Any Woman's Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he is slowly licking up one side of my clitoris and down the other, darting his tongue in and out of that cavity he would like to climb back into, making me come resoundingly again and again and again before he will deign to pull me to my knees and fuck me brutally, almost painfully, from behind, the heat of his cock corresponding to the heat of the sun that bakes us. When we are spent, we lie in each other’s arms on that rocky beach, my head in his armpit, where I smell the odor that links my menstrual cycles to the moon, his sweet sweat clinging in trembling drops to the honey-blond ringlets in the curve of his armpit.
    I can remember the curl of each hair in the sunlight, the tendency his armpit hair had to tangle in little knots—which later I would tenderly cut away with a nail scissors—the faint whorls of ashen-blond hair around his nipples, the curve of his warm belly (not as flat as he wished it, dammit— his dammit, not mine), and his battering ram of a cock deceptively sweet in repose, a little rosebud listing to the left and weeping one glistening dewdrop tear.
    I remember the shape of his loins, the blue vein that pulsed where his leg joined his groin, the golden hair on his calves, the shape of those calves, the length of the tendons. And then I remember a slightly funny, moth-eaten odor his mouth had—not unpleasant but hinting faintly of corruption—“the moth-eaten odor of old money,” he called it (for he could also be funny in a self-mocking sort of way). I noticed that odor in the beginning and then I stopped noticing it—only to notice it again right at the end.
    We drove through Yugoslavia in a tiny cheap Yugoslavian car called a Zastava—the only car we could rent. The engine must have been made of plastic, and somewhere in the mountains of Macedonia it gave up the ghost. The car puttered to a halt on a mountain road in a region of infernal factories and mines, where leathery-faced peasants in sweaty bandannas seemed to be mining lead. Of course it wasn’t lead, but it hung in the sky like a grayish haze, making one think of gnomes in the lands of Oz and Ev, underground factories, and regions of infernal gloom.
    Not a soul spoke English in that infernal land, and there were no garages.
    “Do you have a wire coat hanger, baby?” Dart asked, looking under the hood of the car, then strutting over to me as if he wanted to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
    I knew better than to ask why. In fact, I didn’t really want to know why. From my expensive leather-trimmed tapestry suitcase I produced the hanger as if I were the nurse at one of those kitchen-table abortions of my youth. I was full of admiration for his WASP knack of fixing things . . . I who had grown up poor in Washington Heights with Jewish men who thought that when something broke, you “called the guy”—inevitably a Polack, Irishman, or Latino, or some other member of that under-class that exists for the sole purpose of sparing Jewish men manual labor. Something about Dart’s ability to fix things like throttle linkages got me hot. It seemed to have a sexual dimension.
    And fix the Zastava he did. As we puttered off into the Yugoslavian sunset, I thought I had found my fixer at last: my mate, my addictive substance, my pusher, my love.
    Love is the sweetest addiction. Who would not sell her soul for the dream of the two made one, for the sweetness of making love in the sunlight on an Adriatic beach with a young god whose armpits are lined with gold? I thought we were pals, partners, lovers, friends. I, who had always—even in my marriages—maintained my obsessive separateness, now let myself relax into the sweetness of coupling, the sweetness of partnership, the two who are united against a world of hostile strangers.
    It must be admitted: famous women attract con men and carpetbaggers. The sweeter men, the normal men, are shyer and hesitate to come close. So one looks around and sees a world filled with Claus von