Any Woman's Blues (21 page)

If I’ve decided (and I seem to have decided) not to fall in bed with the Waynes of this world (who pick up other girls in bars when they’re with you), not to grovel to Dart and pay for his bimbo’s dinners, then what is there left for me but this endless solitude before the easel?

I love it and I hate it. I thank God for giving me a livelihood out of this solitary bliss, and I curse God for the gut-wrenching loneliness of it.

Elsewhere in the world people are making phone calls, faxing documents, circulating at cocktail parties. Whenever I think I’m missing something, I have only to drive into New York and see how little, in fact, I am missing.

At parties, I miss this blissful solitude. When I’m in my solitude, I think I’m missing “Life” by not going to the parties.

What is “Life” anyway?

My life, at its truest and purest, seems to consist of standing before an easel, smelling the turpentine smell and arranging the hues of white on a white canvass before green hills. I could stand here for all eternity. I seem, in fact, to have been standing here for all eternity. This is your life, Leila Sand, I think, the youness of you. How lucky to have found it, or to have come back to it before it was too late.

I call up the ghosts of female artists of the past—Marietta Robusti, “La Tintoretta,” Lavinia Fontana, Rosalba Carriera, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Angelika Kauffman, Anna Peale, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Vanessa Bell, Georgia O’Keeffe—to protect me like ranks of guardian angels, painted in wet lime on some Venetian ceiling. All the technique, the love, the infinite capacity for taking pains, the courage, the guts, the
heart
of these women who drew and painted
against all odds,
comes into my aching fingers. Oh, the longing to make the difficult look easy! I want to be like those old fresco painters who had such talent, such craft, such knowledge of chemistry, even, that they could put down the color before the lime had time to dry, leaving the illusion of
sprezzatura
—that wonderful Italian ideal of making the difficult look easy—for all eternity, or at least five hundred years.

I think of the scene last night in the bar. All the young pulchritude gathered around Wayne. The difference between forty-four and twenty-two in a woman’s life is not just a question of looks. I don’t
look
worse than a twenty-two-year-old—to some men I look better—but I
know
too much. I am less easily conned. I don’t beam up at them with those eager eyes. I don’t smell the bullshit and call it roses.

Is it all a matter of hormones? Estrogen
über alles
? Nature gives us thirty years of blindness to male bullshit so we can make the maximum number of babies. And then the estrogen begins to wane, and we come back to ourselves again. We return to the bliss we knew as nine-year-olds, coloring in our coloring books. We get our lives back, our autonomy back, our power back. And is that the moment when we become witches to be stoned in the marketplace? Not because we are ugly but because we
know
too much. We are onto their game, and they don’t like it.

“I love my man better than I love myself,” sings Bessie, “and if he don’t have me, he won’t have nobody else. . . .” Ah, the estrogen talking. The wail of female fertility. “I love my man better than I love myself.” Do we
have
to feel that way to take them into our bodies and make babies, putting the future of the species above our own ease, our own rest, our own peace of mind?

Yes, apparently.

I break down and cry. Fall at the foot of the easel and cry salty tears, which slide into the corners of my mouth. The dog comes up and licks my face. “I shall get myself a mastiff bitch,” said Enid Bagnold. Ladies of a certain age always wind up with animals and gardening as their consolations. Is that where I’m headed? Is that what my sane mind wants for me?

I get up and pace. Think of going to a meeting and reject that. Think of going for a walk with the dog but postpone that. Think of a drink but tell myself I won’t drink today—one day at a time.

The telephone. That’s what I need to do—call people. The last addiction I’m allowed.

So I start phoning. My friend Maria in Paris, where it is almost midnight and raining. My friend Lorelei in Venice, where it is almost midnight and also raining. My ex-boyfriend Stan in New York, where it is the same time and weather as here. My old friend Julian in Los Angeles, where it is midafternoon and sunny with yellow smog.

Julian is locked in his house in Hollywood hills, playing with his synthesizer. Through his Kurzweil, Julian communes with the music of the spheres.

“What do people eat?” Julian asks across the continental divide.

“What do people
what?
”

“Eat,” says Julian. “What do they eat?”

I think of Julian, who is slender and small, with shoulder-length white hair. Julian has the most astonishing eyes—the eyes of an alien from another planet, where everyone’s IQ is 503.

“I don’t know what people eat,” he says. “Since Christina left, I’ve only eaten pizza—but now I want
real
groceries. But for the life of me I don’t know what people eat. Give me a list of stuff to stock the house.”

“Okay—got a pen? Raisin bran, milk, bananas, coffee, apples, sliced turkey, rye bread, mayonnaise, mustard, a barbecued chicken, tuna fish, butter cookies, chocolate ice cream, aspirin, Valium, yogurt. That should hold you for a while.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Julian says, really sounding grateful. “I’ll never know how to thank you.”

“Don’t worry—I’ll think of something,” I say. On Julian’s planet, they have astral observatories but no supermarkets.

“So what else is new?” I ask Julian.

“
Listen,
” he says. “It’s the mating song of the quarks.”

Unearthly sounds fill my ear. The sound of Julian’s Kurzweil mating the quarks.

“What’s that for?” I ask.

“A major motion picture called
Thrust,
” says Julian.

“You’re making that up,” I say.

“I wish,” says Julian.

In my present mood, the strangeness of this web of friendship strikes me. How close yet how alienated we all are—alone in our houses painting or writing or composing and phoning each other all over the world. Each of us living alone and calling out through the cosmos to a network of loving friends we seldom see. Sometimes when I meet my good friends, their physical presence assaults me. I am shocked to see them in the flesh. I am used to their voices, but their faces seem too intense, troublingly intense. Are we all preparing for life in space capsules? Is that why we lead these podlike existences, in which social life is conducted digitally? Lovers we touch and smell. But friends we increasingly “visit with” only electronically—even when we live a few blocks away. What is the meaning of this? The human race preparing itself for space?

The dog barks. An actual person is arriving.

For a few minutes, there is hushed anticipation. Then, the sound of boots on gravel. Then, a knock at the door. (The studio-silo has neither bell nor lock.) I run downstairs to open the door, and in walks Darth Vader, holding a rose.

He might as well be a Martian arriving from outer space, or some other species of Spielbergian alien heralded by bright light and bad television reception.

“Leila,” says Dart, “I had to kiss my lucky person before I left for L.A.”

I look at him—the bullshit smile, the sheepish expression, the sheer chutzpah of his coming back after the scene in the restaurant—and I am in a rage.

“I’m not the Blarney Stone,” I scream. “I’m a woman!”

“Leila, baby,” says Dart. “I’ve been asked to go to L.A. to audition for a movie about a young artist, and I had to kiss you before I left.”

Now, this could be true or not be true. This could be the sheerest invention on Dart’s part, or it could have some little grain of truth—like the bead the Japanese pearl fisherman slips into an oyster to con the mollusk into secreting its precious bodily radiance. With Dart you never know how much is pearl and how much plastic.

“How nice for you,” I say. “Stardom.”

“Baby, I’m sorry,” says Dart. “Maybe someday I’ll be fit to live with.” And he turns on his sheepish love-me smile.

“Get out of here,” I yell. “I’m not some amulet you touch for luck! I’m not your mother! I’m not your banker! Get out!”

He looks at me like a petulant child. (It’s at this point that my twins would stamp their ten-year-old feet and snarl, “Not fair.”)

“Baby, I tried,” says Dart. “I was a seed, and you were a whole forest. I couldn’t grow in your shadow.”

“Oh—it’s my fault, is it?
My
shadow was too big? I love being fucked over and then blamed for it too.” But the trouble is, I know there’s truth in what he says. His truth.

“You were always my artist,” says Dart, falling to his knees and throwing his arms around my thighs. He is crying real tears. They wet my jeans.

Torn between rage and despair, I struggle for a moment, wanting him and wanting to kill him. (It’s not unlike the feeling one often has with one’s kids—to kill or to cuddle, that is the question.)

I crumple to the floor, crying copious salty tears, and we hold each other, both weeping.

Time seems suspended as we rock in each other’s arms. I never knew there were so many tears! The whole sea seems to be feeding our tears. They are endless—a tidal wave of brine taking us back to some prenatal existence in which we hold each other like twins embracing in the amniotic sac.

He is me and I am him, the bond so deep and unbreakable it astounds me even now. The con man in me, the heartbreaker, the faker, the phony—all of these aspects of Leila/Louise Dart embodied, and I loved him as I loved my baby self, the little girl who never got enough love and would lie and cheat and charm for it, break hearts for it, die for it, cry for it. We hold each other for what seems like eons, geologic time, light-years. We cry together the way we used to fuck.

Then, wordlessly, we get up, separate, and Dart goes down the silo stairs again. I pick up my brush and paint a highlight on one maenad’s cheek. A tear. But only one. And Dart is gone.

 

 

Later I discover he’s taken some of his things. The white cowboy shirt, boots, hat, some jewelry. I don’t care. What interests me is that the house is locked and that he entered it, leaving no trace: no broken locks, no fingerprints, no trail. The perfect second-story man. Born to it. Or maybe he never really existed. Emerged from under an earth barrow like one of the little people. The green man. Robin Goodfellow. Peter Pan. The horned god of the witches. And, like all devils, our own creation.

 

 

Dart gone. I won’t go into detail about the week between his final departure and the arrival of the twins. The utter amputation of it. The way I attempted to follow every helmeted man on a motorcycle and very nearly creamed myself on various ancient deciduous trees; the hopeless suitors who called—old boyfriends, friends from the fellowship, those first bedraggled ones who stagger in during Week I, postamputation: the walking wounded, raging over their divorces, their teen-addict children, their business collapses, their Chapter 11s . . . bellying up to your bar to partake of your nonalcoholic warmth. Mostly they come to mope and talk, sensing another lost soul who hates to be alone at sundown, and they eye you and you eye them, thinking sexual thoughts but deciding that it is just too much trouble—this being after all the second summer of heterosexual-AIDS hysteria—and not knowing whether to hand them a Kinsey questionnaire or a condom, or both, you finally do nothing, escort them to the door, and offer a chaste cheek for them to kiss, and so to bed.

You have your trusty old white plastic vibrator—capped with an Excita condom to make it trendy—and you have your life-size marble cock, that ten-inch circumcised specimen sent by a famous Japanese sculptor when your film stills of Dart opened in Tokyo.

The marble cock is of white Carrara marble as pure as Michelangelo’s early Pietà—the one in the Vatican, which was not long ago defaced by some thug. Its cold white purity—half Brancusi bird, half Marini horse cock—takes forever to get warm within your cold abandoned cunt. You warm it and warm it, feeling the marble heat on the surface but stay cold inside, like your heart. Wax to receive and marble to retain. This is the pleasure of it—making these connections. Sex, even self-sex, is a question of completing some circle, making some synapses snap, some cosmic synapses that link your nerve ends to the stars.

How hard it is, and how hard it is to connect with another person, or with one’s self, or, finally, with God. To crash through that wall of flesh into spirit, to open yourself to the cosmos in the neon flashings of the orgasm.

My God, my God. Dart, Dart, Dart, Dart. I convulse around the Michelangelo-Brancusi-Marini marble, shouting Dart’s name and God’s name as if they were one. Tears run down my cheeks. I am all liquid. And the marble? The marble at last is warm.

 

 

Thank God the twins came home and I could lose myself in motherhood. The whole household drifted back in to greet them—my raw-boned dykey assistant, Natasha, with her black punk crew cut, her safety pin earrings, her big shoulders, her horsey face, her glittering green eyes. The “executive housekeeper,” Lily, once upon a time the nanny, now chief Amazon in our Amazon commune—soft-spoken, Scottish, and serene. Even my shrink came home from Europe and was suddenly available for counsel—from her little thatched cottage in Cornwall Bridge—my shrink, the incredibly brilliant Dr. Sybille Panoff, who gave Freudian-Jungian-Reichian analysis as well as tarot card readings, medical referrals, and healing crystals. Dr. Panoff had studied with Melanie Klein in London, Wilhelm Reich in New York, and Henry Miller in Big Sur. She was eclectic, to say the least.