Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [109]
“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.”
“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