Answered Prayers (4 page)

I met Jean Cocteau there—a walking laser light with a sprig of
muguet
in his buttonhole; he asked if I was tattooed, and when
I said no, his overly intelligent eyes glazed and glided elsewhere. Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty’s, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I’d met when he photographed me for Boaty’s magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, “The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking.” Garbo, after a mournful pause, “Ah, if only I could say the same”).

In truth, one encountered an exceptional share of the celebrated at Boaty’s, performers as various as Martha Graham and Gypsy Rose Lee, sequined sorts interspersed with an array of painters (Tchelitchew, Cadmus, Rivers, Warhol, Rauschenberg), composers (Bernstein, Copland, Britten, Barber, Blitzstein, Diamond, Menotti) and, most plentifully, writers (Auden, Isherwood, Wescott, Mailer, Williams, Styron, Porter, and, on several occasions, when he was in New York, the Lolita-minded Faulkner, usually grave and courtly under the double weight of uncertain gentility and a Jack Daniel’s hangover). Also, Alice Lee Langman, whom Boaty considered America’s first lady of letters.

To all these people, the living among them, I must by now be the merest memory. If that. Of course, Boaty would have remembered me, though not with pleasure (I can well imagine what he might say: “P. B. Jones? That tramp. No doubt he’s peddling his ass to elderly Arab buggers in the souks of Marrakech”); but Boaty is gone, beaten to death in his mahogany house by a heroin-crazed Puerto Rican hustler who left him with both eyeballs unhinged and dangling down his cheeks.

And Alice Lee Langman died last year.

The New York Times
printed her obituary on the front page, accompanied by the famous photograph of her made by Arnold Genthe in Berlin in 1927. Creative females are not often presentable. Look at Mary McCarthy!—so frequently advertised as a Great Beauty. Alice Lee Langman, however, was a swan
among the swans of our century: a peer of Cléo de Mérode, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, Garbo, Barbara Cushing Paley, the three Wyndham sisters, Diana Duff Cooper, Lena Horne, Richard Finnochio (the transvestite who calls himself Harlow), Gloria Guinness, Maya Plisetskaya, Marilyn Monroe, and lastly, the incomparable Kate McCloud. There have been several intellectual lesbians of physical distinction: Colette, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles; and, in altogether another category, simple endearing prettiness, both Eleanor Clark and Katherine Anne Porter deserve their reputations.

But Alice Lee Langman was a perfected presence, an enameled lady marked with the androgynous quality, that sexually ambivalent aura that seems a common denominator among certain persons whose allure crosses all frontiers—a mystique not confined to women, for Nureyev has it, Nehru had it, so did the youthful Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, so did Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

When I met Miss Langman, and I never called her anything else, she was far into her late fifties, yet she looked eerily unaltered from her long-ago Genthe portrait. The author of
Wild Asparagus
and
Five Black Guitars
had eyes the color of Anatolian waters, and her hair, a sleek silvery blue, was brushed straight back, fitting her erect head like an airy cap. Her nose was reminiscent of Pavlova’s: prominent, slightly irregular. She was pale, with a healthy pallor, an apple-whiteness, and when she spoke she was difficult to understand, for her voice, unlike most women of Dixie origin, was neither high nor rapid (only Southern men
drawl
), but was muted, as cello-contralto as a mourning dove’s.

She said, that first night at Boaty’s: “Would you see me home? I hear thunder, and I’m afraid of it.”

She was not afraid of thunder, nor of anything else—except unreturned love and commercial success. Miss Langman’s
exquisite renown, while justified, was founded on one novel and three short-story collections, none of them much bought or read outside academia and the pastures of the cognoscenti. Like the value of diamonds, her prestige depended upon a controlled and limited output; and, in those terms, she was a royal success, the queen of the writer-in-residence swindle, the prizes racket, the high-honorarium con, the grants-in-aid-to-struggling-artists shit. Everybody, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Council on the Arts, the Library of Congress, et al., was hell-bound to gorge her with tax-free greenery, and Miss Langman, like those circus midgets who lose their living if they grow an inch or two, was ever aware her prestige would collapse if the ordinary public began to read and reward her. Meanwhile, she was raking in the charity chips like a croupier—enough to afford an apartment on Park Avenue, small but stylish.

Having followed a sedate Tennessee childhood—suitable to the daughter of a Methodist minister, which she was—with a kickup that included bohemian duty in Berlin and Shanghai as well as in Paris and Havana, and having had four husbands, one of them a twenty-year-old surfboarding beauty she had met while lecturing at Berkeley, Miss Langman had now relapsed, at least in material matters, into the ancestral values she may have misplaced but never lost.

Retrospectively, with knowledge since acquired, I can appreciate the distinction of Miss Langman’s apartment. At the time I thought it cold and underdone. The “soft” furniture was covered in a crisp linen as white as the pictureless walls; the floors were highly polished and uncarpeted. Only white jardinieres massed with fresh green leaves interrupted the snowiness of the interior; those, and several signed pieces, among them an opulently severe partner’s desk and a fine set of rosewood book cabinets. “I would prefer,” Miss Langman told me, “to own two really good
forks rather than a dozen that are merely good. That’s why these rooms are so little furnished. I can live only with the best, but I can’t finance enough of it to live with. Anyway, clutter is alien to my nature. Give me an empty beach on a winter’s day when the water is very still. I’d go mad in a house like Boaty’s.”

Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor?—and she had none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist. But she was indeed a talker: a relentless bedroom back-seat driver: “No, Billy. Leave your shirt on and don’t take off your socks the first man I ever saw he was in just his shirt and socks. Mr. Billy Langman. The Reverend Billy. And there’s something about it a man with his socks on and his billy up and ready here Billy take this pillow and put it under my that’s it that’s right that’s good ah Billy that’s
good
good as Natasha I had a thing once with a Russian Dyke Natasha worked at the Russian Embassy in Warsaw and she was always hungry she liked to hide a cherry down there and eat ah Billy I can’t I
can’t
take that without withoutso slide up honey and suck my that’s it that’s it let me hold your billy but Billy why aren’t you more! well! more!”

Why?
Because I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners—whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter.

The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and I’m sure that many of us, even most of us, share this condition of dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body
above or beneath us—those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us. “That’s better better and better Billy let me have billy now that’s uh uh uh it that’s
it
only slower slower and slower now hard hard hit it hard ay ay
los cojones
let me hear them ring now slower slower dradraaaaagdrag it out now hit hard hard ay ay daddy Jesus have mercy Jesus Jesus goddamdaddyamighty come with me Billy come! come!” How can I, when the lady won’t let me concentrate on areas more provocative than her roaring roiling undisciplined persona? “Let’s hear it, let’s hear them ring”: thus the grande mademoiselle of the cultural press as she bucked her way through a sixty-second sequence of multiple triumphs. Off I went to the bathroom, stretched out in the cold dry bathtub and, thinking the thoughts necessary to me (just as Miss Langman, in the private quietude beneath her public turbulence, had been absorbed in hers: recalling … a girlhood? overly effective glimpses of the Reverend Billy? naked except for his shirt and socks? or a honeyed womanly tongue lollipopping away some wintry afternoon? or a pasta-bellied whale-whanged wop picked up in Palermo and hog-fucked a hot Sicilian infinity ago?), masturbated.

I have a friend, who isn’t queer but dislikes women, and he has said: “The only women I’ve got any use for are Mrs. Fist and her five daughters.” There is much to be said for Mrs. Fist—she is hygienic, never makes scenes, costs nothing, is utterly loyal and always at hand when needed.

“Thank you,” Miss Langman said when I returned. “Amazing, someone your age to know all that. To have such confidence. I had thought I was accepting a pupil, but it would seem he has nothing to learn.”

The last sentence is stylistically characteristic—direct, felt,
yet a bit
enunciated
, literary. Nevertheless, I could more than see how valuable and flattering it was for an ambitious young writer to be the protégé of Alice Lee Langman, and so presently I went to live in the Park Avenue apartment. Boaty, upon hearing of it, and because he didn’t dare oppose Miss Langman but all the same wanted to bitch it up, telephoned her and said: “Alice, I’m only saying this because you met the creature in my house. I feel responsible. Watch out! He’ll go with anything—mules, men, dogs, fire hydrants. Just yesterday I had a furious letter from Jean [Cocteau]. From Paris. He spent a night with our amigo in the Plaza Hotel. And now he has the clap to prove it! God knows what the creature’s crawling with. Best see your doctor. And one thing more: the boy’s a thief. He’s stolen over five hundred dollars forging checks in my name. I could have him jailed tomorrow.” Some of this might have been true, though none of it was; but see what I mean by a killer fruit?

Not that it mattered; it wouldn’t have fazed Miss Langman if Boaty could have proved I was a swindler who had swindled a hunchbacked pair of Soviet Siamese twins out of their last ruble. She was in love with me, she said so, and I believed her; one night, when her voice waved and dipped from too much red and yellow wine, she asked—oh in such a whimper-simper stupid-touching way you wanted to knock out her teeth but maybe kiss her, too—whether I loved her; as I’m naught if not a liar, I told her sure. Happily, I’ve suffered the full horrors of love only once—you will hear about it when the time comes; that’s a promise. However, to revert to the Langman tragedy. Is it—I’m not certain—possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn’t the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle—sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial,
human: the difference between that and truly
using
another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters.

What I wanted from Miss Langman was: her agent, her publisher, her name attached to a Holy Roller critique of my work in one of those moldy but academically influential quarterlies. These objectives were, in time, achieved and dazzlingly added to. As a result of her prestigious interventions, P. B. Jones was soon the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship ($3,000), a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters ($1,000), and a publisher’s advance against a book of short stories ($2,000). Moreover, Miss Langman prepared these stories, nine of them, groomed them to a champion-show finish, then reviewed them,
Answered Prayers and Other Stories
, once in
Partisan Review
and again in
The New York Times Book Review
. The title was her decision; though there was no story called “Answered Prayers,” she said: “It’s very fitting. St. Teresa of Avila commented, ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ Perhaps that isn’t the precise quotation, but we can look it up. The point is, the theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate it, is of people achieving a desperate aim only to have it rebound upon them—accentuating, and accelerating, their desperation.”

Prophetically,
Answered Prayers
answered none of mine. By the time the book appeared, many key figures in the literary apparatus considered that Miss Langman had oversponsored her Baby Gigolo (Boaty’s description; he also told everyone: “Poor Alice. It’s
Chéri
and
La Fin de Chéri
rolled into one!”), even felt she had displayed a lack of integrity appalling in so scrupulous an artist.

I can’t claim my stories were one with those of Turgenev and Flaubert, but certainly they were honorable enough not to be entirely ignored. No one attacked them; it would have been better
if someone had, less painful than this grey rejecting void that numbed and nauseated and started one thirsting for martinis before noon. Miss Langman was as anguished as I—sharing my disappointment, so she said, but secretly it was because she suspected the sweet waters of her own crystalline reputation had been seweraged.

I can’t forget her sitting there in her perfect-taste parlor, with gin and tears reddening her beautiful eyes, nodding, nodding, nodding, absorbing every word of my mean gin-inspired assaults, the blame I heaped on her for the book’s debacle, my defeat, my cold hell; nodding, nodding, biting her lips, suppressing any hint of retaliation, accepting it because she was as strong in the sureness of her gifts as I was feeble and paranoid in the uncertainty of mine, and because she knew one swift true sentence from her would be lethal—and because she was afraid if I left, it would indeed be the last of
any chéri.