The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (69 page)

It was therefore not without a feeling of a needed recess that I greeted the news that Arlina was departing with Red on a two months' lecture tour across the country to promote her new book. She was very emotional about our separation and made me promise to write her daily to the care of her trusted female agent, who would be traveling with her. I was only intermittently faithful to the task, but the many florid epistles that she indited to me were the ones that turned up in the “cache” at Sulka U.

In her absence I dropped in more often on Dan Carmichael in his studio. If I was not averse to being freed for a while from Arlina's sometimes fatiguing attentions, I missed almost at once the reassuring glow of her approbation, which had given me a novel but gratifying sense of success in life. I knew that I had aroused strong feelings in Dan, and I should have left him alone, but there you have me. My nature craved this new incense of admiration from the great.

His studio was reached by a back stairway descending to the service entrance, so I did not have to encounter his bleak and saturnine spouse, who, in Red Suydam's mocking description, brooded about male models in the floor above discarding their raiment least of all to be sketched. I found Dan in a depressed mood; he complained that he could neither paint nor draw, and wanted only to talk and drink.

He did, however, one afternoon a sketch of me, executed with remarkable speed. It was a very fine likeness, and I flushed with pleasure when he said I could have it.

“But it's too valuable for a gift,” I protested, more to please him than to offer it back.

“I can give what I like to my friends,” he growled. “Only promise me one thing. Don't give it to Arlina.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Oh, some silly notion of how a lover should behave.”

“So you know about me and Arlina.”

“Everybody knows about you and Arlina.”

“Even Red?”

“Oh, Red indeed. He's positively obscene about you being the smaller. He says you have to sling a bucket over her head and hang on to the handle for dear life.”

I was horribly mortified, but it was not my habit to show it. There had to be other ways of getting back at Arlina's sneering court.

“You say you can't draw these days.” I rolled up my sketch and put a rubber band around it. I wanted to be sure to take it away with me before he changed his mind, of which he was all too capable. “But this,” I added, holding it up, “is surely no example of artist's cramp.”

He viewed me obliquely. “Maybe you're my only inspiration now.”

My stare was cool. Had I really aroused a major passion? If so, I felt little sympathy. I needed to pay him off for the bucket crack. As I turned to go, I asked, “Is there anything I can do for
you
in return for my handsome present?”

He looked up at once. “Yes! Pose for me in the nude.”

I laughed. “Dan, you old lecher. You know I'm too modest for that.”

“You goddamn little prick teaser!” he exploded. “You're afraid if you stripped you might give yourself away. You're not half as straight as you like to make out. Oh, I've heard about you. Now get your hot little ass out of here!”

I laughed, with genuine good nature, and departed, taking my sketch.

But I returned only three days later, behaving as if nothing had happened. At this poor Dan broke down completely. He pleaded with me desperately to respond to his love; he blabbered about his obsession with me; he even wept as he threatened me with being the cause of the extinction of his art. It was appalling to see a great man reduced to such a state of uncontrol.

Now what was I up to? Was I still smarting about Red's cruel image of me and Arlina? Did I suspect that it was really Dan's invention and not Red's at all? A little, perhaps. But couldn't there be an understandable pride in seeing an artist of the first order (at least so he was still considered by many) grovel before you? And tell you that it was in
your
power and yours alone to enable him to pick up his brush?

Yes, but that was not all. There was still the idea of my pleasant little function in life to give some pleasure where I had received so much. And I had owed in the past year most of my pleasure to the circle to which he had introduced me.

Anyway, I did not keep Dan long on tenterhooks. I accorded him what he wanted, to my very mild and to his too furious satisfaction. Indeed, so ecstatic did he wax that, had I desired it, he would have kicked his poor old wife out of the house and established me in her stead. But of course I wanted no such thing, nor had I the least intention of continuing the liaison after Arlina's return.

Arlina's return, however, was to result in the end of both affairs. I had agreed now to pose for Dan as he had requested, and in doing so I had actually expected to be the subject of the greatest painting of his career, a nude portrait imbued with all the feeling that Dan poured into the love which, at least in his younger days, had not dared to reveal its nomenclature. But one afternoon, while I was posing, the back doorbell rang, and Dan pressed the buzzer to open it, expecting a delivery which could be left downstairs. Instead, two minutes later, Hiram Scudder pushed open the studio door without knocking and walked in.

The mistake I made was to grab a shirt and cover myself. Hiram's beady eyes leered at me; his tone was malignant.

“Oh, go on, please, go on. Let me not interrupt so charming a seance. Or are such beauties to be revealed only to the artist?”

Of course I should have brazened it out, as if it had been a routine posing, and allowed the jealous Hiram's lecherous eyes to feast on my bodily parts as we all three casually chatted. Instead, I protested that the session was over anyway and that I was already late for an appointment. Dressing hastily behind, a screen, I took my leave.

Five days later I received this epistle from Arlina:

“I have had a revolting letter from hateful Hiram which has made it impossible for me to continue my tour. I have told Red that I am suffering from migraines and cannot speak in public. And so indeed I am. I cannot find it in my heart to believe it of you, dearest, dearest Martin, though Hiram says that Dan actually boasted to him of his ‘conquest.' I shall, of course, hear what you have to say. I will come to you on the afternoon of the 25th. My plane gets in that morning. Oh, God, God! Have I been a fool?”

Arlina stood before me in my small living room whose only first-rate objects of art were the three Whistler etchings of Venice which she had given me. She was very pale and sad and grave. I remembered my initial impression of her as a pagan priestess. I had not attempted to deny or even to palliate Scudder's charge.

“You tell me it meant nothing to you. I cannot imagine a human being to whom such things mean nothing. Certainly not one with whom I have been so intimate. A man I loved!” At this she gave a little cry. “Oh, Martin, how
could
you? The moment I was gone! Did I mean nothing to you?”

“You know that's not true.”

“How can I know?”

“Don't you feel it? In the deepest part of you?”

“No!”

“Then how can I help you?”

“You can't! Oh, I must face this alone. I see that.” She clasped her hands and shook them in her distress. “There's no use talking. You're simply not the man I took you for. That's not your fault. There's no reason you should have been. You never claimed to be. It was my folly to erect a pedestal and put you up on it. It would have been better for me if we'd never met.”

“Oh, don't say that. We had good times.”

“Maybe
you
did. In your own way. Mine were illusions.”

“Isn't love an illusion?”

“Ah, no cheap platitudes, please.”

“Look, Arlina. Give this time to heal. You say I wasn't the man you thought me. But the man I am isn't so bad a guy. Get to know him. He and you might still be friends.”

“So that's it.” She shook her head sadly. “Friendship. It's your
métier
, isn't it? I suppose it's all very well.
If
you've never known the other thing.”

And with this she left me.

But we did in time become friends again, mild friends perhaps, but still friends, and we remained such until the day she died.

And now let me put the question. Did I do her any real harm? If, as the critics claim, the affair deepened her insight into the passions that “consume mankind,” was she not the gainer and I a significant contributor to American letters? What did her suffering, or even Dan's, amount to? Weren't they both still on top of their worlds?

But the truth is that I had nothing to do with the nourishment of their art. Passion in great artists is as much the product of their imagination as it is of their hearts. As a skilled paleontologist can reconstruct the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single bone in its toe, so could Arlina resurrect the love of Antony and Cleopatra from the mere memory of our poor fling of an affair. Nor, if the truth be told, did she need even that. Jane Austen could create Elizabeth and Darcy, and Emily Bronte, Heathcliff and Cathy, out of daydreams strolling in a garden or a moor.

And so they go, the great Arlinas, supreme in the delights and consolations of their celestial visions, deriving occasional niblets of nutriment from the lesser humans on whom they occasionally feed, yet receiving the lachrymose sympathy of academic researchers for every supposed pang of “disprized love” they may incur, which love is actually only further grist for their busy mills. While as for the poor partner of this “love,” well, out upon him! Who was he to play gross tunes upon the heartstrings of genius?

With scrupulous fairness, however, I append the lines which Arlina had underlined in the morocco-bound copy of Shakespeare's sonnets which she gave me one Christmas:

 

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow;

They righdy do inherit heaven's graces

And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

 

But you know what the sestet tells of these lords and owners. They are also lilies which, when festering, smell far worse than weeds!

Trust the artist to have the last word.

 

L
OUIS
A
UCHINCLOSS
was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection
Manhattan Monologues
and the novel
The Rector of Justin.
The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.