We talked about the terrible weekend when our life together really began falling apart. How he had dragged heavy luggage through the Metro because a car I had arranged failed to show up. We had missed our train and I had only said, “You’re late.” We both had done everything wrong. He could be forgiven, but I found it hard to forgive myself since experience had taught me how to handle it and I hadn’t. I could have risen to his going out to a farewell dinner with his friends in the village, the farewell being the girl I suspected him of sleeping with. I could have accepted her parents’ invitation to dinner, which Radomir told me she had requested they make, knowing I’d be furious at being left alone. I didn’t have to flee back to Paris the same evening in a rage. I didn’t have to make him creep back into the apartment in Paris alone the next evening, undoubtedly feeling humiliated and hating having nowhere else to go. When he apologized the next day I could have been more understanding and not just dismissed his apology. We were in a situation where we couldn’t move forward and we couldn’t stay where we were. When you are in love you behave in ways you could never accept or understand in other people. And I really couldn’t forgive myself just because I loved him so much. I had put him in hell. It took me a long time to realize it. And when I did, I did nothing to extricate him. So do we punish those we love.
Somehow we had survived it. Sitting next to him on the train the traces of how he would look when he was older were gone. That quick chestnut eye of his, that sometimes looked gray, difficult to see under his brow, shone in the sun setting across the fields. He said, “I want to come down regularly to take care of the lawns and gardens. And if you need money I’ll pay some bills for you. I believe you’ll work again and can pay me back.” I felt that pang where crying starts.
I think both Radomir and I have a taste for living intensely. A three-day weekend of high emotional content was the kind of thing we both enjoyed doing. If we share little else, we share a low threshold for boredom.
When he left me on the Metro he leaned over me and kissed me on both cheeks. I felt his beard. I was so glad to have kissed him good-bye and waved from the train as we passed him walking down the platform. Good-byes in the Metro are the worst.
Now that I am back in New York we have spoken several times. The last time he was in the country. When I asked him who was there with him he said, “Jean-Luc.” I don’t know whether I wished Jean-Luc wasn’t there with him. I do wish that whatever they do, they are very, very careful.
~30~
Nevis and Amanda
Have Another Chat
I was in Paris on my way back to the United States and stayed with Uncle Nevis in that flat that looks like a miniature dream of the czars. Uncle Nevis always has said that he isn’t interested in jewelry unless the stones looked as though they were torn from the crowns of the czars. His apartment looks like it was torn from Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine the Great’s country palace—all moldings and pastel walls and big draperies. It’s not really so faggy. He says it is designed to look like the home of one of the Grandes Horizontales of the nineteenth century. It is the sort of apartment where you feel as though you should be making bamboola with someone. Bamboola. That’s an Uncle Nevis word, too.
We went for a walk along the river past the bouquinistes and he really got on a roll when I said that the disappointing thing about men was that you always had to handle them.
He said, “You really have no alternative except to handle men. If you let them handle you, they drop you and break you. I’ve been knocked out of the ring three times and I’m not going in there again. I may look like a whole person but I’ve been severely damaged. And after you quit looking for that warrior lover who was going to make you a complete person, what do you do?
“You amuse yourself with great clothes and wonderful jewels. Beautiful houses and swell furniture, paintings, all that stuff. You have amusing friends and you go out looking like a million dollars and laughing a lot. It’s not the same thing of course, but it’s not a bad life: It’s the life everyone else wants. Little do they know, poor saps.”
I said, “If you don’t have any more lovers, at least you have a lot of friends.”
He said, “You never knew how many friends you have until you get sick and then all their miserable guilts come to the fore and they send you fruit baskets to make up for all the times they didn’t invite you to dinner. They don’t want your death to weigh on their conscience along with everything else.
“And those damnable fruit baskets. What do you do with them when the fruit is gone? My home is full of those baskets. For that matter, what do you do with the fruit? It all tastes like … not fruit. What? Bed pillows.”
“I have an idea,” I told him. “If your friends are such poor substitutes for a lover maybe you should get involved with S and M. I’ve been dabbling with the idea. Sadists and masochists are much less critical when it comes to physical beauty.”
He looked at me sideways. It was one of those very evaluating glances. “Don’t get involved with S and M,” he said. “You’re too small for S and M. Tell me about your latest boyfriends.”
“You know I’ve been seeing Roger Brodkey in Madrid. He wants to be an actor. He’s always talking about when you went to college with his parents.”
“I didn’t know Roger spoke Spanish,” Uncle Nevis said.
“He doesn’t,” I said.
“What a curious idea to pursue an acting career in a country where you don’t speak the language.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t really want it and is making sure he can never have it,” I said.
“That’s a good conclusion,” Uncle Nevis said. “Many people are like that. I’m afraid Roger swims poorly in the sea of life. It’s all struggle and splashing just to keep afloat at all. His parents can’t keep afloat at all. Someone is eventually going to have to provide a raft for them. I was hoping it was going to be Roger. But I guess no dice.”
My feet were getting tired. “Let’s stop for a hot chocolate,” I said. “And then there’s David Schise. I could kind of like him even if he is a geologist. Except for that name.”
“Corot supposedly loved someone named Parfaite Anastasie Osmond. I always wondered if he wasn’t more in love with her name than her. But she must have been a lovely baby to get a name like that. Perfection. When you have a name like that you can always believe you are beautiful. No, you’re right. Maybe Amanda Schise would be all right in the Midwest. But you’re never going to be there.”
“Actually there were lots of reasons to stop seeing him. He was very anti-abortion,” I said.
“If you eat steak you should have no objection to abortion. They both involve slaughter. I’m quite against abortion myself. Only because I hate the destruction of beauty. Maybe I’d like your David Schise.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “He’s homophobic, too.”
“But I love that. Also men who are anal retentive. Imagine a man who would actually hang up his pants. Morgan used to tell me that if it isn’t messy you’re doing it wrong and I always told him I preferred to do it wrong.”
I knew Morgan all through the many years Uncle Nevis and he were involved. I think I was three years old the first time I met Morgan. Very handsome. A tough act to follow.
“I probably should have stayed with my Argentinean tennis player but he had such bad taste,” I said.
“Bad taste leads to crime,” Uncle Nevis said. “That’s not original with me. I think Baudelaire said that.”
“Well, it was certainly true in Filiberto’s case. He was always looking around underground parking garages for a car to steal. I probably have so many troubles with men because I don’t love myself enough.”
Uncle Nevis said, “That’s not such a bad thing. At least when you’re not in love with yourself it leaves some room to love somebody else.”
I said, “None of them are as nice as you are, Uncle Nevis.”
He said, “I was a nice person. Now I only act like a nice person. But all
the time. I’m consistent. Someone should have taken better care of me. Besides God.”
“You never know. You always tell me don’t get upset about missing a flight. You never know whom you might meet on the trip back into town,” I said.
“I am afraid I will die crying for the man I’ve been looking for all my life and have only caught glimpses of. But let’s not complain. It only makes us unattractive. Another hot chocolate?”
~31~
The Trip to Turin
Was the trip to Turin a turning point? My life had lost direction since my contract with the French agency had expired. I really didn’t want to go back to New York and get another job. I knew very well how that worked. As a former star, you become a kind of decoration to a big agency that pays you nothing like what you once earned—usually an agency whom you had worked for before, who could now humble you by having you work on diaper accounts. Or sanitary napkins. And I really didn’t want to leave Paris because Radomir was there and ridiculous as it was I found myself still revolving around him emotionally.
I was holding things together financially by doing major freelance jobs for different offices of one of the big international agencies. Sometimes in New York, sometimes in London (they hated me there), and most often in Germany, where they seemed to venerate my former status. Very occasionally I had a call to go to Tokyo. All of which somewhat justified my staying in Paris and letting my life drift along.
Just before I had to go to New York for a project I made a quick run to Turin. Have you ever been there? A very strange town. The worldwide capital of black magic. Very few know this. Its arcaded streets have something sinister about them and, as is true in many of these old cities, the people have an air of planning to do things in the most devious way possible just because it pleases them to do so. On the upside is the ice cream, sold from glass cases under the arcades, which is wonderful. One could almost take an ice cream vacation in Turin.
However, I wanted to go there to see a large art exhibit on Amore. The Herald Tribune had reviews on it and said it was very hot. It included the secret cabinet material from the Museum of Naples, which is rarely opened to the public. I like pornography when it is handled by the masters. Actually, I like pornography whether it is masterful or not, if it is really sexy and not just repetitious and sordid. I have been encouraged in this by Buckminster Fuller, the famous architecht. In a rather ordinary magazine I stumbled upon an interview with him in which he said that pornography is a must as you grow older because it releases testosterone into the system, which keeps your bones and muscles strong and makes it possible for you to have more erections. So off I went to Turin, inviting Radomir to come along. It was really a kind of health mission. And Radomir is a good companion for sex explorations. It is a subject that fascinates him as much as me. It is one thing we truly have in common.
We slept in twin beds pushed together but we had no physical contact except for a few moments on Sunday morning when I rested my hand against Radomir’s bare shoulder. I think it was those brawny shoulders and strong arms that captured my attention in the first place. And the flat stomach. He still was hanging on to all these attributes.
Saturday we found the exhibition site, which was as truly bizarre as everything else about Turin. A former synagogue, built in the form of an enormous cube, decorated with a terrifically tall spire. Something like a gigantic birthday package with a carrot on top of it. Evidently this grandiose structure was so overly ambitious that the congregation could never pay for it and it never truly served as a place of worship. Now it is an exhibition hall.
In the center of the vast empty building, which was essentially one great four-story-high room, was a glass box on a wire, which was the elevator that hauled a few passengers at a time up to the turret above. It looked scarier than any amusement park ride.
The exhibit leaned largely to modern erotic art with shiny breasts and couples grappling in a way that may have made some comment on the inherent brutality of sex but was in no way provocative. The collection from Naples was made up of fragments of Roman frescoes and statuary which contained little that hasn’t already been in the art magazines for decades. Fortunately there were a few drawings by Fuseli, whose weirdly imagined hanky-panky in the English Georgian period always has so much elegance and distinction.
There was a Fuseli drawing of a courtesan, hair dressed beautifully, reclining on a divan while a robust young man groans in agonized anticipation as her maid washes his organs. This alone was worth the price of admission.
And there were a series of drawings by an Italian Romantic painter showing his mistress and himself running through a fairly complete repertoire of what is possible between men’s and women’s bodies. Because the artist himself was the male participant, both Radomir and I wondered how the line could be so precise and the sometimes exaggerated perspective so accurate. They didn’t seem to be drawn from memory but from live models. Perhaps he used a stand-in. I have great admiration for an artist who can draw with such sureness and exactitude.
I took Radomir to a rather expensive restaurant Saturday evening where he flirted with a young blonde Italian girl at the next table. I love that kind of northern Italian blondness. A really golden kind of hair, olive skin, and greenish-blue eyes. You can have very ordinary features with that kind of coloring and still come off as a stunner. The great model Isa Stoppi had that coloring with even snowier hair and icier eyes, in a tawny skin. She was pretty sensational looking.
This girl was quite pretty and was having a boring evening out with her father. She probably thought Radomir was in the same boat. Or perhaps she was a schoolgirl whore out with her lover. That happens, too. Her little flirtation was interrupted when I paid the bill and departed with Radomir in tow.
Radomir got admiring whistles from teenage girls the next day while we were strolling the arcades. We had gone to see the country palace of Stupinigi in the morning, with its fantastically painted ceiling. I had just read about it in World of Interiors and it lived up to its press. Radomir surprised me a bit by saying it was what he liked best about the weekend.
Suddenly on the way to the airport on Sunday afternoon Radomir began talking to me about his friend Tony, who had come back from Crete with him and who now was living in Amsterdam.
Tony had always seemed to be a stable influence upon Radomir, I thought. Living in Amsterdam with his pretty Dutch girlfriend, cooking in a café, not going much of anywhere but enjoying himself in that typical Dutch way. But now it seems there was trouble in Paradise.
Radomir told me, “I went up to Amsterdam to visit him and he was sharing digs with this kind of drugged-out scruffy guy and he told me they were sleeping together. It was Mardi Gras there so we drank too much and did a little cocaine. Then we got it on ourselves, with his girlfriend asleep in the next room. I felt kind of shitty about it the next morning.”
The news surprised me. I had met Tony in Crete, a kind of pleasant, blondish young man. Radomir and he had shared a house there for some time. I would have thought the occasion for this would have come up long before. But it was very much in a pattern with other people in Radomir’s life: one more friend who winds up as a sex partner and then exits, as so many had in Radomir’s life.
The more I thought about it the more surprised I was. Tony had been in Paris and stayed overnight with me while he was visiting Radomir. At breakfast on Sunday morning he told me that Radomir and he had gone to a sex show the evening before. It had been very disappointing. A naked couple dawdled about and finally he touched her parts, a female couple did much the same thing, a single female displayed her unattractive self. That was the show. And then a very large and bossy woman threw on the lights and ordered the audience out. When the audience objected she got really tough with them.
When Radomir showed up for breakfast Tony brought up Minerva Minot, perhaps in the context of the corpselike performers they had seen the night before. “Radomir told me that she laid there like she was dead,” Tony said.
“I don’t like people talking about what it’s like sleeping with someone else. I always worry about what they’re going to say about me,” I said. Radomir studied the floor.
In the plane Radomir told me more. Tony had called Radomir once he was back in Paris and wanted to come to Paris so they could continue their sexcapades. Radomir declined. Then Tony called again to say that his girlfriend had suspected something and that he had admitted to her that he had had sex with Radomir because Radomir had been so persistent. That Radomir had been trying to lay him ever since Crete. Outraged, Radomir said, “It was completely the other way around. He was the one who was so hot to have sex. I told him our friendship was over. And then he says, ‘Does this mean our Canada trip is off?’ We had been planning to go to Canada with his girlfriend. I couldn’t believe it. I just slammed down the phone.”
Back in Paris Radomir insisted on taking me to dinner. He was very jovial and amusing. Maybe he felt he had bent my ear too much about Tony. And then we doubled-kissed good night on the best of terms and I was not to see him again for many, many months. I was just as glad. I had my own life to get in order and I had to work my way out of this Radomir fix I was in.
~32~
Amanda Reports In
Uncle Nevis and I sometimes send poems to each other. It’s our sentimental side. Not about each other of course—just things that come into our minds. He taught me to keep a writing pad by my bed. Not for dreams, but those thoughts that come into your head as you’re waking up. I sent him a poem that just came to me in one piece.
The light was diffused
We were confused,
I could have refused,
Our bodies fused.
I was just ending this relatively long-term affair with an Argentinean tennis player. Talk about confused.
The Millionaire of Love Page 18