Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [56]
The city boils around you. The great, steaming Rome-at-the-end-of-the-empire city. Police cars screaming, ambulances tearing through the streets, garbage pail lids bouncing noisily on pavement, bottles breaking, ghetto blasters blaring endless songs about the flood of hormones, the crescendo of testosterone seeking estrogen and estrogen seeking testosterone—the pulse of the universe.
Everyone has someone, and you are alone. Everyone is grinding pelvis to pelvis, hip to hip, and you are all alone.
Suddenly the love comes to attack you. You want to summon bad memories, but all the good ones come flooding back. You want to hate him, but the love is still there, pulsing like a severed heart. You want to forget, but you can do nothing but remember.
The Dalmatian coast in summer, and Dart lying in the sun like a young god. The tender purple veins in his lids. The gold of his chest. The trace of a crack in his forehead where the windshield stopped him once on his way to a coke-propelled car crash in Bucks County. Dart killing a copperhead by blasting its head off with a shotgun. Dart fucking you on the floor of the Connecticut house. Dart darting. Dart gone. Dart back. Surely Dart is coming back.
This time I doubt it. The con man needs the mark to feel real. The drunk needs the drink. The addict the needle. The prick the pussy. Where have all my gratitude and grace gone now?
I get up, snap on the light, and go to the bar. There, in a mirrored cabinet designed by Ettore Sottsass himself especially for this loft, I admire the parade of bottles: Chivas Regal, Jack Daniel’s, Stolichnaya, Beefeater, Canadian Club, Pernod, Lillet, Cinzano, Noilly Prat. . . . The bottles confront me with their amber and crystal lights. The bottles goad me and tease me.
What’s the difference? I think. Why not?
I uncork the Chivas (though Scotch was never my drink) and dare myself to take a slug. I do. And another. And another. As soon as my head starts to get fuzzy, I know I’m in trouble. I pour the liquor down the sink and smash the bottle on the floor.
The meetings have ruined my drinking. I used to drink, waiting for the click in my head (as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and now I hate it when my head gets fuzzy. The minute the fuzziness starts, I know I’m doomed: doomed to a week of depression and sadness and self-hate. Doomed to the long and winding fall to the bottom of the rabbit hole.
I toss and turn on my bed, waiting for the booze to work its way out of my system. Dart’s sheepish look haunts me. I remember how the bimbo did all the talking for him, and I am desolate. I want to comfort Dart, not blame him. Somehow I know that Dart is the victim of his own weakness and despair—and far more lost than I am. He hates his dependency even more than I hate it, and yet he doesn’t know any other way to be.
The hell of my condition is that I understand Dart so bloody well. He is my baby, my darling, my man, and I want to nurture and protect him even as he is slaughtering me. If Dart were to write his side of the story, what would he say? That big, bad Leila emasculated him and made him feel weak? That big bad Leila took all his marbles away? I appreciate the problem of being the model, not the artist.
Once, when I was in art school, I was the model for a friend of mine—a figurative painter names Mikhailovich, who painted me for a month (out of love, I believe) but who made me look a way that was not at all to my liking. I remember the sense of being under another’s spell, of bad magic, and I remember, too, the feeling of being out of control. Dart feels this way all the time. Dart is trying to control me by