Answered Prayers (6 page)

Me, I was Daisy in Paris. I spoke no French and never would have if it hadn’t been for Denny. He forced me to learn by refusing to speak anything else. Unless we were in bed; however, let me explain that, though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual; nor was he disposed toward anyone else; he said he hadn’t had his circle squared in two years, for opium and cocaine had castrated him. We often went to Champs-Élysées movies in the afternoon, and at some juncture he always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men’s room and dosed himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crusts of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.

Perhaps, at night’s end, with approaching daylight edging the drawn bedroom curtains, Denny might lapse a bit and carom off into a curvaceous, opaque outburst. “Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it’s some after-hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by
some
name, and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a year meditating in a California monastery. Under the super-supervision of His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this … Meaningful Thing. This … God Thing.
I did try
. No man was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayer, prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off. And all that ever came of that putrid torture was … Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café. There it is: right where they throw you off at the end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump. Watch your step: don’t step on the severed head. Now knock. Knock knock. Father Flanagan’s voice: ‘Who sent ya?’ Christ, for Christ’s sake, ya dumb mick. Inside … it’s … very … relaxing. Because there’s not a winner in the crowd. All derelicts, especially those potbellied babies with fat numbered accounts at Crédit Suisse. So you can really unpin your hair, Cinderella. And admit that what we have here is the drop-off. What a relief! Just to throw in the cards, order a Coke, and take a spin around the floor with an old friend like say that
peachy
twelve-year-old Hollywood kid who pulled a Boy Scout knife and robbed me of my very beautiful oval-shaped Cartier watch. The Nigger Queen Kosher Café! The cool green, restful as the grave, rock bottom! That’s why I drug: mere dry meditation isn’t enough to get me there, keep me there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of Thousands, him and all the other yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except—the
price is too high, I’m killing myself.” Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: “I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn’t object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it
is
a risk. I’ve done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin’. I’ve always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. It would be real quiet, and you could write stories. Basically, I’m pretty healthy. I’m a good cook, too.”

Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: “Scared?” Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny’s derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a
born
bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn’t free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I’d have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn’t want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.

So I told him to take the cure. But added: “Let’s not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that’s
my
destiny.” How optimistic I was in those sheltered
days!—battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I’ve since withstood.

It was decided that Denny would travel alone to the clinic in Vevey. We said good-bye at the Gare de Lyon; he was somewhat high on something and looked, with his fresh-colored face—the face of a severe, avengeful angel—twenty years old. His rattling conversation ranged from filling stations to the fact that he had once visited Tibet. At the last Denny said, “If it goes wrong, please do this: destroy everything that’s mine. Burn all my clothes. My letters. I wouldn’t want Peter having the pleasure.”

We agreed not to communicate until Denny had left the clinic; then, presumably, we could meet for a holiday at one of the coastal villages near Naples—Positano or Ravello.

As I had no intention of doing so, or of seeing Denny again if it could be avoided, I moved out of the rue du Bac apartment and into a small room under the eaves of the Hotel Pont Royal. At the time the Pont Royal had a leathery little basement bar that was the favored swill bucket of haute Boheme’s fatbacks. Walleyed, pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, De Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned pair of ventriloquist’s dolls. I often saw Koestler there, never sober; an aggressive runt very free with his fists. And Camus—reedy, diffident in a razory way, a man with crisp brown hair, eyes liquid with life, and a troubled, perpetually listening expression: an approachable person. I knew that he was an editor at Gallimard, and one afternoon I introduced myself to him as an American writer who had published a book of short stories—would he read it, with the thought of Gallimard printing a translation? Later, Camus returned the copy I sent him, with a note saying that his English was insufficient to the task of passing judgment but that he felt I had an ability to create character and tension. “However, I find these stories too abrupt and
unrealized. But if you should have other material, please let me see it.” Afterward, whenever I encountered Camus at the Pont Royal, and once at a Gallimard garden party that I gate-crashed, he always nodded and smiled encouragement.

Another customer of this bar, whom I met there and who was friendly enough, was the Vicomtesse Marie Laure de Noailles, esteemed poet, a
saloniste
who presided over a drawing room where the ectoplasmic presences of Proust and Reynaldo Hahn were at any moment expected to materialize, the eccentric spouse of a rich sports-minded Marseillais aristocrat, and an affectionate, perhaps undiscriminating, comrade of contemporary Julien Sorels: my slot machine exactly.
Mais alors
—another young American adventurer, Ned Rorem, had emptied that jackpot. Despite her defects—rippling jowls, bee-stung lips, and middle-parted coiffure that eerily duplicated Lautrec’s portrait of Oscar Wilde—one could see what Rorem saw in Marie Laure (an elegant roof over his head, someone to promote his melodies in the stratospheres of musical France), but the reverse does not hold. Rorem was from the Midwest, a Quaker queer—which is to say, a queer Quaker—an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and self-righteous piety. He thought himself Alcibiades reborn, sun-painted, golden, and there were many who seconded his opinion, though I was not among them. For one thing, his skull was criminally contoured: flat-backed, like Dillinger’s; and his face, smooth, sweet as cake batter, was a bad blend of the weak and the willful. However, I’m probably being unfair because I envied Rorem, envied him his education, his far more assured reputation as a coming young fellow, and his superior success at playing Living Dildo to Old Hides, as we gigolos call our female checkbooks. If the subject interests you, you might try reading Ned’s own confessional
Paris Diary:
it is well written and cruel as only an outlaw Quaker bent on candor could be. I wonder what Marie Laure thought when she read that book. Of
course, she has weathered harsher pains than Ned’s sniveling revelations could inflict. Her last comrade, or the last known to me, was a hairy Bulgarian painter who killed himself by cutting his wrist and then, wielding a brush and using his severed artery as a palette, covered two walls with a boldly stroked, all-crimson abstract mural.

Indeed, I am indebted to the Pont Royal bar for many acquaintances, including the premier American expatriate, Miss Natalie Barney, an heiress of independent mind and morals who had been domiciled in Paris more than sixty years.

For all those decades Miss Barney had lived in the same apartment, a suite of surprising rooms off a courtyard in the rue de l’Université. Stained-glass windows and stained-glass skylights—a tribute to Art Nouveau that would have sent good old Boaty into mad-dog delirium: Lalique lamps sculpted as bouquets of milky roses, medieval tables massed with photographs of friends framed in gold and tortoiseshell: Apollinaire, Proust, Gide, Picasso, Cocteau, Radiguet, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Stein and Toklas, Stravinsky, the queens of Spain and Belgium, Nadia Boulanger, Garbo in a snuggly pose with her old buddy Mercedes D’Acosta, and Djuna Barnes, the last a luscious pimiento-lipped redhead difficult to recognize as the surly author of
Nightwood
(and latter-day hermit-heroine of Patchin Place). Whatever her calendar age, which must have been eighty and more, Miss Barney, usually attired in virile grey flannel, looked a permanent, pearl-colored fifty. She enjoyed motoring and drove herself about in a canvas-topped emerald Bugatti—around the Bois or out to Versailles on pleasant afternoons. Occasionally, I was asked along, for Miss Barney enjoyed lecturing, and she felt I had much to learn.

Once there was another guest, Miss Stein’s widow. The widow wanted to visit an Italian grocery where, she said, it was possible to buy a unique white truffle that came from the hills
around Turin. The store was in a distant neighborhood. As our car drove through it, the widow suddenly said: “But aren’t we near Romaine’s studio?” Miss Barney, while directing at me a disquietingly speculative glance, replied: “Shall we stop there? I have a key.”

The widow, a mustachioed spider feeling its feelers, rubbed together her black-gloved hands and said: “Why, it has to be thirty years!”

After climbing six flights of stone stairs inside a dour building saturated with cat urine, that Persian cologne (and Roman, too), we arrived at Romaine’s studio—whoever Romaine might be; neither of my companions explained their friend, but I sensed she had joined the majority and that the studio was being maintained by Miss Barney as a sort of unkempt shrine-museum. A wet afternoon light, oozing through grime-grey skylights, mingled with an immense room’s objects: shrouded chairs, a piano with a Spanish shawl, Spanish candelabra with partially burnt candles. Nothing occurred when Miss Barney flicked a light switch.

“Dog take it,” she said, suddenly very prairie-American, and lighted up a candelabrum, carrying it with her as she led us around the room to view Romaine Brooks’ paintings. There were perhaps seventy of them, all portraits of a flat and ultra realism; the subjects were women, and all of them were dressed identically, each fully outfitted in white tie and tails. You know how you know when you’re not going to forget something? I wasn’t going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes, all of whom, to judge from their coifs and cosmetics, were painted between 1917 and 1930.

“Violet,” the widow stated as she examined the portrait of a lean bobbed blond with a monocle magnifying an ice-pick eye. “Gertrude liked her. But she seemed to me a cruel girl. I remember she had an owl. She kept it in a cage so small it couldn’t
move. Simply sat there. With its feathers bursting through the wire. Is Violet still alive?”

Miss Barney nodded. “She has a house in Fiesole. Looks fit as a fiddle. I’m told she’s been having the Niehans treatment.”

At last we came to a figure I recognized as the widow’s lamented mate—depicted here with a Cognac snifter in her left hand and a cheroot in the other, not at all the brown mother-earth monolith Picasso palmed off, but more a Diamond Jim Brady personage, a big-bellied show-off, which one suspects is nearer the truth. “Romaine,” said the widow, smoothing her fragile mustache, “Romaine had a certain technique. But she is
not
an artist.”

Miss Barney begged to differ. “Romaine,” she announced in tones chilled as Alpine slopes, “is a bit limited.
But
. Romaine is a very great artist!”

It was Miss Barney who arranged for me to visit Colette, whom I wanted to meet, not for my usual opportunistic reasons, but because Boaty had introduced me to her work (kindly keep in mind that, intellectually, I am a hitchhiker who gathers his education along highways and under bridges), and I respected her:
My Mother’s House
is masterly, incomparable in the artistry of its play upon sensual specifics—taste, scent, touch, sight.

Also, I was curious about this woman; I felt anyone who had lived as broadly as she had, who was as intelligent as she was, must have a few answers. So I was grateful when Miss Barney made it possible for me to have tea with Colette at her apartment in the Palais Royal. “But,” warned Miss Barney, speaking on the telephone, “don’t tire her by overstaying; she’s been ill all winter.”

It’s true that Colette received me in her bedroom—seated in a golden bed à la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee; but otherwise she seemed as indisposed as a painted Watusi leading a tribal dance. Her
maquillage
was equal to that chore: slanted
eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The room smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said: “Jicky. The Empress Eugénie always wore it. I like it because it’s an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it’s witty without being coarse—like the better conversationalists. Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not
too
reliable”), of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains.