Love,
Loretta De Coy
Nevis read her letter and started planning a trip to Guatemala. Where the hell was it? Just south of Mexico, it seemed. Not even as far as from Miami to New York.
Lo’s letter to Radomir was somewhat different. She obviously felt less affection for him than she had for the unknown Nevis.
Dear Radomir,
What rhymes with Rad? Bad, sad, glad? All of these things may well be you, my friend of Paris days.
I’ve just written a letter to your, what should I call him? Certainly, friend Nevis.
Lost as I am here in Guatemala City with many photographs to do of very similar brides and identical babies. I use the same lighting on all of them and they are very content.
My work here is not so demanding of my time and talent that I do not have much time to think of you, Radomir. Although all is calm here now, there has been much conflict with the rebels as you know.
This endless conflict generation after generation has a relationship of some kind with you I believe, Radomir, and your conflicted life with Nevis. There was something there that ran deep, the two of you twisting and turning in the wind of the past. Not understanding what the Gods had planned for you, who knows how long ago? I think Nevis understood this better than you did. And was more willing to suffer to see where it would lead. Or was unable to free himself. Although I guess he finally did. Perhaps he shouldn’t have. Perhaps he just could no longer handle the pain.
I only write this because I have a kind of envy of the love he had for you. My parents, as you know, regard their children as property. Love is not something they have known, I think. And I wonder what runs beneath the world we see day by day?
Is my English good enough to communicate what I am thinking? I wish you all the best in the life you now have, even though it is unknown to me. You have already lived a life that I will probably never know. I can only hope that one day I may find myself hopelessly in love with someone or that someone will be hopelessly in love with me. I think I will know how to conduct myself having lived it a bit through you.
The girl from Guatemala,
Lo-Lo
Radomir sent this letter to Nevis without an accompanying note.
~41~
A Few Last Words
from Radomir
It’s me, Ronald Pool. Radomir Pulkanovic. However you may want to think of me. I finally got my shit together. It took a while, but I did start over in Europe. I am a homosexual. That decision has been made.
Of course Nevis and I are talking again and we see each other several times a year when he comes to Paris. The last time he was here he said, “All those years ago, what did you use for masturbation fantasies? Men or women?”
“Men,” I said. “That should have told me something, shouldn’t it?”
I had a French lover for several years, who was very handsome and loved to be affectionate in public but much less so in private.
I had a Russian lover for several years who was very handsome but thought of himself as some kind of princeling swept in from the steppes. I could service him but I never fucked him. Not even once. And he didn’t me, either. He didn’t like that kind of thing. That, too, wound up in the trash heap.
Now I’m planning to spend the rest of my life with a good-looking Englishman. We’ve been together for almost five years and we still don’t bore each other. Sexually or any other way.
Julian and I were in Miami Beach not too long ago. Nevis wasn’t there, but we had lunch with his sister, who also lives there. At the end of the meal she turned to Julian and said, “You look very much as my brother Nevis did when we were much younger.”
I told Nevis this when we met next and he said, “I know. My sister told me. Do we want to discuss this any further?”
I said, “I don’t.”
Nevis said, “Neither do I.”
~42~
My Last-Minute Thoughts
It’s been hard weaning myself away from Radomir. Refusing to see him, refusing to think about him, I even have thought of not returning to France. The one thing I would miss if I left France is the quality of the coinage, the thickness and the heaviness. I’d miss that feeling of extra-living … those late violet evenings in good weather that last until almost eleven in the summertime.
But I can’t go on like this dreaming of hard-ons I haven’t seen for many, many years. Thinking of lovers that, even if they are living, no longer have any power to move me.
It was a clear, sunny morning in Miami and we were whirling along one of the vertiginous highways that soar about the old city, circling the clutch of towers in downtown. I don’t know where we were going. Perhaps Vizcaya. Or Parrot Jungle. Or Monkey Jungle. Not Butterfly World, that’s way up to the north. My nephew was driving. My nephew Willem. There was something about the clear sunshine, the old wooden houses down below, my legs in their shorts in front of me on the car seat that made me think of California long ago. When I would be in a car with a young man in the morning sun, heading down the coast highway to Carmel or across the Golden Gate Bridge toward Tiburon.
And I felt anguish. I felt the excitement and the hope and the future of those long ago years and at the same time I felt the knowledge that those years are now long past. I have lived out the hope; I have lived into the future; I have been with those men as they aged from handsome abstractions into worried realities. There had been nothing bad about my life unless you want to call reality bad. Now I know where those dreams lead, what becomes of that excitement. I felt a pang. And yet, and yet. If Mel calls from Chicago tonight, I might have a little flash of those feelings again. We might plan a cross-country trip. Chicago—San Francisco. On blue roads. No highways. Cheap motels. Stuckey’s candy. Rodeos in Wyoming. Over the Donner Pass. Mornings in some cheesy wooden Victorian hotel in San Francisco. I could kind of go for it.
I seem to have been refreshed by the agony and the anxiety and feel younger than I used to be. I know I’ve been a fool over this whole Radomir mess. But it’s over now and you must forgive me because I was older then.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Millionaire of Love is David Leddick’s fifth novel. His other books include a number of photography books on the subject of the male nude that he has edited, an art history of the 1930s titled Intimate Companions, and a nonfiction work on gay men who married women titled The Secret Lives of Married Men. He has been a dancer, naval officer, advertising creative director, and a director of television commercials. He recently returned to the stage as a cabaret performer with a new one-man musical based on the life of Quentin Crisp called Quentin and I. He lives in Miami Beach, Paris, and Montevideo, Uruguay.
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