Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  He tilted his head to the side, hawk-like, as if drawing a bead on some troublesome object.

  “Well, I can imagine one or two women revising the past. Not out of malice, necessarily. Maybe not even consciously . . .”

  He cleared his throat. An odd expression—pained but also faintly amused—came into his eyes.

  “Have I ever told you about my anthropology tutor at university?”

  3

  BY THIS POINT in Marco’s saga, something like a tacit agreement had been established between the two of us that I was going to be, if not its official chronicler, then at least a kind of semiauthorized literary witness. He knew that the subject interested me. On one occasion he’d said he was surprised I hadn’t already written a book about a predicament exactly like his. I’d explained the difficulty: that in a made-up story you’d have to clarify in your mind who was lying, the man or the woman, and that this would inevitably read as a larger statement about the relative truthfulness of men and women in general, which in turn would reduce the story to polemic or propaganda. In a true story, on the other hand (I’d added), the question would remain specific to the individuals concerned and the particularities of their situation, which would make it much more appealing, at least to me. He’d smiled as if to say, “Be my guest.” Between that and various asides of his over the months, along the lines of “I’m sure you’re taking notes on all this—just make sure they’re accurate!,” I got the feeling he accepted the inevitability of my writing about it some day, and that he was okay with it.

  Needless to say, this complicated matters between us. He wasn’t so naïve as to think I would take everything he told me as gospel. As he himself had said when he visited me and Caitlin in the spring: “You can’t not have doubts.” He’d reiterated the sentiment many times since, and I took this to mean he understood that although I might be entirely sympathetic in my role as his friend and confidant, I was also going to be entirely dispassionate in my role as the teller of his story. Not a faithful amanuensis, in other words, but an appraiser of the truth.

  In all our conversations he was careful to signal this awareness of my—so to speak—judicial independence, and his respect for it. But at the same time I could feel the constant pressure of his desire to keep me in line with his version of the events, and I realized I needed to be vigilant in maintaining my objectivity. I’m sure Marco was aware of this, and adjusted himself accordingly, which of course added yet more layers to the already complex and potentially treacherous transaction being conducted between us.

  I was more than usually aware of all this during our conversation about his affair with his tutor at Cambridge. I’d heard rumors of this affair as a teenager, when it formed part of the general legend of conquest and precocious charisma that trailed after Marco even then. I hadn’t known the details though, and what he told me now fleshed out the story in unexpected ways.

  The tutor’s name was Maeve McLanahan. She was twenty-nine—quite a bit older than Marco at the time. She’d written a book about a matriarchal Amazon tribe she’d studied for her doctorate, which had found a wide general audience owing to its graphic details of sexual customs in the primeval rain forest. From Marco’s description she was a tumultuous character, easily moved to raucous laughter, though also easily angered, with a fondness for drinking brandy during tutorials, which she conducted wearing jeans and sweaters and an old sea captain’s hat.

  “She wasn’t what I thought of as my type, which was pretty conventionally feminine at that time,” Marco said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to think about a teacher in that way. That wasn’t a fantasy of mine. She was the one who initiated things.”

  “She seduced you?”

  He paused a moment.

  “I’d say more like helped herself to me. There was nothing slow or simmering about it. She basically ordered me back to her flat one afternoon, told me she fancied me, and took me up to bed.”

  He paused again, as if to let some implication sink in, and this time I felt that slight controlling pressure exerting itself against me, along with a corresponding stirring of my own defenses.

  “Not that I wasn’t into it,” he continued. “I was just a bit surprised. I’d never been with a woman that frank about what she wanted. It was confusing at first because what she wanted turned out to be the opposite of what you might expect, or at least there was something deeply paradoxical about it. She wanted to be totally in control and yet at the same time she wanted the sensation of being taken by force.”

  Again I felt a sharpened attentiveness bristling inside me.

  “I’d never encountered that before, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. But she was a very determined teacher. She’d get furious if I overstepped some invisible mark, or equally if I understepped it. But when I got it right, the results were ­spectacular. I’ve never had sex like that with anyone, before or since. It was delirious.”

  “For her, too?”

  “I think so. She used to call me her Nijinsky.”

  “After the horse?”

  “No! The Russian dancer. I reminded her of some ballet he was in. Something about a faun.”

  “Afternoon of a Faun?”

  “Yeah. What is that?”

  “It’s a poem by Mallarmé. It was made into a ballet with Nijinsky. I think Debussy wrote the music. I sometimes have it on my syllabus, actually—the poem.”

  “What’s it about?”

  I told him it wasn’t exactly “about” anything. “I mean, there’s a story of sorts but it’s highly ambiguous. A faun wakes from an afternoon nap and remembers an erotic dream about a nymph. A couple of nymphs actually. And it’s not clear whether the encounter was what we would call consensual, or even whether it was in fact a dream—it’s possible he’s remembering something that actually happened. Basically it’s a celebration of a certain phase of male desire where the intensity of feeling dissolves all the usual categories of reality. I teach it alongside Sylvia Plath’s journals and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet about female desire, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .’ ”

  “It’s about rape?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so . . . It’s very tender and delicate. Paul Valéry thought it was the most beautiful poem ever written, at least in French. There are flashes of brutality, but the language creates a kind of pagan, premoral atmosphere in which—”

  “What is a faun anyway?” Marco interrupted. He never had much patience when I waxed pedagogical. “Is it the same as a satyr?”

  “No. Those are cruder—”

  “They’re the ones with the hairy goat legs and the enormous rampant dicks?”

  “Yes. Fauns have something more shy and elusive about them. They live in enchanted forests, as far as I remember. You could say they represent male desire in its youthful, innocent form, when it’s all just wonder at the magical new kinds of pleasure that arrive with puberty. Whereas satyrs embody something worldlier, more corrupted. Lechery, I guess, as opposed to desire.”

  “So she was being complimentary then.”

  “Your tutor? Definitely.”

  “Well, anyway, she was certainly extremely interested in—what you said: the combination of brutality and tenderness.”

  It appeared this old professor of his had come to consider herself not only his academic instructor but also his tutor in matters of erotic technique. On breaking off the affair (which she did after a few weeks, as brusquely as she’d started it) she assured Marco she’d taught him an infallible method for arousing women, and guaranteed him limitless success with future lovers if he applied it.

  “I believed her. Why wouldn’t I? She was this sophisticated woman who seemed to know everything there was to know about sex, while I was this nineteen-year-old . . . faun.”

  He fell silent.

  “Did you try it out?” I asked.

  “Yeah. A couple of times, with girls my age.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it w
orked, sort of. Or anyway, no one objected. But I didn’t feel good about it. In fact, I felt pretty awful. I made a ­conscious decision never to use it again, and I didn’t. It was ancient history by the time I met Julia.”

  I asked him what, precisely, “it” was. An uncomfortable look appeared on his face, but then he nodded in that defiantly reasonable way of his, as if to assure me I had every right to ask.

  “I suppose you could call it a sort of stylized sexual aggressiveness . . . or not aggressiveness, more just a kind of playacting of confidence. Brutish confidence. You know the way gangsters in movies say ‘I got this’ when they’re volunteering to take care of some tricky situation? That was pretty much the mental attitude behind it.”

  “I got this?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah. As in, you don’t have to worry, I’ll make this happen, for both of us. Anyway, you ask if Renata Shenker’s lawyers are likely to find other women to corroborate Julia’s story, and the answer is, I hope not, but I’m a little afraid one of those girls might look back and decide it wasn’t all as harmless as they thought at the time. Actually I’m more than a little afraid. I’m having serious cold sweats about it.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this story. It seemed believable enough, but it smacked also of preemptive defense—calculated insinuation. I wondered if Marco’s real motive for telling it was to plant the suggestion that he, too, had been victimized in his turn—sexually manipulated by a person in power. If so, did that mean he was moving toward an admission of guilt concerning Julia, and coaching me to present his excuses for him if and when I ever got around to writing about him?

  That same afternoon he took me into one of the small rooms off the corridor on the second floor of his house. It was a sort of junk room, piled high with photographic equipment and dusty old computer parts. Opening the drawer of a metal file cabinet, he lifted a stack of dog-eared papers.

  “See that?”

  I peered in, and flinched back.

  It was a gun, a handgun, black and blocky, with a square barrel and curved indentations along the handle.

  “Jesus, Marco!”

  My shock seemed to please him. He gave a grim smile.

  “I got it when I first moved here. The neighborhood was rougher then. There were a lot of break-ins. Joan made me buy it.” Joan was his ex-wife, Alicia’s mother. “It’s a Glock, which is what the cops here carry. Needless to say I never had any use for it, till now.”

  “You’re planning to shoot someone?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Who?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “Julia?”

  “Yeah, right, I’m going to smuggle it onto a plane and shoot her through her letter box. No, dummy, guess!”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  He glared at me.

  “I think you’re being obtuse.”

  I was. I’d guessed what he meant but I didn’t want to ­acknowledge it. I’d known only one person in my life who’d killed himself, a school friend who’d jumped from a building. He’d led a fairly desperate existence from the age of fifteen when, for ­reasons he never discussed, he walked out of his parents’ comfortable home in Highgate and moved into a squalid bedsit, where he lived like some Dickensian waif, betting on horses (for which he had a certain gift), eating tinned soup and trying to keep up with his homework. Uncomplaining, unassuming, introverted to the point of not being able to look even his friends in the eye, he’d come to embody my idea of what it was to be “a suicide,” which was to say someone about whom the surprising thing (at least in hindsight) wasn’t that he killed himself, but that he kept going for as long as he did. Marco, secure on the foundations of his happy and privileged upbringing, fit and vigorous even under the stress of his resurgent ordeal, could not have been less like him. I knew rationally that there were plenty of different reasons why people killed themselves, but I couldn’t take him seriously as a candidate for that particular act. He was too vivid even in his dejection—too solidly anchored in life.

  “Marco,” I said, as gently as I could, “I mean, come on!”

  “What?”

  “You have a daughter . . .”

  “It’d be for her sake, mainly, if I do it,” he said.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “My sake too, obviously. I don’t have the temperament to live as a pariah. I’m too attached to the things I’d lose. I like working. I like being on panels and juries. I like being invited to dinner parties at people’s houses. I like having an intelligent, glamorous girlfriend. I like knowing my daughter and her friends feel comfortable around me. I care what the world thinks of me. Maybe too much, but that’s the way I am. I don’t have your appreciation for solitude, or the wilderness.”

  It was an eloquent speech, and it touched me, but at the same time its very eloquence affirmed my sense of his fundamental robustness.

  “I understand,” I said. “But still . . .”

  He stood close, eyeing me fiercely from under the sharp angle of his brow. I knew he was waiting for me to be properly appalled—for his sake, not just his daughter’s—at what he was contemplating. I couldn’t bring myself to oblige him though. There seemed to me something maudlin about the situation, melodramatic, that shouldn’t be indulged. And I couldn’t help feeling that slight pressure again: a not so subtle attempt to reinforce his image in my mind as a figure of tragic honor and pathos, and to lay claim to the role of victim in this story. I didn’t necessarily dispute either point, but I didn’t like the feeling of being coerced.

  “I’m sure you’ll win this battle, Marco,” I said.

  He slid the drawer shut and turned away with a look of such unmistakable hurt that I felt at once ashamed of my coldness, and spent the rest of the day trying to make up for it.

  4

  BUT I WAS RIGHT about him winning the battle, even though it came about for reasons so unexpected as to seem absurd—farcical almost.

  I was already in London, at my mother’s hospital bedside, while this next set of events was occurring. As I say, I had more pressing things on my mind than Marco’s troubles, and Marco was tactful enough to keep his distance. I heard nothing from him, in fact, until this particular chapter was over. He sent me an email:

  Just to let you know, Renata Shenker backed down. No need to write back, but I thought you’d want to be told. Hope you’re bearing up ok. M

  I was curious, naturally, and despite the drama unfolding in my own life, I emailed back to arrange a call.

  He kept his tone carefully restrained when we spoke, but I could tell he was jubilant, reveling again in the joy of victory. Even the roundabout way he told me the story had something transparently gleeful about it. He’d obviously enjoyed himself thinking of the juiciest way to recount it.

  “Have you heard of Hanna Reitsch?” he began.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She was an aviator. First woman to fly a helicopter. First woman to compete in the world gliding championships. Huge celebrity in her lifetime. Kennedy invited her to the White House. Nehru flew in a glider with her over New Delhi. In the sixties she lived in Ghana where she had an affair with Nkrumah. Died in seventy-nine. Anyway, Julia turns out to have been a big fan of hers, and it seems she wanted to write a book about her. This was after her TV career had gone belly-up. Ditto her return to radio. She’d had a spell as partner in some short-lived gallery, then I think a brief debacle in PR, and then some time in the nineties she decided she was a writer. She did some magazine articles, fluff mostly, but then she got interested in this Hanna Reitsch woman, and started researching a biography. You’re sure you don’t know the name?”

  “It does ring a faint bell.”

  “You never saw that Carlo Ponti movie Operation Crossbow?”

  “No.”

  “Or Hitler: The Last Ten Days?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about Downfall?”

  “With Bruno Ganz? Yes. Oh, right.” It c
ame back to me: “She was Hitler’s test pilot.”

  “Bingo. So Julia fires off a proposal for this book. The proposal gets read by a friend of hers who used to read for a publisher back in the nineties. Our investigator tracked this woman down and she told him about this proposal and the report she’d written on it. He found copies of both in the publisher’s archives in Croydon. They make fascinating reading. It seems this new heroine of Julia’s was an unrepentant Nazi—Kennedy and the rest notwithstanding. She wore the Iron Cross with diamonds that Hitler gave her, to her dying day. In her last interview she said, quote, ‘I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism.’ ”

  “Julia didn’t know that?”

  “Oh, she knew it. That’s the point. She appears to have found the woman’s, uh, constancy altogether admirable. She positively gushes about it. Let me read you the last paragraph of her proposal: ‘I want to tell the tale of this heroic woman whose physical courage and astonishing technical skills were matched only by her refusal to betray her own principles. She was no more reluctant to acknowledge her belief in National Socialism, than she was to test-pilot a V-1 Flying Bomb; no more afraid of denouncing modern-day Germany as a “Land of bankers,” than she’d been to fly General von Greim out of the bunker under enemy fire in order to deliver the Fuhrer’s last commands to the Luftwaffe. I hope to write a book that will do justice to this brave, stubborn, uncompromising, altogether extraordinary individual.”’

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Unbelievable, right? Our old friend Julia Gault, a Nazi sympathizer!”

  I chafed a bit at that.

  “Well, as you said, it’s the constancy she’s admiring, not the principles themselves.”

  “I don’t know,” Marco replied, suavely enough. “She clearly has no problem with that phrase, ‘Land of bankers,’ which you have to admit has a certain Julius Streicher-esque ring to it . . .”

  “But I mean, didn’t you tell us when you came to visit that she was even further to the left than you?”

  “That was when she was young. People adapt their politics to their circumstances. She certainly wouldn’t be the first unhappy person to get lost in these particular woods.”