, Dendre. Especially
Gideon. You do pick your times to wake up, tonight of all nights! I don’t want you hurt any more than you already are, so please, for the sake of all concerned, no public scene.’
She gave a nervous laugh. Fighting back tears, she told her brother in the saddest voice he had ever heard, ‘It must be a family trait, being able to blind oneself from reality, because now you’re doing it. Gideon is walking away from me and our marriage forever, and he’s doing it blatantly in front of everyone here. He has it all, everything he has ever wanted, and on a grand scale. My worst fear from the first day we met and I fell in love with him is being realised in front of the whole of all America: he is leaving me behind. You see those TV cameras? That woman next to him with adoring eyes? That’s not me, is it, Orlando? Our three daughters standing behind their father … I’m not there with them, am I?’
‘Come then, let’s join them,’ he suggested.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve played out this scene one way or another many times and got on with your life with him.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Then what makes tonight different from any of those other times?’
‘I discovered tonight, when he failed to acknowledge to the world my part in his life and work, that I deserve better than the grudging love he doles out to me.’
‘I can’t dispute that,’ said her brother.
‘I think I could use a glass of champagne, Orlando.’
Dendre watched her brother walk away then melt into the crowd. She stood very much alone, still on the fringes of the throng, and searched the faces for Gideon and Adair. After several minutes she found him again. He was standing apart from a group of old friends, now famous artists like himself. They looked happy, glittering with pride, for each in their own way had made it big in the art world. True, none as big as Gideon had, but then none was as great an artist.
Gideon was lighting a large, fat Havana cigar. Never had he looked more magnificent than he did at that moment. He was still as he always had been, from that very first time she had seen him, every inch a charismatic figure. He was a volcano of a man,
one who intrigued all who encountered him, commanded love and adoration from those who fell under his spell. She knew as she stood there looking at him across a crowded room that she would never be able to confront him, not in public nor in the privacy of their bedroom.
Aware now that there was no way she could challenge Gideon she brought herself under a semblance of control. She stopped trembling. Her fate had always been in his hands. Orlando was right; she need not make any moves about her love for Gideon or do anything about their marriage. She was no match for her husband. She never had been. He would do what he wanted to do and she would passively follow his every wish. She could do nothing but wait for her execution. That is, unless she saved her life and ran away.
Watching Gideon from a distance had a mesmerising effect on Dendre. She knew she could never run away. Then something quite inexplicable happened to her. Dendre, who by her very nature never looked at herself, did just that. Flashes of herself and her life became vivid pictures that ran before her like a strip of film she was forced to watch against her will.
Orlando returned with the glasses of wine. He saw something in Dendre so distant, so far removed from the present, that he spoke very nearly in a whisper so as not to jar her back too quickly from wherever she was.
‘You seem so far away, in another world. Tell me that you’re all right?’ he begged.
She saw the deep concern in her brother’s face, heard the anxiety for her in his voice, and reached out to caress his cheek. She took the glass of wine from his hand and slid her arm through his to walk him back to the bench where they had been sitting. The doors to the museum had been unlocked and streams of black-tied men and gowned women, the after-dinner guests, formed a slow but steady steam, flowing past brother and sister.
Dendre was hardly aware of them, she was far away. The vivid pictures of her life flashing before her had indeed transported her back to another time, another place, and the Dendre she had lost or misplaced somewhere along the line of loving Gideon.
‘I
am
far away, back in Brooklyn when we were young, happy and secure. We neither knew nor wanted better than we had. Except
for our youth, Mother’s dreams and our arrogance, we might still be there.’
‘Time doesn’t stand still, Dendre.’
‘No, but it lives on as memories or baggage that we carry with us all our lives. I keep getting flashbacks of how I was before I met Gideon. How comfortable our life was back in Brooklyn. It was our world then and how proud we were to have been born and bred there, be a part of Jewish Flatbush.
‘I remember that first day I met Gideon on a park bench in Washington Square. It was a sunny day. I was eating the lunch Mamma had prepared for me: a sandwich of tongue and Swiss cheese on thick slices of rye bread with caraway seeds, a meat filled
K’nishe,
half a sour pickle, and for good measure three large
Kreplach
. I had bought a cup of coffee.’
Orlando began to laugh. ‘One of Mamma’s light lunches! She was a great cook but a lousy dietician.’
‘But you never told her that?’
‘No, never.’
‘I never did either. She was our goddess, the comfort of our lives. Why would one offend Mother?
‘Gideon was watching two men play chess when I first laid eyes on him. I thought him the handsomest man I had ever seen. He was like a Greek god, so big and proud. He emanated strength and sensitivity, both at the same time. He took a flask from the hip pocket of his jeans and I remember how shocked I was when he took several gulps from it and passed it on to the two players. I had never seen a man drink in the street before. It was a few minutes before he took notice of me. First my legs. He kept staring at my legs. I was wearing a lightweight black spring coat, it was early April. It had fallen open and so I closed it to cover my legs. He laughed aloud and walked directly up to me.
‘ “You were staring at me,” he announced as a greeting.
‘I was shocked at having been caught out. I told him, yes.