Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [92]
And then there are assorted greeting cards—notes of love, notes of apology after a quarrel, crushed corsages (one, in fact, from that fateful Thanksgiving with his parents). I examine these artifacts with agitation, excitement—but also a soupçon of new detachment. There’s something perverse and unsavory about Dart. The Polaroid of him holding the meat cleaver above his cock is especially unsettling. As if he would do anything to get attention. I can’t invite that man back to my home with my girls again.
My heart cracking, I take all the photographs, cards, dried flowers, and begin to assemble them into a collage. As the fury to turn the love affair into its own monument takes me, as the fever rises, I seize hold of scissors and paste and start snipping, pasting, even daubing over the bits and pieces of my life with Dart. Pandora’s Box, I call it, as the fury to collage my life overwhelms me.
If Dart were to see this collage, would he love it or hate it? Hard to say. Would it make our split permanent or heal it? Dart is such a narcissist I almost think he’d like it. A shudder goes through me as I think that even now I care more for the work than for the love. If forced to choose, I’d rather have the model than the lover—or would I?
And then the phone in my studio rings—the secret one, the one only Dart and Emmie have the number of.
I run to pick it up.
“Hello?” I say.
A click. Dart calling. Drawn by the strength of my snipping his pictures. Black magic. The soul captured on a piece of photographic film. The connection made. And broken. The scissors I wield cuts Dart’s cock off. Inadvertently?
And then I am back in the longing again. My fingertips ache. I have a queasy feeling at the pit of my stomach. Love? Addiction? I am suddenly skidding down the street in Dubrovnik. I take the glue and paste Dart’s cock back on.
Oh, God—will I never get myself back again? I long to be in love, but love annihilates—and anything less does not feel like love! The more fiercely independent one is, the more one longs for self-annihilation. The battle continues. The battle between bondage and love. I long to give myself away, take myself back, give myself away again. Arranging snipped pieces of Dart on my mounting board, putting him together and taking him apart, I battle with myself. Which do I want more? Control or love? Power or love? And are the two mutually exclusive? Or are they so only for me? What does it mean to be an artist who takes all the pieces of her life—quite literally—as material? Does it doom one to unhappiness, or is it, after all, the only bliss? I do not know the answers to any of these questions. I only know I am trying to learn to love the questions themselves. They are all I have.
I pick up the phone again and call—call, instead of Dart, Julian in Los Angeles. Julian, who is probably composing electronic music for another of his space operas. Julian, who looks so much like Albert Einstein—with his shock of snow-white hair, his big, sad, sparkly eyes—that people stop him on the street and ask if he is Einstein.
“E=mc2,” Julian always says, puzzling them even more.
“That’ll teach ’em,” Julian whispers to me, with a leprechaun’s twinkle.
I’ve adored Julian for years. Julian is my pal, my spiritual guide. I tell myself that if I don’t get Julian, I’ll call Dart back forthwith. But Julian is home.
“How are you, sweetest lady?” he asks.
“The worst. Awful.”
“What’s the matter, babe?”
“I don’t know whether I’m painting or living. I don’t know whether I’m killing Dart or killing myself. I just made this collage out of the bits and pieces of my life—and I’m in the collage; I can’t get out.”
“I know the feeling,” Julian says.
I recount the story of the last several weeks—Dart gone, AA meetings, the proper millionaire, the slips, seeing myself poised over the cosmos, the work, the life, the