Any Woman's Blues (23 page)

Danny Doland from Dallas was my last chance to go two by two into the ark with silverware. Danny Doland from Dallas was my last stab at
normality.
If I had got in trouble seeking my dybbuk, my demon lover, then surely I would be safe with this portly and proper burgher, with auctions at Sotheby’s and suites at Claridge’s, with dinner parties for eight (at eight), before which Danny Doland actually
rehearsed
his own jokes and wrote insulting yet flattering descriptions of each guest on the place cards, as if for a celebrity roast.

Make no mistake, I was madly in love with Danny Doland. I am not now and have never been a cynical gold digger. When Danny and I met at that first dinner in the Berkshires, at Wheatleigh, on a hot summer night, our eyebeams locked, and we both tumbled.

His eyes were washed-out blue, smallish and glittering. He was blindingly bald, with a double chin and an ample paunch, which his tallness disguised—except in bed. He wore yellow suspenders and red bow ties. He carried a silver-headed cane, which he sometimes twirled. He wore silk boxer shorts with “DD” monogrammed on one leg. He sometimes even wore spats. Somehow, in my warped mind, these things connoted safety. (I was not used to men who wore underwear at all—let alone custom-made underwear.) I had
had
a goyboytoy, and Danny Doland was no one’s toy; little did I know that Danny Doland had his hand on the joystick every bit as firmly as Dart—albeit in another fashion.

At that first dinner, our eager conversation blotted out the world. Danny loved Italy, Turner, Blake; he collected my film stills. He pronounced business “bidness” and important “impordant.” He actually had been following my work for years and owned an early painting of mine I had somehow lost track of. It flashed through my mind that I could get it back by marrying him. But even without that, I would have fallen for his fatal charm. For Danny was funny, cuddly, warm. Like going to bed with a hot cup of cocoa. After five years of going to bed with an auto-da-fé, it seemed appealing. I went home to Lunabella with Danny and tumbled into bed.

Hot cocoa. Even the images we used in bed were about food.

“I want to pour chocolate syrup over your cock and lick it off,” I said.

“You’ll have to beat me to it first,” said Danny (without, however, explaining how he was going to bend over that far).

 

 

In an age of uncommitted men, Danny was loaded with commitment. He gave me jewelry on the second date (an Art Deco pin—“we’re pinned,” he said), proposed on the third, and on the fourth gave me an elephantskin Filofax with his name (or his initials) written beside lunch and dinner on every page. He planned safaris in Kenya and château rentals on the Rhone. He was going to buy me the
piano no-bile
of a palazzo on the Grand Canal—and a
motoscafo
to zoom to it. He was going to build me an Italianate folly at Lunabella as a studio. He was going to buy me a classic As-ton Martin to drive to his country house in Hampshire and a Silverado to drive to his ranch in Texas. I guess my goddess sent him to me to test my resolve, for after this incredible full-court press, Danny Doland wilted.

Here’s the strangest part: I didn’t care all that much. Impotence is, after all, AIDS-proof. Besides, I had known a relationship built on searing sex, and I knew it didn’t solve all problems. Maybe I’d had enough sex in my life and was scheduled to spend my declining years at
auctions
. But Danny Doland cared. He was devastated that I knew his sexual secret. And from that point on, he began to get even with me.

It was subtle at first. Still in the first blush of our compatibility—in all areas but bed—we were planning our nuptials, our renovations, our purchases (for was not love in the eighties merely a prelude to the purchase of real estate? and in the upper classes, art?).

Danny Doland had an architect design a folly to be built as a studio for me at Lunabella. This studio looked like the main house in all respects, except that it was hidden in a copse of trees and that it had no windows.

Surely an oversight. Surely Danny Doland’s architect did not expect me to paint in a house without windows.

But Danny Doland had his reasons for this. Skylights in the roof would supply the light. And the “windows” would be limestone and marble replicas of windows.

“But why?” I asked.

“So that we can keep the whole structure climatically controlled, sugar. To preserve the art.”

“But if I can’t look out and see the sky and the hillside, how can I
create
the art?”

Danny Doland looked down at me with his small pale-blue eyes, the color of oxford shirting.

“Sweetie,” he said, “we’ll have perfect north light controlled by skylights with special electronically operated sunshades. That way, we can have the gallery below—works by you and your major contemporaries: Graves, Bartlett, Schnabel, Sherman, Natkin, Frankenthaler, Twombly, Johns, whoever pleases
you,
your
personal
collection—and above, you’ll paint under conditions that ensure that your work will never deteriorate. Imagine knowing that, sugar!”

I imagined myself trying to paint in a mausoleum without air, without birdsong, without the occasional butterfly (or wasp) landing on my work-in-progress—and I was horrified. Life, in short, was what he planned to exclude in the name of preserving art. How could I create art without life to power it?

Sex I could give up. But could I also give up
air?

 

Isadora: You say that
now!

 

“Darling, I must have at least one window that
opens,
” I said.

“I’ll talk to the architect, sweetie,” said Danny, “but I can tell you right now he’ll say it’s a bad idea. Have you ever been to the Beinecke Library?”

“Of course, darling—I
went
to Yale, remember?”

“Of course I remember, sugar. And you must know how
vital
it is to keep the air properly controlled.”

“But I want to
charge
the air,
de
control it, make it eddy around the spectator’s eyes, make the shakti leap out of the picture and change your life. . . .”

“That’s such a romantic idea, sugar. Look—you just paint your little heart out and let
me
worry about preserving the work, okay?”

I thought of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s husband spending all the money she had made as court painter to Marie Antoinette.

The French Revolution, your best friend and favorite subject beheaded en famille, and suddenly you discover that your husband has spent the loot! Penniless, you take off in 1789—what a year to leave home penniless!—and visit the courts in Italy, Austria, Germany, Russia, making your fortune anew, painting landscapes. In France, the bloodbath continues. Your ex-husband, who might as well be Danny Doland, has trimmed his sails to the prevailing winds and is acting as salesroom agent for the new government. You return home, refuse to meet bloody little Napoleon, and leave immediately for England, where Sir Joshua Reynolds still rules the taste of the time and condescends to praise you even though you are a woman. Then back to Paris, to paint at Napoleon’s court, publish your
Souvenirs,
and die at eighty-seven. What a life! If Vigée-Lebrun could do it during the French Revolution, why am I rushing headlong into the arms of Danny Doland?

“Darling,” I said, “have you ever read Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s memoirs?”

“Lebrun? Lebrun? Who
was
she, sugar?”

“Court painter to Marie Antoinette, then to Napoleon’s court—but she was just a woman painter who lived by her brush and who survived in very troubled times.”

“Didn’t she paint those pretty-pretty female portraits?”

“Mmm,” I said, determined to have windows and fresh air.

“Look, sugar, let
me
deal with the architect, and you do the painting. I know what’s best for you, sugar. Haven’t you had enough upheaval in your little life? What you need now, honey, is someone to protect you, to take care of bidness, to
free
you to create. I’m
good
at that, sugar. An’ it would give me such
pleasure!
”

I’m melted by his affectionate tone. Danny’s speech has, anyway, always melted me. With its curious combination of Dallas and London, it was the first thing about him that I fell in love with. That and his tallness.

“How can a man that tall and that rich fail to protect you?” my sane mind asks me.

“I’ll think of a way,” says my obsession.

As for protection, of course I want that—don’t we all? And who more than a chronic vagabond—a bolter, as they say in England? One can’t always live in turmoil. One can’t always be alone. I go to hug Danny Doland, but he pushes me away.

“Very well, then, it’s decided, sweetie.”

“As long as you don’t expect me to paint in a mausoleum,” I say.

“Who ever said anything about a mausoleum?” asks Danny. But I can tell he’s offended in his own sweet way and is storing up another grievance for future use.

After that contretemps, Danny began to eliminate physical contact altogether.

It started innocently enough. I noticed that whenever Danny and I spent the night together at Lunabella (we never stayed at my house) he would sleep above the covers if I was under them and he would wear underwear if I was naked.

A small thing, really. How could one complain? We were grown ups, middle-aged lovers. We had our own habits, our own lives, our own houses and children. (He had one son at Choate, the other at Le Rosey.) But clearly Danny Doland didn’t want to hug me. The tune “A Fine Romance” kept playing in my head.

One summer night, I gathered up my courage and asked him about it.

“I’m not keen on hugging,” he said. “Don’t tax me, sugar.”

Certainly a provocative remark for one’s fiancé, one’s new lover, the love of one’s life, to make. But I managed to be
mature
about it and not react.

“Okay,” I said to Danny. “We don’t have to be joined at the hip. It’s okay, darling.” And I turned over and went to sleep and had searingly erotic dreams about Dart. (Sleeping with Danny, I always dreamed about Dart.)

When this distancing maneuver didn’t work, Danny upped the ante.

One night he brought home piles of erotic videos (with names like
Las Vegas Lust, Cherry Ready Gets L.A.ed,
and
Hell Bent for Leather
) and suggested that we watch them. I was game. I still had all the garter belts and gear I had bought for Dart when sobriety made
him
impotent, and I didn’t mind bringing them over to Lunabella. I had been wearing garter belts and black lace merry widows even when my pals in the feminist art cabal considered them treasonous, and now that such accoutrements were chic, I still saw no harm in them. Men respond to visual stimuli, I reasoned. They’re just not as
evolved
as women.

So I got all tarted up in black lace, and Danny and I turned on the VCR and watched C
herry Ready Gets L.A.ed
—a porn flick of surprisingly good production values, which showed a nubile young “Cherry” making it with a succession of goyboytoys in Malibu, Santa Monica, Bel Air, Beverly Hills.

I was fascinated. We were meant to believe that Cherry, the young starlet, was getting ahead in her career as a result of blowing producers, casting directors, and studio moguls (one of whom looked like Dart), when of course everyone knows that such blandishments are far too common in the film business to make a difference in
any
one’s career.

Porn is very innocent, really. It presumes that there is a sort of sexual justice in the world. And whenever the scriptwriters get stumped, they up the number of participants in bed: the numerical phallacy.

Danny was turned on by Cherry. I wasn’t. Not much. But I was turned on by
Danny
being turned on. Usually it took me forever, teasing with tongue and fingers, saliva and baby oil, to get him—sort of—hard. But this time he sprang into action. And entered me. And went soft.

Back to Cherry. Back to baby oil. Back to back and belly to belly. Danny and I kept trying—until finally, exhausted, we fell asleep.

I became an expert on porn videos. I began to think of doing a porn video piece as a tribute to my love affair with Danny. I wasn’t about to give up, but it seemed
he
was.

“I feel overwhelmed by you, sugar,” he finally said one night at Lunabella. “All your pressure for connubial bliss—”

“All my
what?
”

“Your pressure for marriage. And all your sexual pressure, sugar. I feel overwhelmed.”

At that moment, I felt pretty overwhelmed myself.

“Danny,” I said, “you’ve been the one pressuring for marriage, not me. And you’ve been the one making a big deal about the sex. I’m quite contented with you. I love you . . .”

“Inadequate though I am . . .”

“I
love
you. And I
don’t
find you inadequate. Perhaps
you
think you’re inadequate.”

“Don’t give me that psychological hooey, sugar.”

“Darling,” I said, “I don’t want to fight with you. Stop. Please stop now before we both say things we’ll regret.”

“You think sex is important, sugar, and I, quite simply, do not.” Every couple has one argument they return to over and over. And that was ours. We found it early and never deviated.

“Well, sex
is
important,” I said, “but it’s not the only important thing between two people. Please don’t let’s fight.”

“You think sex is the most important thing between people, sugar. You do. Admit it. And I’ll never be the stud you’re used to. I shoulda met you when I was twenty.”

“I don’t
want
the stud I’m used to, Danny. That’s why I threw him
out.
”

“You miss him, sugar. Admit it. You miss him.”

“This is a ridiculous conversation.”