Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [79]
Feh, I think. Dolph’s daughter is going home.
In my garter belt and silk stockings, with a silk robe over them and bare feet, I take off into the night in DART, sans driver’s license, sans money, sans everything.
I am speeding through the Berkshire midnight, wearing my porn video getup, feeling the cool summer air on my hot cheeks, singing “My Sweetie Went Away” at the top of my lungs—
Until I see him in the rearview mirror. Darth Vader on his motorcycle, the masked man, my dybbuk, my demon lover. He hasn’t gone Hollywood at all. He is following me! Right here in the Berkshires, he means to stop me and make me his by the side of the road. My heart lifts; my cunt moistens. Ah, Dart, I knew you’d be back! The beam of his motorcycle headlight is piercing my trunk. The siren is piercing my heart.
The siren? Since when did Dart have a siren?
Darth Vader zooms up beside me and tries to force me to the side of the road. I play with him for a while, leading him a merry chase over hill and down dale, growing ever more excited as his siren shrills and shrills. Finally he veers me off the road, onto the soft shoulder.
“Dart!” I cry, the words slowly dying in my mouth.
For the motorcycle cop does look a lot like Dart—as did the croupier, as did the porn-star producer.
“License, ma’am,” says the cop, looking at my scanty attire.
“Ooops,” I say. “You’ll never believe this, Officer, but I was just off to the drugstore to get some Pampers for my baby with diarrhea!”
The cop doesn’t look me in the eye.
“Please show me your license, ma’am,” says the Dart look-alike, surveying my cleavage. I have the drunken thought of unzipping him and having him here and now. Or could that be considered bribing an officer of the law?
Isadora: Why is it that whenever Our Heroine is confronted with a figure of male authority, all she can think of is sucking his cock?
Leila: Who’s using that word now?
Isadora: Don’t quibble over vocabulary. Answer the question.
Leila: Because sex is never a thing apart from politics.
Isadora: Oh, come off it. This is not The Land of Fuck—this is a speeding ticket.
Leila: Which my namesake (and your alter ego) hopes to avert. As long as a woman is youngish and nubile, desired by men, she cannot resist playing her last trump card.
Isadora: Isn’t that name copyrighted?
The rest is history—or herstory (as they used to say in the sixties). Picked up in the little Massachusetts town of New Egremont by the New Egremont police, booked for speeding, indecent exposure, drunkenness, and other puritanical New England crimes, bailed out by Danny and André, in loco parentis, and sent, in shame, back to my silo. I narrowly escaped being the subject of a New York Post headline because it was a hot day in the Middle East, but I did become a “transition” item in Time. “Booked for drunk driving in the Berkshires, noted artist Leila Sand pleaded guilty to charges of operating a vehicle under the influence.” DWI—as they say in the Program. Drawing Without Intoxication—that was the risk I ran marrying Danny. Another sort of jail.
Guilty as charged, my license suspended, I go back to my silo as if under house arrest.
Danny disappears. Emmie reappears. She and Lily and Natasha and Mike and Ed take charge of my life. And the police agree that instead of going to a rehab, I can be put under the care of Dr. Sybille Panoff of Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, who, among her other qualifications, has a degree in Family Therapy and the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction.
Saved again, but who knows why? Where are my maenads and crystal now? And where oh where is my sane mind when I need it most?
13
Spiritus Contra Spiritum
It’s a long road but I know
I’m gonna find the end.
—Bessie Smith
Sybille’s thatched cottage with the whirring mill wheel was the perfect setting for a Disney witch. Filled with collections of theatrical memorabilia—in her youth (an indeterminate number of years ago) Sybille had been an actress