Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [66]
Don’t be a drag, Leila. This used to be fun. Drunk, I got in a lot of careening cars and thought it was fun. This is not fun.
“Stop the car, Wayne.”
“I know a place,” Wayne says. “Just let me take you to the place I know.”
He careens on. I try to take the wheel, but he jerks it away. The car veers from side to side as we struggle.
I’m not sure whether it’s more dangerous to resist or not to resist.
“Take me to your place,” I say.
Wayne drives like a maniac to Westchester, where he burns rubber along the back roads until he finds a little roadhouse buried in the foliage of the summer night.
He parks the car at a rakish angle, pockets the keys, puts his arm around me, and steers me inside.
Blaring jukebox. People drinking. Girls at the bar looking us over as we enter.
“Hi, girls!” says Wayne sloppily. “Wanna fuck a real artist?”
They don’t seem impressed.
Wayne finds a barstool amid the pulchritude—three young women whose combined ages, I think with a stab of pain, don’t even total mine. (It’s not true, of course, but sober, I feel like the Ancient Mariness.)
I head for the ladies’ room, leaving Wayne with the pulchritude. There, I pee, wash up, fix my makeup. I take a good look at myself in the mirror. My chin is starting to get a bit loose, and the circles under my eyes are deepening. I feel old. My bravado has carried me through a lot, but now I’m beginning to wonder if bravado is enough. I long for someone to nurture me. I seem to have been bouncing around alone for years. Ah, for a nurturing man, a daddy to tell my troubles to—wouldn’t that be sweet for a change? Someone to buy me a gold Rolex, or a cowboy suit, or a car.
My daddy was never like that, even when I had him. The tenderest moment I have of Dolph is of him making me origami birds or pulling silver like taffy to make me jewelry.
When my mother died, I found one of his brooches gathering dust in her jewelry box. My initials in silver script interlaced in a silver heart. Louise Zandberg aka Leila Sand. Wax to receive and marble to retain. Like the memory of my daddy. Oh, how our daddies hook us on all our addictions, pressing the packet of junkie love into our little-girl hands. Daddy! He comes and goes. He runs. He leaves Mommy and baby girl, and she longs ever after for the man who darts.
Out of the bathroom, back to the bar. Wayne surrounded by cuties, flirting. Arm around an eighteen-year-old curly redhead, who laughs and laughs and clinks glasses with him, not caring that he smells of booze and drives like the red menace.
I saunter over, sit at the bar, to hear Wayne telling the girl to call him in the city, then scribbling his phone number on a damp napkin for her. Another girl, next to her, looks at me avidly, then says: “Hey, I saw you on TV! Didn’t you do those big pictures of your boyfriend or somethin’?”
“You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
“Nah. I never forget a face. You had that cute boyfriend, and you photographed him. There was this show about you on TV! Hey—that’s really neat. Hey, Liza—hey, Jennifer.” She turns to her two friends. “This chick is really neat. She photographed this dude in costumes. Where is he? He was cute.”
“Gone the way of cute men.”
“Then it was you. Jeez. You’re neat. I wish I was an artist.”
Wayne seems discomforted by no longer being the center of attention.
“Don’t you love me anymore, girls?” He sulks.
“Can I ask you somethin’?” The girl called Jennifer, with long black hair down her back and a gauze minidress, is speaking.
“Sure,” I say.
“Why do we always fall in love with the bastards? I mean is there somethin’ about their bein’ nasty that turns us on?”
I laugh. “The first woman who figures out the answer to that is gonna be sainted.”
“Do you fall in love with the bastards?” asks her friend Liza, with the flaxen blond hair and the face of a Scandinavian angel.
“She just said so,” Jennifer interrupts. “She’s just like us.”
“It’s what one of my English friends calls ‘The Great Nasty Man Question,’ ” I say in my mock-English accent. “ ‘The nahstier they