Next to each other in that dusty soundstage, I could see how badly you wanted to get away from me. It was the first time I had ever sensed that from you.
I should be done by four, Desmond. I’ll find you then.
Did you expect me to wait for you to leave? It seemed to be implicit, so I stood there alone on set, watching you walk into the sun. Before you disappeared from view, Nick Charles stopped you. Whatever he said startled you, and I wanted to shout at him to leave you alone but knew, of course, how cavalier such an intervention would be. With Nick at your side you turned in the opposite direction from the commissary, where I assumed you would be meeting Helen for lunch, the two of you always performing the dutiful husband and wife. I was about to leave the stage myself, thinking I might follow to see where you were going, when the stout man in the panama hat appeared from behind Mary’s dressing room.
A moment, Mr. Frank?
I was so startled by his approach my first instinct was to deny my own identity. With his sunburned bulldog face and greasy shirt he was too sloppy to be a federal agent, but his bearing was menacing in its own way.
And you are?
He removed his hat and wiped his forehead before replacing it, cocked at an angle that made him look like a boy playing dress-up from his father’s closet. That’s not the question, Mr. Frank.
If I’m going to speak with a man I like to know his name.
He spat tobacco juice out of the corner of his mouth. You can call me Hank.
Just Hank. Nothing else?
Hank will do.
Can I help you in some particular way? The man squinted at me as if struggling to make sense of my words. Do you work for the studio?
In a manner of speaking. They hired me to follow you.
That must be boring, I said, surprised by how unsurprised I was at the revelation. He had not yet made eye contact with me, was in fact scrupulously avoiding looking me in the eye.
Maybe not so boring. I have some photographs that might interest you. Photographs people I know would pay a lot to see.
I tried to imagine what he could possibly have captured, certain it must be a bluff.
If the studio is paying you I’m sure you’ll get what you deserve.
Thought I’d give you a chance first. You can buy them. Prints and negatives. I’ll hand them over now if you give me twice what they’ve promised.
And what are they going to pay?
Five thousand dollars.
I laughed. I knew it was a lie. The studio might have him on a weekly retainer but that would cover whatever he gave them. So you want ten from me.
That’s right.
I think I’ll let the studio pay what it’s promised.
Might want to think about that. Maybe I’ll raise my price. Maybe I’ll sell them to someone else, someone who’ll let the whole country see them.
So show me. What have you got?
But there I had him, or he had me. They’re still being processed, he said, fingering the brim of his hat. You pay me now and I’ll turn them over as soon as I have them.
You think I walk around with so much cash?
Man like you, I bet you could get it easy. I’d do you the favor, wait until the end of the day. You could pay me tonight.
And why should you want to do me a favor, as you call it?
The man stared at his shuffling feet. We all got our problems.
A wife and a houseful of kids you can’t feed? Rent you can’t pay?
One kid. And a wife. She’s not well. Kid neither.
How sad for you.
No call to be mean about it.
I thought for a moment but it would have been nearly impossible to raise ten-thousand dollars by the end of the day and Hank gave me no reason to believe him. I’m sorry, I have my own problems.
You’ll have bigger ones now, Mr. Frank. As he tipped his hat and scuttled off through the door of the soundstage, trailing an odor of sewer gas, he nearly knocked over Helen.
Who was that?
A blackmailer, but I think it was a con.
What did he say?
Nothing we should take seriously. It was just intimidation.
I hope that’s all it was. Have you seen Myles?
He left a while ago.
That’s funny. He was supposed to meet me outside the commissary at a quarter to one but he still hasn’t shown. It’s not like him to be late. She took my hand and squeezed. Have you told him?
I haven’t figured out what to say, or how to say it, and I’m still hoping I won’t have to.
Helen and I started walking toward the commissary, trying to separate ourselves off from the crowds of other people. With the sun overhead it was hot between the soundstages and when I looked up I felt a sudden vertigo. It was the same feeling I’d had in the jungle with John, of distance and proximity in flux, the sky as close as the end of my nose, the soundstages around me remote as the cosmos.
Are you okay, Desmond? You don’t look so well.
Maybe I just need to eat.
We turned a corner and when we were alone Helen stopped me, taking my arm. This morning in the car Myles asked me whether I thought you might be seeing someone else and I said no, that was impossible. I wanted to tell him what you’d said but I think you’d better do it yourself. Please don’t torture him.
I’m not trying to, Helen.
You know he’s sensitive. It’s so exhausting sometimes.
Until then I had always assumed that the two of you were happy when I was not around, despite the subterfuge and performance required to support the lie. That note of weariness made me feel as though there might be an opening I could leverage, perhaps even one that would allow me to maneuver you and Helen so that I could get what I most wanted: for you to leave her and follow me wherever I might go.
Do you ever regret all of this?
Marrying Myles? Of course not, Desmond, don’t be stupid. We’re suited to each other in every way but the one the world assumes. Perhaps that’s a perfect marriage. The studio will expect children at some point and neither of us has figured out how that might happen. I don’t really want them but Myles does.
This also surprised me. You’d never said anything of the kind to me as far as I remember, perhaps because you knew I had no interest in having children myself, at least not then, not when I was still young.
Myles likes the idea of being a father. I don’t have the urge to be a mother. Something about the way I was mothered, I guess that’s what an analyst would say. Maybe I’m still too young. Although I feel I’ve aged a hundred years since this morning. I can’t really imagine our lives without you here, Desmond. Myles moons around the house the second you leave. It’s like he doesn’t know how to be himself without you there to watch.
I don’t believe that.
It’s true. He likes me well enough but you’re the reason he gets up in the morning and smiles and goes to work, as corny as it sounds. Without you, I worry what will happen. I can imagine him just winding down and falling over. I don’t know that I’ll have the means to bring him back to life each day.
Helen’s eyes had turned red and she fished a handkerchief from her bag to blot them. We both looked around to be sure we were still alone.
Dammit. First you and now me.
It’s okay. No one’s watching.
You were my first friend here, Desmond. I would have been on a train back to Denver if it hadn’t been for you turning to John and saying let’s give that one a line. That one. Just another bit player in the background. What made you notice me?
I saw you talk back to a guy at the newsstand who whistled at you. I liked the sharpness of your tongue.
Funny, I don’t remember that. I probably didn’t know what else to do.
Self-defense is a good instinct. I suspected it might take you places.
Did you know then – I mean, did you guess?
Maybe in a way. But I didn’t look at you and think, Oh, there’s one of my tribe, I’d bett
er recruit her, if that’s what you’re asking. You just looked like you needed someone to give a damn about you before the studio spat you out the wrong end.
That Christmas when you first asked me about Myles, and I said you should marry me, and then sobbed all over you when you said it wouldn’t suit you—
That was the worst party I’ve ever thrown but I don’t remember you sobbing.
I did. I want to apologize for that.
Why should you apologize?
I didn’t know if I’d meet anyone as sympathetic as you. I hardly knew Myles then, so I couldn’t have imagined it would work out with him. I thought you might be my only chance to find someone I could live with who the rest of the world would look at and say, What a lovely couple, and it wouldn’t be painful living through it. I feared the studio trying to match me up with someone who would expect to do whatever he liked to me and that was enough to make me contemplate going back to Denver a second time. I’d mapped it in my head. I knew the train timetables and had started looking into real estate up in the mountains. I was going to buy a cabin in the middle of nowhere only I couldn’t figure out how I’d support myself. I don’t know how to do anything except sing and dance and land a joke and there aren’t many places where those skills make a life.
Poor kid.
Don’t pity me, Desmond. That’s not one of your nicer qualities.
Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.
I just want you to understand how much you’ve meant to me.
You would have done fine on your own.
Maybe. I could have learned to hunt and fish and gone to work in a diner in Estes Park if I had to. But you’ve made this particular life livable in a way it might not have been otherwise. Myles has too of course. We’ve been lucky with one another, the three of us.
And Barbara.
Barbara, too, yes.
You should dry your eyes again.
Helen scrunched up the handkerchief and checked her face in a compact. Lord, they’ll have to start from scratch after lunch, she laughed, dropping the mirror back in her purse.
Tell Myles to find me later.
Aren’t you coming to lunch? Oh no, I forgot. Good luck, she said, kissing me on the cheek.
It would have been hell if it had been anyone but you.
Yes, Desmond, I know. For me, too.
8
This morning Alessio comes to me ecstatic. He has sold a painting. Although I give him whatever he needs, I understand how this must feel, the sense of independence, and I accept when he offers to take me to lunch at a little restaurant I like just south of the Ponte Alla Carraia, a place quite undiscovered by tourists, except those with local knowledge, who tend to be more sympathetic and do not threaten to ruin the atmosphere.
As we are taking our seats, we look up and discover that Néstor, our Spanish novelist friend, has just sat down across the room. He glides over to speak with us. Always so fashionable, his black hair has been recently cut and brushed into an elegant quiff, a style that hurls me back into the 1950s. I watch to judge the energy between Alessio and Néstor, seeing the way they embrace, the kisses on cheeks, the hypermasculinity of them both, and try not to feel jealous. I can tell that Néstor is attracted to my Alessio. Unmistakably so. I want to wag my finger and say, You will have to wait until I am dead, perhaps it will not be so long, but you may not have him yet – and anyway, you are too much a top for Alessio, both of you too manly ever to be compatible with each other. I grasp Alessio’s hand and he holds it, almost petting it, that clear smooth skin clutching mine, withered and spotted, and I know that he senses my jealousy, my need to be reassured that he has not already betrayed me with this Castilian princeling.
Néstor is with a young American, another writer who is teaching for the spring semester at one of the countless American universities that have acquired villas and even great estates in and around the city. When I look at him more closely I realize it’s the young man I saw near the Palazzo Vecchio the other day and mistook for a soldier with his mirrored sunglasses and camouflage rucksack, the one who reminded me so much of you, Myles. Why don’t you two join us, Néstor says. There is plenty of room at our table. Alessio and I are too polite to decline, too generous to say that this is a private party and we want no one else to complicate it. With Néstor and his American joining us, or us joining them, there will be the bill to consider. It would be too much to expect Alessio to pay for all four, and as we move across the room, these two beautiful young men attending to me as if I were a dotard unable to walk, about to fall on my face, I worry that the encounter will ruin our little celebration.
The American, Paul, is from New York, or at least he lives in New York, but I sense that he is from elsewhere, perhaps Illinois or Iowa. He lacks a certain polish, his face is open and innocent, he speaks with a youthful intensity that makes me feel sorry for him. I remember Helen’s criticism, that pity is one of my least attractive qualities. But how earnest Paul is, how desperate to please us, how assiduous in showing his deference to me, careful to pay attention to each of us in turn, to acknowledge his innocence, even his naïveté. He is like someone out of the past, not a man of this new millennium. You belong in 1950, I tell him, and he asks what I mean. So fresh, I say, so unguarded. Like an angel. George Cukor would have devoured you, made you a star and then eaten you alive. He blushes as if enjoying my flattery.
Paul, I sense, is like the rest of us at the table, a man who loves men, and while he is masculine in his affect, unlike Néstor and Alessio he has a certain softness about him that also reminds me of you, Myles. I can see at once that Alessio has caught his eye, Paul keeps staring at him, trying to engage him in conversation, rolling out a few phrases in Italian until it becomes apparent that he is far from fluent and we all switch to English for his benefit. He wants to know what to order, we consult the waiter about the specials, and choose for him. Ribollita for each of us to start, then carrè di agnello for Néstor, triglie marinate for me, quaglia confit for Alessio and crudità di stagione for Paul, who turns out to be a vegetarian, to Néstor’s amused horror. How can you be in Italy and not eat meat? Néstor asks. You would never survive in Spain, but never.
After the soup arrives, Alessio and Néstor lapse into Italian and Paul cannot follow. He smiles, pretends to understand, but I can see he does not. Although I would rather monitor the conversation between Néstor and Alessio I throw the young American a lifeline. What is he teaching? Modernism and one Creative Writing workshop, he tells me. And your students are good? They’re a mix, he tells me, one of the students was looking at a photograph of a young woman in the villa library and asked me whether that was Somerset Maugham, who had a connection with the previous owners. What did you tell her? I ask. I said, no, that is definitely not Somerset Maugham, and left it at that. It’s her first trip outside of America. She’s never been anywhere. I thought it would be cruel to tell her the truth.
Cruel, perhaps, but at least then she would know, instead of carrying on in her misunderstanding. You could have done it gently, while the next person might not, might instead be very cruel.
Paul looks at his soup. He seems puzzled by it. Are the croutons supposed to be so soft? he asks. And this time it is my turn not to be cruel.
It’s bread soup, I laugh, a Tuscan specialty. Here, you must pour some olive oil on it, it is best that way.
And this bread? he asks, tearing at a piece from the basket in the center of the table. I think they forgot to put salt in the dough.
No, believe me, it’s meant to be that way. Traditional Tuscan bread has no salt.
Have you always lived in Florence? he asks. Your English is so good.
No, I tell him, smiling, I have not always lived here.
When the bill comes, I recognize in Paul’s face an anxiety that provokes my pity once more, a nervousness that wonders how much the meal has come to, whether he will have to pay a share for the two bottles of wine despite only drinking water, whether the vin santo and cantu
cci were additional or included, how to calculate it all in a way that will not make him lose face. To his credit he reaches for his wallet, but I am overwhelmed with pity, and want also to protect Alessio from feeling he should have to pay. I say to him, quietly, in Italian, you can buy me lunch tomorrow, and he concedes as I pay for the table. Paul is relieved but also grateful and surprised, he expected no such generosity, he offers to leave the tip, and I tell him no, don’t be silly, it’s hospitality from one American to another. I have confused him, he does not begin to understand, even with the information laid before him. He wrinkles his brow but does not ask me to explain, too innocent or insecure to reveal yet another thing he has failed to understand.
As we leave, I can see that he wishes to embrace Alessio as Néstor does, longs for Alessio’s lips against his cheeks, wants to put his hands on Alessio’s shoulders, that he desires so much more from Alessio than I would ever allow him to receive. Do not touch him, I want to scream, yet I do not know whether I would say this to Alessio or Paul or to both of them. Is this how I am destined to end my days, jealous of the last man to occupy my heart?
If you and I had remained together all these decades, would I have worried in the same way, or would our mutual antiquity have prevented me from imagining you slipping into the arms of another man and finding there a home more attractive than the one I might provide? If I had managed to stop you before Nick Charles did that morning, leaving the soundstage, if I had accompanied you to the commissary and handed you off to Helen’s trustworthy hands, would we all be together still?
After leaving Helen at the commissary, I continued to the Executive Building, my feverish sense of vertigo returning. As I stepped inside the green marble lobby, one of the elevators was closing and I was certain I saw you and Nick Charles inside.
Night for Day Page 19
