Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [76]
“Darling,” I said, “have you ever read Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s memoirs?”
“Lebrun? Lebrun? Who was she, sugar?”
“Court painter to Marie Antoinette, then to Napoleon’s court—but she was just a woman painter who lived by her brush and who survived in very troubled times.”
“Didn’t she paint those pretty-pretty female portraits?”
“Mmm,” I said, determined to have windows and fresh air.
“Look, sugar, let me deal with the architect, and you do the painting. I know what’s best for you, sugar. Haven’t you had enough upheaval in your little life? What you need now, honey, is someone to protect you, to take care of bidness, to free you to create. I’m good at that, sugar. An’ it would give me such pleasure!”
I’m melted by his affectionate tone. Danny’s speech has, anyway, always melted me. With its curious combination of Dallas and London, it was the first thing about him that I fell in love with. That and his tallness.
“How can a man that tall and that rich fail to protect you?” my sane mind asks me.
“I’ll think of a way,” says my obsession.
As for protection, of course I want that—don’t we all? And who more than a chronic vagabond—a bolter, as they say in England? One can’t always live in turmoil. One can’t always be alone. I go to hug Danny Doland, but he pushes me away.
“Very well, then, it’s decided, sweetie.”
“As long as you don’t expect me to paint in a mausoleum,” I say.
“Who ever said anything about a mausoleum?” asks Danny. But I can tell he’s offended in his own sweet way and is storing up another grievance for future use.
After that contretemps, Danny began to eliminate physical contact altogether.
It started innocently enough. I noticed that whenever Danny and I spent the night together at Lunabella (we never stayed at my house) he would sleep above the covers if I was under them and he would wear underwear if I was naked.
A small thing, really. How could one complain? We were grown ups, middle-aged lovers. We had our own habits, our own lives, our own houses and children. (He had one son at Choate, the other at Le Rosey.) But clearly Danny Doland didn’t want to hug me. The tune “A Fine Romance” kept playing in my head.
One summer night, I gathered up my courage and asked him about it.
“I’m not keen on hugging,” he said. “Don’t tax me, sugar.”
Certainly a provocative remark for one’s fiancé, one’s new lover, the love of one’s life, to make. But I managed to be mature about it and not react.
“Okay,” I said to Danny. “We don’t have to be joined at the hip. It’s okay, darling.” And I turned over and went to sleep and had searingly erotic dreams about Dart. (Sleeping with Danny, I always dreamed about Dart.)
When this distancing maneuver didn’t work, Danny upped the ante.
One night he brought home piles of erotic videos (with names like Las Vegas Lust, Cherry Ready Gets L.A.ed, and Hell Bent for Leather) and suggested that we watch them. I was game. I still had all the garter belts and gear I had bought for Dart when sobriety made him impotent, and I didn’t mind bringing them over to Lunabella. I had been wearing garter belts and black lace merry widows even when my pals in the feminist art cabal considered them treasonous, and now that such accoutrements were chic, I still saw no harm in them. Men respond to visual stimuli, I reasoned. They’re just not as evolved as women.
So I got all tarted up in black lace, and Danny and I turned on the VCR and watched Cherry Ready Gets L.A.ed—a porn flick of surprisingly good production values, which showed a nubile young “Cherry” making it with a succession of goyboytoys in Malibu, Santa Monica, Bel Air, Beverly Hills.
I was fascinated. We were meant to believe that Cherry, the young starlet, was getting ahead