Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [54]
“Maybe we should take a trip together,” I say, “to Europe.”
“What? And leave Dart here?”
“Fuck Dart,” I say, with a bravado I really, for the moment, feel.
“What’s that ring?” Emmie asks. “It’s gorgeous.”
“I’m engaged,” I say.
“You’re what?”
“I’m engaged to Louise Zandberg. Leila Sand is engaged to marry Louise Zandberg.”
“Mazel tov,” says Emmie, with a convent school accent.
We drink our Tabs and happily eat our food, looking around the restaurant to nod and wave to various amiable presences from my thoroughly corrupt world. Just getting into the city has cheered me and made me happy. I belong somewhere other than on the floor of my foyer, weeping. My sane mind is back, and welcome to it!
“I don’t know why I don’t do this more often,” I say.
“Because you’re alone in Connecticut, drinking and waiting for Dart to fuck you,” says Emmie.
We gossip about friends, about Emmie’s menopause book, about the imminent return of my twins, about my new paintings. Life seems good again—even without Dart. At some point, I get up and go to pee.
Walking toward the ladies’ room, I see, at a bad table, in the Siberia reserved for the unknown or nonfamous, the face of the trashy little blonde whose pictures I found among Dart’s things. She is sitting there, smiling smugly and reading The New York Times. On the chair next to her is a white linen jacket I remember buying for Dart.
My heart skips at least ten beats. I break out in a sweat. I can hardly breathe.
The girl looks up, focuses on me for a moment, seems not to recognize me at first, and then goes back to reading the paper.
Seeing the face from those photographs come alive fills me with panic. Where is Dart? He must be in the men’s room.
I go to the ladies’ room, try to pee and can’t, knowing he is right across the wall. I sit on the can with my head in my hands. At once despairing and utterly confused, I finally force myself to pee, get up, fix my makeup, and open the door. Outside is the trashy blonde, leaning against the men’s-room door, whispering something into its wood. Then she looks at me, this time with recognition, and turns and goes back to the table.
I rap on the men’s room door loudly.
“I know you’re in there, you coward—come on out!”
No answer. Just the sound of the toilet flushing.
“You bastard!” I yell. “Stop hiding from me! Come on out!”
The lock turns, and a very sheepish-looking Dart emerges from the men’s room.
“The trouble with lying,” I blurt out, “is that it leaves you terribly lonely. You lie to the one person who really loves you, and then you have no one to trust and no one who really trusts you!”
Isadora: Speech! Speech!
He’s edging back toward the men’s room, this big macho guy who always made such a big deal of protecting me and protecting the twins.
He looks at me pleadingly, as if to say: “Mommy, I’m sorry.” He shrugs. “I tried,” he says. The trouble is, I know it’s true. The girl comes up behind us.
“I hope you can afford him. He’s very expensive,” I say.
“There’s more to life than money,” she answers, snippily, in a way that tells me he has complained to her of me, of my not spending enough on him. Ha! What I spent on that man would buy a nice medium-size villa in the south of France!
“You’re getting more like your father every day,” I say.
“That’s a low blow,” the girl counters.
“Low, but true.”
Dart says nothing. Let the women fight it out, his silence screams.
“I feel sorry for you,” she says, with all the contempt a woman of twenty-five can have for a woman of forty-four—a contempt born of blissful ignorance. “Come on, darlin’,” she says.
And she takes him by the hand to the table where the Amex slip awaits—along with the platinum card whose bills come to me.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I say. “I’ve paid for your last meal!” And I snatch the card and tear up the Amex slip, fluttering it over my head like confetti.
“How petty,” the girl spits contemptuously, producing, out of her shabby wallet, a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Ohio.