Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  I can’t resist it and shout out: WHO KILLED SIR HARRY OAKES?’ The look of terrified panicked shock on their faces is adequate compensation for me – for everything they did to me, for all time. They can do their worst now. They scramble into their limousine and are swept away. I almost become involved in a fist-fight with a portly royalist who calls me scum and a disgrace to America. Warm agreement from the other bystanders. When I explain that I’m English they find it very puzzling. ‘Traitor,’ one of them says half-heartedly, as they turn away. ‘That man conspired to pervert the course of justice,’ I say to their indifferent backs.

  Ann Ginsberg is most amused when I explain what went on. What a funny old life you’ve led, Logan, she says.

  Thursday, 11 July

  La Fucina. A perfect Fucina day. Just the three of us – though we don’t see much of Cesare this year. He’s very old and very rigid in his habits, writing his memoirs in his room all day, only joining us for drinks and dinner. The house is rambling and airily comfortable with well-placed sun terraces, set in its own olive and citrus groves at the end of a gentle valley, facing west, its back to Sienna. I have a room in a separate little guest annexe and walk across the courtyard for breakfast, at which I am always the first to arrive. Gloria comes down when she hears me being served by Cesare’s manservant and factotum, Enzo. She wears jeans, her hair tied back in a scarf, a man’s shirt knotted at the waist. She’s more ample now but carries the extra pounds with her usual careless flair. ‘I’ve been up for hours, darling,’ she says, and I pretend to believe it. She smokes a cigarette and watches me eat – always poached eggs on toast, which is as close as Enzo can come to an English breakfast.

  Today we went to Sienna for lunch and sat in a café on the Campo drinking Frascati. Funnily enough the tourists don’t bother me – the square is vast enough for them not to impinge on its beauties. I wandered around and went to the cathedral while Gloria picked up a gramophone that was being repaired. Then back to La Fucina after a plate of pasta and a salad. Gloria took her dogs off for a walk – they have four – and I lay in a hammock and read and dozed. Très détendu.

  She’s still very sexy, Gloria, at least to my old eyes. The other evening she came down in a cotton sweater and I could see from the hang and sway of her breasts that she wasn’t wearing a bra. After dinner, when Cesare went up to bed and she was standing by the gramophone leafing through her LPs, I went up behind her, encircled her waist with my arms and nuzzled her neck. ‘Mmm, lovely,’ she said. Then I moved my hands up to her breasts. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Bad Logan.’ ‘Not even a boff de nostalgie?’ I said. She put her records down and kissed me smack on the lips. ‘Not even that.’

  The trouble is that when we’re alone at the pool she takes her top off while she sunbathes. Delicious torment for me, eyeing her over my book. Maybe that’s why I’ve come to love this place – the atmosphere always spicily redolent of Gloria and our sexual history. I think she likes knowing I’m sitting there, aching with frustration. She had the latest news of Peter. The Cuban Missile Crisis sent Already Too Late to the top of bestseller lists around the world. ‘He does love it when critics describe him as prescient,’ Gloria said. ‘He’s been to Vietnam twice.’

  Tonight Cesare joined us for dinner, perfect in blazer and white cotton trousers. He moves very slowly, stiffly, leaning on a cane. Gloria teases him, much to his delight: ‘Here he is, silly old count.’

  I’m writing this on the terrace of my little guest house. Moths batter at the bulbs set into the rough stone walls and the geckos eat their fill. Crickets beep, toads croak in the darkness beyond the yellow rim of light. I carried over a big glass filled with ice cubes and whisky. I always sleep well here – no need for my pills.

  Saturday, 12 October

  New York. Dinner at Bistro la Buffa with Lionel and Monday. Jack Finar was dining with Philip Guston and Sam M. Goodforth at another table, but I avoided his eye. I won’t be popular in the Finar household when he reads my piece in next month’s revolver. I detest his new stuff. It’s always strange when a perfectly competent painter deliberately starts to paint badly. Only the very best can get away with it (Picasso). In Finar’s case it looks like a desperate attempt to be fashionable.

  Monday turns out to be a dark, strapping girl, of Italian or Hispanic extraction, I would say, with olivey skin, a small slightly, delightfully, hooked nose (maybe she’s Jewish?) and a pointed chin. Lots of thick curly unwashed hair. She looks like she could eat Lionel for breakfast. She used to go out with Dave, the lead singer in the Dead Souls, but has switched her attentions to Leo, the manager. The transfer is an amicable one: indeed the whole group is currently staying at Lionel’s apartment, to economize. They haven’t managed to repeat the success of their debut single, ‘American Lion’ (number 37 was as high as it climbed in the charts). Lionel and Monday somehow manage to hold hands the entire evening. I ask Monday what her surname is and she says she hasn’t got one. What was it before you abandoned it, I insist. Oh, all right then, ‘Smith’. And I’m Logan Brown, I say.

  I walked them home and Lionel asked me up to meet the band. Two of them were there, one whom I’d met before, and three girls, all about Monday’s age. Half a dozen mattresses with coloured blankets made up most of the furniture. For the first time in my life I felt a sense of ease and relief about Lionel; he’d broken away from the world of Lottie and the Edgefields – who cared here that he was a baronet and the grandson of an earl? He’d found a place where he could be himself. I felt a pang of envy too, as I walked the streets looking for a cab, imagining them all getting ready for bed. No doubt they just fucked when they felt like it – no big deal. Suddenly feeling old.

  1964

  Thursday, 30 January

  One of my rare clandestine meetings with Gail. As she’s grown older11 her features have sharpened rather, and I can see the Alannah in her more clearly. Her hair is long now – like everyone else’s, it seems, but her sweet nature is unchanged. She makes all the arrangements for our meetings in a hushed voice over the phone: ‘Meet me in the diner at the corner of Madison and 79th. I can stay an hour.’ We sit at the rear (I have my back to the door) and she smokes a cigarette as we drink coffee. She’s good at art and she wants to go to art school, but Alannah and Peterman won’t hear of it. ‘It’s too bad you and Mom got divorced,’ she said with almost adult bitterness. ‘You’re a much more interesting kind of stepfather. Even Arlene (she rolls her eyes) thinks so.’ She lists my virtues: English, works in the art world, knows all the groovy artists, has lived all over the place, has written novels, has been in prison. Even I begin to think what a tremendous fellow I am. I tell her I can still help her out if she ever needs it. Then I make a little declaration to her that brings a lump to my throat as I say it, taking her hand. We were a family for years, I say. I love you girls and I’ve watched you grow up. Nothing can change that. The fact that me and your mum couldn’t make a go of it has nothing to do with you and me and how we feel about each other. I’m here for you, darling, I say, whenever you want me – always, for ever. I can see the tears welling in her eyes and so I change the subject and for some reason ask her where she was when JFK was shot. At school, she says, in a math class. The principal came in and broke the news. Everyone started to cry, even the boys too. Where were you? I’d been on the phone to Ben in Paris. He must have had sight of a television because suddenly he said: ‘Jesus Christ, somebody’s shot your president.’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, very funny, Ben.’ Then I heard Helma scream in the gallery and I knew it was real.

  Thursday, 27 February

  Fifty-eight. Good God. I don’t think I’ll bother making another of these annual assessments – too depressing.

  Health: fair. No more teeth out. Haven’t had a Dexedrine for months. Drinking more under control. I ration myself to one cocktail at lunch but I probably still drink too much in the evening. Smoking: one pack a day if I don’t go out. Somewhat overweight, bit of a belly. Hair receding, greying. Still r
ecognizably the LMS of old, unlike, say, Ben Leeping, now a fat old man, quite bald.

  Sex life: adequate. Naomi Mitchell [a curator at the Museum of Modern Art] my current girlfriend. Respectful, tolerant affair –could be more fun. We date once or twice a week when our schedules permit.

  Soul: a bit depressed. For some reason I’m worrying more about my future. I can stay on here in New York indefinitely, running Leeping Fils for as long as I want or am able. My salary is good, my apartment comfortable. My journalistic output and influence is gratifyingly high. I move in an interesting, sophisticated crowd; I travel to Europe whenever I wish; I own a small flat in London. So what are you complaining about? I think… I never really expected my life to be like this, somehow. What happened to those youthful dreams and ambitions? What happened to those vital, fascinating books I was going to write?

  I believe my generation was cursed by the war, that ‘great adventure’ (for those of us who survived unmaimed) right bang slap in the middle of our lives – our prime. It lasted so long and it split our lives in two – irrevocably ‘Before’ or ‘After’. When I think of myself in 1939 and then think of the man I had become in 1946, shattered by my awful tragedy… How could I carry on as if nothing had happened? Perhaps, under these circumstances, I haven’t done so badly after all. I’ve kept the LMS show on the road – and there is still time for Octet.

  [June]

  Lionel is dead. There, I can write the words down. A stupid meaningless accident. No one to blame but himself. It happened like this.

  Monday called me at about 6.00 one morning, wailing, sobbing, screaming down the phone: Leo’s been sick and he won’t wake up, he’s not moving. I told her to call a doctor and jumped in a cab and raced downtown. The doctor was already there when I arrived and he told me Lionel was dead. He had drowned, in his own vomit.12

  Monday and he had had a fight and she’d gone out to see the band play at a club somewhere in Brooklyn. Lionel had taken speed and been drinking before she left and there was an empty bottle of gin and several empty cans of beer in the kitchen. Completely drunk, he had passed out on one of the mattresses on the floor; his head wedged awkwardly – effectively in a booze and amphetamine coma. And when his body rebelled and he had vomited, his unconscious state and the fixed angle of his head had – well he drowned. His lungs filled up with the expelled fluid from his stomach, and he drowned. Poor stupid boy. Poor sad Lionel.

  I called Lottie. She screamed. Then she said in a tight grating voice – and I’ll never, never, forgive her for this – she said, ‘You bastard. It’s all your fault.’

  There was a crowd of forty or so at the funeral, nearly all people I didn’t know, and it was touching to see, gathered together, Lionel’s small world. Lottie sent a wreath. I gravitated towards Monday and we had a good weep together. She said it was her birthday – she was nineteen – and that was what they had been fighting about. She wanted to go to Lake Tahoe to celebrate – he wanted to go to New Orleans. She said she couldn’t stay in the apartment any more so I said she could use my spare room. She’s been here ever since and I think it’s helped us both. She takes Lionel’s copy of The Villa by the Lake everywhere (‘He loved that book, Logan’) like a talisman.

  [July]

  I’ve decided not to go back to London and Italy this summer. I’m deliberately engrossing myself in my work: buying wisely, I think – a few Pop Art pieces but mainly picking up a lot of good second-generation Abstract Expressionism as the fashion changes and the patrons and the collectors go racing after Warhol, Dine, Tazzi, Oldenburg and the rest.

  Monday has a job in a café in the Village and we both set out for work simultaneously. She has her own keys, comes and goes as she likes. She’s home most nights, I have to say. I like her presence in the house – a warm uncomplicated girl. We watch TV, we send out for Chinese or a pizza, we talk about Leo – she was surprised to learn he was Sir Lionel (‘So if we’d gotten married I’d have been, like, a Lady?’). She’s introduced me to the subtle pleasures of marijuana and I’ve practically abandoned barbiturates and sleeping pills. John Francis Byrne approves. When I go out myself in the evening – to a show opening or a dinner party – Monday waits up for me. I rather wish I’d kept on Mystic House but we’re happy enough in the hot city. I receive many invitations for the weekends but I don’t think I could really turn up at the Heubers or Ann Ginsberg with Monday in tow – I just tell them I’m busy writing.

  [August]

  Problems. I woke at 6.00 this morning and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. Monday was standing by the open fridge, hair tousled, bleary with sleep, naked. She picked out a carton of orange juice and wandered past me back to the room, saying, ‘Hi, Logan,’ completely unconcerned.

  Unfortunately it’s not an unconcern I can pretend to. Maybe living communally as she did, with Lionel and the band and their girlfriends, casual nudity was the order of the day. But as far as I’m concerned it’s as if a switch has been thrown and I’m suddenly very aware I’m sharing my apartment with a pretty nineteen-year-old girl. Images of her body fill my head. I find the whole atmosphere in the apartment completely changed – it’s charged, now, sexually electric. Sweet suffering Christ, Mountstuart, she could be your granddaughter. Yes, but I’m flesh and blood, blood and flesh. This evening I sat watching her covertly as she moved about the living room, picking up a magazine, sipping at her iced-tea. It was hot and she wandered over to the air conditioner to be closer to the flow of cool air. She was talking to me about some obnoxious customer she’d had that day – I wasn’t listening, I was looking. As she talked, she gathered her tresses of hair in both hands behind her head, twisted it into a thick hank and spiralled it on to her crown, exposing her moist nape, the better to let the chill reach her. As she collected up her hair I could see her breasts rise beneath her t-shirt. I felt thick-tongued, dry-throated, unbalanced by a desire that was so straightforward and unequivocal it took my breath away. I wanted her, wanted her strong young body beneath me –or on top of me, or next to me.

  So at supper this evening I took pre-emptive action. I said I had to go to London and Paris on business and that I’d be away for six weeks or so and that, perhaps, she might find it more congenial to move in with friends while I was away. ‘What about the apartment?’ she said, surprised. ‘Your things? The plants?’ I’ll get the agency back in, I said. (I had cancelled my contract with the cleaning agency after Monday moved in. Why?) ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after the place for you. I’d like to.’ She licked a spot of ketchup off her thumb. These natural gestures are intolerably hard to bear now. Fine, I said. Great. As long as you won’t feel lonely. As long as you’re happy.

  Friday, 21 August

  It happened last night. It had to. It was inevitable and wonderful. We’d both drunk a lot. I was standing in the kitchen and she came up behind me, put her arms around me and laid her head on my back. I thought my spine would snap. She put on a ‘hurt’ voice: ‘I’m gonna miss you, Logan.’ I turned round. You’d have to have been made of stone. You’d have to have been a eunuch to have restrained yourself in that situation. We kissed. We went into my bedroom and took our clothes off and made love. We smoked some of her pot. We made love again. We woke in the morning, made love, had breakfast. Now she’s gone to work and I’m writing this down. She said she’s been wanting to do it virtually since she’d arrived. She thought it would make her closer to Leo, in some way. Jesus. But she could see I wasn’t interested, and she respected that, happy to be friends. Then everything changed, she said, suddenly she was aware that I wanted her too and that it was only a matter of time. It was that switch-throwing moment in the kitchen. When it’s mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world – as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.

  Tuesday, 25 August

  Crossing Park Avenue, on my way to work, my head full of Monday, I look
ed to my left and saw the hypodermic syringe of the Chrysler Building flare, hit by the morning sun – a silver art-deco spaceship about to blast off. Is this my favourite view in Manhattan?

  Thursday, 27 August

  6.30 p.m. I am coming home from work, walking down my street with my briefcase, when I see a man in a seersucker suit, hands on hips, staring up at my building. Can I help you? I ask. He has a saggy, folded face with a heavy blue beard needing a shave. Yeah, he says. Is there a Laura Schmidt in this building? I shake my head and say there’s no one of that name here – and I know all my neighbours. Thanks, he says, and wanders away. Now I know Monday’s real name. ‘Monday Smith’ is Laura Schmidt. I decide to save the information for later.

  Saturday, 29 August

  And this is how it has developed. I was a fool to be so unconcerned. Yesterday, Monday and I leave for work together as usual. Seersucker is across the road waiting with another man in a straw hat. Monday sees them and starts to run, like a hare, heading for Lexington Avenue. Straw-hat shouts: ‘Laura, honey! Wait!’ and they take off after her. I intercept, arms spread, hemming them in. Hey! What the hell’s going on here? By now Laura/Monday is round the corner, they’ll never catch her. Straw-hat yells at me: ‘You scum! You obscene filth! You pervert! That’s my daughter.’ So what? I say. ‘She’s sixteen years old, that’s so what, you disgusting piece of shit.’ I step back. No no no, I say, she told me she was nineteen. We celebrated her nineteenth birthday. ‘We’re calling the cops,’ Seersucker hisses at me. ‘You English loser.’ LOSER! He shouts once more, and then the two of them walk away.

  I go back to the apartment and try to calm down. Jesus fucking Christ. She looks twenty-five, not even nineteen – let alone sixteen. How could I at my age, at my distance, tell if a nineteen-year-old was really sixteen? Even Lionel couldn’t tell. These girls, these young women grow up so fast. Look at Gail – I’d say she was in her early twenties. But all this justification and special pleading is after the event. I call Jerry Schubert and explain the situation. He listens. It’s not looking good, Logan, he says soberly. The age of consent in New York State is seventeen. Consensual or not, they could get you on third-degree rape. Rape? What should I do, Jerry, I say. I swear to you she told me she was nineteen – she looks older than nineteen. He says nothing. What should I do? You never heard this from me, he says, but if I were you I’d get out of town –fast.