Seducing the Demon (10 page)

“Just this once.”

I thought: That’s what they all say. I thought: I really should throw him out. But since he had a clean foil-wrapped condom, I let him fuck me once—out of pity—just to get it over with. I felt numb. Pity is not erotic.

He was an anti-Semite—I was sure of it. I hated myself for this, but maybe now he’d leave. No such luck.

Thank God, Morpheus arrived and I fell asleep. My greatest blessing is to be able to sleep anywhere no matter what. I don’t know whether he did. I awoke to find him making furious notes in his notebook, lying on the couch in the living room.

Great, I thought, I’ll be in his next book. The only good part is nobody reads poetry!

But before my first interview, I spent about an hour in the bath, scrubbing him off. At that point, I never wanted to see him again. But I have his raunchy letters for my archive.

Oh yes. And copies of my own to him.

Some people are better in books than in life. Reading his poems, I could imagine him a dark demon to be seduced. Meeting him in life, he just became another tin-pot Casanova.

I can’t finish this catalogue of lovers both demonic and not, unless I write about Dart (not his real name), who started in the Social Register and wound up selling meat from a truck.

He was from Darien and Fifth Avenue and he had four names with a roman numeral after them. He entered my life by deliberately skidding off my driveway in a snowstorm and left it five years later when I got tired of his drugs and deceptions and the weapons he kept under my bed.

My driveway in Connecticut is steep and I thought he had skidded accidentally. Only later did he admit that he had buried his car in a snowbank to bury himself in me. And I didn’t know about his love affair with guns.

“Jewish girls and guns don’t go together,” said my friend Grace. When I think of the disasters that might have happened, I shudder.

When he was in his twenties, Dart was gorgeous. He had sandy hair, ice-blue eyes, huge biceps, shapely legs and a cock that went on forever—though it listed to the left, in the opposite direction from his parents’ politics. Part of attraction is novelty—and Dart was a novelty in my life. He had broken his parents’ hearts by not going to Yale—though all his ancestors had. He embraced the actor’s craft but performed mostly offstage. He could convince any girl into bed—after which he got bored. Conquest versus closeness.

Will the sexes ever agree? I doubt it—not as long as the hormones flow.

Fast forward a decade and a half: My daughter Molly and husband Ken were out somewhere and I was taking an afternoon nap in my Connecticut house, where our bedroom is on the first floor. Drowsing in and out of sleep—naps are rare for me—I hear a ring at the door. I stumble out of bed without my glasses and open up. Before me is a blurry tall figure.

“I can’t believe it, baby—you don’t remember me!”

“Let me get my glasses.”

I put them on and there is Dart, whom I haven’t seen for years. He much the worse for wear—with a paunch, a slight sway to his back and a seductive voice that announces he has no idea his hunkiness has fled. When I knew him he was tall and buff and blond—a goy god to make Jewish girls weak in the knees.

“What’s up, baby? Can I come in?”

“Sure.” I walk over to the round dining-room table and he sits down next to me.

“How’s the actor’s vagabond life?”

“Not much acting but a lot of vagabonding,” he says.

“Catch me up.”

“I can’t believe I lost the only true love of my life,” he moans.

“And who was that?”

“You, baby. I just didn’t appreciate it at the time. I’d give anything to have you back.”

“I’m married to Ken. It’s a good marriage. I’m not in the market for reunions.”

“Lucky for you, baby. I have two little boys and my wife just threw me out.”

“I never knew about the marriage or the kids. You didn’t send engraved announcements.”

“Should have written you,” Dart says, putting his face on the dining-room table, “but I was so ashamed.”

“Tell me about your boys.”

And then he proceeded to tell a long story about himself and Calliope (a mile-high Greek girl with “humongous tits,” according to Dart), the birth of the boys, how wonderful he was to her when Calliope was pregnant, his trouble getting work, his fantasies that Calliope was fucking the owner of the diner where she worked and doing a cornucopia of drugs, his futile attempts to get sober, his futile efforts to save the marriage, and other bullshit.

Being Dart, he was probably fucking three other girls and coming home to her all weepy to spend her money.

Once, I had been willing to believe whatever Dart said, but now it all sounded fake to me. Just as he had once gotten me to take care of him, he now wanted me to rescue his boys. I was not in the foster-mom business, though I was afraid if I met them, they’d melt my resolve.

“You have to meet them. Telemachus is brilliant—we call him Telly—and Ari is so adorable, you’d die. I know now what you felt for Molly. I empathize so. Too bad I had no understanding of parenthood at the time.”

“So what do you
want,
Dart?”

“Nothin’, baby, just to see you again and tell you you’re the love of my life. I really goofed. I really fucked up.”

“Where did this revelation come from?”

“I’ve just been thinking about us. I could do so much better now. I’m a father now. I understand so much more.”

What was he thinking? Did he really think he could waltz back in here and rekindle the flame with a few confessions of fault? Was he insane? I was a different person. I knew his jive. I was married, seriously married to a serious person I loved, a person I could count on, a person who could count on me. And Dart had lost his looks, his youth. He was no longer twenty-six, as he’d been when we met. He might still have that indefatigable cock, but that wasn’t enough anymore. Couldn’t he see it?

Obviously not.

“Baby, I miss you.”

“Well, you’ll just have to keep missing me, I’m afraid.” I got up from the table and walked to the door. “It was nice seeing you again.”

Dart took a proprietary tone. “Is he treatin’ you right? Is he takin’ care of you like I did?”

“Dart—stop kidding yourself with this act. You never took care of me.”

“But I did, baby, I did the best I could.” Now he was standing next to the door with me.

He put out his large hand and stroked my cheek. Nothing stirred at his touch. And I had written a whole book about him! Four hundred pages—more ...

“Nothing so dead as a dead love,” my friend Grace used to say.

 

 

“Don’t you remember the fun we had—in Venice, in Split, in Dubrovnik? Remember that drive along the Dalmatian coast in the Zastava that we held together with wire hangers?

“Remember that trip to Japan where you did those lectures? Remember Kyoto? Remember the thousand and one Buddhas?”

I nodded.

“And remember that time in Venice when we hung out in Palazzo Barbaro with Ed White and his friends and John Malcolm Brinnin?”

“Lots of those friends are dead of AIDS.”

“Oh, baby, I didn’t know.”

“Have you been under a rock?”

I remembered my suspicion that Dart was cheating on me with some of my gay friends. For Dart, sex was a commodity. He would do whatever he needed to do to be part of a group. He was that insecure. Of course, I have no evidence other than my paranoia.

“Take care of yourself,” I said, knowing he was incapable of it.

“Can I call you from time to time?”

“Why not?”

“Baby, I want you to see my truck.”

I looked out the door and saw this small white truck with a cab and a closed caboose.

“What happened to the car I bought you?”

“I gave it to Calliope. She needed a car to get to work. I also gave her all the furniture and books—including some of yours. I’m sorry, baby.”

If he said “baby” one more time I’d scream.

But for some reason I walked outside with him to the truck. He opened the locker in back and cold mist poured out.

“You see this meat?” he asked.

In the truck were enormous quantities of vacuum-packed frozen foods—shrimp, crab cakes, steaks, pork chops, racks of lamb, bacon, yams, clams, pizzas, paella.

“All the meat is restaurant-quality prime and all the fish is flash-frozen at sea. I’d love to share it with you,” he said as if he were giving me a present.

He began rummaging in the locker and took out masses of food, samples of each. He stacked it all in a carton and began to walk toward the front door.

“I want you to have this, baby.”

He walked back in the house, rearranged my freezer, packed it in and then he began to cry.

“I wish I could give it to you, baby, I really wish I could, but I’m stony broke.”

“How much, Dart?”

“Well, it’s six hundred dollars’ worth of food, but four hundred will do.”

I wrote him a check as he wept.

“Baby, I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “You’ll love the clams. I know you will.”

When Molly and Ken came home, I was frying crab cakes—a most unaccustomed activity. Usually, Ken is the weekend chef and I am decidedly
sous-chef
and cleaner-upper.

They both looked suspicious but I was embarrassed to tell them what had happened. So I pretended I’d bought the food in New York and brought it up to the country.

After a week of steaks, paella, clams, pork chops and racks of lamb, my daughter looked at me with her most mocking expression and said, “Père de Step and I think that meat has a dirty little secret. Whad’you do? Knock off a caterer? You’d better tell us where you got it.”

“I’m trying to learn to cook.”

“You must be kidding,” Moll said. “It’s a little late to play happy housewife. I remember how panicked I used to get on the nanny’s night off that I’d starve to death!”

It was true. No sooner did Margaret disappear up the driveway than Molly used to ask, wistfully, “Momma, can you cook?”

“Of course!” I’d say defensively before calling the pizza place or the Chinese takeout.

So I finally told Molly and Ken about Dart and his frozen meat. I lowered the price of the order, though—as I do when telling Ken about designer clothes from Bergdorf’s. And Molly, of course, took the story for her next book. Ken also dines out on both versions whenever he gets a chance.

“Meat from a Truck” is what I would call this chapter if Dart were still worth writing a novel about. But the symbolism is just too obvious. The meat is no longer fresh.

 

 

Ever since Freud opined that the artist longs for fame, glory and the love of beautiful women, people have assumed that fame means the same thing for women as it does for men. Famous men may find tootsies, gold diggers and plaster casters at every turn, but famous women attract louts, losers and men of indeterminate sexuality who want to publicly prove themselves. Maybe it’s different for actresses—acting is one field that heightens femininity—but the well-known woman writer is likely to wind up like the romance writer in Fay Weldon’s
Life and Loves of a She-Devil:
seduced and abandoned and broke.

I consider it a miracle that I met Ken, who understood me and loved me anyway and wasn’t intimidated by my ridiculous public image. He deflates my diva act with laughter whenever I pull it on him.

“Ich ken dich”
(I know you), he’ll say in Yiddish when I get on my high horse and lecture him about politics, global warming or the vicissitudes of fame.

I’m not much of a diva anyway. Second children aren’t good divas. My older sister claimed that role early on. As the conciliator and clown of the family, I had to cede it. But I had other tactics—like my bloody pinches or answering the phone and screaming to my older sister,
It’s a boy!
—as if he were the first one who ever called her. I’m no saint. I just have other strategies—often verbal. I kill my enemies with words.

Doing the diva hardly appeals to me. But I once saw the opera singer Regina Resnik do it in Venice and I was full of awe.

“Watch me do the diva,” she said as we swanned into the RAI studios in Palazzo Labia (I wish I could live in a palazzo with that name!). We wanted to screen her excellent movie on the Ghetto of Venice and needed a screening room. She managed to get the favor while convincing the head of Venetian RAI that she was doing
him
a favor.

Ever since then I have longed to be able to do the diva on appropriate occasions, but I’m too short.

As for the care and feeding of studs, I did that in my thirties and forties and had my fill. Every woman should try it briefly. Just don’t give them your credit cards—or a car.