by Edmund White
“I tried to get into Sciences Po here in Paris, but my grades weren’t good enough. Then we moved to Rome, where I became a painter, and we lived in a family palazzo near the Campo de’ Fiori. I had a show at the Obelisco Gallery but nothing sold and no one came except relatives. I did abstractions with glossy, gooey brushstrokes like Soulages. I thought of growing raisins—”
“Grapes,” I said.
“Grapes on one of our estates near Genoa, but I was allergic to wine (I drink Scotch as you know) and soon gave it up. We went to my village in the cool months and Isabella learned Italian and even my dialect and wrote a Campania cookbook, but she was bored, took up with an archaeologist from a dig near Naples, Dutch guy named Hoob Something or Something Hoob—and everything just frittered away. She left me and I think she and Hoob live now in Asunción, which is the cheapest capital in the world.”
“Where is it?”
“Paraguay. They took the children, who are now grown-up. Pedro is an ecologist and Martin is a businessman in Spain, in Valencia—he sells cars, I think. Hoob is digging away, but now prospecting for oil in a region called the Chacos. I find I’m happiest in Paris and Teggiano, my castle. I’ve never settled on a career, though I’ve learned to play the guitar and of course I have my horses and the village takes up a lot of time, what with the celebrations around Saint Conehead and some sort of Renaissance marriage with a princess from Urbino that gets celebrated every year in late summer when everyone wears Renaissance costumes and there’s lots of loud drum-beating.”
“And mistresses?”
Ercole just smiled in that maddening way Southern Europeans have of not answering an indiscreet question. If the question is repeated they just smile more.
“But what was your life like with Isabella?” I asked. Of course, between lovers such questions are never innocent; the interrogator wants to know what lies in store for her and the responder is carefully shaping his response to indicate likes and dislikes and to make himself appear in a favorable light.
“She was neurotic? Caractérielle?” he said, looking for the word in either language. “In front of other people (not our sons) she would play the principessa, even mention my modest accomplishments, but when we were alone she would go on weeklong fasts of silence, treat my goals as trivial, my lineage as probably fake, make a loud, hissing sound like a goose if I touched her. She turned our boys against me and taught them the English word ‘malingerer’ to describe me, as if I were lazy or hyperchondriacal by nature. Pedro invented a new last name for himself, joined the Communist Party in Italy, and refers to me as ‘comrade.’ He’d sooner die than admit he’s a prince. He says he’s an ecologist, whatever that is if you’re not a professor, but he lives off family money as we all do. Martin married a Catalan girl and has taken over her father’s Mercedes dealership. He works very hard, speaks perfect Spanish, which of course he learned as a kid from his mother—pretends he is Spanish but from La Mancha—makes a good living, has no interest in us.
“I don’t think Isabella really approved of me, once she saw that I had no direction in life. Here I was, in my fifties, still seeing a psychiatrist, trying to find myself, as they say. Then one day I was sitting in my Rome palazzo and listening to Schubert’s The Trout in the rain. It was sunny outside and the rain looked like silver streaming through the sunlight. I was drinking a Cinzano with the most fragrant lemon peel you can imagine—cedro, those huge lemons from Sicily or Procida, too bitter to eat but good for perfume. I thought, I have found myself—and I’m here, comfortable, the music is complex enough to keep me awake but also melodic enough to delight me, wondrous in the way the piano enters, really like water pouring over white stones. Why should I be looking for a job? Jobs are always annoying. You can’t travel when you want to. You can’t sleep in when you’re hungover. You can’t read till dawn. And why take a job away from someone who needs it?
“If a couple has money they can each live apart, separate bedrooms, different friends. Two of my Italian friends here in Paris—he likes gardening in the South of France, he’s famous for his gardens, she likes une vie mondaine in Paris and has people to dinner five nights a week, which he can’t tolerate. They phone each other every day and are very kind to each other. When she’s in the Midi she drives. He hates her driving and lies down in the back seat. He says he doesn’t mind dying but doesn’t want to see it happening. They get along perfectly. But they have the same tempi. They’re both always busy, whereas Isabella is presto and I’m lento and that was the problem.”
“It sounds as if she’s not very kind, either,” I said, but then he showed me his sketch of me, which many people would be satisfied with but which I thought looked too “commercial,” as if he’d studied at a school for illustration advertised on the back of a matchbook, everything from the swoop of hair to the star in my eye, the stylized nose of two lines and two dots for nostrils, the long lashes, the unified teeth as if I were wearing a boxer’s mouth guard.
“Hmmm …,” I said in a noncommittal British way. I was disappointed, not by a lack of skill (which I’d anticipated) but by a failure to look, really to look at me; his commercial conventions had occluded his actual powers of observation.
And yet he was very attentive in all the ways that counted. He knew what I liked to eat, that (unlike the French) I liked an open window and a breeze, that I needed to spend an hour alone with the children every afternoon, that I liked riding in the car beside him with no goal and with only occasional chatter, that I liked to go to the Louvre with him and just take in one room or two (he liked medieval armor, I preferred ancient Greek sculpture). My afternoon hour with the children was ransom paid to my conscience. I loved them, I knew they were too young to remember anything, but I worried that my seeming indifference, my truancy, would damage them for life. Sometimes Ercole and I would drive to the country, maybe south toward Vendôme, and leave the car behind and walk through the countryside, which was absolutely without interest except fascinating, just the smell of wet foliage, the occasional stand of trees, the less occasional passing tractor, the fenced-in cows who’d come as near as possible to us in their placid way, the huge heavens full of moving gray clouds, the low-eaved houses that looked deserted except for the few pieces of laundry drying on the line and flapping in the gathering wind, the fields of chrome-yellow colza (which in English is called rapeseed), brilliant patches of color in this landscape of dull, muted tones, the village where Ronsard was born. I was privately exhilarated that here I was, a big dumb Texas bottle blonde, living in France, not the tourist’s France of châteaux and cathedrals but this solemn, everyday France of fields and cows and clouds, “everyday” except that, over there, was where Ronsard was born. I’d escaped Dallas. Sometimes I had to look up words in French in the bilingual dictionary to remember what they were in English. What did voire mean, something like “more precisely”?
I assumed that Addy was staying informed about our dalliance, but I didn’t really care. Or rather, quite irrationally, I thought he might learn something from it—to be more considerate, less greedy, more solicitous—oh, it didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t about to let either Ercole or Addy go and my only hope was that this affair would be somehow “educational” for my husband, a learning experience.
I suppose I wanted at least the semblance of stability in my life for the children’s sake. Our father had been so cruel to Yvette; it seemed very important to avoid comparable mistakes with my twins. Sometimes I felt detached from them, but wasn’t that what a shrink would call a defense against feeling too much? I was still technically what people call young, therefore forgivable, but I felt terminally weary—and afraid of loving anyone too much. I was prepared for any rejection from anyone. Other people might think I was frivolous and spoiled, but my heart was cold, ever alert to the first sign of catastrophe. I looked like a femme du monde but in truth I was a seasoned soldier.
One day in Paris we spotted Helen at a café and asked if we could join her; that was easier to d
o because she and I were both American. I wondered if she was growing into her face-lift—it looked more natural, not so wounded, the planes molded out of terra-cotta, not struck from marble. She and Ercole got on famously; they’d both just seen an arty movie and discussed it endlessly and enthusiastically. I kept smiling as when friends exclaim over Corfu, where you’ve never been. I could see Helen was charmed by Ercole; when he got up to buy cigarettes, she whispered, “He’s cute!”
“So are you,” I said, which startled her, then made her lower her eyes coquettishly.
“I’ve never been with a woman,” she said.
“Believe me, it’s wonderful.”
“I believe you,” she said, looking into my eyes. She was dressed in a white middy blouse with a sailor’s collar and a dark blue foulard. I leaned in to pour the rest of the coffee in the little pot into her cup. The day was warm enough that we were sitting on the terrace at Les Deux Magots, looking out at the church. It was before the full tourist season, so we kept studying the passing faces, thinking we might know someone. We spotted an ageless American man, Howard, with his lover-companion, who’d been his tennis coach in boarding school. Howard’s grandfather had invented the airplane or something; he lived on the Rue du Bac in an apartment full of the latest gadgets and with an immense terrace. Helen said, “Hello, Howard.”
He stared at her and said, “I’m sorry, who are you?”
“I’m Helen. We had dinner together last night.”
He slapped his head theatrically and said, “Of course!” He kissed her on each cheek and hurried off to his table inside, where his coach-companion was already seated.
Helen said, “Poor thing. But if I were a dishy boy he’d remember me. He drinks so much but never ages.”
I said, “They say his secret is sleep. He sleeps twelve hours a night. And he has a full facial at Carita every day. One of the girls there told me that. He likes the boys very young, dangerously young.”
“I hope he knows officers in the police mondaine.”
“His companion handles all that,” she said. “But tell me, where did you meet Ercole?”
“We both like serious contemporary music. You must come to one of our Sundays.”
“Yes, come,” Ercole said, rejoining us. “This Sunday we have a very interesting middle-aged French composer named Boulez, very engaging and cerebral. The week after we have a Mormon, La Monte Young, a minimalist. It seems he has a soloist come out onstage in tails and with a score that he props up on a pupitre and then he beats a frying pan twenty-two times with a spoon while frowning at the score. I think it’s called Twenty-Two.”
Helen said, “This ridiculous twentieth century.” Ercole added, “He has another piece where he just builds a fire onstage.”
“Not exactly ‘The Blue Danube,’ but it sounds fun.”
We girls swapped phone numbers.
Ercole confirmed that he found Helen attractive and the next day I phoned her around eleven. She was awake but still in bed. “I saw no reason to wait till Sunday,” I said.
“No reason at all,” she said boldly.
“There’s a particular high-wire transvestite from Texas we want to see Thursday. He’s at the Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione but we can just go see him or her at ten and then come back here for a late supper, just the three of us. Do you like oysters?”
“Sounds like a plan—love oysters. Aren’t they supposed to be an aphrodisiac?”
“One can only hope. We’ll swing by and pick you up. It’s at the Cirque du Nord.”
The funambulist was minuscule and spectral in a purple tutu, a dwarfing cyclamen wig, and lots of makeup. She pranced up and down the high wire in blue capezios, holding a horizontal balancing bar in her hands that she got rid of in order to do some backflips. Thunderous applause. She pulled off her wig and suddenly was a man and bowed from the secure crow’s nest. We rushed backstage to congratulate her and were at last led down fecal-smelling corridors in a neighboring tent and finally into a dressing room, more closet than loge. She was eating animal crackers like a child and was wearing a red silk robe and towel turban and methodically cold-creaming her face clean. Under all that she was a little balding man with bad skin and an overbite; her body was terminally thin, a baby’s formless body, hairless, like a fetus in a jar of formaldehyde. We talked for a moment, established that I was a Texan, too, learned that she hailed from Waco and was named Earl. Ercole said, “You’re an earl?”
The performer said, “No, my name is Earl.”
He/she seemed so shy and joyless, eager to scurry off to some anonymous banlieu, no doubt; meeting her was a real “buzzkill,” as kids say now. We hurried away after congratulating her again and my saying she was “doing the Lone Star State proud.” I imagine she was one of those Americans who feel contaminated speaking in English; she immediately barked something to a friend in French.
At home we had a big platter of oysters then fruits de mer that the cook had brought from a bistro nearby—there must have been a hundred creatures on the iced nickel tray, everything from tiny periwinkles we had to eat with a straight pin to big baroque oysters smelling of lemon and the sea, giant crab legs and clams and mussels (“I’m afraid of eating raw mussels,” Helen said). After we cleared away the tray and all the apparatus and empty shells, the servant brought in warm finger bowls and a fricassee of three different kinds of mushrooms. For dessert we had orange ice with candied orange peel and candied mint leaves. We drank two bottles of a nice Vouvray.
I knew I was doing something irrevocable, a real injury to my marriage, but I said, “Let’s go into my bedroom. I have a TV in there and there’s something I’m dying to see.” They followed me but when we were all sprawled on the bed I dimmed the lights and began to kiss Helen and to stroke her lovely delicate neck. I didn’t much like the taste and feel of her lipstick, but I exulted in her girliness, the warmth and softness of her pliant body pressed to mine. I was propped up on one elbow and bending over her. She was lying on her back with one leg slightly bent. On her other side Ercole was lying on his side, kissing Helen’s ear just above the diamond clip. He was rubbing his body against hers. I reached over and felt his erection through his trousers. I took Helen’s hand in mine and pressed it against his penis. Again I heard a strange click—was I fated to hear it every time I slept with Ercole?
I’m not of the generation to go into detail about all this, but soon Ercole and I had undressed Helen. She lifted her buttocks as we slid off her very frilly panties. She sat up and kissed me while Ercole undid her brassiere, which released its delicate, full weight into my grateful hands (and eventually my mouth). Since Ercole was an experienced lover and since I am a woman, we both knew to go slowly and gently.
Helen touched me between the legs and whispered, “Oh my, you are wet …” That seemed to excite her. Soon we were all out of our clothes. First Ercole stood and undressed and untied his shoes, then he took over with Helen and I disrobed. Three-ways are first and foremost a problem of etiquette—no one should feel left out.
I caressed her as an ideal version of myself. I smelled the perfume on her neck and wrists, I sifted her hair from hand to hand as if it were gold dust to a miser, I felt the contours of her sumptuous body, not in a spirit of rivalry but of astonished veneration. I touched her superstitiously, as if she contained some wonder-working mystery, some essence that couldn’t be inhaled or seen but somehow felt. She was une idole, if that means she was at once emblematic and real, a breathing woman whose hands were surprisingly warm, as if her hot blood were irrigating them, and her skin was so subtle her touch was surprising. Once I’d met Hélène Rochas at a party; she was the least pretentious and most captivating woman I’d ever encountered. When I’d mentioned to the worldly, gay man who’d introduced us how impressed I was, he shrugged and said matter-of-factly, “Yes, but she’s a famous idole,” and I’d been struck by the designation and what was apparently the common acceptance of her status. That was how I felt about Helen. She was affable e
nough but her conversation had a sovereign’s deliberate banality; her mystery was not to be located in her manner but in something strong though intangible seeping out of her pores.
I could tell by her contractions around my hand that I excited her, but she was drawn to Ercole as to something familiar and soon he’d slipped into her and was riding her, which gave me a pang of jealousy. I was kissing her and playing with her breast, like Gabrielle d’Estrées tweaking the nipple of the duchess of Villars. Suddenly Helen surged up, lifting her arm and saying in a shockingly normal speaking voice (and in English), “I feel so alive.” I think that triggered something in both Ercole and me; we began feasting on her lovely pale body with a new intensity. Her hips bucked with one orgasm, no two! Three! I looked at her tear-stained face, all her lipstick rubbed away to leave white lips, as if something studied and feminine had given way to something primitive and female.
All three of us subsided into a wordless, moaning conclave; we needed to console one another for having weathered such pleasure. My only fear was that we’d never feel this good again. Would Helen think we could reproduce this passion every day?
I heard one of the twins crying; I pulled on my robe and rushed into the nursery, guarding against the primal scene of maternal nudity and the odors of sex. When I had finally rocked Foulques (wasn’t a foulque a coot or some sort of small game bird?) back to sleep I laid him carefully in his crib. I rejoined both my guests, who had fallen asleep. Had I broken a taboo? Would the moment of maternal coitus “imprint” the baby duck?
CHAPTER 12
Although I had intended to use the dildo on Ercole, I ended up employing it on Helen. I became slightly jealous that each time we all three got together, Ercole devoted himself mainly to Helen and began to treat me as if I were another man and we were both busy (as they say in old-fashioned porn) “pleasuring” her. He would kiss my neck and pat my ass when I bent over her and blocked his access. I wasn’t sure who I was really jealous of—him for ignoring me or her for moaning louder when he penetrated her. Was she such a conventional woman that she had been raised to prefer men, even though I was the one who knew how to stimulate her clitoris with my finger? (I’d cut my nails short and stopped varnishing them.) I held the secret to her orgasms but as she climaxed she wrapped her arms around his neck, not mine.