The Millionaire of Love

by David Leddick

  Nevis didn’t enjoy it. It was more as though there was an unwritten commitment somewhere that he was compelled to fulfill. Finally the paint was stripped from the sitting room doors and the large beam overhead. The fireplace emerged from its layers of black paint. The kitchen door and bedroom door, too, revealed their aged wood surfaces. The last fragments of old gray paint released their tenacious grip on the lower edges of the doors.

  Then Tahiti had to go. Slopping a sponge over the huge photograph loosened it, only to reveal large holes in the wallboard, covering even more ancient stone walls, Nevis supposed. The board would have to come off one day, but for the time being much plastering of cracks and crevices would have to do, with three coats of white paint on all the walls and ceiling.

  The kitchen in its turn was repaired and painted.

  Broken windows were repaired in the bedroom. A broken window latch was replaced. All loose windows were reputtied, and then all the woodwork that hadn’t been scraped was lacquered white. Nevis sighed with relief to see the peculiar jaundiced yellow of the living room woodwork disappear, the accompanying navy blue walls having already fled beneath flat white.

  The kitchen floor was enameled brick red with deck paint, and the old refrigerator enameled the same blue as the closet interiors above stairs. Next he stripped the little painted table left in the kitchen and put linseed oil on the chairs left in the house.

  He bought a settee and some tables from an antique dealer in a nearby town, and a sleigh bed Radomir had said he liked from another dealer. The woman from whom he bought the bed, a sturdy, volatile lady who delivered the bed herself and manhandled it into the house, noticed all the different levels in Fanette and said she believed the house had been built in two different periods. The older house was the back part, she pointed out, indicating a bricked-up window in the top attic Nevis had not noticed. She also noted that the steps descending from the kitchen to the sitting room were stone, and probably exterior at one time.

  Nevis had two pieces of old mirror framed and put over the fireplaces in the bedroom and sitting room. He scraped rusty paint off the front door shutters, the descending stair rail, and the front gate, but didn’t have strength or time or the desire to repaint them.

  When Radomir was last in the country house he had packed up some possessions in a cardboard box and left them with Fritz. While Fritz was in the United States Nevis took the key he had left with him, went into his house, and brought the box back to his own home.

  He immediately opened it and laid the contents carefully out on a bed so he would be able to replace them exactly as they had been. There were portraits of Radomir done by Nevis’s nephew, the photographer. In them his hair was swept back and he looked slightly upward into the camera in a mixture of sullenness and defiance. Radomir had looked at the pictures and said, “I’d like to look like that someday.”

  There were a few books, several sweaters, and Radomir’s diaries. Nevis had suspected the diaries would be left behind. Radomir wrote in them often.

  Nevis had been brought up to think that reading someone’s mail or anything not directed to oneself was an unthinkable breach of good manners. Only the lowest person would so much as read over another person’s shoulder. He felt deep shame as he opened Radomir’s diaries, but he was far beyond controlling himself. Honor is for the unobsessed, he thought as he began to read.

  He propped himself up in bed and read Radomir unburdening himself in his loneliness when he first came to Europe. Abandoned by his employers in Rome and then in London, chasing back and forth between the cities in pursuit of a job that was never there, he had turned to his writing to strengthen himself. The lover he had left behind in California had suggested he visit a former boyfriend in Germany. He had and there had fallen in love. In his diary he wrote poetically of their first days together. Nevis seethed and at the same time felt as though he had been taken over by a poltergeist himself. Reluctantly, he read on.

  The picture of himself that emerged in Radomir’s diaries he scarcely recognized. While he had been thrilled to have Radomir share his apartment in Paris, Radomir had been railing about being given no freedom and being checked up on all the time. There were no mentions of affection or even interest in him. Radomir mentioned one conversation on a train where he wrote, “Nevis, as usual, tried to make me feel good about myself.” In the diaries were letters from friends, and the woman in Santa Fe in one of her replies wrote, “And as you say, though difficult it is a convenience.” Shaken, unhappy, but not regretful, he carefully packed the diaries back in the box with the other things and stored them in a closet.

  As he labored alone on the house renovations during that long, cold summer he took the box out a second time and read the contents of the letters and diaries again. Even though it was painful, it was contact with Radomir.

  The renovations went on weekend after weekend. Nevis, usually closemouthed, found himself in so distressed a state he couldn’t conceal it from friends. Fritz met Nevis at the train from time to time, so he deserved an explanation for Nevis’s forlorn looks. When he heard that it was a case of old-fashioned lovesickness he said, “I’m jealous.” Nevis wasn’t sure if he was jealous because he wanted Nevis to be lovelorn over him, or if he was jealous because he had no one to be lovelorn over himself. Nevis hoped it was the latter but didn’t want to ask.

  A longtime Swiss painter friend, André, came down for a weekend and spent both days at Fanette doing sketches while Nevis painted walls and woodwork. André found the curious nooks and crannies of Fanette optically fascinating. He loved the curving staircases ascending and descending into irregular spaces. André also spent a lot of time in a straight-back chair in the garden, sketching the strange shapes where Fanette’s eaves and roofs and doorways came together.

  In the evening André and Nevis sat by the fire and talked. Nevis found it bracing to reveal his foolishness and forlorness to a friend of over twenty years. André and his French actress wife had been the closest to Nevis of his friends in France and had often been to the country house to visit.

  In his dry Swiss manner André didn’t allow Nevis a shred of romantic hope, and Nevis knew him to be right. On the other hand, the painter did allow him the pleasure of his feelings and saw them as valuable, if doomed. The only concern he expressed, which was shared by his wife, was a fear that Nevis would be caught in an emotional undertow from which he wouldn’t be able to extricate himself. Suicide was obviously at the back of his mind. Nevis wondered if it could possibly go that far, and remembered the episode on the balcony at Cannes. Not out of the question, he thought, and dismissed it from his mind.

  His lawyer and great friend, Anthony Stuart, came down for a long weekend also. He spent time catching sun in briefs while Nevis worked. Anthony, usually brusque and cool and charming and witty all at the same time, could be very human to a friend caught in the pheasant nets of love. “I must say,” he said in the evening by the fire, “that I find you being sick and obsessed with love a refreshing change from my other friends, who haven’t thought of anything but stock options or real estate in years.”

  When Nevis took him to catch an early Sunday afternoon train he saw the concern and real affection in Anthony’s eyes when he boarded the train. As Nevis crossed the dusty street in front of the station in the hot Loire sun he suddenly burst into tears. Either I’m crying because I’m exhausted, or I’m exhausted because of so much crying, he thought. Either way, he thought, it sits badly on a fifty-six-year-old man. But he saw very little he could do about it.

  ~17~

  This Is a Fantasy

  Why do people think that describing sex acts is obscene? Animals lick their genitals in front of humans all the time and most pet owners see it as normal behavior for their pets. But they recoil in horror at the image or description of one human placing another human’s sexual organs in their mouth, or even in those orifices which were made for that purpose. Or nearly.

  Why this fear? I think Puritanism is based
on a great fear of losing control. And that if you lose control you will sink down through layer upon layer of sexual and sensual excess until you are rejected by society, to die alone and uncared for and in filth and agony. Which seems to be where God looks for people to save for the most part. So why all the panic?

  No, this fear reveals to me that in fact very few people are able to conceptualize anything except this life on earth. And their eventual end here is of paramount importance, hence the search for fame, power, wealth. To find a permanent place in the worldly firmament of stars, so as to never sink to scorn and rejection. And physical pleasure weakens mental discipline. Of course, we now have film stars and politicians who feel they can combine licentiousness and a pure public image and they seem to get caught at it repeatedly. For most people, letting yourself go sexually means you risk letting yourself sink out of sight socially, the worst possible end to a life. My sense of it is, they want to do it so much that the very hint of it frightens them. They feel the thread unraveling. The candle beginning to flicker in the high wind of passion, starting to burn out quickly leaving only the black night.

  Actually, you don’t have to fuck very much before you get tired of it. Two or three fucks in a row and you begin to think about getting a good night’s sleep so as to not ruin your looks. But people who have never had two or three good fucks in a row don’t know this. They think they will then want those good fucks every night and more. So, reader, do not be afraid of the ensuing scene. It won’t ruin your life. It really is scarcely more than your cat cleaning under its tail. I was giving Radomir a massage. Could you call it homosocial contact instead of homosexual contact? It was not quite playing tennis together, but somewhere in that area. He had on his jockey shorts. I just had on my undershorts and a cotton bathrobe from Turnbull and Asser. I want you to understand one thing, also. I may be thirty years older than Radomir, but my body is not disgusting. I was a gymnast in high school and college (no contact sports, please) and have always continued to exercise. My thighs are full and the skin is smooth. I don’t have much of a waistline, but I never did. I have pectorals and my upper arms aren’t thin. I’m not very hairy, and my overall proportions are tall and slender. I was never a Steve Reeves or a Tab Hunter, but men who slept with me enjoyed my smooth skin and slender body. I also kiss with enthusiasm and can get passionate for an appreciative partner. So Radomir’s allowing himself to be massaged was not exactly turning himself over to some repulsive and sagging monster, at least as I see it. Am I kidding myself? I think not. I’m still very critical of other people’s beauty and compare myself to them.

  While I was massaging deeply into the muscles of Radomir’s lower back I flashed on something. You know those ideas that just burst in your brain. I believe they have to be some kind of transmission from someone else. Certainly Einstein and Freud didn’t dream up their theories logically, A following B. Those ideas sprang forth full grown. Not that my flash was of an Einsteinian level.

  I just knew that Radomir would like me to lick his ass. He always resisted strongly any kind of contact that would lead to sexual arousal on his part. No spreading of the legs when I massaged his thighs. When he massaged my back and I pulled him down on top of me, his hips were always lifted so his penis in fact never made contact with my buttocks. Like all men of wide sexual experience, they know what arouses them and keep themselves off the edge of getting truly sexually interested—particularly when they’re manipulating the other person’s sexual interest in them.

  But I flashed and followed the flash by bending down and placing my hot, wet mouth on the crack of Radomir’s ass through his white cotton underpants. I soaked them thoroughly. He didn’t move. Or say, “Please, stop,” which he had done before.

  I chewed those underpants good. I pushed my tongue against them and into the cleft between his cheeks. The wet cotton stretched. I pulled his buttocks apart with my hands as my mouth pushed farther down between his parting flesh. He didn’t resist. Then he stirred and lifted his buttocks so I could gain better access. Finally I had won. This was the Achilles’ heel. This was what Radomir had reserved as his own sexual territory, allowing all kinds of contact with his nipples and penis without getting aroused.

  I pulled his soggy jockey shorts down below his buttocks and pushed my face deeper between his lifted cheeks. My tongue was reaching his anus now. I could push the end of my tongue into the center of it like a small penis. Incapable of entering, but hinting and threatening even so. The threat that was no threat built in his blood. I lifted him onto his knees, his chest and head still buried in a pillow. His arms were flung up along each side of his head. His back and upper arms made a massive “V” sweeping down from his narrow waist. His rounded buttocks were now standing high. I pulled his underpants down to his knees. “Let’s get these off,” I said. He lifted one knee and then the other as I slipped the shorts under them and then pulled them down and off his feet. I threw them across the room. I didn’t try for the ceiling fixture, which I like to do when it’s within reach and reason.

  I bent to my work. I pulled his buttocks apart as far as I could and ran my tongue lavishly up and down the valley between, stopping as I passed over the puckered anus to probe and suck. He groaned. The muscles there were beginning to relax. On one of my down runs I swept lower and licked his hanging testicles. I pulled them up in one hand. I glanced at his penis and could see that it was very erect and pointing strongly down toward the bed. But I wasn’t going to jump to that yet. I lifted his testicles in one hand and inserted them into my mouth. He mumbled into the pillow, “It feels like I have two cocks.” This was much further into sexual intimacy than Radomir had ever ventured with me before. That was much more exciting to me than the touching of his flesh. The flesh could have been anyone’s, but the words from deep inside him were his alone. I felt under the edge of the mattress. I always keep a tube of Vaseline there, in the event it is needed. I sucked strongly on his hanging testicles as I undid the tube and squeezed Vaseline on my fingers. While I continued sucking I rubbed Vaseline over his anus and slowly inserted one finger. He didn’t fight it. I pushed the finger in as far as it would go. It felt warm in there. I moved it in and out slowly with the rhythm of the sucking of my mouth.

  I lay down on my side between his legs and moved my mouth to the top of his penis. My finger was still moving slowly in his body. He pushed into my mouth. He wanted the warmth. His penis was larger than I expected it to be. From having seen him naked I knew it was good sized, but erect it was stout and of important length. Is this Yugoslavian? I wondered. He was now past the point of no return and wanted orgasm. But he had his own sexual skills with himself; he was not frantic to come. He moved slowly in and out of my mouth, pushing in as far as he could, then slowly moving out until just the tip of it rested on my lips, then pushing through again. I pulled off and slipped sideways on it so as to get to the base. I’m no good at getting someone down my throat. It always makes me want to throw up. In fact sucking someone’s penis is really for their pleasure. I want them to have the pleasure. As for me, I certainly wouldn’t miss it if I never did it again. When his rhythm began to accelerate, I moved my finger in him with the same rhythm. Without asking him, I pushed his body over on its side, still keeping my mouth on his penis and my finger in his buttocks. He was ready. He flung himself on his back on the pillows. His arms were still up, light hair clinging in the powerful crevices of his heavily muscled underarms. His arms pulled his pectorals and rib cage up into a “V” that repeated the form of his back, descending into his small waist and flat little stomach. I couldn’t see his penis. It was in my mouth. His pubic hair was light and gathered in small curls around the base of his penis, almost like a wreath. I wondered if this was another Yugoslavian characteristic. Maybe it even traced back to the Greeks and the Romans. It was all part of that ancient world. The sculptors always arranged pubic hair in open curls. Perhaps they were only sculpting what they had seen.

  I took my mouth off him but kept my f
inger in his anus. I moved to straddle him, still in my robe and underpants. I straddled his stomach, one arm reaching back between his legs to keep my finger firmly implanted. With the other hand I found the open tube of Vaseline. I reached behind me and squeezed it on his penis. I was backed up against it. He was waiting patiently, making no move to help me or hinder me. Keeping the tube in hand, I slid the waistband of my underwear down until it was clear of my buttocks and I was sitting on it. I squeezed some Vaseline into my own crevice then slowly lifted and let the head of his penis ride down between my cheeks until it found its entry point. I pressed down gently. I dropped the Vaseline on the bed and used my hand to guide him into me. I pressed into him with the other hand at the same time. I was able to insert my index finger along with the second finger now. He was getting very opened and ready for his orgasm.

  Once he was fully within me I sat quietly. He remained quiet, too. I couldn’t get out of my robe completely, but I shrugged out of it except for the one arm that was around the wrist that reached back toward his anus.

  We were having a little battle of domination here. He pushed up into me in an exploratory manner. I pushed down at the same time. Then I lifted off so that he was almost completely out of me and then slithered down to press firmly into his pubic hair so his entire penis was planted deeply within me. His head, turned to the side, had no expression. He was far away in a world of sensory experience. We repeated this. He retracted his penis, pulling his hips down into the bed, then pushing back. The muscles in his abdomen, pulling and pushing, were exciting. He had nothing but a layer of skin over these muscles, so they were clearly seen, as they pulled his large penis out, then assisted in pushing it back in.