Any Woman's Blues Read Online Free PDF

he could be so tender with me at times and so loving. I remember his searching the city for a certain kind of gesso I wanted. I remember the time he waited a whole day at JFK because I had a shipment of supplies coming from Italy and he knew how worried I was about their safe arrival. I remember the way he nursed me when I was sick, bringing me tea, bringing me consommé, arguing with doctors about my possible allergy to this or that antibiotic. I don’t want to think of these things now in my anger—but they happened, and I can’t make them un-happen.
    If only I could time-travel back to the beginning of our affair and relive the sweetness of it, I would mortgage my soul to the devil. It’s easy enough to let the end poison the beginning when you are disaffected by all the betrayals. But in the beginning, when you hope you have found your One True Love, the world is full of sweetness, you walk with a winged step, and your heart seems a helium balloon that will never spring a leak.
    “I’m only your mirror,” Dart used to say in the mad, passionate beginning of our affair, when we would fuck the nights away all over the world—but I suppose I did not realize how true that was.
    Dart was a moon who required a sun in order to gleam. He had a certain smile—head cocked to one side, blue eyes flashing, mouth turned up in a sort of antique crescent that could melt anyone’s heart. On one of our very first trips, when we were sitting side by side in a haze of champagne and limerance in the first-class section of an airplane, I remember remarking to myself upon the way Dart was smiling at me: it seemed rehearsed. It seemed he had been told what charms lay in his smile and that he had practiced it in front of the mirror. I thought this in the early days and then, of course, promptly forgot it. Once I was gathered into his heart, beaten out of my common sense by the indefatigability of his cock, I did not look at him critically at all—and his smile became my smile, his causes my causes, his pains my pains.
    If I had a lovers’ time machine and I could drop myself back into the past at will and relive one of our trips, which trip would I pick? Hong Kong Harbor at sunset and our mad fucking in a king-size bed at the Mandarin? Vivaldi pouring out of the radio as we made passionate love in Hemingway’s room at the Gritti in Venice? That tumbledown cabin (built of lodgepole pine) at the Lazy C Ranch in Wyoming, where we fucked the nights away in coltish wonder at having actually found our sexual mates? (Dart was the first man I’d ever met who was as mad for sex as I was, as unsqueamish about tastes and odors, as puppy-playful, as dark and kinky and wild.)
    No—I would not pick any of the grand hotels we littered with our towels and sheets and slime and sperm and saliva. Nor would I go back to the first time in that Wyoming paradise of fly-tying and horseback riding and homemade honey muffins, broiled trout, and scrambled eggs. I would pick, oddly enough, a trip to Yugoslavia we once took to spend all the blocked dinars that had accumulated from sales of my paintings there.
    I see him lying on a beach somewhere along the Dalmatian coast (between Dubrovnik and Split, I suppose). Above us is a corniche road cut into the limestone. It crumbles and falls away in places, like the odyssey of our lives. Below us, lapping, is the Adriatic. The beach is rocky, and we have spread blankets and towels, which are littered with snorkel gear and the remains of our peasant picnic of grapes, plums, cheese, bread, and homemade red wine in a wavy green glass bottle innocent of any label. The beach is deserted and we are both naked (not nude—that more polite cousin of nakedness) in the blinding sunlight. We are greasing each other’s bodies in tandem: first he does my back with infinite tenderness; then I do his. Then he does my lips, my nipples, my thighs, my knees—and then he has plunged his sweet, tousled boyish head between my knees