Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [30]
At the last possible moment, when he is kissing me goodbye and donning the helmet, some imp inside me, some creature not of my own making, some dybbuk possessing me, blurts out: “But if I need you, where can I find you?” The words are no sooner out than I regret them, than I long to take them back, than I despair like one of the wretched in Dante’s Inferno, endlessly replaying the fatal act.
And he turns to me and nearly spits out these words: “You didn’t expect that after you threw me out you’d be able to find me!” And he is off, revving up the motorcycle and taking off for New York—or wherever—again.
I pour myself another glass of wine and call Emmie. I have forgotten even to mention the guns.
My best friend, Emily Quinn, has been saving my life for more years than I like to remember. The product of convent schools and an upper-class childhood in Manhattan and Virginia, she now earns her living as a writer of nonfiction books on trendy subjects. Joy of Woman made her rich in the seventies. A meticulously researched biography of Victoria Woodhull made her respected in the eighties; and now she is writing the first no-holds-barred book on menopause for the nineties.
“Did you ever think we’d live to see menopausal chic?” she asked me a couple of days—it now seems a couple of years—ago.
“We’re going to live long enough to see everything,” I told her. Now I’m not so sure. Dart’s departure has devastated me in a new way. I thought I was a survivor—to use that much overused word. Tonight I wonder.
Emmie is tough but soothing; she is walking me through this parting from Dart with infinite tenderness. As I ring her phone, I imagine Emmie with her shoulder-length auburn hair crowned with a black velvet bow, her astounding cheekbones, her slender waist and lovely high bosom. She looks the way everyone should look at fifty. Serene, wise, willowy, clear-eyed, just crinkly enough to be womanly—and infinitely kind. Emmie has a will of iron. She is also funny. We often say we are laughing our way toward the apocalypse. At seventy, we both expect to be working, giggling, and getting laid.
But Emmie is not home tonight, writing, as she so often is on Saturday nights. (Emmie has a married lover in Paris, a Greek shipping tycoon who sails into New York Harbor just often enough to keep her happy and goes away just often enough to let her write—a new arrangement not entirely unpleasing to the working woman of the fin de siècle.)
The phone rings and rings. At last it clicks, and Emmie’s answering machine picks up.
A blast of Bach and then: “You have reached 798- 2727. Please leave a message after the dumb little beep.”
“Help!” I scream into the phone, and as an afterthought: “I’m in Connecticut!” I hang up the phone.
The exquisite cruelty of Dart’s leaving on a Saturday night is not lost on me. Nor is the cruelty of his fucking me, cosseting me, and then disappearing. I think of all the crises we have endured in the last six months—and it is clear to me that I will have to break with Dart and break completely if I am to survive. The pain is too great. Every time I accept some behavior of his—last week I received credit card bills for a hotel he stayed in with another girl; the week before, pictures of some trashy little blonde who looked like a waitress in a B-movie diner; the week before that, love letters from a redhead who used to work at the gallery—he ups the ante. I know it is his own sense of inadequacy—always the model, never the artist—that leads him to these excesses. I know that in his own way he loves me. But that isn’t any longer enough. I have to love myself. The good ship Leila must sail on, and how can it sail, with this pirate down in the hold punching holes in the hull? Between forgiveness and self-protection, where does one draw the line? I wish I had a penny for every woman in love who has ever asked that question.
Alone with the silent telephone, my bottle, my dog, and my