The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  I followed Patrice back to the converted garden shed he called home, saying good night to Father Aurelio at his door.

  “And don’t forget your confessions tomorrow—at noon,” he said, waving a finger at me, with a wry smile on the large red lips that bloomed, a pulpy flower, in the dark foliage of his beard.

  “You can expect me,” I said.

  The shed itself was not unpleasant or dirty, just cramped. In the dim light of several candles the room seemed cozy and benevolent. And the longer you remained inside its walls, the larger it seemed. “She seem to grow with familiarity,” Patrice mused. “I am notice this always.”

  “I could use a drink,” I said.

  Patrice agreed, uncorking a warm bottle of Tiberio. “This is special, 1966. I am said a good year for this wine.” I’d actually had enough alcohol already, but my appetite was aflame, and I was willing to ignore the wine’s temperature. In certain moods, drink calls to drink, and the world becomes expansively liquid. Patrice set the bottle on a rickety table and filled two mugs. After we’d drunk perhaps half the bottle, he lit a bowl of hash. “I have conned this from a boy at the hotel,” he explained. “It is Morocco. Very pleasant.”

  I said nothing as I took the pipe. Hash was unfamiliar to me, an exotic cousin of the usual pot I’d smoked in the States. We sat cross-legged on the floor, and half a dozen scented candles flickered in a semicircle around us. Smelling of cinnamon, the candle fumes blended nicely with the hash, which seemed abrasive, though I didn’t complain. The high came quickly, piggybacking on the alcoholic euphoria already in place, and I liked the combined effect.

  “You have saved my life, Alexi, and I owe you mine,” Patrice said, seeming to enjoy the grand gesture. He would have made a good character in a medieval romance by Sir Walter Scott, full of high sentence and portentousness. “Nothing you ask of me is impossible. Rien.”

  “We must defeat the English when they invade our borders,” I said, imagining myself as Robert the Bruce.

  “I will walk to the moon for you.”

  “You’re stoned,” I said.

  “No, Alexi. My sincerity must not be doubted.”

  I reassured him of my gratitude for his gratitude. It began to annoy me that he kept referring to the incident in the Blue Grotto. I would not have let anyone drown, friend or enemy, if I could help it. (I had not been an Eagle Scout for nothing.) If anything, saving Patrice this afternoon seemed insignificant, a feat of mere physicality and pure animal instinct.

  There was a time, long ago at Lake Winona in the Poconos, that kept rushing back to me. A present and palpable vision, not a dream. Nicky and I had gone fishing in a wooden canoe my father bought for us soon after we acquired the lakeside cottage. The night had been unseasonably cold (I think this happened in November, but I can’t be sure), and the water was chilly, with a mist rising off the lake at dawn as we rounded the point beyond our cottage and settled into a cove to fish. Stupidly, I managed to flip the canoe by reaching for bait. The tackle box scattered in a hundred bits and pieces, and the rods sank quickly. And so did I. I was eight, and had been swimming for several years, but a combination of things—the unexpected flipping of the canoe, the loss of my rod, the inability to kick because I wore rubber boots, and the frigid water—unraveled my composure. I must have gone down two or three times before I felt Nicky’s hand in my hair. He dragged me confidently to shore, boots and all.

  I never thanked Nicky. If anything, I treated him badly for having demonstrated his physical superiority, complaining to my mother when I got a cold that it was Nicky’s fault. He had, I said, insisted on fishing, when it was obviously too cold. We never spoke about this incident, not until Nicky wrote to me from Vietnam. “Asshole,” he said, “you remember when you tipped the fucking canoe and then blamed me for everything, even though I saved your lousy can? I lost a brand-new tackle box and two good rods, and Dad had to fetch the canoe. And then Mom rode my case for a month, saying I should look out for you. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  I suppose it was out of rage and resentment that Nicky became a howling James Dean cliché: the kid who sought and found trouble in the usual places. That he managed to do reasonably well at King’s, a respectable local college, had not registered with anyone but my father—who consistently found something to praise in Nicky. My mother simply ignored Nicky’s successes, being so awed by my golden performances that anything with fewer karats and less gloss seemed irrelevant. Nicky glowed only after a six-pack of Rolling Rock; he smoked unfiltered Camels, snapped his gum at the most irritating moments, and hung around with monosyllabic guys on motorcycles with girlfriends in matching leather jackets. My mother derided all of this, never losing the chance for a subtle put-down. In retrospect, it amazes me that Nicky didn’t explode, though maybe he did.

  “It is good, no—the hashish?” Patrice wondered, exhaling. “My mind, she fizzes.”

  “Aussi moi, mon ami. J’aime beaucoup hashish. Je suis tres content e plus haute que le ciel,” I said. My fractured French—spoken with a self-conscious American twang—always amused him, and I enjoyed launching forward onto these weak limbs of language, tumbling into a grammatical abyss, forcing winces from Patrice.

  “You don’t like it when Vera, she massage you, yes?” Patrice loomed into view, transfigured by the candlelight. I could swear I saw a halo around his head, but it must have been a weird refraction.

  “What was that?”

  “Vera, when she rub your neck. You told me this story about what she did. It was no fun for you,” he said.

  I could finally cut through the haze of mangled syntax and hashish.

  “Do you like her?” he asked.

  “I don’t dislike her.”

  “I think you like her very much, Alexi.”

  “Okay, I like her fine. But it’s not relevant, since she is somebody’s wife, and she could be my mother.” The edge of anger in my voice took me by surprise.

  “I would like to give you the massage myself, but it would displease you, I’m afraid. But I am very good at this, the Swedish massage.” Patrice was deeply stoned, his eyes glassy. His face was uncannily like Nicky’s—though my brother’s face was hard to recall. He did not photograph well, and the picture I kept in my wallet only vaguely resembled him, flattening the features so that he seemed broader and blander of visage. I guessed that Patrice, too, would lose something in photographic reproduction.

  Before I could confirm or deny anything, Patrice came around behind me. He began to knead my shoulders, his hands surprisingly strong. I tensed—as I had with Vera. I wasn’t comfortable with this form of intimacy, and the fact that Patrice was a man rattled me as well.

  “Be soft, my goodness,” he said, “you are very stiff for me tonight.”

  The hashish felt like a safety net spread out below me, an emotional cushion. I relaxed, taking a long draft from the pipe as he worked. The smoke fit my lungs tightly. Holding my breath, I let the chemicals mix with my blood, sensing a pleasantly silken numbness in my outer limbs. My head was predictably light, though I wasn’t dizzy. I felt wonderfully clear-eyed. And I soon began to enjoy the mastering hands of Patrice as they worked the fibers of my neck and shoulders, then traveled toward the middle of my back, fingers leaping from vertebra to vertebra like stones in a stream.

  “You must lie on the bed so I continue,” he said. “I will perform the best massage you have imagine.”

  With my shirt off, I lay down on my stomach on the bed, my face to the left, toward the wall. Patrice sat beside me, out of view, working with unrepressed fury, folding and unfolding muscles, digging and kneading, finding crevices that I had not realized were part of my anatomy. A knot of nerves would harden, then relax, as if summoned only to be banished. He played with nimble fingers, seeking and finding a kind of sensual music—odd fifths and hauntingly diminished chords, tonic and subtonic combinations that drew emotions from me I had not confronted directly before. When he rubbed my feet, I found myself quietly weeping. Was
it thoughts of Nicky that were released? Some lines from his letter came floating into my head: “Dying ain’t so bad,” he wrote. “We’re all atoms, huh? Death is just a rearrangement of matter. It’s just another way of putting the same old thing.” Under the controlling hands of Patrice, I felt the separation of spirit and matter occur—the strands gently untwined, my soul lifted and laid clear as the flesh was isolated and calmed.

  Patrice would have liked to complete, sexually, the experience he’d set in motion that night. I understood that, but held back, refusing to let myself surrender in that way, even when he straddled me to get better leverage as he massaged my shoulders. The weight of him, the pressure of his body lengthening against my own, was overpowering and affecting, but I kept a hand firmly on my internal rudder, intent upon steering this skiff (which could easily get out of control) in ways that would not torment me in the morning.

  “Go to sleep, ami,” he said. “You are tired, I see that. You must dream now.”

  Trusting him enough to let myself go, I floated away on a dark swell of exhaustion, entering a dream as one enters a warm bath, relaxing into the contours of a phantasmagorical world that seemed only a brief step from where my hash-filtered mind had been in the last couple of hours anyway. Like a child in some magical library, I wandered from volume to volume. I kept meeting Father Aurelio in these books. He kept inviting me to the confessional, and I went. I confessed to all sorts of sins, real and imagined. And I was forgiven. Over and over.

  Throughout the night I was vaguely aware of Patrice beside me: the musty smell, the tight skin and unwashed hair, the smoky breath. It was soothing, as when Nicky and I, as children, would sleep in the same bed on special nights, when our parents were out of town or, unforgettably, on the nights before Christmas. When I woke just before dawn, I realized I had an arm around Patrice’s waist, but was not upset because we were friends after all. We were very good friends.

  six

  Father, I have sinned.

  Tell me, son. What have you done?

  It’s of a sexual nature.

  Be explicit, please. Remember, it’s God you are talking to, not me.

  I’ve been fucking goats, Father.

  Goats are bad. I mean, for fucking. Anything else?

  I have not loved my neighbors as myself.

  On Capri? You’ve neglected your neighbors? The place is crawling with neighbors. Not like it used to be. I remember the old days, when—

  Father?

  Yes, my son?

  You’re ignoring me. I have sinned.

  Tell me, child. What have you done?

  I’ve abused myself.

  Masturbation…

  No, I’ve been killing people, stealing things, and so forth. My neighbor’s wife, I fucked her and her goats as well.

  Masturbation is worse.

  It is?

  Theoretically. That’s the one thing I remember from seminary.

  You masturbated in seminary?

  No, I was taught never to masturbate. It comes between you and God.

  God really cares?

  Very much so, my child. He cares about all His creations.

  I am wicked, Father.

  Nonsense. I mean, we’re all wicked.

  Even you?

  I’m a priest. What do you expect?

  I want absolution.

  That’s hard.

  I thought the confessional was ideal for that sort of thing.

  Only if you believe.

  You think I don’t?

  I know it. That goat thing. And the neighbor’s wife. The killing, the thieving.

  I was only kidding.

  You shouldn’t have done that. I believed you.

  You’re gullible.

  I’m a priest.

  Now you’re kidding. Are you kidding?

  Forget it.

  If I hurt your feelings, Father—

  I said, forget it. I’m going to absolve you. Go home, child, and lead a clean life. Say ten Our Fathers.

  What about Hail Mary?

  Do what I tell you.

  Thank you, Father.

  Good man. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, your sins are forgiven. Go with God.

  Amen.

  Amen.

  seven

  I kept hitting roadblocks with my own writing—failures of nerve, mostly—and was incapable of finishing anything. One morning, sitting in the piazzetta beneath the candy-striped awning of a favorite café, I wrote a long story about two young men (closely modeled on Patrice and myself); they were both reading Sartre’s monumental work Being and Nothingness and their conversation was meant to represent two opposing philosophical camps. That afternoon, in Grant’s study, I asked him if it were possible to hold a reader’s attention for a dozen pages or so with a detailed conversation about Sartre’s philosophy. He did not hesitate with his reply: “Only if the two chaps are sitting in a railway car,” he said, “and the reader knows there is a bomb under the seat.”

  I had, of course, no metaphorical bomb under the seat, and I put the story in a drawer. Writing became a dreaded activity most days, but I could always read with pleasure, and it pleased me to read the novels and poems of Rupert Grant while living beside him. He had been generous with his books. “Take whatever you want,” he said. “Just put it back when you’ve done.” I burrowed my way through the novels I’d not yet read, and lingered in his Collected Poems: 1930–1968. The poems, in particular, gained weight and resonance by having Grant’s actual voice in my head, its Scottish whimsicality, with a mandarin pause at certain points in the delivery. My original respect for Grant, as a writer, enlarged, bordering on naked hero worship by the end of June. This expansion coincided with a continuing disillusion with the man himself.

  As a poet, he had come of age in the heyday of Georgian verse, with its simple lines, regular meters, and a sentimental view of nature. But even his early work had a tinge of modernity, as in “Ancient Lovers,” a lyric from his undergraduate days:

  Day by dream the summer long

  I loved you, ancient lover, when

  As young as apples, green and gold,

  We huddled by a windy fen.

  And when the season turned again.

  A world of shaken tinsel fell

  Like orange rain. We burned the leaves

  Yet learned from these our lives were frail.

  The winter came, and years; through hail

  Of time I loved you fervently

  And never lingered, looked behind.

  We met each season earnestly.

  And now I love you urgently,

  For spring has come with empty hands

  To ancient lovers, soon to sleep

  Forever under quilting sands.

  One could see the influence of Yeats there, of course—early Yeats, in particular, whose young apples would certainly have been “green and gold.” That “windy fen” seemed straight from the Georgian Anthology, and the sentimentality of the last stanza had roots in the Victorian age. But “day by dream,” that odd sleight of mind, anticipated the work of Dylan Thomas. The transition from “earnestly” to “urgently,” however, was pure Auden.

  I asked him about this one afternoon when I found him under a tattered straw hat that, with the large sunglasses, obscured his face to such a degree that I only knew it was him by the angle of his sloping shoulders and the rough, dark hands. He sat beneath his favorite lemon tree, in a folding chair, with a book spread on his lap. I seemed to wake him from a dream, and repeated the question about Auden. Had that early poem been influenced by Auden?

  “Auden? Hadn’t heard of him when I wrote that poem,” he said, “but tell me something, Lorenzo. Did you try to fuck my wife when I was away?”

  Flabbergasted, I denied that any such thing had happened.

  “Just checking,” he said. “I gather she likes you. No harm done, if you had. Free love, and so forth.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  �
��Don’t go moral on me. You’re a young chap. Young chaps like to fuck, don’t they?”

  “When they can.”

  “That’s it. You’ve had your opportunity. You muffed it.”

  I was feeling more than a little frustrated now. “We never talk about poetry,” I said.

  “Literary chitchat, is that what you’re after?” He took off his sunglasses, and I saw that I had annoyed him. “You and Holly are alike, you know. Always want a lesson in literary history. Marisa’s easier there. She wants nothing that is not absolutely phallic.”

  “She seems lonely,” I said.

  “A sulky girl.” He used his hand to shade his eyes from the sun. “I don’t mind that, as long as she does her work.”

  I had yet to notice that Marisa did much of anything, despite her ambitions as a journalist. She apparently spent time for Grant at the Cerio library, near the piazzetta, digging up tidbits about Capri for his novel, though I had difficulty visualizing this. Her bedroom, I had noticed on my one visit there, was littered with fashion magazines, and she was often seen carrying one or two. Holly, by contrast, worked hard, but focused exclusively on her own manuscript, which became heavier each week. As far as I knew, she did no research for Grant whatsoever.

  “I know you admire Holly,” Grant said, “but I should tread softly. She thinks you’re silly.”

  Silly? “I’m afraid I interrupted you,” I said, failing to conceal my annoyance.

  “I was reading.” He held up the book. “Tony Powell, From a View to a Kill. Magnificent.” I scrutinized the spine. He pronounced Powell to rhyme with Lowell. “I recommend Powell—the early ones, in particular. He’s gone a bit soft lately. They call him the English Proust, but that’s a compliment to neither England nor Proust.”

  “I’m sorry I disturbed you,” I said, having had my anger somewhat deflected.

  “For Chrissake, don’t keep saying you are sorry. It makes you sorry when you say that.”