Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  JACINTHA: Yeah. You got two girls – one of them is always sitting around, twiddling her thumbs. Unless they got a lesbian thing going.

  ROSE: And think about it: you have another guy in here, you split the price and you only pay for one girl.

  ME: I think it’s the idea of another man in the bed with us – a stranger with a hard on – it would put me off.

  ROSE: Don’t be so squeamish.

  ME: Prudish.

  ROSE: Whatever.

  JACINTHA: SO, how long’re you in town, Logan?

  LOGAN: I live here.

  ROSE: Can we order room service?

  We order some sandwiches (the girls hide in the bathroom when they’re delivered). We eat, talk, drink (I’m fairly drunk, by now) and smoke. Then we all admit we’re kind of tired and clamber into bed. When Rose and Jacintha are asleep I do actually feel a sensual thrill – feel I’ve achieved a form of sexual revelation. Their flanks touch mine, I hear their breathing, smell the soap, booze and cigarette smoke on them. Outside on Sixth, the traffic roar waxes and wanes, the sirens yip, the night gets on with its business. It is over. Alannah is past – I can start again.

  In the morning Rose shakes me awake. It’s very early – not yet 6.00 – and she’s dressed. ‘I got to go,’ she says. I haul myself out of bed – Jacintha sleeps on – and find my wallet (hidden behind the radio in the bedside cabinet). I give her $150 – I’m truly grateful. ‘Can I take these cigarettes?’ she asks. ‘Leave a couple of packs for Jacintha.’ At the door she says, ‘See ya – any time, Logan.’ She blows me a kiss. I leave the door open a crack and watch her saunter off down the corridor.

  I pull on my robe, order up breakfast (taking the tray at the door) and pour a slug of gin into my orange juice to help my headache. I sip my coffee and watch the sun climb the façades of the buildings opposite. Jacintha wakes and I bring her some coffee. ‘Want a shot?’ I say and top up her coffee with whisky. I explain that Rose left early.

  JACINTHA: Want to fool around?

  ME: What’ve you got in mind?

  JACINTHA (lighting up): Want to do something weird?

  ME: What do you mean?

  JACINTHA: Well, I figure this must be some kind of big orgy-thing fantasy – right? Seems to me you must want to do some more stuff.

  ME: HOW about a passionate kiss?

  So Jacintha kisses me ($5) with lots of tongue work and little grunts and groans of ersatz passion. Then she runs through various options: in the ass, doggy-fashion, 69, spanking. But suddenly I feel weary, my brain busy analysing the events of the past few hours, wondering why the occasion has been so straightforward, so unerotic, unexciting. So clear-eyed in its ordinariness. It’s my fault, I decide: it’s precisely because I over analyse, am too observant, am too interested in the details, savouring the quiddity of the two girls. A true punter would have just got on with the job and satisfied himself – do this, do that – while I’m noting what brand of cigarettes Rose smokes and that Jacintha has got a scab on her knee. Sweaty, brusque Rose with her weight problem; thin, damaged Jacintha, with her preposterous name. I should be more selfish, less curious, less –

  JACINTHA: By the way, my name’s not Jacintha. It’s Valerina.

  ME: That’s a nice name. Is it Russian?

  JACINTHA: My Dad was Russian. I think. You think it’s OK?

  ME: Sure.

  JACINTHA: I don’t think a Russian name will work in America. These days.

  ME: It’s a point.

  She slips out of bed and goes to the breakfast tray to butter toast. ‘Nice hotel,’ she says for about the fortieth time. Then her eyes brighten. ‘I got an idea,’ she says. ‘I could piss on you if you like. Some guys like that.’

  ME: They do?

  We agree on a rate of $30 – it’s a new day, Jacintha says: last night was last night. She leads me through to the bathroom and I take off my robe.

  ME: HOW exactly does this work?

  JACINTHA: Lie down in the bath. I was thinking: I need to take a piss. Shame to waste it, you know, maybe he likes that stuff.

  ME: (lying down in bath) You never can tell. I just don’t want it anywhere near my face.

  JACINTHA: I’ll be careful.

  Jacintha straddles me, says, ‘Ready?’ I look up at her body, very foreshortened from my unique point of view. I nod and she lets fly. I keep my eyes open and instruct every sense to record and evaluate in minute detail. This is a first. This night has yielded something new. This is real, true experience. It’s oddly humbling to know that life can still surprise you after fifty-three years.

  When she finishes and steps out of the bath I draw the shower curtain and shower off. Lots of soap. When I come out – actually beginning to feel a bit frisky – Jacintha is already back in her sad dress. ‘I got to go,’ she says, ‘I got to pick up my kid from my sister.’ I give her $200.

  ‘Thank you, Jacintha,’ I say. ‘It was amazing, the whole thing. Really.’

  ‘Yeah. Any time, Logan,’ she says when she leaves, managing to inflect her voice with some fictitious enthusiasm – but she can’t do anything with her dead smile. ‘It was swell.’

  Sunday, 9 August

  Mystic House. I tell myself I enjoy being up here on my own but I’m always half conscious of Alannah and the absent children, now that they never come here any more. Peterman has a place up the Hudson River. I should probably pack it in. Alannah and Peterman, it turns out, had been sleeping together for nearly a year when I caught them out. This is the knowledge that really burns – twists the gut. Again and again you go back over that time, charting and logging the lies and duplicities that you missed; acknowledging and realizing that those moments of fun, of peace, of happiness, of sex, were feigned and fraudulent, and that the affair was running like a pestilence through your ordinary life, poisoning everything. I read back through these journals, thinking: she was seeing Peterman then, and then, and then. So much for your fabled powers of observation, Mountstuart. Yes, but it’s also clear from these pages that I was busy betraying her too, my own lies blinding me to hers. Alannah wasn’t as complacent as I. When I blustered, outraged, about her infidelity she said, ‘Save it, Logan, I know you’ve been fucking Janet Felzer for years. Don’t bother preaching to me.’

  Writing a piece for Udo about Rauschenberg. This second generation seems to me more interesting, more depth: Rauschenberg, Martha Heuber (I don’t think Todd will make the first grade), Johns, Rivers. There seems more intellectual weight here: an acknowledgement of art’s traditions, even as they turn away from them, or cast them anew to fit their purposes.

  Walked down to the shore this evening and stood on the rocks, looking out on the Sound and swigging gin from my hip flask. A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.

  I should note down here another strange development in my career as a gallery director. Jan-Carl Lang [of the Fulbright-Lang Gallery] came to see me on Friday of last week and asked if we had any Picassos. We had three, as it turned out, but his real interest was for the worst and most recent. It was a big stylized nude in front of a window with a bay and palm trees beyond. Very fluent, some texturing of the oil with the handle of the brush, but too facile, in the end: you feel he could churn these out all day, one every hour or so. Price-tag $120,000. Jan-Carl said to me that he had a client who would buy it for $300,000. Was I interested in learning more?

  Jan-Carl is a tall balding blond man in his forties, vain, charming, impeccably dressed in every season. We went to the Carlyle Hotel for a drink and he explained his plan more fully. The ‘collector’, whom he wouldn’t name, is European, domiciled in Monte Carlo, but clearly some vastly wealthy merchant prince. The plot goes like this. Leeping Fils sell this Picasso to collector X for a record sum – announcements in trade journ
als, press releases, interviews – but no money actually changes hands. However, the picture, ‘Nude by a Window’, has now become famous, celebrated, notorious and, more importantly, its provenance is highly respectable – a notable French gallery operating out of New York. And it has a ludicrous price-tag. A year later, two years later, the picture turns up at auction somewhere in the world. Ah! Picasso’s ‘Nude by a Window’. Wasn’t that the one that, etc, etc. The art market being what it is, an indifferent famous picture is worth more than an excellent unknown one. The reserve is set at $500,000. It could go higher. 50 per cent for Leeping Fils for providing the picture and the provenance; 25 per cent each for Jan-Carl and collector X (who, I suspect, is not as rich as all that). Everybody makes a lot of money and a new buyer is very happy with his celebrated painting.

  Jan-Carl lit his cigarette with delicate precision. ‘All we do is create renown. Or call it notoriety, if you must.’ I smiled at him: ‘I’ll call it dishonesty. All we do is commit fraud.’ He chuckled: ‘Don’t be so precious, Logan. We’re exploiting our market. We do it every day. You do it every day. If a rich man only wants to buy a famous painting it’s hardly our fault.’ I said I’d get back to him; I needed to talk it over with Ben. No hurry, said Jan-Carl. Take all the time you want.

  Friday, 4 December

  Nat Tate came round to my apartment last night, unannounced. Not drunk – indeed, quite calm and composed. He offered me $6,000 for the two paintings of his I owned – far too much. I said they were not for sale. All right, he said: he only wanted to rework them (an idea inspired by his visit to Braque’s studio7) and explained what he had in mind. I let him take them away with some reluctance. Before he left he offered me $1,500 for my three ‘Bridge’ drawings; I said I would swap them for another picture but I didn’t want to sell. He became rather tetchy and incoherent at this point – banging on about artistic integrity and its conspicuous absence in NY, etc. – so I gave him a stiff drink and unhooked my two canvases off the wall, keen to see the back of him.

  Then Janet called this morning with a report of the same ‘reworking’ notion. She’d let him take away all the work she had in the gallery – she thought it was a neat idea.

  I asked her for a date but she said she was seeing another man. She was in love with him. Who is it? I asked. Tony Kolokowski. But he’s a queer, I said, you might as well fall in love with Frank. Don’t be so cynical, Logan, she said: he’s bi, anyway. These New York women.

  Saturday, 19 December

  I go down to 47th and Eighth hoping to spot Rose or Jacintha. Am I crazy? How many tricks will they have turned in the six months since our night together? I can’t find them, anyway, and clear off with some relief. Times Square and those side streets give me the creeps. Am I so preposterously sentimental to think that I have shared something meaningful with those girls? That we could meet, reminisce, that there is some sort of a bond between us? Yes, I am that preposterously sentimental. There’s no fool like an old fool, Mountstuart.

  The Jan-Carl situation has resolved itself. I finally received a very cryptic letter from Ben in which he said that the ‘Swiss adventure’ might be worth exploring. Then there was a very circumlocutionary passage: ‘If the Swiss holiday is taken, then it can only be taken by you. I would not be coming on the trip. However, if you had a successful time, then I might, anecdotally, pretend I had been there too. If, on the other hand, you don’t enjoy yourself, then that would be a disappointment you alone would have to cope with.’ I assume all this means is that if it goes wrong I will take the blame – the mud will stick to me. Ben wants ‘deniability’ as I believe they call it. But if we make a pile, he’ll take it. I have to think further.

  Thursday, 31 December

  I’m going to Todd Heuber’s party later tonight and I find myself depressed by the prospect, and not just because my jaw is aching. I had three molars removed yesterday. And my dentist says I’ll have to be careful: my gums are retreating, I could lose the lot. Funny how the idea of losing your teeth chills the soul. I send my tongue out to caress the raw void where my teeth were, then sluice some whisky round my mouth. Ouch! A new decade and a terrible premonition of the body beginning to decay; the old reliable machine beginning to malfunction. New Year’s resolution: resolve to get fitter, to cut down on the booze and the pills. Perhaps I should take up golf again.

  1960

  Friday, 15 January

  Janet called in at the gallery in huge distress. It seems that Nat Tate has ‘gone missing’, though all the evidence points to suicide. A young man, looking very like Tate, jumped off the Staten Island Ferry on Tuesday [the 12th]. Janet then discovered that all the work Tate had reclaimed had been systematically destroyed – burned in a great bonfire at Windrose. She asked me to come down to the studio, where Peter Barkasian was meeting her.

  At the studio, Barkasian, you could see, was only just holding himself together by massive wishful-thinking. Nat would never do such a crazy thing – it’s just a breakdown – he’ll be back, start over. We wandered around: the place was immaculate, tidy and ordered. In the kitchen, glasses were clean and stacked, waste-paper baskets had been emptied. In the studio there was just one canvas placed against the wall, obviously recently started, a crosshatched mass of bruised blues, purples and blacks. Its title, ‘Orizaba/Return to Union Beach’, was scrawled on the back but neither Janet nor Barkasian picked up the reference. I told them that ‘Orizaba’ was the name of the ship carrying Hart Crane [Tate’s magus-poet figure] back from Havana on his last, fatal journey in 1932. ‘Fatal?’ Barkasian said. ‘How did Hart Crane die?’ Janet shrugged – no idea. I felt I had to tell him. ‘He drowned,’ I said, ‘he jumped overboard.’ Barkasian was shocked, driven to tears. The painting, inchoate and mystifying, was suddenly the only suicide note available. If poor Nat could not continue to live his life as an artist, he at least ensured that the symbolic weight of its end was apt – and to be duly noted.

  All very sad, of course, but he was in a desperate state – and who am I to say he should have pulled himself together, taken a grip and not surrendered to despair? He destroyed everything, Barkasian confirmed, which must include my two paintings. At least I have my ‘Bridge’ drawings. Janet is full of conspiracy theories but I think the simple explanation is that the poor fellow had gone barking mad. Talking of conspiracy theories. I spotted Jan-Carl lunching with Marius Leeping. Two dealers lunching – nothing odd in that. But why do I smell the hand of Marius Leeping in the collector X scam? I telephoned Jan-Carl and told him that I wasn’t interested –the Picasso was not for sale. His famous poise became significantly unbalanced. He said that I was a fool, I was already involved and I couldn’t back out now, everything was in place, they needed that Picasso. I said I had told him I would think it over, I reminded him, and I have: not interested. Typically English, he sneered. I said I’d take that as a compliment. Perfide Albion lives on. I telegrammed Ben: SWISS HOLIDAY CANCELLED.

  Monday, 18 January

  I called up Jerry Schubert [Leeping Fils’ lawyer] just to check on the Jan-Carl Lang matter, that he could lay no claim to the Picasso. ‘There’s no contract, no bill of sale,’ Jerry said, ‘he can’t touch you. It was only talk. Everybody talks.’

  Letter from Lionel saying he may be coming to New York and if so is there any chance of a bed for a few nights? My first reaction was – of course not. But he’s your son, you oaf, you moron. Why does his coming disturb you so? Because he’s a stranger to me. But maybe it’ll be good, you get on, you might actually like him. Maybe… It can only be his Mountstuart genes that drew him into the music business.

  [In the summer of 1960 two young independent film producers called Marcio and Martin Canthaler optioned LMS’s novella, The Villa by the Lake, for their Hollywood production company, MCMC Pictures. LMS was flown out to Los Angeles for meetings and to explore the idea that he would write the screenplay. As it happened, Peter Scabius was also in town in negotiations over the film rights of his latest novel, Alrea
dy Too Late (a futuristic allegory about the threat to the planet of nuclear war).]

  Sunday, 24 July

  Bel Air Hotel, Los Angeles. Strange feeling of being in some kind of dream. This hotel is a mini Shangri-La. I feel I only start to age when I cross over the little bridge that leads to the parking lot, and when I return time stands still once more. Perfect peace, low buildings sheltered in lush densely planted gardens, a pale blue swimming pool.

  I had Peter here to lunch yesterday and I could tell he was a little put out at the hotel’s discreet splendour. Who’s picking up the bill? he demanded to know. Paramount? Warner Bros? MCMC, I said. Where are you? Beverly Wilshire, he said. Oh, very grand, I said, and he was mollified, secure and smug again. He’s so easy to handle, Peter, which is one of the reasons I’m so fond of him, I suppose. He’s developed a truly superb, magnificent ego over the years, breathtaking in its presumption, and the match of anything you might find in this town. When I think of what a nervous little chap he was at school…

  The most interesting news is that Gloria has left him for an Italian aristocrat, Count somebody-or-other. He is divorcing her as fast as possible. No problems with the Catholic Church? I asked him. ‘I lost my faith in Algeria,’ he said, looking sombre and battle-weary. He’s in good shape – better than me – tanned, lean, though his hair is suspiciously dark, not a grey hair, most unusual. Mine is now distinctly pepper and salt, forehead becoming more and more prominent.

  Monday, 25 July

  Meeting with Marcio and Martin at their offices in Brentwood. Marcio is thirty-five, Martin thirty-two. Both genial, both slightly overweight, Martin balding, Marcio with a curly, crooner’s mop. They have paid me $5,000 for a year’s option on Villa with the right to renew for a further year.