Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [61]
And who could blame men for being disaffected with the whole female sex? Men are so vulnerable—all their vulnerability hanging so nakedly between their legs. Frightened of their mommies, of shrieking women—all they ask is a little softness and tenderness from us. No wonder armies of screaming women on the march terrify them. Wouldn’t I react with terror and with rage if I were a man? In my sane mind, I know I would.
I tried to take care of business. During the death throes of my affair with Dart, when things were crashing and burning, not a lot of work had got done, as you can imagine.
After the success of the film stills of Dart/Trick, which launched Dart/Trick into a sort of SoHo stardom—complete with all the appurtenances thereto pertaining, particularly toot and tootsies—my work went to the dogs. How can you paint when you never know when or if your lover is coming home? Better to be Georgia O’Keeffe, alone on her mesa beneath the scudding clouds (with a pretty young wrangler to carry your easel and a pretty young potter to catalog your work—no fool Georgia). Better to live in splendid isolation than to look for love in all the wrong places with a tricky Dart or a darting Trick.
So now that he has gone, and I was left on the rock of my half-assed sobriety, I tried to get back to business. Invited by my dealer, one André McCrae (the McCrae Gallery), to a shindig at his Fifth Avenue digs, I accepted—though of late I had made myself scarcer than scarce.
André was a symptom of everything wrong with the art biz. He knew nothing about art and had no idea what he liked. He liked what sold, and the more it sold for, the more he liked it. If it stopped selling, he stopped liking it. If it sold a lot and the artist died, he liked it best of all. His idea of a perfect artist was a dead artist—preferably one who had died at the height of his fame. Once, before I signed with André, he told me at a dinner party in Cornwall Bridge that he really preferred to deal with dead artists. “They don’t puke all over you,” he said. I should have taken this as a warning, but I didn’t. I thought I could manage André—which only goes to show how wrong I can be.
On a hot Wednesday night in July, I drive down from Connecticut in DART and park in the Carlyle garage, then walk over to André’s duplex at Seventy-fourth and Fifth. It’s that rare thing—a summer party in New York, which can only be held on Tuesday or Wednesday night; all the other nights, the city is likely to be left to the poor. The rich are in the Hamptons, the Vineyard, Newport, Nantucket, Maine, the Cape, Tuscany, Greece, Venice, the south of France.
André and his wife, Sally, have devised a unique scheme for saving their marriage: separate co-ops in adjacent Fifth Avenue buildings. This party is being held in André’s, the grander of the two.
Going to parties stone-cold sober is new for me—new and scary. I see too much, feel too much, am too aware of all the lying.
I go up in the paneled elevator and am let out on the fourteenth floor—really the thirteenth, but this building skips from twelve to fourteen for good luck. The apartment is actually on the thirteenth and fourteenth floors. Knowing André, he probably negotiated a discount because of that.
André was not born André, and his father was not named McCrae any more than mine was named Sand. André McCrae is a self-created character. Born Arbit Malamud in Lithuania in the twenties or thirties, he started life as a furrier but soon discovered that there was more pelf in canvases than in pelts.
His first painting, as he likes to tell everyone who will listen (and with André you often have no choice but to listen), was given to him as part of a divorce settlement by his first wife. Apocryphal stories about André’s first marriage abound: it is said he was married to a Rothschild, a Churchill, a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller—perhaps all four at once. She was rich, in any case, defied caste and class to marry this pushy little redheaded Jew (five feet, two inches,