Boswell (42 page)

“Ooo kay,” he said. “Ooo kay.”

“Ca
pito
?” I said.

“Si, si,”
he said,
“capito.”

Margaret said now what, and I said we’re inside aren’t we, and wasn’t that enough for one day, and she said but what was the point, and I said the point was that we got away with it. Margaret didn’t reply to that

I felt a little badly about Margaret’s question. What
did
we do now? I had no follow through, no real style; it was all the flashy stuff. Sure, how many people could get inside, but then how many people would want
just
to get inside? Wouldn’t they have ulterior motives? My flaw was I had none. I had only means, no cause to put them to. I was up to here with means; I had means enough for a regiment, but I was at a loss for ends.

When in Los Farronentes with Lano I had bunked with a kid from Milwaukee named Rohnspeece. He wasn’t very bright, I’m afraid, and he must have been very poor, for he used to annoy me with the great pleasure he got from the small comforts. If there were cookies for dessert, before he ate them Rohnspeece would fondle each one as if it were some rare coin. He was also an admirer of Jello, of all flavors of ice cream, and of the dark meat. But the thing he loved most in this world was the blanket on his cot. There were two kinds of blankets; one was contraband from the Argentine army and the other was a stolen shipment of U.S. Army blankets. The U.S. Army blanket was a little thicker than the Argentine one and Rohnspeece, to his unfailing amazement, had been issued one of the former. Sometimes, on the colder nights, he would suddenly become conscience-stricken by his good fortune and would wake me up. “It’s cold again tonight,” he would say. “It isn’t fair that I should always have the U.S. Army blanket. Would you like to trade?”

“No,” I would say. “Go to sleep.”

“Look,” he would say, “I’m from Milwaukee. It gets pretty cold up there sometimes. I’m used to the cold weather. I don’t need this U.S. Army blanket.”

“Rohnspeece, roll yourself up in your god-damned U.S. Army blanket and go to sleep,” I would say.

It was only because he annoyed me so much that I didn’t take his blanket. I knew that by refusing it I was forcing him to lie awake all night with his guilt and his pathetic metaphysical speculations about why some men always seemed to get extra large portions of vanilla ice cream and U.S. Army blankets, while others were issued blankets from Argentina and had to take a banana when the ice cream ran out

Once while we were eating chicken Rohnspeece gave one of his heart-rending sighs and said something I shall never forget. “Gee,” he said, “I got the thigh again. I had it last time, too.” For him it was the capstone of his good fortune.

When Lano blew up Corbonzelos a piece of a building caught Rohnspeece in the stomach, and as he lay dying he told me that he had heard one time that if you had to get it it was best to get it in the stomach because it didn’t hurt so much when it was in the stomach, it only made you a little thirsty.

“Is it true, Rohnspeece?” I asked him.

“You know,” he said, surprised and pleased, “it is,” and he died wondering about his good fortune.

I had never realized it before, but Rohnspeece and I were a lot alike. We both had that surprising humility of expectation that arises, I think, from profound discontent. To be inside when it was raining, warm when it was cold, to be able to sleep, to move your bowels regularly, to throw peanut butter sandwiches at your hunger—this was living. I shuddered, but there is nothing one can do about one’s character except avenge it, and I am always thinking of ways.

Margaret and I walked through the busy lot, strolling past the fantastic sets laid down in a weird contiguity of geography and time, turning from a toy Roman street corner into a jungle, going from the jungle into the courtyard of a medieval palace where we could see a messenger on his knees before a king. He had run from the direction of a small sea, where miniature destroyers and cruisers and battleships pitched eight feet off shore. We crossed the border into Palestine and Margaret pointed out to me the papier-mâché temple which some humiliated Samson would pull down one afternoon.

“Here’s where the policeman thought you belonged,” Margaret said.

“Oh, belonged,” I said.

We crossed a slum where people pretended to be unhappy, a mock Riviera where they pretended to be

gay.

“It’s like a big park,” Margaret said. “I’ve never seen it this way.”

I was thinking about Rohnspeece and I didn’t answer her.

“Did you hear what I said before, Boswell?” she asked after a while.

“That you’d never seen it this way,” I said.

“No,” she said, “earlier. When you were talking to that policeman and I said I might be able to live with you.”

“Oh,” I said, “live.”

August 4, 1960. Rome.

We were married in the Palace of the Cavalieri di Malta by the Grand Master of the Order.

The Italian Premier was there and the Agnellis of Fiat and Enrico Mattei, the oil man. The Colonnas came. The Borgheses did. There were four Cardinals from the Curia, one of them the Pope’s special representative. There were film directors and the owners of ski resorts and chairmen of boards and directors of banks. There were ambassadors who had to find seats in the back. There was some royalty, and society so high it made me dizzy,

One old man who came by himself and whom I never got a chance to meet was said to have been the developer of the Bay of Naples, an artist with TNT.

Three prima donnas and four male leads from La Scala sang in the choir.

Inexplicably, though many of the others seemed to know him, Harold Flesh was there. Ah, I thought, the Mafia! The bride’s side!

Someone who said he was Cholly Knickerbocker came up to me and said, “At last we meet.”

I heard a German countess say to an English lord, “Europe needed a wedding like this.”

I had sent invitations to all the famous people I could think of, but only Penner, who was in Europe buying up youth hostels, could come. Finally I’d phoned Nate Lace in New York and asked him to get up a party. He brought a dozen of his actors and comics and recording stars, and, though they looked something like a lost troupe of USO performers, they behaved very well really, and were such a hit with the Europeans that I was proud of them. It was sad, though, to think that after thirteen or fourteen years in the business of meeting people these were all I could muster for my wedding. Where were Stravinski and Adlai Stevenson and the Vice-President? Where were Perlmutter and Gordon Rail and Rockefeller and Faulkner and Bellow and Hemingway? Where was Dr. Salk? Where was Lano? Where were the scientists and governors and university professors? Where were the Gibbenjoys? Where, for that matter, was John Sallow?

After the ceremony we strolled among the guests in the gardens of the Maltese Order.

I introduced Nate to Margaret. “Princess,” he said, and dipped his head smartly, as if all his friends had titles. And so they had, of course: Heavyweight, Batting Champion, Leading Ground Gainer.

When Margaret left us to speak with some of her friends I remained standing with Nate. “Happy, kid?” he said.

“Oh boy,” I said. “Oh boy oh boy.”

“Well, I wish you all the luck,” he said. “All of it. All the luck.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

“And Perry thought you were such a wash-out.”

“Perry’s a prick, Nate.”

“You always felt that,” he said philosophically. “She’s really a princess,” he said.

“A Medici, Nate. A Medici. She’s the whore of the world but she’s very sweet.”

Nate seemed a little shocked. “Say, have you had anything to drink?” he asked.

“A little, Nate, I’ve had a little.”

“Well, where did you get it? I didn’t want to say anything but there’s no liquor.”

“Well, it’s religious, Nate. That’s a religious thing. This is a Jesuit palace. The man who married us is the Grand Master himself. The GM. And you know what they say, Nate—what’s good for the GM is good for the Catholic Church.”

“You’re not Catholic,” Nate said. “I never knew you were Catholic.”

“Sure, I’m Catholic, Nate. I’m very flexible religiouswise.” I winked. “Would I let a little thing like God interfere with this wedding?”

“Say,” Nate said, “that’s really something. Not even Catholic and married by a high priest like that.”

“Oh, the highest, Nate. The highest.” I lowered my voice. “They call him the Black Pope. He tells the White Pope what to do.”

Nate shook his head, amazed.

“Did I ever tell you how we got engaged?” I said. “No, of course not. Well, we were sitting in the Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona. Margaret was having a little drink and I was eating the tartufo. That’s a world famous ice cream, Nate, and you know how I am.”

Nate looked puzzled.

“Come on, Nate. Toledo blades. Irish linen. Your own arctic lichen tea. Tartufo ice cream. I steer by Betelgeuse and the larger stars. Landmarks, Nate. Milestones. Beware of imitations. The best is barely good enough. Here is not anywhere. (Later, Baron, I’m talking to my friend, Nate Lace.) So there we were. I was eating the world famous tartufo ice cream in full view of the statues by Bernini the Younger, sitting with the last of the Medicis, and—well, it was very heady, Nate, very heady.”

Nate was embarrassed. He would have walked away if I had given him the chance.

“So I figured to msyelf, ‘Boswell, don’t be a fool. It could always be this way. The girl loves you.’ Oh, Nate, I had given her the business; I was at the top of my form.

Wildness. Self-destructiveness. The works, Nate, the very romantic works. I even faked a tic in my left cheek.”

“Hey, hey, hey, hey,” Nate said soothingly.

“No, no, listen to this. Social history. I had taken that girl for the ride of her life. Listen, it wasn’t easy. You think this was some bobby-soxer? This was one of the most sophisticated women in Europe. I mean, there was real unhappiness there. I mean, at first it was the other way around. I was actually convinced I loved her.”

Nate was astonished.

“Whoops,” I said. “Whoops, whoops. If you drink, don’t drive, hey, Nate? A slip of the lip can sink the ship. Well, no matter, right?
Entre nous,
no?”

I knew, of course, that I was doing irreparable damage, setting a course which it would be impossible to check later. Already it was impossible to check. No selfish man ever kids himself. No
really
selfish man ever bothers to kid others. The surprising thing was that I wasn’t even that drunk; I’d taken only intermittent sips from the flask in the pocket of my morning coat. “My missal,” I had said to the Grand Master, explaining the slight bulge. “‘The Good Book,’ as we Americans say.” It was my triumph that I was high on, the impossibly glorious conjunction of myself with grand people and great events.

Texture is a quality of the experience of the single man. It is no accident, for example, that I have never worn glasses, or that I am uncomfortable in gloves. Nor was it an accident that I could speak this way to Nate. Loneliness is sentimental. It slaps back and prolongs the handshake and weeps easily, for it always imagines— though it knows it can’t be so—that the sense of juxtaposition is universally felt. Even when I was wrestling, and used to sit in the strange hotel lobbies with the other wrestlers, men with whom I had shared a card in Kansas City or in Maine, I could hardly restrain myself from clapping them on the back and saying, “Well, old horse, we meet again, hey? Here we are in a hotel lobby in Cheyenne, Wyoming, among the ferns and spurs.” Often my companion would look bewildered. He could hardly have known what I meant. Why shouldn’t two men in the same profession, traveling in the same circuit, meet again and again? What was strange? The world, the world itself, the world was strange; recognizing another face was strange; being alive was wondrous strange. But the others had families, pictures in their wallets, letters to write. You had to go it alone for it to mean anything. To share experience with so much as one other person was immediately to halve it. To divide it among three of you was to reduce what was left to yourself by two thirds. It was mathematical. All we could ever get from others, really, was comfort. In the long run it was the deepest wisdom to be a pirate, to plot among the survivors on the beach to kill off the other survivors, and then to scheme how to dispose of whoever remained.

I had regard for Margaret, certainly. I was even fond of her. But love of another always involved at least a small betrayal of the self. It was not impossible to love; the temptation was always there, to give comfort like a small sleep, a sweet forgetting. Too often I had read in books that such and such a person was unable to love. It always came out as if something was wrong with one of his organs—as though a kidney were functioning improperly or a hand couldn’t clench into a fist. It was the cliché of our time. One heard it on buses. I was not incapable of love; no one is. I think I could love anyone. But it has never been enough. It provides only a kind of emotional illusion, as community singing, raising your voice to the bouncing ball, provides the emotional illusion of good fellowship.

“So,” I told Nate, “I asked her. And as you saw for yourself, they were married. I made a match, Nate, I made a match.”

“Well,” Nate said uncomfortably, “I wish you all the luck. She’s beautiful.”

“What am I, Nate, chopped liver?”

“All the luck.”

“Thank you, Nate.” I had no desire to make him any more uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said, “I’d better go find Margaret.”

“Sure.”

I walked away, nodding happily to all the guests— my guests, I thought,
my
guests. Margaret had dowered me handsomely. It was a different feeling, I saw, to give the party, even if I was giving only nominally.

As I passed the USO troupe I heard Nate say, “It’s an international incident.”

“What I want to know is who gave him the two bucks for the Cardinal?” one of his comics said. “Margaret,” I said. “No offense,” he said shamefacedly. “None taken,” I said.

I continued my happy walks through the gardens, nodding and smiling to everyone. I had a greeting for everybody. “Baron,” I said. “Countess.” I went through the clipped arch of an enormous hedge. “General,” I said. “Premier.” I strolled past a fountain where a group of distinguished-looking people stood somewhat protectively around an infirm old man. “King,” I said, “how are you?”