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allowed to forget her bondage and loving it even as she hated it, for the clanking of her chains made a woman of her. Did he deliberately plan this reduction, this destruction of me? Or was it something he did by instinct, learned at his father’s knee, the fine art of reducing powerful women to ash?
    And then he would come in, always when you had given up and stopped expecting him. And he would scoop me in his arms, never uttering a harsh word. “My love, my witch, my bacchante, my darling,” he would murmur, the softness of the words cutting deeper than a dagger. And then he would turn me over and give it to me from behind with his hard, pronged, demonic cock. And I would whimper with the sheer relief of his being back, his being safe, his being deep inside me, and we would fuck the night away, no questions asked, until the next time.

2
    Deciphering the Fire
    If you want to hear me rave,
Honey, give me what I crave.
It makes my love come down.
     
— Bessie Smith
     
     
    D art was sweet. Had Dart been sour or mean, it would have been much easier. I would have fled at once. But in the beginning he rarely said anything that wasn’t loving, sweet, and dear. He spoke, in fact, like a Hallmark greeting card. It was just that his actions belied his words. He was like some actors or politicians—full of reassurances and good words, yet doing things that made you terribly mistrustful. “I’ll always be there for you,” he said. Yet the fact was that often you could not reach him.
    I used to try to think up ways of keeping him with me. On trips it was relatively easy; he was always at my side (hence our compulsive traveling). But at home it was harder. If the studio I gave him did not suffice—that wonderful old barn, pierced with skylights, with the hayloft made into a sleeping balcony, and its own bathroom and little kitchen—then I would rack my brains to think up other things: joint projects we could work on (which I always wound up doing, because he was out God knows where—I realize now with a shock that I never actually saw him paint or sculpt), portraits and photographs I would do of him, brunches and dinners with important people who might help his career. All these things worked only for a little while. He was adamant that we should work together (which is hard for artists who have their own visions), and I would do anything to keep him near, so I attempted that folly.
    I am looking now at one of the paintings I painted to his design (he had scribbled a rough sketch on a napkin; I, of course, had painted it), and there is no denying that it’s an abortion. Not my style at all. I had painted (as if bewitched) a rather sappy rendition of our first meeting in the Tetons: cowboy and cowgirl riding beneath the sunset through fields of flowers, an image more suitable for one of those pseudo-hippie greeting cards than for a show of new works by Leila Sand. No danger of that, for when I look at how the painting is signed, I see no trace of my name but only “Darton Venable Donegal IV,” in large vermilion letters.
    In the name of our shared life, I even went so far as to buy a building on Greene Street and establish a gallery for new artists so that he could exhibit there (he’d had rotten luck, he said, in finding a gallery of his own). He worked devilishly hard renovating the building, setting up the first group show and launching the gallery—called, in honor of our liaison, the Grand Teton Gallery—but as soon as it began to show signs of actually succeeding, he lost interest, as he eventually lost interest in everything that promised him the success he claimed to want. Somehow he never got together the work for his projected one-man show, though he was always promising to. (He claimed my success blocked him.) Nor would he run the gallery, as he had said he would. Eventually I hired a pretty young thing to do this—and eventually he seduced her—but he never even began the work for his own show.
    And yet