Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  The others at the table didn’t know what she was talking about. I did.

  “No, I’m American.”

  “See,” she said to her table of friends, slowly, nasally, and I wasn’t at all surprised by her next question: “From Noo Yawk, right?”

  “Right.”

  She stood up to face her friends. “I told you!” she said in a loud stage whisper. Then to me, “I told them you were one of us. One of us, and American. Not that there aren’t tons of Americans in Rome. But they’re all tourists and other icky things. Hey!” to the other girls. “What are you waiting for? C’mon. C’mon!”

  The girl she’d been arguing with earlier leaped up from her chair to join us. “Hi guys! Are you really from New York? Where? East Tenth Street? Where’s Cicely? Oh, by the way, I’m Tina Ledger. That,” pointing to our first visitor who was now back at their table trying to convince the reluctant third to join us, “that’s Donna Slattery. And our friend,” pointing to the svelte, ash blonde who had stood up and was allowing herself to be tugged over, “is Cicely Bowen. We’re actresses.”

  If Donna was short and stacked and Cicely taller and slender and quite surpassingly Beacon Hill in her tweed tailored suit, then Tina was the Corn Belt personified, a flame-haired, curly headed Wisconsin farmerette, wearing yellow toreador slacks and a frilly paisley-patterned off-the-shoulder blouse I never expected to see outside of a Wyoming saloon.

  Without a doubt, separately the three were the best-looking women in the area. Together they were a spectacle. At our table, befriending me, they were an event. My Roman companions were more than pleased by the sudden company: In response Orazio and ’Cesco were sweet, they were attentive, they bought us drinks and coffee and dessert and they sincerely wished they knew more English for the “belle attrice Americane.”

  I almost wished they did too. Primarily because once comfy, the three women treated me as though we’d known each other for months rather than for two minutes. On and on they chatted, Cicely remaining the coolest, but Tina and Donna going on as though they were home in Flatbush or Dubuque, flirting, outrageous, throwing their arms around my shoulder, feeding me dessert on a fork, slipping a hand inside my shirt (three buttons open to my sternum like all the young men in Italy) to play with a nipple, turning to whisper to me, “I’ve had Dago men up to here, but these two seem sweet.”

  And I still couldn’t for the life of me figure how I was “one of us” as they kept saying. So when Donna and Tina got up to greet some pals at curbside in a super fantastic Ferrari, I looked at Cicely and in the style of our encounter so far, asked her point blank.

  “You know,” she responded offhandedly, “you’re not bouge.”

  I decided this was slang for bourgeois. “How do you know?”

  “Pre-cious, we can tell. You’re off. Just like we are.”

  “Off?”

  “Off. Daft, Daring. Dangerous. An artist or writer or layabout or … God, Donna,” she suddenly tried to get the others’ attention. “It’s Angel! There in that awful Principessa’s Lagonda. We’ve got to rescue him!”

  She jumped up and the others joined her in being lifted over the restaurant fence. They dashed into the slow moving traffic on the Via Veneto, and stormed an enormous pre-World War II sedan, pulling out of the backseat a giant young muscle builder—so pale blond he might have been an albino Samson—clad only in a pair of yellow skivvies, obviously borrowed, far too small for him.

  To shouts of Putane! from some female inside the car, the three girls hugged him, jumped all over him, then skipped over auto bumpers and had him lift them back into the restaurant.

  Close up, Angel looked exactly like his name. He was smashingly good-looking, tanned to a fare-thee-well, and didn’t seem to speak a word of Italian other than ciao.

  “Well, howdy there,” he drawled, sitting in a chair next to me which the girls finagled from another table. “These sweet thangs told me we wuz having a purty.”

  ’Cesco and Orazio were nonplussed by the arrival of this most competitive apparition. My eyes almost popped out at the sight of his pinwheel periwinkle blue eyes, his astonishing expanse of flesh, pectorals like dinner plates, waist-sized biceps, tree trunk thighs upon which Tina and Donna perched, explaining that Angel was a movie actor—he’d been in three films which had opened in the past six months, with dozens of lines, and he was another “one of us.”

  They introduced me, Donna saying, “Isn’t he cute, Angel? Couldn’t you just eat him up?”

  Angel reached around her back to deathgrip my neck in greeting. “Ain’t these wimmin fine, huh? They’re lak sistuhs to me since I came to Rome.”

  His arrival had not gone unnoticed. Several women from various tables came over, mostly middle aged and overweight and giggling shy, asking for autographs, which Angel provided, slapping one suddenly freed knee (it resounded like a side of beef) at his celebrity.

  A uniformed chauffeur pushed the last of Angel’s fans out of the way—evidently the abandoned Principessa’s driver—and stood arrow straight, saying something in a low voice and barely restrained fury, to which Angel replied, “You tell her Princesshood I’m all blown out, ya hear! Take me at least another hour or two to chum up some more stuff for her. Ya hear!” To which the chauffeur looked frigid with shock and homicidal mania, but merely snorted and stalked away. “Now where wuz we?” Angel asked, all innocence.

  He ordered and gobbled down a series of rich desserts (“building up my strength—and my virile liquids”) then promptly dozed off in his chair.

  This relaxed Orazio and ’Cesco who’d been quietly discussing leaving. But though they remained, it was soon made clear to them in Tina’s much accented and Cicely’s superb Italian that the girls were not to be had—at least not that night—and that in fact they were off to a party, late even by Roman standards, at some Count or other’s palazzo south of the city, near EUR, that fascist monstro-city Mussolini had never completed building. After a courteous period of time, the two men begged off and left, Orazio swearing up and down, complete with fraternal hugs and leers at the women, to call me the next day.

  “Don’t you leave too!” Donna warned. “You’re coming with us to Contino Eddie’s.”

  I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting up. Partly because I liked them; partly because I didn’t have to get up the following morning; partly because in his sudden sleep Angel had flung an enormous tanned arm across me, his giant hand landing precisely in my lap, under which my erection throbbed like a dangerously infarcted heart.

  The girls talked on, shouting ciaos at friends, suddenly falling into instant whispered conclaves when someone important from Cinecitta arrived—“We live, breathe and sometimes even work there,” Cicely confided. “Don’t look left,” Tina would quietly say to Donna, who of course couldn’t resist looking and would reply breathlessly, “It’s Piero”—or Mario or Enzo or Luchino or Claude … In less than an hour I knew everything about Tina and Donna’s Defoe-like fortunes in the Roman movie business over the past year and a half and, despite her reticence, a bit about Cicely’s too. And as we kept drinking wine, I became so at ease with them I slurred out a slip of the tongue: I called them “Stollywood Harlots.” Instead of being insulted, they loved it so much the name stuck for all four of them.

  Angel reawakened as suddenly as he’d fallen asleep, looked around, promptly found a waiter and ordered a zuppa Inglese which he accompanied with a plateful of cookies and three cappuccinos. When he lifted his hand off my crotch, he shook it a bit, saying “Dang near burned it!” Before I could perish of mortification, he leaned over to me and whispered, “Boy, you’d best do something about that thang.” He asked which of us had a car to get to Contino Eddie’s.

  None of us did, but Donna remembered a former boyfriend of some weeks before who worked in some executive capacity at the night desk of the nearby Excelsior Hotel, and talked the other girls into going with her to help convince him to loan his cap to them—an offer with so much acting and mischief pote
ntial, they couldn’t resist.

  As soon as they were gone, Angel paused in his destruction of a massive chunk of chocolate cake to say to me, “Now I wasn’t kiddin’ back there, boy. You ought to get into the jakes and whack that thang before it breaks through your trousers,” his periwinkle eyes fluttering through naturally long lashes Sylvana Koscina would envy, a smile on his lips stained foamy white from the cappuccino.

  “I think I could use the bathroom,” I said flushed and flustered, attempting to gather together the remaining shreds of my dignity.”

  “Nuthin’ to be ’shamed of,” he said as I stumbled away. “Only natural.”

  When I managed my way through the tables into the restaurant proper, I promptly bumped into someone. Still embarrassed from the talk with Angel, I blushed and murmured “Scusi. ”

  The man I’d knocked into stood back to let me by. The jacket over his shoulders, a la mode that season, made his shoulders even larger. A shock of straight straw-colored hair under an askew bone-white fedora was wetted or oiled so that every thick strand was visible. His forehead was high and wide, a single deep horizontal line creasing it suggested much thought and not a little suffering. Heavy brows and shaggy honey-hued eyebrows shadowed his Slavically angled sea-green eyes. A brush of wheaten mustache hid most of his top lip—the full lower one suggesting both—and cradled his short, asymetrically squashed prizefighter’s nose. A cleft in his chin completed the perfect jawline.

  “Va!” he said, in a mellifluous baritone. “Prego,” he added, gently, somewhat amused. I’d been so stunned by his golden looks I hadn’t moved. “Per piacere,” he now insisted.

  I finally got together enough sense to stumble toward the john; but once arrived at the door, I couldn’t resist turning around to look at him again. He was stopped, talking to a vampirical-looking black model. What held me was how completely he filled some idealized portrait of The European Man I’d developed, without ever being fully aware of it. It had happened over the years from various foreign films I’d seen, from glossy, glamorous full-color ads in The New Yorker and Esquire, where men exactly like him stood aloofly, a slight smile on their faces, as someone held their polo pony or a mannequin stepped out of an expensive automobile. Despite the fact that I’d been in Europe a month, in Italy a week and had seen my share of good-looking men, not a single one had so utterly encapsulated this particular cosmopolitan persona. Without having spoken more than a few pleasantries with him, I knew he was cultured and kind, pensive and provocative, sensual and considerate, deeply intelligent and yet caring. In short, I arrived at a terrifying, exhilarating, Aristotelian recognition that he was devastatingly attractive to me: the first male who had been attractive to me in more than a decade. Then he noticed me staring at him and glanced from my face down to my crotch, which sent me quickly inside.

  The Slavic god was gone when I got out. No, there he was, at a table not far from ours, sitting with the needle-thin model and a bald, fat man wearing an unseasonal knitted sweater and Ray-Ban glasses, despite the fact that it was now past midnight. I looked at my heartthrob and he looked at me as I managed my way back to where Angel was once more snoring, rejoined by the girls. As I pulled up and sat down the Stollywood Harlots were chatting away. “Kit was right there in the Excelsior bar,” Donna said. “He’ll be here in a min. Who are you glaring at?” she demanded of me.

  “He’s glaring back,” Donna said, angling to get a better look past other diners. “Now he’s raising a glass of wine. Cis, isn’t that …”

  “Djanko the T,” all three girls said at once and in a somewhat hushed tone.

  “Who?” I asked. Like a fool, I’d also raised my glass to him. Maybe not like a fool, as he smiled and I saw a row of strong white teeth peeping out of that bushy mustache and those thick lips. I was erect again.

  “Djanko Travernicke, the hottest director in Cinecitta!” Tina murmured. “Do you know him?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I bumped into him.”

  “Angel, wake up!” Donna said, “Djanko the T is toasting our new pal.”

  Angel not only instantly woke up, he also stood up, then did a most amazing thing: raising his clenched fists, he began to ripple his muscles at Djanko. Up and down they bumped and thumped and rolled along his arms, chest, stomach and back, until I thought I would collapse from overstimulation.

  Applause and shouts of Bravo greeted this display, and Djanko now raised his glass to all of us in a toast.

  “I believe we got his attention,” Cicely understated it.

  Angel sat down again, smiling, and reached forward for more food.

  Seconds later an insistent car horn turned out to be Kit, picking us up. Before we’d paid, gotten out from the mess of tables and onto the street, the fat man with dark glasses who’d been at Djanko’s table managed to take Cicely aside and speak to her. I didn’t hear what he said, but she replied in Italian numbers.

  Kit turned out to be an Australian sheep heir, a playboy who’d lived in Rome almost twenty years—“long after he was still new or cute,” Donna confided—who seemed delighted to have our company in his flashy chrome and acid-green Buick convertible. Tina and Donna jumped in front. Angel, Cicely and I in back, and Kit revved away from the curb despite the slow, tight traffic, with much shouting from the girls and burning rubber from the rear tires.

  Once we were on the road Kit took every curve as though he were driving in the Mille Miglia. This either tossed the beauteous Cicely into my arms, or more often threw me into Angel’s huge outstretched curved arm, where I finally ensconced myself, Cicely’s head in my lap so the wind wouldn’t mess her hair. With each sharp turn, Angel would holler out a bloodcurdling “whoopie!” and hold me tighter. Contented as I was at that moment, I still couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the restaurant. I was certain he was attracted to me if by no means as bowled over as I was by him. But how could I meet him? And what if once I did meet him, he turned out to be as densely heterosexual as Orazio?

  At the huge barococo gates to the palazzo, we met others driving out again. The party was a drag, they told us in four languages, even Eddie had left to go to Ulrica’s place in the Alban Hills.

  “Where?” Kit asked.

  “Follow us,” one car full of revelers shouted.

  During the ride, I fell asleep. Once we’d arrived (Cicely later told me) Donna and Tina thought I looked so “darling” they convinced Angel to carry me inside and put me into a small bedroom on the second floor of this seventeenth-century country villa, a palace built by a Pope for his Cardinal nephew and their mistresses. I must have napped about two or three hours. When I awakened, I wandered through rooms full of people, a rather disorganized, slowly-ending party. I found a bottle of cognac but no glasses and sipped from the bottle neck as I searched the large old chambers, looking for the people I’d come with. Outside one room I heard laughter, and the door opened to reveal Tina—quickly pulling up her paisley blouse—with two men. One of them turned out to be Contino Eddie, the other an Austrian Olympics ski champion. They invited me in and offered me a pipeful of burning hashish. I smoked and left again when all three began to undress each other. Finally, in the library I spotted Cicely who took my arm, pointing us outside where an enormous flagstone terrazzo wound around the palace. The night sky was beginning to pale. It was still too early for birdsong.

  We strolled silently past French doors ajar upon rooms with people sitting, talking, or sprawled sleeping in chairs and on beds. At one window-door I saw Angel flat on his stomach, snoring away, his yellow skivvies pulled down to his ankles, Kit fully clothed astride those giant calves, his hands separating those large, hairless buttocks, Kit’s tongue about to dart into Angel’s unsuspecting rectum. Casually, Cicely pulled a curtain, and murmured “I swear, that boy could sleep through an earthquake,” and we sauntered on. We stopped where a double stairway broke the terrazzo’s length of balustrade and descended to a tiny fountain where a travertine satyr was ravishing an alabaster nymph in graphi
c detail.

  “Would you believe me if I said I was still a virgin?” Cicely asked pensively.

  “Why would you say a thing like that?” I asked back.

  She stared at me, then giggled. “Donna was right about you. Well then, would you believe me if I told you that I was a fat and hateful little girl. And that I want more than anything to be a famous actress just to spite all the people I grew up with back in Marblehead?”

  “No. I think you were a beautiful little girl. Your burning ambition to be an actress is to prove to yourself that you’re worthy of all the attention you got.”

  “You clever thing! That’s exactly right! Now, your turn. Go on. What’s your burning ambition?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s writing. But first I have to live, I guess.”

  “You should write for the movies since you’re here,” she said.

  “I couldn’t possibly do that!”

  “Well then,” she temporized, “you should at least try your hand at translations. You know they make scads of films here of all sorts, then sell them all over the world. You could help translate them into English. That’s mostly what I do in Cinecitta, except of course for fending off lewd offers. I’m the only one of the three of us who works steadily, you know.”

  “Well, maybe. But I didn’t come to Rome to work in the movies.”

  “Don’t try to tell me you came to look at the Vatican and all that trash?”

  “No.” Then it just blurted out of me: “I came to fall in love.” She looked astonished then giggled, but instantly stopped herself. “Pre-cious! What a lovely idea. I’ll help. Do you have a clue who it is?”

  Now I hesitated. “Someone I met tonight.”

  “Please don’t say it’s me,” she begged.

  “No,” I said, but didn’t know how to say more. “I’m not sure, of course. But I think,” I went on, checking her aurora-lighted face for reaction, “I think it may be that man in the restaurant. The director,” I explained.

  Both of her perfect eyebrows went up a bit. “So that’s why the Pig wanted our telephone number. So Djanko could get hold of you!”