Love in the Loire

by David Leddick

  Who am I kidding? They’d probably all get up and run out the door. Like the guy I contacted on the Internet just before I left New York. He shows up at the door and says, “You don’t look a lot like your picture.” And I say, “Does that mean you’re not going to suck my cock?” Some people have a lot of nerve. He went right home.

  That game was interesting. Why would people choose some of the things they did? The Comte . . . Andre . . . and all those things that live underwater. Maybe he’s into water sports. And I don’t mean swimming. I could piss all over him. In fact, I’d like to. For any number of reasons.

  What a cold fish. Well, exactly. Maybe Hugo isn’t so dumb with that game. I’ll bet I could fuck the Comte. Comtesse or not, I think he’s up for it. I think I’ll give it a try just so I can say I’ve fucked the French nobility. I know exactly how those guys are. The lights go out. They’re all over the place pulling their butt open. The lights go on and they’re all lah-dee-dah, do we really know each other? I think I’ll punish the Comte. I’ll bet he’d like it. He’d like it fine.

  And Nina wants to be an ant. Imagine running around carrying stuff ten times her size. I picked all the right things. You’ve got to be ready to attack at all times. Claw your way to the top. Or to the bottom. As seems to be the case right now. To think I started my career directing Maureen Stapleton in Tennessee William’s Summer and Smoke. And here I am in the French boondocks starting out a season directing a bunch of kids in The Trojan Women. Most of them have no idea that you can get men to toe the line by not letting them fuck you. They’ve never even fucked, for Chrissake. I was just being smart when I told Cranston Muller what I’d like to do for a season here. He thought it was very classy. Everyone else wanted to direct Annie. They were right with this little bunch of losers. But hell, at least I’m going to get the chance to direct a lot of stuff I’ve never directed before. The Trojan Women is just a lot of big speeches, and Estelle Anderson can do most of that. She probably did The Trojan Women in front of Lincoln. But I think I’ll have Hugo and Steve play their roles as though maybe they could start to fall in love with each other. And that would make the whole premise of the play ridiculous. The whole premise of the play is ridiculous. It takes place in Greece for Chrissake. Do you think those guys cared if the women decided not to put out? Not with all those gorgeous young guys hanging around.

  You know, this is really an interesting slant. The yokels here are never going to get it anyway. I’ll tape it and maybe Cranston will be interested to try it Off-Broadway this winter. I could use the same cast. Hugo and Steve would be a sensation in those tunics. And Estelle could play down to fifty. All right, sixty. There’s an “older women and younger men” slant here, too.

  And once we wrap this up, we can start thinking about Phedre with that stupid Balnéaire woman. Maybe I’ll do it the way they did Tiger at the Gates way back. When Diane Cilento played Helen of Troy like Marilyn Monroe. That was really interesting. Diane was married to Sean Connery at the time. Wonder why that didn’t work out? Wonder whatever happened to Diane? I hope she married a millionaire and said “Fuck it.”

  The Comte Remembers the Evening

  The Americans. So strange. That they would think of playing a child’s game instead of talking seriously about something. How can one ever get to know people if they only want to play games?

  And they are always laughing. Why are Americans always laughing? You see it in restaurants all over Paris all the time. The French are talking. The Americans are laughing.

  And another thing. Why do American men have better legs than French men? French women often have very nice legs. But French men, almost never. Whereas American men almost always have nice legs.

  I’m sure all three of those beauties at the table tonight have good legs. We’ll see in the new play, of course. One of those men claims to be German, but I’m not sure of that at all. There is nothing German about him. And he really doesn’t have any accent in his English as far as I can tell. He didn’t speak much. He doesn’t speak French. It is wrong to be in a country and not speak the language.

  That bizarre director, Toca Sacar, asked me to do a series of small speeches during the play in French to explain the text. I probably will do it. What would I wear? Dinner clothes or a dark suit? A toga? No, I could never do that. My friends would find it ridiculous. The dark suit with a rather plain tie. I must exercise more before then.

  The Americans are good-looking. I have to admit that. I would like to have a sexual experience with all three of those men who were at the dinner table last night. I would lie on my back and one would sit on me. Then another would enter him from the back so we are both inside of him at the same time. Then the third one would offer me his weapon to put in my mouth. Oh, yes, I can see it quite clearly. Now I must masturbate.

  Nina Remembers the Evening

  I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who didn’t like to be with homosexual men. There are some like that dreadful Anita Bryant, I suppose. But her objecting to gay men was more of a desperate attempt to direct some publicity her way. Show business people always need that attention any way they can get it.

  I’m sure everyone at the table last night has slept with men. Me, Graham, Hugo, Steve certainly, Toca Sacar obviously, and I don’t think the Comte was there just because he needed a square meal. And I think women understand being attracted to men. The same things we like about men, homosexuals do too. It’s not hard to figure out. Beautiful eyes, strong profile, a solid jaw, a solid chest, a nice butt, long legs with strong thighs, and beautiful feet and hands in my case. I can’t imagine making love to a man that doesn’t have longish fingers and you can really see the bones in his hands. Every once in a while I see a handsome man with little flipper hands and I think, “How could those hands take possession of someone else’s body?”

  I think that most women fall in love with a man’s physicality. Quite the reverse of what is commonly held. That explains, too, why homosexuals, in a womanlike way, tend to only think of men’s beauty, not their personality. The big difference between women loving men and men loving men is probably the penis. That’s probably going too far. I think a lot of women sleep with men because they feel sorry for them. Marilyn Monroe did. Even married both Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller because they wanted to marry her. Her biography was interesting. She kept a certain distance from her own image. She was a lot like a gay man. When she was interested in someone she had no compunction about sleeping with him. She went beyond the idea that she should be married for security and for her reputation. Icons don’t need a good reputation.

  She said, “I never seemed to get pregnant and be married to someone I wanted to stay married to at the same time.” Aside from that fact that she would have been a perfectly terrible mother. She was perfectly happy having affairs with both of those husbands. They were the ones who wanted to nail that icon down. And I don’t think Marilyn cared very much about whether her partner had a large penis or not.

  I would love to read a personal diary by her about the men she slept with. I’ll bet President Kennedy either had a small penis or had premature ejaculations or something. That bad back meant something. He never wanted to sleep with the same woman more than a couple of times. With the exception of Jackie. Who had to be paid to stay married to him. Really. Once you stop believing all that “moon, June, spoon” stuff you can start getting really mean. As I sat there last night I thought that every single person at the table had almost certainly had a man’s penis in their mouth. And it didn’t bother me a bit. But I’d much rather have the penis in me than in my mouth. I wonder if penis-sucking has something to do with breast feeding? Men like it because it feels reassuring and secure, as it was with their mother. And women, who always seem to resent their mothers, don’t have that feeling. We were all too happy to stop breast feeding. Someone should do a study on this.

  And I think affection is what it’s all about with women and sex. Sally Lamont told me once when I asked her if size mattere
d to her, “It doesn’t matter when you’re in love with a man, but once your relationship starts falling apart, size can matter because that’s all he’s doing for you.” No one ever discusses vagina size, but there has to be some connection there. If your vagina is really large you may need a really large penis in there. I don’t know. My own orgasms don’t seem to have a lot to do with “in there.” But much more to do with the front and center. They’ve done a lot of research about this, but I’ve never read it. Maybe it’s time. Maybe there’s a book here about how women feel about sleeping with men. I don’t want to write it, but I’d love doing the interviews.

  Men seem to get a lot more hung up on parts of the body as being sexual stimulants than women do. I’ve never heard of a woman foot-fetishist. Men love tits, they love asses, and when they’re gay they love penises. I think that makes it hard to concentrate on the person walking around wearing the penis. They seem to be chasing sex parts more than the men. Well, that’s not true. They chase a handsome guy and then seem to get fixed on part of him instead. That’s probably not true either.

  Gay men seem to fall into two categories. Those who just want to chase other men, like Toca and the Comte. Or those who seem to want to have a love partner, like Hugo. I don’t have a take on Steve. Maybe Steve is someone Hugo could corral. Men like that are worth loving, but hard to hang onto.

  Is Graham like that? No, I don’t think so. Graham is a law unto himself. Whatever happened between us and however it sorts itself down the road, we have meshed. We are like one organism, and if we ever get torn apart it’s going to leave us both raw and bleeding. And whatever happens to me, I am so glad that this thing with Graham has happened to me; otherwise, I wouldn’t feel that I had really lived.

  Now I must think about what I will do when Freddy arrives. I’ll put him in the blue bedroom. When mother arrives, I’ll put her in there and put Freddy in the pink one with Theo. It’s a good thing that I put Hugo way upstairs in the tower bedroom to begin with so I don’t have to move him around. The Festival is opening with The Trojan Women this weekend. Graham and I are only here for the month of August so we’ll have to come back down to see the last play. I’ll just leave Hugo in the house by himself for that week. He’ll be okay.

  Now I’m going to make a quick run to Charlestour for some bread. Madame Cerise isn’t really holding up her end at the bakery here. The boulangerie over there in Charlestour is so much better. I’ll get some croissants, too, while I’m at it. They’ll stay fresh if I put them in the breadbox. I hear Theo waking up from his nap. I’ll take him with me.

  The great thing about having a tight relationship with someone is that you see people you could sleep with but you don’t follow up on it because you would never want to hurt the person you’re with. Once you’re ready to sacrifice some sex to be considerate of the one you love, you’ve got a relationship as far as I’m concerned.

  And then you don’t have to be slipping around behind someone’s back, and you don’t have to lie, and you never have to feel guilty. These are all pluses.

  The Trojan Women

  “I think the way to do this is that The Trojan Women will be in English and Phedre will be in French,” Toca Sacar said. “In that way the students that speak English can have a few lines here and there in this production and the French students can have the same opportunity in the next play.”

  We were sitting in the front rows of the riding arena theater. We being the teaching staff of the festival. Toca was wandering around in front of us. He was wearing shorts, sandals, and black ankle socks with a T-shirt that read “One of the Few People Who Never Slept with Shelley Winters.” His legs are not his best feature. I made a mental note to talk to him about black socks with sandals. Maybe the note should be about any socks with sandals, unless you want to be mistaken for a German tourist.

  “And,” he said. Oh, oh, I thought, what’s coming next? “I think we will perform in various places about the Abbey and have the audience come with us. We have no sets. The lighting here is very rudimentary. We can make the Abbey serve as Ancient Greece. The costumes are just going to be sheets and things anyway so the worse lighting the better.”

  Estelle Anderson raised her hand. “You know, Toca, I can’t see a damned thing. I’ll probably break my neck wandering around in the dark.”

  Toca said, “I’ll give you a handmaiden, Estelle. One of the students with particularly keen eyesight. And a flashlight. I think we’ll start out on the terrace in front of the Abbey. There’s plenty of light there. Then we can have the scene with Hugo and you by the great cedar of Lebanon out by the gate. That can be the welcoming home scene. You,” he gestured toward me, “can enter by the gate with your retinue.”

  “My retinue being?” I said.

  “Him,” Toca said, pointing to Steve. He added, “Maybe some students. We’re going to need most of them as the Trojan women. I don’t think we have enough big ones as it is. We’re probably going to have to use some of the bigger boys, too. As women, I mean.”

  “Perhaps they can double up. Put short tunics under their long robes, and they can enter with Steve and me,” I said.

  “They’ll have to run like hell,” Toca said.

  “Just a little faster than the audience,” I said.

  “And that’s what they’re here for,” Estelle said. “To run like hell. God knows I’ve run like hell many a time. I had to strip naked in the wings for The House of Garcia Lorca.”

  “I’ll bet you loved it,” Toca said.

  “I think the stagehands loved it more than I did,” Estelle said.

  “I could stage a little Greek dance that the students could do to lead the audience from one stage to another,” Nadia Barkley said. “You know my first teacher in London was a student of Isadora Duncan. She was one of the Isadorables.”

  There was a long silence. I actually loved the idea. This was going to be one of the worst productions of The Trojan Women anyway. Let’s go for it.

  “Great,” I said. “This is going to be the most original production this play has ever had.”

  “Hugo and Steve are going to play their roles as though they are gay,” Toca said.

  “As though they’re gay?” I said. “Hello.”

  I looked at Steve. He looked uncomfortable. And to think he had been sucking my cock just a few hours before. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Every actor’s private life should be private,” Toca said. I looked around. Estelle and Nadia seemed extremely bored with the direction the conversation was going. It wasn’t about them.

  Toca changed the subject. “Okay, I have to figure out where the scenes will take place. You folks have to learn your lines. Maybe I can get some of the local people to fill in some of the nonspeaking walk-ons. The problem with the students is that most of them are too small.”

  “I’d sprinkle them in with the women as their children,” I said. “They are living proof that these women have had sex with the Trojan warriors at one time or another. I know, I know. Actor’s ideas are always fatal, Toca, so you can ignore that one.”

  “It’s not bad, as a matter of fact. Most directing is just trying to be practical about what your actors can do. Or have to do. We have to use those kids somehow. That’s not bad. We don’t have any fairies or sprites in this, so they can be children, which they are. Maybe we’ll give them a Greek song. Is there any such thing?”

  He looked at Nadia. She said, “My thing is dance.”

  “Maybe they could sing ‘The Party’s Over,’” I said.

  “Smart-ass,” Toca said. “I’ll think of something.”

  So we went our ways. I didn’t have many lines with Steve so that was relatively easy. Steve wasn’t really an actor, but he could play himself. And we figured out some things to do. We thought of putting our arms around each other, even some ways of looking at each other that could be interpreted as having a relationship somewhere beyond friendly. Neither of us thought acting swishy was a way to interpret the roles. We pr
obably didn’t have to do anything. Our own body language would do it. But were Steve and I lovers? I don’t think he would have said so.

  Rehearsing with Estelle Anderson was quite another thing. She knew her role very well. She told me that she was not a Method actress, although she had worked with Actor’s Studio in the early days. “I was too old for them, even then. My training had been memorization and characterization through movement and delivering the role exactly the same every night. I never felt comfortable acting against somebody who might suddenly be a quite different person than they had been the night before. It’s just work, you know. I myself don’t particularly want to have a cathartic experience every night. It’s too hard being charming at dinner afterward.”

  To me she said, “I can play down to somewhere in my fifties. You have to play up to somewhere in your thirties. I know the idea of my refusing to sleep with you is patently ridiculous on the face of it, but the audience here probably isn’t going to realize what it is all about anyway. I just plan to be terribly dramatic. So if you’re not going to be swamped by me you are going to have to be terribly dramatic, too. You’re big enough. You just have to deepen your voice more.”

  She gave me some exercises to get down in my speaking range, and I wandered around the lawns of the Abbey doing my “Me, me, me, me, me. My, my, my, my, my. Mo, mo, mo, mo, mo.” I learned a lot from Estelle. For her, acting training was a lot like dance training. It was very physical, and you had to do it repetitively until you could deliver it without having to get in the mood. Then sometimes the mood got into you.

  She also gave me a very good piece of advice. “Don’t ever play a role that is not suitable for you. You are too beautiful to play tortured geniuses. Leave that for the ugly ones. And don’t ever do operetta. It’s the kiss of death.”