About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  The boredom grated on me. I spent hours at the library reading. Sometimes I started a book, stopped impatiently, moved on to another: Billy Budd, The Ambassadors, John Donne, James Thomson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Because of my proficiency in typing and my degree in English, I was assigned to record company-level courts-martial, proceedings held for petty offenses—being late for formation, talking in the ranks, charges so insignificant that the hearings were recorded in longhand from notes made as I listened to the petty transgressions blown up.

  I looked forward, like all others in army, to mail. I would separate myself from everyone else so that my letters could pitch me, at least for a short time, into other worlds. Wilford wrote to me almost every week. He was directing a new musical play he had written, Trapdoors of the Moon, based on stories I had told him about my family, all converted into a poignant comedy—a feat, I thought, of major proportions. He was trying it out in Urbana, intending to move it off-Broadway. How great, he said if I could be there to see it with him.

  My brother Robert wrote to me expressing the hope that I would return to college, after the army—“You’re going to make something of yourself, Johnny,” he wrote. I could rely on the GI Bill for education. Whatever else was needed, he would provide, he assured me.

  My mother continued write almost every day, long letters, full of blessings, endearingly without any punctuation whatsoever. I smiled to think that she had that in common with the latter James Joyce.

  My sister Olga wrote to me regularly—often sending her letter in the same envelope with my mother’s prayers and benedictions. My sister’s letters always began with concern that I be well and enduring the “damn army.” Then they roamed quickly—I welcomed this—to gossip tinged by her with hints of movie catastrophes.

  In today’s letter, and without introduction, she wrote: “She’s looking for a rich husband!”—of course, she meant Isabel Franklin. That information came from an item written in a gossip column by a famous magazine writer often called “Mr. San Francisco,” (not, my sister added, “because of his physique”). Someone had sent the item to Tina, and Tina had sent a copy to my sister. This was the a copy I was now reading:

  A beautiful young woman has become quite a presence

  in San Francisco, often seen glittering at the

  opera. The mystery woman is from New Orleans, from a family in

  Spain, an exile alone in the country.

  Was the unnamed mystery woman really Isabel Franklin?

  I was sent for a few weeks to an army school in Berchtesgaden to learn shorthand so that I might record court-martials verbatim as a sworn court reporter.

  In the midst of forested greenness and steady drizzle, the small city bordering the Bavarian Alps had been one of Hitler’s places of respite, an aerie that commanded the highest mountain, frozen now although spring had come.

  In my uniform—I couldn’t afford to buy civilian clothes—I took a cable car up to the top of the mountains. There, I entered a restaurant that seemed to have been pulled out of a movie set in Bavaria, with oak panels; decorated mugs on wooden shelves; a waitress wearing an ornate headband, a decorated blouse, and a pleated skirt. Seated at the scattered tables were German men, talking loudly, laughing raucously, some dressed in lederhosen, short leather pants. Almost all were drinking from frothy mugs of beer. When I entered, the laughter stopped. I sat down. As the waitress walked toward me, one of the men put out his arm, blocking her advance.

  I waited, not wanting to retreat from the type of men who, I was sure, had been part of the events that had set the world on fire. All talk had died down.

  I walked out into the cold mountain air, realizing only then that my breathing had become irregular with fear.

  The Ring cycle was playing in the grand opera house in Munich, not far by train. Along the wintry streets of that city, one of the most devastated, vestiges of gutted buildings remained. Blessed now by snow, some of the rubble had become jagged ice sculptures.

  A huge, imperious creation, the opera house had survived or been allowed to survive. When I walked in for the performance, the lobby was crowded with German men and women dressed in threadbare formal clothes. I sat down quickly so that others would not have to get up to let me pass into my seat.

  I was tense, although I had detected none of the strident hostility of the men in the Alps. The opera seemed endless. The music was not like the lyrical romantic operas my father had loved. When the first act ended, people in the audience pounded the floor with their feet, rapidly, steadily—their form of ovation. Then they rose, applauding wildly, calling out passionately, shouting, stomping. Men and women all around me were crying unabashedly for Wagner and his vision of supermen.

  I left before the opera ended.

  I wandered about the cold city—surely a beautiful city before it was battered—now a scarred beauty, a city in mourning. It was late when I went to the station to take a train back to the school.

  Women, heavily painted, roamed the cavernous building soliciting soldiers; they pleaded openly, chided, demanded, bartered like the women who had sold their mouths in the darkness of the outpost in Frankfurt.

  In the restroom, a soldier facing away from the urinals was being blown by a squatting woman. Other soldiers watched or waited their turn or continued to urinate.

  Back in Fulda after completing the course in shorthand, I became increasingly restless. I hated the guaranteed convictions meted out by a panel of stiff officers to recruits in trouble, recruits who were most often professional army men looking their shiny best to be adjudged “good soldiers” by the officers. The only way I saw to shake time loose from its entrenched stasis was to keep transferring from city to city. In the office where I wrote reports, I typed out an impeccably worded and formatted letter to Fifth Corps headquarters in Frankfurt. Using words and phrases I knew would impress, I asked for a transfer. The transfer came through, contingent on my agreeing to extend my time of enlistment another year. I agreed, although I had no intention of doing so. The offices I worked in were in the Farben building, a luxurious glass building that had been occupied by Hitler’s elite. Still a private—I had not stayed anywhere long enough for a promotion—I was assigned to be the personal aide of a gentle old officer, a colonel. My main function was to report to him weekly, from an issued list, how many other high colonels were ahead of him to be promoted to generals.

  Eventually—and here, too, everything turned into unbudging drudgery—I earned ten days of leave.

  19

  Taking with me Levi’s and T-shirts I had asked my brother to send me, clothes I had left behind, I turned up in uniform at an army airport and hitched a ride on an army plane. I landed at Orly field in Paris with thirty dollars in my pocket, the amount I had been able to save out of my salary.

  I rented a cheap room in the first hotel that seemed affordable. I quickly changed to the casual clothes, and I plunged into the city with an excitement I had never felt before, the excitement of a new world of freedom, in another country, away from the army—and in civilian clothes.

  I was instantly infatuated with the city. In the following days, I explored it relentlessly, rejecting sleep. I climbed Montmartre, to the Sacré-Coeur, the white church so grand, so elaborate, so gaudy, like a huge wedding cake at the top of the hill. I lit a candle for my mother and rushed out quickly to experience more. Once, an American tourist, consulting a booklet, asked me directions in mangled French. That pleased me, because, looking around, I saw so many wondrous beautiful people.

  Everything about the city entranced me—its flowery parks, its edifices from decades past, its ubiquitous statues, the wide boulevards, the crooked squeezed streets and alleys. All of that aroused in me a euphoric mood I could not entirely identify beyond a feeling of new freedom; that mood contained within it a sense of grand possibility beckoning, something that lingered with me as I roamed about the gardens of the Louvre and then the museum itself, startled to actu
ally be looking at fabled paintings. It was aroused, that exhilaration, like a sweet powerful scent, as I responded to passing glances, smiles I seemed to be courting, from attractive young women and men everywhere, at times looking alike; a sustained sense of exhilaration that I carried with me into the small cafés where I ate the day’s only meal, and along the banks of the Seine, where I bought fruit for lunch. But along with the feeling of something ineffable about to happen here, in this city, there was, but only in brief moments, a tinge of fright.

  I had walked and walked to the outskirts of the city, without realizing it. It had grown dark. There was a party going on nearby, a combination party and carnival alongside one of the small streets. Young men and women, some tipsy, were dancing. A girl drew me in, and we hopped around with the others, and then a young man joined us. Soon, the girl had spun away to another group, and I was dancing with the young man—not really dancing, more, just moving together and laughing.

  It was deep night when I left. The subways were closed; I discovered that only then. I would have to walk a distance to return into the heart of the city, where I was staying. I didn’t mind. I was intoxicated with the sense of extravagant welcome I had experienced in the gathering I had just left—or was it, now that I was away, a sense of foreboding?

  Exhausted, I reached Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the stretch near an old steepled church across from the Café de Flore, where, I had read, Sartre and de Beauvoir had congregated. I had wandered along this street in the daytime—yesterday?—when it had been buzzing with people of every sort. Upon entering the area at night, I detected an entirely different atmosphere. It must have been as late as two in the morning, later.

  The night was tinted only by distant lights; trees were dark silhouettes; there was the pervasive sound of footsteps, slowed, halting, resuming. Figures along the twilit street seemed to be floating, singly, then together, separating or moving away together.

  There were only men here now.

  The street was touched with a warmth that seemed to have been hiding within the coolness of the night, within which, occasionally, laughter, softened but pitched into mirth, broke, but only somewhat, a mesmerized silence.

  My exhilaration and apprehension heightened even more. Was it here, still not fully detected, not fully identified, that the excitement of days was finding its origin, the stretch of blocks its sudden center?

  I stood near, but not within, the muted, slow procession of men, watching intently, studying it all, until, now—but exactly when?—I realized I was moving in to join it, responding to what felt like a summons, issued when? How far back? Only now? Only here? As far back as—

  I entered the slow current, so slow that it was as if I had walked into a dream, a dream shared with others here, a dream that stark motion or sound would banish. No, no, not like that, no, not at all. It was as if I had suddenly awakened from a long, long dream and into reality. What surprised me most during that confusion of contradictory feelings was that I was drifting into this reality so easily, as if unknowingly having rehearsed it, assuming the same rhythm as the others, pausing as if to glance into a window, moving into a new reality.

  “American?”

  Until he spoke, I had not noticed the man who had approached me, walking slowly toward me—no, I had noticed him, I had paused to be met by him. Had I?

  “American, yes,” I said. I was not annoyed that he had recognized me as an American even out of uniform.

  “GI?”

  That did annoy me slightly, that despite my clothes, that had shown through. I mumbled, neither no nor yes, an ambiguous sound.

  “Cigarette?” he offered.

  No! “Yes.” In the last few months in the army, doing anything to ward off the monotony of waiting, I had taken up smoking, especially when I was reading in the barracks, but I had stopped a few days earlier. Now I took the proffered cigarette and looked at the man directly as he snapped a match to light my cigarette.

  He was young, no older than twenty-five; he was handsome, yes, with an angular face, like that of a fashion model. The latter perception was strengthened by the fact that he had longish hair—black, no, brown—combed back. That emphasized the keen features. He was slightly taller than I, slender, with a swimmer’s body.

  I continued walking in the direction I had been headed; he joined me, silently. We were both smoking, the smoke becoming a part of the hypnotized night. Others glanced at us, glances skidding from me to the man I was with. The slowed activity on the street assumed for me a sense of ritual, of performance, of instinctive choreography, ghostly dancers.

  “You speak French?”

  “A little.” I had taken a course in French in college.

  “Voulez—?” he started.

  I shook my head, no. “I don’t speak it well enough to understand.” Yet I had inferred what would follow—did I?—and it did.

  “Would you like to visit my apartment?” he said, with an accent.

  Did I? Would I? He had thrust me out of the dream, into the former reality. I felt like walking away, even running. “Sure, yes,” my voice said.

  He smiled. “Good,”

  “No.”

  He frowned.

  “I have a room nearby; you can come with me.” I had spoken those words.

  The frown eased into a smile. “Bien.”

  As we walked away from others still drifting, I no longer wondered whether I had wakened from a dream or into another.

  I was simply walking to my rented room with a man I had just met.

  We reached the small hotel. I had hardly used it throughout the frenzy of my infatuation with the city.

  I had a key to the front entrance. As we entered, a woman—I recognized her as the person I had rented the room from—peered out of a door. When she saw us, she did not retreat; she kept staring at us, the door more ajar now, as if to call further attention to herself.

  “It’s all right,” the man whispered as we proceeded up the stairs, “French hotel women are always curious.”

  I hadn’t been aware of indicating trepidation.

  We walked quietly up the steps, to the third level—there was no elevator. We entered the barely furnished room, where my army clothes lay on a chair. He glanced at them, smiling, probably confirming what he had suspected, that I was in the army.

  I had left the bed unmade from a time that I had returned to doze, only to awake, aware that I was wasting time sleeping in this city of mysterious clarity. I moved away from the bed.

  I turned on the light, to chase away the darkness that seemed too intimate. I drew apart the drab curtains—more like stitched panels of cloth—to allow in even more light from outside, from another world that this room was expelling.

  The man reached out, drawing me toward him, bringing his body against mine, his lips parting. One hand slid down, locating the buttons of my Levi’s, his other hand fumbling with the buttons of his own pants.

  “You’ll have to leave.”

  “What?”

  I had pulled back from him. “That woman downstairs; she runs the hotel; she warned me that I couldn’t bring anyone to my room,” I lied. “She’s capable of calling the police.”

  The man laughed, without humor. His smile turned into a smirk. “That’s a lie,” he said.

  “No, it’s true, I—” I raised my hands before me, prepared to push him back.

  The smirk turned into contempt. “You are mistaking yourself, American, but no one else.”

  He walked out.

  The man’s words echoed in my mind throughout the next day. I knew what he had meant. “You are fooling yourself, but no one else.” I repeated the words in my mind, exploring them, hearing them again, denying them.

  In the few days left of my leave, I went to more museums, art galleries, churches, the Folies Bergère; roamed in more parks. I saw Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine with the writer as the prophet and Jean Marais as Oedipus. Jean Marais! The man Baxter Polk had shown me in the disturbing photog
raph long ago. On the stage, the beautiful man did not act; he moved from pose to pose to pose, a performance of postures.

  The memory of the searchers I had joined that one late night recurred. I would not seek that area out now, although I knew that, on that night, I had stepped into another world that I must have known long ago existed. Whatever necessary subterfuges I might have to concoct to live within it, I would not be able to abandon it.

  Into my contradictory thoughts, the memory of the kept woman floated into my mind … as she reached again for the cigarette on the ashtray and looked up and smiled, definitely smiled. Assertive, elusive, that memory, soothing—no, no, disturbing.

  20

  I had overstayed my leave by several days. I was technically AWOL, exposing myself to a court-martial. I turned myself in at Orly field, and was “arrested”—a mere gesture I had counted on so that I would be flown back to Frankfurt quickly. I had also relied on work’s having piled up in the office to an extent that the kind Colonel would welcome me back without charges.

  He did.

  Time crawled before I began edging toward the end of my required term in the army, a term I had agreed to extend by one year to effect the transfer to Frankfurt. I had already taken steps to circumvent that by applying for early release to attend graduate school. As I waited for the official granting of my application for early release, monotonous days piled on monotonous days. When the application was granted and I told the colonel I was leaving, he was wistful, especially because he was still a few rungs from being promoted to general; as he had seen in the listing I had just compiled for him, half a dozen colonels were ahead of him for promotion.

  My mother’s last letter to me before I left Germany—“I’m counting the days before you’re here, m’ijo”—included a hastily added sheet of news from my sister Olga. The envelope had been opened and then resealed, and even the paper on which she wrote, torn somewhat jaggedly, seemed to gasp: