Any Woman's Blues (33 page)

All he had was the most glorious cock in Christendom, the bluest eyes, the sweetest voice, and an inveterate inability to tell the truth about
any
thing. Is Dart growing up? I put down the phone without leaving a message.

Where are Dart and his bimbo at nine on a Saturday night in Hoboken? Dinner and a movie? In bed fucking their brains out, hearing the click on the phone machine and knowing instantly, psychically, that it is me, calling from overseas? That fuzzy sound the line gets when Europe is calling, a sort of blizzard of old loves. Where are the loves of yesteryear? Where indeed?

I still get Dart’s canceled checks, so I know he is buying furniture on the installment plan at Seaman’s and paying some of his own bills. Where is he getting the money?
Is
he growing up? Is he holding down a job?

 

 

Off in Venice—the lagoon of dreams, and in despair. The courage to go on alone has slipped. It fails me. I fail me.

I walk to the window, open it, and look out on the white bubble of the Salute, the water with its millions of dark paillettes in all the colors of hell’s rainbow. Venice can be so melancholy, so haunted. It is not a place to come when you have lost a love.

Below, on the terrace, two American honeymooners are sitting gazing at each other. For them, Venice is a different city. We look at the same church, the same water, and feel such utterly opposed things—they at the beginning of a love story, I at the end. How can two such opposite feelings exist in the same air?

A disturbance on the surface of the water where normally the
traghetto
churns across—the little gondola ferry I so often took on these first trips with Dart. In the sparkling aubergine water, a face seems to appear and then to disappear, making it flat, glassy black, then suddenly greenish white.

Dart’s face! Dart’s arm waves above the waters!

And then Dart sinks under the surface of the waters, saying goodbye.

I collapse in a torrent of tears. “No more pain! No more pain!” I mutter. But even as I imagine him waving goodbye to me, I know I am really waving goodbye to him. This is another letting go, another end of the obsession. How many times will I have to do this before I get it right?
Sane mind:
As many times as it takes.
Sane mind:
Please note that you are not drinking—at least not tonight.

At some point, I get up and tear the letter into confetti. I scatter it over the terrace of the Gritti—but the wind lifts it and carries it away into the Grand Canal. I see the last little bits of my longing for Dart—for Dark, I almost said—carried away on the aubergine waters. And then I fall asleep, exhausted by my own psychodrama.

 

 

In the morning the demons are banished. I awake, throw open the windows facing the Grand Canal, and breathe in the glitter of a Venice morning. I think of Elmore in Chianti when our love was freshly minted, of the birth of the twins, and I remember how much I love Italy—if not Venice.

Venice I used to feel I could do without. Green bilge. Greedy shopkeepers. A kind of cynical medieval Disneyland populated by sweating hordes of day-trippers. Oh, I have friends who
swear
by Venice, live there, even. My friend Lorelei in Dorsoduro, my old art school classmate Cordelia Herald, who paints in a crumbling Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. I never used to understand it. Venice seemed so self-consciously out-of-this-world. But today Venice looks dazzling to me. Perhaps I am becoming a convert.

 

 

Italy, of course, is another story—Italy has always made me happy, has always made me feel like a woman. Whenever I arrive in Italy, I remember the list of proverbs Emmie and I once made for
The Amazon Handbook: A Guide for Free Women
(which, of course, we never wrote). Proverb number one was: “You’re not too fat; you’re just in the wrong country.” Number two: “Be very romantic, but keep the real estate in your own name.” That was as far as we got. (Actually, those two rules alone could take you far, far.)

Italy. There is nothing about this country that I do not love: The language, in which everything sounds better, from “Please pass the beans” (
I fagioli, per piacere
) to “I love you” (
Ti amo
). The people, with their humanity, anarchy, eccentricity, and yet their great belief in all the things that
really
matter: children, art, food, family, conversation, opera, gardening, shoes. The landscape, warm and maternal in places, with mammary hills, and craggy and masculine in others, with phallic peaks. The whole boot of Italy (and I love boots) is lapped by a lingual, sexual sea. From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with—a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.

It’s not that I fail to love America. America is my home, and so I love and hate it equally, as one loves and hates one’s parents. I know it too well. I know its great energy, its pragmatism, but I also know its crazy evangelists, its corrupt politicians, its mad addiction to money. What I love about America is its boundless optimism; what I hate is the way it fetters that optimism in a straitjacket of puritanism. If you have X, you can’t have Y. If you have Q, you can’t have Z. If you have mind, your body must pay. If you have body, your mind must pay. What I hate about America is its belief in dualism—its belief in retribution—when the truth is that the more you have the more you have, the more you grab the
less
you have, and the more you give the more you have. For life on its deepest level is a pot-latch, not a stock market: only by giving do we become rich. Only by nurturing mind do we nurture body. Only by loving the body do we really love the mind. They are indivisible, united, one. The heart of America knows this, in its optimism; the body politic of America does not.

Give, give, give! is the cry of the gods. It rhymes with: Live, live, live! Why else are we passing through this sublunary sphere? I cannot believe it is to accumulate T-bills, certificates of deposit, and stock options.

Keep moving, keep traveling. When I travel, I know I am in my proper mode. For what is life but a passage? When I was younger, it was Italy that kept me painting. I dipped my foot in the baptismal font of life.

The phone rings.

“
Pronto.
”

“Leila—it’s Cordelia. Heard you were in town.” Cordelia’s Southern drawl has not been modified by twenty years in Italy.

“How on earth did you know? I just got in last night.”

Cordelia laughs. “Venice is a
very
small town, honey. I just
know.
I’m callin’ to invite you over for drinks at six-thirty or seven. I’m havin’ a few people—flotsam an’ jet set, as we used to say.”

“I’d love to.”

“I’ve
moved,
honey. I’m now in Palazzo Barbaro. Ask the concierge at the hotel. Everyone knows me. Everyone knows
every
body in Venice.”

“Are you going to the Viva Venezia Ball?”

“Not if I can help it, honey. It’s the event of the season, but I
hate
that sort of thing. Too many cotillions in my ill-spent youth—honey, that’s why I
left
Charleston in the first place. I try whenever possible to hang out with the lunatics, the lovers, and the poets.”

“Good old Cordelia.”

“
See
the Biennale if you possibly can—it’s actually
good
this year.”

“Okay, boss.”

“And come at six, so we can have a minute to talk before the sweatin’ hordes of freeloaders arrive. What do you call them, honey?”

“Call
what?
”

“Freeloaders—in Yiddish.”

“
Schnorrers.
” I laugh.

“I miss your madness, Zandberg.”

“Me you too,” I say.

We both laugh and hang up. Friends. What would I do without my old friends? I get dressed and make my way through Venice to the Biennale.

 

 

A hazy late-summer Sunday in Venice. Bells ringing. A scene that Monet might have painted: a scrim of humidity softening the
campanili,
the sky, the water. No wonder painters flocked here, where the air and water metamorphose moment by moment in a kaleidoscope of light. Venice is the only city in which nearly every view is three-quarters sky. Taking the
vaporetto
to the Biennale, I suddenly understand the light of Venice, the light that drew Ruskin, Turner, Monet—and before them all the great Venetian painters, from Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese to Guardi and Canaletto. Suddenly I
see
Venice as if for the first time. Is it sobriety, the triumph of my sane mind? Is it my maenads and crystal? Is it the loss of Dart? I
see
the motes of light Turner painted. I understand the light as if it were glowing deep in my gut.

In art school I studied with a wonderful old teacher, a figurative painter from Russia named Stoloff. He used to say that the difference between a so-so painting and a great one was tone, the sense that the painter had painted not only the object itself but the air between himself and the object, which transfigured it, made it uniquely his. I had never really understood what he meant, but now I did.

The whole point of painting was to capture the air—the light shimmering in the air between you and your quarry. And why? Because only then were you painting the dance of the molecules, the dance of the molecules that made up what we call “real.”

This was the point—to paint that dance. But first you had to
see
it. Stoloff also used to say, “You are here to learn not how to paint but how to
see.
Because if you can see, the painting comes by itself. But most so-called artists are blind.”

He had been dead a decade, but finally I was learning what he had tried to teach me. Removing the alcohol from my system was like getting a new set of senses: eyes, ears, nose—all worked as if they were freshly made. I could tune in to the cosmos without static; I could see without glasses; I could smell the flowers without nose clips on!

What I was learning, above all, is that life goes on. What I was learning was that alone, I was not alone. I would learn to follow my bliss wherever it led. If this night in Venice had brought nothing else, it had brought, at least, this moment of clarity. I had finally learned my old art teacher’s lesson. I could go home now if I liked.

 

 

But I didn’t. Instead I went to Cordelia’s at six.

 

 

Cordelia lived on the top floor of the Palazzo Barbaro, in whose astonishing library Henry James slept when he was beginning
The Wings of the Dove.
The apartment was vast, with coffered ceilings, a
salotto
that faced the Grand Canal, that Jamesian library with painted panels, its view of the tiled roofs and roof gardens of Venice, and a kitchen that was once Sargent’s studio. Cordelia’s paintings—monumental equine forms (like a sort of mad Rosa Bonheur gone abstract)—were everywhere, hung or propped against walls.

Cordelia embraced me. Then she stood back to appraise me as women of a certain age do. Not dead yet. Not over the hill. Still a few good love affairs left. (Odd, the way we measure out our lives in love affairs, as women of another time used to measure theirs in children.)

Cordelia has waist-length blond hair, piercing green eyes, glorious cheekbones. She is tall, with broad shoulders that can make an Armani suit or a denim shirt look equally elegant. We hug.

“You look great,” I say. “Is it still the same Italian—or a new one?”

“Believe it or not, it’s still Guido, honey. I think our relationship
survives
because we can’t be together. These Italian liaisons go on forever. It must be what Dumas said: ‘The bonds of matrimony are so heavy that it takes two to carry them—sometimes three.’ For certain, if we’d gotten married fifteen years ago, we probably wouldn’t still be together.”

“Still madly in love?”

“Yes, honey. With the accent on madly.”

“Does he still live with his wife?”

“Oh, absolutely. I see him from ten to twelve in the morning and sometimes from six to eight at night. It’s more than most married couples have. Quality time, they call it—don’t they? Not a bad system. And the rest of the time I paint.”

“Do you ever want to live with him?”

“Of course. But less and less. I get into bed at night with all these art history tomes just heaped around me, and you can’t do that with a man—they always resent it. Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, I wish for someone to
hug.
But then the feelin’ passes—and I’m asleep. And in the mornin’, he’s
there.
And you?”

“Dart Donegal nearly brought me to my knees—but I’m starting to get up. At moments I have blasts of freedom that astound me, the kind of happiness I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”

“
Stay
with the feelin’, honey; there
is
life beyond liberation. When you stop being afraid of windin’ up alone, it just gets simple. Life is rich, and there’s plenty of it. I never would have believed it, honey, but these
are
the best years of my life. I practically skip through the streets. I never fret about Guido. He frets about me, poor darlin’—feels he’s missin’ somethin’, and he
is.
When I have guests from home—particularly men guests—he positively
lurks
in the campo like a spy. He’s sure I’m fuckin’ someone else, which I’m most assuredly
not.
Italian men are mucho macho—despotic and weak at the same time.
He
thinks he has the right to tell
me
not to have guests, but I have no right to question the fact that he goes home to La Bella Barbara. Honey, she’s just
awful
—one of those cold, fashionable mannequins who seem more Swiss than Italian. La Pussy Plastica, I call her. He
swears
they haven’t had sex in ten years. Married men always swear that, but in their case it might actually be true. Anyway, I
do
love him. Of course
he
chafes from time to time, suddenly figuring out that
I’m
really freer than he is. But he represses it instantly. Maleness is wonderful, really, isn’t it, honey? Perfect denial of reality. In New York, I’d probably chafe about this and want a proper husband, but in Italy it seems just
fine.
Life is so
filling
here, so
rich.
Just to buy fish on the Rialto makes me happy, to look out a window and see the boats go by, to walk to the
traghetto
and have the gondolier wave and shout, ‘Ciao, Cordelia!’ I feel like the local character. I can’t imagine a better life for a painter—or anyone.”