Any Woman's Blues (7 page)

By the time I took the test for Music and Art, when I was twelve, I was a better artist than most of the teachers and they knew it. The oohing and aahing over my portfolio was fierce. I went to M&A in the mythic old days, when my schoolmates were legends-to-be like Charlie Gwathmey, Isadora Wing, and Tony Roberts. I wasn’t particularly happy there—but who is happy at fifteen?

 

Isadora: Better get this right, kiddo, if you are going to do the unspeakable thing of introducing
me
into the book as a real character!

Isadora: When in doubt, quote Omar Khayyám! But the fact is you know damn well you have given Our Heroine an upside-down version of your
own
high school years. You were the good girl, so you made her
bad.
Any reader can spot these fictional reversals a mile away. You’ll have to do better than that.

 

M&A stood then at the top of a wino-studded hill at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, and I took the exhibitionist-studded subway down from Dyckman Street to get there. The school was enveloped in a gemütlich haze of marijuana and black jazz.

At M&A I learned four things: that Bessie Smith knew all there was to know about womanhood; that blacks had the secret key to America’s heart of darkness; that The Land of Fuck was expensive but worth the price; and that an artist was always an outcast and a rebel in bourgeois America—no matter what anyone said.

At M&A I dressed all in black (stockings to stocking cap), smoked Gauloises, and had a tall boyfriend from Harlem called Snack—a saxophone player who taught me all about jazz and weed and sex. I changed my name from Louise Zandberg to Leila Sand (to my father’s horror and my mother’s delight—George Sand was one of her heroines), and I learned how to ring my eyes with kohl, rouge my nipples (not that my pink fifteen-year-old nipples
needed
rouging), and cut my hair in a shiny helmet à la Louise Brooks (one of my early idols). The hair was Pre-Raphaelite red (Venetian, as Mr. Donegal would have it), but the style was pure 1920s. I was the Greenwich Village kid—a regular at the Peacock, the White Horse, the Lion’s Head—as I shuttled between Dyckman Street, where my mom lived (in increasing chaos and squalor), and Eighth Street, where my dad lived over the store.

 

 

By the time I was a teenager, Theda’s craziness had long since driven Dolph away. He had a mistress named Maxine, who sometimes stayed with him above the store and who tried in vain to woo me with pseudomaternal affection. But I was intransigent and must have given her a terrible time—almost as terrible as the time I gave my mother. Much as I hated my mother, I was fiercely loyal to her around Dolph and Maxine.

Sullen, silent, dressed all in black, squired by a black boyfriend—I was every parent’s nightmare of a teenager. I walked down Eighth Street in a cloud of Gauloise smoke, clutching a copy of
Being and Nothingness
under the arm that wasn’t twined around Snack, while he, in turn, carried his saxophone and a switchblade. Snack was six feet, three inches (I have always liked tall men), and I was then, as now, a mere five feet four (like Elizabeth Taylor, another heroine of mine). My tits were big, my hips big, and my waist almost as tiny as Scarlett O’Hara’s. Considered sexy in a gamine sort of way,
I
never really thought I was pretty, but boys flocked to me because apparently I had “It.” The scent of sex is a powerful aphrodisiac, and some girls have it, while others—even very pretty ones—most emphatically do not. It has less to do with looks than with smell, for human beings are closer to the insect and invertebrate worlds than their hubris lets them know. With all that sex appeal from my teen years on, I was usually more concerned with protecting myself against the opposite sex than with attracting it. (Oh, nature is cruelly unfair when it comes to love.)

I fought the white boys off with my wicked sarcasm and my prodigious talent—which I flaunted like a cock—and turned instead to the rebels, outcasts, and blacks. I had no penis envy; I really thought I had a penis. I graduated from M&A in ’61, went to Yale School of Fine Arts, and the summer of ’64 (the summer of my junior year) found me in Mississippi with Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. That I didn’t get killed is a tribute not to prudence but to providence or sheer dumb luck—the same luck that mysteriously preserved me during my drinking, drugging, and driving days. The gods must have spared me for some awesome task, for certainly I was careless enough with my own life. What that awesome task was I did not yet know, but whatever it was, I would fashion it with my own two capable hands.

From my father I inherited immense skill in making things: craftsman’s hands, an eye that could immediately see the right juxtaposition of shapes and colors. All this I believe is inborn. We are not taught it but merely grow into our real selves if our real selves are not blocked. From my mother I inherited a gift for theatrics that bordered on madness. I was a bad girl in high school and an even badder girl in college. I had a gift for publicity even then. Once, long before Charlotte Moorman wrapped herself in Saran Wrap to play the cello, I wrapped myself in tinfoil to attend the Halloween party of an M&A classmate. At Yale,
years
before the advent of the Guerrilla Girls, I railed against the male-dominated art world (this was in the early sixties, before feminism was chic, let alone tolerated), yet I was not at all against wooing art critics with my sex appeal if it would help my career. I felt even then—perhaps the spectacle of my mother’s victimization by my father inspired this—that women were so discriminated against as a class that all was fair in love and war. I continued to think so until Dart.

Because I was so strong in my integrity against the opposite sex, skinlessness was what I sought. Most boys were too weak for me. I could manipulate them too easily. A young woman who knows her own sexual powers is a rarity indeed, but she is unbeatable. And if she happens also to be smart and talented and has the crazed bravado—I cannot call it self-confidence—that a mad mother and an alcoholic father inspire, then there’s no stopping her. That was me precisely. Unsinkable, unbeatable, unstoppable.

After breaking the requisite number of hearts in high school and college, I did in graduate school what no one expected me to do: I married an heir. Thomas Winslow was the scion of a family just as alcoholic as mine but a lot richer. He was studying English lit at Yale, with a special interest in Romantic poetry, and I don’t know whether I married him because he was the tallest guy I’d ever dated (six-feet-six) or because he was blond and blue-eyed (with eyes the color of faded denim) or because he declared his intentions to leave the whole of his legacy to SNCC—there’s an acronym out of the past—or because he could recite “Ode to a Nightingale” on cue. (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains”—how’s that for a premonition?) It could have been any of these reasons. Or perhaps I was just tired of fighting off men, and getting married seemed like the answer. At least it would allow me to concentrate on my work.

Thom and I were set up by his parents in a mansion in Southport, which we proceeded to fill with radicals, black militants, and war resisters. We painted the windows black, filled the rooms with pop art, and set about drinking and drugging our way out of the good graces of a community that had sheltered Thom’s family for nearly a century. We took a glorious Greek Revival mansion and turned it into a slum—all in the name of art and social revolution. For these were the days of the Beatles, the Vietnam war, happenings, peace marches, and Summers of Love. Thom, like every man I ever loved, was too weak for me, but he adored my work and would do anything to further it. At that time my style was eclectic, to say the least. I produced happenings with Yoko Ono (when she was still with Tony Cox, before she snagged her Beatle)—dubious performances at which the bourgeois participants were forced to strip naked and crawl through canvas tubes or drop their drawers to be photographed mooning at old-fashioned cameras. (Even then I was interested in film stills—which later figured so prominently in my relationship with Dart, as you will presently hear.)

Thom Winslow aided and abetted me in all these ventures: buying the art, supporting the radicals and their movements, renting the lofts, financing all my brash, harebrained schemes. Because he was so complaisant, I was fairly contemptuous of him. I knew he was hopelessly in love with me—and it made me careless. But then the sixties were careless days. Everyone knew the priceless-ness of everything and the value of nothing. Unlike our younger siblings the yuppies, we claimed contempt for money—but what we really had contempt for was struggle and pain. We expected the world to be handed to us on a silver (albeit graffiti-covered) platter—and for a while it was.

Thom Winslow was a good, nice, stoned guy. I was his anger—the rebellion he didn’t have the nerve to act out himself. Once, before we split, I overheard him telling a famous art dealer at a dinner party: “All my life, I went to the right schools, the right clubs, the right debutante cotillions, and then I married Leila Sand, née Louise Zandberg!” Thom said this with considerable pride—it was in fact the great achievement of his life at that point—but I was pissed off because he gave away my original name. (Maybe I also heard the undertone of anger that was soon to sunder us.)

 

 

What a difference twenty years can make! Thom is now married to a lockjawed debutante of his own faith (godless Protestantism) and social class (trust-fund radicalism), who might even have gone to dancing school with him in Southport. They live in Vermont and produce environmentally sound toilets that turn your shit into compost for roses. Heartbroken as he was when I bolted with Elmore Dworkin, the abstract expressionist, he was able to turn it into compost. It takes
merde
to grow roses, as the French say.

Which brings us back to skinlessness—which I was seeking when I fell in love with Elmore, who was older, far more established, and knew everything there was to know about cunnilingus (tongue tricks he had learned during his salad days, to mix a metaphor, in Paris). I met Elmore, fell in love with his paintings and his tongue (though perhaps not in that order). It was 1974; I had received enough recognition as a painter to be earning a good living from my work, be written up in
The New Yorker
and
Vogue
(
People
and
Architectural Digest
would come later). It was not the household-word sort of fame but a classier, more discreet variety—fame in the art world before the art world became a total media circus.

I met Elmore at a dinner party in New York that Thom had not come to because he had a terrible case of the flu. What a wife I was! At seven o’clock I left my husband alone on Park Avenue coughing his guts out, and at eleven I left a dinner party with a hirsute artist twenty years my senior. By midnight I was having my pussy licked into purring ecstasy in a loft on John Street. By 3:30 A.M. I was home in bed on Park Avenue again, embracing my soon-to-be ex-husband, without even the good grace to feel guilty. In the meantime I had admired, from the windows of Elmore’s loft, that pink-as-a-baby’s-bottom look the sky gets during a snowstorm, and I had equally admired Elmore’s cock and paintings. In one evening I was introduced to the New York School’s most promising younger artist, multiple orgasms, and Humboldt County sinsemilla.

“Have a good time, honey?” Thom asked, rolling over and coughing convulsively.

“Mmmmm,” I said, and he drew my hand to his penis. We fucked like mad then, our coupling made more passionate by the unmistakable—if ghostly—presence of a third person in our bed. Never had I enjoyed Thom more. But still I had not come to skinlessness.

My marriage to Elmore, the birth of the twins, our inevitable parting, cannot be given short shrift. I always feel that when the parents-to-be of extraordinary children meet—whether at a dinner party, at a health spa, at AA, or wherever it is fashionable for the young and nubile to meet nowadays—angels, fates, and sibyls (painted by Michelangelo, or at least by Tiepolo or Veronese) are hovering on clouds above them and nudging them toward the most convenient counterpane. All of nature is in a fury to reproduce. Why should human beings think themselves exempt? Elmore’s loft, Elmore’s tongue, and Elmore’s drugs (not to mention Thom’s flu) were merely snares to get the twins out of the ether and onto the planet as soon as possible.

At the moment one’s children are conceived, one ceases to be an ego and becomes merely a cosmic tube, a funnel into timelessness. That, I suspect, is why having children is such a critical stage in one’s development. With parenthood comes our first taste of egolessness, our joining of the cosmic dance. From the moment I opened my thighs to Elmore Dworkin in that loft on John Street, my marriage to Thom Winslow was doomed. Perhaps it was doomed anyway—for the twins were dying to be born—and it was the twins as much as I who picked their father.

Looking back now that the twins are ten (they were my bicentennial babies, born in the bicentennial year), I realize that they had to be fathered by a hirsute Jew of my blood and bone—another dark-eyed anarchist whose ancestors hailed from the Ukraine. I could no more have brought WASP babies into the world than I could have stopped drawing and painting. I remember once when I was pregnant with Mike and Ed (Elmore and I lived that year in Tuscany, in a farmhouse in Strada in Chianti), watching an RAI documentary on Auschwitz, which showed the destruction of Jewish babies like the two I was carrying, and weeping with joy and pain to be replenishing the Jewish race. This amazed no one more than it did the weeper in question—for I had never been religious in the least (it was, in fact, an article of my sort of Jewish faith to be faithless). But where having babies is concerned, all our conservatism seems to burgeon. Pregnant, I became hyper-Jewish, hyperartistic, hypersensitive. Pregnancy, in short, brought out my true Buddha nature. I only became more myself.