Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  ‘Did anything happen while I was away?’ he asked, aware of my mood – prickly, almost resentful.

  ‘Lots of things happened. The world didn’t stop turning, Cleve.’

  ‘You seem different, somehow.’

  ‘People can change in a couple of months. You haven’t seen me for a long while. Likewise.’

  I looked down at the small lozenge-shaped tiles on the café floor: pale cream with a dirty magenta flower effect dotted regularly across the room. Cleve said something, softly.

  ‘What did you say? I didn’t catch it.’

  ‘I said, I love you, Amory. I want you to know that. That’s what being away from you has brought home to me.’

  I looked at him and felt a huge weakness sweep through me as I stared at him across the table, this handsome, super-competent, confident man with his thin straight nose and thick wet-sand-coloured hair. I think I was a bit shocked because I never thought he would say it to me first. I was always certain, in my predictive fantasies about our life together, about this moment, that I would be the one to make the declaration and that he would respond. But no – he said it first.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You know I feel the same about you.’

  He reached across the table and took my hand.

  ‘When I saw you that night – at your exhibition in that strange gallery – I knew something had happened to me.’

  I felt emboldened. ‘And here we are,’ I said, ‘over two years later. Something happened to you, then – but something has to happen to us, now, Cleve, don’t you see?’ I said with deliberate emphasis.

  ‘I know,’ he said, frowning suddenly. ‘I know. I’ve not been fair.’ He signalled for another drink. ‘I want you to come to the house. I want you to meet Frances.’

  ‘Are you completely out of your—’

  ‘It’s her birthday next week. We’re having a big party. There’ll be a hundred people there. You just need to see for yourself. Meet her.’

  ‘Why do I feel a horrible sense of foreboding?’

  ‘If you come – everything will be a thousand times better. You’ll see.’ He smiled his wide smile, not showing his teeth. ‘We’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.’

  Who can tell about human instincts? Something fanciful in me wondered if Charbonneau’s sexual interest in me had subtly changed my comportment in the way I reacted to Cleve. It was rutting season and there was another bull-male wandering around the neighbourhood. I do believe that our Stone Age natures still function strongly in certain situations – particularly to do with sex and mutual attraction – and are felt at gut level, deep beneath the skin, far from the brain. Anyway, however I had played it, I felt stupidly happy remembering his last words: we’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.

  Charbonneau was being at his most provocative the next time we dined – at a very bad Midtown restaurant called P’tit Paris. As we consulted the menu he spent ten minutes denigrating the apostrophe.

  ‘Moody, petulant, selfish, spoilt,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You. I wish I had my camera,’ I said, trying to make him stop moaning. ‘I’d take a great photograph: “Angry Frenchman”.’

  He wasn’t amused.

  ‘I’ve seen your photographs,’ he said.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You think you’re an artist. I read your titles: “The boy with the ping-pong bat”, “The boy, running”.

  ‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I think I’m a photographer, not an artist. I give my pictures titles so I can remember them – not to make them seem pretentious. But there are great artists who are photographers.’ I began to name them. ‘Stieglitz, Adams, Kertész, August Sander—’

  ‘It’s not an art,’ he said, interrupting me, aggressively. ‘You point your machine. Click. It’s a mechanism.’ He took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket and proffered it to me. ‘Here’s my pen.’ He turned the menu over. ‘Here’s a piece of blank paper. Draw an “Angry Frenchman” and then we’ll discuss if it’s art or not.’

  I wasn’t going to enter this argument on his terms.

  ‘But you have to admit there are great photographs,’ I said.

  ‘All right . . . There are memorable photographs. Remarkable photographs.’

  ‘So, what makes them memorable or remarkable? What criteria do you use to judge them? To make that decision?’

  ‘I don’t think about it. I just know. Instinct.’

  ‘Then maybe you should think about it. You judge a great photo in the same way you judge a great painting or a film or a play or a novel or a statue. It’s art, mon ami.’

  ‘Shall we get out of this shithole P’tit Paris and have a proper drink somewhere?’

  ‘I’ve got to have an early night,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a birthday party in Connecticut.’

  Charbonneau looked at me shrewdly. I had told him too much in the past.

  ‘Ah. The American lover. Going to meet the wife and kids?’

  ‘Going to change my life.’

  3. THE WATERSHED

  I WAS GIVEN A lift up to New Hastings, Connecticut, by Phil Adler and his wife, Irene. They picked me up outside Grand Central Station in their Studebaker station wagon – with its wooden side panels it was like a travelling garden shed, it seemed to me – but we whizzed on up to Connecticut in fast time. Quite a few of the GPW staff had been invited, they told me. It was cool drizzly weather, not at all like late spring, and I was sitting wrapped up in the back of their car in my camel coat, and glad of it.

  ‘Have you been to their house before?’ I asked.

  ‘I have,’ Phil said. ‘Sometimes Cleve has a big Labor Day party.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ Irene chipped in. ‘Usually it’s no wives.’

  ‘So what’s different about today?’ I said.

  ‘I believe it’s her fortieth,’ Phil said.

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘So, she’s older than Cleve.’

  ‘You’re on fire today, Amory,’ Phil said.

  ‘No, I mean . . . I hadn’t thought, realised . . .’ My brain was suddenly busy. ‘What’s she like, Frances?’

  ‘Beautiful, sophisticated . . .’

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Irene said with feeling.

  ‘Clever?’

  ‘Bryn Mawr.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘beautiful, sophisticated, rich, clever.’ Somehow I felt Greville would have done better. I had no clear picture in my head about Frances Finzi so I told Phil and Irene about Greville’s Game – how anyone could be summed up in four well-chosen adjectives.

  ‘That’s very English,’ Irene said. ‘Very.’

  ‘Have you met Frances?’ I asked her.

  ‘Once. Years ago.’

  ‘Fine. So give me Frances Finzi in four adjectives.’

  She thought. ‘Cold, patronising, elegant, plutocratic.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Phil said. ‘She can’t help inheriting money. I’d say “lucky”.’ He thought a second. ‘Maybe that’s not appropriate.’

  ‘Her father is Albert Moss,’ Irene explained. ‘Moss, Walter & Co. The investment bank? It’s part of the picture. I’m sorry. She’s very plutocratic in her particular way. Wait till you see the house.’

  I was beginning to warm to Irene, a small sharp-faced woman with intelligent, knowing eyes.

  ‘I think the “plutocratic” adjective is inappropriate,’ Phil said. ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Phil said, loyally,’ Irene added. ‘Precisely.’

  The Finzi house in New Hastings was a suitably impressive red-brick Colonial Revival mansion set in abundant gardens. It had a shallow-hipped roof with a wide overhang. There was a centred gable with an odd rounded porch with pillars and all the ground-floor windows had broken pediments. Ever so slightly over-decorated, I judged – the rounded porch looked like a bad afterthought, spoiling the clea
n lines.

  We were directed by men in red slickers to park on a terraced lower lawn in front of the house and then more of these men, with umbrellas aloft (it was drizzling, now) walked us up brick pathways to the house itself and along its side to a vast rear lawn where the party was taking place.

  On this main garden lawn behind the house was a bedecked marquee. A jazz band played at one end and toqued chefs dispensed hot food from chafing dishes at the other. Waiters and waitresses patrolled with jugs of fruit cocktail, alcoholic or non-.

  For all the manifest expense on display the mood was informal. Men were in sports clothes, some without ties. Children ran around pursued by nurses and nannies. Effortless, moneyed ease was the subtext but the main message was clear: enjoy yourselves, eat and drink, wander around the capacious grounds – above all, have fun.

  I felt overdressed in a black sequinned day-frock with a cape collar and co-respondent black and white shoes with a low heel, and so decided to keep my coat on. Anyway, it was freezing. But it wasn’t the weather that was making me edgy and jumpy – it was the anticipation. I lost Phil and Irene as soon as I decently could and went in search of Cleve.

  I found him on the back terrace – a long platform porch with a balustrade – in the company of four other men. Cleve was smoking a cigar and was wearing a pale blue seersucker suit, a mauve tie and cream canvas shoes. I walked past this group twice so he could see me and then found a corner at the far end of the terrace and snapped him with my little Voigtländer that I was carrying in my pocket. I had been seized with the perverse desire to take a photograph of the legendary Frances and so had brought the camera along with me, on the off-chance. Not a good idea, I now thought, a little daunted by the scale and panache of the Finzi home. I waited.

  Cleve was with me two minutes later. We shook hands. His eyes, it seemed to me, were full of feeling, almost tearful.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I was convinced you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I couldn’t not come—’

  ‘It means a lot to me, Amory.’

  ‘I hope . . .’ I began and then couldn’t recall what I was hoping for.

  ‘Come and meet Frances.’

  I put my Voigtländer down with my bag on a wrought-iron table and followed Cleve into the house, trying, and failing, to drive all apprehension from my mind.

  Inside it was airy and tasteful, if a little over-furnished. Not an empty corner to be seen – occasional tables and grouped chairs, planters with ferns and palms. It was painted in pastel colours throughout and the vast arrangements of flowers on all available surfaces created a slightly oppressive sense of crowded elegance.

  As we crossed the chequerboard marble hall – beige and brown – two little boys ran up to him shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ They were made to stand still and face me.

  ‘This is Harry and this is Lincoln,’ Cleve said, introducing his sons to me (six and four, I guessed, or seven and five – I wasn’t good with children’s ages).

  I shook their proffered hands.

  ‘Hello, I’m Amory.’ They also said hello, politely, dutifully, absolutely incurious. One dark, one fair: plain little boys with short identical hairstyles and round faces – in neither of them could I see a trace of Cleve.

  ‘You boys run along, now,’ Cleve said. ‘Amory’s going to see Mumsie.’

  The boys ran off through the hall and Cleve led me to a spacious long drawing room with four bay windows overlooking the rear lawn. There was a baby grand piano, half a dozen soft sofas and a stacked drinks table. Over the fireplace was an eight-foot swagger portrait of a woman from the last century in a silk ballgown draped with marmoset skins.

  Cleve raised his voice. ‘Frances? Are you there?’ He turned to me. ‘Will you have a drink?’

  ‘I certainly will, my darling. Brandy and soda. A big one.’ I had to remind myself that this man was my lover, that we had been naked in bed with each other, days previously. The fact that I was about to meet ‘Mumsie’ didn’t change those facts one iota.

  Cleve busied himself at the drinks table and I turned to see a woman in an apricot-coloured silk organza tea gown steer herself through double doors at the far end of the room in a wheelchair. She rolled silently towards me across the parquet.

  Cleve handed me my brandy and soda, smiling.

  ‘Amory Clay, let me introduce you to Frances Moss Finzi.’

  We shook hands, smiling furiously. I noticed she was wearing the finest grey suede gloves. I thought I was touching skin. Despite my smile my mind was a disaster area: props falling, the roof collapsing, fires flaring, men screaming, waves of water breaking.

  ‘Hello,’ Frances Moss Finzi said in a deep smoky voice. ‘How charming to meet you.’

  ‘Amory’s our new star photographer from England.’

  ‘Congratulations. I’d like a cigarette, Cleve.’

  A figured brass box was found, proffered, cigarette selected, lit. I said no thank you, gulping at my potent brandy. She had an unusual, arresting face, Frances. Pale hooded blue eyes, a high forehead, a mannish face – her looks compromised by a poor buckled perm of her auburn hair, crimped over her ears. She could have afforded better, in my opinion.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said, raising my glass.

  ‘A watershed,’ she smiled away the compliment. ‘Nobody’s going to be spared. That’s one consolation.’

  Was that for my benefit, I wondered? In the event we talked away, politely. How was I finding New York after London? Had I a decent apartment? How she adored the Village. Photography was the democratic art form of our age. She loved taking photographs, herself. Snap, snap, snap.

  ‘Why don’t you wheel me out into the world, Cleve. And fetch me a shawl. I’ll brave the elements.’

  I followed them out on to the terrace and then darted away, making my temporary farewells, and raced for the marquee where I gulped down a glass of the alcoholic fruit punch and smoked a cigarette.

  Phil and Irene ambled by.

  ‘Hey, there’s Amory. Thought we’d lost you. Having fun?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Phil?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘That Frances was in a fu—. In a flipping wheelchair.’

  ‘I thought you knew. Everyone knows.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s like Roosevelt has callipers. Our esteemed president is a cripple. Everyone knows, nobody bothers to mention it.’

  ‘Well, it was a bit of a shock. What happened to her?’

  ‘Car smash,’ Irene said. ‘Just after the little one was born.’

  ‘Lincoln,’ Phil said. ‘No. Harry. Lincoln? What’s the youngest called?’

  ‘Lincoln. There was a crash,’ Irene continued. ‘Awful. And she’s been in a wheelchair ever since. With the two little boys . . . Very sad.’

  I was calculating. If Lincoln was four or five she’d been in a wheelchair for many years, now. I looked round, distractedly, and saw Cleve signalling to me from an opening at the end of the marquee.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ I said and headed off.

  Cleve and I wandered out into the garden and down a wide flight of steps towards an ornamental lake fringed with bullrushes and teazles. A dozen geese cruised about on the water. There was a boathouse encrusted with gingerbread moulding with a jetty and an extravagantly prowed giant canoe moored to it.

  ‘You somehow forgot to tell me your wife was confined to a wheelchair,’ I said, managing to keep my voice calm.

  ‘I don’t even think about it. It’s been years now.’

  ‘Well, it was a bit of a shock to me. To put it very mildly.’

  He looked at me. ‘You know how I feel about you, Amory. It doesn’t change anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I think it does.’

  ‘I needed you to see for yourself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can’t leave her, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I was driving the car when we
had the accident. We’d both been drinking but it wasn’t my fault. Some kid in his dad’s Buick swiped us and we rolled down an embankment. I had a bruised elbow. Frances broke her spine – became paraplegic.’

  ‘My God. How awful.’

  We stood silent by the lake looking at its choppy, slatey waters. I hugged myself. I had an overwhelming urge to leave.

  ‘That’s why I wanted you to meet her,’ he said in his entirely reasonable way, ‘so you could understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘What we will have. You and me.’

  ‘You’ve lost me. What’re you talking about? What do we have? You and me.’

  ‘Everything. Everything – short of marriage. But, all the same, a marriage of two people, of two minds, in everything but its judicial formalities.’ He faced me. ‘I want to kiss you. To hold you. These are just words. I want you to feel the love I have for you. I love you, Amory. I need you to be part of my life.’

  ‘I need to think . . .’ I thought I might faint, then, and topple into the cold lake. I stepped back. ‘Think about it all. Take it in.’

  I turned and walked away without looking round. I was remembering something my father used to say. ‘Inertia is a very underrated state of mind,’ he once told me. ‘If you feel you have to make a decision then decide not to make a decision. Let time pass. Do nothing.’ Which was what I decided to do. I returned to the terrace, picked up my bag and my camera and set off in search of Phil Adler.

  Phil said he and Irene weren’t ready to leave but he would drive me to the station at New Hastings where I could catch a train back to the city. He wandered off to find his car while I mooched about the hall and the big drawing room, trying to keep my brain inert and ignore the clamouring contradictions that were queuing up to be heard. As I prowled around, distracting myself, I saw a small, framed photograph amongst a clutch of others on a side table. It was an impromptu photo of Cleve and Frances, not looking at the camera, in near profile, both of them in casual clothes and taken early in their marriage, I imagined, long before the accident. I picked up the frame – tortoiseshell – and swung the little brass clips free on the back. I pocketed the photo and slid the frame into a bureau drawer. I had no idea why I’d done this or what had prompted me – it was a strange kind of trophy, I supposed, something that I had stolen and could keep and that would remind me of this cold afternoon in Connecticut: a symbol of something that had ended or was about to end.