Any Woman's Blues (28 page)

My belly cramps. I run to change my Maxipad, then kiss him goodbye and walk him to the chopper.

There was no way I could have had sex anyway in my condition, I realize. Who was I kidding? Lionel barks orders to the pilot, who is sunning on the grass. He hops to it like the semislave he is: “Yes, Mr. Schaeffer. Right away, Mr. Schaeffer.”

The pilot is a handsome blond
shagetz,
twice Lionel’s height. Lionel clearly
loves
bossing him around. Cossacks who looked like this pilot doubtless raped his grandmother—and he hasn’t forgotten, either.

The chopper whirs, brutalizing the air above my sweet green hillside.

“I’ll call ya tomorrow!” says Lionel, using that old male line.

Why, I wonder, do they bother? It’s the rare one who actually calls—and usually the one who doesn’t say he will.

That night, still hemorrhaging, I try to call Dart. I phone L.A., trying first the new listings in area code 213, then the new listings in the valley (818). No luck. I can find no Dart, Darton, or Trick Donegal in all of greater Los Angeles. I consider trying the bimbo’s phone number, but then realize I’ve never had it. In fact, I don’t even know her name.

If I had
any
number, I would ring it and ring it far into the night, wait for someone to pick up, hang up, ring it and wait again. Finally, in desperation, I call the elder Donegals’ number in Philadelphia. The phone rings and rings. In the eternities between rings, our whole relationship replays. Finally a voice answers. It is Dart who says “Hello.”

I slam down the phone and take to my bed, bleeding heavily.

—
J. C. Johnson

 

 

N
ow that I know where Dart is, I begin to obsess as if I have never been free of him. Nor am I. He still regularly visits my dreams. If sexual passion were not a great bond, God would not have devised it as the glue between two beings as dissimilar as woman and man. My spiritual peace is blasted. Dart is back in my life.

It happens with the suddenness of a raid, an attack, a sort of sexual Pearl Harbor. I have merely heard his voice on the other end of the phone, and I am crazed.

I toss and turn in my bed, thinking I could easily get in the car and drive to where he is. In four hours I could be in Philly, if I drove like hell. I remember the sweet things about him—his love for poetry, his mad protectiveness of me when people recognized me on the street, his love of the twins.

Nice try. Actually, he was terribly jealous of them, and as they grew older I always feared he’d molest them. It’s convenient to forget all that in my longing for him. My sane mind has fled the coop. I smell his smell; I see the whorls of hair on his belly.

 

 

I remember Dart’s sweetness early on in the affair: the long afternoons in bed all over the world—the hotel suites, the room service carts, the beds littered with underwear, masks, whips, food, sperm. I try to remember all the awful things—the girls, the photos, the bills, the cruel phrases that curled his lip—but I cannot hate him. It takes only one great lover for a great love: the object may be as banal as Lolita or Mr. Fullerton. Only the lover need be great. And it takes only one to love. One to give and one to receive. The receiver must have a certain
je ne sais quoi.
He cannot be totally charmless. Nor can he be utterly without poetry. (Dart, for example, used to sign his love notes—sent on endless greeting cards in the manner of his elders—D’Artagnan, Darth V., or Mr. Darcy.) I confess I have never been able to love a man who was not literate. Snack sang Bessie Smith lyrics in my ear as he fucked me; Thom would quote John Keats, John Donne, and John Milton by the yard—all those Johns; he also loved Browning and Byron and knew
Childe Harold
and
Don Juan
and
The Ring and the Book
almost by heart. Elmore loved Ezra Pound’s
Cantos.
And Dart, Darth, D’Artagnan, Darcy quoted Shakespeare’s sonnets and the love poems of Neruda. What good is love if it cannot be put into words?

Again I am in flames. Again, reduced to a pinch of ash. Again, consumed.

The word “Hello” has singed me. If one word can do this, how dare I risk two? or three! My heart blazes like Shelley’s on that beach at Livorno.

Oh, Dart had a certain
je ne sais quoi,
all right. His smile, his sweetness—or was it merely his cock? Does the female of the species fall in love just by being well fucked? Is it thus that nature has her way with us? Is this the secret the Don Juan knows? I often wonder why other men, nice men, boring men, do not take more time and trouble over the
Kamasutra
and various other texts of love secrets. Are they oblivious of the rare rewards of fucking a woman well? It’s the gigolos and grifters who chiefly practice the art of love. What fools the nice men are not to learn from them!

Or do they have contempt for mere sex? (As if sex ever could be “mere.”) A real woman will love a man more for his cock than she ever could for his proxy fight or for his bank account—no matter what the cynics say.

Torn between calling back, driving to Philadelphia, and tossing in bed all night, I get up, go to my silo, and open—as if I were Pandora opening
her
box—a box of Dart memorabilia, which I have hidden away (from myself!) behind boxes of canvas tacks, chips, stretcher pieces, and cans of primer.

I open it with trembling fingers. Just unlidding the box—a Bendel’s box!—has made my heart thud again.

There are Polaroid studies for the film stills of Dart—Dart nude, waving his cock (there was nothing that boy wouldn’t do); Dart in the kitchen, putting his cock on the chopping block and raising the Chinese cleaver as if to chop it off; Dart nude, erect, about to fuck the unseen photographer.

And then there are assorted greeting cards—notes of love, notes of apology after a quarrel, crushed corsages (one, in fact, from that fateful Thanksgiving with his parents). I examine these artifacts with agitation, excitement—but also a soupçon of new detachment. There’s something perverse and unsavory about Dart. The Polaroid of him holding the meat cleaver above his cock is especially unsettling. As if he would do anything to get attention. I can’t invite that man back to my home with my girls again.

My heart cracking, I take all the photographs, cards, dried flowers, and begin to assemble them into a collage. As the fury to turn the love affair into its own monument takes me, as the fever rises, I seize hold of scissors and paste and start snipping, pasting, even daubing over the bits and pieces of my life with Dart.
Pandora’s Box,
I call it, as the fury to collage my life overwhelms me.

If Dart were to see this collage, would he love it or hate it? Hard to say. Would it make our split permanent or heal it? Dart is such a narcissist I almost think he’d
like
it. A shudder goes through me as I think that even now I care more for the work than for the love. If forced to choose, I’d rather have the model than the lover—or
would
I?

And then the phone in my studio rings—the secret one, the one only Dart and Emmie have the number of.

I run to pick it up.

“Hello?” I say.

A click. Dart calling. Drawn by the strength of my snipping his pictures. Black magic. The soul captured on a piece of photographic film. The connection made. And broken. The scissors I wield cuts Dart’s cock off. Inadvertently?

And then I am back in the longing again. My fingertips ache. I have a queasy feeling at the pit of my stomach. Love? Addiction? I am suddenly skidding down the street in Dubrovnik. I take the glue and paste Dart’s cock back on.

Oh, God—will I never get myself back again? I long to be in love, but love annihilates—and anything less does not feel like love! The more fiercely independent one is, the more one longs for self-annihilation. The battle continues. The battle between bondage and love. I long to give myself away, take myself back, give myself away again. Arranging snipped pieces of Dart on my mounting board, putting him together and taking him apart, I battle with myself. Which do I want more? Control or love? Power or love? And are the two mutually exclusive? Or are they so only for me? What does it mean to be an artist who takes all the pieces of her life—quite literally—as material? Does it doom one to unhappiness, or is it, after all, the only bliss? I do not know the answers to any of these questions. I only know I am trying to learn to love the questions themselves. They are all I have.

I pick up the phone again and call—call, instead of Dart, Julian in Los Angeles. Julian, who is probably composing electronic music for another of his space operas. Julian, who looks so much like Albert Einstein—with his shock of snow-white hair, his big, sad, sparkly eyes—that people stop him on the street and ask if he
is
Einstein.

“E=mc
²
,” Julian always says, puzzling them even more.

“That’ll teach ’em,” Julian whispers to me, with a leprechaun’s twinkle.

I’ve adored Julian for years. Julian is my pal, my spiritual guide. I tell myself that if I don’t get Julian, I’ll call Dart back forthwith. But Julian is home.

“How are you, sweetest lady?” he asks.

“The worst. Awful.”

“What’s the matter, babe?”

“I don’t know whether I’m painting or living. I don’t know whether I’m killing Dart or killing myself. I just made this collage out of the bits and pieces of my life—and I’m
in
the collage; I can’t get out.”

“I know the feeling,” Julian says.

I recount the story of the last several weeks—Dart gone, AA meetings, the proper millionaire, the slips, seeing myself poised over the cosmos, the work, the life, the muddle of it all.

“You sound like me when I’m locked in, with a deadline. I sleep for three hours, take a cold shower, and fiddle with the synthesizer for three hours. Fiddle, sleep, sleep, fiddle, until I don’t know who I am—a chord or a person—and I don’t even care. It’s bliss. It’s torture. Anyway, we have no choice in the matter. It’s what we have to do. At least you’re an artist. I’m just an old hooker, turning out scores on the synthesizer to earn my paltry two million a year. A well-paid whore. Not as well paid as the stars who flicker to my music—but what’s a boychick to do?”

Just hearing Julian’s voice makes me feel I’m back in my sane mind. He understands me—my work, my obsessions. What a blessing to have a friend like that.

“Leila—you’ve got to expect to mourn Dart at least a
little.
You were with him for five years.”

“ ‘A dead lover must be mourned by the survivor for two years,’ ” I say, quoting “The Rules of Love.”

“He’s not dead, is he?” Julian asks.

“No. I was just quoting from this code of courtly love put together by the troubadours in the thirteenth century.”

“You
would,
” says Julian. “When in doubt, quote from the troubadours. That’s why I love you.”

“Will you be my escort at the Viva Venezia Ball, Julian?” I blurt, out of the blue. I had thought I was going to ask Dart, but now it strikes me that I
must
ask Julian.

Julian hesitates. He is afraid to plunge in, lest he be hurt. Julian protects himself from life with his wit, with his wisecracks, with his isolation in the house, composing. He almost
never
goes out.

“Julian, you owe me one—in exchange for that shopping list.”

“What shopping list?”

“The shopping list I gave you when you were starving after Cristina left.”

“Oh—that.”

“I want you to take me to the ball in exchange for the shopping list. I mean it.”

“Some hard bargain you drive,” says Julian, laughing.

“I mean it. I want you to promise.”

“Let me think about it,” says Julian, “and call you back.” He plays a spooky chord and hangs up.

I return to my collage of Dart—
Pandora’s Box.
Do I imagine it, or is Dart winking at me? He seems to be winking. “Call me,” he seems to say. “Call me.”

 

 

What is it about creating that makes you simultaneously want to destroy? The Indians were right about Kali—the creative principle and the destructive principle joined in one terrible mother goddess. Snipping, pasting, and rearranging bits of my life, I feel like Kali. I would even add the stained Maxipad to the collage if I dared, along with Dart’s snipped (and restituted) cock.