“It’s nothing, sir.”
Hughie sighed and repeated, “Thank you, Teddy,” and fell promptly asleep, snoring, on his sofa. I’d known him with girls, with Alice, in college and in marriage, and here he was, ever the same. Alone again in his bachelor house, with a manservant and mustache, a wife off somewhere putting a child to bed, singing a song he could not hear. No good at love; he knew what I meant.
I have to put down these pages for a moment. The house has been remade for a cocktail party—a quite illegal affair, darling, but I won’t tell—and you are in your bedroom, Alice, shouting for someone to zip up your dress. I’ve got to run. I must get there. before Sammy.
Now let us pick up a dropped detail: the invitation I had brought to Hughie’s house. It was not just to one of our normal club events, the numerous dull evenings that rich men must attend; this was something unexpected. His invitation had come slipped into my own—I guess the hostess only kept track of me—and I delivered it because I needed him to come along. For memory, for history. To a ball, given by none other than my old maid, Mary.
It will not surprise even my youngest reader, I hope, that before the earthquake, every senator and merchant plunked coins in her mechanical jukebox and sat for a bottle of champagne with the woman, and more than a few had peepholes reserved for them within the scented walls of the “Virgin Room.” Madame Dupont had even opened a male brothel with a secret entrance for female customers, who wore satin masks so they would not be recognized, and a harem of men who supposedly worked as volunteers. All that was over by the teens, of course. Church pressure, legislation, the death of our dearly corrupted government, all brought Madame Dupont to close her houses. She had done well—broker clients had helped her to invest well, and stock tips were easy to hear in her flocked parlors. But it was not the last we heard of her, for she had often told me, a few glasses into the evening, that her dearest dream had never been to be a success. “I want to be a lady,” she’d said, adjusting her blond wig. “Damn it, I deserve it. I’ve worked as hard as any wife for those men. I want to be at a dinner party with a Vanderbilt and have him turn to me and say, ‘Madame, it’s been a pleasure.”’ So that was why, years after her brothel had shut its doors, and long after most had forsworn the vices she represented, after most of us had forgotten her, each important man in San Francisco received an invitation:
Mr. & Mrs.————
A Spring Ball
March 20, 1914
8 P.M.
at the home of Marie Dupont
You cannot stop a whore from making money, and money would buy anything in our city, so we found ourselves at an elegant white house sitting between the residences of a railroad baron and a Spanish count. Night-blooming jasmine, juniper, columns arcing in a Teddy Roosevelt grin. I imagined Mary had spent every cent on this house, chosen not for the comfort of her later years, but for this very night. The approach of glimmering gaslight—not electric—the noise of an orchestra coming like a distant waterfall from the open door; all planned, or hoped for at least when she laid down her million. I picture old Mary wandering through the empty rooms, clasping and unclasping her hands, imagining this party when all her sons and fathers and lovers would gather to claim her, this occasion for her best jewels, best jokes, this evening made, like all reunions, of memories best forgotten.
There was an Englishman, and not a Negro maid, to show us inside, but Madame was there all the same, standing at the newel of the stairs and laughing. I could see almost nothing of her except the abnormality of her thinness, her slight hunch that could only be age, and the expensive blond of her wig. The sexes come to resemble each other in childhood and old age, and she stood hands on her hips in the manner of a sergeant. She must have been seventy.
“Mr. Dempsey! I knew you would come,” she said, approaching Hughie with an outstretched hand that shook slightly under the weight of her rings. “And you’re looking so handsome and well.”
“Madame,” he said, kissing those rings. So thin, when did she get so thin?
“No Mrs. Dempsey?” she asked, tensing her port-wine lips.
“I’m sorry, no, we don’t go out together these days.”
She stared hard—the old procuress stare—but it became a sharp dazzle as she looked on me. “But you’ve found a beautiful young man, I’m charmed.” A low laugh of old thrills.
Something of youth comes back with age. Although it was clear at a glance that nothing could restore her body’s beauty, my old Mary, wrapped in her straight black gown, a long egret feather set across and away from her brow, held out her hand and flirted as if love affairs were all before her.
Immediately, though, the hand was withdrawn in a golden jangle. “Well fuck!” she yelled, then a pure yawp of joy. “My God, it’s Max!”
“Now wasn’t there a girl?” she stage-whispered as I helped her into her ballroom. “Some girl you were in love with, poor Max. Have you seen her since you’ve gotten so young?”
“Her name was Alice,” I told her with tenderness. “And Madame, I married her.” I think if she could have cried, she would have. But like a colored gourd, she merely rattled with a sigh, for age and hardness had dried up everything inside her.
“And how’s Hughie?” she asked. Hughie was off at the bar getting a glass of champagne, nodding at the few gathered men. He looked as uncomfortable as any of us among our fellow whoremongers.
“He’s happy, I think.”
“No. His type isn’t ever likely to be happy,” she said, then turned to me and examined me thoroughly with the eye of a slaveholder. “I have to tell you something, Max, you haven’t turned out at all as I expected. When I knew you as a little boy, I mean.”
“No?”
“No, when I first saw you, oh, dear, you were the ugliest thing in the world. What could be sadder than a child in an old man’s skin? I thought, God, here’s something nobody will ever love. That’s the truth. I felt so bad for you, God knows why, the rich little creature. I was so happy to see you’d changed. And you keep changing. I can’t tell you what it’s like to be a woman of my age, and to be so ugly. A gigantic lizard in silk. And now, you see, we’ve switched places. Tonight some man will look at me as he’s drinking my wine and dancing to my band and think, God, here’s something nobody will ever love. Serves me right, doesn’t it? But I’m legitimate at last. I’m a lady, Max. So don’t you tell them I was ever your maid. Don’t you tell them I was ever anything but a lady.”
“You are a lady.”
“You’ve grown handsome, Max. Are you surprised? Try not to get younger. Stay just like this and your wife will love you forever.”
I saw that the old girl was a little drunk. So I told her the simple truth: “I can’t.”
To that, she just laid the back of her hand against my cheek.
It did not take more than half an hour. More men from the club gathered in the ballroom and library, smoking cigars and raising eyebrows meaningfully at one another. I recognized one old fellow as the man who once had paid Mary to be her maid. The orchestra had lit once more into Blue Danube in the everhopeful expectation of bandleaders that some couple will be taken by the spirit and start a craze of dancing that will last until the early morning. There were no couples, however. I could hear Madame Dupont in the other room as more guests arrived:
“But your wife, where is she?”
“I’m sorry, Madame, but she couldn’t make it this evening.”
“Not make it?”
“You have a lovely house.”
It happened time after time.
“I’m bored to tears, Max,” Hughie moaned to me. “Since when did Madame Dupont’s parties get so boring? Blue Danube, Jesus I could scream. And these rotten men who I’m sure I’d recognize better with their trousers around their ankles, sipping champagne in her bordello, all dressed up. It’s such a bore.”
“It’s nice for Madame Dupont.”
“It’s blackmail. I don’t owe her any favors. I paid for every
thing I got.”
“Well, I owe her.”
“I’m smashed. Hold my drink. I’ll be back.”
He was gone for a long time, and in a panic that he had abandoned me, I walked outside to see if the car was still here.
I was relieved to see it parked obliquely on the drive; inside Hughie and the driver were quietly arguing. It was cold out, and I suddenly wanted to go home. I walked down the wet grass and tried to listen to the argument, but some other chauffeur began to crank his engine and I could only watch my friend and his servant, Teddy, mouthing their complaints, the one in a glistening top hat and the other in a Scotch cap banded with goggles. It was a kind of silent feature playing before me; even the night fog rendered them colorless as I watched. I wondered how I had been so careless not to have seen it before.
I pulled back behind a century plant and nearly cut my hand. Another waltz had started from the ballroom. Hughie was wincing as he listened to the shouting young man, pressing one finger against his own temple, giving a soft reply, the young man blinking coldly. Gloves crushed in a fist. Harsh words becoming fog in the air. You, my more sophisticated reader, have known for ages what I first allowed myself to recognize here. A letter burned and thrown into a grate. Friends from college, beloved and then suddenly forgotten. A wife left to her house, a home with Teddy. The hurt in Hughie’s eyes—what other heartbreaks had I missed? I was enraged, watching these men together. I had never guessed. But people do not keep their secrets because they are so clever or discreet; love is never discreet. They keep them because we don’t care enough to notice.
It all happened so quickly, I can’t remember my true emotions at the time—repulsion, I assume, shock and disgust—but thinking back on it, I feel only gratitude. I watched the lovers as they sat silently and, not smiling, took each other’s hand by the fingertips. Teddy’s face was all sorrow and regret, and I suppose he loved my friend as best he could, and almost enough. A moment later Hughie whispered something in the young man’s ear, brushed his lips against his cheek, and kissed it. What an unexpected scene, so perverse and sad. And what wonderful luck. I write this now, after having known Hughie for over fifty years, and I ask you: what better companion could I have had all my twisted life, what greater friend for this friendless beast, than old Hughie—a secret monster just like me?
Back inside the party, when I retreated, the mood had changed. The liquor had lasted, and now the men were gathered into groups, giggling. A few had made it onto the dance floor, waltzing with one another as in the old days in the diggings, when there were no women to be partners and the world was only men. I would say nothing to Hughie, later. What was there to say? That the heart has more chambers than we can see?
Someone came over and saved me, smiling and whispering.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He winked at me; he’d known me once, but didn’t recognize me. “I said isn’t it awful? Isn’t it delicious?”
“The drink’s not bad.”
He grew quickly annoyed. “No, the wives.”
“What about them?”
“You’re married, young man, you should know. She’s shunned.”
“Who?”
“Dupont, the old whore. The wives aren’t coming.”
From the other room, we heard another man making his excuses: “I’m sorry, she couldn’t make it this evening.” We all turned around—perhaps the entire room turned—as Madame Dupont, with a friendless smile, entered her own ballroom and graciously accepted another glass of champagne. Her body was hunched slightly, and this willful woman seemed to disappear for once beneath the glitter of her jewels and her dress. She had at last understood the terms of this evening. It was like a wish granted by a genie: she had conjured up the most important society men in town, but it all meant nothing. She must have realized that men were not the goal, not the key to society; the acceptance of a woman, after all, is all that matters to another. And the wives would never accept old Mary.
I cannot describe the desperate, animal hate in her eyes. She stood and stared at the crowd of her customers with the gaze of someone wrongfully imprisoned, who has studied the walls for years until, at last, she picked the lock and slipped through and only found, in us, another wall. She had not gotten away with poverty, and hard luck, after all; she had not gotten away with youth, as we had. For look at us: in our celluloid collars and club rings and fat bellies. Each of us had dressed that evening knowing what would happen. Each of us, whom she had entertained in the orangesoda light of her parlor, had tied our ties and shrugged into the mirror, laughing at the awful trick we were going to play on Dupont, the old whore. We had convinced ourselves, I guess, that youth is something to be forgotten. And that, to forget it, one must not simply refuse to remember; one must destroy the woman who made the memories.
“All men tonight, is it?” she asked in a crystal voice.
There came a cheer from the crowd. Old Mary, we were shouting for old Mary, and our cheer meant: We won’t let you change.
“Drink up, gentlemen.”
The conductor looked away from his band for a moment, expecting, perhaps, a gesture from the hostess. One slash of a finger to stop the music and send them home, her boys, her sons, who had betrayed their old mother.
Then she lifted her head, briefly gay again the way she used to be. “Fuck, boys, somebody step up and dance with me!”
A cheer. Somebody did. I put down my drink and left through the laughing crowd.
It was 1917 and Alice was up in San Francisco for a few days. Her visits had become shorter as business picked up down south, and I remember the sensation of opening the closet one morning to realize that most of her dresses were gone. I helped nothing by responding with fearful jealousy. I would accuse her of ignoring her marriage, and then, when her eyes softened into something like the truth, I would grow too bold and name her accomplice. “Lawrence!” I might yell, referring to a young train attendant, and she’d examine me oh so very much amused. Oh, Alice. You were right to think I was absurd, because I never understood that the form my nemesis would take was not that of a blond, celluloid boy. Hell, you could have had me if you wanted; I was becoming more like one each day.
We had gone, that evening, to see a Mozart opera, and it was during a thrilling soprano aria that Alice began to fumble in her seat, warming her hands against each other like Lady Macbeth trying to rinse away a spot of blood. She leaned forward, wincing, and while at first I whispered for her to calm herself, she gave me one of her hands and it was ice. Then I noticed, upon her bare back, a firebird of fever. A dowager behind us coughed. Alice stared at me and whispered for me to save her—or that’s what I heard under the coloratura. We waited until the aria was done and then, draping my wife in a shawl and my frock coat, I led her out into a taxi and, from there, home to bed. How tenderly I unwrapped her. My shivering beauty, with the fever glowing from her loins, between her breasts up to her neck, where it seemed to strangle her as she sighed. All through the night I wet her brow and listened to her breath. Watched her eyelids flicker and stare, flicker and stare. I did not sleep, waiting for her secrets. She gave none. By morning, of course, I was sicker than she.
Our deathbeds were in the same room, and all I can remember are warped and colored scenes and moments, unrelated, and revealed to me as an electric storm reveals the edges of a house:
There was the time, past midnight, I assume, when I awoke with an aching throat and looked across to Alice, who lay watching me with sad, adoring eyes. The room, in my memory, is all streaks of lavender and black, with a stripe of color from the upstairs hall, and Alice was pale from her sickness and probably hallucinating. “Go to sleep, Mother,” she said, unblinking, and very dutifully I did.
Many hours later: myself trapped in hot sheets, the room bright despite drawn curtains, our maid giving a glass of water to Alice, who sat on the edge of her bed in a white lawn ruffled slip. A stray bit of sunlight caught the water in the glass and the world seemed to exp
lode. I must have made a noise because the next thing I knew they were both looking at me. “Alice, I need to tell you,” I said. She looked at me expectantly, holding herself up with the bedpost. The maid had vanished. “Alice, I need to tell you.” She looked confused, pale, and scared, and, for a moment, like my grandmother when she rose from her sickbed. The maid returned and I was given a scarlet pill. Painful swallow. The water flashed again and I blacked out.
Late at night: opening my eyes, hoping days had passed and that I would be well again, only to feel my dull brain wriggling like a sea lion in its hot chamber. Immediately I noticed Alice, fully clothed in black and white satin, standing in the doorway, one hand on the knob. Her eyes were different, stern. I knew enough to feign sleep and it was some minutes before I heard her close the door and walk away. Why was my dresser open? The moon came into the room, old lover, and slept in her empty bed.
It was morning when it happened, I think, a mother-of-pearl morning when, feeling no better but somehow able to walk, I made my way to the chamber pot again and, squatting like a king, gave a grateful piss. The room teetered like a boat. I noticed my box of secrets on the bed, lock broken to splinters. I heard her behind me.
“Asgar, explain.”
I craned my neck and saw something gold glinting in her hands. The light was painful to me and the position cramped. “What?”
The Confessions of Max Tivoli Page 19
