Enter Elmore Dworkin
Elmore is Leila’s second husband and the father of the girl-twins Mike and Ed. But besides that, he is an artist proper. The CV of Elmore Dworkin reads that he is ‘an abstract expressionist' far more established and older’ than Leila (p.56,7,8/II). His looks also fit the strong romantic myth of the hirsute artist: hairy and rough. Elmore seems to be the perfect match for Leila, the woman artist who is soon to be mythologized by the public as a celebrity.
I fell in love with his paintings and his tongue; I equally admired his cock and his paintings; In one evening I was introduced to the New York School’s most promising younger artist, multiple orgasms, and Humbold County sinsemilla. p.57/III
The sudden shift from the realm of the high art to the low body pleasures could be reminiscent of Henry Miller’s stylistic approach in the Tropic of Cancer [Miller 1992] and even to be seen as a celebration of the artist’s rage to live and work, of the inseparability of art and love. It is so appealing that it easily recurs whenever love strikes a chord with art. In this same vein, we will be given the essence of Leila/Thom relationship in a nutshell. The year they spent in Italy is made distinct through another zeugma device. They lived that year ‘in a tangle of thighs, art history and extra-virgin olive oil’. We are not far from assuming this was the happiest time for them both, when their work prospered, their babies grew, their love grew because they ‘lived for love, for art, for bed, for babies’. p.59/III
One could easily guess that this idyll, this ‘blessed, blissed’ life is unlikely to happen in one’s homeland. It too much resembles a paradise and by definition paradise is not here. It is always there. Indeed it proves that the happy couple has moved to the mythical land of art. One is tempted to say Paris. However, in Erica Jong’s reading of the myth, Paris is in Italy. We will discover what are the reasons for such a peculiar shift of places soon in the last chapter that covers women artists’ professional ID. By now it seems sufficient to note that Jong tends to refer to this period in positive, yet exaggerated terms. Leila is more than happily married to another artist and this is considered as ‘the greatest ecstasy of all’. What could be ‘more joyful’ than two artists living together, doing their work, nurturing their babies, cooking, loving, walking through the churches and art galleries of Italy. (p.59, 60,5/III)
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998