Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [115]
Is it all that simple? I fear the answer is yes. The porno films, the baby oil, the leather, the black candles, are all compensations for cocks that don’t work. Or work capriciously. For when they work, all you really need is music and moonlight. Or silence and sunlight. Or twilight, half light . . . any light (or darkness) will do.
We start the engine and go in search of an open trattoria. We putter in the boat, looking for places to park. No place to park the Riva (how like New York!) and no trattoria open (how like Connecticut!).
I am melancholy, having been so totally opened. I try to remind myself of nonattachment, but that doesn’t work. I want to come back to my center, my equanimity, but The Land of Fuck will not give me back. Having totally forgotten that the only moment is now, I am in a reverie about some future life with Renzo.
We finally find a place for sandwiches and take them back to the middle of the moon-streaked lagoon, where we dreamily eat, listening to the gulls calling in the super-stillness and gazing at each other. What is Renzo’s secret? I wonder. He holds a part of himself in reserve, as I wish I could. At moments, I have the strong sense that all I have here is the Italian counterpart of Dart—another Don Giovanni but an authentic one: the Mediterranean man, who does the role right. Wax to receive and marble to retain. Have I merely fallen for Don Juan again?
(Sane mind: Are you asking me or telling me?)
Isadora: I’m with her!
Leila: Who?
Isadora: Your sane mind!
Leila: Will you please shut up and let me enjoy this?
We stay in the lagoon, squeezing out the last drop of moonlight. Then he takes me back to my hotel, to Julian, and to my melancholy self.
“Don’t fall in love with him, honey,” says Cordelia.
We are in the garden at Corte Sconta, having lunch, surrounded by the usual multilingual hordes who invade Venice during Regatta Week.
“Fall in love with whom?”
Cordelia gives me a don’t-bullshit-me look.
“Renzo Pisan, of course. Honey, he’s the Romeo of the Rialto, the Casanova of Cannaregio, the Don Giovanni of Dorsoduro, the gigolo of the Palazzo del Giglio, not to mention the Gritti, the Bauer Grünwald, and so on. She gives him enough rope to get his feet—and other pleasin’ parts of himself—wet, and then she yanks his chain and he comes scurryin’ home, tail—so to speak—between his legs. . . . The only thing worse than havin’ your own gigolo, honey, is borrowin’ somebody else’s.”
“Who is she?”
“If you look over there, you can see . . . so hush when you talk.”
I look. At a long table, half hidden behind trellised vines, sits a beautiful blond apparition in a shimmering violet suit and a purple hat festooned with purple grapes. Her brittle fingers glitter with major jewels; her neck is ablaze with emeralds, more appropriate for the Viva Venezia gala than for lunch at this simple restaurant in Castello. And beside her sits Renzo, very cavalier servente, peeling her figs.
They are holding court at a table of fashionable finocchi and American socialites. Renzo does not see me.
“What’s their story?” I ask Cordelia.
“I’m not sure I know the whole thing, but they’ve been married ever since anyone can remember. She’s an honest-to-God Prinzessin from Wien—and he’s a Jew from a Spanish Jewish family. Her mother rescued him from the Nazis when he was a mere baby at the end of the war, raised him like a mamma (and his twin brother too), but him she fancied, sent him to architecture school, married him off to her daughter, settled estates on him. Apparently they were mad lovers once, perhaps still are. Imagine it! The Nazi princess and the Jewish beggar boy! Think what your dominatrix could do with that! Renzo lives in a strange ménage à trois with the daughter and the mother. I don’t know who does whom at home, but outside he does everyone. The mamma’s a character too. When she was very young, she was married briefly to the count of something, and some people still call