by Edmund White
One day she said, “This is embarrassing, and please don’t think I’d be angry, I’m much too realistic for that”—realism she considered to be a supreme European virtue—“but do you have those … little bugs? Pidocchi?”
We looked up the word in the dictionary to make sure she meant “crabs.” I told her I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, and if we had them, she must have given them to me.
“Let’s not hand out blame,” she said. “That is childish. We must be realistic and … scientific about this. You can get them from a public toilet seat. There are many ways to get them.”
“I hope I haven’t infected Alex,” I said. “Do I have to shave all my pubic hair off? Burn our underclothes and sheets?”
Pia laughed. She tried to stifle her laugh and clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was as if a dysentery of merriment had doubled her up, and suddenly she excreted a big laugh that left her weak and twisting in her chair. “A bonfire in Larchmont,” she screamed, “and you hairless as a newborn.” And I hated her then and never wanted to see her again. She’d brought this infestation into our household.
I went to a gay doctor in the East Sixties whom Jack recommended, who handled gays and their horrors. The waiting room was filled with men whose hair color owed nothing to nature. Their clothes were designed to make them look twenty years younger if seen from a distance and from behind. Two guys were chatting about their Fire Island houses, which they were about to “open” (these guys obviously thought of their beach shacks as manors where the chandeliers were bagged and the furniture was draped in Holland cloth). The others were all quiet, leafing through homo magazines like After Dark, with their pictures of young male dancers and the latest “brilliant” clothes designer who’d combined black leather and black lace. For the most part the patients didn’t talk to each other or even look at each other. It reminded me of the one time I’d gone to a Virginia cathouse. Everyone there was embarrassed and had silently agreed not to acknowledge the others.
The doctor, a beefy man with muscles and a Jewish name and a handlebar mustache and a lisp though his voice was pitched low, listened to my spiel and then said, “Come into the other room, undress down to your underwear, sit there.”
He put on a headband with a mirror and a light, and he looked in my ears and throat and had me cough while he fingered my balls. He then knelt and rooted around in my pubic bush, especially at the beltline and then in the area where my balls and cock emerged out of my pelvis (“Blood-rich,” he murmured). Finally he stood up and threw away his gloves.
“Yep, you’ve got ’em.”
He disposed of the paper covering on the examination table.
“Here’s a prescription for A-200. You put it on every hair from your neck down to your toes, including your toes if they’re hairy. Get it into your crack too. Leave it on for two hours, then wash it off with soap and water.”
“What about my wife?”
“Were you intimate with her recently?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No,” I said, “but we do sleep in the same bed.”
“You might just get away with saying nothing,” he said. “Tell her the sheets feel scratchy to you for some reason and ask her if you can change them, pillowcases too. And put on fresh underwear and socks and shirt—everything!—and wash the old ones normally but in extra-hot water if possible.”
“Is that it?”
“The eggs take a week to hatch, so do it again in seven days, the A-200. That should do it. If you see your wife scratching, then you’ve got to tell her.”
“Is there any lie I could tell her?”
“Were you in a crummy motel recently?”
“Yes! That’s perfect,” I said, surprised at how perspicacious he was. I even forgave him the gratuitous testicle-grope-and-cough.
The next evening Alex went to the Metropolitan Opera with her mother to see Tosca and stayed over in Manhattan. I took advantage of her absence to spill some coffee on our sheets as an alibi and strip our bed and make it up fresh myself. I did the treatment and sat on the toilet seat naked the entire two hours, reading, then showered and scrubbed the toilet seat down with a cleaning spray. I threw my underclothes in with the regular dirty clothes.
The next day at the office I talked to Jack on the phone.
“All gone?” he asked.
“Yep! I can’t thank you enough.”
“Don’t forget the second treatment.”
“Are you kidding? Of course I won’t.”
“I talked to Dr. Siegal, and he thought you were sexy.”
“Yeah, he made me cough for crabs.”
“He said, ‘A real man at last.’ He was ready to go down on you, though he said one of your balls—”
“He told you that?”
“So it’s true. Not much confidentiality on the gay circuit.”
Despite Dr. Siegal’s big mouth I was still glad I hadn’t seen my regular physician.
“Hey, Jack?”
“Yes?”
“This is between us, but I don’t really want to have sex with Pia again.”
“Why? Because of the cootie-bugs?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t she do the treatment too?”
“She claims she did, but what if she gets reinfected by her paramour?”
“Her what?”
“By whoever infected her the last time.”
Jack was silent.
I said, “Do you know who the guy is?”
“Don’t do this to me,” Jack said.
“Well? Do you?”
When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I promise I won’t mention it to her.” I thought about it while he paused, and I added, “I guess I don’t really have to know. Is it anyone we know?”
“No.”
“Does he love Pia? Will he take care of her?”
“He’s living with a woman he’s been with for the last six years, but he promises to leave her. Apparently, though, the other woman is very fragile, even suicidal.”
“Most married men say that,” I mumbled ruefully, then spoke more loudly and distinctly. “I never said anything like that. I never said I’d leave Alex for her.”
A moment ticked by.
Then I said, “Is he American? Italian?”
“He’s English but lives in Rome.”
“Is he rich?”
“No. Average. He teaches English to Italian businessmen.”
Disappointed that my rival was so ordinary, I said, “What age?”
“I don’t know him. Fifties, I think.”
“Can they still keep it up at age fifty?” I asked, hostile but also genuinely curious.
“I don’t have much experience with men in that age range. But yes, they can. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s not real hard.”
“Poor Pia,” I said. “And the guy obviously keeps very elegant company.”
“Because of the crabs?”
“Yeah,” I said, then added, “Even the elite can get cootie-bugs.”
And when that got a laugh out of him, I laughed—and there we were, laughing like kids, egging each other on. I felt a strange relief, and finally I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
“He teaches English to Italian businessmen,” I said matter-of-factly, “and around his crotch he’s got a regular conga line of insects going, tiny marimbas in their paws and espadrilles drumming through his pubes. Is that correct?”
“Essentially correct,” Jack said. “You’ve sussed that one out.”
Americans had just started using that anglicism, “sussing out” one thing or the other.
“Hey, Jack, you know what all this makes me think of?”
“What?”
“When I was a teenager,” I said, “I brought a girl home for the weekend. Tina. I remember her name was Tina. That was a very big deal for me, to invite a girl home. I hadn’t slept with her yet, but I was hoping to. She was put in her own
room—one of my sisters doubled up with another one of my sisters and let Tina use her room. Then in the morning my mother came in and sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘Will, that girl isn’t clean. I looked at her panties, and they were stained. She has a venereal disease.’
“ ‘Mother!’ I said, whispering my indignation.
“ ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I am not that naive. I can see she has gonorrhea. She’s not clean, Will.’ Of course, after that I didn’t touch her.”
“Do you think she really could tell?” Jack asked. “Do girls get a drip that would stain their panties?”
“I haven’t a clue,” I said.
“Do you think your mother just wanted to scare you off premarital sex?”
“No,” I said and chuckled, “I think she really believed there was a danger.”
Jack said, “Now, guys secrete something. The front of your underpants gets stiff from it, and it stings like hell to piss.”
“This is the grossest conversation we’ve ever had,” I said. “Anyway, I have now become completely turned off by Pia.”
A week went by before Pia called to say she was going to Rome.
“For long?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, then added, “Yes, for a long time. I like America, but I’m fed up with Americans.”
“Can I ask you a question, Pia?”
“Yes, ask me anything you want.”
“Do you have a new lover?”
“Yes.”
“How long has he been … in your life?”
“I met him four months ago, but we’ve only been together for two months. I started loving him two months ago.”
“I take it he’s not American.”
“English. He’s English. But he lives in Rome, and we speak in Italian. Mostly.”
“He must be an exceptional person.”
“Average,” she said. “He’s average. Though not to me.”
“So he’s average,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“He’s exceptional in the way he loves me,” she said bitterly. “He loves me passionately.”
She said that word forcefully since she knew I’d mock it in my mind.
“A passionate Englishman? Now there’s something new. And is he the one who gave us crabs?”
I could hear Pia making an exasperated sound, and then she hung up on me.
I knew that if I went over there with tears in my eyes, she’d go to bed with me again. Then I could go check in to a hotel right away, do the second A-200 treatment, wait two hours, wash it off, and go home.
I called Jack back and talked it over with him. He said, “Would you want her back? If she agreed to drop Oliver and come back to you like before, would you want her back?”
“If she’d agree to be faithful to me. If there’d be no syphilitic panties or crab lice.”
“She was planning to shadow you on your Serengeti photo safari.”
“What?” I asked.
I couldn’t grasp what Jack had just said, no matter how slowly I replayed his words.
“She’d already signed up for that safari through the Serengeti that you and Alex are planning to take in January. She was going to pretend it was just a wonderful coincidence.”
“That would have ruined the whole trip for me,” I said. “Not to mention for Alex.”
“I think that was the idea,” Jack said. “She was jealous you were inviting Alex on such a glamorous trip. She used to ask me if you were still sleeping with Alex. I said I didn’t know but yes, probably, once in a while.”
“You said that?”
“Honestly I don’t know what you do with Alex. But Pia was indignant that you might be having sex with her. She said, ‘Is there anything more revolting than married men who still sleep with their wives?’ ”
“That sounds like Evelyn Waugh dialogue,” I said, and I thought that if I’d kept a notebook, I would have written that one down.
I was angry. At Pia for hanging up on me. For taking a new lover, Oliver Average. And I was angry with Jack because he’d known Oliver’s name all along, though at first he’d pretended not to. He’d obviously been Pia’s confidant through every twist and turn. Did he encourage her to drop me? And how long was he going to wait before telling me about her utterly moronic little Serengeti scheme?
I felt ridiculously petty, worrying about Pia’s affair with an average Englishman who was about as “cultured” as a petri dish. Bringing crabs back to the marriage bed. Yes, Pia was a woman and I, a man, but we might as well have been gay men for all the bitchiness and shallowness and venereal filth we were wallowing in.
I took the train back to Larchmont and sat next to a workman eating a hot dog reeking of near-meat and mustard.
6.
Pia moved back to Rome, and we never once spoke to each other before she left.
Jack said, “That shows what bad heterosexual values you both have.”
“How so?”
“Straight people, as soon as they’ve broken up, it’s off with their heads.”
“And gays?”
“We stay friends. Why invest so much energy and time in another person and then just cut him out of your life forever? That’s the nasty, brutish way straights behave.”
“But it doesn’t mean anything to you gay guys—it’s all just a joke for you.”
“Not a joke,” Jack insisted. “We’ve invested so much—”
“Invested! But you’re defending your investments like a dry goods merchant.”
“And why do you straights gladly throw over everything you’ve achieved?”
“Love,” I said, “isn’t an achievement. It’s like a sonata. Once you’ve finished playing it, nothing remains. Not even sounds in the air.”
“There are marks on the page someone else can follow,” he said.
My words made me feel melancholy. I recognized how insubstantial my love for Pia had been. Maybe it hadn’t even been love, since it had contained a large admixture of scorn and lust. But we had made love so many times. She’d cooked pasta dishes for me. We’d showered together; she’d told me about her grandfather and his dog in Brescia. She’d described Baronessa Toni’s little house in San Francisco on Russian Hill. I still remembered the younger man from Bergamo whom she’d installed in Sardinia. As a novelist I had ingested every detail with real zest. I told myself that perhaps she’d never known a novelist up close before; Pia had mistaken my professional curiosity for loving interest. Silly and snobbish as she was, nevertheless she’d fired my imagination as no one had ever done before.
When I thought of her in Rome with the half-hard average Brit and his parasite hordes, I found myself tossing and turning like St. Lawrence on his grill.
When I was honest with myself, I admitted that if I could have her back only on the condition that I marry her, I no longer wanted her, not at that price. I loved my children and my wife, even our funny Finnish house and the gardens gone wild. I admired Alex, her physical fragility and her moral strength. I loved Alex as the mother of my children. I loved her as this famous rich beauty I’d somehow captured …
But then I thought of the sunlight flooding Pia’s big room like honey filling a comb and I felt deprived—of her body, her physical generosity—and I wondered if I’d ever find such a sensual woman again. Here I was, getting on in my thirties, and my best years as a man, as a body, were slipping by. I hadn’t succeeded as a novelist. I wasn’t a church or community leader. I was a faithless husband. I had no real friends except Jack. I only skimmed the latest novels, and then only those by writers I judged to be my rivals, which was absurd, since my novel had sold only 952 copies and had long been out of print. I’d detected a look of pity on Wyatt’s face when I’d told him I was a novelist, though he’d pretended to be envious. His imagination and intellectual energy were going into making him richer, searching out new areas of investment, discovering which corporations had resourceful leaders—god, I sounded like one of my own brochures. Fiction, obvious
ly, no longer attracted first-rate minds except Pynchon or Woiwode or that Frenchman, Le Clézio. The best minds, I supposed, were going into physics or math or business.
And then, returning like the piano solo in a concerto after a vigorous tutti, came the thought of Pia wriggling out of her harem pants, which made her look so hippy, her big, firm breasts with their large black aureoles already swinging free, and I wondered if I were the sort of weak, confused man who couldn’t recognize a good thing when he had it. Would Wyatt have realized right away that with Pia (or Beatrice, still better, since she was more intelligent) he had his thumb on the very pulse of life, that this was the heartbeat, steady and strong, that would sustain him for years, and that he’d be foolish and in a sense lazy not to throw everything and everyone over for her? Were cock and cunt the most important things in life? The big, red, slippery heart of a couple? Should everything else be sacrificed to keep a well-suited pussy and penis happily throbbing together? If this genital couple, huge and smoking, sat happily on a throne, didn’t it dwarf and overshadow everything else—house, children, money, marriage, friendship, even love?
The very physicality of her white body thrown back on those gleaming, oiled mink pillows, that fur so alive and pagan and luxurious all around her, now seemed to me as appealing as it had once been intermittently disgusting. I thought of my long-limbed, pale body with the scanty patch of sandy hair on my hard chest, my big hip bones jutting up above my hard, blue-white stomach, a desolate moonlit mesa ringing a desert, my aristocratic feet with the big toe shorter than its neighbors; I could see the shambling, underloved, boarding school body, this quixotic sadness next to the ripe loveliness of my Dulcinea’s curves and clefts.
I jerked off, and then as I wiped up I thought that Pia wasn’t so special.
Suddenly I had a lot of extra time. I was more attentive to Alex, and she and I planned our safari carefully. Of course, most of the arrangements were handled by the travel company, but there were a few options left for us to dither over. Alex always chose the more expensive accommodations. It was just a reflex with her, though she wasn’t extravagant by nature and was anything but showy in her tastes.
