B007Q6XJAO EBOK (24 page)

She was not his only adorer. The wealthy wives he painted, like Adele Bloch-Bauer of
Judith and the Head of Holofernes
, often became lovers, and his models comprised a small seraglio who—reputedly—had fourteen of his children. Klimt’s attraction had much to do with his creative genius, strong libido, and celebration of female sexuality. But he had another appeal as well: he was a mage of riddles and surprises.

Remembering her obsession with Klimt, seductress Alma Mahler said that she was “taken” by his inscrutability and floored by his impromptu kiss in the middle of St. Mark’s Square. He characteristically arrived unannounced at a spa to visit Emilie in 1912 and sent her four hundred cryptic postcards. And women who visited his studio received a tour from Ali Baba. On the outside they saw a flower-bordered gemütlich cottage studio; on the inside, an eye-popping “wonder-room”—brilliant gold-leaf canvases on easels, Japanese and Chinese gowns, African stools, and a black-and-white-striped sofa strewn with textiles and newspapers—and models lounging around in their underwear. Klimt liked to claim that he was “not a particularly interesting person,” but it was only one of his
trompe l’oeils
calculated to obfuscate, entice, and surprise.

Cut and Thrust

[Love is] a refined and delicate form of combat.

—H
AVELOCK
E
LLIS
,
Psychology of Sex

Amanda and Adam are a poster couple for eternal romance. They’re still jazzed by each other. They fix intimate suppers in pajamas, laugh, canoodle, romp, and exchange surprise gifts just for the hell of it. Their pet nicknames are Pinkie and Pinky. But they’re no Hallmarky old marrieds. They’re rival lawyers and strenuous, loud-mouthed combatants in the movie
Adam’s Rib
, played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

That’s the source of their sizzle—the tension of concord and fireworks. And the fireworks almost burn the house down. As Amanda defends her client (a wife who shot and injured her husband and his mistress) with increasing success against her husband, the heat escalates. Adam taunts her and threatens to feed her in little pieces to the jury, and she gives tit for tat. By the time Amanda wins the case, Adam has moved out, and a predatory neighbor, armed with champagne, has moved in on his wife.

When Adam catches them in an embrace, the fur flies: insults ricochet, doors slam, furniture crashes. Then on the brink of divorce, they make up. Each humorously meets the other halfway, and they drive off to the country, where they leap into bed as the camera cuts to “The End.”

Couples who never utter a harsh word and live in seamless harmony for decades are sweethearts of the love industry. Therapists and coaches evangelize concord in relationships: curb anger and jealousy, they counsel, and replace conflict with rational dialogue and affectionate concern. Companionate calm, however, carries a cost—romantic stagnation. Partnerships, although havens of trust and peace, need periodic shake-ups. Aggression, fear, and power struggles underlie passionate love, and skilled lovers take them head-on and transmute them. Instead of gagging adverse emotions, they convert them to erotic excitement through a delicate play of combat and truce, pain and pleasure. Love, for ladies’ men, is an ongoing duel and duet.

Logically, women should run the other way from romantic turmoil. Due to their brain’s hypersensitivity to fear and stress, they have an instinctive “aversion to conflict.” But women seem strangely partial to love quarrels. “Conflict,” writes the female editor of an anthology,
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
, is “love’s secret ingredient, the drop of vermouth without which the martini would cloy.”

Cindy Meston and David Buss confirmed this proclivity; anxiety and jealousy, they discovered, can whet female desire. Women, they also found, often relish a good fight since it releases adrenaline and other stimulants and helps them emotionally connect with men before sex. Power, too, enters in. If the “battle of the sexes” is, at base, a struggle for a balance of power, quarrels can be a strike for parity in a world of gender inequality. Elizabeth Taylor once said her fights with Richard Burton exhilarated her because they made her “feel like an intellectual equal.”

Scholars of romantic love routinely recommend spats, jealousy, and nips of distress to keep passion on its toes. Quarrels, writes philosopher Robert Solomon, “are a sign of strength in love”; they not only test commitment but also preserve autonomy, vital tension, and sexual desire. They can serve as periodic bacchanals, explains Ethel Person, airing suppressed grievances and permitting desire to endure. Like opposition, jealousy has its aphrodisiacal uses. Triangulation, say historians, can jolt amour, triggering the stimulants of fear, possession, and competition.

Conflict and pain, however, come with caution flares. Sensitivities differ; what revs one relationship unravels another. Some women have low thresholds for discord and cringe under attack. Great lovers read these differences and avert “true cruelty.” It’s easy to skid into anarchic rage. The trick, says Adam Phillips, is to maintain “the right amount of misunderstanding,” to alternate hostility with harmony and follow contretemps with the sweets of reunion and repose.

The mythic model of eternal desire, while not placid, avoids the hate zone. Inanna and Dumuzi begin their love affair with a fight, which Dumuzi suavely defuses: “Queen of the Palace let us talk it over,” he entreats, and “From the starting of the quarrel / Came the lovers’ desire.” The first Hindu couple, love gods Shiva and Parvati, forever feud and reconcile. Incarnations of the playful war of the sexes, they constantly bicker, jockey for advantage, fan up jealousy, and make love.

In literature, lovers are less adept at handling the demon of discord. Eric, the aspiring tennis pro of Lionel Shriver’s
Double Fault
, marries the top-seeded Willy, and at first all goes well. Willy’s lecherous coach gins up their passion, and the newlyweds displace aggression into competitive play and win-win sexual tussles. Then Eric begins to outrank her on the courts, and Willy injures her knee, skewing the power balance and unkenneling the hounds of hell. Their fights spin out of control, and the marriage ends.

Popular romances see love combats in a rosier light. Heroes take the heroine’s measure and convert jealous threats and angsty brawls into hot-sheets renewals of desire. Gerard, the Marquess of Grayson, of Sylvia Day’s
The Stranger I Married
, is an erotic golden glove. Ensconced in an open marriage with Lady Pelham, he mounts an offensive to monopolize her. With jibes, digs, and taunts, he goads her into disputes and leaves for mysterious nights on the town. Finally mid quarrel, he calls her out: “Look how aroused you are, even in your fury and distress.” As he thumb-strokes her nipples and she submits to his embrace and monogamy, he promises not to bore her: “I have just enough of the rapscallion left in me,” he vows, “to want you to suffer a bit, just as I will be suffering.”

As a rule, real ladies’ men transcend strife with love and go light on pain, cycling back and forth between discord and concord. Pianist Franz Liszt handled his sensitive mistress of five years, Countess Marie d’Agoult, with a delicate touch. He staunched quarrels with amorous reassurances, and while on tour, he wrote her florid love letters strewn with random nicks—evasions and hints of admirers. When they parted, he cushioned the blow; he was the “sad and deeply distressed” party.

Women who tangled with Gabriele D’Annunzio needed thicker skins. He could be combative and cruel (nasty letters or infidelities), but this “prodigy of love” lavished incomparable rewards. He hymned inamoratas as divinities and discarded them so gently they continued to love him. “Even if all the women of Don Giovanni’s dreams were to pass through my bed,” he told an ex, “they would leave me with a longing and fierce desire for you.”

For his partner of nine years, actress Eleonora Duse, he amped up the drama. He staged blazing fights, flirted with her rivals, and once lost her in a labyrinth of cacti in Cairo until she cried in desperation. After this “game,” he clasped her in a voluptuous embrace and delivered a night of “incalculable profundity and of infinite sweetness.” “I hate D’Annunzio, and yet I adore him,” exclaimed Duse.

Debonair
New Yorker
cartoonist and Casanova Charles Addams had the rare distinction of never making an enemy in his life. Often mistaken for Walter Matthau with his long face and bulbous nose, he nonetheless charmed legions of women into a lifelong passion for him. His taste in women was top-drawer: Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, and Jackie Kennedy, to name a few. A “gentle man,” he was kind, fun, witty, genuine, and wonderful in bed. Lovers said they accepted his many infidelities because time with him, no matter how short, was priceless.

Addams, however, had a dark, aggressive side—an inner haunted house like his cartoon mansion. The duality both heightened his fascination and drew out the Morticia in women. Barbara Skelton, a British novelist and “femme fatale,” spoiled for a fight the moment she met him, once baiting him into a naked bout of fisticuffs. Another Barbara, his second wife, went ballistic. She attacked him with an African spear, smashed the headlights of his 1928 Mercedes, and cut all the left sleeves out of his jackets. Yet after these brawls, Addams always placated her and restored the peace. The union lasted two years, but Barbara’s affection persisted. She reappeared in his life in her sixties and couldn’t speak of him after his death without crying.

“It was impossible,” said his third wife, “Tee” Miller, “to stay mad at him.” Before their marriage in 1980, they had a furious altercation about seals in Long Island Sound and parted angrily. The next day the postman arrived at her door with an unsigned painting of the seal he’d seen. None of Addams’s lovers, including film star Joan Fontaine, forgot him, and at his funeral the room was packed with “all the ladies who doted on him.”

A great seducer can sometimes ratchet the tension and still secure passion, but he has to choose carefully. “God’s own mad lover” Jack London had a deadeye for his kind of woman. The turn-of-the-century American adventurer and author of
Call of the Wild
(among other works), London had a cataclysmic effect on women. It was “his fate,” he said, “to be able to win love easily.” A muscled roughneck, he had a face to launch a thousand fantasies—huge blue, dark-lashed eyes and a sensual mouth set in classic Phidian features.

But his allure for women went beyond pretty. He was an intriguing compound: a dominant alpha male and at the same time a sensitive poet and champion of talented, smart, and independent women. His adventures began early and always with strong proto-feminists who were his equal in the ring: Maggie, the only female “Oyster Pirate” in San Francisco; an intellectual socialite; an actress; a writer; and math teacher Bess Madden, with whom he contracted a “scientific marriage.” Throughout their three years together, he openly philandered, picking mistresses in vintage London mode. When star-struck candidates arrived at his California home, he handed them boxing gloves and fencing foils and subjected them to a “fierce but fun combat.”

At twenty-six he met his match, Charmian Kittredge, who swaggered into his life and outrode, outshot, and outfought him. The first time she beat him at fencing, “he grabbed her and kissed her.” He hailed her as his “Mate Woman,” divorced Bess, and married Charmian in 1905. Their union was a fourteen-year soap opera: torrid breakups and makeups, stray flings, and exotic second honeymoons with his “Dearest love woman.” Just before London’s premature death from kidney disease at forty, Charmian gave up in exhaustion and moved to the sleeping porch. But London was hard to dislodge. Although she had numerous affairs afterward (one with Houdini), she kept a nude photo of her “Mate Man,” taped on the windowsill at the back of her desk.

Couples, of course, vary in what they can stand, and most struggle valiantly in the trenches for harmony. Everyone fears
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
mayhem. Passionate love, though, comes with baggage—rage, fear, and angst. Ideal lovers turn this around. Always accounting for individual differences, they confront these demonic drives and transform them, through a negative-positive mix, into a high-grade aphrodisiac, one without an expiration date.

Inexhaustible Selfhood