Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [8]
But eventually all lovers must get out of bed—and that was how our problems started.
We set up house in Roxbury, my house, the core of which was built in the seventeenth century, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wings. There was also the loft in New York. He needed a car, of course, so I bought him one to bring him to me. I knew, of course, that it could also take him away, but at the beginning of a love affair one doesn’t think that way. An ordinary car would not do for my Chéri, so I bought him a Mercedes. It was a beautiful old restored classic from 1969, when he was just thirteen: a thirteen-year-old’s dream, and I gave it the license plate DART. (Oh, I had a sense of humor about my lover—even while he reduced me to ash.)
I used to love to buy him things: a white suede cowboy suit with long fringes, and white-and-cream lizard-skin boots, with a ten-gallon white Stetson to crown the costume; monogrammed towels that said “DVD”; jewelry (which he usually lost); electronic equipment (which he usually broke); cashmere sweaters, crocodile loafers, costly artbooks, engraved stationery, silk pajamas, silk underwear, the lot. He was my shiksa, and I treated him accordingly, the way my rich English uncle Jakob from Odessa, East End furrier turned country squire in Surrey, treated his chorine. I had great style and recognized Dart at once as one of the great kept men.
But did he have great style? He never once refused a gift. In fact, despite his joy in receiving, there was always a little pout of the lower lip that seemed to indicate that the gift was a trifle less than he expected. If you gave him a car, it seemed he wanted a helicopter. If you gave him a white cowboy suit, it seemed he wanted a white horse to match. If you gave him a ring, it seemed he wanted a watch as well. This was never stated, and had you asked him he would have passionately denied it. But somehow you knew that the gift would only sate him for a little while, and then his hunger would require more fuel.
He was like a great hungry primitive god, ravenous for virgins, wreaths of flowers, plucked hearts, slaughtered oxen, chalices of blood, burnt offerings. . . . It was my joy to offer all these up. What was my success worth if I could not afford a man as beautiful and death-defying as Dart?
I had lived my life like a man, managed my career, my investments, even my pregnancy, exactly as a man would have done (Mike and Ed were born by caesarean on the day and at the hour I chose), so I thought I could manage Dart as well. Ah—there’s the rub. Nature has not arranged men that way. And the more fun they are in bed, the more uncontrollable they are. For it is the wildness within that guarantees the wildness in bed.
Pan does not buy one life insurance nor come home for dinner at the same time each night. I could buy my own life insurance. But I did need a little more serenity than life with Dart provided.
But what about love? you ask. Where does love enter into the equation? I know he loved me passionately. He loved me as the knife loves the wound it makes, as the female tarantula loves the male whose head she gobbles, as the nursing baby boy loves the nipple he takes between his teeth and chews until it spurts blood mixed with milk.
He did not mean to be cruel. It was just his nature—like that of the scorpion who stings the horse who carries him across the stream (as in that ancient Aesopian joke about the nature of scorpions).
Somehow, when we were together, things had a tendency to get lost: wallets, credit cards, jewelry.