by Jeremy Scott
It was rather off-putting, but I did as told. At the window I reported on the two smashed flowerpots blown from the wall and scattered over the terrace. The oak let out a particularly loud creak and leaned towards us. ‘Make it stop!’ Hazel shrieked at me.
Naked at the window, I stood there at a loss. I’d been doing my best to please, but this was beyond me. Hazel moaned; grabbing up the cake knife she cut a huge slice and crammed it in her mouth. She chewed it with eyes fixed unblinking on the tossing branches of the tree. ‘It’s going to fall on the roof and crush us,’ she said with her mouth full.
Our night together was restless. It was impossible to sleep. Very conscious that this was my first paid assignment in a profession I’d hankered after for years along with the suit-that-went-with, I did my best. I knew I had to prove myself. Like a doctor or a barrister, a gigolo’s career depends on word of mouth.
At one point Hazel whispered, ‘I want you to come with me.’
‘Tell me,’ I said gamely.
‘To the kitchen, I’m scared to go alone.’
I accompanied her through the shaking noisy house to fetch a family-size tub of walnut ripple ice cream. Clutching it to her, Hazel scurried back upstairs. During the rest of the night, while the oak tree creaked and groaned and shingles lifted from the roof, she ate it all. At times, setting down the ice-cream pail, she would daintily wipe her lips and beckon …
Why should anyone want to climb Mount Everest? ‘Because it’s there,’ Father had once explained to me, and in the same spirit I attacked that roly-poly mountain of lard-white flesh with the pubic hair shaved off. I was drunk and distanced. It was as though I was watching a film of what was happening, rather than part of the action. It was grotesque, horrifying even, but in a disturbing way I could not analyse, it was also interesting.
In the morning I made myself a cup of coffee and left while Hazel was still in bed. The garden was a mess, the road littered with broken branches and debris from the storm. It took a while to get back to Cornwall. I found Christoph making breakfast. ‘Well, you earned your hundred bucks?’ he asked.
A wave of despair rose up to wash over me. Despite the hurricane and the ice cream and sheer daunting scale of Hazel, I’d performed so bravely, I thought. I’d so wanted to be a gigolo, and I’d done my very best. I understood at that moment what Father felt when he’d returned to base camp after forty days tramping over the Greenland ice cap in vile conditions looking to rescue Courtauld – and failed to find him. A failure. And there was no arguing with the fact that I was too. I’d been given one shot at the profession I’d yearned after for years. I’d had one go – and blown it. I hadn’t been paid.
11
Manhattan
Summer ended. The smart crowd shut up their houses in Connecticut and moved back to the city. With the start of school term my tutoring job ceased, nobody needed their lawns cut, and no second opportunity to become a gigolo presented itself. Christoph was a generous host, but I knew I’d outstayed my welcome; I took the train into New York and found work.
Lehman’s, Manhattan’s premier wine store, occupied the ground floor of the Racquet Club in Park Avenue, directly opposite the Seagram’s Building which then had just been put up. The extensive sales floor was panelled in dark wood, the walls lined with shelves of bottles laid on their side. At one end stood a large leather-topped library table at which customers could sit in comfort while they thumbed through the extensive catalogue and wrote out their cheques. The décor had been artfully contrived to convey the atmosphere of an eighteenth-century St James’s wine shop, though expressed on a much larger scale. I had been hired by the store’s owners in the same spirit as they had chosen the fittings; I was the right sort of furniture for the joint.
The owner, old Haas, his son Robert and a dusty bookkeeper crouched in a corner ran the highly successful enterprise from an office with an observation window overlooking the sales floor. Four salesmen worked there, apart from myself.
Dressed in a white shirt, dark suit and tie, I was standing uncomfortably ill at ease on my first morning there when one of these approached me. ‘Fred Zarb-Mizzi,’ he introduced himself, shaking me formally by the hand. A stocky, moustached figure, he had oiled-back hair and held himself consciously erect, shoulders back. Maltese, he spoke in a curious off-English drawl, and within minutes I’d learn how proud he was of having served in the British army during the war.
‘You can come share my station, old boy,’ he proposed generously.
Each salesman had a station, the best of these were nearest the door to seize upon a customer as he or she entered. Fred’s and mine was at the far end of the store, where we had a chest-high lectern for writing orders, a telephone and a window looking on to Park Avenue. As the shop filled up with customers and the other salesmen became busy, Fred and I moved forward to take up battle stations by the door.
I lived in a rented room on East 38th Street in a brownstone walk-up smelling of dust and central heating, and I walked to work each day. I had no friends and no social life. Posy, whom I’d been seeing in the summer, had gone off on the European grand tour customary for Vassar graduates, and though the people I’d known in Connecticut had moved back to Manhattan with the fall, my easy acquaintance with them had ended. Every evening I ate dinner in the same drugstore. The short-order cook was my friend; he was undergoing times as lean as my own and frequently we were the only people in the place. During the meal, and after it in my room, I read: Nathaniel West, Capote, Carson McCullers, Hemingway, Robert Frost. I joined the public library and got through four books a week.
At weekends I walked. I walked that small inner city I knew from Scott Fitzgerald and O’Hara. The bars at the Plaza and Sherry Netherland I visited for a single drink were the hangouts of the Princeton set of thirty years before. At Thanksgiving I ate alone at the Algonquin beside the round table where the New Yorker had been put together daily.
On Sundays I sat for an hour or two in the whispery silence of the Catholic cathedral on Fifth Avenue, then ate late lunch in a nearby automat. Coming out into the fading twilight, I crossed the avenue and lingered to watch the couples skating to music on the bright-lit sunken ice rink in Rockefeller Plaza. We exist as strangers and foreigners on this earth; here is no abiding city, and no true home … Forty years would pass before I read Thomas à Kempis, but I knew it to be so then. I felt very lonely at times.
And my job was horrible; none of the customers wanted to ask the advice of a 21-year-old pundit with an asshole British accent. Some were rude and difficult. I loathed the routine and servile nature of the job. I longed to be out adventuring in the world. But doing what?
With no abilities except those Father had taught me, for which there appeared to be no demand, my best move was to put myself in the way of fate, I reasoned. Manhattan was wrong, here I was defined as a shop assistant; I required a new place in which to reinvent myself. It was a question of deciding where.
The plan – if it can be called that – took shape in the course of one Sunday afternoon in the cathedral and over the blue plate special in the automat which followed. By the end of the meal I’d decided to remain at Lehman’s until I’d saved a grubstake of $1,000 plus enough for the wardrobe of two suits, white tuxedo, shirts and shoes etc. I believed essential if I was to move easily in the circles I would encounter. I would then take a ship to my chosen destination, book a room in the best hotel and hang out in the bar talking to strangers who would ask me to run their estancia, engage in gun-running, or join them on an expedition to search for Spanish treasure. If I could afford to follow this seemingly well-heeled hotel existence for a couple of months, not just one but several such opportunities were bound to present themselves, I thought.
This scheme struck me as in no way impractical and for the next few months I spent my evenings reading Fodor and other books on South America before deciding finally on Buenos Aires and Argentina as the land of romance and maximum opportunity. Meanwhile I saved rigorously,
putting away $35 of the $75 I was paid weekly beneath a loose floorboard in my room. I never went out in the evenings except to the drugstore to eat, but shortly before the year ended I did receive one promising invitation to a party in their Park Avenue apartment thrown by a couple whose lawn I’d cut during the summer in Sharon.
I was acutely missing bright company and the social scene by now, so at the close of work that day I scampered back to my little room, pressed my only suit, shook out the shirt I kept for best and prepared for the evening ahead with lively expectation. I loved parties, particularly those I went to alone; they seemed to hold such infinite possibility. With calculated extravagance I caught a cab to this one instead of walking. I’d thought the ride through pre-Christmas traffic would take some while but we reached the address much sooner than I’d imagined.
The apartment was the penthouse of a ’thirties skyscraper block, and one entered it in a way I hadn’t met before: the elevator doors opened directly into its hall. So eager was my anticipation of the fun to come that I was the first to arrive by at least twenty minutes.
Waving aside my host and hostess’s apologies for being still in the tub or dressing, I laid hands on glass and ice bucket and began to drink enthusiastically. By the time the first guests sashayed sleek and soigné from the elevator I was definitely intoxicated. I had hardly tasted liquor in three months. I’d neither breakfasted nor lunched that day, banking instead on the canapés that would undoubtedly be served.
Almost no time had passed, the party had not even properly begun, I’d chatted brightly to almost nobody before I began to experience a coldness on the brow, a chill sweat prickling across the forehead … that first faint tremor in the upper stomach which tells one that in the not too distant future one is going to be hideously sick.
I started to look for a place where this could be done quietly and discreetly. The bathroom throbbed with vitality and half a dozen vibrant guests adjusting their make-up. In the kitchen a hired butler transplanted ice cubes. My search became increasingly urgent. The event could not be long delayed, I knew. The main bedroom steamed with fur coats, Burberrys and new arrivals removing their galoshes. My hunt grew frantic, desperate. And then, as I swayed faint and poorly in the hall, privacy found me. The elevator hissed open before my glassy eyes. Happy laughing guests gushed out and past me, vacating a small empty room. I stumbled forward. The doors closed. I was alone at last!
A click on its circuit breaker and the elevator released itself into eighteen flights of record-breaking free fall. My legs buckled and my stomach left me. I clung to the wall, slid, crashed to the floor of that plummeting metal chamber. Weightlessly, endlessly, I threw up.
We hit bottom. The doors purred open, drawing wide and revealing to my dulled gaze an expectant group of beautiful people poised to ascend. Elegantly groomed, perfumed and befurred, the careless laughter of the jeunesse dorée of the Sharon country club died on their lips as they beheld me floundering in a sea of puke.
Weakly I crawled out, butting an aisle between their knees; nimbly they skipped back to let me through. Yet, close to death, some tattered remnant of deceit remained, for as I passed on hands and knees I turned to face their shoes and muttered thickly in an English accent turned slurred and indistinct, ‘Shouldn’t go in there if I were you. Someone seems to have been beastly sick. Goodnight,’ and crawled on, out of their lives for ever.
Living frugally as an anchorite in my room, I heard no word of my family for nine months except for a couple of letters from Nanny which took a long time to arrive as she’d used a 2½d. stamp, the UK internal postage at that time. She was looking after my revolver and .45 automatic, as I’d been doubtful about bringing them into the country. To be arrested on arrival for carrying an unlicensed weapon would have made a poor start. She wrote that the guns were well hidden in the bottom of her trunk, dry and quite safe, but her letters were short on hard news.
The prodigal son was not forgotten, however, for a week before my twenty-first birthday I received a card from US Customs to say they were holding a gift parcel addressed to me. I could collect it at the West Side Pier after paying the duty of $1.40. Although pleased, I was surprised, for birthdays were barely celebrated in the family. As children, usually we received some practical item like a lampshade – until then in daily use in the living room – which Mother wrapped up and presented at breakfast, ‘To brighten up your bedroom, darling, I know you’ve always liked it.’ In the course of the following month the gift would be quietly repossessed and returned to its original place in the living room.
But, to a mother, her firstborn’s twenty-first is a significant event. It felt so to me anyway, as, during my lunch hour, I walked across mid-town Manhattan to collect my present. At the Customs building I paid the duty and postage due, and picked up the parcel. Through the afternoon I kept it on the floor by my station and didn’t unwrap it until I got home that night.
Rather than a single expensive gift to mark the occasion, Mother had chosen to send me a cornucopia of things she knew I liked. Undoing the brown wrapping, I found a cardboard shoebox filled with bunched-up lavatory paper. From its crumpled folds I took out a pad of Basildon Bond writing paper, a half-pound bar of Cadbury nut chocolate, a packet of twenty Dunhill cigarettes and a tin of Nestle’s condensed milk. Also an envelope from Nanny with a ten-shilling book of stamps, which had cost a fifth of her week’s wages and sadly were useless in the States.
Mother’s present was characteristically frugal but thoughtful – she had at least remembered. Her accompanying card – scissored, glued and re-cycled by herself – wished me a happy and prosperous twenty-first, but said nothing of life at Gilston Road. From Father I received no word. Then, a month later, I had most unexpected news.
It was another Sunday afternoon and I was walking up Fifth Avenue in the direction of Central Park. Passing Doubleday’s Bookshop I could not help noticing their window display. The entire exhibit was made up of hundreds of copies of a single title, built into a display wall. The book’s cover, endlessly repeated, showed four ragged, near-naked shipwreck survivors on a raft in a rough sea, one of them a woman. The title of the book was Sea-wyf. The author was J. M. Scott.
I was stunned by the display. Was the work by Father? Since the success of Gino Watkins none of his books had achieved anything; it seemed inconceivable that he was the author filling Doubleday’s window. I went inside. The writer’s stern face glaring from the back cover was unmistakable. I’d been saving so hard and living so stingily I hadn’t bought a newspaper in weeks. Now I studied the New York Times’ top ten titles, displayed in the store. Sea-wyf had been four weeks in the best-seller list and stood currently in second place.
The following week it moved up to number one, but it would be six months before I learned the full extent of the book’s success. By then it had been bought on by Reader’s Digest, who sold half a million copies. The film rights were bought by Hollywood; Twentieth-Century Fox produced it as a big-budget picture. During that year Sea-wyf was published in nineteen different countries, including Japan. In the space of only a few months the book made Father an enormous sum of money.
Standing in Doubleday’s that afternoon, looking through a copy of Sea-wyf I was unaware of this. All I knew was that Father had produced a blockbuster; after years of obscurity and failure almost overnight he’d become a best-selling author. It would be a while before I was to learn how success had changed him.
Christmas came and went in New York City. Snow melted from the streets, the new year advanced towards spring. At Easter I went to pass the holiday with Christoph and revealed my plans.
‘Buenos Aires? Argentina? It will end in tears, it’s a lunatic idea. No, what you should be doing is going after Posy,’ he said.
She and I had dated through most of the summer, but never gone beyond heavy petting. Her mother was divorced, but the family was mainline Philadelphia, where they owned coal mines. After Labor Day Posy had gone off to Europe, where she was now
doing an art course in Florence. We corresponded regularly and I liked her. But was there a future there?
After Easter I went back to work at Lehman’s. Trade following the holiday was seasonally slow, the four salesmen competed for the few customers. Milton the Nark, a hunched mole whose twenty-five years of slavish service in the store had won him the door station, guarded his patch jealously, informing on all to the management.
‘He told them you’d used the telephone to call Italy,’ Fred Zarb-Mizzi said to me. His blue suit shone at the elbows where it caught the light and the grease spots on his jaunty bow tie showed through despite dry cleaning. ‘Milton’s a filthy little sneak. You and me, Jeremy, we’re the only gentlemen here,’ Fred told me.
One afternoon while the store was busy two women entered it from Park Avenue. The other salesmen were occupied, so I stepped forward to serve them. One was tall and ancient, the other stout and middle-aged, with the officious manner of a nurse or minder as she held her employer’s arm to guide her into a chair at the leather-topped table. So sure, regal and detached were the old woman’s movements it took me several moments to realise she was blind.
Seated at the table with them, I wrote down their order. This was substantial – a dozen bottles of Scotch, bourbon, a case of gin, mixers, champagne – and it required time to list it on the order pad. While I was doing so old Haas crept from his lair on to the sales floor, and scurried up behind me to whisper excitedly, ‘You know who that is? That’s Helen Keller.’
The name meant nothing to me. The cases of drink were assembled while I totalled the bill, which came to almost $1,000. ‘Bill it to the Helen Keller Foundation,’ the stout woman ordered, giving me a card.
‘Have you an account with us?’ I asked, but old Haas lurking behind us darted up to say, ‘Yes, yes, yes … that’ll be just fine,’ fawning over them in an ingratiating fashion all the way to the door.