The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  “Empire is like any other lust,” said Vidal. “After a while, any body will do.”

  “Not mine,” said Austen.

  “I rather admire Nixon,” Grant said, playing the devil’s advocate.

  “So do I,” said Vidal. “One rarely sees vice on this scale. It’s inspiring. Only a great nation can support such maliciousness.”

  “Unpatriotic Gore,” Vera put in.

  “In fact, I’m quite patriotic,” Vidal insisted. “Why else write about my country at such length?”

  “They seem to have forgotten their history,” Greene said.

  Howard Austen was shaking his head. “The schools gave up a long time ago.”

  “The United States of Amnesia,” said Vidal, who launched into a short history of the empire, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase and moving up through the acquisition of the Philippines. “It’s an invisible empire now,” he said. “We leverage the world with a dollar bill.”

  “People prefer it like that,” said Austen. “You get the benefits of empire without having to exercise direct control. No cops running around with American flags on their helmets.”

  Holly, Marisa, and I watched the spectacle in silence, intimidated, with Vidal quipping away, with Greene making grand statements, with Grant reflexively taking the opposing side. I hadn’t thought of Grant as having reactionary politics, or any politics; but that evening he seemed a cross between Kipling and Churchill. At first, I’d been alarmed by the superior tone of the table. Then I realized that nobody here would go to the wall for an argument. One could say outrageous things in this company, testing them on the air, propositionally.

  Vidal, in particular, seemed eager to try out various ideas, seeing how they would play in intelligent company. There was a solid core of belief there—a sense that America had betrayed its original democratic impulses, and that it had become a sham democracy, where only the rich have a say. All politicians, he claimed, were “bought men, controlled by their owners.” He disparaged the two-party system: “We have only one party, the party of business. It has two wings, Republican and Democratic.”

  I waded in, gingerly. “It’s still a fairly classless society.”

  Vidal laughed. “You don’t really believe that?”

  I did. The fact that I, for example, was the grandson of Italian immigrants on both sides meant something to me. I could not quite reconcile my own story with Vidal’s appealing and ear-catching formulations.

  “One day, you’ll see that the Bank, as I call it, controls everything.”

  “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories,” I said.

  Greene was smiling broadly. “Good chap,” he said. “You mustn’t let Gore badger you.”

  “He’s a bully,” said Austen fondly, lighting a cigarette.

  “I grew up in Washington,” Vidal said. “My grandfather was a senator. I’ve seen how the system works, and it’s not pretty.”

  “You should run for office,” said Vera.

  “He has,” Austen told her. “He lost.”

  “If I had won, it would have been a waste of my time.”

  “I thought, briefly, of standing for parliament,” said Greene. “But Gore is right. It’s the Beaverbrooks of the world who have their hands on the levers. I would have got lost in the system. Digested, rather.”

  “That would have been fun to watch,” said Grant. “Like a rat going down the length of a snake.”

  “In the end,” said Greene, “they shit you out.”

  Grant frowned. He didn’t like the use of words like “shit” at the table, and later told me that Greene had never outgrown this adolescent streak. “Tell us your view of Vietnam, Lorenzo. You never answered Gore’s perfectly fine question. Why didn’t you go to Vietnam? Might they still come after you?”

  I could hear the grandfather clock against the wall, with its slow fat tick. Maria Pia, in a black dress with white lace at the collar, was standing opposite, staring at me, aware—though she spoke no English—that I’d been put on the spot. The faces around me bobbed, unreal, in peculiar elongations of time. I was there and nowhere, vaguely aware of having drunk too much already—a glass of wine in the kitchen, and several more during the meal. I had eaten almost nothing, too excited by the company to care about feeding. Hunger seemed petty compared to the matters at hand and my wish to seize every conversational morsel.

  Grant would not let me off the hook. “Perhaps you’ve already been to Vietnam? It’s an odd system, isn’t it? The typical tour of duty is what, a year or so?”

  “A year,” I said.

  “So have you been there?” Austen asked me.

  “My brother, Nicky, was in Vietnam,” I said, moving from word to word carefully as one might step across a stream from wobbly stone to stone. I drew a big breath now. “He was killed.”

  Vera gasped.

  Greene, too, looked very concerned. “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Last winter,” I said. “He was on a recognizance mission.” I reached anxiously for water. “He stepped on a land mine.”

  “Bad luck,” said Grant.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

  I had managed to acquire, for the first time, Holly’s complete attention. Her eyes grew wide and glistened.

  The table was frozen, and I found it unbearable. Rising, I excused myself. I rushed through the kitchen into the garden, trembling, and sat under an umbrella pine. It was sundown, and my eyes settled on a cloud of ferns, artfully untended. Below me, the sea moved through shelves of opaline translucence.

  “Are you all right?”

  I turned to see Holly beside me.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said. “I had no idea.”

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Ruined the dinner party.”

  “No, you did the right thing. It brought the discussion, well—back to basics.”

  “We are basics.”

  “Yes, but you’ve been—closer—than most. Closer to the war, I mean.”

  “Nobody ever mentions the war here. Have you noticed?”

  “It’s not their war.”

  “Or yours.”

  “I’m part American,” she said. “I feel some responsibility.”

  “Responsibility is good,” I said, unable to conceal my annoyance.

  While I was glad for Holly’s attention, I could not suppress my anger. She had not, until this evening, showed more than a slight interest in my history. Now that she knew about my loss, I seemed interesting to her.

  “One thing troubles me, Alex,” she said, ignoring my irritation. “That time with Rupert, in his study. When he read and discussed your poem when I was present. It upset me afterward.”

  “It’s a rotten poem.”

  “That’s not my point. He just shouldn’t have done that. It was cruel.”

  “I’m getting used to him.”

  “Everyone does, and that’s a problem. He goes scot-free.”

  “He’s a Scot,” I said, making a feeble joke. “And he’s a gifted man.”

  “What nonsense.”

  “You once thought him remarkable. I remember you saying it, after the birthday party.”

  “Everyone’s remarkable, once you get to know them.”

  “I guess you are American,” I said. “That sounds very democratic.”

  “I don’t like to see Rupert treading on people, treating them like disposable objects.”

  I couldn’t understand her turning on Rupert like this. “You and he are still friends, huh?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I’m under no illusions.”

  She fell short of saying that I was under illusions, though I was. I had innocently apprenticed myself to him, and while part of me resisted, I still wanted to believe that, as an artist, he only did what was necessary in order to accomplish his work. If that meant cannibalizing the people around him, so be it.

  A strong breeze lifted Holly’s hair a
nd riffled her dress, which in the evening light was diaphanous. Though angry, I still wanted to embrace her.

  “Were you and your brother close?” she wondered.

  “It was complicated,” I said, not elaborating. I thought about what he wrote in that letter: “You probably can’t have good without bad. Or peace without war. I have seen both of these famous opposites here, and they are the same when you dig deeper. Good and Evil. Peace and War. Nicky and Alex.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “If you ever want to talk about this, I’d be glad to listen.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wanted badly to kiss her, but refrained. It would have been unseemly.

  Over Holly’s shoulder, I noticed the shadow of a person beside a large hedge, barely distinguishable from the massive shadow of the bush itself. At first, I thought it must be Mimo. He had a way of making himself part of any scene like this. But I quickly realized it wasn’t Mimo. It was Marisa, her hair like a black curtain, which she swept from her brow. When our eyes met, she pulled back into the shade, behind the bush, and I could for a moment imagine I had not seen her, and that life would be simple in the days to come. That was not, of course, a possibility. Not anywhere near the Villa Clio.

  PART FOUR

  ars longa

  one

  It was early morning, the only time of day in July when I found it really comfortable to sit outside with a book. The sun sat like a red boulder on the eastern horizon, a warning that a hot day lay ahead. The sea was streaked with violet, still relatively cool. I leaned back on my cane chair under the lemon tree where Grant sat in the late afternoon. Like him, I wore a floppy straw hat, a castoff that Vera had given me.

  I was reading Love’s Body, the volume of provocative aphorisms arranged and recast by Norman O. Brown, the neo-Freudian guru-philosopher from Santa Cruz. Toni Bonano had lent it to me over lunch in the piazzetta the day before. Skeptical at first, I read it slowly, finding Toni’s judgment sound. It was an exhilarating book, knitting a vast array of learning into a challenging, and provocative, pattern. I reread the opening lines: “Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story.”

  My own story preoccupied me now, but it was not so old. My situation had, in the past few weeks, changed dramatically. I had come to the island alone, uncertain, and full of turmoil that I could not quite manage. Despite having lived away from home for several years, I remained naive. (“A virgin,” as Vera said, “in all but body.”) Now three women—Holly, Marisa, and Toni—occupied my thoughts in various ways. And there was Patrice, who continued to pine after me, sighing wistfully in my presence (though his affair with Giovanni had helped relieve the intensity of that situation).

  Toni and I had met several times, yet I still didn’t know where the relationship was going. She mentioned, during our picnic on Mount Solaro, that she’d been “seeing” someone “at home,” meaning New York City. His name was Jason, and he was an architecture student at Yale. (A badly herniated disk had kept him out of the army, she explained.) Her parents, for one reason or another, were not so keen on Jason. (Dominick considered him a snob.) Toni herself was undecided. “You have to trust your instincts,” I said, enjoying the aura of generosity and good sense created by such a statement. I was simultaneously relieved to hear that she had a boyfriend and reassured that it was not an irrevocable commitment. We were, for the moment, “just friends,” but I wondered if this might change, knowing that friendships between men and women often deepened into something more intimate.

  The situation with Marisa was more complicated. She had become more difficult than ever, sitting silently through meals, avoiding me in the garden or, more unnervingly, confronting me about my fickleness. “I am sad when thinking of you, Alessandro,” she said, leaning into the window of my cottage one afternoon, her elbows on the sill. “You are so selfish all the time, thinking of only yourself.”

  She was right, though I refused to think of myself in those terms, and was always shocked when any notes were sounded not already in my tonal self-assessment. I had certain ideas about myself that were inviolable. I was nice. I was a good person. I meant well. At the very least, I did no harm. Yet somehow I had to reconcile Marisa’s comment, which must have sprung from genuine feelings.

  I pushed her from my mind, however. Holly remained the focus of my fantasies, the object I coveted, the one whose company I sought. I was hobbled by desire in her presence, transformed into a halting nincompoop. Needless to say, I envied Grant’s access to her, and was angered by her attentions to him. What she saw in him, as a sexual partner, baffled me. He was an old and wrinkled man. There could surely be no gratification there? I understood that he provided a kind of mentorship for her as a writer, and when I realized that he was reading her manuscript one afternoon—I saw it on his desk, the margins full of comments and suggestions—I was, if anything, relieved. This made sense. But I still didn’t understand the sexual angle, and Holly was not the sort of person with whom one could discuss such things.

  One night, after everyone had gone to bed, I heard a splash in the pool while sitting in my cottage. Curiosity got the better of me, and I crouched behind a manicured privet hedge to spy on whomever. It was Holly swimming by herself. She floated on her belly in the water, doing what we used to call a dead man’s float. I strained to get a better view of her, and my breath caught when I realized that she was naked. Her ass was lovely, white against the tanned lower back and sleek upper thighs. Her legs seemed impossibly long. When she flipped onto her back, her small breasts were white as well, poking through the water. Her blond hair fanned out around her head. I could see a tantalizing wedge of pubic hair.

  I wanted her desperately, but my desire felt hopeless until the night of the dinner with Vidal and Greene, when Holly had seemed to revise her opinion of me. I was now a person to pity, someone to add to her collection of interesting types. Not a sexual partner, perhaps, but a person worthy of her attention. Whereas I had barely attracted her notice before, she now asked me questions, wondering what courses I had taken at Columbia, how I felt about the antiwar activities there, and what part I had played in them. (My SDS membership had clearly impressed her, though I neglected to say how inactive a member I had been.) She told me excitedly that she had once participated in a march on the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had almost been arrested. Her boyfriend at the time, a Rhodes Scholar from Connecticut whom she called Granger (presumably his first name), had actually spent a night in custody for kicking a bobby in the groin. (“Granger was a pacifist” she added, incongruously.)

  Much to my discomfort, Vietnam became a subject of debate at the Villa Clio, especially with Vera and Holly, who prodded me with questions about the war, as though I must be an expert because my brother had been killed there. Grant, who continued to maintain that the war was a necessary evil—though he’d never known war at firsthand—sat stony-faced throughout our discussions or made sharp, ironic statements calculated to put us in our place.

  Grant startled me that morning in the garden, approaching from behind while I was deep in Love’s Body. I shuddered and looked up.

  “It’s bad luck about your brother,” he said, squatting next to me. “I lost a brother in North Africa.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Nigel was an officer, under Monty. Rommel got him—anti-artillery fire.”

  I expressed sympathy but still felt embarrassed, having been caught under his special tree in one of his straw hats.

  “It’s a shitty thing to happen,” he said.

  That understatement would, two months ago, have enraged me; by now, I simply took his manner for granted. It was a tone upon which an empire had been constructed. No obstacle was too large, no defeat too numbing. Everything—even disaster—was taken for granted, viewed as part of a larger scheme
that spelled eventual success. It was the same approach that had put Grant, after many setbacks, somewhere near the top of the heap of writers from his generation.

  “What was his name, your brother?” Grant asked.

  “Nick,” I said.

  “You were close?”

  “Fairly,” I said, not wishing to lay out the complications of our relationship.

  “Bad luck,” he repeated.

  “War seems to increase the amount of bad luck people have,” I said, unable to conceal some irritation. “Bad luck” seemed dismissive, although I understood that it played differently to British ears. On the other hand, I liked the fact that Grant was being friendly with me, aggressively so. He was showing genuine sympathy: a feature I had not found in abundance at the Villa Clio.

  “You’re doing a good job, Lorenzo,” he said, his tone like that of a platoon leader singling out a particular soldier. “Just thought you might want to know that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t intrude,” he added. “One doesn’t like intrusions.”

  “Thanks,” I repeated.

  “The last boy, Edgar—from Twickenham—he was no good at the typewriter. Made a lot of mistakes. Your copy is clean. No mistakes, grammar, and so forth.”

  I had actually hoped for more, but accepted this bantamweight and garbled praise without comment. Despite my complaints, there were many reasons to be grateful to Rupert Grant. He had broadened my scope, dropping books and suggestions into my lap. His work in “correcting” my drafts of the Suetonius had proved useful. My prose had become noticeably swifter, cleaner, and more sure-footed. The one thing that still languished was my poetry.

  “Were you close to your brother?” I asked.

  “Not so much,” he said. “One hardly got to know one’s family in those days. Sent to prep school in Sussex, far too early. Seven years old. Nigel went to a school in Hampshire.”

  From Vera, I had learned something of Rupert’s family and childhood. His mother, from an English family who owned a large country house near Carlisle, had died when he was four, of liver cancer. His father, who never remarried, had been a successful lawyer in Edinburgh. That Grant retained a trace of Scots in his accent was a tribute to his fierce stubbornness: Scottish children sent to English public schools were not supposed to hang on to their burr. His first wife, whom he met in London during the war, had been the daughter of an English baronet. “Rupert was always climbing in those days,” Vera said. Apparently it took exile on Capri—and the safety net of Vera’s family fortune—to put him at ease, socially. “Even so,” she said, “he doesn’t really get around much. His life is really his work, as you’ve seen. It’s a bit of a bore, for me. I should have married a lad.” By this, I believe, she meant that she should have married someone who liked to go to parties.