The Apprentice Lover (9 page)
Read The Apprentice Lover Online
Authors: Jay Parini
I found it impossible to sit near a bookcase without studying the titles, alternately awed and depressed by the number of books I hadn't read. In particular, I was drawn to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
in twelve volumes, the maroon spines with gold lettering. Although I had studied Roman history at Columbia, I was hazy on the details, and made a vow to plow through Gibbon as soon as possible. The thought that Grant might quiz me about the emperors made me queasy. Before attempting this translation, I should have looked up what Gibbon had to say about Tiberius; it seemed unlikely that an emperor so esteemed by many had become a titan of self-indulgenceâespecially in the final years on Capri, when (to quote Suetonius) “having gained the license of privacy, he gave free rein at once to all the vices which he had for a long time barely concealed.”
“Pay attention, Lorenzo,” Grant said.
I leaned toward him, chastened, watching as he began to “correct” my work. Everywhere the fuzzy adjectives dissolved, absorbed into stronger nouns. “Adjectives are the writer's enemy,” Grant said. “If you had got the right noun, you wouldn't need these bloody qualifiers.” The same held with verbs, he said. I witnessed the blotting out of countless adverbs; often he transformed the verbs as well; thus “ran swiftly” became “sped.” “You must find the right word,” he said. “It needn't be fussy, just full-blooded. Let it carry all the freight it can.” He quoted some lines from Eliot: “âThe common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic.' That's the thing, what?”
With a thick horizontal line from his fountain pen he crossed out countless versions of the verb “to be.” “What's all this
was, was, was
? Bad habit, Lorenzo.” He urged me to use the active voice whenever possible. Thus, “Tiberius was somewhat held in check by the presence of Germanicus” became “The presence of Germanicus held Tiberius in check.” “That âsomewhat' is foul,” Grant scoffed. “You're equivocating. Resist the impulse.” I watched as prose I had considered quite sophisticated and polished became tougher, grainier, more direct. He glanced at the manuscript, with his multiple erasures and corrections, and seemed to understand what I was feeling. “Look here,” he said, “I'm not trying to change you, only to correct bad habits. There's a tune there, in your writing. I hear it, and that's a good sign. Every writer needs a tune.”
I knew this, and was afraid of losing a tune that, however small, I had cultivated with some diligence.
“Revision won't kill the tune,” he told me. “It actually brings out the tune. That's the point of it.”
I said, “I'd like to show you one of my poems.”
“By all means,” he said. “But I won't spare your feelings. I've never known how to be tactful with young people about their work. It's why I gave up teaching. Spent a bloody awful year as Professor Grant, in Malaysia, just after the war. That was enough for me, thank you. Threw in the towel when a young lady threatened suicide because I challenged her scansion.”
Many of Grant's more colorful anecdotes were invented, but they held one's attention. I assured him I wouldn't try to kill myself, no matter how ferocious his critique, but his warning frightened me; it would be some time before I dared to lay a poem on his desk. Nonetheless, I left his study that morning encouraged by the unexpected tutorial in compositionâbetter than anything I'd encountered at Columbia. He was right about my prose. I vowed to bring him more to read in a few days, and I promised that the work would be tighter and stronger.
“Good lad,” he said, dismissing me. Already his mind had turned to his own manuscript, the book on Capri, now gathering pages on his desk.
A
t the beginning of his second month in Vietnam, Nicky was shipped out of Saigon. “I don't want some patsy-ass assignment,” he wrote. He wanted to get “out there, where it's happening, whatever it is. Like Saturday night back in Pittston. If you weren't out, you were a dickhead, a wussy who got no pussy. Like you, Alex. Always home on the weekends, your nose in a goddamn book, dick in hand.”
Dear Asshole,
I went and did it, yesterday. Not a month up here, andâyou guessed itâI fucking killed a guy. Some poor bastard, and I didn't even mean to waste him. Was just sitting in a tree, minding my own business on the trail, thinking about nothing but pussy. Only half a mile from campâplaying lookout like we did as kids. We do it here all the time, taking turns on the trail near camp, keeping an eye open for the goddamn enemy. You just sit in a tree, M-16 on your lap. In daylight, you can read a book if you got a book you want to read. Or sit there and think about things. Or don't think about things.
You ever notice how, in the middle of some goddamn mess, everything seems so quiet? There is life, crumbling under your feet, and it's all smiles and kissy-kissy. Suddenly, wham. Reality sticks a finger in your eye. It's all over you, and over before you know what hit.
So there I was, sitting like a tree frog happy as shit, and this Commie walks out of nowhere. Black pajamas, sandals, Soviet weapons, the works, but all by
his lonesome. Like he stumbled out of bed in the middle of the day, going down to take a piss in his pj's. A skinny little guy, walking along in a daze, kind of lost. I figured back in his village he was probably nothing special. A bike mechanic, maybe. The sort of guy who would bag groceries in Skettino's or pump gas at the Chevron. But what do I know? All I really know is I caught him top down. Put a hole in the back of his head that took away the whole fucking front part, ripped it right off, the face mask. Caught him again between the shoulder blades as he fell.
Half a dozen guys came running. Our guys, not their guys. We never found anybody else from their team in the vicinity. (He must have been on some private expedition, looking for butterflies. This place has these big white butterfliesâlike snowflakes in hell.) My team, they were ready to mow, man. I mean, Micky Donato's a big guy, and he came running ahead of everyone, spraying bullets from an M-60, his goddamn machine gun. Eddie was behind him, Eddie Sloane, the Iowa guy, my cornpone half-Injun friend, with his medical kit and a .45 caliber pistol, waving it overhead like the Lone Ranger and Tonto in one uniform. Then comes Jimbo Samuels, Black Jimbo, a skinny black kid from the Bronx, lugging his stoner, one of the those big motherfucker guns, and Fink O'Malley and Buzz Baxter. They were big-eyed, scared, excited as shit. Fink especially.
I don't know how he got to be called Fink, but it's how he introduced himself. O'Malley is from Boston, and he keeps a Red Sox pennant rolled up in his knapsack, for luck. A mixed-up bastard if I ever saw one, a walking medicine chest, with dope and tranquilizers, uppers and downers, inners and outers. He's got creams, too: for jock itch and toe rot, for blisters and boils. American skin wasn't made for jungles. Buzz is, well, another story. A bear of very little brain. Doesn't say peep to nobody, but he likes comic booksâSpider-Man, Batman, Superman. One day he's gonna fly away, they say. Surprise everybody and fly away from this fucked-up shithole of a country.
Yes, they all agreed, the motherfucker was dead. Fucking eliminated. So we dug a hole and shoved him into it. It was too close to camp to just let the shredded wheat rot on the trail, which is usually what happens here. I mean, you don't go around packaging the goods, burying them. And they don't come with choppers and body bags and flags and shit, like we do. We pick off ten guys, they say, for every one of us they get. Which is good arithmetic, unless you're on the short end of the equation, which I don't intend to be.
You can only get so much from scenery, but I got to say, the scenery here is something else, especially in the highlands. I was telling Eddie it's like the
Poconos only with palm trees and kamikaze mosquitoes. Vines and bamboos, all that Tarzan shit. I was thinking of Tarzan when that poor bastard in the black pj's walked under my perch and got himself blasted on the old bean.
Fink said, Jeezus Christ, you shredded the poor fucker. They couldn't even sell him for body partsâunless all you wanted was the odd toe or finger. It was real weird to look at him, the way his face was pretty much pulped. You hit a guy from above like that, with several good shots, and it takes away most of the cheekbones, the nose, even the upper lip. The skull was like a jack-o'-lantern, only more fucked up. Bigger and blacker holes. Jeezus is right, I said. You nailed that one, Finko.
Nam is one nightmare hunting trip. No wonder I keep remembering those trips in the Poconos, with you and me and Dad, with Sam Barzini and Joey the Jock and Little Nino with the fat lip. Just last night I was telling Eddie about when you got your first deer, and how you didn't want to look at it. Dad got moral and macho, and he said that if you're gonna kill something, you gotta take responsibility. Spoken like an hombre. But then you started to cry, and he felt like a piece of shit and gave you my fucking chocolate bar. Mine! The nice part was when we got home nobody said a thing to Mom, and there was this amazing thing we suddenly had in common.
One of the few good things I can say for this adventure is that we're doing something together, me and Eddie and Mickey, Jim, Fink, Buzz. A good thing or bad thing, it doesn't matter. It's a team effort, and that brings a good feeling.
But that bastard I shot. What do I do about him? Do I take some responsibility here? Weren't no fucking deer, Eddie Sloane said. But you should have seen the guy, so messed up you couldn't take your eyes off him. While we were digging a pit the bastard got covered in ants like a piece of candy in summer on our sidewalk, but worse. I mean swarming. We tossed the fucker in the hole, covered him over, not very deepâjust enough to keep the smell away and to satisfy ourselves that we'd done the right thing. Planted him, maybe a couple of feet under. It probably wasn't necessary, Mickey Donato said. You let anything just lay there by itself, uncovered, and it's history in maybe a day or two. The rotting time is fast-forward in the jungle.
Last night, I got thinking about being nowhere. Dying ain't so bad, I figured. We're all atoms, huh? Death is just a rearrangement of matter. It's just another way of putting the same old thing. And it probably doesn't hurt, not after the first couple of seconds, if you're lucky.
I don't know yet how bad it's going to be down the next few months or how
often I'll get time to write. Lots of S & D coming up, which means you walk around in the bush with your dick out, looking for trouble. Really ingenious. You'd think somebody in Washington or Saigon would say, Hey, why don't we get ourselves a strategy? But there's no hope for that. It's not like any thought went into this war.
The thing is, I don't feel like a soldier yet, even though I killed this guy. I don't feel anything, which is creepy. I was sorry for the bastard, of course. He's got a past, a family, a neighborhood that knew his habits. There was a picture in his pocket, but I couldn't tell what it was or who. Boy or girl. Lover, friend, mother. I put it back where it came from, figuring I'd done enough to disturb his course through this particular universe.
Jeezus, there was something beautiful about that kid, with shiny black hair that fit him like a helmet, and his beardless chin. Not a hair on his goddamn chestâat least where it wasn't blown away. Like maybe I killed a kid, I said. Lieutenant Jack Waller, a prick under most circumstances, with a loose belly and a bald head, he said, Hey, it's war, so what did you expect, a fucking tea party? It's war, all right, I answered, but a kid's a fucking kid. He's got a mother, a history. Waller just shook his head. You must be Catholic, he said.
I hate to admit this, but I started crying. Weird, huh? I never cried back home, not once that I can remember. But Eddie took my arm, and he said, Sit. Sit your ass down. Here, have a drink. He had Jack Danielsâone of those miniature bottles you get on airlines that somebody must have slipped him. So I drank it. He said, Don't take it so hard, there's a lot more where this came from. A shitload more.
He meant death, of course. Not whiskey.
Maybe you've heard enough for one letter, Asshole. Sorry for the ramble. I hope it's okay to spill all this shit. From your letters, I can tell you're curious as a dog around a pile of new shit, so I don't feel guilty rambling on like I do, passing time. Write me again, and soon.
From Nam, with kisses,
Nicky
I
n heading to Rome, Grant left a vacuum. At meals, it was just me, Vera, and Marisa, though I sometimes asked Patrice to join us. Vera liked his amiable, diffuse nature, his ram-shackle ways, and found him a waiter's job at the Quisisana, the fanciest hotel on the island. She had somehow persuaded Andrea Milone, the manager, that it would be sensible to have a French waiter. Americans generally preferred a French waiter to an Italian one, she explained; furthermore, the combination of a French waiter with Italian food was irresistible. Signore Milone found Vera's arguments
“un po pazzo,”
but he needed waiters of any national persuasion; high seasonâJune through Augustâloomed, and Patrice claimed to have experience in a Parisian bistro.
The day after Grant left, I wandered into his study, hoping to absorb the atmosphere in an unobstructed way by sitting at his desk and imagining what it would be like to
be
Rupert Grant. Behind his amber eyes I imagined a vast consciousnessâa landscape of hidden valleys, abrupt mountain ranges, tumbling seas. Reading his work with fierce attention, as I had done since arriving at the Villa Clio, I'd become more, not less, interested in the man behind the witty, eccentrically learned essays, the history-obsessed novels, and the passionate but formally restrained poems, most of which concerned some aspect of love. What I liked was how suggestive he could be: there was infinitely more on the page than met the eye, and I found myself scribbling in the margins, prompted to
further thoughts by his thoughts. I became envious of his deftness, the shrewd felicity of his phrasing, the vast range of reference.
On the other hand, he seemed bland much of the time in person, reluctant to play the part of the artist-genius. He cautioned me against “reading too much into things,” as he might say. Even Vera warned me that he was “not as interesting in person as on paper,” suggesting that “only frauds are.” She said that Grant's success as a writer had been the result of extremely hard work. “He is working all the time,” she said, “even when he's playing. That's the only way it's possible.”
I didn't begrudge Grant his success as a writer, but I'd become jealous of his relationship with Holly. Was she, like me, overly impressed by his achievements? This alone didn't justify her erotic attachment to him, which I sensed but couldn't understand. Physical attraction, on her part, seemed impossible, as he was forty years her senior. It was all such a howling cliché: the goatish older artist and his nubile consorts. Wasn't Grant embarrassed by this scenario, the ridiculous tableau vivant, with Marisa and Holly sprawled at his feet by the pool? Wasn't Vera, with her charm and undiminished beauty, able to satisfy his needs? The greater question, for me, was why Holly would participate in this spectacle.
I sat in Grant's oak chair, sinking into his space. The globe on the left was well spun, a symbol of the author's scope; he had written about the ancient and medieval worlds with ease. Even the complications of the modern world had never daunted him. He appeared to have read, and remembered, everythingâalthough he always said he knew far less than anyone would believe: “It's all smoke and mirrors,” he said. “We're all half charlatan, even the best of usâas Auden once said.” He often dangled the name of Auden before my ears, knowing how much I admired his work. (A volume of Auden's
Selected Poems
was on my bedtable, on “permanent loan” from Grant's study.)
The photographs on the desk surprised me by their studied conventionality: Vera in a sleek riding outfit, on horseback, smiling. The children, Nigel and Nicola, at the Marina Piccola, ankle-deep in water, both tall and blond, androgynous. In a small snapshot that had turned sepia with age, a much younger Grant sat in an English pub beside Auden, whose smooth face made him almost unrecognizable. In a larger one, on
a rooftop in Rome, Grant and Gore Vidal stood beside an older, smaller man in rumpled clothes. Tennessee Williams? Christopher Isherwood?
The dagger beside the inkpot caught my attention. I had seen him fiddling with it, running a finger along the sharp blade. Once I had seen him hurl it, for no reason, across the room at the wooden board pinned to the wall beside the map. It had stuck tip-first in the wood. “A little trick I learned in school,” Grant said. “In another life, I'd have been an assassin. Writers are all murderers in disguise, what?”
Murderers in disguise? I didn't understand. My idea of a writer was far different from this. To me, a writer was a healer, a builder, a creator. Not a destroyer. When I suggested as much to Grant, he shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. “If you're really a writer, Lorenzo,” he said, “you'll slay your next of kin first, and proceed from there. It's a bloody business. A bloody goddamn business.”
I leaned over a gray folder marked “Poems, Unfinished.” Opening it, I saw on top, in Grant's meticulous script, a brief poem or fragment:
Green eyes I love, and yellow hair,
a hip that tilts into the sun:
I should be driven to despair
if she thought I was not the one.
Not so good, I decided. Sentimental, plain without the kind of simplicity that is hard-won. The last line was ludicrous: “if she thought I was not the one.” On the other hand, it was unfinished, a scrap of verse that might develop into something of interest. What upset me was the subject: Holly. It could not be a poem about anyone else: the green eyes, the yellow hair, the hip. The way her hips would shift to one side when she stood: that was part of her lovely awkwardness. I felt consumed by jealousy now. It is always dreadful when someone else desires exactly what you desire, sees exactly what you covet, appreciates its genuine butâas you dared to hopeâunrevealed value. I wanted to be the only one in the world who “got” it, who understood why Holly was so appealing.
A further rush of unpleasant feelings overwhelmed me, a mixture of envy and resentment tinged with despair. I wanted Holly, not only phys
ically, although certainly that. I thought of her in Rome with Grant at the moment, in a wide bed in some plush hotel room, unclothed; the image was painful, a brain blister in need of pricking. I wanted to lie beside her in that bed myself, to feel the length of her body, its contours and textures. I wanted to touch her hair, to brush her face with my fingers, to pull her as close as skin itself, breathing her breath, losing myself inside her. And I wanted her to know me. To see me. I wanted a deep intimacy that included friendship and erotic love, and I wanted to know her mind, to linger in the curls and twists of her consciousness, to see things through her eyes.
Though I didn't really know her yet, Holly represented something I had never had before, a kind of wisdom thatâso farâI could only know by intuition. Her ironic sense of the world appealed to me, in part because it was without the tinge of contempt I often heard in Vera. My friends and relatives back home were definitely
not
ironic. They devoted themselves to surfaces. To accede to them, one had to spread an immense veil of ignorance over every object of perception, every scene and sentence. I did not want to live my life without irony, in that thinness of expression where only one dimension is acknowledged.
Suddenly I felt hands on my shouldersâcaressing hands. Turning, I saw that it was Vera, and the intimacy of her gesture surprised more than alarmed me.
“You're snooping, aren't you?” she asked, whispering, close to my ear. “Naughty chap!”
“Just sitting here.”
She kept massaging, squeezing the cords at either side of my neck, softening them. “You're tense, darling,” she said. “You do need a good massage, don't you?”
I did, but this seemed like the wrong place and the wrong person. My muscles involuntarily stiffened, and I leaned forward away from her. This was, after all, the wife of my employerâa woman more than two decades older than me.
Her lips brushed my ear. “I won't bite,” she said. “Relax.”
I could not relax, but decided not to resist, letting Vera massage my neck and shoulders, digging and kneading with both hands. When fin
ished, she leaned her cheek against my head, breathing into my hair. “I'll give you a better massage one day,” she said, “if you like.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Are you a virgin?”
“No,” I said. At least four women stood between me and my virginity, although I had yet to encounter either love or amorous continuity. I'd had four one-night stands, and during all but one I'd been seriously drunk or stoned. The names of my first three sexual partners were beyond retrieval, and the fourth I recalled only with painâthe whole thing had been her idea, not mine; the act itself had seemed less like lovemaking than hydraulics, and it left me with a wasted feeling. In general, the sexual revolution of the sixties, which had opened the door to ecstasy for so many of my friends in college, had remained only slightly ajar for me. Although my fantasy life was rich, I was poor in actual experience.
“You're lying, naughty boy,” Vera said. “I can always tell when someone is lying, especially about sex. You're a virgin. It's printed on your forehead. In italics.”
“I've had four lovers,” I told her.
“Four! I take it back, then. You're a man of the world.”
Her patronizing tone annoyed me, and I was about to complain when she planted a wet kiss on the back of my neck. I rose from the chair at once.
“I'm sorry if I interrupted you in the midst of profound thoughts. Have a seat, if you like. Read the great man's idiotic jottings. But I'm waiting for you in the kitchen when you're finished. Today you will learn how to make polenta. Now
that
is important.”
She left me standing there, disappearing through the door in her white diaphanous shift, more like a young girl than a mature woman: unpredictable, willful. I realized that, in spite of myself, I was attracted to her, and found the idea of a full body massage by those fingers an appealing one. But I knew enough to resist, aware that life at the Villa Clio would become only more and more complicated, my heart rooting in soil where nothing good could issue from that attachment.