Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [31]
I think of Dart: he is his own finest creation. If he cannot paint and sculpt, it is because all his artistic ability has gone into the creation of his own persona, a not inconsiderable feat. He is always inventing himself—how can he invent mere paintings? An artist must be a funnel from the muse into matter. Dart is both muse himself and self-creation. I merely photographed what I saw. Protean, changing—now the Lone Ranger, now Harlequin, now Elvis Presley—Dart was infinitely inspiring, infinitely bewitching, infinitely alluring. It was not just his cock—it was his fantasy. And the way it locked into my fantasy. The best lovers know how to use their fantasies as well as their cocks. The former being rarer than the latter.
I collapse in my bed with all the lights on—the bed so lately anointed by Dart. I think of all the cruel things he has done lately, the lies—useless lies about small things and big lies about big things. I think of seeing his motorcycle parked at the railroad station on a day he said he was going to a neighbor’s to help paint her house. I think of all the times I answered the phone, only to hear the caller listen to my voice, then hang up. I think of the photos of other women left around, the bills, the love letters, the credit card charges. Dart turns thirty next weekend. Will all this stop—or has it only just begun? Shall I wait it out or shall I change the locks and give him the boot? Who can advise me—who but the voice within myself?
This is the voice that Sybille, my shrink, calls the voice of my sane mind. “But in your sane mind, what do you think?” she always asks. And I know precisely what she means. She means the voice of that fierce advocate within myself, the sane, centered part of me that is on my own side, that shining nugget of self-love surrounded by fathomless darkness. I listen in vain for the voice of my sane mind—but I can hear it only intermittently, through the static of obsession.
I crawl into my big disheveled bed and pull up the covers. Boner settles in at my feet and heaves a big, doggy sigh. My bed is my sanctuary. A monument to passion and celibacy both. It’s a white-lacquered antique iron bed-stead with curlicues of steel and brass, covered with a brilliant Amish quilt emblazoned with a kaleidoscopic star, festooned with pillows of all sizes covered in antique cream and white lace.
I feel safe in this bed. Climbing into it, I often think, She took to her bed, and I understand perfectly the sense of refuge in that phrase. Outside the big picture window (punched into this seventeenth-century wall) is dreamy green Connecticut, now shrouded in darkness. In my mind’s eye I see its mammary humps of hills, its red barns, its silver silos, nestled below the golden gibbous moon half-veiled by scudding clouds.
I love this state. I feel safe and mothered in these hills. I love to work here: far enough from Monster Gotham not to hear its mental static, near enough to catch its lightning charge. But then I am a sucker for gentle mammary hills—whether in Tuscany or Litchfield County, Umbria or the Veneto. The only thing I like better is the sea. The Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Aegean, the Caribbean—any sea will do.
The sea, the sea. Dart and I used to dream of sailing in the “sugar isles,” as the eighteenth-century pirates called them. We loved the Caribbean, and at the height of our idyll would often run away to Barbados, Jamaica, Tortola, Saint Kitts, or Saint Barts. Dart taught me to swim in Jamaica, off a white sandy beach near Port Antonio. In Tortola he taught me to sail and snorkel. When I think of him I still see him swimming like a blond merman—a big tall blond WASP (raised on tennis and swimming and shooting) teaching a little flame-haired Jewish girl (raised on physical cowardice) how not to wince at hammerhead sharks, how to be physically brave, how to treat