by James Brady
“That first year he was cavaliere (gentleman); the next year commendatore. Now, he’s barone.” The sailor paused. “Next year, principe!”
Oscar was a powerfully built man in swim trunks, not the delicate designer I’d expected, and a very good swimmer. I flailed about while Bingo squeezed fresh lemons on his hair to make it blonder (it may have worked, but when it dried the pits remained there and looked silly), and Françoise sunned herself. Before the sport ended I had sea urchin spines in my foot.
“You get a young girl to bite them out with her teeth,” Françoise said lazily, smiling at me through her suntan oil.
“Oh?”
“Yes,” said Bingo authoritatively, “everyone knows that. And Ames.”
Though the sea urchin spines were more annoying than painful, I would not have minded having a girl, even one without accurate, urchin-seeking teeth.
Several days passed like this, and I thought how blue the water was and how the rocks looked beneath it when you dove with a mask and how warm the Med was and how good the white wine tasted in the sun and how I’d owed myself a holiday like this, pampered and lush.
And paid for by Bingo Marsh.
I mentioned my uneasiness. “Catholic guilt, I guess.”
“Don’t be puritanic. It’s part of the job,” Bingo said. Then, “Is it true about nuns and priests, that they have to sleep with their feet toward Rome?”
It occurred to me this trip was but another movement in a seductive dance. But there was the sun on my back and the taste of wine on my tongue and I could hear the splash of Oscar’s efficient dive from the forward deck and I didn’t care, awfully.
25 How can you find bad pizza in Italy?
VALENTINO was now the most important of the Italian fashion designers, Bingo said, and we had to see him while we were here.
“Otherwise, he’ll be slighted. You know how vulnerable they are.”
A decade earlier Roberto Capucci had been the leading Italian, but when Bingo persuaded him to relocate in Paris (“It’s where the buyers are, Roberto”) from his native Rome, his gift disappeared.
“Some wine just doesn’t travel,” Marsh said piously, as if the move had been Capucci’s idea.
The other important Italians were Armani, with whom Fashion was now feuding; Emilio Pucci, whom Bingo for some reason, perhaps because they were both snobs, couldn’t stand; Princess Galitzine, who was a White Russian, a member of royalty, and a great beauty (“but without a clue when it comes to designing a dress”), and Simonetta & Fabiani, who were husband and wife.
“They’re washed up,” Bingo informed me. “He plays cards with his cronies and keeps a young film actress. Simonetta dabbles in Orientalism and mystic numbers.”
So that left Valentino, whom we were about to visit.
The Rentas came with us to Capri, invited along by Bingo, who may or may not have bothered to inform Valentino. Ischia was but an hour’s bumpy speedboat ride from Capri, about which I knew nothing, only the famous song. Bingo, as he did on many subjects, seemed to know everything, much of which would prove inaccurate. Four taxicabs were waiting, and on luxurious impulse, we each took one. I remembered the night Bingo and I met and went in search of cabs. Capri looked like a good town for walking, with bars and outdoor cafés and trattorias and shops open to the noon heat, with men in smart sports clothes strolling with pretty women in slacks and shorts and summer dresses, basking in the hot sunlight and looking seductively at each other, a sense of pleasant indolence. Valentino’s villa was behind a wall, and a servant came to the gate to let us in. The house was U-shaped, built around a pool, with at its far end an awninged cabana.
“The only private fresh-water pool on the island,” Bingo remarked. “They’re short of sweet water and Valentino had to pull all nature of strings.”
Servants—there seemed to be a score of them, all in livery—took our bags and led us upstairs. Oscar and Françoise had a bedroom, of course, and Bingo and I were to share.
“Uh-oh,” I thought, slightly ashamed even to think it, the last vestige of disquietude.
The bedrooms were beautiful, if impractical, draped from ceiling to floor in luxurious fabrics I didn’t recognize, creating a tented effect and holding close the heat. Slatted doors opened onto an outside balcony that seemed to run all the way ‘round the house. It was hot at midday, and I wondered about the night under those draperies.
Valentino greeted us when we came down, a slender man desjtined to plump up, hair neatly sprayed so there wasn’t a strand out of place, face deeply tanned by something that came out of bottles. His eyes were expertly made up and I wondered if he did it himself. He was very cordial, considering I was a stranger and the Rentas last-minute additions to the party. His partner, aide, chum, whatever he was, Giancarlo, was a handsome boy with a mischievous smile.
“All the really important designers have a ‘Giancarlo,’ ” Bingo informed me, “someone to smile yet do the nasty business and fire people and keep the books and curse at the press and to talk to over dinner and,” he paused, “and, in some instances, to sleep with.”
We swam in Valentino’s rare and famous pool and lazed in the sun while servants fetched the drinks and I smoked Havana cigars. Oscar and the Italians told stories and laughed a lot, stories about people I didn’t know but whose names anyone would recognize, celebrated folk. They seemed to know all of them personally, intimately, you might think from the degree of lubricious detail their anecdotes contained. Madame de la Renta, who had a marvelous body for her age and enjoyed showing it off, sunned herself in a chaise and napped, having heard all these slanders previously.
There was something admirable, even gallant about Françoise. Not a great beauty, she’d married this much younger, more celebrated man I’d wrongly assumed to be homosexual. Bingo, who claimed to know such things, went on and on about her sensuality.
Now she was married to Oscar, a genial, eager boy who stammered. They seemed marvelously well mated. Why couldn’t more of us encounter women like Françoise?
Valentino was less content with events and conditions. There was a spate of kidnappings throughout Italy.
“It’s not as political as the time of the Red Brigades,” Giancarlo explained, “it’s simply business. They demand a fortune or they start to cut off fingers and ears.”
“And I am so obvious a target,” said Valentino, not at all happy at the prospect of losing an ear. Or even a finger.
He had, at that moment, the villa on Capri, another on the Via Appia with twenty-eight rooms, a chalet in Gstaad (“I am taking ski lessons. At my age, imagine”), an apartment in Manhattan overlooking the Frick, and a ninety-eight-foot yacht.
He was also, he said, learning to swim.
But because of kidnappers he had given up his chauffeured Rolls and was now getting around in a Fiat.
“He drives himself, you know,” said Giancarlo. Several of us clucked our admiration.
I think Bingo felt left out of all this high drama, for suddenly he blurted out:
“There’s this new magazine. Princess Tiny Meat sent me a copy. He gets it every month and it’s all about spanking.”
“Spanking?”
“Yes, but not for punishment. For pleasure. Though I’ve looked over the photos rather closely, and I really don’t see what’s so pleasurable about handcuffs and gags and being paddled with squash racquets and such. Do you, John?”
I shook my head: “I’d be a lousy spy. Just show me the pliers and I’d tell them anything they wanted to…”
“Nathan Hale was a spy,” Bingo said. “A Yale man. And they hanged him. I mightn’t mind, being hanged I mean, if it were absolutely essential. I just couldn’t stand anything more elaborate.”
Madame de la Renta revived and told a rather good story about an attractive woman she knew and her lover, something of a sadist. “He kept trying to get her to have her nipples pierced…”
Valentino cringed. “Ooo, I wouldn’t like that.”
�
�Who is Nathan Hale?” Giancarlo asked.
“Why, he was at Yale,” Bingo said, surprised someone didn’t know, “and he stole all the British plans and General Washington gave him a medal but the British caught him. It was something about Benedict Arnold.”
“Who?”
“Our most famous traitor,” Bingo said, getting it approximately right.
“But that friend of yours, Françoise, did she go along with it, I mean, having her nipples…”
“I always get mixed up,” Bingo said, “do I have a low or a high threshold of pain? I mean, if I can’t stand having my teeth cleaned unless the dentist gives me Novocain…?”
Giancarlo asked for the name of the magazine Tiny Meat sent Marsh.
“Spanky. It’s called Spanky. I’ll call my secretary tomorrow and get you the address. It’s really quite well done and on very nice quality stock, so the pictures reproduce very attractively.”
Dinner was quite formal, the waiters in white gloves, the plate gold, the stemware excellent leaded crystal.
“Gold plate and they serve bad pizza,” Marsh complained later in some exasperation. “How do you find bad pizza in Italy?”
We all got drunk, all but Bingo.
When we’d gone upstairs he decided we shouldn’t undress yet. “Let’s tiptoe around the balcony to Oscar and Françoise’s room and look through the window and see if they do it.”
Marsh had been married nearly twenty years and he still used such euphemisms.
I was drunk enough to think it an amusing idea. The balcony ran at bedroom level, and Marsh and I, still dressed but barefoot to achieve surprise, walked around to the slatted doors of the Rentas’ room.
“Darn,” said Bingo, trying to peer through the slats, “I can’t see a thing.”
“Maybe they’ll put the lights on for us,” I whispered, drunker and as giddy as he.
“It’s so unfair,” Bingo said, “so frustrating.”
In the end we satisfied ourselves by pounding on their door and then sprinting away as lights suddenly blazed through the house.
Bingo remained chastely in his bed and I in mine, and we slept as innocent as schoolboys. In the morning, before going down to breakfast, I remarked on how childishly we’d behaved.
“That was pretty sophomoric last night, like a couple of kids at boarding school.”
Marsh shrugged off criticism and pulled out one of his instructive anecdotes.
“At prep school we had double-decker bunks and the boy who slept above me, Windsell, used to whack off every night into a sweat sock. I remember, the bed used to shake and then, a little groan of delight, and then down would come the sock, plopping on the floor. It was disgusting.”
He was grinning as if in pleasant reverie.
“Yes?” I said unsurely, wondering what might be coming next.
“Everyone called him ‘Socks.’ We put him in the yearbook that way, ‘Socks’ Windsell.” Bingo looked inordinately pleased with this little story.
We toured Capri that day, mostly on foot, which was the way to see the island, and took cooling drinks in cafés and watched the strollers. All the women seemed astonishingly beautiful. Even Françoise said so. People waved and called out; Valentino and Giancarlo seemed to know everyone by name. That night there was a sort of festival and we went to that, swept along by the street crowds, and then to dinner and finally to a nightclub. We got drunk again. Everyone said “Ciao!” or “Ciao, babeee!” even to me, whom they didn’t know. Marsh beamed, for once nearly as drunk as I.
I was very pleased with Capri and I thought Valentino a capital fellow and whose business was it if he painted his eyelids?
Especially was I becoming fond of Capri when a young Italian woman in the nightclub asked me to dance and came back with us to the villa and sat late with me by the pool when the others had staggered up to bed. I told her about the sea urchin spines.
“Oh,” she said, “there’s nothing simpler. You just bite them out.”
Before I could say more she was kneeling before me on the marble, removing the appropriate shoe, and then leaning down and biting me fiercely, suddenly, at which I gave a yelp, and then more gently with an inhaling motion, all the while looking up at me, large, dark eyes solicitous and caring. I thought of Coco, murmuring “Indien” and gazing at me like that.
“See,” the girl said, “it’ll be fine now. Please, the brandy?”
I passed her a snifter and she took a mouthful, squirting it caressingly on the place where the spines had been. It stung, but only briefly.
“So you won’t be infected,” she said.
“I think I love Capri,” I said soddenly.
“Yes, caro.”
In the morning Bingo and I took a cab up to Alta Capri for the noon helicopter to Naples. Valentino and Giancarlo saw us off, waving silk handkerchiefs and pretending to weep.
In Rome we dined with Fellini and a cardinal and a movie actress of incredible sensuality whose teenaged boyfriend spent the entire dinner with his hand on Bingo’s knee. Or so Marsh later swore.
“He kept whispering that she drained him totally and could I arrange for him to escape to America and get his green card.”
“Damned cheek,” I said.
“John,” Bingo said tolerantly, “Europeans aren’t like us. You make exceptions.”
26 There was no one or nothing holding me in Paris.
A month later, in Paris, I received a letter from Bingo, wanting me to come back to New York and to write full-time for Fashion for considerably more money.
“This time I won’t take ‘No,’ ” he wrote. “I’ll give you your own column.”
My most recent novel was being remaindered, my publisher had rejected the new one, there was no one and nothing holding me in Paris but the lovely, wonderful city itself. The idea of becoming a columnist sounded appealing, the money was generous, Marsh persuasive.
I lunched with my lawyer, Tom Webb, at the Travelers Club, where he’d once introduced me to John O’Hara and where Hemingway used to drink, “a man barely under control.”
“How long have you been here?” Tom asked.
“Ten years almost. And I’ll soon be thirty-two. Maybe it’s time.”
“You’ll have to make up your own mind,” Webb said. “After a certain number of years you either put down roots and become an expatriate as some of us do or, eventually, you go back. It’s a simple question only you can answer: where will you have the more pleasant life, where will you write better, and, perhaps most important, in which country do you prefer to die?”
We were drinking martinis, a chill, windswept day with the Champs Elysées beyond the windows, while in the big fireplace a good fire burned. Tom Webb and I talked some more. He didn’t push one way or the other, too good a lawyer to do that, knowing that on certain matters the client must decide. Counting Vietnam, I’d been away from the States more than ten years. Yet I wasn’t really sure I could answer Tom’s question about where I wanted to die.
“Tom,” I said, swirling a second martini gently against its ice, and trying to sound a lot cockier than I felt, “if I knew where I was going to die, I’d move.”
Tom laughed.
“O’Hara once wrote a story about a man who did just that. And Death met him in Samarra.”
27 Tom and Huck, Damon and Pythias.
SO I came home, having put away toys to become a grown-up, swapping the pleasant trompe l’oeil of Paris for the reality of a salaried job, and a very good one, in the most serious city in America. I’d served my apprenticeship, honed my craft, and now a man who put out a successful magazine was giving me my very own weekly column and a lot of money and dangling fame. A magnificent scenario for adulthood.
Which wouldn’t quite work out that way.
Maybe fashion was to blame for what happened between Bingo and me, the industry or the magazine that weekly chronicled its excesses. Fashion with its bitchery and petty cruelties, its instant millionaires and overnight bankrupts, its br
eathtaking beauty and sleazy vulgarity. Or Fashion, the magazine he owned and for which I now worked. Perhaps it wasn’t fashion at all but that we fell victim to gossip, loose mouths, and careless people.
You know those stories ignorant party-goers at West Egg told about Gatsby, that he was a gangster… or the Kaiser’s son… that he killed a man. Almost from the first day I went to work at Bingo’s magazine, false and slanderous tales were told about me and about us, about our friends and those we loved. People said a girl came between us, Babe Flanagan, that it was a lovers’ triangle, that because of her Bingo and I fell out and I betrayed him. Until she came along, it was said, Marsh and I were Tom and Huck, Damon and Pythias, the Boy Allies in Flanders.
Little of that was true. Bingo and I were very different people with distinct private lives who happened for a time to travel the same, rather fast, professional track. For years I wasn’t asked to his house, hadn’t met his wife, and in ways he was a mystery. We just worked together and laughed at some of the same things.
And if it ended badly it wasn’t Babe Flanagan, or certainly not Ames Marsh, who was at fault.
For a long while Marsh was smug about the gossip. “I recognize it’s intolerant of me,” he said loftily, “but I can never quite forgive people for not being perfect.”
Which was what made our relationship so odd. Like Tristram Shandy, or the hero of one of those old, picaresque Spanish novels, I kept trying to do the right thing and it kept going wrong. I tried to do right by Mr. Rosenthal, editor of the Times; I tried to do right by the cover girls in Paris; I tried to do right by the novel. All these went at least partially wrong. Yet Marsh not only forgave my failures but paid me a handsome wage and promoted me shamelessly. It was said by wicked folk he was in love with me, and I suppose in a way he was, though we were both (I firmly believe) heterosexuals, and Bingo never so much as laid a caressing hand on mine.