The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  I wanted to respond gaily. To make an impression, to show I was intelligent, well-read, sympathetic, and to suggest that his work interested to me greatly. But I found myself mute, my tongue thick with anxiety. I did not really understand why he needed so many research assistants, and wondered about Holly and Marisa. An evasiveness in Grant’s descriptions of them puzzled me.

  “We’ll have bundles of time to chat,” he said. “Perhaps I can teach you something. One never knows.”

  I had no doubt that many lessons lay ahead, and this appealed to me. I’d had fantasies about mentors—strong father-figures who could explain the world to me and set me straight. I had eagerly sought them out, with small success. There was a teacher at Columbia, Professor Justin Lorimer, who offered a course in Roman poetry that I took during my sophomore year. He had focused on me attentively, and I found the quality of thought in my papers improving under his critical gaze. But I wanted more from him that he could give me, and he seemed uncomfortable when I began to stop by his office without anything specific in mind. Once, he said he was “in the midst of something,” and began to read in my presence.

  In retrospect, I suppose this yearning for mentors had something to do with my own father’s remoteness, although this sort of speculation didn’t interest me at the time. All I knew was that Rupert Grant immediately inspired in me feelings of longing. He represented a world I desperately wanted to possess myself. I wanted his counsel and help, his guidance. Mostly, I wanted his approval.

  “Try the water, lad. It’s tolerable,” he said. “But be careful. There’s an undertow. People don’t realize…”

  “I’m a pretty good swimmer,” I said.

  “Even so,” Grant said, with an ominous glance at the sea. “I’ll say no more.” He shook water from his left ear, hitting himself on the other ear with the heel of his palm. “When you’ve had enough, come to my study. We’ll have a cup of tea.”

  I could see that teatime came often at the Villa Clio, and that I would have to acquire a taste for the ritual as much as the substance itself. As I discovered, the British do not so much travel as transport their ways to better climates.

  I stepped blithely into the water, and could see at once what Grant meant by an undertow. A weaker swimmer might easily be tugged under. I lost my footing at one point, stumbling, having to fight the current as I began to swim. I cut through the worst of it with strong overhand strokes as invisible paws tugged at me, trying to drag me down. When a wave caught me off-guard, crosswise, I swallowed a mouthful of salty water, and began to retch. For a moment, I thought I might actually drown. Only by intense focus was I able to churn forward, ignoring my discomfort, my fear, and a sense of disorientation. Only when I got about half a mile from shore, where the currents were deep, did I feel at ease again, treading water, with my back to the horizon.

  The island was impressive from that vantage: pink-amber in the late afternoon light, the Faraglioni—rocks like raised, geologic fists—sheer on my right, and the presiding peak of Mount Solaro high above on the left, wreathed in cloud. The hillside was dotted with white villas and expensive hotels, all neatly buried in the carefully tended landscape. Expensive yachts flying international flags—Monaco, France, Liechtenstein, Belgium—moored in the bay of the Piccola Marina, while half a dozen fishing boats stalled in my peripheral vision.

  I could just see the tiny figure of Rupert Grant, arms akimbo, on the beach. His abrupt, determined, elusive manner had taken me by surprise, and I foresaw that life at the Villa Clio would not be simple or straightforward. If I had thought it would be, this was merely a function of my own foolishness or wishful thinking. One inevitably tries to look ahead, imagining in detail the physical and emotional landscape that lies in wait, but these attempts are vain. Life at the Villa Clio was beyond anything I might have constructed in my head. The actual Vera Grant, I feared, was more aggressive and complicated than my hypothetical Vera, whom I knew only from a photograph on the jacket of a brightly illustrated cookbook I had seen at Rizzoli, in New York, before leaving. Rupert was less penetrable than I imagined, from his essays, he might be; there was something northern and inaccessible there, a granite quality, a self-protectiveness. But I cautioned myself to draw no conclusions. “Expect nothing, and you will always be pleasantly surprised,” my grandfather often said, translating an old Neapolitan saying. It seemed, under these circumstances, like excellent advice.

  four

  I lay awake that night, thinking about a letter from Nicky, written within a week of his arrival in Saigon.

  Dear Asshole,

  Arrived Saigon. Not what I expected, but what the hell can anybody expect anywhere?

  You’d never know there was a war on. Taxi cabs running up and down the streets, lots of restaurants, people sitting on the sidewalks, drinking beer, making jokes. Looks kind of happy to me. And if it weren’t for the occasional Army jeep, you’d say, shit, this is vacationland.

  Just waiting and watching, scratching and snoring. That’s the problem with this war, they tell me. Gotta make it happen, so says my friend Eddie Sloane, another asshole like you (he dropped out of a college somewhere in Iowa). I better do something before I lose my fucking mind.

  Lots of girls and cheap, too, I’m told. Beautiful, in their weird yellow way, with long legs and skinny necks. Fuck like bunnies. If you’re lucky your dick won’t swell up like one of Dad’s big zucchinis and drop off. (Remember those zucchinis? Big motherfuckers, weren’t they? He used to come into the kitchen with them in September and scare the shit out of Mom, waving a big one around. “Put that goddamn thing away,” she’d say.)

  Dad isn’t the kind of guy who normally waves his club. You aren’t either. Nice and quiet types. Peaceful and easy. Mom likes that, huh? I guess I scare her, since I’m never nice and not very quiet, except when stoned. Booze still sends me screaming through the streets, so I got to be careful. Pot is more peaceful, right? I mean, you don’t feel like killing somebody after a good joint. You don’t mind so much if they take you down. We all gotta die sometime.

  Excuse my rambling. If I don’t sound exceptionally intelligent, blame the weather. I’ve got a good excuse, believe me. It’s so fucking hot day and night, your brain gets like a piece of chocolate left on the dashboard in mid-August. Like a wet piece of shit. So you say things you wouldn’t say to anybody back home, and you talk bullshit all night because you can’t sleep and don’t want to, in case you don’t wake up. Eddie and I talk all the time. Iowa is nowhere, I tell him. Back in Pennsylvania we pronounce it O-hi-o.

  We tell stories when we can’t sleep, trading them like you and I used to trade baseball cards. He knew everything there was in just a few nights about all of us. About Mom’s fat ass and Dad’s big empty tasteless zucchini and your humongous fucking classical brain and literary presumptions. Is that the word? I’m no fucking writer, but I know what I like.

  PFC Fucking Massolini. Who’s that? I got another month or so here, they tell me, in Saigon. Then up country we go, over the river and through the woods. Can’t wait. Proud to serve. Mr. Rawhide himself, with my M-16, gas-operated, ready to rock. Got twenty rounds in the magazine. Thing weighs 8.2, not including the strap. And not including the fucking grenade launchers they’re hoping to teach me to launch, which means you’re also stuck with ten or so extra rounds of ammo. A lot to hump and haul through mosquito swamps and elephant grass when you’ve got jungle rot and wanna scratch and dust your balls with DDT.

  Eddie’s part Indian, he claims, so they made him the medicine man. (We call him Sitting Bullshit.) Bastard’s gonna haul bandages, iodine, plasma, morphine, tape, hypodermics, all that glassy, gooey, spooky shit. Save your fucking life in the right (or wrong) situation, so he’s got to haul it. The walking drugstore.

  Speaking of humping, you still got your cherry? I hear those girls in the Ivy League are pretty damn tight-assed, all talk and no action. A hand-job in the library stacks if you’re lucky. Come out here, and get laid in style. There�
�s a whole street in Saigon, Ding Dong Avenue, they call it. Stopped by last night. You’d love it, man—regular shopping mall for tits and ass. Take your pick, honey. You stand in the lobby and point, then the Momma unites you in the elevator, till death do you part. The bitch takes you upstairs, saying things with a shit-eating grin like “Americans big money” and “U.S. soldier good man in bed.” Nice bathtubs, where she scrubs your nuts and prick. Big beds, mirrors on the ceiling so if you’re into that kind of kinky shit you can watch yourself hump (if you’re on your back). Or maybe she can watch you hump. They seem to like it, the fucking, though you can’t tell shit from their Shinola. I can’t anyway, but what did I ever know?

  Dad got all emotional and told me the night I left that he learned something in The War, but he never said what. Started to say something about Italy. About Salerno. But the words didn’t come easy and he just quit talking. Like whatever he learned over there wasn’t worth saying or was too deep to spit it out. I don’t honestly think I’ll learn a fucking thing in Nam. Don’t believe there’s anything much to pick up here except the crabs.

  “Is there a God?” Eddie keeps asking me—it’s like the biggest question in Iowa, he claims. “If so, how did he think up all this shit? How did he come up with Nam?” Maybe he’s a demonic genius, I said to him. Maybe he’s bored. This whole fucking mess happened because there’s nothing on TV up there in heaven, and you can’t lay an angel.

  I told Eddie he should ask you the biggies, and that there’s more to you than meets the eye. Underneath it all, you got some balls. I believe that. You come on quiet at first, but then somebody bangs up against your wall, and you squeal.

  By the way, if Uncle Sam Wants You, take my advice. Give Uncle the big finger. No good is coming out of this war, that’s for sure. Whatever Dad says, he’s wrong. He’s “so proud of me,” he writes. Mom writes nothing, though she sends clippings from the Wilkes-Barre Record. Just the sort of info I really want to know, like who in my high school class got knocked up and had to ring the wedding bells. Not me, I tell you. I’m not going home, not to Luzerne County. That’s history. It’s funny how clear you can see things from a distance. I recommend it, though you might think of Paris, not Saigon, as about the right sort of distance. You think about home in ways you never could when it’s right around the corner, or in your face.

  I could have chucked it, the war thing. Gone to Canada like Buzz Mooney or shattered my pinkie toe with a jackhammer like Benny Dixon’s cousin from Nanticoke. Some days I think I should have pinched the doctor’s butt at the physical or just walked into the exam with a real hard-on and started jerking off on the spot. Guys do that kind of shit, and it works. But I made a decision. Just do it. Go to the fucking war.

  Sometimes you just got to do something. Whatever it is, you got to make it happen, goddamn it. Make it happen. You do what you got to do, Asshole. And you do it well.

  Hey, enough philosophy for one letter. War turns you philosophical, they say. Eddie claims there is more philosophy in this platoon per square inch than at Harvard and Yale, and I swear he’s right. You should hear some of this shit. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll pass along some of the good stuff, and maybe someday it will mean something to you. Then again, maybe it won’t.

  So write me, Asshole, when you can take a minute off from slapping your dick around. I don’t know why I’d like to hear from you, since you’re a prick and always were, but I would.

  Your Big Bro in Lotus Land,

  Nicky

  five

  Maria Pia pointed in the direction of Grant’s study. “He is expecting you,” she said, in the local dialetto. Given her tone and expression, she might well have said, “He will cut off your prick if you disturb him, but be my guest.”

  I knocked softly.

  “Indeed,” he shouted.

  Indeed? I leaned close to the door, then knocked again.

  “Lorenzo, I’m waiting.”

  He was slumped in a leather chair, wearing his wire-rimmed reading glasses. La Stampa was open on his lap, and a glass of neat whiskey lay half drunk on the table beside him. His white, voluminous hair stood up like a coxcomb, complemented by frothy eyebrows that seemed to move independently of each other. “So you like to swim,” he said. “I didn’t wait for you to come ashore.”

  I felt guilty. “Were you expecting me sooner?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but no matter. I will get Maria Pia to bring us tea, unless you’d rather whiskey?”

  “Tea is fine.”

  “Good. Sit down.”

  While he was gone, I scanned the room. The wooden desk was a trestle table that faced out from the wall, smothered in scraps of paper. A fountain pen lay beside a pot of India ink, and I remembered that the two letters he’d sent me were elegantly scripted, not sloppily typed or scratched in ballpoint. A dagger—unsheathed—glimmered beside the inkpot; it had a carved ivory handle. On the opposite wall were marks in a wooden board, the signs of target practice.

  There was a colorful map of the ancient world beside the board, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the other walls that supported an extremely old set of the Encyclopedia Britannica; below it, the New York edition of Henry James vied for attention with a handsome set of Balzac in purple cloth bindings. Odd volumes of the Temple Shakespeare scattered among other books. One shelf was devoted to Italian novelists and poets, most of them fairly recent: Eugenio Montale, Ignazio Silone, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi. Moravia was there in abundance. Gore Vidal’s Julian nestled beside I, Claudius. There was a nice run of Graham Greene in what looked like first editions. (As I soon learned, most of them were signed by Greene, who had spent a part of each year in Anacapri since 1948.) Brideshead Revisited was there, too, with a faded spine.

  “What ho,” Grant said, entering with a tray in his hands. It would take some time for me to get used to this affection for Edwardian phrases, like odd snatches from P. G. Wodehouse. “We can get down to it,” he said, taking his seat. “Can you take dictation?”

  “Not in shorthand,” I said.

  “No matter. I’ll dictate slowly. You can write slowly.”

  I nodded.

  “Of course, you’ll type my letters and manuscripts.” He looked at me nervously. “You do type?”

  “Yes.”

  “Americans are good typists,” he said, “but that’s where it ends. Nothing of real interest in your literature.” He poured my tea through a strainer. “I take that back. Nothing of interest since Henry James. Do you like James?”

  “I’ve only read The Turn of the Screw.”

  He sighed. “We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?” After handing me the cup, he found a paperback of The Europeans, which he put on the tea tray. “Read this first, it’s early James. Easy to follow. We’ll move slowly. Eventually, you’ll be ready for the good stuff. The Wings of the Dove is best, I suspect.”

  “Why not start there?”

  “You would crumble. It takes time to get used to his methods, the periphrasis…Trust me, Alex. I’ve been through this before with Americans. They’re brought up on Hemingway. Very destructive influence, Hemingway. Baby talk.”

  Patriotic reflexes I had not known about sent an unfamiliar tingle through my body. “You don’t like Hemingway?”

  “He was a silly man, a minor figure. There is one decent book of stories, the first, I think—some lovely things there. Nick Adams and so on. After that, it’s mostly bluster.” He settled back into his chair, balancing the tea on his lap. “Faulkner is better, I suppose, but he’s an acquired taste. I’ve never acquired it.”

  “I like Fitzgerald,” I said. I actually loved Fitzgerald, but didn’t want to overstate the case. Whole paragraphs from The Great Gatsby lingered in my head like poems.

  “Pretty writing,” he said, dismissively. “Americans like pretty writing. Joseph Hergesheimer, James Branch Cabell, Fitzgerald.”

  I didn’t dare ask who were Hergesheimer and Cabell, but I got the point. “What about our poets?”<
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  “Our poets?”

  I ignored his baiting. “Eliot, for example? Or Frost?”

  A bemused look crossed his face.

  “Whitman? Or Emily Dickinson?”

  “Eliot, yes. I used to see him in London—a remarkable ear: Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged. That’s it. Excellent critic, too. Who could resist The Sacred Wood? Frost was a decent poet, but I can only take him in small doses. And the shorter the poem, the better. Whitman I admire, in bits and pieces, and Dickinson, yes. Monotonous, perhaps, but memorably so.”

  “The Sacred Wood?”

  “Eliot’s essays—the early ones! Good God, man.” Disgusted, he plucked a copy of that slim volume from a shelf behind his desk and piled it on top of The Europeans. “Read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ It puts paid to most criticism written since. You can ignore the book reviews. He tends to fuss a bit.”

  “What about Auden?” I said.

  “He’s English, no matter what he claims.”

  “You and he were friends at Oxford?”

  “We were contemporaries. But I was at Magdalen, so we met only in passing. We got to know each other later.” He slumped in his chair. “Everyone knew that he was the important poet, even before he published anything. Stephen printed his first poems on a small press. I still have my copy.”

  “Stephen?”

  “Spender,” he said, exasperated. “Stephen is not a poet, but he looks the part. Rather dreamy, Stephen. They pay him huge sums in America to play the great bard. Someone has to do it, I suppose.”

  I told him I admired Auden, and he told me “Wystan” and his companion, Chester, had once owned a house on Ischia, a neighboring island. “He might turn up this summer. There is such a rumor afloat.”

  “I’d like to meet him,” I said.

  Of course Grant knew many of the people he mentioned, but I felt a mingling of awe and suspicion whenever he dropped luminous names, as he often did. How had he managed to befriend so many poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, journalists, film directors, and actors? Was Britain such a small world that, as he once claimed, after a while you knew everyone?