My Worst Date

by David Leddick

  I think the concentration camps broke up their marriage. Of course, the Italians shipped some Jews out, but not many. And they certainly weren’t very cooperative. I think when my mother thought about it more and more, she developed a real horror of my father. She used to bring it up from time to time. Yes, I think that’s true. I think she just couldn’t get into bed with him anymore. Haven’t you ever felt that way about someone? Suddenly you just can’t bear to have them touch you. Sometimes I think that includes everybody. It probably depends upon how many people have touched you.

  So we lived together in Trieste, my mother and I. I went to school. She worked as a secretary. She called herself Caratelli and so did I. I suppose my father must have continued to send money, as we lived fairly well. I mean, I never didn’t have plenty to eat and nice enough clothes. I wore school uniforms until I was almost eighteen. Thank God I look good in navy blue.

  Of course I didn’t have any boyfriends. Italian girls never do. But I knew something about the outside world because my mother loved Capri and in the 1950s we used to go there on our vacation in August. Perhaps my parents went there on their honeymoon or something. I still like to go there and did when Hugo was little. Now I don’t want to take him because he’s a nice-looking teenage boy and you know what Capri is.

  My mother was funny. She was very correct but she always rather liked that Capri atmosphere. She explained to me when I must have been about ten that there were men who preferred the company of other men. Which made sense to me, because the few boys I did know in Trieste always wanted to hang around with other boys their age and play marbles or make airplanes or something.

  We used to see all the movie stars and famous people from all over the world wandering around in those little streets. And that’s how I started modeling—Roberto Capucci saw me in Capri with my mother. I guess I sort of looked like Audrey Hepburn. I had short hair at the time. And I was small for a model. I preceded the bigger ones like Tilly Tiziani and Mirella Freni. And Isa Stoppi. She was the greatest. I think she had Tunisian or Moroccan blood. She had a very tawny skin but was blond with pale blue eyes. Yes, she was remarkable. Probably still is. Tilly’s dead but the others are still storming around somewhere.

  At any rate. Roberto asked my mother to bring me to the atelier. My mother was very reluctant because to her modeling was just one step up from prostitution. She wasn’t wrong, of course. But she did it. Vanity, you know, is a very strong motivation. Her little duckling was beautiful enough to model. Roberto was sort of the Italian Dior at the time. Very young, very talented, very structured clothes. It was like climbing into the Tower of Pisa to wear one of his dresses. And of course I could model them well because I had no body. To wear couture you have to have no body at all. The duchess of Windsor, Gloria Guinness. Strange to think of those great femme fatales who married such famous names and great wealth. Men certainly didn’t get all excited lying down on top of them. I suppose they did things in bed that the nice girls those men knew or were married to before hadn’t even heard of. Funny how women don’t think of doing that stuff until men instruct them. Men, the great experimenters.

  So Mother said yes, and I lived with some very nice people who were friends of our family and went every day to the atelier. Except for my little hat and gloves I still wore navy blue and might very well have still been with the nuns. There was certainly no one at the atelier to try to seduce me.

  But then we did the shows, and the American magazine editors were there and there was a big fuss about me that season and I came to New York to do pictures for Vogue. Honestly, I wasn’t much. A little girl with brown bangs. But they had just been through those really big glamour girls like Suzy Parker and her sister Dorian Leigh. And Sunny Harnett. Ever heard of Sunny Harnett? The blonde of blondes. And Dovima, but honestly Dovima was always something of a joke. I was a change of pace, I guess. But nobody asked me out. Eileen Ford had me live with her. None of the photographers were interested, and I was sent back to Rome to Roberto still a virgin. It pleased me that I could assure my mother that this was the case and not be lying. And then I met Baby Baroncelli.

  I wonder where Baby Baroncelli is now? I was crazy about him. I think it was my pictures in Vogue that captured his interest. Not me. Because when I came back, Italian Vogue used me, and French Vogue. Even English Vogue a bit, although they were really into their English thing then. I was a hot ticket there briefly.

  At a dinner party I met him. I think he wangled an invitation because he was not usually running around in those kinds of circles. The friends I was staying with were a count and a countess, so when I went out with them we did see some nice people. And you know Rome. If you don’t have a title you might as well kill yourself. But Baby tracked me down and started taking me to lunch from the atelier and I thought he was just wonderful. Which he was.

  He didn’t work. He didn’t have to. He was the heir to the Baroncelli fortune in Brazil. Yes, he was Brazilian really. I don’t know how long the Baroncellis had been out there, but they made millions abusing the natives in one way or another. Baby was tall, he was handsome, he drove a wonderful convertible, he always had a tan, and he was great fun. I don’t know about intelligence. He was intelligent enough to know how to live life in a really great way and make things seem exciting and wonderful to everyone who was with him. And he was married.

  I know this. He had a very publicized marriage to one of those South American girls whose father had made zillions in tin. And they were both Catholic. And I don’t think either of them were particularly eager to be unmarried. They no longer lived together and they hadn’t had any children so it was just a handy excuse to not marry whomever they were seeing at the present time. Like me.

  So of course I ran off to Brazil with him. He really loved me at the time I think. And I was still a virgin until I left for Brazil. Really.

  We had a huge penthouse on top of a building right on Copacabana Beach, which was really quite nice at the time. Rio was a city where you could venture forth carrying a purse and wearing jewelry in those days. And I had Hugo and we had a kind of dream life. Baby was always with us. We went to polo matches. We went up the coast to his beach house. We went nightclubbing. He had wonderful friends. The women were always beautifully dressed and had fabulous jewels. The men were witty and fun. It was a kind of dream. Imagine me from Trieste just a year before. I wasn’t twenty yet. It was so different from what I know as real life it felt dreamlike. And I had no background. All those people around me, they were having a very different experience. They saw the surface and knew beneath it who was sleeping with whom, who really didn’t have any money, who hated their wife or husband. I knew nothing. I learned Portuguese so I could speak to the maid and that was about all I learned in Rio. It’s funny, you know how everyone is wearing aquamarines these days? Showing off their new aquamarine necklace? When I lived in Rio the maid wore aquamarines.

  And then Baby fell in love with another man. When I look back it was in the cards that he fall in love with someone. We’d been together two years. Hugo was something over a year old. I was a sap. What did I know about hanging on to a man? What do I know now? I’m Italian. Once you have a baby all you think about is him.

  I was good company. And not stupid. I was well read for a girl my age. I could keep up in conversations. I don’t think I bored him particularly. It was just that he was a millionaire who was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it, and two years of me was about what he wanted. I figured this out when I came back from the beach early and found him having fun naked on the white couch in the living room with some guy named Larry, a young American, who had turned up in Rio a few months before.

  You know how you are at that age. I wasn’t just stunned or furious or shocked. I was crazy. When you are really rejected in such a thunderclap way, you just have to run out of there. And I ran. The next morning Hugo and I were on our way to New York. I didn’t even stay in the apartment. I ran out and downstairs to my friend Sybil�
�s. She was English and knew how to handle these things. She went upstairs. Saw Baby, picked up a suitcase, took our passports, and we were gone.

  I couldn’t go back to my mother, obviously. So I went back to Eileen Ford. She always told me I could make a lot of money in New York anytime I wanted to, so that’s where I went. I just arrived in a taxi in front of her apartment building with Hugo under my arm, and I have to say she was great. Also she knew I was going to work. I was only twenty-one. I still looked good. I was young. She helped me get a little apartment, and a little baby-sitter, and gave me a little money to get started. And I was off.

  I don’t think the people who worked with me at that time had any idea I had a baby and no husband at home. Women didn’t do that then. Or very rarely. Eileen passed me off as an Italian divorcee, which is really a joke when you think of it. There have been about four of them in Italy.

  I did very well. Vogue grabbed me up, and then I became the Lady Lillian brassiere girl. You remember that campaign. “Imagine me at the Waldorf with Lady Lillian.” That was me. My little Hugo and I had some money. We had a better apartment. He went to a nice school. I was always home in the evening. Models didn’t travel constantly in those days. Most of our work was in studios in the city. And then we’d do catalog. Day in and day out for mucho dinero.

  How did I get to Miami Beach? I met a man. Don’t all my stories start that way? He had the idea of starting a real estate business here with my money. And now he’s gone, but I’ve still got the business. And although it’s been rotten since just after we got here five years ago, with this new Art Deco revival things are looking much better. My English is very good? It should be. I’ve never lived in Europe again. My mother and I are reconciled and she’s been here twice, but Hugo doesn’t speak Italian, so their relationship is limited. Well, that’s the story.

  hugo nails glenn elliot

  He was waiting for me when I came out of the club. It wasn’t so late, we’d just done our third show. It was Saturday night, my second night, three shows a night. I came out the front door, we don’t really have a back door, and was planning to ride my bike home. It was locked up to a tree down the block. The club hadn’t closed yet but we’d done our last show. Myrtle Beach (his real name is Fred Gooley, which probably started his whole fantasy) came out with me. The other guys were hanging around in the club, trying to get lucky I suppose. Myrtle was really cool. He saw Glenn Elliott over by his car across the street and just walked away and left me, didn’t offer me a ride, nothing. He got the picture in a flash and wasn’t going to embarrass me or anything.

  I said, “What about my bike?” He said, “We could just put it in the backseat.” It was one of those Miami Beach nights. It’s so stupid. I’ve seen millions of them. That navy blue sky. That dumb moon. The little flickering colored lights on the jets overhead. Where could they be going so late at night? Leaving for Europe I suppose. I wished I was on one. Instead of sitting here in this convertible beside this very handsome guy who looks like a movie star going where? To do what? I was really nervous.

  He got the picture. “I just thought I’d wait and take you home, Hugo.” “Thanks,” I said again. “You’re a good dancer, Hugo,” he said. “Thanks,” I said again. I really felt stupid. Well, what were we supposed to talk about? “Your mother would probably call the cops if she knew you were doing this.” “I know, I know,” I told him. “But you know, I think I’m going to earn a lot more money doing this than bagging groceries at Woolley’s supermarket. It’s for college,” I added.

  “Is it really?” he said, and looked at me out of the side of his eyes. “I thought it was just because you couldn’t get dates and didn’t want to stay home on the weekends.” Then he laughed and laughed and pounded the steering wheel. “You are quite a sketch, Hugo,” he said. “Quite a sketch. Thank God, you’re a good dancer or I’d run you right home by the back of your neck and tell your mother on you. Fortunately, you move that beautiful little body of yours around pretty well so I don’t have to be embarrassed for you. Just promise me one thing, will you?”

  Here it comes, I thought. Just don’t go all the way, etc.

  “Just don’t get a tattoo,” he said. “They’re fine on Henry Rollins but you’re not the type.” This guy has something, I thought.

  “I was thinking of just a little one,” I told him. “Oh really?” he says. “Yes, I’m undecided between a nice, plain ‘Mother’ in a heart or ‘Death Before Dishonor.’”

  “Where were you planning to have this tattoo? Exactly?” he said with another one of those looks of his. We were driving beside the golf course, which stretched off under the moonlight like some kind of magical country. A couple in a convertible like ours had just pulled off ahead of us and were getting out of their car with a big dog of some kind. The man had short hair. The women had shortish hair that was blowing around her head and her skirt was blowing in the trade winds around her legs. The dog went romping off across the course and you could hear them laugh together as they strolled off after it. That is what it should be like, I thought. That is what love should be like, strolling across a golf course at midnight in the moonlight.

  “Would you like to stop and take a walk?” he said, noticing that I was watching them.

  “No,” I said. “Not tonight. But some night I would. Very, very much.” I can get the skirt but where am I going to get the dog?

  We drove slowly up Royal Palm. “Where were you planning to put that tattoo?” Glenn asked me again.

  “I was thinking on my behind. But everybody does that. Or maybe on my ankle. But Stephanie Seymour has already done that. So I’m kind of stuck. Under my navel? Under my hair?”

  “Some model in Paris has already done that.” How would he know that? Does he read Vogue? Mr. Paul was certainly a lot different that the fathers I knew, like Macha’s dad, who is quite cool but doesn’t read Vogue—that I know.

  “The best thing to do is to put it on somebody else. Like me,” he said, pulling up in front of the house.

  “Then, wherever it was I could see it easily,” I said, getting out of the car and lifting my bike out of the backseat.

  “Whenever you wanted to, whenever you wanted to,” he said, his voice getting lower than it usually was.

  “I’ll see you again, Hugo,” he said, looking up at me standing beside the car with my bicycle.

  “Will you?” I said. “This is kind of strange.” I could see through the screen door where my mother was lying on the couch reading under the lamplight. “This is kind of strange,” I repeated.

  “Strange is best,” he said, and pulled away. Where was he going, I wondered? I didn’t know if he’d moved into the house Mom had found him yet or not.

  I fastened my bike to a pillar on the front porch.

  “Hi,” said Mom. “Shouldn’t you bring that inside?

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said, unlocking it again and wheeling it into the living room. Mom was lying on the wicker sofa reading a sizable book.

  “What are you reading?” I asked her.

  “The Romanoffs,” she said. “A very wild family. But not boring.”

  “Didn’t they just identify the bones of the last czar and his family?”

  “That’s what the paper claims,” she said, sitting up. “I thought you’d be home before this.”

  “I had to stay and help with the glasses,” I told her.

  When you lie, you must lie with conviction. The slightest hesitation and they’re onto you. Mom told me once, “Don’t ever underestimate how intelligent other people are, even if they seem stupid.” And I don’t, I don’t. “I thought I heard a car?”

  “One of the guys gave me a lift home in his convertible. I put my bike in the backseat,” I told her.

  “A nice guy?”

  “A very nice guy.” Telling some of the truth.

  “Earn any tips?”

  “Not bad, not bad at all.” Which was also true. I hate lying to my mom and maybe I won’t do this ver
y long. Maybe I can figure out some other way to make some money. I really hate not being up front with her. But she also told me, “Don’t lie and pretend you’re not guilty of something if you are. If you’re guilty, you’re guilty. You’ll never be not guilty, no matter how much you pretend. Just hoist that guilt on your back and keep trucking. Not being guilty isn’t important. It’s realizing that we all become guilty as we proceed through life. Just tuck it away and keep going.” At the time I wondered what she was guilty of that she had tucked away. Now I was beginning to get the picture. I didn’t like it but it wasn’t going to hurt my love for her.

  The next day, Sunday, I called Macha and asked her if she wanted to go to the beach. “It’s raining,” she pointed out.

  “You’re right,” I said, “but we could put on our raincoats and walk on the boardwalk.”

  “Right,” she said and came over and picked me up in her car. Macha just learned to drive this year and her parents got her a Miata, which her father really considers his car, but she zips around in it all the time. They’re happy if she’s just on Miami Beach going to school and driving her friends to the beach, instead of raging down to Key West in the dead of night.

  I like the sun, but I think I love the rain. Walking on the boardwalk in the rain is a Miami Beach most people don’t know. No one is on the beach. The lifeguards are huddled up in their little pavilions on stilts. And real Miami Beach people come out to see the gray waves, the birds scudding low over the water, the line of freighters offshore, waiting their turn to come into dock.

  You never think about the people on the boats when it’s sunny, but in the rain you can imagine all those little Chinese cooks sitting about tossing the I Ching or playing mah-jongg or smoking opium. Killing time until the sun comes out and it’s our usual old Miami Beach again.