The Millionaire of Love

by David Leddick

  We decided to have dinner on the quay opposite Notre Dame where we had eaten before. The waiter, short and swarthy with his receding hair pulled into a ponytail, was quite taken with me. I said to Radomir, “In France, I’ve always been popular with the short and dark.”

  “Which includes everyone,” he replied.

  Toward the end of the meal he told me he’d been going through a period where everyone was falling in love with him and ruining all his friendships. Men and women, no one wanted to be friends. They all wanted to be lovers. He started talking about the man who had gone to the country with him. At last! Patience had been rewarded. He was the boyfriend of a young Irish woman whom Radomir knew. They had become friends in turn, and Radomir had given him his typed up diaries to read, most of it having to do with me. The man, Jean-Luc, had said, “I’d like to meet him, this man who decides others’ destinies for them.” And knowing this much about Radomir had evidently felt the ground was solid enough underfoot to suggest his own interest in him. Radomir had tried to have a woman friend join them for the weekend but she had failed to do so and Jean-Luc, of the long-lashed green eyes and tall, lanky frame, soon wanted to go to bed with Radomir, too. Like everyone else.

  We left the restaurant and I sat on a bench while Radomir stood in front of me. Was he really so concerned that they all fell in love with him? He remembered that I had called him a “millionaire of love.” Or did he enjoy all these hearts toppling before him? How was I going to tell him that sexy, solid citizens were in short supply? Particularly those available to both men and women. And did he really want consolation or consultation? He was letting me know what his life was like. And I was finding out that his charm for me was in no way diminished. In my life I’m always waiting for that moment when someone you like reveals themselves to be after all an asshole. As the years moved forward Radomir was moving further away from assholedom. Unluckily for me.

  We said goodnight on the quay and I departed in a cab for Pigalle while he walked back uphill to the Roman Arena neighborhood where he lived. He had agreed he would come to the country for a weekend with me. There was no more I could plan for and there I would find out about all the others who were in love with him. And just how much good it was going to do them.

  During the week I saw an old school friend who had taken up residence in the old Les Halles quarter. Witty but self-centered, he was fun to talk to even if you had to shout at the top of your lungs to batter through his deafness. His homosexuality had been woven through a marriage and two children, but even so he displayed a lot of classic gay manners and mores. He had accustomed himself to sitting in cafés and “boy watching.” He told me that he also sometimes dropped down to the porno tape center, where instead of buying tapes, he rented them for use in the little booths they had there. Nicely equipped with boxes of Kleenex, he explained. He said it was all “Quite correct.” I said, “Oh, please, Gary, bring the tapes home so I can at least imagine you sprawled out on your own couch, legs akimbo, whacking off. There’s something so French and grim about sitting bolt upright on a hardback chair with your fly open, taking care of business. It’s not very sexual.” “Not at all, not at all,” he answered me, obviously thinking I was ridiculously emotional. Despite the fact he barely spoke the language he had become more French than I ever could be. He did not think of love as playing any part in his life, and I’m not sure that he ever did. He was of that male world where having an orgasm in or around an attractive body was the goal. Letting that attractive body have any control over you because of your love for them was not part of the game. Too threatening, too debilitating, too out of control.

  ~26~

  Nevis Thinks About AIDS

  Nevis thought of all the friends who had died of AIDS. His pursuing Radomir to Crete, fearing he had AIDS and had gone away to die, wasn’t really a neurotic fantasy. So many of his friends had died. And each of them before their illness had told him of one special, unusual sexual encounter. And some, who were closeted, he had happened upon with a male lover. He thought they may have, in some prescient way, been telling him of the transference of the poison semen without knowing it. They could not have known. And certainly Nevis could not know. But each had mentioned only one encounter.

  A young French friend had told him of the South American he had met in a bar in Los Angeles. They went into the men’s room and had sex there, as neither wanted to be bothered to take the time to go to someone’s home, getting undressed, all the paraphernalia of romance. It had come to that for poor André, and he never described actual sexual experiences. But this one he did. Within the year he became ill when he was alone at Nevis’s country house in the Loire Valley. He had called Nevis from there, panicky, described how sick he was, was sure it was the beginning of AIDS. Nevis had reassured him and reminded him of the proximity of his parents and how frequently he was ill when around them. But André’s guess was right, and soon he died.

  Harry Lieberwitz told Nevis of going to the baths in Miami and taking home some “foreign guy.” Harry said he just couldn’t suck enough cock that night. The man told him he should go to the gym and firm up a little. Nevis was astonished Harry had done this with no precautions, as AIDS was already sweeping friends off the table. Harry didn’t seem to be able to compute this into his thinking. It was the only sex encounter he ever told Nevis of, but perhaps they weren’t too frequent for the not-too-attractive Harry. Soon Harry registered positive, and soon after a series of horrifying illnesses began that carried him away.

  A former lover of Nevis’s, who died of lung cancer complicated with being seropositive, had told him fleetingly of an evening when a group of friends at his apartment got the clothes off a black pickup. Could this have been the fatal contact?

  Nevis remembered the television producer from a company he often worked with, so handsome, who was deeply in the closet. He had seen him rushing through Penn Station with a young male model in tow. He had passed within inches of Nevis and ignored him. Was that the love who gave him the AIDS that killed him a few years later?

  There was the New York advertising writer he had seen, surprisingly all in black leather, at an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, with a surly black-leather thug. Was that his nemesis? The cause of his death by AIDS? A death that had so surprised his friends back in New York, who all knew his girlfriend so well?

  Nevis wasn’t into all “that woo-woo stuff” enough to really believe that he alone knew the time or the partner that had killed each person. Knew the specific infection when the virus had entered the veins. But there was one fact he was sure of. If there is one thing an illness should not do, it shouldn’t attack you when you’re fully in love or fully in lust.

  Because of the brief tales and encounters involving friends who had died of AIDS, Nevis both liked and hated hearing of Radomir’s sexual exploits. Each one, he thought, might have been the one that would later return in a punishing form. Condoms or no condoms, those tiny viruses are tricky. Radomir told him on one occasion he had totaled up his bed partners and there were about thirty of them.

  Nevis wondered how he could continue to listen to stories of sexual adventures when Radomir continued to recount them to him. He had heard the expression “you’re only as sick as your secrets.” Perhaps not keeping secrets would hold sickness at bay.

  ~27~

  Passage de Salut

  This is a strange and brooding house I have in the Passage de Salut. In a town that has plenty to brood about. This small abbey town, lost in La France Profonde, has Roman origins. Ancient Roman tombs were found when they dug the foundations of the Mairie in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

  This town sits very directly upon the earth. The rich smell of the earth is always in the air, most acutely when the shutters are opened in the morning and when they are closed upon the night air. It is very silent here. Few cars, few tourists come to the Passage de Salut to visit the ancient abbey. It was founded in 1035 by a knight called Gelduin, who had been saved f
rom a storm at sea when returning from a crusade. He prayed to the Virgin and she appeared in a snowstorm and calmed the seas. You may think appearing in a blizzard over the Mediterranean strange, but that she appeared at all is so strange she surely could be accompanied by anything she chose.

  Gelduin swore to found an abbey, which he did when he returned to his village. He was known as Gelduin the Girl because of his beauty. He had no heirs. His sister’s children inherited the abbey. It all hangs together.

  In 1935 the boys’ school that occupied the abbey celebrated its nine hundredth anniversary. When I read the history of the abbey I discovered that the sleeping arrangements in the dormitories alternated a monk and a schoolboy, a monk and a schoolboy, down the long rows of beds. When a child had to go to the bathroom in the night the nearest monk went with him and the child on the other side was also awakened to accompany them. Hanky-panky was hard to come by. The boys went to school all year long; there were no vacations. Cultivating any secret vices required a great deal of imagination.

  In the evening from my front door the sun falls heavily upon the facade of the abbey and its chapel, Notre Dame de la Neige. Our Lady of the Snows, in memory of that life-saving snowstorm. The ancient stones are gold and sharply outlined against the often lavender skies beyond. Turning around, the fronts of the houses across the square are already dark and the sky above them is pale blue. The classic René Magritte painting. Already night below. Still daylight above. The two views to left and right seem to have little to do with each other.

  All the shutters are closed on the houses across the square. They have been since before the dinner hour. In broad daylight the natives close the shutters and sit down to their evening meal under electric light, usually an unshaded bulb. It is a long-standing French tradition to let no one see into your homes. When I first came to France I found it eerie and forbidding to pass through the streets of provincial towns with no sign of life. Now I am used to it and would find it bizarre to see light streaming from windows and jolly people within. I once visited a friend in Holland and saw exactly that. I felt like crying to see people behaving in such a normal, unsuspicious way. I always leave my shutters open and the lights on until I retire in my house in the Passage de Salut. On summer evenings it is a favorite destination for town folk out for a walk. Coming by to see what the American is doing. It probably beats French television.

  The streetlights go out when it gets truly dark and everyone is safely in bed. Sometimes with friends I go out for a walk in the brilliant moonlight. The streets lined with their faceless stone houses are at their most beautiful then. The slate roofs gleam like silver in the white light of the moon, which seems particularly close here in the Loire Valley. The shadows are hard and black. It is exactly the romantic look of old lithographs and Hollywood spy movies. I think that it was exactly this in the Middle Ages; and the same when Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette were on the throne; and at the turn of the century when big hats and bustles passed through these stone doorways and entered these very same shops; and when German soldiers were here in occupancy during World War II, in their metal-domed helmets on their motorcycles as they patrolled this town. No one seems to have minded that much. It is the one subject that is completely taboo and never comes up. One elderly woman school teacher did say to me once, “They were just boys, you know.”

  Now they have been replaced with Americans. Or at least one American, living in a largish stone house in the Passage de Salut. I cannot say that it feels like my home. It feels more like a birdhouse built for birds of passage. A nest perhaps, but not a permanent one.

  Perhaps all the souls that have inhabited these stone walls since 1600 have filled the space so completely with their spirits that there’s little room for me to impose my own personality.

  This isn’t entirely true. When I’m in residence for a while it begins to feel like my house, but when I go away and return I have to start all over again. My personal atmosphere has evaporated. The young American woman who comes by to water my plants and pick up mail when I’m not here says the same thing. “It’s not your house when you’re not here,” she has said.

  There are only three houses in Passage de Salut. Mine is in the middle, flanked on either side by the village priest’s residence and the hairdresser, or what used to be the hairdresser. He’s retired now. Monsieur Albert. There is a Madame Albert about and Monsieur Albert makes quite a point about how he lusts after young girls. I wonder. I hope so.

  It would be awful to contemplate a lifetime of living in a little stone house with a rather plain wife, her hair dyed a dark red no hair has ever been (by you, no doubt), and two charmless and stocky daughters, and all your life you are longing after young men and endlessly pretending to be an old lecher. My feeling in talking to Monsieur Albert is that he has been pretending to be an old lecher for so long he has become one.

  Monsieur Albert plays the trombone very well. In the evening the only sound leaking through the stone walls is the occasional mooing of Monsieur Albert’s trombone. It was some years before I realized that the stone walls standing between Monsieur Albert’s house and my own were actually one wall. My house must have preceded his and when his was built, sometime in the seventeenth-century, the builders just put it lean-to up against mine. They built the three outer walls. The back wall was already there: mine. The priest on the other side has the same construction. His bedroom and the blue bedroom in my house back on the same common wall. Guests sleeping in that room have told me they have heard lashing and cries. I can only hope the mousy little father has some exciting and self-martyring times in there by himself. I once saw a pair of large pink panties on his laundry line. A guest said, “His housekeeper obviously.” Well, perhaps.

  My house in the passage was three houses originally. The main structure has a front door inserted in what was originally an open passageway. The oldest houses in the village are of this construction. An opening passes through the house to allow horses to be led to a stable in the inner court. The oak staircase and hallways were part of the outdoors then. Only when you closed a room’s door and lit a fire in the fireplace were you truly indoors. Perhaps this dates back to the Roman origins of these towns in central France. In the Italian climate there was little need for warmth to be held in.

  I have central heating in this house, the only heating of this type in the village. Turning the furnace full up it still takes two days for the house to warm, the stone walls absorbing all the heat until they are fully dechilled. A weekend in winter requires someone passing by to turn on the heat on Thursday morning if there is to be warmth Friday evening. I tried to stay in the house in winter several times before I installed central heating. The first time I arose in the night and pulled the bedroom carpet over the bed. It was still freezing in the bed. These are the feelings that connect us with the past. A past of candles flickering low, wood fires with a few embers still glowing in a cold, cold dawn. Fingers that scarcely bend; gray, soiled skin under stiff and dark clothing. Frozen feet stuffed into wooden sabots filled with straw. Crudely knitted wool socks if you were very lucky.

  I have seen older people in the town, bent from reaching for the ground for many years, hands in permanent claws from holding hoes and pitchforks. They were only part of the process of pulling food from the earth and pushing it back through their bodies. Hoping to have a little surplus to sell for handwoven cloth, wooden shoes, some salt, a kerosene lamp.

  These stone walls breathe of these hard lives, hard even for those with some money. Nancy Mitford wrote that it was only in the eighteenth century that the wealthy began to exchange splendor for comfort. Comfort can be very beguiling. Only those who have never known it can live without it. Eventually the entire world will be living in Florida.

  I was brought up in a house without central heating. A house with a privy in the garden. So this house is not a far reach for me. I do not care that the bathroom is not luxuriously appointed. I have no desire for a “modern” kitchen. In a
way it’s quite French not to care. I was once shown around a newly decorated apartment in Paris. Long low purple couches ran around the walls. Tall conical Italian lamps lit the red and black abstract carpets on the floors and the pictures on the walls closely resembled the carpets. It was a home for crazed clowns. I said, “Marie-France, what does the kitchen look like?” She replied, “I don’t know. I never go there. Let’s look.”

  We did look. It had grease-stained tile walls, ancient skillets and pans hanging upon them. A black behemoth of a stove that must have burned what? Wood? Coal? It must have all dated to the time the apartment was built shortly before the turn of the century. Marie-France glared about and said, “Cook does very well in here. She does not complain.” And we left.

  I, too, saw no reason to upgrade the kitchen although I could have lived forever without her purple snake-like couches in the salon.

  My kitchen in the house in the Passage de Salut is large, a tiled floor in red, a very large fireplace, a little gas stove, a metal sink, a large armoire for dishes, pots, and pans, a long table and many chairs, some matching.

  Over the fireplace is a tile map bearing the title Carte d’Amour. It shows a land rather like France with a large channel dividing it from a northern isle. Something like England. There are many little towns on this map, separated by numerous rivers. Some are on hillocks. They have names like Médisance, Folie, and Chagrin. I always tell guests I live near Les Falaises d’ Amour. The Cliffs of Love. They never respond or ask me to elaborate.

  Why my own bedroom is gray I cannot say. My bedrooms in all my previous homes have always been blue. But this one is gray and has always been a little austere. I have never known any nights of real passion in the bed of that room. I said aloud to myself once when I walked into it, “I don’t like a bedroom in which I never had a really good fuck.” It’s true. Perhaps my attachment to Radomir is based upon my trying to make that bedroom one I really could like.