The Millionaire of Love

by David Leddick

  Nevis realized he really was falling in love with Radomir one June evening walking back to the flat on the Boulevard Haussmann after having seen a film on the Champs-Elysées. It was the kind of evening of which Nevis had often said, “You’d fall in love with whoever happened to be walking with you.” The sky was still light, the chestnut trees, with their unusual ability to conceal very black shadows among their leaves loomed overhead. No one else walked the wide avenue, and the stop signs sent out their green and red signals blocks ahead to the handful of cars sliding by. The dusk was the exact “Deep Purple” of the song, and they were lost in it as they moved slowly along under the trees. Nevis looked at the sulky boy walking beside him, heavy shoulders hunched forward, looking slowly downward under his heavy brows. He seemed unaware of the evening around him, but Nevis had come to know that the unawareness often signaled being very aware and not wanting anyone to sense it. He felt an old familiar lurch inside. It was like seeing a dish falling. The crash, the breaking apart, the irrevocable thing hasn’t happened yet but cannot be avoided. Those moments when everything is still all right but where there is no road back, the smashing that changes everything cannot be avoided—the moment before death must be like that. That was the moment on the Boulevard Haussmann. The falling toward the bad thing.

  On the weekends that Nevis went to the country they began making day trips. Trips Nevis had talked of making for many seasons. He gave Radomir Le Grand Meaulnes to read in English, and one weekend they traveled into the Sologne to visit the village where that magical, romantic story had taken place. The Grand Meaulnes village itself was dead of any magic, but the long, straight roads through the flat, pine-burdened land, the glimmer of tiny lakes flashing through the trees, the red-brick eighteenth-century chateaux standing straight and lonely in this noncommital Scandinavian-looking countryside had the effect of throwing them more closely into each other’s companionship. The difference in their ages and lives began to wear away. Radomir did all the driving of the ancient Peugeot and at the wheel as he stared over the road he talked more openly about himself. The fact that in the old car the passenger’s seat was so dilapidated that Nevis, a good bit taller, could look directly into Radomir’s eyes leveled their relation even more.

  “I felt very strongly I had been here before and I wanted to come back. That’s why I wrote you,” Radomir said. Nevis had very limited feelings about past lives. He had been educated and done military service before the 1960s had arrived, and at Radomir’s age he had moved with a brittle, hard-drinking witty set who would have thought the hereafter was something their kind of people never discussed. They believed that serious people acted silly, and only silly people acted serious. It was the final fading of the “entre les guerres” attitude that ended in their generation. Radomir had come to Europe from California where the 1960s determination to explore oneself quickly and with the least possible effort lives on eternally.

  “You know there’s a ghost in your house, don’t you?” he said as the car hurtled between the pines in the fading light of the early spring day. Nevis said that many people had felt that in the house, but unfortunately he had never had any sense of it. Nevis felt all large empty houses were spooky and was reluctant to even stay in his own alone. But he blamed this on being brought up in a large house full of people, a house that was heavy with their absence when it was empty.

  He asked Radomir about it. “I hear his footsteps over-head.” Nevis reported that a number of others who slept in the bedroom Radomir was using had said the same thing. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t the elderly couple next door whom he knew cavorted about greatly in the night. His own imaginings ran more to black lace underwear and dildos and “You chase me, then I’ll chase you.”

  “He’s young,” Radomir went on. “Or was young once. He doesn’t frighten me. Well, he did once. He touched me and I probably would have seen him if I hadn’t acted like a fish out of water. I think he likes me. I think he likes my company.”

  As the day grew darker Radomir put on the slightly wall-eyed headlights of the Peugeot and Nevis pondered on the ghost. He didn’t discount it. Radomir had earlier told him that when he was young their family home had been invaded by poltergeists.

  Nevis had read a good bit on poltergeists and knew they were always linked to a young person in the household with strong and disturbed emotions. He thought it was very likely Radomir was experiencing a strong emotional contact with something. He wondered if it was a beautiful French friend of his who had died of AIDS the year before, and who had first become ill while he was staying in the house. Maybe it’s André come back, he thought. It would be just like him to fall in love with Radomir and not make the slightest effort to contact me.

  “He’s trying to communicate something to me,” Radomir went on. “I feel him around me. He pushed the two little porcelain busts on the dressing table in my room together so they were kissing.”

  That evening when Nevis was giving Radomir what was becoming an expected and usual massage he slipped his pajama bottoms down to massage the hollows of his buttocks to see if he objected. Radomir said nothing, but the defenselessness and childlike look of his lower back touched Nevis. It made him think of his own nephews when he tended them as babies, and of their sweet, soft cuddliness when he changed their diapers. Radomir’s heavily developed upper body and long curving back and his relatively short legs gave a childlike quality to his stance, as his rounded nose and cheeks, forehead, and lips gave to his face. Which didn’t keep Nevis from having an aching hard-on while he gave him his massages. And a fairly explosive masturbation session later.

  ~4~

  Radomir’s Side

  So he’s here. What gives with this guy? I’m kind of glad to see him, but I really don’t ever want to lay eyes on him again. I owe him a lot, but I hate him. He’s been trying to get into my pants since the first day I met him, and he just won’t give up.

  But to be fair, it wasn’t always that way. When I first came to France I hardly noticed him. He was just a friend of Larry’s from New York who had a house in the Loire Valley. An old friend. And I mean old. God, he was way into his fifties. He had a big job in advertising. Larry said he could write his own ticket as far as jobs went. He was nice, you know. Very gay. Not so much swishy as tall and thin and very nicely dressed. Too nicely dressed. When you see guys like that you say to yourself, what else could they be? The kind of men who know all the words to all the old songs.

  He was kind of funny that way. I mean really funny. He would just sing out wherever he was. Walking down the street, sitting in a restaurant. It embarrassed some people. But not me. It didn’t embarrass his niece either. Amanda. She was there that Christmas, too. With her boyfriend. She was a model working in Barcelona and Madrid. I broke it off with Larry while we were in France because she and her boyfriend seemed to be having such a good time together. And I wanted to be like them.

  When I first met Larry in Germany I have to admit I was crazy about him. I thought he was so handsome. And he had been the lover of Dan Danforth, the guy I had broken up with when I left California. He really loved Dan, and Dan didn’t give a hoot in hell about Larry. So fucking him was like giving him what Dan wouldn’t. It’s always the same old crap, isn’t it? Larry wanted Dan; Dan wanted me. I wanted Larry and got him. Not that he wasn’t a really great fuck. The first time I was with him we had four wonderful days and three fantastic nights together.

  So when I went back to Germany to live with him it wasn’t as though I was using him when that job I had been promised just failed to materialize. I did want to be with him. But I was always thinking about Esther back in California, too. And when I was in France and Amanda and her boyfriend were there I remembered what it was like to have a girlfriend and decided to go back to that. I gave Larry a really good fuck in that little bedroom on the top floor of the house in the country one morning and that was that.

  Now I kind of wonder why I thought my time with Esther was so great. She had that other
boyfriend she wouldn’t give up. We even had a threesome at her request. Maybe so she could make a real on-site comparison. I don’t know what she decided, but she got hers that night. We were both probably trying to outfuck the other guy. Clever girl. The only hitch was I wouldn’t have minded throwing a fuck into him, too, while I was at it. I could have fucked him while he was fucking her. It occurred to me, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t up for it, so I didn’t try anything. And that would have really clinched it with Esther. All the attention was supposed to be on her. Not on either of us. But he definitely had a nice ass.

  That’s how I came to Europe. Esther wouldn’t leave that guy, who had a nice ass but was definitely a loser. I got that job in Rome through the company I was working for, and when I got there the job didn’t exist. So they sent me to London, and I went by way of Germany and started that little affair with Larry. London didn’t have a job for me either, so I went back to Rome and there it was real obvious that I was just being given the runaround. Somehow I just couldn’t go back to the United States. I didn’t want to see Esther again. I didn’t want to see Dan Danforth again. I’d broken it off with him when I was getting serious about Esther, and I didn’t want to back over the same ground again. So I wound up with Larry. And because of Larry I ended up in France.

  I was never really involved with Nevis. I was involved with his house. The house really got to me. I’ve always been interested in that woo-woo stuff. And he had that really strange house out there in the Loire Valley. It’s all staircases and halls running off this way and that and attics rambling around up above and a couple of caves under the house with strange things in them. I just fell in love with that house. So when I got back to Germany I wrote a letter to Nevis and asked him if I could renovate it for him. He had been talking about how it really needed to have all the old wallpaper pulled off and the plaster repaired and be repainted and there were lots of little things he wanted to have repaired and changed and he just hadn’t found the time to do them.

  Of course, I knew he was interested in me. I’m not that dumb. And I made sure that he saw my body a couple of times while I was there. Just to make sure, you know. I mean, he had a big job in advertising. You never know when those things will come in handy. And he seemed to be a nice enough guy.

  I knew he’d do it. He wrote back and said he wasn’t so sure that I’d like living full-time in a little French village but that I could give it a try and if I didn’t like it and wanted to call it quits that would be fine with him.

  Actually, it was cool. Nevis kept an old car out there and gave me money to buy paint and supplies and I got busy. I’d done a lot of that kind of stuff with my dad when we added a back wing to the house, and I’m pretty disciplined. I can cook for myself, and I kind of got off on that little village with its two grocery stores and the butcher and the baker. It had everything but the candlestick maker.

  Of course, it’s pretty gray in France in the wintertime. And wet. But the house had central heating, and I loved making a big fire in the kitchen fireplace and staying there most of the time I wasn’t stripping wallpaper or plastering or something. And there were some other Americans around.

  There was Fritz, who was doing pretty much the same thing I was to an old house down the street. Fritz had been the lover of a French friend of Nevis’s who had died of AIDS. This all took place in California. Fritz was pretty upset. He had been to France with his lover and decided to come visit Nevis. Which he did, saw that a house was for sale, and bought it. I think he wanted to be near Nevis. I think he wanted to have an affair with Nevis, who wasn’t having any. Which was a real mistake in my opinion. Fritz has a gigantic cock.

  Fritz and I hung out together a good bit. I used to fix dinner for him, and when we needed two people to lift or haul something we helped each other. He was a really good guy, but he tended to use drugs a lot when he got lonely. Prescription drugs. He slept a lot. He said it was because of his asthma. He was a real redneck, good ‘ol boy from Alabama, Fritz was. Very good-hearted. I think there had been a big insurance policy on his French lover and Fritz collected a lot of money, none of which he gave to his lover’s parents, who lived in the next town. That was just a fluke, Nevis told me. Fritz had known the French lover in Paris and only later discovered he was from the same area where Nevis had a house.

  I wonder if the French lover had been a lover of Nevis’s before Fritz? I never asked. Probably.

  Fritz had been in France at least a year before me and didn’t speak a word of French. I told him once I thought he should try to learn, and he said, “Hell, ah don’t even speak English!” Which was kind of true, although he told me that at one time he had taught in a private girls’ school in San Francisco. I wonder what? Those girls must have had some pretty funny accents when they got out of that school.

  I started studying French right away with the wife of the assistant to the mayor in town. She was an American married to a young Frenchman she had met in school in the United States. Elsie was her name. I went to Elsie three times a week. She had a crush on me. I could see that. I wasn’t about to get involved, though she was pretty nice looking. You could tell where all that would go. She would want to leave her husband and marry me. Then we’d go back to the States. Etcetera. Etcetera. Definitely not in my game plan.

  I kind of led her to believe that I was interested in Angelina. Angie. The daughter of some Americans who had a house across the river, about five miles away. They were friends of Nevis’s, too. Angie was staying at her parents’ house for the winter, so she and Fritz hung out together quite a lot. I don’t know quite what Angie’s story was. She was older than I was by a few years, younger than Fritz. They went out to bars together. They took me to the one gay bar in Blois. Which wasn’t very gay. Kind of a mixed crowd. I guess they thought they might each find somebody there. There wasn’t a whole lot to choose from the night I stopped in. I was definitely the hottest guy in the place.

  Angie would have liked to get it on with me—that was clear. But that wasn’t in the cards either. Well, maybe. I couldn’t tell why she was fucked up, but fucked up she certainly was. Fritz told me that they sometimes discussed trying to go to bed together, but that didn’t happen either. When I think of it, it was kind of strange that Fritz never came on to me. I guess any attention he could spare from his house and his sleeping pills went to Nevis—who was always very nice to Fritz, but clearly there was nothing doing.

  In my own case I wasn’t so lucky. Nevis came down to the country every other weekend to see how I was doing and to give me a hand with things. To his credit, he was a good worker and pitched right in with the painting and wallpaper peeling.

  On the alternate weekends he had me come up to Paris so I wouldn’t get too bored. I could tell he was falling for me, but he was always the perfect gentleman. And he could be very interesting. There were always exhibitions in Paris to see. Weird ones on erotic Greek pottery or photographs of French film stars from the 1930s. We took the trip in the sewers of Paris by boat, definitely weird. We walked through the catacombs carrying those flickering candles, another weird trip. No, you could not say that Nevis was boring, and he always concentrated on the other person.

  I think my big mistake was in the country house when I had a stiff neck and Nevis started to massage it. He is very good at massage. I said, “You can give me a massage any time.” Partly because I do love a good massage and I think probably I was getting a little tired of his tight-ass “I’m not going to touch you” routine. Fritz walked into the house just as Nevis was massaging my neck, and he got the picture right away, I could tell. The world is just full of people not getting what they want, I guess.

  ~5~

  Nevis Speaks

  You don’t fall in love with someone all at once. At least I don’t. You fall into it, step by step. Like falling down the basement steps. Bumpty-bump-bump-bump.

  That’s how it was with Radomir. I saw him come out of that airport door and my hackles rose. This was going to
be trouble. He flew into the air when he jumped up on that stone gatepost in Amboise like an avenging angel and something inside me flew up with him.

  But it was on that second trip in search of Le Grand Meaulnes that I think sank the hook in so deeply I couldn’t escape. I had always loved the magic of Alain-Fournier’s book. It has the kind of magic that Halloween has when you’re young. True beauty, but something spooky and inexplicable, too. It’s the same thing that John Fowles’s The Magus has. It seems mysterious, but you’re sure that if you try to understand it you’ll find another level of reality there.

  I gave Le Grand Meaulnes to Radomir and he loved the book, too. He was a good sport about venturing forth, and together we went to the Sologne to find the town where it supposedly took place. It was disappointing. The Sologne is only a few kilometers from my little town in the Loire Valley. When driving to it, the rolling storybook countryside of the Loire abruptly ends and your car enters flat pine barrens. Few houses. And an occasional small lake or pool. The hunting is supposedly great and the reason that many aristocratic families have large rambling country homes there. It’s a gloomy countryside in which to pursue a gloomy preoccupation: the killing of living things. The French of course love that. Anything the kings did they want to do. As long as it’s comme il faut they would never ask themselves if they were actually having a good time. There is no such thing as having a good time in France for the French. There is only doing that for which other people will envy you. That’s even their expression for “would like to.” Envie. “I have envy to do this or that.”

  When we reached the town that was supposedly the site of Le Grand Meaulnes I bought a green hanging lamp in an antique shop. We wandered about. There was nothing in the town, the atmosphere, the air, the sky, the trees that suggested that this place inspired a magical book.