Answered Prayers (5 page)

OLD TEXAS SAYING: WOMEN ARE
like rattlesnakes—the last thing that dies is their tail.

Some women, all their lives, will put up with anything for a fuck; and Miss Langman, so I’m told, was an enthusiast until a stroke killed her. However, as Kate McCloud has said: “A really good lay is worth a trip around the world—in more ways than one.” And Kate McCloud, as we all know, has earned an opinion: Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, she’d look like a porcupine.

But Miss Langman, R.I.P., had completed her segment in The Story of P. B. Jones—A Paranoid Release in Association with Priapus Productions; for P. B. had already encountered the future. His name was Denham Fouts—Denny, as his friends called him, among them Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, both of whom, after his death, impaled him as a principal
character in works of their own, Vidal in his story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal” and Isherwood in a novel,
Down There on a Visit.

Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.

When Denny was sixteen, he was living in a Florida crossroads cracker town and working in a bakery owned by his father. Rescue—some might say ruin—arrived one morning in the fattish form of a millionaire driving a brand-new built-to-order 1936 Duesenberg convertible. The fellow was a cosmetics tycoon whose fortune largely depended upon a celebrated suntan lotion; he had been married twice, but his preference was Ganymedes between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. When he saw Denny, it must have been as though a collector of antique porcelain had strayed into a junkshop and discovered a Meissen “white swan” service: the shock! the greedy chill! He bought doughnuts, invited Denny for a spin in the Duesenberg, even offered him command of the wheel; and that night, without having returned home for even a change of underwear, Denny was a hundred miles away in Miami. A month later his grieving parents, who had despaired after sending searching parties through the local swamps, received a letter postmarked Paris, France. The letter became the first entry in a many-volumed scrapbook:
The Universal Travels of Our Son Denham Fouts.

Paris, Tunis, Berlin, Capri, St. Moritz, Budapest, Belgrade, Cap Ferrat, Biarritz, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Moscow, Morocco, Estoril, London, Bombay, Calcutta, London, London, Paris, Paris, Paris—and his original proprietor had been left far behind, oh, away back yonder in Capri, honey; for it was in Capri that Denny caught the eye of and absconded with a seventy-year-old great-grandfather, who was also a director of Dutch Petroleum. This gentleman lost Denny to royalty—Prince
Paul, later King Paul, of Greece. The prince was much nearer Denny’s age, and the affection between them was fairly balanced, so much so that once they visited a tattooist in Vienna and had themselves identically marked—a small blue insignia above the heart, though I can’t remember what it was or what it signified.

Nor can I recall how the affair ended, other than that The End was a quarrel caused by Denny’s sniffing cocaine in the bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne. But by now Denny, like Porfirio Rubirosa, another word-of-mouth myth on the Continental circuit, had generated the successful adventurer’s
sine qua non:
mystery and a popular desire to examine the source of it. For example, both Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton had, in effect, paid a million dollars to find out if other ladies were lying when they praised that kinky-haired piece of trade His Excellency the Dominican Ambassador Porfirio Rubirosa, groaning over the fat effectiveness of that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker thick as a man’s wrist (according to spinners who had spun them both, the ambassador’s only peer in the pecker parade was the Shah of Iran). As for the good late Prince Aly Khan—who was a straight dealer and a fine friend to Kate McCloud—as for Aly, the only thing that Feydeau-farce brigade shuffling through his bed sheets really wanted to know was: is it true this stud can go an hour a time five times a day and never come? I’m assuming you know the answer; but if you don’t, it’s yes—an Oriental trick, virtually a conjurer’s stunt, called
karezza
, and the dominant ingredient is not spermatic stamina but imagistic control: one sucks and fucks while firmly picturing a plain brown box or a trotting dog. Of course, one ought also to be always stuffed with oysters and caviar and have no occupation that would interfere with eating and snoring and concentrating on plain brown boxes.

Women experimented with Denny: the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, the American Singer Sewing Machine heiress, lugged him around the Aegean aboard her crisp little yacht, the
Sister Anne;
but the principal contributors to Denny’s Geneva bank account continued to be the richest of the double-gaited big daddies—a Chilean among
le tout Paris
, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, our planet’s chief supplier of guano, fossilized bird shit, and the Marquis de Cuevas, road-company Diaghilev. But in 1938, on a visit to London, Denny found his final and permanent patron: Peter Watson, heir of an oleomargarine tycoon, was not just another rich queen, but—in a stooped, intellectual, bitter-lipped style—one of the most personable men in England. It was his money that started and supported Cyril Connolly’s magazine
Horizon
. Watson’s circle was dismayed when their rather severe friend, who had usually shown a conventional regard for simple sailor boys, became infatuated with the notorious Denny Fouts, an “exhibitionistic playboy,” a drug addict, an American who talked as though his mouth were busy with a pound of Alabama corn mush.

But one had to have experienced Denny’s stranglehold, a pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate slumber, to appreciate its allure. Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that was all he had ever been. So, except for his sporadic barterings with maritime trade, had this Watson been The Beloved, a besieged fellow whose conduct toward his admirers contained touches beyond De Sade (once Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum).

Of course, as is true of most men sadistically streaked, Watson had paralleling masochistic impulses; but it took Denny, with his
púttána’s
instinct for an ashamed client’s unspoken needs, to divine this and act accordingly. Once the tables are turned, only a humiliator can appreciate humiliation’s sweeter edges: Watson was in love with Denny’s cruelty, for Watson was an artist recognizing the work of a superior artist, labors that left the quinine-elegant Mr. W. stretched in stark-awake comas of jealousy and delicious despair. The Beloved even used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson, while forced to supply the money that supported a habit he deplored, was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The Beloved from a heroin grave. When The Beloved truly desired a turn of the screw, he had merely to turn to his medicine chest.

Apparently it was concern for Denny’s welfare that led Watson to insist, in 1940, at the start of the German bombing, that Denny leave London and return to the United States—a journey Denny made chaperoned by Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean. The latter couple never met again—Jean Connolly, a bountiful, biological sort, passed out and on in the aftermath of a rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny-Jean cross-country high-jinks hegira.

Denny spent the war years in California, several of them as a prisoner in a camp for conscientious objectors; but it was early on in the California days that he met Christopher Isherwood, who was working in Hollywood as a film scenarist. Here, quoting from the previously mentioned Isherwood novel, which I looked up at the public library this morning, is how he describes Denny (or Paul, as he calls him): “When I first set eyes on Paul, as he entered the restaurant, I remember I noticed his strangely erect walk; he seemed almost paralytic with tension. He was always slim, but then he looked boyishly skinny, and he was dressed
like a boy in his teens, with an exaggerated air of innocence which he seemed to be daring us to challenge. His drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie, made him look as if he had just arrived in town from a strictly religious boarding school. His dressing so young didn’t strike me as ridiculous, because it went with his appearance. Yet, since I knew he was in his late twenties, this youthfulness itself had a slightly sinister effect, like something uncannily preserved.”

Seven years later, when I arrived to live at 33 rue du Bac, the address of a Left Bank apartment Peter Watson owned in Paris, the Denham Fouts I encountered there, though paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe, was not much changed from Herr Issyvoo’s California friend: he still looked vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which Fouts was permanently incarcerated.

How was it, though, that P. B. Jones found himself in Paris, a guest in the high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms?

ONE MOMENT, PLEASE: I’M GOING
downstairs to the showers. For the seventh day, Manhattan’s heat has hit ninety or higher.

Some of our establishment’s Christian satyrs shower so frequently and loiter so long they look like water-logged Kewpie dolls; but they are young and, by and large, well formed. However, the most obsessed of these hygienic sex fiends, and a relentless shuffle-shuffle hunter-haunter of the dormitory corridors as well, is an old guy nicknamed Gums. He limps, he’s blind in his left eye, a runny sore persists at the corner of his mouth, pock-marks pit his skin like some diabolic, pestilential tattoo. Just now he brushed his hand against my thigh, and I pretended
not to notice; yet the touch created an irritating sensation, as though his fingers were splints of burning nettle.

ANSWERED PRAYERS
HAD BEEN OUT
several months when I received from Paris a terse note: “Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is Cecil Beaton’s portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed is a first-class passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth, sailing New York–LeHavre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton: he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham Fouts.”

As I’ve said, I’d heard a lot about Mr. Fouts—enough to know it was not my literary style that had stimulated his daring missive but the photograph of me Beaton had taken for Boaty’s magazine and which I had used on the jacket of my book. Later, when I knew Denny, I understood what it was in that face that had so traumatized him he was ready to chance his invitation and underwrite it with a gift he could not afford
—could
not because he’d been deserted by a fed-to-the-teeth Peter Watson, was living in Watson’s Paris apartment on a day-to-day squatter’s-rights basis, and existing on scattered handouts from loyal friends and old, semi-blackmailed suitors. The photograph conveyed a notion of me altogether incorrect—a crystal lad, guileless, unsoiled, dewy, and sparkling as an April raindrop. Ho ho ho.

It never occurred to me not to go; nor did it occur to me to tell Alice Lee Langman I was going—she came home from the dentist to find I had packed and gone. I didn’t say good-bye to anybody, just left; I’m the type, and a type by no means rare, who might be your closest friend, a buddy you talked to every day, yet if one day you neglected to make contact, if
you
failed to telephone
me
, then that would be it, we’d never speak again, for
I
would never telephone
you
. I’ve known lizard-bloods like
that and never understood them, even though I was one myself, Just left, yes: sailed at midnight, my heartbeat as raucous as the clanging gongs, the hoarsely hollering smokestacks. I remember watching Manhattan’s midnight shine flicker and darken through shivering streamers of confetti—lights I was not to see again for twelve years. And I remember, as I swayed my way down to a tourist-class cabin (having exchanged the first-class passage and pocketed the difference), I remember slipping in a mass of champagne vomit and dislocating my neck. Pity I didn’t break it.

When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded
pissoir
, as tempting as a strangled nude floating in the Seine. Memories of it clear and blue, like scenes emerging between a windshield wiper’s languid erasures; and I see myself leaping puddles, for it is always winter and raining, or I see myself seated alone skimming
Time
on the deserted terrace of the Deux Magots, for it is also always a Sunday afternoon in August. I see myself waking in unheated hotel rooms, warped rooms undulating in a Pernod hangover. Across the city, across the bridges, walking down the lonesome vitrine-lined corridor that connects the two entrances of the Ritz hotel, waiting at the Ritz bar for a moneyed American face, cadging drinks there, then later at the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit and Brasserie Lipp, then sweating it out until daybreak in some whore-packed nigger-high grope joint blue with Gauloises
bleu;
and awake again in a tilted room swerving with corpse-eyed exuberance. Admittedly, my life was not that of a workaday native; but even the French can’t endure France. Or rather, they worship their country but despise their countrymen—unable, as they are, to forgive each other’s shared sins: suspicion, stinginess, envy, general meanness. When one has come to loathe a place, it is difficult to recall ever feeling differently. Yet for a wisp of time I held another view. I saw Paris
as Denny wanted me to see it, and as he wished he himself still saw it.

(Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman’s apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, the top of the Empire State Building, the Staten Island Ferry, feed her Nathan’s Coney Island hot dogs, baked beans at the Automat, all that junk. Now I remember it with a salty nostalgia; she had a great time, Daisy did, and I had a better one, for it was as though I’d climbed inside her head and were watching and tasting everything from inside that virginal observatory. “Oh,” said Daisy, spooning a dish of pistachio ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s, “this is crackerjack”; and “Oh,” said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, “oh, this really is crackerjack.”)