by William Boyd
*
Cleve stood naked at the window looking out at the yard through a thin gap in the muslin curtains.
‘What kind of tree is that?’ he asked without looking round. ‘I see them everywhere in the Village.’
‘It’s an ailanthus. Commonly called “tree of heaven”.’ I liked this rear view of Cleve: the V of his torso, the deep cleft in his small buttocks, his long thighs. ‘If you stand there much longer, however, Mrs Cisneros will have a heart attack.’ Mrs Cisneros lived across the yard, a widow. I sat up in bed, letting the sheet fall from my breasts and reached for my pack of Pall Malls on the bedside table.
Cleve turned and I saw that his penis was thickening, springy. His penis was smaller than Lockwood’s, though thicker and more heavy-headed; the glans seemed distinctly bigger (no foreskin, of course) – clearly shaped. It was like a medieval soldier’s helmet, called a sallet – I once told him, to his surprise – worn most commonly by archers. He was always puzzled by my pieces of arcane knowledge, my need to know the exact names of things. It seemed vaguely to annoy him, in the same way as it had my mother. He leant back against the window frame, and crossed his arms.
‘How do you know about that? About the goddam tree?’
‘I told you, I like to know the names of things. I don’t just want it to be some anonymous “tree” in my backyard. I want to know what it’s called. Someone took the trouble to differentiate, name and classify that tree. A “tree” doesn’t do it justice.’ I lit my cigarette. Cleve was enjoying standing there, looking at me, listening to me, candidly displaying his potency. I crossed my legs under the sheet and rested my elbows on my knees, inclining my back so that my breasts hung forward, free. Lockwood liked me to do that – it always stirred him. Cleve’s eyes moved here and there.
‘The ailanthus is from China, originally,’ I said, goading him with more arcana. ‘It thrives in poor soil with little care. Like me.’
‘Ah. Hard-done-by girl.’ He came over to the bed. I gripped him.
‘Hungry?’ he asked.
‘I told you; I thrive in poor soil.’
Cleve left at six, saying he had to be sure he was back in Connecticut for dinner, home with his family, I knew, his wife, Frances, and his two young sons, Harry and Link. After he’d gone I made another gin cocktail and picked up my book. However, I felt my new-year melancholia returning. Stop it, I told myself, buck up: I was having a passionate affair with a fascinating man and I was earning my living, making more money than I’d done in my life, as a professional photographer in New York City – what was so depressing about that? But I was Cleveland Finzi’s mistress, the other, sour voice in my head told me; I was only with him when it was safe and secret. And it was true – when he was with me everything was grand; when he wasn’t, life returned to the duller, demeaning business of waiting until the coast was clear and no one would suspect.
I had related as much to him – the plaint of every secret lover since adultery began – and he said he understood, but, for various reasons, he had to be very careful, very careful indeed. What could I say? I had entered the ‘deal’ knowingly. But sometimes two weeks or more would go by before he could snatch a night or an afternoon with me. I had been in New York for well over a year now; Cleve and I had been lovers for slightly less. I was happier than I had ever been and at the same time more discontented. My world was awry – maybe you just weren’t cut out to be a mistress, my sour voice whispered at me.
‘Happy 1934,’ Phil Adler hailed me as I came into his office. He was a lean young man in his early thirties with rimless spectacles and short wiry hair. We argued a lot, good-naturedly, principally about photography.
‘You’re from Europe,’ he said, waving me into a chair opposite him.
‘So I’m told,’ I said, sitting down.
‘Ever heard of a French writer called . . .’ He looked at his notes in front of him. ‘Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau?’
‘No.’
‘Well you’re going to take his photograph this afternoon.’
Charbonneau was a mid-ranking diplomat at the French consulate – Phil told me, reading from his notes – who also wrote novels. His third novel, Le trac, had just been published in the US as Stage Fright (Steiner & Lamm) and had been very well received with excellent reviews in The Times, the Post, the New Masses, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly – its little splash had attracted GPW’s attention.
‘Et cetera, et cetera. Culture can be news too,’ Phil said feigning a yawn. ‘You know: foreign literary star, strong light and shade, cigarette poised near face, backlit smoke, Gallic charm.’
‘I think I can manage it.’
This Charbonneau lived in a serviced apartment off Columbus Circle. He was a solid chunky mess of a man with rumpled clothes – there were food stains on his tie – and a tousled mass of curly dark hair. He had a very heavy beard, his jaws and chin dark with incipient stubble, and a big nose and full lips. There was really nothing attractive about him at all but, mystifyingly, he gave off an aura of facetious charm as if everything he saw around him – including the people he encountered – amused him in some secret way. He spoke good English with a strong French accent.
He looked at me in surprise when he opened the door. ‘Who are you?’ he said.
I held up my camera. ‘The photographer.’
He smiled. ‘I was expecting a man. A mister photographer.’
‘Well, I am not Mister Photographer.’
‘But you are meant to come tomorrow.’
‘But I am here today.’
He let me in and hurried off to put on a clean tie, at my suggestion. His sitting room had no bookshelves but was full of books stacked in random piles like bulky stalagmites growing towards the ceiling. I pulled down the blind, rigged my spotlight at his work table and took the standard portrait shot in strong chiaroscuro but with no smoking cigarette – rookie or not, even I had my standards – but with chin propped in palm, index finger extended to cheekbone. It was all over in half an hour. We chatted about Berlin, where he had recently been posted.
‘What do you think about the new chancellor?’ I asked.
‘Crazy, no? Un fou.’
I said I hadn’t paid much attention but had seen enough Nazis in the few weeks I was in Berlin to last me a lifetime.
As we nattered on, Charbonneau offered me one of his yellow French cigarettes. I declined and he lit my Pall Mall. We stood and smoked for a moment or two, then he said, ‘Now I suppose you expect me to ask you for dinner.’
I showed him my engagement ring. It was Cleve’s idea for me to wear it – bought in a dime-store. The story was that I was engaged to a young man in England; it pre-empted many problems at work with my unmarried male colleagues and explained my absences at parties and after-work get-togethers. It worked – Charbonneau held up his hands in mock apology.
‘I never saw it. I yield to my rival.’
‘On second thoughts – thank you very much. I accept.’
‘Second thoughts – don’t you find they’re often the best ones?’
What made me accept Charbonneau’s invitation? I think it was a product of my lurking discontent. Why should I go home to Washington Square South for another lonely night with my gin, my radio and my book? I found Charbonneau amusing and suspected he’d be good company – I owed it to myself.
Enthused, Charbonneau suggested the Savoy-Plaza Hotel at seven o’clock. I caught a cab up to Central Park South and met him in the lobby. He took pernickety care over the choice of wine and ordered a steak so rare it was effectively raw, to my eyes. He asked me lots of questions about myself – where was I born, who were my parents – and, enjoying this gentle interrogation, and the second bottle of wine, I found myself opening up to him, telling him the story of the Grösze and Greene fiasco and, indirectly (I wasn’t wearing my engagement ring), that I was having something of an affair here in New York.
‘And what about your poor fiancé in England?’
‘Well, h
e’s more of a friend than a fiancé. It’s a useful ruse.’
We were at the end of the meal. Charbonneau was on his second brandy and second coffee. I was sipping at a glass of port.
‘Enough about me,’ I said, fishing in my bag for my cigarettes. ‘Tell me about your novel.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A hundred and thirty pages. I wrote it seven, no, eight years ago but now they’ve published it in English so I have to remember what I wrote . . . It’s about a man who has stage fright – le trac, we call it – but stage fright whenever he has to make love.’
‘He’s impotent.’
‘No, no. Have you ever had stage fright? It’s a terrible, physical sensation. You can still go on stage, you can still perform but, I assure you, le trac véritable . . .’ He gestured with his cigarette, making a tightening spiral. ‘It seizes your entire being.’
‘Is it an autobiographical novel, then?’
He laughed, loudly enough for nearby diners to turn and stare.
‘I think you are a very bad young woman, Miss Clay. Méchante. No, I’ve had stage fright but only in the theatre. When I was very young.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I said.
He stared at me and I saw ash fall carelessly from his cigarette on to his sleeve. He didn’t bother to brush it away.
‘Actually, I’m taking a bit of a holiday from sex,’ he said. ‘Personally speaking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I’m a bit bored with the whole brouhaha, what do you say? The surrounding nonsense.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. These days I’d rather have a conversation with an interesting and beautiful young woman’ – he leant forward and whispered – ‘than fuck her.’
It was a test, of course – but Charbonneau could have had no idea that I’d worked with the foul-mouthed Greville Reade-Hill and so I listened unmoved and unperturbed.
‘It’s not an either-or, you know,’ I said, then leant forward and whispered to him myself. ‘You can still have a conversation with the people you fuck.’
He sat back in his chair, an uncertain smile on his face. I think that, for a very rare moment in his life, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau found himself at a loss for words. He said nothing, just pointed his finger at me and wagged it in amused admonishment.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
And so my New York, American life progressed in its alternating, vaguely satisfying, vaguely unsatisfying, way. I saw Cleve whenever he could free himself from his wife and family and, as compensation when he wasn’t free, I began to have a regular dinner date with Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau – once a week or so.
I remember a trip Cleve and I made to California for the opening of the Santa Rosa Bridge in Sonoma – one of the first big New Deal projects to be completed – and we managed to spend a whole four days together, the longest consecutive time we’d ever passed in each other’s company. We took a Boeing Air Transport 247 across country, my second flight in an aeroplane, and then my third flight back home to New York. Perhaps because I was with Cleve, sitting beside me, and those four days were bracketed by long cross-country flights with many take-offs and landings, I found I loved flying – despite the rocking turbulence we encountered. I was never alarmed or fearful though I suppose I might have had cause to be so: instead I was intoxicated by the improbability of being in these shiny metal machines powering themselves into the air, looking down on the land we soared over, slicing through clouds into the luminous blue above.
I remember the first night Cleve and I made love. I knew it was bound to happen – it was why I had come to America, after all, though I have to admit that the money was an extra inducement. He drove us north-east out of Manhattan to Westchester County to a roadhouse on Highway 9 called the Demarest Motor Lodge. We ate an indifferent meal but we hadn’t come all this way for the food. There were eight double rooms with attached bathrooms on the floor above.
Cleve said: ‘I could drive you home but I took the precaution of booking a couple of rooms here, just in case we were too tired.’
I said: ‘Now you mention it I am feeling a bit too tired to go back to Manhattan. What a good idea.’
And so we went upstairs to our rooms. Five minutes later Cleve knocked softly on my door.
I remember we made love twice that night, and then once again in the morning. Cleve was adamant that he should wear a contraceptive: he had come prepared. And I remember, on the drive back to Manhattan, the almost drug-like mood of happiness I was in. I hunched over on the bench seat and leant up against Cleve as he drove, feeling his warmth, my hand on his thigh. I looked through the windscreen at the commuter traffic heading back into Manhattan idly noting details: the colours of the cars – mushroom, mouse-grey, glossy black, dull crimson – and the sky with great rafters or bars of cloud set against the blue, almost as if measured and deliberately spaced. I looked with unknowing, innocent eyes, it seemed to me and, as I touched my throat, I felt my skin was hypersensitive, tingling, frictively alive, because, I assumed, of the feeling of bliss inside me: it was almost as if I were coming down with flu.
I remember Phil Adler asking me if I was all right when I came into the office. Why do you ask? You just seem different, as if you’re not quite here, he said. You take about three seconds to answer my questions. Oh. Then I said I wondered if maybe I was coming down with flu. He sent me to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge for the third time. There were a lot of repairs going on and I strayed from my brief. It was one of my first ‘abstract’, compositional photographs. Maybe I was inspired. Phil said it was unusable.
2. THE HOTEL LAFAYETTE
MY DINNERS WITH CHARBONNEAU took on a pattern. Missing Paris, he always tried to seek out a French restaurant and, however well we dined there, he always claimed to be vehemently disappointed; that what had been presented was a travesty of French cooking, an American fiasco. I often contradicted him just to set his indignation raging – to my British palate everything seemed delicious. He was very analytical about the food he ate – even the bread rolls and the salt claimed his gourmet’s focussed attention. Almost without trying I began to learn a lot about what one could demand from the necessities of eating: the meat, the fish, the vegetables that we masticated and swallowed to allow us to live. But Charbonneau gave the process so much forensic thought it seemed almost unhealthy to me.
In search of the perfect French cuisine in New York we ate our way through the French restaurants that the Village had to offer: Le Champignon, Charles, Montparnasse – and numerous others. Pas brillant, was his mildest judgement.
One night we were in the Waldorf Cafeteria on 6th Avenue, where Charbonneau claimed to have tracked down an ‘acceptable’ Bordeaux, a 1924 Château Pavie. He was in a strange unruly mood and had already criticised me for my choice of lipstick – ‘It doesn’t suit you, it makes your mouth look thin’ – but I paid no attention. I was in an odd state of mind myself as I hadn’t seen Cleve for over three weeks – he was off on a GPW trip to Japan and China – and I wasn’t at my most tractable.
‘Don’t you live near here?’ Charbonneau asked, abruptly.
‘Washington Square. A few blocks away.’
‘Would you show me your apartment?’
‘Why do you want to see it?’
‘I’d just like to see where you live, Amory. To fill out the picture, you know.’
So we wandered home and I showed him in. He prowled around and looked at my photographs for a while and then stuck his nose in my bedroom. I was pouring him a Scotch and water when he came up behind me, cupped my breasts and nuzzled my neck.
‘What the hell are you doing, Charbonneau?’ I said, angrily, wheeling round and pushing him away.
‘I think it’s time we got to know each other better.’
‘So, your sexual vacation is over?’
‘Yes. It seems to be. Back to work.’
He tried to grab me again but I snatched up the ice pick from the dri
nks table and thrust it out at him.
‘French novelist stabbed to death by English photographer,’ I said. ‘Stop this now!’
‘But I want you, Amory. And I think you want me.’
‘Why are you trying to spoil a beautiful friendship like this?’
He sagged. ‘I don’t want a “beautiful friendship”,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I want something much more complicated and interesting than that. More dangerous. Now, if we can just go to your bedroom—’
‘No, Charbonneau! Non, merci. I’m in love with somebody else.’
‘Love. What does that have to do with anything?’ He picked up his Scotch and sat down, muttering irritatedly to himself. Then he apologised. He was tired, out of sorts, I was a pretty girl, his libido was alive and kicking once more.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Amory.’
‘I’m not angry. Just don’t do this again.’
‘I promise, I promise.’
The now familiar paradoxical aspect about the Charbonneau ‘pass’ and its conspicuous failure was that we became firmer friends as a result. Something had come out into the open and had been pointedly shooed away – but the fact that it had appeared changed our future encounters for the better. We now talked with a frankness and abandon as if we had actually been lovers. The air had been cleared in every way.
Cleve came back from his trip to the Orient. ‘I just don’t understand that world,’ he said, in a strange, baffled voice. ‘I can see what’s happening in front of my eyes in Shanghai or Tokyo but can’t analyse it. I might as well be on Mars or Neptune.’
He paused and looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Much the better for seeing you, after all these years.’
We’d spent the afternoon making love in my apartment; now we were in the café of the Hotel Lafayette on University Place. I was drinking gin and orange, Cleve had an Americano. On the table next to us two old men were playing chequers. I lit a Pall Mall.