Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [42]
I erect my little traveling easel near the still life, stand a freshly stretched square canvas upon it, squeeze out my oil paints in umber, ocher, blue, green, and every shade of white, and begin losing myself in the challenge of finding the kaleidoscope of colors within the word “white.”
Wholly happy, wholly content, I feel that I am ten again and have regained that true self I knew before the dance of sex, the tidal waves of hormones, overtook my life. I am happy—happier than I have been in years.
Five o’clock comes and goes without my needing a drink or a meeting. I paint as if in a trance, entirely absorbed in the drama of the white tablecloth, the angles of changing light on the crystal, the maenads dancing as they have danced for centuries, the womanly eggs, the cow full of milk, the clouds full of rain in the darkening sky.
For once I don’t mind the setting of the sun, since I am painting this still life not in real light but in the light of the mind. I switch on the powerful strobes I use for my photographs and go on painting. The valleys of the tablecloth glimmer as if with alpine snow. The eggs show little calcified bumps, like ovaries about to burst their follicles. The crystal egg seems to hold the future in its depths. The roses and lilies open before my eyes.
In a trance, I paint and paint. My head clear, my heart singing in my chest, I am in ecstasy.
At about eleven, Emmie comes in with a dish of pasta, a glass of iced chamomile tea with honey, and a heaping bowl of sliced peaches.
We sit at my drafting table, and she watches me eat.
“Four days sober,” she says. “Mazel tov. And the White Goddess sent you a gift to celebrate.”
We both turn and look at the still life, which seems actually finished. It has a clarity my work has never possessed before. I know that I am onto something new—something beyond cowboys or self-portraits, something pure, clear, complex, and glittering as snow.
“L’chaim!” says Emmie, toasting me with her glass of chamomile tea. We clink glasses, then laugh and laugh.
Dart calls late that night. It is one o’clock or so, and Emmie is asleep.
When I hear his voice on the phone, my heart does a funny little dance. I think I have been longing for him to call, but now I am a bit thrown. I want to keep the clarity I have.
“Baby—what are you up to?” he asks.
“Oh, just painting,” I say. “The usual.”
“Do you miss me?”
“Of course I do.”
“I miss you terribly, baby,” he says, his voice cracking. “There’s no one like you—no one as sweet and wild and sexy. Baby, I’m coming home.”
In four days, I have become a queen; now I go back to pawn. When Dart appears, Leila disappears.
I toss and turn in my bed, waiting for him, unable to sleep. I get up and do my makeup, put on perfume and a silk nightgown, put in my diaphragm, and go back to bed. I wish I were strong enough to tell him never to darken my door again, but I am not. Emmie sleeps in the guest room; my wet canvas glistens in the studio. I wait in bed as if for a dybbuk to claim me. Outside my window, a full moon with a ring around it floats over the hills. I drift off to sleep, awaken to find that it is now three o’clock. I get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, put a sweater over the nightgown, and wander out onto my hillside.
The moon has almost completed her arc. Her ring is gone now, and she lies low on the other side of the horizon. I gaze at her, then bend my head nine times, trying to think of my supreme wish. Always before, that wish has been for Dart. Now it is for me: I wish for the power to keep the clarity these four days have brought.
No sooner have I made the wish than I hear the putter of Dart’s motorcycle and the spray of pebbles in