Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [75]
Here’s the strangest part: I didn’t care all that much. Impotence is, after all, AIDS-proof. Besides, I had known a relationship built on searing sex, and I knew it didn’t solve all problems. Maybe I’d had enough sex in my life and was scheduled to spend my declining years at auctions. But Danny Doland cared. He was devastated that I knew his sexual secret. And from that point on, he began to get even with me.
It was subtle at first. Still in the first blush of our compatibility—in all areas but bed—we were planning our nuptials, our renovations, our purchases (for was not love in the eighties merely a prelude to the purchase of real estate? and in the upper classes, art?).
Danny Doland had an architect design a folly to be built as a studio for me at Lunabella. This studio looked like the main house in all respects, except that it was hidden in a copse of trees and that it had no windows.
Surely an oversight. Surely Danny Doland’s architect did not expect me to paint in a house without windows.
But Danny Doland had his reasons for this. Skylights in the roof would supply the light. And the “windows” would be limestone and marble replicas of windows.
“But why?” I asked.
“So that we can keep the whole structure climatically controlled, sugar. To preserve the art.”
“But if I can’t look out and see the sky and the hillside, how can I create the art?”
Danny Doland looked down at me with his small pale-blue eyes, the color of oxford shirting.
“Sweetie,” he said, “we’ll have perfect north light controlled by skylights with special electronically operated sunshades. That way, we can have the gallery below—works by you and your major contemporaries: Graves, Bartlett, Schnabel, Sherman, Natkin, Frankenthaler, Twombly, Johns, whoever pleases you, your personal collection—and above, you’ll paint under conditions that ensure that your work will never deteriorate. Imagine knowing that, sugar!”
I imagined myself trying to paint in a mausoleum without air, without birdsong, without the occasional butterfly (or wasp) landing on my work-in-progress—and I was horrified. Life, in short, was what he planned to exclude in the name of preserving art. How could I create art without life to power it?
Sex I could give up. But could I also give up air?
Isadora: You say that now!
“Darling, I must have at least one window that opens,” I said.
“I’ll talk to the architect, sweetie,” said Danny, “but I can tell you right now he’ll say it’s a bad idea. Have you ever been to the Beinecke Library?”
“Of course, darling—I went to Yale, remember?”
“Of course I remember, sugar. And you must know how vital it is to keep the air properly controlled.”
“But I want to charge the air, decontrol it, make it eddy around the spectator’s eyes, make the shakti leap out of the picture and change your life. . . .”
“That’s such a romantic idea, sugar. Look—you just paint your little heart out and let me worry about preserving the work, okay?”
I thought of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s husband spending all the money she had made as court painter to Marie Antoinette.
The French Revolution, your best friend and favorite subject beheaded en famille, and suddenly you discover that your husband has spent the loot! Penniless, you take off in 1789—what a year to leave home penniless!—and visit the courts in Italy, Austria, Germany, Russia, making your fortune anew, painting landscapes. In France, the bloodbath continues. Your ex-husband, who might as well be Danny Doland, has trimmed his sails to the prevailing winds and is acting as salesroom agent for the new government. You return home, refuse to meet bloody little Napoleon, and leave immediately