by Gully Wells
I HAD BOUGHT THE DRESS on another one of my marathon walks around Paris, and in its way it was every bit as magical as the bikini. Floor length, made of the same blue-and-white stripey cotton jersey as Coco Chanel’s little sweater, cut like a bathing suit, it had a deep décolleté back with crisscross straps, and pulled off the sly trick of being both childish and sexy at the same time. Of course I had never actually dared wear it. But what had been the point of bankrupting myself, just to have it sitting there in the closet, reproaching me for my extravagance and, far worse, for my timidity? “Take a chance,” my mother always said, and so that night I did. Standing in front of the bathroom window, looking out at the sunset—one of the many oddities of the house was the fact that this was the only room with any real light or view—I propped up a mirror and set to work on my face. Six weeks in the sun had incinerated the top layer of skin and with it all the acne, so that was good. All I needed to do now was pile on the makeup: deep copper foundation, blue mascara, shimmering peach blush, sparkly silver highlighter, lots of kohl around the eyes, mint green shadow, brown lip liner, sticky pale pink gloss. Had I gotten carried away? Maybe piled it on a bit too thick? Mixed too many colors in one palette? I studied my face in the mirror again—dispassionately, objectively, disinterestedly—and was forced to admit the truth, there was just no way around it. How could I tell a lie? I looked gorgeous. Several strategic blasts of Miss Dior—didn’t the magazines tell you to put perfume where you expect to be kissed?—some savage back combing of the bleached straw on my head, and I was ready to slip into the magical dress. With a back like that, a bra was clearly out of the question, and with the clingy fabric, the panties had to go too, but who wears underwear with a bathing suit anyway? My mother shouted up the stairs in her best New York accent: “Okay, Gloria, enough already with the bubble bath and the potions. Put on your rhinestones and let’s go.”
I descended the staircase slowly, careful not to trip on my long dress, and stood in the doorway of the brightly lit kitchen.
“Jesus, you look like Tricia Nixon! If Tricia Nixon had graduated summa cum laude from hooker school.”
“Darling, don’t listen to your mother. You look lovely.”
We got into the car and headed down the hill to the Padulas’ party.
Tiny white lights twinkled on the terrace, Johnny Hallyday—France’s peroxide-blond approximation of Elvis—was on the sound system, smoky torches illuminated the cactus garden, the swimming pool glowed like a gigantic turquoise kidney, and a battalion of wine bottles was lined up on the sideboard beside a mystery dip encircled by a multicolored necklace of crudités. My mother put on her party face, Freddie looked appalled, and I knew instantly that this was the night. Noisy, hot, and crowded, it wasn’t the kind of social occasion where Freddie’s famous wit and intellect could sparkle quite as brightly as he would have liked, so he decided to fall back on his skills as a francophone Don Juan. He claimed that he was constantly being mistaken for a Frenchman, so brilliant was his command of the language (it may even have been true), and his special way with the ladies was such a self-evident fact that even he had given up boasting about it. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him patrol the room and pick out a pretty woman in a slightly too-tight black dress and then settle down happily beside her. Maybe this wasn’t quite such a bad party as he had first thought. My mother’s French was a much more haphazard affair, but so what? She just barreled on, throwing in as many English words as she needed, entertaining everybody with her faultless franglais. It never failed, and I could see her on the other side of the kitchen, with André Padula, waving a cigarette around and laughing out loud, probably at one of her own jokes. I wandered about, chatting with old friends, complimented Nicole on her onion-and-sour-cream dip—“It tastes so American.” “Vraiment?” She beamed—and made frequent trips to the avocado bathroom to reapply my lip gloss and back comb the straw.
It was just like the movies. That enchanted evening I—finally—saw a stranger across a crowded room. Handsome in a French B movie kind of way, charming (or at least eager to charm me), older (probably twice my age), he handed me a glass of wine and smiled. Would I perhaps care to sit down? Mais oui, of course I would, how did he know? Sensitive, perceptive, intuitive—he had read my mind and, pointing to a daybed in a particularly dark corner of the terrace—he led the way through the crowd and I followed.
The plot of this particular movie may have been utterly predictable—I never doubted for a moment how it would end—but it was no less thrilling for being so. He knew his lines (could he perhaps have played this role before?), and yet after all these years the only words of his I can recall are “Que tes pieds sont jolis.” Looking down at my feet—stuffed into high-heeled sandals, tightly trussed up with silver laces, the nails polished a lurid pink called Kiss and Tell—I whispered, “Merci.” Maybe I would like another glass of wine? Or three? He made a foraging sortie into the house and returned with an amphora-shaped bottle of Ott rosé, some cold pizza, and a bowl of olives, and—just as we were going to continue our conversation about my “jolis pieds”—I spotted my mother making her way toward us. Oh please, no. Snappy wisecracks in franglais were not part of this script at all.
“Pardonnez-moi, Gloria, for interrupting your intime tête-à-tête, but il est très tard and we gotta go chez nous immédiatement.”
Was she insane? I glared at her, but maybe she couldn’t see my eyes through the gloom, so I stood up, took hold of her arm, and propelled her firmly back into the house, where Freddie was saying goodnight to André and Nicole.
“Pas de problème,” Nicole reassured my mother. “We will make sure she gets home safely.”
“Okay, but just keep her out of the clutches of that rapist friend of yours out on the terrace.”
“Je t’aime, oui je t’aime, oh mon amour.” It was that song from Bora Bora beach, and the rapist and I danced all alone on the terrace. Just as I had imagined we would when Nicky had left me dozing in the sun on top of his other mistress a week before. All the other guests had finally left, and even our party-loving hosts seemed quite relieved when he—I still hadn’t quite caught his name, Jean-Marie, Jean-Pierre, Jean-Something—announced he would be more than happy to drive me home. Home? I didn’t think so. And nor did he.
I had never been to the beach at night. Cool, dark, and deserted it was a completely different place, vaguely menacing, smelling of the sea, with only the sound of the waves breaking on the sand. He ran ahead of me, naked, and plunged into the water. What had possessed me to abandon my underwear on the bathroom floor? How could I possibly take my clothes off in front of a man whose name I didn’t know? And so I went swimming in my long blue-and-white striped magical dress. The first streaks of light had appeared in the sky as we drove back on the familiar road from Les Lecques to Le Beausset, headed up the hill toward La Migoua, past our house (everybody asleep in their nice cozy beds. I must be mad. What was I doing?), and up a bumpy track I didn’t even know existed. Not so much a house as a plywood cabin—slightly smaller than Madame Carrère’s shack, slightly bigger than the double bed it contained—I stood there shivering and allowed a man whose name I didn’t know to undress me.
Was that it? I suppose it must have been because about half an hour later I was back in my sodden dress and being driven, very fast, down the track, to find myself deposited in front of the lime tree on our terrace. The sun was shining, Monsieur Tricon waved at me, Sorgue started barking, and I could hear Freddie’s voice in the kitchen reading to Nick, “Faster than his own shadow, Lucky Luke rode into town.…”
Neither of them even bothered to look up as I came clattering through the wooden beads and ran up the stairs. Thank God, my mother was still in bed. But no, there she was in her nightdress, coming out of the bathroom with an evil smile on her face,
“Well, Gloria, you sure look BEDraggled. Where’ve you been?”
BIKINI BEACH WAS just the same as ever. Monsieur Maurice was trolling around for candy wrapper
s and cigarette butts with his rake, Teddy St. Aubyn was taunting Nick, Sylvia lay on her mattress smoking a cheroot, Freddie was in his deck chair doing The Times crossword, Prince Azamat was building a sand castle with his son, Sagat, and Madame Carrère was dispensing overpriced bottles of Pschitt from her shack, which was only slightly larger than the cabin up the hill behind our house. I, on the other hand, had been transformed. How odd that nobody noticed. Surely they could tell just by looking at me? Even my mother seemed to have forgotten all about our encounter on the stairs. I lay down on a towel and began replaying scenes from my recent adventure inside my head, amazed and thrilled by my own chutzpah. I’d taken a chance and met my deadline. Now I wouldn’t be a sad and lonesome creature forever more. Leaving my bikini top on the sand, I slowly walked into the sea.
Francette was the concierge of La Migoua. She knew everybody and she knew what everybody was doing. That evening, as the sun was going down, I wandered around to the vertical shed and found Francette and my mother sitting at her kitchen table cackling away like two old tricoteuses. Did I know that my new boyfriend was married, that his wife was pregnant, that he was my mother’s hairdresser—“Yeah, I thought he looked familiar when I saw him sitting there”—and that he was a rabid supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascist Front National? No, I certainly did not. As best as I could recall there had been no mention of “ma femme enceinte” nor of “le coiffeur de ta mère” nor any rousing call for “France pour les Français!” But so what? It wasn’t as if I was ever going to see him again. Which wasn’t strictly true, because one day many, many years later a bandy-legged, wizened, thieving old man in a rusty truck stole my parking spot in the village. “Fuck you,” I said, before realizing that I already had.
Londres
WHEN NICK WAS ABOUT SEVEN YEARS OLD he came home one afternoon after playing with a friend who lived around the corner, and told me about the picture that hung above the fireplace in Tom’s house. His description was somewhat confused. As well it might have been, poor little chap. It was a lady’s face, he said, and she had curly dark hair, not too long and not too short, but her eyes were funny because they were huge and round, like tennis balls that bulged right out of her face, and he opened his own eyes very wide and tried to make them stick out. And then there was her mouth—a dark triangle that didn’t look like a mouth at all—and he squidged up his own lips as tight as he could to demonstrate. “What was her nose like?” I asked, and he had to think for a moment, conjuring up the image of the strange lady inside his head, and then said that she didn’t really have a nose, just a little hole that looked like a belly button. I laughed and said she sounded like a very funny lady indeed and Nick nodded in agreement. “She is funny, but I like her.”
The lady in question belonged to Tom’s dad, George Melly, and had been painted by René Magritte in 1934. It was called The Rape. Maybe at seven Nick didn’t understand what made her look so odd—or why he found her so fascinating—but when he got to be just a bit older he realized that her startled-looking face was composed of “all the naughty bits,” which can only have added to her already considerable allure.
George had discovered the surrealists in London as a young man in 1944, on leave from the navy. He once told me that the recruiting officer had looked a bit surprised when he said the reason he wanted to be a sailor was because “the uniforms are so much nicer” and was deeply disappointed when he was assigned to some boring desk job and didn’t get to mince around on deck in a pair of bell-bottoms.
George never lost his taste for flamboyant clothes, and by the time I got to know him he tended to favor the thirties gangster look with a dash of Harlem pimp—dark shirts, loud ties, pale double-breasted suits, and a fedora. A brilliant jazz musician and blues singer—his heroine was Bessie Smith, whose voice he imitated perfectly and whose “avoirdupois” he acquired—George also never lost his taste for anarchy, subversion, and the louche side of life. Warmhearted and extremely funny—he wrote an autobiography called Rum, Bum and Concertina—no wonder he and my mother were so fond of each other. (And, as a true friend and soul sister, he sang the blues at her memorial service almost forty years later.)
George was married to the beautiful Diana, having left the sailors and bell-bottoms behind long ago, and they lived in Gloucester Crescent, a leafy enclave of solid Victorian houses that curved around behind Regent’s Park Terrace, where our house was. I always thought of the “terrace” as being Freddie’s territory—our neighbors were respectable people like V. S. Pritchett, a couple of judges, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s widow—while the much more raffish “crescent” was my mother’s domain.
At the back of our house we had a long, dank garden kept in permanent shade by two huge trees, where a few etiolated plants eked out some kind of sad existence but were far too depressed ever to produce a single flower. My mother didn’t really do gardens—witness the gravel-strewn parking lot in front of the house in France—so the space became a bucolic bathroom for our two dogs, when they could be bothered to use it. Usually they found it much more comfortable and convenient to relieve themselves indoors on the carpet, and the only times my mother ever went near the garden was when she was screaming and beating them with a rolled-up newspaper while shoving them out the back door. This happened about twice a day. Her difficulties with house-training pets was nothing new, and she told me that in Burma she had adopted a monkey who was no better behaved than our dogs, so she would hit him on the bum and throw him out the window—they lived in a bungalow—until the clever little creature quickly learned the correct routine. First he’d pee or shit on the floor, then he’d smack himself, and then he’d jump out the window.
The garden’s only other purpose was as a shortcut for Jonathan Miller’s sons, Tom and William, to use when they came over to play with Nick. Actually Tom, who was older and much better behaved than his younger brother, mostly took the more conventional approach, and would walk around on the sidewalk and ring the front doorbell. But William thought it was quicker and much more fun to climb over the garden wall, run up the steps, and come through the door at the top. Which would have been fine if the door hadn’t opened into the bathroom. Freddie was an old-fashioned gentleman who liked to have a quiet breakfast—tea, toast, and The Times—in his pajamas and dressing gown and then retreat for a long ruminative soak in his bath afterward. What he didn’t like was to have “that bloody William Miller,” as he understandably called him, burst through the door and dash by on his way upstairs to see his son. Or, more likely, his wife.
My mother adored William, and the more he teased and tormented silly old Freddie, the fonder she grew of him. And William adored my mother because she was wicked, glamorous, funny, opinionated, unpredictable, and ferociously rude. His own mother, Rachel, had many qualities, but these were not among them. Who wouldn’t fall for a woman who, when you said you were bored, bound your hands in Scotch tape until you begged to be released? Or who suggested you dial a telephone number, and when the voice at the other end answered with a crisp “Buckingham Palace,” told you that the cops were coming to get you? (This was an old trick of hers that had terrified me—every time—when she used to play it on me.) Or, when you were a bit older, gave you a marijuana plant, all your own, to take home and keep on the windowsill in your room? There was no end to the fun they had together. But it was fun that excluded her son. At the beginning it was scarcely perceptible—she just behaved in the same hilarious and outrageous way with William as she did with everybody else—but gradually, as the years passed, it became more noticeable. Of course none of this was William’s fault—he was just a young boy—but how about the other boy who watched while his mother amused herself with his friend? What was she doing? And why? Forty years have gone by and I still have no answer.
William was so taken with my mother that he soon started talking like her, which caused some consternation at his school. His parents were a bit surprised to get a call one day from his teacher, who said she was “very
disturbed” by William’s language, and perhaps they would like to come in and discuss the problem. Were they aware that his ever-expanding vocabulary included “fuck off,” “goddammit,” and “son of a bitch,” and where did they suppose he might have picked this up? Only one place, they said, and promised to wash out his mouth with carbolic soap just as soon as they could lure him home from that well-known den of sin around the corner.
FROM ABOUT THE MIDSIXTIES to the midseventies the Ayer-Wells den of sin was just where you wanted to be. No wonder “that bloody William Miller” was constantly barging through Freddie’s bathroom. And plenty of other even-more-scintillating guests used to barge through the front door for lunch, drinks, dinner, and big parties, where people would spill out of the drawing room and spread out all over our five-story house. Politicians like Roy Jenkins or the foreign secretary, Tony Crosland, would find themselves sitting around the table with Sue and Basil Boothby from Burma, newspaper editors like Charles Wintour, writers like Kenneth Tynan, Stephen Spender, or Alan Bennett (who lived in the crescent opposite the Millers); and then there would usually be a few Americans to remind my mother of home. Sometimes a certified superstar like Norman Mailer—fame was always her great faiblesse—would be produced; sometimes it was an old girlfriend like Colette Douglas (who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding to my father) or Anthony Lewis, the New York Times man in London. Once it was a visiting American Indian chief from South Dakota. Honestly. Hey, it was the sixties! And bliss it was to be alive in that extraordinary time, but to be young—or at least in your midforties, like my mother—was very heaven.
I don’t now recall how Chief Spotted Eagle came into our lives, but he seemed to hang around for an awfully long time. The Bernsteins had their Black Panthers and my mother had Spotted Dick—as I called him. (spotted dick is a leaden Victorian pudding, full of suet and dried fruit, that was served under a thick blanket of lumpy Bird’s Custard at school.) A man of few words, he was a tall laconic Lakota Sioux, who had come to London for a benefit—organized by my mother and other guilt-ridden expatriate Americans—to benefit the tribe back home on the reservation. The date chosen for this festive event was the anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Sadly I missed the party (maybe I was in Oxford) but that didn’t mean I missed Spotted Dick, who had settled into our spare room and was soon quite at home in London, showing no sign at all of missing the wide-open spaces of his native land. He had long black hair and favored tight jeans, colorful shirts, and necklaces made of shells, beads, and teeth that looked as though they might once have belonged to a mountain lion, or a shark. Or possibly just an extremely large dog. Not averse to the odd cocktail, Spotted Dick was particularly fond of firewater from Bordeaux, having found a case of claret in the cupboard in Freddie’s study—“That bloody Indian has drunk all my best wine. Really, it’s too much. When the hell is he leaving?” But what he liked best of all was radical-chic pussy, of which there was an endless supply in London at that time. He managed to have his wicked way with several of my mother’s friends, starting with, a hirsute poetess who lived in Hampstead, and then moving on to several other adventurous ladies d’un certain âge.