Once there was another guest, Miss Stein’s widow. The widow wanted to visit an Italian grocery where, she said, it was possible to buy a unique white truffle that came from the hills around Turin. The store was in a distant neighborhood. As our car drove through it, the widow suddenly said: “But aren’t we near Romaine’s studio?” Miss Barney, while directing at me a disquietingly speculative glance, replied: “Shall we stop there? I have a key.”
The widow, a mustachioed spider feeling its feelers, rubbed together her black-gloved hands and said: “Why, it has to be thirty years!”
After climbing six flights of stone stairs inside a dour building saturated with cat urine, that Persian cologne (and Roman, too), we arrived at Romaine’s studio—whoever Romaine might be; neither of my companions explained their friend, but I sensed she had joined the majority and that the studio was being maintained by Miss Barney as a sort of unkempt shrine-museum. A wet afternoon light, oozing through grime-grey skylights, mingled with an immense room’s objects: shrouded chairs, a piano with a Spanish shawl, Spanish candelabra with partially burnt candles. Nothing occurred when Miss Barney flicked a light switch.
“Dog take it,” she said, suddenly very prairie-American, and lighted up a candelabrum, carrying it with her as she led us around the room to view Romaine Brooks’ paintings. There were perhaps seventy of them, all portraits of a flat and ultra realism; the subjects were women, and all of them were dressed identically, each fully outfitted in white tie and tails. You know how you know when you’re not going to forget something? I wasn’t going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes, all of whom, to judge from their coifs and cosmetics, were painted between 1917 and 1930.
“Violet,” the widow stated as she examined the portrait of a lean bobbed blond with a monocle magnifying an ice-pick eye. “Gertrude liked her. But she seemed to me a cruel girl. I remember she had an owl. She kept it in a cage so small it couldn’t move. Simply sat there. With its feathers bursting through the wire. Is Violet still alive?”
Miss Barney nodded. “She has a house in Fiesole. Looks fit as a fiddle. I’m told she’s been having the Niehans treatment.”
At last we came to a figure I recognized as the widow’s lamented mate—depicted here with a Cognac snifter in her left hand and a cheroot in the other, not at all the brown mother-earth monolith Picasso palmed off, but more a Diamond Jim Brady personage, a big-bellied show-off, which one suspects is nearer the truth. “Romaine,” said the widow, smoothing her fragile mustache, “Romaine had a certain technique. But she is not an artist.”
Miss Barney begged to differ. “Romaine,” she announced in tones chilled as Alpine slopes, “is a bit limited. But. Romaine is a very great artist!”
It was Miss Barney who arranged for me to visit Colette, whom I wanted to meet, not for my usual opportunistic reasons, but because Boaty had introduced me to her work (kindly keep in mind that, intellectually, I am a hitchhiker who gathers his education along highways and under bridges), and I respected her: My Mother’s House is masterly, incomparable in the artistry of its play upon sensual specifics—taste, scent, touch, sight.
Also, I was curious about this woman; I felt anyone who had lived as broadly as she had, who was as intelligent as she was, must have a few answers. So I was grateful when Miss Barney made it possible for me to have tea with Colette at her apartment in the Palais Royal. “But,” warned Miss Barney, speaking on the telephone, “don’t tire her by overstaying; she’s been ill all winter.”
It’s true that Colette received me in her bedroom—seated in a golden bed à la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee; but otherwise she seemed as indisposed as a painted Watusi leading a tribal dance. Her maquillage was equal to that chore: slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The room smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said: “Jicky. The Empress Eugénie always wore it. I like it because it’s an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it’s witty without being coarse—like the better conversationalists. Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not too reliable”), of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains.
Tea was brought by a maid, who settled the tray on a bed already burdened with drowsing cats and correspondence, books and magazines and various bibelots, especially a lot of antique French crystal paperweights—indeed, many of these precious objects were displayed on tables and on a fireplace mantel. I had never seen one before; noticing my interest, Colette selected a specimen and held its glitter against a lamp’s yellow light: “This one is called The White Rose. As you see, a single white rose centered in the purest crystal. It was made by the Clichy factory in 1850. All the great weights were produced between 1840 and 1900 by just three firms—Clichy, Baccarat, and St. Louis. When I first started buying them, at the flea market and other such casual places, they were not overly costly, but in the last decades, collecting them has become fashionable, a mania really, and prices are colossal. To me”—she flashed a globe containing a green lizard and another with a basket of red cherries inside it—“they are more satisfying than jewelry. Or sculpture. A silent music, these crystal universes. Now,” she said, startlingly down to business, “tell me what you expect from life. Fame and fortune aside—those we take for granted.” I said, “I don’t know what I expect. I know what I’d like. And that is to be a grown-up person.”
Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all mischief—envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire, even Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony … dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows? Of justice and eternity and mature matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grown-up moments, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death certainly sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what’s left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here”—she nudged the flowered crystal toward me—“drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.”
Once I showed this gift to Kate McCloud, and Kate, who could have worked as an appraiser at Sotheby’s, said: “She must have been barking. I mean, whyever did she give it to you? A Clichy weight of that quality is worth … oh, quite easily five thousand dollars.”
I would as soon not have known its value, not wanting to regard it as a rainy-day reserve. Though I would never sell it, especially now, when I am ass-over-backward down-and-out—because, well, I treasure it as a talisman blessed by a saint of sorts, and the occasions when one does not sacrifice a talisman are at least two: when you have nothing and when you have everything—each is an abyss. Throughout my travels, through hungers and suicidal despairs, a year of hepatitis in a heat-warped, fly-buzzed Calcutta hospital, I have held on to The White Rose. Here at the Y.M.C.A., I have it hidden under my cot; it is tucked inside one of Kate McCloud’s old yellow woolen ski socks, which in turn is concealed inside my only luggage, an Air France travel bag (when escaping Southampton, I left pronto, and I doubt that I’ll ever again see those Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes; not that I care to, for the sight would make me strangle on
my own vomit).
Just now I fetched it out, The White Rose, and in its winking facets I saw the blue-skied snowfields above St. Moritz and saw Kate McCloud, a russet wraith astride her blond Kneissl skis, streak by in speeding profile, her backward-slanting angle an attitude as elegant and precise as the cool Clichy crystal itself.
IT RAINED NIGHT BEFORE LAST; by morning an autumnal flight of dry Canadian air had stopped the next wave, so I went for a walk, and whom should I run into but Woodrow Hamilton!—the man responsible, indirectly anyway, for this last disastrous adventure of mine. Here I am at the Central Park Zoo, empathizing with a zebra, when a disbelieving voice says: “P. B.?” and it was he, the descendant of our twenty-eighth President. “My God, P. B. You look …”
I knew how I looked inside my grey skin, my greasy seersucker suit. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Oh. I see. I wondered if you were involved in that. All I know is what I read in the paper. It must be quite a story. Look,” he said when I didn’t reply, “let’s step over to the Pierre and have a drink.”
They wouldn’t serve me at the Pierre because I wasn’t wearing a tie; we wandered over to a Third Avenue saloon, and on the way I decided I wasn’t going to discuss Kate McCloud or anything that happened, not out of discretion, but because it was too raw: my spilled guts were still dragging the ground.
Woodrow didn’t insist; he may look like a neat nice celluloid square, but really, that’s the camouflage that protects the more undulating aspects of his nature. I had last seen him at the Trois Cloches in Cannes, and that was a year ago. He said he had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and was teaching Greek and Latin at a boys’ prep school in Manhattan. “But,” he slyly mused, “I have a part-time job. Something that might interest you: if appearances speak, I expect you could use some extra change.”
He consulted his wallet and handed me first a hundred-dollar bill: “I earned that just this afternoon, playing ring around the maypole with a Vassar graduate, class of ’09”; then a card: “And this is how I met the lady. How I meet them all. Men. Women. Crocodiles. Fuck for fun and profit. At any rate, profit.”
The card read: THE SELF SERVICE. PROPRIETOR, MISS VICTORIA SELF. It listed an address on West Forty-second Street and a telephone number with a circle exchange.
“So,” said Woodrow, “clean yourself up and go see Miss Self. She’ll give you a job.”
“I don’t think I could handle a job. I’m too strung out. And I’m trying to write again.”
Woodrow nibbled the onion in his Gibson. “I wouldn’t call it a job. Just a few hours a week. After all, what kind of service do you think The Self Service provides?”
“Stud duty, obviously. Dial-a-Dick.”
“Ah, you were listening—you seemed so fogbound. Stud duty, indeed. But not entirely. It’s a co-ed operation. La Self is always ready with anything anywhere anyhow anytime.
“Strange. I would never have pictured you as a stud-for-hire.”
“Nor I. But I’m a certain type: good manners, grey suit, horn-rimmed glasses. Believe me, there’s plenty of demand. And La Self specializes in variety. She has everything on her roster from Puerto Rican thugs to rookie cops and stockbrokers.”
“Where did she find you?”
“That,” said Woodrow, “is too long a tale.” He ordered another drink; I declined, for I hadn’t tasted liquor since that final incredible gin-crazed session with Kate McCloud, and now just one drink had made me slightly deaf (alcohol first affects my hearing). “I’ll only say it was through a guy I knew at Yale. Dick Anderson. He works on Wall Street. A real straight guy, but he hasn’t done too well, or well enough to live in Greenwich and have three kids, two of them at Exeter. Last summer I spent a weekend with the Andersons—she’s a real good gal; Dick and I sat up drinking cold duck, that’s this mess made with champagne and sparkling burgundy; boy, it makes me churn to think of it. And Dick said: ‘Most of the times I’m disgusted. Just disgusted. Goddamn, what a man won’t do when he’s got two boys in Exeter!’ ” Woodrow chuckled. “Rather John Cheeverish, no? Respectable but hard-up suburbanite shagging ass to pay his country-club dues and keep his kids in a proper prep.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“Cheever is too cagey a writer to ever risk a cock-peddling stockbroker. Simply because no one would believe it. His work is always realistic, even when it’s preposterous—like The Enormous Radio or The Swimmer.”
Woodrow was irritated; prudently, I deposited his hundred dollars inside an inner pocket, where he would have had some trouble retrieving it. “If it’s true, and it is, why would anyone not believe it?”
“Because something is true doesn’t mean that it’s convincing, either in life or in art. Think of Proust. Would Remembrance have the ring that it does if he had made it historically literal, if he hadn’t transposed sexes, altered events and identities? If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable, but”—this was a thought I’d often had—“it might have been better. Less acceptable, but better.” I decided on another drink, after all. “That’s the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”
“Maybe you ought to skip that other drink.”
“You think I’m drunk?”
“Well, you’re rambling.”
“I’m relaxed, that’s all.”
Woodrow kindly said: “So you’ve started writing again. Novel?”
“A report. An account. Yes, I’ll call it a novel. If I ever finish it. Of course, I never do finish anything.”
“Have you a title?” Oh, Woodrow was right there with all the garden-party queries.
“Answered Prayers.”
Woodrow frowned. “I’ve heard that before.”
“Not unless you were one of the three hundred schlunks who bought my first and only published work. That, too, was called Answered Prayers. For no particular reason. This time I have a reason.”
“Answered Prayers. A quote, I suppose.”
“St. Teresa. I never looked it up myself, so I don’t know exactly what she said, but it was something like ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ ”
Woodrow said: “I see a light flickering. This book—it’s about Kate McCloud, and gang.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s about them—though they’re in it.”
“Then what is it about?”
“Truth as illusion.”
“And illusion as truth?”
“The first. The second is another proposition.”
Woodrow asked how so, but the whiskey was at work and I felt too deaf to tell him; but what I would have said was: as truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion—but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion)—and of the two, the illusion is the truer.
AROUND FIVE THAT AFTERNOON, AS offices were emptying, I found myself trawling along Forty-second Street, looking for the address listed on Miss Self’s card. The establishment turned out to be located above a ground-floor pornographic emporium, one of those dumps plastered with poster portraits of dangling dongs and split beavers. As I approached it, an exiting customer, someone of respectable and unimportant appearance, dropped a package, which opened, scattering across the pavement several dozen black-and-white glossies—nothing extra, the usual sixty-niners and marshmallow gals getting a three-way ride; still, a number of pedestrians paused to stare as the owner knelt to recover his property. Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn’t develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways—it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men “
on the muscle,” as they say in horse-breeding circles.
A Puerto Rican pimp stood sneering at the stooped man (“What you want with that when I got nice live puta?”), but I felt sorry for him: he looked to me like some youngish lonely minister who had embezzled the whole of last Sunday’s collection plate to buy those jack-off snaps; so I decided to help him pick them up—but the instant I began, he struck me across the face: a karate chop that felt as if it must have shattered a cheekbone.
“Beat it,” he snarled. I said: “Jesus, I wanted to help you.” And he said: “Beat it. Before I bust you good.” His face had flushed a red so bright it pained my eyes, and then I realized it wasn’t exclusively the color of rage but of shame as well—I thought he’d thought I meant to steal his pictures, when really what had infuriated him was the pity implicit in my proffered assistance.
THOUGH MISS SELF IS A most successful businesswoman, she certainly doesn’t squander on display. Her offices are four flights up in an elevatorless building. THE SELF SERVICE: a frosted-glass door with that inscription. But I hesitated (really, did I want to do this? Well, there wasn’t anything I’d rather do, at least to make money). I combed my hair, creased the trousers of a just-bought fifty-dollar Robert Hall herringbone two-pants special, rang, and walked in.
The outer office was unfurnished except for a bench, a desk, and two young gentlemen, one of them a secretary-receptionist seated behind the desk and the other a beautiful mulatto wearing a very contemporary dark blue silk suit; neither one chose to notice me.
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