Villa America

by Liza Klaussmann

  “Oh, may I have one of the peonies?” Zelda asked.

  Sara selected a pale pink one and handed it to her. “It matches your belt.”

  Zelda pulled a bobby pin out of her handbag and fastened the flower to the top of her head. On anyone else it would have looked comic; on Zelda, it looked marvelous.

  “No, Scott,” Sara said when she saw him sticking the flowers through in hunks. “A little more delicacy, a little more artistry, please.”

  He looked quizzically at his display and then tried to pick some of them out.

  “I think we should try this blue bottle first,” Ada said, holding one out to Gerald.

  “The color of your eyes,” Gerald said.

  “You always say the nicest things, Mr. Murphy,” Ada said. “But wine will get you further than flattery with this crowd.”

  “Yes, my love, stop your bows and scrapes and pour us some wine,” Sara said.

  “I’m henpecked,” Gerald said, turning to Scott. “Do you see this?”

  “I’m the one who has to put posies in the fence like some schoolgirl,” Scott cried hysterically.

  “If you were a schoolgirl, you’d be a very, very bad one,” Zelda said. “But Dow-Dow would go to the top of the class. With Al Jolson.”

  “Quit it about Al Jolson,” Scott said, and Sara detected a darkness in his tone.

  Throughout the merriment, Hadley sat quietly watching them. She must be going mad, all by herself. Sara liked Hadley all right, but for some reason she didn’t feel the same about her as she did about Ernest, who was so full of life and thoughts and sheer physicality. Hadley was a plain, handsome woman. A nice woman. And Sara wanted to love her but couldn’t somehow. She seemed neither very bright nor very practical, and Sara couldn’t help but wonder what she’d brought to the marriage. Then again, the mysteries of the closed door were unfathomable.

  By the time they finished the cocktail hour, she and Ada had managed to taste at least four different bottles of wine, Zelda had drunk a bottle of champagne all by herself, and Scott and Gerald had become fairly competitive with their various cocktails. Hadley had sipped at the German wine and agreed that it was very nice.

  Sara emptied the last drops from the wine bottles and then handed them to Scott.

  “I think that fence still looks a little bare,” she said. “Your flower arrangement leaves much to be desired. Let’s see how you do with the bottles.”

  “Oh, with bottles I’m a master,” Scott said. He gathered them up and stuck them through the scrolls and whorls in the wrought iron. Then he said, “Hadley, I also bequeath you my shaker,” and he shoved it in along with the flowers and the colored glass that winked in the crepuscular light.

  It looked very gay, Sara thought. “I know it’s awful,” she said to Hadley. “But it won’t be long now. And we’ll send the driver up tomorrow with more provisions. Is there anything in particular you’d like? Or anything you think Pauline might need?”

  “I think we could use a bit more soap,” Hadley said.

  “Oh, good, you’re using it. It’s the best one for germs,” Sara said. “It’s made by monks in Castagniers.”

  “Any soap is fine, really,” Hadley said. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

  “No,” Gerald said. “Only monk soap will do. Sara will flagellate them if necessary. It’s our duty to keep you and Bumby clean until Ernest arrives.”

  “Flagellate them indeed,” Sara said.

  “I don’t like monks,” Zelda said.

  “Get in the car,” Scott said.

  “Oh, dear,” Ada said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get this thing back to the house.”

  Then they’d all gotten into their cars, with the chairs and the glasses, doors slamming, engines starting. And they were off, waving behind them as they drove back to Villa America, Sara wondering if everyone else felt as relieved as she did to be away from the locked gate and the germs floating behind it.

  It was love, the rip-roaring, ecstatic, rejoicing, fear-inducing, all-consuming kind. It was quiet only in that it was secret, and he was full with it, and when they were alone together it all burst forth in streams of words and the joy of speaking them to someone.

  And it was physical in a way he’d never known or had been afraid to imagine. And God, that made him happy too. When he saw Owen, maybe just in town, walking down the street, running errands, Gerald couldn’t imagine anyone finer, and then he would remind himself: He’s mine. And it made him dizzy.

  Or Owen would walk into a room, and they would look at each other and know what no one else knew, and it was grand and good and wonderful.

  For almost a year now, he’d felt drunk. It was as if he’d been imprisoned inside his own head, his own body, for thirty-eight years, and he’d only just stumbled out into the light. That his hands and lips and all the sensitive parts of him were meant to be used like that, to feel like that; he hadn’t known.

  There were other thoughts that came too, darker, sadder thoughts. About his wife, how he wished he could feel this with her, how he wished that there were no barriers in their bed, in their life. How he wished—how he hoped to God—that, at the very least, he was able to make her feel that way. That this wasn’t a betrayal of her, of them, of their family, but instead an additional connection in his life. That her love for him wasn’t wasted. But these thoughts he tried to push away.

  His work was flourishing, his head full of new ideas. In the past year he’d painted Doves, which was for Sara, for her grace and beauty; Laboratoire; Still Life with Flowers; and Roulement à Billes, a depiction of an eighteen-inch industrial ball bearing that Owen had found for him in a disused German armaments factory. Gerald had had the ball mounted so that it rotated on a black pedestal and he’d placed it on the large ebony piano in their Paris apartment. He loved running his hand over the smooth chrome.

  He was currently at work on another piece, Bibliothèque: fragments of his father’s library, that cold sanctuary he’d at once feared and venerated as a boy. Gerald’s happiness was such that even that dark place, his father’s shadow, could be turned into something beautiful.

  Today he was driving over to La Fontonne, a small village on the eastern outskirts of Antibes, to see the land Owen had purchased. It had been used as a flying school by the Garbero brothers before the war and Owen had said the setup was perfect to expand his business.

  Gerald felt awed by Owen’s ability to do things for himself and also a little unsettled by it. Owen was stronger than he was. Gerald knew this inherently. And he sometimes worried that Owen’s strength would engulf him, would press its will upon him. Expose and ruin him. He’d lived so long with the fear of discovery that it had become a part of his nature.

  But it was no match for the light and the heat that he experienced when he was close to this man whom he adored with every living cell in his body.

  Following the directions he’d been given, Gerald pulled off the old Roman road, went through what passed for a village—a boulangerie, a laundress’s, and a minuscule restaurant, Le Bol d’Or—and took the allée des Cigales. He drove down the small winding path until it finally opened up into a large cut field with two enormous weather-beaten hangars, one of them leaning precariously, and a dilapidated barn.

  As he shut off the motor, he saw Owen emerging from the barn. He watched him move across the field. When Owen reached the car, he leaned over the door, and Gerald could smell the plain soap he used rising off his skin in the warmth of the May sun.

  “Welcome to my palace,” Owen said.

  “It’s…”

  “It’s a shithole,” Owen said. “But that’s why it was cheap.”

  “It’s going to be wonderful,” Gerald said.

  Owen straightened and opened the car door. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you the tour.”

  They kept their hands at their sides as they walked, but Gerald could hear the shift of Owen’s cotton shirt as his body moved under it.

  When they reached
the barn, Owen opened the side door and Gerald saw, among the detritus, a camp bed, Owen’s old battered desk and chair, and a small warmer for cooking and heating coffee.

  “You cannot live here,” Gerald said.

  “I am living here,” Owen said. “I can’t afford to keep the rooms and make a go of this too. It’s fine.” He pulled the desk chair over for Gerald. “Sit down. Close your eyes.”

  Gerald did as he was told.

  “At night,” Owen said, “it’s so dark and so quiet, you can hear insects rustling, grass growing. The crack of an egg hatching. It’s like you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  Gerald, his eyes still closed, smiled.

  “You can smell the wood, and the dust and the sea. There’s a tree on the edge of the field, and you can see the stars through it. And no one knows you’re here, or cares.”

  Gerald opened his eyes.

  “I want you to come here,” Owen said. “See for yourself.”

  “I can’t spend the night,” Gerald said.

  “No,” Owen said, looking away.

  “Besides,” Gerald said, “that camp bed isn’t exactly made for two.”

  Owen nodded. “Sara wrote to me.”

  “Did she?”

  “She wants a waffle iron.” Owen smiled.

  “She would,” Gerald said.

  “She read about it in a magazine. It’s going to be the first waffle iron on the Riviera, apparently.”

  “That woman never ceases to amaze me,” Gerald said. “She’s very excited about Ernest Hemingway coming.”

  “She mentioned it,” Owen said.

  “I, as it turns out, am less excited.”

  Owen smiled slowly. “More tests of your manhood?”

  Gerald stood up. “I know it’s childish,” he said, “and I hate myself for it, but I want to impress him—”

  Owen laughed openly now. “Jesus, G. You are ridiculous,” he said.

  “You haven’t met him,” Gerald said.

  Owen shrugged. He sat down on the camp bed. A green tartan blanket hung off the edge. “Come here,” he said.

  Gerald walked over. He found he was shaking. Still, after almost a year, he was nervous with desire every time. “I can’t stay long,” he said.

  “You can leave whenever you want.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  “No,” Owen said. “I don’t want you to either.”

  And Gerald began undoing the buttons on Owen’s shirt.

  Owen was loading the Fokker when he heard the hum of an approaching motor. It was early morning, and he was expecting Eugene, the mechanic he’d hired away from the air base in Fréjus. A good mechanic was as essential as a reliable engine, and Owen had been forced to promise Eugene a small share in the profits of the new business—if and when they came—to lure him from his steady job.

  But when he looked up, he saw Sara and Gerald’s car; not the touring car the children called Iris but the one driven by the chauffeur. He walked out of the hangar to greet his visitor.

  Sara stepped out of the back, her short hair a halo around her head. “Hello.” She smiled.

  “Hello,” Owen said.

  It was the first time she’d come here, and he imagined Gerald giving her directions. He wasn’t surprised to see her; he’d known she’d turn up sooner or later. And he was glad it was sooner. One of the current complications in his life was his attraction to Sara. It wasn’t the physical, chemical kind he had with Gerald. It was more like standing near a warm fire in a cold room. He felt drawn to her, connected. Yet it unsettled him slightly.

  Sara followed him as he walked back to the plane. He lifted a tool kit and placed it under the pilot’s seat.

  “Are you off somewhere?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “Amsterdam,” Owen said. “To pick up some paintings.”

  Sara nodded at the Fokker. “Is that it? The new one?”

  Owen nodded. Everything was riding on that passenger plane and it made him nervous to talk about her. He’d bought her from a Czech speculator who’d lost his fortune in a mining scam. The cut rate was the only way he’d been able to afford an enclosed passenger plane like this one, and even then he’d had to take a loan from the bank in Paris. He wasn’t sure yet if it was good luck or bad that had brought him to her, but then again, he told himself, he didn’t believe in luck anymore. She carried a much larger load, meaning fewer runs, and this way he could charter flights for holidays and such for all the rich Americans and Europeans flooding to the Riviera.

  Owen followed behind Sara as she walked over to the plane.

  “She’s so lovely. Just one big, glorious wing,” Sara said. “But you have to sit outside, while everyone else gets to sit inside.”

  “No frills for the pilot,” he said. “I don’t mind. I like being out in the air.”

  “Except when it rains, I’d imagine.” She ran her hand over the lettering on the fuselage. “Arcadia?” she said, looking at him.

  Owen kept his expression still. It had been Gerald’s idea, that name, after some French painting he liked. It wasn’t the sort of thing he would’ve chosen himself, but Gerald had gotten so excited, and Owen had wanted to please him.

  Owen had never been in love before, not like this, so he wasn’t sure how it was supposed to go, only that, for people like them, it had to be secret. He knew that.

  For the past nine months, they’d had to carve out time, snatched moments. When the Murphys were at Villa America, he and Gerald met in Owen’s rooms above the café, hiding from the proprietor, making excuses for the numerous visits at odd hours. They’d also seen each other, all of them together, in Paris, and Gerald and Owen had spent some afternoons, curtains drawn, in a hotel room off the boulevard Montparnasse. All stolen hours and whispered declarations and cries into the darkness.

  Owen wasn’t an effusive man, so the secrecy didn’t bother him that much. But the lying did. He had no idea how it was supposed to end, how it could come out right. Still, he told himself that even if Gerald hadn’t been married, it wasn’t as if they could walk down the street hand in hand or shout it from the rooftops. They couldn’t live together, not in any way he could see. So what did it matter?

  “May I look inside?” Sara asked.

  Owen opened the door of the plane and set up the small ladder so she could climb up. After looking around, Sara poked her head out: “The upholstery needs a little work. I could find something for you.”

  “I’m not that worried about the upholstery,” Owen said, smiling.

  “No, something this marvelous deserves good upholstery.” She climbed down. “Anyway, I didn’t come to harangue you. Ernest is coming back from Spain next week and Gerald and I want to throw him a party. I want it to be a champagne-and-caviar party,” Sara said. She chewed her thumbnail. “Does that sound pretentious?”

  “It sounds very fancy,” Owen said.

  “Mmm.” She seemed to think about this. “Oh, I don’t care, it will be good,” she said finally. “So, I was hoping you could fly in some caviar from the Caspian Sea. It will be so romantic and funny and different.”

  “Sure,” Owen said. “I could pick some up in Sofia. Tell me how much you want and I’ll work out the costs and get back to you.”

  Sara kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  They started walking back out to the car and Sara stopped at the door.

  “Gerald tells me you’re camping in your barn.”

  “I am,” Owen said.

  “You know we’ve bought that small bit of land across the road from us, with a little converted barn? It’s a sort of guesthouse now. I was wondering if you might consider staying in it for a little while, to test it out. It would be a great favor to us. There are a few crops and it would be wonderful to get your expert opinion on it all.”

  “You have a farmer,” Owen said.

  “Yes, but Amilcar is so busy with everything else…” She trailed off. “It would make us all so happy. Gerald loves h
aving you around, and Vladimir would be thrilled. And the children. I know it’s a lot to ask, but it would be such a great help.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” Owen said. “But I’m fine here.”

  “Just think about it,” she said, opening the door and getting into the car. “Oh, and you must come to the party for Ernest. I’ll send along the details. It’s going to be pretentious and horrible and disgusting, and we’ll have a grand time.”

  “I’m sure it will be great,” he said.

  “Bon voyage,” she said.

  He watched her drive away. She was a riddle, he thought. What she knew, what she didn’t know. How guilty he should feel. But he was tired of all that. He’d decided, when it became clear that it wasn’t going to stop, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t stop, that life was too short to blame himself for the things in his nature that made him human. If he had a choice, which he did, this was it.

  Ernest had arrived late in Juan-les-Pins, and Pauline and Hadley had picked him up at the station and then headed over to Villa America. They’d gotten there after dinner, but Sara served them a summer vegetable stew and they sat under the linden tree on the terrace eating and drinking a good bottle from the Murphys’ cellar.

  The car ride had been hell for Ernest. All the feelings he’d been trying to scotch in Madrid came back tenfold. He wanted Pauline, wanted to touch her; he felt guilty about Hadley, guilty about Bumby, and furious for being made to feel guilty. If Hadley would just do more or do less, he might not despise her so much. But her sad acceptance made him feel spiteful.

  So arriving at Sara’s house, with its fine things and peaceful quiet and Sara’s good looks and sweet smell, had been a relief.

  Gerald was prattling on, as he liked to do, and Ernest was ignoring it, listening instead to the nightingales in the garden.

  “I’ll never forget how kind you were to me in Schruns,” Gerald said. “About the skiing.”

  “Well, you were graceful,” Ernest said. And he had been, but Christ, the man never let anything go.

  Ernest didn’t know how Gerald had caught a fine woman like Sara, but there you were. Where Sara had a sort of understated way of thinking and speaking, Gerald was like a schoolboy eager to please. He didn’t have the patience for it right now.