by Edmund White
“My decision?”
“You can name the best.”
“I don’t think in those terms,” Kolonakis said, but I could tell he was pleased in his grudging way.
After he left, Ercole and I fell into each other’s arms. It was as if we’d both trod a high wire for the first time and the audience below was roaring its applause. He was passionate yet tender and not at all kinky. Nor was I. We’d performed as a perfect team together. Though we were frivolous and ignorant, we’d hoodwinked one of the most savvy artists around. We felt like sexy teenage con artists, incestuous brother and sister using our pretend wealth and titles to leave a mark on the world. We knew perfectly well that we’d be forgotten in fifty years like all the other Parisian mondains, with their couture clothes, their restored châteaux, their Bugattis and Goyas; their white parchment interiors; their bals masques on themes (heads, kings, surrealism, impersonations); their black bamboo fumoirs; their friends in Bohemia, the Church, the government, the police, the gestapo, the arts; their famous team of chefs, their first editions; their lifeguard lovers; their Thoroughbred horses; their royal houseguests: all forgotten unless their names were perpetuated through the arts. This life is ruled by the rich, the fashionable, the trendy, and the beautiful; the afterlife is ruled by artists and scientists alone.
Although I was in my mid-twenties, had borne two children, had a disappointing marriage, and certainly wasn’t innocent, I was inexperienced. I was beginning to learn the codes of this ancient, capricious world I’d joined, but I still didn’t understand this inconvenient stranger I was yoked to: myself. I could feel the elephant’s immense, delicate ear in the dark but I still knew nothing of its feet, its trunk, its weary, expressive eyes, its mud-spattered hide, its big gleaming tusks, its tucked-away mouth gently chewing grass, its little-girl tail, its matronly, mountainous bulk suddenly lunging and teetering to its full height. I’d felt only the delicate, vein-rich ear. I knew nothing else of this stranger I was living with, pacific but warlike, silent until trumpeting.
Ercole was reassuringly older, the heir to an ancient title, an insider who never flaunted his privilege, rich enough to be indifferent to my wealth, fluent in six or seven languages, related to most of Europe, modest, polite and kind, madly in love with me. He was tall, well dressed without the usual male narcissism, he enjoyed submitting to me in bed but he wasn’t passive or cringing or even very servile unless I switched on that particular red spotlight—in which case he instantly assumed the position. I didn’t have the will or desire to dominate him except in bed. I visited a sex shop and bought some tit clamps and a big black rubber dildo. I had to keep him interested.
Not that I had to work at it. Everything I did (or just was) delighted him. He liked the springiness of my body, my perfume (Ivoire), my cunt and its modest curtain of blonde hair; he said I was a femme fontaine. I didn’t know what that meant. “It’s just that you are always … wet down there.” I thought it was nice to have a feature ascribed to me that I’d never noticed before. When he kissed my breasts and buried his face between them, I pointed at my stomach. “No, here—this is the good part.” He held me by the wrists, pinned to the mattress, and with a sad—or maybe just a tender—look, he stared at me and said solemnly, “All your parts are good, my darling.”
Soon my Sundays were thriving. At first the musicians clung together in one corner. They seemed overawed with the vastness of our rooms on the Avenue Foch, or maybe they were intimidated by so many titles and such suave manners in our other guests; the members of the gratin were polite, though their enthusiasm for electronic music seemed feigned even if their pursuit of the latest cry (le dernier cri) and of the true genius of the moment (le vrai génie du moment) was spirited enough. Kolonakis told us that in the Left Bank world of artists people were excrutiatingly frank and given to rosserie (nastiness), whereas the gratin seemed the last civilized beings on earth. We could say cruel things (“She’s gone to a better demimonde”), but in the name of wit.
For my Sunday teas I had mountains of little sandwiches of all colors, pyramids of vanilla or raspberry macaroons, pains au chocolat still warm from Boissier, babas, and brioches. If it was a long, demanding composition that lasted over two hours I had something warm like a lamb navarin or a Moroccan couscous, which was still a rarity in those days. The children’s German nanny helped translate for some East German composers.
We were determined to snare Eugène Boisrond for our Sundays. He was famously disagreeable, anti-Semitic, but weirdly compassionate toward the poor; he earned his living as a doctor, a general practitioner to the needy. And he lived amid them in a dirty little pavilion in Saint-Ouen. No one had ever met him, though his strange compositions had all the other composers in awe. He was some sort of mystic (but an atheist, of course) and his scores looked like mandalas. It was anyone’s guess how to play them, as arbitrary and undefined as Bach’s Art of the Fugue. The scores were so beautiful they were suitable for framing.
To get up our courage to beard the lion, we were drunk by noon. I had the cook pack a little osier basket with crustless sandwiches (paté, foie gras, cucumber) and splits of vintage champagne and little sweet or savory pies and we went to his address unannounced. The door was opened by a maid missing a few teeth (we later learned she was his much younger English wife) to reveal two nude babies trailing dirty nappies. “Qui êtes-vous?” she asked. We introduced ourselves in English and said we’d brought lunch for everyone and we were here to meet the great man. She gave her name as something like Paraffin or Peregrine and said Dr. Boisrond was seeing patients in his clinic downstairs. We said we’d wait and, uninvited, sat down in chairs burdened with dirty clothes. Paraffin left the room (one of her legs was shorter than the other), and went clomping down the stairs while sighing noisily, leaving us alone with the children, the youngest drooling on his sunsuit, the oldest staring at us while reaming her nose with her finger.
At last the doctor came steaming into the room in his white coat, his stethoscope around his thin neck, his face pale with anger. He was bald on top and his white fringe was cut down to the quick. We stood, laughed a bit, and told him in our slurred speech what great admirers we were and that we’d brought lunch. He glared at us and took a moment to respond, never smiling. “You’re both drunk. You weren’t invited. Take your food. Get out—now! I don’t like people like you. I know you’re cultivating musicians to show off at your salon but I’m not interested. Get out! Don’t ever come back.”
Paraffin was wringing her big, unpainted hands and grimacing with a little tic of a smile. I wondered if she might be a man, a transvestite, or just English. We went scrambling for the door, and going down the stairs I fell and felt a terrible pain stabbing me in the knee. The doctor looked out the front window and closed the blinds. Ercole carried me to the waiting car and we had the driver take us to the emergency room at the Hôtel-Dieu. I was weeping and even yelping from the pain, which was so severe I didn’t worry for once what sort of impression I was making. I was carried into the Urgence and luckily it was empty and I was seen right away. A nurse disinfected and bandaged my knee. I was taken in a wheelchair to a little room about five minutes away and X-rayed. When I was brought back to the waiting room and Ercole, another nurse gave me some strong painkillers. In fifteen minutes I was feeling better and had stopped crying. At last a thin, young, mustached doctor came in, waving an X-ray. He said, “You’ve had quite the fracture; I’m going to have to set your leg in plaster.”
The sedative was so strong that soon I was asleep and woke up only from time to time as the doctor and the nurse embalmed my leg. Then I was wheeled back to Ercole and he whistled like a schoolboy when he saw my cast.
“Is monsieur your husband?” the doctor asked.
“Brother.”
“Will you have someone to look after you, Madame—”
Stupidly I said, “Je suis la baronne de Courcy.”
“Of course,” he said nonsensically, slightly inclining his head as�
�a reverence? A bow.
They gave me a small paper envelope of twenty more painkillers and an appointment for a week later. Ercole paid them something. A hospital porter wheeled me out to the car and Ercole tipped him and lifted me onto the back seat, making sure my leg was stretched out on the seat. The man guided the wheelchair back into the emergency room. Ercole sat up front with the driver. He looked back, reaching to squeeze my hand reassuringly. He caught my eye and we both burst out laughing. I tried to sober up; I was afraid it was the pill that was making everything so hilarious. But we both had a fou rire and soon we were bubbling over, each in turn and then simultaneously.
When Clementine, my maid, in her starched white apron and cap, opened the door her mouth fell open. “Mais oo-la-la. Qu’est-ce que çela? Mais vous avait eu un incident, Madame. Monsieur le prince, je peux vous aider? Portez madame par là, dans le salon. J’appèlle un medecin, Madame?”
I assured her everything was all right. The prince carried me up the stairs to my bedroom and stretched me out on the love seat. Clementine was rushing around clucking and approaching me to straighten my skirt and unlace my shoes. I asked her to bring me a glass of water and the prince Scotch avec des glaçons. “Tout de suite, Madame la baronne.” Through my haze I smiled at Ercole; I probably looked tear-stained, my lipstick mumbled away, my mascara streaked, but I felt like one of those dazzling, creamy Hollywood actresses shot through gauze, tiny backlights sparkling in her eyes and defining the glycerine contours of her lips.
We entered into a new phase of our relationship. We still had our Sundays, with the delicious food, horrible, rumbling music, social awkwardness between gratin and canaille, but we also had our Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays alone, driving into the country to see the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte and eat there in Le Nôtre’s garden by candlelight while listening to a scratchy string orchestra play Lully, more soothing but no less dull than the music we were sponsoring. As spring turned to summer I was released from my itchy cast (still pure white, though in Texas my sorority sisters would have scribbled all over it and drawn wobbly hearts). We motored to Deauville and Ercole showed me the spooky Psycho Second Empire house, all gables and shutters, his family had rented many summers long ago. We had a wonderful seaside dinner at Trouville and he indicated to me his rather battered-looking small yacht, the Felice, in need of a coat of varnish.
We drove out to Chantilly, where he’d somehow arranged to keep two racehorses in the historic stables (they were named Jicky and True Love). He said they were both males and earned him lots of money when he put them out to stud.
Every once in a while we’d break the silence and one of us would just say, “Boisrond,” and we’d both burst out laughing. We were like those prisoners who’ve told all their jokes to one another so often that all they needed was to call out “Number Eleven” or “Number Three” in order to collapse with laughter. “Boisrond,” one of us would say, and soon we’d be falling about. If we were in the nursery the children smiled sympathetically but looked puzzled. The prince was a good cook and would rustle us up some pasta, a spicy puttanesca, which he said was what whores would cook late at night for their customers (could that be true?). We spoke English most of the time, French when there were others around. Ercole said in his family they’d always spoken French at the table. Not only did he spend his summers in France but after the age of fourteen he attended Le Rosey, a French-speaking school in Switzerland. He told me his first lover had been another boy at Rosey, an Indian prince; he’d gone back to India with him, to Srinagar, a beautiful city in Kashmir with snow-covered mountains in the distance and brightly painted houseboats on the lake. They were known as “the two princes.” The lover was Muslim, which meant he was circumcised—the first circumcision Ercole had ever seen up close. He preferred it to his own abundant foreskin; it was “cleaner.” The city was warm in the summer but not hot; it was filled with mosquitoes, mosques, and temples, Hindu and Jain. They listened to records of a singer of ghazels, Begum something. Rather eerie, but he grew to like it. “Maybe that’s what prepared me for our odd musical tastes,” he said, laughing. Then he went silent as he often did when he thought he’d said something banal or vulgar or middle-class.
“Maybe I’ll send my children to Rosey,” I said.
“They’ll meet lots of future monarchs. It’s the most expensive school in the world: one hundred thirty thousand dollars per kid per year. The winter months are spent at Gstaad skiing. That’s the campus in January and February.”
Adhéaume was seldom around. He only raised an eyebrow when he saw my leg in a cast. “I won’t ask you how that happened,” he said. “You must be tired of answering that question.”
I shrugged. “How’s the house coming?” That’s what I called the château—the house.
“It’s so much work. And the children?”
“Fine.”
“And Hercule?” Addy preferred that to Ercole because that allowed him to linger on “cul,” “ass,” or “sex” in general (ribald stories were called histoires de cul).
“The prince is fine,” I said. He knew I knew that one of his friends at the Jockey said, “For me humanity begins only with the rank of baron.”
The next time I was alone with Ercole I said, “I was so happy you told me about your boyhood flirtation with the other prince.”
“Why?”
“I get crushes on girls. My first experience was with a girl. We were fourteen.”
“That age … My theory is that oversexed teens, at least in the past, always had sex with other kids of the same gender. It’s easier, more available, just as exciting and romantic, and sophisticated people don’t take it seriously. Homosexuality isn’t dynastic.”
“I still find myself attracted to women.”
Ercole stroked his chin and said, “Men and boys leave me cold. But the idea of two women excites me, I suppose as it does most men.” He went silent with embarrassment.
After I poured us more tea I said, “If we ever find a willing victim …”
He stood to take his cup, bent down to kiss me, and said, “So much for this famous American puritanism.”
“Texans aren’t Yankees,” I nearly shouted. Then I let out a rebel yell and the governess came out of the nursery looking worried. “Is the Freiherrin all right?” It was Addy’s idea that the children’s first language should be German. (“Since it’s so difficult. Anyone can learn English and the romance languages.”)
The prince also looked startled, then pleased. He examined me with a new respect, as if he’d just discovered I had infrasonic powers. I suppose I felt a little guilty “cheating” on my fortune-hunting, mistress-collecting husband, but only out of some vestigial Dallas prudery. What the French called our “puritanism,” though they had no idea what that word meant.
We had passed to that most intimate of all stages—Ercole and I could read together in companionable silence. Sometimes I would forget where we were and if he made a comment I’d have to pipe myself back into reality, to this study on the Avenue Foch, to the realization that Ghislaine and Foulques were napping in the next room, that the German nanny was humming a Prussian melody to the children.
Ercole decided to paint my portrait—or rather to draw it in pastels. He seemed to know what he was doing. He rolled up his sleeves and took a board onto his lap. I arranged the lights so they were trained on a bergère, which I occupied. I was prepared for the worst—big teeth, a swirl of egg-yolk-colored hair, the full-on frontal grin of a madwoman, clown’s patches of red on my cheeks. But of course I hoped, as everyone does, for something insightful, idealizing and charming, an expert vision rather than an incompetent daub.
He squinted at me in that artist’s way of studying the angle of your cheekbone or the tilt of your nose, which is suddenly more important than your soul, even your consciousness. They say babies are attracted to human faces because our features maximize light and shadow in a compact space—the slash of a mouth under the rudder of
the nose and the liquid, moving eyes under their batting curtains of fringed tissue (I’d noticed my babies were magnetized by my face). Artists are the same, looking at the commotion of light and dark inscribed in the narrow orbit of the face, this oval posed on the flexible column of the neck.
Ercole looked at me with a cold, scientific expression, not registering or reacting to my words (I was silent) or my moues (I was motionless). For him I was a still life of fruit and vegetables, une tête composée, a code of lights and shadows. The German nanny brought the children in for a minute. Just taking one or the other (usually Foulques) in my arms made me melt. And also feel rather dirty—why was this new mother having an affair?
“Tell me about your life,” I said, when they had left in a Teutonic flurry of guttural sounds and tut-tuts.
“At Rosey you had to follow the curriculum in French or in English, so I chose French, of course, though my Indian prince spoke to me in English, a rapid, singsongy English that tripped over certain consonants and darkened certain vowels. I was a good swimmer and equestrian, played an energetic game of tennis and skied well, even liked danger, and at Gstaad had a helicopter fly me to uncharted mountaintops where there were only wolf prints in the snow.
“I played soccer but didn’t follow the teams. I thought being a fan, un tifoso, was silly or maybe ignoble. After school I went to Brazil, where my father had a huge ranch near Ouro Preto. I loved the old baroque city. I learned Portuguese—well, their kind of Portuguese. I had known some Orléans-Gonzagas at Rosey and they became friends in Brazil. One of them, I think the pretender to the throne, was a nice enough guy, a nature photographer, I forget his name. But we partied a lot. While there I met Isabella from Uruguay, a real beauty who’d studied art history in Paris. At that time I was thinking of becoming a diplomat and she’d be perfect as the wife of a consul or cultural attaché. Beautiful, fluent in three languages, grande bourgeoisie who knew how to flatter foreigners and manage a staff and set a table and talk about art to avoid politics. We got married in Montevideo and were together twenty years and had two sons.