Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [91]
It happens with the suddenness of a raid, an attack, a sort of sexual Pearl Harbor. I have merely heard his voice on the other end of the phone, and I am crazed.
I toss and turn in my bed, thinking I could easily get in the car and drive to where he is. In four hours I could be in Philly, if I drove like hell. I remember the sweet things about him—his love for poetry, his mad protectiveness of me when people recognized me on the street, his love of the twins.
Nice try. Actually, he was terribly jealous of them, and as they grew older I always feared he’d molest them. It’s convenient to forget all that in my longing for him. My sane mind has fled the coop. I smell his smell; I see the whorls of hair on his belly.
Isadora: Excuse me, but if I hear one more reference to those goddamned whorls, or that bloody smell, I’ll . . .
Leila: Scream?
Isadora: I know the smell’s the thing. . . . Maybe I should just make this a scratch-and-sniff book and spare the reader the deathless prose.
Leila: Good idea!
I remember Dart’s sweetness early on in the affair: the long afternoons in bed all over the world—the hotel suites, the room service carts, the beds littered with underwear, masks, whips, food, sperm. I try to remember all the awful things—the girls, the photos, the bills, the cruel phrases that curled his lip—but I cannot hate him. It takes only one great lover for a great love: the object may be as banal as Lolita or Mr. Fullerton. Only the lover need be great. And it takes only one to love. One to give and one to receive. The receiver must have a certain je ne sais quoi. He cannot be totally charmless. Nor can he be utterly without poetry. (Dart, for example, used to sign his love notes—sent on endless greeting cards in the manner of his elders—D’Artagnan, Darth V., or Mr. Darcy.) I confess I have never been able to love a man who was not literate. Snack sang Bessie Smith lyrics in my ear as he fucked me; Thom would quote John Keats, John Donne, and John Milton by the yard—all those Johns; he also loved Browning and Byron and knew Childe Harold and Don Juan and The Ring and the Book almost by heart. Elmore loved Ezra Pound’s Cantos. And Dart, Darth, D’Artagnan, Darcy quoted Shakespeare’s sonnets and the love poems of Neruda. What good is love if it cannot be put into words?
Again I am in flames. Again, reduced to a pinch of ash. Again, consumed.
The word “Hello” has singed me. If one word can do this, how dare I risk two? or three! My heart blazes like Shelley’s on that beach at Livorno.
Oh, Dart had a certain je ne sais quoi, all right. His smile, his sweetness—or was it merely his cock? Does the female of the species fall in love just by being well fucked? Is it thus that nature has her way with us? Is this the secret the Don Juan knows? I often wonder why other men, nice men, boring men, do not take more time and trouble over the Kamasutra and various other texts of love secrets. Are they oblivious of the rare rewards of fucking a woman well? It’s the gigolos and grifters who chiefly practice the art of love. What fools the nice men are not to learn from them!
Or do they have contempt for mere sex? (As if sex ever could be “mere.”) A real woman will love a man more for his cock than she ever could for his proxy fight or for his bank account—no matter what the cynics say.
Torn between calling back, driving to Philadelphia, and tossing in bed all night, I get up, go to my silo, and open—as if I were Pandora opening her box—a box of Dart memorabilia, which I have hidden away (from myself!) behind boxes of canvas tacks, chips, stretcher pieces, and cans of primer.
I open it with trembling fingers. Just unlidding the box—a Bendel’s box!—has made my heart thud again.
There are Polaroid studies for the film stills of Dart—Dart nude, waving