Read Any Woman's Blues for Free Online

Bülows, Chéris, and Morris Townsends, in short, a world of heiress-hunters, gigolos, and grifters. The nice men, being nice, hesitate—and in love, as in war, he who hesitates is lost.
     
     
    The real key to Dart was his father, though I resisted seeing that for nearly five years. Darton Venable Donegal III was a fortune-hunting scoundrel of the old school. Henry James could have done him justice—or Dickens. He was six-feet-six, white-haired, red-faced, and totally out of touch with human emotions. He spoke like a person, looked like a person, ate like a person—but the better you got to know him (which was a contradiction in terms, since he was basically unknowable), the more you realized that he was impersonating a human being in the way that certain malevolent life forms of stock science fiction impersonate human beings.
    The first time I encountered Dart’s father in the flesh was Thanksgiving of the first year Dart and I lived together. We were invited—nay, summoned—to the elder Donegals’ manse in Philadelphia to partake of their echt American feast. I must admit that my Dyckman Street Jewish childhood had left me with a lifelong fascination for old WASP ways. I was not just fucking a man when I fucked Dart; I was fucking American history, the May-flower myth, the colonial past. While my ancestors were tearing their pumpernickel apart in the Ukraine, Dart’s were choosing amongst a plethora of silver forks and taking tea at the Colonial Dames of America. The table analogy was apt, for though Dart’s family was downwardly mobile (as only Social Register WASPs can be), they still had enough sets of silver and bone china to serve presidents and kings—in the unlikely event that presidents and kings should come to call.
    No presidents and kings came to call these days; only their twenty-five-year-old son and his thirty-nine-year-old inamorata. Dart was titillated by his father’s jealousy over me (for Dart’s father knew and admired my work). To be twenty-five and to bring home a mistress closer to one’s parents’ generation than to one’s own is a sort of triumph, a flourish of oedipal one-upmanship that was not lost on me.
    I could see Dart’s delight when he brought me home for dinner, and I could tell that his father was bested in the struggle, because he kept dropping things—cold silver, hot hors d’oeuvres, and lastly a Baccarat crystal wine goblet, whose glistening shards he was then obliged to sweep up with elaborate courtliness.
    Dart’s parents’ house was cluttered and catworn. The Collyer brothers came to mind. Torn Naugahyde chairs stood beneath oval portraits of family progenitors. Chippendale antiques stood cheek by jowl with folding chairs from Kmart. The fabric on the upholstered furniture hung in tatters from the ministrations of the four family cats—Catullus, Petronius, Brutus, and Julius Caesar (called respectively Cat, Pet, Brute, and Julie).
    When we came into the living room, Dart’s father was on his knees before the fire, poking it into flames (something the males in that family were good at).
    He sprang to his feet, and one saw at once that the elder Darton was taller than his already rather tall son.
    “Well, my lad,” he said, shaking his son’s hand briskly. “Introduce us.”
    “Leila Sand,” said Dart, proud to be fucking a household name.
    “Well, well, well,” said the elder Darton. “What an honor.”
    I was seated near the fire in a red Naugahyde chair (whose stuffing seemed to want to view the light of day), and the two Dartons—father and son—went off to the kitchen to fetch the drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I sat and took in the scene, as exotic to me, given my background, as the twin palaces of the sultan of Brunei.
    The formality between Darton III and Darton IV, the catworn furniture, the Chippendale antiques, the pervasive smell of mothballs and cat litter . . . all this spelled WASPdom for me—and its essence was as aphrodisiac as,