The next morning they started their chateau visiting early. Through the chilly fog they went. It was colder to the south here in Berry than it had been in the Loire Valley, closer to Paris. Every blade of grass was coated in ice, and the tree branches were coated in crystal. The only landscape colors were the shades of white, silver, and gray of the iced-over plants, backed by the darker silver of the sky waiting to snow.
In a little village they ventured down a muddy lane to find the entrance to the chateau. They rang and knocked on the doors. No one was about. Finally the chatelaine emerged, a portly lady looking more English than French in her cardigan sweater and glasses. She conducted the tour of the ground floor and was particularly eager to sell her canned chicken and preserves in the gift display. Nevis bought a large jar of canned chicken because he had never seen chicken in a glass jar before.
The rest of the tour was turned over to the guide, a very small young woman in a red coat who had just emerged from the early morning fog. Under five feet tall, her skin was pale, her features slightly disjointed, and her dark eyes and hair made her seem even unhealthier. Nevis could imagine the ugly room she must have arisen in. So cold it was difficult to button her clothes. A bath or a bathroom unthought of. Maybe a comb straggled through her hair, and rushing breathlessly down the muddy hill knowing the chatelaine, three times her size, would berate her for her lateness, tourists or no tourists. At least it would be warm at the chateau.
And then two American men to haul around the ramparts, pointing off into the distance where a famous battle may or may not have taken place.
The little guide carefully showed the defenses, the portcullis, the machicoulis. On a large terrace she explained that below were the dungeons where all the prisoners from an ancient nearby battle had been kept. An entrance stood in the middle of the terrace: a dormered doorway she had difficulty swinging open. She stood to one side and pointed downward into the gloom. “Vous pouvez le visitez,” she said. Nevis demurred. He felt he was in the opening sequence of a film where dopey Americans wander into dungeons. He could imagine the door swinging shut with a clang behind him and the pale little face peering through the bars before scuttling away. Radomir, too, was not eager to go downward into the gloom. Did the little guide sneer? Or smile knowingly at their perceptiveness? It was hard to say.
They attempted visiting several other chateaux going back northward. They were all closed. Somehow, despite the disappointment, they felt closer to each other after their escape from the strange little woman in the red coat in the fog.
When Christmas came Amanda arrived from Madrid with the same boyfriend as the year before, Randy, but there was no fun and frolic. The strain between Nevis and Radomir made it impossible to capture any feeling of gaiety. At gift time on Christmas Eve Nevis was given a large, heavy box by Radomir that contained six framed 1920s prints for children with small songs printed under each charming art deco drawing. They were prints Nevis had seen in an antique shop that was never open, and when he had finally found it open the prints were gone. He had come home and cursed the shop roundly to Radomir, but it had been Radomir who had found the shop open and bought them for Nevis.
Nevis was both thrilled to have what he had thought were lost forever and very unhappy with himself that he couldn’t be careless and jolly. He tried, but it was no go.
Amanda came into his room one evening and asked, “Is everything all right?” Everything was so not all right that Nevis flew into a rage and muttered things about “people always bothering me” and “I just want to be alone.”
Amanda looked at him judiciously and said, “You know, Garbo never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ She said, ‘I want to be left alone.’”
“Well, she had it about right,” Nevis said sulkily and threw himself down in the chair at the dressing table. I look like shit, he thought. Amanda left thinking he was acting exactly like Miriam Hopkins in a particularly bad 1930s movie.
~10~
Amanda’s Take on Things
I had no idea. I mean, really. My uncle is so discreet that when I found out he was in love with that kid Radomir I was stunned. I mean, he’s a very cute guy but, you know, nothing that extra special. Nice arms but short legs. There are tons of guys like that in California. I guess having him isolated in the Loire Valley made the difference. I’d sleep with him in a flash, but I don’t think I’d fall in love with him. He’s really too young for me, not to mention Uncle Nevis.
And all the time we were there that Christmas Radomir thought Randy and I were so in love. He wrote me all about that during the period that he decided he was going straight. Said how much he envied Randy and me, our romance. Randy and I had a lot of fun together, but we were on the verge of splitting up that Christmas. We weren’t even sleeping together. He wanted to marry me, but I wasn’t having any. I didn’t really love him, and considering how hard it is to live with someone, you should at least be able to tell yourself that this is the person you love. Or, make that past tense, loved.
Uncle Nevis and I often discuss all the marriages we see that seem to have occurred without either party having been in love. They were graduating from school. They were getting older. His career required a wife. Her self-image required a husband. It must be horrible to be saddled with someone and you weren’t ever crazy about them. At least if you were once nuts about them you know how you got into the pickle you’re in.
I confronted Uncle Nevis when he called me in Madrid after that Christmas in the country. I said, “This isn’t at all like you. You’ve never had lovers who were much younger than you were.”
He said, “Oh, you know I like to lay myself out like a doormat to see how they plan to walk all over me. This one appeared while I wasn’t looking.”
“I thought you were interested in that guy from Dallas you brought to Spain with you. He was crazy about you,” I said.
Uncle Nevis said, “He had the look of somebody’s chauffeur. You know. Black suit. White shirt. Very pale colorless skin and hair. When he took out his change purse and dug through it to give some money to a beggar I knew I could never love him. You know that line, ‘I fucked him but I never dated him.’ You do have to check people out and he was very large.”
“Randy stood next to him in the loo when we went to Las Chinitas together. He said it was enormous,” I told him.
“In his case it was an encumbrance.” He went on, “What can I tell you? I like living with a man. You can leave the toilet seat up all the time. I guess I just stopped having an age requirement. I feel neglected. I guess I’m looking for someone to look after me. I’ve never had anyone look after me.”
I said, “Oh, honestly. That’s like hearing Genghis Khan complain that no one ever looked after him. Or Hurricane Andrew. How could anyone look after you? They’d have to catch up with you first. And you might kill them when they did.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Uncle Nevis said.
“It sounds like self-pity to me,” I said. “Do you think Pamela Harriman was given to self-pity and bemoaned that she needed someone to look after her?”
“After her jewelry, maybe.”
“Perfectly right. As you’ve told me many a time, please don’t complain, it makes you so unattractive.”
“I know, I know. Perhaps you and I should co-author a television series called All My Boyfriends” Uncle Nevis said. “But it is awful being so old you have to face the fact that you can’t take anyone away from his wife anymore.”
“It’s sobering,” I had to admit.
“More than sobering. It’s disgusting.”
“I’m sure it makes you feel powerless.”
“Exactly. And with all I know about fucking.”
“Well, there you have it, Uncle Nevis. The next time you’re in Madrid I promise we’ll go out somewhere and have fun.”
“Spoken like a true friend and a good niece and a real trouper. What do you think? Shopping or the movies?”
“Do you have any objection to both?”
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~11~
The Second Day at the Beach
The first day that they went to the beach together they saw no one Radomir knew, although he talked about a crowd of friends who worked in the tourist hotels, in the youth hostel, ran tours for British tourists, even one American who worked in the olive oil factory up on the hill behind the town.
There was a mysterious romantic couple who lived at the hostel. Nevis wondered why this love-struck couple would be in the most obscure resort on Crete living in a youth hostel where privacy, romance, and lovemaking would be extremely minimal, if possible at all. Radomir had no explanation.
On the second day two friends did appear. There was the blonde, Natasha, a little Australian waif who strongly resembled one of the current crop of top models with whom Nevis worked. He told her this. It triggered her confession that she was very interested in the world of fashion photographers, top models, hairdressers, and makeup artists that was a daily routine for Nevis. Natasha had a kind of elegance to her manner that Nevis found attractive. She said she had been in Plakias a year. She had run the youth hostel at the foot of the hill all that time, staying there alone much of the time in the winter when the youth-tourist traffic ran low. Soon she was returning to Australia, she said. She wandered away to remove her clothes and walk into the water gingerly in the distance. Nevis was beginning to see that there was a certain code to nude sunning and swimming that he wasn’t likely to get the drift of in the few days he was to be there.
Tony, a young blond Canadian, was working as a cook in a hotel beyond the beach, some distance from the village; he was a pleasant, chatty pal of Radomir’s. All three of the young people seemed to agree that they didn’t like what they were doing, had lots of problems with their Greek employers, whom they thought were taking advantage of them, and gossiped a great deal about the other young people they knew in Plakias. Nevis got the impression they weren’t so much in Plakias because they wanted to be, but rather by chance. Life on hold. He tried to remember if he had a similar period in his life. He couldn’t remember one. He didn’t point out to Radomir, who denounced California and swore he would never return, that Plakias, with all its English-speaking young people, was probably as close in style and climate to Southern California as one was likely to find in Europe.
After Natasha and Tony left the beach Radomir and Nevis lay side by side on their mats under the sun. Nevis thought, We never lay this close naked in our lives, yet here we are. And he remembered the modest level of sexual encounters they had in the year they had spent together.
One evening they had eaten at a candlelit restaurant at the top of Montmartre. It was called Le Pierrot. Pierrot dolls, paintings, and sculptures were everywhere in the black and white costume and mask. The owner, although thoroughly French, looked as though she had wandered in from Greenwich Village: all blonde hair, portly body, toreador pants, and lipstick. The standard out-of-work New York actress, somehow French and somehow aground on the top of Montmartre. It was a silly, romantic restaurant and they had not been planning anything so elaborate as candlelight and champagne, but it got to them all the same.
They wandered down the hill to Pigalle later, and during the now almost-nightly massage, Radomir turned over to have his chest and shoulders rubbed with no demurring. He also liked to have his stomach lightly rubbed in a circular fashion; he said his mother had often done that when he was small. As Nevis rubbed his stomach he pushed his pajama trousers down and touched the root of Radomir’s penis. It was very flaccid. Radomir said in a slightly drunken voice, “No, don’t do that. I don’t want our relationship to be like that.” So Nevis pulled up the pajama trousers and returned to the circular stroking of the stomach, feeling less frustration than he thought he might.
As the massages continued, they became more physical. Radomir allowed his pajamas to be pulled down enough to have his buttocks thoroughly massaged, but there was no more full frontal nudity than before. Nevis always had a terrific erection while he was giving the massages, so he felt he was getting something out of it.
Radomir also massaged Nevis, with lesser and greater degrees of enthusiasm. He frequently liked to straddle Nevis’s buttocks, sitting squarely astride him to massage his neck and shoulders square on. One evening when they were in Radomir’s bedroom in the country house Nevis took Radomir’s forearms and pulled him down on top of him. Radomir didn’t object, but bracing himself on his elbows and knees, he kept his crotch slightly elevated above Nevis’s buttocks. They lay that way for some time. Theirs was an unspoken negotiation: one testing cautiously to see if the bond could take any more pressure, the other offering no real resistance, but also never acquiescing.
It was in this same bedroom perhaps a month later when Nevis sensed that something erotic was hovering over the massage. He lowered Radomir’s pajamas. He was using a body lotion for the rubbing. Kneeling over Radomir, he lifted his body by the hips and massaged under his hip bones, reaching deeply into his stomach muscles. He felt Radomir’s erection, reaching downward between his slightly spread thighs. He reached for the body lotion, intending to dribble some on Radomir’s penis to masturbate him. A hard, dry voice came from the inert body beneath him. “Please stop,” it said.
He did, pulling Radomir’s pajamas back into place. He laid down beside Radomir, who was propped up on one elbow and looking furious. “Why do you keep doing that?” he demanded. “I’d think you’d be trying to help me not do things like that, rather than pushing me toward them.”
Nevis considered the possible responses and decided to laugh. “Well, (A) I don’t think that homosexual acts are as dreadful as you do. And obviously, being in love with you, I’m always interested in some of those kind of acts. And (B) I’m never sure that people haven’t changed their minds about what they’d like to do. My first major lover cried for his mother after the first time he made love to me. And before we separated he was giving me blow jobs. And not at my suggestion. People can change, and you can’t blame me for testing the waters from time to time.”
Radomir seemed surprised that Nevis found it funny and not dramatic, and after a few more words Nevis left the room and went to his own bedroom. He was glad that he hadn’t run out in a huff at Radomir’s crackdown, which had been his first reaction. But they never ever came this close again to a real sexual encounter, although Radomir didn’t seem to mind if Nevis laid across him with one leg between his legs, as long as they were fully clothed.
There had been a kind of intimacy to their massage sessions, that although not sexually expressed, was when Radomir gave the most of himself. There, lying with his head twisted into a pillow, was when he would talk about himself and answer Nevis’s questions.
There, having his shoulders massaged, he had said that his niece, a little girl of two, didn’t like him. She would never let him hold her and always ran from him. One time she spat at him when he was trying to be nice to her. He admitted that for much the same reasons, he did not like one of Nevis’s cats who avoided him. The cat, Hester, avoided everyone, but Radomir took it personally.
It was also there that he spoke of the poltergeists that had invaded the family home when he was young. His mother refused to discuss their presence except to refer to the presence as “them.” One of his brothers had experienced having someone enter his bedroom, go to his bureau, and then stand over his bed before leaving. He had assumed it was Radomir or another brother, but then realized neither were at home. The next day, when opening his bureau drawers to take something out, he found them thoroughly disarranged. The phantom presence had searched through them all, turning their contents topsyturvy. There were other noises, fallings, crashings, and inexplicable events. No one seemed to have felt that Radomir’s presence had conjured them up, nor did he himself until Nevis told him that although the poltergeist phenomenon is accepted and it is unknown how it operates, it is always related to the presence of a child in the home, one who is usually unhappy and hostile in their circumstance.
Rad
omir also talked a lot about his family, a topic much drawn out by Nevis. They were Yugoslavian on both sides, emigrants to the Midwest in the generation preceding his parents, who had grown up in the same neighborhood. On the maternal side there was a good bit of talk of descent from minor aristocracy or major landholders. The great-grandmother had supposedly climbed out a window and emigrated to the United States under her own steam, joining family members who had gone to the United States ahead of her. It was her daughter, his grandmother, who lived with them when he was small and to whom he was very attached. It was also she who told him something in the hospital where she lay just before her death which she told no one else. He said of this, “I know I will remember what it was she told me one day, and when I do I know it will be very important.”
It was this same grandmother who accumulated several small apartment buildings and a store in Chicago. Radomir’s mother was brought up above the store and with a variety of relatives in the adjoining apartments.
There was an uncle whose death revealed that he had bought large amounts of electronic equipment, clothing, and much else which he never unwrapped. His home was full of the overflow of an abundant America. Perhaps stunned by the fact that the goods were so available and that he had the money to purchase them, he had continued to buy. Radomir returned from one of his trips home with a large supply of socks from the hoarding uncle. The flashier ones he gave to Nevis.
There was an unhappy alcoholic girl cousin near his own age, married to a handsome policeman, who certainly betrayed her. She had surprised Radomir by writing to him when he lived in California and telling him if he ever needed anyone he could count on her.
There was also the disappointing cousin who had promised intellectual achievement and instead opted for an interracial marriage, largely to discomfit her mother.
The Millionaire of Love Page 7