The Millionaire of Love

by David Leddick

  As Radomir walked down the slope toward the water he showed his brown buttocks. He had said in a phone conversation from Crete, “Even my little tushy is brown.” Radomir had a babylike quality and was aware of it himself. His buttocks were, in Nevis’s opinion, his least-good point, as when they were massaged they did not have the taut tone of the rest of his body. But Nevis had been a dancer at one time and perhaps expected more of buttocks than is normal in the average athletic body.

  On Radomir’s right leg was a small recent scar from a fall he had had in the bathtub at the country house. It was the day they were leaving to return to Paris for the winter. The country house had been repainted, replastered, reputtied, repaired in every way imaginable, and Radomir was changing residence to start serious study of French. Shortly before friends with a car were to come, Nevis entered the bathroom, saw a towel rack ripped from the wall, a wet towel on the floor, and thought, What in the hell is going on here? He went downstairs and in the kitchen found Radomir wearing blue trunks lying on the floor and the young woman from New York, who was spending the weekend with them, applying an ice pack to his leg. “I fell getting out of the tub,” Radomir said, looking at him upside down from the floor. Nevis looked down judiciously. “I know, I know, nothing is by chance,” Radomir added immediately.

  Nevis processed a number of ideas immediately. Since it was Sunday, what local doctor would be on duty? How had Radomir fallen out of the tub, bruised his leg badly, then gotten into blue shorts and down to the kitchen without his hearing anything? It was all very curious. He examined Radomir’s leg where a large lump had formed on the front of his shin. It was very painful, maybe a fracture. He called the local doctor where a recording told him the name and number of a doctor in a nearby town who had the Sunday duty. Another call got that doctor to the house in under fifteen minutes. With the help of the young woman from New York, Nevis got some towels under Radomir and left him lying on the floor until the doctor examined him. The doctor quickly said that no bones were broken, wrote out a prescription, and left with his 500 francs. When the car came, Radomir hopped out to the car on one leg and left. Nevis and the girl from New York followed by train.

  In the water, Nevis saw Radomir pulling something from below the surface. A fishing line. Radomir started pulling it in. There were large hooks on it at intervals. As he pulled the line stretched off far out to sea. Nevis shook off the sand and went in the water to join him. He wound part of the fishing line around his hand, pulling hard. So this is the Sea of Libya, he thought. Many small rocks and larger ones were underfoot. Radomir waded out further and the two of them pulled and wound yard after yard of the hook-hung line. Radomir’s cock stood straight out in front of his body in the clear water and looked much diminished from its more impressive appearance ashore. Nevis thought of swimming under the water and putting it in his mouth but realized that such a plan was out of the question on this nude and prudish beach in Crete. It had to remain something that had occurred on another beach with another person several oceans away many years before.

  When they had successfully wound up what seemed a good mile of line and hooks they took it up to the beach and buried it.

  ~8~

  Radomir Speaks Again

  I want to be fair to Nevis. He taught me a lot. We went on lots of drives around the country and saw things that added up for me. I don’t know if maybe I lived a previous life there. I like the idea that I did. I’ve always liked the presence of things you can’t see and can’t explain. When I was a kid in that house on the Indian burial mound in Sandusky there were lots of unexplained incidents. Bureau drawers would be turned upside down. Papers would get torn up. Pictures would fall off the wall. All that kind of stuff. And the funny thing was that it didn’t faze my parents, who are really very white-bread kind of people. No fooling around. No reading horoscopes. Not at all religious. But when they got phantoms in their house, their solution was just to live with it.

  So when I felt that old house in the French countryside calling to me, I just went with it. And I guess I knew that that wasn’t going to be all there was to it. So I wasn’t so terribly surprised when the ghost started to try to communicate with me. A funny thing about spirits is that when you sense them they seem to defuse your fear mechanisms. You aren’t particularly frightened when you hear footsteps overhead and you know no one is there.

  I woke up one night and heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I always slept in the bedroom beyond the bathroom on the front of the house, and the staircase is pretty much below the head of the bed. I was sure someone was coming in. I knew that the guy who drove me here from Germany had said he might come back this way, and I thought maybe Fritz had given him a key. I called out “Bob?” and the footsteps stopped. I got up and went out in the hall. No lights were on. I put them on and nothing was there. I went down and checked the front door. It was locked. I didn’t feel frightened. I just understood that something was there that wanted to get in touch with me. I went back to bed and fell right asleep.

  Not long after that I noticed that someone had been fooling around with the things on the dressing table in my room. Nevis has a dressing table in every bedroom, not that I would ever use one. But he thinks they are necessary for women guests. And he uses the one in his bedroom. It is always covered with stuff he uses on his face. He doesn’t have many wrinkles. I’ll give that to him.

  On the dressing table in my room were two little porcelain busts, heads, whatever you want to call them—a kind of devil or faun and a pretty young woman. They were sort of on opposite corners, but one morning I noticed that they were kissing. I thought that maybe trucks rolling by had sort of shook them together. But there are very few trucks passing in this town and none in front of the house directly.

  Did I tell you that the National Truck Drivers School is in the old abbey across the street? It’s just another weird thing about this whole town. I kept my eye out to see if there were any cute ones but never spotted any, although you see a lot of great-looking ones out on the road.

  No, those figurines were kissing because somebody had put them there like that. But nobody had been in the house. Fritz had keys, but if I was out of the house I was usually with him, and besides that I was sure they hadn’t been in that position yesterday. I moved them back to where they usually stood. Now I was kind of waiting to see what would happen next.

  I began to resent it when Nevis came down on the weekends. He was getting in the way of my spirits, spirit, you name it. Something was there and I knew that he, she, it wasn’t going to come out when Nevis was around. He always says that he has never heard or sensed anything in the house, although he thinks presences are possible. He’s just such a practical person that a spirit wouldn’t waste its time around him trying to get noticed. Actually, I think I could say of Nevis that under all those Pierre Cardin clothes and Bulgari jewelry there is a rather plain person posing as an interesting one. He’s lucky that he’s gay or he would really be boring.

  And I got so I really didn’t want to go to Paris on the weekends either. I didn’t want to be away from my ghost. More and more I got the idea that it was a man. A young man.

  He touched me once, in the night, and I jumped and yelled. Not because I was frightened, but because I was surprised. What a jerk. I had just gotten into bed; it was eleven. I turned over, pulled the covers up over my shoulders, and then I felt this touch on my back. I yelled and it was all over. I sat up in the dark, well, not so dark because the street lamps in front of the abbey were on and the room was quite light. I never closed the shutters at night. But there was nothing. I sat very still for quite a long time, but he never reappeared. I didn’t sleep very well that night. I was really angry with myself.

  Then I saw him. All the time I was working around the house or cooking meals or just sitting reading I thought about him. Who could this young man be? Why was he trying to get into contact with me? Was the two figures kissing a sign that he was falling in love with me? I know I was fall
ing in love with him. How much more of a mysterious stranger could you get than a ghost? And then I saw him.

  It was in the afternoon and for once I wasn’t thinking about him. Maybe I’d been in the toilet and was just coming in to wash my hands. There’s a sink in my room. And as I came through the door he was there. Shortish, long dark hair, dark eyes, in a kind of baggy-sleeved white shirt. I was kind of aware of some kind of dark pants. And then he faded. His eyes went last. They looked at me like someone who was in love. I threw myself down on the bed, paint-covered jeans and all, and hugged the pillows and wanted to cry but I couldn’t. It was awful. I knew he was there and would always be there, but I would never be able to hold him in my arms and he would never be able to crawl into my bed, his hot body pushing itself down on top of me, his tongue in my mouth, maybe turning me over to fuck me from behind. It was never going to happen and it was all that I wanted to happen. No wonder I hated Nevis.

  Nevis was falling more and more in love with me. I guess I egged him on when I said he could give me a massage any time. It had become a ritual. But it was funny. I hated him but I liked the massage. He massaged my head a lot so I wouldn’t lose my hair. I used to wonder if he was seeing something up there I couldn’t see.

  And he’d push my T-shirt up and pull my boxers down, but never too much. Once when I was giving him a massage he tried to get me to lie down on top of him but I wouldn’t. It really made me mad and I told him so, but he only laughed and left the room. I was really stuck. I didn’t want to leave France, I didn’t really have anywhere to go, and I particularly didn’t want to leave Hervé. I was calling my ghost Hervé now.

  And one more reason I didn’t like the massage sessions was that I imagined that Hervé was right there watching. I was certainly not going to do anything with Nevis that I would have liked to do with Hervé. That would have been awful for Hervé. Is this all too crazy?

  Finally it all came to an end when the house was finished and the summer was over and everyone was going back to Paris. It had been suggested by Nevis that I move up to Paris, live in his guest room, go to the Alliance Francaise to improve my French and then do some work for him at the advertising agency. I draw pretty well and he thought I could do storyboards. Was I supposed to say no? There was no way for me to stay with Hervé even if he was dominating my masturbation fantasies. I had gotten to know Hervé’s body very well. He must have been a horseman, because he had very strong thighs and he was a little bowlegged. He didn’t have very long legs, but they were nice legs. He had a very strong upper body and that white pearly skin that some Frenchmen have. His pubic hair and the hair under his arms was that bushy straight kind. Sticks straight up and there’s lots of it. Other than that there wasn’t a lot of hair on his body. And he wasn’t circumcised. I never looked at his cock very much but I know he had a foreskin. I hoped that imagining him in my masturbation fantasies might work for him and he could be there, too. I wondered a lot about when Hervé had lived. There was something about his hair that made me think of Victor Hugo, or Balzac. Or somebody like that. And his breath also. It wasn’t bad breath but it didn’t smell like people do today. It sort of smelled of grain and wine. You know, I think Hervé had to be a real ghost because I could really imagine him so well even though I had only glimpsed him that once. I couldn’t make up those things about him. They weren’t like somebody else I have known, and I haven’t read all that much about French history. He wasn’t at all like something from Le Grand Meaulnes. There was nothing like the Victorian period about him and he didn’t seem like someone from the eighteenth century. No wig or anything. That was why I came to think that he had lived in the early nineteenth century. Maybe he had lived in this house. Maybe he had taught at the abbey. Maybe he had taught riding and had fallen in love with one of the students and had killed himself. In my room. Is that romantic enough for you? I didn’t believe all of that, but I thought it. So it all came to an end on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Famke, a friend of Nevis’s from New York, was there. She and I were going back to Paris on the train and Nevis was riding back with his cat with friends. The parents of Angie, in fact, who were now living permanently in France. I was taking a shower standing up in the tub and was reaching for a towel when suddenly I fell. Lots of people had fallen on the steps in the house, to the point where Nevis had a railing and ropes on the wall, and rubber guards on the edges of the steps. He warned everyone to be careful and I think thought that perhaps there was a ghost who was pushing people. Not people, women. It was always women who fell on the steps. Perhaps it was Hervé. I kind of liked the idea that he didn’t like women. And then he pushed me out of the bathtub. I went over like a ton of bricks. I grabbed at the towel rack and pulled it right out of the wall. My legs hit the edge of the tub when I went over and I thought one might be broken. There were some shorts there on the floor that I had been wearing and I got them on and crawled over and opened the door. Famke was in the hall. She said, “I heard the crash.” I said, “It was me. Maybe my leg is broken.” She got me up and helped me hop downstairs to the kitchen. Just then Nevis appeared. He’d been out. He looked down at me. For someone who loved me so much he didn’t look very sympathic. Scorn, is that the word? He looked scornful.

  I said, “I know, I know, nothing is by chance. I think I broke my leg falling out of the bathtub.” Evidently he had gone upstairs before he came into the kitchen and had seen the towel rack torn loose and water all over the bathroom and all of us about to depart for Paris. He was pissed off. But he said nothing. He went into the living room and started calling doctors until he found one that was on Sunday duty. Then he called Angie’s parents and asked if they could leave a little later. Then he figured out what trains there were later in the day. Even when he’s pissed off Nevis is good in an emergency.

  The doctor showed up, a tall skinny guy from the next large town. My leg wasn’t broken. Nevis paid him, brought down some clothes for me, and packed my bag. When Angie’s parents showed up he sent me to Paris with them. They weren’t very pleased but agreed that they would help me into the building and up the stairs when we got to Paris and take the cat up, too. Nevis took my suitcase with him. Famke and he took the train.

  The next day my leg was fine and I started going to my French classes and Nevis went to his office. My new life in Paris had begun and I wasn’t going to like it half as much as my life with Hervé in the country.

  ~9~

  The Terrible Christmas

  While they were on the beach Radomir asked about Nevis’s niece Amanda.

  Nevis remembered the previous Christmas which Amanda had spent with them: a very cold December for France, and a wretched time. Someone had said to Nevis long ago, “We always have to do what you want to do.” And he had replied, “If we do what I want to do we’ll all have fun. And if we don’t do what I want to do, I promise you nobody will have fun.” Which was pretty much what happened.

  It was Radomir’s second Christmas in France, and he was thinking that he might go home to see his parents. “Go home?” asked Nevis. “You don’t even like those people.” Nevis didn’t want Radomir to leave, and by chance a request for storyboards for the Caribbean-African market came in. They had to be done by the first of the year, and Radomir needed the extra money he got for drawing these storyboards. Nevis was relieved that he had a legitimate reason for asking Radomir to stay.

  It was in this emotional climate that Nevis asked Radomir if he wouldn’t like to take a weekend driving trip before Christmas down into the Berry to see a series of chateaux he’d read about but never seen. Radomir was sulky but not uninterested. On an extremely cold December morning they set out in the old Peugeot from the country house. Nevis brought a blanket to cover their knees. The old car no longer had heat.

  The car stalled as they passed through a nearby town, fortunately not far from a garage. The garage owner wired a piece of cardboard in the front grille. “It’s too cold for your engine,” he said.

  They stopped for lunch in a t
own on the edge of the Berry region where a wealthy department store family had completely renovated a late-eighteenth-century chateau. The chateau was Nevis’s dream house. Each room was prettily painted in pastels, and the curvy eighteenth-century period furniture was upholstered in flowered or solid pastel fabrics. Everything was cozy, pretty, safe, and charming. Radomir said, “There are very good vibrations in this place. It feels good.”

  Later they stopped at George Sand’s family home, Nohant. Nevis had been there before in summer weather. Now Nohant seemed bleak and a long time not lived in, unlike the pretty chateau they’d just visited. There the family seemed to have just stepped out. At Nohant whatever energy George and Chopin and Liszt and their cohorts might have generated was dissipated. George’s bed was pushed up against the wall and hardly seemed large enough for the two people her biographers suggested so often shared it. And her drop-leaf desk where she sat up all night writing, so that the house parties might go on and on, also seemed small and inadequate for the miles of writing that had poured from it.

  Nevis had reserved a hotel, which turned out to be a slapped together modern little place at a highway intersection, only slightly different from an American motel. They were both cold and tired and laid down for naps. Nevis got up and slipped under the covers of Radomir’s bed and wrapped his arms around the warm body lying there. Radomir was reading. He neither stiffened under Nevis’s touch nor relaxed. He was just there. But Nevis didn’t care. He had been so chilled that holding Radomir’s body close to his own finally stopped his shivering.

  They ate a nondescript dinner in the nondescript dining room. Radomir was a little chattier. He had an interesting day, and then to bed they went in their joyless room.