Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  I thought that was rushing to conclusions and said so.

  She shushed me. “Djanko is perfection for you, Precious. Rich, powerful, restless, temperamental, unfulfilled. I couldn’t have chosen better for romance if I’d tried.”

  “Except,” I had to say, “What if he’s not … interested,” I added lamely, not wanting to reveal myself as the bouge she thought I wasn’t.

  She seemed not to hear me. She went on to tell me I mustn’t breathe a word about it to the other girls, who would mess it up trying to get jobs through me. “Leave it to me,” Cicely concluded, rubbing my cheek ever so softly. “This will be fun!”

  Not too many years later, under a different name, Cicely became quite famous as an actress. She made a dozen films, went on to some plum roles in West End theaters, even had a longish run in one Broadway play and was nominated for a Tony award. Then she disappeared; married—I guess—to a young man from Marblehead, Mass., having proved to herself that she was indeed worthy of all the attention her regal looks had brought her. Of the three of them, only Cicely fulfilled her acting ambitions—if only for a decade. In fact, of all the young Americans at Cinema City I came to know, only she got what she wanted.

  So, you can assume that such a small and easy thing as matchmaking would be a cinch for her.

  I awakened on the floor of the girls’ flat about noon, the phone ringing in that particularly insistent way of Italian telephones. I wondered if I could negotiate my way over Angel slouched next to me in a dead sleep. Cicely was already up, dressed in a little wraparound smock, her hair freshly shampooed and done up in a pink towel turban. She spoke into the phone, then shooed the other girls away until they’d retreated into the bedroom they shared and closed the door. She looked to where Angel and I were sprawled—him out of the yellow skivvies—and turned away, then began speaking again in a somewhat haughty tone I’d not heard from her before. After several minutes of exchange, her tone of voice softened considerably. When she turned into profile, I could see her smiling. Still smiling, she said, “Si, si. Certo!” and then hung up.

  “All right you two,” she said loudly. “Get up. I’ve got jobs for you.”

  Tina and Donna tumbled out of the bedroom doorway from where they’d remained, unsuccessfully trying to overhear the conversation.

  “Not you two,” Cicely said. “Those two.”

  “Oh, Cis! How could you?” the girls whined.

  “I didn’t do a thing. It was a foregone conclusion. I merely pretended I was their agent so the Pig wouldn’t screw them too much. Wake up, Angel. Flexing time!”

  Tina and Donna stormed off into the kitchen, a room separated from the rest of the flat (eighth! floor walk-up) by a long sky-lit corridor. Once there, they could be heard making fresh coffee and loud rude comments on American boys taking the bread out of American girls’ mouths.

  Angel was awakened enough to hear, and shouted, “Hell! I gave you all eight hundred dollars worth of that there Monopoly money they paid me for my last movie, didn’t I?”

  Immediate apologies ensued all ’round, and kisses to make up. Sitting around the living room, we had a breakfast of coffee and day-old Italian bread smeared with apricot preserves. It was a most informal affair. Angel modestly pulled the sheets in which we’d slept up to his midsection, and when I tried to put on my clothing I was pushed back onto the floor, and so wore only my underwear. Tina and Donna wore bras and panties, their hair in curlers, and sat near us on the floor. Cicely had the only chair, poured coffee, jammed our bread and played mother.

  Once we were all settled and fed, she quietly and effectively explained what she’d set up for us. As we all thought, Angel’s impromptu exhibition of the night before had been noticed by the film director. Angel was to be screen tested for a small role in a Medieval historical film Djanko the T was in the middle of shooting. And if he worked out there, he would be tested for a much larger role—that of Hercules in the future Jason and the Argonauts production. This latter role was a co-starring one, third name down on the credits, with lots of action and not too many lines to learn.

  “When you go there today,” Cicely warned, “pick up something heavy in the room and swing it around. And Angel, wear a jockstrap, will you. Portions of your genitals have been seen in every screen test you’ve done in Rome.”

  Under Cicely’s special recommendation, I was to be personally interviewed by Djanko for a position as dubbing translator.

  “Whatever you want to do,” she warned, “resist the impulse and keep to business. I’ve given him a complete rundown on you. All lies, of course. He thinks you’re a Whitney or Rockefeller or something. I told him you’re a brilliant writer and just trying your hand at this for what you may learn of the film business for a novel you’re planning. He’s prepared to treat you like the crown prince.”

  “But I don’t even know if …” I began to protest.

  “/ know. He’s willing to pay you_____lire per hour (here she named some outlandish amount, which even when translated into dollars was a stiff tariff).”

  “The real trick,” Tina said, “is to always make them pay for it.” She was eating the sesame seeds off a small rotund St. Anthony’s roll, biting them off the hardened crust one at a time.

  “It’s true,” Donna agreed sagely. “In fact, it’s absolutely expected. In Rome if you get anything for nothing, you consider it worthless.”

  “Oh, come on,” I protested.

  “Ask anyone.”

  “I’ve never been paid,” Angel said with dignity, “except for work.”

  “Pre-cious!” Tina laughed. “You arrived home this morning with a sheaf of lire shoved in your underwear.” She reached for the skivvies and daintily holding them at a distance, shook them. Italian bills fluttered to the carpet.

  “Well, I’ll be … Where did that all come from?” Angel wondered.

  Cicely and I exchanged glances but kept quiet. She took the bills and doled them out to us, tucking a few into her towel turban.

  “Carfare,” she said succinctly. Then to me, “In principle, the girls are right. However there are always exceptions. I don’t for a second doubt that you’ll continue to be your pre-cious discerning self and know which is which.”

  Angel stood up to go to the john. He reappeared wearing not the yellow shorts but a tiny pair of sheer black panties he’d obviously found hanging in the bathroom. It looked like a posing strap and fit him spectacularly.

  Cicely groaned, “It’s ruined!”

  “Don’t it look good?” Angel asked, turning all around in front of us. “Hell, this better than a nasty old jock, ain’t it? Ain’t it?”

  WHAT I HAD TOLD CICELY about coming to Europe to fall in love was true, although I’d certainly never expected it to happen quite so quickly.

  The past half-decade or so had been romantically sterile for me. I hadn’t had a steady girlfriend since my junior year in college, when I stopped seeing Beverly because she was getting “too serious.” For the following three years I watched, slightly on the sidelines, as my college friends went into a series of unbelievable contortions over their women. Alex would fight with Barbara, then arrive at my apartment sodden drunk and threaten for three hours to join the army instead of going to Stanford Law School. Matthew would break up with Christa, and actively attempt suicide when she announced her engagement to Kenny. Horrified yet fascinated, I observed all these goings-on—and wondered. I’d never once felt possessive, jealous, suicidally depressed, or furious enough to smash an apartment door over a girlfriend’s words or actions. Something was clearly wrong with me.

  I tried discussing the problem with Billy Lee, a sensible fair-skinned black co-worker who came from Springfield, Mass., and who shared with me an “interest” in eventually being a writer. It was Billy who logically if offhandedly suggested that I try out men. “Maybe,” Billy said between ordering draft beers for us at Stanley’s, our crowded Avenue B hangout bar, “just maybe, you’ll discover you can only become emotionally
involved with another guy!” Despite my distant memories of preteen sex with a neighborhood boy, I doubted if Billy Lee’s solution was the right one. But I also thought I felt an attraction to some men, so I decided to give it a try.

  In the following months I allowed myself to be picked up by men maybe a half dozen times. These brief encounters always began most promisingly, with both of us sexually aroused—that is, until we got undressed and into bed—at which point I suddenly became completely turned off. I wasn’t nervous or frightened, I wasn’t in the least bit concerned with what someone “might think.” I was bored; or at least put off in some other inexplicable manner. I wouldn’t take his cock in my mouth, would barely touch it, and the one time a man tried to fuck me it hurt so much I almost punched him out. A few times I let myself be sucked off—but even this wasn’t always possible if I couldn’t stay hard. In most cases, less than five minutes after we’d strolled in through the apartment door, I’d be up, dressing rapidly, mumbling asinine apologies, leaving some poor frustrated guy to wonder what he’d done wrong, how he’d turned me off, and why he would have to jerk off alone, again.

  The sixth time it happened, I promised myself would be the last time. I’d been told both by close friends and by Beverly that I was cold and unfeeling, incapable of love. Fine. I’d accept that judgment. It wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me, was it? Anyway, I was still young. I had time. I could still fall in love. It happened when you least expected it. Happened to the most unexpected people. The right person would still come along. Not the right man, mind you, or the right woman, because by this time, despite my brave front, I was unconsciously so desperate that anyone would do, regardless of gender.

  When I decided to give up my job at the Department of Welfare instead of being promoted to supervisor and to go to Europe, one of the items on my unwritten agenda had been “Fall in love.” Even so, I hadn’t expected it to happen.

  Despite that, and given all of Cicely’s buildup on the telephone, the first thing I did when I arrived at Djanko’s apartment-office suite at the Hassler was to tell him

  1. I didn’t really want a job.

  2. I wasn’t a Whitney or Rockefeller—obvious I thought from my name—but merely a middle-class New Yorker.

  3. Cicely wasn’t my agent, but she was a wonderfully talented actress and surely he had some small part for her.

  Djanko wore no hat inside, had no jacket slung over his shoulders. He did have on a sexy waist-pleated pair of white linen slacks, a royal blue polo shirt, and two-toned aerated wingtip shoes.

  At the time I thought he looked like a fashion plate from Gentleman’s Quarterly on current International Style. Years later, I would be leafing through our family photograph albums and come upon photos of my father taken in the late thirties when he was still single, and I would groan, seeing him in a virtually identical outfit. Djanko spoke in a deep voice, in not terrible English: “Then that’s why you came here?”

  “Pretty much,” I lied.

  “You could have told me that on the telephone, no?”

  “Yes.”

  He stood up from behind the desk and came over to where I sat in the office and to my complete astonishment, knelt down in front of me and took my hands in his own large, golden-haired hands. His perfectly combed hair glittered golden in the afternoon light, his eyes dancing green. “You came here, why? To make love?”

  “Yes,” I said, and immediately wondered that those words had come out of my mouth. “Certo. ”

  “You have done this before? In New York?”

  “Not really.”

  “Nor I too much. I was married to a woman. But a little bit, yes.”

  He kissed my hands lightly, looked up at me again, and I felt like a heroine in a Jane Austen novel receiving a marriage proposal.

  “My father, in Jugoslavia, belongs there to the Party. You know what I’m talking about? There he is a very serious Communist. All the time I was growing up, he would say to me ‘Djanko, remember the Americans are your enemy.’ At the same time, while I was a small child, he would read to me stories of the old Greeks, their legends and their myths—Hercules, Theseus, Andromeda, Perseus.

  “But when I came here to Rome, everywhere I looked, I saw Americans. They were not devils, as my father told me. Yet … Yet … they were not ordinary people like the Italians, like the French people. No. Those girls, that boy Angel, and you, especially you, you are all to me like those people in the Greek legends my father told me. Some Italians make fun of you, call you the new conquerors of the world, despite yourselves. But even they wonder how it is that even the most innocent of you come among us as though … as though you know something.”

  “Know what?” I asked confused. He was getting it all wrong: he—the European—possessed all knowledge, all culture, not I the barbarian American.

  “I can’t say what. None of us know. That you are better maybe. That we are all small and old and ridiculous, maybe.”

  “I never thought that.” He smelled faintly of cologne, an odor more insidiously disturbing than any after-shave I’d ever inhaled; it inflamed me like an aphrodisiac.

  “It’s true!” Djanko said. “But what is most puzzling to us is that you want so very little from us, and we wreck our minds to wonder why that is.”

  “I want you,” I said, boldly, waiting for him to stand up and laugh, tell me the charade was over, and I could go—fool that I was to dare aspire.

  Instead, he continued to astonish me. “Caro. Since last night in the restaurant I am already yours,” he said, thrillingly. Then we went into the bedroom and I understood what it was like to be with a member of my own sex whom I adored. Without a thought, without a jot of the awkwardness, distaste, or free-floating boredom of the months before, I did everything with Djanko that all those men had expected from me in New York. Loved it, and excited, panting, sweating, loved him.

  That night after dinner (sent up to his rooms from a restaurant below) we made love again. During an interlude, Djanko said, “I spent all of last night trying to think who of you five were lovers with each other. Then I thought, ‘Wait, Djanko. These are Americans. It won’t do to think of them in the usual way.’ ”

  “Well, you’re right about that. We’re all just friends.”

  “Tonight I fly to Cannes on business. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. You’ll stay here, of course, from tonight on.”

  Later, we were sitting in a Via Veneto cafe watching the Kessler Twins singing “Danke Schoen” on the Scopetone—a movie and jukebox duo that never successfully crossed the Atlantic—and Djanko told me more of his childhood as a Young Communist, one of twenty boys and girls in the local party division who’d gone off on a combination summer camp and history/geography jaunt to Dalmatia.

  Djanko spoke of the basalt barrenness of those skyscraping rocky shelves, so cleanly broken they might have arisen out of the earth’s restless mantle the day before. He told me about the storm-swept sunsets observed from what had once been an overdecorated Grand Hotel. Magyar Princes and Italian revolutionaries, the principal residents of the previous century, had preferred their bit of nature unpredictable and few experiences could equal a piano recital in the glass-enclosed conservatory, lightning crackling to punctuate someone’s attempt at “Reminiscences of Norma.”

  In his eleventh summer, Djanko’s group had stayed a week at a People’s Summer Resort in a shell-shocked Romanesque abbey. Somewhere among the warren of tunnels and vaults was inlaid an icon of St. Stephen, a local patron, who, Djanko swore, looked like me—preordained me: “Greek, Italian, Spanish, Lebanese, echt Mediterranean.” During one of the many organized activities, young Djanko had run off and hidden in the vault. Discovered, he had been slapped across the face by his leader and dragged back to the others and later on censured for dawdling so long in front of the icon-studded wall with its unLeninist religious connotations.

  Long after midnight, we drove out of the city, past the airport to the Ostia seaplane basin. The
re, Djanko told me one of us would hurt the other and that he hoped I would be the one who left first.

  Coming so soon after eight hours of complete bliss, his statement was highly unnerving to me. “Why? Why even talk like that?” I asked. “It’s so fatalistic. So negative.”

  “Why? Because I’m a European. What choice do I have?”

  “Just get to and from Cannes safely, will you?” I demanded.

  Once the seaplane had buzzed off over the Tyrrenian, I started up the Maserati’s engine and left. Speeding back to Rome through a fog that shredded into mist and turned into a soft warm rain, I luxuriated in a new emotion compounded of jealousy, anxiety, longing, desire. I became angry, sad, terrified, hopeful, content again, all within seconds. Jesus, I remember thinking, this is weird.

  “I count only the sunny hours” reads the inscription on a bronze sundial I’d come across in a chateau garden in the Loire Valley. Were I to tell of mine and Djanko’s affair for the following months, it would be counting mostly sunny hours which are virtually alike and frankly more interesting to experience than to read about. So, I’ll pass over the idyll. Yet in the midst of our newfound romantic and sexual happiness, we also had problems, larger and smaller, and conflicts, which at the time didn’t seem at all irreconcilable. It was following what probably was our most outspoken argument that I came by that expensive Bulgari watch.

  Djanko’s housekeeper and cook, Mafalda, a squat barrel of a woman just past middle age, yet still black haired, had been with him since he’d been in Rome. That is to say, all through his early difficult days of living in a dingy flat in the Pincio—where she’d slept in a closet—right up to these palmy successful days in their seven-room Hassler suite, with hotel help to overlook for all the heavy work. That is to say, through Djanko’s earliest love affairs with waitresses and actresses and film students through his two-year marriage to Jocelyn, an Anglo-Irish magazine writer, right up through the separation and divorce, to me.