by Edmund White
He didn’t say a word but blushed through several colors.
But he did go through what seemed an entirely unmotivated attack on American mothers and grandmothers. He criticized their loud laughter, their bottomless thirst for being amused, their weird “feminist” way of defying men while at the same time fishing outrageously for compliments from them, their way of dressing too youthfully and having their faces lifted (which he called hygiène de peau). “They don’t want to fool anyone by being radically ‘lifté’; they just want to look like other face-lifted women, to prove they’re rich enough for the surgery. Their happiness is completed with a little dog and a draft.”
They belong to no particular milieu and want only their own garish independence. When someone French asked Bobbie Jean her age, she said, “I don’t remember.” When her interlocutor insisted, she replied, “How do you expect me to remember a number that changes all the time?” That was considered very witty, though Addy thought it was impertinent and “typical.” Later he muttered that American women represented “an unknown model,” un modèle inconnu, and weren’t “realistic.”
CHAPTER 11
It was about then that I took my first lover and started my salon. He was an Italian prince and at first I thought he preferred men. He took me to the theater one evening and after the play to supper at Le Grand Véfour. Over our food he said he liked the play by Anouilh that we’d just seen because it embodied the typical French virtues of “irony, lightness, and speed.” I was so impressed and enjoying myself so thoroughly (though he wasn’t handsome or young), I asked him to repeat what he’d just said, it was so intelligent, and he did so with some embarrassment (he was afraid of sounding pedantic) and then, after my third glass of Chablis, I blurted out, “Êtes-vous pédé? (Are you a fag?) Do you like men or do you like women?” And he said with a sweet smile and in a low voice, “I like flowers.”
“No, seriously?”
“Women. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”
“Why should it disappoint me?”
“Some women feel safe only around their capons. And those men are usually more clever than us dull normals all normaling around.”
“You’re so refined. And mysterious. And such good company. That’s the only reason I thought you might be homosexual.”
“I’m also Italian.”
“So?”
“We’re pleasant people. Stendhal said, ‘The French are Italians in a bad mood.’ ”
I laughed, the new tinkling French laugh I’d exchanged for my American gasp-and-roar. “You’re an enchanting man,” I said.
“Not exactly the virile adjective we were hoping for.”
I touched his leg under the table. He smelled wonderful: bergamot, I guessed.
He said, “I’m so afraid of assertive American women that you’ll have to take all the initial steps.”
“Toward what?”
“Whatever your heart desires.”
In the car home (it was raining), I leaned over and kissed him. “How do I know if you like it?”
“Now you know the dilemma we men constantly face. Yes, I like it. Lots.”
“I’ve always dreamed of being the active one. On top. In charge.” I looked out after a sudden deluge of rain swamped the window; maybe an over-heavy branch above us just bent. “Do you like to be tied up?”
“I’ve never tried it. But it’s an intriguing idea.”
“Are you from Rome?”
“No. A village in the south. Teggiano. I’m not only the prince of Padula but the duke of Teggiano. Our patron saint is San Cono. He’s named that after his cone-shaped head, which has something to do with the Trinity. He also used it to deflect cannonballs aimed at the Teggiano castle.”
“Saint Conehead? How delicious. And you a prince?”
“Every other person in Italy is a prince. And in southern Italy we use all our titles. ‘Prince, would you like something to drink?’ ‘Thank you, Prince, but I already have some prosecco.’ It makes aristocrats from elsewhere laugh at us.”
I was familiar enough now with this form of aristocratic self-mockery not to take it too seriously. It was of a piece with titled ladies who claimed that their couture dresses came from a secondhand stall at the market on the Ile de Ré or that they’d found their Hubert Robert painting of the Roman forum in a Brussels bistro covered with grease. I suppose now we would call it humble-bragging; it was intended to defuse envy of everything but their discerning eye, or, in this case, to laugh at their pretensions to an ancient title they had a perfect right to bear. Or to tease them for the ancestral castle they were fortunate enough to inherit.
“I’m so bored. I’m thinking of starting a salon, or is that idea a little desuète?”
“What sort of salon?”
“Music. At literary salons you have to listen to writers read. Or, worse, talk.”
“A music salon sounds very amusing. I’ll help you if I can. Would Adhéaume approve?”
“Who cares? He’s too busy restoring his family château or going to auctions or bedding new mistresses.”
The prince just arched an eyebrow. “Do you know any composers?”
“No. Are they difficult to find (dénicher)?”
“I know a music critic for Figaro. I’ll ask him for a list. I assume most composers want a free meal. Which will be your day?”
“My day? Oh—Sunday. It’s always so gloomy, Sunday.”
“We’ll invite the gratin, the ones who think of themselves as intelligent. Critics, of course. Will your salon be avant-garde? Nothing hummable, squeaks and squawks? Or melodic—Auric, Honneger, that sort of thing?”
“What’s chicer?”
“Squeaks and squawks.”
“Then it shall be avant-garde.”
“You’ll have to buy big speakers and a state-of-the-art tape deck. The music is really and truly unbearable.”
“Bring it on. Only the philistines will protest. It will be a sort of test.”
I felt guilty taking up any hobby that would consume my time when the children were still so little. They didn’t need me. They had the wet nurse and soon the new German nanny whom Adhéaume was lining up, and the house servants were always fluttering around them, but people were constantly saying children grew up so quick that I was afraid of missing something irreplaceable. I hadn’t had my tubes tied nor was Addy out of commission, but I felt these two children were my legacy, my patrimoine, and like Chinese women during the Cultural Revolution I’d be sterilized if I exceeded my limit.
His name was Ercole Moncada. Principe Moncada. I found him very attractive. I kissed him on the lips when we reached my doorway on the Avenue Foch. The usual streetwalker was standing in the doorway. We nodded at each other politely. The prince said, “À bientôt, j’espère.”
He was wearing a dark blue suit (not as tight as one of Addy’s), a white shirt, and a plain dark-blue silk tie. He had a white linen handkerchief, not in stiff little peaks but sumptuously casual in his breast pocket. He wore a gold ring mounting for a black cameo, a Roman emperor, no doubt. He was tall and slender, with a full head of long, straight silver hair pushed back from his face. I wondered if he’d have white chest hair and hair on his shoulders. Men! But I loved his bergamot cologne and I’d felt its aura pulsing around me all evening; irrationally I ascribed it to him, to his body.
I thought about him as I undressed and lay in bed. Maybe I’d never been in love with Addy, but I had nursed the illusion that he loved me, at least as the “little mother” of his heir, Foulques. Some days the only time I’d see him was when he visited the nursery, held his son, and even threw him in the air (which I hated). But Foulques seemed to find it exhilarating and smiled his toothless, senile, slightly mad smile. Adhéaume gave me no credit as a parent, as if I’d been nothing more than a surrogate, a mère porteuse, as people say now—as if I’d done nothing more than carry the fetus. His coldness to me left me feeling very wounded, as if he’d married this raw-boned, big-toothed Texan
for her money alone, which everyone said but I hadn’t wanted to believe.
It was insulting, I felt deeply humiliated; he’d raided my womb as he was emptying my coffers, transferring my family wealth into his family château, grafting my babies onto his family tree. He’d won on every front and I felt like—oh, I smelled the faint echo of bergamot on my hand. I thought that probably Ercole was just one more duplicitous European, but I was tempted to believe in him. I felt torn between the modesty that had been drilled into me and my desire for revenge.
Two days later Ercole’s chauffeur delivered a little tree of bergamot oranges, clearly labeled with a neatly printed botanical word planted in the soil. The fragrance was bewitching, unforgettable. I looked it up in a multivolume Larousse and found it was called sour orange or sweet lemon, which left me slightly mystified. The oil of its peel was used in the eighteenth century for the first eau de cologne. It was the flavor of Earl Grey tea. The oranges were greenish, larger than lemons but smaller than oranges. The leaves were polished. I found a handwritten note in a crested envelope: “I had this little tree brought by car from southern Italy because you said you liked the scent. I hope it’s not overpowering. I have no idea how to care for it; my gardener says to water it once a week and give it lots of sunlight (good luck with that in Paris). Your faithful servant, Ercole.”
His closing sentiment excited me. Two days later, when Addy had left for the Var, I sent Ercole a pneu inviting him to stop by for a drink—late, around ten thirty or eleven. I addressed it to “my faithful servant,” and signed it just “Y.” I felt my breasts twitch, or did I just imagine that? I didn’t let myself think too much about what I was doing.
At ten forty-five a servant brought the prince into the smaller salon, where I was sitting by the fire. I rose to greet him. The servant gave him a whiskey and soda and withdrew, closing the double doors behind him. The prince took my extended hand and bent toward it. He was wearing white trousers, a dark blue jacket, a rose-colored polo shirt, and a foulard, as if he were on a yacht. “Sit here, beside me.” I’d made that delicate transition to the informal you, but he persisted in addressing me as vous, as if I were older or more important—or more powerful. It could have been a rejection of intimacy, but I didn’t take it that way.
I said in a very firm voice, “I wore boots for you.”
He lowered his eyes and said, “Thank you.”
“Kiss them.”
He slid to his knees beside me and without looking up bent to kiss my boot.
“Good boy,” I said.
There are so few moments in life, especially social life, when one is required to be bold. Usually, everything, from which direction to walk to which restaurant to choose, is arrived at through a micro-series of conferences and concessions as one coaxes forth reservations or mixed responses or hidden desires. But in this kind of domination sex (or so at least I imagined) the least hesitation or wavering of the will would make the mood evaporate. As I would learn, the great enemies of sadism are laughter and irony because they require perspective and evaluation, a fatal distancing. Just as the facilitating angel (or devil) was determination. What was sexy was one will making another will bend to it.
“You can take your clothes off,” I said.
“Thank you, thank you,” he muttered. Only now did he look up at me from his kneeling position with supplication in his eyes. He looked twenty years younger. He shrugged off his jacket and pulled his shirt down (for a moment his silk foulard was still tied around his neck and hanging down on his chest, as hairless as a ballet dancer’s, a danseur noble, I thought inconsequentially). He unknotted it, stood, with his head down, awkwardly stepped out of his moccasins, undid his trousers, and peeled off his underwear. Big penis, small patch of hair, no paunch, large nipples with a history, I thought, which thrilled me. My hunch was right! A hard erection. He must like this sort of thing!
That first time I didn’t get much beyond twisting his nipples and whispering insults. When I called him a pig (cochon) he had a climax without touching himself. I was very gratified and within seconds I had my orgasm, though I did touch myself. I heard a clicking sound and thought I noticed a flash, but a minute later I dismissed that paranoid notion as just the evidence of a guilty conscience. I smiled and shook my hair out and pulled him up beside me and kissed him; I’d hiked up my skirt but otherwise stayed fully clothed. It was the first time I’d ever enjoyed sex with a man. I was very affectionate to him, still just following my instincts. I wish I’d read a manual or something or Sade.
Ercole and I had lots of fun together and our sex roles didn’t inflect our off-stage behavior. We were good pals and laughed a lot. He showed me pictures of his castle, which looked like an anthill with flags; he even showed me Saint Conehead, with his neon halo! Much more impressive was the monastery at Padula, a baroque masterpiece that Napoleon had looted of its paintings but that was overwhelming architecturally with its vast cloisters, its inlaid semiprecious stone altars, its trompe l’oeil octagonal tower.
We found a little shop on the Rue des Archives that sold leather whips and manacles; we were nearly breathless when we got them to his place on the Rue du Bac. We didn’t talk at all on the ride back and my hands were shaking as I tore open the overly ingenious French package.
I’ll draw a veil over our exploits lest I offend my younger readers but suffice it to say that I spent hours daydreaming about Ercole’s next humiliations. I found my thoughts were far more occupied with punishment than music. Though for all that, my thoughts (and deeds) were highly creative—constantly daring myself to go further and further while always advancing a controlled, coherent narrative. In the end it became more verbal than physical, with me barking commands and he whispering compliance. Sometimes I felt a twinge of performance anxiety just before he was due to arrive, but his gratitude (he even wept grateful tears) banished all stage fright and elevated me in my own eyes. I saw myself as beautiful and imperious, and since I was both things our sport didn’t require too much playacting.
My husband, who spent hours every day on the phone and gossiping at the Jockey, was soon abreast of my intimacy with Prince Moncada. “I see you’ve taken up with Ercole. Isn’t he a little old for you? Isn’t he impotent? How does he like that worn-out pussy of yours?”
“He likes it fine,” I said, “since he got past the worn-out part. He has a very large penis.”
“How Texan! Texans are always saying Texas is as large as France—but there’s nothing in Texas! Whereas France is so varied, from the palm trees of the Côte d’Azur to the pines of Burgundy, from the cold Atlantic coast to the hundreds—thousands!—of châteaux, from the Pyrenees full of bears to the Breton coast crowded with oysters. You Texans always care about size rather than quality.”
“His penis is of the highest quality. He’s a prince and a duke. You sound like a travelogue.”
Our first composer was a Greek, Kolonakis, immensely respected and utterly repugnant. His face had been shot and deformed in the Greek civil war against the monarchists (Kolonakis was a Communist). He was due to be executed when he slipped (illegally) into France, where he studied mathematics and architecture (he worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier). None of the prominent composers in France (Honegger, Nadia Boulanger) liked his music. When he asked Messiaen if he needed to study harmony and counterpoint, the older, bird-crazed mystic said, “No. You already know mathematical and scientific theory—that should suffice,” and Kolonakis turned around and did a composition based on the mathematical expansion (or was it saturation?) of gases, and soon was doing game theory, set theory, and stochastics, whatever that is. Musique concrète, electronic music—you name it. If it was avant-garde and intolerable he was for it. He had a silly journalist wife whose trademark was round red glasses, and a whiny daughter.
He was reserved and his conversation was very abstract, or concrete—anyway, impossible to understand. He never looked us in the eye. I think he could see right away that we were rich dilettantes just wa
iting to be milked for money; that we were foreigners like him made us more attractive. A bit exotic. Naive. Ercole and I had him for dinner and we peppered him with questions, as no real French person could possibly do. We were complicitous in a way I’d never been with Addy; I toyed with the fantasy of being married to him but wondered how divorce would affect the children. Was divorce always a bad thing? What if it cut through unbearable tensions? I think Kolonakis was puzzled how such uninformed people could like his work; it was all about being initiated.
But he liked being humored and having his hopes raised. I showed him our immense reception rooms and said that we wanted to stage a performance of music by him and his friends; it could be on a Sunday evening with champagne a-go-go and hot food. He could invite whoever he liked.
He warned us that we would need to warn the neighbors—it would be deafening. We could also have (via a recording) the Paris premiere of Charles Wuorinen’s Third Symphony—the American, won the Pulitzer, you know, he was passing through Paris on his way to Stuttgart (the performance would be in the presence of the composer). There were other Americans who could be had for the price of an airplane ticket and a hotel room—Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Robert Ashley. “The ultimate, of course, would be Boisrond.”
“What about Stockhausen?” Ercole asked (he’d been doing his homework).
“Can you afford twelve musicians?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“Certainly.”
“Or we could have a pianist play some of the Klavierstück II,” Kolonakis said.
“Great,” I murmured, nodding vigorously.
I hoped he wouldn’t ask me what was so great. He was the most unsmiling man I’d ever met. I thought how lucky earlier musical salonnières had been with their Debussy and Ravel. “But we don’t want just these foreigners en passage. We want French composers who will come back each week,” Ercole said. I added as our ultimate bait, “With your decision we can present the best composers at the Salle Pleyel,” naming the most prestigious concert hall.