by Livia Ellis
Memoirs
of a
Gigolo
Happy St. Patrick’s Day Oliver
Livia Ellis
Back to Ireland
I spent four years in Ireland. Sometimes I find it difficult to imagine it’s been five years since I’ve returned to England. What have I accomplished in the intervening years that even compares to what I did during those years in Dublin?
Nothing. Not a thing. Five years of wasted opportunities and infinite squandering of possibility. I’m not even thirty but yet I already look back on my life with thoughts of what might have been rather than wonder what could still be.
In my quiet moments, when my mind stills just enough for the normal buzz of my rambling inner dialog to be silenced, I think thoughts like I should have gone to graduate school. If I’d gone to graduate school I’d have a doctoral degree at this moment and probably a very different life. At least I would have a job.
I wasn’t properly thinking during those years in Dublin. I’ll admit it. I let Renata and her insanity drag me along in her wake. Hindsight is nothing if not a walk of shame through the past. If I ever have children I know I will tell them one thing and one thing only – they are worthy of love. They don’t have to cling to the first person that offers them some affection out of fear it will never be offered to them again. They will find love and loose it and then find it again. I know this from experience. If I’d known then what I know now, I never would have spent so much of my psychic energy trying to get someone incapable of loving even herself to love me.
Finishing school was not the end for me. I wanted to go to graduate school. It wasn’t because I didn’t know what else to do. I liked school. I was good at school. My obscure interests in things long dead and gone had a place in higher learning. I wanted to go to graduate school because I loved school. I was also afraid to leave it behind. What else was there for me? My parents never actively encouraged me to be or do anything. My father, as far as I could tell, did nothing of any value since providing the XY chromosome encoded sperm that created me. His job was done after producing a male child. The long road from that coupling in the back of a car to his death would be filled with a whole lot of nothing.
What I don’t understand is why my father, a man of not limited intelligence, never did more with his life. I think it had something to do with my grandfather. Achieving anything beyond a superb tan and abdominal muscles a much younger man would envy might actually make my grandfather proud of him. My father would have preferred to die unfulfilled than doing anything that his father would approve of. I, unlike my father, wanted that approval. The only thing I’ve done in my life that garnered any praise from my grandfather was achieving so superbly in school.
Actually that is incorrect.
I have another achievement he considered to be nothing short of splendiferous.
He died believing I would marry my former fiancée.
This was an achievement in his mind.
I’d bagged a wealthy wife. My worth was wholly invested in my ability to marry and procreate. My value to my family lay in being an attractive prospect to a woman who could restore the family coffers. This idea is so backwardly Byzantine it makes my head hurt.
I liked school. I wanted to stay in school – forever. If I had been thinking clearly and only of me and what I wanted when I graduated this is the path I would have taken.
I could easily visualize myself lecturing in one of those grim and brutalistic concrete bunkers they called theatres in the Arts Block at Trinity.
There is something ironical in that the arts in the premier university in Ireland are housed in the ugliest building on what is otherwise a beautiful campus. Boggles the mind.
Had my grandfather known I wanted to go to graduate school his magnetic pull might have been stronger than Renata’s. Which is probably why I never revealed this desire to him. I was too afraid of losing Renata than I desirous of fulfilling my own desires. My grandfather was focused on Renata the way he once focused on my mother. He did not approve of her with the same burning fire he did not approve of my mother. Any avenue which could be exploited to separate the two of us would have been explored. From the moment I graduated from college until I met my former fiancée, he led a focused campaign directed at finding me a suitable wife. That my former fiancée presented herself at precisely the right moment was a fluke.
My fatal error was letting Renata know, before anyone else, that I was considering staying on for more schooling. Her response came at me as if I had asked her permission rather than informed her of my intention. It’s possible I sought out her permission. I wanted her approval which I equated with love.
Good thing that’s a thing of the past.
Renata simply said no. She was done living in Dublin. She wanted to return to England. Besides, school bored her and it was just too much work, so spoke the woman that used poor graduate students in need of money to write her papers when I refused to help her cheat.
I loved her and wanted to make her happy.
I so feared being without someone to love me that I capitulated.
This was the depth of my loneliness and fear of abandonment.
I didn’t apply to graduate school. I wrote Renata’s senior thesis along with my own because I loved her and wanted her to love me.
Somehow she made it through the exams.
The following October when I returned with my parents and my grandparents for commencement she was off somewhere in the South Pacific with a Rastafarian. The man had a Jamaican accent that sort of came and went like the tide. She’d picked up in London. She let him move in with us and called me uptight when I protested. She liked to think of herself as a vegan hippy at this moment. The Rastafarian liked to tell me in great detail and depth with disturbing regularity what my problem was - I was a capitalist bourgeois pig that lived off the backs of others, and how I could be happy - namely giving his mission to bring his new religion to the world - all of my money.
I was able to get rid of both of them by conspicuously leaving a large sum of cash easily accessible and making it clear I’d be gone for no less than two nights. They took the bait. I returned home to the apartment in London after four days to find a note from Renata suggesting I learn to “chill out” and a promise that she’d call me when she’d cleansed her chi of my negative mojo. Or some bullshit like that.
Fucking hippy dipshits.
I drew a line under my relationship with Renata and never looked back. I considered applying for graduate school. But it always felt as if that ship had sailed. That door was somehow closed to me. All I had left was to cultivate that image of a devil-may-care playboy and find a wife. And it worked. I met scores of appropriate women. I just wasn’t quite ready to settle down. But I knew based on experience that when I decided to get married, the field was open to me. I could pluck a wealthy wife from the crowd like a cherry from a bowl.
How wrong I was.
Return to Ireland
Here I am. So many years later. Headed to Ireland. Just me, Marcus, Avan, and Elon. A lad’s trip to attend a party that has all sorts of salacious undertones. Every detail is wrapped in secrecy. The invitation was a work of art. Someone, somewhere, took the time and the effort to handwrite invitations on paper so thick it was nearly cardboard. The envelope sealed with wax hand delivered. It was all so deliciously anachronistic.
The instructions in the invitation were obscure enough to be interesting, but clear enough to hopefully get us to our destination. We are going to what I am imagining in my mind will be some sort of mannerbund with oaths and handshakes and secrets which have come down through the ages.
Olga is excluded from this. She is a woman. This is a men
’s only event. I was allowed to bring Elon and Marcus with me after assuring the Doctor that the two of them were in fact (in his words) a couple of goers. The Doctor partnered me up with Avan. He likes us together. It’s not that I don’t care enough about the Doctor to wonder what it is that he enjoys about watching Avan and I together, it is that I respect him enough to leave him his privacy and not push when he refuses to join us preferring to sit in his arm chair as an observer.
To each his own. If the Doctor likes to watch, then so be it. It’s not like Avan is an objectionable bed partner. Neither of us know what will be expected of us this long weekend. We haven’t really talked about it. I know I am looking forward to whatever it is that will happen over those days surrounding St Patrick’s Day. I hope there will be bonfires and general madness. This is the kind of crazy shit I signed on for and so rarely get.
Wanting to go with just to men to Galway was just the sort of thing I knew was going to be an issue with Olga. I’ve never gone anywhere without Olga since our journey began. Never once since I started scheming (because what else could it be called?) to spend St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland did I wonder whether or not she’d let me go without a fight. In fact, based on her Valentine’s Day bait and switch, I knew in my gut she’d kick off.
This is how the conversation went:
I’ve decided I’m going to Ireland with Avan, Elon and Marcus after all for the Doctor’s house party.
Fine. She doesn’t want to go, but she’ll go. Obviously I must want to go since I keep bringing it up.
She already knows this is a men’s only event.
That’s stupid. It’s not like they’ll turn her away if she just shows up.
She’s not invited. I’m going to Ireland with Avan, Elon and Marcus for the Doctor’s St. Patrick’s Day party. Just us men.
She wants to go too. She doesn’t like when we’re apart.
It’s just the boys this time darling. Maybe next time.
Why can’t she go?
Because it’s just the lads (I’m being very jovial and light still although an edge is starting to creep in).
She can be one of the boys. She wants to go too.
No.
Yes.
No.
Yes.
No.
What am I planning on doing in Ireland that I don’t want her to know about?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
So why can’t she go?
Because it’s just men.
Marcus is Elon’s boyfriend.
And?
They’re a couple. We’re a couple. It should be a couple’s trip. Not a boy’s trip.
(I’ll admit she was coming at me with arguments I hadn’t anticipated. The couple thing threw me off. I don’t think of Elon and Marcus as a couple.)
Avan is coming. The Doctor arranged this because he would like Avan and I to join him for the party.
Fine. Whatever. Avan is a professional and not my boyfriend. She’ll book a hotel in Galway. She’ll stay there when I’m off doing whatever the hell it is those freaky cultists do.
I don’t think they’re freaky cultists. It’s sort of this thing with men to have secret societies. We’ve been doing it for a long time.
What kind of sex party doesn’t have women?
(The kind filled with men that don’t want to have to put up with a bunch of women for a couple of days?)
I don’t really know darling. I truly haven’t been given many details. As she well knows.
(This thing I’m going to has been shrouded in so much secrecy that it’s starting to make me uneasy. If it weren’t for the fact The Doctor would be present I wouldn’t be going. This is his thing. Secret societies aren’t my thing. But honestly he is my friend, he has invited me so I will go.)
So I’m going to be gone for nearly a week…
Actually I’ll be gone a week. Before the secret society sex party we’re staying in Dublin for a night. After we’re all driving up to Northern Ireland to see my crumbling ruins.
I have a castle in Northern Ireland?
More like a crumbling tower. Or it was a crumbling tower. It’s been taken over by a trust that was set up by my former fiancée to restore it. Who knows what’s up now? Not me.
She cannot believe that I would go and do something like that without her.
Would it help if I were to tell her that her usual footwear would probably be wholly inappropriate to make the trek across the bogs to get to the site?
No.
I’m going without her. Either she can accept this or she can let it make her angry. I’m going without her.
But…
No.
But… (petulant sigh)
No.
But… (foot stomping)
No.
But… (eyes filling with tears)
No.
But… (hands going for my trousers)
No. She’s welcome to go for my junk, but she’s still not going to Ireland.
But…
No. Unless she grows a penis in the next hour…
What do I mean hour?
I’m leaving in an hour.
But… Why didn’t I tell her sooner?
Because we just decided that morning and she was gone.
But…
And this continues until the doorbell rings and Elon bounds into my bedroom like a puppy. Thank god he’s early for once. For a man with a wristwatch obsession, there is a sort of predictability about his constant lateness.
Olga turns to him. Her tears appear just for his benefit.
She wants to go to.
Elon kisses her on the cheek. Not this time. Men only.
I won’t say that I had to chew off my leg to get out of the house, but I nearly lost a shoe trying to slip out the door before it slammed shut and locked me inside.
Marcus is waiting at the car Elon hired to bring us to the airport. Blond Marcus with his American good looks and perpetual grin. He’s a good time, but not good enough for Elon. Unfortunately I’ve lost my vote when it comes to who Elon chooses to spend his time with. There are moments when I wonder if Marcus isn’t his way of demonstrating how much I’ve lost by giving him that final push.
I look at Marcus for just a moment before climbing into the back of the car.
Why didn’t he come inside?
He didn’t want to see Olga.
Any particular reason?
He would rather stay as far out of the shit storm brewing between Olga and her father as possible.
I thought things were better after Christmas.
Marcus stares at me. He looks like a cowboy. All steely gaze and pouting lips. He’s sizing me up.
(What do I know? What to tell me? How deep in this ocean should he dip his oar? Do I in fact have a horse in this race or not? These are the questions I can see in the set of his mouth.)
He heard I might be going to work for Vladimir.
I laugh loudly. The spontaneity of it surprises me. I’m certain I snort at some point. No. Not ever. I have no intention of going to work for Olga’s father. What has he heard?
I impressed Vladimir over Christmas. And him for that matter. I can play polo. Vladimir wanted to know if he could find a place for me on the team. He told Vladimir he could. That was it.
I know nothing about this. Not a thing. I need to have a conversation with Olga.
That might be in my best interest. What’s the plan for Ireland?
(that’s that conversation finished)
The Mystery that is Avan
We meet Avan at the airport.
For someone that I’ve had sex with as much as I have with Avan, I hardly know the man. I almost don’t recognize him as he approaches us. There is something chameleon like about him that defies description. There is no crowd Avan couldn’t blend into. Although he is handsome, he is generic. He would be equally at home on the streets of New York, London, Tel Aviv, and Kabul. He speaks English like an American and French like a Parisian, but I couldn’t
say for certain how old he is or where it is he goes when he’s not working.
Avan is the person in this profession I wish I could be. The one I would be if I had to start all over again. A mystery figure that really doesn’t exist as far as I know outside of this world. When he’s done working with his body for a living, I have no doubt there is a whole other life he has that will never overlap with this one. I wish the Matchmaker would have paired with me Avan and not Olga from the start. But that’s not really her call either. Avan is a free agent. I truly do envy him.
We sit next to each other on the flight from London to Dublin. I’m too restless to focus on my book, so I read over his shoulder. I don’t know where one buys an Israeli newspaper in London, but obviously they’re available somewhere. I’m no expert on Hebrew, but I know gibberish when I read it. I try to make sense of what I’m reading and I can’t.
I point with my nose. There. What is that? It looks like intercept but that would make no sense in the context.
Avan folds the newspaper and puts it in his carryon. I speak Hebrew.
I had two years of ancient Hebrew and one of Aramaic in college. More like I read Hebrew. Sort of. It’s been a while and it was never my strength.
I really am just a touch too good at convincing people I’m as dumb as I am pretty.
Is that a compliment?
An observation.
He pulls a paperback out of his carryon and hands it to me. John Le Carré in Hebrew. Stop reading over his shoulder. It’s irritating.
He reads spy novels?
He reads everything. If I get stuck on a word, just ask him.
I take the book. We’re both readers. Something about him I do know. It’s one of the things Avan, the Doctor, and I have in common. I know this from our evenings together. What happens during these evenings? It defies description from a contemporary point of view. In order to understand fully what happens on our evenings it is necessary to put oneself in a post-war / pre sexual revolution frame of mind.
It is necessary to dress for one of these evenings. We are gentlemen after all and gentlemen dress for dinner. The Doctor has two homes. One is what he calls his London pied-a-terre which is both grand and spacious by anyone’s standard. The other is his country house located in the rolling hills just north of Oxford. It’s pleasant, quiet, and discreet. He inherited both.