Then I read the cover copy of my guidebook more closely and discovered that Alain-Fournier spent summers in this town in the Sologne with relatives, but that he actually had grown up in a small town to the south. Beyond Nohant, where George Sand lived, deep in the region of Berry. So we set out again another weekend, Radomir and I, in my ancient black Peugeot.
Radomir preferred driving and I preferred riding, so he was at the wheel as we headed south. It must have been April because it was chill and clear and precise. The fruit trees were flowering and about every twenty feet there was a Vincent Van Gogh painting. A fragile pear tree, a fluffy apple tree, occasionally a violently pink cherry tree in frilly blossom. Each one a perfect subject for one of Van Gogh’s saner days.
There were very few cars on the road. The French don’t weekend that early in the season. We stopped for lunch somewhere south of Nohant. One of those small town hotels. The large, empty, sunny room all varnish and white tablecloths. A few large local people in clumps here and there. They look at you with little interest. If you’re not French you are never of interest in France.
The menu is always the same. You have the soup and the chicken and a green salad. And red wine. The French virtually never drink white wine. They think it makes your digestive system acidic.
It was so perfect I almost cried. The big room, the sun pouring in, the warmth after the cold car, Radomir across the table looking muscled and American and completely out of place and loving it.
It was a long drive to Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, where Alain-Fournier’s father had been a schoolteacher. It was well into the afternoon before we approached it. Across long, green fields with not a sign of a telephone or electric wire along the narrow, winding road. We could have easily been in pre-World War I France. I suppose they must have had macadam roads by then.
The town was tiny. Really just a crossroads in the fields with a small café and a few houses in each direction from where the roads crossed. A sign indicated the schoolhouse a few doors away from the café. A small square stone building. The teacher and his family had lived upstairs over the two school rooms below. Now it was a small closed museum. Probably Mme. Fournier taught the little ones. It was not at all a typical French town. The houses were surrounded by lawns, each in their own little plot of land, rather like an American town. There was no forbidding rank of stone houses edged right up to the street, shutters closed or about to be. No feeling of stony indifference. It must have been a lovely town to grow up in around the turn of the century.
I had a guidebook that said a local chateau may have been Fournier’s inspiration for the chateau in his book. We circled around the outskirts of the town and saw a red brick building back in a grove of trees. Two rutted tracks formed the drive. As we turned into it the sun was setting sideways. The chateau looked deserted. Suddenly in front of the car a large bird flew up. I thought it was an owl. “An owl?” I said.
“At this time of day?” Radomir answered.
In front of the chateau there was a battered-looking Land Rover kind of car. But no sign of life. The large windows were uncurtained, but the building seemed to be well maintained. Gentlemen farmers most probably. It was gloomy now in the grove of trees surrounding the chateau. “Let’s go,” I said to Radomir. We had had our Le Grand Meaulnes experience. This could easily have been the chateau that the young Meaulnes finds in the night when he is lost returning from the train station. Inside all those weirdly assorted guests could easily have been getting into their eighteenth-century clothes, preparing for the evening ahead.
The sun was squarely above the horizon as we headed back north for the Loire Valley. It threw Radomir’s profile into dark silhouette as I looked at him, the dark, damp brown of fields behind it. The sun passed through his light brown eyes. It is at moments like these that you realize how much we are like large dolls. Eyes like clear glass observing the images about us.
Radomir had said very little during the day.
“This has been a wonderful day for me,” I said. “It was an effort coming here, but now I think I have felt what Alain-Fournier felt.”
“I loved it,” Radomir said.
I was surprised. I never really knew if he was perceiving and enjoying what was going on around him or if he was just dutifully accompanying me.
“When the bird flew up I thought it was an omen. The bird was waiting for us. It was an owl. And owls aren’t out wandering around on the ground during the day. It was an omen telling us that we had come to the right place. That we were in the heart of the mystery.”
He went on. “I love this country. I feel like I really belong here. I felt that the first time I came to your house. It was something like coming home.”
“There are two sides to you, Radomir,” I said. “There’s the American boy side. And there’s the magic side. It’s the magic side I love.”
He turned and looked at me. “You’re the only one who sees the magic side,” he said. “You’re the only one I let see the magic side.”
And I fell down another step. Bump. There in the cold spring air of the end of day I really fell in love with Radomir Pulkanovic.
~6~
Lunch in Plakias
After Nevis finished the sparse taverna breakfast he repeated the walk of the night before. Wild and windy then, now it was in blinding sunlight. The disco snoozed behind its skeleton of empty neon, and the few tourists from the one tour bus searched for something to buy they hadn’t already seen endlessly repeated in Chania, Rethymnon, Heraklion, Agios Nikolaos, and Sitia. The dusty little town made Nevis think of Mexico. The barren hills, the square stucco buildings, the shops of repetitious factory-made junk. He finally found some espadrilles and bought a black pair and a white pair.
He walked back to the taverna and took a seat on the terrace. Radomir came over and, leaning against the railing, lit a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked when he left Paris.
“I’ll be out of here at noon.”
“Do you want to have lunch here?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, let me take you to one of those places in town, one that’s right on the water.”
Which is where they went. Radomir told Nevis where he’d been since he left Paris. The young married couple who had shown up from California and with whom he’d hurriedly departed had gone with him from Paris to Monaco to Florence. Radomir had grown less enchanted with them as it became quite clear that their Europe-on-a-shoestring plans did not include spending money to enter museums or even the least expensive restaurants. He had seen Michelangelo’s David by himself and then described it in detail to them on the train that bore them away to the port for Corfu. Corfu, it seemed, was pretty but covered in debris.
The trip he described was one Nevis had never taken. A series of youth hostels with seemingly the same mixed bag of wandering European and American kids, none of whom had a very clear idea of where they were or what was to be done there. The point seemed to be to hang out together with a minimum of expenditure and a maximum of free time in which one did as little as possible. From Corfu Radomir and his friends had come to Greece, traveled by train to Athens, seen the Acropolis, and come by boat to Crete. In Crete they had moved slowly from one north-coast town to another and hearing at their youth hostel there was a companion hostel in the town straight south had come across the island. And there they had stopped. Probably because it’s so much like California, Nevis thought.
A number of young foreigners were working in the local hotels and restaurants. Local management needed their language skills for the tourists and obviously enjoyed paying them less than the locals and avoiding taxes by paying them in cash. The dazed owner of the taverna had taken a liking to all three of the new arrivals and offered them jobs. They had automatically turned him down, but Radomir had thought it over, and when the Californian couple moved on to similar beaches in Turkey, he stayed behind and took a job at the taverna.
Radomir said, “I was sitting on a wall up at the hostel having a bee
r and looking out over the water at the sunset and I felt so happy. I decided why not stay? And here I am.”
“You know I was looking for you everywhere while you were gone,” Nevis said, tucking the paper napkin under the edge of his plate so the wind wouldn’t blow it away. The sun was high and brilliant over the white-railed terrace. An English couple at the next table, rather close, had stopped talking. The woman, whose back was to them, was obviously asking her male companion what Radomir and Nevis looked like, as he was studying them and talking in a low voice. Nevis didn’t give a shit. Radomir didn’t seem to notice.
“That’s funny. Just this morning one of the English girls who handles the tours told me she had been on the other side of the island and someone told her there was a person calling all the hotels looking for me.” Radomir ordered a funny kind of steak. He had hypoglycemia and had to eat full meals three times a day or he became emotionally unstrung. Nevis ordered shrimp.
When Radomir left Paris he had told Nevis he planned to travel to Greece for a week and fly back from Athens to his parents’ home in the Midwest. Nevis had not had a real chance to say good-bye, as Radomir had dropped by the apartment the day before he had left when no one was there, leaving the keys and a brief note with about a thousand dollars in francs he felt he owed Nevis.
Two days later Nevis, feeling somewhat badly used and rather relieved that Radomir had left, was walking up the street toward his apartment at the end of the day. Suddenly he realized that Radomir was no longer in Paris, and he felt as though someone had punched him hard in the stomach. He stopped and had to steady himself against a building for a moment. This is going to be awful flashed through his mind. And it was.
There was that feeling that he was about to cry right behind his eyes that never went away. There was the compulsion to bring up Radomir in conversation with anyone who knew him, just to talk about him, mention his name. He was sure he’d be able to talk to him in the United States as soon as he arrived there and, having to go to New York to work the following week, he called Radomir’s parents. He considered just flying there without advance warning, but a last fragment of control prompted him to call first. When he did they said they had heard nothing. His mother told him Radomir had written before leaving Paris to say he would be home in several months (not in a week!) and they rather thought he would be. Nevis felt the hysteria mounting.
He talked to Fritz, the friend down the street in the country, who gave him the advice that Nevis himself would have given anyone else. “Don’t do anything,” he was told. “Just sit tight. At least he’s in Europe. He’ll be back. You know he will.” Nevis found himself unable to do anything except the most obviously programmed and desperate stratagems of all deserted lovers. And we weren’t even lovers, he admitted to himself. But as Radomir’s absence lengthened he became increasingly frantic.
He wrote Radomir a long letter every week, neatly addressed to him in care of his parents, and stored them away in a cabinet on his desk.
Fritz received a card from Radomir. He was in Greece. Nothing suggested he was leaving, staying, or going anywhere else. Nevis’s niece Amanda called from Madrid to say she’d had a card. From Florence.
Nevis called all of Radomir’s friends he could bring to mind. He remembered a woman Radomir had visited in Arizona when he’d gone back to the U.S. for a brother’s wedding. He called the woman in Arizona who said she had heard from Radomir. He was in Crete; he thought he was going to get a job in a hotel and stay all summer. No address, though. Nevis asked the woman, who wasn’t unfriendly, if she could decipher the name on the card of the town from which it had been sent. She wasn’t any too sure, but it looked like M-Y-T-H-I-O-S to her. And, she added, Radomir was going to send her an address to write to soon. Nevis asked if she would call him in Paris with it when she received it, knowing she wouldn’t.
In June Nevis went to the Cannes festival for advertising films, always a nightmare. The agency had asked him to go at the last minute and had trouble finding a hotel for him. What they found was like so many third-rate hotels where he’d been his unhappiest. He thought how perfect it was for his present love-bereft condition. The single bed sat awkwardly in a corner of the L-shaped room. The curtains and bedspread hung stiffly as though paper had been used in their synthetic mix. The cheap bureau and chair stood forlornly, nicked and marred with a thousand kicks and tears.
Oh, God, he thought, what a place to be sad in. The autoroute cut sharply around the corner of the pension, making getting out the front door hazardous.
He dressed and walked into Cannes. In a flashy lamp shop he saw a beautiful carved wooden male torso. Big. I’d like that, he thought. In a restaurant he ran into Nika, the creative director of the Milan office. Short, bleached-white hair and a big grin gave her something of the look of the “Me Worry?” boy. He told her of his sad hotel and she said, “Oh, come over to the Gray d’Albion. I’m there and I’m sure they’ll have a room. Lean on them.” Nevis, who always had to boost the morale of others, now felt boosted. And at the Gray d’Albion they said he could come over the next day.
That night as the cars roared past the dusty little garden outside his window he turned fitfully on his thin and beaten pillow and felt less sorry for himself, knowing he was escaping in the morning.
He spent the day with the worldwide creative director, who kept him waiting for an hour on the terrace of his hotel. While sitting there the dwarfish creative director of the Paris agency passed the table and said, “You look very angry.”
“Only at you,” Nevis replied.
That evening as Nevis walked into an expensive restaurant high in the hills behind Cannes with the worldwide CD he saw the tiny monster again at a nearby table. This time it was the tiny monster’s turn to look angry.
The next night he opted out from the agency entertainment. Chatting up the clients was exhausting. And missing Radomir as he did, it was particularly hard to be vivacious with the emptiness eating away at the edges of his heart.
He remembered sitting beside a pool at the Majestic at an earlier festival and saying to a friend, “I’d rather just go upstairs for twenty minutes and get it over with.” But that would be too unsubtle for a business based on being amusing and fun and attractive with clients who weren’t and would never make any attempt at being so themselves. Agency people and homosexuals, Nevis thought, we’re just like geisha. Always amusing. Always attractive. And never allowed to show unhappiness or irritation. It is a courtesan’s business. And he decided to not get up and dress and go to the large party in the hills. No one would even notice he wasn’t there. And if they did he’d claim he was at another party somewhere else.
He remained lying on the large bed in his luxurious room at the Gray d’Albion after eating dinner from a room service cart. He looked across the terrace to the rooftops setting into the dusk. An hour so mournful in the United States, but never so for him in France where the purple-blue skies of “L’Heure Bleu” had always seemed promising, not nostalgic.
From the terrace it was four stories down to the gardens below. Suddenly he had an urge, as though some exterior force had seized him, to get up from the bed and feel what it would be like to fall face up through the air into the gardens. The terrace doors stood invitingly open. The breeze below softly moved the flowered draperies. It wasn’t despair that moved him. More the temptation to stop feeling the sadness that seeped from him down through the mattress and into the carpet beneath.
No, I cannot do this, he thought. And he mechanically stood up on the far side of the bed from the inviting windows. Turned on the night light. Shut the doors partially, pulled the draperies, and got into bed with his book. He didn’t feel shaken but only as though the temptation to fall through the air was like a low-grade cold. Always there, lurking, needing to be quashed from time to time.
There was a meeting the next day for all the creative directors from around the world. Nevis showed the work done for his client, one of the world’s largest beauty hous
es. The tiny monster who headed the creative department of the Paris agency raised his voice to say he thought the work could be better. And the even tinier German art director, who wanted Nevis’s job, joined in. Nevis stared at them from the head table where he was standing and did not reply. The worldwide creative director, who was supervising the meeting, looked at them with his Dickensian schoolmaster’s face, colder than ever, and said, “Be quiet.”
At the farewell party that evening many New York acquaintances who were in Cannes for the festival came to the agency party. Chatting and laughing with people he knew well only pointed out for Nevis that he was in a foreign country where no one meant him well and that he was disabled with a broken heart. A malady few people in the room would have allowed themselves to have, and would certainly think laughably inappropriate for someone of his age and rank in their industry. He was glad to return to Paris the next day. The large wooden torso he’d seen in a store window he purchased on the way to the airport. It was under his feet as he buckled himself into his tiny seat aboard the plane. The torso was too poorly packed to be checked, too large for an overhead bin. He had brushed past the stewardess assuring her it would go under his seat, which it wouldn’t. With his knees under his chin he thought, At least something beautiful has been rescued from the awfulness of Cannes.
Back in Paris he called Radomir’s parents again and they had heard from him. Radomir had called. He was in Crete. Their card was from Rethymnon. Nevis checked out the other card that his friend had received. It didn’t mention Crete, but it was from Chania. And in the several guidebooks Nevis had bought at Galignani he found Chania among the towns in Crete. One of the guidebooks said the only really good map of Crete was published in Austria—the Freytag and Berndt map.
Working in Vienna a few days later, Nevis sought the map out and began placing the towns in his mind. As he looked at the carefully detailed map he realized it must certainly have been prepared for the German invasion of Crete during the war. A great, unfolding work, it gave the impression that Crete was as large as Europe and one would have to drive hours between cities, which were in fact villages and only a few miles apart.
The Millionaire of Love Page 4