Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [106]
I dial Dart’s number. Perkily, jauntily, an answering machine picks up.
It’s the bimbo’s nasal voice.
“This is the home of Darton Donegal and Sylvie Slansky. We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message, we’ll get back to you. Beep!”
What is this new, organized Dart? When I knew him, he had no forwarding address, no answering machine, no beep.
HOTEL GRITTI PALACE VENEZIA
HOTEL GRITTI PALACE VENEZIA
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 anything. 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.