Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [65]
“No. What did Barnum say?”
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That’s why I sell them money. I used to do sensitive nudes and still lives, Turneresque luminescent skies, mad Pollockian abstractions. Now I give ’em what they already know the value of—money. Fuck ’em. The whole business makes me sick. Come to bed.”
“No, Wayne.”
“What the fuck are you standing there for? Come to bed.”
“Get your clothes on, and let’s blow this dump.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. Nell’s. The garbage scow. Connecticut.”
“Will you fuck me if I wear a rubber?”
“No.”
“If I don’t?”
“Maybe.”
Wayne laughs and bounces out of bed. I check out his shlong, but who can tell under those circumstances?
“I see you’re checking out my shlong,” Wayne says.
“Yep.”
“And. . . ?”
“Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.”
“You cunt,” says Wayne, laughing again.
We head for Connecticut, out of the city and into the hills of the Nutmeg State. Leaving the city, one feels the head clear, the heart leap.
Wayne, Mr. Macho Man, drives like a drunk. Actually, he is drunk, but he won’t let me drive, denying it. I keep telling him I want to drive, and he keeps telling me no. Every time he turns to tell me no, I get a blast of booze breath. His whole body reeks of alcohol and dope—something I never smelled before I got sober, but now it is overwhelming. Sickening.
“Let me drive, Wayne,” I say. “It’s my fucking car.”
“Baby, I’m fine,” he says, nearly careening into a side barrier as he takes the curving ramp up to the Triborough Bridge.
“Let me drive the car. . . . You’re drunk.”
“I am not drunk,” he says drunkenly, turning to me and nearly hitting the toll booth. Wayne has those funny little teeth that are three-quarters gums. They look like Chiclets. His hair is sandy, his green eyes squinty, and he has the flattened, turned-up-tip nose of an Irishman. A drunken leprechaun. I think of all the times I used to get drunk and stoned with Dart so that we could do mad sex together, and I realize that I am outside that world now, isolated from men and sex by sobriety. Possibly I will never get laid again. I can’t stand the way this man smells. His pores reek of alcohol and dope. Why have I never smelled this before?
I never much liked coke; sinsemilla and wine were my drugs of choice. Actually, it was not sinsemilla and wine so much as sex—sex was my drug of choice. Sex was what blotted out the world for me. Sex was my opium, my anodyne, my laudanum, my love. Sex was what I used to kill the pain of life—the pot and the wine were just my avenues to bed. Open your mouth and close your eyes. Open your legs and close your eyes. Open your heart and close your eyes.
A line comes back to me from a poem I read in college: “Wax to receive and marble to retain.” Don Juan’s heart. Byron’s Don Juan. Dart’s heart. Wax to receive and marble to retain. I don’t want to fall in love with Don Juan again.
I imagine a piece based on this insight, using the materials of marble—faux marble—and real wax. It would be called Don Juan, and it would deal with all the many possibilities of this theme. The marble heart. The wax heart. The heartless heart.
But I myself am Donna Giovanna, I think, and Dart was a sort of karmic revenge—the revenge of my own philandering. I lived for sex, for falling in love with love, for breaking (or at least collecting) hearts—and Dart was the gods’ revenge. What goes around comes around, they say in the Program. Dart was the visible manifestation of my own addiction.
Jesus. Wayne has nearly careened into another lamppost. The open car, the drunken driver . . . I could be killed! Worse still, I could be creamed and crippled. I have twins to raise, work to do.
“Stop the car this instant.” (Ah, my sane mind has not deserted me utterly.)
“Oh, baby—don’t be a drag,” Wayne says, nearly hitting the side barrier again. “I’m perfectly okay.”
I clutch the seat in terror. We are careening from side to side, making lazy snakes around the white lines in the middle of the road.
I am paralyzed. Here is the voice of male authority