And there were pictures, pictures, pictures of Radomir. Somehow the three older boys seemed more of a team in the pictures, with him left out as the baby. In one he wore a little red coat and hat. “He always hated that hat,” Brenda said. In another he slumps asleep over his father’s shoulder in a little plaid jacket. And in a number of pictures he is a ring bearer in a wedding. About four, all in white. His sick grandmother said she would give him a dollar if the rings didn’t fall off their cushion. He took it, although he confessed to her they weren’t the real rings and had been sewn on so there could be no accident. In many pictures he has a slightly befogged and worn look around the eyes, as he must have been nearsighted and straining his eyes even then. At this wedding was a handsome young man. The four-year-old Radomir was very taken with him and wanted him to come home with him. “You’re kind of young to be a friend,” the man said. “I have older brothers,” Radomir replied.
There was a photograph of Radomir as a teenager with a Beatles’ haircut, like a helmet, hugging a white dog. And Radomir with his other grandmother, a prickly pickled-looking old lady. She had lived with them, not successfully, for several years when the children were teenagers. In the photographs one can see there was a bond between the sulky teenager and his grandmother.
Radomir in his prom picture has his arm around his little girlfriend. I mean literally little. He’s not all that tall, and she was only up to his shoulder. I suppose they lost their virginity together.
There was a bigger picture of this period of the four boys together. Radomir is wearing an animal-print shirt under a suit. And there is also his graduation picture. His pictures of this period all have the look of a hot, dissolute teenager, with something definitely going on beneath the surface.
Then Radomir beside his aunt’s pool in Phoenix. Other photographs of him leaping down snowdrifts in the Arizona mountains, falling back laughing, half-submerged in the snow. That was the trip he took as a birthday present from his hooker roommate/girlfriend. A faint “bad seed” air hangs over him in these pictures. How much do his parents know of his life at that period? Plenty, I guess. He was thinner, hungrier looking then. The sex toy of many, as he put it. Only later did he get hunkier looking.
And pictures when I knew him but that I’d never seen. One on Crete where he stands beside a sign for a nightclub he’s painted. He’s wearing brief shorts, looking so husky and long-legged I had to ask to make sure it was him.
Later there were pictures of Radomir at the family Christmases and holidays where he is the visitor from California or France. He’s always there, always pleasant, but somehow usually a bit apart. There is something of the good sport about his manner.
The pictures, a few, where his lover Linton, the ex-priest, visited them have very much that atmosphere. There, at ease, but somehow distant. Linton is good-looking but not exceptional.
There was one oddly poignant picture of Radomir looking back over his shoulder on a sidewalk in front of a brick building. “That was taken in front of Linton’s sister’s building in Chicago,” Brenda said. “They stayed with her.” She, too, seemed to feel the picture meant something, though neither of us could say exactly what.
We talked about Radomir’s name. He had been brought up as Ronald Don Pool. Their family name had been Pulkanovic but had been changed. The children were all brought up with the name Pool, and his brothers were known by that name. Only he had decided in California to return to his grandfather’s name. I was surprised when Brenda told me that he had chosen the name Radomir himself, and that his legal name was now Radomir Ronald Pulkanovic. I thought back over all those pictures and realized that they were almost all of Ron Pool. Ronnie Pool. Ronald Pool. His parents dutifully called him Radomir when they talked of him to me. But I started referring to him as Ronald and they obviously preferred it. How could they not? They were quite amazing in their ability to graciously follow their youngest son into a new personality and not feel resentful. I liked thinking of him as Ronald Pool. It made a lot more sense with all those pictures of a high school student in Sandusky, a little bisexual sexpot in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Ronnie Pool. What’s that song? “All About Ronnie?”
Brenda fixed an elaborate dinner for just the three of us. None of the brothers or their wives could come to dinner, although one brother was promised for afterward. At dinner John talked a little bit about the paranormal experiences Radomir/Ronald had in the house. He remembered waking one night to a smoke-filled bedroom and going downstairs to find Radomir/Ronald and a friend trying to burn a Ouija board in the fireplace with the damper closed. They had evidently just had some very scary news, and when John kiddingly mentioned the incident years later, Radomir pleaded with him to never get another board. Brenda said that one night when they had a lot of guests she had slept in the basement bedroom and been disquieted by the memories of the presence down there. “But finally I just turned my back to the door and went to sleep,” she declared. John added that he had asked Radomir how a house that had been built for their family to occupy could be haunted, and Radomir told him he believed it was built on an Indian cemetery and they had disturbed their resting place. They both seemed to neither believe nor disbelieve that a spectral presence was there. In a solid Midwestern way they seemed to accept things as long as it didn’t seriously inconvenience them.
Radomir’s father also talked a little bit about his war experiences and the buddies he never particularly wanted to see again. In the albums there had been pictures of a very handsome blond brother who was lost in the war as a pilot. The one thing in their home with great distinction was a framed collection of his brother’s medals with a small oil painting of his brother in the center. It had great emotional weight, although John didn’t express any great loss at his brother’s death. He told me of one of his army buddies having sought him out a few years ago, even though when they had separated after the war they had all agreed to let their acquaintanceships evaporate. “He keeps inviting us to visit them in Alabama,” he said, “but I just don’t want to go.”
“It’s not so far.” I ventured, “You’ve taken longer trips.”
“It’s not that,” he replied. “I just don’t want to see him again.”
Earlier in the day he and I had been leaning against the kitchen counter talking. He looked up at me and then suddenly walked off across the kitchen in a youthful way that made it clear what he must have been like as a young man. It wasn’t exactly flirtatious, but rather like the memory of what being flirtatious was all about. Radomir had wondered if one of the reasons his father no longer wanted to see the old espionage and assassination team from his war days in South America was that there had been some romantic attachment, complicating the memories even further.
After dinner Radomir’s next older brother stopped in with his three children. An attractive man who surprised me by actually seeming to want to meet me, and not dutifully responding to his parents’ phone call. His smallest child, a rambunctious two-year-old, had his head shaved to call a halt to his pulling his curls so much he pulled them out. The family thought he resembled a tiny Buddhist monk. A tiny, tough Buddhist monk. He resembled Radomir’s early photographs and chased his older brother sturdily around the living room. When his brother sat down in an easy chair he clambered quickly up to squeeze in behind him as though they were riding a motorcycle together. He brought to life in front of me what Radomir must have been like as a child. The rollicking, fun-loving, roll-about, knockabout style was certainly the same.
I had to leave very early the next morning, and Brenda and John were up at six o’clock to take me to the airport. Real troupers, even though they were leaving even earlier the next morning for Mexico to vacation. In the dark of dawn in front of the deserted Sandusky airport we hugged and kissed again. An unusual pair, they seemed to realize and understand a great deal. I wonder if they sit and talk about what they know, or just share the understanding.
~38~
Ronald Pool
On my way
back to France I remembered two things. His father had told me how Radomir/Ronald had completely decorated his room when he lived alone with them as a teenager. Murals on the walls, violent colors. And now the room is an innocuous pink with fluffy curtains.
Brenda had said when they first moved to Sandusky Radomir/Ronald had wept every morning and hadn’t wanted to leave his mother and go to kindergarten. She’d felt terrible every morning pushing him out the front door to wait for the bus. His teacher had realized he was having a tough time being separated from his mother and set him to drawing pictures of everything he saw in the classroom, which distracted him. Even today, it is Radomir/Ronald who draws the little cartoon signs they put up around his office to tell the staff of new regulations or coming events.
It also occurred to me, which I hadn’t thought of at all at the time, that perhaps Brenda and John were edgy because of all those times when I had called desperate to find the fleeing Radomir and they had pretended they had not heard from him and didn’t know where he was. Maybe not. Maybe they had forgotten those days, too.
In the morning arriving in Paris by plane, a large red sun emerging from the horizon, the same sun that had just set a few hours before miles out over the Atlantic from New York, I felt the world was rolling too fast. That I stand too tall upon it, like the Little Prince on his tiny globe.
As I got off the plane I said good-bye to the steward. I had noticed when he placed the tray in front of me that he had good-looking hands. Tan, well modeled, with some fine, black hairs on them. Often when I see men’s hands, good-looking or not, I imagine them pulling at their penis. It isn’t a sex fantasy, but a reality, however difficult to imagine in some cases.
When I returned to France Radomir/Ronald was still in a distant mood. He then wrote a long and rather intelligent letter explaining that he felt I had slipped back into the mode of loving him and that it was based on a fantasy and in fact there had never been any reason to think I could be in love with him.
That night, not really asleep but not really awake either, my mind began to examine the phrase “Ronald Pool, The Trickster.” Somehow my mind was grappling with the idea that in fact the Radomir I was so obsessed with in fact was not Radomir at all, but Ronald Pool. This person was Ronald Pool. There was no Radomir Pulkanovic. There never had been. That person was a chimera, dreamed up in California by a kid from Sandusky. The person I dropped in to see at his office was Ronald Pool. And he was right. There was no Radomir for me to love. It was like a movie image.
Can I hang onto this idea? Now after my visit to Sandusky, I begin to see the fix I’m in. In some way I think Brenda and John were trying to help me and let me know all they could so I could rescue myself. If any evil spirit rose up out of the bowels of their home, it was gone now, perhaps hovering around their son Ronald, who now called himself Radomir. Something very Central European informed their actions. They didn’t like it or dislike it; they were only observing it.
~39~
Can We Talk About Obsession?
Finally, my relationship with Radomir was all about obsession. Can obsession be called love? Or is what most people call real love just a form of obsession, to lesser or greater degrees? Whatever it is, it isn’t just a new fragrance from Calvin Klein. And it certainly isn’t a million laughs.
Very recently Radomir sent me a document he’d written titled “The Missing Facts.” It was designed to fill me in on any missing details in his checkered sexual history. A lot of it I knew from those conversations we had had sitting on beaches and over wine with candles flickering.
But there were things I didn’t know about. Another opportunity to scratch that itch, so painful but so necessary. Isn’t there another side to this obsession, too? Doesn’t Radomir have a kind of obsessive need to tell me all these things? I’m not sure whether this is some kind of need to inflict pain on me; I know on any number of occasions he has told people how much he hates me. Or is it some kind of need to unburden himself and try to find some answer to his ricocheting back and forth between men and women without finding any safe landing places?
He said in his letter that when he lived in Denver he didn’t consider himself “promiscuous” because he had five or six both male and female “regulars” with whom he slept. He referred to himself as their “toy.” He often likes to refer to himself in a childlike way. On Crete he said that he had even tanned his “little tooshie.”
Of his life in Los Angeles with the lady who awarded kisses and prizes at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he said that cocaine was a standard accessory. With his look-alike roommate he would get high and then zip through gay clubs, dancing and hugging and turning everyone on and departing suddenly. They called that “wrecking ’em.”
There never is any concern about AIDS in anything Radomir writes, and in fact I don’t think I have any concern for myself about it. I told him once that if he slept with me and gave me AIDS I would prefer to die than to stay behind without him. He told me that he thought I was crazy. Yet it was true and is still true.
I remember the first time I saw Radomir, slouching toward us at the airport in his leather jacket and jeans. My immediate reaction was “studlet hustler.” How accurate we are sometimes.
With the great love of my life from the 1960s my immediate reaction upon first meeting him was that he was insane. Ten years later I came to the same conclusion. Could I have saved myself a lot of trouble? Or was it the trouble I was looking for? Same story with Radomir.
He admitted in his letter to me that in California he used imaginary “girlfriends” to cover up a lot of his sexual carryings-on. When pinned down he would conjure up an imaginary girl back home to the degree that he actually did begin an affair with a young woman from his hometown who was visiting California.
This was the first time he experienced something like “love” and also the first time he thought of fleeing to Europe and “starting over again.” This rang a bell for me. Perhaps this had all been about restarting his life. With a woman or a man? It was this indecision that led to his reprising the whole scenario in Paris.
This is not good, I told myself when I finished reading Radomir’s fact sheet. I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. A long-ago friend used to say, “If there’s no solution it isn’t a problem. It’s just a fact.” And there was no solution that I could see. Both Radomir and I could go on indefinitely with me longing for him and him telling me about all the people he was sleeping with. We were obviously seeking some kind of answer by doing this, but neither of us knew the questions.
I called Radomir in Paris from my deck in Miami Beach.
“I think we have to cut off all communication,” I told him. There wasn’t any reply. This is perhaps what he has been longing to hear for some years. “I have to go cold turkey. If I don’t hear from you or see you or know anything about you maybe I can get interested in somebody else and get myself out of this situation.”
When he spoke Radomir was calm and even kind. He said he understood that I had to do something. He sounded neither relieved or unrelieved. I had probably never meant a great deal to Radomir. It was only the exotic and bizarre nature of our relationship that had appealed to him.
I felt the ghostly presence of many others standing in the line to take my place in the life of Radomir Pulkanovic, who was himself a kind of ghostly presence for Ronald Pool. I said good-bye, hung up, and called Don Amour, my husky sailor friend. I was going to need distraction.
~40~
Letters from Lo De Coy
Lo De Coy wrote both Nevis and Radomir from Guatemala, where she had returned to pursue a career as a photographer. Busily photographing babies and weddings, she found time and distance to review her years in Paris, which prompted her to write letters to many of the people she had known there.
In her letter to Nevis she wrote:
Dear Nevis,
I call you by your first name, though we never met, because I feel I know you very well. Perhaps not as a friend, but cert
ainly as someone with whom I am very familiar.
Radomir Pulkanovic so often spoke of you, and although his comments were in the most part negative, I did not perceive you that way. I felt you were someone caught in a moment of destiny. Someone who managed to preserve his dignity despite events which must have often been difficult for you.
Here in Guatemala one cannot but be very aware of destiny. The native Indians consider themselves still to be victims of an invasion.
Just to live in Guatemala is difficult as one is forced to move emotionally from one century to another regularly. With the Indians one is in the simple but violent world of the Mayans. With the people who fancy they are running the country one is in a nineteenth-century world of privilege and prevarication.
Beneath it all is some spiderlike web of connection, a connection I think you would sense and perhaps understand more than myself.
I always envied Radomir’s connection to you and your inexhaustible love for him. With parents like mine, obviously this is a kind of love I have never known. Impossible as it would have been, I would have liked to have been loved by you like that. I think it is rare. People call this kind of love obsession. I would think to be obsessively loved is a kind of good fortune. But I would, wouldn’t I?
Radomir once told me that he had a friend who referred to you as “the man who creates destinies for others.” I’m sorry I missed knowing you personally and perhaps having had my own destiny molded by your deft and loving hands. Could I end this letter by saying,
The Millionaire of Love Page 21