Any Woman's Blues Read Free Page B

forever darting. Oh, when I was younger, I used to make fun of male hormones and what they make men do. I used to think that men ought to try to be more like women (who were more rational , I then supposed), but now that I am forty-four I know that the glory of the male sex lies in how different they are from us—though of course it infuriates us, as nature meant it to do, fury being an aspect of our drive to merge.
    I met him at a dude ranch in Wyoming—the Lazy C Ranch, it was called (an upside-down C, not unlike his cock)—and I was a dude and he a cowboy. Not that he was really a cowboy. He was an aging prep school boy from the East, playing at cowboy for a summer, but I didn’t know that. Under the Grand Tetons (or Big Tits, as the French so bluntly called them), on the wildflower-studded greensward made by the great Snake River, he looked as authentic as any cowboy, riding his nag. At least he looked authentic to this cowgirl from the canyons of New York, who wanted him to ride her.
    I had come to this most beautiful part of the world (Moose, Wyoming) to shed an old love affair, there where the elk shed their antlers, and he was a passionate twenty-five and I an even more passionate thirty-nine, moseying through fields of Indian paintbrushes, blue lupine, and black-eyed Susans on my old cayuse. I looked at him—dirty-blond hair, battered cowboy hat, torn cowboy shirt, those touching purple lids like a baby’s, and under them those penetrating (I use the adjective advisedly) blue, blue eyes—and I was hooked. Later he hooked me properly in bed. Only twenty-five, but he knew the power he had and made sure I knew it too. That he loved my work was the icing on the cock (as it were), for he aspired to an allied art himself and told me that he fashioned out of clay western sculptures à la Remington (when he wasn’t fashioning female bodies with his extra rib).
    After the summer we resumed in SoHo and Litchfield County. There was a girlfriend I had to dispose of (a little ninny of twenty-three, the first of many), but then we fell into living together—mainly because we could not bear to spend a night apart.
    At first it was glorious: a mad drug-crazed affair, days of wine and roses, sinsemilla and chrysanthemums, cocaine and calla lilies. Nights of wild endless lovemaking in which one lost count of the number of acts of sex because they had neither beginnings nor endings. I could look up his nostril and see eternity. The nights might have been eons long, epochs measured in geologic time, or they might have been merely minutes. It was impossible to tell. As we coupled, mountain ranges rose and fell; rock was formed from molten lava; hot springs bubbled out of the earth; extinct volcanoes came to life. For a year I did no work, nor did he. We toured the world—from king-size triple-sheeted bed to king-size triple-sheeted bed.
    All the travel was on someone else’s tab. We went from Dokumenta to the Basel Art Fair, from the Whitney to Palazzo Grassi, from Düsseldorf to Munich, from Venice to Vienna, Nice to Paris, Madrid to Mallorca, London to Dublin, Stockholm to Oslo, Tokyo to Hong Kong to Beijing. Who cared where we were, as long as we were in bed? I remember a blur of other artists, art dealers, collectors, critics, like ghosts in a Shakespearean tragedy. Either they were as drunk and stoned as we were or we were drunk and stoned enough for both. From time to time, I (being the older and supposedly responsible party) would awaken and wonder if we were becoming drunks or drug addicts, but in that crowd, who could tell? All the artists drank and used that way. Or so I thought. The only time I really became upset was when Dart carried sinsemilla into the USSR—and without telling me.
    We had arrived at our grand hotel in MOCKBA, and we were about to fall into bed and reassert our primal connection (it had, after all, been seven hours since we made love in Copenhagen, and we were both in a state of deprivation that