Jack Holmes and His Friend (27 page)

I called Jack again and told him he shouldn’t mention to Pia that he’d told me she hadn’t gone to D.C.

“You’ve got it bad,” Jack drawled. “This is beginning to feel like high school.”

“You can say that,” I snapped, “because you don’t care about anyone that much.”

“Are you sure of that?” he asked, with a trace of asperity. Then he sighed and said, “Maybe you’re right.”

At last I got to sleep and had long dreams in which Pia or a near-Pia teased me, denied me sex while permitting me to touch her stomach. We were in an old-fashioned sleeping car with sooty dark green serge upholstery and soft blue night-lights beside the net hammock where I’d stowed my wool sweater and toiletries. When I awakened, I’d worked myself halfway out of my pajama bottoms and was pressing a hot, sticky erection into the bare mattress.

Back in New York I dropped into the office. The Lackawanna pictures had already been developed. I looked at the slides on
the light table with a magnifying glass. They were exactly what I wanted.

When I called Pia at three, I didn’t mention Washington at all, in case she was aware that I knew she hadn’t been there. She asked me if I could come by for a quick drink.

Her apartment was just a studio in a white brick high-rise on Third Avenue in the Seventies, but she’d obviously decorated it with care so it could be photographed by shelter magazines. She was a “stylist,” it turned out, someone who could locate and rent absolutely anything for professional photographers. She’d managed to hire an animal trainer and get two grown deer up slippery stairs to a photographer’s studio on Fifth Avenue across from the Forty-second Street Library. She’d assembled on a single school playground the thirty-two prizes to be awarded in a contest—everything from a Cuisinart to a Piper Cub. She’d had to have the plane’s wings removed to maneuver it on a truck bed through the streets.

Her apartment had a double bed that also served as a couch, piled high with thirty pillows in mink covers. There was a profusion of smelly, camera-ready cheeses and hothouse fruits artfully arranged on a round, blue-and-white Moroccan platter. There were two delicate white chairs with a blue Isis on the back folding a wing over her own standing body, arrayed in a gown with vertical pleats; the chairs looked as if they were remnants from a 1930s Cleopatra film. The sunlight created a wide, brilliant band hectic with dust motes.

I was put off by the mink, the cheese, the dust, and Pia’s own ripeness in the harem pants she was wearing. Her bottom was big and jiggly, and the strip of bare flesh between the pants and her beaded bodice looked clammy.

Or that’s what some other Will would have said, an imbecile invulnerable to her.

Did Jack look at women with the weary indifference of a eunuch? I couldn’t, since even if Pia came across as so much less distinguished than my wife and even if I had contempt for her, that scorn was linked to my desire. I’d come to respect Alex too much to desire her.

It hadn’t always been that way. When I’d first met Alex, I’d been passionate about her
and
revered her. I was a Charlottesville boy, spotty and naive, enflamed with dreams of glory. And she was a New York debutante, with her fragile beauty, her fine porcelain, her satin hostess gown, and a freezer full of crab claws. She had her adorable cross-eyed way of disputing everything I said, beating fragile fists against my chest while laughing at herself and insisting she was serious.

Pia and I sat on the couch-bed with its raw-silk spread, the lines of white silk alternating with beige wool stripes: the upscale bedouin look. We chattered about this and that, carefully avoiding any mention of Washington or Lackawanna, and sipped our cocktails. I couldn’t stop nibbling on the cold lemon peel, relishing its bitterness. We were treating with airy indifference the fact that I had to catch the six forty and it was already five twenty.

“It’s nice,” I said, “that you can keep your big window uncurtained and no one can look in, you’re so high up.”

“Another drink?” she asked, and I stood up with her and put our glasses down on the sill and took her in my arms. Until now the distance between us had been a form of suffering, not that holding her eased the pain completely. On the margins I noted that she and her mink pelts were vulgar, but between the margins the wide column of reality that I was perusing was compelling—compelling me to pull her closer, to kiss her with a need that was
irredeemable. Talking about how “nice” her uncurtained window was sounded to my ears like a madman’s little rhyme before he threw himself off a bridge. The air was crackling with the big banner of drama. My life had become dramatic.

We saw each other whenever we could snatch a free moment, usually an hour at lunchtime, though I preferred to spend the night with her after she’d elaborately stripped her bed of the mink pillows and stacked them in three neat piles on the parquet. I learned that she liked caviar, and I’d bring it over in little jars from Caviarteria on Madison Avenue, though she scolded me for being so extravagant. She was a rich girl used to frugality. Once she prepared the caviar in what she called the “Russian manner,” with small boiled potatoes, sour cream, and melted butter. She showed me how to make an incision in a peeled potato, then fill it with the caviar and other ingredients and eat it in a single bite. We ended up feeding these potatoes to each other.

I don’t think she worked much as a stylist, though like every rich lady in New York she felt obliged to have a job. Of course, she also had her charities. She thought my indifference to these was maddening, though she liked men too much to be a feminist about it. It seemed to be my fate to inspire mock feminist indignation in unbelievably sweet women.

Pia told me that her mother, Toni, was a debutante from Sacramento. I was surprised that the people out there bothered with “society”—I thought of the women as riding around in convertibles the whole time with scarves tied over their hair. At St. Moritz on a ski holiday Toni met an Italian
baronino
who’d rebelled against his family in Brescia and was working as a waiter in Barcelona. Some of his rich childhood friends, it turned out,
were paying for his St. Moritz sojourn. Later Pia wondered if his friends hadn’t been staking him on a bet that he’d meet someone precisely like Toni.

Toni and Alessandro were very happy for a while with her money and his hand-kissing charm. She’d been brought up in a very Protestant way, taught to keep her expenses down, live modestly, and contribute most of her income to disease-related causes, but Sandro, as a Catholic, felt no such scruples. He knew about pleasure and how to secure it for himself and confer it on Toni and several other women.

“So you see,” Pia said, “I have a double heritage. The famous American puritanism and the voluptuousness of Italy. It’s all rather fascinating, don’t you think?”

I leaned over her to kiss her lips. “I’m afraid not much of the puritanism rubbed off.”

Months went by like that—the whole summer and part of the fall.

I didn’t know if Alex suspected. Luckily we’d had sex only rarely during the preceding two years, so in all likelihood she wouldn’t notice any diminished desire on my part. What increased was my tenderness and gratitude toward her. I pretended to myself that she did know about my affair with Pia and that she countenanced it because it brought me pleasure. In a cockeyed way I thought of the excitement and unpredictability of my affair with Pia—its passion and the moodiness it inspired—as compensation for the novels I wasn’t writing, a rough transcript of the feelings I might have summoned up as a solitary creator before the empty page.

Pia and I couldn’t go out to restaurants often for fear of being seen, though I’d discovered a disgusting Indian place upstairs on Forty-ninth Street where no one we knew would dare to
eat. We drank sweet pomegranate cocktails and ate crushed-kitty curries and oily puri and desserts of coiled doggie-do pastry dissolving in clouded honey. Usually we had the place to ourselves, and we’d recline on pillows and watch a cockroach investigate the corner of a dusty windowsill.

Slowly I learned bits and pieces about her life. She was older than me, drifting about somewhere in her mid-thirties. She’d studied international relations in D.C. (I don’t think she ever told me the name of the school). I thought she’d told us she’d gone to Smith. Lying always surprised me but I didn’t much care. She praised American campus life and hands-on teaching and preferred that to the big-city impersonality of European universities.

She said, “I tried the Sorbonne and La Sapienza in Rome, both laughable.”

She seemed ashamed to admit it, but her mother had ended up buying off Alessandro.

“He pretended that as a Catholic he had scruples about divorce. He even has a genuine saint in his family, a 1920s doctor who saved the life of a Jewish child in Liverpool—one of his miracles—and instantly baptized him, which of course enraged the child’s parents. Maybe he’s just a Blessed. And we have another Blessed, Lucia Crocifissa—I love these names, aren’t they delicious?”

So much conspicuous piety in his bloodlines, I gathered, made it difficult for Sandro to accept the sin and humiliation of divorce for less than two million dollars, a Maserati, and a modern villa near Borgo San Sepolcro.

“A scoundrel,” I said, but Pia looked hurt and tears sprang to her eyes.

“I didn’t tell you all that so that you could mock my father,” she said.

“What am I supposed to say?” I asked in consternation. “Probably nothing, huh?”

“It’s just that my father is a dear poetic man, a Don Juan, perhaps—but then, we of all people shouldn’t be too quick to condemn him. Now he lives with a thoroughly elegant Italian mistress, a countess with a whole floor of a Renaissance palace on the most beautiful street in Europe, Via Garibaldi in Genoa. It’s like the Grand Canal but straightened out and without the water. He’s such a snob, Sandro, that he loves his countess and their Luca Giordano paintings and their two maids tiptoeing around and even the three corgis.”

“Well, in that case,” I said, as if I’d just been enlightened.

Her mother had a house in the South of France, in Menton, but she seemed to know almost no one there and spent most of her time in San Francisco, where she was still “Baronessa Toni.” She attended the opera and was active in a charity devoted to rape victims all over the world. Pia admired her mother but found her frugality a bit ridiculous.

“She’s the sort of woman who might serve ten lamb chops to ten people with a teaspoon each of commercial mint jelly, and this from a woman who’s eaten at the best tables in Italy and France.”

“But what about you?” I asked. “You interest me more than they do.”

“I do?” she asked, and she blushed for the first and only time I’d ever observed. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

“Who was your first lover?”

I don’t think that was the sort of question she’d had in mind, but she said, “It was a lifeguard at Laguna. I don’t know who we were visiting down there. Nor can I imagine how I escaped everyone’s supervision to run off with him.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen. He must have been seventeen. He had a white stripe painted down his nose and a superbly tanned hairless body, a black Speedo with a white-and-red cross on the side, and—well, his attraction to me was obvious. Let’s say he filled out his Speedo nicely.”

She kissed me as if I might be jealous, whereas I was aroused, filling out my own boxer shorts more than adequately.

“Now that I think of it,” she said, “he must have been kind of pervy, going after a girl so young. I still had braces on my teeth and no breasts.”

“Where did he take you?”

“There was some sort of clubhouse. He asked me if I’d put lotion on his back. He was afraid of burning. I just shrugged and kept looking down. As I followed him, I thought everyone must know where I was going and why.”

“He probably saw you staring at him on the beach.”

“Possibly. I was trying to get rid of my virginity as if it were an annoying little brother. No one wanted me as long as it was tagging along. But the lifeguard asked me if I was a virgin, and when I made a sound of vexation and squeaked, ‘Yeah, squeak-squeak’ he said, ‘Good.’ He told me he liked to rack up cherries. ‘And where do you put them,’ I asked, and he swatted me on the butt with his sign-out sheet and said, ‘Brat!’”

“Did it hurt?”

“Who’s the perv now?” she asked. “Yes. He was efficient and had a washcloth for the blood, and he said, ‘Now you’ll remember me for the rest of your life,’ and I have. I even remember his name. A ridiculous one: Forrest Green.”

I found out she’d been married at twenty to a rich boy. She
knew from her mother’s example to avoid fortune hunters, but she’d not been warned against dullards.

“He bored me with his golfing and Young Republicans, and he never liked to hear about our family rape charity, as if it were in bad taste.”

“How long did that last?”

“Three years but the last two out of inertia. No children. I’m not sure I can have children.”

I found this news reassuring, though I was careful to look sympathetic.

“And after that?” I was staring into her swimming, upside-down eyes.

“I met a younger man. I was staying with friends in Milan, and they said they had an unexpected guest and would I mind sharing a room with him—there were two small beds. He was so beautiful, ten years younger than I, tall and blond, from Bergamo. No, nothing interesting. Office work. He fell in love with me, and within a week he wanted to marry me. I said he should come live with me, in Sardinia for a year, and if he still wanted to marry me at the end of twelve months, I’d consider it.”

“Did he and did you?”

“It was a sacrifice for him to leave his mother and his clerical job—I know that sounds funny—but he was happy in Sardinia. I’d bought a little house by the sea. He loved swimming, and we had a cat and a dog, and I cooked for him. He was quite the homebody. When I thought of a twenty-two-year-old lover, I thought, Oh dear, drugs and bad girls and discos and dark moods. But no, he just wanted to play with the dog, swim, do some of his gardening, and spend the whole morning between my breasts.”