Any Woman's Blues (3 page)

 

 

We lived together once, Darth and I. (His real name is not far off: Darton—named for some distant family warlock of the past.) I never called him that. I called him Dart: it seemed so appropriate, since he lived in his cock and also was forever darting. Oh, when I was younger, I used to make fun of male hormones and what they make men do. I used to think that men ought to try to be more like women (who were more
rational
, I then supposed), but now that I am forty-four I know that the glory of the male sex lies in how different they are from us—though of course it infuriates us, as nature meant it to do, fury being an aspect of our drive to merge.

I met him at a dude ranch in Wyoming—the Lazy C Ranch, it was called (an upside-down C, not unlike his cock)—and I was a dude and he a cowboy. Not that he was
really
a cowboy. He was an aging prep school boy from the East, playing at cowboy for a summer, but I didn’t know that. Under the Grand Tetons (or Big Tits, as the French so bluntly called them), on the wildflower-studded greensward made by the great Snake River, he looked as authentic as any cowboy, riding his nag. At least he looked authentic to this cowgirl from the canyons of New York, who wanted him to ride her.

I had come to this most beautiful part of the world (Moose, Wyoming) to shed an old love affair, there where the elk shed their antlers, and he was a passionate twenty-five and I an even more passionate thirty-nine, moseying through fields of Indian paintbrushes, blue lupine, and black-eyed Susans on my old cayuse. I looked at him—dirty-blond hair, battered cowboy hat, torn cowboy shirt, those touching purple lids like a baby’s, and under them those penetrating (I use the adjective advisedly) blue, blue eyes—and I was hooked. Later he hooked me properly in bed. Only twenty-five, but he knew the power he had and made sure I knew it too. That he loved my work was the icing on the cock (as it were), for he aspired to an allied art himself and told me that he fashioned out of clay western sculptures à la Remington (when he wasn’t fashioning female bodies with his extra rib).

After the summer we resumed in SoHo and Litchfield County. There was a girlfriend I had to dispose of (a little ninny of twenty-three, the first of many), but then we fell into living together—mainly because we could not bear to spend a night apart.

At first it was glorious: a mad drug-crazed affair, days of wine and roses, sinsemilla and chrysanthemums, cocaine and calla lilies. Nights of wild endless lovemaking in which one lost count of the number of acts of sex because they had neither beginnings nor endings. I could look up his nostril and see eternity. The nights might have been eons long, epochs measured in geologic time, or they might have been merely minutes. It was impossible to tell. As we coupled, mountain ranges rose and fell; rock was formed from molten lava; hot springs bubbled out of the earth; extinct volcanoes came to life. For a year I did no work, nor did he. We toured the world—from king-size triple-sheeted bed to king-size triple-sheeted bed.

All the travel was on someone else’s tab. We went from Dokumenta to the Basel Art Fair, from the Whitney to Palazzo Grassi, from Düsseldorf to Munich, from Venice to Vienna, Nice to Paris, Madrid to Mallorca, London to Dublin, Stockholm to Oslo, Tokyo to Hong Kong to Beijing. Who cared where we were, as long as we were in bed? I remember a blur of other artists, art dealers, collectors, critics, like ghosts in a Shakespearean tragedy. Either they were as drunk and stoned as we were or we were drunk and stoned enough for both. From time to time, I (being the older and supposedly responsible party) would awaken and wonder if we were becoming drunks or drug addicts, but in that crowd, who could tell? All the artists drank and used that way. Or so I thought. The only time I really became upset was when Dart carried sinsemilla into the USSR—and without telling me.

We had arrived at our grand hotel in MOCKBA, and we were about to fall into bed and reassert our primal connection (it had, after all, been seven hours since we made love in Copenhagen, and we were both in a state of deprivation that prisoners of war may know), when Dart smiled at me with his shy “love me” smile (practiced from childhood on his mother, his nannies, his sisters, and any other females he might meet) and extracted from under the insole of his cowboy boots two flattened joints of purest Humboldt County sinsemilla. I remembered where we were, searched the ornate golden room for hidden TV cameras and mikes, looked at my child lover, and my blood literally ran cold. I had never said a cross word to him till now.

“Get rid of them,” I said.

“You mean we’re not going to smoke them?” said my incredulous little boy.

“Get rid of them, and
now
.”

“Just a puff?”

“Not even one.” And then I watched as he flushed them down the Soviet john (shall we call it an ivan?), a tear in the corner of his bright blue eye for the dope, which he still did not realize might have been our passport to Siberia forever.

Furious as I was at his defection from my welfare, his incomprehension of the danger, I was powerless to yell at him, and this was not only because the room was bugged. My heart was bugged as well. I was so tied to him body and soul that yelling at him would have been like yelling at the little child in myself. What an odd combination of manly power and childlike credulity he was! He thought he could light up a joint and make the Gulag disappear!

We did not make love that afternoon. And for two who made love on arrival in
every
hotel room, that was a sort of sundering, the first of many. It had to do with drugs, which we thought joined us but which really sundered us—that being, of course, the paradox of drugs.

 

 

Dart’s history was as deprived as any ghetto child’s. He grew up rich, in Philadelphia, in a town house on Rittenhouse Square filled with Chippendale antiques, Chinese porcelain, seventeenth-century bedwarmers, threadbare Oriental rugs, rooms of unused shoes, piles of 1930s magazines, that sort of thing. His mother drank sherry and abused Seconal; his father drank bourbon and seduced debutantes. The nannies drank gin and seduced Dart. He was born with an erection, his mother always said (with her smoky, boozy laugh), and from then on no one who took care of him ever let him forget that they considered his cock the most important organ of his body. Once, I thought this was cute, but now I find it exceedingly sad that a young man should be valued above all for that appendage which he has in common with all other men—even if his
is
bigger and better shaped. Sometimes, when I think of this, I want to weep for Dart and change his name to something real—Daniel perhaps—and give him a real life, such as I would have wanted for my son.

But I have no son. I have twin daughters, Michaela and Edwina. Dart became my lover and my son, a dangerous (and perhaps impossible) combination.

This
Wanderjahr
continued after MOCKBA. Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok, Borobudur, Singapore, Bombay, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Baghdad, Jidda, Cairo, Athens, Tunis, Nice, Lisbon, Bahia, Rio—but life in bed at a deluxe hotel (whether the Okura, the Ritz, the Peninsula, the Oriental, the Shangri La, the Goodwood Park, the Cipriani, the Bel Air, the Plaza Athénée or the Vier Jahreszeiten) is much the same everywhere.

My friend Emmie once remarked that a deluxe hotel is like a hospital, what with food being wheeled in and out and flowers being dutifully sent by business acquaintances (and never by the lovers you wish had sent them) and polite notes or mass-produced “greeting” cards appearing at irregular intervals. The help are usually dark-skinned and do not speak your language, and they have the same indifference to your condition whether you are lying in bed dying of some rare disease or lying in bed dying under your lover. It’s all the same to them: more sheets to wash. Truly, you can go around the world with your lover and never see more than the pucker of his anus or the silhouette of his cock. Thus a year went by: one of the longest or shortest (depending on whether or not I was stoned at the time) years of my whole life.

But eventually all lovers must get out of bed—and that was how our problems started.

We set up house in Roxbury, my house, the core of which was built in the seventeenth century, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wings. There was also the loft in New York. He needed a car, of course, so I bought him one to bring him to me. I knew, of course, that it could also take him away, but at the beginning of a love affair one doesn’t think that way. An ordinary car would not do for my Chéri, so I bought him a Mercedes. It was a beautiful old restored classic from 1969, when he was just thirteen: a thirteen-year-old’s dream, and I gave it the license plate DART. (Oh, I had a sense of humor about my lover—even while he reduced me to ash.)

I used to love to buy him things: a white suede cowboy suit with long fringes, and white-and-cream lizard-skin boots, with a ten-gallon white Stetson to crown the costume; monogrammed towels that said “DVD”; jewelry (which he usually lost); electronic equipment (which he usually broke); cashmere sweaters, crocodile loafers, costly artbooks, engraved stationery, silk pajamas, silk underwear, the lot. He was my shiksa, and I treated him accordingly, the way my rich English uncle Jakob from Odessa, East End furrier turned country squire in Surrey, treated his chorine. I had great style and recognized Dart at once as one of the great kept men.

But did
he
have great style? He never once refused a gift. In fact, despite his joy in receiving, there was always a little pout of the lower lip that seemed to indicate that the gift was a trifle
less
than he expected. If you gave him a car, it seemed he wanted a helicopter. If you gave him a white cowboy suit, it seemed he wanted a white horse to match. If you gave him a ring, it seemed he wanted a watch as well. This was never stated, and had you asked him he would have passionately denied it. But somehow you knew that the gift would only sate him for a little while, and then his hunger would require more fuel.

He was like a great hungry primitive god, ravenous for virgins, wreaths of flowers, plucked hearts, slaughtered oxen, chalices of blood, burnt offerings. . . . It was my joy to offer all these up. What was my success worth if I could not afford a man as beautiful and death-defying as Dart?

I had lived my life like a man, managed my career, my investments, even my pregnancy, exactly as a man would have done (Mike and Ed were born by caesarean on the day and at the hour I chose), so I thought I could manage Dart as well. Ah—there’s the rub. Nature has not arranged men that way. And the more fun they are in bed, the more uncontrollable they are. For it is the wildness within that guarantees the wildness in bed.

Pan does not buy one life insurance nor come home for dinner at the same time each night. I could buy my own life insurance. But I did need a little more serenity than life with Dart provided.

But what about love? you ask. Where does love enter into the equation? I know he loved me passionately. He loved me as the knife loves the wound it makes, as the female tarantula loves the male whose head she gobbles, as the nursing baby boy loves the nipple he takes between his teeth and chews until it spurts blood mixed with milk.

He did not mean to be cruel. It was just his nature—like that of the scorpion who stings the horse who carries him across the stream (as in that ancient Aesopian joke about the nature of scorpions).

Somehow, when we were together, things had a tendency to get lost: wallets, credit cards, jewelry. Perhaps this was because we were often stoned or perhaps this was because together we entered a gyre in which whirl was king and all order and structure went out of our lives. I took this as a proof of love, for is not love, after all, self-forgetfulness? And who needs that self-forgetfulness more than one who has lived her whole life for discipline, for art, mimicking a man’s hardness despite her woman’s heart?

When I met Dart, I had spent thirty-nine years climbing the glass mountain of a woman artist’s destiny—I wanted a treat, a reward for all that desperate climbing, and at first he seemed to give it to me, too. There was not only his generosity in bed, with its punitive kinkiness (which I felt I
deserved
somehow for challenging the gods by becoming so successful), but the way he cosseted me. He moved into my house and took over the care and protection of Leila Sand. He played bodyguard, cook, maître d’hotel, general factotum. He was good at keeping the world at bay, frightening off troublesome fans, ex-husbands, ex-lovers, would-be parasites. He installed himself, in short, as chief parasite, court jester, her majesty’s pleasure barge, Robin Goodfellow—which, you may remember, was another name for the devil.

I had been, until the epoch of Dart, a very disciplined worker. No artist gets anywhere otherwise. I had a studio in Litchfield County—a silver silo with an observatory-like skylight, studding my country acreage—and in New York I had my loft. I preferred working in the country, where the birdsong did not invade but rather accompanied my work. But once I got going on a major project, I had to stay where I was, for my canvases at this point in my life were very large. Besides, there is something profoundly conservative about even the most avant-garde art: it likes to grow in one place.

Dart installed himself as my majordomo, made me dependent on his good offices (as I had never in my life allowed myself to be dependent on anyone), and then he began finding excuses to flee. Just when I was nursing the delusion of having found, at long last, my helpmeet, my live-in muse, the husband of my heart, Maurice Goudeket to my Colette, he began spending more and more time in New York, at the loft, and always with a good excuse: He had to meet a gallery owner who was interested in his work. He had to buy materials. He had to go to the foundry. I had given him every young artist’s dream—a barn to work in, unlimited time, all his expenses paid—and that was when he started flying from me, or else he was flying from himself. I never knew.