“And so, after Tutti had departed, I joined Kate at her solitary table, seated myself beside her on the red banquette, and to my surprise she kissed me on the cheek. I blushed with shock and pleasure, and Kate laughed—oh, what a laugh she has; it always makes me think of a brandy glass shining in the firelight—she laughed and said: ‘Why not? It’s been a long time since I’ve kissed a man. Or spoken to anyone who wasn’t a waiter or chambermaid or a shopkeeper. I do a great deal of shopping. I’ve bought enough stuff to furnish Versailles.’ I asked how long she had been in Paris and where she was living and what her life was like in general. And she said she was at the Ritz, she’d been in Paris almost a year: ‘And as for my day-to-day affairs—I shop, I go for fittings, I go to all the museums and galleries, I ride to the Bois, I read, I sleep a helluva lot, and I have lunch here every day at this same table: not very imaginative of me, but it is a pleasant walk from the hotel, and there are not too many agreeable restaurants where a young woman can lunch alone without seeming somewhat suspicious. Even the owner here, Monsieur Vaudable—I think at first he imagined I must be some kind of courtesan.’ And I said: ‘But it must be such a lonely life. Don’t you want to see people? Do something different?’
“She said: ‘Yes. I’d like to have a different kind of liqueur with my coffee. Something I’ve never heard of. Any suggestions?’
“So I described Verveine; I thought of it because it is the identical green of her eyes. It’s made out of a million-odd mountain herbs; I’ve never found it anywhere outside France and damn few places here. Delicious; but with a kick like bad moonshine. So we had a couple of Verveines, and Kate said: ‘Yes, indeed. That certainly is different. And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be … well, not bored, but tempted: afraid, but tempted. When you’ve been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself. Everybody wanted me to go to a hospital; and I would have done anything to please Harry’s mother, but I knew I could never live again, be tempted, until I’d tried to do it unaided by anyone but myself.’
“Suddenly I said: ‘Are you a good skier?’ And she said: ‘I might have been. But Harry was always dragging me to this horrible place in Canada. Gray Rocks. Thirty below zero. He loved it because everybody was so ugly. Aces, this drink is a marvelous discovery. I feel a decided thawing in my veins.’
“Then I said: ‘How would you like to spend Christmas with me in St. Moritz?’ And she wanted to know: ‘Is that a platonic invitation?’ I crossed my heart. ‘We’ll stay at the Palace. On floors as far apart as you like.’ She laughed and said: ‘The answer is yes. But only if you’ll buy me another Verveine.’
“That was six years ago—Lord, all the blood that’s flowed under the bridge since then. But that first Christmas in St. Moritz! Really, the young Mrs. McCloud from Middleburg, Virginia, was one of the most important things that had happened in Switzerland since Hannibal crossed the Alps.
“In any event, she was a fabulous skier—as good as Doris Brynner or Eugénie Niarchos or Marella Agnelli: Kate and Eugénie and Marella became Bobbsey triplets. They used to helicopter up to the Corviglia Club every morning and have lunch and ski down in the afternoon. People loved her. The Greeks. The Persians. The Krauts. The Spaghettis. At every dinner party, the Shah invariably asked to have her at his table. And it wasn’t just men—women, even the great rival young beauties like Fiona Thyssen and Dolores Guinness, reacted warmly, I think because Kate’s attitude was so carefully correct: she never flirted, and when she went to parties she went with me and left with me. A few idiots thought it was a romance, but the cleverer ones said, and rightly so, that a swan of Kate’s feather would never bother with a backgammon bum like Aces Nelson.
“And anyway, I didn’t aspire to be her lover. But a friend; a brother, perhaps. We used to go for snowy walks in the white forests around St. Moritz. She often talked about the McClouds and how good they’d been to her and to her sisters, the homely Mooney girls. But she avoided Harry’s name, and when she did speak of him the references were casual, though bitter-tinted—until one afternoon, as we were strolling around the frozen lake beneath the palace, a passing sled horse slipped on the ice and fell and broke its front legs.
“Kate screamed. A scream you could have heard the length of the valley. She started to run, and ran straight into another sled that was rounding the corner. She wasn’t physically wounded, but she went into a hysterical coma—she was virtually unconscious until we got her to the hotel. Mr. Badrutt had a doctor waiting. The doctor gave her an injection that seemed to start her heart again, refocus her eyes. He wanted to order a nurse, but I said no, I would stay with her. So we put her to bed, and he gave her another piqûre, one that totally erased all trace of terror; and it was then I realized that swimming below the soigné surface, there had always been a fearful, drowning child.
“I lowered the lights, and she said please don’t leave me, and I said I’m not leaving, I’m going to sit here, and she said no, I want you to lie down here beside me on the bed, so I did, and we held hands and she said: ‘I’m sorry. It was because of the horse. The one that fell on the ice. I’d always wanted a palomino, and Mrs. McCloud gave me one on my birthday two years ago, a mare—such a great hunter, so brave-hearted; we had such fun together. Naturally, Harry hated her; it was all part of his crazy-man jealousy, the way he’d felt toward me since we were children. Once, the summer after we were married, he tore up a flower garden I’d planted; at first he said it was a fox, but then he admitted he had done it: he said the garden took up too much of my attention. And that was why he didn’t want me to have a baby; his mother was always bringing up the subject, and one Sunday at dinner, right in front of the whole family, he shouted at her: “Do you want a black grandchild? Or don’t you people know about Kate? She fucks niggers. She goes out in the fields and lies down and fucks niggers.” He went to law school at Washington and Lee and flunked out because he couldn’t concentrate unless he had me under surveillance; he opened and read all my letters even before I had a chance to see them; he monitored all my telephone calls: you could always hear him slightly breathing at the other end of the line. We’d long since stopped being invited to parties; we couldn’t even go to the country club—drunk or sober, Harry was ready to throw a punch, usually at some man who had asked me to dance more than once. The worst of it—he was convinced that I was having an affair with his father and with his brother, Wynn. A hundred nights he shook me and woke me up, holding a knife at my throat—and he’d say: “Don’t lie to me, you slut, you whore, you nigger-fucker. Admit it, or I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear. I’ll slice your head off. Tell the truth. Wynn’s a real stud, the best you’ve ever had, and Dad, too, he’s a great stallion.” We’d lie like that for hours, Aces—that cold knife at my throat. Mrs. McCloud, everybody, knew about it; but Mrs. McCloud would cry and beg me not to leave, she was so sure Harry would kill himself if I did. Then the thing happened about my palomino, Nanny. Even Mrs. McCloud had to open her eyes to the real extent of Harry’s insanity—this insane jealousy. Because what Harry did was, he went down to the stable and he broke all of Nanny’s legs with a crowbar. Even Mrs. McCloud saw it was useless, that Harry would kill me sooner or later; she chartered a plane and we flew out to Sun Valley, where she stayed with me the whole while it took to get an Idaho divorce. A wonderful woman; I called her Christmas Day, and she was happy I was in St. Moritz and going out and seeing people: she wanted to know if I’d met any interesting men. As if I’d ever marry again!’
“But you know,” said Aces, “she did marry. And less than a month later.”
Yes: I was remembering a mass of magazine covers at Paris kiosks: Der Stern, Paris Match, Elle. “Of course. She married …?”
“Axel Jaeger. The richest man in Germany.”
“And she has since divorced Herr Jaeger?”
“Not exactly. That’s one of the reasons I wan
ted you to meet her. She’s in considerable danger. She needs protection. She also needs a masseur who can travel with her permanently. Someone educated. Presentable.”
“I’m not educated.”
He shrugged and glanced at his watch. “May I ring her now and say we’re on our way up?”
I should have listened to Mutt; she whined, as if warning me. Instead, I let myself be led off to meet Kate McCloud. Kate, for whom I would lie, steal, commit crimes that could have, and still could, put me in prison for life.
A WEATHER CHANGE; SHOWERS—AN ENLIVENING spray dispelling Manhattan’s heat-wave stench. Not that anything could ever get rid of the jockstrap and Lysol aromas here at my beloved Y.M.C.A. I slept till noon, then called The Self Service to cancel a six P.M. booking they had made for me with some john staying at the Yale Club. But the sun-kissed bitch, the golden Butch, said: “Are you gaga? This is a C-note gig. A Benjy Franklin with no problems.” When I still demurred (“Honest, Butch, I’ve got a blue-balls headache”), he put Miss Self herself on the phone, and she gave me a real Buchenwald, Ilse Koch castigation (“Ah, so? You want to work? You don’t want? Dilettantes we don’t need!”).
Okay, okay. I showered, shaved, and arrived at the Yale Club with a button-down collar, clipped hair, discreet, not fat, not femme, aged between thirty and forty, fairly well-hung and well-mannered: just what the john had ordered.
He seemed pleased with me; and it was no hassle—a reclining labor, shuttered eyes, occasionally a spurious appreciative grunt as one fantasized toward the obligatory spasm (“Don’t hold back. Let me have it”).
The “patron,” to use Miss Self’s terminology, was hearty, balding, hard as a walnut, a man in his middle sixties, married, with five children and eighteen grandchildren. A widower, he had married his secretary, someone twenty years younger, perhaps a decade ago. He was a retired insurance executive who owned a farm near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he bred cattle, and, as a hobby, “unusual” roses. He told me all this while I was dressing. I liked him, and what I liked most was that he didn’t ask me a single question about myself. As I was leaving, he gave me his card (unique for the anonymity-aware Self Service clients) and said if I ever felt like dusting the city off my heels to ring him up: I was welcome to vacation at Appleton Farms. His name was Roger W. Appleton, and Mrs. Appleton, he informed me with a pleasant, entirely unvulgar wink, was an understanding woman: “Alice is a fine person. But restless. She reads a lot.” By which I understood that he was suggesting a threesome. We shook hands—his handshake was so muscular my knuckles were numb a solid minute—and I promised I’d think about it. Hell, it was something to consider: meandering cattle, green meadows, roses, the absence of …
All this! Snores. Soiled breathings. Asphyxiation. The lugubrious slapslap of searching feet. On my way “home,” ha ha, I bought a pint of clearance-sale gin—the kind of raw ambrosia that would gag a slew of skid-row throats. I killed half of it in two gulps, then began to nod, began to remember Denny Fouts and to wish I could dash downstairs and find a bus, the Magic Mushroom Express, a chartered torpedo that would rocket me to the end of the line, zoom me all the way to that halcyon discotheque: Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café.
Stop. You’re pissed, P. B. You’re a loser, an asshole dumb drunk loser, P. B. Jones. So good night. Good night, Walter Winchell—in whatever hell you’re baking. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea—in whatever sea you’re sinking. And a very special good night to that wise philosopher Florie Rotondo, age eight. Florie—and I mean this, honey—I hope you never reached the interior of the planet Earth, never discovered uranium, rubies, and Unspoiled Monsters. With all my heart, what there is of it, I hope you moved to the country and lived there happily ever after.
PART TWO
Kate McCloud
“I may be a black sheep, but my hooves are made of gold”
P. B. JONES,
while under the influence
DURING THE WEEK MY SAINTED employer, Miss Victoria Self, sent me out on seven “dates” within three days, even though I pleaded everything from bronchitis to gonorrhea. And now she’s trying to talk me into appearing in a porno film (“P. B. Listen, darling. It’s a class production. With a script. I can get you two hundred a day”). But I don’t want to go into all that, not just now.
Anyway, last night I felt too ripple-blooded, too restless to sleep; it was impossible, I just couldn’t lie awake here in my so-divine Y.M.C.A. cell listening to the midnight farts and nightmare moanings of my Christian brethren.
So I decided to walk over to West 42nd Street, which isn’t far from here, and search out a movie at one of those ammonia-scented all-night movie palaces. It was after one when I set out, and the route of my walk carried me along nine blocks of Eighth Avenue. Prostitutes, blacks, Puerto Ricans, a few whites, and indeed all strata of street-people society—the luxurious Latin pimps (one wearing a white mink hat and a diamond bracelet), the heroin-nodders nodding in doorways, the male hustlers, among the boldest of them gypsy boys and Puerto Ricans and runaway hillbilly rednecks no more than fourteen and fifteen years old (“Mister! Ten dollars! Take me home! Fuck me all night!”)—circled the sidewalks like buzzards above an abattoir. Then the occasional cruising cop car, its passengers uninterested, unseeing, having seen it all until their eyes are rheumy with the sight.
I passed The Loading Zone, an S & M bar at 40th and Eighth, and there was a gang of laughing, howling, leather-jacketed, leather-helmeted jackals crowded on the sidewalk surrounding a young man, costumed exactly as they were, who, unconscious, was sprawled between the curb and the sidewalk, where all his friends, colleagues, tormentors, whatever the hell you care to call them, were urinating on him, drenching him from head to heel. Nobody noticed; well, noticed, but merely enough to slow their movement slightly; they kept walking—all except a bunch of indignant prostitutes, black, white, and at least half of them transvestites, who kept shouting at the urinators (“Stop that! Oh, stop that! You fairies. You dirty fairies!”) and slapping them with their purses—until the leather-boys started hosing them down, laughing the louder, and the “girls,” in their stretch pants and surrealist wigs (blueberry, strawberry, vanilla, Afro-gold) ran in flutterbutt flight down the street shrieking, but enjoyably so: “Fags. Fairies. Dirty mean fags.”
They hesitated at the street corner to heckle a preacher, or an orator of sorts, who, like an exorcist demolishing demons, was assaulting a shifting, shiftless audience of sailors and hustlers, drug-pushers and beggars, and white-trash farm boys freshly arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal. “Yes! Yes!” screamed the preacher, the flickering lights of a hot-dog stand greening his young, taut, hungry, hysterical face. “The devil is wallowing inside you,” he screamed, his Oklahoma voice thorny as barbed wire. “The devil squats there, fat, feeding on your evil. Let the light of the Lord starve him out. Let the light of the Lord lift you to heaven—”
“Oh yeah?” yelled one of the whores. “Ain’t no Lord gonna lift nobody heavy as you. You too full of shit.”
The preacher’s mouth twisted with lunatic resentment. “Scumbags! Filth.”
A voice answered him: “Shut up. Don’t call them names.”
“What?” said the preacher, screaming again.
“I’m no better than they are. And you are no better than I am. We’re all the same person.” And suddenly I realized the voice was mine, and I thought boyoboy, Jesus, kid, you’re losing your marbles, your brains are running out of your ears.
So I hurried right into the first theatre I came to, not bothering to notice what films were on display. In the lobby I bought a chocolate bar and a bag of buttered popcorn—I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Then I found a seat in the balcony, which was an error, for it is in the balconies of these round-the-clock emporiums that the shadows of tireless sex-searchers weave and wander among the rows—wrecked whores, women in their sixties and seventies who want to blow you for a dollar (“Fifty cents?”), and men
who offer the same service for nothing, and other men, sometimes rather conservative executive types, who seem to specialize in accosting the numerous slumbering drunks.
Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I’d seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain. Sad. Sad. Enough to jerk the tears out of Caligula’s eyes. I choked on a mouthful of popcorn.
The picture ended, and was immediately replaced by Red River, a cowboy love story starring John Wayne and, once again, Montgomery Clift. It was Clift’s first important film role, the one that made him a “star”—as I had good reason to recall.
REMEMBER TURNER BOATWRIGHT, THE LATE, not too lamented magazine editor, my old mentor (and nemesis), the dear fellow who got beaten by a dope-crazed Latino until his heart stopped and his eyes popped out of his head?
One morning, while I was still in his good graces, he telephoned and invited me to dinner: “Just a little party. Six altogether. I’m giving it for Monty Clift. Have you seen his new picture—Red River?” he asked, and went on to explain that he’d known Clift a long time, ever since he was a very young actor, a protégé of the Lunts. “So,” said Boaty, “I asked him if there was any particular person he wanted me to invite and he said yes, Dorothy Parker—he’d always wanted to meet Dorothy Parker. And I thought oh my God—because Dottie’s become such a lush, you never know when her face is going to land in the soup. But I rang up Dottie and she said oh she’d be thrilled to come. She thought Monty was the most beautiful young man she’d ever seen. ‘But I can’t,’ she said, ‘because I’ve already promised to have dinner with Tallulah that evening. And you know how she is: she’d ride me on a rail if I begged off.’ So I said listen, Dottie, let me handle this: I’ll call Tallulah and invite her, too. And that’s what happened. Tallulah said she’d love to come, d-d-darling, except for one thing—she’d already invited Estelle Winwood, and could she bring Estelle?”
Answered Prayers Page 9
