Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [89]
We sit down to chow.
Lionel kids with the twins.
Suddenly there is a loud beep beep beep from the handmade Florentine briefcase, and Lionel runs to it, snaps it open, and extracts a portable phone.
“What’s up?” he asks the unknown caller.
A pause, then he says: “Tell that bastard we’ll give him fifty-six dollars a share—not a penny more. I’m not scared of a proxy fight. This is a guts play, pure and simple.”
Lionel is talking partly for me and partly for the caller on the other end of the phone. He’s an addict too—addicted to taking over companies. I recognize the intensity, the adrenaline high; I have been trying to learn to live in another state: moderation, the golden mean. It feels boring to me, but I know it’s the secret of life. In a society that worships addiction, how can you find a non-addicted life?
Lionel paces, walks down the hill with his telephone, turns and paces back. I see that his face is contorted with rage. He has been about to enjoy this feast—and now he is plugged into his addiction again. What a destructive implement the telephone is! More destructive than a machine gun or a bullwhip. Suddenly the feast has turned to gall.
He sits down, wolfs his chicken, but is utterly preoccupied, tasting nothing.
“What’s a proxy fight?” asks Ed, who misses nothing.
“That’s a good question, young lady,” says Lionel, when the phone beeps.
He curses, gets up, answers it, and paces down the greensward again, muttering into it.
I watch him, thinking that the telephone is about to cut short his visit and wondering if I care. At one time I had nursed fantasies of an affair with Lionel as the answer to my problems—but I see that Lionel is, in his own way, less able to sit still than Dart, whom I am missing again in my fingertips, in my gut. That baby boy was his—I’m sure of it.
Whenever I get going on the fantasy of a man to protect me, to nurture me, I see that he’s in more trouble than I am, more desperate, more frantic, more full of spilkes. Dart was forever darting. And Danny too, in his own way. And now Lionel. I will have to learn to sit still alone. Nobody knows how to teach it to me. Even I—with my crackpot semisobriety—seem to have more serenity than any of the men I know.
Lionel stomps back, muttering and cursing.
“Those fucking bastards say the stock is worth seventy-five dollars a share—they’re fucking crazy. . . .” I see in him the male madness to win, win, win, and I wonder whether any woman would or could care about this the way he does. Women just don’t give a shit about winning in that way—or at least, I don’t. I love the fruits of money as well as anyone—houses, cars, clothes, power, autonomy—but somehow I feel freer and happier when I am working without a commission, for love, not money, than when I am working for money. I’m happy to have turned down Lionel’s two fifty. I may be crazy, but it makes me glad to know that acquiring things is not first on my agenda.
And yet I know that my passion for Dart is not so different from Lionel’s passion to take over companies or André’s to take over artists. Consume, consume, consume. The bottomless pit of wanting. These are our values, and this is the world we’ve made. Never have we needed nonattachment more.
Lionel rushes through lunch, with one ear out for the phone.
When we’ve stuffed our faces, we go back to the silo, always with that potentially beeping briefcase in attendance. The mood of the day is smashed. I feel the static of New York here on my green hillside. I’m wishing Lionel would leave and let me get back to sitting by my pond, doing nothing, doing everything.
Lionel loosens his tie, at last takes off his jacket.
“Lie down, I think I love you,” he says, putting an arm around me. I giggle. It’s all so silly—the bid for a painting behind André’s back, the proxy fight, the obligatory pass. I am looking for love in all the wrong places.
“Why’re you laughing, babe?” says Lionel.
“Because it’s all so silly.”
“What is?” asks Lionel, hurt.
“Life.”
I’m thinking that when a man and a woman lie down together, he’s thinking