As a reply Uncle Nevis sent me his poem. Which also came to him as he was awakening. We’re not really poets of course.
WE DON’T NEED GLACIERS
We don’t need glaciers,
People will do.
Some day people will tear the pictures
of your lovers from their silver frames
and throw them away.
Putting their own pictures of loved ones
in their place.
Children.
Animals.
Not handsome young men.
Someday someone will laugh at the shirt you wore
the night he fucked you so hard
your brains rattled.
You didn’t realize he was capable of passion like that.
Or that you weren’t.
At least with him.
Someday someone will say to a friend,
“The ruby ring is nice,
But I don’t know about sapphires.
Don’t they bring bad luck?”
And they’ll separate the rings you always wore
together on your left hand,
That Fred gave you.
That you wore for fifty years or more.
We don’t need glaciers to push their way
into the house,
Crush the furniture,
Dampen the photographs,
Bury the jewels.
People will do it.
And every detail of your life will be swept away.
You’ve done it yourself.
You painted over the lavender wall someone chose
so carefully to go with the bedspread.
Put the plate back down on the table
at the flea market deciding against it,
Gave your aunt’s napkins away.
Who uses cloth napkins anyway these days?
All this will be swept away as surely as by glaciers.
All that will be left is your memory of someone
holding you very closely as you shuddered
in the night.
Be grateful and remember
The emeralds and the eighteenth-century desk
and the little Vuillard print.
All will be ground away.
The jewels torn from the crowns of kings
Gone.
Because we don’t need glaciers,
People will do.
He called me in Madrid from Paris about a week later. I said, “I think you have to have a break from this torchy little love you’ve got going for Radomir. It’s making you feel old.”
He said, “I’m turning brown around the edges.”
“You’re not really,” I said. “It’s just that Radomir is so much younger than you are. Aren’t there any interesting older guys lurking around town?”
“Older guys are never interested in anyone like me. I could go for them, but they are only interested in blond little twinkies. Honestly.”
He went on. “And I don’t know how honest I am in saying I prefer an affair with someone my own age. No one looks older than when you’re looking up at them having an orgasm. So what did you think of my poem? Is it too gloppy?”
I said, “It would probably be great set to music. Like Samuel Barber’s ‘Knoxville, 1915’ or whatever the date is.”
“God, Knoxville,” he said.
“I was talking about the music not the town,” I told him.
“Do you have tango music playing?” he said.
“It’s the score from that new tango troupe that’s wandering around Europe.”
“Whenever I hear tango music I feel I should throw myself away on someone unworthy of me.”
“As if you haven’t dozens of times.”
“It’s true. I do seem pretty indestructible,” he said.
“If you got into it with a Sherman tank, God help the tank.” I told him I could tell he was getting into better spirits.
“Don’t mention Sherman tanks, darling. It dates you,” he said.
“You mean like referring to the USO?” I said.
“Exactly. What’s your favorite thing, Amanda? Mine is the fine skin on men’s bodies that has been covered by underwear all their lives.”
“Mine is money,” I said.
“Having enough money is like a stiff breeze blowing through the house. It clears the air,” he said. “Well, that’s enough nonsense, honey. I’ll talk to you soon.” And he hung up.
~33~
Radomir Visits Miami Beach
In the year that passed before I was to see Radomir again I was very occupied trying to salvage my career. Salvaging my life had to come second.
And then, too, Amanda had to be bailed out. She had conceived and delivered a baby in Madrid with her bodybuilding blond lover from Uruguay. A man too much younger than herself, already burdened with a live-in mother and live-in mistress, both who had come from Uruguay with him. I didn’t think it was my part to point out to Amanda how much he resembled her father and her brothers. She’s no dope.
I think she thought as soon as irresistible baby Boris appeared that Mr. Bodybuilder would insist on marrying her, but that was not to be. After all the adorable pictures of recovering mother and newborn in Dad’s arms had been taken, Dad hit the road. What’s that old song? “He may be good fucking but he’s no fucking good?” That was him.
I had moved to my apartment in Miami Beach by this time. I needed the rent from the house in New York. I’d been renting it for a couple of years, and that essentially was my income as my advertising star faded. However, it was an excellent income. But now something had to be done about Amanda, so I suggested I buy a house in Miami Beach where we could all live together. Amanda could work there as the makeup artist she had become when her modeling career nose-dived. Baby Boris could go to the beach.
And so it came to pass, although I hadn’t anticipated that the four-bedroom art deco house would soon fill up with Amanda’s friends. “The Ladies on the Loose,” I called them. And they weren’t all ladies. Not at all. And they weren’t even all women. There was quite a string of former models trying their luck in Miami Beach before they gave it up completely. All the European magazines and advertising agencies had started coming to Miami Beach in the winter, and it was rapidly becoming a chic destination. People were beginning to call the neighborhood near us South Beach and it was all happening.
Which probably explains why Radomir included it in his itinerary when he made a tour of the U.S. that summer. We hadn’t seen each other since Turin, but he called and found me and said he’d like to come see me with the teenage French boy and the French couple who were all traveling with him.
I was on the curved front porch hosing down the front walk when they pulled in from the airport. Radomir looked hunky at the wheel. The fifteen-year-old was portly and serious as only French kids can be. It turned out that Radomir was a friend of his mother’s; she had contracted cancer and begged him to take her son along on the American trip, which he agreed to do.
The couple were a good-looking Laotian woman and her sapphire-eyed boyfriend-slash-husband.
It all went pretty well. The Laotian girl and her beau bought groceries and cooked and made beds and dried dishes. Quite a change from the “Ladies on the Loose” and all the other Bedouin tribes of Amanda’s friends who passed through all winter.
I invited Don Amour to come down from Fort Lauderdale one evening. Don was a handsome sailor I was guiding gingerly toward a modeling career. Don was very good-looking, kind of a tall Mel Gibson, and was very at ease in front of the camera. I got some tests of him done and he really looked good. I began to think he might actually make it as a model and actor once he got some wind into his husky sails (which made me feel a little less like a manipulative slut). I wanted to show him off a little as a kind of defensive maneuver. Radomir was friendly with Don and struck hunkier-than-usual poses while they chatted.
Of course, Radomir and Amanda got along wonderfully. They always did. They laughed and snor
ted food through their noses at the table. Something like high school students. I don’t imagine they think of each other for a moment once they’re apart.
Baby Boris liked Radomir, too. Tiny but stalwart, blond and blue-eyed like his father and mother, Boris had a very Latino temperament under his crew cut. Living with a household of women had given him some unusual set phrases. One morning when I crossed the room to answer the telephone he looked up from his fire engine and said, “Tell them I’m not here.”
When we went to the beach Radomir and Boris romped in the water together. I was floating nearby and Radomir suddenly turned to me and said, “When we were in Santa Fe I went to see a medicine man. He told me to go to one of the souvenir stands and buy one of the animal stone carvings. The one that appealed to me most. I bought a coyote and brought it back to him.”
He deposited Boris on the beach, who wanted to annoy his mother, and came plunging back in. He obviously wanted to tell me this story which had begun, as was so often the case, with no preliminary. I bobbed up and down as he said, “The medicine man said, ‘Oh, the coyote. The Trickster. I thought you’d choose that.’” When he said that there was a sideways glance from those opaque Central European eyes that never give anything away. It was a strange look I’ve only seen a few times, as though the real Radomir within was sending me a little semaphore message. Then the eyes were veiled again.
He went on to explain that the medicine man had told him of all the positive aspects of being a coyote. That the coyote was independent, explorative, self-reliant. But I remembered the glance. It was like a stone slowly twirling downward through the sunlit water I was swimming in.
When we got back on the beach we lay down beside each other. Radomir’s body looked good in his dark blue Speedo trunks. Not quite as taut as it had been when he was twenty-two and first came to France, but still thick-armed; broad shoulders sliding down to his small, flat waist. At one point when Radomir was kneeling on all fours straightening his towel I imagined lying under him with my mouth at his crotch, looking up at his flat stomach.
We did manage one lunch alone together while he and his friends were there, and Radomir told me about an American he had met in Paris on a assignment. They had fallen into something that felt like love and Radomir had recently been out to Los Angeles to visit the man.
They had gone bicycling, to the beach, to gay bars, and Radomir said, “He wanted me to wear long boxer shorts to the beach. It embarrassed him to have people see him with another man wearing a small bathing suit. But he wanted to show me off in the gay bars he went to. I just hated it. I realized that I don’t want to live that kind of life again. It was just like Linton, the priest. I didn’t love him more than my life in Paris. One night I just cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t stop crying. But I couldn’t do it.”
I told him that it sounded like the same scenario as the priest affair. There was no question of these men giving up their careers to move to Paris.
“I’m not going to say what I said last time we had this kind of conversation,” Radomir said.
“Please don’t,” I said.
All I could think of was that though I would move to anywhere on the globe to be with Radomir he would never “cry and cry” for me. So on the next Saturday morning he got up and I took him to the airport so he could fly back to Paris. I think we both felt it was a kind of strange role reversal. My days of flying off to Paris were over; now he was taking over for me. But not quite. The Germans called on Monday and I found myself heading for Paris just one week later, on my way to Frankfurt. A new shampoo was being launched and they needed my help.
~34~
The List of Lovers Gets Too Long
In Paris, just one week from the day Radomir left Miami Beach, Nevis was with him again at the house in the country. Radomir seemed pleased to be going to the country, saw no problem in catching a train slightly earlier than usual, and had a more “there” presence with Nevis than he had shown for a long time.
On that evening, Nevis set the table in the garden and lit candles. Radomir had gone out for wine. When Radomir walked into the house he could see from the entryway through to the garden and said, “Candles. I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to get all gloppy and sentimental.” Nevis felt a little flush of relief at not having to feel embarrassed. “Not tonight. Not tonight,” he replied, laughing.
At the table they talked at great length. Radomir went out again to buy cigarettes so they could talk, drink wine, and smoke. Nevis thought, If you don’t smoke or drink or eat or fuck, what is the context you’re supposed to talk in?
That night Radomir talked more about Phillipe, the boyfriend from the gym who had been a regular sex partner and who had killed himself when he discovered he had AIDS. Nevis felt a quick knowing of fear. Radomir seemed noncommittal. No voice tremor or eye movement suggested he was concerned about his frequent contact with Phillipe. Nevis wondered if he felt immunized by his unvarying use of condoms or was rigidly concealing his qualms. He was very capable of that.
Radomir told Nevis about going to a bar with Phillipe for a drink and noticing at the far end of the bar one man was fucking another. The fuckee, who had entered shirtless, had lowered his jeans and was bent over a bar stool while his barrel-chested, husky new friend prodded away at him. Apparently without a condom, Radomir said when he glanced their way from time to time, not sure he was seeing what he was seeing, although most of the people in the bar had gathered around to watch. When they were done, the husky man hugged his companion and left. But Mr. Fuckable pulled up his pants, tipped his penis into his fly, and ordered another drink.
Phillipe advised Radomir to go outside to pee; the backroom and the toilets were not to be visited. Radomir said he thought Phillipe had probably gone to that place frequently and had contracted AIDS there.
He had also broken off with his friend/lover Jean-Luc, whom he’d led Nevis to think he’d slept with in the spirit of experimentation. He said Jean-Luc had become possessive and jealous. Had gone to the gym with him really to keep an eye out for good-looking competition.
Nevis said, “He was just taking every chance he could to see you with your clothes off.”
Radomir said, “He had plenty of opportunities to do that. All he had to do was invite me to dinner and he got that. For someone who claimed to be a homosexual virgin, he got into the swing real quick. He knew exactly what he liked and how he liked to do things.” Nevis supposed Radomir was talking about blow jobs.
It was a different tone of voice Nevis was hearing—a tone he’d heard before from good-looking guys who liked their sex and it didn’t have to be dressed up in romance. Preferably not. He felt a little sorry for the good-looking Jean-Luc. He’d wanted to try it. Got it hot and heavy and very regularly from a handsome hunk. And bang, one day handsome hunk doesn’t want to do it anymore. And as with all dealings with handsome hunks, was told, “You have only yourself to blame.”
Nevis remembered Radomir telling him that at one time in California his twinlike roommate had brought home a man who fancied Radomir instead. He insisted he did not wish to be screwed by the roommate but by Radomir. Who then did, although he “hated every minute of it.”
Nevis said how sadomasochism escaped him as a source of sexual pleasure. He received the reply, “I tied somebody’s hands together once in California.” Another Radomir was taking form, solidifying but distorting the form of the Radomir he knew.
Radomir also talked more about Phillipe, the gym friend who had suddenly reemerged in recent months claiming to be in love. Radomir said that after he’d drifted away from Phillipe there had been only one night during a Metro strike when they’d slept together again. Phillipe had asked if he could stay over because of the strike. Once there, Radomir had given him the choice of the floor or sharing his bed. Phillipe had chosen the bed and once in bed Radomir said, “I realized it wasn’t going to work. I said, ‘Phillipe, I think you’d better sleep on the floor after all. I don’t seem to be able t
o control myself.’ Phillipe said, ‘That’s all right.’ And my body took over. I think that’s what he wanted anyway. And you know he has a very beautiful body. Shoulders out to here and a small waist.” He made a V-shaped gesture with both hands. Nevis thought there was more than one person in that bed who had colluded on that little scenario.
Upon Phillipe’s return to his life they had agreed to meet for dinner and talk things out. Radomir had told the jealous Jean-Luc where they were planning to eat and suddenly Jean-Luc had appeared beside their table, saying he’d just dropped in by chance for a drink. Phillipe soon left, not offering to pay any share of the dinner in typical French style, although he had requested they meet. Radomir chewed Jean-Luc out. Jean-Luc insisted that he truly was there by chance, having had dinner with his uncle. Radomir didn’t believe him.
Again Nevis felt shut out of these true-life dramas and conflicts, ones very like earlier events in his own life. He wondered at himself, that he still wished to figure in these kinds of events, still wanted to be a player, wanted to have these things happen to himself, although he had had his share of these so-necessary passions. It made him feel selfish. Radomir deserved his experiences, but still Nevis mourned that they were not with him.
On Saturday they raced about on errands all day and rewarded themselves with a lavish dinner at a nearby chateau hotel. On the chateau terrace, grand and beflowered, they were caught by a sudden and violently windy thunderstorm. In a flurry of blowing menus and tipping tables they dashed inside, carrying their glasses and wine in its bucket. They finished the very good wine they had carried inside, and as the storm abated drove home, tipsily. With the rain beating down on the old Peugeot, Radomir at the wheel talked about what he actually did in bed with the ever increasing list of lovers.
Nevis first told him that he preferred having love made to him face to face. He did make love to other men and enjoyed it but it was something like masturbation. Whereas having his lover in him was for him the true expression of love. He added, he didn’t quite understand sex lives without sexual entry. He asked, “Do you just rub together?”
The Millionaire of Love Page 19