by Edmund White
I asked Pia about her brother and for any news of Francesco. She seemed touched by my asking after both men and lit up, saying, “Alfredo is okay. And Francesco—well, you know, he’s so delightfully crazy. But Jack is really the one I’m worried about.”
“Oh? Why?”
“You haven’t noticed anything?”
“No, but I’m not terribly observant.”
“He’s so lonely. Why doesn’t he have a lover?”
“If you ask me, he enjoys being a free spirit. He loves sexual adventures.”
“Then he could find a boyfriend who is equally … adventurous. Promiscuous. But he needs the human warmth. A constant companion. The intimacy, no?”
I said, “I guess we all do.”
“Really?” She pushed her hair back almost defiantly behind one ear.
“I do,” I said. “Do you?”
“Of course,” she said. Then, distancing herself, she added, “In principle we all need warmth.”
I looked at her so intensely that she lowered her eyes.
“But you know Jack so much better than I do,” I said.
She said, “Have you ever noticed how he never talks about his parents or his childhood? Americans always talk about their childhood. They find little stupid traumas to complain about. Europeans never do that—we’re much too private, and why bore other people? Everyone had a bad childhood, anyway. Everyone except dull normals, who are to be pitied. Americans aren’t really friends until they’ve exchanged incest confessions or a dramatic story of Papa’s refusal to come to the horse show the day you won your first blue ribbon.”
I laughed, happy merely to listen to her voice, to watch her as she rattled on. I felt that her breasts were performing under her blouse just for me.
“But Jack never talks about anything that happened before boarding school. And he loved his school, unlike most rich American boys, who complain that they were banished to boarding school by selfish, superficial parents.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “He’s never volunteered a word about his childhood.”
“And have you actually ever asked him anything about it?” she said, looking over the tops of imaginary glasses, though I refused to be scolded.
“I didn’t dare,” I said.
“You can be cold, Will.”
“How so?”
“I’ve learned the hard way.”
“I can also be very affectionate. Once I have my priorities straight.”
“Are they straight now?”
I nodded and looked at her, pouring as much warmth as I could into my eyes. But they were so deep-set that I wondered if she could read them.
On our way out she glanced at my crotch and saw my erection. She looked uncomfortable and confused, but then she caught my eye and smiled—a startled smile of embarrassment, pure reaction, and then she melted into a conspiratorial little grin.
“Oh, what the hey,” she said half grudgingly.
She took my hand and led me back to her apartment building. We went in silence. I didn’t remind her of the afternoon appointment she’d pretended to have.
Once I was inside her, I felt my brain unscrambling. I was so happy to be with her—I’d really thought it would never happen again—that I kept standing aside mentally and trying to memorize everything we were doing. I observed my right hand on her left breast and my left hand circling her waist and cinching her up more tightly against me. I was glorying in her full, wet mouth, which still tasted of the creamy pasta and bitter espresso. We’d thrown ourselves across the bed, and she’d swept the thirty little pillows to the floor. The sunlight was hot, and we both stretched and untangled in it in a slow photosynthesis of pleasure and desire.
She had her orgasm first, and her contralto moans and tear-filled eyes made me widen and tighten into a band of gleaming steel above her—I could feel my whole body taking on bulk and sheen. Her pelvic thrusts seemed involuntary and completely unstoppable, whereas I was poised above her in a hot, milled point of pure will. She was fucking my cock with her cunt. I wasn’t doing anything, just holding still. And then I finally collapsed beside her, my body jerking in the aftershocks. She’d never seen me twitch like that before. She half sat up in delight at the effect she’d produced and trailed her hand across my pelvis, which made me jackknife and wince.
Two minutes after it was all over, I started worrying—she was wearing that damn jasmine perfume again, and I realized I’d have to go to a barber shop in Grand Central and get the man to douse me in some cheap hair tonic, that clear blue stuff, which would disguise her perfume.
She’d bitten me on the neck, and when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I realized it would turn into a blue-brown hickey—luckily it was just below the shirt-collar level, but for the next four days I’d have to undress in the dark.
How childish, I thought. Does that mean she wants to lay a bigger, louder, more obvious claim on me?
To hell with her.
Before I left, she could see that I was angry. I looked at my watch and actually slapped my forehead and went rushing out with kisses and promises to be in touch soon and thanks for taking me back—“into the fold.” I literally said that. We both looked shocked and then laughed. Into the fold. Thank god we laughed.
I had the station barber give me a Mafia-style razor cut and drench me in cheap toilet water. Even he, looking at my hickey, winced, though he was an unflappable old man who held up the mirror for inspection without any sort of expression on his face. He gently powdered my neck and ears with a cloud of talc.
“That’s the worst haircut you’ve ever had, Will Wright,” Alex exclaimed, standing on tiptoe to kiss me. “You look like a corrections officer. And you smell like a cheap whorehouse.”
I held her face between my hands and said pensively, “Oh, I thought you only knew about the expensive kind.”
“Touché,” she whispered.
Her lips, unlike Pia’s, were thin, and her tongue made darting motions that somehow years ago she’d decided I adored, just as I’d decided Alex loved glass paperweights with snow scenes inside them. I’d been bringing them home to her after every business trip when one day she came out with, “Actually I detest snow scenes.” I’d been hurt for a moment—and then laughed at the whole misunderstanding. I’d never had the courage to tell her I hated her little darting tongue motions.
During the next few days I’d be sitting in my office around three in the afternoon, usually after a two-martini lunch, and I’d reach down under my desk to rearrange my half-erection, and a black wheel of dots would start to turn before my eyes, and my mouth would fill up with saliva. I could see myself standing beside the bed Pia was lying on, where she was naked except for her pearls, one pearl in her mouth, her nails small and dark red. The minute the mood turned sexual, Pia would switch off her social smiles. She became heavy, logy, even sullen with sluttishness, unlike Alex, who, when she wasn’t grinning like a mother at her child’s piano recital, was narrowing her eyes and compressing her lips in what she imagined was a dreamy, romantic expression.
As I was phoning Pia to see if I could drop by, I thought, This could all work out. With any luck I could get a good ten years of sluttishness out of Pia, Alex none the wiser. After a decade of service I would renegotiate—by then Pia would be too old and fat and irritating. She certainly wasn’t becoming finer or less predictable, nor was she slimming down or toning up.
My own cynicism disgusted me. Even when I’d been at my horniest as a teenager, I’d never dreamed of mechanizing my pleasures. Maybe that was why I could never cook up new jerk-off fantasies, but could only replay the few exciting moments I’d already tasted in real life.
There was nothing systematic or abstract about my desires; they were linked to particular girls and particular moments, repeatable only in my memory. And maybe that’s why I treasured a woman’s responses to my ministrations, her writhing and thrashing about. Since I couldn’t dream up new delights, I had to dwell on t
hose that experience had already afforded me.
I’d always been an idealist. I’d never been practical about guaranteeing myself a regular regimen of sex. To me each encounter was a miracle, a one-time thing. A unique and perfect surprise. To keep a sex partner on the side, ready and receptive, was like keeping a milk cow in the barn for the children’s meals, too heartless a convenience.
Again I blamed the Catholic church. It had taught me that sin was a regular part of my life, that sex was a sin I had best contain. Now I contested everything about the Catholic solution, starting with the idea that “sex” was an identifiable unit of human and animal activity, rather than an abstract word flung over disparate feelings and motions with only a spurious unity, like a tarp thrown over junk in a rummage sale. That was “sex.” Every bit as unreal as “sin,” a linguistic or theological convenience.
I longed to be pagan, to intuit a god in every mountain, a nymph in every tree. I wanted my gods to be schemers, temperamental bullies ready to ignite and go up in flames. No better or wiser than human beings, just immortal and bigger and more powerful.
I despised Catholicism, but I’d been so thoroughly catechized that I still half crossed myself when I passed a church. I still felt abashed when Christmas came and went without my attending mass. When we traveled to Mexico one winter, I felt half envious and half ashamed as I watched the Aztec pilgrims crawl on their knees up the countless steps leading to a cathedral. Behind the altar hung hundreds and hundreds of ex-votos—tin replicas of eyes, a leg, a soldier—to testify to the miraculous protection or cures attributed to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
My mother never reproached me for losing my faith, but her own piety filled me with a melancholy regret. She’d never defend or even discuss her religion, but she lived it, and nothing more needed to be said. I thought of all the pointless debates I’d heard over the years about God, the authority of the Bible, the likelihood of the afterlife. My mother’s inarguable faith trumped all those words. She had a good sense of humor and could see how greedy our local priest was for extra sweets. When someone brought up the question of purgatory and how many days one might be sentenced to spend in it, she would make the charming little gesture of brushing cobwebs out of her face. In fact, my mother’s smiling approbation of the foibles of our local priest and her tacit impatience with the fine points of dogma rendered her more benign in my eyes. “Your mother is a very good woman,” my father would say threateningly with a strange emphasis, as if he feared that her piety was too subtle and refined for me to grasp. My mother was so kind that once she said that she believed in hell because it was doctrinal, but she thought no one was in it.
Pia was Catholic, or rather papist. She saw the church as a political entity to be reckoned with, and she liked to say that there was no church in the world less spiritual or more imperial than St. Peter’s. When Jack asked her what she thought of the Pope’s policies on abortion and birth control and a celibate clergy and homosexuality, she just shrugged and said, “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t think up all that crap. They’re traditions. I thought you liked traditions, Jack. Aren’t you a traditional man?”
In response Jack widened his eyes and touched his chest and whispered stagily to an unseen observer, “Traditional? Me?”
Pia ran into a Roman friend, Beatrice, who was working as a New York correspondent for a communist newspaper. Beatrice was a duchess and a communist, the Red Duchess, they called her, but she lived grandly with a tall, polished Texan who Pia assured me spoke good Italian. He was named Wyatt, and he was a rich trader in commodities.
Pia said, “Beatrice and Wyatt are the perfect couple. They have her title and his money, and they’re both communists. Him not so much, but what the hey. I know you Americans can be alarmist about communism, but it’s really very chic, especially if the people are of the intelligentsia and chic.”
“What complete bullshit, Pia,” I said. She really was moronic sometimes. “So it’s ‘you Americans’ now, huh?” I asked.
“I’m happy for Beatrice,” Pia said, ignoring me. “She’s way up in her thirties, and I’m sure she thought she’d never find anyone. She had an affair with Angela’s assistant, a black boy much younger than her named Jake, and she even had a little girl with him called Aïda. But he was a real nobody and unreliable, ten years younger and poor. Wyatt loves Aïda, though he’s a Texan and you’d think he wouldn’t—they’re racist, right?”
I didn’t want to discuss it. I shrugged and shook my head.
“Yes, I’m sure they are,” she said. “But Wyatt’s not. He’s adorable and very enlightened and chic—a communist, as I said, not so frequent in Texas.”
“You’re right. Not so frequent in Texas.”
“I hope you’re not being sarcastic. Anyway, Wyatt is going to marry Beatrice, and I’m so happy for her and Aïda. She needs some stability in her life, and with such an attractive man!”
In Pia’s private language, “attractive” usually meant rich.
I said, “I wonder if he’s going to invite Aïda back to Texas to meet his folks.”
Pia rolled her eyes, but my question was half serious.
“Aïda’s going to be the flower girl,” she said. “The wedding will be up here. Actually, in Bar Harbor. That’s where they’re holding the wedding.”
We spent an evening with them. Beatrice was less scatterbrained than Pia, and I couldn’t tell if she much liked Pia. She knew a lot about politics and had an eight-track of “Bella Ciao” that she’d turn up and sing along to—in that hoarse voice of hers, I imagined, even in her car as she sped through the city. Singing the communist partisan song without a trace of a smile.
Wyatt didn’t have a Texas accent, though he did wear the most beautifully tooled boots I’d ever seen and jeans and a Saville Row dark blue blazer. He was light and cheerful in the regulation high-society manner and made no shadows, unlike me. He was extremely polite, almost as if he were the duke, and insisted that I go through a door first—and he touched my shoulder frequently with his huge hand as he guided me around and asked me lots of questions but not nosy ones. Maybe because I hoped to impress Wyatt, I told him I’d published a novel. “That’s terrific,” he said. “I’d like to write something someday.”
Unlike most people, he didn’t ask me if I’d had a bestseller or a movie sale. He was too sophisticated for that, I supposed. And I was impressed when he went on to confide in me by saying, “But I don’t have the courage to write. Or the talent. That’s the biggest problem—no talent.”
“You should write about the life you live,” I said. “Most writers are schoolteachers living in little provincial towns. You live with a duchess in New York.”
“I’m just a simple boy from Lubbock.”
He looked up with a grin from the cocktails he was mixing.
“Sure,” I said, “but you also know about Tuscany and Wall Street.”
“People don’t want to read about privileged lives,” he said and sighed.
I thought of a new reason to hate Catholicism. It had robbed me of sophisticated, sensual adventures I might have written about. Wyatt was probably a Baptist, such a stupid religion that it must have been all too easy for him to shed. There were no Baptist Dantes or Michelangelos or Palestrinas. Catholicism retained all the authority of its great art, even the contemporary work of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor, of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was hard to throw over a religion that had been defined by such geniuses.
Later I asked Pia if Wyatt and Beatrice disapproved of my being a married man, and she replied, “Since there is no divorce in Italy, everyone is married to the wrong person. It’s a fact of life.”
But even though she said that, I felt that something had changed for her. Maybe after seeing Beatrice’s happiness, she could imagine getting married herself to some big, “attractive” man. I felt she was on the lookout for someone more suitable than me. Maybe she’d thought she was too old to marry, yet Beatrice had proved th
at a woman in her late thirties was still viable. Pia was fond of me, even still in love with me, but she was no longer picturing a future with me.
When we said good-bye as I headed off for several days with Alex and the children, she still got tears in her eyes, but now she looked away and tried to hide them, no longer using them as emotional blackmail. Before, she had liked it when I’d talked dirty to her on the phone. She’d giggle, and I could hear her breathing more heavily. Now she changed the subject, as if she found my obscenities obscene.
Nor did she respond as she once had to my silly love-talk. If I called her Honey Bunch or Puddnin’ Pie or La Mia Pizza Margherita, she seemed exasperated. One day I said to her, “You don’t like me to sweet-talk you anymore or to dirty-talk you.”
And she said, “Are you only now realizing that things have changed between us?”
I didn’t dare ask her how they’d changed, or if she’d found someone new, because I was afraid of the answer. I couldn’t offer her marriage or even a sleepover date. I gave her an old jade necklace, but she looked embarrassed and begged me to take it back, to give it to someone more “suitable.” For once she didn’t even sound bitter at this allusion to Alex. If she had found someone new, how long would it take her to tell me? Maybe the new man had to extricate himself from another marriage. There were no eligible bachelors—straight ones—in their late thirties or older. There were a few widowers, but they were an actuarial rarity and were snapped up instantly. Some men her age got divorced, but usually only for younger women. A real hard-core bachelor of forty was obviously suffering from a dangerous personality disorder.
I felt that my days with Pia were numbered, I who had been so confident just a few weeks previously, so sure that she might last me for a good decade.
We continued to make love two or three times a week, but we were both less excited, which made the act seem tiresome and vaguely sordid. Twice she said she had a headache, and once she pleaded her period, though surely it wasn’t the right time of the month for that. (I was highly aware of the timetable for her periods because they were always so painful and copious, and she often took to her bed looking sallow and exhausted.) Once she winced when I licked her nipples, and I wondered if “he” had been working them over the night before.