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He taught me a lot. He gave me a lot. It was not an uneven exchange. I gave him gifts, made him a star, but he also gave me gifts—chief among them bringing me back from the dead. Lovers give each other life. That is what makes love so irresistible—no matter what the killjoys say. Who can resist the one who makes you feel alive? Who can resist salt and sperm and sea and shakti? For love is nothing less than the gift of life. (Though sometimes you have to pay for it with your death.) And if artists love so often and so hard, it is because they have a rage to live.

I drink my wine and weep. The loss of Dart seems deep, abysmal, fatal. If I had the number of the little waitress, I would call, humiliate myself, offer him anything to come back. Thank God, I don’t have her number.

I get up and put on Bessie Smith. As she belts out blues after blues, I cry myself to sleep with all the lights on.

Yes I’m mad

and have a right to be

after what my Daddy did to me.

I lavished all my love on him.

But I swear I’ll never love again.

All you women understand

what it is to be

in love with a two-time man.

The next time he calls me sweet mama in

his lovin’ way

This is what I’m going to say:

I used to be your sweet mama, sweet papa—

but now I’m just as sour as can be. . . .

5

The Land of Fuck (or Any Woman’s Blues)

Good morning blues, blues how do you do?

Well I just come here to have a few words with you.

—Bessie Smith and Clarence Williams

I am back at Yale—or somehow it is a cross between Yale and Music and Art. High above the park at Convent Avenue someone has built a cage that stands upon crossed steel girders like the old Third Avenue el, which thundered past Bloomingdale’s when I was a child. There, up in the sky, is a special cagelike room where lovers meet when they wish to enter The Land of Fuck.

I have gone there—cutting all sorts of classes, risking losing my credits for the year—and when I arrive, the first thing I do is pull the blinds—venetian blinds they are: what other kind of blinds would The Land of Fuck have?

In a state of high excitement, I wait for my lover—Dart—to arrive.

In the dream, I am wet, throbbing, terribly excited. I know somehow that my whole life depends upon this meeting.

He arrives, dressed not in black leather but in white silk. He really is Elvis Presley and not Dart—dark hair, a pudgy, bloated face, a pair of Kewpie doll’s lips, which open and shut mechanically like plastic Dr. Dentons. Maybe he really is a giant Kewpie doll and not a person. And yet I want him—how I want him! I am unzipping the white silk jeans, unbuttoning the white silk cowboy shirt, holding him, stroking him, murmuring words of encouragement and love. And then, as I open the fly of his satin jeans, I see that in place of a penis he has a deep gash, which is crawling with earthworms, slugs, snails. Disgusted—yet also oddly aroused—I try to rezip his fly, but I cannot. The worms and slugs are wriggling out. One snail is making its slow, slime-trailed way down a shiny white trouser leg. Earthworms are beheaded by the zipper I tug. I look up at Dart’s face and see that the Kewpie doll face has peeled away. Beneath it is blankness—white blankness. Featureless eyes, nose, mouth, like a wooden doll’s head washed clean by the sea.

Bitterly disappointed, I push the doll-man aside and look for the way out of The Land of Fuck. There is no door. Just this cage high above the city—New York? New Haven?—where I am trapped forever. I hear my mother’s voice saying: “Louise, you always think the rules that apply to other people don’t apply to you!” And my sane mind is nowhere in sight.

I wake up in greenly docile and benign Connecticut, with all the shades up and the lights and the stereo on. Outside my picture window, poplars and hemlocks sway. Below my hilltop are the red barns and silver silos of halcyon Litchfield County. I am in my white iron bed, sailing through the cosmos as in an iron