Boswell (24 page)

Nate lives in the Village, in the Mews. The houses in the Mews are not very large, but Nate keeps a butler and a full-time maid. (Nate is a bachelor, as will be, I suspect, all my friends. I am not the sort of person wives would normally abide. Perhaps that’s another reason Perry— who after all is a kind of housekeeper—finds me so distasteful.) I banged on Nate’s door and the butler opened it.

“Is Mr. Lace in, Simmons?”

Unlike Perry, Simmons shows no open hostility toward me. I am not sure, however, that I fully approve of his tolerance. It too, after all, is simply a tool of his trade. I like all people to meet me unprofessionally.

“He is not, sir. I don’t
know
what Mr. Lace’s arrangements are this evening. He did seem to be expecting you, though, Mr. Boswell, and instructed me to invite you to stay until his return.”

Nate doesn’t keep a cook. There’s never any food in his house; everything is brought from the restaurant. “That’s very kind, Simmons,” I said. “I’m a little tired though, after my trip. I think I’ll just go up to my hotel and lie down. Mr. Lace can reach me there.”

“Very good, sir. Should he call I shall certainly tell him that. Where shall you be this time, sir?”

“The YMCA, I think, Simmons.”

“Very good, sir,” he said.

I have always enjoyed my conversations with butlers, and Simmons is one of my favorites. “Yes,” I said philosophically, “the International Youth Hostel is filled up this trip, Simmons. There’s a convention of Children for Peace in town to picket the UN.”

“Ah,” Simmons said.

“And Travelers Aid is just a little weary of my tricks by now.”

“Ah.”

“Well, Simmons, give the master my message. I shall probably be seeing you. You’re looking very well, incidentally.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank
you,
Simmons. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

He closed the door quietly behind me and I walked happily back up the frenchy cobblestoned street to the Fifth Avenue bus.

It is interesting how I got to know Nate. It was two years ago. New York is the hardest place in the world for an outsider. I had made about half a dozen trips there and was no closer to the prizes the town has to offer (“offer” is hardly the world) than I had ever been. I could see celebrities, of course, almost at will, but I could not get close to them. What was the difference between me and the teen-age autograph hounds that stalked them on the sidewalks outside their hotels? The techniques which worked in other cities were useless in New York. The great were so often there only for short intervals. Without a formal structure, without a community where the great moved always in habitual patterns, I was helpless. (It is common knowledge, for instance, that Hemingway drinks on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons at the Floridita Bar in Havana and that Faulkner buys his tobacco at Pettigrew’s Drugs in Oxford, but how many people know that Igor Stravinski borrows books religiously on the first Monday of every month from the Los Angeles County Public Library, Branch #3, or that the Oppenheimers dress for dinner every night and that Robert himself brings in the cleaning to Princeton Same Day Cleaners on Wednesday morning?) My blue suit—which I had bought when I quit wrestling—hung unused in my closet.

When I had exhausted all the techniques I could think of (at one time I was so desperate that I palmed myself off as a singer and waited six and a half hours in a cold theater to audition twenty seconds for a part before Rodgers and Hammerstein), I had my inspiration. The problem, of course, and somehow I had lost sight of it, was not to meet any particular great man—that could always be done—but to make a reliable contact. I had always been an avid reader of all the columns. It was in this way that I was able to keep track of the hundreds of celebrities who were constantly coming in and out of New York. It wasn’t long before I became familiar with the name of Nate Lace, through the doors of whose restaurant celebrities of all sorts spilled in a redundancy of fame, like fruit from a cornucopia. With a contact like him, I thought—
With a contact like him
—And that was it. It was at once so simple and so profound that I could not concentrate on the details, or wait to put it to the test. My original intention had been to wait until evening, but I was so full of my plan that at two in the afternoon I could sit still no longer. I put on my blue suit and went down to Nate Lace’s restaurant. I had no reservation, of course (Nate’s policy is to give no strangers reservations over the telephone; somehow I had divined this), and I tried to give ten dollars to Perry, who at that time I did not know. He looked me over, laughed coldly, and handed the money back. (I thought I had done something gauche. It wasn’t until months later that I discovered I simply had not offered him enough.) “That is not
nessaire,”
Perry said. “As it happens there is a table.”

I ordered ninety dollars’ worth of Nate’s most expensive food. (Nate says that his restaurant is the most expensive in the world.) I was so nervous when it came that I had difficulty eating it. (Actually, I do not really
like
good food, though Nate would be offended to learn this.) When I had finished I called the waiter. “You needn’t bother with the bill,” I said. “I can’t pay for any of this.”

The waiter went off to consult with Perry, and I cursed myself for not waiting until the evening, when Nate would certainly have been in. My only hope now was that it was too big a case for Perry and that it would have to be called to Nate’s attention. I needn’t have concerned myself; I should have known my man better from the columns. This was the sort of thing a man like Nate would take great satisfaction in handling personally. Perry leaned across the table familiarly and said with a nice sense of menace that Nate wasn’t in the restaurant and would have to be called. Even better, I thought, by making his rage keener this works into my hands.

When Nate came in he barely nodded at Cary Grant, sitting in a booth near the window, and went directly over to Perry. He had on a heavy, fur-collared overcoat and his nose was red and dripping.

“I couldn’t get a cab and had to walk from Fifty- fifth,” I heard him tell Perry. “Where’s the mooch?”

Perry pointed to my table, where I had been allowed to sit until Nate came. He walked over.

“You the one don’t like my food?”

“It was delicious,” I said.

“I see you didn’t touch the Balinese wonder pudding,” he said, pointing to an enormous, Victorian confection with flying buttresses of a caramelly, fruit-streaked cream which lay untasted on an ornate doily on a snow- white plate on a scalloped, thick damask napkin on a rich silver salver.

“It was a little much after the smoked whale in ambergris sauce,” I said.

“Was it?”

“A
little
much,” I said. Cary Grant was looking at us.

“It stays on the bill.”

I couldn’t imagine why he made an issue of it since I couldn’t pay for any of it.

“Nate,” I said. “I’m not an actor.”

“What the hell do I care you’re not an actor?”

“I mean to say I’m not using this incident to get a part in a picture or to obtain publicity for myself.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“I know you have allowed certain of your favorite comics to run up tabs of ten thousand dollars and more.”

“You ain’t one of my favorite comics, buddy. What you’re going to run up is a tab of thirty days or more.”

“Where is your vaunted sense of humor, Nate?”

“Where’s yours?” he said. “You couldn’t order bear steak? You couldn’t order tiger filet? Ambergris sauce! Do you know what ambergris sauce costs me? It would be cheaper to pour the most expensive Paris perfume over the god-damned whale.”

“I’m sorry, Nate,” I said. “Look, must Perry hear all this?”

“Perry’s a trusted employee,” Nate said. “Beat it, Perry.”

I told Nate my story. At first he listened doubtfully, but then, as I told him of my past, of my desperate need for a contact in New York, he began to warm up. Soon he was picking at the Balinese wonder pudding with his fingers and I felt I had him. He seemed to find it very amusing. The more I talked the more he laughed. “Hey,” he said when I had finished, “you’re a character, ain’t you?” He said it as though he had discovered something deep and abiding and true about the human personality.

“I guess I am,” I said humbly.

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. A character.”

“That’s about the size of it.” I said.

“Yeah,” Nate said. “Hey, you want me to show you around the place? You want to see my kitchen?”

He took me with him through the restaurant. I even looked with him into the women’s powder room when Estelle, the attendant, said it was all clear. In the kitchen (which was not very large and none too clean) we sat at a butcher’s block drinking arctic lichen tea and laughed together over Nate’s story of his troubles with the government. It seems that Nate’s was a very popular place for important people to bring important clients. Of course they would then deduct the bill from their taxes as a business expense, and the government found itself in the peculiar position of buying three- and four-hundred-dollar dinners for people. They were going to refuse to allow it by declaring Nate’s off limits when Nate flew to Washington and made his offer. He would rebate the government 15 per cent on everything declared a deduction in his place. The government knew itself to be on very shaky legal ground and accepted at once.

“Why did you offer fifteen per cent? Why did you offer anything if they had such a bad case?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Nate said. “Suppose they took it to court. Look at all the business I’d lose from people who’d be nervous the deductions wouldn’t be allowed.”

“That’s right,” I said, pleased as I always am when I get some insight into the mysteries of business manipulation.

“Sure,” Nate said. “I would give twenty per cent.” He laughed. “The suckers.”

“The dumb suckers,” I said.

“You know, those bozos out there”—with his thumb he indicated the main dining room—“don’t know I’m helping to pick up some of their tabs?”

“The lousy bozos.”

“Those bozos are my friends,” Nate said severely.

“Long live them,” I said.
“Bon appetit
to all the millionaire bozos.”

“Yeah,” Nate said, laughing. “Yeah.” He got up and told a waiter to get Perry. “Perry,” Nate said, “bring Mr. Boswell’s bill.” When Perry came back he looked at it again and added up the figures.

I groaned to myself. Was it all a trick? I wondered desperately.

Nate looked up at me, smiled, and tore up my check. “With you, Jimmy,” he said, “we won’t even pretend there’s a tab.”

It was about two o’clock in the morning when someone pounded on my door.

“Who’s there?” I asked, startled.

“James Boswell?”

“Yes. Who is it?”

“It’s Potter, at the desk.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Potter. I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but there’s a call for you downstairs, Mr. Boswell. It’s a matter of life and death, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”

I put a pair of pants over my pajamas and followed Mr. Potter downstairs. He led me to the phone at the desk and stepped respectfully away from what he thought was my tragedy.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Nate. Sorry I missed you before.”

“Yes, Nate, what is it?”

“Jimmy, I told you it was big. Are you ready?” “Sure, Nate.”

“Okay. Can you be at my place tomorrow night about eight?”

“Yes, Nate. I think so. What is it?” “Jimmy, Harold Flesh is in town.”

October 26, 1953. New York City.

…like a doctor, perhaps a surgeon, or an engineer, or someone on a committee. The important thing is his aura of conservatism—not respectability, conservatism. He seems to move in a paneled, masculine, conspicuously bookless world, to have come from rooms with bottled ships on their mantelpieces. There would be no guns on his walls though, I think, for he is no hunter. One doesn’t know, finally, what he is, although I got the feeling, hearing him speak, that there is something—what? astrology? Rosicrucianism? the restoration of the Bourbons?—to which, privately, he is deeply committed. It is the measure of how little he is to be trusted that he never talks of this, whatever it is. Nevertheless, when he leaves a place there lingers the smell of something off-center, subversive,
wild
—what Bruchevsteen calls “the metallic aura of closed systems.”

Flesh is not frank, and one knows instinctively—this is perhaps it—that he is constantly underrating his friends, if he has them, as well as his enemies. Patently, nothing will ever come of this, for he underrates not their talents (he moves in a world of specialists, of the delegation of authority and the division of labor), but their value as persons.

I found myself wondering about him sexually. He is not homosexual—that, at least, would take some sort of passion. I suspect that if he treats with women at all, he is most comfortable with whores. The obvious comparison is to John Sallow, yet there is something wrong here. Whatever one might think of him, Sallow is manifestly a force. Harold Flesh is too clearly only a middleman, someone high and dry within a chaos not of his own creating but which he controls with a mocking impunity and which yields to him in his perverse safety fantastic, endless profit. I was reminded rather of a scion, someone far along in the generations, whose wealth and power, great perhaps as they might be, seem out of touch with that original force which first created and wielded them. The dark-suited son of a distant king, he has hobbies, one supposes, where his fathers had causes, so that finally he seems derived, mutative, some primogenitive fact not so much of nature as of some obscure, still operative law and order.

It was surprising to me to discover how much I disliked him. So rarely do we meet someone of whom we can say positively, “I hate him,” that it is startling when it happens. In addition, I find it an extremely upsetting experience. I am nervous in the presence of my own hatred and behave stupidly.

Perhaps, though, I made him as nervous as he made me, for although there was no apparent reason, he chose to deal with me on a professional basis. He tried to corrupt me. Was I interested in being his bodyguard, he wanted to know.