I finished packing my bags, loaded the trunk of the car, shook Max’s hand, and hoped the money I gave him would be enough to buy me a cushion of time. After picking up Barbara we drove back to the hospital, arriving before dawn. I took my suitcases upstairs to your private room where Helen was asleep in a chair. It was then that I noticed they had removed all the mirrors.
If I had known it would take a dozen surgeries before you began to look like yourself again, I would never have left. Had I known that you would no longer be a leading man, becoming instead the asexual best friend, a sidekick unlucky with women, and later, when the movies caught up to real life in a more realistic way (believing in the illusion of their own realism, or perhaps still not even realizing that their realism was merely an illusion, that any attempt at realism can only ever be an illusion, the real we perceive in our daily lives itself being a series of highly structured illusions, all of us moving through a deadly convincing miasma of false consciousness), that you would have parts only as the raging anti-hero, the self-destructive cowpoke, the ambiguous motorcyclist, the Korean War vet battling psychological tsunamis of Communist soldiers spilling in waves over peninsular hillsides, had I known that was what awaited you in my absence, I would never have left.
I placed my lips on your silent lips but you did not stir.
Please try to understand that I believed my livelihood in Hollywood was the least of my concerns, that it was only a matter of time before I was arrested either for being a homosexual or for refusing to give testimony in the kangaroo-court that McCarthy and the rest of them had orchestrated. I left because I feared for my liberty as a man of the left and a man who loved men. You will say that a man of more generous heart would have sacrificed himself to look after the man he loved. My response is simple: you are right. I failed you and can only beg your forgiveness. That is what remains.
I woke Helen and put the car keys in her hand, hugged her, kissed her on both cheeks, and said goodbye to Barbara. Then, left alone with you, I held your hand and kissed you again, pressing my lips into yours with as much purpose and passion as I felt your body could tolerate given its state. And before I was in tears, or perhaps I was already crying openly, unconscious of how loud my sobs might have been, I picked up my suitcases and walked out of the room and along the hall and down the stairs where I got a cab that took me to the airport to catch my flight to New York.
Now old and decrepit, I am not yet immobile. I can still trudge across Florence, make my way to the Uffizi, take a taxi to the Accademia to look at the David early in the morning before he is ringed by tourists endlessly capturing his exquisite body with their cameras and phones. This city offers as much chaos and bustle as my frailty can withstand. In New York, sixty-three years ago tomorrow and the next day and the next, I attended to my financial affairs, phoning every day to make sure you were alive and improving, heartbroken that you refused to speak to me when you woke. Although far from you I found you kept appearing on the streets of Manhattan, the back of your head in a young businessman, the curve of your shoulder in an athletic teenager, and then your face itself, but your face as it had been before the accident, smiling from countless movie posters for whatever film you happened to be in that was then playing in theaters. Because you were inescapable it was impossible not to keep you in mind at all times, when I bought traveler’s checks, when I said goodbye to old friends, when I went to visit Noah Roy’s parents in their apartment on Gramercy Park and found them more careworn than ever, when I boarded the plane at Idlewild, when I flew to Newfoundland and Shannon and London and then finally arrived, a week after departing Los Angeles, in Paris, where my apartment on rue Bonaparte was home for the next four decades, during which time I disengaged more than ever from politics, and though I might perhaps have found a home in the French Communist Party if my queerness would not have prevented me, I instead turned inward, living cheaply and writing in my attic suite of rooms with their long windows and skylights and walls covered in books, with an assortment of peripatetic friends and lovers and visiting parents and cousins, people who saw in me no particular change except that I had left the movie business, fled Los Angeles, retired from America, and now made my living as a novelist in English who lived in France, that is to say, one in a long line of outcast rabble-rousers with no more rabble to rouse than words on a page, ignored at home, read with curiosity if at all in the country they have adopted, and hoping just to live out the balance of their lives in peace. The only change that was visible upon me was that all of a sudden my hair turned white, so completely white that I acquired the nickname l’aigle d’Amérique, the bald eagle, a North American migrant returned to the continent of his ancestors.
Over the subsequent years, people, new friends, all of them Europeans, asked me if I ever missed Los Angeles, the question usually spoken in a tone of certainty that said only a philistine could miss such a place. But of course, I miss it enormously! They had no idea what Los Angeles was actually like, only the image presented by its largest industry, which elides what is most interesting about it. Nonetheless, I have never been able to bring myself to go back, in part because I miss the city that I am certain is now rebuilt beyond recognition, and that was the landscape of my happiest time, my years with you. I miss the city that was already disappearing in 1950, overbuilt and sprawling with shoebox suburbs, the city that on a sunny spring day with the breezes uncurling from the Pacific and the air still clear looked like an Olympus of the west, those white buildings with their terracotta tile roofs surrounded by a lush green garden. I miss that city, the city that was crazy in a beautiful way before it went crazy in what appears from a distance to be an ugly one. I miss the city before it went to hell, and then I think maybe the crazy was always mostly ugly underneath the beauty and paradise is just another word for hell. Now it is Concreteville – that’s what my father was calling it by the beginning of the sixties. Funny coming from a lifelong New Yorker more comfortable on a Park Avenue sidewalk than on the lawns of Central Park, but for him the obscenity of Los Angeles was that it had turned a space so recently natural into one that wanted first to tame nature, to pastoralize it, to classicize it, only in the end to obliterate it, consuming all the land around it rather than building skywards. We Americans waste land, he said to me. Most people have no idea how valuable all this space is. If they’d been to Europe they would understand, and I have to agree with my old crank of a father, may he rest in peace.
Here in my apartment a few streets south of the Arno, I look out on a city so compact, so tightly packed, which nonetheless remains one where I never feel claustrophobic. Not like Venice, where I sometimes find I cannot breathe the streets are so narrow and crowded with tourists. No one would want to chase beauty there in old age, not now, it is far too perilous these days. Florence may not be Paris or Rome, but I feel at home in the higgledy-piggledy streets and winding alleyways of this city, enjoy the possibility of getting happily lost, the fact that I can still at my age live a life almost entirely on foot, walking with my cane to the nearest market and the Pitti Palace and when the blood is strong inside me all the way to the Palazzo Vecchio where I can contemplate the poet’s death mask and stand at night-time in those great rooms overlooking the illuminated city where chic Florentine teenagers live as if it were still 1950, overflowing with impassioned debate in a country that has never seemed so politically unstable in recent memory, making out extravagantly and being romantic with an openness that seems almost angelic. I know they all piss and shit and fart and fuck and that there is no unblemished beauty in the world, but when they promenade in twilight and forget their beauty as they so often appear to do, or when they seem never to have been aware of their beauty in the first place, as you were, Myles, at that point they surpass every ideal of beauty I might imagine, even beyond the beauty of Botticelli’s angels, the faces of those boys in whom, in one specifically, I imagine I see your eyes. He is there in the Madonna of the Magnificat, wearing the white tunic on the right of the paint
ing, raising with his right hand the crown upon the Virgin’s head, and there again in the Madonna of the Pomegranate, on the extreme right, next to the one holding a book, and he is looking intently at the child, not at us, not breaking the fourth wall of the painting to gaze directly at me as I wish he would, as I sense that he does when he appears again as Saint Sebastian in Berlin, where I have sometimes been to see him, or as Mars in London, and in his recurrence through Botticelli’s works I imagine the adoration of the painter, which transcended the bonfire of the vanities, an adoration and idealization as great as what I continue to feel for you, Myles, with whom I had something approaching the purity of union that one most desires in life, an alliance that blinds one to the flaws of the beloved, at least for a while, or if not blinds then occludes those shortcomings, makes them less significant than perhaps they are in the police-interrogation beam of objective analysis.
The Arno flashes, not red or gold but a liquid marine fire robed in the flowers of spring, sparks of light shooting from its roiling surface. The phone rings and I ignore it, it rings too often, I will let someone else answer. It stops, Alessio makes excuses, he gets me off the hook while the phone is off the hook – unless, no, the patter of those feet, it is a call for Margaret, except it could not be for Margaret because she is long dead. It is a call for me, and the phone, cordless, comes into my hand, my dear Alessio smiling apologetically, for we both know the likelihood of silence on the other end, or in this case, today, the panting of muffled breath and then the dial tone as the caller hangs up, leaving me beached in anxiety.
You see, even in my exile they persecute me.
Exile has never been a protection from persecution. Not long after landing in Paris I became conscious of having grown a tail, slicker and better dressed than the snap-brimmed men in Los Angeles, but unmistakably part of the same extended family. I noticed him first because he was my age and attractive in that New England way that attempts to be European while never entirely casting off the heredity of centuries in North America, which is to say he was trying to blend in as French, and on overhearing him speak in bookshops, I could not immediately tell whether his French was acquired at the breast or only, as I suspected, through study and practice. The man kept turning up, not every day but a few times a week, and his features were so striking it was impossible not to notice him, or the careful tailoring of his suits, or the way he was always alone. We never spoke, but he was with me for a year at least, the first of a succession of men who tailed me with such ostentatious discretion that I came to think of them as lovers I had not yet seduced and began to invent histories for our relationships, seeing in the blond man who succeeded the New Englander someone whose mother was a foreigner and therefore could blend more seamlessly into that particular Parisian street theater. It was around that time, by which I must mean 1951, that my name began to be bandied about in a certain room in Congress, put down in public record, slurred as a known Communist and, although this did not appear in the public record of the Committee, a pervert. It was not only John and Mary who testified, and in testifying pronounced my name as a traitor, but many others whom I had long imagined were friends. That you and Helen were spared such a performance has always made me wonder if you did not reach some private arrangement with the authorities. John’s testimony was the hardest to bear because he appeared as a friend of the Committee, one present not by demand but by choice. He volunteered to testify, to name countless people he either knew to be Communists, suspected of being Communists, had heard might be fellow travelers, or feared might simply be subversives, which was the damning catch-all category for those who had done nothing more than believe in the rights of ordinary people to make a decent living, have a reasonable quality of life, and not worry that they might get fired without notice. Believe those things, sign a petition in support of them, give a little money to the wrong organization, march in a parade or protest, and you must be a subversive bent on overthrowing a democratically elected government. Horseshit of course. I must not try to think about it too much because it still raises my blood pressure and this, my dear old doctor (who himself has heart troubles) tells me, I must not do.
My phone is ringing again and it is the hour for my walk. I will go to the Boboli Garden to escape my persecutors as I do every day. Yesterday, however, something happened. I took an eccentric route along the Borgo San Frediano and then down the Via dei Serragli – a street I cannot walk without imagining it is instead the Via dei Seraglio, street of the brothel instead of that noble family – turning onto the Via Sant’Agostino, past the graffiti that has become the greatest menace of the city, the menace of the whole of Italy and most of Europe, past the rank of dumpsters, I stopped to buy a single blood orange, now almost out of season, peeled it on the street, let the juice trickle between my fingers, placed the beetdark segments between my purple lips, tasting the fruit as though tonguing sex, disposed of the skin, and listened as bells pealed. I made my way to Santo Spirito to browse the antiques in il mercato. There is one man in particular I find often in the same place, with his collection of movie memorabilia, and standing there yesterday under the timpani beat of the sun I flipped through his posters and found, with something like awe, the faces of you and Mary staring back at me, Mary doubled as Faye and Ursula, John’s name splashed across the bottom, and mine nowhere to be seen, because all trace of Desmond Frank was stripped from that film, in Italian retitled Mai Tornare Indietro, never go back, never turn back, never return, and there you were, about to glance over your shoulder at the identical twin sisters. The shock of those faces gazing at me in that unlikely place, translated into another language, translating me back into another time and place, was so disorienting I stumbled to the fountain and sat down on the steps. Those good Italians, so solicitous, such respect for the aged, converged to help me, making sure I had my cane, bringing me a drink of water and then an espresso from the neighboring café, and I sat there under the sun in this Florentine square finding myself quite overcome, gushing tears and leaning against the fountain, crying silently as only the old can cry, my chest again turning with that tight knot I used to know so well as I looked up, surrounded by the concerned faces of antiques dealers and junk sellers and, in the distance, the face of one of those well-fed American men I continue to see whenever I leave my house, men who no longer wear suits but come dressed as tourists, sometimes as women, but always looking at me with too much attentive nonchalance, and I saw that man several more times yesterday as I continued my perambulations.
I put the parts of myself back in order, I stood, I bought the poster of Mai Tornare Indietro and said to the dealer, whom I could tell did not believe me, that I had written that movie, Ho scritto che film, and that I was once a screenwriter, sceneggiatore, but am now nothing more than a romanziere, a writer of novels, which in Italian and French and Portuguese and even Romanian sounds to the Anglophone ear like nothing more than the writer of romances. In English, in the seventeenth century, as well as being a term of disparagement for innovators of any kind (newness being as great a sin as sodomy), ‘novelist’ meant ‘novice’, a beginner, an unskilled person, and this is how I feel even at the end of my life, as if I am only beginning to understand anything at all. I could feel them watching me as I left the square, past the Basilica and along the Via dei Michelozzi, and then further along until I reached the stone embrace of the Pitti Palace, its paved carpet covered with tourists taking the sun, past whom I stumbled on my way to the Garden’s entrance.
Today I go straight to the Boboli, for there is no mercato. At the gate I show my pass, I look behind me, and today again that American is with me, pretending to be a tourist. I climb through the steep terraces and up to my favorite spot, in the garden of the Museo delle Porcellane, where I sit on the wall clutching my cane, looking over my shoulder at the hills and the cypresses and the receding countryside of my adopted country, the country of my mother and her family (our family villa, not far from here, is now a hotel), perhaps then the country
I have reclaimed as my own, surveying hills in which, with their white buildings and terracotta roofs on a clear day in April, I can catch the same spirit of Los Angeles sixtythree years ago, and in breathing these airs I return again to what was happiest about that time, the private love of the lives we held private by design.
The tourist is here with me, taking photographs in my direction, photographing me as if I were a part of the landscape, an example of faded Italian aristocracy, an old Tuscan queen devoted to his tailor and shoemaker and his much younger lover, still nursing an ideology that, decades after being declared moribund in the west, seems again to be pulsing with life. Cycles, the dialectic of history, thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Communist Bolshevism was a false revolution. No one should be nostalgic for the Soviet Union or Mao’s China or any of the other communist states. The real revolution we cannot imagine until it has arrived, and then we will know it, like the Messiah. Hours pass and I sit, or perhaps only an hour at most and then I return, back through the gardens and the streets south of the Arno to my own building, to the cool marble interior of the entry, the door I open on the right, the hook where I hang my coat, my Alessio helping me up the broad stairs to a seat in the salon where he serves me lunch and I sit, cool in the late afternoon, dozing as I lose myself in the frescos on the ceiling, the grotesques animating themselves against the screen of my mind as the phone rings and rings.
Once upon a time Margaret Brookes answered my phone, joining me in the last years of her life, not because of any romantic love, but in something like a twilight union of sympathy and solidarity, in the final reel of her life if not of my own. She died here, is buried here, and during her life with me confused all those people who thought they had understood me before her arrival, for we lived, outwardly in Florentine society, as husband and wife in all but name, delighting in the disbelief we sowed. It was both pain and pleasure to have her with me, for reminders of past happiness are always intercut with recollections of failure and a recognition that the passage of time, the creation of memory, the elapsing of years that creates the very possibility of reflection, plays to a soundtrack of irremediable loss. In my case, loss of Noah and you, but also of Helen, that firmest of friends, loss of parents in the intervening years, loss of my country and the career that I loved for the one that allowed me to continue without hindrance. For Margaret, solitary her whole life, obscure even with me about the nature of her desires, whatever sense of loss she carried she did not share, for we were a couple who did not test each other, respecting the pain of the other and understanding, I believe for my own part, that the clues to her private anguishes, as much as I knew about them, were there to be read and understood in the pictures she wrote, in the fictional lives she animated, the characters whose passions and losses beat with humanity beneath her tough-talking exterior. Margaret collaborated with me on one of the first drafts of She Turned Away, and much of her dialogue found its way into the final script, though her name was nowhere on it, stripped in the merciless studio process just as my own name was rubbed from the final cut, so that John Marsh could claim to have written and directed it without anyone else’s involvement (never mind it was based on an original story of my own, never mind that Orph Patterson continued to live on in the books that I subsequently wrote), and Nick Charles could succeed in bargaining for a producer credit, only later to take over for Porter when Porter, as so many of us suspected he would, elbowed Leo Krug off the lot and into a bitter retirement in which he denounced the scheming of Reds and queers to oust him. But that, of course, is past, and I try not to nurse the resentment I feel towards my erstwhile friends, all of them now dead, although in the end I fail: I understand Mary’s betrayal because she never liked me and always made that obvious, but I do not and will never understand the actions of John Marsh. I have tried and failed to make sense of his motivations. I have tried to see his fear in terms of love, which is to say fear of being alone in the world, bereft of his wife and daughter and the career he created. I have tried to see it in terms of him wanting to progress in a nation that claims to champion progress. But I cannot bring myself to understand his treason against me as anything other than petty and self-serving, the act of a man who could only think of himself in his own moment of danger. Know too that in saying this I can see the mirror of my actions, the selfishness of my flight, though I think it is a selfishness of lesser degree: my flight did nothing to harm except emotionally. I destroyed no lives, I undermined no government or democratic system, I betrayed no friends. All I did was leave as an act of self-preservation. I did all I could to persuade those I loved to come with me, even though you refused. I had no other choice as I saw it.
Night for Day Page 49
