Any Woman's Blues (24 page)

“Admit it, sugar.”

“I won’t have this conversation.”

“Admit it.” Danny stood up, changed the videotape, put on his underwear, and sank down on the bed. He just lay there, under the weight of his great jiggling belly. A new videotape came on the screen:
Las Vegas Lust.
One of the croupiers looked like Dart. I could have sworn it
was
Dart. But how on earth could he have launched his movie career
that
soon? But someday I
would
be lying in bed with an impotent Danny watching Dart make love to bimbos in a porn flick. It was inevitable. Poetic justice.

I watched
Las Vegas Lust
as if my life depended on it. Was it Dart or was it delusion? Granada or As-bury Park? Was I going mad? What had happened to my sane mind?

Danny meanwhile began to masturbate, using baby oil—and the image of Dart (or his doppelgänger) as a visual aid. A fine romance, indeed. What would Fred Astaire make of this? He jerks off; she sits riveted by the video image of her former lover (or his look-alike); and the whole world thinks they’ve got it made.

Danny jerks off defiantly, as if to say: Who needs
you?
When he is finished, he looks up at me for approval.

“Safe sex,” I say, and go downstairs to the wine cellar.

The wine cellar is a wonder. Photographed by
Architectural Digest,
with limelight on the wine bins and perfectly controlled humidity, the wine cellar sits under Lunabella as the diamond as big as the Ritz sat beneath Scott Fitzgerald’s mythical mountain mansion. I wander in, Theseus into the Labyrinth, examine several bottles of rare Bordeaux, and choose a Mouton ’45 to get drunk on. With a racing heart, I open the wine the way Danny has taught me, take a glass from the wine cellar bar, pour, swirl the ruby-red mixture in the bottom of the glass, sniff, and burst the grape upon my palate fine.

Now, it should be said that during the weeks with Danny I have not been drinking. Well, not exactly. But I have been tasting, sniffing, and learning about nose, bouquet, and finish. (Of my affair with Danny, I would later say, “Nice nose, nasty finish.”) And I have not been going to meetings. I can control my drinking myself, I have decided. This is what they call in the Program “stinkin’ thinkin’.”

But everyone has been so approving of my affair with Danny—André, my dealer; Sybille, my analyst; the twins; their fairy godmother, Lily. Why? Because he’s rich. Because he’s from
Dallas.
Because he has a mansion on either side of the Atlantic (not to mention various flats). Because he buys me jewelry (and erotic videos). Because at long last I have a proper millionaire, befitting my station as a celebrity artist. Nobody thinks that I’m a drunk falling in love with a wine collector for cover. No one but Emmie. However, I am avoiding Emmie. I haven’t called her since I fell in love with Danny Doland. And she, knowing I have to reach my bottom in my own way, has called from time to time but doesn’t noodge. I almost wish she did.

Just one sip, I think, nose into the bowl of the Tiffany Bordeaux glass. And then another. And another. And then the whole glass.

How does it taste after all these sober weeks? Metallic, sweet, sour, like liquor to a kid. My head gets the buzz, the heavy, fruity, prehangover feeling, but no click. I wander about the wine cellar reading labels, glass in hand.

Here are the châteaus of Pomerol: Pétrus, Trotanoy, Lafleur, La Conseillante, Rouget, Le Gay, Bon-Pasteur, Petit-Village, Clos René, La Violette, La Croix-de-Gay. . . . And here are the châteaus of Margaux and Médoc: Palmer, La Lagune, Malescot-Saint-Exupéry, La Tour-de-Mons, Paveil de Luze, Camuet . . . of Graves: Haut-Brion, Domaine de Chevalier, Carbonnieux. . . .

(Oh, I am not getting drunk on wine so much as on these lovely French names that roll off my tongue even more trippingly than the wine.)

The châteaus of Pauillac: Latour, Mouton-Rothschild, Lafite-Rothschild, Pichon-Longueville, Comtesse de Lalande . . . of Saint-Émilion: La Tour-Figeac, Troplong-Mondot, Couvent-des-Jacobins, La Clotte, Ripeau, Villemaurine. . . . (Not even out of the Bordeaux, and I’m already tipsy!)

I wander among the wine labels, thinking of the great châteaus of France, her lovely snaky rivers: the Loire, the glimmering Rhône, the sun glinting off the wineskins of Bordeaux. Claret, the English call it, as if it gave clarity.
In vino veritas,
as if it brought truth. But to me all it brings are tears. I weep and drink, sprawl on the cold floor of the cellar, and keep on draining the bottle. The little picture on the label invites me into a sunny world of châteaus and glimmering rivers, cool cellars and hot sun. But here on the floor I am suspended in time, seeing the parts of my life all jumbled together as in a kaleidoscope.

The silver silo. The flapper dress of moonbeams. Dart’s cock. Dart’s letter about time and eternity. The chocolate-scented puppybodies of my twins. Dolph, Thom, Elmore, Dart, Danny. My mind rushes as it used to on pot—white nights awake by Dart’s side after much lovemaking. (Pot made him sleepy, me wakeful—a paradox for such a well-mated couple.) Is this where my hegira has taken me—to a wine cellar buried in a basement in the Berkshires, drinking claret and getting murky?

I stagger up, wander through the house, inspecting Danny’s treasures: his art collection (Monets, Modiglianis, Warhols, early Sands), his glass collection (Lalique, Gallé), his antiques (Queen Anne, Georgian, Biedermeier). I think about my life as a part of that collection. Dinner parties with rehearsed jokes. The right art collection. The right people. Climatically controlled air, jokes, wine, paintings. I think again of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, of the French Revolution, of the year 1789, of living to be eighty-seven! Artists can be incredibly long-lived. I might have another forty-four years to paint. How am I going to do it without fresh air?

Feh,
I think. Dolph’s daughter is going home.

 

 

In my garter belt and silk stockings, with a silk robe over them and bare feet, I take off into the night in DART, sans driver’s license, sans money, sans everything.

I am speeding through the Berkshire midnight, wearing my porn video getup, feeling the cool summer air on my hot cheeks, singing “My Sweetie Went Away” at the top of my lungs—

Until I see him in the rearview mirror. Darth Vader on his motorcycle, the masked man, my dybbuk, my demon lover. He hasn’t gone Hollywood at all. He is following me! Right here in the Berkshires, he means to stop me and make me his by the side of the road. My heart lifts; my cunt moistens. Ah, Dart, I knew you’d be back! The beam of his motorcycle headlight is piercing my trunk. The siren is piercing my heart.

The siren? Since when did Dart have a siren?

Darth Vader zooms up beside me and tries to force me to the side of the road. I play with him for a while, leading him a merry chase over hill and down dale, growing ever more excited as his siren shrills and shrills. Finally he veers me off the road, onto the soft shoulder.

“Dart!” I cry, the words slowly dying in my mouth.

For the motorcycle cop does look a lot like Dart—as did the croupier, as did the porn-star producer.

“License, ma’am,” says the cop, looking at my scanty attire.

“Ooops,” I say. “You’ll never believe this, Officer, but I was just off to the drugstore to get some Pampers for my baby with diarrhea!”

The cop doesn’t look me in the eye.

“Please show me your license, ma’am,” says the Dart look-alike, surveying my cleavage. I have the drunken thought of unzipping him and having him here and now. Or could that be considered bribing an officer of the law?

 

Leila: Who’s using that word
now
?

Leila: Because sex is
never
a thing apart from politics.

 

The rest is history—or herstory (as they used to say in the sixties). Picked up in the little Massachusetts town of New Egremont by the New Egremont police, booked for speeding, indecent exposure, drunkenness, and other puritanical New England crimes, bailed out by Danny and André,
in loco parentis,
and sent, in shame, back to my silo. I narrowly escaped being the subject of a
New York Post
headline because it was a hot day in the Middle East, but I did become a “transition” item in
Time.
“Booked for drunk driving in the Berkshires, noted artist Leila Sand pleaded guilty to charges of operating a vehicle under the influence.” DWI—as they say in the Program. Drawing Without Intoxication—that was the risk I ran marrying Danny. Another sort of jail.

Guilty as charged, my license suspended, I go back to my silo as if under house arrest.

Danny disappears. Emmie reappears. She and Lily and Natasha and Mike and Ed take charge of my life. And the police agree that instead of going to a rehab, I can be put under the care of Dr. Sybille Panoff of Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, who, among her other qualifications, has a degree in Family Therapy and the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction.

Saved again, but who knows why? Where are my maenads and crystal now? And where oh where is my sane mind when I need it most?

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

S
ybille’s thatched cottage with the whirring mill wheel was the perfect setting for a Disney witch. Filled with collections of theatrical memorabilia—in her youth (an indeterminate number of years ago) Sybille had been an actress—the cottage had the look of an eccentric New England antiques shop in which the stock mingles with the possessions of the owner and it is not clear what exactly is for sale.

“Tea? Coffee?” asks Sybille.

“Mouton ’45,” I say, laughing.

Sybille gives me a wry look and sweeps off to the kitchen in her long black silk dress. I follow.

While she clatters teapots and cups, I talk.

“Well, Danny Doland certainly was a disappointment. I hear he’s left for Hampshire, where hurricanes hardly happen.”

“You were never meant to marry a civilian,” says Sybille. It’s not clear whether she’s using the term in the show business sense or in the military. Much as she liked Danny’s money, it now appears she regarded him as an interloper because he was “in trade.”

“You don’t even know it, darling,” she goes on, “but you are on the verge of a totally new life. You’re struggling being born, like any baby. Dart and Danny are incidental.”

I heave a deep sigh. “Well, there goes my last chance for normality. . . .”

“Darling, the antiques business—like the art business—is the eighties equivalent of real estate. Any little
grubber yung
with a glib tongue can do it. They think they’re so smart because they are selling art, but they are, after all, still
selling.
The
airs
they give themselves! You’d think they
made
the stuff. You are not meant to be part of
anyone’s
collection. You are your
own
collection.”

Sybille turns her elegant profile to me. At six feet tall and a hundred and twenty pounds, she could still play Cleopatra or Gertrude or Lady Macbeth and have the whole audience riveted.

“Sybille, I think I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life—I mean without a man. I scare them. And they’re all so scared to begin with.”

“Most, but not all.”

“But their fear makes me so sad. All our lives, we’re taught to look to them for guidance and support. And then we reach middle age and realize how terribly frail they are. It’s
cosmically
sad, I see the game of it, and it makes me weep. I want a partner, and all I find are gigolos or terrified middle-aged babies.”

“You are meant to be alone right now, with your girls. Being alone isn’t so terrible. Look at me!”

“We’re
always
alone. And they always go on to the next nymphet. There are just too damn
many
of us and too few of them. We can’t make demands, because then they run. We’re meant to make all the compromises. It’s bloody unfair.”

“An opportunity.”

“Some opportunity!”

“It’s an opportunity to find your sane mind,” says Sybille, “to establish its beachhead inside you so that even alone, you’re never alone. To learn to talk to yourself kindly and gently, to learn to nurture yourself. No matter how alone I am, I always have my sane mind as a companion. I want to give you that.”