Her large blue eyes blazed with pride and muted promise as she unbuttoned her suede blouse. She unhooked her bra, slipped it down from her shoulders, dropped her skirt. There she stood, slim hips, muscled thighs, sugarloaf breasts, avid shining eyes. My hands ran around her solid, conical breasts, fingered her small, agile nipples.
I want you," she sighed.
I gave her body a long, loving look and slowly took off my belt, looping it. "Lie down," I commanded.
She looked at me with a mocking smile. "You wouldn't. You wouldn't dare. You're too chicken...."
CHAPTER ONE
In the stillness of the night I took her. More properly, she took me-let us give anatomy its just due. Her eloquent breasts rose to speak of pneumatic bliss. Her long thighs twitched in reflex. "You have missed me," she said.
My nether part thrust hard, hopefully reestablishing a lover's franchise. I share the male illusion that a lover's claims are valid only if adequately staked.
"Oh my!" she said.
"But all this while you have had John." I knew that not long back young John had been thrusting as I now thrust, the same long thighs had twitched as now they twitched. And even to him she had probably said, "Oh my!"
"We do not count nephews, do we?" Amy was eminently sly, a past mistress in the gentle art of titillation. And in a brief flash of moonlight I saw the dimpling of her cheeks.
"Or husbands?"
"Or husbands." She emphasized her unconcern with a momentary flirtatious constriction of her vagina.
"He is young," I said, thrusting once more, and sensing in myself the first twinge of geriatric rage. Say what we will, we age. And time sometimes takes from us the spurting, trigger-happy displays that some women treasure.
"Clean-cut," she added in her teasing way. His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure. At least relatively and recently pure. "And ever so grateful."
I did not like the notion of a rippling-muscled young man riding herd on Amy's ramparts. Nor did I cherish the notion of competing with maladroit youth.
Amy, who is more philosophical in such matters, heaved and sighed with generous sweetness, made me feel, with cosmic generosity, that we alone had discovered the spell and mysticism of illicit love.
We were now in Charleston, I might add, in the great bedroom of our borrowed house on East Battery. The huge French doors opened on the harbor. In the distance, could I see, was Fort Sumter. And skirling in the dark were the herring gulls, the laughing gulls. And somewhere in the far reaches, a lone bell buoy tolled.
I had been away too long. Conscience bothered me. I had been in Italy with Anna Ricci, the Italian film industry's latest find-a young blond clone of the young Sophia Loren.
"Business," Amy had said, accepting the fact. "Monkey business."
It had been agreed (Amy concurring) that I was to entice Anna Ricci to act in a new picture that I would write, and which our corporate company, Cholmondeley Enterprises, would produce. And in this, Amy, now a star in her own right, would also feature ("Exquisite and double-naked," as Lady Cholmondeley put it).
In my kind of work, business is seldom separated from pleasure. The stories write themselves. And such, I tell myself, is the nature of art. Art is a wild, untutored thing.
Amy, when whim moved her, had her moments of resentment. She had, as well, her own secret urges.
I kissed now her marmoreal breasts, caressed the long, tapering thighs, tongued tenderly the hardened nipples.
"You have missed me," she said, making capital of the perfectly obvious.
A deft twitching of her loins told me, in body language, that my ardor was not unnoticed.
Nor was Amy anymore the shy beauty I had once known. All juices were now a flow, all sluice gates open.
Connoisseurs of loving, I reminded myself, must sometimes engineer separations.
I heard the chimes of St. Michael's sound the quarter hour. I heard her deep breathing.
"Remember?" she asked. "Remember the first time you kissed my tattoo?" She referred to the fleur-de-lis tattooed on the left cheek of her aristocratic bottom.
In reply I ran my tongue around a nipple.
"You kissed it." There was a smile in her throaty voice. "That ... then tout le reste."
I withdrew slightly, then slowly eased my extension back into her. I brought my lips back to hers. "And John?"
"John what?"
My erection throbbed, took on a life of its own. "The tattoo?"
She laughed suddenly, in a gay, teasing, birdsong way. "Of course he kissed the tattoo. Et tout le reste. That's what nephews are made for. Aren't they?"
About nephews I did not, of course, know. It occurred to me, however, that it might be rewarding to have such a niece-a loving, nimble-tongued girl structured, say, along the lines of Brooke Shields.
It was then that my hungry, single-minded penis took over. It gloried in its independence and single-mindedness. It trembled, shivered, communicated its yearnings in warm, viscid spurts.
Amy seemed pleased. She responded with a peristaltic pulsing of secret sphincters, an ultimate heave, a measured sigh. Then she said, "For a man who can no longer hold back, it seems to me you ask an awful lot of questions."
It was then that Cloris stirred.
Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley, had been asleep on the other side of Amy in the massive four-poster the three of us shared. She turned to face us, her blond hair fragrant in the dark.
"If you two lovebirds would shut up," she said, "I might have an unmentionable dream."
"Excuse me," Amy said to me. Turning her back to me, she pressed her thigh between Cloris', caressed Cloris' breasts, covered her lips with kisses.
"My God you're wet," Cloris said in a voice that implied more admiration than complaint.
"Oh my!" said Amy.
Cloris was as ever commanding, demanding; Amy, gracious, insatiable. In time there was a quivering of soft flesh against mine, and I heard secret words with it that would be scarcely tactful of me to repeat.
The next morning we had breakfast on the upstairs piazza, overlooking the harbor. And we were serenaded by the garden's resident mockingbird.
Amy had prepared one of her special Charleston breakfasts: grapefruit, hominy, scrambled eggs, broiled shad roe, com muffins. And she moved about rapturously, gracefully, in a scarcely closed black lace negligee, under which she wore ... nothing.
"Such a gracious house," Cloris said. And, looking out to sea, "What a view!" She wore, with a certain brash nonchalance, only the tops of her pajamas, and her bronze athletic legs sparkled in the morning sun.
The house, it should be explained, belonged to Larrine Lamboll, who was now in Ischia. And this was the house in which Amy, to quote from her diary, had first been "brought out." Larrine, who had a sharp eye for cryptic pleasures, had seen to that.
Amy leaned over the table to pour coffee in Cloris' cup. Her negligee opened. "I came too much last night," she said.
Cloris, reaching, opened the negligee. Amy's pale white breasts swung from side to side with superb nonchalance. "I came too much last night," she said.
"Too much," said Cloris, "is never too much."
I leaned over, touched and kissed each breast, watched while each nipple rose. Then I mentioned my Lady Hamilton idea.
Some backtracking is in order.
While in Europe, with Anna, I had dreamed up an ideal screenplay to feature Amy ... and the classic glories of Amy's body. We would dramatize, in spectacular undress, the story of Emma Hamilton's life-her relations with Lord Hamilton, the wealthy connoisseur of excellencies, then British ambassador to the court at Naples. The story, too, of the aging Lord Hamilton's generosity in sharing Emma with the dashing Lord Nelson.
The story had a modem twist. Moreover, it was an ideal vehicle for Amy. Amy as Emma could make a place for herself in cinema history.
"We could shoot on location," I said, "in Naples and on Capri."
Cloris smiled. "I like the idea. But I think I have a better idea."
"What?"
She looked caressingly at Amy's d'collet', slithered her tongue around her lips. "Let's save Amy."
"For what?"
"Oh, many things. Other parts ... even bigger. Other places. And lots and lots of civilized fucking."
Amy looked at me, sighed with a certain pretense of sadness. "I don't think I could ever come again."
I put butter and salt in my hominy, stirred in the eggs and shad roe.
"For a killing, today," Cloris went on, "we need enormous money. Millions."
"So?"
"I know how we can get the money."
"How?"
"Amy won't like this. You've got to screw Jill Philbrick." She explained. This was the age of anxiety, inflation, and organized corruption. We could ride herd on all three.
"We make the picture here ... and we make it with Jill Philbrick."
Jill was the wife of John C. Calhoun Philbrick, our not-long-back former Ambassador to Upper Volta. Philbrick, unfortunately, had been accused of heavy dealings in Colombian marijuana-importing much of it, with diplomatic immunity, by way of Africa. Jill, meanwhile, startled the staid Low Country by appearing, without benefit of beads, on the gatefold of Matinee, "the thinking man's magazine."
"We would have a self-made hit," Cloris said. Philbrick was litigious. Divorced or not, he would sue. Moreover, he was the chief backer, and by the same token, chief beneficiary of the Clean Heart Conference of Americans Against Sin, an organization dedicated to dedication. ("Send money, Dear Hearts, to keep this noteworthy, tax-deductible cause on the clean air of this great country. And let us not forget, Dear Hearts, the starving children of Chad.") "Good," said Amy, dimpling her cheeks. "I need a rest."
"And your job, my love...." Cloris pressed a finger into the hollow of my knee, the left knee. "Your job is to meet, captivate, seduce, recruit, and write one-syllable words for dear Jill."
"Jill, Jill ran up the hill," Amy chanted, pressing a hard Finger into the hollow of the other knee. "Inspire but not touch."
Jealousy became her.
"Touch he must." Cloris said this with jaundiced realism, a weary lilt in her voice. She knew well my weakness, that I have never anything of my own to write, that my inspiration, such as it is, is acquired by osmosis, the gift of a muse with a wet thigh. My scenarios have been little more than naked accounts of beauties shared. And she, a subtle mistress of intrigue, had often managed to engage me, in spite of myself, in low deeds of daring-do.
"More coffee," Amy announced, refilling my cup. "More coffee," I said.
"Besides...." Cloris turned to Amy.
"Besides what?"
"Bill's always better for you after he has been with another girl."
"Really?" Amy, I was happy to note, could still blush. "And for you?"
"I've never been the possessive type. I sent him to you ... remember? On loan."
"And now you're sorry."
"That's my point. Bread upon the waters."
"Meaning?"
Cloris stopped to light a cigarette. "Not only did I not lose Bill ... I got you. And you excite me terribly. You know that."
"Bill has written enough about it, hasn't he? And don't you think it's rather poor taste for a man to tell the world the exact way a girl he makes love to makes love to another girl?"
"Your vagina will go down in history ... like the crack in the Liberty Bell."
Amy looked at me and smiled. "More coffee?"
"Besides...."
"Besides what?"
"For a girl who has been screwing the hell out of her young nephew...."
Again Amy blushed. "I'm very fond of John. Bill knows that."
She looked at me.
I nodded.
"Bill is understanding. I'm not like that. Sorry, but that's the way I am."
"You're not like what?"
"Understanding. I can make love to you ... make love to Bill...."
"And John?"
"John is different."
"You mean his tallywhacker is bigger than Bill's. And comes more quickly. And you just love to get it up."
"Please!"
"You're famous now! A movie star. The whole world has seen you naked."
Amy laughed. "And leered at my ass."
"A tattoo on the left cheek makes the whole world kin."
"And so?"
"And so you can talk up. Say what you mean. There's no great shakes to fucking a nephew. Some perfumed pillows ... a little sweet talk ... and there he is inside you."
Amy reached for Cloris' cigarette, took it from Cloris' hand, put it to her own lips, inhaled deeply. Then she blew a stream of smoke toward me. "You want me to talk this way, don't you? Get totally naked?"
"Yes," I said.
"Amy tells all, gives all."
"I like you that way. Totally naked."
"Nothing hidden."
"Nothing hidden."
Dimples appeared in Amy's cheeks. "You're impossible."
"He is," Cloris conceded for me.
Amy ran her hand up my thigh. "You have a hard-on."
"What do you expect?" Cloris asked.
"A hard-on," Amy said.
"I like a man who has a hard-on at breakfast."
"So do I," Amy said, almost self-consciously, I thought, deepening her dimples.
"Shows character," Cloris said.
"I like character in a man. Character and imagination." The bell buoy in the harbor tinkled.
Amy inhaled again the smoke from Cloris' cigarette, blew the smoke toward me. "Bill," she said.
"Yes."
"If I were not so shy ... so inhibited ... I'd ask you to fuck me."
"Why don't you?" I said.
"I wouldn't dare."
With that she rose, stood facing me. Then she slipped off her negligee. Her fine breasts stood out, nipples reddened and alert. In statuesque bareness she looked down on the high sea wall where tourists, with their discount Japanese cameras, were documenting their visit to the city.
"Behold!" she said to the world at large. "I have been overcome."
An hour later, when, on the great four-poster Charleston bed, I extricated myself from the hold of her nimble golden knees, Cloris said, "What a lovely, municipal morning!"
"Spanking," said Amy, reaching for a Kleenex.
Later I showered, washing from my skin, not without a feeling of poetic injustice, the intermixed sweetness of Amy and Cloris.
Then I sat down to work.
The gesture, I discovered, was more ceremonial than functional. I had nothing whatever to write. (I could, of course, have detailed the pleasures of the past night; but all such was more confessional than chronicle; autobiography, not record.) A writer must write; but he must, according to my canon, be removed, distant, objective, critical. I cite Clickhov. Only the naive, the maudlin, write about themselves.
I wrote and published books, I concluded, only because I liked the life of a writer. I was addicted to the fringe benefits: the unhurried hours, the dolce far niente, the enjoyment of Amy, the pleasures of Cloris, passing seductions and rose-colored quests. Always, however, there was the day of reckoning-the day of the record, the squaring of my psychic accounts. It was then that I had to tell my assigned story, interpret for a casual reader the inward lives and fine edged feelings of persons I in no way understood.
Haruspicy should have been my profession. Voyeurism, perhaps, if the deeds of a committed voyeur have ever a professional appeal. But not writing.
I was in the card room, the small room adjoining the drawing room. Here the dandies of Charleston's yesteryear, after a hard day at the slave mart, would relax over bourbon or port, play a hand or so of whist.
And here I stared at my typewriter.
The French doors opened to a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the harbor. Outside, in the garden and along the margins of the High Battery, the dogwood was in bloom, the white tea olive, sensuous and musky. The sea breeze, pungent with salt and a suggestion of oysters, swayed the curtains.
I tried to picture Lady Hamilton in this house, or a house much like this, bordering a harbor. I tried to picture Amy as Lady Hamilton, standing by a window, sad, restless, expectant. I tried to think of myself alternately as Nelson and Lord Hamilton, and asked myself, in either case, what I might think, what I might do, as our combined destinies unfolded.
Meanwhile there was much laughter in the next room. Amy and Cloris were enjoying each other-as always, stirring, entertaining, complementing and titillating each other. I was, in a sense, as superfluous as the widower spider.
"Really? Not really?" Amy's voice came to me with the sweetness of birdsong.
"Really."
"And now...."
"And now." Her voice sounded like the tinkling of a little bell. "And now il fautfaire pipi."
After much pleasure, Amy likes to lace her talk with little gillyflowers of French.
Around noon I had a visit from Vulpe, the ubiquitous, wily, flattened-nosed Vulpe, who tended to turn up unexpectedly, inexplicably, at most indelicate moments. ("I can open any door, signore. I can a-go everywhere.")
The girls had gone shopping, leaving me to my so-called work and acute postorgasmic emptiness. ("The cause is so obvious," an analyst once informed me. "Fucking.
And the cure? A glass of water. Not before. Not after. Instead!")
"Alio, signore," he called, climbing the spiral stairs. He was wearing, as always, his battered fedora-looking, as always, as if he had just come, running, from a mafioso funeral.
At the second-floor landing he stopped, breathless, tugged at the brim of his hat, then extended his hand to be shaken. His hand was limp. The shake was without pressure. But marking it was an almost imperceptible fraternal wiggle of his little finger.
"I come-a," he said, with his murky Sicilian accent, "to bring not-a peace, but a sword. Who know?"
Vulpe had been in Madrid the last time I saw him. Nor had I reason to be ungrateful to him. He had given me then a little Bulgarian pen which fired invisible, almost imperceptible sleep-inducing pellets. And with this, with a flourish worthy of James Bond, I had disposed of Anna Ricci's ever-present husband, overridden Anna's ever-proclaimed faithfulness. ("I'm a one-woman's woman. No?")
"Lord Cholmondeley sends you his greetings, signore."
"Thanks." I would tell Lady Cholmondeley.
"Also Agent Ninety-six."
"Ah." I smiled a pleasant, inward smile. Much had I learned from the extraordinary Melissa Panter-Downes. And much yet would I learn.
Vulpe, I should explain, was an international operator wily enough, wealthy enough, active enough, to be a peer of the 1980's multinational realm. He was sometimes agent, ambassador, bodyguard, for Lord Cholmondeley, Cloris, Melissa-sometimes me. He was most helpful to me in the rescue of the Countess of Liechtenstein; and I had repaid him, I am sorry to say, by shooting him in the foot. ("That's not-a good, signore. I'm-a on your side!")
Yet Vulpe was also his own man, international exporter, importer, a dealer in smiles and suspense. He was a factotum. Whatever you wanted, a girl, a boy, a karate chop properly placed, he could, would, get it for you, place it for you, instanter. ("You would love my daughter, signore. So tender! So lovely! Cooks good ... and still a virgin. Ha! Ha!") Lately he had turned to evangelism, which he believed much more profitable than oil, heroin, or the now-defunct white-slave dealings. ("Never underrate de power of amateur competition.")
I despised the man. Yet, as I implied, he had done me many services in times past. And since he was an enthusiastic admirer of my writing, and constantly quoted me, I must confess that, from time to time, I found in him a certain undeniable charm.
"You know Signor Shubrick?"
"Shubrick?" I knew no Shubrick. There was Philbrick, of course. Philbrick from Upper Volta, husband of the spectacular Jill. "Philbrick?"
"Philbrick, Shubrick. Eeny-meeny."
"What about Philbrick?"
"You want to make a lot of money fast?"
"Not particularly."
"You should think about money, signore. I mean it." He tugged at his fedora-a gesture that indicated the onrush of deep thought. "You need-a me like an agent. No?"
"No."
"You no hear me preach last night ... on TV?"
"No."
"Hallelujah Network. We're a-goin' public next month. Want to buy in on the ground floor?"
I appreciated his concern, I told him, but I would bypass the ground floor.
"Everything's tax-free," he informed me. "Even your expense account. Anytime. Take your girl to Atlantic City, Myrtle Beach, Salt Lake City. Charge it to the Lord."
"Thank you," I said.
"You wanna buy some Quaaludes?"
I took him to the little room in which I was deploring the fact that I had nothing whatever to write.
"Sit down."
He dropped deadweight into an overstuffed armchair, tugged again at his hat. "Last night I gave just-a de right signal."
"What kind of signal?"
"I said, 'Brethren and sistern, unite. We must-a rid de world of pornography.' You know what dat means?"
A moral crusade, I suggested.
"Oh, no." He opened his mouth to show me his bright spread of pointed teeth. " 'Pornography' means de Com-bahee River. Means land de cocaine on a little island up de Combahee. Trucks will be waiting."
"Praise the Lord," I said. I had slumped down in my swivel chair behind the typewriter.
"Now, take 'obscenity.' Obscenity means North Santee. Get the stuff there. Everything's hunky-ducky."
"Clever."
"All this in English, mind-a you, signore. English is my second sight. In italiano is nutting."
I nodded. English is not an easy tongue, even for me. "And 'smut'? Smut is not a nice name, signore. Fuliggine, no? But in code it mean, 'Get you ass up the North Edisto, subito. Much money, signore. Much. Much." Again I nodded. Vulpe had no head for philosophical discourse.
"Someday you must write my story, signore. The things I could tell you! Oo ... ee!"
"Adventure," I said, "is not my bag."
"What you write? You write about Signora Dellmore, huh? De long-a, long-a legs? And la Donna Cholmondeley? Ain't no money there. You gotta get into big time, signore. Believe me! And I think of you like-a my genero-my son-in-law."
"Good."
"Si. Now, look-a, signore. I got now to keep out of sight. I am-what you say?-on de sheep?"
"Lam."
"So right. On de lamb. Baa! Baa!" He wrinkled his drooping nose.
"You want to drink?" In Charleston the offer of a drink is required if any conversation shows signs of longevity.
"Grazie, no. Never on duty."
I got up, mixed myself a Bloody Mary. (It is part of Cloris' housekeeping to see that there is a properly stocked bar in every room used for work, entertainment, or passing seductions.)
A ship in the harbor sounded a deep, melancholy blast of its horn.
"A Stiarchos ship," Vulpe announced. "From Abu Dabu. Sheikh Hassam's on board."
"Why?"
"You did not like being an agent, signore. I understood. Is not in your cut."
What, I asked him, was he trying to tell me? It is true that my role as "Agent 69" had scarcely been to my liking. I saw, still see, no charm in international intrigue, the interplay of agents and counteragents, spies and double spies. All such is the checkered realm of James Bond, the sport of those whose only other interests might be football, hymn singing, and rock 'n' roll. There are those of us who find joy in headier things. Yet "agenting" had not, for me, been altogether without compensations. It had enabled me once more to enlace myself with the intrepid Countess of Lieclistenstein. It had introduced me to the pleasures and connivances of Melissa. And, thanks to Vulpe, Melissa, and the "poisoned pen," it had given me a kind of success of esteem with Anna Ricci. All in all, I would say, my role had been a trade-off. I had committed myself to a great deal of nonsense, a great deal of discomfort. In return I had the pleasure of exploring the psyches and sensitive places of some extraordinary women; and, as a by-product, written several books, several screenplays for successful motion pictures. Little cause had I to complain.
"Nobody must know I am here, signore. I come to you as a man I can trust."
"Indeed."
"Here, take this." He put a small gold-plated revolver next to my typewriter. The gun was familiar. He had given me this gun once before-this gun, or one exactly like it. With it, despite good intentions, I had winged him.
"I'm a lousy shot. Still a lousy shot."
"Don't make no matter, signore. It's just for show-like an American Legion button. And remember, we gotta fight gun control-along with pornography, indecency, Satan, and sin. That sort of thing. If you ever tune in my show and hear me say, 'It's the atheists and humanists who a-want to take our guns away,' you'll know that means, 'Don't land nuttin' tonight.' "
"Praise the Lord," I said.
"I gotta get word to Shubrick."
"Philbrick."
"You know Philbrick?"
"No."
"Pee Wee. Shubrick, Philbrick-who care? You got to know Pee Wee."
"Why?"
"There's millions there, signore. Millions. Anything I can't get, he can."
"How?"
"Don't ask, signore. If you got to ask, you not ever understand. You should spend more time in Sicily, my fran. And my daughter's still there, remember. Thinks a lot of you, signore. And cooks? Mamma mia!"
"Why do you need me to ... to what? Carry some news to Philbrick?"
"I got to keep under cover, man. Too many people know me. I'm a reverend, now. Also a swami. Got to keep my image. Holy men don't mess around wit' Pee Wee. Except for money, of course. Money drives the money changers from-the temple. Puts them back in the boardroom where they belong."
He explained to me something I had occasion to comment on elsewhere, that the only business of business is business; that as business goes, so goes the spirit; that if Buddha were to be born again, he would be in international conglomerates. "All is illusion," he said. "Even sin. But there is-a more money in the illusion that-a sin is sinful. If you want-a make big money, you got to have a product."
"Philbrick. What about Philbrick?"
"Do this for me, signore."
"Do what?"
"Tell him the sheikh's here. Eighty-two kilos are here. And it's all at Ali Baba's on the Combahee. He'll get it. He's no dope."
I explained to him that I did not know Philbrick, had never set eyes on Philbrick, would not recognize his face if his head were brought to me on a platter.
Vulpe put on show his double row of serrated teeth. "Signorina Panter-Downes asked me to ask you help. Sends-a you her love. Says this is still the same old story."
CHAPTER TWO
We drove that afternoon to Berkeley Hall, Amy, Cloris, and I. Both girls were fragrant with Givenchy. Amy wore a black blouse with Grand Canyon cleavage, sandals, leather trousers. Cloris wore white short shorts and a triumphant smile.
We drove through the tunnels of oaks which form the old Summerville road. Amy sat between us, my hand on her left knee, Cloris' on her right.
"No fucking this afternoon," Amy said.
"No fucking," I said, divorcing words from thought. Whatever would be, would be. With Amy, you never knew.
Eventually I turned Cloris' Jaguar into the long line of live oaks that led to the lawn in front of Miss Wescott's plantation house-a Palladian villa whose entrance was marked by a double staircase.
"Perhaps a little foreplay," Amy said as I stopped the car. A peacock strutted in front of the car, spreading his feathers.
I got out of the car, went around to the right door, opened it for Cloris, pulled her up from the low seat.
"How very kind," Cloris said.
I reached in for Amy. "I'm bushed," she announced.
Cloris, hips swinging, preceded me on the left staircase. Amy, singing to herself, ran up the right.
Miss Wescott met us at the door.
"This is Beauregard Benton," Cloris said, introducing me.
"Bill." Miss Wescott winked, held out her hand. "I have read you."
It is difficult not to like any woman who, on first meeting, winks and says, "I have read you."
"Bill," said Amy, kissing Miss Wescott on the lips, "is my biographer. He has made me infamous."
"So many write nowadays," I said. "But so few read."
What impressed me about Miss Wescott was her Lucrezia Borgia look, imperious and demanding. Her black hair, pomaded, was pulled back from her forehead. Her dark eyes were framed with shadow, like the eyes in the paintings of Egyptian princesses. I had the feeling that if she invited me alone for supper, I would sup at my own risk.
Cloris said something or other about a Beast with Three Backs.
Miss Wescott patted possessively Amy's left buttock, then led us to the drawing room.
Once again I found myself in this splendid room, a double cube, not a great deal different from the massive drawing room at Ramspaugh, the Cholmondeley country place. Miss Wescott had been in Europe the season past, when in this very room we had shot scenes featuring the nude Anna Ricci. ("Must I take off everything? Really everything?")
I then heard my name called, my pompous name, "Beauregard."
I turned.
Pushing his way through a grove of elevated highball glasses was a man in sandals and a white toga. His long blond hair cascaded to his shoulders, intertwining in places with the long blond hairs of his beard. "Vanderhoff," he said, politely recalling himself to my memory. "The guru."
"The guru."
"The guru. You remember me?" He held out a limp white hand.
The remote past came back to me. Dalton Vanderhoff had once been professor of psychology at some Ivy League college. He had then discovered the joys and profits of the psychedelic gospel, had come to Charleston to visit his cousin Larrine, and become-in passing-the erstwhile lover of Isabelle Wescott. I had met him at Larrine's. ("Behold, I preach the Gospel of Exhaustion.")
"I just saw Amy."
"Indeed." I shook, with savage pressure, his waiting, wan hand.
"More radiant, dreamy, fuckable than ever."
"Special. Very special."
"Special, special," he said. And I recalled, with more resentment than grace, that he had been (according to John's equally resentful memoir) a concerned spectator when Amy had first been whipped. And the ceremony had properly been a consequence of his urging, a hint that the ultimate therapy was the awakening of the sleeper and the quickening of the dead.
Amy, the great Amy, whipped!
"I have written about her."
"I know."
"You know?"
"I congratulate you. I have read you. A workman-like job, I must say, although ... you must forgive me...." Vanderhoff rolled a watery eye. "A trifle anatomical." The record, I said, should be complete. It should distinguish Amy from all other women-with whom she might be carelessly identified.
"Isabelle has a thing for Amy," he said. "Always will have."
"I know."
"Terribly jealous of both you and Cloris. Thinks you are plucking the flowers she nourished."
"A fine job she did. Subtle. Knowing. I should be grateful."
"Someday you should write about her. Who else, at Vassar, could have got another girl pregnant?" He spoke glowingly about the uses and abuses of the Daisy Chain ("The tie that binds but never chafes").
"And you?"
"What am I doing?"
"It's been a long time."
"Living on Isabelle, as usual ... but with a twist."
"Meaning?"
"A new business. No more 'inner-space' stuff. That's old hat. Old hat. Thing today is the retail God business. Biggest goddamned thing since instant sex ... and instant sex doesn't pay." Sex, he went on to explain, is now given away-the way missionaries once gave away Bibles. "God-now, there's where the money is. Big money, dude. Big money. The mob is already there ... in the sheep fold."
I, fresh from the harangues of Vulpe, nodded.
"The underworld is there, dude, the underworld! The Scippione gang in Vegas, the Gambirini mob in Jersey City, the Colazioni mob in Miami ... Tony Sibioni in the South Bronx." He tugged at a drooping eyelid. "Odd, is it not ... the underworld selling the Other World?"
The world, I agreed, is a fiction made up of contradiction. "I have founded a new sect."
I nodded.
"POM. Postorgasm monasticism. Sex isn't everything-at least after you've had it. Tolstoy's invention: when you're all fucked out, give it up. Dialectical immaterialism."
"Now, about Isabelle? You were about to tell me...."
"It's rough. Isabelle's still hung up on Amy. Is longing once again to whip that whipped-cream ass. But, of course, Amy no longer will let her. She's a big star now. And she has you and Cloris. The best of asses, I daresay, peregrinate, experiment, find new joys. Everything changes. No one can whip twice the very same flesh. Tattoo, yes. But that's another story."
"Hung up?" The phrase had so many possible meanings. "A compulsive urge to get her hands on her. Just normal madness, old man. Normal madness. Each of us has it ... one way or another. Dr. Johnson loved to knock on fence posts."
Buttocks, I conceded, were more alluring.
"The data of experience are confusing. We see what we want to see ... what we are conditioned to see."
I agreed.
"Thus, only the surreal is real."
There was much, I thought, in what he had to say.
"On the other hand...." He twirled the fine hairs of one nostril.
"On the other hand, what?"
"I would not willingly submit to open-heart surgery on the basis of a surrealist's examination. There are degrees of credibility, even in illusion."
Looking across the room, I saw, standing listlessly, the trim, effervescent June Poitergrue. She, so graciously, exuberantly, had, with her twin sister, once posed for illustrations of a book I never wrote, never intended to write (Naked Charleston). And for a moment I became confidential, even friendly. "Fucking," I said, "is my hang-up."
"Of course, dear boy, of course. Home is where the hard is. As a lad I saw through a glass lewdly. I was horny and corny. I said, 'Apocalypse is all.' "
Such is our nymph stage, he informed me. "We all start there, don't we?"
We all start there. He spoke of normal madness. "Masturbation is the only pure art form ... a pleasure cultivated for itself alone. There could be no posing, no pretense, affectation there. It could never win you a Nobel prize ... even a Pulitzer."
In the nymph stage of our lives, he informed me, we are indiscriminatingly, heterodoxically horny. We then "progress," as it were, not knowing, as yet, that progress itself is an illusion. We become cautious and sly, hesitant and conforming. "We then discover gods inside us. And they tell us, 'Success is more profitable than sex. Spread the word and get rich.' "
"I see," said I, seeing in my mind's eye all of June's generous young charms. (Why had I lost touch with her?)
He followed my eye. "Sex, as I teach it, is sinful. Not for the usual reasons. But, as Origen well knew ... having cut off his all for the Lord ... it diverts our thoughts ... agitates the spleen."
Tolstoy, I reminded him, came eventually to the same conclusions-not, however, until he was eighty. Much is to be said for delayed conclusions.
"In the sect of my persuasion, the sect that I have founded ... "He looked at me with a steely eye, Machiavellian in tint. "There is a contingency for everything. We are a compassionate order. We know that the flesh is weak, nights are long ... and that the gods see everywhere ... even into the virginal cranny."
"Gods? Plural? A democratic pantheon?"
"Of course, dear boy. Feel the toga."
"Ah."
"I'm ecumenical. Ecumenical, epicene, and tax-exempt." Vanderhoff, as I recalled, was ecumenical on angles. "Everything you give me is tax-exempt. Give now and get a tax-exempt cash rebate."
"Ah." I said.
"Awn." He brought his hands together to form a benign hatchet, touched the hatchet to his forehead. "Aum. Money, padme, aum."
Vanderhoff, it came back to me, was as ubiquitous as he was ecumenical. He had been in Larrine's drawing room (better, "withdrawing room") when Amy's well-bred defenses had first been breached; when John, entranced by what he saw, sneezed; when Vanderhoff explained the sneeze as Fliess' Syndrome.
Vivid, naive, almost enthusiastic, had been John's account (the account, I confess, which had brought me from London to introduce myself to Amy):
* * *
"Je vous ferai pleurer," Larrine chanted, "c'est trop de grace parmi nous." ("I will make you cry, there is too much grace with us.") My aunt screamed; her naked body heaved, quivering with each cut of the whip. "Pleurer de grace, non de peine, dit le Chanteur de plus beau chant." ("Cry from grace, not from pain, said the Singer of the most beautiful song.")
The screams rose in pitch and intensity. Then, pulsed with sobs, they rose sweetly, hysterically, to an onrushing climax. Larrine dropped the whip, but my aunt's body still surged convulsively, the muscles spasmodically contracting and relaxing. The sobbing continued, and it seemed to me that she was in some state of seizure, of transport-like a priestess in a voodoo rite. She was no longer herself-at least in the sense that I knew her. She was so ultimately naked, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
I sneezed.
"Gesundheit," Vanderhoff said.
"Danke schon." I felt apologetic for my interruption. One does not sneeze at Delphi.
"Fliess' Syndrome," Vanderhoff explained, unnecessarily, and with inappropriate nonchalance. Who was Fliess? (It was not until I many months later had read Freud's Letters to Fliess that the reference made sense. Even so, you would not expect a casual acquaintance-appearing in Charleston from nowhere-to have such an intimate association with Freud's correspondence.)
Nor can I forget his parting shot-a parting shot, mind you, after he had enjoyed the passing hospitality of my aunt's body: "Charming, that syndrome, the sexual sneeze. Those old Viennese knew much about living. Think! From a single city: The Magic Flute, Fledermaus, The Merry Widow, schnitzel ... and the sexual sneeze."
Such recollections came to me at this nostalgic moment, and yielding to the force of suggestion, even if autosuggestion, I, too, sneezed.
"Krishna be with you," Vanderhoff said. "And Venus, too!"
An affected Latinist, he pronounced the V as a W. It was odd to hear the great goddess of love referred to as "Weenus."
"Fledermaus," I said absently. "Fledermaus, The Merry Widow, schnitzel, and the sexual sneeze."
Amy's Uncle Bubba, a man with a forked gray beard and Brezhnev brows, spoke chiefly in Gullah, a patois as musical as Robert Burns's Scotch; and Uncle Bubba, at this moment, pumped my arm.
"Womans," said he, "is a sometime t'ing."
Uncle Bubba, I knew, had a special liking for Amy-a kind of liking, I suspected, which resembled Amy's "liking" for John.
"You must come to my next prayer meeting," Vanderhoff said, touching his hatchet-embraced hands to his balding forehead. "You will see many young girls in transparent voile strewing rose petals on other young girls in transparent voile. I assume, of course, you like young girls in transparent voile."
"Indeed," I said.
"Amy once played Hamlet in sheer black tights." Uncle Bubba toyed with his beard. "Now, ain't dat sumpin'? Dem long, lovely shanks a-shimmer in de moonlight! Uhpheelya couldn't keep her cotton-pickin' hands off dem lovely, silky thighs." He nodded. "Ah, Hamlet! Hamlet!" He was, you could see, the sort of man who sustained, supported, distorted, everything that was hallowed, curved, or doomed.
"Distinguished," Vanderhoff agreed. "I saw them once when she was naked, in this very room."
"Nekked?"
"Stark, staring naked."
"Right here, man?"
"Right here."
"And nekked as a jaybird?"
"With nothing on whatever. Isabelle wanted her that way."
Uncle Bubba's bushy brows leaped up. Then he sneezed, sending his dentures bouncing on the inlaid floor.
"Gesundheit," said the guru, smoothing a pleat in his toga.
Uncle Bubba, on hands and knees, snatched his mobile teeth from their momentary rookery between the feet of a man in kilts.
"Aum, money, padme, aum," Vanderhoff said. "Loose spots can be dangerous."
I felt then suddenly, as so often I suddenly feel, aimless, displaced, empty. I who, a few hours past, had felt so full, complete, replete, was now aware of my emptiness. Amy had deserted me, had returned to the fold of her Charleston past. Cloris was sporting herself in fresh pastures. And here was I, alone, a writer with nothing to write. The Lady Hamilton script lost its appeal for me; the story was remote, unlinked to modem themes-besides, I now recalled (Why did it take so long for this recall to shape itself?), Alexander Korda had already filmed the Emma Hamilton story (featuring Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh), and it had been a sorry mess. I needed a drink.
I had as well a vague sense of danger. Isabelle Wescott had, so she did, a "thing" for Amy. And a "thing," like the phthisis, is not readily banished. She no doubt still had this "thing"-so Vanderhoff had announced. In short, she would like to continue the seduction, the bondage titillation. Nor did I think, if such intentions were made clear, Cloris would stand in her way. Only I was the prude, the unflagging square. Cloris had ever an eye for the dramatic, a libidinous love for love's purple fringes. She had once, at Civitavecchia, delivered Amy for such pleasures on the altar of the contessa's chapel. And looking down had been Salvador Dali's painting of the nude contessa-nude, ecstatic, and crucified.
"I need a drink," I said, convinced, now that the Civitavecchia scene had come back to me, that Emma Hamilton should be played by Amy, not any untested Jill Philbrick. And I pictured myself as Lord Nelson in some other sequestered chapel, gazing with nautical rapture at the compound curves of Lady Hamilton's bare uplifted bottom.
Vanderhoff raised his hands to blessing position. "I am the offering," he said. "I am the sacrifice. I am the oblation, the libation, the chant, the holy oil. I am the fire. I am the supporter, the witness, the refuge, the beloved, the forthcoming and withdrawing ... blessed be coitus interruptus. The men of the Three Vedas, soma drinkers, offering sacrifices, seek from me the way of Lord Indra's Paradise...."
He smiled. "But those who think on me, I bring a sure reward. For he who perceives that works are altogether worked by Nature, and that the Self engages not in works, he indeed perceives."
Uncle Bubba adjusted his teeth. "Ah, dat beautiful word, 'Mesopotamia.' Makes um want to walk on pluff mud."
An exceedingly tall, slim, blond girl glided past us, a camellia in her mouth. "Ah, love," she mumbled, her words altered by camellia, "love, lub, ludd, love."
"Sister Theresa," Vanderhoff introduced her.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," Sister Theresa clucked, with no loss of fricatives. "What an elegant ecumenical day!"
"Catchoo!" said Uncle Bubba. And once again his teeth emerged from his mouth, to land with a clatter in a punch bowl, splattering the unwary with an undrinkable potion known locally as Madam Margot's Beresford Street Punch. (One quart grenadine syrup, one bottle Curasao syrup, one quart raspberry syrup, one-quarter-pound green tea leaves, one quart bottle red cherries, one quart bottle white cherries, carbonated water. Lace with bourbon and light rum.)
I excused myself, headed for the bar, which was set up in the tiled hallway leading from the drawing room to the dining room. My excuses were unnecessary; neither Vanderhoff nor Uncle Bubba, much less Sister Theresa, was aware of my departure. "Aum, money, padme, aum," I heard Vanderhoff intone. Running counterpoint was the Sister's "Lub, ludd, ludd, and fuck." So many of us, nowadays, find enchantment in can't phrases.
At the entrance to the hall stood Jill Philbrick, speaking to no one. I recognized her from her picture. And how mistaken had been my preconception of her! How wrong I had been. The gatefold, like the gatefolds in most magazines intended for American men, was dedicated to the high-school football player's dream-the girl next door at last undraped and folded over a pillow, smiling the same toothsome, wholesome smile she unveiled at her first marshmallow roast.
How wrong I had been-so easily are we deceived by editors' directions and photographers' cliches. Jill was no giggly, over-rounded graduate of cheerleading squads, no latter-day girl next door. She was serene, languorous, with eyes like lately warmed amethysts.
I introduced myself, muttering a name to which (as later events attested) she paid no attention whatever.
"I had the wrong impression of you," I said.
"Oh?"
"Totally wrong. Your picture...."
"You saw it?"
Obviously I had seen it. But cocktail conversation is no respecter of logic. Words follow one another in graceful, aimless pirouettes, like goldfish on parade.
A girl came up to us with a tray full of highballs and a whispered drawl. "Scotch, anyone?"
Jill reached for a glass, graciously handed it to me. I did the same for her.
"Thank you," I said, intending the gratitude to be shared.
"Anytime," the girl said, accenting the phrase with a grave curtsy.
I returned my attention to Jill. "A stunner ... that picture. So naked, yet so poised. Like Lady Godiva recumbent."
"Really?"
"Really." Then I went on. "You are both dashing and disarming, Mrs. Philbrick-and in the flesh even more enticing than in your no-long-sleeves-to-deceive-you picture."
"Not too fat?"
"'Svelte' is the word. Trim and nimble, svelte."
"The picture made me look fat."
"Camera came too close. Bad angle."
"But I'm not fat, am I? No way." She slapped thighs, bottom, tapped her bosom.
"No way. You are svelte, mysterious, magnificent." I compared her to the great ladies painted by Reynolds, Gainsborough, even Sargent, and of the way they might have looked, if painted in the nude.
"I am transmogrified, simply transmogrified." She said all this in a certain transmontane voice-which is to say that her words sounded as if they had just tobogganed down the Alps, and that, if I knew what was good for me, I would lickety-split look up "transmogrified" in the nearest Webster.
I told her that I had a great fondness for nudes, and that, in this connection, this arcane, eternal art area, her form and posture had been nonpareil, a model of propriety, self-possession, beauty; that if I were a producer, I would certainly cast her in my next picture.
"No?"
I told her that she was, had been, spectacular; that, stretched out on the magazine gatefold, she looked for all the world like Velasquez's Rokeby Venus. (She did not, of course, but I have a great fondness for that S-curved Venus, and I would have liked in various ways to have shared that fondness. The yearning for empathy wells high in all of us.)
"Pee Wee was pissed off."
"Pee Wee?"
"Pee Wee." The amethyst eyes widened, as amethyst eyes often do, when reviewing memories. Elizabeth Taylor's eyes, although -rimmed with kohl, looked much like these when Elizabeth Taylor, playing Cleopatra, brought an asp to her bosom. "My husband."
"Ah," said I, and "Oh," said she.
"I like to think of him as more roommate than husband ... and ex-roommate, at that. Husbands are no good as constant companions. Only get a hard-on for the girls they haven't had."
"Pee Wee," I deduced, was the much-publicized John C. Calhoun Philbrick, the man to whom I was to deliver a message.
"Do I shock you?"
"Scarcely." I spoke, I think, for all men when I then said I liked a girl who could speak like a man.
"And fuck like a man ... hither and yon?"
"Hither and yon. No hang-ups. No regrets."
"And no holes barred." Her teeth flashed. "I do shock you, don't I?"
She was, I conceded, a refreshing novelty, a Venus's flytrap among camellias.
"You sound terribly familiar. Don't I know you from somewhere?"
"Perhaps."
"No perhaps about it. I met you at Larrine's."
"Of course." The lie ephemeral. I knew her only from her nude recumbence on the gatefold. That, and only that. But her friendly recall was not to be questioned. To be recalled, even in error, is an invitation to intrigue.
She then pointed an accusing finger at me. "I know you"!
"Of course."
"Your name is John Dellmore ... and you screw your aunt."
"Not really."
"I'm transmogrified."
"You flatter me."
"And you wrote a book about it!"
I conceded that I wrote a little. Such was my weakness and my livelihood.
"Too much, if you ask me. And your own aunt, too. If I was Amy, I would have wiped the floor with you."
"Now you shock me. I assumed that-"
"Read it when I was in Upper Volta. Made me horny as an elephant's tusk."
"I did not actually...." I was about to disown John's book. Tact prompted me to hold my tongue.
"I wasn't sleeping with Pee Wee anymore. And as for the natives?" She looked around her to be sure we were alone. "One doesn't fuck the natives anymore, does one?"
Shamelessly mixing metaphors, I assured her that the shoe was now on the other foot. "On the other hand, there still was Pee Wee, was there not?"
She looked at me with eminent disdain, the kind of look Lady Hamilton might have given her old father, had he, visiting her in Naples, queried her about her sex habits. "What woman in her right mind screws her husband?"
I was then convinced that she would make an admirable Emma. She could combine hauteur with earthy bluntness. Such girls are rare. Lord Hamilton knew well what he was about when he acquired Emma by the simple, deft act of settling (in exchange for her) his nephew's gambling debts.
I pictured her as Lady Hamilton, and, from long habit, gave my mind the luxury of stripping her. I saw her areolae loom into view, her navel, the trim, triangular pubic bosk. And I heard an eighteenth-century provincial voice ask me, with adolescent surprise, "Lord Hamilton, must I take everything off?"
And I, admiring her as I once admired the Portland Vase, would drape around her exquisite neck a necklace of diamonds, would say, "Everything, my dear, but this!"
A slight smile discreetly framed between parenthetic wrinkles at either end of Jill's mouth returned me, brusquely, to the twentieth century. "I don't blame her," Jill said. "If I were your aunt, I'd fuck you too."
"You are kind. A perfect Charlestonian lady."
She slapped her glass. "I am not a Charlestonian. I am not a lady. And what's more, I'm not your aunt. So, John, my boy...."
"Fuck off."
Her eyes flared. "You have a way with words, don't you?"
The drink was still in my hand. I had been too busy talking, appraising Jill, to give it direct attention. Now, as an escape from a conversation which was going nowhere, I gave it attention. I gulped it. I had a strong need for that haze which climbs over you when alcohol rises to its appointed task.
Meanwhile, I took a step back, took stock of myself, summarized my report to myself about Jill. I had been this way before with Amy (the "naked" Countess of Liechtenstein); with Jennifer Digby, the outgoing daughter of Britain's austere Sir Kenelm Digby; with Marianna Stiarchos, the trim, suave shipping tycoon; with Anna Ricci. The way was hard. The way was long. But the way was unavoidable if I was to stay active, potent, creative. Sandwiched snugly between Cloris and Amy, I was afflicted (Amy understood this so well) by the law of diminishing returns. My mind went blank, my skills eroded, my virility diminished. ('Tom must rest," Cloris had said to me once, in Mantua, when, lying between her and Amy, I had, as she put it, disappointed her. "You must get some rest, Bill. Really you must." She then took my naked Amy in her arms, ignoring me. And Amy, the restrained, camellia-like lady, had kissed her ardently and well. Thereafter there were fluting sounds and the laughter of young birds, much joyful twisting and writhing. And eventually there was the cresting of the great wave; the hiss, the seething, and the crash of the wave on the shore.)
I must correct my thought. I had been the way I was at this moment not with Aimee, Jennifer, Marianna Stiarchos, Anna Ricci; I had been this way before good fortune and Cloris had cast me with them. Cloris, as I have said elsewhere, is a superb psychologist. She knows how a mood is made, how to flag passion, keep avidity ever at its peak. And it was she who, from time to time, engineered my excursions. (Or as she said, anent the last, "You would not love me near so much, loved you not Anna more.")
The program, T think, is clear. I was for a while to detach myself from her, from Amy, say for a short space. "Good-bye to all that'." I was then to seduce some appointed anointed girl, write a book about her, translate the book into a screenplay.
Say what you will, the ploy worked. The ploy made the book, the screenplay, the production-four times at least. Lord Cholmondeley's enterprises supported Lady Cholmondeley's, supplied capital, connections, promotions. Four times we had copped top honors at Cannes. Twice we had nominations for Oscars. And in each film foray our newest star or starlet was featured in creative undress.
The media, particularly Variety, had accustomed themselves to await, greet, then hand bouquets to "Lady Cholmondeley's latest discovery." (Camavaron, Cloris' camera director, was usually more to the point. "Ah, those gluteal splendors!" he had said, on first seeing Amy on set; then, recalling her predecessors: "Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these. Neither Venus, fresh risen. Obviously they toil not-but perchance they spin.")
"Don't you?" Jill asked.
"Don't I what?" Reverie is disconcerting. Perhaps she was still pressing me to explain my relations with Amy. If so, was this question a halfhearted flirtation or an angling for gossip? Who sleeps with whom? How often? and Where? are questions usually of great interest to the unfulfilled. In Charleston they are the bedrock of gossip. Without waiting for an answer, I changed the subject, substituted a compliment for a query.
"You are," I said, "even more spectacular in the flesh than in your picture." A compliment, I have learned, is always apropos. It stills troubled waters. And it is a balm, always, to all bruises of the spirit.
"I'll never pose naked again." She was positive. She tapped her glass with her fingernails.
"Why not? You were superb, spectacular, sinuous, subtle." I had no clear idea what I was saying, but the succession of sibilants, I felt sure, would prove useful.
"I did it to spite Pee Wee."
"Pee Wee? Why?"
"Pay him back for fooling around with other girls. I wanted everybody to look ... see what he was missing."
"Ah," I said. I mentioned the Duchess of Alba, who did more or less the same thing. There were no cameras in her time. What, then, could she do? Use Goya.
"You know Pee Wee?"
I said, in essence, that I had never met John C. Calhoun Philbrick, but that I had read much about him. Did he or did he not bribe the president of Upper Volta to buy Dixie helicopter gun ships-in whose manufacturing company he had a controlling interest? Did he or did he not comer the opium-poppy market in northwest Burma? And was he not the organizer, president, and sole beneficiary of Hope Springs Again-a political action committee whose sole aim was to elect public officials who thought and invested as he did?
Jill finished off her drink. "Pee Wee is into many things ... including some of my best friends."
I said nothing, because, at that moment, I had nothing to say.
She then said, with drawled overtones of disinterest, "Lovely weather we're having."
My daimon, my guardian imp, informed me that at this moment, at all moments when apathy threatens to cut off communication, we must lunge. We must take verbal chances, wakening the sleeper and quickening the dead.
"I am not John Dellmore," I said.
"No?"
"And I do not go to bed with my aunt." ("Go to bed with" seemed to me the euphemism that good taste, at this moment, required.)
"How terribly old-fashioned!"
My stand, I explained to her, was based not on principle but on the unfortunate lack of an aunt.
"I understand." She smiled, put her finger vertically across her lips, as if to imply that she too was not a Charlestonian, that non-Charlestonians, unlike those born to the fold, unlike the Ptolemies, are not honor-bound to the traditions of high romance. Incest is not for outsiders, much less the faint of heart.
My attention swung to tea olive. I have spoken before of its sweet, heady scent, hinted at its frolic invitation to languorous pleasures. Now, as I was pleasantly aware, the scent pervaded the house. What is more, in some odd psychological way, it induced disassociation, fragmenting and blurring images. And I found myself combing confusion with a metaphor.
That Hamilton Woman. It suddenly came to me. That Hamilton Woman was the title of Korda's picture. And it was not a flop-not in England. In fact it earned Korda a knighthood. It got nowhere in this country for a simple reason. It could not pass the Hays office. The Production Code, still steadfast in the protection of American morals, could in no way condone the fact that Lord Horatio Nelson had made love to another man's wife.
And now? In my version we would see the audacious Emma in full frontal nudity ("Double-naked," in Cloris' wording) before, perhaps during, and after the intimate acts-although I, old-fashioned as I am, dislike filming the bald facets of coupling. (Because, except in exotic Kama Sutra positions, the camera can detail little more than the male rear end-a part of interest only to proctologists.)
"Pity," she went on. "I had hoped you would tell me how you did it, what she said when she found you had done it, then what you said. So few young men nowadays are intimate with their sisters, their mothers, and their aunts. I suppose it's all the amateur competition."
"Even so," I said.
"You have a cigarette on you?"
I did. I reached in my pocket, found a pack of Pall Malls (without filter), lit two cigarettes, handed her one.
"Thanks." She inhaled deeply, fixed her eyes on me, then blew smoke toward my fly-a gesture I interpreted as one of flirtation.
I found her growing in attractiveness. I took notice, now, of her height, of a slimness made significant by the sweep of her hips and the rounding of her bosom. Her lips were generous, red as a fresh wound; her nose almost nonexistent. She might, after all, make an ideal Emma.
"I am Bill Benton," I said, thinking this a good time to introduce myself. Social introductions, even if self-made, give a man privileges he might not otherwise have-such as a kiss on second meeting. And in Charleston, among those so franchised, kissing is endemic; not even a cold is sufficient excuse to forgo the social buss.
Leaving the cigarette between her lips, she held out her free hand. "Jill Philbrick," she said, as if we had not discussed her notorious picture.
"I know." I took her hand. "We talked about your picture."
"You like?"
"I like."
"You liked my picture? Really?" More smoke followed the trajectory of the first stream. This time, however, Jill's lips dreamily fashioned the smoke into rings. Slowly, with deliberate aim, the rings descended to my center; and I felt drawn, without consultation, into a game of social quoits.
"Indeed." I repeated what I had said about the Rokeby Venus. A compliment always bears repeating. The person you compliment never reminds you that you have said before what you are saying now. Words of praise are always fresh, to the point, and sincere. (Benton's Law.)
"I'm getting fat." She slapped her bottom, thus calling attention to its full curve and to the contrast between its graceful sweep and the napkin-ring waist.
"Perfectly curved," I said. "Like Lady Hamilton."
"Lady Hamilton?" She inhaled her cigarette, ejected the smoke in twin tusks. "Who she?"
"One of the most beautiful women in naval history." I was arch. "Lord Nelson's mistress."
"Oh."
"You know Trafalgar?"
"Who screwed him?"
Jill Philbrick, it seemed to me, could think of only one thing at a time. I liked, however, her point of focus. Too many women turn to cooking.
She paused. Her eyes, as if to imply thought, turned to seek out an invisible horizon. "You know about Pee Wee?"
"What about Pee Wee?"
"He's dead set against sin and all that."
"I have read the papers."
"Especially sex."
Sex, I agreed, can be pernicious, overwhelming, chafing. "Sex on the tube. Sex in the movies. Naked girls in Playboy, Penthouse ... all that jazz."
I took pains not to interrupt.
"Thinks that's what's wrong in this country. Why crime and interest rates are so high. Americans are screwing their heads off ... while the little Japs make cars."
"You don't?"
"I think he's dead wrong. It isn't sex that's screwing up the country. It's the new math. Of course, I'm a fine one to talk. I couldn't even balance my checkbook ... or keep count of the hundred-dollar bills Pee Wee had stashed away in every part of the house."
To each, I said, his own, and, stepping backward, invited my sexual eye to assess Jill. She could be a scrivener's treasure. I complain always, I said to myself, that I have nothing to write about. Yet all around me is bounty: Jill, her world-sixty characters in search of an author.
"On the other hand...." She took time out to pout.
"On the other hand, what?"
"If Pee Wee is so dead against sex, why is he screwing all my friends?"
If I were not as incompetent a writer as I am, if I had more feeling, understanding, curiosity, (if I were Clickhov), I would by now be seeing the world through Jill's eyes. I would know, say, that she had been born on a dismal farm near Hell Hole Swamp; that in an April such as this, neither the warmth of the lucent days, nor the fragrance of the languid loblolly-pine woods, nor the black flocks flying over the timeless swamp offered her anything new or interesting, offered her anything to lift the dull depression that enveloped her. I would know that at seventeen she felt that she had been living in the miasma-the same miasma of which I complain-for a long, long time, perhaps a hundred years. That it had seemed to her that she knew every tree, every raccoon, every listless alligator; past and present merged; nothing had ever changed, nothing ever would change. Amy had felt this way, even in the charmed city of Charleston; had shared the same black emptiness, the same unbelief that with the passing of years anything would change.
Then Philbrick, this pseudo-Lochinvar, must have emerged from the East. He was, I assume, no knight in shining armor, nor even mufti. He was an obese redneck, a used-car salesman who went regularly to prayer meetings, guzzled beer, and hoped one of these days to speculate in real estate. Most to his credit, he liked her. He saw her dressed in finery, a would-be mother to a herd of overweight children, a good-looking wife whom he could exhibit with pride when he attended realtor conventions in Kansas City, Miami, or Las Vegas.
He proposed and she accepted. After seven drab years, unblessed by offspring, success sought him out. He was the lone Republican dentist in a Democratic county. And loyalty to the party, plus a heavy contribution during a current campaign, a contribution derived, gossip had it, from traffic in substances then (perhaps unfortunately) illegal, he was named ambassador to Upper Volta. ("He has every important qualification for the job," Senator Ashmead said of him, in sponsoring his appointment. "He knows nothing whatever of Upper Volta; in fact, has never heard of it.
Moreover, Upper Volta is a black republic, and Pee Wee is a guaranteed Good Ole Boy-God-fearing and segregationist to the bone."
All this, I submit, is imaginative biography. It is what I might have written, were I Clickhovian, sensitive, concerned.
"Since you don't fuck your aunt, what do you do?" Jill was a realist. "What are you in? Cocaine? Pot? Or real estate?"
Were I John, I could say, "I'm in cahoots with my aunt." Bill Benton had no such glib out. I was in the doldrums. But "doldrums," like "tantrums," is a word not easy to explain. "I write."
She adjusted her breasts. The gesture was conspicuous, almost conversational. "I shock you."
Not to no purpose had I read my Freud, skimmed Kinsey, Masterson, and Hite. She was saying, of course, "Please, may I shock you? It would make my day."
Girls of this era have become conversationally aggressive. This is the ERA era. No more do men need to retire to smoking rooms to commingle lies, cliches, and port.
"In no way."
"Not at all? But you do fuck, don't you? Women, I mean."
"Such," I said, "is my pleasure, my obsession, my weakness, and my strength." I spoke of erections and deflections. And I added, in the Greek spirit, that on a happy day and well-ordered night, there is a place for everything-and everything finds its place.
Thoughtfully, she licked her right index finger. "Nowadays you never know."
"Never. Do you?" I thought of Lord Cholmondeley, who showed excessive interest in little Charley, the precocious Eton boy who, on set, exhausted Jennifer Digby-when we were filming Tom Brown's School Days-and whose mother tactlessly, and for this very reason, asked that his salary be doubled. (And of Jennifer's pert suggestion that his mother exhaust him before he came on set.) I thought of Amy's husband, who was once seen coming out of a local bordello wearing Amy's clothes (even her high-heeled shoes, which were too small for him).
"And you do drink, don't you?"
I drank. Indeed, I drank. I rattled the ice in the empty glass I held in my hand.
"I always think that men who neither drink nor fuck sooner or later get ... How shall I put it? Prematurely dehydrated."
Pollexfen, at this moment, interrupted us-Pollexfen, a man normally so shy, infolded, unobtrusive.
He extricated himself from the monologue of a very fat woman, and, more in defense than sociability, wedged himself between us.
"Ah, Benton," he said weakly. The full voicing of words called for more effort than he cared to exert. A scholar speaks faintly but well, and those sufficiently concerned will somehow hear him.
"Pollexfen." In the rarefied air of scholarship, an exchange of surnames is an economical substitute for the raising of visors and ceremonial can't. "You know Mrs. Philbrick, of course."
"I say," said Pollexfen, with the kind of bemused smile that spoke of issues still active in the innards of his mind (Does spearmint, for example, lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?), "I hear you're going to Upper Volta." Once again, with aforethought and aplomb, Jill adjusted her breasts. "Saw spot. Despised same."
George Pollexfen was the tall, ethereal, erudite, and somewhat wistful uncle of June and Elza Poltergrue, the golden twins whose exuberance I had once written about (On or About the First Day in June) and which Cloris and I had enshrined in the motion picture which had the same name as my book. He had a com-floss mustache. He was also hypochondriacal and much given to seclusion. Few ever saw much of him; sometimes he remained cloistered for weeks in the high paneled rooms of an old Georgian house. He scomed both telephone and doorbell; and on the few occasions I tried to see him, I reached him only by scratching on his dining-room window. An intimate of the muses ("I am now on surprisingly good terms with the Nine"), annotator of forgotten epics, he was the author of Understanding Uchdrwldrydd and The Imchiuin Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym-both privately published.
"I say," said Pollexfen, stroking the left spur of his mustache, "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
(Pollexfen, an impassioned monologist, had a gift for interrupting. An unexpected intrusion into others' conversation guaranteed him a captive audience. No need was there to ask if anyone was interested in what he was about to say; whoever was within earshot was his honored if unwilling guest.)
"Interruptssaid Jill, "is sport for the gander, sauce for the goose."
(Nor could I forget the last literary interruption. Amy and I were on the porch of the Seabrook house. Amy, stark, staring naked, had just accused me of an insane desire to present her thus to a new lover. Just then had been the light, embarrassed tap on the screen door. Behold! Pollexfen! Even then had he spoken the same words ["I hope I'm not interrupting anything"], spoken with a compulsive scholar's cheery insensitivity. "Just happened to be passing by.")
"Coitus, that is," said Jill. "Coitus interrupts "I say," said Pollexfen, delving into strange waters. She smiled at me. "So lovely in young boys. Otherwise a little messy."
I held up my glass to imply agreement, then slowly backed away.
"See you," said Jill with impersonal optimism.
"I am reminded," said Pollexfen, "of the words of the great Celtic bard Seaan Mor O' Clumhain. To wit: 'Oh, the slow cows with their full udders from the lands of the great plains of Tuam.' It was the cows, of course, not the udders by themselves which came from the great plains of Tuam."
"Pity," I heard Jill say, "I'm so flat-chested."
CHAPTER THREE
I thought Miss Wescott slightly hostile, certainly distant, as she took my hand and led me through the garden maze. The azaleas and camellias were in bloom; ablaze were cherries and crabapples. Peacocks strutted in front of us. Nevertheless she took me by the hand. The gesture was encouraging; it signaled, so I thought, an urge to make contact-make of this what I could.
"I have read you," she said. "Carefully. And between the lines. Every book."
"I am grateful," I said. Which I was. People talk of my books. Few read them. And there is no point in writing except to be read. Writing is talking, but with more weight, you hope; and to friends still waiting in the wings.
"You have made Amy a life's career."
This had been Amy's doing, her unconscious doing, I said. I had not set out to make Amy a cynosure. Chance, Hogarth S-curvings, errant yearnings, had done the rest.
"I, too, have loved Amy, hurt and enjoyed Amy. You know that too well, have written about it well-perhaps too well."
I knew.
"And you love and fuck Cloris as well."
I did.
"That is good. I approve. You wrote somewhere, 'We each belong to everybody else.' I like that."
I was pleased.
"I am colder than the three of you." She looked at me as she said this, and smiled, as if to say that she could talk to me openly, impersonally.
"I don't really believe you," I said. The ego of every man presses him to believe that no woman is totally cold, at least toward men. She is simply as yet unstirred, as Amy had been unstirred until Miss Wescott stripped and whipped her-forced her to be a party to her own undoing.
If she is as yet unstirred it is because no man has as yet been sufficiently deft, concerned, persistent. Sleeping Beauty had been unstirred until a passing prince had the temerity to kiss her. (A sound whipping, perhaps, would have unloosed the floodgates.)
"I am colder." She paused. "Yet God knows I enjoyed Amy. The whip on that pure white bottom did something to me. Although...."
"Although what?"
"It was more traumatic for Amy. It was her first time. A kind of second loss of virginity. An invitation to things unspeakable. A bouquet of fleurs de mal."
"I know."
"Of course you know. You are a certified, snooping son of a bitch. You wrote about it ... tried to make Amy do to that Anna Ricci what I did to Amy ... what you would like to do to Amy."
I assured her that I had no desire to whip Amy, and she assured me that she understood me too well, that my real addiction was to spectator sports. I wanted to ask myself rhetorical questions while watching her do what I had not courage enough to do myself. She said to me what Melissa had said to me, in another connection: "You're chicken." We were approaching the lagoon. Gnarled cypresses, rising from black waters, stood classically in front of us, indifferent to us, intrusions, time. Their black knees rose from the black water, as Amy's knees rose when passion beset her, these, however, were somber and sinister, reminding me of alligator snouts. Reflections in the water doubled all images.
Somewhere in the labyrinth of the swamp a mourning dove, much given to repetition, sounded its solemn "coo-ee, coo-ee, coo-ee-ee-ee."
"I have long wanted to meet you," I said.
She smiled. "And fuck me?"
"You overrate me."
"Fuck me to extend your franchise? Even...."
"Please."
"Even if I didn't want to fuck you ... didn't enjoy it ... you would still, I think, want me. Because you would think I wanted Amy. By taking me as well, you would cover all options."
A fascinating idea, I thought-an erotic conglomerate. Yet it was beyond me. I was not that imaginative, that energetic, conniving. Yet to me as a writer, a collector of quiddities and oddities, it was an idea worthy of thought.
I turned, took anatomical stock of her-as, a short while before, I had cataloged the virtues of Jill. Her breasts were not conspicuous; she was no Amy or Anna. She was pale. Her darkened eyes were sullen. Her nose was accented with flared nostrils. On the other hand, she had the hauteur, cold elegance, so exploited by high-fashion models-the look of a young woman who had tasted everything, found nothing worthy of taste, yet was still hungry. To such a one, nothing is foregone, nothing forbidden, nothing fully satisfying.
"By getting into me...." She was persistent. "You will, through double osmosis, get my view of Amy. And you will feel what I feel when I make love to Amy. And when she, so demurely ... and with no protest whatever ... lets me draw her out of herself."
She stopped suddenly, pointed to the swamp. A turtle swam lazily between water lilies. "Nothing in the world matches the magic that lurks in those black depths ... in the shadows of the moss, the fragrance of old roots."
"Coo-ee," sounded a distant dove. "Coo-ee, coo-ee, coo, coo, coo."
"If you want to understand Amy, you must understand this."
"I know." Which I did. Amy was inseparable from this Low Country, from the fragrances of tea olive and pine-shadowed marsh, from the colors of the jasmine, the camellias, azaleas, and Spanish moss. All these purveyors of fancy are gentle and soft.
"Amy," she went on, "is my opposite. Everyone has an opposite, needs an opposite. I am hard, unsentimental, terribly, terribly practical. Time was when Amy needed me."
"And so you whipped her."
"Of course I whipped her." She looked at me obliquely, which is to say, without turning her head. And her lips formed a tight smile, as if to give me the impression that she knew well what was in my mind, that perhaps in me was a certain envy-envy of her strength and sureness. "Tell me about your crest," I said. "The fleur-de-lis."
"You have a hard-on," she announced. "I interest you."
"Obviously." With a single word I acknowledged one fact, made capital of another.
"She told me you have never whipped her."
I told her I considered myself chicken.
"The crest," she said, "is a fake. Designed by the Liverpool Lively Lithograph Company. My grandfather bought it for two guineas. But on Amy it's regal." She smiled.
It was regal. I said as much. "And now," I added, thinking of Amy's postures in Monna Vanna, "the whole world has seen it."
"What a wonderful, ecumenical ass!" Her penciled eyebrows danced. "And now...."
"Now what?"
"You want mine."
I was quiet. I have learned in Charleston never to speak directly, certainly not clearly, about desires and disinclinations. And I am not sure, in this brief life of alarums and excursions, that an embargo, at such moments, on simple declarative is not sound. Much can be said with a nod. More sometimes can be said by saying nothing at all.
She took my hand, kissed the back of it. "A man walking with a lady, leisurely, in an old garden, does not have an erection because he's thinking of her family crest." Her logic, I told her, was exceeded only by her eagle's eye. And I wondered why in detective fiction there had been as yet no female counterpart to Sherlock Holmes.
"You understand me too well." This was more badinage than compliment. An erection tends to explain itself-such, at least, is the evidence of history.
"Having me will give you double enjoyment ... because of Amy. You'll try to see me in Amy's eyes, at the same time ... while having me ... imagine my having Amy ... or Amy me."
The compounding of fantasies, I suggested, is one of the great pleasures of life. It is, in a sense, the triumph of art over nature.
"It's amazing," she said, "the way a simple erection can put big words into a man's mind."
She paused, looked with languid grace at the foreboding swamp. "You want to fuck me not alone for the excitement of fucking me, but to give you one more glimpse of Amy. You want to know why Amy let me do to her what I did."
She was doing my thinking for me, playing hopscotch with my fantasies.
"Except for what I read in John's book-" I began. "You know nothing about me."
"Indeed."
"And now you want the story in my words ... round out your twenty-six views of Amy."
I stood back and looked at her. She was really quite exquisite, with delicate features, a reed-like figure, and a soft eye. Too delicate, I would say, for such sharp perceptions, sadistic drives. All of which is to say that life is an unbroken succession of unexpected combinations. "Perhaps...."
"Perhaps what?"
"Perhaps ... just so ... I might let you."
We turned a comer of the path.
Ahead was a rectangular square of bright grass, bordered on three sides by a screen of bamboo. Robins hopped about on the grass, grubbing for worms.
"There." She pointed to a nook in the bamboo. "There?" I could not believe she was serious.
"Why not?" Then she added, "I want you to take off your clothes. Everything."
I walked with her to the opening in the bamboo, took off my jacket, spread it on the ground.
Isabelle wound her arms around me, kissed me slowly, languorously, her tongue inquisitive, active. She undid my tie, unbuttoned my shirt. "I read in one of your books that you made love to Amy once in a clump of bamboo on Longitude Lane. Everybody who lives on Longitude Lane has read about it. You made the real-estate prices go up."
. For some obscure, Freudian reason, my recollection of probing trysts are always blurred. There are blanks in memory and a leapfrogging of past and present, fantasy and fact.
What I next recall is an awareness of myself lying flat on my back, naked. Isabelle was lying next to me, fully clothed. I, in essence, was playing the role of Amy. She was herself, half Amazon, half Venus-in-Furs-or, to be practical, a Venus-in-Furs in a costume properly adapted to a semitropical climate.
A soft, warm breeze stirred the bamboo.
My erection held her interest. She gazed at it, fondled it, turned it one way, then another, tracing the veining. Leaning over, she dramatically, even if chastely, ran her tongue around the tip.
"I know so little about penises." She sighed. "I've turned most of my attention the other way."
"To girls?"
"Girls, of course. I'm very fond of girls."
I understood.
"Especially Amy. Amy, as you know, is special. Terribly special."
For a long time she was silent. Her fingers meditatively, inquisitively ran over my alerted nerves. Then, coming dramatically to the point of emotional focus, she said, "Now ... what specifically is it you want to know?"
"You know."
"Of course I know." She rolled close to me, ran her tongue around my lips. "You want to know what I thought, how I felt...."
"Exactly."
"When I first undressed Amy."
"Yes."
"When I whipped her ... and seduced her."
The talk was going as I wanted it to go. Isabelle and I had had, I thought, an immediate understanding. We had the rapport of two men both fixated on the same girl. Yet Isabelle was in every way the exotic woman, as feminine as Amy or Cloris. And I, half set to make love to her, was naked and at a tactical disadvantage, my erection, enhanced by this insidious talk, bobbing indelicately in the breeze.
"In short ... She smiled. "You want me to write your next book for you."
She had sensed my weakness.
"I am," I said, "the keeper of the records. Beauty fades. The records? Never."
"You have a point."
"Much so, I think."
"I will tell you." She looked meditatively at my nakedness. "Why not?"
"Why not?" As if to bind an agreement, signal understanding, I ran my hand under her skirt. Her skin was smooth as glass, as if nowhere on her thighs were there pores.
She did not stop me. She did not in any way inhibit my hand, my inquisitive fingers. Yet she said in the most detached way, "Foreplay will get you nowhere."
I said something or other to the effect that foreplay and no work was the beginning of a perfect friendship. In prone banter you are never expected to say anything that makes much sense. On the contrary, at such moments sense is almost bad taste, a defense against feeling.
"Don't be too clever," she said, putting one hand in a scrotum-cupping position, and indulging herself in a sisterly squeeze. "Anyone too clever depresses me. He tells me too many things I should have thought up myself."
I lay quiet for a space, listening to the birds, to the rustle of the wind in the bamboo, to the distant whir of a cricket.
"I will tell you something," she said eventually.
"What?"
"You are tickling me."
Had I been clumsy? Or was her announcement a ploy to inform me that she was aware of, if not altogether averse to, my upper-thigh gambit?
Again, had there been some confusion in signals? I was naked, she was not. Moreover, I was unnecessarily naked. When she had asked me, even ordered me, to undress, I expected (from her) the reciprocal strip. I had been surprised but pleased to find her thinking my kind of thoughts, bizarre and progressive, and to have taken the initiative in seduction. Not to no end had I, all my life, lent my suasion to equal rights. We have moved on, I maintained, from the club-wooing of the cave, from the tender-trap coyness of the age of corsets and corsages. (Most men, I think, fantasize about the rare girl who seizes the moment now, restages the perfumed entertainments of the Arabian Nights. Yet time and again this storied hope, even as now, comes to nothing. The girl so sought, so treasured, when apparently seizing what is so loosely called the initiative, seems to seize time by the forelock-but nothing more.)
Isabelle made no move to undress. Not to open even a button on her blouse; remove, say, an earring.
Instead, she turned verbal.
"Whipping Amy was a great come-on for me," she said. "It turned me on! My God, it turned me on! And I'm usually cool about these things."
A gnat bit me. I slapped at it with my free hand. No one, however, hits a gnat.
She kissed the tips of two fingers, touched her fingers to the place I had slapped. "We were good for each other," she said, referring to Amy. Then, as an afterthought of politeness, a gesture a gracious chatelaine makes to an honored, naked guest: "Pity I don't like men."
"Pity."
"I like men as friends ... companions, dinner guests. You don't mind that I asked you to strip, do you?"
"Not at all." I tried to give the impression that stripping, during a walk in Paradise Garden, was part of my normal social routine, like removing shoes before flinging myself on a mat in a mosque.
"I would like to have a salon ... like Vanessa Bell's, in Bloomsbury. I would invite, at select dinner parties, the ten cleverest men in Charleston ... and the ten most beautiful women." She went on to say that it was not altogether true that she was not interested in men. If she had lived in the days of the Bloomsbury set, for example, she would have filled her house with men like Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Jack the Ripper.
"And the women?"
Her lips puckered, then twisted themselves into a curve, half-disdainful, half-triumphant. "I do pretty well, don't you think?"
I so thought.
"Take today. Without half-trying, I have a good half-dozen of the most beautiful women in Charleston. Amy, of course. Amy stands alone."
"A class with only one member."
"Yours, I suppose."
Intuitive, like Amy with her own gestures, I shielded with my hand the basis for her pun. We are at bottom all creatures of habit.
"And Cloris, the clitorescent Cloris, always so cool and demanding. And then there's Jill Philbrick. You haven't gotten to know Jill yet, have you?"
"In passing."
"Then ... the Poltergrue twins, June and Elza. Particularly Elza." She threw a kiss to the air. "Fabulous. Took her to Ischia with me once." She paused. "Or was it June?"
Each, I conceded, was a posy of delights, an invitation to chafmgs. I compared their corporate loveliness to the spell of the painted bunting.
"Now, the Poltergrue girls ... You should get to know them." She appraised my neglected organ. "You really should."
(Although she claimed she had "read" me, it was evident that she had not read my book about them, inaptly titled. On or About the First Day in June. And it then occurred to me that, although I complain incessantly about my lack of talent, I have managed, somehow, to write too much.)
"Amy," I said, using this one word as a piece of string tied about her finger. "You were about to tell me about Amy. How you felt. What you felt she felt."
Even naked and abandoned, I was still the writer, biographer, keeper of the records.
An artist, I said to myself, must pursue truth with a total lack of consideration for other people's feelings.
A sullen wind stirred the trees.
"God! I can still see Amy's sad, sad face." Her hand, more for emphasis than concern, caressed me. "There's a time in every woman's life when she needs a sadist."
"Of course." It is the part of a learning listener, a collector of vague essences, not to disagree.
"God! That sad, sad face! That ass uplifted, so white, so penitent! The faint blue veins, like arabesques ... erotic arabesques? And then the trembling! My God, the trembling!"
The erection, so masterfully induced, began to throb. Also to bob-like a metronome.
"Oh my!" she said. "Feisty, isn't he?"
"Go on."
She squeezed her hand, inhibiting the bobbing, and suggesting in sign language, that we change the subject. "About Amy?"
"About Amy."
Her attention, however, had wandered. Her connoisseur's eyes fixed on my tumescence. "What a wonderful place for a tattoo!"
"Another fleur-de-lis?"
"You're a literary man, aren't you? You deserve a literary inscription. We could prick on it ... when it is full and rampant ... something like, 'HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT'S TIME.' To the point, no? Then, when that little accordion was sad and folded, we would read only the middle pricking-'UP, PLEASE."
I told her I was not happy about her verb, and she said something or other about sweets to the sweet.
"Good," I said. "And now, about Amy...."
"It was after the first whipping when everything happened."
"Meaning?"
"Amy made love to me. Our inhibited Charleston beauty made love to me."
"And you?"
She lay back, sighed, looked up at the sky. A lone white cloud floated over us.
Again my hand moved up her thighs. Again my fingers sought the bosk in which, as romance has it, the straight way is lost.
All now was softness and wetness.
I slid her skirt up the splendent thighs, stroked the dream landscape.
I rolled over on her.
"She was crying. There were tears all over me. In my mouth, my navel. Between my thighs...."
I plunged.
"Oh, my God." Her hips rose. "You've done it."
"I'm sorry you don't like men," I said. And I wondered if she might improvise for me some variation on the lines I improvised for Emma: "I should be very happy, Lord Nelson, if you would withdraw before ejaculation."
About not liking men: Cloris had said more or less the same thing to me when for the first time she came to my Greenwich Village apartment. Yet she, like Isabelle, had been most sporting. "I will not go to bed with you, but I will take off my clothes for you-if that will give you any pleasure." Once her clothes were off, there had been a knock on the door. The girl from the apartment below, a girl who very much liked to sleep with men, had come to pay me a ceremonial visit.
The situation then (barring the ceremonial visit) was not a great deal different from the situation now. There was even a reference to Lady Hamilton. "If you are a little undressed," I had said, "our talk won't be so formal."
I return to the present: "I'm not on the pill," Isabelle said, her voice silky, her hips heaving.
"Sorry," I said. If she had no special turn for men, it was understandable that she had no pressing need for the pill.
Her hips rose and fell. Her breathing came faster. "You like being in me?"
Overhead I saw the white, Ariel-like figure of an ibis, his long legs stretched straight behind him.
"Indeed."
"Is the first time in a girl very special to you?" She tightened her constricting inner muscles as if to make her question a rhetorical one.
"Very." It was clear to me why English gardeners fell in love with sharawadgi-the pleasures of the unexpected. In making love to a new girl, every thrust is an adventure, every riposte a surprise.
"Always?"
"Always." This fact alone, it seems to me, is justification enough for infidelities (if anyone, anymore, makes use of that overworked, meaningless word).
"Oh."
"Indeed." Words are suggestive, spurring action. Without thinking, I thrust hard.
"Oh!" she shouted, showing me with a swift quiver how the same word, within seconds, can be given two totally different meanings.
"Sorry."
"Oh!" The tone this time was caressed and sustained, reminding me of the country wife who when praying could say only "Oh" and who was told by a wise bishop that her prayer had much more meaning than his own.
"Ah," I said in resonance.
Her teeth flashed in the sunlight. "You probably have just fucked Amy."
"You are psychic," I said. Isabelle was dependably decadent. I saw no reason to lie. Nor to include Cloris, whose favors I had as recently and avidly enjoyed.
I have become, I think, a good director, a perverse psychologist. The image of Amy enjoyed, Amy opened, Amy shared, opened her own arcane sluices. She trembled as Amy sometimes trembled.
"Good," I said, holding her thigh against me.
I then discovered a singular fact. Isabelle's body was dramatically pliant. It gave in to mine at every point of contact, thigh yielded to thigh, groin to groin; each muscle yielded to my corresponding muscle. There was nowhere any resistance; I could mold her, shape her, do with her what I wanted. All of which was most surprising. Here was this handsome, strong woman, a soupgon sadistic, if Amy's confession were to be believed. ("I would let her do anything to me. Anything!") Yet here she was with me on the greensward, as giving as a child.
Two conclusions were possible. In her, sadism and masochism were interchangeable-as interchangeable as buskins shaped for either foot. Else Amy's stories were not altogether to be believed; Amy was of the two the stronger-played the passive role the way cheese lies as a ploy on a trap. Never underrate the power of the uplifted bottom.
I am, I am afraid, rambling.
"More," she said in the spirit of Oliver Twist, no party to my excursus.
Deeper I went-the retort courteous; deeper, with vigor and authority. Pubis met pubis in a fraternal thwack.
She screamed.
Nor was I immune to passion's pressures. The Vesuvian moment was hard on me. And since she was not, as she had told me, prepared for cresting's consequences, gallantry was at bay.
I have written elsewhere of my fondness for Charleston manners. One does not unnecessarily scare the horses, becloud a moment. More, one will be thoughtful in those frenzied moments when the Devil calls the tune.
I withdrew. My unspent erection, throbbing, spurting, forked the air.
"Silly," said Isabelle, meaning, I dare say, nothing.
As a drowning man is said, somewhat tritely, to review the central events of his life, so, I believe, do men in their seminal throes turn to flotsam. Such, at any rate, is my way-a consequence, no doubt, of early frustration and idle study.
It occurred to me that pleasure for its own sake (even if, unfortunately, interrupted) had no right or wrong, was seldom approved, and the mastery of it, no matter how great your ardor and skill, could never earn you laurels.
"Well, rotten luck," Isabelle said. "Back to the old drawing board."
She conceded that she had not been an ideal hostess. "I have not pleasured you much," she said.
She had been, I conceded, exciting.
With exquisite, almost (I thought) sisterly concern, she bent over and took my dejected part in her mouth. Her tongue slid about provocatively. Her teeth combed the tired nerves. "I could have done this earlier," she said.
I agreed.
"Perhaps next time."
"Next time."
She smiled. "If there is a next time."
"Why not?"
"This time I only wanted to taste what Amy has tasted. And will probably take again tonight. Won't she?"
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps? Why perhaps? Don't you make love to her every night?"
"Not every night."
"But you would like to if you could? Doesn't she always excite you?"
My shriven part answered for me, suddenly beginning to harden.
"Oh my!" Isabelle disengorged it. From nowhere she produced a tissue and dabbed the places where her lips had been. "Mustn't leave lipstick. Lipstick raises questions, doesn't it?"
At that precise moment a high-pitched, familiar voice sounded beyond the bamboo copse.
"Hreran mid hondum brimcaelde. That means, 'To stir with his hand the rime-cold sea.' "
Pollexfen rounded the bamboo copse.
"Groovy." I recognized June's voice.
"The bard is sometimes a bit bawdy."
"Wow!"
When Pollexfen was in full view, I saw that he was holding a book. A piece of cardboard held in his other hand shielded the book from the sun. And since we were on the sun side of Pollexfen, the shield obscured us.
I then, unfortunately, saw June, whose heart-shaped bottom I had photographed so often and so enjoyably the summer before.
June stared at me, graced me with a minor Gioconda smile, then, in a voice larded with teenage sarcasm, said, "How utterly utter."
Isabelle made a belated attempt to push down her skirt. She was sitting on it, however. The hem would not descend. Instead, it formed a conspicuous pleat high on her thigh. "Love your tutu," June said, sotto voce. "It's too-too."
I got dressed quickly. The sun was covered by a dark cloud. A fresh wind blew in from the river, bending the bamboo, stirring moss. Isabelle, still sitting on the ground, produced from some recess of her skirt a small mirror and lipstick. Carefully she rouged her lips.
"It would not be good if we got back to the house together ... and Amy saw my lipstick smeared."
"Amy would forgive you anything."
"Anything with her. She would let me do anything."
"But?"
"You're different."
"I don't follow."
"She would not like me to make love to you. That would be a double no-no. Double betrayal."
"She has changed, I think."
"Not really. She's possessive."
She pulled down her skirt, reached up for my hand. I helped her up. "I didn't pleasure you much. Do you mind?" she asked.
"I enjoyed you." For a woman not essentially interested in men, she had been, I thought, most generous.
"I enjoyed you." She smiled. "I surprised myself."
"I did not intend-"
"Of course you didn't. I seduced you, in my own way. I'm strange-you know that? I told you I didn't like men. That of course challenged you. I talked about Amy ... drew a picture for you...."
I breathed in the fragrance of the gardens. "It is beautiful here."
"It is always beautiful here."
"Your great-grandfather laid out the gardens?"
"Great-great-grandfather. He didn't do the job himself. Brought over a French botanist. Also brought over the first azaleas, first camellias, first mimosas."
Berkeley Hall was indeed an enchanted garden, and I said as much. "You should write about it," Isabelle said.
"I will."
"Or my vagina?"
We do not, I suggested, live in an either/or world. "Amy," she said, "will kill you."
"Not really." I knew Amy. There might be some slight sulking, some preliminary pouting. Ultimately there would be heightened excitement-and a confession. She would feel pressed to tell me that while I was going through my Hamlet routine, cultivating guilt, she had been pleasuring herself in unspeakable ways.
Isabelle gave me a chaste peck on the cheek, a sisterly pat on my fly. "Now I leave you."
She walked away, turning only to wave and blow a kiss. The implication, as I interpreted it, was that I was to follow; that we would not return to the house literally or symbolically arm in arm.
I stood for a while staring at the lagoon, contemplating the charm of a tamed nature-the nature with which Amy, a lover of the Lake poets, identified herself. All of nature was not like this, sweet and benign. Amy would not be happy in an equatorial jungle, in the heat, the dark, the dank, the mosquitoes and rot.
Of a sudden, I heard a thrashing of canes, a muffled grunt. I turned. The bamboos were parting. And rising from the ground, where he apparently had been lying, was Vulpe.
"Signore Sixty-nine," he said, touching his fedora. ''I am intruding?"
"Not at all."
"I followed you."
"Yes?"
"Business. Very much important. Hope you don't mind."
"What business?"
"Signore. I have always your-a best interest in mind."
"Yes?"
"You can-a make a lotta lire. Subitol"
"No?"
"So easy, signore. Turn a buck here, turn a buck there."
"I don't follow."
He leered. "You like-a that Signora Wescott? Not good for you. No? Not ardente ... not-a like my daughter. Not-a like la Signora Amy? No?"
I despised the man.
"Anyhoo," he went on. "I got-a for you a good message. Bellissimo! All-a for-a best."
"What?"
"You know whose-a here? Who's-a want to see you?"
"Who?"
"Agent Ninety-six. Agent Ninety-six wants-a see you." His little pig eyes glowed.
"Melissa?"
"Exactly, signore. Signorina Panter-Downes."
"Where?"
"I will conduct you, signore. I not know so good the names of all these-a fiumi."
"Rivers."
"Rivers. Exactly, signore. There's the Pee Wee grande ... and the Little Pee Wee...."
"Pee Dee."
"And the Combahee ... and the Santee, North and South. And the Edisto, North and South. And all the little creeks. What they say, signore? 'Beware the creeks a-bearing gifts?' Ha! Ha!"
He reached under his jacket, produced a walkie-talkie. He flicked a few switches, then talked in some unintelligible tongue. And this reminded me that, although I had written much about Vulpe, I knew nothing whatever about him. He claimed to be Sicilian, had, in fact, been most helpful to me, once, in Sicily (providing me with "the other" Melissa, and with introductions to the most powerful mafioso in the Palermo area), yet I knew about him only what he chose to tell me. And his accounts of himself, like Melissa Panter-Downes's (Agent 96's) account of herself, varied from occasion to occasion.
"Is serious."
We walked back toward the house. We threaded our way between blazing stands of azaleas, white, pink, red. We walked under trellises of flowering vines. All about us, birds were singing, song sparrows, mockingbirds, throaty grackles. Eventually we came to the stepped terraces which descended to two lakes which together formed the figure of a butterfly.
"La donna Cholmondeley knows," Vulpe said, by way of reassurance. "She say go to Ninety-six, Sixty-nine." Sixty-nine was my code name in this fanciful, James Bond, Cholmondeley-Stiarchos empire. Why code names were required, I never knew. As a cynic, I accepted the fact that there is protocol in every occupation; and this only the unemployed, uncorrupted, very young question.
A helicopter appeared from nowhere, landed on the spit of lawn between the two lakes.
"From now on, signore, I call you Sixty-nine."
"Oke," I said.
"Beautiful day, Sixty-nine."
"Beautiful."
"You got-a the gun I gave you?"
"No. I left it in town." I do not, as a rule, on social or carnal occasions, carry a gun. A gun, I have always felt, is symbolic of sexual weakness. The mechanical equalizer.
He laughed. "No matter none. You no hit anything never-except maybe me."
"There's something else, though."
"What?"
A happy thought had come to me. The pen-the Bulgarian pen (which reminded me that "buggery" comes from Bougre, the French for Bulgarian). The pen was a hardy weapon in the arsenals of the CIA, KGB, and all offices and sub-offices of secret-agent chicanery.
It fires tiny, invisible barbiturate pellets. The victim, when hit, feels nothing-or almost nothing (give or take a would-be gnat bite). He falls, however, into almost instant sleep; on waking, remembers nothing.
"The pen, Vulpe. The Bulgarian pen."
"You want it, signore, you take it."
He reached into his inside jacket pocket, handed me an object which looked more or less like an ordinary felt-tipped pen.
"Thanks." I put it in my pocket.
"No sweat, signore. No sweat. De pen, day say, is-a mightier than-a de sword. But what-a the hell you can shoot wit a sword?"
CHAPTER FOUR
The helicopter door opened. A head appeared. Memories revived.
There was the same jet-black hair falling to her shoulders, bobbed square in front. And framed by the dramatic tresses were the sharply chiseled cheekbones, the flashing white teeth.
Looking at me and laughing was Melissa Panter-Downes, "Agent 96," my sometimes guide, instructor in secret-agenting, sponsor of the swift, mindless seduction. I had met her with Cholly-Boy when Cholly-Boy first visited Charleston, met her during a drinking bout in a little restaurant on Market Street.
What immediately followed eludes me. I remember only my surprise, the following morning, in a room at the Kiawah Inn:
I opened my eyes. The room I was in was dimly lighted by a sun not yet above the horizon. Next to me, her back turned to me, her unclothed body nuzzling my left hip, was a girl.
I was enormously thirsty. My head ached. My dully vagrant eye roamed about the room. One wall was solid glass shielded by an opaque curtain around whose edges crept streaks of morning white.
I got up, surveyed my clothes, which lay in a heap on the floor. I walked to the room-wide window, pulled back the curtain. The ocean lay below, gray, restless, seething. Unfriendly clouds, dark, elongated like putty which has been rubbed between hands, hung sullenly along the horizon. I turned. In the morning light, somber as it was, I could inspect my sleeping companion.
When I say "could inspect," I speak in pure theory.
The girl's face was pressed into the pillows. All that was visible were bare shoulders and a spread of tangled hair.
Cautiously I turned down the covers. There was no need as yet to wake her.
White shoulders came into view, solid, broad muscular. There was a long spine. Ah then, the buttocks-small, also muscular. And on the left cheek (where Amy wore so proudly her blue tattoo) was a mole.
I was about to appraise the thighs when my companion squirmed, grunted sleepily, then turned over. She was Miss Panter-Downes, breasts upstanding, nipples erect.
"Isn't this a little indecent?" she said. "We've scarcely met."
Enough for the reverie. "Get in," Melissa said.
I climbed in beside her. She kissed me, introduced me to the pilot, a turbaned Arab with an Arab's expected toothbrush mustache. "Ahib," she said. "Ahib, meet Sixty-nine."
The door closed. Vulpe remained on the ground. Melissa squeezed my hand. "You're a dear. A lovely, fucking dear."
The helicopter slowly rose. Melissa reached for a bottle, poured herself and me a slug of Scotch (Glenlivet-Melissa always lived well).
She held up her glass. "Cheers."
"Cheers."
"How is Amy?"
"Well."
"Cholly-Boy sends his best."
"Thanks." Would that all husbands were as civilized as Lord Cholmondeley. Much is to be said for the training a man gets in the English public schools.
"I hear you're having writer's block."
"How did you hear that?"
"There are no secrets, Soixante-neuf. No secrets."
The helicopter climbed, moved slowly down the Ashley River. Seagulls eyed us suspiciously.
I asked myself why I was always so passive, always led, not leading. A writer should be masterful, decisive, innovative. He should intrigue, cajole, seduce. He should be adventurous, in ways so well defined by Alexander, Napoleon, Byron, Casanova. Not thus was I. I mused. I was a muser, waiting to be taken in hand, or by the hand, to have my erection pointed-by the nearest inviting and concerned woman-to the direction in which I was to go. All such I deemed a defect in character. Character, I concluded, was a quality which had bypassed me. Yet-and as a pragmatist I made much of this "Yet"-my passivity had been productive. By floating like a straw in a stream, I had achieved in my passive way a suspicion of success. Chance encounters became the flowers of cogitation; they, in turn, matured into affection, passion, books that wrote themselves. All that life and my publishers seemed to ask of me is that I float, observe, record. Nor could Joseph Smith have had it easier when he was handed the Book of Mormon fully copyedited and engraved.
"Me spik English," our pilot said, pointing below to a separation in the green marsh. "Wappoo Creek."
The helicopter made a right turn at the junction of the Ashley River and Wappoo Creek. We followed the creek to the Stono, turned south at the Stono. A file of brown pelicans soared solemnly in front of us, then veered to avoid the whirligig monster from outer space. The wildlife of the Low Country has, quite properly, not yet forgiven the white man his intrusion into the quiet places.
We flew over John's Island, Edisto Island, and the many unnamed or obscurely named islands which lie nestled in the marsh. Above us, silhouetted against the sky, were ibises, their long necks thrust forward in almost a straight line, their long black legs outstretched behind them. Below, standing motionless in the pluff mud, were egrets.
Eventually we approached a small barrier island. Waves, breaking on the beach, looked from above like placid white strings.
We descended slowly, crossed the island from the ocean side, almost topping the tall palmettos.
"Pretty," said Melissa.
"Pretty," I thought, was an understatement. To me the beauty of this Low Country outpaces adjectives. The melding of water and marsh, lushness and quiet, induces a dreaminess in which all Fine distinctions are lost. Over all is what I think of as miasma consciousness-an ongoing blur in the mind.
In time we approached a clearing, slowly descended.
Melissa put her hand on my knee. "Welcome, Sixty-nine, to Island X."
"So nice, Ninety-six, of you to have me."
"YouTl never be sorry, believe me."
"Sixty-nine is ever loyal, ever trusting."
"And a card-carrying bastard."
I told her that a writer, to write competently, must be altogether without scruples. And she told me she still thought of me as incurably, insufferably square.
The pilot touched down, cut the rotor, opened the door. "No Coast Guard never never find Mecca," he said.
I got out. I held up my hand to help Melissa.
Melissa took my hand, extended an inviting leg. "How very gallant," she said with the sarcasm of the fanner's daughter who had spent a chaste night with the traveling salesman, separated from him only by a board.
I saw a jeep at the edge of the clearing.
"Mr. Benton, I believe." Dr. Livingstone, as I recall, was similarly greeted in a spot perhaps not greatly different from this-although a dingle, perhaps, or a dell. "So good of you to come."
I turned. Behind me was Cholly-Boy. He was still the slim, dapper Cholly-Boy, sporting his guardsman's mustache, sporting riding boots and a riding crop.
From his tone, his choice of words, I gathered that he did not remember me, although we had been several times together.
I remembered well the first time, when Cloris had invited me to visit Ramspaugh, the Cholmondeley country place, about halfway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. (It was there that Cloris and I had cast Jennifer Digby in the role of Tom, in Tom Brown's School Days-a picture we finished in Spain.) I had been delighted and awed by Ramspaugh, which was more empire than estate. It began high in the Kentish hills, rolled on across rill and river, across hamlet and copse, until it ground to a halt, it seemed to me, in the far reaches of Ultima Thule.
Lord Cholmondeley had been suave, hospitable, charming, ignoring as well-bred, regimentally striped Englishmen are prone to ignore, my acceptance of bare favors from his wife.
("Ramspaugh was built for a remote ancestor of mine," he had said to me, with a gracious effort to put me at ease. "Sidney, sixteenth Earl of Pembroke. The wrought-iron gates were bought in Italy by Sidney, Lord Herbert of Lea. The forecourt gardens were laid out by the seventeenth Earl of Pembroke as a memorial to his father, the sixteenth-who departed this life quite romantically, cut down, as it were, in the inlaid bed of a Manchu princess.")
And then as now, I found it hard to look him in the eye. Then, as now, I had, only a few hours earlier, enjoyed the thrice-heaved thighs, the fondling birdsounds of Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley.
"So good of you to come."
The phrasing, I thought, was unfortunate-an unconscious prodding of a guilty conscience. (So helpful had been Melissa's sage suggestion: "Toughen up, Sixty-nine. We don't have time for long courtships!")
"Delighted," I said, feeling English by borrowed osmosis.
"Cloris thought you might be willing to help."
Cloris had been in touch with him? He with Cloris? How? When? Cloris' thrust had never ceased to surprise me. There was nothing she could not engineer, promote, develop-ultimately enjoy.
"Indeed." I had an obligation to Cholly-Boy, a debt to pay. I reminded myself of the French naval officer, played by Charles Boyer, in an old movie called L'orage. The French officer is discovered in the arms of Lady So-and-sake, wife of the commander of the Japanese Navy. And because soon after the Japanese commander is killed in battle, Boyer finds himself honor-bound to take the commander's place. Such is the code of the French samurai; and such is the code I was now called on to adopt-although I had no reason to feel French by osmosis.
"Sixty-nine," Melissa said, "is ever helpful, always polite, and double-quick on the draw."
It came back to me. The last time I had seen Cholly-Boy was not at Ramspaugh, but in Cloris' and my room at the Mills House.
I had left the room to buy whiskey. Cloris, presumably, was making herself comfortable. ("Darling, do draw me a bath. I'm so utterly, municipally sticky.") Among proper Charlestonians, I had noted, the close of every day is celebrated with the juice of the flowing bottle; and Cloris was already much at home in this pleasant, decadent, sea-washed city. I had walked to the Tavern, a few blocks away, on East Bay; bought two quarts of Glenlivet. On my return I had a colossal surprise; colossal and slightly numbing: Cloris was still naked from her bath-naked but not alone.
* * *
Cloris was stretched full length on one of the beds (my bed), her hand behind her head (elevating her breasts a la the Duchess of Alba in Goya's La maja desnuda), her right knee cocked (tightening the long thigh muscle).
Conspicuous, now, dramatically conspicuous, was the absence of the expected pubic triangle. (The deficit was a gesture of identity with the Countess of Liechtenstein, who had been thus unadorned to make common cause with the girls of La Concorrenza whose furzelessness was a benchmark of beauty-and a bedfellow's badge of identity.) And delicate was the brazen, shaven cleft-the slim vertical divide, now deepened by shadow.
I was reminded of the Moon's Alpine Valley, as seen under medium power soon after the lunar sunrise.
Lord Cholmondeley was staring at her through his monocle. "She's ibid," he murmured. "Always so ibid and so deft. Makes you remember, somehow, how clever the convolvulus is at climbing."
And why had Lord Cholmondeley been in Charleston? Because Prince Charles was then visiting Charleston, and Cholly-Boy had been traveling with him as a commercial attache. There was much to be bought in South Carolina-including the favorable disposition of some of its politicians.
Memory plays strange leapfrogs with us. Perhaps all of this was no more than a bright fig ripening in my imagination.
Melissa climbed into the jeep, made herself comfortable on the backseat. She was nimble, graceful, eminently self-possessed. A lone seagull circled overhead.
"Please get in." Cholly-Boy motioned to the front seat on the right.
I got in. Melissa, in memory, perhaps, of auld lang syne, kicked me.
"So terribly good of you to come," Cholly-Boy repeated, climbing in beside me and starting the jeep. "You know, of course, about the merging of Cholmondeley Enterprises with the Stiarchos combine? Have you heard?"
I had. Nor was it proper, I thought, to mention my work (if work it was) with Marianna Stiarchos, the season past. As a companion, on-and-off lover, and co-conspirator of the girl by whom Marianna Stiarchos was seduced (Melissa), I had some complicity in the merger.
"Business is very complex, these days."
"The world itself is complex. Take Northern Ireland. Take the Near East."
He smiled. "You are very perceptive."
The announcement of the perfectly obvious, I have long known, brings with it understanding, respect, rapport. It is only the solving of problems that makes a man suspect.
The jeep snaked through a deep jungle of scrub oaks, bamboo, wax myrtles, magnolias. Heavy drapes of Spanish moss hung lazily overhead.
A deer, startled, leaped across the road in front of us, disappeared with a crash into a copse of myrtles.
Eventually we came to a marsh-draped river. This was the end of the road-if road is a proper term for the sandy ruts the jeep had followed in our bumping, jostling, weaving ride through the woods.
Ahead of us was a crude, half-rotted dock. And tied up to this dock was the handsomest oceangoing yacht to be seen this side of the French Riviera. So large was the yacht that it did not seem possible to me that it navigated the shallow backwaters of the Carolina coast.
"My office," Cholly-Boy said, framing the yacht with a sweep of his hand.
Once aboard, we settled ourselves in deck chairs, were served drinks and caviar sandwiches by a steward in crisp uniform.
"Cheers," said Melissa, showing me, again, the flirtatious white dots in her upper front teeth. I had forgotten about these exotic fillings-a mark as personal, distinctive as the fleur-de-lis on Amy's left buttock.
"Cheers," said Cholly-Boy.
I gave the appropriate echo.
We had been served Bloody Marys. We clicked glasses, drank.
"Now to business," Melissa said.
"Your motion pictures have been very profitable, very useful for our business interests." Cholly-Boy looked at me with big sheep eyes, eyes that could never harden themselves to espy me in bed with his wife.
"Your version of Gone with the Wind...."
"Grossed forty million. The biggest sales ... you would never believe ... were in Asia. Took the earnings in Mitsubishi stock. Traded that for Saudi oil." Cholly-Boy was precise, business-like, pleasant.
"Anna Ricci. Anna Ricci," Melissa chanted. "How did you get her clothes off ... with Magnello watching?"
I seemed to be having a happy moment. I got Anna's clothes off by pinking her with the little Bulgarian dart pen Vulpe had given me. I developed not so much a modem version of Gone with the Wind as La Sonnambula in modem, double-naked undress. Subsequent pinking of the wary Magnello ... and seeing to it that Anna saw him entwined with the undraped maid-that did the rest. There is no fury like a woman who discovers her husband doing what he has forbidden her to do-and she has just done. So much for catharsis.
Cholly-Boy lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out slowly in a slim, neat stream. "You know, of course, of Achmed Abdullah."
"No."
"No?"
"No."
"You're square, Sixty-nine. Square as a baby's sandbox.
I always told you."
She had, in fact. And she had been, I must concede, exceedingly useful. It had been through her-at least under her-that I had become forceful, conniving, ruthless, at long last aware that only to the swift is the girl laid bare.
We are given false teachings in youth, given the notion that there is a premium in inaction; that a proper young man, admired by all, follows the model of a shy Englishman, inept and gallant. The reverse is the case. The male stars of the screen are invariably macho, those of the fast lariat, the quick draw, the thoughtless leap. Witness the long string of picaresque rogues-extending from Clark Gable to Burt Reynolds.
"The big money today is in the Near East," Cholly-Boy said. "That's why I asked you about Achmed Abdullah."
"Who is Achmed Abdullah?" I sipped my drink, rested my eyes on Melissa's twin white dots and a nearby duck.
"Achmed? One of the Saudi princes. Has his hand in every big oil deal Saudi Arabia makes. And you know Saudi politics-one hand oils the other."
"What he's trying to tell you," said Melissa, "is that this remote Arab has a thing for Jill Philbrick."
"Jill Philbrick." Cholly-Boy nodded. "Saw her picture in that girlie magazine. Is crazy about her navel. You know how Arabs are. Little boys and navels."
"Life in the desert," Melissa explained, "is very uptight. A man doesn't get around very much."
"The Koran," said Cholly-Boy, "is very strict."
"What can a man get?" Melissa counted on her fingers. "Four fat wives, one round-bottomed boy ... and maybe a sheep."
"Achmed would like to get into motion pictures. Come to this country. Promote Jill Philbrick. He's got a thing for Jill Philbrick."
"Wants to pour myrrh in her navel."
"I'm a simple businessman, Mr. Benton. Simple but shrewd. And I have an excellent track record. I love making money. There's a fascination in money. There's something obsessive about making it, then compounding it. I can understand compulsive gambling. Understand Las Vegas. On the other hand, a gambler never wins. I do-almost always."
"You already have a title," I said, more for the sake of conversation than for anything else. "And Ramspaugh-a magnificent place." (I saw no reason to mention Lady Cholmondeley.)
"I inherited my title. I inherited Ramspaugh. The money I made myself-a billion or so, by now. And I say to you, with no apology, I love every pound and pence."
I nodded.
''And don't believe what the copy books tell you. Money can buy you anything in the whole world you want. What about health? you might say. Love?"
Again I nodded. There was no need to interrupt; a nod indicates that you have heard whatever there was to hear, that your interest has not flagged.
''Money buys all the love you can take. Listen not to Poor Richard. And as for health-if you're going to have bad health, you're going to have it as soon without money as with money. Life does not give a choice. And it's too much to sit around waiting for a genie to jump out of a bottle."
"I'm expensive," Melissa said, refilling my glass and lobbing a lump of ice into my lap.
"Have you never loved money?" Cholly-Boy twirled the tips of his mustache.
"Have never given it much thought." By this I meant I had never thought much about the nature and nurture of big money. No more had I thought about running the four-minute mile, or sailing around the world in a one-man kayak. The money needed to pay for a hotel room, or a presentable preseduction dinner, had, it hurts me to say, been in times past a source of heartbreak and pox.
"Let me come to the point," Cholly-Boy said. "I will pay you a flat million dollars and give you a fifteen percent override on profits, for a few months' work."
"Interesting," I said, finding little else to say. And by the same token, I suddenly found Cholly-Boy interesting-extremely interesting. As a novelist, I said to myself, I tend always to overlook the obvious.
Melissa added what could only be a clincher. "And a title. Vice-president of Cholmondeley-Stiarchos-Haroun-al-Raschid Productions ... at a reasonable salary."
"Of course." Cholly-Boy smiled. "Say two hundred thousand? No. Make it three hundred thousand. It's all Arab money ... washed clean in the sweetest Arab oil."
"Of course," I said, not even bothering to ask what I was to do to justify this money. Talk about extravagant sums has, I gather, just such an effect. It is hypnotic, much like extreme decollete on a girl who makes decollete wholesome and American-Raquel Welch, say (or Amy).
I began to like Cholly-Boy, like him very much. Such, I gather, was the liking Nelson eventually felt for Hamilton. He saw in him the virtues of good sense, a civilized man's tolerance of peccadilloes, and certain suggestions of creative connoisseurship.
(I now catch myself in a web of contradictions. I announced to myself, at first, that I had nothing whatever to write, have nothing whatever to write-hence pass myself illegitimately, and with much pretense, as a writer. I milk this complaint with masochistic fervor. Then I turn to someone I choose to write about, Amy for example, or Cloris, and complain that I do not understand her, can never understand her, never know what goes on in her mind while I enjoy, and ponder in my muzzy way, the wonders of her body. All the more, what goes on in her mind, to what uses and abuses she puts her body, when I am not present. Again, why is my interest, concern for psychic subtleties, confined solely to women? Why does my probing eye, my penchant for wonder, not embrace Vulpe-surely a rich enigma? Or Cholly-Boy, a gracious host, complex veteran of the British fox-hunting, pukkasahib world-a dealer in ivory apes and peacocks?)
"This is the pitch," Melissa said, her tooth dots aquiver in the late-aftemoon sunlight. "Prince Achmed has the movie concession for all of Saudi Arabia-and that includes movies on the boob tube."
"Purdah," said Cholly-Boy, "plays skittles with young men's fancies."
"At any rate, he wants to make Jill the bright star in every Arabian night. He's queer that way. One star, one company, one country."
"Delightful," I said, picturing Jill riding naked and sidesaddle on an Arabian stallion, screaming, "Women of the seraglio, arise. Arise!" I could rewrite Lawrence of Arabia-have Jill play Lawrence.
"It's all very simple," Cholly-Boy said. "All you have to do is write a book for Jill, turn it into a screenplay-or vice versa, if you prefer. Then get her to play in it."
"You've done it before, Sixty-nine." Melissa sat herself on the deck in front of me, hugged my legs. "You did it for Anna Ricci. For Marianna Stiarchos. Your beloved Amy. All for love and nothing."
"Think of power, my boy. Prestige. If you'd care to turn British, I could get you a Garter."
"I have an idea," I said.
"What?" The two spoke in concert.
"A modem, double-naked version of the Lady Hamilton story...."
"Promising, dear boy. Promising."
"But with a twist."
"Perfect." Melissa was encouraging. "Jill, on coming, does a half-gaynor with full twist. Stirs the cockles and is surer than the pill."
She told a story about an extraordinary young man who, on his first visit to New York, met three attractive young women in Central Park. They invited him to their apartment. Each girl, after momentary fulfillment, somersaulted for similar reasons. "And that's the way it was all night." She looked to me for approval. "One on the bed, two in the air."
"Funny," Cholly-Boy said to me, "you know, you remind me so much of a chap I once met."
"Who?"
"Can't remember his name now. Looked so much like you."
"Indeed?"
"Name of Beauregard. Something like that. Maybe Beau Rivage."
"Indeed." I saw no reason to be helpful.
"Wrote books, too. A friend of Lady Cholmondeley's. Brought him out to Ramspaugh. Likable chap."
"I bet," said Melissa.
"Interesting," I said in the offhand manner of a man who collects odd scraps of information.
"Brought a dashing piece of fluff with him. Girl named Jennifer. Used to run around in the altogether. Lady Cholmondeley didn't like that one bit."
"About the movie," I began. I saw no reason to discuss Beauregard and Jennifer.
"Ah, yes. The movie. Keep a little fluff in mind."
I then explained my twist, a natural for the Near East. I would take some license with history-for who, east of Suez, reads history? Reads at all-except signs and portents? "Admiral Nelson," I said, "does not defeat the French. He defeats the Turks ... and frees the Arabs. We take Revolt in the Desert out to sea."
"Topping, dear boy. Topping."
"The great battle we fight is not the Battle of Trafalgar. It is the Battle of Oman."
"Onan?" Melissa was wistful. "What a lovely boy. And so considerate."
There followed some talk about details. What was my bank? The Citizens & Southern? A half-million would be deposited to my account the next morning. No contract was needed-a contract, if anything, might be inept. It might fall into the wrong hands. Contracts do that sort of thing. The second half-million would be paid me on completion of the book, screenplay, and the start of production. Shooting could begin in Charleston. Cholmondeley-Stiarchos still had facilities there-unused since our shooting of Gone with the Wind. Cloris would attend to the details-of this Cholly-Boy was sure. No need for him to stand around. He would only be in the way. Meanwhile, I would see to it that Jill Philbrick was hired, coached, properly filmed. Rushes should be gotten to him as soon as possible-rushes featuring the stellar Jill. Cholly-Boy would show the film to Prince Achmed in Kuwait. Rlyadh, at this moment, was too risky. ("Remember that lovely princess whose head was chopped off? Achmed's half-sister. He misses her.") We had more drinks, hearty handshakes. Cholly-Boy excused himself. "Some messages to get off. We have our own satellite, you know."
"A good afternoon's work," Melissa said, unzipping my fly.
"Unexpected," I said. "Unexpected but neat."
"You'll have a tax problem. I'll have to take you to Switzerland. Maybe Liechtenstein."
Her head moved lower.
A deft hand darted into my trousers. Deft fingers drew out the gristle there discovered.
"He's lonely," she said, rubbing her tongue over the minute orifice.
"I give magnificent head," she said. ''You must remember."
I remembered. ("In this kind of business we don't have time for long courtships.")
Her lips grew aggressive. "It's getting hard," she announced, making capital of the obvious.
I felt nerve endings tingle. I kissed the back of her head, reached under her and unbuttoned her blouse.
I ran my hands around solid, almost conical breasts, fingered the small, agile nipples.
"Are you still so square, Sixty-nine?"
"Scarcely," I said.
"You talk a lot. But you always run too scared." Her mouth descended and I felt the hard touch of her larynx.
"Yes?"
"Even now...." She spoke with understandable difficulty. "Even now you're afraid to come in my mouth." Debate, at such moments, is pointless.
"A gentleman doesn't come in a lady's mouth. It's just not done ... isn't that so?"
Amy, I had read (in John's book), first took John this way-when she had decided to take him.
"Aunt Amy," I could hear him saying, "stop. I can't hold back anymore."
And I could hear Amy saying, a little hoarsely perhaps, a little mockingly, "Who asked you to?"
All this was too much.
Melissa ran her tongue along an unseen vein, sucked in her cheeks. Inside me were the electric tremors, a sudden burning, three seismic reflexes. Three times the sphincters jerked. There was the hot, primal spurt; then two echoic quivers.
She pulled back her head, swallowed hard, then looked up at me. A smile crow-footed around her eyes. "That was one for the road."
Only I had been pleasured. I had been remiss. I apologized.
"There you go again, Sixty-nine. Square as a high-buttoned shoe."
Ninety-six, however, was a practical girl, as practical and pleasure-loving as she was, at times, gallant.
"There's a little circular bed in a back state room," she said, after some reflection. "And if you really cared . .
She led me through a carpeted gangway to a little stateroom in the stem of the yacht. Light came from clerestory windows which rose above the deck. In the center of the room was the bed, round as a turntable.
She pressed a button until the bed revolved, positioning the pillows opposite the end of the diameter at which we stood.
"Remember Rome," she said, unbuttoning invisible buttons, sliding down invisible zippers.
Never before had I seen a girl become so naked so quickly.
And there she stood beside me, the old Melissa Panter-Downes-still slim, solid, with flattened hips, muscled thighs, sugarloaf breasts, and avid, shining eyes.
She leaped on the bed, positioned her head on the pillows, her hands behind her head.
I, more slowly, got out of my clothes.
Starting at her feet, I slowly kissed my way halfway up her body. I was apologizing in my way for my spent erection.
"Heavenly," she said, giving no heed for my frontal deficiency.
Her legs moved apart. Her hand pressed encouragingly on the back of my head.
It is the law of ying and yang, however, that one cosmic response uplifts the other. My virility was fed fresh magic.
"Of course," she said, as sure of herself as if certain always of her own force.
Quickly, nimbly, she leaned forward, doubling our bodies in inverse positions, each tongue dedicated to its own sentimental tasks.
Ninety-six screamed without inhibition; screamed, pulsed, quivered. Cholly-Boy, I was sure, was within hearing distance. But this fact, if so, played no part in her practiced ways.
Eventually we disentwined and got up. Her eyes were shining, her mouth triumphant.
"We work well together," she said. "As all agents should."
Soon after, she saw me back aboard the helicopter. Her eyes were still shining. The sun was setting. Ribbons of red and orange streamed through the eclair clouds that hung over the horizon.
"Don't tell Amy," Melissa said sagely.
I kissed her, feeling very rich, very relaxed.
My head was filled with fine phrases and plans for delectable pieces of business-such as Jill, nude, playing Lady Hamilton playing Lady Godiva in a pageant to honor Lord Nelson at the royal court in Naples.
And it was clear to me, then, that we have little control over our destinies. Sometimes the world, like Melissa, is good to us. Most times, it is not. Either way, our freedom to choose, set our courses, is a snare and delusion.
CHAPTER FIVE
Melissa, I concluded, had this afternoon done her bit for the empire on which, until recently, the sun had not set. And I had a slight burning as a consequence.
We were in the bedroom of the big house on East Battery. Amy was already in bed, the great bed over which presided a canopy and (for whatever reason) the coat of arms of George III. Cloris, Amy explained, had been driven to the Cholmondeley estate on the Combahee. "Something's going on there ... I don't know what."
About nine that evening, about an hour before, the helicopter had deposited me at the Charleston Marina. I had been driven "home," if my lodgings on East Battery can be so described, by taxi. ("Nice place you got there," the taxi driver had said. "We don't drive many old Charlestonians anymore. Too tight, I guess.")
"Turn on the boob tube and come to bed." Amy, I thought, was most cordial; and the warmth of her voice eased a little my chronic sense of guilt. Melissa or no Melissa, I was always uncomfortable when I faced Amy after forays elsewhere. I had, I assured myself, no reason to feel guilty; but it is not easy in a short space to offset the conditioning of a lifetime. And "guilt," I well knew, is nothing more than fear of punishment. How might Amy punish me? Withdrawing, I suppose. Turning her back to me. Despising me.
I would have liked to shower. A gentleman would have showered, after meetings such as mine. (Was there lipstick on my tender part-a sentimental reminder of Melissa's ardor?)
Showering, however, would have been too obvious a confession of guilt. Lochinvar, one might assume, never bathed, never thought it necessary to bathe. There was nothing to erase. Lancelot was another matter; Lancelot, on approaching Queen Guinevere (who, as the bard said, "was much given to being carried off"), had to account for Elaine. And the tragedy of Elaine, as I read epic, was her inability to give samples.
I took off my clothes. As if to hide the evidence of my weakness, defection, disloyalty, I turned my back to Amy when I slid off my trousers and shorts.
Then I turned on the TV.
Instantly I saw Vulpe, surrounded by a chorus of young girls, each wearing wings.
"Pee Dee, Pee Dee, Pee Dee," said Vulpe, an unexplained exhortation to virtue, but which I interpreted as an order to dump the cocaine and marijuana in the estuary of the Pee Dee River. "Let us all unite against sin. Let us drive pornography from the four comers of this earth. Let us let God enter our souls-take over, tell us what to do. And let us send immediately a hundred dollars ... fifty dollars ... even ten dollars-the Lord will understand-to keep this message of inspiration on the air."
"Come to bed," Amy said.
I got into bed.
Guilt, as I have said so many times, is my be'te noir. Say what you will about fear of punishment. Read me the decalogues of Freud, Adler, Jung, Wilhelm Reich. There it is: the queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach, the unwillingness of the penis to rise.
"The money you invest in the Lord...." Vulpe's voice floated on. "That money will come back tenfold. That's-a why I not hesitate to say to you, give, give, give!"
The chorus of angels joined in. To the music which ordinarily brings the "Hallelujah Chorus" to a thumping finale, they shouted, "Give! Give! Give! Give!"
With a remote switch, Amy snapped off the set.
"Prerecorded," I said. "Couldn't be live."
"Expensive."
I was pleased that we were talking about Vulpe; not about me-where I had gone, what I had done. Nor could I easily explain Cholly-Boy. I could scarcely claim to know him. He knew little if anything about me. It was odd that he had sent for me, and, with so little ado, suggested an unbelievable business arrangement. Strange too, it seemed to me, that he had, so soon after, asked to see Cloris.
On the other hand, I was tired of questions.
More to the point, I was tired. Dead tired. The day had been full and draining; and sexual energy, I was fast learning, is limited by a cosmic budget.
Yet there were problems of protocol.
I eyed Amy's flimsy black lace gown. (When in bed alone, she was never naked, Charleston lady as was she ever. Ladies observe the proprieties as Englishmen once dressed for dinner-even if alone in the heart of the Sahara.) Then I turned off the light.
"That's better," Amy said.
I turned to her.
She kissed me.
The kiss was light, pleasant, friendly. It was not an ardent kiss; not a kiss that carried with it overtones of longing.
In return, I, from habit, curiosity, recollections of past lust, slid the hem of the gown up Amy's long, smooth thighs.
"You don't really want to make love to me tonight, do you?"
"Always," I said, hoping that my reserves would justify my promise.
"Always?"
"I always want to make love to you." This was fact, not idle gallantry. My penis, however, had a life of his own; and I was not fully franchised to speak for him.
So much for me-my questions about myself, my need to hide my guilt. But Amy? Why should she raise the question: Did I or did I not want to make love to her? Had she acquired by some erotic telegraph, by some quirk of intuition, an awareness of my erotic gallimaufry with Isabelle Wescott? The sweet reunion with Melissa? Did she sense, perhaps, that I was altogether exhausted, could not, probably, as Cloris would say (with more give-and-take humor), "get it up"?
"Always." I repeated the sentiment of spirit, ignoring the flesh. Meanwhile I pushed the hem higher, caressed the thighs' marmoreal slopes, traced with a queasy finger the spread of the love-centered bosk.
"Careful," fluted Amy.
My fingers sought, located, entered casually the moist, mysterious cleft.
"Oh my!" said Amy.
"Oh my!" I echoed.
At all tender moments, I am convinced, an exchange of feelings is at best echoic.
It hurt me to think that my talk with Isabelle, when talk reflected a rising heat, had also been echoic. And in Isabelle I had had no more than the curiosity and interest a casual guest has for a charming and colorful hostess-and sometime lover of one's own love.
Meanwhile, thought compounded on thought, image on image, and a buzzing as of bees seemed stirring in my prostate.
Amy's hand explored me; and I was delighted to note that her wandering hand was no longer constrained by the Charleston proprieties.
"You have a hard-on," she announced.
I had, indeed; and the erection pressed against the palm of her hand, reminding me that a recollection of wrongdoing-once guilt has been acknowledged and forgotten-is the strongest of aphrodisiacs. And it is for this reason, I daresay, that in ongoing social doings, adultery will always win, hands down, over connubial bliss.
"You want me?" Her fingers fluttered as they worked at their appointed task, and her voice once again had the music of a flute.
I conceded, proudly, enthusiastically, that this was the case.
The consummation of true love, it seems, wipes out all responsibility for past misdeeds. It is the ultimate catharsis.
A slight burning in my nether part suggested, however, that a. night of rest might be useful. But such burnings are not talked about, particularly to the woman one loves. Not easy is it to explain the simultaneous persistence of loyalty and disloyalty.
I cupped her breasts in my hands. The nipples were hard. Amy kissed me sweetly, then hard. The fragrance of Givenchy embraced me.
"Why don't I take off this silly gown?" She pulled the gown over her head, threw it across the room.
BAREFOOT ON JILL
Thereafter she made me realize how foolish I was to waste my virility on charades and lawn games. No other lovemaking was like this. No other woman, it seemed to me, could give herself as Amy gave; and no other had a body so perfect to give. Nor when the moment of truth asserted itself could Amy in any way hold anything back. Yet she was in no wise aware of her own spell, her loveliness, of the music that came with cresting.
In such a way did we fall asleep, all fluids blended.
Toward morning, the faint east light crept through the harbor windows. A cardinal in the garden sounded his "pretty, pretty, pretty." Amy lay lightly asleep, one thigh over mine, her lips parted, her face innocent as a flower.
As I stared at her in softness and wonder, she stirred, became aware of me, sighed. Her eyes half-opened. "Darling," she said, "I have a confession to make."
"No."
"I was unfaithful to you yesterday."
"Unfaithful" is an old-fashioned word. It would have rung hollow anywhere but on the lips of Amy. ("To thee I pledge my troth, liege lord ... till death do us part." Thus might Lady Diana have addressed Prince Charles, one honeymoon night. Such wording would scarcely become Melissa, or Cloris, or any others in my fine Amazonian band-not even Aimee, the Countess of Liechtenstein.)
"Yes?"
"I'm so ashamed."
No more need I trouble my conscience about Isabelle, about the swift tryst with Melissa.
"It was with Isabelle. After you disappeared."
"Really?"
"Really. Do you mind?"
How nice of her, I thought, how cajoling, how perverse, to ask if I minded.
Soon the herring gulls and the laughing gulls were whirling and skirling outside our window. And I thought, for no particular reason, of the little yellow-bellied sapsucker.
In time I wheedled the details from her. She knew I would try; her "Do you mind?" was an invitation to me to press her, urge her to confess. This was the small game we played together.
"I was in the drawing room talking to Senator Aslimead," she said. "Isabelle came up to me, took me by the hand. She was trembling-you know, the way I sometimes tremble."
I knew. The tremor was part of her great sensuous appeal, the outward sign of defenses melting, of the war between the states.
"'I need you,' she said. 'Terribly. I have to have you.' I asked her if she wanted to whip me."
"Would you have let her?"
"Of course. You know I would. It would hurt terribly. You know that too. But pain sometimes is exquisite."
I heard the chimes of St. Michael's sound the quarter-hour in minor thirds.
"She took me up to her bedroom. You've been in the bedroom?"
I had been in the bedroom. I had once taken Anna Ricci to the selfsame bedroom. (Down, memory! Let us not interrupt confession so freely given!)
"She undressed me."
"Everything?"
"Everything. Then I undid her blouse, dropped her skirt. That's all she wore."
This I knew ("Love your tutu!"), although I saw nothing to be gained by advertising the fact.
"You have no way of knowing, of course, but Isabelle has an exquisite body. Slightly boyish-scarcely any breasts. But all-over slim, rippling, ... like the neck of a swan."
"Then?"
I could feel a smile in her fingers, as they tightened, teased. "You want to know everything, don't you?"
"Everything." I am, after all, a seasoned listener, accomplished voyeur. I am also a self-appointed keeper of the records. And Amy's place in history, embarrassing as it might sometimes seem to be, depended much on my memory-and my resolve to write truthfully and well.
"She was trembling. I was trembling. I don't know why she was so excited ... so hungry."
"Then she made love to you."
"No." Her fingers twitched. "I'm getting you excited all over again, aren't I?"
I conceded that she was.
"I made love to her."
I sneezed. (Fliess' Syndrome.)
"Bless you," she said sweetly.
"Thank you."
"And I suppose you want to know how?"
I did.
"Really?" Amy was expert with the verbal tease.
My returned virility went rampant in her hand. "Really."
"Like this." She pulled my face toward her, kissed me, her tongue wildly flickering; then slowly, deliberately, she guided my head down the perfumed slopes of her body.
And there I was, at the unknown, remembered gate, reminding myself that the way up and the way down are one and the same.
A little later, Amy got out of bed, put on her high-heeled slippers (each topped with a small blue pom-pom), walked with rocker-beam grace to the bathroom. She came back with only eye shadow and lip rouge to accent her nakedness.
Voyeur that I am, I lay back on the pillows, inviting my eyes once again to rampage over her sweeping thighs; her full, up-pointed, magnetic breasts-breasts which swayed with pride and a certain coaxing malevolence as she walked. There was also, for my pleasure and enticement, the cascade of lustrous black hair which semaphored such spirit and disdain when she gave a sudden twist to her head.
"Breakfast?" The lilt in her question, the question-mark lift of her eyebrows, the perverse smile of her dimples, announced to me that she knew well what was in my mind; that it pleased her to make the most of my bewitchment.
"Breakfast." I jumped up, stroked what a moment before had been no more than a parade of fancies.
And breakfast we had, as one the preceding day-crisp bacon, however, replacing the shad roe; and the breakfast room (because of Amy's delectable undress) substituting for the piazza.
Again the time passed pleasantly; and again our morning mockingbird warbled its borrowed tunes. "Listen," Amy said. Sometimes I think she lives for little birds, and little birds alone.
She was later, she told me, to meet Gian-Carlo Menotti. The annual Spoleto festival was upon us; and an awareness of that makes me demur from my claim that Amy gave her heart alone to little birds-her heart and her concern. Amy had been, and was still, a citizen as capable as she was alluring. She had been, as I noted elsewhere, South Carolina's sometime commissioner for consumer affairs. She had been an active and photogenic aid to her husband in his various political imbroglios. And now that her fame as a film actress was national and international (even if older Charlestonians occasionally looked on her with what their generation called askance), she was much in demand-as are all who are larded with publicity. (Vide: the string-bikini cover picture on Time, the frontal nude on Oggi.) The Historic Charleston Foundation bid for her services, as did the Preservation Society, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Junior League, and the Carolina Art Association-which sponsors the Gibbes Art Gallery, where Larrine's nude study of her hangs in brazen grace. ("Pretty lady," I remember a little boy saying as he pointed shamelessly at the arcane wonders other Charleston ladies tend to veil.)
And now Spoleto.
Menotti, various committees, wanted her sage advice on program planning, housing and entertaining visiting celebrities, party giving, fund raising.
* * *
Later we showered together.
I enjoyed the sight of water dripping from her hair, water glistening on her thighs.
"I talk too much," Amy said.
"Never."
"I tell you everything. That's not right."
"Why not?"
"A lady should keep some secrets."
"What secrets?"
"Like my making love to Isabelle."
"Why?"
"You didn't mind?"
"Of course I didn't mind."
Unconsciously she raised her hand and fondled her breasts, as if for the moment she had become her own lover. "It was good. Good for me. Terribly good."
"I know."
"And you didn't mind? Don't mind?"
"No." To lend force to my "no," I pushed her hand away from her breasts, kissed each nipple.
"Darling, I'm no longer your discreet lady. I do terrible things, don't I?"
"No."
"Your hands feel good. Awfully good. Don't take them away."
"I won't," I said.
"But I was good for you, too. Wasn't I?"
"You're always good for me."
"But I'm better for you ... after I do these things." Her nipples rose between my lips. "You're exciting me again," she said.
"Darling, make love to me here. In the shower. Make love to me the way I made love to Isabelle."
I did.
Amy was indeed excited. The shower slashed at my face. Pubic soapsuds left a bitter taste in my mouth. But none of this much mattered.
Later I dressed, left the house, intending to visit my bank to check my resources-to learn, in fact, if the funds Melissa and Cholly-Boy had promised had, indeed, been transferred. Fairy gold is all about us.
I banged the wrought-iron gate, turned left, walked up East Bay toward Broad Street. A little brown puppy paced me, watering the palmettos. Hordes of tourists in black socks, shorts, and visored caps greeted other hordes in black socks, shorts, and visored caps-and each group, with mock jollity, aimed its little Japanese cameras at the competing group, enshrining inanity in a thirty-five-millimeter niche.
I turned west at Broad Street, skirting the dungeon of the newly restored Exchange Building, skirting the People's Building, an office building flanked by two stone lions-both obviously demented.
At last I reached the C&S bank.
I approached Miss Poindexter, the suave, all-knowing blond girl who presides over Customer Service. "Could you find out for me, please, what my current balance is?" (I do not like to end a sentence with an interrogative "is." But sentences sometimes take on a life of their own.)
A telephone was dialed. There was a relaxed whispering. Then Miss Poindexter wrote the total on a blank pad. (The balance, by bank protocol, is always communicated to you in writing-as if voiced figures would induce early epilepsy or figurative vomiting.) "$531,892.13."
I was, it seems, in business.
The desk telephone rang. The receptionist answered. "Oh my," she said, more or less in the same tone Isabelle Wescott, the preceding day, had voiced the same two syllables.
She put down the telephone, looked at me. "There has been a slight mistake."
I was afraid of this.
"This is the correct amount." She scribbled other numerals on her memo pad. Then she handed me the top sheet.
The amended notation read: "$1,531,892.13."
"Sometimes," she added, "our computer is a little off."
Within a microsecond I found myself discovering fresh color, even charm, in the role of Agent 69. Say what you will, the role was antidoldrums. Say what you will, life, if not a cabaret, is a succession of trade-offs.
Cloris was in the East Battery house when I got back. I told her what had happened, that is, the financial dealings, the deposit at the bank which came to an unexplained million more than Cholly-Boy and I had discussed. I saw no reason to discuss (at this time) my byplay with Miss Wescott, nor the sweet episode with Melissa. There was, of course, no reason not to tell her; Cloris would herself have promoted such passing dalliances ("Keeps the juices flowing"), would have titillated herself with my lickerish reportage. More important was the discussion of money, the logic behind the money, the mystery that cloaked it.
"I feel odd," I said, "living with you, making love to you, yet being paid, mysteriously, by your husband."
"Don't be naive," Cloris said. "But there is no reason why you can't mix us Bloody Marys."
I made the drinks. Cloris does not like to talk seriously about anything without dandling, for decorum and luck, a well-chilled drink.
I went to the bar, mixed the drinks.
"I know everything." She clinked the ice in her glass. "I saw Cholly-Boy last night-also Melissa."
"And...."
"You wanted a Lady Hamilton story. Here it is-all written out for you."
"Meaning?"
"I'm Emma."
"I don't follow." I gulped my Bloody Mary, hoping to find in it immediate enlightenment.
"You're always complaining that life is not dramatic-that you have nothing to write about. And here you are in the middle of a plot as complicated as anything in an Italian opera."
"The tenor, I take it, is the last to know."
"Lord Hamilton, you know, represented the British govemment's-interest in the Mediterranean ... when things in the Mediterranean were mighty messy."
I knew.
"Cholly-Boy is doing things for the government in the middle of the oil mess. With mullahs taking up arms against mullahs, and the Arabs folding and unfolding their tents. He also has his own business."
"So?"
"He needs an American connection. Someone no one in his right mind would think of in connection with business, politics, or common sense."
"And I'm it?"
She stuck out her tongue. "And you're it."
"In spite of 'us'?"
She laughed. "You're such a square, Bill. And so fucking American."
"And the money?"
Again she laughed. "The money is not Cholloy-Boy's. It's syndicate money, Arab money, anonymous money, Monopoly money. One corporate deal, one honest bribe, one merging of sheikhdoms, and the money mushrooms.
"Besides," she went on, "nobody knows where the money comes from in the first place." After a half-dozen palace revolts, seizing of national assets, oil wells, merging of national corporations, international corporations, the assets used for any one operation are as impossible to trace as that Judge Crater who evanesced some half-century ago.
The amount already paid me puzzled me. A million had been agreed on, half to be paid in advance. Yet a million and a half had been paid in advance, with no contract, no spelling out of duties-and nothing whatever in writing.
"Money talks. It buys-don't let anybody fool you-love and happiness. It buys honor, loyalty, and the eternal devotion of an adoring public."
We then discussed the next book I would write, the motion picture we would make, and the houses and yacht I would buy for Amy.
CHAPTER SIX
"We are a very proud people," Achmed said.
"Indeed." There was no need for me to speak against my business interests. I would say what I thought of him when I mentioned him in a book. (As now.)
"Our roots go back. Way back. All the way to Fatima. You know Fatima?"
Fatima, I was aware, was a relative of Muhammad's, but what the precise relationship was, I did not, at that moment, know. My mind, running in queasy channels, tended to draw parallels to Oedipus and Jocasta. (When later I learned that Fatima was his daughter, the parallel espoused Alessandro and Beatrice Cenci-although the Encyclopaedia Brittanica [eleventh edition] assures me that Beatrice gave her father never anything other than the purest of filial affection.)
"However, naturally, most of our people do not read. They are a desert people. Very good people. Other peoples get us wrong."
I conceded that Arabia, by and large, got a bad press. The Arabian Nights, so-called, did a better job. But the scene of action in those splendent tales was more or less Bagdad, which is a far jump from the sands of Saudi Arabia.
"Mr. Benton...." Cloris nodded toward me, to assure Achmed that I was Mr. Benton.
"Ah, Mr. Benton." Achmed nodded to acknowledge Cloris' nod.
"Mr. Benton is writing a book that will glorify the Arabian past." She spoke knowingly, if irrelevantly, of the kingdoms of Ma'in, of Saba, or Hadramaut, of Katabania. She spoke glowingly of the Queen of Sheba
(Saba). She deplored the fact that so many of the reciters of Arabian poetry had been slain in battle.
"Ah, Sheba, Sheba. Now, there was a queen!"
"Sheba?"
"Glamour, my friend. Now, there was glamour."
"She brought King Solomon a hundred and twenty talents of gold."
"Glamour!" Achmed was in his private world.
"She had glamour, indeed. And ivory, and apes, and peacocks."
We were in New York, in Prince Achmed Abdullah Majed Bin Aziz Al Saoud's suite on the twenty-eighth floor of the Waldorf Towers. And I had met for the first time this diminutive, sad-faced, thick-mustached, almost bald young man who had elected to import Western culture to the arid sands of Arabia.
"Pictures," said Cloris, "are the in thing."
"Ah, yes." He looked, sadly I thought, through the window that faced Brooklyn.
"One picture...." She smiled at him in her most engaging, Lady Brett, public-relations way. "One picture is worth a thousand words."
"Ah, yes. You say things so well. Understand so much."
"Glamour is what makes the world go round. Glamour ... and maybe a little oil."
"Glamour," said Achmed sadly. "Glamour is what our country needs. And a national ideal woman ... a model all young girls can look up to."
Such a feature, I assured him, could be arranged. I explained to him that my script would deal with the emancipation of Arabia ... and the destruction of the Turkish fleet in the Gulf of Oman.
"But the girl." He twirled his mustache. "The girl. We have to have the right girl."
"I have in mind the girl who is perfect for the role."
"Mr. Benton," said Cloris, "has a perfect eye."
"Who? Tell me who.I Who is she?"
"Jill Philbrick. Her husband was lately ambassador to Upper Volta." I had studied my lines.
"Ah!" His face suddenly shone with the brightness I would expect to see, at sunset, on the dome of the mosque at Mecca. "Ah, Joan Philbrick."
"Jill."
"Joan. Lovely Joan. I once saw her picture in some magazine. Lovely face. Wonderful, wonderful teeth. Our women not have very good teeth. Too much camel meat, maybe."
In my capacity of vice-president of the new Cholmon-deley-Saudi venture, I explained to him that this picture could be telecast in many installments from our new satellite, and could be seen-once we supplied battery-operated TV sets-in every tent in the kingdom.
"That will please me." He smiled. "Also please many of my brothers, particularly HRH Prince Abdullah Al Faysal Al Saoud, HRH Prince Mechal Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud, HRH Prince Bandar Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud, HRH Prince Muhammad Al Faysal Al Saoud, HRH Prince Majed Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud, HRH Prince Saoud Al Abdullah Al Faysal Al Saoud, HRH Prince Sultan Bin Muhammad Bin Saoud Al Saoud." He paused, tugged at the left wing of his mustache. "I don't know about H.H. Prince Abdel Bin Abdel Mohsen Al Turki Al Sodayri. He's only my half-brother."
His title, I understood, was only "H.H."-not "HRH," a full brother's title. Like the months in which oysters can be eaten, a full brother's title requires an R.
"Delighted," I said.
"She is just like Sheba. She'll be our new Sheba. A princess, even. I'm entitled to two more wives."
"She's already married," Cloris said.
"I would stand proxy for her husband. I say, simply, three times, 'Lowly woman I thee divorce,' and-praise be to Allah-she is then divorced. Then I marry her. We are a very proud people."
He leaned back in the Waldorf's beige overstuffed armchair, beamed at me an official Arabic smile. "Life is so simple."
"Simple as a cranny in a crannied wall."
I mentioned something about a late lovely princess whose head was chopped off.
"Think nothing of it," said Achmed, waving his hands in wide arcs. "First, she was not lovely. She was fat. All our women get fat. No?"
"Yes." I spoke, happily, from book knowledge.
"But I change all that. No? You and I together ... you and I and eency, teency Joan Philbrick."
"Second?"
"Second, it not at all happen. Not at all. All lies. 'Lies,' you say? Or 'lays'? English not a very clear language."
I discussed the idiom "Go see how the land lies." With reference to wives, I said, especially unfaithful wives, the choice of a verb was more straining.
"Anyway...." The discussion had gone far enough. "What you hear happen, not happen. All Arabs are compassionate-passionate and compassionate ... especially with women. What you hear happen ... what the imperialist media say ... was all done with mirrors."
"No cutting? No chopping? Just illusion for illusion's sake?"
He smiled, conveying to me the international camaraderie that exists among men, the camaraderie that unites Solomon, Henry VIII, and (by extension of the term) King Kong. "You know the Arab men. Never say no to good show! Praise be to Allah, from whom both oil and mercies flow."
"Egad," I said.
"And by the way ... He lowered his voice, as if there were genii in the room who might hear us. "In the pictures of Joan that we show in my country ... a separate version, if you like...."
"We can cut, of course."
"There must be no kissing. Absolutely no kissing. All my brothers would be shocked."
The Wall Street Journal, two days later, carried the following ad:
IN THE NAME OF ALLAH THE BENEFICENT, THE MERCIFUL FOUNDATION OF "CINEMA AL MAAL AL ISLAM"
WITH A CAPITAL OF 500 MILLION DOLLARS Almighty Allah Says:
Ye who believe! Fear Allah, and give up what remains of your demand for usury. It is no sin for ye who seek beauty from the Lord to carry beauty, yea, across all the sands of the desert ... that others, traversing the sands, may see Allah's bounty!
"TRUTHFUL IS ALLAH THE MAGNIFICENT!"
ALLAH IS THE PURVEYOR OF SUCCESS!
List of Some Honorary Founders:
[Below, in small type, appear the names of His Royal Highness Achmed Abdullah Majed Bin Aziz Al Saoud, seventeen of his full brothers, and nine half-brothers.]
The paper had been brought to our suite with the breakfast tray.
Cloris and I were staying at the new Helmsley Palace, a glittering glass escarpment which I like to think of as an annex to the old Whitelaw Reid mansion. (Progress is not to my liking. No more will I be pleased to greet the four-lane highway which will inevitably, in time, replace the great Bohicket Road access to Seabrook and Kiawah. In architecture, we tend to beat the big drum for the great leap backward, assuming that the higher the high-rise in glass, the greater our surfeit in glory-and the lesser the status of those high-rises of yesteryear whose glass now stands panel to panel parallel to the other high-rises of yesteryear.)
"Now you have to do some writing," Cloris said. "Pin down Jill."
I had a nostalgic concern for my fantasy about Lady Hamilton. "She probably can't act."
"Neither could Amy. Did it matter?"
"It did not matter. Amy didn't need to act." So much is to be said for significant form.
"Screw your image of Lady Hamilton. For that matter, Jill too."
Cloris, as ever, was generous.
We buttered our croissants, sipped our coffee, looked through the glass wall to the purple haze behind the Jersey Palisades.
"We work well together," Cloris said, kissing me, and leaving marmalade sentimentally on my left cheek.
Ahead were many problems. I had now to write with Jill in mind. More: entice Jill, persuade her to act, uncovered, in a motion picture that would be all things to all people. There would now be no naked Amy on camera. There would be, if I faltered not, or failed, a naked Jill.
And Amy? Amy was always a lovely, loving mystery.
She had, obviously, none of Cloris' jaundiced tolerance, perverse generosity. Yet she expected of me much. Her jealousy, for example-as in the case of Anna Ricci. (She balanced the score with John.) She expected me to understand her odd loyalty to her husband, her occasional trips with him, "for appearance' sake." She expected me to understand her periodic need for Miss Wescott, and her occasional return to her for exotic refurbishing-as on our visit only a day or so back, to Berkeley Hall. ("I would let her do anything to me-anything.")
Stranger still, in spite of her jealousy of me, was that idle fancy-to have me, presumably because of my own bizarre needs, undress her before some strange man and present her as a sacrificial offering. Even so, before submitting, she would, ceremonially, ask me permission. Permission for what? To pleasure herself to pleasure me.
Yet Amy's whimsy was not to be trusted. She was wayward in her moods, sometimes refreshingly open and decadent, tolerant as the wind. Other times she was uptight; old-fashioned, sad, and possessive. She might-it was a reasonable thought-resent Jill, feeling that my scriptwriting for Jill, attentions to Jill, and (Who knows?) screwing Jill compounded to a disloyalty beyond repair.
I must move cautiously, like a mountain climber at the edge of a crevass. And I must bear in mind that Amy, even in her maddest moments, always had a slightly married air.
I looked, now, at Cloris, extricated myself from reverie. "Indeed," I said, although the drift of her talk had by now escaped me.
"I've been talking too much, haven't I?"
I have written in various places of Cloris' great sharpness, her insights, Sensitivity, imagination. Practical matters in no way suspend them. Here is an instance. "I've been talking too much, haven't I?"
To answer her question, she put her hand under the covers, slid the hand between my thighs. "Indeed I have!"
"Put it down," I said, "to morning fatigue." I spoke of a young monk, in one of Boccaccio's stories, who, on finding himself similarly disinclined, said to the naked young nun he was instructing, "You should always, of course, want to put the Devil in hell. But not, remember, until he raises his head in pride."
"This," Cloris said, "will never do. Amy would never forgive me." She pulled down the covers, smeared orange marmalade on my limp member. Then, her head descending, she demonstrated her avidity for sweets.
My virility rose at once, as would any gentleman's at the first brush of a lady's lips.
"If this is not hell," she mumbled from the side of her mouth, "make the most of it."
Later, in my own way, with different asides, I returned the compliment. And she conceded, once again, that we worked exceedingly well together.
Cloris still was not satisfied. "Something has come over me this morning," she said after a short space.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I want more of you."
I was flattered. Cloris was always superb in lovemaking. But she had none of the extremes of Amy-no obsessive needs.
She put her hand between my legs. "What you did was wonderful. I'm not complaining, mind you."
"But?"
"Hors d'oeuvres are not enough." She smiled.
Her fingers saw to it that what she demanded was soon available.
I rolled over on her.
Her hand, half-caressing, half-guiding, slipped my risen self inside her. There was much wetness.
"Ah," she said. "This is better. Much better."
I plunged deep.
She drew back her legs, supporting my weight on the inside of her thighs-a position Amy preferred. Her hips rose and fell. "You like me this way?"
I did. In truth, however, I liked her all ways.
Slowly her hips gyrated. "In this best of all possible worlds, I like everything in its place ... and a place for everything."
I nodded-a note of assent that she was in no position to see.
Later that day, Cloris went shopping. She had clothes, bags, knickknacks to buy at Bergdorf's, Saks, Gucci. I, meanwhile, had a board meeting to attend in the New York offices of Armageddon International, a new subsidiary of Stiarchos-Cholmondeley Enterprises, a subsidiary of Cholmondeley-Stiarchos-Haroun-al-Raschid Productions.
Armageddon's offices are in the Olympic Tower, overlooking the cathedral.
I walked lazily to Fifth Avenue. People, as is to be expected in New York, rushed past me, as yet unaware that there is no place to go to, that an interchange of environments is no more than an exercise in illusion. Such at least is a Far Eastern idea to which I give lip service.
As if anticipating my musings, a Far Eastern group, with wild chantings, hoppings, jangling of tambourines, was waiting for me at the comer of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Men and girls in saffron robes and sneakers, their eyes closed, jumping up and down, were chanting, "Vishnu ha, Vishnu da, Vishnu la, la, la."
In front of them, a stocky man with a broad, loping nose held out a tambourine to receive money. For whatever reason, the tambourine was piled high with paper and silver money. Passersby, each with a private, dazed look, dropped money into the waiting instrument.
As I passed, he let out a prolonged "Psst."
I turned.
"Hi, Sixty-nine! You not know me?"
"Vulpe!" Surprises in my life are without end. I have, I concede, no excuse for not writing. I had no need for imagination. All that was asked of me was a memory for detail and a tape recorder.
"Great business here. You gotta admit. You hold out a fuckin' tambourine, and what? Clank! Clank! Clink! Clank!"
"Life is strange, Vulpe."
"Aye, signore. You can-a say that a coupla times." He hopped from one foot to another. "Vishnu, ha. Vishnu, da. Vishnu, Vishnu, la, la, la."
I went through the revolving door of the Olympic Tower, found the floor of Revelation International on the directory board, went up in an express elevator.
A receptionist led me to the boardroom, where the meeting was already in progress. "Have fun," she said.
I found a chair near one end of a long conference table. At the other end, presiding, was Senator Aslimead. He, I was later to learn, was president of this newly organized subsidiary. At his right, to my amazement, was Philbrick. I recognized him from his pictures.
"I bring you greetings from the great state of South Carolina," he said to the assembled board with a great shake of his white mane, a great sweep of his arms. "And I remind you that we must all band together in righteousness."
"Hear! Hear!" said Philbrick, clapping.
"By rights we should begin with a prayer."
Philbrick nodded.
"Unfortunately, our chaplain. Brother Virginius Phineas Vulpe, is not able to be with us today. He is spreading the good word elsewhere."
"Dogs," Philbrick muttered.
"So I will get right down to business."
"Business is our business."
"Right." Aslimead beamed. "Business has nothing to fear but business itself. The business of the Lord is business."
"Right," said Philbrick.
"And business is growth ... and religion is business."
"Praise the Lord and pass the prayerbook."
"In short...." Aslimead paused. "In short, it is high time the Lord went public. The Lord's business is everybody's business. That's why the shares in our new corporation ... when they go on the Big Board next week ... will be snapped up by everybody. 'Buy a piece of Paradise.' That's our slogan. Who can resist? You put your money where your heart lies and get yourself a sound investment that's absolutely tax-free. Talk about municipals. What have municipals to hold a candle ... forgive the sacrilege, folks ... to this? We're selling a blessing in disguise."
"Praise the Lord."
"From whom all tax-exempts flow."
Philbrick rose. "Why let the competition take all the money? We, too, can buy radio stations, fight pom with com, found colleges, sell cassettes with this great, inspiring message."
"Indeed! Indeed!" Aslimead shook his mane. "The Lord loves free enterprise."
"The Lord loves those who help themselves."
Senator Aslimead, now seated, sat at the conference table in rapt tranquillity. His Confederate head, absent of thought, was propped up by his fist. "Does anyone," he asked, "have an approximate date for the Second Coming?" No one had.
"It would be awkward, of course, if we got all organized for nothing."
Philbrick thought this was a risk well worth taking.
"Of course...." Aslimead was pragmatic. "Our Islamic affiliate has a different calendar."
"Let's face it," Philbrick said, "they're heathens. Bow down. That sort of thing."
"Still, their money's good. Them bathrobe boys own half my shish-kebab chain."
"They is still heathen."
I wondered why I was in the room. I had nothing to contribute. Nothing to gain. I was no more functional as a vice-president than I had been-was?-as Agent 69.
Aslimead, however, caught sight of me. "Ah, Mr. Benton," he said cordially. "So glad you could come." To the others he said, "liiis is Mr. Benton, who is Lord Cholmondeley's representative on the board."
"Understand you're Welsh," Philbrick said.
"We are a conglomerate of interlocking conglomerates," I said, "dedicated to the notion that no man is an island. What is good for us is good for the world. And vice versa." I started to say something about the notion that not doing anything to anybody else that we would not have anybody else do to us might have some general usefulness. But on second thought it seemed to me that such an idea would be considered subversive-certainly contrary to sound ecclesiastical policy.
"There is money in sin and pornography," Aslimead went on.
"Amen," sounded the board.
"But there's more money in fighting it."
"Hear. Hear."
"And in the television stations that fight it ... and in the widow who hears our message and sends in her mite"-in tongueslip he said "mit"-"maybe a little more ... to fight it."
"Praise the Lord."
"Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance."
"Amen."
"My name is legion; for we are many...."
"You sure you ain't Welsh?" Philbrick looked at me. "Yes," I said, meaning no, I was not.
I then rose to my feet. I had a cannonball to deliver-a last-minute block-busting word from Cholly-Boy's office, a guarantee to me of position and clout. "Gentlemen," I said, "I have good news for you. The emirate of Dabu Dabu wishes to join us in our fight against sex and sin. And I'm authorized to tell you that the emir himself"-who was anxious to get his money out of Dabu Dabu before the next palace coup-"has bought a fifty-million-dollar block of our eighteen-and-a-half-percent Series A tax-exempt debentures."
"Welsh, smelsh," Philbrick said. "It's all the same to me. We all do the Lord's work."
I heard somewhere in the streets below the tomcat wail of a fire engine. And for whatever reason I remembered that Vulpe had asked me to pass on some message to Philbrick. I figured I might as well pass on the message then and there. It would give me something to do. (My span of attention is short.)
"Mr. Philbrick, can I have a word with you alone?"
"Here?"
"Outside."
He went to the door. The blond receptionist passed us, looked at me, smiled at me the way girls smile in advertisements for toothpaste.
"I have," I said, "a message for you."
"Message? What kind of message?"
"From Lord Cholmondeley's agent, Vulpe." Agent? I knew nothing about Vulpe, actually; had, in fact, no interest in knowing a great deal. But ordinary talk calls for a rounding out of descriptions-an interplay, as it were, of fillers.
"Ah, Vulpe. You know Vulpe?"
"I saw Vulpe a day or so ago, in Charleston."
"Ah, Charleston? The Bah-try. Cannonballs. All that jazz." He paused, recalled an old Charleston joke. "Also St. Michael's. Uppity-up. They tell me you can't get 'religion' in St. Michael's. Desecrates the sabbath."
"Vulpe-"
"Right. Vulpe. What's he want?"
"Asked me to tell you that the sheikh is here."
"The sheikh? Abu al-Koram Habu Dassu?"
Who else? I would scarcely have expected the return of Rudolph Valentino. "I do not know him ... so sorry ... by his Muhammadan name."
Philbrick pinched his jowels. "Pity. Hell of a nice glly-if you don't mind a touch of the tarbrush. If you like boys ... and ever get to Abu Dabu or Dabu Dabu ... he can show you a hell of a good time."
"Rest of the message...." There was no point in discussing with him my sex preferences or my travel plans.
"Rest?" Philbrick was only half-listening. "No rest for the weary."
"Vulpe said to tell you eighty-two kilos are here. Eighty-two. Forescore and two." He had a feeling, I thought, for Gettysburg locutions.
"Hash or pot?"
"Better, I think." I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was pleased by my suddenly acquired quick, brisk manner. From Melissa, on my last international foray (to traduce and import the lush Anna Ricci), I had learned to act rather than think, speak without reasoning, abandon regrets.
"Where?"
"Up the Combahee. Everything's waiting." The last was my own invention. It added a fillip of urgency. Everything's waiting? Of course everything is waiting. The Combahee is still where it always was; even so, the salt marsh, the pluff mud, the stolid herons, the oysters that go "ping."
"My God!" Philbrick thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "What am I doing here?" The implication was that Dabu Dabu invests, but Abu Dabu delivers.
The blond receptionist returned, reversing her direction. Once again she smiled. And I, now more at home in the place, more relaxed, noticed that she wore skintight pants, walked on excessively high heels, and that with each step her hips rose and fell with rocker-beam grace.
Philbrick winked at me. His words applied with equal logic to the news I had brought him and the appeal of the passing girl. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform."
With this he dashed down the hallway, rushed past the receptionist-not without greeting her, however, with an appreciative thwack on the left buttock.
I went back to the meeting.
Senator Aslimead, running manicured fingers through his high-styled white hair, informed the board members that stock for the new company, Armageddon, Inc., would be listed on the Big Board the following week, that it would appear (as ARM IN) somewhere between AT&T and Armour, that is, "between communication and love," that it was his advice that everyone in his right senses invest everything he had in this God-blessed bonanza.
"What God puts together, let no man put asunder."
He went on to explain the fine points of theology and taxation. Every dollar invested could be immediately written off as a charitable contribution. That was Plan A-if you took equity alone, and let your holdings quadruple each year. "Beats oil-depletion stocks all get-out." Plan B gave you no immediate write-offs. Instead, you got guaranteed 27-percent dividends (barring an act of God). "And you deduct every penny. Who needs municipals?"
When I left the building, Vulpe was still hopping, still banging his tambourine.
I pulled him aside. "Delivered your message," I said. He seemed surprised. "Vishnu, da? Vishnu, la? By itself don't-a mean much. Lousy business, signore. Not like the Moonies. Moonies got fishing boats. Boats can go in little-a creeks."
"Not that message."
He pointed to his robe. "l'm-a here incognito. Nowhere Vulpe not go."
"To Philbrick."
"Ah, Signore Shubrick! Lovely mens. Buys a lot from me. Werry good customer."
"And the sheikh?"
"Ab? Also very good mens. Got forty sons. All princes. All in the business, too. Ab wants to buy an island. Get his money out of his country. Some wives, too."
A Fifth Avenue bus passed, shrouding him in diesel fumes. He stood still for a moment, meditative. All about him saffron-robed boys, their heads shaved, hopped on one foot. Then, suddenly, atavistic schemes floated through his one-track mind. "Say, signore, want to change some money?' '
"No."
His hand reached mechanically to a nonexistent pocket. "How about a wristwatch?"
I flashed at him my best Buddha smile, and walked on.
Why, I wondered, had Vulpe not given Philbrick his message? Why use me?
I have explained ad nauseam that I have no head for the secret-agent business. The secret agent, I long ago learned, never does directly what can be done with bell, book, and candle. The idea, I take it, is to keep everyone off balance, fellow agents as well as counteragents and transient enemies. Thus the numbers instead of proper names, the interchangeable assumed names, the faceless corporations, even the fancy dress-witness Vulpe's saffron Vishnu robes.
With all such, I say again, I would by rights have no truck.
I walked up Fifth Avenue to Tiffany's, bought presents for both Amy and Cloris-for what is love without gesture? And what use is money, except to make extravagant gestures? For myself a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a convenient bough might be more than enough; but, I daresay, it is the part of wisdom to accept the world as we find it.
For Amy I bought a special necklace designed by Paloma Picasso. It was ironically appropriate: a twisted rope of resplendent pearls holding pendant a diamond fleur-de-lis. For Cloris I selected a pendant diamond, a single flawless diamond the size of a pecan.
I paid by check, had the bookkeeping department telephone Charleston to validate the check. The cost cut a considerable slot in my first year's salary as monster internationalist. Yet somehow it justified the sleazy role I was about to play.
Cloris was delighted with the diamond. She stepped out of her bath, dabbed herself with a towel, hung the dia mond between her breasts. "At last," she said, "I'm a kept woman."
"Good," I said.
"And how sweet. And just because we made love so much this morning."
I insisted that the gift was nothing fnore than my boy-scout deed for the day.
"It's really because I fuck so well."
"Like a drunken angel."
"You know what?"
"What?"
Her tongue ran around her lips. "I don't know what's come over me today. I want you again."
I put a hand on either naked breast, kissed the diamond, then kissed her lips.
Her tongue found mine.
"I mean now," she said, when she drew away. "Inside me."
There were no problems.
"I'm getting to be like Amy," she announced. "I can't stop coming." Her eyes glowed. "But in another way I'm not at all like Amy."
"How?"
"I'm not ashamed."
"You are as usual, dear boy, incredibly naive." He waved his cigarette in the air.
Camavaron, Cloris' general manager and production factotum, sat opposite me at a table in Le Cygne, a splendid restaurant on East Fifty-fourth Street. Around us, on the walls, was a wraparound plan of the city of Paris-a mammoth black-and-white mural. Towering over us was the eighth arrondissement, home of the Crazy Horse, whose showgirls' pubic hair is ever tonsured, by decree, to exact equilateral triangles, three centimeters to the side.
We had begun our dinner with a lobster bisque as flawless as a lobster bisque can be. We were now engrossed with a vol au vent aux fruits de mer-a shell filled with mussels, crabmeat, morsels of lobster, baby shrimp, scallops, mushrooms, all in a sauce made from fish stock, white wine, and cream.
"You're hung up on that Lady Hamilton story. Why?
Because Emma Hamilton is one of your hang-ups-like Amy."
''Maybe so."
''Of course 'so.' "
I did not like to dispute Camavaron's dicta. He was astute. Tall, slim, balding, top cream from Eton and Oxford, he had exceptional insights. He had handled well the psychological niceties of past problem roles, in our casting and filming: Jennifer Digby as Tom Brown, Amy as Monna Vanna, Anna Ricci as Scarlett O'Hara. I had come to respect him.
"The world is too much with us," he said, yawning. The waiter poured our wine, a pleasant if somewhat light St. Estephe (a Cos d'Estoumel '69). I tasted my few peremptory drops, nodded approvingly, as does a grand seignior. "Good."
"You're hung up with the idea of the 'high fall'-which is a fancy way of talking about...."
"Stripping the great lady." I knew the way his mind works. Start with Aristotle. Wind up in a burlesque.
"As for myself ... He blew smoke toward the ceiling. "My mind runs the other way. I like the very young. Strip, I say, Brooke Shields. We could rewrite Black Velvet-have little Brooke ... she's gotten beautifully long-legged, hasn't she? ... ride naked and sidesaddle ... in the Kentucky Derby."
He spoke of telephoto shots showing Brooke, her bare thighs pressed against the horse's flanks, her long hair streaming in the wind. "That's where your talent really lies-rewriting kid stuff."
Condescendingly, however, he gave credit to the power of fantasy, conceded that Dante might not have written The Divine Comedy if he had not been hung-up on the nine-year-old Beatrice Portinari, who later and inconsiderately married one Simone de' Bardi.
"About Jill...."
"That's what I want to talk to you about." The dreaminess had left him, the Oxonian love for legend and lost causes. "We're in a new business now. Pounds, not pence."
"Meaning?"
"No more the hand-held cameras weaving over hotel beds to enshrine young love for posterity. We are, whether you like it or not, in conglomerates."
"Meaning?"
"Cholmondeley-Stiarchos ... National, International, or Supergalactic doesn't give a good goddamn about Lady Hamilton."
He raised his glass, as if to toast the beginning of a new age.
I clinked.
We drank.
He went on to say that in the new world of business, the product is a byproduct. "You sell a name, a symbol-not a story, talent, automobile, suppository. The next year you sell the company."
"But about Jill?"
"It's all about Jill."
"We're selling Jill?"
"You're selling Jill."
"I don't follow."
"Incredibly naive, dear boy. I'm telling you."
"I still don't follow."
"Nobody goes to movies anymore. Nobody goes to movies. Movies are made for kids. Prime time is the Children's Hour. What is there to see? I ask you? Invasion of the Giant Tomatoes? Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams? Clash of the Titans? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has already grossed almost a hundred million. It's a kids' world, dear boy. Little kids, the postdiaper set. And the ones that never grew up." He paused, sipped his wine. "And you want to fool around with Lady Hamilton."
"So?" I twirled the wine in my glass.
"About the future? There's no future, dear boy. No future for the future."
"About Jill. We were talking about...."
"Ah, Jill. Jill."
His watery blue eye glazed over.
"Jill Philbrick." It seemed not easy this day to keep his attention.
"Jill makes jack. Ah, yes. That's what I was about to say. Forget about art. Art is for first-year students in a life class. Today's the day of trade-offs. Jill is Cholmondeley's trade-off."
This in a vague way I knew. What I did not know was what was traded for what. More to the point, how? I said as much.
"It's all so simple. If I were a contriver of plots, I'd forget this one. Achmed has his hands on oil. Cholmondeley-Stiarchos wants oil-oil at pre-cartel prices. The company, in short, wants to upset OPEC."
"Understandable." I meant that it was quite understandable that it, the company, should want to upset OPEC. The "how" was not clear.
"Now, Achmed has a thing for Jill, the way you-if you'll forgive me-have a thing for Amy. Not, however, in the same way."
Achmed, as Camavaron saw it, wanted to make Jill a kind of Florence Nightingale for Saudi Arabia. "Or, barring Florence Nightingale, at least Barbara Walters ... or, let's say, a cross between Barbara Walters and Jackie Onassis."
"A symbol."
"Exactly. A symbol."
"But a symbol for what?"
"That's where you come in. You have to write something for her that will make every Arabian woman look up to her ... want to be like her ... go on a jehad ... a holy war for her ... a Jill jehad."
"In this world," I said, "nothing is altogether clear."
"And a great deal amounts to nothing," he quoted, "because nothing amounts to a great deal."
I finished off my glass of St. Estephe. The waiter, who had a drooping mustache and a scar on his left cheek, refilled the glass. "Sixty-nine," he said, "was a fine year." And sixty-nine, I recalled, was my code name. I was earning a neat million pretending I could play the part. (How much of it, if I was not careful, would go to the government? I made a note to discuss the problem with Melissa. Seraglios, perhaps, were deductible.)
"I understand," he went on, "you're getting a million."
"There are no secrets." I had already, of course, much more.
"For a million you ought to be able to fill in your own details."
The waiter asked for our entree order. I had had enough to eat. I settled for an avocado-and-leek salad-a specialty at Le Cygne. Camavaron was still hungry. He ordered squab (pigeon aux olives), which was artfully carved at tableside.
"You've done very well in times past," Camavaron said, with a nonchalant look that resembled a smirk. Yet I was grateful for the remark. So often I think I reminisce about much which could never have occurred.
"When can we start shooting?"
"You tell me. I can get a production crew together in a week. You have to get Jill, write the right script, let Cloris start casting."
We could start work, he informed me, in Charleston; finish up in New York, Cinecitta, or any part of Europe Cloris and I found agreeable.
It all sounded so easy.
Cloris, when I got back to the hotel, agreed with Camavaron. "It is easy." She spoke from the bed, which is to say ex cathedra. "Only one thing...." Her tongue slithered around her lips. "You must be careful not to make Amy jealous. She is...." And she emphasized her point with a deft caress of her exploratory hand. "She is-you know well-incurably possessive."
My sexual eye then made a catalog of significant details.
Cloris was wearing a black transparent nightgown. There was a conspicuous, although unnecessary cleavage-unnecessary because the sheer fabric concealed nothing.
Sparkling in the cleavage was the pendant diamond I had given her.
"You may have problems with Amy," she went on. "On the other hand...."
"On the other hand, what?"
"Forgive me for mixing a metaphor ... but on the other hand, you have to fuck Jill. And much and well."
I assured her I would brace myself to do my duty.
She fingered the diamond, then raised it to her lips. "So sweet of you." There was a slight pause. "And just because I came so much."
"A bauble," I said.
"I don't know what came over me today."
I said nothing.
Suddenly she lifted the. black gown over her head. "What do we need this for?" She threw the gown across the room.
In the muted light of the bedside lamp, the diamond, now bordered by the roundings of her golden breasts, smiled in its own way.
I quickly slipped off my clothes, got into bed next to her.
She kissed me warmly, pulled me over her, guided my hardened part with an unerring hand.
"I don't know what's come over me today," she said.
"I really don't."
She then asked me to show her, in full detail, how I intended to make love to Jill.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Philbrick addressed the Rotary Club, invited the Charleston business community to join him in a crusade against lust, lucre, and licentiousness-although it seemed to me that a business community could scarcely be persuaded to war against lucre.
The following day, the Charleston Mercury gave the event front-page banner-headline ("PHILBRICK FIGHTS FILTH") coverage.
I quote:
John C. Calhoun ("Pee Wee") Philbrick, our former ambassador to Upper Volta, is something of a purist. He is also a vegetarian. He doesn't drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, eat any food with additives; and he doesn't smoke.
But he is literate in perverse erotic language.
In his talk before the Rotary Club yesterday, words like "pimp,"
"prostitute,"
"bestiality,"
"necrophilia," and phrases like "homosexual orgies,"
"skin magazines," and "sex supermarkets" littered his speech. He nurses a quiet anger-which has been strengthened by his years of crusading against pornography.
"You don't know what a chicken hawk is, do you?" he asked sixty club members who turned out yesterday to hear him. "That's someone who buys and sells young boys. And prices are going up every day. Inflation is plaguing the market, just like it is with real chickens."
Philbrick is the founder and president of Armageddon International, an organization dedicated to fighting immorality in the media and the four-billion-dollar sex industry. While its goals are similar those of the Coalition for Better Television, which has organized a boycott against NBC, and the Moral Majority, which, Philbrick said, has "created a tremendous stir on Madison Avenue," Armageddon International wants to compete with the American Civil Liberties Union. "But we have a different approach," Philbrick said. "It's through the law-international law. That's why we have affiliates in so many countries, like Libya, Chad, Colombia, and Surinam."
He did not, I observed, make mention of the gatefold that featured his naked wife-the gatefold that had ensnared the eyes of a Saudi prince.
And it was to her that I must now, not altogether willingly, or by choice, give crafty attention.
* * *
Jill, I learned, was "in love." The announcement did not make my task easier. I very much dislike infatuation in young people. It distorts values, narrows attention to the trivial, and tends to put an end to all civilized conversation.
Cloris' office had informed me that Jill was at Kiawah, the island now owned by the emirate-or-what-you-will of Kuwait. She was staying at the Kiawah Inn, some twenty miles south of Charleston.
With Amy's permission (I was cautious), I called her. Were I to make headway, I could, I thought, and easily, I thought, spirit her some seven miles to our beach house on Seabrook.
"This is Bill Benton," I said.
"Bill who?"
"Benton."
"Do I know you?"
"Informally. Perhaps incoherently. We talked, last month, at Isabelle Wescott's."
"You're the boy with the pimples?"
"No."
"You limp?"
"I," I said, "am Bill Benton, the man you thought was John Dellmore, who screws his aunt."
"But you do, don't you? Not that I blame you. If I were in your place...."
"I'm calling you about business." Badinage, I sensed, would get me nowhere. "I speak for Cholmondeley-Stiarchos International. We have all seen, respected, admired your photograph...."
"Any boy who could screw his Aunt Amy, and doesn't, should have his head examined."
"But I'm not John Dellmore."
"Pity." She coughed. "You're gay?"
"Look, Mrs. Philbrick-"
"Jill ... please."
"Jill."
"Tell me about yourself."
"Cholmondeley-Stiarchos. I'm vice-president."
"You must be a Republican. All Republicans are vice-presidents. Except Reagan, of course. He's conservative."
"About your picture. I'm calling about your picture."
"Oh, that? Lousy camera angle. Makes my ass too fat."
"Your figure, in our opinion, is ideal. Like Bo Derek's. That's why I'm calling you."
"It's a little rounder than Brooke Shields's, perhaps. But trim. Like a pullet's egg."
"That's why we want you in our new motion picture. The lead...."
"Really."
She sighed. "I don't know."
"We were thinking about something like two hundred thousand. ("Any girl," said Cloris, "will do anything for art ... or money.") And ten percent of the gross."
"Really?"
"And maybe first refusal on our next...."
"Is it a good part? I must protect my image."
I assured her that it was the kind of part that made Garbo famous. And Ingrid Bergman. And Vivien Leigh. And Sophia Loren. I would have liked to list some more recent successes-the naked Amy, for example, in Monna Vanna, the naked Anna Ricci in our version of Gone with the Wind. Discretion held my tongue.
"I will talk it over with my boyfriend," she said cautiously. "You can drive out to see us."
I now needed psychic space.
Swashbuckling, as I have implied, does not come easy to me. And Amy, as I have also implied, inhibits me.
With Amy looking resentfully over my shoulder, I can scarcely give full heart to the role of Agent 69. Or to the vagaries of Jill, about which I was eventually to write.
At this point, however, chance intervened. Perhaps Amy's afternoon tryst with Isabelle had something to do with it; perhaps my byplay with Isabelle, which stirred Isabelle's purple yen for Amy. Who knows what is a cause? And who can distinguish an effect from a sequel? At any rate, Jeff Dellmore (Amy's husband) asked Amy to join him in Washington for a television appearance with Senator Aslimead. The Moral Majority was backing the reelection campaign of Senator Aslimead, and Aslimead was responding in kind. He would campagn vigorously for teenage chastity. The television appearance, in company with Amy and Jeff, was to be the start of his crusade.
("What fun," Amy said later. "I felt like Linda Lovelace, the girl in Deep Throat, telling voters to take the lozenge doctors recommend most for chafed larynx.")
High time, I said to myself, that I get on with my Machiavellian business.
A few evenings later, I found myself on Bohicket Road, driving to meet Jill. I, no manipulator of men (or women), no quacker of salves, a man with an indomitable yen for Amy (and Cloris), was now bent on the seduction of Jill. I was driving, I might add, my new Ferrari-the first fruit of my unearned spoils.
I credit Melissa for my sudden show of derring-do. She had no conscience, no doubts, no sentimentality. And she was a fountain of wisdom and delight. All of which is to say that to be wanted, loved, all one had to be was wantable, lovable-not good. The "good" the Greeks spoke of (arete) meant expertise, not benevolence.
It was high time, in short, that I took luck by the forelock, fornication in stride. Moreover, Amy was in Washington. And with her husband! Perhaps I was being taken a soupgon for granted. Perhaps I had become-let us brace ourselves for fact-a bit boring. When all hormones flow, no heady woman by choice opts for home, hearth, a man about the house, and occasional mention in the staid Charleston Mercury. Neither domesticity nor constancy was Helen's forte; nor did even Homer care.
Jill was waiting for me in the bar of the Kiawah Inn.
And scarcely could I miss her. She stood out like a model on a Vogue cover. She wore shrimp-colored leather jeans and a suede blouse notched to her navel.
She was sipping a Pernod.
Gold dangled from her wrists. Gold dangled from her earlobes. There even seemed to be-such is the power of illusion-a glint of gold in her black, rampant hair.
"My producer," she said in greeting, holding out a tanned hand to be squeezed, toyed with, or kissed. I squeezed it, toyed with it a bit, then kissed it. Greetings at beach resorts can be highly eclectic.
"Lovely drive."
"Lovely."
"Lovely Pernod."
"Lovely. Have one."
"Also a Pernod," I called to the bartender. "Ice and a dash of water."
"I'm sure you screw your aunt." She half-closed her much-darkened lids, giving me the feeling that she was peering at me through little slits.
"No."
"You look like a man who screws his aunt."
"You're getting a divorce?"
"Trouble is, Pee Wee is broke. What good is a divorce without alimony?"
"And your boyfriend?"
"Also broke."
Happy words, I thought. I had long back learned from Cloris that a handsome woman will do almost anything-not for love; love is inhibiting. She will do what ultimately she will do, for art, spite, or money; and of these possible persuaders, art is most potent. Art breathes charm, eclat. It carries with it the slightest suggestion of transcendental sin, fruits forbidden to the faint of heart. Again Cloris speaks: it does no harm to interlard art with a few layers of filthy lucre. (Moreover, lucre, to the untutored eye, is only "filthy" when tendered in small amounts. Large quantities are, like some of the new electric ovens, automatically self-cleaning.)
"Lovely evening," said the bartender, pushing my Pernod toward me. He was, like most Charleston bartenders, most Charleston waitresses, a likely youngster in full flight from seriousness.
"Lovely," I said, from echoic habit, mouthing listlessly that imageless word.
Jill put a cigarette between her lips. The bartender lit it for her with one of the lighters bartenders sometimes produce so swiftly from nowhere.
"Thanks."
"Lovely evening."
"All of it?"
"My name's Jim."
"Lovely evening, Jim."
By now we had collectively established the state of the weather. At beach resorts, as I suggested earlier, we tend to be lax about logic and style. Dolce is all.
"Mr. Benton." Jill turned toward me.
"Mrs. Philbrick."
"Jill." At beach resorts one is never formal.
I replied in kind. "Bill, Jill."
"Bill." Her face softened, her eyes widened, as if to say there was a link between us, a monsyllabic link forged by rhythm and rhyme.
"Jill?"
"You didn't drive all the way out here just to talk about the weather."
"Scarcely." My cue now was briskness, efficiency. No nonsense. "I came to talk to you about making a motion picture." (I emphasized "motion." A still picture might suggest questionable propriety--even French postcards. Not without an effect on custom, it seemed to me, were the nude showgirls in the Folies Berger e forgidden to move.)
"Me?"
"You, the fabulous Jill Philbrick, pinup of the year."
I handed her my card, a card I had had printed only that afternoon. It named me as vice-president of Cholmondeley-Stiarchos International, with headquarters in London, Rome, Ramspaugh, and New York.
She read the card aloud, pronouncing Cholmondeley "Chol-mon-dely" rather than "Chumly." Then she asked, "So what?"
"We have been impressed by your publicity, your possibilities."
"My ass."
"Assets."
"Lousy camera angle."
"I liked it." Beauty, I implied, is in the eye of the beholder.
She slapped her bottom, as if to suggest that her approach to herself was objective, professional. "Zaftig."
"Svelte," I countered.
"Beamish."
"Frabjous."
"I think," she said, "you want to screw me."
"Photogenic," I went on, reaching for an assortment of similes. "Spare, like Bo Derek's, but rounded, like Raquel Welch's. Boyish, like Brooke Shields's, but totally, exoti-cally feminine."
"Really?" No compliment, no matter how high-flown, is altogether disbelieved.
"Really." No repetition of a compliment, no matter how inane, is ever totally wasted.
"Tim thinks I'm too fat."
"Who is Tim?"
"My new boyfriend."
I would have to buy off Tim. This was now clear. Else have him threatened, blackmailed, or killed. An Agent 69 or no, I was not prepared for organized hostility or for lethal blows.
"What does he do?"
"He's terribly possessive. Doesn't like me to do anything without him."
"You can be an instant star. You have the body, the verve, the publicity."
She stared pensively at her Pernod. "You do want to fuck me, don't you?"
I saw no reason to disavow the thought. I nodded, but politely, discreetly, with no show of obsessive passion. There were the amenities to be observed. No girl, no matter how prim, wants ever, in her heart of hearts, not to be wanted.
I stared with apparent pensiveness into my own Pernod. Deep, I thought, should call out to deep.
"I was thinking about art."
"You mean Tim."
"Fine art. The art of the theater ... the motion picture."
"Show biz?"
"Show biz." I spoke indistinctly and disconnectedly about Bergman, Bunuel, Fellini, Bellini, fettuccine, Pasolini, Mussolini. I threw in Mozart for good measure.
"I'm transmogrified," she said.
"I was also thinking about something like ten thousand a week-some of which you could give to your boyfriend to put into money-market funds at, say, seventeen percent." No argument, I think, is more convincing, more persuasive, than a string of irrelevancies.
"I think," she said, "you want to screw me." She said this pleasantly, almost objectively, the way she had appraised the qualities of her own bottom.
She could, I told her, be sensational in a picture Cloris and I would develop. I told her about Jennifer, the Countess of Liechtenstein, Marianna Stiarchos, Anna Ricci. I mentioned the prizes at Cannes, the box office of our Gone with the Wind.
She smiled. "I saw Monna Vanna in Upper Volta." She finished her drink. "That Amy Dellmore is something!"
"Yes," I said.
"Those tits."
"Marmoreal."
"Those long legs."
"Ziegfeldian."
"And so unashamed. To be so naked. In a major motion picture. That must have taken some doing."
"It did." I explained that all credit should go to Lady Cholmondeley, who was a genius in her way.
"But that Amy was something!"
I agreed.
"Don't you wish you could have screwed her?"
I told her that for a man who liked that sort of thing, that was the sort of thing he liked.
"You're deep," she said.
I thought it wise to steer the talk back to the magazine gatefold.
"I liked what I saw of you."
"Pee Wee was pissed off."
I finished my drink, signaled the bartender for refills. In the distance I could hear the sullen thump of the surf.
"Stunning picture."
"You liked it? You really liked it."
"Stunning."
"It was so naked ... so right out bare-assed naked."
"A turn-on. In the classic sense. What is so rare as beauty bare?"
"Beauty bare?"
"Beauty bare. Classic." I by now had verbal momentum. "Euclid first saw it on the Aegean. Looked on it, that is."
"How odd. I've never been to Aegia."
"I could take you there."
"When?"
"Tonight, if you like. On my own plane." An urge to swashbuckle swelled up in me. I had a company plane at my disposal. I had much money in the bank. (Too much. Who in his right mind leaves a million and a half in a checking account? High time, now, to give heed to hurling interest rates, diversification, tax shelters.) So pleasant are the burdens of the nouveau riche.
"Aegia?"
"Aegia. Lydia. Phrygia. Wherever you'd like."
"In a way," said Jill, "you're sort of nice."
I spoke pleasantly of things Mediterranean, and Jill said, "I think you want to fuck me."
I suggested that we could fly over tonight. I turned to capital the images of a Ferrari, private plane, the allure and rewards of show business. More pressing, however, were her immediate thoughts. "I didn't think I'd have nerve enough to go through with it."
"Through with what?"
"Taking off my clothes. A girl doesn't take off her clothes just so, does she?"
I pressed her to tell me how she felt, to provide me with a lush replay of the significant action. Confession, as I knew from intimate moments with Amy, is an innate urge; that forbidden fruits, tasted in memory, acquire fresh flavors.
"I got excited when I did it. Real excited. You wouldn't believe that, would you?" She put her hand on my wrist, looked hard at me, as if expecting to see shock on my face.
I assured her that I would not have expected that of her; but, as a man of the world, a student of psychology, I could understand how it happened.
"Frabjous."
"Indeed."
"I was transmogrified."
"Of course."
"Didn't think I could go through with it." She pressed hard on my wrist; pressure, at such moments, conveys sincerity.
"Naturally."
"But I did." Triumph was emblazoned on her eyes.
Fortitude, I said, is what determines character, distinguishes anointed ladies from milkmaids, chambermaids, and catch-as-catch-can strippers. I thought, in passing, of some of the great ladies of Gascony, ladies who once presided over Courts of Love, and who decided momentous questions such as whether or not true love can exist between husband and wife, who decreed that nothing prevents a woman from being loved by two men, a man by two women.
I thought, in turn, of Jehanne, Lady of Baulx; Huguette of Forcarquier, Lady of Trects; Briande d'Agouit, Countess de la Lune; Mabille de Villeneuve, Lady of Vence; Beatrix d'Agouit, Lady of Sault; Ysoarde de Roquefueilh, Lady of Ansoys; Anne, Viscountess of Tallard; Blanche of Flassans, sumamed Blankaflour; Doulce of Monestiers, Lady of Clumane; Antonette of Cadenet, Lady of Lambesc; Magdalene of Sallon, Lady of the said place; and Rixende of Puyvard, Lady of Trans. I thought as well of Amy, trembling but transfixed, slowly undressing herself in Isabelle Wescott's drawing room, and I was aware of an electric pulsing somewhere in the area of my prostate.
"I was edgy at first ... especially when I dropped my robe and just stood there ... stark, staring naked."
I understood.
"Then Mr. Ruggiero-he's the photographer--put his hand on my behind. I don't think that was nice, do you?"
I did not. A photographer should keep his head in the clouds and his hands to himself. I spoke of Ansel Adams and the Sierras.
"Then I said to myself, this will screw up Pee Wee with the Moral Majority. Really kill him. 'ambassador s wife reveals ALL.' After that I felt great ... even enjoyed it."
"You looked great."
She took her hand from my wrist, slapped her bottom. "You really mean it?"
"A double-digit turn-on. But of course with taste, with delicacy and charm ... like the early-morning ride of Lady Godiva."
"I like you," she said.
The bartender brought us fresh drinks.
"Thanks," I said.
"Are you Mr. Benton?"
"Yes."
"There's a phone call for you. Telephone is in the lobby."
I got up.
"Hurry back," Jill said. "I'll miss you."
I left the bar, went down a half-flight of stairs, crossed an open loggia to the lobby. Inside, two Arabs in burnooses were explaining to the clerk their immediate biological needs; and the clerk, in sign language, warned them about pushing open the wrong door. It was not easy, however, to spell out "Ladies' Room" in gesture. "Darling," asked Cloris, "getting anywhere?"
"Don't know yet."
"You miss Amy and me, don't you?"
"I miss you," I said, "even when you go to the bathroom." Nor was this an exaggeration. No woman was quite as close to me in feeling and understanding; and no other woman had her amused tolerance, urbane grace, wit. (My feeling for Amy, obviously, was quite different; it was more of an obsession, a play in fantasies, the enjoyment of a spell.)
"Think money. Money. Money. Think big."
"I have enough money."
"Not big money. Money with clout. And I am your partner, remember. You're doing this for me. You're fucking Jill for me."
"And Amy?"
"And Amy." Her voice winked.
"Good." It is always reassuring to be told to do what you already had a mind to do.
I could feel her smile course along the wire. "My love, I'm practical. Amy is clairvoyant. What I'm trying to tell you is that there's a company plane fueled up ... waiting for you."
"Where?"
"At the John's Island Airport. Get to it, if you can. Take Jill. I'll meet you in Rome."
"I don't think . .
"Remember what Melissa taught you. 'In this kind of business we don't have time for long courtships."
Cloris blew me an invisible kiss, suggested, sardonically, that I not exhaust myself, then hung up.
I walked slowly back to the bar.
It was high time, I told myself, to toughen up. Happenings descend on us, and only the moon calf reasons why. If the roll of cosmic dice, the subtle twist of a guardian vagina, had cast me now in the role of an intrepid agent, agent intrepid would I be. No weakness, Benton!
I felt my inside jacket pocket. Snug against my wallet was the Bulgarian pellet pen Vulpe had given me. I felt, as well, most warmly about Vulpe. A splendid man, devoted friend, and knowledgeable reader of my books.
When I got back to the bar, I saw Philbrick talking to Jill. He was red-faced. His hair, long, trimmed in the Buster Brown fashion now common in the South, was flapping about his ears.
"I want the money I left in my clothes pockets," I heard him say. "Every single hundred-dollar bill."
"You will get what I give you," Jill said with peppermint coolness. "Nothing more. And probably a great deal less."
Philbrick put his hands on her wrists.
"This man...." Jill turned to me, spoke to me (how flattering, I thought) as if I were her agent and protector (as if I were, perhaps, her Lord Hamilton). "This man is annoying me." lnstanter arose my Walter Mitty dream. Here was my challenge, my invitation to greatness, my romance-kissed opportunity. High time was it for me to out-macho the most no-nonsense moves of John Wayne.
In a transcendent flashback I saw myself in action. My left hand extended to block a thrust by Philbrick, I would hold a knife firmly in my right hand, the blade pointing back up my right arm-the classic assault approach developed by Mike Echanis, an American mercenary killed in Nicaragua (Slight slip! So sorry!) in 1978. The weapon, held thus, would be almost invisible to Philbrick, yet ever poised for deadly slash and thrust.
(I would be using, of course, no ordinary knife available at Sear's or any drugstore which stocked hunting equipment and herbal douches. My weapon would be a deadly Gerber hunting knife, manufactured by Cholmondeley-Stiarchos Puppy Chow International, and supplied secretly to the Green Berets, the CIA, and the missionary empire of the late Father Jones.)
Philbrick, sensing an opening, would make a stab at me.
"Look out!" Jill would scream.
I would block his cut with my left hand-just a second or so slow, perhaps, and take a slash across the inside of my third and fourth fingers. Then, ignoring the pain, and with the swiftness of a Nureyev, the strength of a gorilla, I would execute a 360-degree spin followed by a spinning neck slash and reverse stab.
Philbrick would never more speak glowingly, even at all, of Upper Volta, the evils of gun control, or the hopes and aspirations of the Moral Majority.
Such, however, was not my course of action.
Inertia prevailed.
Unnecessary force, I assured myself, is the resort of field hands, sumi wrestlers, and goon squads. Those of us who live by the pen have an understandable pride in the tool of our craft.
Agent 69, roused to fury (cold fury) by the sight of a damsel in distress, reached for his Bulgarian pen.
Agent 69 pointed the pen at ex-ambassador Philbrick's red neck.
"Ouch," said Philbrick, slapping his neck. (The pellets are supposed to be stingless. But nothing in this workaday world is altogether perfect.)
"Ouch! Ouch!" mocked Jill, an octave higher.
"Mosquitoes," said Jim, the bartender.
For good measure, good luck, and to keep my trigger finger happy (as a Zen master cultivates swordsmanship), I zinged in a second ticket to Lotus Land.
"Ouch!"
"Ouch! Ouch!" Again Jill purled her contrapuntal echo.
"Mosquitoes sorta early this year," Jim said.
"Maybe it's Ramadan," Jill said.
Jim looked at Philbrick. "You all right, Mr. Philbrick? You look funny."
"I feel funny," Philbrick said.
"Naturally." Jill raised a linear eyebrow. "You're a prick. A card-carrying prick."
She expressed other sentiments which need not be repeated. It is an oddity of our time that when husbands and wives quarrel, they say to one another more or less the same things. Domestic dialogue is notoriously lacking in novelty. In a more urbane age it will probably be dictated by computer.
"Maybe it's a no-see-um," the bartender said, referring in island talk to the insidious, invisible gnat. Then, afflicted by suggestion, he slapped his own neck.
Philbrick tottered to a bar stool, sat down, buried his face in his hands, deposited face and hands on the bar. Seconds later he was snoring.
"Let's get out of here," I said, taking Jill by the elbow, easing her down from the stool.
I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, suggested to the bartender that he have an interesting evening.
"You haven't even touched your drinks." Jim was now on our side, not management's; he would have liked to have us enjoy what I had paid for.
"Take them to a lovesick friend." Jill waved to him. "Hopefully a girl."
We walked to the lobby. "Pee Wee thinks I have money of his," Jill said. "He wants it back."
"Do you?"
"Not much."
We walked to the parking lot. The sky had clouded over. The moon shone like a tired ball through mottled veils.
"Where is your car?"
"There." I pointed. My bright new Ferrari stood proudly in the muted light. It would carry, I trusted, clout.
"Impressive," she said.
A Ferrari is not the most expensive car in the world.
And so I said. (What is $55,000 among tycoons?) Not the fastest. Not the most comfortable. (Who on those glistening leather seats could assume the missionary position?) Certainly it is one of the least practical. But it has been properly said, I think, that nothing else on four wheels put as much fire in the imagination.
"Should I buy one for your boyfriend?" Not even Black Michael (was it in The Prisoner of Zenda?) could have congealed in his voice as much sarcasm and simple malice.
"Drive me somewhere."
I opened the door to help her in, helped her stretch out her languorous legs. Then I walked to my side of the car, opened the door to the driver's seat.
A tall, broad-shouldered man emerged from the shrubbery. He lurched toward me. "Just a minute, there, buddy."
"Timothy!" Jill knew the man. Tim-the boyfriend.
"Just where do you think you're going?" The question was apparently addressed to me.
Those who read little, I find, tend to put their threats in the form of rhetorical questions.
"Careful," Jill whispered. "He's mean."
"Aegia," I said amiably, meanwhile reaching for my Bulgarian pen. Armed with superior and unsuspected weaponry, a man can afford arrogance.
"Not with Jill, you don't," he said, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder and compounding his negatives.
We so often, it seems to me, confuse "ought not" with "do not,"
"should not," and "shall not."
I pointed my "equalizer" toward his obtrusive hand, fired.
He slapped at his hand. "These goddamned mosquitoes! By Jesus, they're out tonight."
"You've been drinking again," Jill said.
He yawned.
"I'm ashamed of you." Jill was severe. "I'm absolutely transmogrified."
"A Ferrari," I said, "always draws mosquitoes."
"Mosquitoes?" His voice was fuzzy. The Pentothal pellet, or whatever it was, was already tiptoeing through his hemoglobin.
Timothy backed away a few steps, turned about, crashed on his face in a clump of oleanders.
"To Aegia," I said, starting up the soft-throated 205-horsepower engine.
"Tim's drunk. And he's a nasty drunk. Awful. Transmogrifying!"
"I'll fly you to Rome," I said.
"Without Tim?"
"Without Tim."
"I'll miss him."
She seemed sleepy. She leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.
Agent 69 then took over. This was no time for romance, pussyfooting; no time for indecision.
I reached for my Bulgarian pen. A slight drowsiness under moonlight has its charms, even a special interior music. But dramatic action, like surgery, calls for deeper sleep.
Zing went my pen.
"Ouch," she said, and slapped her arm, and dreamily she added, "These fucking mosquitoes."
"We'll fly to Rome."
She yawned. "You know ... in spite of your aunt ... you're kind of cute."
"Maybe we'll go on ... to Naples ... Amalfi ... Capri."
A wanton breeze stirred her hair, wafted to me her special perfume (a scent called "Charley," I was later to learn).
"Anywhere, Tarzan. Mesopotamia. Four Hole Swamp. Just get me a good night's sleep. Everything's too much forme."
I ran my hand along her thigh. "My plane is at the John's Island Airport."
She was not listening. "I still think you screw your aunt."
I drove across the Kiawah causeway, turned right into Bohicket Road, once again enjoyed the road's symbols of triumph over time. The headlights, rotated or levered up and down from the dash, picked up the druid oaks, the pendant moss. The night air was pungent with the fragrances of pluff mud, pine woods, and sea salt.
"I'm so sleepy," she said. "You're too much."
"We'll fly to Rome."
"Rome. Home. Any old place will do."
She was deep; asleep when I drove into the John's Island Airport. I circled the main building, stopped at the end of the parking strip. Nowhere was the company plane, the Albatross-a conspicuous Boeing 707, refurbished to sport a circular revolving bed and a sunken bathtub. "Something's wrong."
She did not hear.
I got out, walked to the administration building.
Inside, sitting in an armchair, sucking on a long black cigar, was Vulpe.
He sighted me, rose, stuck out his pudgy hand. "Ah, signore, I was expecting you."
I shook his hand, was rewarded by the wiggle in my palm of his little finger-his private fraternal handshake, implying, I gather, that I could call on him anytime when the going got rough.
"Where's the plane?"
"Ah, signore, there's the rub. When-a the a-going gets tough, as somebody a-once said, the tough gets a-going." He had an associate, he explained, who was not altogether trustworthy, a certain Father Damiano, patriarch of a very special Coptic church somewhere in Tobago. "Very pure man otherwise-no smoke, no drink, only smoke pot. 'Ganji,' he call it. Everybody in church a-smoke Ganji. Very big business.!'
"But the plane?"
"No worry, signore. Not our big plane. No Albatross wit' revolving bed. No Albatross around-a your neck. Ha! Ha! One little plane-Pinocchio."
"I need a plane."
"You have a girl, signore. No?"
"Si."
"Good. I bring you a message from la donna Cholmondeley. Lots-a plan change. Like-a mice and men. No? The best-a plans. What's best-a laid, never sleep."
I remembered the Bulgarian pen. I held it up. "Four times. Pip ... pip ... pip ... pip. Quattro volte." (Or was it five?)
"Per la ragazza?"
"Si!"
He smiled, exhibiting once again his matching rows of pointed teeth. "Benissimo. Benissimo."
He went on to assure me that I was making progress. "First-a you shoot the little pips. Then? Up. You trade up. It's-a just as easy to go boom-boom as pip-pip."
I thanked him. And I told him I thought I needed a refill.
"Gimme."
I handed him the pen.
He looked at it critically, held it to his ear, shook it. "Good-a two time more. Due volte. Then maybe ancora una volta. Who know? No?"
"Who know?" In an empty echo I was summing up my whole view of the human race.
"Still, signore, why take a chance? Live dangerously." He threw my pen in a trash box, handed me another. "Buon divertimento ... enjoy yourself."
"And now the plane?"
"La donna Cholmondeley say go to Seabrook. Everything is hunky-glory."
"Okay?"
"Hunky-dory. Who know? I go now.,Gotta see a man about a dog." He walked a few steps, then whirled about. "You got money, signore?"
Indeed, I had money. Long ago I had learned that there is little love without money (despite the hallucinations of hippies); certainly no business without money. Moreover, money tends to make money, hence a penny squandered is a pound earned. Earlier that day I had stirred my coffer at the C&S Bank. I had in my inside pocket, next to the Bulgarian pen, a hundred thousand dollars in traveler's checks. I had in my wallet about five hundred dollars and-just in case-a few million lire.
"Indeed," I said.
"That's-a good. You never know, signore. You never know."
He had, I conceded, a commendable point.
Jill was asleep when I got back to the car. Her head was on the seat, and she was snoring lightly, sounding as if a low wind gently rustled the palms.
I got in the car, lifted her head to my lap, started up the Ferrari 308's 205 horses.
"Umm," she said in dream talk. She had, I gathered, a Pernod or so before our meeting. Perhaps even a joint.
I ran my hand through her hair, weaved the car through lines of parked planes.
Soon I was for the third time zooming through the oak-grove tunnels of Bohicket Road, dodging the bobbing cottontails, listening to the numbing whir of crickets and the short, sharp croaks of tree frogs.
The soft, salt night air swept into the cockpit, stirred Jill's hair.
On the causeway leading from John's Island to the two barrier islands, I swept past the turn that led to Kiawah, drove on to Seabrook. I stopped at the security gate, thankful for once that Seabrook was protected by Pinkerton's best.
"Hello, John," I said to the guard. "Haven't seen you for a long, long time." I felt a rapport with him now-the professional bond that links one agent to another.
"You haven't been around, Mr. Benton. I missed you."
My rite of passage performed, identity established, I drove on, winding through the island's serpentine road. Eventually I came to the cypress-shingled beach house Cloris, Amy, and I shared. Around it were high dunes shrouded with sea oats and wax myrtles.
I parked the car in the garage underneath the house.
I shook Jill. "Ummm," she hummed, not moving.
I lifted her out of the car, carried her up the back stairs, in some contortionist manner managed to get the door unlocked and opened.
I carried Jill to the room where so much wise pleasuring had been accorded me. (The countenance of Priapus had, ununderstandably, smiled upon me.) Gently I lowered her to the waiting, jaundiced bed.
"Ummm," she hummed.
Then I went to the bar and poured myself a slug of Glenlivet. I had need of wisdom, artificial courage.
From Jill's lips came garbled, low-key, sibilant sounds.
The moon streamed in through the oceanside windows, casting arabesques on the bed. Outside the palmetto fronds rustled in the sea wind, and the night seabirds skirled.
What now? Agent 69 has many problems, hates decision making. Agent 69, lacking imagination, talent, likes his decisions to be made for him-by Cloris, Melissa, or inexorable fate. Decisions have a way of being final, like the slamming of a door. And thereafter conscience keeps asking "Why that?"
I looked at her as she lay supine in the moonlight, her body long and languorous, her jet hair fanned across the pillows.
I liked what I saw. I would write her a scene in which, on a winter's night, on the terrace of her palazzo in Naples, wearing nothing but a diadem and great sable coat, she would greet her distinguished guests. On Nelson's arrival, momentarily, discreetly, she would open her coat.
"Ummm," she said.
But what now?
For the nonce, the least I could do would be to make her comfortable. A host's first concern, whatever his designs, is to see to the comfort, pleasure, best interests, of a guest.
Gently, with the light touch of a pickpocket, the dexterity of a card shark, I undressed her. Off came the high-heeled Roman sandals, the shrimp-colored leather jeans. Off came the gold earrings. Up went the V-necked suede blouse. Gently, deftly, with infinite patience, I wormed the blouse over her head, extricated, in ways as yet unknown to me, her limpid arms.
There was no more comment than a slightly smothered "Umm."
Bra and panties were nowhere, a tribute, I assumed, to chic and the decorous carelessness of high beachcombing.
I took off my clothes, took another slug of Glenlivet, and lay down beside her.
I pulled up the covers.
It did not seem proper, with so little said, so little shared, so little passed between us, to touch her. In this kind of business, as Melissa realistically informed me, we don't have time for long courtships. Nevertheless I am still, I think, conditioned to an inhibiting shyness. More properly, I suppose, a fear of rejection. ("What do you think you're doing?"-the retort discourteous.) In my naive way I like to think that all amorous joustings begin, like a minuet, with a gentle bow and measured steps.
I listened, without interest, to the roll of the surf. The moon, now, was full; the waves surged high on the beach, lapping at the dunes. In the morning I would see sea oats wrenched from their rooted homes, prone on the sand.
Absently I ran my fingers over her-a five-finger exercise certain to exorcise writer's block, establish the scrivener's franchise.
Her body was smooth, incredibly smooth, and as finely joined as Bo Derek's. She stirred slightly, almost responsively, as I traced, almost objectively, her risings and furrows.
Then I fell asleep, ignoring, inexplicably, Melissa's advice.
I had troubled dreams, of course; I always have troubled dreams, dreams of frustration, confusion, sprouting guilt. I dreamed of an urge to get up quickly, found myself unable to move. I dreamed of a need to get into my clothes, found my arms caught tight in my sleeves. I dreamed I was in Rome, at the Hassler, trying to find my way back to the room in which I had left Jill. I, for whatever reason, was in the corridor, and naked, and each turn took me farther away from Jill and my clothes.
Alternately, there was the dream in which Jill had brought me two new pairs of pajamas-an act of domesticity which I well knew would in no way sit well with Amy. Yet how, in a small space, does one hide pajamas?
I return now to flesh-and-bone fact.
The telephone woke me. There was a loud ring, the special Seabrook ring-a sequence of paired trills.
As I reached for the phone I became aware of Jill's body, naked, relaxed, one leg slung nonchalantly over mine. There was a beatific look on her face.
Why had I not made love to her the whole night through? Drinking leaves us with so many unanswered questions.
"Hello," I said.
I was still tense from my dreams, alert to trouble. Who would call me at this hour? Philbrick? Was he on his way to this bedroom, indignant in a redneck way ... and well armed? Could Amy, alert so early, jealous, want to put an end to my planned infidelities?
There was a moment of silence.
I repeated my "Hello."
"Hello? Albert? Everything's ready. Let's get going."
I looked toward the window, saw through the window a horizon tinted with streaks of orange, streaks still timorous, fitful. The surf, unseen, announced itself with an indifferent thud.
"Albert? There is no Albert here."
"Albert, if you're chickening out on me, I'll come over and kill you."
"I think," I said, with that tendency to understatement common to those who have just waked, "you have the wrong number."
"God damn!" The caller banged down the receiver. Annoyed that I was not more annoyed, resentful that no swift punishment can be handed to anonymous and unapologetic daybreak dialers of wrong numbers, I lay back on the pillows.
"Darling." Jill's voice came to me cloaked in peach fuzz. "Darling."
"Darling." How rude it had been of me to ignore her these past few minutes, while ambling fruitlessly among the furrows of the mind. And how uncharacteristic! Early senility had come upon me.
Jill was still asleep. But even in sleep she was warm, loving, outgoing. "Darling, make love to me."
I moved close to her, put my head close to hers, put my arms around her. Our position then was the exact position I had shared with the anonymous girl in my dreams-evidence, I suppose, that life follows, if not art, at least dream flow, and that the real and the surreal tend to compenetrate, each the other, as did the good Bishop Berkeley and his excellent tar water.
Jill had a special way of kissing, her lips soft, limp, clinging, with much indrawing of breath. She made me feel that I was volatile, that she was drawing me inside her. She threw one leg over me. A hand, human, all to human, sought out, coaxed to braggadocio my second self, guided it to its appointed place.
Her body then followed mine with passive imitation, adherence. Those who have seen the Philobolus dancers know what I mean; there was between us synchrony, mimesis. Every muscle movement of mine was anticipated, embraced, responded to in kind. Such anatomical harmony is rare in life, and nowhere given its proper due.
Nor when there came the rush of many waters, the tinkling of the sistrum, was there any break in this preestablished harmony.
Unfortunately, at this moment of truth, with apocalypse all about us, she chose to speak. "Tim," she said, "I'm sorry about those terrible things I said to you last night. I didn't mean them."
"Really?" Who am I to intrude on a dream?
"Really!"
It was nothing."
"Really, Tim. Really!"
"What matters is now," I said, combining fact with forgiveness.
"You're so good for me. Really!" Her voice glowed with the sincerity which comes from deep sleep.
Some two or three hours later we both awoke. She sat up in bed, her hair cascaded to her shoulders, breasts rampant in the morning sun. Slowly she turned to face me. "And who," she asked, "are you?"
"Beauregard Benton." I bowed as best I could. "Allow me to introduce myself."
She yawned, smiled, tossed her hair back over her shoulders. "You're the boy who screws his aunt."
I looked out the window. Forlorn sea oats, wrenched from the dunes, lay prone on the sand.
"I'm transmogrified."
"I," I said, "am Beauregard Benton."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jill was remarkably relaxed that morning.
It was odd of her, I thought, to make no reference to the night before, to the fact that I had made love to her-and that she, in her sleep, had mistaken me for her boyfriend. She behaved as if we were casual acquaintances who might have met at some resort in the Caribbean and were looking forward to a day of tennis and golf.
The implication was that neither of us had a past.
Yet she was in other ways unexpectedly intimate. She got up from the bed totally naked, for example, made no effort to cover herself, and said, "Now I go pee-pee." Amy, when I first knew her, would either turn her back to me or else make a mock-modest effort to hide her breasts and pubic hair. Scarcely Jill. Jill stood for a moment smiling at me, her breasts (on which I seemed to have smeared some of her own lipstick) standing out proudly. "That gatefold," I said, "didn't half do you justice." She patted her pubic hair, then put her fingers to her lips and blew me a kiss. Then she walked through the open door of the bathroom and sat down on the toilet seat. There was an unabashed tinkle.
Jill flushed the toilet, came back to the bedroom, put her arms around me, kissed me warmly.
"I know you want to screw me," she said. "Maybe someday I'll let you."
I ran my hand over her naked buttocks. They were tight, like Cloris'. "How do you know?"
"That you want to screw me? Or that someday I might let you?"
"Both."
"Well, let's take the first first. Your erection is jabbing into me. I take that as a subtle hint-unless you always have a hard-on when you get up in the morning."
"And the second?"
"How do I know that someday I might let you?"
"Yes."
She kissed me again, this time with pulsing, clinging lips. "Don't be a fool."
With a pleasant sigh she led me to the bed, fell back on it, pulled me after her.
I was soon convinced that she would make a delightful traveling companion, an exquisite Emma Hamilton.
"Your aunt," she said, "must be very proud of you." Later we went swimming. Cloris' bikini and bra fitted Jill, and about them Jill, discreetly, asked no questions.
In the water I could not resist the temptation to feel all parts of Jill's body. A writer, I told myself, must make a study of detail. Overhead two rows of pelicans came together. Each passed through the other with the precision of Lipizzaner horses.
Jill asked me if I had oral sex with my aunt, and announced that she thought oral sex with an aunt was as shocking as it was incestuous. "On the other hand," she added, "I was not born in Charleston."
Later, on the porch facing the ocean, she took off Cloris' bra and bikini.
She leaned over the banisters, looked at the wide beach, the breakers, the sandpipers. Her bottom gazed at me amorously. I framed the vista in my mind's eye and muttered, "Art conquers all."
Between the partings of her thighs I saw a glimpse of pubic hair. Beyond this I saw the wide beach, the breakers, sandpipers.
"It is beautiful here," Jill said.
I was aware only of the cascade of black hair on her white shoulders, the flirtatious view through the parting of her thighs, the spell of the ocean.
A moment later she said, "I enjoy you very much, but I'm really not your aunt." Nevertheless she leaned farther over the banisters, and her loins moved gracefully to outline a figure eight.
"I'm not this way, really," she said, pressing backward toward me. "And I will never be your aunt."
We then went to the Seabrook Club for brunch.
"If we go to Rome," she said, "I will have to buy all new clothes. Everything ... from scratch."
I then made a startling discovery. A side effect of the Bulgarian pen's dosage was a sharp shift in psychological horizons. It combined a slight amnesia with the very vivid feeling of having been born again. Accidentally and narcoti-cally I had presented her with a new life.
"I don't know why I feel so good," she said. "Or why I feel so comfortable with you--a complete stranger."
I had once (in his academic days) met Timothy Leary. He had explained to me the great thaumaturgy of LSD-its ability, given a favorable set of associations, a favorable setting in which to rearrange the set, to make tomorrow factually the first day of the rest of your life. Now, unwittingly, I was extending his research, playing tiddledy-winks in the front parlor of inner space.
"We can stay at the Hassler," I said.
"What's the Hassler?"
"The best hotel in Rome."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"But in separate rooms. I scarcely know you."
"In separate rooms."
"I don't think it's right for a girl to sleep with strangers." Nor did I, I assured her. In morals I was distinctly old-fashioned, much like Lord Hamilton-the English ambassador in the motion picture I was writing for her, and in which she would star.
"My husband...." She introduced the topic of her former husband in a way that made me think we had indeed just met, that I knew nothing whatever about her. "My husband ... was our ambassador to Upper Volta. Hot, humid little country. No sex at all. Babies are flown in by storks."
"Sex," I said, "is often sinful and always fatiguing." Sex, I suggested, has its proper place between five and seven, and she said, "There you go again with all that new math."
I wanted to know if she had a passport that she could quickly lay hands on; I could supply instant transportation but forging a passport was not in my line. (Agent 69 knows nothing about engraving.)
"In my pocketbook. One thing I learned in Upper Volta. Never to go anywhere without my passport, a bottle of pills, and my herbal douche."
"I know so little," I said, "about the younger generation."
I signed the check.
We got up from the table.
Behold! On the next table lay a copy of the morning's paper. Screaming at me were the headlines:
EX-AMBASSADOR'S WIFE ABDUCTED
Estranged wife of J. Calhoun Philbrick Abducted at Gunpoint from Lobby of Local Inn; Husband Suspects Soviet Agents....
I picked up the paper.
The article quoted an eyewitness account of the kidnapping. Four men wearing stocking masks had seized this glamourous woman, "whose provoking photograph in a popular magazine, recently, had been a source of embarrassment to her husband." They had forced her into a waiting van and had sped off in the direction of John's Island. I read further:
Authorities, however, discount the Russian-agent theory. County police tend to link the reported abduction with the epidemic of drug smuggling that is now plaguing the Carolina coastline. Said County Police Lieutenant Quincy Smallback, when interviewed by a Charleston Mercury reporter, "Planes flying heroin and hashish from the Near East have been spotted with greater frequency in recent months. The traffic is now big business, a profitable sideline of many minor oil sheikhs. Ancient Greek courtesan Laima's fee was a staggering 250 talents [$300,000], but Macedonia's King Demetrius Poliorcetes paid it. To raise the money, he levied a special tax on soap."
"Let's get out of here," I said, taking Jill by the elbow, hurrying her to the door.
"Let's." She was most agreeable.
We walked to the car. The morning sun sparkled on its chrome.
"Love ... just love your Ferrari."
"In Rome I'll get you one of your own. And maybe a Lamborghini or two. And a palazzo near the Villa Borghese. And a villa near Ostia." In show business, as with penises, I assured myself, bigness counts. ("Not really!" Amy had lied to me, after, with much avidity and pretended distaste, she had done, with that boy in Perugia, what she earlier had declared "impossible.")
"I will love your script," Jill said. "I feel it so plain."
Back at the house, while Jill was in the bathroom, I dialed Cloris. "Act one, obscene one ... according to plan."
"You amaze me," she said. "You never cease to amaze me. I never knew you could be 'four men in stocking masks.' And whose stocking, I might ask? Jill's so soon?"
I did not know, I told her, my own strength. Perhaps I needed analysis.
"The county police and the FBI are looking for you."
"Honored," I said.
"Wonderful publicity." Cloris was jubilant. "One, two, three, we have an international issue. Guaranteed box office."
"Already I feel like an international issue. Also a little tired."
"But not for long, dear love. I know you too well." Cloris was, as ever, generous. "Nothing primes the pump like a new girl."
An hour later a helicopter landed on the beach in front of the house. Jill and I got in.
"This will be fun," Jill said. She had clean forgotten Tim. Philbrick was no longer in mind.
The chopper ferried us to John's Island. At the airport there the Albatross, Cholly-Boy's plane, was waiting for us.
We took off at once. Jill, conveniently, asked no questions. She was gay, child-like, enthusiastic.
The stewardess, whom I faintly remembered from my first flight with Melissa, greeted me cordially, smiled in an odd conspiratorial way at Jill, and served us caviar and champagne (Veuve Clicquot '70). Jill admired the plane, the caviar, the champagne, the stewardess's profile, and promptly fell asleep.
I carried Jill to the revolving circular bed, made her comfortable, lay down beside her. The stewardess undressed her, put her under the covers. "Nice piece," she said.
"Yes," I said. "Nicely put together."
"I'm Jane," she said. "Remember?"
I remembered only vaguely. When last I had flown on this plane, Melissa had spiked my Rusty Nail (Scotch and Drambuie) with some barbiturate. She had then, I later learned, made love to Jane. "Of course," I said.
"How's Melissa?"
"Melissa is always Melissa."
She smiled knowingly. "But of course."
"But of course," I said.
"Anything you want? A joint? Condoms? The New York Times?"
"You," I said.
"Sorry," she said. "It's that time of the month."
"So sorry."
"But surely on your next flight...."
"Of course." I made note of the fact that she looked very much like Margaux Hemingway. Then I too immediately fell asleep.
It was about ten-thirty that evening, Rome time, when Jill and I entered the lobby of the Hassler Hotel, surrendered our passports at the reception desk.
"Separate rooms, please," Jill said to me. "After all, I scarcely know you."
I asked for my old room, a room I had shared, in seasons past, with Cloris, Amy, and (once or twice) Melissa.
I requested a nearby room for "Mrs. Philbrick."
"No luggage?" The concierge who had shown us to our rooms was puzzled. Couples who ordinarily arrive without luggage ordinarily share the same room, ordinarily ask for a double bed-letto matrimoniale.
Not us.
"Later," I said. "Piu tarde. By pony express."
He was not happy.
I gave him a ten-dollar tip and happiness arrived subito-at once. It is a weakness of mine, the mark of a man unused to money, always to overtip. John D. Rockefeller, were he alive, would have given him a dime.
Jill went to her bathroom "to freshen up." I to mine to diminish bladder pressure. We were to meet in the lobby a little while later, and I, after due overtures, would try to persuade her to share my humble hospitality. If necessary, I could always call into play my friendly Bulgarian pen.
Unfortunately each of us, each in his own room, fell asleep. Such are the wagr of jet lag.
In the morning I called her. Yes, she would be delighted to have breakfast with me in my room. Unfortunately, she had as yet no dressing gown, no wraparound. She was utterly and forlornly naked. In such a state it would be unseemly to step out in the hall.
We met, a short while later, in the lobby. I handed her two or three thousand dollars' worth of lire.
"For what?" she asked sweetly. "I have ... as yet...."-she winked-"done nothing to earn it."
A momentary advance, I assured her. She would soon have salary, expense account, contract. There was all time ahead.
Our first chore was shopping. I guided Jill to the Via Condotti, which stretches from the Spanish Steps to the Corso. We got much of what we needed at Gucci and Ibbas, both on the Via Condotti a block from the Piazza di Spagna. I bought myself some slacks and blazers at Fabrizi's, on the Corso. The salesmen, all of them, were still pregnant with old-world courtesy, alert to tourist needs. All purchases were to be delivered to the Hassler before nightfall. Jill's finer clothes, we agreed, she would buy on her own, at the famous couturiers'. In this area I could be of no help.
I took her for lunch to a favorite place of mine on Via Condotti.
"I'm pooped," she said.
I ordered for us-antipasto misto, minestrone, and zuppa di pesce (although a bouillabaisse on top of minestrone was rather much). We washed it down with a Bolla Valpolicella.
"How wonderful," Jill said as she held up her wine. "Quite a change from Kiawah."
It was, I conceded, a startling change. And I was grateful that up to now Jill had asked me no questions. She had parted quite readily, I thought (even if aided by my little Bulgarian persuader), from the friend to whom she was, as she told me, so passionately committed. And all such told me, to my Machiavellian delight, that the course of true love tends sometimes to prolapse, hiatus, and syncopation-which is to say, a hop, a skip, and a jump.
My problem, now (my old problem, my perennial problem), was to decide what to do next. I had with speed and aplomb airlifted her from her Babylonish captivity. I had interested her, presumably, in an attractive motion-picture contract. I had even sampled anatomical tidbits.
But what now?
The crux of the matter was that I had no personal interest in Jill. I knew nothing about her, her early life, first seduction, alarums and excursions; nor had I any great desire to know. I missed Amy, her sadness, perverseness, alternating aloofness and passion. She was my Emma Hamilton, a model for Emma Hamilton. Neither had I any stomach for the cops-and-robbers game I was playing in company with a cast of national and international crazies.
On the credit side, I was more than a million dollars richer, with bull-market prospects for the future. I had clout. I had had handed to me all the plot and color I needed for the next three books.
Yet I was anything but happy. I had not held hard to the lessons of Melissa, had not toughened up to life's little byplays and foreplays. "Nothing primes the pump like a new girl," Cloris had said to me, not without a certain vicarious interest-expecting from me a full account, with illustrations, of my various deeds of derring-do. Little was I living up to expectations: Cloris', Melissa's, my own.
"You're a strange one," Jill said.
"Meaning?"
"I know nothing whatever about you. You've told me nothing. Have not even made a pass at me."
How sweet, I thought, are the fruits of Nepenthe.
"Yet ... lickety-split ... you pick me up at Kiawah ... get me away from my boyfriend ... bring me to Rome."
"Routine," I said.
"And I let you."
I explained that it was a failing of mine to inspire confidence.
"I don't believe anything you say," she said, "but this could be a fun trip, couldn't it?"
I emptied my wineglass, refilled hers and mine. I needed alcoholic confidence.
"Think of this as strictly business. You will make a lot of money, become terribly famous. And at the same time . .
"I'll get even with Pee Wee."
"You'll get even with Pee Wee."
"And Tim?" She was arch. What she was asking was what did I think she thought about Tim.
"Fuck Tim," I said.
"Why don't you?" Arcliness turned to ploy. "He's A-C, D-C."
I spoke of architecture, said approving things about Alberti, Bramante, Vignolo, and Palladio.
"It was nice of you to bring me to Rome. Someday I will thank you."
"Business. We have great things ahead. Think of Brooke Shields. Bo Derek."
"I'm a lot older than Brooke Shields."
"A double," I suggested, "for Bo Derek."
"Funny."
"Funny, what?"
"When I first met you, I thought all you wanted to do was fuck me."
Appearances, I assured her, are often deceptive.
"But you do fuck Amy Dellmore, don't you? Even if she's not your aunt."
"Yes," I said.
"And write about it?"
"And write about it."
"How about me?"
"What about you?"
"Are you going to write about me?"
"Probably."
"And what else?"
"First you will act ... in what I am writing for you."
"The picture...."
"The picture."
"About Lady Hamilton."
"About Lady Hamilton."
"I told you, didn't I, I'd seen Monna Vannal Well I did. And Monna Vanna wore very little clothes. In fact, at times, nothing."
I chewed meditatively on a lobster claw. "At times," I said, "she was spectacularly, oracularly naked."
"And you want me the same way."
"In your own way, of course." Every girl, I assumed, would want to personalize her own nudity-give it, in some sense, an individuality. Cleopatra, I reminded her, was stark naked when first introduced to Caesar. But she was brought to him (by her paladins) snugly rolled in a rug.
"No casting couch?"
"No casting couch." I was distant, professional. "Pity." She stuck out her tongue at me.
"Why?" (Here was I, ever the sociologist, veteran questioner.)
"Because I like to be wanted ... and not give."
I poured more Valpolicella.
"You're not a bad sort," she said, looking at me in a lynx-eyed way across the top of her glass.
It was my duty, I assured myself, to exercise my erotic franchise at the earliest moment-that afternoon, perhaps. This was not the time for recollections of Amy, the fine edges of sentiment. After that I would call Cloris, establish schedules.
"I like this wine," she said.
I liked her use of the word "like." It was a feeling word, an expression of emotional tone. She wanted, in short, to be personal, to exchange information about preferences. Or was I reading too much into a simple verb? Getting ahead of myself?
"I like," I said, "the way you look, talk, smile, and move. You are...." I took the liberty of exaggerating. "Star stuff."
"I'm feeling the wine." (More feeling talk.)
"Good," I said.
"What's good about it?"
"I like you the way you are."
She smiled. "Then why don't you order us some brandy?"
I had the waiter bring us some Vecchia Romagna.
"This, too, is good." Again she smiled. "I like . .
I nodded.
"Everything is good."
She then told me, without my asking, the story of her life. She was not the sweet country girl I had thought her to be. She was a navy brat; her father had been a commandant at the Charleston naval base. Philbrick had been no sleek Lochinvar rescuing her from an onslaught of boll weevils, from the tobacco-stained ennui of a red-clay farm. Far from it. She had gone to Sweetbriar-but that was no fun, because by the time boys got all the way out there to see her, they were dead drunk. She had been seduced, with eminent cooperation (she was then seventeen), by a quarterback on the VMI football team. ("Ejaculatio prae-cox ... you know what that is? Ugh!")
Once on a dare and a hotel bed, she had taken on the entire Georgia Tech baseball team. ("And I didn't even know the difference between a high fly and a good clean slide to first base!")
Her father lately was suffering from psoriasis-which he had learned from a book to treat by bathing in warm water once each week ... and abstaining from asparagus.
Had I ever made love to my sister? In fact, did I have a sister? And if I did, would I make love to her as passionately and often as I made love to my aunt?
"By the way...." she added.
"By the way what?"
"I once made love to you somewhere before."
"All of us," I said, "have errant feelings. Freud speaks of unconscious desires."
She tapped her lips with her fingers. "I have the feeling that somewhere, somehow...."
"Tell me more about yourself," I said.
She had done a public-relations stint in Atlanta ("Kindling fires in visiting firemen"), was briefly married to Jingo Jones, business manager of the Unfinished Business, a Miami-based rock group. She had met Philbrick when Philbrick was at a Republican convention in Miami Beach. The Unfinished Business was entertaining. She, bored with Jones, was "just ambling."
"Pee Wee was in charge of fund raising for some committee or other. He always liked to get his hands on money ... money and girls on the loose. I don't know why I went for him."
"Not even good in bed. He thought foreplay was something you did in golf ... like hitting the ball twice with a number-two iron."
None of this recital had any interest for me, even if it is my craft to root out and hoard trivia. It seemed the better part of tact, however, to keep up a show of interest. Confession can be autosuggestive and self-pleasuring, a fact that psychoanalysis has turned to good account. "Go on."
"So you want to know why I married him?"
"Why did you?"
She winked. "A girl needs a change every now and then, doesn't she? Like now. Like my coming to Rome with you, just so! No romance! No push-push! Just so!"
I spoke glowingly of the yen for adventure. That and a properly placed casting couch introduced many a girl to glory. I spoke appreciatively of the glories that had been Hollywood.
After another brandy, a fillip of Strega, I paid our check, overtipped to buy myself an extra "Grazie, signore," and we left the place.
"It was good," Jill said, squeezing my hand. "Awfully good."
"Buy her something," said my inner voice. "Splurge! Play Great Gatsby."
On the Via Condotti I saw a small jewelry store. A blue-and-white-striped awning hung over the door. In the window, clinging lovingly to a velvet neck, was a gold necklace. "It would look good on you," I said.
"I'm drunk," she said.
We went in. Behind the front counter was a slim girl with black eyes and bangs.
"For the signorina," I said, "the necklace in the window."
"Aha!" Her eyes flashed with Italianate understanding.
She took the necklace from the window, held it up for proper admiration, then walked up to Jill, fastened it around her neck. "Bellissima," she said, referring indifferently to the necklace, the necklace's appearance on Jill, and Jill herself.
"I'm squashed," Jill said.
"How much?" I asked. "Quanto costa?" Not that I cared. The greater the cost, the more devious the gesture. Asking, however, seemed seemly; it showed concern, a jaundiced appreciation for life's little jousting toys.
"In dollars?"
"In dollars."
She looked at the tag, as if to imply that the price of a necklace, even one featured in the window, was of interest only to bookkeepers. "Two thousand, three hundred dollars."
"And earrings to match?" I had long ago learned never to buy a necklace without buying matching earrings. This is one of the things a man is taught in Ivy League colleges. It is a small thing, of course, but serendipitai-like foreplay.
"But of course! Subito!" The earrings were produced, caressed, held up. "Six hundred dollars. And I will, of course, falsify your sales slip ... for U.S. Customs."
She spoke an excellent English.
I looked at Jill. "You like?"
"You are very sweet." She stroked my hand. "And I think you want to fuck me."
"The signore has good taste," the saleswoman said, closing the sale with that worldly courtesy we so much admire in the Italians. "And now, perhaps, something in a diamond garter? A little daring ... but in perfect taste?"
* * *
At the Hassler, the concierge handed me a message. "Call Signore Camavaron. Pronto. Rome office." He also handed me the two room keys.
Jill and I went up together in the small lift. She touched my hand and said, "You're horny."
"Obviously." It is always flattering to be accused, unjustly, of planned assaults.
She unbuttoned, provocatively, prophetically, the top button of her blouse. "Your room or mine?"
"Mine." There was, of course, no difference. Somehow, however, a man feels more secure on his own pied-d-terre-even a transient hotel room.
"I'm drunk," she said. Like Amy, she was prepared to yield to a force greater than her own. Still, I said to myself, I would lean rather to the persuasive effects of alcohol than to those of the Bulgarian pen. The latter was not beyond cheating; and Agent 69, even in his most Machiavellian moments, deplored cheating. That Jove, to the same end, occasionally changed himself into a shaft of light, or some such effluvium, was beside the point. Jove, with all passion spent, was still Jove-equipped to decide cosmic issues with no more than a nod.
I pause for an aside.
I am not happy with the thought that I had, in a way, worn the Ring of Gyges-that I had made love to Jill in moments when she had no awareness of my presence.
The Bulgarian pen had given me, if not invisibility, at least the advantages of nonbeing while very much a being, of coming without becoming. And as a seemingly nonexistent person-an active nonperson-I could scarcely be blamed for unshared pleasures.
Agent 69 put Freud to good use-even Machiavelli, could Machiavelli have had the advantage of Freudian insights. Realities influence dreams. And dreams translate into wishes the subtle links between desire and the spasm. Jill-even Anna Ricci, on whom I had earlier thus presumed-might well believe that what actually happened was no more than a dream about what she would have liked to have had happen.
In sum: the Bulgarian pen promoted the possibility of my fleshly adventure. Let us give the Unconscious its due, even if there is no Unconscious.
I offer no apology. Craft itself is the writer's craft. His best work is done sub rosa-better sub myrtus, on the slippery slopes of the myrtle, an aromatic shrub once dedicated to Venus.
She walked into my room with the authority of one who had been hostess there since the time Lars Porsena of Clusium by the nine gods swore that the great house of Tarquin would suffer wrong no more. Her large blue eyes blazed with pride and muted promise. She unbuttoned her suede blouse, threw it on a chair. She unhooked her bra, slipped it down from her shoulders, threw it on top of her blouse. Then, turning her back to me, she dropped her skirt.
There was, as I recalled from the first episode, nothing else to take off. Girls nowadays are so practical, pragmatic, and ecumenical.
Through the parting of her thighs, under the keystone of her erotic arch, I could see the glistening dome of St. Peter's.
"Obviously I'm drunk," she said with serene nonchalance. "Otherwise, on such short acquaintance, I would not let you do what I'm obviously going to let you do."
"You're a princess," I said.
She turned to look at me, and her breasts, it seemed to me, pointed upward like the nether horns of twin crescent moons. "Or should I not?"
She walked with high-heeled grace to my bed, thfew herself on it facedown. Rome's seven stately hills, in my eyes, had now become nine. The newcomers I now stroked.
"Oh my!" she said, acknowledging contact.
I kissed the back of her neck. A man of parts, I reminded myself, is never hurried. Like Aristotle's "Great-souled Man," he is slow of pace, solemn of tone, asks no favors.
I can to this day recall no foreplay, no badinage. In some instantaneous and automatic way, as if quicksand had suddenly opened and encased me, I was inside her; and amid a wild churning and exotic heaving, she explained once again that she was very drunk. "Just the same," she went on, "pretend I'm Amy."
And it was then that the phone rang.
I reached over to the bedside table.
"Darling," said Amy, "this is Amy."
It took not a little effort to keep my voice level, mix competently the sincerity which I felt with the enthusiasm that such sincerity demands.
"Don't stop," said Jill-very decently, I thought, in a throaty whisper.
"I had to talk to you." Amy's voice purred with the honeyed sweetness I knew so well, the tone that told me that she loved me very much, that she had just been (in her own way) slightly errant, that she must confess and urge me to forgive her. It was a welcome message.
"I would say," I said, "ditto and double-ditto."
''I'm in New York ... and want you back ... pronto."
"I'll be back pronto."
"More, more," screamed Jill. "I'm coming." Ungallantly I clapped my hand over her mouth; and, unappreciatively, she bit me.
"I mean it." Amy did. I knew Amy's impulses, vagrant moods, as well as I knew my own.
"Darling?"
"What?"
"More! More!" Jill muttered through the fingers of my muting hand-the sounds coming out, "Muh! Muh!" Her hips, churning, squirming, heaving, repeated in anatomical braille her flattering request.
"Think of me and do...." I could see through the telephone Amy's cajoling dimples. "Do ... you-know-what." (A teasing joke of hers, when away from me, was to invite me by telephone to cultivate, romantically, the ardors of self-abuse.)
"I will," I said. "Indeed I will."
"Now." Amy was thoughtful, cajoling, concerned. "I mean right now."
Her wish, I assured her, was my command. Simultaneously, my sincerity, aided my Jill's spasmic caresses, erupted. There was the Vesuvian moment, the three cosmic spurts, the suppressed inward groan.
"And think of me."
Obediently, sentimentally, I thought of her.
"How very ecumenical," Jill said, meanwhile melodramatically, with thumb and forefinger, extracting my detumesced part. "And how sweet."
I phoned Camavaron and learned that our studio had been bombed.
We slept through what was left of the day. Sometime in the early part of the evening, I had room service-or its Roman equivalent-send us up some antipasto, soup, and pasta (fettuccine with asparagus). Also a bottle of Asti Spumante.
When we finished the wine, Jill said, with a pleasing throatiness in her voice, "I'm horny."
"Good," I said. It is so seldom in life that a girl speaks up about her erotic whims. Much less on such short acquaintance.
I touched her bare body in several places, kissed various convexities and concavities.
"I think it was the call from Amy."
"What about Amy?"
"I've never screwed a man while he was talking to another girl."
"No?"
"No." She stuck out her tongue.
I gave more tactile attention to the convexities and concavities. She, in turn, stroked my again-risen extremity.
"You love Amy very much, don't you?"
I assured her that I did, an assurance that induced her to bend over, run her tongue along under the ridge of my erection.
"And Cloris?"
"And Cloris."
She then, with mischievous dexterity, did her best to convince me that organized unfaithfulness is a tonic to the soul.
* * *
The next day we went shopping for Jill's high-fashion wardrobe.
Jill knew, it seems, all the in places, all the new styles. At Laura Biagotti's she picked out a blue cashmere pleated sleeveless blouson with matching pleated harem pants; at Enrica Massei's, a red silk box jacket with silk foldover long culottes; at Mila Schon's, a shirt-sleeved blazer and plaid skirt; at Andre Laug's, a fuchsia single-breasted wool jacket with maroon garbardine skirt-and a pink-and-white-checked silk blouse. ("Something ultraconservative-just the thing to take off for my next nude gatefold.")
The last purchase, and Jill's last all-too-knowing quip, gave me the idea I needed to make the movie script come to life. Lady Hamilton would play in modem dress; alternately, in ultramodern undress. To round out the notion, I bought her at Vittorio Ricci's a pair of embossed leather high-heeled boots. When Lady Hamilton is at long last totally revealed, we find her nude and regal in these-which to the trained and subtle eye can symbolize so much. (Already my sexual eye saw the subhead to Variety's review; "Lady Cholmondeley's latest epic a triumph of innuendo.")
I had all our purchases sent to the hotel by special messenger. I then bought myself a camera-a Nikon with a high-speed lens.
"You're impulsive," Jill said. Little then did she know that I think with my eye, write as a voyeur. I was anxious to see her in and out of her new clothes, develop my script from what I saw.
When we got back to the Hassler, we found our room (my room) neatly decorated with the new additions to Jill's wardrobe.
I closed the door and kissed her.
She was, I thought, warm and understanding-responses, perhaps, to my spending spree. Presents, no matter how trivial, are always rewarding to the giver-a kind of casting of bread on erotic waters. All of which is to say, with a shameless mixing of metaphors, that when I kissed her, her tongue sought out and embraced mine.
Get out the camera, I said to myself. Take the nudes. Lovemaking is evanescent. Images last forever.
"I think," I said, "we should shoot some establishing shots."
She kissed me again, running tongue against tongue. "To establish what?"
"How beautiful you are. How talented. How municipally appealing."
"In short," she said, "you want to fuck me."
I said nothing. This was no time to speak of art for art's sake. Voyeurism is its own reward.
I got out my Nikon, checked its settings.
"I suppose," she said, "you want me to take something off." She smiled pleasantly, unfastened the top button of her blouse.
I eased Jill to the window, posed her against the background of St. Peter's.
Now on her own (which is to say, with no implied suggestion from me), she kissed me again.
I unbuttoned the remaining buttons of her blouse, slipped it off; unhooked, slipped off her bra.
The sun was now setting behind a nearby hill. A golden glow lit up the sky. Shadows from the window crisscrossed Jill's neat breasts.
I leaned over, kissed her nipples.
"Fresh," she said.
They hardened, rose, making the pose more interesting.
I took two or three shots of this stance, then asked her to drop her skirt.
"I'm not wearing panties." With this apology, she dropped her skirt, kicked it aside, and stood straight, her hands at her sides.
I had her put on the high-heeled boots.
I had been right. Jill was now as erotically appealing as she was regal. Her long body had become commanding, assertive, authoritative; and the jewelry sparkling above her high breasts and now erect nipples contrasted dramatically with the leather.
She seemed suddenly to become aware of her force.
She caressed the pubic triangle. "I want you," she said.
I clicked off my final shots, kneeling and pointing the camera up-to accentuate the length of legs and torso. "Yes."
"And I want you to make love to me in a way that I've never been made love to before."
"Meaning?"
"That's for you to find out."
I looked long and lovingly at her naked body, thought of Amy standing just so in front of Isabelle Wescott (and her confession to me: "After that I went wild ... there was nothing I wouldn't do").
Slowly, deliberately, I took off my belt, looped it. "Lie down on the bed."
She looked at me with a mocking smile. "You wouldn't. You wouldn't dare. You're too chicken."
As if to prove her point, she walked over to the bed, threw herself down on it, her face in the pillows.
"I dare you."
Her bottom rose with provoking arrogance. It was a lovely bottom, creamy, solid, tightly curved. Even more provoking was the mole-the beauty spot on the left cheek.
My instinct was to kiss it, stroke it, make love to it. I had never before whipped a girl-not even Amy, when her restless, vagrant moods came on her.
But as I have written elsewhere, I have learned much from Melissa. I had learned never to let the fine points of etiquette interfere with the business at hand.
"You're chicken," Jill said.
Yet I was not chicken.
I went about my appointed task. I went about it with precision, force.
Jill, unbelieving, screamed. Her whole body twitched.
I continued.
The screaming was replaced by sobbing, yet she never got up from the bed.
Ultimately I got out of my clothes, got on the bed behind her now reddened bottom, made a rapid, unexpected entrance.
"No! No!" she screamed. "That is verboten."
"On the contrary," I said, "it's a Turnverein."
Late that evening, Jill and I met Camavaron at the Hostaria dell' Orso, a fifteenth-century villa on the Via Monte Brianzo. (Ristorante di gran, gran lusso.) Jill was gloriously conspicuous in her blue cashmere blousson and harem pants. Camavaron was sipping a negroni (gin and Campari).
I introduced them.
"Hi," said Jill, holding out a perfumed hand.
"I say," said Camavaron, kissing it.
We sat down.
Camavaron turned to me. "You look pale, my friend. Jill too much?"
"He rapes me," Jill said.
A writer, I explained, must have something to write about.
"Rapes well?"
Jill honored me with a condescending, cryptic smile. "Fair to middling."
"Lovely, lusty face." Camavaron spoke in a musing way, not looking at either of us. "Long legs. Languorous look. Lecherous lips. Uptight tits. Jill should make jack."
A band, plump waiter came to our table. Jill and I both ordered martinis and oysters.
"Subito," said the waiter.
"Working?" Camavaron winked at me.
"Thinking," I said.
"Now, I suppose, you'll tell the world about Jill."
"This is a strange business," I said, touching Jill's knee, and picturing to myself, in a blurred flashback, my sudden and confusing montage of love, loyalties, business, clout, craft, and craftsmanship.
I became aware, of a sudden, of a new set of frustrations, a fresh attack of numbness. I became aware, in short, that I had no idea what I was about.
"You're a bastard," Jill whispered to me. "I can hardly sit down."
I was flattered. Little did I think I had such power within me.
"And now you're dribbling out of me."
"Sorry," I said.
"Such things are not done. Just not done."
"Sorry."
"But I loved it." She reached out and squeezed my hand.
"Good."
"My ass is a mess. Do you mind?"
Camavaron fixated me with a fishy stare. "I have only one criticism of your Lady Hamilton idea."
"What?"
"It's a bore."
It came to me that my feeling for Amy, which I had projected as Lord Hamilton's concern for Emma, was a feeling peculiar to me. It did not have a standard appeal. It had no violence. It did not involve an invasion of extraterritorial monsters. My fantasies were dated.
"You're hung up on sex," Camavaron continued. "Sex with Amy. Sex with Jill."
"Really?" said Jill, looking at me with angled eyebrows, as if to say that until now she did not quite know what was wrong with me. Philbrick had been simple. He wanted nothing more than a bribe here and there, or a quick turnover in cocaine.
"Sex with Jennifer, June, Caterina, the naked Countess of Liechtenstein. I make no mention of Cloris, Anna Ricci, Melissa, Spagnola, much less Elza, June's sister."
"Really!" Jill was unaccustomed to a diversification of interests. Philbrick, apparently, talked little, and, unlike a writer, kept few records.
"You forget about action." Camavaron; concentrating on me, voiced his own frustrations. He had written nothing-other than a few new translations of tired Greek and Roman classics; and a translation, I would argue, is not in the best sense "writing."
"Like what?"
"The public-the moviegoing public, television public-wants action. Not personality problems. Not purple fantasies."
"For example...."
"For example? There are so many examples. A con man runs from the mob into the arms of a widow and a koala. A man trains dolphins, then finds that they have been kidnapped to assassinate a politician whose hobby is sailing. A woman has a nervous breakdown, is treated at a chic sanatorium, where she falls in love with a werewolf. A publisher looking for lost love letters falls in love with a girl from another planet. A scientist accepts an assignment to live underwater for a month and is seduced by a manatee."
"Personally," said Jill, "I like sex. All you have to do is lay back and enjoy it."
"Lie," corrected Camavaron, a congenital purist.
"It's the truth. I swear it."
"I was speaking," said Camavaron, with clipped Oxonian contempt, "of the cinema." As a posy to Rome, he said "cheen-ay-ma."
"In the drive-ins...." It was clear the Jill regarded Camavaron as outmoded. "You get both."
Camavaron gave me his full attention. "About your Lady Hamilton story...."
"Go on." I had, at this moment, a keen concern for business.
"I have a better idea."
"What?"
"Lady Hamilton-Emma-deceives her husband according to plan."
"With ... and I think this is important. A twist. With Lord Hamilton's approval."
"Of course, dear lad. Of course. A nice touch."
"No longer,-" I reminded him, "is a woman taken in adultery an object of scorn, a target for slings and arrows."
"Of course not. Stone no more my lovelies. Stone no more."
"I love adultery," Jill said. "It's so civilized. I'd been doing it most of my life ... and never knew it."
No longer-this was my point-is a woman taken in adultery to be stoned by the populace, or by envious elders. We live now in more chivalrous times. The date of her adulterine tryst is to be cherished, to be recounted with cherubic glee-and each year thereafter to be celebrated, like Valentine, Labor, or Guy Fawkes' days.
"A nice touch." Camavaron put a monocle to his right eye, contemplated critically the shaping of his fingernails. "He's kind of cute," Jill whispered. "I wonder if...."This is it."
"What?"
"Nelson comes to Lord Hamilton's house just after his great victory at Trafalgar."
"So?"
"He is very much the man of the hour. Handsome, virile, confident."
This much I had taken for granted.
"We go on ... much as you have it."
"Good."
"Lady Hamilton, still the great lady, undresses coyly, disarming ... proceeds with her seduction."
"Good." My eyes roved over Jill, picturing the action. "Sweet," said Jill.
"Curiously, tenderly, deftly, she unbuttons, unhooks, unstraps Lord Nelson."
"I?" Jill looked at me coldly. "I'm the one to do this?"
"Not quite. Not quite. This is the twist. When Lord Nelson's clothes come off, we make a remarkable discovery. Remarkable."
"Tell me." For the first time Jill seemed interested. "We discover that Lord Nelson is actually a girl. 'Lord Nelson' is you!"
CHAPTER NINE
"Achmed," I said, "wants to make you the Florence Nightingale of Saudi Arabia."
"Who she?"
"Florence Nightingale was the Mary Pickford of the hospital business. She made antisepsis chic."
Jill understood. She nodded her knowing head. "Like a Chanel perfume."
Our cab let us off in the Piazza Navona, opposite Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers. Nearby, on a small street moving in the direction of the Pantheon, was the palazzo now occupied by the Saudi cultural mission. A single lamb's-wool cloud floated above us, the lone interruption to the sky's uniform spread of blue.
A turbaned guard opened the door of the palazzo, muttering platitudes in Arabic.
A male receptionist, presumably Italian, led us up a winding staircase.
On the landing, at the door leading to a conference room, stood Achmed.
"Please come in," he said, bowing, also kissing Jill's hand.
I introduced her.
"My, oh my," Achmed said, his little eyes popping.
"Hi," said Jill.
Camavaron rose from his chair at the conference table, said what was expected of him.
Achmed, whose place was at the head of the table, held the chair at his right for Jill. "Please."
He motioned to me to take the chair opposite Camavaron. Camavaron looked at me, winked.
"Mrs. Philbrick," he said to Achmed, "is the former wife of the American ambassador ... former ambassador ... to Upper Volta."
"Charming." Achmed displayed several pairs of gold teeth. "We shall make her very rich."
Jill parted her lips to reproduce the look of poised expectancy once stereotyped by Marilyn Monroe. "Filthy lucre. How lovely!"
"We are a very proud people."
"Of course."
"We want nothing but the best. We will be satisfied with nothing but the best."
"Why, naturally!"
"And we can afford it." He stroked, complacently, his Islamic-standard toothbrush mustache. "You've heard of Mecca?"
"Who hasn't? There's no coffee like it."
"You like palaces?"
"Love 'em." Jill was diplomatic, sympathetic, interested. "You can have dozens of palaces ... with gold plates, jewels, diamond-studded daggers, eunuchs."
"Eunuchs must be great fun. Give you all of the titillation and none of the bother." She looked reproachfully at me, as if to accuse me of putting her to much newfangled bother.
"Have as many as you want. Or say the word ... and we can always make more." He moved his right hand in a sweeping, cynical, Near Eastern way.
"Oops!" said Jill ambiguously.
"And Rolls-Royces. You like Rolls-Royces?"
"I adore Rollses. There's nothing like a Rolls." Jill clapped her hands.
"You shall have dozens ... even fleets. Camels, too, if you like. But, to be frank with you, camels are more trouble than they're worth. Dirty, too."
"A few Rollses are enough." She looked to me for confirmation. "I am, after all, just a country girl with simple tastes."
"She comes from Dixie," Camavaron explained. "Way down dere in de land ob cotton."
Achmed seemed pleased with Jill. He smiled at her. "If necessary, we will put a billion U.S. dollars in this production. Even more."
"Mr. Benton," Camavaron said, with more charity than truth, "has completed two outstanding screenplays. One glorifies the glorious past of the glorious Arabian people ... and features the beautiful Mrs. Philbrick with her face always veiled. The other-"
"I understand." Achmed rewarded me with the full radiance of his gold-capped teeth. "The other is for the other princes and myself. A-how do you say it?-tit-bit."
"A beautiful, historical extravaganza."
"Perfect. We are, after all, a very proud people. And we go all the way back to the Queen of Sheba."
"Never fear," said Camavaron. Had we not won a Cannes prize with our double-naked Oedipus Rex'? And were not the ancient Greeks also a proud people?
Achmed turned to me. "Even though we are a proud and ancient people, we have much to learn from the West. I would be the first to admit it."
I assumed that he would like for me, as a corporation official, a man of connections, to supply him with the secrets of the hydrogen bomb. A nerve gas, perhaps.
I was wrong.
"Like how to have your cake and ... how you say it? Regurgitate too." He rolled his eyes eloquently toward Jill. "Like how to be married and still not be married." Jill, for no apparent reason, adjusted her right garter. Perhaps she had fleets of Rolls-Royces in mind. Or a Levittown of palaces.
"In my country you have your wives always with you. And they all complain ... believe me. In your country, the ladies you love still live with their husbands, complain to their husbands. And with their lovers they are what all women were meant to be." He made an hourglass outline with his hands, and his eyes glistened.
"Tough," Jill said.
"Family life is not all it is cracked up to be. I, for example, was only one of forty children." He appealed to Jill for understanding. "My father had forty children. Twenty-three girls, sixteen boys ... and one neither here nor there. I must compete, you understand, with my sixteen brothers."
"Tough." Jill understood much.
Achmed reached for a carafe, poured us each a glass of milky fluid. "Arrack," he said, holding his glass high and seemingly seeing through it, even if darkly. "Like absinthe ... makes the heart grow fonder."
"Cheers," Jill said.
We all made appropriate toast gestures.
"The West thinks Islam is a backward world. Not so, my friends. Not so. We are advanced in our ways ... even though our ways are often hidden. I give you the words of Muhammad Isqbal, my favorite poet: ' 'Thou'-he is speaking of Allah-'Thou didst create clay, but I made the cup.' "
"Cheers," said Jill.
Achmed jerked his glass in a second salute. "Here's mud in your pie."
"You speak English so well!" Jill widened her eyes.
"Thank you. Please have a ruby." He reached in his jacket pocket, handed her a red stone about the size of a swallow's egg.
"Why, thank you, sir." Jill rose, made a neat curtsy.
"I like your ideas. When the women of Saudi Arabia see you on the screen ... see you on the new Achmed Abdullah Mohammed Majed Bin Aziz Al Saoud's network ... even late at night when everyone under eighteen is asleep...."
"You think they'll like me?"
"They will adore you ... as, of course, I do. They will like you for your ideals, your purity ... the way you, like Bo Derek, on a scale of one to ten...."
"Rates eleven." Camavaron had a way of reading men's thoughts.
"I'm transmogrified! Really transmogrified!" She put the ruby to her lips, kissed it, then dropped it into her blouse-inserting it in the slot formed by the opened top button.
I visualized at once the closing scene for the Islamic version of my screenplay. The setting would be the great palace of the victorious Arabian admiral-a nineteenth-century counterpart of Prince Achmed. Each of his brothers would be present. And each would be paired with one of the great ladies of my fantasy catalog. I would, for good box office, for good multinational conglomerate business, pair a simulated HRH Prince Abdullah Al Faysal Al Saoud with Jehanne, Lady of Baulx; HRH Prince Mechal Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud with Huguette of Forcarquier, Lady of Trects; HRH Prince Bandar Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud with Briande d'Agouit, Countess de la Lune; HRH Prince Muhammad Al Faysal Al Saoud with Mabille de Villeneuve, Lady of Vence; HRH Prince Majed Bin Abdel Aziz Al Saoud with Ysoarde de Roquefueilh, Lady of Ansoys; HRH Prince Saoud Al Abdullah Al Faysal Al Saoud with Blanche of Flassans, sumamed Blankaflour; HRH Prince Sultan Bin Muhammad Bin Saoud Al Saoud with Magdalene of Sallon, Lady of said place. And so on.
All of the ladies, however, would have elaborate coiffures, would sparkle with jewels of consummate price-necklaces, earrings, bracelets, anklets. Otherwise they would wear nothing at all.
Thus would my Arabia, arising phoenix-like from The Thousand and One Nights, celebrate a great naval victory.
"Enjoy your arrack," our host said, according Camavaron a genial slap on the back. "For drinking that little glass ... back in my home ... you could get a hundred lashes."
Jill wanted to know what that came to, in American money.
"Perhaps I should have undressed a little for Achmed," Jill said to me when we were back in my hotel room. "Would you?"
Nonchalantly she took off her blouse and bra, dropped her skirt. "This is business, isn't it?"
"You liked him?"
"I wonder if he has a big thing."
"Big penises excite you?"
With a twist of her head she flicked her hair behind her shoulders. "Not particularly. I've had men with giant things ... and never knew what to do with them. Pee Wee, for instance."
"You liked mine?" I wanted to keep her mind on erotic topics, draw her out.
She smiled slyly. "I've never been whipped before." She turned her bottom toward me, bent over slightly. "Look."
I gazed admiringly at the lovely upturned derriere, the derriere that one day would be Emma Hamilton's.
I had left my marks. The streaks, earlier red, were now turning black and blue.
"I should never have let you do it. You know that."
"You were very brave. And handsome."
"You hurt me."
"Sorry."
"Then you screwed me in the littlest opening. Nobody had ever done that to me before."
"No?"
"That hurt, too. And when we went to that restaurant afterward, I could hardly sit down."
In lovemaking, I suggested, we sometimes trade one thing for another.
She laughed. "I came a lot, didn't I?"
All of this put me in mind of Amy-the hint of pleasure in pain, the need, afterward, to confess it.
It also reminded me that I missed Amy.
"I guess I sort of liked it," she said.
* * *
Jill excused herself from coming to my room the following night. "It's that time of the month," she said.
Nor, oddly, was I much bothered.
Something in our relationship was not right-which is to say I was making love to her largely in the line of duty. I had a part to play. It came with my windfall. And as Agent 69 and a faceless corporation executive, I was called on to play it well. If failing memory serves, it was old Epictetus who first mouthed the notion that in life it is not given us to choose our parts.
My part was not to my liking. Not that success was not coming my way. It was. Not that Jill, once properly entrapped, was not agreeable. She was. What bothered me was ... What?
Jill was scarcely interesting. I could write her lines for her, carry on both sides of our short-lived conversations. Not that she was not, once aroused, most accommodating. She was. Yet for reasons unacceptable to any male chauvinist, her heart was not in her work, nor mine in mine.
It was with quintessential satisfaction, therefore, that when I answered my phone in the dead of night, I heard Amy's voice.
"Darling, what are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"No girl?"
"No girl."
"Not even you-know-what?" It was a fancy of hers-and I could see now the smile flickering on her lips-that whenever I was in bed alone, I would think of her and do you-know-what.
"Darling," she went on, "I need you."
"Ditto," I said, "and double ditto." On emerging from a deep sleep, our wit is sometimes sodden.
"Badly, sadly."
I nodded, meaning I understood-in fact, felt the same way. Unfortunately telephones are not yet equipped to pass on the fine points of gesture.
"I mean it! I feel awful. Cloris has been away. And I'm slipping ... slipping. You know what I mean."
I knew quite well. And I was wasting myself with Jill.
I looked out of the open window, saw the dome of St. Peter's. And I remembered how dramatic it had seemed when I saw it from behind Amy, sighting across her bare shoulders; how once, when she was sprawled across the bed, I framed it in the furrow of her bottom-as a hunter might sight a sitting duck in the V of his gun sight.
"I saw Isabelle this afternoon." Once again the confession. She wanted me to know.
I knew.
"Now I want you to fuck me." She hesitated. "What am I saying? How I hate that word!"
Nor could I tell her that on her lips that terrible word had the charm of a tinkling bell.
"If you were half a man ... and as rich and important as you're now made out to be ... you'd be back in Charleston before noon tomorrow ... Eastern daylight-saving time."
I called a secret company number, told the transport man then on duty to have a plane fueled up and ready for me on the double (subito).
I scribbled (with guilt, of course) a note to be left with the concierge for Jill:
My love, Urgent secret business made it necessary for me to leave Rome at
once. Keep in touch with Camavaron.
We will start shooting soon. Back in two shakes.
Bill
Then I called Camavaron.
"Sorry to wake you at this ungodly hour."
"Read you. You want to make Monna Vanna with Jill. Whoopee is not enough."
"I'm flying back to Charleston." Nor could I resist the additive: ' 'Subito!' '
"Forget your grits?"
"It's personal. Very personal."
"Good," he said. "That means you will write, as usual, in the first person."
"Take care of Jill. See that she's entertained." Again, my old sense of guilt.
Camavaron laughed. "No sweat."
I locked my door, walked with my luggage to the lift. A clock above the lift door read ten minutes to three. That meant it was ten minutes to ten in the evening, Charleston time. Or was it ten minutes to nine? Probably eight.
The concierge was still awake, although unshaven and soggy-eyed. I gave him the note for Jill.
"Signore Benton, I have a message for you." He handed me a sealed envelope.
I opened it.
There, written in a childish backhand script, with little degree marks instead of dots over the I's, were these words:
Mr. Benton, dear:
Urgent, secret business with Mr. Achmed makes it necessary for me to take a
quick cruise on his yacht. Back in two shakes.
Your ever-grateful, Jill
P.S. XXX
It was midnight, not noon, when my plane touched down in Charleston. The company plane had developed an aircraft's equivalent of Montezuma's revenge, and we stopped in Newfoundland for therapy.
The Charleston night was balmy, the air heady with sea salt, pine scent, and pollution.
I took a cab to the house on East Battery, and noted, as I paid my fare, that a round, beaming moon was rising behind Fort Sumter.
Upstairs in the drawing room, a cigarette in her left hand, highball in the right, was Cloris sprawled on the Duncan Phyfe sofa-a bare leg draped over the back. "Welcome back to Sodom by the Sea."
I kissed her, inhaled, as usual, the fragrance of Givenchy-so different from Jill's Charley.
"Amy's at Berkeley Hall. Expected you in the afternoon." I went to the bar, mixed myself a Scotch and soda. "What's going on?"
"Was Jill good? Would I like her?"
Nothing, I told her, could hold a candle to the Beast with Three Backs, and she informed me that candles are passe.
"About Amy?"
"About Amy-about what you might have expected. I was away awhile. Besides ... she couldn't put up with your screwing Jill. She is, let's face it, terribly old-fashioned-in a free-floating way."
I sipped my drink, then sat on the sofa next to her, my free hand on her left thigh-the thigh still recumbent. "She had you. And...."
Cloris smiled. "I like your hand on my thigh."
"I have always enjoyed your thighs."
"Among others."
"Mostly your doing."
"We share, don't we?"
We did, I acknowledged. Cloris is the only woman I have known who could love fully without jealousy.
"When you make love to other women, I don't lose any of you. And sometimes I enjoy them as well. When I first met you, remember? I made love to that lovely little actress you had."
I remembered.
"Beautiful women are an art form all their own. They can be a special kind of music ... even to other women."
"And men?"
"Men, too. Although except in your case ... and, in a way, Cholly-Boy's ... Cholly-Boy is terribly civilized ... I usually prefer women."
"Especially Amy."
"But of course. Amy is a very special woman's very special woman. Remember, after I read John's book, I sent you here to meet her ... meet her and make love to her."
Again, I remembered. "But now ... about Amy."
"Amy's jealous. Amy's depressed. The two go together."
"But she had you."
"In Amy's mind, I am you ... at least part of you. And she thinks I engineered the affair with Jill. That's a high-powered turn-off."
"So?"
"She went back to Isabelle. Isabelle knows exactly what to do ... what to make her do. And this sort of thing is like whiskey-at least what whiskey is to you and me."
"Rough."
"I think you had better fuck me tonight."
"You want me?"
"I always want you. That I screw Amy, and you screw Amy, has nothing to do with the way I feel about you."
"I love you," I said in the spirit of full friendship. Do what either of us might do, give or take the rise and fall of libido, we understood each other.
"In Amy's mind," Cloris went on, ignoring my oratorical token of affection, "I am part of you. And it is I, in imagination at least, who am also screwing Jill."
I took a deep swallow of my drink, Cloris of hers; then we touched glasses to toast mutual affection and general confusion.
Cloris then got down to business. "Things went well with Jill?" I raised my glass in affirmation.
Once again her glass kissed mine.
"I knew they would. You're good at that sort of thing."
"What sort of thing?"
"You always have a hard-on for a new girl."
"I don't like this agenting business. It's not my thing."
"You did well, sonny boy. Exceedingly well. Made us all a lot of money."
"Business is still not my business."
"You're a fine one to complain. You screw Amy, me, Jill. You make yourself a million dollars. You're a corporation executive. All your books are published. Your screenplays are produced. Still ... you're not satisfied. What else can you want?"
"I'm worried about Amy." It was Amy, after all, who had brought me back from Rome, Cloris who promoted the trip.
"Was Jill good?" (The repeated question; the quest for details.)
I did not want to explain to Cloris that Jill was good, exceedingly good-but in a mechanical way. There was not the sadness, tension, mystery, ultimately abandon, that there was with Amy. Not the warmth, wit, malicious experimenting of Cloris. Nor did I care to confess that my needs were finely drawn. "Good indeed! Exceedingly good."
"Did she excite you ... the way Amy does? I do?"
"It's not the same." I said a few words outlining the perfectly obvious-details, subtle psychologist as she was, Cloris knew better than I. The seduction of the Lady Vere de Veres yields high pleasure-because of the high fall. The seduction of a girl from a girl-glamour magazine's centerfold is scarcely high-fall; it is no more than a strategic maneuver involving a tippling body conditioned to toppling.
"You know what?" She looked reflectively at the ice cubes in her glass.
"What?"
"You're going to have to seduce Amy again."
We discussed Amy, agreed that she was possessive. What passed once between her exquisite legs was hers ever more to dandle, engage or reject. More, she was demanding, even in her soft, undemanding way.
"I would say," said Cloris, "that a fascinating book could be written about Amy ... were it not for the fact that you have written it several times over."
"We are back to an old story. Everything changes, changes as we see it, sense it. How often have we talked about that?"
"Too often."
"And so it is with my accounts of Amy. As I write about her, she becomes another Amy-a host of Amys."
"You have had John-a very virile quid pro quo" I had been able to say to Amy after my furtive fling with Anna Ricci. And she had been able to say to me, discounting her quid pro quo, "Nephews don't count, do they? Or husbands." This, mind you, in spite of her professed horror of incest.
This time there was no John to counterbalance my defection.
There was ... what? Or rather, who? Isabelle?
There was also-and I find it distasteful to nourish the thought-Amy's own patented masochism. She used her own pretended weakness to reseduce Isabelle. I could see her naked, at Berkeley Hall, her white body upended on a sofa much like the sofa on which Cloris now was sprawled. I envisioned a young butler, dapper in his white jacket, entering the room with a tray of drinks. He would approach Amy. Amy, as always, would attempt to cover her breasts as best she could-no easy task at best. Meanwhile, with a rare and engaging poise, she would reach for a highball, coolly and politely say, "Thanks."
"You have never seen Amy whipped, have you?"
"Once," I said. "Only once. At the Contessa Borromini's villa, at Civitavecchia."
"At the Contessa Borromini's ... Of course. I had forgotten." Cloris' telltale tongue darted out between her lips.
"On the altar in the chapel."
"Of course. How silly of me not to remember. I stripped her. And I did it."
Much more came back to me. Amy had let Cloris undress her-in front of the altar. Had submissively bent over, as Cloris pressed against her back; had submissively dropped to her knees and allowed Cloris, her right hand now on Amy's bare stomach, to raise the passive white bottom to what I like to think of as the receiving position. And it was then that the contessa, an attentive hostess, gave oral hospitality to my risen manhood. "Amy hards you molto, molto," she said bilingually, and somewhat indistinctly.
It seemed strange to me that Cloris had forgotten such a traumatic moment. Amy had arrived in Italy only a few hours before, had met Cloris for the first time, had driven with Cloris and me to the contessa's villa at Civitavecchia-a town where Stendhal (whose Duchessa Sansaverini was not a great deal unlike Amy) had once been consul. Nor had I known ever an erotic drive, a curiosity and passion as strong, as those which collectively engrossed Amy, Cloris, me, in the dark of that night. ("No more," Amy had said to Cloris, in the pale light of a too hasty dawn, and said this flailing her thighs against the moist bedsheets. "No more ... really no more." All this, mind you, from the lips of an anointed Charleston lady.)
"You will have to, you know."
"Have to what?"
"Seduce Amy again. Perhaps even...." She stopped short.
I could read her mind. I knew Cloris by now quite well. I knew how she fantasized, how she turned her fantasies into screen productions, how her love life and screen life overlapped. She would ask me to whip Amy. She would persuade Amy that the yielding of her classic buttocks, her cold dignity, would be as pleasurable as it was painful, and much to be preferred to the doldrums of ordinary life. Amy, after many protests, would submit. I, against my conscious wishes, my unwillingness to give Amy pain, would-when the moment came-take whip in hand. And at that moment, Cloris would have managed to have the room properly lighted, to have a camera ready to record the action. And all this, by chance, indirection, and directorial imagination, would turn out to be the opening or establishing shot of our next production.
"You think Amy should play Lady Hamilton?" I hoped to have Cloris say what I wanted her to say.
"But of course."
"And Jill? What about Jill?"
"You had a job to do with Jill. And you did it. Did it, I must say, with the professionalism I expected of you."
"Thanks."
"Think of Jill as our corporation beauty. Miss Choi mondeiey Enterprises. One, two, three: you made her rich, an international playgirl ... and have given her a Mediterranean vacation. And we'll use her in the scenes we shoot for the sheikhs of Araby. But for the real thing...." Cloris finished her drink. I finished mine, then refilled both glasses.
"Remember when we first met," Cloris said as she reached for the drink I handed her. "In New York. I picked you up at that little bar on Christopher Street...."
"Waverly Place."
"You invited me to your place on Charles Street. It was a cold night. You had a fire blazing."
"And the first thing you said was, 'Let's have an understanding. I don't go to bed with men. There are exceptions ... but that doesn't concern you.' "
Her ready tongue again flicked about her lips. "I liked you, even then. On the other hand, there was no reason to hurry. I knew when I was ready, I could always get it up."
"Outside, it was snowing. It would have been lunatic of you to go home."
"I had no intention of going home."
"And then, you said, very generously-"
"'If it would give you any pleasure, I will undress for you.' I figured that would turn you on."
"Even then, you were a great director."
"And I undressed for you, did I not?"
I assured her that she had been magnificent, provocative, marmoreal. "Amy," she said, "is marmoreal. I was svelte." Somewhere, far out in the harbor, there were two blasts from a freighter. After this I heard the descending Doppler wail of a passing seagull.
"I've been a good lover to you, have I not? Always helpful, never jealous."
"Indeed."
"It was I who sent you to meet Amy."
She, and she alone, had sent me to meet Amy.
"And there were all the lovely girls I got for you. There was Caterina, remember? On the road to Perugia? And Jennifer ... Jennifer Digby ... in London? She served us lunch at the Tate."
I remembered well these favors, tactfully did not men tion that all such giving had been, in a sense? Indian giving. These passing young flowers in time gave as much pleasure to Cloris as to me, and were featured in our motion pictures-as well as my books.
"And how about Jill?"
Jill, I told her, did not work out as well as most of the other girls. She was not altogether right, it seemed to me, for the part of Emma Hamilton. Jill was not, I thought, immensely interesting. Moreover, there was now the problem with Amy....
"You know what?"
"What?"
She put down her glass, snuffed the cigarette that she had been smoking, leaned back on the sofa, her hands clasped behind her head. "We have talked Amy ... Amy ... Amy...."
"We have."
"But I, too, have missed you. And I feel amazingly unpricked."
I leaned over, kissed her, unbuttoned her blouse, unfastened the clasp of her tight-fitting slacks, pulled down the zipper resplendent; then, there were the golden athletic thighs I had almost forgotten, the long muscles that run down the underside of the thighs, the smiling blond bosk.
The slacks soon flew across the room, followed by the wing-flapping blouse. In my turmoil about Amy, the contradance with Jill, I had forgotten how delicious Cloris could be, how intelligent, resourceful, and sweet.
We clasped, rolled, twisted. My tongue sought out the secret place, hers the hard rising. Absorbed thus, we rolled off the couch.
"Ouch," said Cloris, more in declamation than complaint.
I was soon in standard missionary position, alert to inner throbbings; and Cloris, in imitation of Amy, gracefully doubled back her legs.
"Ah," she said ultimately, her panting concealed as is the panting of ballerinas, "you are good for me, aren't you? I don't know why I waste you on so many girls." Her moisture and mine, now commingled, oozed to the Bokhara rug beneath us.
I kissed her again, as I extracted myself from the hidden place where so much pleasure was to be had, and which was now so moist and relaxed. I looked down on her cool nakedness, at the little pink nipples, so different from Amy's stalwart old-rose styli, so often (to her) so embarrassingly exuberant.
"I don't know why I go to bed with women," she went on, "when I am so much more excited by men." She smiled, flaring the nostrils of her slight nose. "Especially you, after you have been away from me ... screwing other women."
I became aware, suddenly, that I still had most of my clothes on, that it was almost indecent of me to exploit, on the floor, the spell of her nakedness.
"Let's bathe together," she said.
I went to the bathroom, turned on the water in the large tub, got out of my clothes.
Cloris followed me. She looked at her face in the mirror over the washbasin, then turned to face me, her breasts swaying. "I look well-pricked now, don't I?"
"Comfortable," I said.
"Properly pricked."
I put my hands on the two cheeks of her bottom, each cheek as solid as a pomegranate, pulled her close to me, kissed her hair, her neck, her shoulders. "Let's start shooting soon," she said.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Berkeley Hall. Our studio in East Bay. Even in this house."
I should pause here to say a word about the bathroom, the bedroom-bathroom, in the spacious Classical Renaissance house. It was directly above the card room on the floor below, and had about the same dimensions-which is to say that it could accommodate, at one time and without seeming crowded, all the members of the Yale Whiffen-poofs-a group which, the year before, had actually entertained in the drawing room of this house.
The door to this bathroom, which adjoined the bedroom, consisted of two hinged sections whose upper contours together formed an arch, and because the bedroom itself screened the bathroom from the rest of the house, the door was seldom, if ever, closed.
"I'm ready," I said.
"Good."
The tub by then was full.
I turned off the water.
Cloris stepped in, leaned back, spread her legs, and said, "Ah!"
I followed, sat down facing her, my legs sandwiching her legs, the water spout jabbing my back. Then I also said, "Ah!"
"We are good together," Cloris said. "It's been so long since we were completely alone together. I'd quite forgotten."
Her eyes glistened, her shoulders glistened; there was a contrapuntal glistening on the sides of her breasts.
We talked a lot. We resurrected fine points about our meeting in New York, our unexpected reunion in Amalfi (when, sighting me in the lobby of the Hotel Luna Convento, she had nonchalantly told the reception clerk to send her luggage to my room. "My husband has been expecting me"). We discussed her past affairs and mine, recounted the girls we had shared. ("My screwing your girls," she informed me, "was just another way of making love to you. Even so with Jill. Tell me everything you did with her ... tell me every detail ... then show me.")
Cloris, as I have tried to say in various ways, is unbelievably civilized. She is also compulsively reminiscential.
"You remember Amalfi?" Her tongue, her telltale tongue, slithering with amorous grace over glistening lips, told me that she indeed remembered Amalfi. "And what you wrote?"
I remembered well what I wrote-more particularly the problems that underwrote my writing, problems not a great deal different from the problems now before me. Yet then I scarcely knew Cloris, asked no questions, was asked none. I said then, as I recall, that, as the wind quickened and the sunset spread itself prophetically across a weary horizon, I had to fight the urge to obscure details, the urge to sink into a sea of thoughtless sensation. (What one philosopher, much given to Latinate definitions, called "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum".) Yet to be a writer is to differentiate, to separate detail from miasma, to ask of the passing moments the tedious questions: What? How? In what way? And why?
And I remember saying to myself that those who by intent or chance might read my odd accounts would ask the same questions. They would have no care for mystic transports, essences and quintessences for which there are no points of reference. They would want reproduced the variegated veinings of Cloris' thighs. They would want to hear, as I heard, the trilled bird calls. They would want to know, as I then wanted to know, why Cloris was in Amalfi, in my room, in the Hotel Luna Convento-and why she behaved with me, with so little introduction, like a seasoned lover.
Eventually our talk turned to Amy. Cloris always liked to excite herself, excite me, by talking about Amy-drawing word pictures of Amy's breasts, thighs, vagaries in loving.
"Odd," she said, "the way being whipped turns her on."
"Sometimes she needs it."
"All of us need something strange sometimes. Lady Godiva needed a horse."
"And you?"
Cloris smiled, ran her tongue around her lips. "I like Amy to make love to me while you watch. Thrills the hell out of me."
"My watching?"
"Your watching embarrasses her."
"Why?"
"A great lady does not let herself be seen lying naked ... her head between another lady's thighs."
"But she does it. The great lady does it."
"Of course she does it."
"And wants to be seen doing it."
"Of course," said Cloris. "The great lady ... it's like the whipping. Every great lady needs a moral holiday." My fingers probed her sensitive place. "And you are Lady Cholmondeley ... a peeress."
"I would have liked to get my hands on the naked Lady Godiva the moment she slid down from her horse."
She punctuated her speech with a playful bell-pull jerk on my now limp part, reminding me that the devil is always ready to take over an idle mind.
It rose.
"Old Faithful," Cloris said, underestimating her own charms. She bent forward, took it in her mouth.
My hands cupped her neat breasts, my thumbs pressed on hardening nipples.
Just then I heard a rasping "Ahem."
I looked up.
Standing in the doorway was Amy, her finger wagging a polite no-no. And holding her arm was Cholly-Boy.
"I say," he said with reasonable aplomb.
Cloris withdrew her mouth, took my now hardened part between her thumb and forefinger. "Behold," she said. "Never a dull moment."
"Don't get up," Amy said. "I'll mix the drinks."
"Vodka for me," said Cholly-Boy. "On the rocks." He then turned to Cloris and me, screwed a monocle (with a long black ribbon) to his left eye. "Jolly nice place you have here, what?"
"Spanking," said Amy.
Cloris was more forthright. "Takes a heap of fucking to make a house a home."
"Sugar Child," Cholly-Boy said to Cloris, peering through his monocle and affecting an Oxonian imitation of a Southern accent, "you is gettin' skinny. Yo' ain't eatin' enough chitterlings."
Cloris surveyed her drum-tight abdomen, her athletic thighs. "Semen," she said, "is noncaloric."
Cholly-Boy had other matters on his mind. "Have a man here named Vulpe. In Charleston, I mean. Peculiar sort of chap. Into everything."
"Yes," I said, discreetly swishing a cluster of soap bubbles over my middle. "Saw him not long back ... on the tube."
"Past week or so, I've been in Bermuda."
"Lovely place," Cloris said disinterestedly, and once again fingering my dejected part. I bit my lip (useless gesture), thought quickly of mathematical formulas, thus, by diversion, to offset erection. (As every man knows, when the time for erection arises, it had better, by Jove, be there. On the other hand, there is a time for detumescence-a time no whit less demanding.)
At this instance, detumescence triumphed-a blow, I think, to Cloris' ego.
"He was preaching," I said.
"Preaching? You don't remember, by any chance, what he preached about?"
Cloris stood up in the tub, her wet hair spread over her shoulders, water streaming down her flanks. "Be a doll," she said to Cholly-Boy. "Hand me the towel." Cholly-Boy reached to the towel rack. Without looking at her, he handed her a large blue towel.
Amy gave Cloris a comradely slap on the bottom, then left the room. "See you at the bar."
"Let there be no moaning at the bar," Cloris sang, "when I pass out at sea." She dabbed at her bosom.
"What did he say?" Cholly-Boy now showed an avid interest in religion.
I understood him. I was, after all, an involved business associate. And Cloris bound me to him with a kind of osmotic knot.
"Saw him last in Rome," I said, then asked myself if it was Rome where I saw him. With ubiquitous men it is hard to remember time and place. Now you see them, now you don't.
"But last night, man, last night. What did he say?"
"He was much on the side of charity." And I quoted to myself, "alas for the rarity of Christian charity."
"Must have said more than that, man" Cholly-Boy was serious. "What else did he say?"
I owed Cholly-Boy a debt for the continuing loan of Cloris. Also for the million dollars which were so effortlessly transferred to my account. I strained my memory. "He said, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.' Much emphasis on 'stone.' "
Cloris powdered her breasts, yawned.
I went on to say that I thought the Gospel point was poorly taken. The moral question, as I saw it, was not who was without sin, but why should the poor girl be stoned at all. Because she was taken in adultery? How else should she be taken? And without adultery we would have very little fine art. I spoke eloquently of Paolo and Francesca, Pelleas and Melisande, Tristan and Isolde, even Siegfried and his buxom aunt, Brunnhild-not to mention Siegfried's mother and father-siblings both.
Cholly-Boy was not listening. "Ah," he said. 'Stone.' Stone? The Stono River! Near here, isn't it?"
"A stone's throw," I said, convinced that among the insensitive, one bad pun is no worse than another.
"Anything else?"
"He also said something about turning the other cheek." The view of Cloris, who then had bent over to dry her shins, brought back to mind this lissome figure of speech.
"Cheek? Creek? Other cheek? Other creek?" Cholly-Boy furrowed his brow, pulled at his left ear. Then suddenly he turned ecstatic. "Ah, I get it! Otter Creek. That's the place."
Cloris, nonchalantly powdering her intimate triangle, said, "You go to your church, and I'll go to mine."
CHAPTER TEN
I slept alone that night, a practice conducive to good rest but contrary to my better nature. I slept in the guest room on the fourth floor. Cloris slept (in the mistress bedroom) with Cholly-Boy-for appearance' sake, she said, to which I asked, "Who is watching?"
Amy also slept alone, or presumably alone, and presumably to sustain decorum while Cholly-Boy was a houseguest. The charming twist to both Charlestonians and the English is that they insist, come hell or high water, that appearances be maintained. Externals make the gentleman; heart and soul are food for peasants. Moreover, once appearances are maintained, nothing is forbidden.
I slept soundly, a side effect of virtue, fatigue, an excess of alcohol, and a debilitating loss of semen.
The sun was high, although swaddled in fog, when I came downstairs. The house was silent. I went to the ground floor, opened the front door, picked up the morning paper. On the front page was a banner headline:
BILLION-DOLLAR COCAINE HAUL ON STONO RIVER
Police Suspect Smugglers Had Some Part in Strange Kidnapping of Ex-ambassador's Wife
I read on. Strange it was, the article said, that Jill Philbrick, who was recently kidnapped (by four men wearing stocking masks), has not been heard from since. Behind both the cocaine haul and Mrs. Philbrick's disappearance, it was believed, was the fact that John C. Calhoun Philbrick, our former ambassador to Upper Volta, and a vocal voice in the current crusade against immorality, was active in the legal war against dope, and was considered by many a bright hope for the presidency.
The raid was sparked, so the article said, presumably by a tipoff from Ex-Ambassador Philbrick's office.
Nine men were arrested on a shrimp boat, which carried a cargo of four tons of cocaine. The value of the cargo, at current market prices, was approximated at $950,000,000. The seizure was made on Otter Creek, a tidal inlet of the Stono River. John Badby, one of the Lollarrd Martyrs, was a tailor in the West Midlands, and was condemned by the Worcester Diocesan Court for his denial of transubstantiation.
I looked out one of the French windows. I could scarcely see the high wall of East Battery. A mournful foghom sounded somewhere off the river edge of White-point Gardens, somewhere beyond the statue of Sergeant Jasper, that Revolutionary soldier who once said, so pompously and unrealistically, "We cannot fight without a flag!"
I looked at my watch. It was nine o'clock.
I called Amy's name.
There was a faint answer. "Here."
I followed the voice. Amy was in the room to which she had gone so late the night before. She was half-asleep, her face in the pillows, in the canopied four-poster.
"You slept all alone," she announced, her sleep-heavy voice muffled by the pillows.
"Alone."
"Good. You had it coming."
"This is the first time we have slept in the same house in separate rooms."
Without turning her head, she said, "You couldn't have done anything, anyway."
"Probably."
"You couldn't have gotten it up."
Then I made the mistake of speaking sentimentally, an act totally out of character. "I like sleeping with you even when I can't get it up It's you "Fuck!" she said.
"Sorry."
"Cloris fucked Cholly-Boy. Right under our very eyes. Would you believe it?"
"No." I would not have believed it. Cholly-Boy had gone to an English public school, then Oxford. (Although Melissa had told me that his tastes were quite catholic-"Women for reproduction, little boys for pleasure.") "Now I'm doubly jealous."
"Pity."
"I've gotten terribly sexual. Would you believe it?"
I would. I did. "And possessive."
"I didn't like your playing around with Jill."
"Nor I." And in this there was a grain of truth-not a large grain, I concede, but one large enough to give me doubts and twinges of a confusing conscience. (This, I argue, is the human dilemma: faithfulness, in the middle-class meaning of the word, yields to the Law of Diminishing Returns, eventually the War Between the Sexes. The missionary position gives way to the adversary position. Faithlessness, on the other hand, leads to guilt, which is to say, an expectation of punishment.)
"Was she good for you? Really good?"
"No. Not good for me. Not really good."
"Did she come the way I come?"
"No." Cloris would relish a detailed comparison. Not Amy. Amy still clung to the notion that what is not discussed possibly did not occur. To be is to be observed, described, discussed.
"I was so jealous!"
I understood. I was sonry. I mentioned to myself how difficult it is to be modem and old-fashioned at the same time; to be realistic, philosophical, practical; and at the same time hold untarnished the purity and simplicity of total commitment.
"I, too, was naughty."
"Naughty?"
"Eventually I tell you everything, don't I?"
"We have no secrets."
"I tell you everything. I break down, confess. Then you, you bastard, write about them ... make me totally infamous."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps? You lie."
"You are quite wonderful." I said this with full sincerity. Nowhere was there any woman as Amy, so flawless in features, figure, so altematingly reserved and abandoned, alternating her personalities. She was multiply honest, multiply loving. And all of this led up to an interesting philosophical question: If I was unfaithful to Amy #1 (the most proper, devoted Amy), was I also unfaithful to Amy #2 (the unleashed, maenadic Amy)?
"Sometimes...."
"What?"
"When I know you're making love to other women ... I know ... art and business and all that sort of thing...."
"Believe me-"
"Your heart was not in it ... I know."
"And you?"
"I did something on my own ... call it anything you want."
"Meaning?"
Again, from the depths of the mist, came the melancholy foghorn toot.
"Pull down the covers. I have no secrets from you."
Slowly I slid down the covers. Amy was wearing nothing. The creamy shoulders came into view, each slightly dimpled.
"I want you to hurt me," she said, her words taking on the perfume of her hair, which had tumbled over her arms; and the words were muffled by the pillows. "Cloris and Cholly-Boy drove to the country." (More phonetically, "Cloris and Jolly-Boy.")
The covers descended.
"I want you to."
My movements were slow. I have always liked to uncover Amy slowly, enjoy each subtlety as my senses fixed on it, much as a wine lover might savor, slowly, the flavor and aroma of a premier cru Bordeaux. Haste here indeed makes waste, dampens the hard, gem-like flame.
Eventually that special derriere came into view, the creamy hills rising with solidity and majesty. And there, flawing the posterior landscape, even crisscrossing the tattoo, were brazen, livid streaks.
"I made love to Isabelle," she said. "And I want you to know." And suddenly she began to tremble. Some loosened part of the bedspring tinkled like a shaken, coloratura bell.
"I like her," I said, thinking back to that strange afternoon in which she and I shared a kind of dejeuner sur I'herbe.
"She hurt me first. She always does."
"And you let her?"
My question was empty. Of course Amy let her. But I wanted to hear her say this in her own words, with her special tones and overtones, throatiness and pause.
"Of course I let her."
"Then what? She made love to you."
Her lip's quivered. "I made love to her. Made love to her the way Cloris makes love to me ... my head between her legs."
The tones I wanted to hear, I now heard-the musk tones, the soft hoarseness.
I turned Amy over. Her nipples were hard and upright. "And she?"
"Isabelle was terribly excited. Whipping me sort of drives her crazy. And my kissing her there was just too much."
I could picture Amy bent over in lover position, her naked buttocks uplifted.
She reached out to touch me. "You have a hard-on."
"Yes."
"Get your things off. I want you to fuck me."
I took off my dressing gown, my pajamas.
"It's beautiful," she said. "The fact that I made love to Isabelle doesn't mean I don't always want it." She emphasized the "it."
"I should have come to you last night."
"I always want to fuck you. You know that. Every way."
"I always want you."
"Look." She rolled over, pointed to her buttocks. The two cheeks were crisscrossed with whip marks.
I feasted my sexual eye. A writer can draw a lot of energy from obsessional material.
"After I've made love to a woman, I always need a man." She stopped short, clapped her hand over her mouth.
"What am I saying? I've really only made love to two men in my whole life. You and John."
"You enjoyed John."
"I loved John. After I stripped for Isabelle ... the first time ... I took John ... I wanted him."
"I remember the Italian boy ... the Olympic diver." She laughed gaily. "Pietro? Was that his name? The boy with the enormous penis. I didn't think I could ever get it in me."
"But you did."
"While you watched. Sometimes you're quite a bastard." In her oblique way, Amy was telling me that, at this moment, she needed a great deal of lovemaking.
I put my arms around her, cradled the spectacular breasts. I kissed her lips, nipples, navel. Her thighs parted. I kissed the black triangle, the inward lips. My tongue darted to the hidden stylus.
Our bodies, with respect to each other, were upside down. In no planned or expected way, my erection found its way into her mouth.
"You want me," she mumbled. "You want me very much."
Almost instantly, forces beyond my control, Amy's control, took over.
Simultaneously, what Amy announced described my response.
"More," she said. "More!"
I realized then what an exquisite woman Amy was, as subtle and enticing as she was handsome. Her erotic whims were ever unpredictable, ingenious.
"Someday," she said, "I'll let you whip me."
The telephone rang.
"Fuck," said Amy, unwinding her thighs.
I got out of bed, plodded to the drawing room, picked up the phone.
"Signore ... Vulpe here. Hope I not-a disturb you."
I assured him that I was delighted to be disturbed, that his voice was as tonic as a salt sea breeze.
"Big-a things have happen."
"Like what?"
.ip--.
"Like-a Signore Philbrick. He in jail. Ha! Ha!"
"Why the 'ha ha'?"
"He not a nice man."
"No?"
"He work-a for the wrong people. The enemy, no? So I do what? I send him the wrong signal. No? The Stono."
"'Throw the first stone'?"
"Si. Ha! Ha!"
"Come back, Bill," Amy called in a voice suggesting a woodwind in passion. "Come back."
"I'm busy," I said to Vulpe. "Very busy. Call me later. We can have lunch."
"Signore, we make much money together. You very good in beezaness."
I hung up, went back to Amy.
She had turned over, pulled the sheet to her chin. Her black hair hung in disordered waves over her shoulders, over the sheet. The blanket and quilt lay in a tumble at the foot of the bed. Her eyes seemed on fire, her cheeks sucked in to permanent dimples. "No more business."
"No more business."
"I don't like you in business. You're not cut out for business."
I agreed.
"No more."
"No more."
"Just love me."
"I will."
"Make love to me now ... the way you think I made love to Isabelle."
I made love to her the way I thought she made love to Isabelle. Her body, which had calmed itself while I was on the telephone, once again began to tremble. Her hips heaved. Her thighs caressed my face. And as my tongue sought out, then circled the hidden, hardened stylus, she abandoned herself, as ever, to communication by tremor and birdsong.
"I love your tongue," she gasped. "You're so good. So good."
I was in no position to answer.
Her nether lips, now moist, hospitable, embraced my pouting lips. The hard, hidden stylus seemed to grow harder, larger.
Amy's breath quickened. Her hips rose to make all of love's stamens and pistils more accessible and responsive.
"You are so good for me," she said, drawling and accenting the "so."
"So good."
My virility suddenly returned, pressed hard into the mattress. I accepted the swelling as a goodwill offering, bypassed all questioning.
Amy screamed, heaved, sighed.
I waited a few courteous moments. Then, no longer unequipped, I climbed up to the missionary position, the only sexual position considered legal-according to South Carolina law.
The gentle adit, already once pleased, received me with full sweetness and grace.
"Oh my!" Amy said. "Not really?"
"Really," I said, with a childish thrust and flourish of my revived part. The risen phoenix sometimes brags.
"You have missed me," she said! "You really have."
Vulpe met me for lunch the next day. I had him join me in a booth at Henry's, on Market Street. Henry's, whose seats have springs always in need of replacement, is my favorite eating place in Charleston. Its roasted oysters, each with its topping of crisp bacon, are a specialty of the house. And there a Bloody Mary is brought me as soon as I am seated, an attention I much appreciate. Moreover, I can always sit there and talk as long as I care to talk. No waiter takes an order except by invitation.
I was sipping my Bloody Mary meditatively, trying, as usual, to make sense out of the confusing events which seemed to have enveloped me, when Vulpe appeared. He was wearing his customary fedora pulled well over his eyes. Before he sat down, however, he took off his hat, hung it on a hook above us. Then I discovered a startling fact. Vulpe was altogether bald. His head looked like the blunt end of an egg. I realized that in all the time I had known Vulpe, I had never seen him without a hat.
"Signore," he said, "I know you not like very much what you have-a been doing. But I congratulate you. Mi rallegro con voi."
"For what?"
"It's-a not easy to explain."
He rambled on, telling me stories too complex to be digested in a single sitting, details meaningful only to a James Bond or Superman. The Cholmondeley-Stiarchos empire cooperated with Interpol, the Italian Caribinieri (who in turn were at war with the Red Brigades), and at times with the CIA. The Near East connection. I had provided Achmed with Jill. Achmed had provided Cholmondeley-Stiarchos with certain information about heroin, hashish, pot, en route to this country.
"Achmed know much, much. What Upper Volta do ... what Syria send to Upper Volta ... what Upper Volta send here ... and deliver ... a-thanks to Philbrick."
But more. Vulpe assured me that he was a loyal and longtime friend of the United States. He had used his Bible hour to give Philbrick misdirections. "I tell him take-a the Libya stuff up-a Stono. Land-a the stuff up Otter Creek." Result: federal operatives made one of the biggest drug hauls ever-at least on the Carolina coast. Meanwhile-and this made my stomach turn-he had landed his own shipment on a plantation, not far from Cholly-Boy's, up the Combahee. "Same night. All the feds were up the wrong creek."
I congratulated him.
"I owe so much to you, signore." He flashed at me his rows of serrated teeth. "Maybe you no like to marry my daughter? Guaranteed ... maybe hundred and one percent virgin. Cooks like a dream."
A waiter by chance came to our table. I ordered roasted oysters, recommended oysters to Vulpe.
"I take-a the same," he said. "And remember, you-a my guest."
To celebrate, he ordered a bottle of Valpolicella, received instead the house's special, Gallo's Hearty Burgundy.
"I not know why you no like this intemational-agent business," he said, holding up his Hearty Burgundy in a belated toast. "You good at it, oh so good! And you make-a lot a money. Also a lotta women."
I conceded to myself that I was something of a mess. Nothing I did seemed to satisfy me. Nor could I explain to either Vulpe or myself why it was that I wanted to under stand and interpret the people around me, hear the singing in the sails that was not of the wind. And what did I do? Mix myself in affairs I did not understand, write confusedly about what I did not know, perhaps could never know. Lacking somewhere was the proper sensitivity; there was astigmatism in the mind's eye.
In retrospect, I think it was only Amy I did not understand. Cloris was much like myself. To understand her, I had only to ask myself what, at a given moment, I was thinking. What I wanted.
"Money is so easy to make," Vulpe said. "One foot washes another."
He told me he had learned this fact with his mother's milk. "Every napolitano know-a dat."
"Napolitano? I thought you were born in Sicily."
He laughed. "I look siciliano, no? I work in Sicilia, yes? You make-a more money in Sicilia, but you get your wits in Napoli." Anna Ricci was also Neapolitan. "That's-a why she never need to study acting. Great head there! And give-a same, if you excuse-a my English."
When the Hearty Burgundy warmed his cockles, he told me much more about himself, a story I could put to good use, were I more of a novelist. His great-grandfather had been an amorous dwarf, much sought after by the ladies of the court-in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. (Note to myself: use in scenes of court life, at time of Lord Hamilton's arrival in Naples.) The "virgin" daughter, of whom he was so proud, was not really his daughter. Her father was the handsome and notorious "Don of Dons," Don Corigliano Bonaface. I had once been a guest in his home. ("We mafiosi," the don had explained to me, "are a people of peace. So few understand this in your country. Every time there is a bombing, a machine-gun killing, a body sealed in concrete, people blame the Mafia. Actually these terrible things are all done by communists. Communists or oilless Muslims. Muslims with oil are very different people. With them you can always do business.") As I recall, I had been introduced to the don only a few hours after jousting with this nonpareil "virgin," who was then dedicating herself to the struggle for women's rights.
Why did Vulpe claim this exquisite girl (Melissa II) as his daughter? Why was he so concerned about her? Why was he ever suggesting that I marry her?
These were questions for which, as yet, I had no answers. Yet in the intrigues which now surrounded me, which were writing my next book for me, I had answers to few things-and even with these, the answers made very little sense. Yet in life itself, so little made sense. Masochist that I am, I ask too much to make sense. It was not enough that a lovely, tempestuous girl made turbulent love to me, on first meeting, in a hotel whose name I have forgotten. (Hotel Jolly, Piazza Annerina.) I had to know why, when how was more than enough.
"Signore Benton, I have so much to tell you. Oo! Ee! You should write about me. Why you always write about girls? Shakespeare no write about girls."
I said a few fortifying words about Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet. Vulpe had not heard of them-not even Desdemona, who had suffered so much from idle gossip.
"International finance, international politics...." He made a motion as if to tug at his absent fedora, settled for a tug on his left eyebrow. "There, signore, there is where-a the action is. Money and action. You think I only-a work for money. Not so, signore. Not so. It's art. I, too, signore, work for art. And to discover everybody ... tutti ... is so foolish. For nutting, signore, nutting is what you think it is."
"No," I said. There was no point in disputing the obvious.
"My 'daughter' is not-a what you think she is."
I tactfully avoided a discussion of virginity. (Melissa II had screamed, as the Countess of Liechtenstein had screamed-in spite of lubrication-at Piazza Armerina. Screaming, when sweet sphincters part, is no token of virginity. It is primal. It is also part of the protocol of giving.) It was enough to discover that, in a bizarre way, he and I were of the same mind.
"I like-a you, Signore Benton. You know that."
I knew. And in a bizarre way I was beginning to like him too, particularly when he praised my books.
"As I was saying, take Lord Cholmondeley."
"Lord Cholmondeley."
"He not the international dealer-wheeler you think."
"No?"
"He actually a big-a wheel in Her Majesty's Navy. He no need-a to make money. Never. He gather always important information ... like Benedict Arnold."
Information, I said, is the industry of the future, will long outlive sperm oil and spice.
I spoke, quite forcibly I thought, of cybernetics, robotics, semantics, romantics, and the silent revolution. Wealth, I said, is no longer money, real estate. It is international know-how, feeding the right bits to the right machine, getting silicon chips off the old block.
Vulpe presented his crooked, tired smile. "Do not-a, signore, sell religion short. Or-a dope. Who-a say opium is the religion of the working classes? Heroin, anyway. How about pot? Saturday-night specials?"
He had not heard about the new math.
"Anyhoo," he went on, "in the long run, there's more money in preaching. Beats-a the dope business all get-out." I said that in life so few things are either/or.
"You know, signore, you right. Every way right. The wise man no specialize. He hedge-a his bet; keep one foot in every bed."
The waiter brought our oysters.
Vulpe tucked a napkin in his collar, plopped a plump oyster in his mouth, changed the subject. "Philbrick? He some card, no?"
"Indeed," I said, with a show of amiability. I think it protocol for a man to speak well of the husbands and ex-husbands of the women he has shared.
"Signore Pee Wee. You gave him my message, no?"
"Yes." By now I had forgotten what I had told him. But I had certainly delivered the message-while wondering why Vulpe could not have delivered it himself.
"Pee Wee is my partner for all Carolina imports. He macho-macho big shot in politics. He also know these creeks like nobody's business."
"Creeks?"
He winked. "Signore, beware-a the creeks bearing gifts." He explained that he depended on Philbrick for import instructions. "Santee, Waccamaw, Stono, Edisto, Combahee ... who know where rum runs best." But Pee Wee had not been altogether trustworthy. Pee Wee had, in fact, held back on the last payoff, had invested the money (paid to him) in his own and Senator Aslimead's political campaigns. "You know, signore, the code of the Mafia-a code of honor...."
I did not know, but I saw no reason to interrupt the conversation.
"So last night ... when was it? ... what I do? I preach sermon. I say something about him who cast the first stono...."
"I heard it. You spoke, I take it, from the heart."
"So the boat he hire go up the Stono. And who wait for him there? I tip off Coast Guard, the FBI, the pastor of Come-and-Be-Save Time-Life Inc. Church. Now Philbrick, he in deep trouble. Meanwhile, what? Meanwhile, my boat sail serenely up the Combahee. You wanta some reefers? Call-a my fran, Pastor Bideawee, Church of the Denunciation, Yemasee. Praise the Lord ... and a happy hallelujah to you!"
Our eyes for a brief moment met-and instantly parted. "I tell-a you something more, Signore Beel. To be a big shot in this-a business, you gotta hedge-a your bet. Play both side against a happy medium. Me, now ... I work-a as much for the United States government. FBI, CIA ... much other alphabet baloney. I leak tips ... tell-a where bodies are buried. That-a way nobody mind-a my business except me.
"Take-a that boat how go up Stono River. It carry ... you won't-a want to believe ... a-two ton of cocaine. That's-a four thousand pound. And you know what-a four thousand pound bring in cold cash?"
"What?" I did not follow the commodity market.
"Nine hundred and fifty million dollar, signore. Add another fifty and you a-have a billion. That, signore, ain't pasta."
"And you, Vulpe? What's all this to you?"
Vulpe pulled at his nose. "So simple, signore. Plain as your face. My boat also out there. But all kind of cops go where I tell them. Up the Stono. And my boat? Up the Combahee. Unload at a dock I borrow from-a Lord Cholmondeley. That's-a way, signore, you hedge-a your work."
We finished our lunch with hot apple pie and coffee.
Vulpe by then was jovial, convivial, even warm. "You a-want to know why I am in so many businesses, no? Why I do all-a things I do?"
"In a way...." Vulpe was a mystery to me. On the other hand, I have no great interest in mysteries. At least as such. The life cycle of an ordinary lemming is mystery enough.
"Why I run pot, preach, make deals for oil, educate a oo-la-la daughter?"
I nodded.
"I tell you, signore. I tell you as it is. Always I level with you, signore."
"Good."
"Not for money. Believe me, signore ... Can I not call you Beel?"
"Beel."
"I do it, Beel, for fun, not money. Although money, believe me, grease the wheel for fun. Some men like money, and money alone. Some alike women-and a-women alone." He winked. "And some-a leetul boys ... alike Lord Cholmondeley. Some alike power ... alike Pee Wee Philbrick ... although he alike money, too ... and girls."
"Different blokes, different strokes."
"Now let's-a look at me ... Virgine Vulpe. Vulpe, Signore Beel ... and I say this to your face ... is an artist. He do what he do just because it is there to do ... alike what's-his-name who a-climb Mount Everest. He do what he do just because it's there to do. I follow Machiavelli, signore ... Signore Beel ... Beel. Happiness is-a to dare to do what is-a there to do."
I had nowhere read this in Machiavelli, and said as much. He said it was a pity I was not more at home in Italian.
"To do only what you want to do because you want to do it is art. Pure art. Like-a the jerkoff."
I suspected that he had been talking with the guru. And, quoting the guru (Vanderhoff), I assured him that such practices would never win him a Pulitzer, much less a Nobel-no matter how wistful his fantasies, how expert his style.
"Aphooey!" He made a face. "You would a-never say such things, even a-think about things like-a that if, Beel, you knew my daughter. I mean-a really knew-a my daughter ... like-a the Bible say."
I conceded that his daughter-more properly the don's daughter-was a pearl ... a nonpareil.
"Actually ... "He lowered his voice, as if all Charleston was concerned. "Actually she's a contessa ... or almost a contessa. Her mother was ... I tell you this in all a-confidence. The Contessa Borromini is her mother."
It came to me with a start that but for a hiatus in timing and for the oddities of conception, I might have been her father.
A soulful look swept Vulpe's face; sadness painfully asserted itself in his eyes. "You write good, Beel. Sometimes very good. Except those lies you write about that sweet girl. Oo ... ee! You do that, I know, to sell-a books. That's-a life. But you have a-one great fault. You no mind if I tell you?"
"No."
"You a-want everything in this world to make sense. And nothing, my fran ... absolutely nothing make sense. All is spaghetti."
On my way home I bought Amy a Ferrari, very much like the Ferrari I had bought for myself.
"You're trying to spoil me," she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A novel, somebody once said, is the only decent form of autobiography. The same could be said for a motion-picture script.
I wrote my two screenplays by projecting myself into them. This is an operation, I submit, which makes writing easy. The writer takes on the mantle of an actor, enjoys vicariously the roles he defines.
In my first script I pictured Amy (not Jill) as Lady Hamilton, myself as Lord Nelson-and after much concupiscence and idle canoneering I die a hero's death. That much was easy. What would give life to the production-and I speak now from long experience-would be the detail, the unveiling, the undoing of Emma Hamilton. There is no moral to be drawn from the story. The details, the individual pieces of business, are what matter. Emma seductive and seduced; Emma enticing and understanding. All of this I wrote-drawing on memories of my feelings about Amy and what I would have liked to believe Amy felt about me.
There was, of course, the deeper story-the story of Lord Hamilton, an aging connoisseur of excellencies, understanding and promoting the emotions and best interests of a girl half a century his junior. This story I, shrewdly, kept to myself.
I wrote as well the swashbuckling Arabian nonsense I had promoted in my dealings with Achmed.
Achmed was delighted. "We are a proud people," he said to me in a letter. "And nobody since T. E. Lawrence has understood us as you have."
What did I understand? That Arabs, like everybody else, like to be pictured as coming out on top. Allah be praised.
A moral is to be drawn from Achmed's comment. To be liked, admired, trusted, it is only necessary to give back to a person what he has given you-to give him a mirror image of himself. Nor does embellishment hurt.
I had gained thus a certain success of esteem. Which is to say I was a much better wordsmith than secret agent or clout-mad member of a board. Moreover, for me a script writes itself; I put on paper what I see or what I would like to see; as a businessman I see little or nothing.
My scripts, in short, justified (at least for the moment) my Croesus income, so unexpected but useful; offset (at least for the moment) my persistent feeling of inadequacy. Cloris was delighted. "We can start shooting at once." Amy was delighted. "You've written me such nice parts ... at least in the scenes in which I keep my clothes on." I told her that she was fascinating with her clothes on, exquisite naked, a piece of banter which happened to be altogether true.
"But...." Her face reddened.
"But what?"
"You want to see me whipped, don't you?"
"I didn't write any scene like that."
"But you would like to, wouldn't you? You'd love it!" She said this as we sat on the porch of the Seabrook house. There was an unusually high tide that afternoon, and the waves were slashing at the dunes.
"I did once." I reminded her of the whipping on the altar of the Contessa Borromini's chapel, in Civitavecchia. And she reminded me that I had made love to her immediately after, and that I had been, as she put it, "terribly, terribly turned on."
I remembered.
"You think about it a lot, don't you?"
"Sometimes."
"Would you like to whip me?" Amy was past mistress of the subtle tease.
"Not really." Which was the case. I had no desire to hurt her. Her being whipped by someone else was another matter, particularly if Amy knowingly, obediently uncovered herself, presented herself for punishment. There was the exotic scene John had described, the ritual at Miss Wescott's. ("Where do you want me?")
"You could, if you wanted to. Or let Cloris do it for you
... or...." Her face now turned totally crimson. "Watch while Isabelle whips me. I let her, you know ... I still do."
I turned my eyes away from her, looked out over the ocean. A brisk salt wind was blowing in from the east. A line of brown pelicans, wings spread, soared slowly by, and I asked myself the question I had asked so many times before: How does a pelican get to be lead pelican?
"You could, you know ... you could watch."
"Really?"
"Like tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock."
Amy, as any reader must be aware by now, is exceedingly clever, and leads, always, by indirection. She was asking me to write this part for her in the Hamilton script.
"Already...." Her voice was soft and caressing. "Already you have a hard-on."
"Yes," I said.
She slipped her hand into my trousers, pushing it down under the belt. "I could do something about it."
She could. I agreed.
She apologized for herself with her now seasoned line, "I'm shameless, aren't I?" Then she withdrew her hand. "I want you to stay this way until tomorrow ... tomorrow at five o'clock."
We drove back to town in my Ferrari. The sun, low in the west, sent long shadows across Bohicket Road. The old live oaks looked down on us, as ever, with eminent disdain.
"I suppose," Amy said, "you're going to put all this in your next book, tell the whole world about the streaks on my behind, mumble your usual lines about not being able to understand me."
"Perhaps." I lit us both cigarettes.
"Don't you ever get tired of trying to analyze me?"
I spoke of infinite riches in a little room, the motto of a magazine for which once I wrote. I spoke of Heraclitus' river, never the same when the bather returns. I quoted the old line: When you are tired of London you are tired of life.
"You are a child," she said, running her hand along my leg. "You will never grow up."
"Rough."
"No." She smiled. "I like you that way. You're crazy about my breasts. My behind. You write about them over and over again ... with an occasional parliamentary visit to my vagina. All as if you had never seen any of these things before ... never made love to another woman. I love it!"
I apologized. "I sometimes, I think, go a little overboard."
"This is the tail end of the twentieth century. Anything goes. Besides ... what you write about me is really nothing about me ... but so much, really so much, about you. What, for example, makes you sneeze." She laughed, and quoted me. "Fliess' Syndrome. I strip and you sneeze."
"And you?"
Her hand moved up, maliciously, to promote a declaratory response. "Tomorrow? Will you sneeze?"
I sneezed. Anticipation sometimes outweighs consummation.
Amy abruptly changed the subject. "Were you surprised to see me with Cholly-Boy last night?"
"Very much so. Particularly when I was in the tub with Cloris."
"While you were away with Jill, and doing ... you will forgive me...." She gave my unfolding erection a reprimanding slap. "A lot of things have been happening. Senator Aslimead and my husband, with Cholly-Boy's financing, want me to run for Congress."
"From this district?"
"From this district. Cholly-Boy thinks your script will do the trick. What matters, he says, is not experience ... even ability. What matters is exposure." She stopped and looked at me with an expression that was both disapproving and appreciative. "And God knows you've given me enough of that ... and will give me, if I let you...."
I agreed. The picture would sell the office, the office the picture. Or, as Vulpe might have put it, one foot washes the other. I thought of Claire Boothe Luce, Messalina, Evita Peron. I thought, for no reason at all, of Lady Godiva and Bo Derek. Images, once stirred, find strange bedfellows.
"Lady Hamilton," I said, "was, in her time, a great political force. She kept the kingdom of the Two Sicilies solidly in the British camp, gave all possible aid and comfort to the commander of the British fleet."
I will bypass the details of that night. Amy had a political meeting with Cholly-Boy and Senator Aslimead, at the Mills House. Cloris had a meeting with our production staff, in the studio Cholmondeley-Stiarchos had set up on East Bay.
Left alone, I drank too much, fell asleep while watching an old Moulin Rouge show on cable TV. (I paid much attention to cable, at this time, for it seemed to me more and more obvious that our productions would find their best market on cable. People no longer take the trouble to drive to movie houses in the remote suburbs.)
When I woke the sun had already risen from the harbor waters, a cardinal was singing, and I was still in the great armchair facing the television set.
I do not know if Cholly-Boy came home with Amy the night before; or, if he did, if he slept with Cloris. I saw no signs of him. Nor do I know if Amy came home. I saw no signs of her. (Usually she left her pocketbook, as did Cloris, on a chair by the telephone table-outside the drawing room.)
I got up, went to the second-floor bathroom, relieved the pressure in my bladder, shaved. I went then to the kitchen (also on the drawing-room floor), made myself coffee and toasted French rolls.
When coffee and rolls were about ready, Cloris came into the kitchen. She was ebullient as usual. She was, in fact, the only woman I have known who woke, even in the early morning, singing.
"Good morning," she said. "Sleep well?"
"I drank too much."
I poured her coffee, buttered the rolls, cut two more, and put them in the toaster.
She seemed unusually blond this morning, exceptionally young and athletic. She was wearing a short, almost transparent nightgown, and a negligee which she had not bothered to close. Her hair, tumbled to her shoulders, sparkled in the morning sun.
"Things went well last night," she said. "We can start shooting as soon as we line up the cast." She would like to get Olivier or Gielgud to play Lord Hamilton; and if they were not available, we could at least settle for some look-a-likes. For Horatio Nelson she wanted Burt Reynolds-or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Amy would play Emma. "What about Jill?"
"Things have worked out perfectly. Everything you wanted, we have."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning Jill will play in your Garden of Allah version. And we shoot that in Rome. Meanwhile, we have all the money in the world. You had your little fling with Jill-and you're back again with Amy."
"And you?"
"What do I have?" She laughed. "I have you ... don't I? And Amy? And the picture-both versions? And if you don't mind, I'd like to screw Burt Reynolds a few times. What's more...."
"Olivier and Gielgud."
"Even at their age! You fantasized about Emma Hamilton. But you-in spite of your lies-understand me. Genius is more exciting than youth. And you know what?"
"What?"
"If I had been Emma Hamilton, I still would have preferred Lord Hamilton. Something ran deep there. He understood the world. That he had grown old was a fact of life. Sooner or later we will all grow old."
I sipped my coffee. Over the harbor, seagulls screamed. Through the kitchen window I saw a baby squirrel running along the telephone cable.
Cloris sipped her coffee. We were on opposite sides of the kitchen table.
"Where's Amy?" I asked.
"Still sleeping. She came in late."
"You know about this afternoon?"
"Of course I know about this afternoon."
I saw no reason for the "of course."
"You don't mind?"
"Why should I mind? It will turn you on, turn Amy on, give Isabelle wet pants-and it will be a wonderful dress rehearsal for the picture."
Cloris, as I have noted elsewhere, is always the professional, always delaying pleasures until production problems have been solved. Without this she would scarcely have so many firsts at Cannes; and now that nudity and eroticism have become as acceptable as baseball and boxing, an Oscar nomination (for The Delights of Anna-starring Anna Ricci).
I asked Cloris if she were coming with us.
"I was not invited," she said. "Even so, I would rather not be there. Something should be said for witches' Sabbaths. A good whipping has a life of its own. Its loveliness increaseth; it will never wither or decay. And it's certainly not the place for a family get-together ... like Thanksgiving dinner or a marshmallow roast."
She had a point.
"Incidentally...." She handed me a magazine. "Did you see this piece about Jill in People?"
"No."
"We are getting our act together. Jill, thanks to you. Plenty of Saudi money, thanks to you. Your story-make that plural. And now the publicity."
I opened the magazine to a place that had been marked, read the headlines:
SUPERMODEL JILL PHILBRICK GETS HER KICKS FROM OIL-RICH PRINCE ACHMED
"Behold," Cloris said, "a new Jill ... new biography."
I read on. The story told here was not the story Jill had told me. The Jill of the interview was not the Jill I knew. The facts of her biography in no way coincided with the items she had passed on to me-all of which is another instance of the notion that you can never make love to the same girl twice. (Even once is in question, because she changes as the loving progresses.)
I quote some relevant parts:
Jill Philbrick, the new favorite of the Saudis' financial wizard and promoter of the new, streamlined Islam, is a quiet, modest beauty-the latest superstar in Lady Cholmondeley's sometimes-eyebrow-raising productions.
"I have high cheekbones," Jill said when she was first interviewed. "I think that's what helped me."
But behind Jill's sudden rush into the international scene is an enduring faith in the goodness of people in this best of all possible worlds. "I don't know why," she said, "but people are always helping me."
She believes that life is essentially simple. "All you need to do is lead a good clean life, and someone always does all the rest."
The wife of our former ambassador to Upper Volta leads almost a girl scout's life-despite some unfortunate publicity in one of the leading men's magazines. And for this reason she will soon be featured on Achmed Abdullah Majed Bin Aziz Al Saoud's Islamic network-even late at night (with fewer if any veils), when everyone under eighteen is asleep.
"I like her ideas," Achmed announced.
"I don't smoke," Jill said, "except filtered cigarettes-and even then I never inhale. I don't drink-except champagne-and that's nothing but grape juice. I sleep always in the raw-to let all my pores breathe. And almost every day I go horseback riding. Perhaps now...." She smiled sagely. "Bouncing on the back of a camel. Camels, you know, are the ships of the desert."
Yet the record should show that Jill has more going for her than her avid faith in health and humanity. Like so many people in the Near East, she guides her life by the stars. "Most stars in show business have their analysts," she said. "I have my astrologers; my approach is scientific." In fact, now that Jill is well on her way to fame and fortune, she maintains two astrologers, one in New York, the other in Rome; she is thus never at a loss for the guiding advice of a celestial navigator.
Her New York adviser is the renowned Vergine Vulpe, star gazer to the stars, "the Nostradamus of the 1980's." In Rome her day-by-day horoscopes are cast by Signo-rina Sophia Gervasi, daughter of the notorious Anna Gervasi, whose demise was sometimes attributed to Vergine Vulpe, a onetime Mafia associate of Don Corigliano, better known as the syndicate's "Don of Dons." Like her mother, Sophia also foretells the future by the veinings of a client's breasts.
Before Jill signs a contract, begins new work, or takes on a new lover, she consults her nearest zodiacal counselor. Even her casual dates are subject to rigid astrological screening. "I am Aries; and Aries people are the most energetic ... also the most stubborn. They have tremendous drive. Libra is my marriage sign (Pee Wee, unfortunately, was not Libra). Leo is my romance sign. Before I go out with a man, I like to find out whether he is Libra or Leo."
Achmed, it seems, is Sagittarius. But since Jill has the excess of vitality which goes with Aries, she does not let this disparity disturb her. "It is only the exception," she maintains, "that proves the rule." .
I handed the magazine back to Cloris, my eye, meanwhile, open to the appeal of the illustration. The article featured Jill in the same pose she had taken, in her much-publicized men's magazine shot. This time, however, she was not nude. She wore the suggestion of a bra, and a bikini bottom with the dimensions of a G-string.
"That will sell the picture," Cloris said.
It rained that afternoon-on and off. Black clouds rolled in from the sea and floated like malicious halos over the spires of St. Philip's and St. Michael's.
"You're sure you want to go through with this?"
"I'm sure," Amy said, pouring herself another drink. "You don't have to do it to please me ... excite me."
"I never try to please you ... excite you. In this sort of thing, it's every man for himself."
"You're very gallant."
"Come on!" She seemed to me to be unusually tense, almost irritable. "Fuck off!"
"If you're not doing it for me, why...?"
"If Isabelle wants to ... and I will let her-that's none of your business." She gulped her drink. Her hand shook.
"And I read you like a book," she went on. "You want me to tell you everything ... what I think about before ... during ... after. If at heart I'm really lesbian ... and Isabelle knows how to make me be myself."
I said nothing.
"And if I put on panties, when I know I'll have to take them off? And you will love to see me take them off, won't you?"
After this almost hostile talk-so unnecessarily hostile, I thought-she came over and kissed me. "Do you want me before?"
"No," I said.
She smiled. "The time I really pleased you was when you undressed me and gave me to another man."
"A boy."
"What I want to know ... Amy's eyes roved to the reddened sunset clouds which hung over the rooftops to the west. "What I want to know is why that excited you so much."
"Did it?" I was protective of my confused psyche. "Afterward you couldn't stop making love to me. And I came to you scarcely untried, untapped. And more overdone than undone."
"You changed that night."
"Where was it? Perugia? Mantua? Moniga del Garda? I forget."
"Perugia."
"He was an Olympic diver or something, wasn't he? I forget his name."
"Something like that." I saw no reason to recall devious details.
"It was his 'thing' that was so fascinating, wasn't it? Enormous. Magnifico. I didn't think I could ever get it in me."
"But you did."
She rolled over on our Seabrook bed, smiled up at me, her cheeks dimpling in the gull-spanned twilight. "Painfully, embarrassingly, deliciously."
I understood now so much more than I had ever understood before-so much more about Amy, Cloris, myself. Amy knew that what stirred me more than anything else in this pale, brooding world was to see her come to life, want something with fever and abandon, flirt for it, lie for it-in her sly, disarming, transparent way.
"How about Isabelle?"
"Am I going to make love to Isabelle? Maybe."
"Yes."
"Maybe. Who knows?" She spoke slyly, edging her words with honey.
We did not speak on the drive out. She said nothing, and I could think of nothing to say that was not rude, clinical, or presumptuous. And when you know that a woman you love is about to be whipped, it seems unthinkably irreverent to talk about the weather.
We crossed the Ashley River bridge, turned right to join the old road that once was the scenic road to Summerville. We burrowed through the suburban sprawl that now rims every American city, interminable stretches where ranch houses take each other hand in hand in a dismal, empty saraband.
Eventually we came to the live-oak tunnels which once made this road, like Bohicket Road, on the way to Seabrook, one of the magical stretches of the Low Country. Every quarter-mile or so the oaks would part to unveil quiet, green spreads of marsh. And there the herons sit, contemplating cosmic navels.
This road leads the unwary to four of the great places in the Low Country: Magnolia Gardens, Middleton Gardens, Drayton Hall, and Berkeley Hall.
Rain splattered on the windshield. Rain dripped from the stalactites of Spanish moss suspended from the arms of the live oaks.
Little could this timely country know or care that, within a short space, Amy would be naked and prone in one of the great rooms of Berkeley Hall. Far were we now from the sheeted Arab, eager to prostrate himself four times a day, in homage to a god obsessed, more or less, with sheeted men eager to prostrate themselves, recta uplifted, four times a day.
"At last!" Isabelle Wescott said to me, most cordially I thought, as Amy and I, after climbing the double staircase, were met by her at the door.
She kissed Amy on the lips, gave her a possessive pat on her bottom. To my surprise, she also kissed me on the lips-although I daresay our foreplays and byplays that signal afternoon justified, if nothing else, the intimacy of a kiss. Charleston, however, is most snobbish in such matters. The wildest intimacies can be indulged in, on a bed, on the grass, or, should there be one, a passing roller coaster. All such, however, would not justify a nod in the drawing room. What matters in the drawing room is not what you have done, but who you are.
Miss Wescott wore tight black silk trousers and a tight black silk jacket buttoned with small brass buttons. Her eyebrows were plucked to the point where they resembled question marks. Her eyes were blackened. Her dark, short hair was sleeked back. The fleur-de-lis appeared in a jade brooch. There were also jade pendant earrings and a jade bracelet.
Amy's hair was piled high on her head-as in a turn-of-the-century coiffure. And, apart from her now characteristic high-heeled sandals (open-toed), she seemed to me to be wearing a see-through white lace skirt, a see-through white lace blouse (which buttoned down the front), the Paloma Picasso pearl-and-diamond necklace I had given her-and nothing else.
I had thought the three of us would be alone. We were not. I saw Philbrick, and deeply resented his presence. It is intolerable, I think, to have the husband of a girl one has slept with, present at the disrobing of another. Adultery in no way justifies reciprocity.
I will not bore the readers of this record with the details of what followed. One whipping is like another.
One fact, however, stands out. Reaching to my inside jacket pocket--the wallet pocket-I found that I was still carrying the efficient little Bulgarian "pen" Vulpe had given me. At the appropriate moment I shot an invisible pellet into Philbrick's thick neck. There was no reason for him to glut his eyes with my great love's intimate places. He immediately slipped into a deep sleep, and snored like a foghorn on a record in which the needle was stuck. Isabelle found him unforgivably rude.
"I see now," said Isabelle, her left hand caressing the whip she held, "what Jill couldn't see in him."
What followed was what was to be expected. There was, after the usual polite prattle, the usual sipping of strong drinks, the imperious command from Isabelle.
There was, as I knew there would be, Amy's sad, downcast eyes, her slow disrobing (from a sitting position), the uncontrollable tremor, the expected gestures of mock modesty (the right forearm shielding her breasts, the left hand, with fingers spread, over the pubic triangle).
There was Isabelle's demand that Amy stand up; Isabelle's brusque pulling away of Amy's arm and hand; the flushing of Amy's cheeks as she stood erect, her high places in unabashed display.
And when Amy meekly positioned herself as a sin offering, her hands and knees on a low cushioned bench, her tattoo repeating the design on Isabelle's brooch, there was Amy's expected hoarse whisper, "Don't hurt me! Please don't hurt me!"
Nor is there any need to describe the brutal slashes of the whip, crisscrossing fresh crimson lines with the older slash marks (which had by now turned grayish blue). Or Amy's maenadic screams!
There is no need to say how stroke by measured, leisured stroke fell on those pristine hillocks, between whose inward slopes you could discern, if you stared, a suggestion of vagabond pubic furz.
It is enough to say that in time the white-coated butler picked up the naked, trembling, sobbing Amy and carried her to Isabelle's bedroom.
Isabelle motioned with her head to me, implying that I was to follow her.
I heard the ominous ticking of a grandfather clock.
Isabelle's face was flushed, her breathing heavy. "Now Amy needs you," she said to me, once we were in the bedroom. I thought the invitation most gracious, a benchmark of breeding. She would coax from me now, for my pleasure and Amy's, a hissing and bridling snake.
I looked toward the bed.
Amy was lying on her back, her legs slightly parted, on Isabelle's huge four-poster. And in this room, on this very same bed, it had once been my privilege to seduce, or be seduced by, the fabulous Anna Ricci-in the course of our filming our much-revised version of Gone with the Wind (which emerged as The Delights of Anna).
I took off my clothes, draped them over the back of an armchair. Neatness, at such moments, seems protocol.
Isabelle, highball in hand, stood by one of the windows (nine lights over nine) that overlooked the butterfly lakes, some terraces below.
I, absorbed in my concern for Amy, paid Isabelle no attention. This was no time to call her attention to the Hogarth curves of Amy's hips, chitchat about weather, or to suggest to her that she have a good day. Nor did it seem odd to me that I should so nonchalantly undress in front of her. Had I not done it once before, with engaging consequences?
Amy was still trembling, still crying, when I did what she expected me to do-what Isabelle promoted.
There was at once-I speak of Amy-a wild heaving of hips, a tempestuous thrashing about. Only with consummate deftness, like some decadent rodeo rider, could I hold my appointed place. Meanwhile old habits worried my mind with semantic niceties. I asked myself, for example, if "to climax" was a legitimate infinitive. Or was it no more than a passing barbarism, like "to finalize." (Could Amy, in point, were Amy less inhibited in her talk, say, "Come, now, my love ... and finalize your loving?") And, anent that issue, I, for unknown reasons, held back. I bit my lips and made many an attempt to calculate the volumes of imaginary spheres.
Sobbing turned to screams, and the screams, coordinated by some anatomical logic, ran counterpoint to the thrusts of Amy's hips.
Eventually the screams, as is the way of screams, subsided. Eventually all was silent.
Amy then said what I might have expected her to say, what she had said before on so many signal occasions. "I'm shameless, aren't I?"
"Shamelessness," I said, "becomes you." I spoke of the delight to be had in watching a Venus in furs shed her mink (keeping in mind the fact that "Venus in Furs" was a creation of the eminent Professor Sacher-Masoch, from the latter part of whose hyphenate we have "masochism").
Amy's thought turned to more practical matters. "Did you, you-know-what?"
An odd question, I thought, a kind of sexual bed check-as if pleasure can be measured by the cubic centimeter.
"Not yet."
"I want you to."
How kind, I thought. How maternal.
"I want you to ... now."
"Really?" (I remembered Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. "How kind of you to let me come.")
"But not in me. In Isabelle."
"Why?"
"I promised it to her. Do you mind?"
In no way would I mind; but the picture came back to me of Isabelle's and my late dejeuner sur I'herbe ("I'm not on the pill"), my pseudo-gallant probing of the air. What had changed in Isabelle's mind? Or philosophy of prevention?
"I want you to come in Isabelle."
"You are sure?" If much of what she had staged had been in some way connected with a resentment of Jill-jealousy, even-it did not make sense that she should promote a fandango with Isabelle. But then, I suppose, an intimacy that a woman herself promotes is one in which she vicariously shares-as in the case of the various girls Cloris acquired for me. Nor does the sharing have to be vicarious.
I extricated myself from Amy's now quieted body, turned around.
Isabelle was still standing where I had last seen her, still holding her highball glass. But she was like the Venus in Furs I had conjured in my words to Amy. She was entirely naked. Her boyish body was tinted crimson by the light of the setting sun. The nipples, solid raisins risen from the flat Gomorrhal plain of her chest, glowed in the twilight.
I got up, went over to her.
Isabelle put down her glass, pulled me to her. Her tongue sought mine, slithered around it. Her right hand slithered around my now almost wooden erection. "You're terribly wet," she said; and these words were not easy for her to mouth-with her tongue enmeshed with mine.
After a moment or so, she led me to the bed, her hand trailer-hitched to my still-solid member.
She threw herself on the bed next to Amy, kissing her once, then putting between Amy's thighs the hand which, just before, had held me.
"Don't," said Amy, for the record.
I then got on the bed, kissed Isabelle on the lips, kissed Amy on the lips, cupped my left hand over Amy's right breast, observed that the nipple had softened, made a mental note to check out in Webster the verb form of "climax."
Isabelle, meanwhile, with chatelaine hospitality, with deftness and aplomb, had taken me inside her.
"Make love to her," Amy murmured.
"I will."
Amy sighed. "After this, I could never run for Congress, could I?"
With a disreputable pun, I asked her why she should run for what she already had.
Isabelle's body then exhibited a phenomenon I had never before seen-or, more properly, experienced. Her outer body remained totally passive, almost catatonic. But inside her, in the tight, very tight adit, rippling muscles began a quivering, milking movement that sucked and chumed with the speed of a vibrator.
There was no holding back.
"You're a bastard," she said.
"Bill is sometimes," said Amy, "a soupgon trigger-happy."
In time, Isabelle tugged three times on a tapestry bell pull which hung on the wall on her side of the bed.
A few minutes later the butler appeared, carrying a tray of drinks-three highball glasses containing, I assume, Scotch and soda.
What stood out in my mind, however-and I speak as the chronicler of our several lives-was the fact that, at the time of the butler's appearance, Isabelle and Amy were still entirely naked, and neither made any effort to cover herself. (Nor did Amy bother to go through her usual ritual of pretending to cover breasts and center.)
The butler was a young man who looked much like Harry Belafonte, as Belafonte must have looked in his early thirties. Nor did the butler in any way show surprise. With dignity and poise he set his tray down on a table next to the bed, looked (almost too appreciatively, I thought, at Amy's spectacular breasts), and left.
"Arthur's a gem," Isabelle said, handing me a drink. "Knows everything I want, almost before I do."
"My behind hurts," Amy said, dimpling her cheeks.
Isabelle opened the drawer of the table next to the bed, reached in, and took out a tube of Solarcaine. "Turn over."
Amy looked at me "roguishly," as they say, as if asking me if I did not think that she was very daring and decadent, and as if, at long last, she had decided to let me share her secret life.
She rolled over.
Isabelle carefully spread the soothing ointment over the livid stripes, the back-and-blue stripes, the tattoo. "You like the tattoo?"
I did.
"Don't you think it terribly presumptuous of me to put my own mark on Amy's ass?"
"Audacious? Yes. Presumptuous? No."
"Particularly because it's a fake. The Wescotts don't have a crest."
"You once told me."
"On the grass." She laughed. "We've come a long way, haven't we?"
"You're tickling me," Amy said.
* * *
"We Wescotts are a strange people." Isabelle handed Amy a drink, reached again in the table drawer, found a Kleenex, and with the Kleenex wiped Amy's lipstick from her breasts. "But every family in Charleston is a little strange. My cousin Fenwick was once in love with Amy ... although he was a Weston ... Fenwick Weston ... the Westons were just as strange. Fenwick fell in love with Amy when he saw her ... in black tights ... playing Hamlet. Ashley Hall ... that's before she went to Vassar ... put on a Shakespearian play every commencement. Pretty horrible ... most of them."
"Not always, really!" Amy sat up straight on the bed.
"Anyway, he saw Amy in sheer black tights...." Possessively she ran her hand up and down Amy's thighs. "Imagine these long, sexy thighs in tights. Who wouldn't get excited?"
I reached over to remind myself how appealing were these legs; continued, with my reach, to remind myself how appealing was the spell of her bosom.
"Please!" Amy pretended she was annoyed by the liberties I was taking, made a mock effort to brush away my hand.
"Fenwick was shy ... pathologically shy. He shot himself because of Amy. I'm sure of it."
Amy blushed. I thought, comparing one happening with another, one comment with another, it was rather late in the day for her to blush. But an anointed lady maintains her aptitude for blushing, even naked, as Amy now was, and after a spate of enormities. At sensitive moments a courteous blush is expected of her. It is protocol. Not by temperament or because of training is she ever remiss.
I thought it odd that she blushed when Isabelle said Fenwick had shot himself because of her, but had not reacted at all when Isabelle took credit for having the fleur-de-lis tattooed on her left buttock. Perhaps to elicit a blush, Isabelle would have had to shoot herself immediately after. In Charleston, perhaps elsewhere, embarrassments have their pecking order.
"He saw Amy as a classic beauty, only partly human-Charleston's answer to Helen of Troy. I don't think in his whole life he ever kissed her, much less-"
"Ha! Ha!" said Amy. She got up, slipped her feet into her high-heeled sandals, walked with infinite grace to the bathroom-her tattoo rising and falling with each flick of her left hip.
"Fenwick was very strange. I, of course, adored him. But there was never anything between us. I...." Isabelle smiled. "Usually do not like men."
"I am flattered."
"I think of you as an extension of Amy, a lovely extension, a tool with life in it. And on which is much of Amy."
She pointed to the terrace visible through the window. "There ... that's where Fen shot himself ... on the little grassy spit between the lakes."
I looked out of the window. A peacock was now sitting on the green between the lakes.
"Fenwick once said to me, 'I find I'm very much like my remote ancestors. Only I don't butter my hair.' He was strange, very strange. So shy. And so much in love with Amy, although he could never bring himself to say so. Instead, he said to me, obviously lying, 'What I want does not exist. This is my tragedy. This is the tragedy of life."
She paused, put her hand on my cheek. "If only he could have done to her what I did this afternoon ... what you did...."
She also thought it unfortunate that, in Egypt, so many young girls have their clitorises removed.
"Odd, isn't it?" Amy said when she returned. "The moment I was naked, Philbrick fell asleep."
Amy sat down on the bed.
Isabelle kissed her, ran her tongue around Amy's. "So many men nowadays can only be turned on by a naked little round-bottomed boy."
I unveil, now, a trade secret.
In the parts I write for Amy in my screen scripts, I have learned to allow for improvisation. Amy in the flesh is much more exciting to me than any Amy I invent. And if they are exciting to me, I assume they will be exciting to the viewers.
All the more so are her body responses. Her uncontrollable trembling, reflex jerks, unexpected acts of passion, are more stirring than any directions I could write for her. Nor, were I to write them for her, is there any certainty that Amy would or could act them out. Amy is an extraordinary and unpredictable person, but scarcely an actress.
I now had the feeling that the parts Amy, Isabelle, and I had played, impromptu, had, or could have, an appealing place in my Hamilton story. But Amy would have to improvise her lines. Act out and talk out precisely what she thought and felt.
I said as much to Amy.
Then I asked her if she would be willing to do on camera what she had done that afternoon with Isabelle. More to the point, would she be willing to let Isabelle do to her again what had been done, with such passion, that afternoon?
Amy, flirtatiously, dimpled her cheeks; and to my surprise she said yes. The great lady was prepared to play herself on camera, even naked and spread-eagled. With a Gioconda twist to her lips, she added, "It got your balls in an uproar, didn't it?"
All she asked was that we show no welts. "After all," she said, "a naked lady is entitled to some vanity."
Amy's talk had of a sudden changed character; fallen, in fact, out of character.
The truly coy Low Country lady does not speak of "balls in an uproar." Parts of the body associated with reproduction are alien to her azalea-and-camellia purview. Her world is compounded of seeming innocence and steely guile. Neither would she agree, as did Amy, almost with enthusiasm, to have done to her on camera what Isabelle had so zestfully done in camera.
Thus Amy presents us with a classical study of dual personality, with each persona indifferent to the whims and no-nos of its predecessor.
Much of the spell and mystery of Amy hinged on her unpredictable transformations-as in the story of Sleeping Beauty. In this instance the agent was a deft whip hand rather than a sweet kiss, although the sweet kiss, strategically placed, soon followed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Money buys money. Money also buys publicity, cooperation, respectability. Thanks to our Near East connection and Achmed's growing yen for Jill, we (meaning the Cholmondeley-Stiarchos cartel) were able to sink some sixty-four million dollars in my twin projects. Consequently, for weeks the gossip columns, newsmagazines, glamour magazines, ran advance publicity about our two stars, about the genius and know-how of the madcap Lady Cholmondeley.
Amy, in spite of her misgivings, her total commitment to die purview of the Democratic party, became the Republican party's choice as candidate for the congressional seat allocated to the Charleston district. Time and Newsweek commented on her aristocratic background (two signers of the Declaration in her family), her spectacular performances, totally disrobed, in Monna Vanna "and some of Lady Cholmondeley's other delicately erotic epics," and speculated that hers could be an exciting presence on the political scene. The Charleston Mercury, as in times past, photographed her in brief bikinis on the beaches of Edisto Island and Seabrook. (On a dare, she posed without bikini for one photographer, standing in the Botticelli Venus pose, on the green spit between Isabelle's butterfly lakes.)
One Sunday, the same paper featured Amy's picture on the front page. Amy was presumably undraped, but, as befitted the urbane policy of the journal, she was shown clutching and kissing an enormous cluster of yellow flowers. The following day the Mercury ran on its front page an item conspicuously boxed with purple lines:
WARNING!
A picture of Charleston's glamorous and capable Amy Dellmore in yesterday's edition of the Charleston Mercury could be construed as indicating that the Carolina jasmine is an edible flower.
It is not. Unlike Mrs. Dellmore, all parts of the jasmine are poisonous and should not be eaten.
Nor those weeks was Jill neglected. She was featured on the covers of both Oggi and Paris Match. Oggi presented her unclothed except for a discreet harem veil, and called her "the Supply Economy's answer to Mata Hari." A Cairo newspaper called her the symbol of the new Islam-"Florence Nightingale in a see-through purdah." The Tehran Al Haram, reflecting the official Shiite position, declared her a daughter of Satan now in the pay of the CIA. ("How more salubrious," said Carnavaron, "is the missionary position.")
In casting, Cloris had been her customary imaginative, efficient self. Sir Laurence, Sir John, and Burt Reynolds, unfortunately, had not been available. But Cloris, flying to the West Coast, had, with ingenuity, charm, and the transient use of a casting couch, found lesser-known actors with potentially great box-office appeal. ("Business, my love. No high passion.")
Amy, as planned, starred in the actual Lady Hamilton role; Jill in what I called "the shish-kebab version."
Our production crews worked simultaneously at several locations. Amy's key scenes were shot in and around Charleston-at Berkeley Hall, Seabrook, Middleton Gardens, and our warehouse studio on East Bay. The necessary establishing shots were made in Naples, Capri, and Amalfi. All special effects, storms at sea, frigates lobbing fusillades into other frigates, were filmed on the West Coast-where tempests are easily raised in teapots.
And because the motion-picture industry is congenitally perverse, we shot the Arabian scenes on the California desert, where there was less likelihood of interference by purblind Shiites, Sunnites, and errant whirling dervishes.
What simplified both operations was a corporate Cholmondeley-Stiarchos decision to forget about both Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, and to model Lord Hamilton on the flesh-and-bone role of Lord Profumo-the British admiralty man linked, not so long back, with the nubile Christine Keeler. "After all," Camavaron had said, "who wants to see a period piece-with all the men in knee breeches, and all the girls in a dudgeon?"
Monna Vanna, I pointed out, was a period piece, a costume piece, and it had had an astounding success.
"That," said Camavaron, "was two years ago. When Amy fucked to death the whole top echelon of the Florentine Army, people cheered. Now? Who cares?"
Nor did Amy find that, once production started, she could still give to politics the time politics required. She was too tired, of mornings, to appear at prayer breakfasts, party breakfasts, or the happy, singing breakfasts of the Optimist Clubs. Nor could she stay up late for television interviews in which she would state her much-too-liberal views on birth control, the legalizing of pot ("She will ruin us all," Vulpe told me), or gun control ("You don't need a handgun to protect yourself. Look what I did in Monna Vannal").
Thus, Amy, in time, dropped out of the race. "It's a damn shame," Jeff was reported as saying. "With Senator Aslimead in the upper house, my wife in Congress, we could have the whole Low Country in the palms of our hands. That's when you really make money."
I now raise a peripheral point, one not sympathetic to the power brokers, and another instance, I suppose, of the notion that life is a hospital in which every patient believes he will be happier if he moves to another bed.
We had money, publicity, promotion, a professional cast (excepting Amy and Jill). We had exchanged the Naples of Lord Hamilton for the London of Profumo. But somehow the combination did not come to life. No one's heart was in it-Amy's, Jill's, Cloris', even Camavaron's.
I had traded high passion for thirty pieces of gold, possibly fool's gold.
I said as much to Cloris.
"Look," I said, "we don't need all this Saudi folderol. We don't need sixty-four million dollars to make a picture."
"Look," she said, "the company's millions bought you a very pleasant fling with Jill, two Ferraris, and a quick cure for writing block." She thought I was slightly ungracious.
I spoke of the technique we had evolved together, of training our star actresses on the casting couch, recording their best ad-libbed lines, catching with the camera's eye the poses evolved in reflex.
"Pavlov," I said, "was the best director."
I reminded her of Caterina, the Abruzzi girl we had picked up on our drive to Perugia, who would not undress in front of her brother (Pietro) until she understood that what she was expected to do was "art"--not routine seduction.
I reminded her of Aimee, the very liberated and often naked Countess of Liechtenstein, whom I discovered at Taormina, and drove to Piazza Armerina-to meet Spagnola, who was that season her lover.
Her lips were soft and moist, as are those of girls who have not yet reached the age in which a kiss is no more than a prelude to a lecture-and the lips, while kissing, are already tightening up to form words.
Because of the difference in our heights, my erection seemed to probe into her navel. It was an obtrusive perpendicular, keeping our midsections well apart.
"Perhaps," she said, "it could be harder."
The kissing completed, she leaped up on the altar, lay back, her slim legs spread wide apart, her arms in crucifixion stance, breasts pointed skyward.
"Sacrifice me."
Greek altars, unfortunately (even in Sicily), leave no place for a man's knees. An admission to a girl in pinwheel position, at navel height, requires a point of vantage. Even Archimedes, when he offered to move the earth with a lever, demanded, as I recall, a place on which to stand.
"Sacrifice me," she said. "What are you waiting for?"
I was waiting, obviously, for a small ladder; but this, absurd as it was, was nothing I could explain. Good lovers must have some knowledge of geometry. Spirit is not all.
Some of our most fetching shots in the pictures we made then-Tom Brown's School Days, Oedipus Rex, Lysistrata ... and later, of course, Monna Vanna, with Amy-were made with a single hand-held camera. Interim material, establishing shots, chase scenes, bridging detail-all of this was photographed later, then blended with the major scenes in the course of cutting and editing. Even when we worked with professional camera crews, Car-navaron (and sometimes Cloris, when she was behind the camera), slowly panned the camera to background items. The consequence was the high praise Cloris received in Variety, Time magazine, and elsewhere for her "dramatic symbolism."
Even the unprofessional work of the hand-held camera-the unsteadiness of the image-evoked fulsome praise. It was interpreted, by some critics, as "Lady Cholmondeley's masterful way of conveying the agitation of the lovers ... a streak of genius." Little did the critic sense that the agitation was Cloris', and that it preceded, only by minutes, Cloris' unabashed participation in the on-scene action.
The thrill of the past was now strong in me. The past, with most of us, is always golden; always distinct from the sodden, commercial present, where some Clickhovian Lopahin stands with his ax, ever ready to chop our cherry orchards.
Nor was this all.
Not to no purpose had I studied my Amy, classified her whims, made book with her whimsies. Amy, I well knew, would not before strangers, at least on camera, let herself go, as she had when the actors were Isabelle and me.
And this calls for a footnote. Certainly, when Isabelle whipped her, the whipping was before strangers-and the awareness of being watched contributed to her wild frenzy (watched, titillated, humiliated). But she was not whipped by an actor, a stranger, even if the actor-stranger were someone as distinguished as Olivier, or Gielgud, or Burt Reynolds. She was whipped by a handsome, perverse woman who she knew loved her, and was, in turn, enormously excited by what Amy permitted her to do. Amy was the unconscious seductress; with her quivering buttocks, she played Svengali to Isabelle's Trilby.
With a man in Isabelle's place, even Sir Laurence or Sir John, the tension would nbt be there. Nor with Burt Reynolds. The scene must be played with Isabelle.
Moreover, I had the solution.
We would shoot this scene with Isabelle dressed as a man. For the most part, we could keep her back to the camera. She would, in other words, be a temporary stand-in for the man we would cast as Lord Hamilton.
In this, too, Cloris agreed, as did Amy, dimpling her cheeks. "You have a thing," she said, "for erection direction."
As things turned out, it was good that I thought as I did, that I thought in terms of simplicity and economy, of aesthetic purity.
A singular event suspended our Near East operations, dried up our financial feeders, threatened to put our consortium into bankruptcy.
Achmed was assassinated.
What follows is not altogether clear. On the other hand, nothing in the Near East is altogether clear.
Rumor had it that Achmed, in Rome, had met Melissa II, the splendent girl whom Vulpe called his daughter, and once, romantically or not, identified as the daughter of Don Corigliano, the "Don of Dons," whom I had once visited in Sicily, and in whose house I had once seen a portrait of Melissa II. And had Vulpe not also spoken of the Contessa Borromini as her mother?
Secret agents tell many stories. ("Some you must write about me, Signore Benton! Oh, the stories I could tell you! Oo ... la ... la!")
There are mysteries here.
Don Corigliano was a wealthy man, an aristocrat of sorts. If Melissa II had been his daughter, why would she be more or less in the care of Vulpe, who was an operator of lesser standing? Perhaps she was, as the phrase goes, the don's natural daughter-as if any daughter so sprightly and avid could be unnatural?
More to the point, she could have been once in spite of their age difference, more than a daughter to the don. And/or the Contessa Borromini-who, like Isabelle, claimed not to like men, but who on occasion lapsed.
On the other hand, had she once been "more than a daughter" to the don, she might well have been Vulpe's daughter-merely on loan to the don in return for the canceling of a debt. Had not Lord Hamilton acquired Emma from his debt-ridden nephew in more or less the same way?
To get back to the rumor:
Gossip columnists reported that while Jill was shooting on location in the California desert (near Yucca Valley), Achmed had met Melissa II; and with the magnanimity of a Near East tycoon, had offered her a movie career. To discuss details, he had invited her aboard his yacht, then docked at Ostia.
Two days later his body, somewhat bloated, was found floating, facedown, in the Bay of Naples.
My disinterest in murder mysteries is outpaced only by my dislike for international agentry. Who killed Achmed, or why, is to me a matter of deep unconcern-even though I had, in my detached way, a liking for him. (Much as I have for Vulpe, and might have had for Lord Hamilton, had I known him.) But, in retrospect, it seems to me that Achmed was pinpointed for early death. Anyone who knows anything about the Near East, or has followed the careers of the Borgias and the pitfalls of Byzantium, would know that. He was a member of the Saudi royal family, which is a position that speaks for itself. Was there not a remote sister or niece of his who was beheaded recently for the peccadillo of adultery? And had not this been denied, but with less than half heart, by Achmed himself?
As in an Agatha Christie novel, there was a spate of suspects.
Melissa II might herself have done it. Was she not an ardent member of La Concorrenza, that Italian organization dedicated to the overthrow of machismo? Was it not Melissa II who took me to meet the Amazon queen of La Concorrenza, Spagnola? And who could be more machis-matic than a Saudi with several wives, an oil-fed fortune, and an ongoing yen for pretty girls?
Any member of the PLO, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang could have done it.
Any member of an OPEC organization could have done it. Was not Saudi Arabia cutting the barrel price of oil?
One of Achmed's wives might have done it ... or a brother of one of his wives. Or any one of Achmed's sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts.
There was Jill-perish the thought! There was Philbrick himself-either as a jealous ex-husband or a double-dealer who considered himself doubly dealt.
Finally-and I jump to no hasty conclusions-there was Vulpe. ("She the apple of my hindsight, signore. If anything happen to her ... Who know what! A virgin still, signore. And cook like a dream.")
Achmed's death should not long detain us. The rise from and return to dust, as Vulpe might have told us, is an inescapable cycle. Final cause, in any individual's cycle, is of interest only to minds not yet attuned to the Big Wheel.
Of more immediate concern to Cloris and me was the fact that Achmed's "oil" money-in fact the laundered gains from his less legal activities-was the keystone of our financial arch. With the loss of the keystone, our arch would collapse.
I was not surprised, not unhinged. Those who are not entranced by Monopoly money, lose nothing when there is a run on the Monopoly bank. Such wealth, like fairy gold, glisters in the moonlight; it is foreordained to turn to ashes in the morning.
Ironically, only the week before, People featured an interview with Jill which included a touching tribute to Achmed's charm. The title of the item was "Jill's Tale."
"Pee Wee forced me to pose nude," she informed the interviewer. "He exploited me. He thought if enough people saw me in my birthday clothes, it would help his political career. 'In politics,' he used to say, 'the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
Her life was now different. She had escaped from the unspeakable bondage of married life. She was now her own thing-no more a bird in a gilded cage. She lived alone for art ... art and world peace. She made no mention of me, of my fine Italian hand, in her sudden rise to fellowship in the international set. All credit was given to Achmed, whom she declared to be the love of her life. He was every inch a prince.
"Royalty," she said, "moves and breathes in a world apart ... something totally transmogrifying. In life, you're either born to the purple or you aren't. Achmed was. And with him I feel like a Turnverein."
I suppose I should feel flattered that, thanks to me, my Bulgarian pen, pedagogical skills, she had learned the word Turnverein. But like most ten-o'clock scholars, she had been too lazy to look it up.
Some days later, the New York Times came out with a startling story. Quoting "informed sources," it reported that Achmed, far from being the far-seeing financial genius of the royal Saudi family, was not even Arabian. He was a Syrian rug dealer, with side interests in heroin, hashish, and cocaine. He had entered the world of international finance by the devious route of bamboo. Some years back he had made the ingenious discovery that bamboo canes are excellent containers for powdered drugs. An ideal way to ship drugs from one part of the world to another is to hide them in the hollow bamboo canes around which rugs are rolled-much as Cleopatra was rolled when she, otherwise undraped, paid her first visit to Caesar.
In time came the cocaine connections, the heroin connections, oil, shipbuilding, television networks, and our own indistinct motion-picture projects. "One foot," as Vulpe put it, "washes another."
I turn now to bases closer to home.
We all know by now, from Watergate, the Profumo affair, almost every political bruhaha of history, that one startling disclosure triggers another. There is the domino effect.
John C. Calhoun Philbrick was entrapped.
A "sting" operation by federal authorities, and the fine hand of Vulpe, disclosed that this upstanding spokesman for the Moral Majority, president of Armageddon International, Inc., and former ambassador to Upper Volta, was Achmed's Carolina connection.
The trap was sprung up the Stono, when Philbrick's crew, following Vulpe's misleading and prayerful instructions, landed his billion-dollar cocaine cargo at the fatal bend in Otter Creek. ("Turn, my fran de Otter creek, and cast-a your bread on water.") The creeks bearing gifts, as Vulpe had noted, are, like Vulpe himself, not always to be trusted.
Philbrick, guarding his treasure, was arrested at the scene of the action, a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of contraband in either hand. "You got hold of the wrong feller," he told the arresting officer. "I'm here for the same reason you are-to get the goods on these crooks who are trying to ruin our country. But, mind you, I won't let 'em. I'll stand up and fight."
In due course he was tried and convicted. He put the blame on "a little clique of old Charlestonians who live below Broad Street. "It's all politics," he said. "Some people just don't want to get Big Government off the backs of the taxpayers."
In South Carolina, however, justice is often genial. Philbrick was fined ten thousand dollars and given a three-year suspended sentence. The judge was from upstate. "After all," he said, "Pee Wee ain't never hurt nobody."
Shortly thereafter Philbrick was named ambassador to Chad.
The Charleston Mercury, which sides always with righteousness, regretted the appointment. Philbrick, let's face it, is a felon-a convicted, card-carrying felon. And some consistency in ethics is to be asked of those in high places. Look back on Thomas Jefferson. Washington. Madison. Even Pee Wee's namesake, John C. Calhoun! Moreover, there were others from this area in every way more deserving-Senator Aslimead, for example. Even Jeff Dellmore, who had managed Senator Aslimead's campaigns, and whose morals were above reproach, except, perhaps, for that singular lapse ... when he was seen leaving a local bordello dressed in women's clothes. But who among us is without fault? Who is to cast the first stone?
* * *
I have no head for business; in fact, I lump business with my other announced dislikes. But I have had extraordinary luck. In a crisis, some deus ex machina usually comes down from the proscenium arch and does what any deus ex machina is supposed to do. In this case the salvation was cutting. As the Bauhaus once taught us, "Less is more." (When in doubt-cut it out!)
The loss of the Achmed connection meant, obviously, the loss of funding for further work on our great Arabian epic. There would be no more fantastic sea battles, no more frenetic mob scenes glorifying the Star and Crescent.
What, then? My suggestion was to make do with what we had. We had already much tempestuous footage-land battles, sea battles, gallops on camelback. In Rome, in Cinecitta, we could paste up an epic, make culture hum.
And this we did. We created a new milieu.
Italy has long been notorious for its "spaghetti western"-the American cowboy-and-Indians melodrama translated into the tongue and gestures of Italian opera.
We introduced the "spaghetti near-eastern."
Our stock in trade was the footage we had-and imaginative cutting and piecing.
I appeal now to the lesson of American television, to the educating influence of movies edited for television.
Most of the motion pictures shown on television today-more so, late-night television-make no sense whatever. They are a melange of unconnected fragments of miasma. The viewer is expected somehow to assemble the snips and make his own picture. He could as easily reassemble the Rubik cube.
To establish mood, the picture begins with a rock-'n'-roll theme. The inference is that whoever will soon appear is traveling down a lonesome road. Life is bitter, life is long, and both master and the missus are in the cold, cold ground. There follow long stretches of darkness, interspersed, here and there, with stroboscopic glimpses of a man and a girl (a) driving, (b) kissing, (c) fighting, (d) naked, (e) all of the above in millisecond sequence.
If the production is rated R, Anglo-Saxon expletives are added, with hysterical fervor, to imply that this is American peasant life as American peasants live it; and as upper-class Americans live it, when they shed their stained-glass attitudes. Chases follow, introducing transient voices, flashing lights, and establishing without cavil that this is the age of the stroboscope. We are all of us intermittent lovers, even fractured idealists; yet, ultimately, we are all stroboscopists.
Thus we resolved the problems of our manque near-eastern-featuring Jill Philbrick exquisitely denuded and presented in a variety of cockle-warming poses.
With Achmed's death we had, of course, no more need to feature Jill. But in my odd way I had taken a fancy to Jill's body, and had written parts for her which justified extensive exposure. A craftsman must be worthy of his craft.
The Hamilton story, unfortunately entitled No Time for Foreplay, came out equally well. The establishing shots, as planned, were made on location at Naples and Capri.
Cloris had cast adequate substitutes for Olivier and Gielgud for the male roles; and they, with Amy and Amy's stand-ins, acted the routine scenes on studio lots in Hollywood.
Cloris, agreeing with Camavaron (and earlier with our corporation executives, including Cholly-Boy), had voted to make the scene current-a decision which eliminated Lord Hamilton as himself, Horatio Nelson as admiral of the early-nineteenth-century British fleet. Yet none of this mattered. What was kept was the quintessence of the story-the story as I saw it, wrote it. I had no complaints.
What had bothered me initially, the behavior of Amy on camera-in the most intimate scene-had been masterfully and deviously handled. Camavaron, at Cloris' urging, had a camera hidden (behind a two-way mirror) in the drawing room at Berkeley Hall the afternoon Amy yielded herself to Isabelle; Isabelle herself to me. All such became record.
Camavaron, in added shots, panned his camera, developing by chance and whim the symbolism the world admires. (As Amy bends, for example, the camera pans to the steeple of St. Philip's. What does this imply? Ask any Vassar freshman who has read her first book of Freud. Ask Susan Sontag-she will call it "camp.")
We had, in short, another hit, another picture illustrating Lady Cholmondeley's mauve touch. "Only the English have this kind of inscrutably erotic insight," said the critic from the New York Review of Books, unaware that Cloris, like Senator Jesse Helms, was a Tar Heel from the Sun Belt. ("I was graduated from Chapel Hill the year North Carolina discovered oral sex.")
We also introduced two new and unexpected actors; Isabelle, me. Nor was I pleased with my image. I did not, I thought, look like any Burt Reynolds. Nor any young Gary Cooper, young Cary Grant. Not mine was the poise of the young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. I looked, to be frank, rather drab.
EPILOGUE
"Do you despise me?" she asked. My eyes roved, naturally, along the coasts of her bared body, now so tranquil on the bed., "How could I despise you?" Faced with indelicate questions, we so often replace one question with another. "I despise myself. I have been weak, selfish."
Her breasts pointed rhetorically toward the plaster rosette on the ceiling. Her weakness, I told her truthfully, was part of her charm. Great strength, determination, single-mindedness, are becoming only in gladiators and fools. She sighed. "Lovemaking isn't everything, is it?"
"No."
She turned to face me, stroked appraisingly her trim bosk, smiled. "But almost."
She had, I conceded, an extremely philosophical point of view.
"It isn't my fault that I was born weak. It really isn't." I agreed. I said again that it is not given us to choose our roles.
"You blame me?"
I did not blame her. How could I blame her? I had asked nothing and received so much.
Again she sighed. "Now I'm all fucked out."
We were in the Cipriani, the most desirable hotel in all of Venice-built by Giuseppe Cipriani with Guinness family money on the island of Giudecca, across the lagoon from the Piazza San Marco. We were six minutes from Harry's Bar-by motor launch.
Jill had flown to Venice with me to see, at the Venice Film Festival, a screening of my spaghetti near-eastern.
With the fortune she had acquired from Achmed, Jill had bought (and was now exploiting) all rights.
The picture, for whatever reason, had won a Golden Lion award. "Money talks," Jill explained, without going into detail. "Money and my naked ass."
I suggested that we go over to Harry's Bar for a bite. We could down a few Bellinis (fresh peach juice and sparkling Prosecco wine-a drink invented by Giuseppe Cipriani) and look for the ghosts of Toscanini, Noel Coward, and Hemingway.
"You're sure you don't despise me?" Like Amy, she could be most cajoling under the umbrella of an apology.
"No."
"No?"
"No."
"You don't want me again, do you? I mean right away?"
Again I said no, not knowing whether this monosyllabic retreat would be interpreted as a consideration or disinterest.
"Fucking isn't everything, is it? I mean, everything in life?"
I did not answer. If it were, I would be underrating her status as a personality-a woman of the world, actress, celebrity. If it were not, I underrate her physical charms. Nor was this, I thought, the best moment to discuss the sweet mystery of life, to ask whence have we come, whither are we going? No more would I care to compare the vocal styles of Edouard and Jean de Reszke.
"But I love it!" She smiled at me with malicious detachment. Then she paid me back with my own counterfeit coin. "It makes me feel like a Turnverein'."
I told her that she was every luscious inch a Turnverein ... an anointed Turnverein.
"You know what," Jill said, "there never was anything between Achmed and me. There was nothing! Absolutely nothing!"
"Nothing?"
"Absolutely nothing. But...." She hesitated. "With one exception, maybe."
"What?"
"He liked to walk barefoot on my naked body. Said it was an old Saudi custom-like treading the grapes. Only I was not to make wine. Just get hot pants without pants."
"Did you?"
"I wore a veil, of course. Obviously no pants. I was always bare-assed on an oriental rug. And of course facing east. Like this."
She got off the bed, threw herself facedown ward on the Cipriani's rug. My eyes rolled with approval along the bare dorsal expanse, noted the waist, pinched in as if by an unseen napkin ring; noted the tight hillocks.
"Pretend I'm wearing a veil," she said. "Think of me as naked as a jaybird ... except for the veil."
I so pretended, so thought. I liked very much what I saw in the mind's eye; very much what I saw with the fleshly eye.
"Now walk on me. Walk on me with your bare feet. I want to feel you."
I had no heart for this sort of thing. The soles of my feet, even when on warm girl's flesh, pass on to me no promise of bliss. Nevertheless, a man of the world must accustom himself to the bizarre, the unexpected. I walked all over her. In time, I assumed, I might learn to walk on coals.
"When I do this sort of thing," she explained, "I always lie down facing the east. It's better that way."
"Yes?"
"I carry a compass in my pocketbook."
It was an odd feeling-my feet on the tight buttocks, indenting the curves; my feet pressing against vertebrae. She gasped when my weight pressed her lungs.
"Is good," she said, when breath was available. "Is very good."
I accepted what I considered to be another invitation. I got down on her, kissed the back of her neck, inhaled the musk-tinged fragrance of her hair.
"I turn you on too," she mumbled. "I always do, don't I?"
My tumescence answered for me.
Probing, prodding, acting entirely on its own, it entered fancy's meadow.
"You're hurting me," she said, raising her bottom in cooperation. "And you love it."
I reached under her, touched, through the thin, moist wall', my own penetration.
Jill sighed, squirmed, made sibilant sounds.
All was too much for me. There was no holding back-no need to hold back.
"Don't wait," she said. "Don't wait." Nor did I. Nor, apparently, did she.
"That was too much," she mumbled some moments later, when all pulsing ceased. "Too much." She then asked me if I would like to spend the winter with her in her palace at Abu Dhabi; cruise with her on her yacht in the Gulf of Oman; and make love to her, the very same way, on the steps of the mosque at Mecca. And could she buy me a eunuch?
She was, I assured her, exquisite.
There was an appreciative constricting of her innards, a kind of peristaltic "thank you." Jill then twisted about to face me. Her lips parted in a careless smile.
"Tell me now, Beauregard Benton ... tell me the truth. Aren't I much better than your aunt?"
"Much better," I said. In fact, to do with my aunt what I had just done with her would be unthinkable, if not incestuous.
She yawned, implying that she now felt very close to me--almost domestically so.
