Answered Prayers (7 page)

Tea was brought by a maid, who settled the tray on a bed already burdened with drowsing cats and correspondence, books and magazines and various bibelots, especially a lot of antique French crystal paperweights—indeed, many of these precious objects were displayed on tables and on a fireplace mantel. I had never seen one before; noticing my interest, Colette selected a specimen and held its glitter against a lamp’s yellow light: “This one is called The White Rose. As you see, a single white rose centered in the purest crystal. It was made by the Clichy factory in 1850. All the great weights were produced between 1840 and 1900 by just three firms—Clichy, Baccarat, and St. Louis. When I first started buying them, at the flea market and other such casual places, they were not overly costly, but in the last decades, collecting them has become fashionable, a mania really, and prices are colossal. To me”—she flashed a globe containing a green lizard and another with a basket of red cherries inside it—“they are more satisfying than jewelry. Or sculpture. A silent music, these crystal universes. Now,” she said, startlingly down to business, “tell me what you expect from life. Fame and fortune aside—those we take for granted.” I said, “I don’t know what I expect. I know what I’d like. And that is to be a grown-up person.”

Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all
mischief
—envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire,
even
Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony … dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows? Of justice and eternity and
mature
matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grown-up
moments
, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death certainly sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what’s left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here”—she nudged the flowered crystal toward me—“drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.”

Once I showed this gift to Kate McCloud, and Kate, who could have worked as an appraiser at Sotheby’s, said: “She must have been barking. I mean, whyever did she give it to you? A Clichy weight of that quality is worth … oh, quite easily five thousand dollars.”

I would as soon not have known its value, not wanting to regard it as a rainy-day reserve. Though I would never sell it, especially now, when I am ass-over-backward down-and-out—because, well, I treasure it as a talisman blessed by a saint of sorts, and the occasions when one does not sacrifice a talisman are at least two: when you have nothing and when you have
everything—each is an abyss. Throughout my travels, through hungers and suicidal despairs, a year of hepatitis in a heat-warped, fly-buzzed Calcutta hospital, I have held on to The White Rose. Here at the Y.M.C.A., I have it hidden under my cot; it is tucked inside one of Kate McCloud’s old yellow woolen ski socks, which in turn is concealed inside my only luggage, an Air France travel bag (when escaping Southampton, I left pronto, and I doubt that I’ll ever again see those Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes; not that I care to, for the sight would make me strangle on my own vomit).

Just now I fetched it out, The White Rose, and in its winking facets I saw the blue-skied snowfields above St. Moritz and saw Kate McCloud, a russet wraith astride her blond Kneissl skis, streak by in speeding profile, her backward-slanting angle an attitude as elegant and precise as the cool Clichy crystal itself.

IT RAINED NIGHT BEFORE LAST;
by morning an autumnal flight of dry Canadian air had stopped the next wave, so I went for a walk, and whom should I run into but Woodrow Hamilton!—the man responsible, indirectly anyway, for this last disastrous adventure of mine. Here I am at the Central Park Zoo, empathizing with a zebra, when a disbelieving voice says: “P. B.?” and it was he, the descendant of our twenty-eighth President. “My God, P. B. You look …”

I knew how I looked inside my grey skin, my greasy seersucker suit. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Oh. I see. I wondered if you were involved in that. All I know is what I read in the paper. It must be quite a story. Look,” he said when I didn’t reply, “let’s step over to the Pierre and have a drink.”

They wouldn’t serve me at the Pierre because I wasn’t wearing a tie; we wandered over to a Third Avenue saloon, and on
the way I decided I wasn’t going to discuss Kate McCloud or anything that happened, not out of discretion, but because it was too raw: my spilled guts were still dragging the ground.

Woodrow didn’t insist; he may look like a neat nice celluloid square, but really, that’s the camouflage that protects the more undulating aspects of his nature. I had last seen him at the Trois Cloches in Cannes, and that was a year ago. He said he had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and was teaching Greek and Latin at a boys’ prep school in Manhattan. “But,” he slyly mused, “I have a part-time job. Something that might interest you: if appearances speak, I expect you could use some extra change.”

He consulted his wallet and handed me first a hundred-dollar bill: “I earned that just this afternoon, playing ring around the maypole with a Vassar graduate, class of ’09”; then a card: “And this is how I met the lady. How I meet them all. Men. Women. Crocodiles. Fuck for fun and profit. At any rate, profit.”

The card read:
THE SELF SERVICE. PROPRIETOR, MISS VICTORIA SELF
. It listed an address on West Forty-second Street and a telephone number with a circle exchange.

“So,” said Woodrow, “clean yourself up and go see Miss Self. She’ll give you a job.”

“I don’t think I could handle a job. I’m too strung out. And I’m trying to write again.”

Woodrow nibbled the onion in his Gibson. “I wouldn’t call it a
job
. Just a few hours a week. After all, what kind of service do you think The Self Service provides?”

“Stud duty, obviously. Dial-a-Dick.”

“Ah, you
were
listening—you seemed so fogbound. Stud duty, indeed. But not entirely. It’s a co-ed operation. La Self is always ready with anything anywhere anyhow anytime.

“Strange. I would never have pictured you as a stud-for-hire.”

“Nor I. But I’m a certain type: good manners, grey suit, horn-rimmed glasses. Believe me, there’s plenty of demand. And
La Self specializes in variety. She has everything on her roster from Puerto Rican thugs to rookie cops and stockbrokers.”

“Where did she find you?”

“That,” said Woodrow, “is too long a tale.” He ordered another drink; I declined, for I hadn’t tasted liquor since that final incredible gin-crazed session with Kate McCloud, and now just one drink had made me slightly deaf (alcohol first affects my hearing). “I’ll only say it was through a guy I knew at Yale. Dick Anderson. He works on Wall Street. A real straight guy, but he hasn’t done too well, or well enough to live in Greenwich and have three kids, two of them at Exeter. Last summer I spent a weekend with the Andersons—she’s a
real
good gal; Dick and I sat up drinking cold duck, that’s this mess made with champagne and sparkling burgundy; boy, it makes me churn to think of it. And Dick said: ‘Most of the times I’m disgusted.
Just disgusted
. Goddamn, what a man won’t do when he’s got two boys in Exeter!’ ” Woodrow chuckled. “Rather John Cheeverish, no? Respectable but hard-up suburbanite shagging ass to pay his country-club dues and keep his kids in a proper prep.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“Cheever is too cagey a writer to ever risk a cock-peddling stockbroker. Simply because no one would believe it. His work is always realistic, even when it’s preposterous—like
The Enormous Radio
or
The Swimmer
.”

Woodrow was irritated; prudently, I deposited his hundred dollars inside an inner pocket, where he would have had some trouble retrieving it. “If it’s true, and it is, why would anyone not believe it?”

“Because something is true doesn’t mean that it’s convincing, either in life or in art. Think of Proust. Would
Remembrance
have the ring that it does if he had made it historically literal, if he hadn’t transposed sexes, altered events and identities? If he
had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable, but”—this was a thought I’d often had—“it might have been better. Less acceptable, but better.” I decided on another drink, after all. “That’s the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”

“Maybe you ought to skip that other drink.”

“You think I’m drunk?”

“Well, you’re rambling.”

“I’m relaxed, that’s all.”

Woodrow kindly said: “So you’ve started writing again. Novel?”

“A report. An account. Yes, I’ll
call
it a novel. If I ever finish it. Of course, I never do finish anything.”

“Have you a title?” Oh, Woodrow was right there with all the garden-party queries.

“
Answered Prayers
.”

Woodrow frowned. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Not unless you were one of the three hundred schlunks who bought my first and only published work. That, too, was called
Answered Prayers
. For no particular reason. This time I have a reason.”

“
Answered Prayers
. A quote, I suppose.”

“St. Teresa. I never looked it up myself, so I don’t know exactly what she said, but it was something like ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ ”

Woodrow said: “I see a light flickering. This book—it’s about Kate McCloud,
and
gang.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s
about
them—though they’re in it.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Truth as illusion.”

“And illusion as truth?”

“The first. The second is another proposition.”

Woodrow asked how so, but the whiskey was at work and I felt too deaf to tell him; but what I
would
have said was: as truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion—but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion)—and of the two, the illusion is the truer.

AROUND FIVE THAT AFTERNOON, AS
offices were emptying, I found myself trawling along Forty-second Street, looking for the address listed on Miss Self’s card. The establishment turned out to be located above a ground-floor pornographic emporium, one of those dumps plastered with poster portraits of dangling dongs and split beavers. As I approached it, an exiting customer, someone of respectable and unimportant appearance, dropped a package, which opened, scattering across the pavement several dozen black-and-white glossies—nothing extra, the usual sixty-niners and marshmallow gals getting a three-way ride; still, a number of pedestrians paused to stare as the owner knelt to recover his property. Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn’t develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways—it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men “on the muscle,” as they say in horse-breeding circles.

A Puerto Rican pimp stood sneering at the stooped man (“What you want with that when I got nice live
puta
?”), but I felt sorry for him: he looked to me like some youngish lonely minister who had embezzled the whole of last Sunday’s collection plate to buy those jack-off snaps; so I decided to help him
pick them up—but the instant I began, he struck me across the face: a karate chop that felt as if it must have shattered a cheekbone.

“Beat it,” he snarled. I said: “Jesus, I wanted to help you.” And he said: “Beat it. Before I bust you good.” His face had flushed a red so bright it pained my eyes, and then I realized it wasn’t exclusively the color of rage but of shame as well—I thought he’d thought I meant to steal his pictures, when really what had infuriated him was the pity implicit in my proffered assistance.

THOUGH MISS SELF IS A
most successful businesswoman, she certainly doesn’t squander on display. Her offices are four flights up in an elevatorless building.
THE SELF SERVICE
: a frosted-glass door with that inscription. But I hesitated (really, did I want to do this? Well, there wasn’t anything I’d
rather
do, at least to make money). I combed my hair, creased the trousers of a just-bought fifty-dollar Robert Hall herringbone two-pants special, rang, and walked in.

The outer office was unfurnished except for a bench, a desk, and two young gentlemen, one of them a secretary-receptionist seated behind the desk and the other a beautiful mulatto wearing a
very
contemporary dark blue silk suit; neither one chose to notice me.

“… so after that,” the mulatto was saying, “I stayed a week with Spencer in San Diego. Spencer! He is oooee some
rocket
, wow. One night we were parachuting along the San Diego Freeway, and Spencer picked up this spade marine, a real country-boy piece of smoked Alabama beef, so Spencer was like going after it in the back seat, and afterward the guy says: ‘I sho can see what I git outta it. It feel good. But what I sho can’t see is what you fellas
git outta it.’ And Spencer tells him: ‘Ah, man. It’s deelicious. Jes pussy on a stick.’ ”