The Millionaire of Love

by David Leddick

  “No, I went for a walk on the beach and read.”

  Nevis took a table by a window in the sunlight and Radomir brought him some breakfast. The cab came. Nevis shook the dazed taverna owner’s hand, and Radomir walked him to the cab. All he said to Nevis was, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.” They shook hands. As the taxi rushed Nevis away up the hill past the hostel he looked back. Radomir was walking back into the taverna. It was early in the morning in Plakias and Nevis was leaving.

  ~15~

  Lo De Coy

  I don’t think I would have gotten through that awful winter in Paris with Nevis if it hadn’t been for Lo De Coy. I met her in my French class at the Alliance Francaise. She was from Guatemala. Spanish really. She said that her family was descended from the conquistadors. Then she laughed and said that everyone in Guatemala said that.

  Minerva Minot and she and I became pals because we were the only ones from the Americas in the class. We always sat together. Lo was a lot better than we were because her first language was Spanish, but her English was excellent, too. We were probably an interesting-looking trio. Kind of like the cast from of a B movie about young Americans in Europe. Minerva was blondish and blue-eyed and kind of pudgy, and Lo was very dark and had a muscular sort of body, and then there was me. Cute American me, I suppose.

  Both the girls had families who didn’t really want them. Minerva had parents in Texas who sent her money to live in France and pursue a singing career, but they obviously didn’t want her around. And I always wondered about that career. She never seemed to have a singing teacher and I never heard her sing. Well, once. She was at the apartment one day when Nevis was singing, “Look me over once, look me over twice, examine the line of my spine.” From Die Fledermaus. You always learned a lot of obscure things from Nevis. Minerva got the music and sang it for me frequently when we were in the country together. I never had the heart to tell her that Nevis sang better than she did. But then he had had a real career singing and kicking his legs higher than his head when he was a chorus boy. As he always said, “Right after the Civil War.”

  Lo was something else altogether. She had the strangest story. Her parents had separated, each to marry someone else, when she was about five with sisters ages three and one. Neither of the parents wanted the children, so they were sent to live with her mother’s parents, where they stayed until Lo was about fifteen. Then both grandparents died and two aunts inherited the house. They didn’t want to inherit the girls too, but everything looked up when both the spouses of their father and mother died, and their parents remarried. But they still didn’t want the children with them. They said they didn’t have room for their children and so they put them in a rooming house, where Lo, real name Loretta (“I hate that name”), lived, keeping an eye on her sisters. Now the sisters are eighteen and sixteen and Lo saw fit to depart for Paris. In comparison to Lo I have never had any problems at all, yet she rises above it all with no hard feelings.

  I said, “If I had parents like that I’d never want to see them again in my whole life!”

  “Oh, no, it is not at all like that,” Lo said. “They are quite demanding that we are all present for their birthdays and the holidays and especially Christmas. They look forward very much to our presents.”

  “Presents! I’d give them a bomb,” I said.

  Lo looked at me pityingly. “You must remember that they are always willing to pay. They just don’t want to see much of us. But later when they are very old they will want to see a lot of us.”

  “And revenge is a dish best eaten cold. That’s a Spanish saying,” I said. I had learned that from Nevis.

  “Well, not too cold,” Lo said. “You don’t want them to be dead. Or so old they don’t even realize that it is revenge.”

  “That must be the Spanish way,” I said.

  “Of course, I don’t know any other,” Lo said.

  Lo became my confidante and Minerva became my girlfriend. I’m not sure quite why or how. Of course, I concealed that Minerva and I were sleeping together from Nevis, although there wasn’t much to conceal. She didn’t ever really move. I think we slept together because there really wasn’t anyone else around. I say that, but I could have slept with Lo, I’m sure. But Lo didn’t care one way or another. Minerva needed desperately to be doing something with someone. And I needed desperately to be doing something with someone other than Nevis. So Minerva was it.

  I talked a lot about Nevis with Lo, and sometimes Lo and Minerva together. Minerva took my side. Lo not always. When I said he was controlling she said, “But look, Radomir”—she never called me Rad as a lot of my new friends in Paris did—“what’s the problem? You have a nice place to live. You have warm clothes. Even better than that, nice clothes. You have very nice clothes and that is very important in France. You never are without food. There’s always something in the refrigerator at Nevis’s apartment, isn’t there? You do those little freelance projects for him for which you get paid. It is not as though you are being kept. And, and this is a big and, there are no strings attached. Is that what you say, there are no strings attached? You don’t have to sleep with him. So how is it that he is so controlling?”

  “He always has to know where I am all the time. And he always wants me to do things with him all the time. I don’t feel free.”

  Lo said, “Well, he’s in love with you. Maybe you don’t know how that feels. It is like a dream that you are always afraid is going to end. He is afraid that suddenly you will meet someone and fall in love with them and go away. I understand that; don’t you?”

  I said I didn’t understand it and that I didn’t plan to.

  “You will some day, you little boy,” Lo said. Lo is four years younger than I am, but I think she has seen a lot more or felt a lot more than I have. Maybe it’s another one of those Spanish things.

  She went on. “And as for doing things with him, if you don’t want to go I’d be delighted. I would be delighted to run down to Milan for a few days. I’d be delighted to go to Casa Olympe for a really good dinner. And he even bought you a house in the Loire Valley. I’d be delighted to go there.”

  “That you can do, Lo,” I said. I invited Lo and Minerva and some other friends to come down and help me work on the little house Nevis and I owned together in a big town not far from his country house. We were there taking people to see the local chateau one day and saw this little house up a side street. I have my magical side, and this little place hit that streak. It was kind of perched on a hillside and when we got inside with a real estate agent it was like something out of a fairy story, all little steps up here and down there and a big walled garden behind it. From the top floor you looked into the tops of the cherry trees, and they were full of cherries. You could reach right out the windows and pick them. It was a great little house. So when Nevis suggested he buy it in both our names I said that would be fine. Which he did. I started going down on weekends to work on it. Scraping beams and painting walls and all the same kind of stuff I did on his house.

  The first time Minerva came down it was because Lo couldn’t get away from her au pair job. I kind of hated her. She was very pushy and always knew the best way to do everything. But she really worked. She got out and cleaned up the garden and made bonfires and I came to like the fact that she was really helping me. Lo wouldn’t have done that. In fact, she looked at the house with a very skeptical eye.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Radomir?” she asked. “You don’t like this man. You are using this man. And then you let him buy this house for you. It doesn’t look right. Are you sleeping with him and not telling us? You know, it’s all right if you are. It would actually make more sense with all that he does for you. If you’re not you are going to regret this. I don’t really want to help you with this house. I think it is unhealthy.”

  I knew what she meant. We had just learned malsain in French class. It means “dirty” in the way we use it in the United States, like a dirty book. But it
translates as “unhealthy.” I knew what Lo meant. But Minerva didn’t. She thought everything I did was fine.

  That whole winter was awful. We had a rotten Christmas down in the country. Amanda was there again and tried to keep things going, but Nevis was in a real snit. Everything everyone did was wrong. He hated everything. We went for a long walk to talk things out and that only made it worse. I kept telling him he was trying to control me too much and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He wanted to fuck and I didn’t. That’s what it boiled down to.

  In February we went down to the country and I decided to go out with Fritz and Angie on Saturday night. Nevis wasn’t invited. He called a taxi and took the next train back to Paris that evening, leaving me there. I apologized when I got back to Paris, and I could tell he was feeling shitty for having made a scene and run away. Things weren’t good, and I was looking forward to making my getaway in the spring. I wrote some friends in California, Lauren and Bixby, and we made plans to take a tour of Europe together. What I was going to do at the end of it I wasn’t sure.

  I always liked Lauren and Bixby a lot in California, and I was looking forward to our trip. Nevis was very cool about it. He took all of us out to dinner the night before we were leaving, gave me a generous last payment so I had plenty of money to travel, and seemed perfectly happy to see me go. On our way out of the office in the Montparnasse Tower on the last day … I had been over there delivering some storyboards … he said, “Just remember, Radomir, to read the small type before you get into another situation like the one you’ve been in with me. Not everyone is willing to give you something for nothing.” That really pissed me off. At the beginning of our relationship I thought it was really a friendship and of course it always boils down to the same thing. They want a piece of your tail.

  Every day on the trip I came to like Lauren and Bixby less. Nevis had said, “She has too many gums.” And I began to find it true—that irritating smile with all that pink flesh showing along with that big mouth full of Chiclet teeth.

  In Florence they didn’t want to spend the money to see Michelangelo’s David. They just wanted to have me tell them about it later on the train. Stuff like that. Totally uncultured, and Bixby is supposed to be an art director. Lauren got looser and looser as the days went by. We had a picnic on the beach in Greece at a youth hostel, and she wandered off into the night with some guy. I told Bixby he should go look for her. He wasn’t planning to. He did and they both looked like they’d been made to do something they didn’t want to do when they came back to the campfire.

  When we got to Crete we finally wandered down to the south shore and decided to stay there. I asked for a job at the hotel in the café and they hired me. There were lots of English and Australians and some French working around the village and it looked like it would be a lot of fun. Lauren and Bixby decided to go on to Turkey and then back to the States, so we said good-bye there and I haven’t heard from them since. I had no plans, so there I stayed.

  The only person I wrote to was Lo. She didn’t answer. I think she thought I was crazy.

  ~16~

  Fanette

  Nevis returned to Paris. Through the hassle of the wild taxi trip to Heraklion; the discovery that his ticket had been written incorrectly and he had only five minutes at the Heraklion airport before his flight departed; the mob scene at the Athens airport where he had to wait in a giant queue to change terminals; the strangely somnambulistic quality of the international airport where the waiting passengers moved as though they were underwater or perhaps only seemed so. Through all this Nevis moved numbly. He kept waiting for the drunkenness and the brief hours of sleep to hit him, but they never did. He felt as someone must who has been narrowly missed by an avalanche. The relief provided all the energy he needed not to fall apart.

  Once back in France he was gripped by an enormous compulsion to complete the renovation of the country house he had bought in both Radomir’s and his name. A strange fairy-tale house he had seen with Radomir on a curious winding lane leading into the nearby town of Amboise. Out driving one day they had noticed the unusual cliff-perching site with the À VENDRE sign and had routed out a local real estate agent. The house made Nevis think of a drawing from The Toys of Nuremberg, a childhood book he had loved. A gate in crumbling green paint opened directly from the street into a small courtyard. In front and to the left green-painted doors opened into caves, cut directly into the cliff the house sat upon. A barred window beside one door gave the whole ensemble the look of a small prison in a Mozart opera.

  On the right an iron-railed stone staircase wound round upon itself to a balcony where the green-shuttered front door opened into the house itself. They entered this door after the agent struggled with a clutch of keys. Once inside they found themselves in a small room painted navy blue with acid yellow trim. In an alcove a photo view in color of a Pacific lagoon had been pasted like wallpaper from floor to ceiling.

  The agent opened another door, and up a short flight of steps they found a stone-walled garden with cherry trees full of fruit filling the sky overhead. From the edge of the garden one looked down on the lane below and across the valley to not-distant hills.

  Behind this garden through a gate, they found another larger and wilder garden reaching to another wall of cliffs. This garden had many terraced levels, fragments of old walls, shreds of old stone staircases, and entrances to caves even more ancient than the ones below the house. Each cave had stone fireplaces and indications of having once been inhabited.

  Back in the house they wandered up through different levels. The red-and-white kitchen’s casement windows opened flat with the lawn of the garden outside and matched the color of the fruit filling the trees.

  Up a tiny winding staircase was a black and candy-pink bedroom. The bedroom window looked directly into the cherry-heavy branches of the trees outside. From the attic room above it one could reach into the treetops and pick the cherries.

  As they leaned side by side out of this window looking through the tops of the trees and to the valley beyond, Nevis had thought, If I could spend one happy night here with him I could stand the rest of my life, however it might be. He didn’t tell Radomir this.

  Radomir, too, seemed caught up in the fantasy quality of the house. He said, “It would be wonderful to live here, wouldn’t it?”

  They left the real estate agent, and as they walked to the car Nevis noticed a small plaque on the front of the house. It read FANETTE.

  He had no reason to buy Fanette, didn’t really have the money to buy the house in fact. But Radomir was increasingly ill at ease with him and the house was a subject they both enjoyed discussing. One night at dinner in a tiny Japanese restaurant in the Montmartre foothills he suggested that he buy Fanette in both their names. Radomir looked down at his plate in the flat-faced, choked-up, noncommittal manner Nevis had come to know meant something important was going on inside. “Would you like that?” he asked. Radomir suddenly moved from a mood of sulky recalcitrance to one of open enthusiasm. They discussed what could be done with the house through the rest of the meal and as they walked down the narrow cobbled streets past the tough transvestite hookers. Nevis had found something Radomir loved, even if it wasn’t Nevis himself.

  In one of the few times they had been at Fanette together before Radomir left Paris, Nevis had discovered that the hillock rising in the back of the grounds was actually earth covering the foundations of an old house. At the entrances to the caves there were remnants of old windows and doorways in the hillside that suggested this, but while working on the hill with a hoe he discovered a hole. Poking his head and a flashlight inside, he saw that the walls still stood inside the hill, though the room was largely filled with dirt.

  He told this to Radomir, who wanted to look, too. Radomir put his head and the flashlight in the hole and then suddenly thrust himself backward out of the hole, sliding down the hill. “Spiders!” he gasped.

  When Nevis first went to look at the
house alone on a wet spring day shortly after Radomir had gone, he found Radomir had been working on it the weekends he had gone to the country by himself. In the bedroom the alcove beam had been scraped to the bare wood, as had several of the cupboard doors that framed the fireplace. One coat of white paint dimmed the vividness of the bright pink walls. A large can of paint remover, a scraper, and a pair of paint-begummed gloves lay together on the floor. Nevis ached when he looked at them and realized Radomir had cared enough about Fanette to make a start. Before he left for Crete Nevis had finished the paint removal in the bedroom and had put another coat of paint on the ceiling and walls, so the room looked fairly finished.

  Now on his return from Crete he felt swept up in a tide of needing to do as much as he could to finish the work on Fanette. Radomir had written soon after Nevis returned that he was coming to France in July, coming to rendezvous with a California friend, a woman he had worked with at one time. He had written repeatedly from Crete, “You know I’m not coming to see you. I’m coming to see Savannah.” His friend’s name was Savannah Dickens. A very Californian name, Nevis thought.

  First Nevis attacked the woodwork of the lower sitting room at Fanette. It seemed modest at first: a beam separating the alcove containing the view of Tahitian beaches, a closet door, a door to the kitchen stair, and an old wooden fireplace front. But soon he found the ancient wood was very resistant to paint remover. He borrowed a sander from Fritz, his American neighbor. Couldn’t find the right size of rolling sandpaper strips to fit it and finally bought a new sander to fit the rolling strips he’d already bought. His local friends who dropped by obviously thought this was all remarkably unlike him, and the local workmen who had come to take measurements and make plans for installing a septic tank and converting the attic on the stair landing to a bathroom regarded him with amazement in his shrunken sweater, decade-old jeans, and paint-flake-speckled hair, glasses, and face.