Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  As for the other players in Marco’s drama, his parents had heard the news of my mother’s death through Marco and had sent a message asking to be informed about the funeral arrangements. Unlike Julia, they’d never been more than dinner party acquaintances of my parents, but nor had they ever entirely disappeared from my parents’ lives, and after some hesitation I decided I wouldn’t be stretching a point, or even indulging inappropriately in personal curiosity, by inviting them to the service and the reception afterward. Renata Shenker presented no such difficulties: she was an old and much-loved family friend, and was one of the first people I called.

  She arrived early at the crematorium on the damp, pale morning of the funeral, and we talked for a while in the cloister outside the chapel. In my early twenties I’d interviewed for a job with her. She ran a small publishing company that specialized in social science, European fiction, and Holocaust memoirs (her husband had been a camp survivor). On my way to the interview I’d prepared clever things to say about Herbert Marcuse and Primo Levi, but she was more interested in my typing speed. She didn’t offer me a job, but she sent me to an editor at another firm, who eventually hired me, so I’d always felt indebted to her. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral, almost twenty years earlier.

  “You’ve lost your hair,” she said. “Still at least you haven’t swollen up like me. I can hardly walk these days.” Having always been rather thin and wiry, she’d grown stout and short-breathed, and leaned with both hands on a metal stick.

  “But you’re still publishing books,” I said. “That’s the important thing!”

  “Is it? Yes, I suppose it is.” She frowned, and then added darkly: “When people let me.”

  I had a pretty good idea what she was referring to, but I felt I should make a show of ignorance.

  “What does that mean?”

  She gave me a searching look. She’d always had a reputation for shrewdness, and for having her ear to the ground. Still, it seemed unlikely she could have known I knew anything about Julia Gault’s memoir, much less that I’d become Marco Rosedale’s confidant.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s always nonsense of one sort or another going on in the book world, as I’m sure you know. How are you? I’m sorry about your mother. I shall miss her. She had her ways, but I was fond of her, on the whole. I certainly didn’t expect to outlive her. She always seemed so youthful. And of course she was considered a great beauty. Well, we all have to go.”

  I knew her—knew her generation’s spiky honesty—well enough to know she was being affectionate, in her own way.

  An usher opened the chapel and I went in with my siblings to check that everything was in order, directing Renata to a waiting room. She shuffled off, but reappeared back in the chapel a minute later, looking upset.

  “I think I’ll wait in here, on second thoughts,” she said, squeezing into a pew at the back. I assumed the waiting room must have been crowded, though I hadn’t noticed many people arriving yet. It wasn’t until after the service, when she made a conspicuously hasty exit and told me she’d changed her mind about coming to the reception, that it dawned on me the Rosedales must have been in the waiting room, and that it was the sight of Alec Rosedale—Sir Alec Rosedale, QC—that had upset her.

  It occurred to me at that point that I had in fact already made the shift from observer to participant in Marco’s drama, and that my role, minor as it was, had already implicated me in the distress of at least one person: an elderly woman who had once helped me, and whom I admired greatly.

  2

  IT WAS AT my urging that Marco had finally told his father what was going on. I’d suggested it early on, and I pressed him again soon after that sobering phone message of Julia’s announcing (among other things) that Renata was going to publish her memoir.

  “You’re going to need legal help,” I’d said. “Why not get the best?”

  As before, Marco was reluctant:

  “He’s not a libel lawyer, my dad. The reverse, if anything. Free speech was always his thing; anti-censorship . . . He defended a publisher in an obscenity trial once.”

  “All the more reason to get his advice. He’ll know the subject from both sides.”

  “I don’t want to drag him into this, though. At his age he deserves some peace. Also, it’s just so humiliating, getting my dad to bail me out. And it’s embarrassing, too. Can you imagine telling your father you’ve been accused of rape?”

  “He’s going to find out anyway, if you don’t stop the book. Then you’ll end up with the worst of both worlds.”

  He hung his head. “I know. But I can’t tell him. I just can’t do it.”

  But eventually he swallowed his pride and called his father.

  Far from being unwilling to get involved, the old lawyer had rallied at once to his son’s defense. Elderly as he was—ancient, really—he retained a keen interest in political and social affairs, and grasped instantly the danger facing Marco.

  “This will destroy you,” were the words Marco dourly reported him saying, “unless we fight back and fight back hard. If we lose, you’ll never make another film. You won’t be able to publish articles in reputable places either. And don’t expect your friends to stay loyal. This sort of thing is absolutely radioactive. But we shan’t lose. I’m going to put a team together. Send me your correspondence with that man at the Messenger.”

  From what I gathered, he shared his son’s view that he himself was at least a part of the reason why the Messenger had wanted to run the original excerpt from Julia’s memoir. Years earlier they’d published an article attacking him after his defense maneuvers in a terrorist case at the Old Bailey almost caused a mistrial. Later, when his clients were exonerated and freed from jail, the editors were forced to run a groveling retraction, prompting (so he believed) their everlasting enmity. I still had my doubts about this supposed vendetta; the scenario smacked of grandiosity to me, but in any case Sir Alec apparently took a particular pleasure in his son’s victory over Mel Sauer.

  “That’ll teach them to go after a Rosedale!” he’d chortled, delighted at Marco’s account of that incident. He seemed to regard Renata Shenker, however, as a more dangerous adversary. “She’s a tough bird,” he’d told Marco. He’d known her former business partner, who’d parted from her acrimoniously, and he used to run into Renata herself occasionally at social events in London.

  “I doubt she’ll back down as easily as the Messenger,” he’d warned his son. “She’ll know, or her counsel will, that a jury’s going to look sympathetically on a spirited senior citizen running a high-minded little independent publishing company. It’ll be expensive to go to trial of course, and I don’t imagine her pockets are deep, but they’ll award her costs if she wins, and she’ll probably have a best seller on her hands, too, what with the publicity these things generate, so she might decide it’s worth the gamble. I don’t mean to alarm you; I’m just thinking aloud, but we’re going to have a battle on our hands.”

  The battle was swift and, it appears, hard-fought on both sides. Sir Alec, acting with a former junior from his days as a busy QC, as well as a team of solicitors and a private detective, had cease and desist letters sent to Whitethorne Press and their printers, and an application for a preliminary injunction against publication delivered to the High Court. Marco’s correspondence with Mel Sauer, along with a copy of Gerald Woolley’s letter about Julia, were offered as a basis for the injunction, on the grounds that whatever compelling legal reasons had caused the Messenger not to publish, could be presumed to apply equally in the case of Whitethorne Press.

  All this I learned from Marco at my weekly visits to his house and, increasingly, over the phone. He’d begun calling me frequently. Though I wasn’t his closest friend by any means, I believe I was still the only one he confided in on this particular subject. My knowing Julia and some of the other people involved was obviously a part of it, but he was worried about gossip, and my not knowing an
yone in his professional circle was probably just as important.

  I don’t think he talked about it much with Hanan either. He’d told me she and Alicia had listened sympathetically when he explained the situation after Julia’s phone message, but I got the feeling he wasn’t entirely confident in her loyalty. I assumed she must be weighing her options. On the one hand, she’d just moved in with Marco—taken the plunge with their relationship—and reversing course would have been complicated at the very least. Also, she was having visa problems, to which the simplest solution would have been marrying Marco, who’d acquired U.S. citizenship himself through his first marriage, and I imagine she wasn’t ready to give up on that prospect just yet. On the other hand, there was everything her instincts as a rational woman of the world must have been telling her: that if things went badly for Marco, she could find herself encumbered with a piece of irrevocably damaged human goods that she’d have to be constantly explaining and apologizing for, and dragging around with her like an invalid with some highly noxious disease.

  It’s possible, of course, that her air of disengagement was just a more emphatic version of what I’d sensed earlier: an essential remoteness from the culture of New York—in this instance its anxious, obsessive interest in the subject of sexual conduct. It’s also possible my perspective on her was shaped by factors that had nothing to do with her at all. Earlier that year, for example, I’d seen the documentary about Anthony Weiner. I didn’t make any connection at the time, but as I write now it seems likely I was seeing Hanan through the lens of Weiner’s wife Huma ­Abedin. There were physical resemblances: similar black hair and large dark eyes; similar pale-olive complexion set off by bright red lipstick. Gestural similarities, too, particularly a certain way of taking up position in a doorway or far corner of a room, arms crossed, gazing at their partner with a look expressive of both tenderness and cool appraisal. (No doubt, by the same token, I was also viewing Marco partly through the lens of Weiner himself; at the very least, Weiner’s drama must have added a tint of its particular farcical goatishness to the general murk of errant masculinity shadowing Marco’s own.)

  I barely glimpsed his daughter during that time, though I’d sometimes hear her and Erin puttering around in the basement. The little grin on Erin’s face during Julia’s fateful phone message had struck me as faintly malicious, and I wondered whether she was amusing herself in some devious way, turning Alicia against her father. That’s unfair perhaps, possibly even a bit crass, but I know that among the many kinds of pain Marco was experiencing during those days was a sense that his daughter might indeed turn against him, with or without her lover’s connivance.

  He was in bad shape again, worse than before. With Sauer, he’d conducted his own defense, which at least gave him something to focus his energies on. Now, having effectively handed matters over to his father, he’d succumbed to a restless, powerless inertia. A manifestation of this was an uncharacteristically crude, even brutal, cynicism. He wasn’t someone who monitored his own speech very closely, at the best of times. On the plus side, this gave his more generous sentiments, when he expressed them, a refreshing air of sincerity. But it also exposed his less worthy impulses. At times he could sound pettily angry or mean-spirited.

  “I’m beginning to think it’s all just a land grab,” he said at one low moment. “Land grab, power grab, money grab, all this public accusation stuff . . . Yes, people get assaulted, and they deserve justice, but this isn’t about justice. It isn’t about mindless imitation either—I was wrong about that. It’s about business, plunder. Well, fair enough, we all want our share, and I’m sure I’ve had more than mine. But let’s not pretend this public shaming rigmarole has anything to do with justice or civil rights. I mean, am I seriously expected to feel a burning solidarity with those reporters, so-called, at Fox News, cashing in on having been treated like bunny girls all those years? Let them grab their millions in payback, and good luck to them. I’m all for it. But don’t tell me it has anything to do with righting wrongs, or healing wounds. It’s business! Pure and simple.”

  “But Julia isn’t demanding money, is she?” I said.

  “True. Not yet. Not from me. But I’m sure if this memoir of hers comes out, she’ll find some way of leveraging it. It’ll be her official certificate of victimhood, which is money in the bank, as you know. It’s like what a cab medallion used to be.”

  “You really think it’s just money motivating her?”

  “Why else would she put all this effort into a lie? She’s been broke for years, and now suddenly she realizes she has a nice, juicy, privileged, straight, white male she can take down. I’m a bounty-hunting opportunity, is what I am. A scalp. So are you, by the way, so watch out.”

  Other times however, in less rancorous humor, he’d admit at least the possibility of motives besides money for Julia’s behavior, and he’d speculate on what they might be.

  “Could she be punishing me for not offering something more serious all those years ago?” he said on the phone one morning. “Not pushing her to dump the boyfriend and ride off into the sunset with me? I know things fizzled out between her and ­Gerald Woolley in the end anyway . . .”

  I waited while he reflected on this.

  “So actually maybe that’s what she’s angry about,” he mused. “Not my casual attitude in itself, but the fact that our fling screwed up her relationship with the guy she might have married. Do you think that could be it?”

  “It’s possible . . .”

  “I was definitely careless about people’s feelings in those days. It never occurred to me not to make a move on someone just because they were involved with someone else. And then as soon as I was bored I’d cut out. That was the code back then: every man for himself. Every woman, too, by the way. And Julia certainly gave the impression of being as tough as anyone else, in that department. But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t such a great code anyway. I’m certainly open to being persuaded that it wasn’t. I think I half-knew it was problematic even at the time, though I won’t pretend that slowed me down. The truth is I regret a lot of things I did when I look back. I could be charming when I wanted, and I’m pretty sure I was fun and interesting to be around. But I wasn’t kind. I wasn’t interested in kindness. Kindness was for people who couldn’t get laid, in my book. Sex was what mattered, not being kind. Maybe that’s what I’m really being punished for, karmically speaking . . .”

  On the legal front, meanwhile, things were moving fast. Within days of his father’s application, a temporary injunction was granted against publication of Julia’s book. Renata, who shared the high-principled, somewhat pugnacious temperament of that vanishing generation, saw this as a challenge to her ­integrity as a publisher, and vowed to fight it. A court date was set. Sir Alec and his team mapped out a dual strategy, mustering arguments in readiness for a trial, if it should come to that, while also taking steps to expedite their preferred solution, which was to get Renata to back down before proceedings began.

  For the trial strategy, he asked Marco for copies of a documentary he’d made for American TV in the nineties, about atrocities committed by Serbian forces against Bosnian Muslim civilians during the Yugoslav war. A segment of the film was about the notorious rape camps in Foča, and the lawyers seemed to think the footage might help cast Marco in a usefully ennobling light, illustrating an unimpeachable attitude toward women. For the same reason, they also asked for copies of the segment about the girl being tarred and feathered, from the film he’d shot with Julia in Belfast.

  Marco wasn’t happy with any of this. He hated it in fact: hated the suggestion it raised, that he had some ongoing morbid interest in the abuse of women; hated the idea of using his films for purposes of self-exoneration; hated being in the position of trying to censor a book in the first place.

  “I don’t seem to have much choice though, do I? Either I fight or I’m fucked, and these are apparently the only effective weapons I have to fight with. I have to win, too, obviously
, though it’s possible I’ll be fucked even if I do.”

  We were at his house during this last conversation, having an early lunch before I caught the train back upstate. Hanan and the girls were out, which inevitably meant a torrent of talk about his case. I asked about the other part of his father’s strategy: getting Renata to back down. A pained expression crossed his face. Then he shrugged, and told me with the acid resignation that was increasingly his tone at that time, that his father’s team was looking for ways to discredit Julia.

  “Digging up dirt on her, basically. Apparently that’s what you do. The assumption is that Renata Shenker’s team will be doing the same on me.”

  “They’ve seen that letter from Gerald Woolley?”

  “Yes. But we need something stronger than that.”

  “Such as?”

  “Anything that’ll make her look like she’s unhinged, or a liar. Other false allegations of assault would be helpful, I suppose.”

  “And what are they looking for on you?”

  “Oh, dodgy bedroom behavior, I imagine. Other women willing to corroborate her story . . .”

  “Are they likely to find any?”

  “No. Not from anyone telling the truth. But . . .”

  “But . . . ?”