Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [55]
“Here,” she says to the maître d’hotel (who by now has appeared to see whether a fight’s in the offing). “I’ll pay for this one.”
“You certainly will,” I say, before stomping off and rejoining Emmie at our table. “You’ll pay and pay.”
“What on earth happened to you?” says Emmie.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“There was some commotion in the other room, but I couldn’t tell what it was.”
I am sweating and out of breath.
“I just played my last scene with Dart,” I say. “Next thing I do is cut this in half and change the locks.” And I give Emmie the credit card that reads: Darton Venable Donegal IV.
“It’s all yours,” I say. “Why don’t we have a witches’ sabbath and burn it? We could sprinkle the ashes into our cauldron. . . .”
“What happened?” asks Emmie.
“See that couple?” I ask. “That’s Dart and my replacement. I hope her credit’s good—she’s going to need it.”
9
Bravado and After
When I woke up my pillow was wet with tears,
Just one day from that man o’ mine seems like a thousand years. . . .
I need a whole lot of lovin’ ’cause I’m down in the dumps.
—Leola P. Wilson and Wesley Wilson
It doesn’t really matter who breaks up a relationship. Whether it’s you or him, the pain is the same.
You sleep with a man for almost five years, smelling his sweat, feeling his hairy legs brush you in the night, and you are bonded to him. His leaving has to feel like an amputation. And you go out looking for a wooden stump, knowing it will do no good at all.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you know the man is bad for you. It doesn’t matter whether or not you know the man is bad. At the end of a love affair, you subscribe to the Stella Kowalski school of logic: there are things that happen in the dark between two people that make everything that happens in the light seem all right.
The first night was the worst. I forced myself to sleep alone at the loft, which was littered with Dart’s things—and with the little bimbo’s. She was some piece of work. Her tatty wired bras and stained bikini panties were hanging insolently over my sink; her half-used birth control pills were on my dresser; her perfume (Charlie!) was on the night table.
I went through her things with rage and curiosity. Her dirty makeup bag, filled with broken bits of cheap cosmetics I would never use, her curled snake of a rubber douche tucked in a nylon pouch in her club bag. Her polyester dressing gown, festooned with pink and aqua flowers. Her scuffed bedroom slippers, in filthy aqua terry cloth.
I contemplated making a collage of all these found objects (and the photos from before) and entitling it Dart’s Bimbo—but the pain was too great, so I let anger triumph over art and tossed them all out the window. The big window of the loft had to be cranked open and turned around sideways. (It had been made in Germany at great cost and shipped here.) When you opened it, you figured you might as well jump down all six stories—but I resisted the temptation. From the loft I could feel the heat of the street, the singing of the car tires on the wet pavement (it had started to rain), the lure of the open window.
I threw all the nameless bimbo’s shit out into the street: birth control pills, douche bag, makeup kit—all. The makeups cracked and scattered on the street below, a million bits of broken mirror bringing bad luck (to her, I hoped, and not to me—though who could tell?). The douche bag seemed to bounce a little, and then it burst its pouch and lay in the street like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a football. (I hate girls who are always deodorizing their pussies; I thought Dart knew better than to hook up with one of those; I thought he understood the value of natural smells.) I threw all the rest of the stuff out, and then I cranked shut the window and collapsed on the bed, too desolate even to cry.
There is no worse betrayal than having a lover bring another woman to your bed; the very mattress vibrates with their sex, interrupting your sleep: your dreams are infected with their treacherous lovemaking. You know how central you were to their love,