Any Woman's Blues (13 page)

Emmie laughs and laughs. “What do they play?”

“They play Barbie joins the Mile High Club, I guess. With twins you never know—they have a whole secret life.”

During the evening, Fleur’s story drifts back to me. Some of it is even starting to make sense.

“I keep thinking of Fleur,” I say, “of women not loving their daughters into health unless they can love themselves into health—you know what I mean?”

“I do,” says Emmie.

“And that makes me think of Theda, who certainly didn’t love herself—and yet she gave me this crazed bravado, this notion that I can do
any
thing. And Dolph too. I am so much my father’s daughter. My mother’s madness fired my ambition in a strange way too. I want to redeem her life and make her pain worthwhile. If only she could have stopped drinking.”

“Tell me about ‘The Rules of Love,’ ” says Emmie.

“Let me find the book.”

I run up to the attic and look among the shelves where I keep the books from my Yale days. There it is, a dusty greenish volume called
Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century
which I have saved all these years because of its account of the tradition of courtly love and its survival into the Renaissance. I pull the book out as carefully as I would an ancient scroll, sealed in a tomb, preserved from ordinary air. As if by magic, it falls open to a page headed “The Rules of Love.” I stand alone in the attic and read in the dusty sunlight from the dormers:

“Love always increases or diminishes,” I say aloud. “A dead lover must be mourned for two years.” I hold on to those thoughts as if they are the very pillars of my sane mind.

I run downstairs to read “The Rules of Love” to Emmie, who listens intently.

“Why do they remind you of ‘The Twelve Steps’?” she asks.

“Because human beings have this need to codify everything, even heartbreak, even despair. ‘The Rules of Love’ and ‘The Twelve Steps’ are parallel universes. They’re like floating spars to a drowning person. It’s comforting to know that others have passed that way before.”

“You mean you’re not the only stumbling human being, the only stumbling lover?” Emmie asks, not without irony. “You mean you’re
allowed
to be imperfect?”

“Precisely,” I say, pretending to be in my sane mind. This is one of the first principles of the Program, I have learned from Emmie: “Act as if.” Perhaps even if I cannot find my sane mind, I can
pretend
to have found it. And perhaps by pretending enough, I will eventually cease having to pretend.

 

 

Emmie stays with me that night and the next and the next. The first three days without booze are hard. Every day at five, I crave wine so badly I think I can’t live without it—and instead we go to a meeting and then come home and gorge on ice cream. Something seems missing in my life. The days seem three times as long as before. The house is empty without Dart, without the twins, without the ritual of drinking.

Emmie and I cart all the wine down to a storage closet in the cellar and lock it up, then bury the key somewhere in the ground near my silo.

“If you ever want to drink, you’ll have to call a locksmith,” Emmie says. “Ideally, we should throw it away—but you might have a party and need the stuff.”

“How long will it be before I stop wanting wine every day at five?”

“I think you’re like a lot of women—you drink with men.”

“And since there’s no sex in my life, I won’t need to drink, right?”

“I didn’t say there’d
never
be—”

“Oh, Emmie, why did I ever let you drag me to that goddamned meeting?”

“Drag you? You dragged
me.
You think I’d come all the way up here just for a
meeting?
”

 

 

On the fourth day I go to my silo and start a still life. Emmie is in the guest room, sprawled out on the water bed, reading a half-dozen books about osteoporosis while keeping a nostril and an ear out for the gallons of tomato sauce she’s making in the kitchen. The whole house smells like an Italian restaurant. The cooking smells give me comfort—as does Emmie’s presence.

Out in my silo, I set up my still life. I choose the elements carefully: a dozen white jumbo eggs in a Lalique crystal bowl with maenads dancing around its borders, a clear crystal egg, a white china milk pitcher in the shape of a cow, a cylindrical clear-glass vase filled with white roses and calla lilies, and under it all an antique white lace tablecloth, which I gather into folds so that it looks like snowy alps.

I erect my little traveling easel near the still life, stand a freshly stretched square canvas upon it, squeeze out my oil paints in umber, ocher, blue, green, and every shade of white, and begin losing myself in the challenge of finding the kaleidoscope of colors within the word “white.”

Wholly happy, wholly content, I feel that I am ten again and have regained that true self I knew before the dance of sex, the tidal waves of hormones, overtook my life. I am happy—happier than I have been in years.

Five o’clock comes and goes without my needing a drink
or
a meeting. I paint as if in a trance, entirely absorbed in the drama of the white tablecloth, the angles of changing light on the crystal, the maenads dancing as they have danced for centuries, the womanly eggs, the cow full of milk, the clouds full of rain in the darkening sky.

For once I don’t mind the setting of the sun, since I am painting this still life not in real light but in the light of the mind. I switch on the powerful strobes I use for my photographs and go on painting. The valleys of the tablecloth glimmer as if with alpine snow. The eggs show little calcified bumps, like ovaries about to burst their follicles. The crystal egg seems to hold the future in its depths. The roses and lilies open before my eyes.

In a trance, I paint and paint. My head clear, my heart singing in my chest, I am in ecstasy.

At about eleven, Emmie comes in with a dish of pasta, a glass of iced chamomile tea with honey, and a heaping bowl of sliced peaches.

We sit at my drafting table, and she watches me eat.

“Four days sober,” she says. “Mazel tov. And the White Goddess sent you a gift to celebrate.”

We both turn and look at the still life, which seems actually finished. It has a clarity my work has never possessed before. I know that I am onto something new—something beyond cowboys or self-portraits, something pure, clear, complex, and glittering as snow.

“
L’chaim!
” says Emmie, toasting me with her glass of chamomile tea. We clink glasses, then laugh and laugh.

 

 

Dart calls late that night. It is one o’clock or so, and Emmie is asleep.

When I hear his voice on the phone, my heart does a funny little dance. I think I have been longing for him to call, but now I am a bit thrown. I want to keep the clarity I have.

“Baby—what are you up to?” he asks.

“Oh, just painting,” I say. “The usual.”

“Do you miss me?”

“Of course I do.”

“I miss you terribly, baby,” he says, his voice cracking. “There’s no one like you—no one as sweet and wild and sexy. Baby, I’m coming home.”

In four days, I have become a queen; now I go back to pawn. When Dart appears, Leila disappears.

 

 

I toss and turn in my bed, waiting for him, unable to sleep. I get up and do my makeup, put on perfume and a silk nightgown, put in my diaphragm, and go back to bed. I wish I were strong enough to tell him never to darken my door again, but I am not. Emmie sleeps in the guest room; my wet canvas glistens in the studio. I wait in bed as if for a dybbuk to claim me. Outside my window, a full moon with a ring around it floats over the hills. I drift off to sleep, awaken to find that it is now three o’clock. I get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, put a sweater over the nightgown, and wander out onto my hillside.

The moon has almost completed her arc. Her ring is gone now, and she lies low on the other side of the horizon. I gaze at her, then bend my head nine times, trying to think of my supreme wish. Always before, that wish has been for Dart. Now it is for me: I wish for the power to keep the clarity these four days have brought.

No sooner have I made the wish than I hear the putter of Dart’s motorcycle and the spray of pebbles in the driveway. The dog barks. I kneel down on my hillside and raise my hands to the moon.

What am I praying for? I think I’m praying for the return of my sane mind.

I am on my knees, immobilized in the moonlight, as he enters the house, using his key, storms into the bedroom, looking for me, and then storms out again, heading for my silo.

I am seized with panic—somehow convinced that if he sees the crystalline still life he will destroy it (so clear will it be to him that he has been replaced as my muse). I run after him, calling, “Dart, Dart,” catching up with him just before he enters my studio.

I embrace him, drag him out to the grassy slope again. There, under the mocking moon, we couple like witch and warlock, screaming and crying in the dewy grass, rolling over and over laughing like maniacs and even rolling down the hill to the border of my ha-ha. There we stop by the side of the ditch and fuck again, powered by the blue fullness of the moon.

“Baby, you’re wild—wild,” says Dart, who does not know that all my wildness was to keep him from my still life, or that in my screaming and coming, I hold back a little piece of my heart—a small sane sober corner that can never give itself away again.

I lead Dart to bed, where he collapses, spent, reaching his arms around me and sleeping on my breast like a baby. Immobilized by his need, I lie awake watching the pink light of dawn begin to rise behind my trees. On one side of my bedroom the moon sets: on the other side the sun rises. I lie in the middle—Isis with Horus in her arms, Astarte with Adonis, Rhea with the Zeus who is destined to dethrone her.

But can we ever dethrone the earth? The earth is there, whatever we do. We have but to take off our shoes and reassert the contact of our soles with the soil.

Dart groans and turns, letting go his hold, and suddenly I am free to breathe. I stretch out on my back, my mind racing. I know he will sleep for hours, know he has a small boy’s need for sleep, especially after sex.

I slip out of bed, pull on a sweat suit and slippers, and pad back out to the studio. Can my still life possibly be as good as I remember it?

The studio smells of turpentine, the piny, woodsy smell of earth. I switch on the light—and there, on the easel, is my glimmering testament to a new life.

“Thank you, Moon,” I say.

In a rage of excitement I wash my brushes, clean my palette, put a new canvas on the easel, and set the first painting aside to dry. I rearrange the crystalline elements of my still life and begin a second version of this albino study—this one much more fantastical and abstract, with the moon setting behind the dancing maenads and the eggs transformed into little whirling planets and the cow spraying milk through the starry universe.

I paint and paint—rapt, happy, imagining a whole series of paintings based on this crystalline theme, with each of these objects—moon, maenads, eggs, cow, milk—becoming an emblem of a new life for women, for children, for the planet. I will call it
Albino Lives
I, II, III, and so on to infinity, and I will even do large canvases of eggs, of maenads, of white roses—taking these same several elements and considering them from every vantage point, in all sizes.

I see a new show, a new period, a new way of mirroring my life. At 8:00 A.M. I am still painting like this—my mind galloping, my heart full—when Dart staggers in with a cup of coffee and says: