Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  [October]

  Janet and I have restarted our affair in a desultory way. I wonder why? Perhaps because I rather miss Gloria and the fun we had. I drove Janet back from Windrose the other day (we’d been out to see Tate) and she asked me in for a drink and what with one thing and another… We were celebrating, anyway, partners in crime. We look set to more than triple our money on the Alberti collection. So easy.

  Went to meet Charlie Zemsche [a client] at the Plaza. It was a warm day and the stink of horse-piss and horse-shit from the ponies and traps on Central Park South was as thick as felt. I never come by here in summer because of the stench but had thought I was safe in October. It is an interesting history lesson: if three dozen horses can make this stink, imagine what the pungent reek of a nineteenth-century city must have been. Not to mention the thousands of tons of horse manure deposited on the streets each day. I find my gorge rising as I skirt round – how would I have survived in Dickens’s London?

  Charlie is as engagingly morose as ever: he hates New York, hates his new house. ‘I’m through with contractors, architects. You don’t lead a life. You got to live in a hotel – I’m selling all my houses. You live in a hotel, it’s another person’s problem, not yours.’ Charlie’s theory is that if you minimize the fuss and hassle in your life, you appreciate life all the more. I asked him how he could abandon New York for Miami.’ A bad day there is better than a good day here.’ All the same, he’s interested in my little Bonnard. It’ll fit in a suitcase, I told him, take it from hotel to hotel.

  1958

  [May]

  A weekend at the Ginsberg house in Southampton. Todd Heuber was there with his sister Martha, also a painter: a redhead with odd slanting blue eyes. She paints crude stripey abstracts like Barnett Newman’s. Todd is quite keen for Leeping Fils to take her. ‘Marius is very interested,’ he said, to spur me on.

  Gail spends all evening until her bedtime ‘looking for the Sputnik’. I join her on the lawn, a bit stoned, on a perfect night and stand with her peering up at the stars looking for the moving point of light. I feel empty-headed, vertiginous, and lose my balance. Gail helps me up off the lawn. ‘Why did you fall over, silly Daddy?’ she says, then adds, ‘Silly Logan.’ I was glad she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  [July]

  Mystic House. Watching Alannah, naked, shaving her armpits this morning, brought on a little quiver of lust, like the old days. I slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom and let my hardening cock nudge against her buttocks. ‘Honey, it’s my period,’ she said. But I know it’s not.

  [July]

  I slug gin direct from the bottle at 10.00 in the morning, just wanting that buzz, that little kick. The fog burns off to leave a day of hazy blue, the water in the Sound oddly opaque, like milk. I’m bored, which is why I reach so early for the bottle: Alannah is in the city for three days. Shirley has come up to help with the girls and their two friends. Four young girls in the house – they’re either fighting or giggling together, there seems no other form of behaviour available to them.

  [August]

  Looking at my face in the shaving mirror, I note its roughening texture: the nodules and pigment shadows, the burst capillaries, the lines and the slackening skin, all the small accruing damage of ageing. My hair seems to be receding, the promontory of my widow’s peak very marked. I experiment with different ways of combing my hair but don’t like the result. I’m fifty-two for God’s sake, no point in pretending.

  [August]

  NYC. Todd called, very excited, asking me to come and see Martha’s new paintings. It’s strange being in the apartment on my own. It seems so big without the girls and Alannah. I have a couple of extra meetings and so have decided to stay on over the weekend till Monday.

  I went to Martha’s studio. Peculiar, haunting work. The paintings are big – eight feet by four, ten by five – charged, Turneresque swirls of colour. Light and shade, impressionistic brush work. But they seem to be flawed by marks, as if tiny drops of dark paint have been spilled or the weave of the canvas is showing in some way. Then when you peer very closely – very close, just inches – you can see that these dots are in fact minute figures or animals – I would say never more than a tenth of an inch high. The sudden change of scale this brings about when you step back is startling. Perceptual gears change automatically, almost audibly, in your head. You look again at the picture and it’s altered. Suddenly these vague, misty coronas and supernovas of colour are vast unearthly wildernesses with tiny people moving through them, beneath astonishing weather and light effects. I sign Martha up for a show. We had a boozy lunch in the Village to celebrate.

  [August]

  Today, Sunday, a bit hungover, I went to see a movie in the afternoon – Gigi. Even this ersatz Hollywood version made me long to be in Paris, in Europe, the old world. As I came out I was thinking: maybe I should take Alannah and the girls to Paris – and thinking how much they would love it – or even if they didn’t love it, how it would be good for them to go, part of their education.

  And so I was strolling up Lexington looking for a cab, my head full of Alannah, when a woman came out of a coffee shop across the street who looked exactly like her. It was her. I shouted, but she didn’t hear me. I ran across the street but she’d turned the corner. I think it was 44th. I saw her go into a hotel. The Astoria. I went into the lobby – no sign. Then I saw her in the bar sitting with another man, her back half turned towards me. He looked to be in his thirties, dark, attractive, with heavy, black-rimmed spectacles. You can tell from the way two people sit beside each other in a bar how intimate they happen to be. There was no doubt in my mind. I waited outside the hotel for half an hour and then went back in. They weren’t in the bar any more and they hadn’t come out.

  [August]

  When I returned to Mystic, Alannah told me she’d had to go into New York on Sunday – some crisis with her sister. She’d called the apartment but there was no reply. I was at a movie, I said: Gigi. It made me want to take you and the girls to Paris. She was full of enthusiasm for the idea and we talked of Paris all through supper. I wonder who her lover is?

  [In October, Alannah told LMS about her affair and asked for a separation. She was in love with a colleague at NBC, a producer called David Peterman. LMS said that if she broke off the romance he was sure he could find it in himself to forgive her. Alannah replied she had no intention of ending the affair. So LMS moved out of the Riverside Drive apartment and crossed the city to the Upper East Side, taking the top floor of a townhouse on E. 74th Street between Third and Second Avenues – an easy stroll from the gallery. They agreed to share Mystic House on alternate weekends. LMS continued his visits to Dr Byrne.]

  1959

  [February]

  It’s pathetic. I was standing outside Gail’s school in the afternoon waiting for her class to come out. I missed her and I wanted to see her, just go to a diner for half an hour and chat. Alannah’s man was there too, also waiting. I said: what the fuck are you doing here, Davidson? Peterman, he said, David Peterman. He was here to meet Gail and take her home. I said I’d bring her home. He thought Alannah wouldn’t like that. I said I had been part of Gail’s family for six years and as far as I was concerned she was still my stepdaughter. He looked at me: Just beat it, Mountstuart. It’s over. Accept it. I wanted to hit him, haymaker his square jaw and stamp on his heavy framed spectacles. Then I thought of Gail coming out and seeing these two men she knew fighting over her. Not fair. I left, found a bar and got drunk.

  [April-May]

  Got this banal song in my head – ‘Gonna do the jailhouse rock’ –won’t go away, I’ve been hearing it for days. I listen to Bach and Monteverdi and as I change records it starts up again: Gonna do the jailhouse rock.

  Coincidentally, a sweet letter from Lionel saying he is working in the music business in London as the manager of a band called the Greensleeves. He says he has changed his name to Leo – Leo Leggatt – and doesn’t want to be known as �
��Lionel’ any more. ‘Leo’ sounds good to me: Lionel-Leo. Christ, he must be twenty-six by now. And now the old man is dead Lionel must have inherited the baronetcy. Sir Leo Leggatt. Mother would be pleased.

  Thursday, 23 April

  Went round to Nat Tate’s studio at 6.00 to collect my ‘Still Life No. 5’. He was already quite drunk and kept repeating that Janet was to know nothing about this sale. I reassured him. He offered me a bowl of Benzedrine pills – as if they were peanuts – but I declined. He took a couple and washed them down with a slug of Jack Daniel’s. We went into the studio and I watched him work for an hour or so. He was painting a triptych and the final panel was primed and ready on the big easel. We listened to music (Scriabin, I think) and talked aimlessly about his forthcoming trip to France and Italy – where he should go, what he should see. Amazing to think a man – an artist – of his age has never left the USA.

  Nat seemed content to drink and talk until he reached a certain plateau of drunkenness, waiting for the booze to trigger the precise moment. Suddenly he threw the dust sheets off the other two completed panels of the triptych. There was, first, a nude, an orthodox odalisque, more yellow than flesh toned, and then, in the second panel, was another version of it, more stylized and crudely flashy – very sub-de Kooning. Nat stood staring at the two panels, drinking, and then, putting the bottle down, literally attacked the big canvas with a wide brush and tubes of cadmium yellow, laying on great swathes of colour. He seemed almost deranged to me. I left after an hour with my still life and he was still at it, rubbing off most of what he had done with a rag, then going at it again, this time with black and green.6

  He has some talent, Nat, but he seems unduly tormented. One wants to say: relax, enjoy life a little more, creation need not always be so apocalyptic – look at Matisse, look at Braque. It doesn’t have to be all Sturm und Drang to be good. However, this is hardly a message to be heeded in New York in this day and age. The Jack Daniel’s had given me a thirst so I stopped off in a couple of bars. Drank more whisky when I came home. I realize I’m alone again and drinking too much. I’m unhappy: it’s not my natural state – I need to be married, or living with someone. Mind you, I have to say I drank as much when I was with Alannah and the girls.

  Friday, 5 June

  I told Byrne I was feeling depressed and he prescribed me some tranquillizers and Seconal to help me sleep. He advised me not to mix them with excessive amounts of alcohol. Define ‘excessive’, Dr Byrne. I can have a couple of Martinis, some wine – that sort of level. Any amount of beer is fine.

  Byrne asked me about my sexual fantasies and pronounced them pretty banal. I suppose they must be, given the stories he hears in this place. He seized on one that I mentioned, however: the idea that’s always tempted me of going to bed with two women at the same time. You should try it, he suggested. His theory is that it is a fantasy associated with my married, familial life. Now that I’m alone, my indulging in it will be a form of liberation, a watershed, a sign that I had moved on – a sense that my time with Alannah was truly over. Fine, I said, but how do I set about realizing it? You got a girlfriend? Byrne asked. I mentioned Janet. So tell her to bring a friend on your next date. I told him that wouldn’t work. Byrne shrugged: well, I guess you’re just going to have to pay for it.

  Saturday, 6 June

  My mood has lifted. Perhaps Byrne has a point: I’ve been thinking seriously about his theory. Anyway, this evening, after 10.00, I go down to Times Square and take a stroll around the streets that lead west off it. There are a lot of hookers and a lot of worrying-looking men. I am offered the opportunity to buy drugs at least a dozen times.

  On 45th and Eighth I see a girl standing by a small neon-lit bar. My first thought is that the image could be from an Edward Hopper painting. The girl must be in her late twenties, quite heavy, with a pronounced bosom. Her cheap clothes are creased tight on her and she has a curious coppery glint to her hair that catches as highlights the flashing neon of the beer signs – blue, yellow, green and blue again – above her head. She’s wearing a matching jacket and skirt, high heels and a red satin blouse. I go up to her. ‘Hi,’ I say, ‘can I buy you a drink?’ ‘What do you want, mister?’ ‘How much for a whole night?’ I feel curiously calm: this takes me back to my youth – mine was a generation that unreflectingly went to prostitutes, almost in the same way as one would go to the theatre. She looks me up and down and I know she’s making calculations based on my clothes, my manner, my accent. ‘A hundred,’ she says, ‘and any extras are extra.’ I ask her if she’s here most nights. Yes and no, she says. I say I’ll be back on Wednesday. ‘Oh, sure,’ she says disgustedly.

  I keep walking and end up on Sixth Avenue, where I find a medium-sized, medium-priced hotel. It has a big lobby – good for discretion – and there’s a bank of ten elevators to take you to the rooms above. No one should notice a couple of hookers coming in and out of a place like this. I book a junior suite for Wednesday night.

  Thursday, 11 June

  It’s over. It’s done. Write it down quickly while I remember.

  I have everything ready in the room. Scotch, gin, mixers, some beers, six packs of cigarettes – different brands – peanuts, pretzels, chewing gum.

  At about 10.00 I go back to the corner of 47th and Eighth but the girl isn’t outside the bar. Then I see her across the street. She’s wearing the same clothes as on Saturday. I saunter over, my heartbeat audible to passers-by, it seems to me.

  ME: Hello, remember me?

  GIRL: NO.

  ME: I’m the one who asked you for a whole night.

  GIRL: Oh, yeah…

  ME: I’m ready now but I have another request. Can you bring another along?

  GIRL: A guy?

  ME: NO, no. Another girl. A hundred dollars each.

  GIRL: Extras are extra.

  I give her the address of the hotel and my room number and hand her a $20 bill as a token of my sincerity. I return to the hotel, where I sit in my junior suite for an hour and a half, becoming increasingly angry with myself – how naive can you be? The easiest twenty bucks she’s ever earned. I switch on the TV set and the doorbell rings. It is my girl, with another in tow: smaller, darker, with a nervy, shifty gaze. They come in, I pour them a drink and we introduce ourselves: Logan, Rose (my girl) and Jacintha (her pal). In the light of the room I have a better look at them. Rose is buxom, hefty. Jacintha is grubbier, her print dress stained, her cardigan has a hole in the elbow. They both smoke.

  ME: DO you two know each other?

  ROSE: I seen her around.

  JACINTHA: Yeah. This is the whole night, yeah? Hundred bucks?

  ME: Absolutely. Help yourself to a drink.

  They do and sit down with their drinks on the two available armchairs while I perch on the edge of the bed. I switch on the radio and try to find a jazz station. The girls drink, smoke and munch peanuts – Rose asks about the room rate. I suggest we all take our clothes off.

  When we are naked the girls go automatically into a different mood, one of routine coquettishness. I’m glad to see I have the makings of a respectable erection. Jacintha asks about rubbers and I tell her I have a drawerful. I go over to Rose and take her in my arms as if we are going to dance to the crackly jazz emanating from the radio. I try to kiss her and she says, ‘No kissing.’ We agree on $5 for a proper kiss with tongues and I get my five dollars’ worth. I’m very aroused now and Rose and I fall on the bed as I fumble for a condom. Rose could be a pretty girl – prettier, anyway – if she lost about twenty pounds. The fat she’s carrying distorts her face, plumps her cheeks unattractively. We fuck and I come very quickly. Meanwhile Jacintha has switched on the television. Rose asks if she can take a shower and disappears into the bathroom. I sit on the rumpled bed, looking at Jacintha, then I look down at my flaccid dick – I feel not an ounce of sexual interest in my entire body. Jacintha turns round.

  JACINTHA: You know, you look a bit like one of those guys in ‘Sergeant Bilko’. The dark
one – what’s his name? – Paparelli.

  ME: Thanks a lot.

  JACINTHA: YOU from out of town?

  I wander over to her. She can hardly tear her eyes from the screen but she reaches out and gives a few tugs to my cock. I cup her breasts. Close to, her body looks unhealthily pale: I can see the fragile fluted cage of her ribs, the grey square screen of the TV set reflected in her dark eyes. I turn away and go to pour myself another drink. Rose comes out of the bathroom, all steamy and pink, a towel around her waist. They got great soap,’ she says. So Jacintha goes to take a shower in her turn. Rose pours herself a big gin, lights another cigarette and looks squarely at me. ‘So, how’s it goin’, Logan?’ ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘The night is young.’

  We watch a movie, a western, the three of us lying on the bed at my request – me the meat in the hooker sandwich. Occasionally I grab one of their hands and place it on my cock and they jerk away desultorily for a while. I get hard and reach for Jacintha but she says she’s enjoying the movie and we’ve got all night. I nuzzle Rose’s big bubs and she pushes my head out of the way.

  After the movie Jacintha gives me a blow-job ($15) and when I’m hard I whip out a condom. I stay hard but I heave away for what seems hours without coming. Eventually I withdraw.

  JACINTHA: It’s better with two guys and a girl. Free advice.

  ME: Why?

  ROSE: TWO guys can always be doing things – more variation.