In Search of Love and Beauty (17 page)

Louise tossed her head. She got up. She went over to the public phone in the lounge. Her head held high, facing Regi, she called her own number in New York, collect. A strange voice answered, there was some explaining to do, then Leo himself came on. As soon as she heard his voice, Louise turned her back on Regi.

As soon as he heard hers, he went into a flood of talk: he was so glad she had called, there was such chaos in the apartment, not to be believed—no one could find anything—and he had never, in his life—

“Leo,” she said.

—in his whole life seen such a bunch of useless people.

“Leo, I don't want you to stay in the apartment.”

“And I don't want to stay here. It's terrible, Louise, you can have no idea. No one can find the towels, they can't find the sheets, there's no orange juice, the dishwasher's not working—I can tell you, you can thank your lucky stars you're not here.”

“I want to come home, Leo.”

“Absolutely unnecessary. I appreciate it—but on no account do I want to spoil your holiday. I'll manage, don't worry. It's not the first load of shithole students I've had on my hands.” He laughed bitterly, could be heard to bark out some order, than spoke back into the receiver: “There's nothing you can do. This is my problem. I've asked for it and I'm getting it. Well, don't worry. Just relax and go on enjoying yourself. I'll pull through somehow.”

“There are more towels on the top shelf of the left-hand closet in Marietta's room.”

“Towels. Sheets. Would you believe it? That's what you
get for setting up as a goddamn guru. Who wants it. Who needs it. . . . I suppose it's just wonderful up there. Good food, good sun—you don't know how I crave it. I tell you what, Louise: if I absolutely can't stand it here, I might come up for the day on Sunday. Well, I don't promise anything, but I'll try.”

“They do a very good Sunday lunch in the hotel. Roast meat, potatoes, and some sort of English savory. Or are you still a vegetarian?”

“Good God, no. I
need
meat.”

He hung up. She turned around and went back to Regi. Regi looked at her with her shaved and penciled eyebrows raised high; one pointed crimson fingernail, hard as a bird's beak, tapped the table. But Louise couldn't say anything; her upper lip trembled more. She was afraid she would burst out laughing—the way she had done after sending the note to the red-haired officer—so she turned suddenly, abruptly, and hurried out of the lounge. And once outside, she did more than hurry: she ran—up the stairs, into Natasha's room. She flung herself on Natasha's bed, her face on her pillow. She burst out laughing into that. Natasha smiled; she stroked her grandmother's hair. “You've been speaking to Leo,” she said.

“He may be coming up for the day on Sunday.” Louise's face was now as flushed as Natasha's, so that they both looked as if they had fever.

Mark was immensely enjoying his acquisition of the Van Kuypen house. Nothing—no one—not even Kent could stop him from his weekend expeditions to watch the progress on the place. Fortunately, the part damaged by the fire had been a later addition, and now that Mark had had it stripped away, the original dimensions of the house, simple and grand, could be clearly seen. However, although willing to restore the house to its old lines outwardly, inside, Mark was willing to sacrifice period authenticity in favor of his modern needs.
He had an exact idea of what he wanted done, and how it was going to look, and moreover what sort of a life he was going to lead there with his friends.

One weekend Kent was keen to attend a party with Mark. It was in celebration of yet another newly decorated loft, this one belonging to a dancer and his friend who was a lawyer. It had been done by another friend of theirs, a decorator, and was said to be the most attractive yet in a long line of daring and attractive lofts. Everyone anyone ever knew or had heard of was going to be at the party, and Kent felt it to be important that he and Mark should be there too. But Mark needed to go to his house.

“It'd be good for me,” Kent urged. “Professionally. I'd meet people. I might get a commission to photograph the place. Listen, I thought you wanted me to get on. But all you care for is your dumb old house.”

Mark left it at that, and for the next day or two Kent was alternately sulky and seductive. He said, “You've got someone up there, that's why you keep going.”

“I go for my house.”

“That's what you say.” Kent turned away in a sulk, and he did so with a graceful swing of his hips for Mark's benefit. Mark observed and delighted in it—but he was also irritated, on two counts: he did not like to be nagged, and he did not like too many feminine seductive gestures in his friends. He was interested in boys who
were
boys—with scars on their knees and warts on their fingers from handling toads. Was Kent getting spoiled? Was he himself getting tired of Kent? These questions always came up for him in the course of his relationships, which had many ups and downs with now one person getting tired and then the other, in a seesaw of intense affections.

Meanwhile, Mark was getting used to going away by himself on the weekend. After his usual business session with Leo at the Academy, he and Natasha would drive over to the
house. Sometimes Stephanie and Jeff joined them, and while Mark was busy with the architect and the contractor, the other three lay in the grass, drowsy and drunk with the fragrant scents brought out by the sun. Natasha did her best to explain Mark's plans for restoring the house, but she must have done it badly, for all Jeff ever said, from under the battered straw hat tilted over his eyes and with a blade of grass between his teeth, was “What's he want it for?” Natasha was willing to start again, but perhaps it was hopeless; perhaps she would never get it right. It was strange—when she was here alone with Mark, she saw the house as he did: as a beautiful mansion, an immensely desirable possession, but when she was with the other two, she saw it the way they did, as just an old dump.

But they were all glad to get away from the Academy for a while. Even Stephanie, though still involved in her work there, felt she needed an occasional rest from Leo. He kept on sending for her at night and had also begun to follow her around in the day. Sometimes when she looked around, she found him loping behind her like some great bear; or he would jump out at her from behind a tree, crying “Boo!” and laugh till he choked over the shock he imagined he had given her.

All this, although a nuisance, did not undermine her faith in her work with him. She studied his doctrine and ardently followed the exercises and felt herself becoming a truly more integrated person (or, as they put it at the Academy, a more
become
person). As for Leo's odd behavior, she took it as an additional incentive to her faith. Yes, it would be very nice, wouldn't it, she said scornfully, if he were a stereotype saint with a long beard and kindly eyes and all of that; very easy to believe in him then—but to believe in lecherous Leo in his dirty monk's habit, that was something else again. When she talked like that Jeff appeared to be asleep under his straw hat; until suddenly he jumped up and ran through the grass
which sloped from the house down into the lake and he dived straight in the water with his clothes on and thrashed around there, making a lot of noise as though wishing not to hear anymore.

The fact was, Jeff was getting ready to move on. That was his life, moving on: he didn't really know anything else. This may have been because from his father's side he came from a long, long line of prospectors, moving from place to place in a hunger for wealth and adventure, and on his mother's side from migrant workers who had also moved in hunger, but only for food. Jeff had never known his mother who had run off when he was a baby; he hardly knew his father either, for like Jeff himself he had been constantly moving on. He had worked when he had to—on the railroads, in construction, in auto plants, as a short-order cook—and when he could afford to lay off and just spend, he did that. There had been no place for Jeff in this scheme, so he had been mostly in foster homes. No one family ever seemed to want to keep him for long, and as he grew older he grew wilder and got into trouble and spent some time in the reformatory. Here he found a library and read a lot and also wondered a lot, including why it was that no one wanted him. Later, when he grew up and began to move around the country, it was not like his father only in search of pleasurable survival but also of what he had read in those books or had thought for himself. He took the same sort of jobs as his father—whatever came to hand—but ranged farther and met up with people who were thoughtful like himself. He traveled with them and tried out different ways of living with them in communes and different ways of being in drugs and religions.

When Mark had finished with his people in the house, he came to join the others lying in the grass and to listen to their conversation. But often Natasha saw that he was not so much listening to as looking at Jeff; and she also saw that Jeff was aware of this and that he did not seem to find it unusual. Jeff
was a nice-looking boy, blond and sunburned with flat hips and rounded buttocks in very tight jeans. And when Mark's eyes lingered on him, Jeff could be seen to arrange himself in attractive attitudes. Natasha tried not to notice all this, but where Mark was concerned she noticed everything, whether she wanted to or not.

In this instance, Stephanie also noticed, for one night up in the attic, she said, “I think he's getting really hot for Jeff.”

Although she spoke casually, Natasha, lying in the lower bunk, became alert. She longed to ask questions but felt shy about doing so. There were so many things she didn't understand that everyone else seemed to take for granted.

Stephanie went on musing as casually as before: “Jeff wouldn't mind. He does it with men sometimes; he's still sort of free-lance. He told me about an actor he was doing it with, out on the coast. He said he did it for the money but you could see that wasn't a hundred percent true. It's fantastic the things you can see when you know what to look for.” Now she stopped speaking casually and became engrossed in giving Natasha a rundown on the techniques of lie-detecting, in oneself and in others, that Leo was teaching them. She talked till she fell asleep, which happened very suddenly.

Jeff could be seen to wander over more and more frequently to Mark's house. This may have been because he was getting tired of what went on at the Academy, and of the Academy itself. Mark's house was in the greatest possible contrast to it. Leo's house and grounds were as Gothic, convoluted, inward-looking as the psychic activities that went on inside it; whereas Mark's house was simple and classical, standing on an eminence which commanded a clear view over the surrounding countryside. It was a long drive up to the house, and though the gates were missing, the gatekeeper's cottage was still there, a sturdy little one-room stone house of the same period as the main building. One day Jeff asked Mark: “What are you going to do with it?”

“I guess I'll need a caretaker,” Mark said.

After a longish silence and probably much thinking on both sides, Jeff said, “That's right.” With that, an understanding seemed to have been reached between them, so that they didn't need to talk about it again.

Leo had once confessed to Mark that he too had at one period of his life tried to love men—as indeed he had tried, experimented with everything (one had to if one was, as he put it, “into human nature”). “It was quite fun, Mark,” he said, “but it wasn't the same thing.” He then went into the sort of rapture over the luxurious intricacies of the female body that he liked to indulge in, especially with Mark whom he knew to be bored and irritated by the subject. “No,” he concluded, “you see, Mark, once you've been into all that”—he roared for a moment at the accidental ambiguity—“you can't be satisfied with some little boy's backside. . . . By the way, I understand you're taking Jeff away from me.”

“He's going to be my caretaker.”

“So that's what you call it.” Leo never could resist that kind of joke nor laughing at it inordinately himself. But this time he sobered up more quickly than usual; he raised a warning forefinger: “Don't expect much from him, Mark, in your line. He may be willing to play a little bit here and there, but once you like girls you like girls, even when it's the thing not to.” And then he sighed in real deep human concern: “It's all just fucking around, body and mind—except that fucking is too good a word for it. No one's serious,” he lamented, very serious himself, even grave, and in despair of a generation so light-minded that it didn't even know which sex it wanted to belong to.

But Mark found Jeff to be serious—certainly about moving into the gatekeeper's cottage. While work on the main house proceeded under contract, Jeff fixed his own little place up himself. Wearing nothing but a pair of cut-off jeans, he worked from morning to night, whistling cheerfully. It turned
out he could strip and solder and plaster and carpenter and put in sanitary and electrical fittings. He didn't seem to think anything of knowing all these crafts. He couldn't even tell how he had picked them up. He had often worked on construction sites, all over the country, months at a time, doing every kind of work; but then, he had worked at many other kinds of jobs too, anything that came to hand, skilled or unskilled, he didn't care as long as he could earn enough money to live on. That was the only reason he did it.

Now he was on Mark's payroll, and while getting the cottage ready, he camped out in the big house. Dinnertime, he sat with the men working there, eating pastrami leaking out from huge rolls and drinking Pepsi or beer. At night he was alone and cooked and slept either in those lofty rooms or, on very warm nights, he stayed out on the grounds, rolled up in a sleeping bag and smeared with mosquito repellent. Natasha and Stephanie came to visit him, and on weekends Mark came too. Mark still checked into the fancy local inn, but he spent all day and slept most nights with Jeff in the unfinished house, or out on the grounds. This was very idyllic for him. He felt himself to be really taking possession of his property. He also incidentally took possession of Jeff, but this was just part of the pleasant summer nights, which were always astir and alive with passionate insects.