The Conversion (2 page)

He arrived at my place in the 18th early the next morning. He’d told me to bring only what I wore, an extra pair of dress pants, and the
necessary
toiletries. Although at six feet tall, two inches taller than I am (and ultimately, two inches shorter than Ed), we wore the same size
button-down
shirts and T-shirts.

Michel liked me to wear his clothing, mainly because it was always beautifully laundered (and mine never was), but also because it was a fetish for him. In particular he liked me to borrow his very brief French
underwear
; he hated what he called my “unsexy American boxer shorts.” When we lay down together, he’d pull his underwear halfway down my thighs and with an evil grin tell me how “slutty” they looked. This part went on in English; his enunciation of the two
t
’s in
slutty
was charmingly erotic.

The first morning of our excursion, when I climbed aboard the BMW, knowing that he’d carefully packed the saddlebags for two (and, I imagined, with the clothes that he wanted me to wear), I started to get hard thinking about it. We began to weave through the North African 18th
arrondissement
, passing street vendors hawking roasted corn, Arabs mingling in their djellabas. I tightened my knees around his legs and remarked to myself how good our bodies felt in this sort of motorcycle tandem.

Although Michel’s height and bulk made him seem more like an American, his face had a refined, carved look that could not belie his Germanic ancestry. At the same time, his almost-too-prominent features were softened by the ringlets of light brown hair that highlighted his gray eyes. Sometimes when I’d had a few drinks, or when I was annoyed with him, I found his face too sharp-featured, too angular to be called handsome, and when he made me furious I thought he looked like a rodent.

Our relationship was primarily an inspired, romanticized sex life whose reverberations were deceptively profound. A sex life characterized by a lot of sultry chatter about the sorts of things we did and what we might do in the future. Until I met Michel I never realized that previous erotic episodes could be talked about to heighten the mood of the present; until I met Michel I never realized that remaining partially dressed during the
act could be incredibly arousing. He certainly broadened my appreciation of the male body, from the obvious pull of his form-fitting T-shirts to the suggestion of contours through well-cut business suits. On the rare occasion that we went out for dinner, he would supervise my dressing and always insisted I wear a crisp button-down shirt and a tie. There was nothing sexier than taking off another man’s tie, he used to say. It didn’t take me long to realize that the more layers Michel had to go through to get to the core experience of the unadorned body, the more turned on he became. Which was why he was a big fan of leather—arm bands and chaps—and of flimsy G-strings. He liked adding these accoutrements to the mix as much as he liked to talk about what we’d do in bed. Once I even dared to question him if he made love to his wife in a similar fashion, and he looked at me as though I were insane, as though he expected me to just assume he made love to his wife as chastely as possible. Or that he no longer made love to her at all.

It was a glorious excursion blessed by arid, cloudless weather; the wind blasting our faces on the motorways was as dry as dust. The temperature spiked during the day but always ended up in chill. It took two days to get to Aix. We arose early every morning and had enormous breakfasts of baguettes and local cheeses and huge cerulean bowls of café au lait. We avoided the superhighway and found our way along secondary roads, stopping for hour-and-a-half lunches of hard salamis and cornichons and bottles of Burgundy. We spent so much time on the motorcycle that the vibrations from having ridden that many hours stayed with me long after we dismounted.

We had sex at least twice a day—usually at the hotel. However, on one occasion we managed to do it in a secluded grove of poplar trees that Michel staked out before pulling off the main road. He’d brought a vinyl tarp that rolled up tightly and commanded very little space. Wrapped inside the tarp was a bottle of lubricant that came in the shape of a medium-sized dildo. He spread the tarp in the shade and we went at it like two beasts. I must add that during our entire time away, he was effusively affectionate and seemed incredibly content, although I did notice a few moments when he became worryingly withdrawn.

We rode back into the city in late afternoon of the fourth day—glorious Paris luxuriating in a scarf of sunny amber; so many vibrant fruits were perfectly arranged in oak bins, grand monuments casting languorous
shadows, well-heeled Parisians crowding the narrow, smoky cafés and strolling the Seine arm in arm. There was a pervading smell of fermenting yeast and the slow, simmering scent of cognac sauce. Hugging Michel around his taut stomach, resting my chin on his shoulder, I found myself bitterly regretting that in a just a few moments I’d be alone. And, indeed, in a month’s time, my apartment swap would be over. I found myself wishing some other opportunity for work would present itself before I’d have to hoof it back to my cheap one-bedroom flat in Brooklyn in an out-of-the-way place called Gravesend.

As we drew within a few blocks of my apartment, the sadness of having to part with Michel overwhelmed me. After all, I’d never before had him to myself for four days straight. It was a luxury I felt I could easily get used to and even began fantasizing that Michel’s feelings for me would become so urgent and undeniable that he’d be forced to leave Laurence. I got myself worked up into such a state of absurd hope that I felt tears
smarting
in my eyes and had to fight off the urge to weep. For I instinctively knew I could never show this desperate side of myself, that it would portend disaster. Instead, I promised myself a swim at the fifty-meter pool at the Forum des Halles. I’d do laps, look at all the attractive Parisian men, maybe even get some attention, and somehow make myself feel better.

When we finally arrived at my building, Michel parked the motorcycle next to one of those green, octagonal newspaper kiosks. The swarthy North African man who sold roasted corn there recognized me, nodded, and smiled. But I didn’t really pay much attention to him then because I was fighting to keep my composure. I hastily grabbed my toiletry bag and my dress pants and was preparing to say good-bye when Michel hit the motorcycle’s kill switch and said to me, “Russell, I need a word.”

“About what?” Sensing something wrong, my whole lovesick body went on pulsing alert.

His gaze was steady and without expression. “Well … honestly Laurence finds out about our relationship.”

The terrifying feeling of free fall began. “She
did?
But did you tell her?”

“Of course I don’t tell her!”

“Then how?”

He heaved a great sigh in the way the French do and exhaled through tightened lips. I was so light-headed and frantic that the subsequent words came to me piecemeal, as though we were in a wind tunnel. Apparently,
the previous week while he and I were having coffee in out-of-the-way Saint Germain-en-Laye, a friend of his wife also happened to be there, unbeknownst to Michel. We’d been seen holding hands and nuzzling each other.

I heard him saying quite distinctly, “And so when Laurence asks me, I don’t deny it.” Not quite comfortable with English, Michel had an
annoying
tendency to cling to the present and future tense, whose narrow dimensions somehow made his news sound even more harrowing and irreversible.

“Well, you said you would never deny it,” I replied automatically in a breathless voice.

He merely shrugged. “She has told me to stop it. And as you know, and as we discuss, I must do as she asks.”

“But … the last four days?” I sputtered. “What have they been
about?
Why did you go away with me when you knew
this
was going to happen?”

Michel said, “Well, she knows I will be with you. I tell her I want to be. And she let me go, but only if I will speak to you at the end.”

“So you’ve known about it the whole time?”

He nodded.

“That’s … really lousy.” I began to stutter. “You at least could have told me first!”

Michel’s expression was at once compassionate and, I couldn’t help noticing, slightly impatient. Later on, after replaying the scene thousands of times, I began wondering if that moment of slight irritation was actually the sign that, although my sexual power seemed to equal his, he was actually realizing that I was still a lot younger and greener than he was, in short a liability. An enormous leaf came feathering down from a tree and brushed his face and he closed his eyes self-protectively. At that moment he looked so vulnerable. Had I wanted to, I could’ve easily punched him and knocked him to the ground. When he spoke again, it was with more patience. “Would you really want to know, Russell?”

Of course. Why wouldn’t I?

He shook his head resolutely. “If you know, I doubt you will have gone with me. And if you know and still decide to go with me, you would never enjoy yourself.” He smiled forlornly. “At least we can say that we have these four wonderful days. Not true?”

Now I think to myself: Who else but a Frenchman would be able to pull off a breakup with such disarming diplomacy? But of course, at the time I still felt monstrously mistreated.

“Well then, if I have no say in this, then what
can
I say?”

“Nothing but good-bye, Russell,” he replied with great courtesy,
offering
me a handshake instead of a kiss. Quite a contrast to perhaps six hours earlier when he was begging me for sex.

I was so furious with Michel at that moment I couldn’t speak. Although the compulsion to attack him and hurt him openly grew stronger by the second, it ended up scaring me into a state of inertia. All I could do was watch him lope over to his BMW and mount it. With a flick of his wrist, the motor ignited and his motorcycle launched down my street, its chrome tailpipe transmitting a sad flash of acknowledgment in the dusk of a late-summer city.

Watching him ride out of my life was so incredibly painful. There was no delayed reaction, no numbness or shock. The tearing sensation that is so clichéd was stunning. And somehow in the midst of it, I happened to notice an elderly woman, in a kimono, her thick mascaraed eyes staring down at me from her apartment window, a cigarette between her fingers. She observed the obvious signs of a
chagrin d’amour
with what I imagined to be the recognition of someone who’d perhaps lived through it many times herself. She reminded me of a wise old Colette peering down into the street like a patron saint.

I sank into a fuguelike depression, the sort in which your appetite dries up and there is a perpetual coppery taste in your mouth. I slept very badly, my dreams frenzied and feverish and always of operatic length. I’d wake up in the middle of some outlandish scenario in which Michel was playing most of the parts—male and female—and marvel at the insane dimensions of my
imagination
and then, like a psychic prisoner, tumble back into the same nightmare.

I will say, however, that Paris comforted me: the precise contours of its formal gardens à la française; the rapturous, musky scent of its towering linden trees; winding streets bulging with shops whose eclectic displays inspired fabrics with brilliant color and texture; fresh flowers that seemed to have been cut only moments before in some vast, sun-dappled field. All of it brought brief moments of solace.

One week into this terrible interlude, Ed called me out of the blue. He sounded genuinely surprised to learn of my
chagrin d’amour
and
immediately
invited me to dinner. By our third engagement he’d already begun lobbying for me to stay on in Paris—with him at his apartment on the rue Birague. Until he’d mentioned the tantalizing idea I’d been consoling myself with the thought of getting far away from Michel and France, of returning to America. And now I can admit to myself that I let Ed convince me to stay on because I still held out some stupid glimmer of hope: Michel would miss our relationship so much that, despite his promise to his wife, he’d come back to me.

In an hour we shall cross into Italy. And I believe that will make you feel better,” says Marina Vezzoli, the Italian writer Ed and I met in the café. A day after his death, she’d contacted me, extended her condolences, and offered to let me stay in her family’s villa in Tuscany while I sorted things out.

I look out at the taupe-colored landscape of moldering stone
farmhouses
, gnarled olive trees, and espaliered grape vines. “Beyond the border we’ll stop for a
panino
,” she suggests. “You’ve eaten nothing since this morning.”

“No, grazie, non ho fame.”
I find myself answering in Italian, then
regretting
the switch, hoping she won’t admonish me to speak English the way she did Ed.

She nods respectfully and I vaguely realize: Of course she won’t correct me. Not at a time like this. She’s knows what I’ve dealt with during the last few days in the wake of Ed’s fatal heart attack. I’ve eaten very little and have hardly slept. “May I ask you something?” Marina now says.

“D’ai,”
I answer.

This triggers her to lapse into Italian. “You didn’t go back to America with the body—”

“I couldn’t afford to, knowing I had to come back for the inquest.”

“Nevertheless. I just don’t get a sense that you are in love with this man.”

Or the way Ed used to say it, “You can’t love me the way I want to be loved,” something that continues to pester me. I explain that for me, but unfortunately not for him, the relationship had been more of a friendship. And if Ed hadn’t died perhaps it might have been only a matter of months before our closeness was wrenched apart by this inequality of feeling. In light of this, Ed’s dearest friends had always treated me with caution, even contempt, as though I were some kind of literary hanger-on.

“First of all, not every relationship is sexual,” Marina observes. “And second, it’s absurd, this idea you’re a hanger-on.” She signals to change lanes. “Didn’t you tell me that besides your translations to earn your living, you’ve done some serious work?”

“Yes, that’s right.” I’d told her that I’d translated some poetry and one novel for a small press.

“I’ve also been informed that you published a novella somewhere, too,” she presses.

In a literary journal out of Oregon, I tell her, but then ask point-blank how she found this out.

“I have a friend who works in Intelligence. When I mentioned to him that I invite you to the villa, he insisted on having a look into your life—before I would bring you to my house. Let’s just say he did some digging.”

How strange, I think. I wonder why Marina would do such a thing.

“So what is this novella about, anyway?” she persists.

I briefly describe the story line, which is based on an incident in my childhood where I witnessed the drowning of a young child and, in my way, felt responsible.

Marina listens with interest and finally says, “But now, if you’ve published something such as this, you deserve to be called a writer. You are among
us
. Only time—and not the critics—will anoint the writer whose work will last.”

Her glance is shrewd, her eyes glacially pale. I know Marina is being earnest; she hardly seems the sort of person who’d indulge in flattery. I want to tell her that I feel as though my small
succès d’estime
is a fluke of nature, that the need to make a living has propelled me far away from the conviction that I have any sort of literary vocation.

Beyond this, I am hardly surprised to learn that she has her contacts in Italian Intelligence. Ed had told me that Marina’s father, an anti-fascist, had been a famous politician who’d helped craft post–World War II Italy’s constitution, that his death had been observed all over the country, and that, for a while, Marina herself had bent to the pressure of following in his footsteps and briefly served as the mayor of Genoa before returning to her childhood home in Tuscany.

And yet her manner and appearance strike me to be more Scandinavian than Italian, even down to her tasteful yet simple dress, which is neither ultra chic nor expensive. She seems to prefer tweed jackets and corduroy pants with snug twinset sweaters that are often much brighter in color than the rest of her ensemble.

Marina now asks me how I met Ed, and I explain that a mutual friend had introduced us and how, when my affair with the Frenchman ended,
he’d been mysteriously waiting in the wings and had helped me through that difficult time.

“I understand now. Say no more,” Marina murmurs. She brakes the car in anticipation of the last toll station that remains before Italy begins. She pulls up to the booth, smiling at the boyish sentry patiently waiting for her payment, then realizes she hasn’t even prepared it and begins rummaging through her purse saying,
“Désolée
…
désolée,”
eliciting his smile of indulgence. Once she finds her euros, pays the toll, and we are speeding along again, she sighs and continues in Italian, “The last few days … hard to believe when you actually think about it.”

A thumbnail flash of the brutal intrusion, the faces in fury, but at what? The dull gleaming gun. And the evil sun, the long, scabrous knife, the clammy fear gripping once again. “I just wish I could … well, just take in what’s happened,” I say. “It all still seems so absurd.”

“You’re in shock,” she reminds me. “Of course you are. Now, I must confess to you how bad I feel because the last time I spoke to your friend, I made him feel his Italian was inadequate.”

“Luckily, he was a Francophile,” I find myself saying. For the first time since our journey began, we both laugh.

This bit of shared irreverence seems to dismantle the facade of strict decorum that we’ve been maintaining. The highway is crossing a divide that affords a commanding view of the Mediterranean, whose tourmaline depths, now more than a thousand feet below us, pitch and roll beneath the glaring sunlight. The heat wave plaguing Paris also afflicts the South of France; with the warm dry air blasting me in the face, I look out over the water and dream of a cooling swim.

“I do remember that your friend worked very hard at being
charming
,” Marina remarks at last.

“He didn’t think his charm worked very well on you.”

“Nonsense! I just couldn’t place him at first.”

“Apparently you had long conversations.”

“So what? Not everybody is blessed with immediate recall. I wasn’t expecting to see him. But he obviously demanded instant recognition because of his celebrity.” Hearing Ed spoken of in the past tense gives me a terrible jolt, and a buzzing, windy silence follows the remark. “I don’t know about you, Russell, but I must say I never feel completely at ease around people for whom charm and suavity are second nature.
I admit that I am utterly fascinated by them, but that’s where it ends for me.”

“But charm isn’t ever second nature. It comes at great expense. Always,” I say just as I spy ahead of us a checkpoint where cars are being randomly stopped and searched by men in military fatigues. In travel between one European Union country and another, this border searching seems superfluous, a throwback to another era before the European community became economically linked. However, in light of the recent Middle East conflicts and the various terrorist bombings in Europe, the “instant checkpoint” is becoming more frequent. On certain days the Italian authorities set up random roadblocks and do unannounced
inspections
and searches. “What a mess!” Marina exclaims, and then suddenly pulls the car hard to the right and steers for a man wearing a splendid khaki uniform. More prepared this time, she rolls down her window, reaches deftly into her purse, and pulls out a green laminated photo I.D. The official scrutinizes it, then smiles at her flirtatiously and waves us through in a lackadaisical manner.

I wait for Marina to explain why we have been so effortlessly conducted into her country while the rest of the motorists have been detained at checkpoint. But the silence endures. So finally I ask.

“I do this drive so much that they’ve given me a badge. Not for
privilege
, but rather to just make it simpler when they do these checkpoints. Only because I often go to France on government business.”

I ask what sort and she says, “A cultural emissary of sorts. I am often invited. The French like the fact that I was once a politician.” As though to avoid further discussion of her ambassadorial role, she tells me, “Now, this is the part of the drive, from Ventimiglia to Tuscany, that I detest. Because of people like him.” She gestures at the rearview mirror. I turn around to find that an aggressive motorist has driven up to what seems to be only a few feet of the rear of Marina’s car, insistently flashing his lights. This is typical behavior of drivers who streak along in the left lane and muscle slower motorists to the right. But Marina is already in the right lane, so there’s nowhere she can go. “My God, this is madness! What do you want?” she demands. “Does he want me to drive off the road?” she asks me.

The car finally pulls up alongside us. The long-haired driver peers at us through reflective sunglasses and then races ahead. Out of my window, a sign for Ventimiglia proves that hundreds of kilometers behind us is the
city of Paris, where I’ve just spent a year and a half, and hundreds of kilometers ahead of us in Tuscany is Marina’s famous residence, which is called the Villa Guidi.

Crossing into Liguria, we follow a series of high overpasses and tunnels carved into the mountainside. “You don’t have so many tunnels in America,” Marina remarks to me. “They cost a fortune. That’s why our motorways charge such high tolls.” We descend along the coast, passing Genoa and La Spezia and the Gulf of Venus, where Shelley’s boat went down on the way from Livorno to Lerici. As I begin to think about untimely deaths, I wish that Ed had woken up before his heart attack, that he’d said something to me, given me a few words, however trivial, to hold on to. The last thing he told me before the sedative took hold and induced him to sleep was, “I feel funny, Russell.”

We finally turn inland right before the beach town of Viareggio, where Puccini spent his last days, and soon are heading in the direction of Florence. Partway to that Tuscan city, we quit the
autostrada
and only moments later arrive at a pair of tall iron gates. A long driveway lined with linden trees leads to an enormous villa with ocher-colored walls, a
terra-cotta
hip roof, and surrounding hedgerows of oleander and hydrangea. “At last!” Marina exclaims, and exits the car to be hysterically greeted by a pack of six dogs.

“Russell was absolutely fine until Italy. Now he sleeps all the time.”

“Doesn’t that make sense?” asks a man. “Think about it. Held at gunpoint, wakes up to find his lover dead of a heart attack.”

“Wasn’t a lover. Really more of a friend.”

“Oh, come on, Marina, you know what I’m saying.”

“I’m merely explaining the facts to you.”

“You’ve made them quite clear. Nevertheless—”

“If he doesn’t get up tomorrow like a normal person, I’m going to yank him out of bed and make him walk with me.”

Their voices fade as their conversation migrates to another part of the villa. Who could this other person be?

What is this fatigue that has endured for these last ten days? I’ve been sleeping in eighteen-hour increments, my sleep fevered with nightmare. The scenes are mostly Parisian, late-night excursions through a city of dark splendor in which I am on my way to collect Ed’s ashes from a
crematorium. And as I try to find my way through a warren of streets, I’m carrying a burden of depression, the yoke of a man who has always been single and solitary,
célibataire
, as the French say. In these dreams I feel so dejected by the death of my friend that I thrash and flail and often wake up with my head at the foot of my bed.

Now it’s late at night and a throaty chanteuse is singing American hit songs from the seventies and eighties: “You are the sunshine of my life”; “I want to make it with you.” I smell attar of roses and deep spice. Once again, there seem to be intruders in my room, and I cry out.

“
Ma è una camera privata
(But this is a bedroom),” a woman exclaims to her companion, who says, “
Ah, scusi, Signore. Non lo sapevamo
(We didn’t know).”

“Didn’t you see the do-not-disturb sign on my bedroom door?” I shout at them.

“We were looking for a place to make love,” the man admits candidly.

These straggling guests have ventured where they don’t belong. On the way here from France, Marina explained that although there were many grander villas in Tuscany, Villa Guidi’s common rooms are extraordinarily large, which makes it prized for weddings and corporate functions. She rents it out and conducts a bustling business. During my stay there already have been two large and raucous affairs. Lying there, listening to the din of voices and the cover tunes, the revelry in full swing, I somehow manage to fall asleep again.

And awaken, but now to the sounds of a chain saw. I’ve cycled back into daylight, but it’s hard to know precisely what time it is. The villa is hunkered down for siesta, and my wooden shutters, opened by the
housekeeper
very early in the morning, are closed once again around noon to ward off the late-summer heat. I’ve been staring up at the high coffered ceiling of carved circles and hexagons and now get out of bed and throw open the shuttered window. The sky is an untarnished azure, the lawns stretching toward the tall stone walls surrounding the property are freshly mown, and Marina’s young, angelic-looking Polish groundskeeper is hacking away at the limbs of a fallen tree. There is a smell of freshly sawed wood and burning fires. Intent on staying awake, I keep the shutters open and instinctively move to the densely packed bookshelves lining an entire wall. I find literature in five languages including poetry, biographies and political texts. I notice the short novels of Mario Soldati and my favorite
Italian novel of all time,
La Coscienza di Zeno
, by Italo Svevo. Then I discover an entire shelf filled with editions of the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
.