Gigolo

by Ben Foster

  When I arrived, the door was open. The studio was silent. Shadows climbed the walls and the photographs seemed more ominous in the evening light. There was a new addition to the sculpture display: Big Ben on a white pedestal cast in bronze. I had seen it before, Annabel had one, so did Maggs and Maddy Page, but it was still weird.

  I went through to the bedroom and called.

  ‘Vivienne. Vivienne. I’m here.’

  I heard a muffled sound from the wardrobe. I slid the door open. She was coiled up like a foetus behind her clothes, knees against her chest, her hair covering her face. I tried to urge her to come out and she persuaded me to climb in beside her. She slid the door back in place and I held her in my arms while she cried.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you doing in the wardrobe?’

  ‘Hiding.’

  I didn’t ask why. I knew why. People with everything get depressed the same as everyone else.

  ‘You slipped off the highwire,’ I said and her sniffles had a different tone. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Just stay here with you.’

  ‘We can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s no happy ever after for people like us.’

  We were quiet, just holding each other. Then she unzipped my fly. In the cramped space, she took me into her mouth. Her movements were slow, methodical, as if she were drawing out my energy, refilling her own. I ejaculated. Then we kissed.

  ‘Who are you, Ben Foster? What are you doing in my closet?’

  ‘It’s a mystery to me.’

  ‘You’re the cuckoo’s egg in the nest of the phoenix.’

  ‘That sounds hot.’

  ‘Let’s go somewhere.’

  We stepped out of the wardrobe. We hugged for a moment. She seemed small, fragile. Her features were drawn. She was clutching her stomach.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m better now.’

  I watched her dress in a tartan skirt, white blouse, green blazer, black stockings with suspenders and flat shoes. She pinned up her hair and added a straw hat with a plaid ribbon that trailed over the back of the brim. She turned from the mirror smiling, then tensed up again.

  ‘I have to eat something.’

  I followed her into the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty except for bottles of sauces and champagne, a carton of soya milk. There were two bananas going black. She mashed them in a bowl and added a splash of soya. She ate quickly and looked like a schoolgirl with a milky moustache.

  ‘A snack’s like a kiss before orgasm,’ she said.

  ‘Or after, in this case,’ I replied.

  She laughed. She wiped the milk from her top lip, then raised both arms as if she were about to execute a dive.

  ‘To infinity and beyond,’ she cried.

  We chased down six flights of stairs to the street and climbed into the yellow Ferrari. The hood was down. She drove as if on the wall of death, the road unwinding with surreal logic to the gates of Southley. Aurélie, the French girl at reception, studied Vivienne with arched eyebrows as she booked the suite in the old building.

  ‘Do you have any luggage?’ she asked, knowing we didn’t.

  ‘We only have each other,’ Vivienne replied, and took my arm, a scrap of gossip for Aurélie to share with the spa.

  The suite occupied the entire top floor. The windows were like portholes on a ship and looked out in all four directions. The night was clear and clean, full of stars to guide us. I remembered that boy on a fishing boat at night, the lap of the waves, the steady boom of the engine. Vivienne was starving. While she ordered from room service, I closed the door to the bedroom and called Kelly to say I was still at work.

  ‘I’ll probably stay over,’ I said.

  ‘People want massages in the middle of the night?’

  ‘There’s a reception. It’s going to go on late. I have to be back early . . . ’ We fell silent. ‘How was your class today?’

  ‘It was all about perspective.’

  ‘Keeping it?’

  ‘Maintaining it,’ she replied. She paused. ‘Take care. Love you.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  Kelly must have known all along that it wasn’t massage alone that propelled money into our bank account. Subconsciously, she had stopped thinking about the means, and was concerned solely with the bottom line. We were a partnership. It was all about asset building, cash flow. I had spoken often about rich people being confident because they went to private schools. It had influenced Kelly to want that for our children. Now that Ollie was almost seven, she had brought home brochures from Willington, a prep school close to where we lived with fees of £3,000 a year. He would be mixing with boys whose parents would appreciate her unconventional photography. Could we afford it? Could we afford not to?

  I looked at the photo of my kids on the screen-saver and buried the phone in my pocket.

  Vivienne studied me as I approached across the suite. I sat beside her on the sofa.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s . . . actually, she’s happy.’

  ‘I envy her. It’s not easy being happy.’

  ‘It depends where you’re starting from. Kelly was working in a laundry washing other people’s dirty clothes. Now she’s learning to be a photographer.’

  ‘Thanks to you.’

  She turned to look at me. I had never told her anything like that before and regretted that I had.

  ‘Not really . . . ’

  ‘You’re one of the good guys, Ben. There aren’t many.’

  ‘Course there are. You just have to know where to look.’

  ‘What do you think I was doing in my closet,’ she said and the mood changed as we laughed.

  We ate omelettes and fries. We drank a bottle of wine. Vivienne was always full of energy. But, that night, she was exhausted and fell asleep as we snuggled up on the sofa in front of the TV. I turned it off and gazed out at the dark night. I could hear birds on the roof. The moon was rising, pale and gaunt. I stroked her hair. I wasn’t sure what we were doing in Southley. It meant something. It always meant something. I was persistently unfaithful to Kelly. I was unfaithful to her every single day. But I never felt disloyal. With Vivienne, it was different. I was more than just a gigolo. Rescuing her from the wardrobe had created a sense of conspiracy. We shared a secret.

  The following morning, we swam and made love under the power shower. We had breakfast and watched as Bethany entered the dining room, all in black, fiercely efficient. Vivienne gave her an enthusiastic wave and asked her to join us. She took a photograph of Bethany and me. She asked me to take a picture of Bethany and her, then flicked through her collection showing Bethany shots of herself falling from a horse. I had no idea why Vivienne was doing this, but when she left Southley that morning, Bethany was unusually pleasant for the rest of the day.

  Having set the precedent of staying away for the night, it was easier to justify my absences on the two occasions that came up before the rich crowd migrated for the summer.

  The first occasion was a week later. I met Vivienne at the studio, a car drove us to Heathrow and we flew first class to Amsterdam. A hotel courtesy car was waiting to take us to the Waldorf Astoria, an imposing 17th-century palace a short walk from Dam Square. Southley was upmarket. The Waldorf Astoria was old-fashioned luxury.

  Our suite was below the eaves with views over the rooftops. We slept late in a bed big enough to hide in and had breakfast at noon with fizzing mimosas. We made love on the white sofa, then stood naked like a sculpture gazing at our reflections multiplied around the bathroom.

  ‘In an invisible mirror you see your invisible self,’ she said.

  ‘It would hide all your faults.’

  ‘If you have any.’ She turned. ‘Don’t let’s shower. I want to smell you on me all day.’

  The sky was streaked in cloud. We walked arm in arm along the edge of the canals wi
thout a need for talking. I loved being a foreigner in a foreign place. It was like escaping from yourself. The hands on the clock had stilled. I couldn’t read the advertising hoardings or understand what anyone was saying.

  We smoked marijuana in a coffee house. We went to the marijuana museum, the sex museum, sex shops with dildos in every colour, shape and size. She bought a nun’s habit with scarlet underwear, a black monk’s costume for me; a whip. We rode bicycles and visited the house where the diarist Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. We ambled through the national Rijksmuseum and, across the square, the museum showing the work of Vincent Van Gogh.

  ‘He was poor all his life,’ she said. ‘Now his paintings sell for millions.’

  ‘Isn’t that what they call irony?’

  ‘All life is irony. It would be unbearable if it wasn’t.’

  It was late afternoon, not so crowded. It was possible to be alone for a moment and study the paintings. I had never understood art. I had thought you had to know about the painters and their times. I realised that day that you didn’t need to know anything at all. Art either grabs you, or it doesn’t. I stared at the thick furious swirls of oil paint giving life to flowers in vases, the stormy night sky bursting with stars. I could see myself in Van Gogh’s self-portrait. He was suffering a terrible pain he couldn’t rationalise or understand. Perhaps just the pain of living. I would never be able to explain it. But I felt it. Vivienne stood beside me.

  ‘You’re crying,’ she said. She pulled on my lapels and licked away my tears. ‘I wanted to tell you something. I’m clean.’

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘I’ve kicked coke. I’m so happy.’

  She led the way to the men’s toilets where we made love against the wall in one of the cubicles. We could hear water flushing, the sound of men peeing against the urinals, the main door opening and closing. Her voice rose in a stifled cry as she climaxed. Everything was suddenly clear, her hiding that day in the wardrobe, the stomach cramps, the mood swings, Amsterdam.

  We wandered among the crowds through the narrow alleyways of De Wallen, the red light district, where the prostitutes display themselves from behind glass windows. We stopped and she pointed at a transvestite.

  ‘Do you fancy her?’

  ‘With a tranny, I wonder who puts what into whom.’

  She laughed. We walked on. We stopped at another window, a girl of about twenty with moon white skin and green eyes.

  ‘I do envy them,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘You envy the idea, not the reality.’

  ‘You’re getting so clever. Why don’t you kiss me?’

  We kissed. Then she looked into my eyes.

  ‘There in an innate pleasure in falling from grace,’ she said. ‘The feeling that you are doing wrong. Working girls are wise women. They know things.’

  She could have been talking about me. Not that I was wise, or the girls in glass cages were wise. They fucked for money. The same as me. I didn’t know if Vivienne was blind to this, or if it was all part of some complex game. The first time I went to her apartment, she gave me a cheque for £500. When I told her it was too much, she said: Not for a work of art in progress.

  Anyone who had seen her lick away my tears in the Van Gogh museum would have seen two people in love. But Vivienne didn’t believe in love. That was her problem.

  24

  CITY OF LOVE

  Vivienne tapped the face of her watch as she observed me approach, out of breath and jogging at a steady pace. She was standing outside her building where a driver was loading a pair of Louis Vuitton suitcases into the back of a vehicle.

  ‘You are a very naughty boy. I was about to leave without you,’ she said. ‘Did you remember your passport?’

  ‘Oh my God, I don’t think I did,’ I replied. I ran through my pockets. ‘No, hang on, here it is.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’ She touched a fingertip to her cheek. ‘You may kiss me.’

  The second I did so, she moved away. I threw my gym bag in with the cases and we took off for London City Airport, a twelve mile journey that took an hour. When we arrived, we found Maggs and James Chipping in the lounge gathering up the free newspapers and magazines. On the floor, gripped between the Minister’s polished brogues, was an official red box. He handed it to me.

  ‘Take this, there’s a good chap,’ he said.

  We walked through the security formalities to the loading bay and climbed the steps into an 8-seater Learjet. The engine was already running.

  The Minister hooked wire-framed glasses over his ears and read from folders in his ministerial box. Vivienne and Maggs flicked through magazines and gossiped. I stretched out in the big pale cream leather seat. I was going up in the world. I had flown economy to the Canaries, first class to Amsterdam, but you can’t beat a private jet. We buckled up for take-off. I gazed down at the slate grey English Channel until the plane climbed into the clouds and a male steward served coffee.

  We were whisked through passport control at Paris Le Bourget. A porter with a full beard and white robes pushed the luggage on a trolley out to a waiting car and the wide roads took us into the city centre in forty minutes. Adjoining suites had been reserved at the Hotel Meurice. We went to our rooms to ‘freshen up,’ and dashed off to have lunch at Les Deux Magots where, according to Vivienne, Ernest Hemingway always hogged the stove in winter while he wrote his short stories.

  ‘Writers have such cold souls,’ Maggs said. ‘Except you.’

  ‘I’m just a dilettante,’ Vivienne replied.

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ added the Minister.

  This was funny for some reason and they laughed.

  Vivienne caught the eye of the waiter and pointed to the empty wine bottle. He touched his hand to his chest, gave a theatrical bow, and hurried off to fetch another.

  Vivienne was all in white, a sheer blouse, narrow, calf-length pants, thick-soled trainers, a loose jacket. She was always chic. Now she was French chic with the addition of a red beret and round sunglasses. Heads turned. The way men smiled at her had less of a sexual connotation, more an appreciation of her beauty. She acknowledged the flattery by returning the smile and I understood why the City of Light was also the City of Love.

  While Maggs and the Minister went to the Louvre, Vivienne and I raced off to the Latin Quarter to see The Panthéon, the resting place of Victor Hugo, the man who wrote Les Misérables.

  ‘Critics always tell us this book and that book will change our lives,’ she said. ‘Only Les Misérables changed my life.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ I replied, and she looked back at me with a surprised expression.

  ‘I changed from a socialite to a socialist.’

  ‘You are being ironical?’

  ‘No, I am not, actually. You always underestimate me.’

  ‘That’s not true. I think you’re amazing.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘I do. But you’re hardly a revolutionary, Vivienne. I’ve seen a photograph of you with the Queen.’

  ‘She’s a sweetie.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘I’m a revolutionary up here. Where it matters. You haven’t kissed me since we arrived.’

  ‘I thought I was in your bad books.’

  ‘Are you?’

  We kissed for the tourists.

  We hailed a cab and the vehicle wriggled like an eel through the narrow streets to the Eiffel Tower. We chased up the first two floors then took the elevator to the top where Paris encircled us, the most beautiful city I had ever seen, not that I had seen that many. The driver had waited, doors open, moustache twitching. He kissed Vivienne’s hand when she gave him €100 and he took off for our next destination as if his very life depended on it.

  The launch waiting for us on the banks of the Seine was nothing like a fishing trawler. It was long, low, white and narrow with brass trim, wide windows and a crew in sparkling white uniforms. It even smelt good. Maggs and James were with several buttoned up couples, men in blazers, women with a disdainful air. E
veryone knew everyone and everyone spoke French. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it sounded romantic.

  We set off at a leisurely pace. A pair of seagulls stood on the stern rail watching to see what the propellers threw up to the surface. The sun caught the spray so that it shimmered like silver coins and the air had a distinctly French aroma, cologne, coffee and croissants. I was surprised to see so much activity on the river banks, cafés, stalls with paintings and antiques, booksellers.

  A woman in a straw hat with a large brim who had seen me standing alone on deck left the salon and came to join me. She pointed at a church with a large dome and said something I didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,’ I said, and she looked mystified.

  ‘Then you should learn,’ she replied, and walked off again.

  We arrived back at the Meurice at nine, leaving barely enough time for a quickie in the round bath before changing for dinner.

  Vivienne wore a black leather pencil skirt with a zip up the front, a top consisting of leather straps and zips like a harness. In stilettos and dark glasses, she looked like an advert for BDSM. I wore a black suit and a thin black tie like a character from Reservoir Dogs. James Chipping was his debonair self in his white suit. Maggs was ultra-glam in a pink gown with her breasts exposed to full effect and an emerald necklace that matched her eyes.

  Our table for six was in the back corner of the restaurant. J-J and Annabel rushed in with two security guards who sat at another table watching for paparazzi and public nuisances. J-J hated all that shit, but it was in the contract. After all the kissing and complimenting, he talked about his twin pit bulls – Mark and Bark – that he missed, his kids who were a pain in the ass, and his best friend who had run off with his wife.

  James leaned across the table.

  ‘When your best friend steals your wife, the best revenge is to let him keep her.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck ’em.’

  We laughed and drank wine.

  J-J wasn’t only shorter, he was ten year older than he appeared when he was on screen, but dressed young in ragged jeans, Converse All-Stars, a tee-shirt with the words ‘I’m With Stupid,’ and a black suit jacket with badges and stains. There was a smart-casual dress code, but it doesn’t apply beyond a certain level of fame. You didn’t notice J-J’s clothes, you just recognised J-J. He had small perfect features, sparkling teeth, brown eyes with long lashes. He was a capable actor, but still it was hard to know why he had been picked out from the seven billion people on the planet to be a living god.