Inside a Pearl (19 page)

When I told him I was writing an article on Cy Twombly, James looked livid and he half levered himself out of his chair.

“You
what?
But, my dear, he's a fraud! Are you going to treat seriously those wretched daubs he's managed to fob off on the public?”

I told him that a Twombly recently went for a million dollars and James said wearily, “He gave me one, but I put it out in the trash.”

“No! Why on earth did you do that?”

“Because that's where it belongs!”

If he was rude about so many people, he was as polite as a potentate with me. I had to avoid admiring the tie he was wearing or else he'd take it off and hand it to me. James liked to imagine we were exactly alike—the same age and possessed of the same wealth—and he'd often refer to influential friends of his, like the American ambassador to
France, Pamela Harriman, as if I must know her. I was quick to disabuse him, but he'd merely shrug it off.

James lived on the rue des Beaux-Arts, a block-long street lined with art galleries leading to the gates of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He'd put together several maid's rooms at the very top of his building to create his large apartment—the big living room, the modern eat-in kitchen, a dining room with a table for ten, and James' own bedroom. There, as he put it, he slept in his own well of Narcissus, surrounded by paintings of himself by Lucian Freud, Cocteau, John Craxton, Picasso, Dora Maar, Balthus, Cartier-Bresson—and nothing by Twombly.

James had lived for a while with Dora Maar in a big house Picasso had given her in the town of Menerbes in the Luberon, a hilly lavender-growing region in the south of France. The experience became the basis for his book
Picasso and Dora.
He hadn't been back there since the late 1940s. One day my partner Michael and I drove him to Menerbes, about an hour's ride from where we were staying in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The house sat atop one of the highest points in Menerbes and was huge and impressive and commanded the valley—and when we arrived it was full of workmen. They explained that a Texan had bought it, along with the mayor's house at the top of the road.

James, who was very sentimental, was tearful as we toured the shell of the old place. Then we walked up the road to the mayor's house. A willowy young Texan working for the lady of the house was just returning with a whole pack of little dogs he was reproaching for dawdling. I'd lived in Dallas as a child and I put on my best Texas accent and accosted him. He invited us in for a second, where much of the furniture was designed by Alberto Giacometti—not his brother Diego, who usually fashioned the chairs and tables with their little birds and animals—which of course delighted James, the biographer of Giacometti. He was delighted to see the furniture, as was I to see a large Caio Fonseca, a New York friend and the brother of Isabel Fonseca, the wife of Martin Amis.

When we began to point out the treasures one by one and exclaim over their importance, the young man seemed completely unaware of their provenance and said, “Okay, that's neat. But it was really the decorator who chose them.”

James shrugged airily, though I wondered if the lack of general culture he encountered in young people—what he'd spent his own youth acquiring—wounded and deeply irritated him.

The hundreds of evenings I spent with James Lord over the next two decades followed a ritual. As with every Paris apartment building, there was a regularly changing code to be punched in to open the solid, heavy, ornamented door from the street. In the inner courtyard, there was an intercom that James's butler answered. Then the slow-creaking elevator that had been created a century earlier to fit into the stairwell took you up, up, up.

The “correct” and traditionally liveried and white-gloved butler, a good-looking man in his forties, friendly but formal, took your coat and drink order. Michel was a butch gay man with closely cropped hair (a fashionably forbidding gay style the French call a
para
, since it was how French paratroopers kept their hair), and I joked with him once when I ran into him at a gay bar in the Marais. Even then Michel insisted on calling me “Monsieur White.”

Michel took care of Monsieur Lord's clothes on a daily basis and helped with the heavy housecleaning. He served drinks and James's favorite pretzels and (on rarer and rarer occasions) dinner. For a while there was a cook, whom I never met—a man who prepared three-star meals but was frustrated because Monsieur Lord so seldom entertained at home. James liked to invite his friends to rue des Beaux-Arts for drinks and pretzels, then take them to the Voltaire, on the quai Voltaire—a small jewel box of a wood-paneled restaurant so exclusive it did not welcome evaluations from the listings magazines or the Michelin or Gault-Millau guides, and where it was nearly impossible to make a reservation unless one was already a habitué. Looking up from your plate you suddenly realized that sitting at the next table was the deeply tanned designer Valentino with a retinue of beautifully dressed, unboisterous friends. There were just a handful of booths and tables in the main room, though in the summertime there was a sidewalk café looking out on the Louvre, across the Seine. James had been coming to the Voltaire for such a long time that on the menu there was a starter
named Oeuf James Lord, a hard-boiled egg in mayonnaise priced at a few francs. It had not always been called Oeuf James Lord. One day after the hard-boiled egg in mayonnaise had disappeared from the menu, James had complained so vociferously to the owner and management that the dish was reinstated and named for him.

Once I had what might be called a Proustian moment at the Voltaire. When I was a kid I'd seen an opera at Chicago's Lyric Opera,
Lord Byron's Love Letter
, by Raffaello de Banfield. It was based on a libretto by Tennessee Williams, who was inspired by Henry James's
The Aspern Papers,
except that Williams had set the opera not in Venice but in New Orleans. At age fifteen I was very moved by the music, which I now realize was sort of sub-Puccini. That evening at the Voltaire, James saluted a man his age eating alone, then when we were alone together at our table said, not too softly, which was never his style, “There's that old fraud, Raffaello Banfield.”

“What! He's one of my favorite composers.”

“Don't stare or he'll come over and we'll never get rid of him.
Quel raseur!
” (“What a bore!”)

“But I love
Lord Byron
. I even had an LP of it.”

“Sweetie, I'm sure he hired someone to write it for him.”

And yet how happy I would have been to meet one of my teenage idols.

James liked to make a spectacle of himself in restaurants, though seldom at the Voltaire.

Or maybe he couldn't control himself. In the beautiful hillside town of Les Baux-de-Provence, we had dinner many times at the Oustau de Baumanière, and it could have been such a special treat. The pleasantly shaded outdoor restaurant overlooked a gorgeous, irrigated valley sunk between dramatically steep walls of craggy reddish stone—and just beyond, the lowlands that swept down to the Camargue, with its wild white horses and pink flamingos.

Drunk, James became something of a control freak, as bullying with the servants as he was generous with the pours of expensive champagne for his guests. The sun was going down over the colorful lowlands and all James could worry about was keeping the champagne bucket next to
his chair, where he could reach it just at the moment he was ready to pour from it himself. After all, he was the host—and in his lapel he wore the red button of the Legion of Honor.

The wine steward, no doubt afraid for his job, refused to relinquish the duty, and there ensued an argument we believed might come to actual blows. The bucket stayed in the steward's territory off away from the table, the steward guarding it haughtily, until James could no longer take it and began shouting in English, “I
said
I want it
here
—and I mean
now!
”

With difficulty, the young man finally did what he was told. Maybe since dinner for six was costing thousands of euros, he was obliged to obey.

For a while James owned a summer house outside of Perpignan, not far from the Spanish border, until he could no longer take what he and his lover perceived as the cheeky service of the couple they'd hired to bring in homemade meals the wife had prepared each day. In fact, James would always complain about hired help, confiding, not too softly, that they were ripping him off and that it was better to cancel such arrangements and repair to a restaurant for the major meals.

Once in one of these restaurants, the rather grand young neophyte headwaiter arrived, as was the old custom, to the table with a number of other waiters each bearing a single silver dome concealing each guest's main course. As always, the domes were lifted at the same moment, and then the headwaiter proceeded to announce in detail each of our selections in an officious whisper-shout: “Monsieur has ordered the baked baby lamb in its coulis of charred artichokes and Roman honey, served with three purées of carrots, cauliflower, and spring peas.”

At once James cut him short and said, “You can skip it, sweetie.”

Dumbfounded, the headwaiter stood by steadfastly, unblinking.

In French, James assured him once again that the traditional ceremony wasn't necessary.

“And do you know why?” he went on, grinning. “It's because, and I'm going to astonish you [
je vous étonne
]—we ordered it!”

I laughed, but then I caught a waiter's gaze and rolled my eyes derisively, but he just stared through me: I was with the enemy. Yet I'd
always been conscious of the burdens of waiters and tried to anticipate and eliminate their problems. I overtipped and always had, ever since I was a child eating alone in the dining room of a hotel where I lived with my mother and my sister after my parents' divorce. I'd sign the bill, adding 20 or 25 percent to it.

In France in the provinces there was always the exhausted but handsome young waiter who'd be there until one or two in the morning, and who dreamed of only one thing: “mounting” to Paris one day and working in a still more temple-like restaurant.

Certainly there seemed something potentially sexual in the relations between diner and waiter in France. When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS he was always trying to fix me up—posthumously, as it were—with the cute busboy at the hotel, whispering, “There's one for you.”

Proportionately, fewer servers in America were men. If they existed they were old, and if they were young, they'd soon move on to a better, or at least less obviously servile, job. In France they were boys from the provinces in search of a position in a fine restaurant. After that, with some luck and help, they might someday start their own restaurant—or, failing that, a newsstand and tobacco store–cum–bar with a few tables. The luck they were counting on might flow from an older client.

“It's all like a Balzac novel,” Edgardo Cozarinsky once observed to me, making me think of my own Brice.

Although Edgardo was a Polish Jew who'd been born and brought up in Buenos Aires, he had lived in Paris for decades, working as a writer and filmmaker, and he took at least one meal a day at the Café Select on the boulevard du Montparnasse. One day when we were eating there, he pointed out a slender waiter with thick, curly hair and a disturbingly pale face. Edgardo had an unfailing sense of Paris life, and he set about, rather like Balzac, delineating the waiter's story.

“Now that boy, for instance, grew up on a farm in the Auvergne. His mother looked at him one day and decided he was too slight to make a farmer. She sent him off to her brother in Lyon, a coiffeur. The uncle, in turn, had a friend in Paris, at the Select, who was looking for a
busboy. Now, two years later, Jean-Pierre has a protector, a ‘Monsieur
très bien
,' and he's been installed in a cozy little studio apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement. He and his monsieur take little holidays during the year and spend the whole month of August in Cassis. No, it's just like a nineteenth-century novel,” Edgardo added.

And the fact that Edgardo looked exactly like the middle-aged Henry James (bald, portly, distinguished) only lent greater authority to his words. Recently he himself switched from boys to girls.

James Lord himself had an adopted “son,” a former hairdresser who took the Lord family name. I seldom saw Gilles Roy-Lord, who seemed ashamed of his sketchy English and didn't have much in common with James's friends. Gilles owned an apartment downstairs from James. James's cook would prepare Gilles's dinner in the kitchen in James's apartment and leave it on the kitchen table for him. We rarely ever saw Gilles.

He had a painting studio where he turned out pastiches of Matisse and Van Gogh. James, who condemned almost everything artistic his eyes landed on, nonetheless remained loyal to Gilles's daubs. James's Paris friends would keep up with the latest books and read the classics and knew everything about serious music and the history of cinema; Gilles was more like the stereotypical contemporary gay guy—addicted to Madonna and Grace Jones, fashion, interior decoration, and
The Golden Girls
. Gilles eventually turned James against his butler and his chef and the woman cook who replaced him and got them all fired. Gradually Gilles, I knew, was isolating James.

The concierge in our building often referred to my new partner Michael as my son (
“Votre fiston est déjà sorti”
); older gay men called their companions their “nephews.” One time I was with Bernard when he ran into a
tante
(queen) who said, “Do you know my nephew?”

“Yes,” Bernard replied, “he was my nephew last year.”

Bernard loved making cheeky
répliques
. When an older society woman said she didn't like fags (
“Je n'aime pas les pédés”
), Bernard replied,
“Quel dommage, Madame. C'est votre avenir!”
(“Too bad, Madame. It's your future”)—only queens hung out with older women as their “capons” or “walkers.”