Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [9]
When I met Dart, I had spent thirty-nine years climbing the glass mountain of a woman artist’s destiny—I wanted a treat, a reward for all that desperate climbing, and at first he seemed to give it to me, too. There was not only his generosity in bed, with its punitive kinkiness (which I felt I deserved somehow for challenging the gods by becoming so successful), but the way he cosseted me. He moved into my house and took over the care and protection of Leila Sand. He played bodyguard, cook, maître d’hotel, general factotum. He was good at keeping the world at bay, frightening off troublesome fans, ex-husbands, ex-lovers, would-be parasites. He installed himself, in short, as chief parasite, court jester, her majesty’s pleasure barge, Robin Goodfellow—which, you may remember, was another name for the devil.
I had been, until the epoch of Dart, a very disciplined worker. No artist gets anywhere otherwise. I had a studio in Litchfield County—a silver silo with an observatory-like skylight, studding my country acreage—and in New York I had my loft. I preferred working in the country, where the birdsong did not invade but rather accompanied my work. But once I got going on a major project, I had to stay where I was, for my canvases at this point in my life were very large. Besides, there is something profoundly conservative about even the most avant-garde art: it likes to grow in one place.
Dart installed himself as my majordomo, made me dependent on his good offices (as I had never in my life allowed myself to be dependent on anyone), and then he began finding excuses to flee. Just when I was nursing the delusion of having found, at long last, my helpmeet, my live-in muse, the husband of my heart, Maurice Goudeket to my Colette, he began spending more and more time in New York, at the loft, and always with a good excuse: He had to meet a gallery owner who was interested in his work. He had to buy materials. He had to go to the foundry. I had given him every young artist’s dream—a barn to work in, unlimited time, all his expenses paid—and that was when he started flying from me, or else he was flying from himself. I never knew.
Where did he go during all that time away—zooming off in the car I bought him, refusing to be tied down to a specific time for dinner, refusing to tell me where he was going? My imagination immediately leapt to the worst conclusions: other women, hustling, drug smuggling, gambling, other men.
“I’ll call you,” he’d say, climbing into the blood-red Mercedes (bought with my blood), and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t.
When I complained of this, he flew into a rage and said: “But I always come home to you.” Or else he would accuse: “You never trust me! You always question me!” You always . . . you never—the language of male bondage.
So I would pace my studio-silo, trying to work, my peace of mind destroyed: listening for the phone; listening for his/my car; wondering if he would or wouldn’t be home for dinner; wondering whether to ask or (since asking only made him madder) whether to ignore it, and having another glass of wine. I began working drunk. Never had I done this before. For all my indulgence in pot, peyote, hash, coke, wine, I had never mixed it with my work. My work was sacred. But now my silo, my obvious phallic symbol, which had been my freedom, had become my prison. I paced and paced, tied to that silent phone as if it were a household god, afraid to go out lest he call, afraid to get in my car and drive to New York lest I find him with another woman in my loft, afraid to invite a friend over lest he suddenly come in and want me to himself, afraid to move, to paint,