The Apprentice Lover (6 page)

In retrospect, I suppose this yearning for mentors had something to do with my own father's remoteness, although this sort of speculation didn't interest me at the time. All I knew was that Rupert Grant immediately inspired in me feelings of longing. He represented a world I desperately wanted to possess myself. I wanted his counsel and help, his guidance. Mostly, I wanted his approval.

“Try the water, lad. It's tolerable,” he said. “But be careful. There's an undertow. People don't realize…”

“I'm a pretty good swimmer,” I said.

“Even so,” Grant said, with an ominous glance at the sea. “I'll say no more.” He shook water from his left ear, hitting himself on the other ear with the heel of his palm. “When you've had enough, come to my study. We'll have a cup of tea.”

I could see that teatime came often at the Villa Clio, and that I would have to acquire a taste for the ritual as much as the substance itself. As I discovered, the British do not so much travel as transport their ways to better climates.

I stepped blithely into the water, and could see at once what Grant meant by an undertow. A weaker swimmer might easily be tugged under. I lost my footing at one point, stumbling, having to fight the current as I began to swim. I cut through the worst of it with strong overhand strokes as invisible paws tugged at me, trying to drag me down. When a wave caught me off-guard, crosswise, I swallowed a mouthful of salty water, and began to retch. For a moment, I thought I might actually drown. Only by intense focus was I able to churn forward, ignoring my discomfort, my fear, and a sense of disorientation. Only when I got about half a mile from shore, where the currents were deep, did I feel at ease again, treading water, with my back to the horizon.

The island was impressive from that vantage: pink-amber in the late afternoon light, the Faraglioni—rocks like raised, geologic fists—sheer on my right, and the presiding peak of Mount Solaro high above on the left, wreathed in cloud. The hillside was dotted with white villas and expensive hotels, all neatly buried in the carefully tended landscape. Expensive yachts flying international flags—Monaco, France, Liechtenstein, Belgium—moored in the bay of the Piccola Marina, while half a dozen fishing boats stalled in my peripheral vision.

I could just see the tiny figure of Rupert Grant, arms akimbo, on the beach. His abrupt, determined, elusive manner had taken me by surprise, and I foresaw that life at the Villa Clio would not be simple or straightforward. If I had thought it would be, this was merely a function of my own foolishness or wishful thinking. One inevitably tries to look ahead, imagining in detail the physical and emotional landscape that lies in wait, but these attempts are vain. Life at the Villa Clio was beyond
anything I might have constructed in my head. The actual Vera Grant, I feared, was more aggressive and complicated than my hypothetical Vera, whom I knew only from a photograph on the jacket of a brightly illustrated cookbook I had seen at Rizzoli, in New York, before leaving. Rupert was less penetrable than I imagined, from his essays, he might be; there was something northern and inaccessible there, a granite quality, a self-protectiveness. But I cautioned myself to draw no conclusions. “Expect nothing, and you will always be pleasantly surprised,” my grandfather often said, translating an old Neapolitan saying. It seemed, under these circumstances, like excellent advice.

I
lay awake that night, thinking about a letter from Nicky, written within a week of his arrival in Saigon.

M
aria Pia pointed in the direction of Grant's study. “He is expecting you,” she said, in the local
dialetto
. Given her tone and expression, she might well have said, “He will cut off your prick if you disturb him, but be my guest.”

I knocked softly.

“Indeed,” he shouted.

Indeed?
I leaned close to the door, then knocked again.

“Lorenzo, I'm waiting.”

He was slumped in a leather chair, wearing his wire-rimmed reading glasses.
La Stampa
was open on his lap, and a glass of neat whiskey lay half drunk on the table beside him. His white, voluminous hair stood up like a coxcomb, complemented by frothy eyebrows that seemed to move independently of each other. “So you like to swim,” he said. “I didn't wait for you to come ashore.”

I felt guilty. “Were you expecting me sooner?”

“Yes,” he said, “but no matter. I will get Maria Pia to bring us tea, unless you'd rather whiskey?”

“Tea is fine.”

“Good. Sit down.”

While he was gone, I scanned the room. The wooden desk was a trestle table that faced out from the wall, smothered in scraps of paper. A fountain pen lay beside a pot of India ink, and I remembered that the two letters he'd sent me were elegantly scripted, not sloppily typed or
scratched in ballpoint. A dagger—unsheathed—glimmered beside the inkpot; it had a carved ivory handle. On the opposite wall were marks in a wooden board, the signs of target practice.

There was a colorful map of the ancient world beside the board, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the other walls that supported an extremely old set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
; below it, the New York edition of Henry James vied for attention with a handsome set of Balzac in purple cloth bindings. Odd volumes of the Temple Shakespeare scattered among other books. One shelf was devoted to Italian novelists and poets, most of them fairly recent: Eugenio Montale, Ignazio Silone, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi. Moravia was there in abundance. Gore Vidal's
Julian
nestled beside
I, Claudius
. There was a nice run of Graham Greene in what looked like first editions. (As I soon learned, most of them were signed by Greene, who had spent a part of each year in Anacapri since 1948.)
Brideshead Revisited
was there, too, with a faded spine.

“What ho,” Grant said, entering with a tray in his hands. It would take some time for me to get used to this affection for Edwardian phrases, like odd snatches from P. G. Wodehouse. “We can get down to it,” he said, taking his seat. “Can you take dictation?”

“Not in shorthand,” I said.

“No matter. I'll dictate slowly. You can write slowly.”

I nodded.

“Of course, you'll type my letters and manuscripts.” He looked at me nervously. “You do type?”

“Yes.”

“Americans are good typists,” he said, “but that's where it ends. Nothing of real interest in your literature.” He poured my tea through a strainer. “I take that back. Nothing of interest since Henry James. Do you like James?”

“I've only read
The Turn of the Screw.”

He sighed. “We have our work cut out for us, don't we?” After handing me the cup, he found a paperback of
The Europeans
, which he put on the tea tray. “Read this first, it's early James. Easy to follow. We'll move slowly. Eventually, you'll be ready for the good stuff.
The Wings of the Dove
is best, I suspect.”

“Why not start there?”

“You would crumble. It takes time to get used to his methods, the periphrasis…Trust me, Alex. I've been through this before with Americans. They're brought up on Hemingway. Very destructive influence, Hemingway. Baby talk.”

Patriotic reflexes I had not known about sent an unfamiliar tingle through my body. “You don't like Hemingway?”

“He was a silly man, a minor figure. There is one decent book of stories, the first, I think—some lovely things there. Nick Adams and so on. After that, it's mostly bluster.” He settled back into his chair, balancing the tea on his lap. “Faulkner is better, I suppose, but he's an acquired taste. I've never acquired it.”

“I like Fitzgerald,” I said. I actually loved Fitzgerald, but didn't want to overstate the case. Whole paragraphs from
The Great Gatsby
lingered in my head like poems.

“Pretty writing,” he said, dismissively. “Americans like pretty writing. Joseph Hergesheimer, James Branch Cabell, Fitzgerald.”

I didn't dare ask who were Hergesheimer and Cabell, but I got the point. “What about our poets?”

“
Our
poets?”

I ignored his baiting. “Eliot, for example? Or Frost?”

A bemused look crossed his face.

“Whitman? Or Emily Dickinson?”

“Eliot, yes. I used to see him in London—a remarkable ear:
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged.
That's it. Excellent critic, too. Who could resist
The Sacred Wood
? Frost was a decent poet, but I can only take him in small doses. And the shorter the poem, the better. Whitman I admire, in bits and pieces, and Dickinson, yes. Monotonous, perhaps, but memorably so.”

“
The Sacred Wood?”

“Eliot's essays—the early ones! Good God, man.” Disgusted, he plucked a copy of that slim volume from a shelf behind his desk and piled it on top of
The Europeans
. “Read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.' It puts paid to most criticism written since. You can ignore the book reviews. He tends to fuss a bit.”

“What about Auden?” I said.

“He's English, no matter what he claims.”

“You and he were friends at Oxford?”

“We were contemporaries. But I was at Magdalen, so we met only in passing. We got to know each other later.” He slumped in his chair. “Everyone knew that he was the important poet, even before he published anything. Stephen printed his first poems on a small press. I still have my copy.”

“Stephen?”

“Spender,” he said, exasperated. “Stephen is not a poet, but he looks the part. Rather dreamy, Stephen. They pay him huge sums in America to play the great bard. Someone has to do it, I suppose.”

I told him I admired Auden, and he told me “Wystan” and his companion, Chester, had once owned a house on Ischia, a neighboring island. “He might turn up this summer. There is such a rumor afloat.”

“I'd like to meet him,” I said.

Of course Grant knew many of the people he mentioned, but I felt a mingling of awe and suspicion whenever he dropped luminous names, as he often did. How had he managed to befriend so many poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, journalists, film directors, and actors? Was Britain such a small world that, as he once claimed, after a while you knew everyone?

Now Grant told me about a novel he planned to write in the coming year. It would be set on Capri, mostly in the present, with excursions into various centuries. “The island is full of wonderful stories and characters,” he said. When I told him that I hoped to learn more about Tiberius, he lit up. “I've been asked to translate
Lives of the Twelve Caesars
. You read Latin, what? At Harvard?”

“Columbia. Yes, but my Latin is not wonderful.”

“No matter. Suetonius is straightforward.” He popped up again, finding a copy of Suetonius, which he put in my lap. “Translate the chapter on Tiberius. I've got a good Latin dictionary if you need one. Will do you some good, and help me. I'll correct your prose.”

I was mildly put off by this expression. How would he “correct” my prose? But I said nothing, and would try, for a while, to keep with the program as laid out by him.

“Suetonius is unreliable, as history, but he's fun,” Grant said. “Smutty in places, though he stops short of pornography. Knew how to keep a reader's attention.” He finished the whiskey in a gulp and wiped his lips with the back of his rough hand. “The emperor trained small boys—
pisciculi
is the word he used, I believe—to frolic between his thighs when he went swimming. They would nibble at his cock. Eventually, he commandeered infants from local families—liked their sucking reflex. Rather disgusting, don't you think?”

“Yes,” I said, unambiguously. He did not, I feared, consider the emperor's behavior disgusting enough.

“Had a painting in his bedroom, old Tibby—Atalanta sucking off Meleager. Very sexy. Loved it, apparently.” He lapsed briefly into silence, staring blankly ahead—a habit of conversation that would become familiar but never comfortable. “It was pathetic, I suppose. Came to a bad end, Tibby—at least in the version of him put forward by Suetonius. Died cranky, unfulfilled, and much loathed. One dislikes lust in old men, don't you think?”

“I've never thought about it.”

“You will,” he said. “Have you read St. Augustine's
Confessions
?”

For once, I had. It had been required reading in a course I'd taken during my freshman year.

“Good boy. Think of Tiberius as Augustine without the conversion. Burning in lust. Horrid spectacle.” Grant went around to his desk, taking some pages from a brown folder. “Here's your first official task, a little job of typing. Something I did for an American travel magazine,” he said. “I do prose for money. It's like breeding dogs so that I can afford to keep a few cockatoos.” He contemplated this simile for a moment. “Poetry has no market value. That's why I prefer it.” He handed me the pile. “See what you can make of this. Double spaced, please. Wide margins.”

I took the pages from him, seeing they would pose a challenge. Sentences were crossed out, rewritten above, then crossed out again, with arrows and balloons in every available margin. “When will you need this?”

“Two, three days. No hurry. We don't hurry around here.”

Without knocking, an olive-skinned girl of about twenty in tight,
faded jeans and a pink T-shirt walked in. She wore leather sandles that showed off her bright red toenails. That she was aware of her unusual beauty was evident from the way she swept her brown hair, casually, from her forehead. But there was also something dark and sulky about her, as though she had swallowed a purple thunderhead. She curled into his lap, draping an arm around his shoulders.

“Mind the tea,” Grant said.

She kissed his eyebrows, lightly. I didn't know quite where to put my eyes. I had seen plenty of adolescent displays like this at Columbia, but usually after long, beery parties in darkened dormitory lounges.

“This is Marisa,” he said. “Surname, Lauro: Marisa Lauro. A poem in its own right.”

I nodded slightly in her direction.

“Marisa does research for me,” Grant said. “Very bright girl, this. She's digging up stories for me about Capri, aren't you, dear?”

I waited for Marisa to speak, but she didn't. Her makeup was thick—the lipstick redder than red, and her eyes like water at the bottom of deep wells of eye shadow. She wore large gold earrings, and the smell of cologne permeated the room. Her jeans were way too tight.

Grant folded his hands around her narrow waist, and her head slumped onto his shoulder. She seemed in need of comfort, and I felt like an intruder. I stood to leave.

“You needn't disappear, Lorenzo. We won't fuck in front of you. Promise.”

I hoped that my face registered nothing. “I've made arrangements to meet a friend in the piazzetta,” I said.

“What? Already got a friend in the piazzetta?”

“I met him on the ferry. A student at the Sorbonne.”

“Is he French?”

“Yes.”

“Marvelous. Invite him to my party—tomorrow, at six, on the beach.”

“Really?”

“Why not? Is he beautiful or intelligent? Either will do.”

Marisa was finally aroused to speech. “What a silly man you are,
Rupert,” she said, her English heavily accented. “Don't say things like this. You embarrass him.”

“He's a student of philosophy,” I said, riding over her remark.

“A beautiful philosopher,” Grant said, “how excellent. One always prefers beauty to intelligence in a philosopher, since philosophy is nonsense anyway, especially French philosophy. Tell him to join us. He needn't dress.”

Even before I was gone, Grant had begun to kiss Marisa, pulling her toward him with his large hands. From the corner of my eye, I saw her knees lift as she swiveled to face him.

I closed the door and ran.