Answered Prayers (10 page)

Slit-slavering bitch! Boy (I thought), would she be sorry! And even when I arrived in Paris and found at the American Express a letter from the publisher rejecting the book (“Regrettably, we feel we would be doing you a disservice to sponsor your debut as a novelist with so contrived a work as
Sleepless Millions
…”) and asking what I wished them to do with the manuscript, even then my faith never faltered: I just supposed that, owing to my having abandoned Miss Langman, her friends were now making me the victim of a literary lynching.

I had fourteen thousand dollars left from my various swindles and savings, and I did not want to return stateside. But there seemed no alternative, not if I wanted to see
Sleepless Millions
published: it would be impossible to market the book from such a distance and without an agent. An honest and competent agent is more difficult to secure than a reputable publisher. Margo Diamond was among the best; she was as chummy with the staffs of snobrags, like
The New York Review of Books
, as she was with the editors of
Playboy
. Maybe she did think I was untalented, but really it was jealousy—because what that fish-hound had always wanted to do was T the V with La Langman herself. However, the prospect of going back to New York made my stomach lurch and dip with roller-coaster aggressiveness. It seemed to me I could never reenter that city, where I now had no friends and many enemies, unless preceded by marching bands and all the confetti of success. To return droop-tailed and toting an unsold novel required someone with either lesser or greater character than I had.

Among the planet’s most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long, are those Americans who elect, out of vanity, or for supposedly aesthetic reasons, or because of sexual or financial
problems, to make a career of expatriation. The fact of surviving abroad year upon year, of trailing spring from Taroudant in January to Taormina to Athens to Paris in June, is, of itself, the justification for superior postures and a sense of exceptional achievement. Indeed, it
is
an achievement if you have little money or, like most of the American remittance men, “just enough to live on.” If you’re young enough, it’s okay for a couple of years—but those who pursue it after age twenty-five, thirty at the limit, learn that what seemed paradise is mere scenery, a curtain that, lifting, reveals pitchforks and fire.

Yet gradually I was absorbed into this squalid caravan, though it was some while before I recognized what had happened. As summer started and I decided not to return but to try to market my book by mailing it around to different publishers, my head-splitting days began with several Pernods on the terrace of the Deux Magots; after that, I stepped across the boulevard into Brasserie Lipp for choucroute and beer, lots of beer, followed by a siesta in my nice little river-view room in the Hotel Quai Voltaire. The real drinking began around six, when I took a taxi to the Ritz, where I spent the early evening hours cadging martinis at the bar; if I didn’t make a connection there, solicit an invitation to dinner from some closet queen or occasionally from two ladies traveling together or perhaps from a naïve American couple, then usually I didn’t eat. My guess would be that, in a nutritional sense, I consumed less than five hundred calories a day. But booze, particularly the sickening balloons of Calvados I emptied every night in writhing Senegalese cabarets and bent-type bars, like Le Fiacre and Mon Jardin and Madame Arthur’s and Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, kept me looking, for all my disintegrating interior, well-filled and sturdy. But despite the waterfall hangovers and constant cascading nausea, I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time, the kind of educational experience necessary to an
artist—and it is true that a number of those persons whom I encountered in my carousings cut through the Calvados mists to leave scrawled across my mind permanent signatures.

WHICH BRINGS US TO KATE
McCloud. Kate! McCloud! My love, my anguish, my Götterdämmerung, my very own
Death in Venice:
inevitable, perilous as the asp at Cleopatra’s breast.

It was late winter in Paris; I had returned there after spending several unsober months in Tangier, most of them as a habitué of Jay Hazlewood’s Le Parade, a swanky little joint operated by a kind and gangling Georgia guy who had made a moderate fortune from dispensing proper martinis and jumbo hamburgers to homesick Americans; he also, for the favored of his foreign clientele, served up the asses of Arab lads and lassies—without charge of course, just a courtesy of the house.

One night at the bar at Parade, I met someone who was to influence future events immensely. He had slicked-down blond hair parted in the middle, like a hair-tonic ad published in the twenties; he was trim and freckled and fresh-colored; he had a good smile and healthy teeth, if a few too many of them. He had a pocketful of kitchen matches that he kept lighting with his thumbnail. He was about forty, an American, but with one of those off-center accents that happen to people who are used to speaking a number of languages: it’s not an affectation but rather more like an indefinable speech defect. He bought me a couple of drinks, we rolled some dice; later I asked Jay Hazlewood about him.

“Nobody,” said Jay in his deceptive red-clay drawl. “His name is Aces Nelson.”

“But what does he do?”

Jay said, and said it
so
solemnly: “He’s a friend of the rich.”

“And that’s all?”

“All? Shit!” said Jay Hazlewood. “Being a friend of the rich, making a living out of it, one day of that is harder than a month’s worth of twenty niggers working on a chain gang.”

“But
how
does he make a living out of it?”

Hazlewood widened one eye, squinted the other—a Dixie horse trader—but I wasn’t joshing him: I really didn’t understand.

“Look,” he said, “there are a lot of pilot fish like Aces Nelson. There’s nothing special about him. Except that he’s a little cuter than most of them. Aces is okay. Comparatively. He hits Tangier two, three times a year, always on someone’s yacht; he spends every summer moving from one yacht to another—the
Gaviota
, the
Siesta
, the
Christina
, the
Sister Anne
, the
Creole
, you name it. The rest of the year he’s up in the Alps—St. Moritz or Gstaad. Or the West Indies. Antigua. Lyford Cay. With stopovers in Paris, New York, Beverly Hills, Grosse Pointe. But wherever he is, he’s always doing the same thing. He’s sweating for his supper. By playing games—from lunch till lights-out. Bridge. Gin. Cutthroat. Old Maid, Backgammon. Beaming. Flashing his capped teeth. Keeping the Geritols happy in their oceangoing salons. That’s how he makes his walking-around money. The rest of it comes from pumping broads of various ages and hungers—rich quim with husbands that don’t give a damn who does them as long as they don’t have to.”

Jay Hazlewood never smoked: a true son of the Georgia hills, he chewed plug tobacco. Now he spouted a brown stream into his special private spittoon. “Hard work? I
know
. I’ve damn near fucked cobras. That’s how I got the pesetas to open this bar. But I was doing it for myself. To make something of
me
. Aces, he’s lost in the life. Right now he’s here with Bab’s bunch.”

Tangier is a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a mountainside facing the Bay of Gibraltar. One descends from the top of the mountain, through a middle-class suburb sprinkled
with ugly Mediterranean villas, to the “modern” town, a broiling miasma of overly wide boulevards, cement-colored high-rises, to the sleaky maze of the sea-coasted Casbah. Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the essential risks have been removed.

At that time, the five reigning queens of the Casbah were two Englishmen and three American women. Eugenia Bankhead was among the females—a woman as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor. And Jane Bowles, that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf. Author of a sinisterly marvelous novel,
Two Serious Ladies
, and of a single play,
In the Summer House
, of which the same description could be given, the late Mrs. Bowles lived in an infinitesimal Casbah house, a dwelling so small-scaled and low-ceilinged that one had almost to crawl from room to room; she lived there with her Moorish lover, the famous Cherifa, a rough old peasant woman who was the empress of herbs and rare spices at the largest of Tangier’s open-air bazaars—an abrasive personality only a genius as witty and dedicated to extreme oddity as Mrs. Bowles could have abided. (“But,” said Jane with a cherubic laugh, “I do love Cherifa. Cherifa doesn’t love me. How could she? A writer? A crippled Jewish girl from Ohio? All she thinks about is money. My money. What little there is. And the house. And how to get the house. She tries very seriously to poison me at least every six months. And don’t imagine I’m being paranoid. It’s quite true.”)

Mrs. Bowles’ dollhouse was the reverse of the walled palace that belonged to the neighborhood’s third genetically authentic
queen, dime-store maharani Barbara Hutton—the Ma Barker of Bab’s bunch, to quote Jay Hazlewood. Miss Hutton, with an entourage of temporary husbands, momentary lovers and others of unspecified (if any) occupation, usually reigned in her Moroccan mansion a month or so each year. Fragile, terrified, she rarely voyaged beyond its walls; exceedingly few locals were invited inside them. A wandering waif—Madrid today, Mexico tomorrow—Miss Hutton never traveled; she merely crossed frontiers, carting forty trunks and her insular
ambiente
with her.

“
HEY THERE
!
HOW’D YOU LIKE
to go to a party?” Aces Nelson; he was calling to me from a café terrace in the Petit Socco, a Casbah piazza and great hubble-bubbling alfresco salon from noon to noon; it was past midnight now.

“Look,” said Aces, who wasn’t high on anything but his own high spirits; in fact, he was drinking
the Arabé
. “I have a present for you.” And he juggled in his hands a wiggling plump-stomached bitch puppy, an Afro-haired pickaninny with white rings circling both her big scared eyes—like a panda, some sort of ghetto panda. Aces said: “I bought her five minutes ago from a Spanish sailor. He was just walking past with this funny thing stuffed in the pocket of his pea jacket. Head flopping out. And I saw these lovely eyes. And these lovely ears—see, one drooping, the other perked up. I inquired, and he said his sister had sent him to sell it to Mr. Wu, the Chinaman who eats roasted dogs. So I offered a hundred pesetas; and here we are.” Aces thrust the little dog at me, like a Calcutta beggar woman proffering an afflicted infant. “I didn’t realize why I bought her until I saw you. Sauntering into the Socco. Mr.… Jones? Have I got that right? Here, Mr. Jones, take her. You need each other.”

Dogs, cats, kids, I had never had anything dependent upon
me; it was too time-consuming a chore just changing my own diapers. So I said: “Forget it. Give her to the Chinaman.”

Aces leveled at me a gambler’s gaze. He set the puppy on the center of the café table, where she stood a moment, trembling traumatically, then squatted to pee. Aces! You son of a bitch.
The nuns. The bluffs above St. Louis
. I picked her up and wrapped her in a Lanvin scarf Denny Fouts had given me long ago and held her close. She stopped trembling. She sniffed, sighed, slumbered.

Aces said: “And what are you going to name her?”

“Mutt.”

“Oh? Since I brought you together, the least you might do is call her Aces.”

“Mutt. Like her. Like you. Like me. Mutt.”

He laughed. “
Alors
. But I promised you a party, Jones. Mrs. Cary Grant is minding the store tonight. It’ll be a bore. But still.”

Aces, at least behind her back, always referred to the Huttontot (a Winchell coinage) as Mrs. Cary Grant: “Out of respect, really. He was the only one of her husbands worthy of the name. He adored her; but she had to leave him: she can’t trust or understand any geezer if he isn’t after le loot.”

A SEVEN-FOOT SENEGALESE IN A
crimson turban and a white jellaba opened iron gates; one entered a garden where Judas trees blossomed in lantern light and the mesmeric scent of tuberoses embroidered the air. We passed into a room palely alive with light filtered through ivory filigree screens. Brocaded banquettes, piled with brocaded pillows of a silken lemon and silver and scarlet luxury, lined the walls. And there were beautiful brass tables shiny with candles and sweating champagne buckets; the floors, thick with overlapping layers of rugs from
the weavers of Fez and Marrakech, were like strange lakes of ancient, intricate color.

The guests were few and all subdued, as though waiting for the hostess to retire before tossing themselves into an exuberant freedom—the repression attendant upon courtiers waiting for the royals to recede.

The hostess, wearing a green sari and a chain of dark emeralds, reclined among the cushions. Her eyes had the vacancy often observed in persons long imprisoned and, like her emeralds, a mineralized remoteness. Her eyesight, what she chose to see, was eerily selective: she saw me, but she never noticed the dog I was carrying.

“Oh, Aces dear,” she said in a wan small voice. “What
have
you found now?”

“This is Mr. Jones. P. B. Jones, I believe.”

“And you are a poet, Mr. Jones. Because I am a poet. And I can always tell.”

And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty—a prettiness marred by her seeming to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain. I remembered reading in some Sunday supplement that as a young woman she had been plump, a wallflower butterball, and that, at the suggestion of a diet faddist, she had swallowed a tapeworm or two; and now one wondered, because of the starved starkness, her feathery flimsiness, if those worms were not still gross tenants who accounted for half her present weight. Obviously she had somewhat read my mind: “Isn’t it silly. I’m so thin, I’m too weak to walk. I have to be carried everywhere. Truly, I’d like to read your poetry.”