Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [118]
“And where, pray tell, do you find civilized life? Hollywood? New York? Venice? The truth is that the best little girls are raised outside the brainwashing of our culture. Beryl Markham, for example, raised with African warriors. All civilization does for girls is teach them that they’re supposed to be inferior. Better to have palm fronds and yam festivals. You’d be doing them a great favor, really. Think about it, Leila; I’m not kidding.”
“Do you know what Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization?”
“No.”
“It would be a good idea!”
And we laugh and hug each other and eventually, still giggling and hugging, fall asleep.
At some point during the night, the phone rings. I roll over and grab it.
“Leila, baby,” says Dart. “Leila, baby.”
I wake up all in a rush. This is like a telephone call from the dead.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Just miss you, baby.”
“You’ll get over it,” I say.
“I was walking down Madison Avenue, baby, and what do I see in a gallery window but the Lone Ranger! Remember the Lone Ranger, baby?”
“How can I ever forget?” (Dart is alluding to one of my film stills, in which he was dressed as the Lone Ranger, and his gun was tucked into his pants rakishly and seemed to bulge like a cock.)
“Because of you,” Dart says, “everyone knows about my big gun. . . .”
Now wide awake and pulled into a world I had let go of, I say jauntily: “Darling—the whole world knew before.”
“Only a select few,” says Dart.
“A select few hundred thousand,” I say.
Dart laughs, despite himself. The manipulation isn’t working.
“Good night, darling,” I say brightly, and go back to sleep.
The afternoon before the Viva Venezia Ball, I am in the lagoon with Renzo, making love in the Riva.
So besotted am I that I ask the forbidden question. “Do you love me at all?” I ask.
He covers my mouth with his hand.
“Don’t ask about the most important things in life,” he says.
20
Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues
Now, when you’ve got a man don’t ever be on the square.
If you do he’ll have a woman everywhere.
I never was known to treat one man right,
I keep ’em working hard both day and night,
Because wild women don’t worry.
Wild women don’t have the blues.
—Ida Cox
The Viva Venezia Ball has been preceded by luncheons, teas, dinners, during which skeletal New York socialites with porcine husbands (or fashionably slim walkers) circulated amid the Italian (and Austrian and French and English) skeletal socialites with porcine husbands (or fashionably slim walkers), kissing the air near each other’s cheeks. Since they are in Italy, they have kissed the air near both cheeks. (In New York, they would kiss the air near only one.)
The crowd is very Town & Country, very Vanity Unfair. The marchesa of this kisses the principessa of that. The walker of Park Avenue cuts the walker of the Via Veneto or the walker of Avenue Foch. Platitudes are plumbed in three or four languages. Yes, we have all been to Venice before. No, we were not in Cortina or Gstaad this year; we were in Vail. Yes, it was beastly hot in Lindos. No, the Orient Express to Bangkok has not yet opened. Mustique in January? Saint Barts in February? Autumn in New York? Christmas in Saint Moritz? Kenya? Aspen? Who ran off with her best friend’s son? Right out of Le Rosey? She didn’t really leave that nice Piero. She did? And what of James? Is he still ambassador to . . . what country is it anyway? And are they still married? Well, thank heavens for that at least. She’ll get over it—but will he?
And so the ball begins!
It is a sweltering night on the Grand Canal, and the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta—a great sixteenth-century pile—once the scene of ducal fetes and intrigues, has now, alas, been turned into Rent-a-Palazzo.
People step out of their rented gondolas and motoscafi , looking outrageously pleased with themselves. They have packed and unpacked. They have tipped and tippled. Topped and toppled each other and their friends—poor dears—still in the predictable Hamptons or Litchfield, Kennebunkport,