Any Woman's Blues (34 page)

“I nearly had a proper husband this year. An antiques dealer. It was
awful.
First, of course, it was wonderful—proper dinner parties, and all my friends breathing a sigh of relief. Leila the wild card suddenly tamed, out of trouble, paired off. . . . Then he stopped touching me. Or fucking me. Out of spite, I think, for having touched his heart. The heart is out of fashion in New York at present.”

“It always was, honey. That’s why I left. And then he blamed you, right, honey? Oh, Lord—when my girlfriends come from New York and tell me about what goes on there between men and women, I’m even
gladder
about Guido. At least this is
human.
In New York there seem to be all these workaholic yuppies whose precious bodily fluids have gone to Wall Street!
You
tell me—am I wrong about that? I left in 1968, after all.”

“Wait’ll I tell you about my night with the dominatrix.”

“Your night with
what?
”

“My night at Madame Ada’s in black leather and black candles up the ass.”

“Leila, honey, it’s time for you to get out of New York. I’m tellin’ you, you’re in danger. . . .”

The doorbell rings, announcing the arrival of the first guests.

We circulate in the library, among the leather-covered books, the antiques, the mélange of multicolored guests from Venice, New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong.

It’s the usual late-summer party at Cordelia’s—the same one I’ve dropped in to out of the blue for twenty years. The same elegant homosexual poets (their ranks sadly thinned by the plague of the eighties), the same artists who live in Venice, the same eccentric shipping tycoons, the same writers recovering from novels that flopped—or novels that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations—the same ladies of a certain age in search of Guidos, the same well-tailored lesbians and ill-tailored lesbians, the same serious students of art history (or musicology or Renaissance poetry) come to Venice for the first time and smelling of the stacks of the Marciana Library or the Cini Foundation, starry-eyed because they are in Venice surrounded by art and they cannot believe their eyes.

And then, suddenly, amid all these old standbys, there is a new face.

He swims up to me through the room of familiar undersea life, a merman, fluid in his movements, slender in his white linen shirt and beige linen slacks, smiling with a slightly mocking smile, his cheekbones slanted like Pan’s, his eyes dark green flecked with light gold, silver, platinum, his tousled blackish curls like a young Bacchus’, and his ears, I swear it, slightly too pointed for him not to be part satyr.

I look down at his feet, expecting hooves, or at least fins, but all I see are cream-colored loafers and no socks.

His eyes lock on to mine.

“
Ciao
, Leila,” he says, as if he were saying, “Darling, turn over, I want to take you from behind.”

The air is full of gold and silver. Every light mote shines with sex.

“How do you know my name?”

“
Tu sei famosa. Ho visto la tua fotografia molte volte nel giornale.
Excuse me—my English is terrible. I am Renzo Pisan.”

“Renzo il Magnifico,” I say, looking into his sea-green eyes.

He touches my hair.

“We have the same curly hairs,” he says. It is a very good sign. Pagan hairs. “May I take you on a tour of Venice by boat?”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, at eleven?”

What can I possibly say but “yes”?

(
Sane mind:
Try “no” for a change!)

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

H
e comes for me at eleven the next morning at the Gritti, looking even more like a satyr in the morning light than he did at dusk.

We putter out into the middle of the lagoon, where the seagulls live, dipping and diving for fish and alighting upon buoys and rotted wooden posts.

The sun is behind us in a haze, dispersed in the sky, exploded into atoms.

I lean back in the boat, sunning myself, knowing that there is no place I’d rather be.

We sail and sail. A dreamy, glittery day, with Venice receding behind us in the lagoon. From the lagoon, Venice suddenly seems so
small
—all turrets and towers low on the horizon, like Cybele’s crown.

He drops anchor in the middle of the lagoon, makes me hide my eyes while he changes out of his dapper linen pants and shirt and into his swimming trunks. I strip to my bathing suit, and we sit in the back of the boat, touching yet not quite touching, in the way that lovers do before the explosion, when the decision to become lovers has been made and has not yet been acted upon.

He strokes my cheek, my breasts; he bends and kisses me, and suddenly we are lost in each other’s mouths, the land of tongue and tooth, nature red in fang and claw threatening to overtake us. He touches me, and I can tell by the way he touches me—as if he were a part of myself longing to know its boundaries—that it is only a question of deciding whether to make love in the boat or at my hotel (where Julian is expected to arrive from California in two days), or to go to his house (where, Cordelia says, he lives with his German wife, who is an honest-to-God principessa). Whatever he asks I will do. He has only to crook his finger and say
vieni
, come, and I will follow.

We play and play, lie in the sun, speaking in that rudimentary way lovers do—your smell, your touch, your touch, your smell—and then eventually we putter back to his house and make mad love on the divan in his office, with architectural drawings all over the floor.

His house is on a little island (which appears on no maps) near Burano. It is a smallish villa, built by a follower of Palladio, surrounded by gardens filled with Greco-Roman sculpture and strange, primitive stones dredged up from the lagoon.

No one is there but an aviary full of canaries, who chirp and chirp as we make love, as if they, too, are pleased.

The lovemaking demolishes the boundaries between us; we become one person. He enters into me very small at first, keeps saying,
“Apri, apri”
(open up, open up), as if the whole of his need were to possess me, fill me, let me know him entirely.

Sex, when it is like that, is not sex anymore but a communion, a bridging of separateness, an abolition of bodies. And it is so rare, and so astounding. You can search for it forever and never find it.

(
Sane mind:
You found it before, and you’ll find it again.

Leila:
Could you please shut up? I’m trying to con myself into falling in love!)

We sleep in a tangle of sweat and juice; awaken, make love again; sleep again; awaken again and make love.

“We were like an old couple, very much in love,” he says. And it is true. We knew each other wholly from the first touch. We make love as if on our twentieth anniversary, a homecoming, perfect fit.

With his ebony hair and his sea-green eyes, he looks like a
giovanotto
painted by Bronzino. He wears a black cord around his neck, the lion of Saint Mark and a Star of David on it. He’s an architect who designs important buildings in Italy, and he’s involved in some project to restore the ghetto of Venice. Something in him evokes all my womanliness and all my Jewishness—a powerful combination. There is about him a courtliness, a
gentilezza
, that makes me think of the Italian Renaissance. And yet there is also something slightly calculating about him—
furbo
, shrewd—that hints of the practiced Casanova. It is so hard to tell. Seized by the scruff of my neck and dragged again to The Land of Fuck, I find all judgment and all discrimination have fled.

(
Sane mind:
Help!)

 

 

I am deep into The Land of Fuck with Renzo—even though Julian is now here, staying with me at the Gritti. In the afternoons, I make some excuse—an interview, photographs, drinks with Venetian friends—and wait by the dock for Renzo to fetch me.

He comes on the very dot of two, as soon as he can get away, fracturing the sacred Italian lunch hour. Comes for me in the little motor launch—a classic Riva—
putt, putt, putt
—wearing white linen trousers and a blue linen jacket over a striped gondolier’s shirt, his body very slim and smelling of sweat and salt marsh, ovulation and the moon.

I step into the boat, which will carry me into the middle of the lagoon, and we sing vulgar American songs—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” for one—as we putter off in the sunlight, drop anchor in the middle of the lagoon, where, in view of seagulls and low-flying planes, we make love in the boat, Venice suddenly nearly collapsed into the horizon line—low and insignificant, with its hordes of Michelin-carrying tourists, its skeletal socialites assembled for the Viva Venezia Ball, its gouging headwaiters, its hotelkeepers, shopkeepers, restaurant keepers, and its cruising gays, who now all practice “safe sex,” whatever that is.

Renzo and I do not practice safe sex. In The Land of Fuck, nothing is safe. We are lost in a watery Atlantis in the middle of the lagoon, where we communicate with cock and cunt, speaking, when we speak, only the most rudimentary English and troglodyte Italian.

The lack of language defeats us yet also makes everything more intense. Renzo claims to speak English like a Zulu. And my Italian, after all these years, is suitable only for survival on a desert island, photographed by Lina Wertmüller.

I call him Carissimo Troglodita (or Beloved Trog). He calls me Piccola Pittrice (or Little Painter). I would not accept the adjective from anyone else, but coming from him, it sounds like a compliment. He fucks me at every angle until I weep tears of joy. The tip of his cock also weeps when it emerges from his pants. He wears no underwear.

(
Sane mind
: Your mother warned you about men like that.)

“Piange per te,”
he says. It cries for you.

He is trying to knock me up. Oh, how lovely Mediterranean men are in their understanding of the primal ooze and what it is all about. We Americans have lost touch with the
purpose
of sex. Sex is about babies. The Land of Fuck is the lure; the Tunnel of Love leads to the Romper Room, through caves of bloody endometrial ooze and salty sperm.

And Julian? Julian waits in the hotel suite, writing symphonies in his head (and in his notebook), knowing and not knowing what I have been doing in the lagoon.

Julian and I are soulmates. We understand everything about each other’s hearts and souls, and yet we do not fuck. Both strangers from a distant asteroid of the mind, we speak the same language, the language of hyperspace.

When I return, Julian asks me if I have met a gondolier. And I say, “Yes,” and then I describe sex in a boat with this irresistible nameless gondolier. And Julian stares at me, spellbound, as I describe my adventure, which grows even more ecstatic in the telling.

Between Renzo and Julian, I have two men adding up to one whole person—every woman’s cure for the blues!

Nonattachment, I tell myself. Nonattachment is the key to all of life. I want to feel everything, to get lost in sensation, and yet I also want to be able to retrieve myself. I want to go down to the bottom of the lagoon and still be able to come back up. I want to give away all of myself and still have some piece of myself to regenerate from—like an octopus cut into bits and tossed into the lagoon to grow again.

What a terrifying life I have chosen for myself—or the muse has chosen for me! To dive to the bottom of the lagoon again and again, seeking skinlessness, seeking self-annihilation.

And yet I am happy. I had forgotten how happy you can be when the sex works! I had forgotten singing in the streets and sunlight glinting off your lover’s hair. I had forgotten . . . Dart!

Racing across the lagoon, singing like teenagers . . . I had forgotten the wonder of newly falling in love. Who needs Ada and her black leather and candles now?

 

 

Nonattachment. Can you love and still live completely in the present? Doesn’t love always leap ahead into anticipation? Waiting for Renzo’s calls, I become crazed, mad, obsessed—all the things I swore I’d never be again. I dream of having a baby with his oceanic eyes. My ovaries start to ache. How can you nonattach with aching ovaries? Can the female of the species
ever
be an existentialist?

Julian and I talk all night, our arms and legs wrapped around each other’s.

“Someday,” he says, “we’ll make love—but it will come not out of sex but out of love, time-tested, true love.” Ah, the land of promise!

Julian and I have been friends forever. He is the only person I can trust to see the dance of the molecules with me and know I am not crazy. He was the only person I could trust to guide me after I crashed through space-time in Connecticut and saw my mother stomping through the woods. He didn’t laugh at me. When I called him from Venice, he said, “Take two gondoliers and call me in the morning.” If I called him from the fourth dimension, he would probably say the same.

Julian and I have an understanding: we are not allowed to have sex. I’m not sure how the decision was reached or who made it. Perhaps we are too much like siblings to succumb.

We cuddle. We shower together. Naked, we eat strawberries in bed. But we are much more comfortable talking and dreaming with our arms and legs wrapped around each other than we ever would be fucking. Sometimes we talk all night, rub each other’s backs and legs, and float through space in the cosmic bed. Wherever we are, the bed becomes a starship. Strange planets hover overhead.

We speak of the nonexistence of time, the blurry line between meat and air. We heal each other with laughter. When we walk in the streets together, people stare at us because we seem like two little kids, giggling. Can we spend our lives together even though we never fuck? This is the question that bothers us both. I know there are various connections between people, not all of which are carnal. Since soul and body overlap in different ways, since flesh and spirit have more points in communion than those below the navel, I can love Julian without what the world calls “sex,” but from time to time I suspect he is troubled by this, since he measures himself, like most men, by the stiffness of his cock.