Seagulls in My Soup

by Tristan Jones

  “Awf’ly nice to meet you?” he chanted. “I’ve read so much about you in Sissie’s letters?”

  “I hope she didn’t say anything bad,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he chortled.

  I’d never really known what the word “chortle” signified until I heard Bishop Willie Saint John do it that noontime at the Alhambra. The chortle issued from his lips like wine burbling from a suddenly unbunged barrel. The sound reminded me of the mating call of the walrus, or the noise a flock of penguins makes when the whole bunch decide to change the direction of their comical waddle. As the liquid, bubbling chortle escaped from Willie, I decided that it came either from an over-goodwilled innocent or from an evil demon. Another brief glance into Willie’s bright blue eyes convinced me that the former possibility was more likely.

  “Oh, no, nothing at all, Captain,” he chortled again. “And I do hope you will address me as Willie?”

  “All right, but for Chri . . . for goodness’ sake, don’t call me Captain. It’s a mode of address for a paid functionary.”

  “Ah, yes. Quite so.”

  He turned to Sissie. “Miss Benedict is playing in the croquet finals at Windsor?” He turned to me again. “Miss Benedict is my housekeeper?”

  The bishop’s accent was not nearly as “refined Kensington” as Sissie’s. It was good, plain, straightforward Victorian-style upper-class English, with all the vowels said as they look.

  “Oh,” I nodded, wishing I’d finished the crossword.

  “Otherwise, I mean if it weren’t for the croquet match, I could have had her accompany me to Ibiza?”

  Sissie’s face cracked. “How simply spiffing that would have been! Deah Miss Benedict—oh, I do hope she wins something. She tries so terribly hard.”

  I cocked my eye at Sissie. “Yes, we could have taken on the local police team.”

  The bishop looked at me with genuine interest. “Really?” he asked in a sharp tone. “Do they have a croquet side here?”

  “So I’m told,” I replied.

  “Well, in that case, I’ll bring her with me next year?”

  “The only thing is,” I continued, “the Spanish croquet balls are made from ossified bulls’ testicles.

  The bishop’s mouth opened. “Really?”

  “Yes—they call them cojones,” I informed him.

  “How very interesting? How very original? Cojones?”

  Several passing peasants turned and stared at Willie.

  “Yes, in fact croquet is known in Spanish as conmiscojones, and if you want a game of croquet here the phrase you use is, Quieres jugar conmiscojones?” I was really enjoying myself.

  “Really? Let’s see . . . What does that mean?”

  “Do you care to play croquet,” I replied, slowly.

  Sissie, blushing like crazy, compressed her lips together and shook her head slightly as she stared at me—but not a flicker crossed the bishop’s face.

  “Quieres . . . ?”

  “Jugar,” I prompted him.

  “Ah, yes, got it, old chap. Quieres jugar conmiscojones?”

  All around him now the devious denizens of a dozen dens of depravity, collectors of things and people, were silent. They stared, fascinated, at Willie the Bishop as his voice rolled and thundered the question out along the crowded terrace of the Alhambra. Over and over he repeated it.

  Willie and Sissie took off to visit the cathedral at the top of the steep hill. I headed for a fisherman’s bodega for a lunch of yellow peril washed down with San Miguel beer, with which I toasted Miss Benedict’s success in the forthcoming croquet tournament and her absence from the island.

  Sissie told me later that day that Willie had kept repeating the Spanish phrase—all the way up the hill to the cathedral, all the way through that venerable building, and most of the way back to the Hotel Montesol, before some English-speaking Spaniard (rare in Ibiza, then) had, after gently tugging him out of Sissie’s earshot, informed him what it meant: “Will you play with my testicles?”

  Horrified, Willie recalled that he had asked the question several times of the verger in the cathedral.

  “I’ll bet he’s really pissed off with me,” I said to Sissie.

  She laid a calloused hand on my arm. “Oh, no, not really, deah. You see, Willie’s used to choirboy pranks and all thet sort of jolly rot.”

  “Do you think I’d better come with you to that bloody tea party tomorrow, then?”

  “Why of course, dahling Tristan. Willie knows that at heart you’re simply supah. And anyway, he must forgive you out of Christian charity. You simply must come to Elmyr’s tea party. It will be ebsolutely spiffing. Deah Willie and I passed his villa on our way back from the cathedral. It’s simply awf’ly naice—you’ve simply no idea. I’m practically bursting with enticipation . . .”

  Sissie disappeared up the companionway ladder on her way to her sleeping den under the forward dodger. Soon after there came the tinkling of a Booth’s London Dry Gin bottle against a secretive glass and the rustle of Bible leaves being turned; then all was silent onboard the good ship Cresswell, and I slept the sleep of the justified.

  After breakfast the next day I went ashore, crossed the road, and had a beer in a tiny fishermen’s bar. Sailors, longshoremen, and fishermen—anyone to do with the sea—can always use a good bar. It’s probably because people who live on and by the sea like the friendliness that booze brings on shore. Maybe it’s the salt air.

  As I waited there while Sissie changed into her best clothes aboard Cresswell, I visualized my friends very clearly and drank to their health. I could even hear their voices as if they were present. Imagination seems to have a fourth-dimensional quality in a voyager, especially one who has spent long periods alone. He learns to use his solitude to sharpen his ability to remember events long past, and so live his life several times over. Some voyagers can—and I have so often heard them—conjure up scenes and people in a manner almost unknown to shorefolk. They are the practitioners of a special art, which will never be lost as long as there are vast spaces and people to cross them.

  When Sissie turned up to collect me at the bar before meeting Willie, I hardly recognized her. She had on a white dress with red and blue roses (blue roses?), a wide-brimmed white hat with a light blue ribbon around and a great bow to one side, real nylon stockings, and a pair of elegant-looking white shoes—all of which Willie had brought with him from England. She was transformed. Of the Sissie I had known, only the steel-blue eyes, the frizzy hair, and the accent remained. She trotted into the bar, empty apart from an old crone and me, and, holding a white leather handbag out with one hand, pirouetted around. I stared. I gawped. I gaped in astonishment.

  “Like it, dahling?” she crowed. “Oh happy, happy day!”

  I quickly finished my beer and grabbed Sissie’s arm. “You look like . . . like . . . Ascot,” I told her.

  Pleased, she slipped one of her arms, bare and sunburned, into mine, and seemed to purr like a cat.

  We went outside, with me feeling like a beach bum escorting the Queen Mum, and made our way to the Hotel Montesol to meet Willie, who treated us to lunch there. We then set off for a car-tour of Ibiza. The driver, a young New Zealand woman, was good-looking and very pleasant, and Willie was so friendly to me that no one would have suspected that I had played such a cruel trick on him the day before. I was so impressed by his courtesy that I invited him to go for a sail with us the next day, even though he was a preacher.

  Just before four o’clock the New Zealander duly dropped Sissie, the bishop, and me in front of the by now somewhat jaded-looking hustlers, hucksters, pimps, and pushers at the Alhambra, and we waited for another car that was to take us to Elmyr the Art Collector’s villa.

  We sat in the afternoon sun, Sissie and I content subjects of the bishop’s munificence, sipping Courvoisier brandy (nothing but the best when deah W
illie was around), and Willie with ice cream and coffee, which he enjoyed the Spanish way by dipping the ice cream in the coffee and eating it so, with the hot, bitter tang exactly complementing the cold, bland sweetness.

  By now, after a bottle of wine with lunch at the Montesol, two brandies as chasers, and now another two brandies, Sissie, splendid in her new outfit, was aglow. She and Willie kept up an incessant conversation about Miss Benedict and other friends, acquaintances, relatives, and servants, dead or alive, and, for all I knew, yet to be born. Sissie’s screech was the tune; Willie’s booming was the descant, and soon every rogue within twenty yards of our table was completely familiar with the domestic arrangements, business affairs, sexual scandals, sporting abilities, regenerative achievements, and secret proclivities of everyone who lived within the environs of the cathedral town of Southchester. But the Courvoisier was good, Sissie was in blossom, and the bishop was a stout fella. Then the red car showed up.

  It was a Corvette Stingray. As it pulled brazenly alongside the terrace of idling wait-ers and waiters, it was followed closely by an ancient Ibizan taxi. Now a venerable taxi anywhere else means simply an old taxi. In Ibiza such taxis looked as if they had been constructed before the precocious infant of Frau Benz had learned to walk. Behind the Corvette it looked like an elderly orphan who had been adopted by a film star.

  As the red Corvette, the very spirit of rodomontade, pulled up, a cry rose from a dozen voices along the terrace. It was as if the car had just won the Monte Carlo rally.

  “Elmyr!” The raucous bellow came from a young Frenchman wearing a dozen silver bracelets, a string of beads, no shirt, a tight-waisted jacket, and bell-bottoms.

  “Elmyr!” A screeching howl from an elderly figure of indeterminate sex, which had been huddled all day before an empty coffee cup as it nervously tugged at a mink jacket around its shoulders with heavily ringed, long-fingered claws.

  “Elmyr!” A bass boom from a dark, heavy-set man in a black leather jacket, whose build and thick mustache reminded me of a circus lion-tamer.

  “Elmyr!” In unison from two blond males in their early teens, their faces so smooth and effeminate that you could see their mothers in them. Both were wearing pink satin suits, with obviously nothing under them but slim boys’ bodies.

  “Elmyr!” The American tones of a huge woman bar-owner, sitting with her great pudgy arm around her dark, sparrow-like, bespectacled female companion.

  As the voices hollered, Sissie, the bishop, and I watched a display of sycophancy unrivaled since the days of the Caesars. The object of all this adulation was relaxing casually behind the wheel of the low-slung Stingray, which, although it was supposed to be the very last word in sports cars, looked to me like some great blood-gorged insect. He was, when he alighted, quite short—no more than about five and a half feet. As he glided over to our table I saw that he was dapper. His hair was obviously dyed, jet-black, and it had the horse-hair look of an old sofa’s stuffing. He wore around his neck a gold chain, from which a gold-rimmed monocle dangled over a cashmere sweater. When he languidly stretched out his hand to raise Sissie’s and kiss it, six gold rings, heavy and thick, and one diamond ring, attracted the eye of every impecunious being in sight, including me.

  “Elmyr,” said Sissie in a fainting voice, “how naice of you to come.”

  “Charmed,” said the art collector as he gently lowered Sissie’s wilting hand.

  “My brothah, Bishop Saint John.”

  “Sir, Elmyr Dore-Boutin.”

  “And my deah, deah skippah, Tristan.”

  Elmyr’s eyes, large and brown, self-pitying, yet calculating, took in my seaman’s jerkin and tatty cap with one swift sweep. He shook my hand cursorily and said, “Yes.” I felt as if I had been ordered over the top of a battle-trench.

  He turned to Sissie and Willie. “I hope you did enjoy your little trip around our beautiful island?” His voice had the timbre of a wayward elf, and the way he accented his words was strange, as if he had studied English only in its spoken, colloquial form, and never learned where to put the emphasis.

  “Oh, it was delaightful,” gushed Sissie.

  “Good, then I better take you up to my studio,” said Elmyr.

  I had been studying him. He reminded me of someone. It didn’t strike me right away, but I soon figured it out. He was stocky. Everything about him seemed to be horizontal. His brow, which was wide and intelligent-looking, his ears, his nose, his mouth; everything, including the faint stripes on his green cashmere sweater was horizontal. The only vertical thing about him was the dangling monocle chain. His manners, and his manner, were both perfect and charming, a rare combination. Then he turned his round, muddy eyes on me, focused, and blinked slowly. That was it—Mister Toad!

  “You will come in my car, Miss Saint John?”

  I was startled, for a moment, to hear Sissie addressed by her correct name.

  “Oh, perfectly delaighted.” Sissie melted before the reptilian eyes.

  “And your brother will go in the taxi?” There were only two seats in the Corvette.

  “And deah Tristan, too?” Sissie entreated.

  The toad’s eyes inspected mine for cataracts, my beard for fleas. “Yes, of course, my dear.”

  So it was that Sissie, in the splendid vulgarity of the Corvette, and deah Willie and I in the ancient, hoary, dented dignity of the taxicab, arrived at Elmyr’s villa.

  As we pulled up at the bottom of a set of steps I noticed the wrought-iron name on the whitewashed walls: “La Falaise.” The Cliff.

  “Original,” I said to the bishop.

  “Quite,” Willie replied absentmindedly.

  Elmyr shepherded Sissie, in her rose-bedecked splendor, up the steps. Willie and I followed. Through the arch of the villa we entered a large, cool, dark hall. On either side were mahogany doors.

  Elmyr guided us through the hall like a ballet dancer, sweeping one cashmered arm to one side. “My sleeping quarters.” Then the limp, Cartier-adorned wrist to the other side. “La chambre rouge,” he said with a sly leer at me. “Sleeping quarters of my . . . young guests.”

  Willie was staring at the lines of original paintings on the walls, hands clasped behind his back in true connoisseur’s style. “Dali . . . Dufy . . . Renoir . . . Picasso,” he read them off, his voice low with respect and awe.

  Elmyr escorted Sissie and Willie, with me traipsing after them—an embarrassing presence, like a dose of influenza that had found its way into the villa—up a tiled stairway and into a huge living room. Its walls, too, were covered with the works of half a hundred masters of modern art.

  We all sat down to tea, which was served in the finest Delft-ware on a solid silver tray by a strikingly good-looking, fair-haired, green-eyed youth of about nineteen, with broad shoulders and a street swagger. I could sense that every step he took was being paid for by Elmyr. He wore a spotless white shirt and thin, bright yellow pyjama pants, under which his crotch bulged so that Sissie was constrained not to notice him.

  Elmyr introduced him. “This is Henry.”

  Henry’s mouth moved slightly in the direction of a smile, but he must have realized the smile was not going to be paid for by us, so it hovered halfway to realization, then died.

  “Henry did come from Nebraska, did you not, Henry?” said Elymr.

  The frozen face nodded. He was handsome in a tailor-dummy way, with dirty blond hair and regular features. But his eyes were sly.

  “Henry is a student, are you not, Henry?”

  Again a slight nod, and a shift of the eyes.

  “A student of biology, are you not?”

  The sly eyes and yellow-covered genitals retreated toward the kitchen, leaving the fourth question, the one that was silent in my mind, only too-well answered.

  Elmyr was a well-traveled man. He described his days in Rio and London, New York and Hong Kong, Tokyo, and
just about every well-known city. Always he had met the people who mattered. In Paris it was Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and Lady Malcolm Campbell, the wife of the holder of the world land-speed record. In between Sissie’s oohs and aahs and the bishop’s cries of approbation, Elmyr held brilliant court. He told us, as we sat in wonder at his feet, about his meetings with the Aga Khan and Zsa-Zsa Gabor, and Anita Loos and the Duke of Kent. Elmyr didn’t drop names; they just flowed from his lips and fell, used and exhausted, into our laps. He had haunted the Café du Dome and the Rotonde, the famous literary hang-outs in Montparnasse. He knew everyone in Manhattan, in Zurich, in Berlin . . .

  Suddenly a strange noise broke the spell of Elmyr’s monologue. It was a loud, high-pitched yapping. Elmyr strode over to the ceiling-high French window, which let out onto a flower-bedecked patio with a kidney-shaped swimming pool overlooking the ocean from the high cliff on which the villa was built. He opened the door. “Fifi!” he shouted in a peeved voice.

  A small white poodle, only inches tall, with a green ribbon around its neck, dashed into the room. It dodged Elmyr’s startled grab. It raced around the room, over the leather sofas and poufs, until the teamaker and I trapped it in a corner. We both grabbed for it, but I beat the teamaker to it and picked the squirming animal up. By now Elmyr was back in the room, away from the French window.

  “Outside?” I asked him as I passed by.

  Elmyr seemed a little flustered. “Er . . . Yes, outside, please.”

  I went to the door-window, opened it, and happened to glance at three deckchairs with their backs to me, facing the pool. I saw a part of a leg and a foot raised from one of them. Curious, I strolled over almost to the side of the pool before I released the poodle and turned around.

  There were three males in the chairs. One seemed about thirty, with fair hair and sharp eyes; another was about twenty-two, with a face and fawn-like brown eyes so pretty than any young woman could be jealous of them; and the third was a stripling of no more than sixteen, with wide blue eyes. They were all laid out, bathing their already deep-brown bodies in the sun, with drinks beside them. They all looked ineffably bored, they all held hands, and they were all stark naked.