Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [27]
The Pygmalion story has been told and retold many times—but never with the woman as artist and the man as Galatea! Eliza Doolittle becomes a lie-dy, but she is still, after all, a good girl (“I’m a good girl, I am”), and whether in Shaw’s version (where she rebels against Higgins) or in Lerner and Loewe’s, where she abandons Freddy Eynsford-Hill for the Rex Harrison daddy figure, she still winds up loyal to one man at the end—in short, toeing the mark for any female in society.
But what happens to Pygmalion when our creator is a woman and her creation is a man? Simple: the creation betrays the creator with as many nubile young groupies as possible.
It was not that Trick/Dart wanted to betray me. It was just that, having become a star through my loving recreations of him, he was now besieged by young cuties. The sexuality I had found in him exuded from those C prints, from those cowboy canvases, and every spectator could feel it. Dart had become the property of the world, and everyone wanted to fuck him. It was my own damn fault. As an aficionado of Bessie Smith, I should have known enough to heed the advice she proffers in “Empty-Bed Blues.”
When you git good lovin’
Never go and spread the news—
Gals will double-cross you
And leave you with them empty-bed blues. . . .
But I was hoist on my own petard: the artist in me was stronger than the woman. A fierce lover would have kept her beautiful man under wraps. A fierce artist instead made a star of him—and chaos ensued.
Art reshapes life even more than life shapes art. Imagine if Helga had walked off the covers of Time and Newsweek and into the arms of every young man who lusted for her? What would Wyeth have done? Gone mad? Taken to drink and drugs? But he was tended by women—both wived and modeled, cushioned, cosseted. And time, that great softener, had intervened. He had Helga (in whatever sense he had her), and he also had Mrs. Wyeth. Not so the fate of the woman artist. I had my twins, I had Dart, and now I had all these bimbos calling up and asking for Dart. It struck me as a wee bit unfair.
Well, I was strong, I thought. I would ride out the crises. Sexual infidelity was not the worst thing in the world. Let Dart fuck bimbos, as long as he always comes home to me. Or so I thought. This proved to be easier to say than to do.
Which brings us to the summer in question, in which Leila (I talk about myself in the third person only in jest—or in extreme crisis) is waiting by the phone for Dart to appear on his motorcycle. The twins are in California with their father (who is teaching at UCLA). And I am in Connecticut, trying to get together some paintings for a new show. But my concentration is utterly blasted—my muse has flown the coop. I tell myself the muse is within me and I should be able to work, but in reality all I do is listen for the sound of Dart’s motorcycle on the gravel pathway, for the sound of the telephone announcing his arrival.
Connecticut is greenly beautiful, as only Connecticut can be—and I am utterly wretched. Alone with my dog in my studio-silo, without even Mike and Ed to distract me, all I can do is listen for the crushed gravel under Dart’s motorcycle wheels, which seem to ride right over my heart.
4
Playing Penelope
The meanest things he could say would thrill you through and through,
The meanest things he could say would thrill you through and through,
And there wasn’t nothing too dirty for that man to do.
—Bessie Smith
Penelope knew this, loving Ulysses: years of waiting for a man to come home makes a woman mad.
I wait. I wait. And as I wait, I try to paint. Unable to paint, I drink. And having drunk, I plunge into despair. It is midnight on a Friday night when he comes back. He has been in the city one, two, or three days—I have lost track. I have gotten through the time talking to Emmie on the phone, which is where I am right now.
“He’s back,” I say, scratching Boner’s belly with one bare toe. (The dog, mirroring