Radomir said there was rubbing and mutual masturbation and sucking, although wearing condoms made that less than really fun. With Phillipe the swimmer and his ex-priest lover they had “screwed around.” And he said with women he was, of course, in them. He laughed and remembered the hit-and-run sex attack of the woman at the film laboratory who had dragged him home with her and “nailed” him.
Before they retired Nevis asked for a back rub and returned the favor. It was not at all the sexual temptation it had been in the past, although he thought he could feel Radomir’s erection with his knee when he put it between his legs to steady himself. Radomir began talking about relatives in Phoenix, but Nevis thought he had a lot of information to digest and said good night.
~35~
The Ghost Lover
Sunday at breakfast as they ate croissants the famous ghost of the house came up. Now Radomir elaborated very fully on his encounters with the ghost. He said that as soon as he arrived at the country house one of the first things he had heard about was the ghost. Fritz, who had stayed in Nevis’s house while renovating his own nearby, had told Radomir, “And of course there’s the ghost.”
Not long after, in the night, Radomir heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Getting up to look, no one was there.
Then in the night the ghost touched him. Radomir evidently shrieked and jumped. But the ghost continued to try to make his presence known. Radomir could feel the atmosphere of his being, and he had materialized to reveal a young man with long, dark hair to his shoulders, clean-shaven, wearing a white shirt. Shorter than Radomir. He was from the turn of the century, Radomir thought. Nevis the fashion expert wondered. That look was more the Romantic period from the early nineteenth century.
Radomir fell in love with his ghost. For almost that whole first year, of Nevis coming and going, friends visiting, renovating the house, going to Paris, Radomir had been obsessively in love with his spirit. Concealing the slightest hint from anyone, longing to get back to the country to be alone with the spirit again.
As he told Nevis this he moved uneasily about the kitchen. It obviously wasn’t easy for him, and several times he said, “I really don’t want to talk about this.”
Radomir reminded Nevis about the fall in the bathroom as they were preparing to move to Paris at the end of that summer. He had looked up at Nevis from the floor and said, “I know, I know, nothing is by chance.” But now his unwillingness to go had other dimensions. He thought the ghost had tried to keep him there.
When he returned to the country for weekends the spirit was still there until one day after Christmas. Then he was gone. Completely gone. Radomir was bereaved. It was soon after that he set out for Crete.
Nevis looked at the person before him, who in this terse little story had slashed apart their whole history together. All the time Nevis had been suffering, struggling in emotional chaos over Radomir, he’d accepted that in fact Radomir was sleeping with many other people, men and women. But now it was clear that more importantly the man he loved had been deeply involved somewhere in his own mind with the spirit of someone who no longer existed.
Radomir didn’t say as much, but his desire to be with the spirit he loved must have edged him toward thoughts of death, to join the presence he loved wherever he was. Radomir said that when he told his experience to his spiritually inclined woman friend in New Mexico, the only person he ever confided in, she said, “He loved you enough to go away. He had things he had to do. And so do you.”
When he told his parents later, those sweet, simple people seem to accept the story easily, as they did everything about Radomir. His mother said, “But he left traces. Now your hair is wavy. It was always straight before. And your eyes are gray-green, and they used to be brown.”
Radomir was evidently shaken by his discussion of the ghost, but he went on to say, “When I went to Santa Fe while all this was happening, my friend had me hypnotized. While I was hypnotized they asked me what I was experiencing. I said I was at the chateau here at the edge of town. I was in uniform with two rows of buttons. I was talking to a woman with black hair in a blue dress with a kind of lacing on the front. She wore some kind of large ornament on the back of her hair. She was crying violently. We were in a corner ground-floor room of the chateau. A library with dark red, maroon wall coverings and draperies. I knew there was a man somewhere in the house, although he wasn’t with us.
“I was telling the woman I was going away to the Spanish War. The hypnotist asked me if he knew who this woman was. I told her, ‘Yes, Mr. Neeland.’” Nevis’s last name.
The hypnotist had also had Radomir write down dates and phrases. The first one he wrote was 1823.
Nevis went to his library and found a French history. There had been a brief war with Spain in 1823.
Telling this to Radomir, he said, “Let’s take a walk to the cemetery and see if there is a Comtesse de Bodard who fits into that time scale.” They went in the rain under a single umbrella up the Rue de Paradis, but in the row of counts and countesses de Bodard none of the tombs went back so far. “There must be more graves somewhere. We will have to try to visit the chateau one day and also see if there is a red library there,” Nevis said.
Nevis could accept that perhaps he had once been a French countess and Radomir his military lover. Perhaps the ghost was the Radomir of that time, trying to meet up with his present self. Perhaps everyone was revisiting the scene of their earlier mistakes and misdemeanors. Nevis didn’t care very much.
Just before their train pulled into the Gare d’Austerlitz on their way back to Paris, Radomir said that the man he’d left in California so long ago when he first came to Europe had called him the previous week.
Nevis said, “He’s not on your list of people you loved, and yet you saw him for a long time and lived with him.”
“I was very fascinated with him. I don’t know that I loved him,” Radomir answered. “He could be very insensitive and dorky. Once I was crying in the car and he didn’t even notice.”
~36~
On Géricault
Do you know Géricault? The French painter? The Raft of the Medusa and all that? I’ve been following his career for some time. Something like keeping up with the news of an ex-lover. Except that this ex-lover died about 150 years ago. More maybe.
Géricault was a very sexy guy. He fell in love with his uncle’s much younger wife and they had a tempestuous affair. It’s interesting with artists; you can tell how tempestuous an affair was and what they did by looking at their art.
There is a wonderful drawing of a couple making love that I have to believe was modeled on Géricault himself and his mistress. He was a handsome guy with a strong body, quite a horseman, so one can easily imagine him as a dashing and virile lover.
In the drawing, white and black ink on a dark blue background, the man is kneeling, leaning backward with strong thighs and taut biceps. He is holding a woman who is sliding down his body, her legs extended backward like some great fish, or mermaid, caught at the crotch on the anchor of his cock.
The light and dark lines on the navy paper create the effect of bodies seen in moonlight. This is a couple plunged into the erotica of each other’s bodies. It is hard to imagine that in the early nineteenth century, without the benefits of television’s blue light or an electric lamp by the head of the bed, people actually tore their clothes off and got it on. Mad about each other’s bodies. Mad about each other.
At an exhibition of nineteenth-century French sculpture at the Grand Palais I saw a small bronze done by Géricault. The same couple, this time both kneeling, he with his hand plunged deeply between her legs, feeling, feeling, feeling that crevice that soon he is going to plunge into.
Géricault was the kind of lover I want. That we all want. Strong of body. Passionate in nature. So crazy about us he wants to get in there and be one with us. That’s a lover. That’s how I always imagine Radomir would be if one ever got past all his defenses. If one ever could arouse any real intere
st.
Géricault’s affair with his aunt was discovered. There was never any question of the woman leaving his uncle and going off with Géricault. The uncle simply took her to their country estate, Géricault was forbidden to see her, and I imagine she was reminded frequently by her husband what an absolute slut she was. She died after not too many years.
Géricault lived on a little longer than she did, but not much. He went to England to try to forget her. He went to the morgues to paint severed heads and lopped-off arms and legs, to harden himself against the inevitability of death.
When thrown from a horse and injured in the lower back he refused treatment. The wound festered, and slowly and painfully he laid in his bed and died. His artist friends mustered around, drew his portrait as he lay dying. And then he was gone. The young, handsome, sexy, talented guy was gone at thirty-three. He’s the only artist I really mourn.
I’ve always said that I’m quite willing to not have any of Van Gogh’s paintings in existence in exchange for his having been happy. I’m not big on the idea that creativity comes from suffering. Suffering is bad. Creativity is nice, but the world can live without it. What Radomir has put me through may have resulted in this book, but have I added greatly to the world’s treasure trove of literature? Hardly. I would have much preferred to not have suffered.
~37~
A Visit to Sandusky
I must put all this down before I forget. I went to visit Radomir’s parents in Sandusky. I always said if I was in that part of the Midwest I’d visit them, so I did. I don’t know quite why. Yes, I do.
I couldn’t get there except on a flight that arrived late. 10:30 p.m. They were sitting side by side in the waiting area when I got off the plane. They looked very much the same as they had in France over three years ago. His mother’s hair was a lighter shade of reddish blonde. His father seemed slimmer, slighter, younger. Her name is Bernadette, but everyone calls her Brenda, for some reason. She was quite a chic lady at one time, and is still not unchic. She was a buyer at a major Chicago department store. I suppose at that time Bernadette was a pathetic, religious kind of name and Brenda rather glamorous.
His name is John. Just plain John. We hugged and they both kissed me. I’m a lot taller than they are. I didn’t realize how much until they reached up to give me a kiss. They seemed really affectionate and a little nervous. Something in their manner was like parents greeting a child. I bring that out in people. They’re only a few years older than I am but I mentally have placed them in another generation because of Radomir. And I usually deal with couples as though they are my parents or my children.
I’ll never know what Bernadette and John knew about what had gone on or is going on with Radomir and me. So much less and so different than they suspect probably.
We had ham sandwiches before we went to bed. In the house where all the strange things had happened to Radomir. The house of the poltergeists. That was one reason I had to come. To see that house. A newish house, undistinguished. A strange floor plan and many levels on what isn’t apparently a very hilly site. A stair goes up to the small bedrooms. A stair goes down to a library, study, TV room? Then down again to a basement and bedroom. Bedroom? Then up again to a back sunroom. There was something about all those levels.
My bedroom was small and faceless. The whole house had no feeling of having been much lived in, although they had brought up four sons in it. They probably had completely redecorated once the boys were all out.
The next day they took me to a small nearby town where my grandfather had once been the superintendent of the school and my mother had taught for him. He wasn’t her father; she was later to marry one of his sons. I’d heard of this town often in childhood and wanted to see it. Masterbridge. A very early town for the Midwest, founded in 1829 when the area was still a territory. An important station on the Underground Railroad later, and there seemed to be many blacks living there. Like real people, not ghettoized.
Some large important houses. A decayed main street. Small. Brenda and John had never been there before, though it was only about half an hour away from their home. I knew it was so close only because Radomir had said that friends and he used to go there in high school. For what reason I don’t remember.
The school where my grandfather taught was gone, but the library had pictures of it. It had been considered a fine building when built in the 1880s, and then was torn down in the 1950s. I’m sure the people of Masterbridge don’t know why now. Just old, I suppose.
I imagined my mother walking those sidewalks, probably thinking of someone other than my father. She very likely lived with my grandparents as their son’s near fiancee. I’ll never know now why she was really there. Perhaps my grandfather fancied her. She was a lovely young woman.
We had a sort of awful lunch in Masterbridge. When we got back to Sandusky, Brenda suggested I might like to look at photographs. Brenda talks nonstop but she’s canny. Without really bringing it to the top of her mind I think she sensed I was there to piece together what I could of Radomir when he lived there. John did, too, but I think they were in different zones. I don’t think there was any complicity there.
Brenda had already pointed out a cubbyhole off Radomir’s old room where she said they kept his books and some stuffed toys that had been his.
John pointed out a large drawing hung on the staircase of a very 1970s boy. Radomir had won a prize with it in school. I asked if it was a self-portrait and was told it wasn’t. There were other paintings and art objects Radomir had made. He had done pottery sculpture that was not untalented, with something a little dark and violent about it. He had once brought home from California a piece for each of his brothers and his parents. They were symbolic, he had said, but refused to explain the symbolism. Brenda and John had a Pierrot clown seated in the splits. Something macabre hung over it, like Jack Nicholson as The Joker. It definitely wasn’t cute. Certainly as a high school student he had been considered the artistic one of the sons.
Brenda first brought out large albums of old pictures, some duplicating a collection of old family pictures on the staircase landing. Brenda’s mother when she married at sixteen. A soft-mouthed, babyish pretty girl, in a veil that fitted low over her brow as they did in the 1920s. Her bridesmaids looked older and wore very pretty chiffon dresses with skirts like petals. She had had an expensive wedding.
Her husband, Brenda’s father, was handsome and obviously older. How much it was hard to say. He could have been in his late twenties or even late thirties.
Brenda said they always celebrated his birthday on July Fourth, but she never truly knew the year of his birth. John said someone in the family had once told him that his father-in-law was twenty-five years older than his bride.
There was another photograph on the staircase wall of the father as a younger man with a male friend. His best friend, now unknown. They were both good-looking. Their clothes were a style worn before World War I. There was an uncle in the photo book who had also married very late.
In the book, as well as on the wall, were photographs of John’s parents as well. In their wedding portrait done in Yugoslavia Radomir’s grandmother looked like a stunned doll. Another photograph of relatives in Yugoslavia showed a group of people in peasant costume wearing round hats, babushkas, and multilayered skirts.
Both Brenda and John’s families were originally from Yugoslavia, and they met through the Yugoslavian community in Detroit. They weren’t kids when they married. He was in his late thirties, she in her early thirties, when they started their family. In the albums were pictures of Brenda after she left school, looking cute and starletty in that early 1950s way. She had very dark hair then and that look of actresses like Peggy Ann Garner. Never a big star, but there was something there. One big picture was John when he was in the army. Cute. Very cute.
Brenda always looked chic in the pictures. The smart little dress. The immaculate hair. They were well put together, the women of her family. Her mother, though heavier, h
ad that groomed look, too. Brenda never looked like the harried mother of four. I noticed there were no pictures of Brenda in her twenties. A definite gap there. John, also. Were they married to other people at one time? Or into heavy affairs. There were mysteries back there in their lives.
There were, of course, pictures of all the boys from babyhood on. In the upper hall was a row of all their baby portraits. Radomir was the last one, upturned smiling face, with a kewpie-doll curl on top. Immediately recognizable. All the boys were very cute, bright-eyed babies. But aren’t all babies? I think not.
After I’d seen the big albums Brenda asked me if I wanted to see the snapshot albums, too, which I did. In these more of the pieces fit together. There were photos of Brenda’s mother early in her marriage. She looked happy. A teenager having fun, even though a married lady. Both Brenda and her sister were born before their mother was twenty, I think. Then their mother became a portly lady, something like a stylish Russian commissar’s wife. She was a clerk in the jewelry department of the same store where Brenda worked. Portly but soigné. Then she came to their home to die of cancer, when they had lived in the Detroit suburbs, before moving to Sandusky.
They had showed me the ornamental hand bell on the study mantel that one of the boys had bought with his own money as a child so his grandmother could signal from her bedroom if she needed help. Brenda said she would ring just so the boys would run upstairs to keep her company. She was the grandmother who once told Radomir something very important when he was little and sitting with her. But now he can’t remember it, although he knows if he remembers someday it will be truly important. Brenda also told me that when her mother was desperately ill she had to take her for radiation therapy every day, leaving Radomir with their neighbors. Finally the neighbor said to her, “You’d better talk to that son of yours. He thinks one of these days you’re going to leave him and never come back.” She was torn, not wanting to neglect either her mother or her child.
The Millionaire of Love Page 20