“Delicious!” I blurted, sounding as if I were surprised.
He laughed. Of course I blushed. I wanted to apologize but I couldn’t form words. Putting down his own glass, the count asked me if I’d do him the honor of sitting next to him at the meal. He made a sign to the valet, who immediately opened the doors in the far end of the room, and took my elbow again.
The dining room was exactly as I would have imagined the dining room of a French château. I checked off everything on my mental list: white linen, crystal glasses, silver cutlery, dark wood, wall hangings. Add to this half a dozen crystal vases of white roses and lavender placed every few feet along the immense table. We were eighteen for dinner. We arranged ourselves and sat. Willis was on the opposite side, farther down, between two women of a certain age. The sun was coming straight in through the windows, and I could feel the sweat trickling from my underarms into my bra.
Gentlemen ask you questions about yourself and look like they find the answer very interesting. When I told the count what I did, he said, “A fine assistant is a precious thing.” He asked about the magazine’s methods for gathering news from behind the Iron Curtain. I certainly didn’t know much, but I talked anyway. He continued listening actively, then said, “Don’t worry. It will come up, the curtain. They will miss our wine too much.”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m sure those who drank it before are still drinking it now.”
“Precisely,” he said.
By this time we were eating lobster. A pair of white-gloved hands kept appearing between us and replacing the previous course’s plate with a clean one before I’d had time to finish. On the other side, another pair of gloves expertly served the next course between two large spoons. I wanted to eat but I was struggling. Between talking and enjoying the wine I couldn’t really apply myself to the food, and then they took it away. I noticed the count didn’t finish anything either, but where it may be elegant in a host I felt sure it was offensive in a guest. My napkin was covered in lipstick and upper-lip sweat.
And then the waiters came in with sorbet, little glass bowls of sorbet arranged in a circle around the decorative tops of pineapples. Each of us received one, and a pretty glass of calvados as well.
The count was talking to me as I looked down at my spoon, wondering if I could force myself to pick it up.
“This is what we call a trou normand,” he said. “A Norman hole. It’s something to clean the palate between very different courses. Traditionally it should be an apple sorbet, but I adore pineapple. Please.” He indicated that I should go ahead and taste it.
I hate pineapple so much, it might as well have been a delicate serving of blood and hair. I tried to smile but it made my lip tremble. I looked at Willis, desperate for him to recognize my predicament and get on his white horse, but he was deep into some tall tale and had too much of a head of steam to switch tracks.
He looked so happy. Stalling was my only option. “Please go ahead, Henri. I must excuse myself for a moment to use les toilettes.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, standing, signaling to the valet. “Take your time.” God knows I would. I’d stay long enough for the sorbet to melt.
The toilet was clearly designed for ladies, and quite recently. Maybe there weren’t any toilets on the ground floor originally. Maybe upstairs they were still connected to high cisterns and flushed with a long chain. I would have loved to creep up the stairs and look around, but there was the question of the valet. This toilet was modern, in a room with a tiled counter inset with a pretty porcelain sink. I could breathe in there, although the mirror showed me terrible things. I had known my lipstick would be gone, but I hadn’t anticipated that the nervous sweating I was doing would have begun to curl my hair. I looked mortifyingly Midwestern, but in my haste to leave the dining room I had left my handbag on my chair. So stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I made sure the door was locked, took off my jacket and camisole, and splashed my neck, chest, and underarms with the extremely cold water that came out of the tap. It felt so good I did it again. I wet a corner of a linen hand towel and dabbed at my face. I decided that if I messed up my eyeliner I’d leave the château immediately, but I did okay. Before putting my clothes back on, I flapped them smartly to dispel the smell of distress. There was nothing to do about the curls, but I ran my fingers carefully through my hair so at least they would curl in the same direction.
When I finally emerged, the unsmiling valet appeared from around a corner. I felt I’d never experienced anything more discreet in my life. He showed me back to the dining room. The count stood, I sat, then he sat. The pineapple was gone. Cheese and grapes now dominated the table.
I said, “Wow!” and the count laughed. I took a sip of calvados, which was pure fire in my throat. I pretended the coughing was brought on by the laughter.
In bed that night, Willis said, “Sure you’re satisfied with the likes of me?”
It was an excellent question, but I had no idea why he asked it. It wasn’t his style at all.
“Why?”
“Because you could be having yourself a count.”
“What?”
“He was yours for the taking, babe.”
“He was not.”
“Ripe for the plucking.”
“He was not. You just don’t know a gentleman when you see one,” I told him. Then I thought for a while, blinking at the dark ceiling, replaying the event. I decided Willis was mistaken. Willis really, really didn’t understand anything.
On English as a Foreign Language
Of course my parents had a bit of trouble swallowing Willis. Among other things.
On the first day of their first and only trip to visit me in Paris, I walked into their hotel dining room to find Mother shocked and disgusted. I have to say she looked otherwise handsome, but her face was pinched with discomfort and I thought, Oh God, it’s only the first day, please let this be something we can get over quickly. There are so many confusing feelings involved in entertaining Midwestern parents in a European city. I suppose I’d been in Europe too long to remember that not everyone in the world hankered to start the day with a croissant. No matter where they were, Mother and Poppa asked for sweet rolls for breakfast in hotels. It was nearly lunchtime already, but they still insisted on starting the day the usual way. Apparently when they asked for sweet rolls they had received blank looks and had rightly understood that the word “roll” was the culprit, so tried asking for sweet bread instead. I arrived just after the waiter had taken the lid off the thymus gland of a calf.
Mother said, “Calf’s thymus, Lillian? I wish I weren’t too tired and hungry to laugh.”
“Well, you could try it, since it’s here now.”
“Don’t push her, Lil,” Poppa said, squeezing my elbow.
Impasse. So I said I’d eat it. I waved a waiter over and ordered Mother a selection of pastries, and I ate the sweetbreads, pretending not to mind in the slightest. They tasted a bit like bacon, so I told Mother they tasted a lot like bacon. I added that I’d heard that sweetbreads of pancreas rather than thymus were said to be more delicious. She laughed at that, and it was nice to see.
After we finished eating, Mother pulled out her cigarettes and I surprised them both by pulling out mine. Poppa didn’t miss a beat, though, and lit them for each of us, Mother first, of course, and went back to his coffee, smiling at the spring sun coming through the windows. Mother and I puffed. I didn’t want a cigarette; I wanted some orange juice, but instead I built a smoke tower to rival hers. Smoking is only convivial if you partake of the same pack; otherwise it’s territorial.
I knew very little about Mother then. I still don’t have the facts straight. She wouldn’t tell anyone what year she was born because she was a year older than Poppa. She had been a rural teacher before marriage and the suburbs, but showed no teacherly tendencies at any point in my life with her. She had two charming sisters who irritated her
but nonetheless kept her secrets. Her drink was bourbon on the rocks. Sitting across from her in the hotel that morning, though, what I did or didn’t know about her and what I did and didn’t like about her didn’t matter. I wanted my parents to have a good time, and I wanted to show them what a big girl I was, and I wasn’t sure how to work it all out. Then it hit me like my own private earthquake that Mother and I were wearing the same shade of dark red nail polish. I put out my half-smoked cigarette and tucked my hands under my thighs.
“So,” I said in my high school voice, “what do you want to do today?” They visibly relaxed. It’s unfortunate how we have to cripple ourselves for love, but it’s a fact. We have to. Poppa did that more elegantly than any human I’ve ever met, keeping his thoughts to himself on Mother’s complaints and desires, giving the impression that he had gained rather than lost something as a result.
I can’t remember where I took them that day. Probably the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. That would have made sense. I know we had beautiful weather. I remember our nail polish flashing in the sun. For dinner with my parents and Willis, I changed shades. He would have remarked upon the matching fingernails. The clotheshorse doesn’t fall far from the tree, now, does it? he’d have hooted. I took off the red and put on an extremely dark plum after my bath, knowing it would look as good with the black-and-white satin dress as the red, and sat naked on the edge of the bed waiting for it to dry. Willis took a photo. When he couldn’t keep his hands to himself any longer, he pushed me onto my back and took me. I kept my hands in the air, away from our bodies. That was fun. It was fun to think of when we walked into the hotel bar and greeted Mother. Less fun to think of when I hugged Poppa, though, and when I introduced him to Willis.
Willis ordered drinks and commandeered the conversation. He was just back from Naples, where he believed not only that every other person he met was a Mafioso but also that they were now his best friends. I drank and cringed and watched my parents’ reactions. Mother smoked and accepted another drink and asked Willis about his people in Texas. Willis was succinct for once. Poppa stuck with two drinks and nodded. Willis turned to Poppa and said, “You saw some of the first war here in France, Lil tells me.”
“Well, yes, I suppose I did,” Poppa answered.
“You suppose, huh?” Willis said, ready to laugh, but he caught my look. “Well,” he said, and took a swig of his gin. “Paris has a brand-new face on these days anyway. It’s not the same town you liberated, George. No, sir. You’ll see that. We’re back to flowers and smooches in the street now, aren’t we, Lil?”
“Hallelujah,” I said, and raised my glass. Willis and Poppa and then Mother followed suit.
“To smooches,” Willis said.
Mother and Poppa hesitated—it wasn’t their sort of word—so I said it, “To smooches,” and we drank.
At dinner, Mother talked about the trip she and Poppa had taken to Florida two months before to visit her sister Celia, and how Celia’s husband had spent so much time tending his hunting dogs that she wondered why Celia didn’t come back to Missouri, and Poppa said he supposed she enjoyed the beautiful sunsets over the lake. Mother said, “Celia?” but I knew Poppa was saying that he had been touched by that evening light.
For all Willis’s brutal directness, I knew that he would have loved the Florida sunsets too. I also knew that it would be hard to convince anyone that this was true. People say it shouldn’t matter, that you shouldn’t worry about whether or not other people see your lover the way you do, but when are things ever that simple? Have the people who say that lived at all?
I spent a lot of money telling all this to Alma years later in New York, when the strain of loving Ted, and waiting for Ted, and enduring the disapproval of the family got too great. Alma smoked while I talked and cried. It’s a shame shrinks can’t smoke in their own offices anymore. The smoke looked like her thoughts. Shrinks who just listen make me nervous. We entered areas of feeling that I worried might overwhelm me completely. Hate, for example. It’s an emotion I continue to avoid, both in myself and in others, but I like to encourage others to admit to it if they can. I like to watch when they do. I now prefer women who breathe fire when truly provoked to those who sit alone in their bedrooms and cry. Back then, though, I was still convinced that hate wasn’t allowed, and that crying was the only path to peace. As I told Alma my stories, my crying led not to relief but to more crying. The well felt bottomless. Standing at the door after an early session, knowing there was someone in the waiting room who deserved his or her turn, I couldn’t get myself to leave. Alma asked me if I’d like to come more than once a week for a while.
“Yes, please,” I blubbed.
“That’s okay. We’ll do that,” she told me.
This still didn’t get me out.
“Would you like to come every day?” She was smiling.
“Yes, please.” I meant it. Still I stood.
“Would you like to move in?”
Now I laughed, which released me. I felt really stupid, but I could finally walk through the door, and, more importantly, back out into New York and my life. My life with Ted but not with Ted, with, without, with and without. Alma said that would keep until we’d talked about Mother, and Poppa, even George Junior, which was weird, and Vassar. She made a joke to get me back out on the street, but out there I cried again. Once even, actually maybe twice, on my way home, I imagined coming across a sharp rock protruding from the sidewalk and deliberately falling so that it pierced my temple and killed me, but of course there never was one. Also, Alma had tried to convince me that even though I felt each time I saw her that I was descending deeper into a dark, rank pit, I was actually climbing a ladder out of it.
On Remodeling
Michael likes tea in the morning, and I always wish I could have a steaming pot waiting for him when he comes into the kitchen, but it’s impossible to time it correctly. I sat at the little table for a while after I finished my breakfast and wondered what to do about the corner cabinet. I can’t just keep putting Scotch tape on it to keep it closed. Well, I can. But there must be something else I can do. Maybe a sliver of cardboard in the hinge. People who ask me why I don’t just replace the old cabinets don’t understand at all. When you choose new kitchen cabinets you don’t just choose new cabinets. You set off an avalanche of decisions to be made: Will they clash with the countertop? Will I hate the way the handles stick out? Will having new cabinets make the old fridge look too shabby? I keep meaning to have some gay friends over to ask their opinions.
I like to think that if Mother had been born a bit later and in more cosmopolitan circumstances, she would have had gay friends. She would have had a good laugh with them, maybe even a good, wicked laugh. They would have enjoyed her well-made dress suits, and maybe they would have improved her taste in interiors.
She had a decorator over once, when I had just finished college and was volunteering here and there. This woman looked around the house at all the details—the things that couldn’t be reupholstered or painted over, the paintings. She came last to my room and pointed at the little Zao Wou-ki watercolor I had just bought. “Well,” she said, “that’s the only art of any value here.” I saw Mother stiffen.
It didn’t go with my ice-blue room at all. I had leaned it up against the wall in anticipation of living somewhere else. I still do that. I buy stuff for future walls. Fantasy walls. This was the first, though. I’d seen the painting in the window of a little gallery in St. Louis, and started going in to stare at it after my activities with the Junior League nearby. I had volunteered to read to children in a hospital in the city, which I adored. Afterward, someone from the Junior League would drive me to the bus station. But first I went into the gallery. I couldn’t walk by it; I had to go in. If this has happened to you, you know what I mean. Time stops. You don’t feel your body, just the swirl behind your eyes. Finally the woman in the shop asked me how much I felt I coul
d pay, as it was obvious to her I was blocked by my budget. I floundered. After a moment she very elegantly suggested an installment plan. I would bring her ten dollars as regularly as possible, and she would leave the painting up with a little SOLD sign beside it. “Good for you, good for me,” she said, explaining how SOLD signs always got hesitant browsers’ juices flowing. So eventually I had it, a little watercolor window on my future propped up against the wall of my bedroom, and Mother had to eat crow, because she had said it was very strange and the decorator had called it valuable.
I can admit that I now need a decorator. I know this kitchen is ridiculous. Not enough space to swing a cat. Between the sink and the oven there’s no space to swing even a mouse. Silly. But no one’s offered a solution that feels right. I should see the design and time should stop. You should know it’s the one for you.
That was Ted. The first time I saw him I knew, and it wasn’t just how he looked; it was the energy that came off him. I felt it coming out of his eyes but also off his forearms when he rolled up his starched sleeves. It was in the shine on his eyebrow hairs and in the deep creases on the tops of his gleaming shoes. I felt it in the way his trousers slid along his long calves when he walked.
It was August 15, 1968. I was thirty-five. We knew that the new managing director would be moving into the New York office that day. Those of us who were interested had read his bio, and some people in the office had met him when he was with AP. Most of the assistants hadn’t thought too much about him, but I was going to be his PA. I read the bio. I asked around. He’d attended the School of Journalism at Indiana University. He also had a law degree. He’d worked for newspapers in Pennsylvania and California before joining AP, where he progressed from reporter to editor. He had a wife and three children. He was fifty-one, and, as I noticed when he walked across the outer office to where I was standing by my desk, he limped.
Lillian on Life Page 5
