"YOU'LL HAVE TO TEACH ME EVERYTHING," she said as she undid the knot in her shirt, breasts swinging into view. I went over to her and devoted a hand to either breast, cupped, fondled, ran forefingers around each nipple. I kissed her young girl lips, soft, moist, fragrant, clinging. She dropped her pants and nothing more obscured her lithe, sunburst body-naked, golden, glowing, sensuous.
I led her to the bed and kissed her eloquent places in descending order, tasting the subtle changes of salt to honey. I moved up her body and let her tongue stroke and slither about mine. She leaned forward and cradled my pressing passion between her breasts.
"What now?" she asked as her slim legs spread wide apart....
It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
CHAPTER 1
On the first of June Amy and I moved out to the Sea-brook shore; and on or about the first of June a strange change occurred in our entwinement.
Looking back, I am not sure which came first, the onset of Amy's odd unease or the arrival on set of blonde, bronzed June Poltergrue and her blonde, bronzed twin.
The sun and moon were then in conjunction, and vast, venal tides assaulted the dunes, sweeping off sea oats and slashing the myrtles.
It was then, from nowhere, without preamble or hint, that Amy made her startling pronouncement: "You want to see me made love to by another man."
"What?"
"You want to undress me first, don't you? Before an audience? Then watch...."
"Scarcely," I said, countering exaggeration with an understatement.
"I think you're beginning to get bored with me." She said this absently, her eyes on the sea.
"Do you get tired of the ocean?" Amy had great beauty, great grace, a combination of sudden passion and unpredictability. She could be exhausting, never tiring.
"You want to, don't you?" There was this suggestion by repetition. She pronounced her words with luminous precision, with care, drama, pride.
Had Amy lived some generations earlier, you would have expected her to maintain one of the great salons of Charleston, to have entertained the distinguished Marquis de Lafayette on the occasion of his visit of state; to have entertained Washington. And you would have expected her to say, with the words of another Charleston hostess and historian, "If Washington symbolized to me Strength and Virtue, so La Fayette personified chivalric Generosity, Honor, and Romance." And here she was suggesting, no matter how covertly, that it would please me to see her made love to by another man; implying, as sooner or later she would state openly, that I was to secure the other man, undress her, present her. As if I were Lord Hamilton, and Lord Nelson were to be my invited houseguest. ("Lord Nelson, may I call your attention to the exquisite fleur-de-lis on Emma's left buttock?")
"Why?" I launched an exploratory syllable.
"Because..." There was the polite hesitation. A lady, on the verge of a daring suggestion, always hesitates, as in the first steps of a minuet.
"Because what?"
"Because it would please you." She was sibylline, suggesting, cajoling the future. Then she added, "I enjoy pleasing you."
"How do you know it will please me?"
She smiled her special, cryptic way, dimpling her cheeks. "I know."
"What man?"
"Any man you choose. It really doesn't matter."
"You'd do it?" The proposition seemed absurd. It was not in character. Amy was eminently proper, reserved, a throwback to the traditions of azaleas and camellias, Low Country interpretations of Sir Walter
Scott. My Lady of the Camellias did not open herself wantonly to errant men.
"Of course ... if you watched."
"You want me to watch?"
"I want you to watch." She stroked her middle, as if in anticipation Her white shorts were tight. "You'd be inhibited."
"I'm inhibited as it is." She looked at me for confirmation. "I've never been free this way, have I?"
Her right hand, asserting itself, undid the top buttons of her shorts, slid inside to savor the pubic terrain. The gesture, I gathered, was unconscious-a classic case of the eloquence of body language.
"Sometimes yes. And sometimes no." Amy for the most part was reserved, as a Charleston lady is assumed to be reserved. She made no direct references to erotic acts, initiated no advances. Her long, sensuous legs, swelling breasts, were denied by her choice of words, her innocent references, by the fact that she did not often reach out in reflex to touch you. Not ordinarily. But there had been exceptional moments. There had been times when events quite out of the ordinary had set her free-when her naked bottom exposed to a selected audience, the tattooed emblem on the left buttock quivering, a livid streak, newly imposed, flaming across the milk-white skin, she had turned maenad.
"I don't like to talk about sexual intercourse."
A second after she said this she realized how stilted her words were. "Oh, fuck," she added, laughed, blushed, jerked her hand back from under her shorts.
I went over to her and eased down her shorts. She was stretched out on a chaise, facing the ocean. She lifted her hips cooperatively. "That was not an invitation."
"Of course not." I slid the shorts down over her ankles, tossed them to the chaise I had abandoned. She put her hand, fingers wide apart, over the trim but very black copse of pubic hair.
("Sometimes yes. And sometimes no." We had our private phrases, Amy and I. Only a short space back, in Mantua, in the Labyrinth Room of the Palazzo Ducale, Amy, warming to her role of the Duchessa Giovanna, so soon to be traduced, was fascinated by the inscription on the ceiling: Forse che si, forse che no. Her eyes had feasted on it when, later, she lay naked on the massive Gonzagan bed, surveyed by carved, lurid cupids-her own curves blending so aptly with the Renaissance flutings. Forse means perhaps. "Forse che si, forse che no." Amy would roll these syllables around her tongue whenever she chose to make herself more than usually alluring to me, hissing the sibillant s's, trilling r's in the repeated forse.)
"It's just the middle of the day."
"The Revolution will begin exactly at twelve-seven-teen." This was our private joke. The failure of the German Revolution. Too much orderliness. And Amy, brought up in the tradition of Adam symmetry and formal gardens, sometimes, from habit and instinct, struggled to keep lovemaking orderly. There is a time for cotillions and a time for bed. One does not waltz on a four-poster bed; neither does one writhe on the ballroom floor.
"You really want me?"
"Really. Really." Repetition establishes reality. ("What I tell you three times is true.") It also establishes the fact that the preceding question was heard.
"Really?" Dimples appeared. She was banal and brief.
"Scout's oath." I was equally banal, almost as brief. "You're impossible." Meaning incorrigible, insatiable, and flattering. The maternal nuances flowed, in folded no-nos, down to the precocious, demanding child. In honeyed, chiding words, full of birdsong, she informed me that I was a little boy. "Spoiled. Spoiled rotten."
Amy continued on for a reasonable and parliamentary stretch of time. A lady does not give herself lightly, at high noon. Then she undid her bra.
Thus were exposed spectacular breasts with aureoles exactly centered, breasts Cloris and I presented to the cinema world in the motion picture Monna Vanna. They were now a part of legend, a component of glory. They had been shown full-flowered in Paris Match, Oggi, Epoca, Der Stern. With slight retouching, pictures of them had appeared in Time and Newsweek.
"And you?" I asked. The fantasy, I suspected, was more stirring to Amy than to me; but Amy would never volunteer fantasies, never on her own voice such private, arcane urges.
Amy was, I repeat, too much of the old Charleston/Waverley-novels tradition to speak up on such matters. Hers was steadily the passive role; speak not of such until spoken to. But she was never impolite. Asked a question, she would not ignore it.
"And I? I what?"
"Bothered?"
"About another man?"
"I would take him, if you asked me to-if that's what you mean."
The pattern was clear; and not without interest-certainly to me as a writer. She would excite herself by imagining herself exciting me ... with the thought that she wanted me to think that she wanted me to excite her by undressing her and giving her to another man. Any man. Preferably a stranger. She would have no guilt; she would not be being unfaithful. Far from it; she would be more than faithful. All this would be shogun honor; the faithful mistress, giving her body, at her lover's request, to a visiting diplomat, for reasons of higher honor.
"Forse." Again the long, trilled r, the hissed s.
"I must ask you?" I thought it useful to wring from her a clear statement of program. She might be talking in full, dead seriousness; as possibly, she. might not. Forse che si, forse che no. The motto was coined for Amy. In that Labyrinth Room, she could well have been the Isabella d'Este who once trod lightly on the room's marquetry; and Isabella, I suppose, could as well have lain naked, proud, sacrificial, on that same bed, before our camera, staring dreamily at the ceiling.
Amy walked her fingers around the apex of her thighs, walked them in a gesture of thoughtfulness. "You've never seen me made love to by another man."
She was, I thought, unnecessarily biographical.
"A little boy," I said. I referred to little Randy, a youngster we had exported from Charleston to Mantua, Cloris and I, to make love to Amy on camera. (We had discovered that although Amy had qualms about modesty on camera in scenes with adult males, she was nonchalant, even avid, when the actors were boys.)
"A little boy doesn't count." Her tongue slithered around her lips, a mannerism she had acquired from Cloris.
"Other women."
"Women don't count."
"I was not counting."
"Cloris, perhaps." She was thoughtful. "But then, Cloris is you ... the Orlando switch."
I said nothing. Amy was in a confessional mood.
One does not interrupt confessions-all the less I, who had books to write.
"I have had in my life only two men. Really."
(This was the beginning of a theme that was later to become excessive in Amy. It dramatizes the omnipotence of thought; and perhaps the magic force of binary arithmetic.)
"Only two?" My accounting had a different tally.
"I mean had-capital H. John and you ... and John was my nephew."
"Jeff?"
"Jeff was my husband. Husbands don't count, do they?" Her smile curled as gracefully as petals of a magnolia bloom; she knew I knew what she knew, shared her pleasures, crested on her assets.
Amy had two great functional assets: her position in society, solid and unassailable; and the fact that her husband was a nonentity. Jeff Dellmore in no way interfered with her behavior; nor was there any reason for her to divorce him, no more than for Lady Hamilton, in her time, to divorce the convenient owner of the Portland Vase-now in the British Museum. Moreover, Jeff Dellmore had his fine uses. As factotum to the aging Senator Ashmead, sometimes his political manager, Dellmore could occasionally promote appointments, persuade obligated committee chairmen to allocate funds for unseemly causes.
Jeff shared Amy's background. The fact that he was a nonentity in no way diminished his standing. Position in Charleston is determined by ancestry, not achievement; and freshness in outlook is often taken as a sign of instability of character. like Amy, he had been conscientious and romantic, believing that marriage was intolerable without love, and love unthinkable without marriage. Since his inclinations, covertly and overtly, were bisexual, his course of action was considerably confused.
"I married young. You know that."
"Eighteen?"
"Nineteen. But it isn't the age that matters. I wasn't then quite awake."
"Jeff?"
"Jeff was never awake ... that is, with me. He actually preferred boys. But at that time I didn't know. Perhaps he didn't either."
"Yet...."
"Of course. It was expected of me. I was always a good wife."
"I would expect that."
"Just as I'm a good mistress." She moved her hand from the pubic bosk to her breasts, as if asking her breasts for confirmation. "And I am a good mistress ... aren't I?"
"I don't use the word." Mistress, today, is as passi as fainting. Language, however, has its genetic lags, and we English-users have as yet found no nimble substitute. We have a ready and proper argot for gadgets and trends, but our tongue is slow in coining moot words for erotic wayfarings.
"Don't I give you everything you want?"
"Everything." Amy did not try to excite me by getting me other girls, as did Cloris-Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley. But Amy was so handsome, loving, voluptuous, unstinting, that I scarcely had interest in other girls. Not that there were not occasionally vestigial stirrings.
"Of course I don't get you other girls, as Cloris did." She had a way of reading my mind.
"I don't need other women." This was the thing to say, even if, for the moment, it was reasonably true.
"You want me now?"
"Yes." I always wanted her, except at times when I was physically exhausted. And I had learned in Rome, when we were last there together, that when push came to shove she had vastly more staying power than I. She was, when totally aroused, literally insatiable. She could engulf me, as Vesuvius once engulfed Herculaneum and Pompeii. But then there was Cloris with us ... to stir, slither, command. "Even if its one-sided."
"Even one-sided."
"Show me."
I stood up, dropped my swim trunks. There was the engorgement. Ambulant, aggressive, impatient, bobbing slightly, an avid bowsprit.
"My, my," said Amy politely. A natural sweetness impelled her always to comment on my routine risings.
"Naturally," I said. "Come closer."
I went over to the chaise. She leaned forward and cradled my erection between her breasts. The fat light of noon clung to her skin. Her perfume, mixing with the tart salt of the sea breeze, spoke of soft pleasures. "Good," she said, and her nipples rose-those eloquent nipples which rose, on occasion, like prune-toned obelisks. ("It's so embarrassing," she sometimes lied, stroking them for emphasis. The prune tone would turn salmon, then red, and I would expect them, at any moment, to spurt lactic jets.)
"Good," I echoed.
She pressed the nipples into me, creating a kind of triple-penis configuration. Meanwhile she looked up at me, her face radiant with the innocence it acquired whenever her other parts asserted themselves in unabashed rut. The more demanding her passion, the more her face spoke of beatitudes-the more it glowed with the sweetness of a sly Madonna.
Since she had played nude in Monna Vanna, the motion picture we made in Italy, Amy had become almost exhibitionistic about her breasts. They had been much admired, fondled, photographed. They had drawn high praise In a country whose women almost all have praiseworthy breasts; whose men, weaned on such niceties, are aficionados of the full-blown bosom.
Nor were the reviewers of the picture any less appreciative of Amy's physical charms, lucent glories. Her excessive Charleston modesty was thus quickly eroded. Unconsciously she paraded the fact that what most women call modesty is little more than fear of the unpleased eye. As conscience is the fear of abuse.
Bit by bit, with little awareness of what she was doing, she made more and more of herself visible. The openings of her blouses grew wider. Her skirts rose higher. She found more and more occasions to dispense with bras; and often, when she seemed to be daydreaming, I observed her hand checking out the contours of her bosom, of her bottom; or tracing the minute separations at the apex of her thighs.
All this I recalled. I thought of the spread of Hogarth engravings showing stages in the undoing of a splendid young woman.
"Before I knew you, I could never do this," Amy said, inventing for herself a shining, virginal biography. She smiled a Madonna smile, turned innocent, glowing eyes to the horizon, as if reviewing, in sadness, her unfulfilled youth. Then, audaciously, she tongued the orifice of my extended device.
I was tempted to think of myself as a gifted teacher, dedicated to higher tasks. I was akin to the great Dr. Arnold, who, to promote higher learning, introduced discriminate flogging in the English public schools.
(The reader is referred to Tom Brown's Schooldays, the motion picture Cloris and I made in England and Spain, with the young-boy-bottomed Jennifer Digby, Sir Kenelm Digby's daughter, playing the part of Tom Brown.)
The waves lapped listlessly at the Seabrook sands. Seagulls, circling, made shrill, circling sounds. We, Amy and I, had before us a lyric world creased with sweetness.
Amy ran her tongue along the great artery of my erection, playing on it, like an accomplished flautist appeasing long-forgotten wars. Then, with aplomb, expertise, affection, she engorged her swollen toy, her lips pursing, slithering.
My ardor acquired pressure, pulsed, spurted three times in cataclysmic pride.
Amy, eyes glowing, smiled, sighed, swallowed. Then she dabbed at my adit with the back of her hand. Horrendous to the neat housewife is the spell of a dripping faucet.
"There," she said, her voice sweet and maternal. "There."
I was the little boy whose little nose needed wiping. Amy was the handsome mother, hand-hewn for incest. "Thank you."
"You're very welcome." She was quite pleased with herself.
She eyed my softening member, than pumped it slightly, to see if craft and concern could extract from it a final viscid drop.
"Put this in your next book." She had been pleased, not bothered, that I had written so baldly about her in my last book; and that we were now living quite pleasantly on royalties linked to my descriptions of the fine uses of her body. She pretended not to have read the book-to know it only from reports and innuendo and invaginating quips. ("I don't want to inhibit you.") Nor did she know how difficult it is to write aptly about small crevices.
Heightened nipples, the softened eye, the sly curvings at the corners of her mouth, all conspired to tell me that inside Amy the bright sap was rising. Perhaps she was about to tell me this herself, tell it to me in polite, ambiguous phrases culled from Walter Raleigh, Walter Scott, and Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
We were, however, interrupted. George Pollexfen rattled the door, the erudite Pollexfen, author of The Least Known Poems of Llywarch-Ludd and Understanding Uclidrwldrydd-both privately published.
"I hope I am not interrupting anything important," he said, with a scholar's cheery insensitivity. "Just happened to be passing by."
Without flutter, Amy covered her breasts. Her free hand sequestered the pubic furze. She covered herself, in short, with grace and modesty, as became an anointed lady.
"We were just passing by," Pollexfen continued, as if a passing detail in autobiography justified an inexcusable intrusion.
"Then you must come in," Amy said sweetly.
Pollexfen, I might add, is tall, thin, balding, wiry-a scholar gypsy altogether unaccustomed, I would assume, to seeing beauty bare. Much less Amy bare. Amy. he once told me, was for him a symbol of detached beauty, crystalline, sibylline, plangent, and grave. And that one day he intended to write about her, much as Dante wrote about Beatrice, Petrarch about Laura.
Here, now, was Amy in full, apocalyptic nakedness, gloriously real. Scholars when discomforted talk to themselves.
They become bardic, recite. And Pollexfen was a congenital scholar. "I am reminded, somehow, of the immortal lines of the great Celt Seaan Mor Clumhain. To wit: 'Oh, the slow cows with their full udders from the lands of the great plain of Tuam ... great Tuam.'"
He chanted, I must say, with ardor and solemnity, as would befit a less awkward occasion.
I heard a titter behind him as I disappeared in search of a beach robe.
Through a window opening on the porch I saw two blonde girls. They were young, slim, with long hair that shimmered in the sunlight.
"These are my nieces," Pollexfen said. "Elza and June. Twins."
I wondered if they were identical, if they had the same erotic fantasies, had their periods on the same days. And what kind of fantasies might they have? Standard American, I supposed: much kissing of quarterbacks in bright moonlight; eventually light intercourse in the strict missionary position-then babies and upside-down layer cakes.
There was not much promise there for me. Nor would Amy be of any help. Amy was not Cloris.
I shampooed and dried my middle, put on the terry-cloth robe, meditated on my postorgasmic emptiness. Aprks une debauche, on se sent toujours plus seul, plus abandonni. After a debauch, one always feels more alone, more abandoned. (This, of course, is not true. Baudelaire, for all his absinth-tinged shouting, was a Victorian romanticist; and a romanticist has a congenital need to feel himself frustrated. More, thus, becomes less; excess, a deprivation.)
Amy's voice floated to me through the open window. "Sunbathing is so terribly relaxing, isn't it?"
She had, indeed, the nonchalance of the Below-
Broad-Street lady. (I refer to the old quarter, where manners are as indigenous as Spanish moss, where custom is made, not followed.) She was still naked on her chaise. And obviously not in the sun.
"You have a tattoo," one of the girls announced with little tact Young people nowadays assume that whatever is visible is public domain. . "A fleur-de-lis," Amy said.
Since she was naked except where her hands gave cover, it would have been absurd to pretend that the tattoo did not exist, or that, once existing, it had migrated elsewhere.
"Wow."
"A crest."
"Wow," said the other girl, face to face, as it were, with a heraldic device so daintily positioned.
I tried to imagine her position. The tattoo obviously was visible; it had become a conversation piece. She had probably drawn up her knees, thus shielding her center, exposing the join of thigh and rump. As a writer, schooled in the rigors of Flaubert, I was inured, now, to the search for detail. Every moment differs from every other only in the configuration of detail; the way a shadow falls, the way a smile is formed.
To my surprise, I found that again I had an erection. Such recovery might be expected of an eighteen-year-old boy steeped in adolescent juices. Not in one twice that age. Amy, perhaps, had more insight than I would admit; there was a fitful stirring in me at the thought of exposing her. Such thoughts do not translate readily. Why should there be stirrings in me in the image of what I was not, myself, to receive?
"What does it mean? You know what I mean ... the tattoo?" One of the girls must be pointing.
I went back to the doorway. One of the girls was pointing. Amy was considerably naked.
"It means," said Amy, "that I am allergic to extremely young girls."
I went back to the bedroom, picked up a patchwork quilt which had been lying on the bed. I took it to Amy, draped her.
"Thanks," she said, smiling at me, pleased, apparently, that I should have concern for her modesty. "Now I can use my hands." She reached for a pack of cigarettes, put a Multifilter between her lips. Before I could reach over to her, she had located her own lighter, flicked her own flame, inhaled deep, with insouciance, aplomb, and a slight trace of boredom.
Pollexfen introduced me to his nieces. Elza was studying psychology and wanted to be an actress. June was studying acting and wanted to be a psychologist. June had the fuller bosom, Elza the longer legs; otherwise their parts were interchangeable, like the parts of finalists in the Miss Teenage America contests.
What struck me was their blondeness, their youth, their sly vitality. They would not be as yet as mystically moody as I had discovered Amy to be. They were still naive, I gathered; thus they promised all the pleasures that might be had from disrupting innocence.
"Bill is a writer," Pollexfen said, nodding toward me. The acknowledgment was courteous, even if empty, for Pollexfen, I knew well, had never read anything I had written. To him nothing was worth reading unless deserving of footnotes. Literature calls for lexicons, concordants, explanations.
"And a professional cocksman," Amy added, reading my fantasies and expressing no wish to be helpful.
"Coxman?" Elza's eyes brightened, bosom heightened. "We love sailing."
"Sailing..." June echoed, bosom swelling. "Sailing ... and surfing ... and light necking."
Amy had used both hands to light her cigarette, one to hold the lighter, the other to shield lighter and cigarette-which is to say, the flame-from the splay of the wind. Her covering, unattended, slid down the white slopes of her breasts. Cleavage widened. The faint rim of aureoles rose, almost imperceptibly, over the fabric horizon.
Pollexfen's eyes sipped the honey of revelation. They widened. His brows arched in reflex. "I wonder, after all, what do we mean when we ask: What is the meaning of life?" He said this reflectively, slowly, as if giving the question profound thought. He had the scholar's love for irrelevance.
I, on the other hand, stared at the adolescent centers of the two girls. Both wore identical light blue shorts, laced, along a wide, open space, upon the thighs. Through the fretted margin was an ample spread of golden flesh. The gold was uniform, implying that the sun had played freely on their open bodies.
I found myself talking nonsense, as if drunkenness had suddenly come on me. "Life," I said, "is a small egg, in golden gimbals, hung high in an eyrie in Ecuador."
Sudden excitement sometimes unstrings my reason. I saw before me the two girls, writhing, radiant, totally delighted, en brochette. Ossa would lie on Pelion, I atop Ossa. The ultimate positioning would not be exactly what the dictionary would define as en brochette. More would it be successive broaching. But in the fine spread of passion there is room for a twist in semantics.
"Of course." Pollexfen nodded in agreement. "That obviously is what life is. But what is life's meaning?
"The unexamined life,' as Socrates, away from his wife, once said, 'is not worth the living.'"
His eyes, turned to me for the moment, drifted back to Amy. Suddenly I grasped his train of thoughts-I could come up with unexpected pronouncements, as did Sherlock Holmes in the acrid smoke of Baker Street. This was the inference of Hamlet's soliloquy. To be ... or not to be? And I remembered that Pollexfen once had told me that Amy, while at Vassar, had once played Hamlet. ("And a splendid Hamlet she must have been, with those long, tapering legs, sheathed in sheer black tights.") And here, these past moments, he had been staring at those same splendid legs, escaped now, totally escaped, from the sheer black tights. There was even an added fillip-the tattoo.
Amy suggested that I make us all drinks. "Your special." I went to the kitchen, dumped half a dozen pina-colada packets into the Mixmaster, added a pint of rum, powdered sugar, ice cubes. The rum, I saw to it, was a triple portion.
The mixer whirred. The waves slapped ceaselessly at the waiting beach. The seabirds sounded their casual notes. I felt the sap rising, once again, in my middle.
A slight excursus, at this point, might be useful. I had been in Sicily, with the Countess of Liechtenstein, while Cloris and Amy made the last parts of Monna Vanna, in Mantua. ("You must not inhibit her.") We were all to meet in Rome. But Amy, in the interim, for secret reasons, strange, mood-ridden, had returned to Charleston. I followed her, found her, alone, not happy, in her beach house on Edisto Island, which is a jungle-swept barrier island south of Seabrook, north of Hilton Head. Edisto, with its ghosts, its entwined sadness, its palmettos and chigoes, is an hour's drive from Charleston. Edisto, in short, was too remote for my purposes: and Amy's house, a century and a half old, of unpainted cypress, was without telephone. A happy alternative was Seabrook Island, equally beautiful, half the distance newly developed. I leased for the summer the splendid beach house on whose front porch, overlooking the surf, Amy, in spectacular undress, was now ensconced.
Seabrook is a wild island of enlaced magnolias, palmettos, live oaks, scrub and loblolly pines, sand dunes, salt marsh, wax myrtles. Deer leap across the roads, as do the cottontail rabbits, the latter in more precipitous, staccato leaps. Everywhere are the free, wild sounds of birds-wood birds, field birds, marsh birds, seabirds. Everywhere are the invisible gnats, gnawing at your pores.
To reach our cottage, which was flanked by dunes, you drove from Johns Island to Seabrook, stopped at a security gate, stated your business to a Pinkerton guard, then drove another three miles along a winding road, dodging islands of trees, skirting marsh lagoons-eventually a golf course (where, I was later to learn, the twins often played) and the Seabrook Club (where the twins habitually lunched and exchanged teenage speculations about the physical endowments of the club's male members).
"Spectacular," Amy called the island. "A tropical paradise. But after a few months, let's face it, a soupgon monotonous." Her thesis was that ocean waves tell you about all they have to tell you in three or four weeks; after that, they repeat themselves.
The drinks, and their replacements, were downed rapidly, as are most drinks at midday in summer in and near Charleston. Charlestonians are inveterate drinkers, immoderate talkers; and each activity, talking and drinking, spurs, implements, consummates the other. And I, no enemy to either, added to each fresh round of pina coladas more rum than was in the round preceding.
Pollexfen spoke of the book he was writing: the definitive study of an obscure Welsh bard named Crymnwhylggh, which he pronounced "crunch."
"Incantation. Pure incantation. You must, of course, not know what it means. If you know what it means, it slips away from you."
Amy loyally discussed my last book, the book about her. "Obscene," she announced. "So beautifully obscene."
The girls thought this exceedingly funny. Their bare navels leaped up in synchronized glee. "Wow," said June. "Ditto," said her sister.
This book, unhappily titled Between Cloris and Amy, was not well received in Charleston, as might have been expected. For in this sea-lapped city, where DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen once sang odes to wayward beauty, every family, behind the screenings of high brick spiked garden walls, cherishes its perfumed privacies; cherishes the intimacy it enjoys with incestuous camellias. And here social distinction is inseparable from the absence of publicity.
And I, in my insensitive way, had said too much, too soon. Charleston was not, as yet, ready to embrace Amy as Paris embraced George Sand; or London, my Cloris, Lady Cholmondeley. The conservative Charleston Mercury, in a reluctant review, had this to say:
To write adequately of a personality as rich, abundant, talented as Mrs. Dellmore, whose husband is one of the chief political influences in this state, and whose ancestors (Mrs. Dellmore's) include two signers of the Declaration of Independence, were a task demanding no small share of sympathy and wisdom. Unhappily, these qualities are conspicuously absent from Mr. Benton's book. This fictionalized biography, with its slipshod writing, its inexcusable invasion of the boudoir, its utter lack of taste and purpose, is a fair specimen of the kind of biographical work which seems to give so much satisfaction to such a large share of the sensation-seeking public. Indeed, the book would be entirely worthless, and undeserving of comment, were it not for the first 125 pages, which contain some rather colorful descriptions of the Low Country wildlife.
"I have always intended to read you," Pollexfen said, and I was reminded, somehow, of that delightful woman in Rome who read the future in the veinings around the nipple. "But the days, even with daylight saving, are always too short."
"You have read him?" Amy looked at June.
"Wow," June said.
"Wow," said her sister.
In my jaundiced mind's eye I saw the two of them, facedown, bodies parallel, on some convenient couch. From behind I would plunge into the parallel tunnels, each in turn. And each girl, in her own way, as I passed through the adit, would squeal the appreciative "Wow."
"Wow, indeed," Amy said, her dimples deepening.
"So I understand." Pollexfen tapped his chin to signal the onset of scholarly reflection. "Rather racy, I hear."
I looked beyond him to the beach. There was the glancing green of the wild dune grasses. A lone grackle, tail high, stalked the snaking beach foam, snipping errant bits of lamprey, bits of whelk, from the wet sand.
Pollexfen stroked an imaginary beard and hummed:
Where you get dat pongee shirt? I get 'em from Mull ally. Where Mullally keep he store? King and Bottle Alley.
like most Charlestonians, he had consummate tact In Charleston, distinction comes not from wealth, or fame, or naked power, but from the grace notes of gesture and talk.
Amy flashed, appreciatively, her strong white teeth. The courtesy was not unnoticed. Even as liberated as she now was-or seemed to be-she did not savor discussion of herself; certainly not in print.
Perhaps it would be more to the point to say that she was not as free in Charleston as in Rome, in Mantua, or spread-eagled on the terrace of the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia.
"Are you still virgins?" she asked June.
"We are twins," June said.
"That is not what I asked you."
"Yes." Elza strummed on her treasure. "We're still pretty young."
Amy would not have spoken out about virginity, certainly not asked about it directly, when I first knew her. Europe, the motion picture, experiment, had loosened her tongue, quickened her curiosity. The change, I thought, enlarged her charm. Propriety and a certain daring go well together, each complementing the other.
(I fantasized June prone, on Amy's bed, saying, "One inch only, please. Ah ... that's it ... bastal" Elza would then fasten a plastic flange to my extension, at that point-to celebrate entrance but defy penetration.)
"We should do something about all this," Amy said, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. It was not in character for Amy to promote my erotic entertainments. In this she was quite unlike Cloris. But, as a proper Charlestonian, Amy was never at loss for a polite sentiment.
"Virginity?" June lifted an eyebrow.
"Virginity."
Pollexfen was reminded of an old joke. "Oh, Mesopotamia, that beautiful word!"
"We like it," Elza announced, stretching her legs and staring down at the presumed residence of her jewel.
I was disappointed. I could see little hope of lasting friendship arising from the Law of the Excluded Middle. (Except as a warning, a negative maxim. In logic as in lechery, the Middle must be distributed.)
All about us the noon birds sang their several songs: the sparrows, "sweet, sweet"; the cardinals, "pretty, pretty, pretty" and "boreeta, boreeta, boreeta."
I stared stoically at the foam-flecked sea. There seemed little else to do.
CHAPTER 2
Amy seemed dreamy, disconnected, appraising foam and seabirds with an inner eye, when later that afternoon we went for a swim. She said little, and even that little was hushed by the wind.
Our house, the last on the beach-in the direction of Kiawah-was far from neighbors, far out of range of prying eyes. Thus, without awkwardness, without sparking island scandal, we usually swam naked. But today, with no explanation, Amy elected not to expose herself. Not that it mattered. Amy was more sensual, penis-titillating, in her sheer, extreme cutaway swim-suits (worn without bosom constrictors) than when nude.
The water was warm, And the sea, for once, was quiet, a wet plateau at whose edge a few waves, from time to time, rose listlessly, then fell with an unconcerned thud. Baby porpoises sported offshore. An occasional pelican floated over us. On the beach a lone sandpiper ran a gleeful obbligato along the margins of a lapping wave.
I wanted to say something about "Pippa passes," but held back in fear of a spoonerism.
Afterward, under the shower, her long legs scissoring, her swimsuit underfoot, her sculptured breasts swinging, Amy extended her distance. She pulled back, sounded a slightly annoyed "Don't" in response to my customary reflex touching.
"No?" My hands were on her breasts, as they so often were. Not to have them so placed, in lust and affection, when Amy was undressed and close, would be a sin of omission, like not standing during the formal playing of the national anthem.
"Please don't." She brushed my hands away.
The rejection induced erection.
Life plagues us with such contradiction of opposites, the phallic translation of the Hegelian dialectic.
Amy leaned over to dry her legs (the shower had been stopped), and her breasts swung symmetrically, casually, full-firmed, inverted cones.
Behaving, now, like a sleepwalker, a pure spirit, a latter day Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Amy pretended not to see my extension, nor to feel it, when, even unavoidably, in the shower stall, it brushed against her. Certainly not to observe its sang de boeuf coloring. Nor to note that this tone matched the coloring of her unleavened nipples.
Abstractedly, mechanically, she dried her pubic hair (which had been high-styled, in Rome, at Cloris' insistence, by Vidal Sassoon). Abstractedly, mechanically, she walked up the stairs in front of me, from the ground-floor shower to the upstairs bedroom.
Her hips gyrated.
The tattoo danced.
"Do you miss Cloris?" she asked, en route, full naked.
The inference, I gathered, was that we were both aware that Cloris was always avid. Amy was not. She had moods, spells of withdrawal. She was not easily to be understood; nor did she, in full truth, understand herself.
A man always avid (she overrated me) would, after a long separation would, in time, miss an always-avid girl.
"No," I said. I did, of course, miss Cloris. But I am also an erotic realist. It has been shown in modern game theory (vide: Von Neumann and Morgenstern) that it is not possible to maximize advantages for two variables at the same time. I had chosen (at Cloris' urging) to come to Charleston to make love to Amy, to enjoy Amy, to write about Amy. But with that choice were realities, the realities that made Amy, au fond, an absorbing study. Cloris and I could share Amy. We were a body with three parts, like Caesar's Gaul. But Amy, ascendant, would not share me-at least, that was my belief. And she was now ascendant. We were together on a lonely island.Cloris was across the sea.
I slapped my erection and repeated the polite "no."
"No?"
"No."
"I do."
Amy was always surprising. Whenever I felt that I had at last gotten to know her, could write about her with the sharp insights Flaubert had of Madame Bo-vary, she surprised me. Madame Amy Dellmore was not like that, not what I thought she was-not exclusively proud, pristine; not exclusively Messalina. She was alternatingly mysterious and forthright, erotic and withdrawn.
She had, I gather, a certain fixed number of moods, a finite collection of personalities, just as Jupiter has a countable number of moons, each with its own orbit and timing A jaundiced astronomer could predict the precise location, at each moment, of each of Jupiter's satellites-and Galileo once suggested that we use such moons as a universal clock. But to me Amy's moods were not as predictable as Jupiter's moons. On chance encounter there was no telling what to expect.
In a woman less gifted with weaving beauty, such uncertainties would not be so acceptable. Nor so interesting. Beauty is a bribe.
This, at any rate, is the dictum of a penis sang de boeuf.
"You're tired," I said.
"Oh, God!"
"Hell," I said, with equal ambiguity. "You want me?"
I always wanted her, I assumed she assumed. "Why do you ask."
"Oh, God."
A fresh breeze swept in from the sea. It rattled the windows.
She threw herself facedown on the bed. The tattoo stared up at me.
"You want me ... even so."
"Yes," I said. I did not, in truth, want her quite that much. And I had been abundantly pleasured by her, as kissing kin, only a few hours before. But years of Machiavellian intrigue had taught me never to pass by the offer of a carnal gift. In such matters, consideration is seldom taken as a kindness, a beau geste. Consideration is taken as retreat, coldness, withering of heart. Better to risk burnings and chafings. Better to take what can be had when it can be had, even if one spills one's seed in an ear, a pulsing navel-or spurts it on a Chinese rug.
"You mean it?" The rhetorical question.
"Of course."
"Not 'of course.' Most men are not gluttons."
"Women?"
"Women?" She raised her buttocks. "Sometimes. Cloris was."
I nodded, even though I knew that with her face in the pillows she could not see me. I nodded to myself, to confirm memories. "In Rome ... I know."
"In Rome?" She laughed the little two-syllabled laugh of understatement. "In Rome. In Mantua, Perugia, Civitavecchia. She never had enough."
"And you?"
I sensed an unseen blush spreading obscenely across her face and draining into the pillow. Her hips twitched. "For God's sake, Bill ... take me and shut up."
Unlike Cloris, she did not assume that the virtue of hospitality stands midway between memory and ostentation.
I kissed the tattoo. This was my routine gesture of affection and passion, a salute to the posterior flag.
"Thank you," she said as my tongue languorously retraced the outlines of the lily's leaves.
She then used a verb which I was surprised to hear mumbled by her own legitimate lips, but which derives from references in French to the alleged practices of Bulgarians. (And which conjured in my mind images of the round-bottomed horses painted by Bouguereau.)
I tried to turn her over. Amy held firm, like a wrestler determined to resist the ultimate surrender, the touching of shoulders to the mat.
"No, Bill. ... No."
I suddenly remembered that my given name was Beauregard. Strange are the byways of association. Beauregard Benton. Given Verner's Law, Grimm's Law, time, and Gresham's Law (which holds that bad currency will drive out good), God knows how my name could erode. Bad puns came to mind; infantile-but my own.
"No what?"
She resisted the turning, flattened her front to the bed. "No."
"No."
"Not in front."
I contemplated, philosophically, the alabaster bottom, cleaved for pleasure. The future, like the past, has no destination. Yet here was a moment, Zen-perfect, that would never, could never, repeat itself. The poised buttocks, passive, serene; perversely parted. Amy's mood, combining withdrawal and impatience. The red glow of the sun as it set beyond the North Edisto, and now spending itself, in little wedges, on Amy's back.
"The little gate." She was explicit.
"It is so small," I said.
She raised her hips.
I was talking, I realized, much too much. I gazed lovingly at the dingle before me, and my private daimon suggested that I shut up.
"The little gate." She slithered a pointer finger around a sloped buttock. "There."
She moved her knees apart. The crevice widened.
All of this was so unlike Amy-a ninety-degree turn from Amy to which I had become accustomed. There had been the forays in Europe, of course, but these had been in the grand manner, like the Merry Widow's visit to Maxim's. Nor has she ever been the aggressor; always she was the sleeper waiting to be awakened.
Why, now, I asked myself, did she insist on holding back from me the loving, wedge-shaped hollow from which the sibyl speaks? In which freshets spring? Why this little gate?
My debate, of course, was inner monologue, the voice of the voyeur. It was also professional soliloquy. As a novelist, I was also Amy's biographer. Her thoughts were my grist. It was important for me to know, at least guess, why she did whatever she did, at the time and in the way she did it.
I am, I'm afraid, a collector of fantasies, of secret views, the muffled boom of distant drums. I remembered the time I had taken Cloris in obverse position, in London, in moonlight, in the tower of St. Paul's Cathedral. She had obligingly taken off her clothes, obligingly leaned forward over a brass telescope which was pointing at Bedlam. After polite climax, and still in forward recumbency, she had waved to the spires of nearby Wren churches.
I warned Amy-it was only polite: "It will hurt."
"You can write about it."
Posterior slopes are characteristically expressionless. Perhaps sarcasm was implied in her comment. Benevolence. Even an ultimate decadence. It was not easy to know.
"My writing about it would embarrass you."
"Nothing embarrasses me anymore. Nothing."
Perhaps this was Amy's way of revolting against the rigid forms set up by ancestors who threw away tea. Throwing tea is an aspect of revolt. And so, by the same token, is the stretching of sphincters.
I steadied myself, thrust, missed.
"You're too high." Her voice was steady, casual, untroubled, although I had presumably struck the coccyx. I thought back, with some skepticism, on Adam Smith's notion, that a man bent only on his own self-interest is guided, as it were, by an invisible hand.
Once more I tried, using furrow in the cupid's bow as a hindsight. And once again I missed. Perhaps, Amy suggested, I would prefer a little boy, fresh from the playing fields of Eton. And it came to me, of a sudden, that we who deplore the drabness of middleclass customs sometimes underrate the facility and cushioned comforts of the missionary position.
"Go to the bathroom," Amy said over her left shoulder. "Look in the cabinet."
Anatomical differences, cultural differences, the dark separation of poetry from common sense, left Amy indifferent to the fact that my problem was one of visibility, not friction. The adit is not to be seen. One obscures it by one's own frontal parts. And the greater one's avidity, the less accessible is the minuscule entrance. It is approached, as is a proton in a particle accelerator, only with high hopes and the spread-of-probability theory.
The wind stiffened, jostling the curtains. Amy sighed a special sigh, which I interpreted to mean sadness, resignation, and daring. So many of her gestures combined extremes. This, I think, was the crux of the fascination she had, in so many ways, for so many-man, woman, and hobbledehoy.
The sigh rose to muted fullness, crested, followed me to the bathroom. Whether or not friction was the problem, as she seemed to think, it would have been boorish of me to debate the suggestion. It was enough that she had been so thoughtful, unabashed, concerned. Again, the spell for me hung on the sudden change, the high fall, the nuance of a wish. And it pleased me to recall that buttock, like turbot and halibut, comes to us from the Old High German bozan, to beat.
I returned with what was required.
It is not wise, or kind, and scarcely gallant, to go into detail at this point. Suffice it to say that I made an odd discovery. Although friction had not been my initial problem, lubrication removed the problem. A soft, clinging film of Nivea cream converted the dell of the nether cheeks to the slopes of an amorous funnel. like Archimedes in his bath, I could then justifiably shout, "Eureka!"
Lubrication paced eroticism, eroticism constriction, constriction ekstasis. In a single, apocalyptic moment, I understood, savored, the yogic charms of peristalsis. There was union, as it were, with the ongoing, cradling, cosmic pulse.
I envied, for the moment, the Italian count to whom, her nephew maintained (Or was it Larrine?), Amy granted such favors, with Miss Wescott watching, in the Hotel Cipriano, in Venice-granted them without taking her eyes from the view of the Piazza San Marco, across the lagoon. Amy, perhaps, had become bored with me. The thought was not a happy one. A man's ego hinges on the opposite. He will admit to any vice, any failing, other than that of boring a woman. This is the ultimate illness, a violence to the machismo of spirit.
We pursue only what we do not have. I did not have Amy in the sense that Amy had me. I am, I believe, reasonably simple, in. spite of my wayfarings, curiosity, infidelities. There was thus little to hold Amy's interests over a long span, any more than did the pelicans that, in predictable patterns, glided past us in solemn rounds. Even now, I suspected, she was offering herself with oblique hospitality, chiefly, I think, to pique her own curiosity, to challenge herself, to lift herself out of herself.
It was then that the phone rang, rang in timed rhythm with the last spasms of wly sphincters. The odd coincidence of ring and constriction seemed to imply that there is an order in nature too subtle for the play of simple reason.
Amy reached for the phone without changing position, without ejecting me from my pleasure trove. There was even an ultimate conspicuous, caressing constriction, the gallant gesture of a flirtatious python. Such is the beau geste of an anointed lady.
She said her initial "hello" in a restrained way, as if greeting minor royalty from her box at Ascot. There was then an eloquent silence. She nodded her head several times. Once or twice she smiled. At long last, in a voice muted, slightly hoarse, she said, successively, "Yes ... yes ... of course ... of course not ... in a little while."
At this point, I extricated myself. It was, I thought, the proper thing; one does not overstay one's welcome.
Amy, unpinned, turned herself over. She looked up at me, not seeing me; and I report at this time that it is most disconcerting to be looked at but not seen. "I have to go somewhere." Her right hand instinctively cupped itself over the pubic center as if to protect it from the baleful glare of some evil eye. (I had seen this reflex once before, in Sicily, in the mountains, where every girl is in fear of l'iettatura. Carlotta, who first came to me in my room at the San Domenico Palace in Taormina-mistaking me for someone else-always, after lovemaking, gestured a sign of the cross over her uncrossed loins.)
"Now?"
"Right now. And don't ask me where."
Amy had a way of dressing that was more sensual by far than most women's undressing. Much stemmed from her expression-unsmiling, demure, sometimes sad. Much stemmed from her deliberateness. She dressed slowly. And she fondled herself as she dressed. Her hand moved slowly, as my hand might, as any other lover's might, over each roundness. Then, there was the mock show of modesty. She would turn her back to me, for example, as she slid into her panties, tugging at folds to offset tightness. Then, facing me, she would keep her breasts covered, not moving her arm until the bra was in place.
All of this, mind you, after maenad rites, after giving with abandon what she could not freely mention-in mixed company.
I watched her from the bed, curious, wondering.
I watched her as, in sequence, she put on stockings and high-heeled shoes, garter belt, lace panties. Then came skirt, bra, blouse. She sat for a moment in front of her dresser, applying eye shadow, lip rouge, perfume-surveying herself in the mirror and finding the image pleasing.
At the door she turned and blew me a kiss. "You can have the twins if you wish. I give them to you."
A half-minute later I heard the start of her car. There was the screech that comes when the starter is used after the motor is running. There was the screech that announces that the steering wheel has been turned too far.
After that there was only the thud of the surf, the wind in the pines, and the soft screams of circling gulls.
After Amy left, I poured myself half a tumbler of whiskey (Smith's Glenlivet), took a deep gulp, put paper in the typewriter.
A sober study of novels had taught me two things: (I) to write in detail about my love affairs (I learned this from d'Annunzio); (2) to write quickly, while the details were still hot. I learned the latter from Stendhal, whose Contessa Sanseverini so much reminded me of Amy.
I now wrote, quickly, truthfully, with love, with passion. Amy was an extraordinary subject, extraordinary study. Nor did she object to what I wrote about her. (Pehaps because she never read what I wrote about her. "Darling, write anything about me that you please. Anything. Just don't show it to me.")
Thus I had written about Amy's and my life in Italy (sometimes with Cloris), just as earlier I had written about Cloris-and Cloris' and my life together in Italy and London.
Life had become sweet, quite sweet; leisured, profitable, and sweet.
Amy had once been very establishment, professionally Charlestonian, extensively proper. Eventually, however, she was brought out, as they say. Enticed, unveiled, undone.
Cloris and I had a hand in this "bringing out." But we were not the first.
There had been Larrine Lamboll, this girl who looked much like Cloris (slim, a tennis player's long muscles, ridged cheekbones, radiant), and whom Cloris had met in Rome. Larrine had moved to Charleston, taken an imposing, colonnaded house on the East Battery. She was heiress to an East Lansing ball-bearing fortune, had made a name for herself, in New York and London, as a painter of abstractions. In Charleston, however, she entertained herself painting nudes of Amy. "And one thing," Amy once informed me, "soon led to another."
"With Amy so naked so much of the time, it seemed the most natural thing in the world." This was Larrine's version. But it was Amy, I later learned, who, to Larrine's surprise, made the overtures. They had gotten drunk together one night. Larrine had passed out. When she woke, she found herself naked and on the floor. Amy, also naked, was kissing her in unexpected ways. "T had been so afraid of shocking her ... and then ... there she was with her tongue inside me."
There had been Isabelle Wescott, Larrine's friend.
Miss Wescott owned the spectacular Berkeley Hall, a famous plantation, whose Georgian house overlooking the Ashley was recently named a national landmark. Miss Wescott stripped her and whipped her. And Amy had let her.
These stories came back to me as I wrote out my impressions of the day's happenings, as I tried to imagine where she might be at this moment-and what was the meaning of the odd call.
I thought, too. of the odd announcement: "You can have the twins if you like. I give them to you."
Was Amy at long last about to give me girls, as Cloris did? Giving them Indian fashion, giving and taking back, giving and sharing?
Or was this a cryptic good-bye? With these two girls I thee divorce.
I drank more Glenlivet goes down pleasantly, stirring memories, old lusts.
"On the first day of June..." I wrote:
... Amy and I moved out to the Seabrook shore; and on or about the first day of June a strange change occurred in our entwinement.
Looking back, I am not sure which came first, the onset of Amy's odd unease or the arrival on set of blonde, bronzed June Poltergrue and her blonde, bronzed twin.
The sun and moon were then in conjunction, and vast, venal tides assaulted the dunes, sweeping off sea oats and slashing the myrtles . ...
In the sweep of alcohol there is a richness of hopes. I saw Amy. Elza, and June joined together in friendship's garland. I saw the four of us, in a circular bed, linked amorously like the carbon atoms in the chemist Kekule's benzene ring.
There is also ingenuity. I saw on my middle finger the wonder-working ring of Hans Carver, the ring which kept all young wives constant. Hans Carver, it will be recalled, dreamed that this thaumaturgic band had been placed on his finger. On waking, he found it no more than love's laborae.
Was Amy now in alien hands? I did not object, basically; I was not possessive. I was curious. Was she at this moment undressed, about to be fondled? And, if so, sadly, in passive surrender? Or was she making an offering of herself, freely, gladly, while fluting little birdsongs?
I heard, in the distance, the restless heave of the surf, the hiss of the crested waves.
Then, in some way, I got myself to bed. What followed is not clear; alcohol dissolves memory as well as the superego.
When awareness came back to me, Amy's mouth was on mine. There was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a rich exchange of whiskey breaths.
"Take me," she said amiably, her voice throaty, low contralto, heavy with peach fuzz.
She had of a sudden put aside her Old Charleston restraint, her classic Below-Broad-Street reticence.
In a trice, or sooner, she was astride me. No "May I."
"Would you like...? " or "Please."
Nor did she hesitate to grasp my extension, grasp it, knead it, shake hands with it-ultimately taking it inside her as if sheathing a sword. She was quite sure of herself, enormously wet, surprisingly deft.
"Take me," she repeated in her well-ordered, maenadic voice. The order was verbose. It was also superfluous, for no other course was possible. Moreover, the act ordered was already in progress. Already there was a mighty churning, a hard grinding of loins.
Nerve ending spoke glowingly to nerve ending, flesh to flesh, and she made many primal, sibilant sounds.
Then she came. In viscid gushes, with tumult and abandon, a wild quivering, and a spread of hot honey.
I understood, then, how natural it was, how loving, for the Bacchae to tear Orpheus to pieces, that night of round revels, on a glossy hill in Thrace.
And I resolved in my next book to chant the praises of Amy's eloquent, oracular part. I would ring the cyclic changes, I would celebrate its slow unfoldings, its diluvial climax, its violent close.
"I must say," Amy eventually said, larding kisses on my eyelids, "this beats buggery all get-out."
We could conclude thus, I suppose, that Amy would ever be para-Bohemian; for the benchmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for purposes to which they are not adapted. Such at least is the dictum of Mr. Max Beerbohm, of whose judgments I am always trustful. You are a Bohemian if you would gladly use a straight razor for buttering your toast at breakfast, and you aren't if you wouldn't. Amy, understandably, wouldn't
I was the first to wake the next morning. Amy lay next to me, face buried in the pillows, a thigh slung over me.
Outside, wood birds, in unison, sang their several hallelujahs-sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, grackles, and mourning doves. The air was already fragrant with honeysuckle, jasmine, sea salt. It was a balmy air, dampish, clinging.
I went to the bathroom to drain off tension. Then I went to the kitchen, poured orange juice for the two of us, put coffee and water in the Mr. Coffee machine. ("A perfect cup of coffee ... every time.")
I made toast, spread it with orange marmalade.
Then I took our two breakfasts back to the bedroom.
Amy was still asleep, breathing softly into the pillows, a picture for Good Housekeeping's cover. Innocence hung over her like Damocles' sword. Innocence was spelled out in the smile on her half-turned face, on the corners of her lips.
Slowly I pulled down the sheet. Voyeur that I am, I like to look at Amy's body whenever it is exposed, or can be exposed, and she is not aware of my looking.
The sheet descended.
Uncovered first were the white shoulders. Then the soft back with its pinched-in waist. On the sides were marks from my nails.
I pulled the sheet back to her ankles. She sighed, aware, even in sleep, that she was being uncovered.
Then came the astounding surprise: Amy's buttocks were crisscrossed with angry red whip marks. One mark, missing altogether the sensual crease, trailed apologetically down the slope of the right thigh.
We drove to town in my car later that morning. Amy had many things to do. She always had many things to do; this I had discovered soon after coming to live with her.
In daylight hours she was seldom the mysterious, dreamy beauty who had figured so vividly in my obsession with her, in my accounts of her. She was a practical, active woman, much concerned with Charleston political affairs, the preservation of Charleston's historical and architectural values. The present city, with its tourist attractions, its restorations, its frenzies of landscaping, the cult of the garden, owed much to her.
Yet she seldom spoke of such doings. I knew of most of them only from items I had read, stories people told me. Most of my time with Amy had been spent in Europe. I knew at first hand her talents as an actress, as the beauty who had starred in Monna Vanna, whose naked body and cryptic smile had first been savored at the motion-picture festival at Cannes.
Nor did Amy speak much this morning. She looked dreamily out of the car, dreamily at the marsh in which white herons, here and there, stood passively, philosophically, with Zen eyes, surveying mud.
The Low Country is a sensuous place. Everywhere are vivid colorings, shadow patterns, sounds of birds, trees, water. Fragrances blend in uncountable variations: pluff mud with sea salt; pine and honeysuckle with pluff mud and oysters. There are traces, at times, of magnolia aromas, of the persuasive tea olive. The blue of the sky, gray-green of creeks and lagoons, interspliced greens and browns of marsh grass, leap up at you, announce their missions, lapse back into the spreading background. If you let yourself go, you slip slowly into a miasma of floating images, in which no form long has sharpness and distinction. Nor do sharpness and distinction anymore seem to matter. And such was my feeling this morning, aside Amy, as we drove slowly along the island road, swept by a loveliness not outdone, in my brief wanderings, by the fashionings of any other place in this world.
"Pretty," Amy said, establishing our rapport in understatement. In Charleston one does not emphasize the obvious.
"Pretty," I said. I pointed to a meadow where gail-lardias were in bloom and a mongrel puppy played, unaware of its mixed ancestry.
She put her hand on my knee. "You didn't mind about last night?"
"I got a lot of writing done."
Mind? I minded very much. An emptiness comes over us when we are deserted. We become aware, quite suddenly, that our thoughts and feelings, our seriousness even, are like parts of an arch that hold together only because they press against a keystone. When the keystone is taken away, all tumble; what is left is only a vague recollection, an untrustworthy frame for a vacuum.
Moreover, I had acquired, these past weeks, an unholy sense of possessiveness about Amy. She was mine, more or less exclusively. Not that I wanted possession, any more than I would want a cloud, or the sea spray. It came.
I bypass the suddenness of her leaving, the odd call, the easy acquiescence. Nor will I speak of the marks on her body.
"You wrote about me? About us?"
"Yes." The statement had a masochistic ring. Amy had been out pleasuring herself, if being hurt can have such an ambivalent meaning. And no doubt taking pleasure in giving pleasure-all offstage to me.
The "yes" was enough. Nothing was to be had from talk with Amy about my various feelings, confessing my jealousy, admitting my curiosity about what had been done to her after she left me. Nor to ask who took part in the cabal. Amy was not Cloris, to whom admissions were flirtations, details aphrodisiac. Amy had to be approached with a delicate casualness, as you would approach a woman walking in her sleep along the edge of a cliff.
The simple "yes" was more than enough. Amy expected no answer. She was not listening. She put her hand to her cheek, stared straight ahead, straight into a tumble of tall pines and tunneled oaks.
"I was sad yesterday," she said dreamily. "I don't know why."
Nor do I believe she did. She had her Cherry Orchard moments. She expected them; she accepted them.
("Oh, my orchard!" I could hear Mme. Ranevskaya saying. "My sweet, beautiful orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye! Good-bye!")
This Chekhovian sadness, this dreamy weariness, recurring like a hunter's moon, made her to me all the more stirring. High passion has much sadness in it.
"You hurt me yesterday." She smiled to herself the wan, sad smile of a woman examining herself critically in a mirror, who finds herself not quite the self she had expected to see.
"Not after you came back."
"My God." She clapped her hand over her mouth, as if closing her lips would hold within her mysteries not to be shown to many-nor described.
"God," I said, meaning good.
"I came a lot, didn't I?"
"A lot."
"It's not very lady-like, is it?" She was obviously pleased with herself. She dimpled her cheeks. "You soaked me."
"I don't want to talk about it," she said.
She looked straight ahead through the windshield. Two tall loblolly pines bowed gracefully in the morning wind, then embraced.
"It was good."
"Was it good, Bill? Really good? Good for you?"
She very much wanted to talk about it.
"Look at the heron," I said, with a suggestion of tact. A white heron (or was it an egret-egrets have a special tuft, and black legs?) swooped from the sky to the marsh on our right, landing on a mudbank.
With Amy, in the wide circles of morning, it was not expedient to dwell on sex. There was a change of ambience. There was the onset of discreet amnesia.
One spoke, instead, of songs of innocence; of skylarks and skinks, of the curvings of a rose leaf.
But this morning was an exception.
"What is it, Bill? Please. You know about such things. It's not really coming, is it? It's much, much more."
"It's the miasma," I said. And she informed me, sweetly, that I was a bastard.
CHAPTER 3
The harbor was still that afternoon, very still. The seagulls screamed as ever. There was the occasional tinkle of a harbor buoy as it bowed toward Fort Sumter. Otherwise all was still.
Even Larrine was pensive, withdrawn. And before us, standing, not speaking unless spoken to, were Elza and June, both structurally shy.
Larrine's butler had served us all drinks-martinis. After each of us had downed two cocktails, had talked fitfully about the girls' work at school (a subject that evoked no enthusiasm), their boyfriends, if any (a subject that stirred no great interest), about what they had been doing since coming back to Charleston (nothing), Larrine asked each, in turn, to get up and walk around the room.
Each, in turn, got up, said, more or less, "Gee, I feel those drinks," and obligingly walked around the room.
The request was stage-setting, no more, no less. It was to give legitimacy to my interest in hiring them as models. If I were to use them as models, picture their figures and faces in a picture book about historic Charleston, I would be expected to want to know how well they walked, how graceful they were, how loose-limbed, nonchalant, natural. Such are the established features of high-fashion models.
Although I intended to take their pictures when they were stark still and wearing no clothes whatever, it was good public relations, I thought, to talk art before getting around to nudity. Later, it would be well to prize nudity before getting around to intimate touching.
Asking the girls to walk around the room gave my venery the benchmark of an audition. It suggested that they were on trial. It was up to them to show themselves worthy to be featured in my unworthy and as-yet-unsold book.
And I had not as yet, I now realized, mentioned my unworthy, unsold, unrealized book.
My next step would be to offer them modeling fees too tempting to be refused.
I had learned from the casting techniques of Cloris that all young girls are both vain and venal. To seduce them you do not lean too heavily on charm. On wit. On your own evanescent, if ever actual, physical appeal. You speak of beauty and offer bribes. Beauty laid bare, of course, is art. The bribe makes every girl a dedicated, inveterate, intransigent lover of art. If the bribe is large enough, the virtues of art are instantly self-evident.
"You walk well, you talk well, you are indecently handsome," I announced, as the girls rounded out their tour. I could not, without more groundwork, ask them to take off their T-shirts.
I needed now an interim piece of business.
"Thanks," Elza said, June said, with what I took to be adolescent appreciation. (I was particularly pleased with my reference to talking well-an extravagant praising of six or seven "wows.")
"I admired your looks when I first saw you ... at Seabrook."
"We sure barged in at the wrong time, didn't we?" Elza asked, with adolescent malevolence.
"We sure did." June's eyes widened. She saw, no doubt, the tattoo still sunning itself on Amy's flank. And young girls do not often come across such brazen tattoos, nor such rampant display.
"I'm writing a book," I announced, moving my strategy into its second phase.
"He's a good writer. He really is. He's written about Amy. And he's written about the famous, fabulous Lady Cholmondeley. But I don't recommend that either of you read them." Larrine was multiply helpful.
"This is a different kind of book," I said.
My image of myself, at this point, was not pretty. I do not like being sly, devious. Nor did I feel that I needed to be. But I was. I was pretending to write-at least, produce-a book which I had no intention of writing or putting together; which I could not possibly sell, if produced. All because I wanted these two girls; and as if I did not have Amy, almost in surfeit; Cloris. Sooner or later, I told myself, I would dream up a rationalization for what I was doing. It was part of my craft to lie to myself; the decay of art is the decline of lying.
"About what?" The two girls asked this in unison.
"About Amy ... as usual," Larrine said, sipping her drink. Then, making a gesture to the girls, "Do sit down."
"Thank you," June said, sitting herself stiffly on the edge of a Queen Anne armchair.
"Thanks," Elza said, plumping comfortably on the couch.
"This is another book ... an art book." I pronounced art solemnly, as if I were introducing the Queen of England.
Both breathed hard.
"It is a book about the historic places in Charleston ... the finest possible photography ... almost poetic text"
Larrine shot me a serpent look, sly, disapproving, pleased.
"And I need two frabjous models."
"My," said June. "Frabjous!"
"Oh, my," Elza said. "Beamish, too?"
The fact that I had asked Larrine Lamboll to ask them to meet me at her house this afternoon implied that-now that program was public-they were--likeliest candidates.
Charleston, today, is a cosmopolitan city; more cosmopolitan, even, than Durrell's Alexandria. Here old decadence is swept by fresh currents. Artists, retired diplomats, retired admirals and generals, young professors, writers like myself, girls as pretty as the Chelsea girls-all meet, intertwine, gossip. And those so inclined enjoy one another in secret, experimental ways. And all in the gentle ambience of the great oaks, the fragrance of the sea, the sadness of magnolias.
From this flowered madness, Amy was inseparable. Even in Rome, Florence, Mantua, there was always about her, in passion or quiet, the sweetness, fragrance, the gentle mystery and singing fight of this enchanted place.
And such a place, as would be expected, as we have learned to expect of the other golden cities, gives birth or passing comfort to those whose gifts, beauty, wit, needs, are uncommon.
Before me, suave, knowing, eminently hospitable, was a choice example-Larrine, Amy's warmest friend. You could talk to her about Proust, Gide, the "Arcliduke" Trio, or soixante-neuf. All would be treated with equal grace, curiosity, passion, and detachment. (In this she was much like Cloris.) Nor would she let her affection for Amy, or the urge that led her to paint so many nudes of Amy, dilute her kindness to me.
"What do you want to do with the twins?" she had asked me. "Fuck them or write about them?"
"Both," I said.
She conceded that the latter was a good idea, and that the former was as good a way as any to get on with the latter. She held that there had not been an adequate book about twins since The Bobbsey Twins, although she gathered that my approach would be radically different.
Quite so.
"And, of course, you don't really want to take their pictures."
"Not at all."
Knowledgeable, like Cloris, she agreed that taking pictures was a promising way to get started; not for nothing had she painted nudes of Amy.
What tact now required was an overwhelming mention of money.
I made my face look disinterested, as a gentleman's face should look when he talks to a girl about money. Money was no object. Art-art was the thing; art and beauty.
"I will pay, of course, the usual modeling fee." As if anybody knew what was usual. "A hundred dollars each, per session. That is, for an hour or so. And three or four sessions each week."
(It made no difference to me what I paid. All of this would be deductible, because I could write about it ... even if nothing came of the crazy idea about the picture book. Besides, who knows? Even the picture book might work out. This is a surrealist world.)
I might have offered more, but too much might seem unprofessional. Too much might have suggested that my basic intention was to get them undressed-which it was; undressed and undone, solo and en brochette.
"Wow," Elza said.
"Wow," said her sister.
With this money, I pointed out, each could buy many books-books on psychology, books on theater, even buy a package tour of Europe: London, Paris, Rome. (Perhaps I could even go with them, combining the services of patron with the office of cicerone and-had they been married-cicisbeo.)
"I would like you to show me the Louvre," June said, almost reading my thoughts. (Better a gazebo in Deer Park.)
Elza, more practical, spoke of Crazy Horse, the sumptuous strip lounge on the Avenue George V, a stone's throw from the Hotel George V.
"I will pay you for the first shooting in advance." I had learned well. This was how Cloris had sealed her bond with Jennifer Digby, Sir Kenelm's daughter, that singular afternoon in her hotel suite at the Savoy, in London. ("I've never done this before," Jennifer had said, nonchalantly raising her skirt.)
"You mean it?" June thought the proceedings acceptable, although unorthodox.
I took out my wallet. I had come prepared. I counted out two hundred-dollar sums in twenty-dollar bills. The currency was mint-fresh. I had seen to that. New money speaks of crispness, business, style. Only old bills call to mind the seamy acts by which society, like the cockroach species, obverts extinction.
"We might as well get started," Larrine said.
"Okay." June was cooperative, although scarcely enthusiastic.
"Okay," said Elza, half-whispering.
I now took notice of their dress. I had not analyzed it before. I was now to anticipate revelations, as each piece of clothing came off. Both were barefoot. Both were in blue jeans. Both wore T-shirts.
I took my Nikon out of its case, looked through the through-the-lens viewfinder, read the indications of the light meter. Then I set the lens stop for the indicated shutter speed: f.2 for 150th of a second. That was for an average spot, that afternoon, at that time, in Larrine's drawing room. I was using Tri-X film, which is fast-ASA 400.
All of this was throwaway ritual. I had no interest in taking pictures. But as an adopted Charlestonian, Amy's lover, Larrine's friend, I had to legitimize my role. Voyeurism is not, as yet, a recognized profession. Politesse is a beating around the bush.
"Who is first?" Larrine asked.
"June," said Elza.
"Elza," said June.
"You decide," I said to Larrine.
"You must think of this as art. Pure art." Larrine smiled affably as she said this to Elza, going over to June, kissing June, lifting June's T-shirt.
"Gosh," June said, pulling the shirt over her head. "I've never done anything like this before." June was the one.
A tight, white, neat bra covered her candy-apple breasts; she was thus no more exposed, unveiled, than she would normally be on the beach.
"Take a drink." Larrine poured another martini, handed it to her.
"Thanks." June took the glass, put it to her lips. Larrine meanwhile walked behind her, unhooked the bra, exposed the candy-apple breasts, fingered them.
"Gee," June said, not removing the glass from her lips.
"Gee," Larrine murmured.
I focused my camera, made two or three ceremonial shots.
Larrine made two or three ceremonial remarks.
We all had two or three more ceremonial drinks.
June, meanwhile, got used to her absence of upper costuming. She walked about unusually erect, her little breasts jutting out in adolescent pride.
From time to time I focused my camera, clicked, to make a conspicuous display of professional interest.
When enough time had elapsed for a smooth transition to nudity, I said, still ignoring the fully clothed Elza, "Please drop your pants."
"Panties too?"
"Panties too."
"Everything?" June acquired fresh joy in dragging out the discussion.
"Let's have a look at the golden ass." Larrine lit herself a cigarette.
"If s okay with me." June looked at her sister and winked. She looked at me and smiled. She looked at Larrine and stuck out her tongue, as if to say, "Don't you wish, at your age, you had an ass as neat, as tight, as innocent as mine?"
She unbuckled her belt. She undid the button at the top of her jeans, slid down the zipper. Then she began the artful, slow process of sliding the pants. More skin came into view. Then the pale yellow hair of the pubic mound. There was very little of it, little more than a suggestion, as if puberty had decided to stay with her a long, playful time.
Unfortunately, her undressing came to a swift, dry halt.
Larrine had closed the door leading from the central hallway to the drawing room. Now there was a hard knock on the door, and the sound of a man's voice: a grunt, a conspicuous clearing of the throat, and the words, "May I come in?"
Simultaneously the door began to open. The opening was delayed, ominous, continuous.
Then the man was with us. He had about the height and weight of Cary Grant; an abstracted, reflective expression which seemed to say, "I'm a stranger here on earth." He was also very pale.
Larrine jumped up "My God, the guru."
"I just got out of jail," he said.
"Good for you." Larrine was congratulatory. "I always knew you'd make it."
Larrine introduced him around. I had read about him (in the book John Dellmore wrote about Amy). He was now famous, or notorious-depending on your social alignments. Dalton Vanderhof, Ph.D., onetime professor of psychology, had had high adventures in inner space, had rediscovered the psychic high jinks of the Far East, had ultimately migrated to Charleston, where he had a Pied Piper influence on the very young, a Svengali influence on their sisters, mothers, aunts.
Of late he had had trouble with the law. I remembered reading about it in the Paris Herald Tribune. He had opened, in Florida, a therapy clinic for those well-heeled, but suffering from incurable tedium vitae. His treatment was simple. He provided all his patients with luxury rooms, gourmet food, masseuses who gave "total" massage; all patients with exquisite bed partners of the requisite sex; all patients opium and its many derivatives. He was consequently indicted, tried, convicted, and jailed for income-tax evasion.
"It was ennobling," Vanderhoff said, going to the bar and pouring himself a neat slug of scotch.
"Help yourself to a drink," Larrine said, purring proper words post facto.
"Ennobling and enfeebling, like an amateur crucifixion."
Larrine smiled benevolently at June. "You have a lovely pussy."
"Thanks," June said.
"A slight, slim, slit," Elza conceded. This was her first announcement that ran on past the initial syllable.
"Ennobling?" Larrine indicated to Vanderhoff that, despite vaginal distractions, she was listening.
He gulped his slug, poured himself a second. "Ennobling because of the stretch of inner space. Not for nothing do we speak of 'doing a stretch.' Certainly not for nothing. Nothing is a great deal of something. It's the emptiness in the middle that makes a wheel a wheel."
"Where are you staying?"
Vanderhoff did not seem to hear. His eyes fixated themselves on an imaginary emptiness in the middle of a wheel. "The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to the Wheel of Life."
"Drink your drink ... and tell me where you're staying."
"The trick is to lower your vitality. That's why a man's best moments are when he is in prison-look at Socrates!-or when he is all fucked out. Given my druthers, of course, I'd choose the latter."
"Do sit down." Larrine had resigned herself to an afternoon of non sequiturs.
Vanderhoff loped to the armchair nearest the bar. "Behold! I preach the Gospel Of Exhaustion. Perhaps here we have the founding rock of a new church. Let us invite our souls to rest."
He dropped with a thud into the armchair, draped his right leg over the right arm of the chair. "Where am I staying? I'm staying with my dear friend Isabella"
"Berkeley Hall?"
"Berkeley Hall. Of course Berkeley Hall. I'd be a fool to dream my dreams in Locksley Hall." He tossed off his whiskey.
"Isabellas back?"
"Obviously. Otherwise, except by astral projection-the infinite erection of a cosmic, gaseous vertebrate-it would be very hard for me to stay with her. ... Isabelle's been living in Nepal," Vanderhoff said.
Larrine nodded. "I know."
"She corresponded with me in prison."
"Oh?"
"She's very astute, you know. Very astute."
"That I knew." She smiled, recalling, I assume, the ways in which Isabelle Wescott had played on Amy's weakness, had contributed to her strength. (The seduction at Berkeley Hall. The double seduction-the seduction which induced Amy, in the midstream of her own seduction, to seduce her own nephew.)
"She knew I was about to be paroled. She knew it-not I. She wrote, 'When you get out, meet me New York.' This, mind you, from Katmandu."
"You met her?"
Vanderhoff nodded. "She's lost a lot of weight."
"Then, together, you came back here?"
"You put two and two together very nicely." He smiled approvingly at the twins. "Always did."
"You're very astute yourself."
Vanderhoff looked at her through his shot glass. "What a pleasant spread of compliments. Astute guru."
"Does Isabelle still have a thing for Amy?" I smiled to myself. Larrine was doing my work for me.
"She will always have a thing for Amy. She's mad
... fucking mad ... about Amy." He got up and refilled his glass.
The two girls exchanged eye gestures. June motioned with her head toward the door. With her lips she formed the words "Let's go."
Elza answered, silently. I am not much of a lip reader, but it appeared to me that she said, "Wait a minute ... I want to listen ... this is wowl"
"Still no interest in men?"
"Not really."
"But you go to bed with her."
"Of course. But then I'm a collector of chinoiserie. And I think in pizzicato."
"What's it like."
"Making love to Isabelle."
"Making love to Isabelle."
"Always interesting. Impersonally interesting. like making love to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits et des Grands Express Europeans."
Larrine, as gracious a hostess as Amy, turned to me to include me in the intimate frame of reference. "The guru once took Amy ... just as impersonally ... in this very same room."
"Ah ... Amy! Amy!" Vanderhoff gazed up, his eyes presumably passing through the ceiling in ascent toward a pendant Queen of Heaven. "What a gluteal jewel."
Then, as if recalling some vagaries which had asserted themselves before my arrival in Charleston, some delicious and unexpected gallimaufry, he added, "She lets us play with the tresses of her hair."
There was, for a space, an embarrassed silence, as if we were all aware that there are certain insights not to be bandied lightly. He looked at me. "Blessed are the imperfect," he quoted, "for theirs is the Kingdom of Love."
"He's really an old friend of Amy's." Larrine thought some explanation was in order. An old friend is expected to have an intimate acquaintance with gluteal muscles.
Vanderhoff lapsed into soliloquy. Images intertwined. "Ah, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits et des Grands Express Europeans. What a delightful phrase to have tattooed, hopefully, on one's extended part."
"Who would know?"
The girls tittered. Nothing of this sort turns up on TV. Nor is such talk common on Seabrook.
Vanderhoff flopped back in his chair. His right leg again draped itself over the right chair arm. "You know, three of you-you, Amy, Isabelle-have done Charleston an enormous service. You are a cabal. A liberating cabal. The city will never again be swallowed up by the old miasma."
"We do our part, sir. Our part." She looked approvingly at the two girls, as if to say, "It's only a matter of time, now, before you, too, will be doing your part ... naked and prone."
I mentioned, earlier, that with VanderhofFs entrance, June's undressing had come to a sharp, dry halt. This was something of an overstatement. Everything, by then, had been taken down or off. All that remained for her to do was step clear of the dropped, crumpled blue jeans. And this she had done, with insouciance and grace, while the guru talked. With a deft kick, the jeans had been dismissed; and she, more or less self-consciously, stood in the middle of the drawing room, puffing on a cigarette.
VanderhofFs eyes wandered to her middle. "How pleasant it is to see things steadily and see them whole."
"Home fucking," said Larrine, eyeing me, "is the curse of the middle class."
Had I become too settled with Amy? Was that what she was telling me? Was that why she was being so helpful to me in my machinations with the twins?
But though scant as my memories are of the moments there that signal afternoon, very full and warm in me is the fused memory of the two bright girls who were first undressed there. like the Ancient Mariner, I, in general, remember so little. The Mariner seemed to recall only the albatross and that ghastly crew; and I recall only my absence of understanding-and the palliatives thereto.
"May I sit down now?" June asked, with the shy politeness which stems from good breeding. This was obviously her first official nakedness; and she approached it with the deference that one might reserve for the first edition of a play by some lesser Elizabethan or Jacobean. It boded well.
CHAPTER 4
I went back alone to Seabrook that night. Amy drove with Larrine to Columbia, the state capital. The Spo-leto Festival was about to come to Charleston. Amy and Larrine, both spirited citizens, both emotionally involved with gardens, exhibitions, sweetness and light, wanted state funds for a half-dozen or more art and culture projects. "We need more concert halls, more gallery space," Larrine had said. "We need a music library. And we need places where all the young dancers and musicians can eat, sleep, practice, and lay one another."
Amy, as I have said elsewhere, was an old hand at South Carolina politics. She and her husband were in, as it were; or, more justly, in-and-out. In politics, however, an out is frequently more in than any incumbent. An out is a free-lance, unencumbered. And Amy, as I well knew, knew well the incumbent governor, congressmen, senators-as well as a colorful slew of state assemblymen, commission chairmen, arm-twisters.
"If she'll just show enough cleavage," Larrine had said, "she can get anything she wants-anything."
(There had been another man, it occurred to me, who was to be listed in the roster of those to whom she had yielded favors: Senator Ashmead. When she had been appointed South Carolina Commissioner for
Consumer Affairs, she had once gone to bed-so it was said-with the senator, in a Washington hotel. The senator, allegedly, was not able to perform. And since the absence of an erection, at the time and place an erection is in order, tends to make a man hypercritical of the girl for whom the erection was desired, Amy, through no fault of her own, stripped herself into political disfavor.)
Amy, however, was a political animal. Her mind, when not diverted by centaurs' tricks, turned intuitively to matters of right reason and social reform. Of late she had been lobbying to get the State Legislature to repeal the 1813 law which held that sexual intercourse, when performed in any except the orthodox parallel, prone, face-to-face position, constituted a felony.
("Do you realize," she once spluttered, disengaging her lips, "we are habitual, hang-up, constitutional felons. And any day now we might be called on to instruct and entertain a grand jury?")
And this night, because of Amy's dedication to public service, possibly only because she wanted a vacation from me, I was left to entertain myself.
Spoleto? That seemed a slim excuse for leaving me. Certainly so suddenly. And with Larrine.
I meditated on these matters as I hoisted a final drink at the bar at Henry's, on Market Street. I felt much alone and sad. After great pleasure, aloneness, the forlorn feeling, is greater than at other times. The memory of glut makes us more sensitive to the awareness of loss.
Next to me a man with a double-pointed, tobacco-stained beard, a white mane, and a cascading Mark Twain necktie spat a brown wad into a waiting cuspidor, and said, "We'll stop 'em at Appomattox, that's what we'll do."
It occurred to me that those who are still fighting the War Between the States are scarcely aware that, in these parts, it is felonious to fornicate except in the missionary position. Nor, being so occupied, could they much care. States' rights came before private rights.
"It's gettin' warm," the bartender said to me, stirring a Bloody Mary. He was an amiable man with thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was always amiable; and he never put enough ice in his drinks.
Eventually I got back to my car.
I drove up Market Street, past dozens of shops whose scrawling, amateur-painted signs said, "Flea Market," to Meeting Street. The streets were dark, empty. I drove north to Calhoun Street, turned left past Marion Square, the old Citadel parade ground.
The statue of old John C. Calhoun, standing like St. Simeon Stylites, high up on a Doric column, high enough to be almost out of sight, towered over me, muttering musty words about secession.
I turned left on King Street, in spite of the sign that said "No left turn permitted." (It is liberating, when night falls and people vanish, to disregard signs.) On King Street I drove past Elza's, a fashionable store that had no connection with my own potential Elza, but which heartened me because it invoked her name without raising problems. (We who are cowardly, lazy, inept, find childish, vicarious pleasure in form without substance, as when a child chants, "Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.")
In time, lonely and meandering, I wormed my way to the Ashley River Bridge. Ahead was the now-drear twenty-mile drive to Seabrook.
At Seabrook, waiting, was nothing but the empty cottage, the wind in the loblollies, the skirls of the sea-birds.
Nor was my mind at rest. Bright in my mind were the lurid stripes on Amy's bottom. They reminded me of one of the old Jesuit arguments for die existence of God: If you came across a running watch in the middle of the forest, you would not ordinarily believe that it got there by accident-or a consequence of a competition among mushrooms.
The stripes were evenly spaced-except for the errant stripe that wandered down her thigh.
Who earlier had contemplated those sensuous hillocks? And whose hand had spaced those glowing marks, each of which must have been acquired with a jump and a quiver?
Who telephoned?
And why, still earlier, had Amy been obsessed with the notion that I should want to watch while she was made love to by another man? Pythagorean. Of all those who attend the Olympic games, happiest are those who only stand and watch.
There were many oddities. Many quiddities. Cloris would have told me all, in lurid detail, exciting herself as she talked. Amy told nothing.
Nor did the talk about Spoleto make a great deal of sense. The fate of the festival still hung in the balance. It would come to Charleston, so it was said, if enough money were available. But Charlestonians suspected that much of the money, if raised, might be funneled to Italy. Spoleto itself needed funding. Already there had been resignations from the committee. Amy, however-and this was more to the point-had no official connection with the festival. She was not on the committee. She was not to be onstage, even in shadow, as Monna Vanna; Charleston was as yet no Cannes. Why, then, was she so involved? Gian-Carlo Menotti, I knew, had been in town these last few days, making peace with the local promoters. Had he been at Miss Wescott's that signal night? Had he, too, seen Amy bare? Would Monna Vanna make an opera-Monna Vanna in modern undress.
The bridge across Wappoo Cut, joining the mainland to James Island, was open. There was a long, depressing wait. A sailboat with a mast no higher than a camel's hump idled by.
The bridge across the Stono was open. There was a long, depressing wait while a shrimp boat sidled by.
Eventually I passed under the great Bohicket oak, bored through the tunneled moss, tunicate and sad, crossed the causeway to Seabrook Island.
There was a raw moon.
I climbed the stairs to our seaside porch, listened politely to the hiss of the foam, to the cannonading of ripened waves. Then I put the Smith's Glenlivet bottle to my lips. The night was made for drink.
All the more surprising was the scratching at the screen door, some hour or so later. All the more surprising was the sibilant girlish voice. "May I come in ... please."
Bottle in hand, I opened the door.
Standing barefoot, bare-legged, in shorts and bra, Elza, a bottle of scotch in her hand. "I brought you some whiskey."
Even astride a Trojan horse, she was welcome. What does one say to a young girl bearing gifts? Timeo the Greeks?
I kissed her. I tried, as is proper in Charleston, to kiss her on each cheek. Camaraderie without lust; affection without self-interest. She would have none of this. She planted her lips squarely on mine; the young-girl lips, soft, moist, fragrant, clinging.
We went inside.
I opened her bottle, which was the only appreciative thing to do. I poured each of us half a tumbler. (The whiskey was a biting rotgut; but it is enough for a young, tight-bottomed girl to bring anything. Her body alone was gift enough-even if not totally given.)
"Cheers," she said, looking up at me with doe-eyed frankness, clinking glasses.
"Cheers," I said, clinking glasses and stroking her bottom. (Tight, as I expected, childish, but with muscles that smiled, flirted.)
The distant surf cheered, rumbled, spluttered, spread its hiss.
"You want me?" She was adroit at rubbing against me, an atavism, I reasoned, running back to the examples of the archaic Egyptian cat.
"Obviously." I do not believe anything I had thus far said or done made my lust evident, much less obvious. But the adverb was about as parliamentary as any. And every question from a source such as this leggy, adolescent, untested-deserves a decent answer.
She downed her drink in three successive, determined swallows, then held out her glass for a refill.
I was handy with the refill; handy, quick, generous.
"You want to fuck me, don't you?" For a girl who, until now, had measured herself in monosyllables, this, I thought, was a clarion sentence. Seven words, each grammatically poised, each moving directly to a poignant end.
"Yes." It was my turn to be monosyllabic. And youth, I now well knew, is honest. The sexual revolution has made my kind of masquerade as dated as bundling.
"You've gone through a lot of trouble. Pretending you want to take our pictures. So sweet of you. And quaint." Quaint?
"You've already paid for it, so you might as well take it." She smiled sweetly, unbuckled her belt. "Where's June?"
"Necking, probably. Or watching a basketball game. How should I know?"
With the coming of the sexual revolution, the erotic fancies of girls not yet twenty have developed a rich, fertile field for Ph.D. research. The young now have a way of looking on their elders as uninspired, uninformed, incurious beings-a sentient subspecies of skimmed milk. About the fine and forbidden uses of the flesh, elders know nothing. Some over thirty, it is conceded, may have picked up interim clinical facts from Psychology Today ("Penis Envy and the Incipient Id") or in Executive Health ("Correlations Between Chromium Deficiency and Extramarital Sex"). But lusty, vicious, delicious sex, the young feel, is a discovery of their own; an exclusive, dark, dangerous, secret practice. It is the ultimate nectar of those who, like themselves, dwell among untrodden ways while green fields sleep in the sun.
I led her to the bedroom. Fortunately, Amy, always neat, had made the bed. ("Fortunately" is my guilt word. I don't think Elza gave a passing thought to the condition of the bed.)
She dropped her pants, stepped clear of them. Then she unhooked her halter, threw it over Amy's rocker. Nothing more obscured her lithe, sunburnt body. There was the minuscule cornstalk wisp of pubic hair, as on June. There were breasts struggling to assert themselves on a flat, golden plane. There was the golden hair that tumbled to her shoulders.
"You like me?" She stood up straight, waiting to be admired. "I like you."
"Really."
"Really."
"I'm awfully different from Amy, aren't I?"
"In a way. A very nice way." Naked girls are a challenge to tact.
She looked at herself in the mirror on Amy's dresser. Then she picked up one of Amy's perfume bottles-Prince Matchabelli. Nonchalantly she put a dab behind each ear, a dab on either latent pale pink nipple. Then, with what I considered a dash of audacity, old-fashioned as I am, she poured some drops into the cup of her hand and rubbed them into and around the pubic wisp. ("Careful," I wanted to warn her. "Not inside.")
"You'll have to teach me everything," she said impishly, falling back with studied grace, her and Amy's fragrance rising.
I lay down next to her and kissed her. "Don't frighten her," I advised myself, almost audibly. "Be thoughtful. Be gentle." Thus had the redoubtable Humbert Humbert advised himself as he slipped a sleeping pill into Lolita's avid little hand. ("The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.")
My kisses were accepted, improved on, returned. Elza pulled me down to her. Her tongue located, stroked, slithered about mine. A hand, eventually freed, sought out, closed about, tested my erection. The hand seemed practiced, as if it had often entertained itself on the gearshift levers of foreign cars.
"Wow," she said politely. (My rigidity, I felt, was deserving of a passing "oh," a friendly "ah."
"Wow," I thought, was a trifle excessive.)
The portal was passed. Victory was mine.
"Wow," she said a second time. With more eloquence, more heart, more suggestion of surprise and fulfillment than the first.
Then it happened.
I could not hold back. I, the veteran of a thousand jousts, bravura lover of Amy and Cloris, was undone by a slip of a girl.
"Do I excite you?" Her voice, to mix a metaphor, was wide-eyed, sibilant, and sly. What now hath God wrought? How, now, brown cow?
I still hear the words. The "ci" in excite slithered a long time, like an actual sigh.
I got up, wiped my hands on my handkerchief, took my clothes off.
"You don't have to be so timid with me." Pleased with herself, Elza had noted my pulling out, at the ultimate moment, noted my care and waste. "I'm on the pill."
This from a girl who, in the hard sun of Seabrook, had made much of virginity.
"Believe nothing that you hear ... and only half what you feel."
I looked down at her, and she looked up at me and smiled in a proud, cherubic way. She seemed indelibly innocent. She had, however, spread her slim legs wide apart, a stance of abandon that was anticherubic.
"Come back," she said, in proper time.
I got back. The bed squeaked a joyful welcome. The small slit smiled. Now was the time for the great Casanova to make a show of his might, to lunge with bright, swift skill into the maw of innocence.
It was then, precisely then, that my trusty friend deserted me. He retreated like a bored snail. No wonders did he see, smiling and supine, on the loving bed. He celebrated the glories of gristle. "You go your way," he said in his limp, obstinate way, "you go your way, and I'll go mine." No man yet lives who owns a penis.
I retreated from the bed to let time and tact operate. I walked to the bar and poured myself more whiskey.
"Me, too." Elza held out her glass, a Houdon nymph posing, poised, quite pleased with herself. I poured whiskey in her glass-straight. "Thanks."
"How long have you been on the pill."
"You don't have to be careful with me."
"How long?"
She looked down to the space where her breasts would be, were they risen, pneumatic. Young slyness blossomed on her face, the slyness that passes for shyness. "Since yesterday."
"One day."
"I thought I'd seduce you."
"Nice of you."
"If I was going to pose naked for you ... and I was ... I took the money..."
"So?"
"If I was going to pose for you, I figured I might just as well go all the way. So I took my mother's pills."
"So." The new generation is full of surprises. Not talkative, as is ours. Not searching, questioning, peeking, probing. No Peeping Toms here-Peeping Toms are the Uncle Toms of the Sexual Revolution. Nor Lady Godwas, whose side-saddle rides generate Peeping Toms, as thesis generates antithesis; yang, yin.
"She'll never know."
"How about June?"
"If you screw June ... and I guess sooner or later you'll get around to it ... you must be careful."
"I will."
"You don't mind?"
Minding was not now the issue. To be careful, one must first be equipped to perform the act for which care is requested.
"I don't mind." To dramatize my sincerity I gave my dejected friend a vigorous thwack. He swung aside sadly, uncomplaining, then swung back in a limpid arc, pendulant and slack.
Now, were I Proust, I said to myself, T would here have a host of irrelevant, invigorating memories. I would recall how, in youth, in my bed at Balbec, an enterprising rtiaid had dandled my penis in her hot, honeyed hand; how the scent of heliotrope was then heavy in the air.
For Beauregard Benton there was no such richness of reverie. No counterthrust.
"You are or are not a virgin?" T asked, passing off my weakness as a charade. Should she say "virgin," it was to be understood that my limpness was mere gallantry.
"Yes and no," she informed me, by which I was to understand (as she later explained) that last winter she spent the night in bed with an inexperienced boy; and, at this late date, she did not know whether to classify her state as intact, indented, or interrupted.
I got back on the bed. I kissed her once more, was enlaced as before. I probed the Cave of Furies and found it ready.
"Incidentally..." she began.
"Incidentally what?"
"You were just in there."
"So I was." It was well to establish this fact. A man at moments of diminished potency clings, like Homer, to reports of derring-do. I would have liked a receipt. ("Bill was just inside me. Wow! [Signed] Elza.")
Better would be the testimony of two witnesses. (One of them June.)
"So if I had been a virgin before, I'm certainly not one now. You're a bastard and you raped me."
I agreed, with gusto, chest-thumping, pride.
"Now rape me again."
There was a challenge to myingenuity, and meeting it, I suppose, is the price a man must pay for dalliance with and explorations among the very young. At any rate, Elza soon said many things in the happy jargon that goes with such practices; and there was a confabulation of sounds and heavings.
The effect on me was tonic; ultimately hypertonic. Lovemaking, indeed, occurs first in the mind, as I have variously suggested. First use the word, then the word becomes flesh, solid, extended, eloquent.
Elza, for her part, said many unexpected, imaginative things. And for an untried girl, it did seem to me that her phrasings were more apt, glib, knowledgeable, than innocence prompts. But then, all young girls are more worldly today than were the girls of a decade past. They read, as here, of the unfolding of their sisters; and they see pictures such as Monna Vanna in which women (whose perfume they wear, and whose beds they usurp) stride about in unabashed nudity.
"Come back into me ... hurry."
And there I was, once more in the conservative missionary position. And there was Elza, legs instinctively drawn back, as so often were Amy's, under-thighs offered me as caressing stanchions.
In time we showered together, as etiquette requires after brief couplings. Then she put a dab of Amy's powder in the cleft between her thighs, and I remember her saying, in response to my reflex caress, that I should respect the orifice-if not the girl.
She dressed in some seven seconds, slipping effortlessly into shorts and halter.
"I'll drive you home," I said.
"Not necessary." She stepped on my bare feet with her bare feet, raised herself to tiptoes, kissed me with a neat, cheerleader's impersonal peck. "I parked Daddy's car a little piece down the road."
"You are thoughtful."
"I'm also concupiscent." To find her vocabulary advancing so quickly from last week's budget of "groovy" and "wow" gave me renewed faith in the bed's uses as an instrument of culture.
She used a second kiss as a semicolon. "After all, this is adultery, isn't it?"
"I am contributing," I conceded, "to the delinquency of a minor."
"Anytime." A third kiss. "It all comes with the modeling fee."
The telephone rang about half an hour later. "Darling." Amy's voice, slightly tipsy. "Darling, are you screwing June?"
"No," I said with emphatic truthfulness. And I was glad she had not called a half-hour earlier. My statement would still have been true; but somehow it might have been weak in emphasis. Between June and Elza there was probably only the slightest of mammary differences-although, obviously, I could not yet speak from experience. And experience alone justifies judgments, as Elza had so logically observed in our discussion of the axes of inclination of Chinese girls.
"I'm glad," she said. "Although you know I wouldn't really mind. I've never been jealous, have I?"
"No." I had a twinge of guilt, not about principle. About sentiment. I could, I thought, have waited anther day or so. Perhaps (new thought) that was why
I had had that terrifying no-go, no-rise spell. The revolt of the sentimental phallus.
"But if you do, I'll ... you-know-what!" Amy had indeed been drinking. Quaint joke or no, she would never in a sober moment use quite these words. Such things are not said in Charleston by a proper lady, no matter how spurred by errant passion.
Nor would she ever, even joking, let herself voice such an unfriendly thought.
"She is joking." Larrine's voice cut in. "She would never, never, never..."
"Hardly ever," Amy added, from a distance.
I heard in the background much laughing and a clinking of glasses.
"Darling..." Amy again was on the phone. "We're running up to Washington for a few days. You won't mind, will you? Awfully important. Tell you all about it when I get back. And I was joking. Really I was."
CHAPTER 5
"There's Bill."
"It's Bill," I heard June say. Her voice, with piccolo overtones, overrode the wind, in girlish obbligato.
"Hey, Bill." Both voices in concert.
I turned, as any man would, hearing his name so enthusiastically sounded.
The twins were sitting at a table on the terrace of the Seabrook Club, sipping drinks. Their untamed hair streamed, with blonde jubilation, in the wind. With them was a staid couple, of an age which would have justified parenthood.
I went over to the table.
"This is Bill," Elza said.
"The writer." June, as I was to learn, looked on herself as Elza's translator. She had an urge for exactness. Elza attributed it to the size of her breasts.
It was thus that I met Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Pol-tergrue.
Mr. Poltergrue was wispy, steel-eyed, and wore rimless glasses. I took him to be a doctor, a bank president, or a used-car salesman. It was Mrs. Poltergrue, apparently, who had given the girls their good looks. She was a symmetrical blonde, like girls in cigarette ads, or the girls in TV commercials who tell their daughters what to do for occasional irregularity.
Mrs. Poltergrue, it must be conceded, was a trifle plump-a controlled voluptuousness, you might say, as in the case of Mrs. John Dean (who was then more or less in the headlines). Her hair was tucked in a bun; and her bosom, as generous as Amy's, now in brazen decollete, lazily toasted itself in the Seabrook sun.
"You are a writer?" Mrs. Poltergrue graced me with a listless smile.
I nodded, and returned the smile. "What do you write?"
"Biographies." There was little point in telling her that I was now planning an account of the erotic gambols of her two ebullient daughters.
"How nice."
"Usually biographies. Right now I'm doing a book on Charleston. You might call it the biography of a city." All of which, I thought, was as good a half-truth as any. Inanimate objects are entitled to biographies; they have a lifetime, a history. The canon pointing toward Fort Sumter, for example, would change somehow, once the two naked Poltergrue girls were astride them. The statue of John C. Calhoun, at Marion Square, would perhaps show some muscle movement-like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni-once the naked Elza embraced his peristyle.
"We're going to work for Bill all summer," June announced to her parents.
"And make scads and scads of money." Elza had a practical turn of mind.
"Scads," said her sister.
"Youngsters nowadays are so independent," Mr. Poltergrue informed me.
My eye by then had had time to rove over the girls. Once again they were in identical light blue shorts, laced, along a wide, open space, up the thighs. And once again there was displayed, through the fretted margin, a broad spread of golden flesh.
In front of us was the early-afternoon ocean, light blue, like the shorts, and fretful.
"So you really write." Mrs. Poltergrue sipped her long drink thoughtfully; too thoughtfully, I was afraid. It was only the unstirrable emptiness of her face that assured me that her mind, as yet, had not combed mine.
"Usually in Italy. This summer is an exception."
"I've never met a writer before."
"He knows 'Miss Amy' Dellmore," Elza volunteered, presenting my credentials, and, as a well-brought-up Charlestonian, referring to a woman a half-generation older as "Miss."
From one end of the horizon arc to the other hung a single cloud, jaggedly serrated on top, like mountains in a Chinese scroll. Immediately in front of us and parallel to the lower edge of the cloud was a line of pelicans, black, scoop-beaked, floating single file. There were exactly twenty-one birds-I counted them-each, except for the first, following its predecessor gracefully, passively, wheeling and dipping.
"Ah, Amy," Mrs. Poltergrue beamed.
"What a woman!" Mr. Poltergrue also beamed.
My eye followed the lead pelican and wondered what precisely a pelican needed to do to win his place at the head of his line. I suggested to myself that the operation probably followed procedure by which one became a grand duke. (On the other hand, was the same pelican always at the head of the same line? With pelicans, as with chipmunks, it is not easy to establish personal identity.)
"So good to look at, so charming," Mrs. Poltergrue went on. "An intuitive political animal."
"She's that all right." Poltergrue was positive. He smirked almost imperceptibly, as if recalling one of the published pictures of Amy in a slim swimsuit.
I returned my eye from the pelicans to Mrs. Poltergrue and asked myself how she would look in a slim swimsuit. Not that I was concerned. The mental activity was no more than a reflex, a consequence of habit. (A trifle overripe, I concluded, a bit too round here and there; but she was still young enough, as was Lillian Russell in her prime, to make plumpness prurient.)
"She could be our first congressman-if she could ever be persuaded to run." She looked at me with what I took to be an appraising, half-calculating look. Perhaps I might have some influence. "Or should I say congresspersonl"
"They say she's having an affair with Senator Ash-mead," Poltergrue said, giving no thought to me.
"Ssh." Mrs. Poltergrue put her finger to her lips. The gesture was apparently intended, by retroactive black magic, to keep such hearsay from my ears.
"Such an aristocratic family." Poltergrue was prepared to make amends for his lack of gallantry. "Her great-grandfather hung somebody or other."
"Hanged, dear." She looked to me for understanding. What do bankers know about preterits?
"Stede Bonnet." June, like many Charleston girls, was expert in the history of piracy.
"Blackbeard," said her sister, a more precise historian.
"Everything tastes better with Stede Bonnet on it."
"How udderly udder." Elza, I was to learn, regarded sibling rivalry as mammary competition. "Balls," said June.
"It's so nice of you to use the girls in your book," Mrs. Poltergrue said to me blithely, happy to change the subject. "They have so much talent. Really! But they need experience."
I agreed. On all counts, I agreed. I visualized myself exploiting the first, providing the other. There was now clear evidence, I thought, Panglossian proof, that this was the best of all possible worlds.
Mrs. Poltergrue gave me a brief resume of their scholastic achievements. Straight A's in dramatics, gymnastics, drawing. At least a C in everything else. June, last year, was second runner-up in the Miss Cotton Boll Contest. Elza's class voted her the Girl Most-likely to Succeed.
Mr. Poltergrue was glad that his daughters were working. Work, he felt, built character. It also diminished the need for a perpetual allowance.
They-the elder Poltergrues-wanted to know more about my book, the book featuring their talented daughters, not the one, obviously, featuring Amy (and now also their talented daughters). When would it come out? What was it about?
It would have been eminent discourtesy to explain that it was about their talented but naked daughters. And that it would never come out. (Although possibly they could read about my shameless shams in the book about Amy-as yet untitled.)
A book was in progress; the book was to have many fine photographs; the many fine photographs were presentations, in sundry poses, of the photogenic Poltergrue twins. These facts had been established. And for the time, in my purview, they were all the facts known, needed to be known. Truth is beauty, beauty truth.
Poltergrues pere, mere, seemed pleased. Sooner or later Elza and June would be interviewed on the Today show. Their pictures would be emblazoned on the i covers of Time and Newsweek. Eventually, perhaps, given a Republican administration, there might be ambassadorships.
It was, however, June, June herself, in whom he had high hopes of worldly success. Not that he loved Elza the less; but Elza was flighty, moody, more given to poetic lapses-all of which, I suppose, was his unconscious way of noting that her breasts were smaller. June, he thought, had a natural gift for business; a simple, uncluttered way of looking at the world.
He wanted her to become an insurance underwriter and be the first of his daughters to be, if not an immediate member of the Million-Dollar Club, at least self-supporting. First, of course, she would have to study, study underwriting; for underwriting, unlike ordinary writing, is not a craft acquired willy-nilly, hit or miss. It was a calling, a dedication. You studied for it the way you studied for holy orders or better golf.
Yet, now the twins, thanks to me, were about to be launched in another direction. If ambassadorships were not waiting, show business was. (As indeed it was. One of my prints, mailed to Cloris, shown to Cloris, could lead to stardom; superstardom.)
In the interim there were television commercials, high-fashion modeling, Miss Teenage America, Miss America herself-although it was highly improbable that Elza and June could simultaneously be Miss America. (There have been dual archons, dual kings, even dual popes; never dual queens.)
In any event, once the book came out, was acclaimed as inevitably it must be acclaimed, Mummy and Daddy would no longer have to support them. They would be launched. On their own. And sooner or later they would marry Prince Charles or the son of a former member of the Nixon cabinet, sequentially, simultaneously, or in concert.
"Anywhoo..." Mrs. Poltergrue beamed at me eyes that reminded me of the possibility of twin suns rising from sea. "Anywhoo, where's the book ... the action ... set?"
"Most of the action is in Charleston, or thereabouts," I said, more or less truthfully. Book or no book, my plans left room for considerable action. Perhaps even a motion picture. (The Bobbsey Twins Turn Nudist? The Girls from Syracuse? Two for the Show?) "Historic Charleston ... with its poetry, its patina, its gates and cannon ... its walled gardens in which every camellia reads Sir Walter Scott."
I waved my hands toward an imaginary Charleston, twenty miles north of the nearest laughing gull.
I improvised praise of Ruskin's Stones of Venice, suggested that my book would be ... could be ... something like Stones of Venice, given Charleston rather than Venice, given lavish photographic illustrations.
"If I had done a latter-day Stones of Venice, illustrated, as I would illustrate it, I, of course, would have used Marisa Berenson and Sophia Loren as models."
"Of course." Mrs. Poltergrue had no doubt about it.
"But in Charleston..." I did my best to look solemn, dedicated, as I imagined Edward Weston to look, while focusing on a green pepper. "In Charleston we have Elza ... and we have June." (I thought it tactful to mention first the twin with the flatter bosom.)
"Of course. Of course."
"Work their asses off," Mr. Poltergrue said prophetically, but with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than he might have expressed had he attended our rehearsals.
Nor did I approve of such blunt language in front of girls yet so tender, so unfurled.
"So far, they've had it much too easy." Mrs. Poltergrue, now in the presence of a full flesh-and-bone writer, wanted it understood (as if for the record) that, like her husband, she took virtue to be consonant with long hours and hard work.
I agreed, Elza winked, June kicked me under the table.
I felt all was well in hand. I could afford to relax, rejoice, be imprecise. The Poltergrues were realists. Every realist knows that good books gestate much longer than elephants; and this was to be a good book. Soon the summer would pass; Seabrook would be no more than an enchanted ripple long remembered. Amy and I; Amy, Cloris, and I-perhaps Amy, Cloris, Elza, June, and I-could well be in Rome, Mantua, Sirrhione, or Madrid.
"Order Bill a drink," June said.
The surf of a sudden compounded its rhythms. Low booms bowed down to sustained hisses; in running counterpoint was the pitter-patter of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.
The sea airhas a way of sensitizing your ear.
"And order me another bottle of my favorite wine." Mrs. Poltergrue was suddenly exuberant, as the wind seemed, when it stiffened. She informed me that she was most demanding when it came to wine. She could tolerate nothing but the best. Her favorite was called vin blanc. "Burgundy, you know."
The next afternoon at four, when the tide was beginning to ebb, waves still nibbling at the sea oats on the dunes, the girls came to work.
Both wore blue jeans and men's shirts knotted at midriff. Both were barefoot and chewing gum.
"Hi," each said in turn, running up the beachside staircase.
And there they were, standing in the place they had stood when, looking through the opened screen door, they had first seen the tattoo on Amy's naked rump. (Frustrated director that I am, I find a special pleasure in replaying scenes I have enjoyed. There is the same staging, same location, more or less the same action; only the cast is changed-or, more to the point, the leading actresses.) "Hi."
As soon as greeting ceremonies were over (a polite Continental peck on either cheek-cordial, but not ardent), I mixed drinks. Drinks were much in order if what I hoped would happen would happen much as I hoped. Pina coladas had promoted good cheer the first time around; I mixed pina coladas again-double strength.
The girls sprawled themselves comfortably in large redwood patio chairs, each puffing cigarettes in between nonchalant champings on gum. , As I served the first drink (tall glasses, very cold), I gave each a crisp, new hundred-dollar bill. "I will pay you at every modeling session," I said in a tone intended to be as crisp as the spanking-new money.
"It's really not necessary," Elza said sweetly, folding the bill and putting it in the right pocket of her jeans. "We trust you."
"Look," June said, pointing to the ocean, "a porpoise."
I explained in some detail what I apologetically call my production plans. And since I had few, if any, specific plans, over and above specific enjoyments, the explanation was not easy.
"We will have a certain number of basic positions and poses. Among these are lolling, leaning, lying, loping ... sometimes singly, sometimes together ... sometimes seen from the side, sometimes frontally. Occasionally we will need a straight-on derriere shot, as when one of you is leaning over to read the inscription on a gravestone ... or to pick up a forgotten musket ball."
"Groovy," Elza said.
"You will of course be naked."
"Wow," June said.
I picked up my Nikon and looked casually through the finder, as if my mind, always on professional matters, was now directing itself to matters of aperture and focus. Meanwhile I listed some of our possible locations: the East Battery, Whitepoint Gardens, City Hall Park (which has a statue of Pitt, one arm of which was shattered by a cannonball during one of the many sieges of Charleston). I spoke glowingly of Middleton Gardens, Magnolia Gardens, Cypress Gardens, the gardens of the Villa d'Este (where I hoped to take them, at some later date)--.
"When do we start?" June arched ecstatically, crassly, a penciled brow.
Money, indeed, paces art; and art, rectitude. And how pleasant it was for me to remind myself that, come what will, all my expenditures were deductible. No empty phrase is "the writer's craft."
"After the next drink."
The next drink was triple strength.
"You're going to like June," Elza said. "I told you."
June did not look at me. She sipped her triple-strength pina colada quietly.
"You like Proust?" Again Elza aborted the "Groovy ... wow" routine.
"Yes."
"You think he ever took any nudes?"
"Plenty," June said. "All ladies with black silk stockings, long gloves, and big sailor hats. And all on daguerreotypes."
"Lewis Carroll took nudes of little girls," Elza said.
"Look." June pointed. "Another porpoise."
I let a reasonable spread of time slide by. Then, eventually, I came to the signal question: "Ready?"
June put down her drink and stood up. "Ready when you are, B.B."
She recited her lines bravely. Elza, not moving, listened, watched.
"Good." I, too, got up.
"You want me to undress?"
"Yes."
"Right here."
"Right here."
"Everything."
"Everything."
"I'm a little scared."
"I did it, didn't I?" Elza gave me a collusive wink. She, too, soon would undress. That was understood. For the moment she chose to sit back and watch June. And June, coloring slightly, was enjoying, masochistically, this otiose discussion of what she was to do. this echo serenade. Tension is heightened by talk, particularly antiphonal talk-with much repetition of identicals.
"I already saw a lot of you at Larrine's. Remember?"
She laughed a small lie. "I'd almost forgotten."
"Superb." I held up the O formed by thumb and arced pointed finger. Flattery could do no harm. "Tits," Elza said.
"Okay." She smiled with a fillip of resignation, as if to say farewell to virtue, good-bye all that. She undid the knot in her shirt. The shirt opened. Breasts swung into view. Convenient nipples, pale, subdued, looked at me with the shy nipple eyes.
Why, I wondered, did Amy insist that I wanted to see her made love to by another man?
June took off her shirt, threw it to the nearest chair.
Then she faced me, Nefertiti style, arms straight down, palms flattened against thighs. "Okay?"
"Okay." The slopes had a golden glow, like the parts of her ordinarily visible. She had done her sunbathing, most evidently, sans bra.
I went over to her. I devoted a hand to either breast, cupped, fondled, ran forefingers around each nipple. I kissed each nipple, and each, I was pleased to note, rose slightly.
"Is this usually done?"
"Always," I assured her.
"It's the in thing." Elza, I thought, was proud as a sucked stone.
"I always thought of the in thing as a little bit different." She raised, again, her linear brows. "Just a weeny, teensy weeny bit different."
"To each her own." Elza was now conspicuously comfortable with me, like an old wife.
"What now?" June, who had turned to face Elza, swung back to face me. Her breasts, gelatinous pomegranates, swung with her, but because of their gel, because of the laws of inertia, oscillated temptingly, like a baked Alaska, after the initial swing.
"Drop your jeans."
Elza interpreted. "Strip."
June looked at me, her eyes now enigmatic. "Yes?"
"Yes," I said.
"Okay."
She unbuckled her belt, unfastened the lead button, unzipped the front.
The pants fell. She extricated, gracefully, her left foot. Her right foot sent the jeans flying in the direction of Amy's and my bedroom.
"There."
And there it was. The naked June, golden, glowing, lithe, untouched, sensuous and cynical.
I ran my hands over her. The spectacle defied social gravity.
Young girls do not do such things. Young girls do not strip on demand-even at a hundred dollars per unit stripping. Chaos stalks this umbilical world.
"Stacked, isn't she?" Elza said.
"Stacked." There was no denying. Elza, however, was toying with a more simplistic, envious note. Breasts. Young girls with negative breasts think that mammary inflation alone attracts men to girls; just as young men think, once chips and bedcovers are down, nothing interests a girl, holds a girl, other than penis girth.
In the face of such illusions, it is pointless to speak about Platonic essences. The shadow is the substance. Graham Greene, I think, grasped well this sensitive point, even if in theological dress.
Was it my intention to fuck June or an essence? Or Elza? Or the two en brochette, as suggested above?
To the Many, All Too Many, all that is intended is my enjoyment of twinned sisters in the flesh, wallowing in juices, exulting in sibilancies and twitching. To the initiated, however, I preach the logos. En arche", en ho logos, as the Johannine Gospel asserts.
In the beginning was the Word.
I quoted the first sentence in the Gospel According to St. John to Elza, while fondling June's rump, numerating the countable pubic hairs.
She countered with a handsome couplet of Charleston high-school doggerel:
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Hold that girl 'till I get on.
"How lovely in the hay," June said, from the depths of her fondled nakedness.
"Wow." Elza was adroit at punctuation. "Turn around," I said.
Obediently June turned. I examined her in profile, from behind, once again frontally. What was important was not what I saw, but that she turned on request. How happy many marriages might be, how few divorces, if a wife were so concerned with pleasing a husband. (But it is only on the interior illusion that the mind hinges. This was Plato's message, calling the illusion the only reality.)
Victorian that I am, I felt the obligation to act out what I had announced. I took token pictures.
I asked June to stand in a select group of standard poses: leaning against a post, the leg nearest me bent in languid ease; the derriere toward camera stance, torso bent over like the curved arm of a bentwood rocker. I tried even the as-you-say-sir at-attention pose: the model standing stiffly erect, eyes unseeing, arms tightly pressed to her sides-a pose made more dramatic when the model wears earrings and chain bracelets.
Here was June, naked among the bow-and-arrow birds; and here was I, wallowing in deceptions.
My deceptions, I began to surmise, were slightly old-fashioned. They were deceptions that practical youngsters were happy to humor, on a career basis.
Two hundred dollars per modeling session was not a high price to pay for twinned, lithe, lissome un-draped girls-assuming that the twinned, lithe, lissome girls were to be photographed for the accepted commercial reasons ... an advertisement, say, for Doublemint gum. On a day-by-day basis, however, it was a costly way to subsidize an infantile obsession. Each week they could now afford a new Carribean cruise-without me; each month a mink coat.
I stifled at once this bourgeois complaint. Only the sad and sodden ask what pleasure costs.
Moreover, as I tried to say elsewhere, such modeling fees were, for me, deductible. (Ironic it is, how we concern ourselves about costs, even when there are no costs. Such is the spell of habit. It is given to so so few to see beauty bare.)
After, on the porch, I had used one roll of film photographing the naked June in this and that classic stance, I suggested to Elza that she take her clothes off.
"For a hundred dollars," she said graciously, "why not?"
The occasion, for Elza, was the second time around. Her clothes came off swiftly, naturally, without debate or dialogue.
In retrospect, I must say that this was a singular afternoon. Two of the most succulent, loblolly girls that lust could imagine, here, now, in the lucent ocean light, cavorting in front of me, awaiting direction. The device? Not charm. Not art. Not the arcane philosophy of essences. The device was duplicate, crisp hundred-dollar bills.
It gives pause.
My next shot was of duplicate, bare, triumphant rumps, both inclined over a fallen palmetto tree. "This," I said, "is a dry run for the shot I want of the two of you over the northernmost cannon on East Battery."
For this we went down the porch steps, climbed over the dunes. The girls walked ahead of me, their golden bodies flashing, their flat flanks undulant.
I found the appropriate prop, a tall palmetto toppled by eroding tides. Roots, still dug into the white sand, held the lower end a good three feet above the sand.
Obediently, but with suppleness and grace, both girls bent over. Their upturned bottoms smiled at me, with dash, insouciance, as if peaked in a cancan.
My en brochette idea, position now told me, was a Baron Munchausen exaggeration. More feasible was the metaphor of successive skewers.
I stroked, in turn, each of the outspread cheeks, kissed, with horizontal sweep, the crest of each moraine hill.
"Sweet of you," Elza said over her left shoulder.
I put a K2 filter over my Nikon lens. Even if I had no use for the pictures I was about to make, there was no reason not to have them rich in darkened cloud backgrounds-the end product of the K2 yellow filter.
"Rumps higher," I ordered. Rumps rose. There was no technical, artistic, social reason for the extra elevation.
It gave my work, however, a more professional cast. I was not alone titillating myself with the sight of twinned naked bottoms. I was directing a tableau, staging action, launching a career.
And it suddenly occurred to me that, in spite of the many advantages that have come to us from Relativity, the transistor, and the sexual revolution, all is not balm in this bright, brain-bent world. Many pleasantries have disappeared from our lives-like waltzing, sacerdotal harlotry, and the pert rump flick in the cancan.
Elza wiggled, improvised a bump and a grind. She was much at home.
I took six or seven pictures, entertaining myself with camera angles. From the sixty-degree vantage right, for example, I got interesting concentric curves, June's buttocks before Elza's. Sixty degrees vantage left gave me the reverse effect. The straight-on view gave me four absolutely symmetrical ovals spread out in horizontal array.
I enjoyed them enormously, even without touching them. They were so immaculately slim and trim, like the little golden conchs on the sand.
To the well-practiced eye, form, I suppose, eventually triumphs over function.
Eventually Elza straightened up. She swung around, her hair flying. "My ass is tired, do you mind?"
June jumped up, turned, her little breasts swinging.
"Let's all go skinny-dipping," Elza said.
She was, quite clearly, no longer, if ever, shy.
Behind the house, in the green swirl of pines and wax myrtle, two bobwhites sang "bobwhite" in unison. A singular sound, twinned monotones in leaping fifths. Moments later a slip in timing dispelled the union; the "bob" of Bird I overlapped the "white" of Bird 2. And suddenly, on this enchanted island, was the beginning of a fugue.
An afternoon on Seabrook, between ardent nymphs, can be eminently cultural.
"Get your clothes off," Elza ordered, she of the hard thighs and transcendent "wow."
"Off ... off ... off," said June, chewing on a sea oat.
I quickly got out of my clothes.
Our only neighbors were sea foam and birdsong. Seabrook, once sparsely settled by Kiawah Indians, ruled over by a legendary cacique of Kaiwah, is still sparsely settled. You could walk miles on this barrier island, clothed or unclothed, without thought of scanning eye.
"Look!" Elza pointed. "It's standing up."
"How rude to point," June said. "I think you've made a conquest."
"You." There was this competitive use of the second person.
"You ... you." Elza, two-gun style, used both pointer fingers. One pointed to my tumescence. The other to June's swelling breasts. She had pleasing, although naive, notions of cause, and effect.
We, chaining hands, plunged into the water; and the ocean that day was warm and balming. The ocean was once again the Great Mother. A baby porpoise surfaced about ten feet in front of us, arched and dived. Pelicans swooped overhead, gliding along the furrows of the wind.
And there they were, Houdon nymphs, but solid, palpable, quick, vocal. You would have expected them, at any moment, to mount dolphins.
I touched each in various touchable places, various sensitive places, and each laughed a young, bright laugh that blended with the lapping of the waves, and seemed part of the spray.
Eventually Elza grasped, with a pert show of pos-sessiveness, my central part, and put her lips to my ear. "You want to screw June, don't you?"
"Yes."
I looked at June. She stood a little farther out, facing us, her breasts well above water, their wetness shimmering in the afternoon sun.
"Then why don't you?"
"Is it as easy as that?"
"It's not easy at all." She yanked her indignation. "But you bought an option ... and she'll live up to her contract."
Young people have such a direct way of undermining our romantic frustrations.
Above us were the lamb-white clouds; around us were moving fish, and the wild streaks of foam saltwater weaves when it is stroked by wind.
The three of us showered together, with considerable touching, considerable kissing, selective fondling. I reminded myself of Louis XIV, who kept himself young by rubbing himself, each day, against the fresh, lithe bodies of very young girls-the same girls later painted by Fragonard and Boucher, sculptured by Houdon, and who, most-likely, and in more or less the same way, rubbed themselves against Fragonard, Boucher, and Houdon.
Once in Amy's and my bedroom, both girls simultaneously threw themselves facedown on the bed, their identical buttocks smiling at me in collinear grace.
I retired, for a brief space, to the bathroom, preferring to forestall a confusion of genuine lust with a pedestrian pressure in the bladder. Purity of heart is one thing at a time.
Once back on the bed, I admired the relaxed spread of gluteal beauties-the four identical hillocks, the twin cupid's bows, the parallel cleavage. I began on the left, parting the sinistral roundings. There was a squeal, a squirming.
The time had come for a compliment, routine, perhaps, but one making penetration personal, intimate, tender. "Elza..." I began, groping for the mot juste.
"I'm June," June said over her left shoulder. "Remember?"
I remembered.
"Twinning," she added, with more philosophy than the moment required, "doubles opportunity, but halves insertion." She raised her head, raised her eyebrows. "Or doesn't it?"
I withdrew, made one or two meaningless sounds, for politeness' sake, then turned June over. June's breasts, jutting ceilingward, guaranteed her identity. She then, of her own accord, with special ardor, kissed me. It was all quite funny, she thought. "Right pew, wrong church."
There followed much kissing; and the kissing was full, ardent, eloquent. In my jaundiced, cynical career, I had lost sight of the seriousness of kissing, forgetting that passion is essence, an apocalypse ever so innocently at hand. Worldly girls take kissing as a matter of course, a rite of passage. To the young it is its own end, as is a Popsicle or an all-day sucker.
June was startled, however, when I kissed her breasts. She jumped.
"I want to watch," Elza said, as if watching were a privilege reserved for those dedicated to the sacred mysteries. Thus might Oedipus' sister have spoken, on Oedipus' bridal night.
"Has Amy ever watched while you made love to another woman?" Elza was interested. (Amy, now, not Miss Amy.)
"Yes."
"Did she mind?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Not at all." (Because the other woman was Cloris. Amy, I was sure, would explode if she found me making love to a girl who was younger, competitive, and whose lovemaking excluded her. If she found me making love to Elza, to June, or the two in a combination package.)
"Has anyone ever watched you make love to Amy?" June asked.
"Yes."
"Amy didn't mind?"
"No." (How could Amy mind? We were the Beast with Three Backs.) "Who watched."
"Cloris."
"Who's Cloris?" Elza wanted to know. "Lady Cholmondeley. The woman with whom I made movies. You've heard of Monna VannaT' "What's Monna VannaT
"The picture we made last year. The picture in which Amy plays ... nude."
"Not really." Elza was no easy believer. "Like we are now?" June's question. "Like we are now."
"Amy didn't mind, really didn't mind?" Elza got back to the problem of etiquette. "Being watched, I mean."
"No."
"Did Lady Cholmondeley make love to her, too."
"Yes."
I thought we talked enough. Pleasant as were these recollections to me, warming as they were to my collective cockles, there were other, more eager joys closer at hand.
I took Elza in arms. She was passive, unresisting, altogether limp. It was exciting to find her so yielding. Her arms, legs, followed mine as if in a dance. But when I felt below, she was dry as a bleached desert bone.
I felt, without protest from Elza, June's corresponding adit. This, too, was dry.
We had been talking too much.
Elza placed her hand over my hand, as my hand rested on her arid center. It was a gesture of friendship, intimacy; perhaps a substitute for smoking.
"Please screw June," she said.
Once more I kissed June's eloquent places in descending order. I kissed, kissing sea salt. I tasted the subtle change of salt to honey. June mumbled a variety of monosyllables, beginning with . "no," ending with "oh." There was a quiver, a scream.
"Now," she said. "Now ... please ... please."
It is such a luxury to be wanted.
I moved up her body. Her lips engulfed mine in pleasant frenzy, and my engorged penis slid, without guidance, into its proper, warm, wet, welcoming place.
But not yet was journey's end.
"Oh, no," June screamed, wiggling in reverse peristalsis to eject me. "First put something on."
"A conundrum, perhaps," Eliza said, lackadaisically. "Or an old raincoat." She yawned. "Not on the pill, you know."
Communication, in act one, scene one, is apt to be lax.
"A quondam," June translated. "Don't you have a quondam?"
"Or Saran Wrap?" Elza taxed her imagination. "How about a mongrammed silk handkerchief?"
"So sorry," I said, establishing polite regret.
The dialogue was now academic, rhetorical, anachronistic, because my solidity was now deep inside the sanctum.
There was time for only a final, intense, poetic thrust.
"Oh, God," and gave way to an authentic, lyrical spasm. Her legs pulled up. There was the thrashing, frenzied, maelstrom response, so rare nowadays, cathartic as Greek tragedy. The ineffable became flesh, and the flesh dissolved. There were the cosmic sounds; sudden, explosive, unexplained tears.
(I recount these details because I am totally without gallantry, making capital, like an entomologist, of mysteries the gods incline to keep veiled. I feel sometimes like that Hippasos whom the Pythagoreans drowned because he disclosed to the world the fact that, in Euclidean geometry, the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This theory would obviously not hold on a Lobachevskian surface, such as the walls of a vagina; there the sum of angles would depend on the degree of constriction-and in spasm would be totally unpredictable.)
It seemed only proper to withdraw. I was not unmindful of dangers.
"Don't." In a moment of unexpected raptus, June reversed herself. "Please don't."
Coitus interruptus, unfortunately, though much abused, is seldom mastered. It has its own regimen, rhythms, rules. Nor was I any more adroit in such practices. There was the expected, awkward spurting of essence.
"Such a waste." June sighed.
Elza eyed my performance with serene detachment, her lips curled in little Mona Lisa attitudes. Premature ejaculation was a weakness of character, like wet dreams and a susceptibility to hypnosis. "You could, you know, get a vasectomy." Then, after a routine pause, during which she seemed to weigh the respective pulls of desire and propinquity, she added, "That is, if you want to see us regularly."
June did not look happy when they left.
The wind had freshened; and the waves, in sustained crescendo, pounded the dunes.
I had dinner alone, at the Seabrook Island Club. The club has an exceptional chef, and the dinner that night had exceptional savor-possibly because of the chef, possibly because sexual excess sensitizes the taste buds. I ordered she-crab soup (the great Charleston specialty), lobster Calhoun (rock lobster, broiled, flavored, outside the shell, then served, with sauces, in the shell), a chefs salad with the chef's dressing, and a bottle of eight-year-old Bernkasteler Doktor (brought to the table in an ice bucket). The twins were sitting on the opposite side of the dining room with their parents. They waved. Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue smiled genially; after all, I was molding a career for their daughters.
I made a mental note to buy a few dozen condoms.
Life was indeed sweet.
The Moselle, fragrant as frangipani, brought back to my lips the flavors of the afternoon, the stirring freshness of nymphs. I sipped it slowly, eyeing my girls over the rim of the glass, plotting strategies.
Sooner or later, I assured myself, I would have to exhibit a few pictures. Proper pictures. The girls were glamorous enough, even in raincoats. This was one novel theme: rain. I could take them to historic Charleston sites in a downpour. They would both wear raincoats. Under the raincoats, nothing. The raincoat pictures they could frame. Parents would see the beginning of a career, give or take a decent amount of imagination. The nudes I would take for my own amusement. Some I could send to Cloris. Possibly? The bright thought came to me. Cloris and I could use them in our next picture. I could take them to Rome. Rimini. I could write some kind of justifying story-something about Romulus and Remus, perhaps. Something about the Bobbsey Twins?
Not that any of this was possible; there were too many obstacles. Particularly Amy. It was, however, an enticing thought.
Meanwhile, time was on my side. I could take many public, conventional, dull pictures of Elza and June in swimsuits at Cypress Gardens, Magnolia Gardens, Middleton Gardens-even on Seabrook beach, or poolside at the club.
For general information, a balm for parents, I would make clear the time span of book production: at least a year, possibly two, between "writing" and release. In two years, or less, I could be with Amy or Cloris, or Amy and Cloris-with or without the Bobbsey Twins-in Rome, Rimini, or Rangoon.
Toward the end of my dinner I saw Vanderhoff standing at the door. He also saw me. He came over. "Could I join you for a cup of coffee?"
I ordered another bottle of wine.
"I read about Amy in the morning paper," he said. "Very interesting."
"What about?" The paper is not delivered to Seabrook. My only contact with news was the TV and radio coverage, sparse, national.
"She may be our next ambassador to the UN. Senator Ashmead is pushing her. And with this administration he carries clout. Southern strategist. That sort of thing."
"This is the first I heard."
"She and Ashmead had a falling-out sometime back. You know about that."
"I heard." I did not know Amy then. "Seems Larrine patched things up."
"How?"
"Seems she was posing for Larrine a couple of weeks ago ... Larrine loves to do nudes of her ... dozens and dozens. Ashmead walked in. Just so."
"Just so?"
"Maybe Larrine planned it that way. With Larrine, you never know."
"Or with Amy?"
"Fascinating personality. Not since Lady Hamilton has there been such a Lady Hamilton. Sadness-great beauty calls for sadness. Dante knew this. Leonardo.
Sadness, perversity, exhibitionism, a witch's charm, alternating fire and ice."
The waiter brought the second bottle of Bernkaste-ler, a glass for Vanderhoff. He filled the two glasses.
Vanderhoff resumed: "Isabelle may have had something to do with it."
"Isabelle?"
"Wescott. My lean, lovely, perverse hostess. Chatelaine of Berkeley Hall. Isabelle-you must have read about her-still has a power over her. You need to be a cryptologist to explain it. Amy would do anything for Isabelle."
He raised his glass for a toast. "To Amy ... and to that famous, feckless, tattooed ass."
There was much, I realized, that Amy did not tell me. Not, I think, because she did not love me; not because what she did, how she did it, was indelicate, indiscreet, fattening.
Nor had she any more Confederate notions of fidelity. I was an interim lover, on leave from Cloris. A lover is not a yoke. Nor is fidelity any more than a quondam name for an insurance company.
It was something else. This secrecy, these hidden acts, these intimacies not shared, all were part of a subterranean need to keep separate each of her several personalities. She needed veils-even if only to enjoy the embarrassment which came over when they were lifted.
"He was at Berkeley Hall the other night."
"He?"
"Ashmead. He was there when Amy was there."
Famous, feckless, tattooed ass? Vanderhoff's earlier words suddenly resounded in my ear. I was not pleased, somehow, with the notion that my love's private bottom had become ecumenical. Nor that this lovely fane should be available, for the asking, to any catch-as-catch-can politician of a conservative stripe. "Incidentally, you know Ashmead?" I did not.
"Unusual man, unusual. Aging, of course; we are all aging." He stopped to mop his face, as if this would deter time in its relentless march. "Perhaps that's why he's so interested in Amy. Young women, they say, reheat the blood."
I wanted more detail about the meeting at Miss Wescott's. What was done to Amy? What did Amy do? It did not, however, seem quite proper to ask.
One does not, for example, to a total stranger say, "Tell me, old man, about the whipping of my mistress. Was she pretty? Did she blush? Did she tremble, as once she did; then quiver and cry?"
"Extraordinary man, quite unusual. The two sides of his face don't match; they redden differently. Somebody there said something or other nice about one of the Kennedys, and Ashmead got quite uptight. But only one cheek got red. A single cheek. The left. This fact is worth noting in a time when physiology occupies so much of our attention."
The incandescence was on the left cheek. On the left cheek was Amy's lily. Life is dappled with the colors of coincidence.
I went back to the beach house and put paper in my typewriter. I was beginning, I thought, to understand Amy; I could write about more than the pleasant shapings of her body, the oceanography of her loving.
Bits of the current mosaic began to fit together. The mosaic was fit for Pompeii. She had been sad that day, sad and conflicted; sad, conflicted, withdrawn. Because Amy No. I was being overwhelmed by Amy No. 2. Miss Jekyll was wrestling with Mrs. Hyde. She had left me, in the midst of lovemaking, because Miss Wescott had called Miss Jekyll, giving bed orders to Miss Jekyll already bedded.
What followed? Miss Wescott had whipped Miss Jekyll in front of Senator Ashmead. The good senator, charmed, excited, forgave all past deficiencies, observed on Amy's naked bottom the benchmarks of a bright political future. Amy (of whatever number) returned unconflicted, uninhibited, unleashed-a composite of all the heroines in Greek drama.
"Drang-drank," said the telephone, in the midst of my detective work. "Drang-drank!" (The telephone at Seabrook rang always in paired trills.) I picked it up, this instrument over which Amy, according to my theory, received her birching orders.
"Darling." Amy's voice. "Are you lonely?"
"Terribly," I said.
"I miss you terribly. I'm horny for you."
"Double ditto," I said, which was acutely true. The scenario I had just framed had worked me up, and I was writing with my typewriter perched over my stalagmite.
She followed with an affectionate description of what she would do, and how she would do it, were we at this moment in bed together, instead of exchanging chitchat over long distance. All of which was very thoughtful, chic, maternal.
Presently she came to matters less expected, more mundane. "Darling, how would you like to go to live in Liechtenstein?"
I had been in Liechtenstein only some nine months earlier, recording my-and Cloris'-plesaunce with Amy's namesake, Aimee, the Countess of Liechtenstein. (The consequence was our collaborative motion picture, The Naked Countess of Liechtenstein, currently playing in New York, Rome, London, and Paris.) "Why Liechtenstein?"
"I've been offered the ambassadorship. Interesting, no?"
"Interesting, yes."
"And by protocol, every ambassador is entitled to a lover. Come with me and be my love."
"At once."
"You do miss me, don't you?" Her voice was filled with music. "I can't tell you..."
Her smile leaped up at me through the telephone. "You don't need to."
"I'm horny for you." (Banal repetition. But in love talk, repetitions are useful, even hypnotic, as in anthems, hymns, and the war chants of the Ojibway Indians.)
"You could ... oh, I'm ashamed to say it..." (No shame at all; mock embarrassment for flirtatious effect.)
"You could think of me ... and ... and ... jerk off."
"Such a waste." (A throwaway line; filler.)
"You might even look up the twins. But that's more of a waste. You'll get nowhere."
The omnipotence of thought. In its way, quite flattering. I could get nowhere, so go ahead.
"I have a favor to ask. You must be patient with me."
"What?"
"I'm going to make a sacrifice of myself tonight ... a political sacrifice. Call it that. And don't ask with whom, how, or where. Do you mind?"
Two questions artfully intertwined: Did I mind her sacrificing-for political reasons-her moon-white, tattooed bottom? Did I, biographer, mind not asking with whom, how, where?
Artful, my love; also exhibitionistic, piquant, and teasing. I must know and not know at the same time.
"Of course not." I tried to give my triad of approval a hearty nonchalance. "If it excites you."
I minded much. I did not savor the idea of my special love opened naked to another man. Opened to Cloris, to Larrine, was another matter. Her nakedness, her secret options, opulence, like the ineffable names known to the initiate, belonged alone to me-and my cabal.
"This is politics," she announced crisply. "Strictly politics."
As novelist, biographer, voyeur, I find it easier to ask questions than to find answers. Much easier it would be to account for the strange disappearance of Dorothy Arnold near Central Park on the only day that a black trumpeter swan has been seen on the placid lakes of Central Park.
Amy was by now a power in state politics. This was another part of her mystery; why was she a power? She had never talked to me about political interests, political theory, the chicaneries of office. She had no theories, as far as I knew, about causes and cures linked to social unrest. She was, if anything, apolitical. (Except, of course, when she took up a cause, like the undiapering of horses, that expressed a love for sanity, gentleness, permissive ease.) Yet, like Alice Long-worth, in days long past, like Jacqueline Kennedy, when the Kennedys gave color to national scene, she was a power, an influence. Local politicians consulted her, respected her. Her husband rode to interim prominence chiefly, I thought, because he was a reflection of her entrenched glories, her charm, her position.
Nor were her scandals, now widespread, embellished i gossip, a drawback to her authority. Everybody by now knew of her roles in the erotic films, knew of her episode with John; many had read John's book, and mine. None of this diminished her reputation, none dimmed her luster. If anything, the reports, the gossip, the legends, enhanced her glamour.
But what, in political circles, did she actually do? What now was she doing? Why would she say, "This is politics. Strictly politics"?
I fell into a deep sleep. I had had a ripe, full day. Many promises, many problems. I dreamed I was back in Vaduz, in the Count of Liechtenstein's schloss. Aimee had slipped away from her husband, who, ardent ichthyologist that he is, was counting fish. She had crept through the secret passageway which connected her bedroom with mine (and which is rough on your feet, if you try to grope through it, naked and barefoot). She was scratching at the secret panel hidden under the huge Gobelin which hung on the wall. (The Giorgione Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan.) She was calling my name. "Bill. Bill."
The sound seemed slightly odd, as is the sound of all given names when fervidly mouthed under a Gobelin.
Then I heard, "Uncle Bill."
Never, even in jest or passion, would the Countess of Liechtenstein call me Uncle Bill. I woke.
"Uncle Bill, are you still alone?"
The question would have been highly inappropriate had I not been alone. (But such questions, framed swiftly in the groin of the night, seldom, I suppose, take account of all contingencies.)
There she was before the latched screen door of the porch; there she was, rippling soft in the spider moonlight-June, wearing nothing.
"Can I come in?" The ultimate urbane, mock-innocent query, ironic and errant. As if any man, decently schooled, would deny shelter to a naked girl, rippling soft in the groin of the night.
I unlatched the door. She came in, kissing me lightly, saying the usual interim things a girl says when she comes naked to a man's house in hours before dawn.
After various other greeting ceremonies, I allowed myself an avuncular stroking of her bottom and eased her down on the bed. She then kissed me with inexperienced enthusiasm, bashing her teeth against mine.
"I brought you a present," she said, handing me a neatly wrapped box.
"So nice of you." I kissed her a second time, this time with care, caution.
"I hope you'll like them."
How could I not like whatever she brought? It was more than enough that she brought herself, so artfully unpackaged.
"They're lubricated."
"Yes?"
"They're quondams." With this announcement she again kissed me, her lips, well-pomaded, sliding over like succulent Chap Sticks. "Supersensuous."
She had driven twenty miles, that late afternoon, to get them.
I conceded that she was very sweet, very thoughtful, also supersensuous.
"I didn't know whether to buy sensuous or supersensuous. I never bought quondams before." She rubbed against me.
The whole mission, it seemed to me, called for skill, effort, imagination, nonchalance; and I announced to her, with careful choice of an honorific, that she herself was "super."
"I love posing," she said.
She had a feeling for le mot juste.
"Posing is groovy ... once you get over the feeling that you're naked on roller skates and can't think of anything to do with your hands."
She then explained to me, as if explanation were necessary, why she had arrived naked. "I didn't think you'd mind ... since I'd be naked when I posed, anyway...."
"How logical," I conceded. "And how very practical."
She had left her clothes in her car, and her car down the road. The reason? Amy. She did not think Amy would be home; but she might come home unexpectedly. Should this happen, this traumatic return (June thought of everything), she would not have to dress. She would leave no telltale finery, no clues to the pleasures of stealth. "I'd just pittipat, like raindrops, down the back staircase."
Still rampant, I said, still eloquent, and screaming louder than a fire siren, would be the "quondams."
She laughed. The bed heaved and creaked. "A girl can't think of everything, can she? Quondams are a man's department."
She was too young to be told (nor was there any reasonas yet to tell her) that a man's time-tested betrayers are not girls slowly dressing, but earrings or hairpins left in bed, lipstick on shirtfronts or pillows-or, apage Satands, lipstick around the penis.
"Sometime you must teach me how to write," she said, embracing me, thrusting her tongue in my mouth, pulling me down on top of her.
Nothing, I am convinced, is as lyric as the first flowering of a young girl. Nor are there pleasures greater than that of the feel of her bones moving parallel to mine, of the fragrance of her breath, fresh as honeysuckle and quick with love.
In time, with change of mood, ripening heat, she insisted that she be allowed to put on, as giver, one of the barbaric devices she had given. She turned on the light. She took from a tin box a fragrant yellow rubber mollusk. She took hold of my erection with the hand sinistra, capped it with the dextral hand. She then unrolled the sensation-dulling membrane, pushed it down, smoothed out wrinkles. No child could have given more care, concern, affection, to her first Barbie doll.
The ensheathed tumescence was now all hers, an obelisk enfranchised with love and sentiment, a new toy.
She insisted on rising above it, settling down on it, the taking of me rather than the taking of her, settling on it as an egret settles on its first egg.
"I hear Amy's going to run for governor," she said, rising, settling back.
"News to me," I informed her.
She rose and sank again, enjoying her explorations, her study, her newfound relation of cylinder to piston. "I suppose legitimate lovers are the last to know." All this circumscribed with the nimbus of a mock sigh.
I raised my hands and fingered her breasts-which is the least a new lover can do to express empathy and inspire concern. Braile is the most effective of all alphabets.
"I'm really not a virgin," she went on. The word struck me as slightly dated, like womb, or phthisis.
"Really." She was insistent.
She was teetering, I gathered, on the brink of confession. Intimacy spurs confessions; confession paces intimacy. I sensed the wording to come. June would tell me, any moment now, about the scrawny, drawling, pimpled football captain to whom her virtue had been no more than a passing touchdown. The loss had occurred, no doubt, on the back seat of her father's car (Electra motif). She had invited it. ("I pretended I was drunk.") She had felt nothing, ruined her dress, missed her next period (hysterical pregnancy).
I underestimated her.
All of which is background for the simple, girlish statement: "I'm not a virgin. If I told you I was, I lied to you. If I implied I was, I misled you."
The details were immaterial to me. I am not a master of the plow, an aficionado of Rotorouter.
More, now, on the urge to confess. "I had a boyfriend in college. A drip, maybe. But a very nice drip. He knocked it off. Maidenhead-if you still believe in maidenheads. I don't. I lean toward the Loch Ness monster. And the Yeddi."
"He was good?"
"Not really. Praecox-that sort of thing. But what else is there to do in college?" She thought of glassblowing; but after Deep Throat even that seemed amiably suspect.
I thought of other things that could be done at college, but I saw nothing to be gained by listing them.
"I went to the Book Basement and bought your book about Cloris," she said.
"You liked it?"
"She's quite a girl ... Cloris."
"Quite a girl."
"Better than Amy?"
"Better in what way?"
"In bed."
"Different."
"How can girls be different in bed?"
I got up and poured us both some scotch. Straight on ice. There was a subtle disloyalty, unworthy of me, I felt, in discussing Amy's sexual habits with her juniors.
"Will you teach me?" she asked. "Teach you what?"
"Everything that Amy does that pleases you. T want to please you. Please believe me. I do ... more than anything else in my whole life."
She threw her face on mine, her breasts on my chest, groin joined to groin.
A little later she said, "Why don't you compromise me?"
"Compromise?" The word had its proper place in a dictionary. Here it did not make sense.
"Make me do something altogether unmentionable to you. Then take my picture doing it. That way you'll have power over me for the rest of my life."
She had, I thought, an inestimably sweet disposition.
"If you become a congressman..." A more venal idea. "If you became a congressman ... and I was your mistress ... you could put me on the payroll ... just to satisfy your sexual needs."
"And Amy?"
"Amy could be our den mother."
Soon she wanted me to teach her everything Amy knew, carnally speaking, carnally shouting.
She was an apt pupil; apt, inventive, flamboyant, untiring.
"Maybe," she announced ultimately, "we don't need the quondams after all."
A little later she said, "I have a title for your next book."
"What?"
"The First of June." She was piquant, jubilant, triumphant.
"On or About the First of June."
"The First Day in June" She had a gift, this stripling.
In I thought too blatant.
"But it's the truth, isn't it," she said, making the gestures that established the fact-sans quondam.
A hasty withdrawal was soon in order.
June complained that I had "no sense of adventure." She also used the word "chicken."
CHAPTER 6
Anent: sibling rivalry:
I felt myself more drawn to June because June read my books. She took the trouble to drive to town, to go to the Book Basement on King Street, and buy a copy of every book still in print.
I don't think I am vain about my writing, nor do I set great store by it. But it is, even so, a report on what I see and feel. It is communication. It is one half of a conversation; something more, hopefully, than an ms. found in a bottle.
Elza did not read very much. Curiosity did not inspire her to read even those books of mine June brought to Seabrook. (Except, I later learned, certain lurid pages detailing the passions of Amy-passages June had marked and shown her.)
"You'd rather screw June," Elza claimed, "because she has bigger tits."
To stabilize matters, I found it useful to make love to both together as often as possible. Each time, of course, there was the ceremonial snapping of pictures, each time the ceremonial payment of modeling fees. And both, each time, the record should show, were punctilious about the duties of a model.
All in all-and I congratulated myself-our arrangement was artful, urbane, happy. I had available, at any hour, day or night, two of the most delectable young girls to be found anywhere, a boon to my body, inspiration for my work. And they had, in turn, a hardy income which I could well afford, and which lowered my tax outlay. (I put no premium on my humble person, or on my services as companion and guide.)
"Daddy wants to know when the book is coming out," Elza announced one day while scrutinizing her chest in the mirror on the bathroom door.
"I think we ought to show him some pictures," June said.
Both had just taken off some several hundred dollars' worth of new finery. Long past were the days of the dingy dungarees, of simple halter and shorts. Nor did they anymore arrive naked. They arrived looking always like the models they presumably were; and they undressed with proper exhibitionistic pride.
Unfortunately, the only pictures I had taken thus far were unexhibitable nudes-many in the compromising positions so generously suggested by June. Nor had I bothered to have these developed. One does not take nudes of well-known Charleston girls to a local photofinisher to be developed and printed.
And I had been too lazy, too uninterested, perhaps too occupied, to process them myself. Not that that at ah mattered in this instance; neither Mr. nor Mrs. Poltergrue would be cheered by my various views of their golden daughters cavorting in the buff.
It was still early afternoon. There would be fight until eight.
I suggested that both climb back into their St. Laurent or Von Furstenburg frocks, their mono-grammed lace panties, adjust their new earrings, new bracelets, and drive with me to the city.
June thought it would be nice if they modeled a little on the bed, "just to start the afternoon."
I scheduled twenty minutes for this warm-up. ("Just to relax us," Elza said.) Then we drove to town.
Once below Broad Street, I accomplished in two hours-perhaps three-almost all that I had planned when the idea for the book first came to me. (Although these were prim, formal shots-not my planned, lush nudes.) I took pictures of each alone, both together, (I) leaning against the cannon on East Battery; (2) in front of the Sword Gate on Legare Street (near Amy's old house); (3) in the doorway of St. Stephen's; (4) at the entrance to the Old Market; (5) embracing the base of the monument to Sergeant Jasper ("Next time we'll embrace the old boy himself," June said, with handsome glee, "and we'll both be naked."); and several other poses in as many other local shrines.
I took careful shots, using a large-format camera which until then I had kept in reserve (Mamiya RB 67. with 120 mm. f.3:8 lens), a tripod, and an orange filter, where necessary (for dark cloud effects).
When we were through, I took the film, and the girls, to the photo studio of an old friend of mine (John Young), on Market Street.
I introduced him to the twins, heard him say "wow," June say "wow," Elza say "groovy"-a sudden reversion to the limited vocabulary of our first meeting. Young people today apparently have special greeting syllables, to be understood only in terms of Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, and the Principle of Least Effort. The ceremony, in any event, is a vast improvement over the greeting rituals of young dogs.
My friend agreed to develop, proof-print, eventually enlarge "for publication," rolls of film I handed him. He was kind, warm, understandably interested in the charm and proportions of my twins.
"I like your mustache," June said to John. "I like all of you," John said to June. "I could use you."
"You bet you could," Elza said, with the pride of a press agent.
June kissed his cheek, a kindness in return for his kindness in processing the film. "When the book comes out, we're going to run a lobster stud farm. You must drop over."
John kissed her hand, the gesture of an artist who hoped one day to study in Paris.
When we left, I took the girls to Henry's for drinks and dinner. John's place is on Market, between King and Meeting streets. Henry's, Charleston's most esteemed seafood place (and which has an atmosphere much like P. J. Clarke's in New York), is also on Market Street-but a few blocks east, facing the open stalls of the market.
"Let's not go home tonight." This was Elza's suggestion.
"Don't your father and mother expect you?"
"We told them we might stay in town-particularly if we worked late. They don't like us to be driving late at night. We said if we worked too late, we would stay at Larrine's."
"Larrine's in Washington."
"They don't know that," June said.
Elza pointed to her head. "They're not very hip."
June put her hand on mine, to say, tacitly, "Pretty please!"
Elza was even more persuasive. "If we stay in town tonight, we could get up at dawn ... and do the real thing ... really."
"Stark, silly naked." June smiled. "And you could send the prints to Lady Cholmondeley."
"Where would you like to stay?"
"At the Mills-Hyatt House, with you, silly." June found me, if not altogether square, at least impercep-tive.
"We're really on the pill now," Elza said. "Really. You won't even have to be careful."
I gave each of them her customary modeling fee, and ordered dinner. It occurred to me that I had acquired an exceedingly pleasant $200-a-day habit. Life was nowhere as doleful as old Schopenhauer suspected.
"Two separate rooms," I said nonchalantly to the room clerk, a blonde, smiling young man who reminded me of Jimmy Carter. "A double for Mrs. June and myself. A single for Mrs. June's sister."
"They're almost identical," he said, interest written in electronic letters on his watery blue eyes.
"They are," I agreed, repressing the addendum, "and interchangeable."
"The luggage is in the trunk of the car," I said to the bell captain, handing him the key. Fortunately, I kept my camera gear (two cameras, extra lenses, tripod, lights, film) in two suitcases.
I registered as Mr. and Mrs. Jean June (suggested by jejune) and Miss May Hemme, and put down as address the address of my agent, on Madison Avenue in New York. My American Express card, flashed on registering, assured the clerk that all was in order. Money talks.
"That won't be necessary, sir," he said, with the po-litesse one expects in Charleston.
Only seconds later I realized that my card carried the name, "Beauregard Benton," and had expired the previous month.
There is much music, I believe, in the charm and abstract courtesy of old Charleston.
One of my bags had a quart of Smith's Glenlivet, an accessory always useful for steadying models' nerves, stirring the photographer's imagination, cleaning lenses. This was in the bag deposited in "Elza's" room. We took it out of the bag, rumpled her bed (for good form's sake), retired to the double bedroom.
"Force a little down my throat," Elza said.
Each of us took a hearty slug from the bottle. Then we showered. We were tired, sticky, grimy from the first legitimate picture-making of our combined operation. And all for what? To give Mummy and Daddy a few prints to frame for lamp tables and pianos, and to mail, proudly, to relatives in the Redneck up-country.
We had a second drink after the shower; a third, a fourth. The details of what followed are no longer significant. There was no need anymore to use "quondams." Of this I was volubly assured. I could do what I wanted; in any way, in any stance, and as often as the spirit moved me.
With this understanding established, I got into bed between them. June passed the bottle. We each had a final, Independence Day slug. Then, with Glenlivet's blessings within us, we all fell asleep.
I woke about four o'clock. Moonlight, filtering without friction through harbor clouds, spread itself on our bed. The chimes of St. Michael's rang solemnly, announcing to the dreaming city that all was well, even if the bells were a semitone flat and five minutes late.
On either side of me were my sleeping nymphs, breathing deeply, oblivious, as youth is, to the pulls of anxiety. Elza, face buried in pillow, slept with her rump upraised, as if expecting an enema.
Reaching right, reaching left, I assured myself of the reality, curvature, solidity of this treasury of nymplidom. I sampled each buttock, circumnavigated by touch the perimeter of each pleasure dome, pleasure niche; debated with myself the arguments for and against each of my several tactical options. In the process I, again, fell off to sleep.
What woke me, ultimately, was the clasp of Elza's wet, slithering lips on my manhood. "Time to go to work," she announced from the corner of her mouth, her enunciation slightly blurred.
June stirred, sighed.
"Kiss her once ... there," Elza mumbled, expressing a touching sense of concern, charity, togetherness.
Without detaching my center from Elza's oral sweetness, I turned a half-somersault, kissed June tenderly "there."
"Ah," June sighed, opening her thighs.
"Time to go to work." My words, like Elza's, lacked the bell tones of classical articulation. They sounded as if spoken through the double reed of an oboe.
"Oh, no!" Half-sleep dulled her articulation; half-sleep and a confusing dream. "Don't stop."
In my inverted, fetal position, it was a simple matter to touch Elza "there."
"Ummm," she said. Her thighs swung apart. The separation was in no way required; it was, however, heartening and hospitable-nature's way of spreading out a welcome mat.
I hoped my own anatomical responses were heartening to Elza in more or less the same way, although no man is at his erectile best when roused from deep sleep at this unprepossessing hour.
June, in her half-sleep, heaved, groaned, quivered, dreaming, no doubt, of some provincial Lochinvar pleasuring himself en route to a hockey puck.
Nor did Elza resist the apocalyptic effect of my adroit touch. We thus had dual, synchronous, parallel patterns of heaving, groaning, quivering preludes to wet dream-flow.
Nor did I resist, or try to resist, the charm, efficacy, peristalsis of Elza's shrewd lips.
"You're a bastard, Beauregard," Elza announced with stripling pride as the expected occurred.
I had planned, long back, that if and when we ever got around to actual nude shots at the historic places, I would have the girls arrive on location wearing only raincoats. The raincoats could be dropped on cue. If possible spectators were sighted, the raincoats could be pulled back on. The actual nudity on site could thus be limited to the minute or so it would take me to shoot, advance film for the next picture.
This morning the girls were without raincoats. Their only clothes were under things and their expensive high-fashion dresses. Even the dresses were not easy to take off; they had to be unbuttoned, unzipped, then pulled up over the head.
We decided to make the best of what could not be avoided. The girls left off panties and bra. And in the car, they kicked off shoes. If people came on us unexpectedly, it was agreed, they would make a dash for the car, lock the doors, huddle down.
The sun had just emerged from the sea when we arrived at the Battery. I decided that we would make our first shot a view of the harbor, shot from the high wall of East Battery.
I had the girls stand with their backs to me, looking over the harbor toward Fort Sumter.
"Groovy," June said.
"Great," said Elza.
I set my Mamiya RB 67 on a tripod, had the girls, still clothed, pose while I took an exposure reading, focused, set shutter speed, aperture.
Black morning clouds were stretched out like chocolate eclairs. It was high tide; a stiff onshore breeze stirred whitecaps on the harbor waves. Herring gulls, waiting to be fed by tourists, were perched on the wall's railings, one bird to each post.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Ready when you are, B.B., " June said.
Simultaneously, each pulled her dress up over her head, handed it to me.
The city was empty, silent, ours. A lone loping Irish setter was on the sidewalk, across the street, sniffing at the palmetto in front of the colonnades of Larrine's house.
The girls turned to face the harbor, their hair swept toward me by the wind. There was not a surplus curve to their bodies, nor a curve not proper to its place. I shot half a roll (four frames) of their ideal backs, varying only angle of attack and aperture.
I then had them turn, look toward me, eyes on ground, bottoms pressed against the top rail.
"Don't smile," I said. "Be mystical, deprived, brooding. Think of Catherine Deneuve."
"I'd rather think of Mastroianni," Elza said.
Her sister, elevating her breasts, said, "My ass is cold."
The Irish setter came over, entranced, as I was, by the spendid sight of spring-steel adolescence. A long-haired dachshund trundled toward him.
When the roll was finished, the girls put their dresses back on. We walked south to the cannon on the prow of Whitepoint Gardens.
"Hello again," June said, patting the first cannon on its nearest flank. "Missed us, didn't you?"
A delivery truck drove by. An anonymous hand waved.
MechanciaUy, the girls stripped. Once again the chic dresses ascended the tanned bodies, opened like flowers above their heads, then were tossed to me.
Once more I made the derriere shots over a cannon, singly and paired; once more I photographed the girls astride the iron phallus. I repeated, in short, the poses of the preceding day. The two sets of pictures were identical except for the on-again, off-again draping of the models-as in Goya's alternate vestida and desnuda versions of the recumbent Duchess of Alba.
"My God, the gnats are out this morning," Elza proclaimed, slapping the parts used for usual recumbency.
"In this climate," June said, "to get turned on, you need a lot of Off-if you want to get turned on al fresco."
She then spied a morning jogger and got dressed. Elza, more adventurous, simply ducked behind the cannon and slapped at gnats.
Our first tactical problem occurred at St. Stephen's. I had left the car in the parking lot of the Old Armory across the street, which is to say at the most celebrated junctures of Charleston streets, the overlap of Slight and Shaftesbury streets.
The girls had had the audacity to cross Shaftesbury Street naked. They flattened themselves against the massive oaken entrance doors to the church; and these poses were useful, silhouetting, unexpected. I repeated the stances before the unlocked, intricately wrought iron gates leading to the cemetery.
Because these precincts were consecrated ground, I insisted on no frontal nudity. No less could I do to revere the memory of those signers of the Declaration of Independence who lay buried there, men who in breathing, livid, vital flesh would have reveled in such nudity-particularly in girls as "human, all too human" as my vibrant twins.
"This is where Td like to lay," Elza said.
"Personally..." June was less romantic. "Personally ... I like the Mills-Hyatt House."
Time, unfortunately, had passed. We had lost track of it, absorbed as we were in our private worlds, our experimental, un-fig-leafed Eden.
A buzz of voices realigned private time with the time of the clock. The chimes above us struck the half-hour, signifying seven-thirty.
Tourists appeared. Women in slacks, bursting amidship: men in shorts, the better to display their spindled, spaghetti-thread legs. And with them came a babel of voices, their own-Bronx, Brooklyn, Milwaukee voices, dedicated to breakfasts, grandchildren, medications-and the stentorian voice of the travel-tour cassette, directing them where to look, when to turn, how to find the nearest comfort station, if any.
It was not possible, at this unscheduled moment, to justify a wild dash to the parked car.
No more would anyone accept a legend about mermaids, or about the incarnation of the beautiful girls once said to have walked the corsairs' plank. (Low Country legend has it that such girls returned to this life in the form of the graceful, lambent skimmers who, each day, dip into the last, lapping waves which break on the beaches of the barrier islands.)
"Where can we hide?" June asked, with a modest show of panic, meanwhile adjusting her pristine pubic hairs to maximize privacy.
"Duck into the graveyard," I said, my words, I felt, no more than a meaningless approximation of relief. Semantically they grouped themselves into an orthodox sentence. But whether or not the sentence had meaning was another matter. How much defense of modesty could be had from tombstones lying flat on the ground-and with inscriptions by now in part, or wholly, illegible? The girls outdid me.
They were not addicted to my advice; nor were thef as helpless as I supposed. They disappeared.
My eye intercepted a golden streak, the lightning of June's Olympic thighs as they disappeared through the opened door at the rear of the church.
All augured well. Ecclesiastical history, I recalled, exalted the fig leaf. The Greek rooms in the Vatican look like drying rooms for albino figs. Ecclesiastical history, now more ecumenical, was now destined to be enriched by the loss of such artifices. Less is more.
I hoped merely that my insouciant models, in the interest of taste, which is cardinal in Charleston, would have the foresight to stay out of the pulpit. The community could well abjure naked truth waving itself from an oratory-waving itself, moreover, in twinned consonance.
The tourists moved on en masse, as is the way with tourists. People en masse move much as sheep move, and make, more or less, the same woolly, ovine sounds. Many carried the standard discount-house Instamatic cameras; some the standard sale-priced Japanese cameras; others carried cassette playback decks which, on command, delivered fragments of a guided-tour talk.
The sun, still young, cast long shadows. The long shadows of the legs of the tourists overlapped the shadows of the tombstones. A mourning dove, unseen, sounded his ominous "Coo-wee, coo-wee, coo, coo, coo."
A cassette player, suddenly touched, informed the group of its whereabouts: "You are now on Church Street facing the Dock Street Theater, once the old Planter's Hotel. There is a legend that the fabulous Lola Montez once..."
Suddenly I saw my girls-my models, my charges, my twinned loves. They had not ascended the pulpit. They had not climbed the belfry. Neither were they prancing about like nudist Doukhobors. They emerged from the same church door they entered, striding out proudly, with sober step, arms akimbo, tresses flowing, in somber choirboy robes.
Only one sartorial detail jarred the observer's eye: they were barefoot, as if on a penitential march.
At this moment the rector arrived, tall, poised, with Byronic features, and, as rectors go, perfectly shod: His eyes rested on Elza and June, so naked under the robes; June conspicuously so, for, in such instances, choir robes, to be properly fitted, call desperately for a bra.
The rector, in his ecumenical way, looked only at their feet, knowing in his heart that many who love most move to their appointed rounds on naked feet; and that never are the cherubim shod.
"My brother," said Elza, "always dances to the altar."
"Ah so," said the rector, a patient man.
June, holding two fingers in front of her lips, went, "Mi ... mi ... mi ... mi ... mi." The upper part of her robe swung gently from side to side, as if supported by peaks of Jell-O.
"Quite a new breed, this generation of choirboys." The rector looked at me. "Slightly epicene. Terribly ecumenical."
"Wow," said Elza.
"They all talk soprano ... and sing bass."
CHAPTER 7
What did Elza and June think about when they were not with me? Or, for that matter, when they were with me, naked or clothed, in bed or out?
Nor did I yet know, after these many months, what went on in the secret places of Amy's mind. Nor why she had gone away from me that signal night, returned before dawn with electric strength. Nor did I know now why she was away from me. Her political concerns were bloodless, it seemed to me, and suspect.
I have always envied those writers who could see every flutter in the hearts of the characters they wrote about. Tolstoi knew Anna Karenina inside and out; Flaubert knew the turnings of each flick of Emma Bo-vary's thoughts, as she combed her perfumed hair, or sat, in loneliness, on her china commode.
Such, as any rate, was my drift when, back in June's and my bedroom at the Mills-Hyatt House, I watched the girls strip and shower. They had a passion for showering; a passion for perfuming and powdering.
Thev emerged shimmering with golden innocence.
With them, I was sure, I could lead a life of study, and of kindly, unostentatious acts.
I paid them their usual modeling fees.
Each, still naked, curtsied and said, "Thank you, sir."
Each then proposed that she "model" a bit more in bed. "Modeling," said June, "is more fun without quondams."
Elza thought it would be nice if they modeled some more, the way June suggested, and that I would write about it and make them immortal.
June had a thoughtful suggestion. "Squeeze us in the book you're writing about Amy."
"We'd do anything to become immortal." Elza pointed, in turn, to all the sensitive parts of her body. "Really."
"And without a modeling fee. Because we love you."
They wanted to know the details, mundane and lurid, of my relations with Cloris; how I balanced an intimacy with Cloris and the intimacy with Amy. Were there not conflicts, jealousies, resentments? In many ways they were more naive than I would have expected; they were modern girls; college girls; one majoring in psychology, one in drama. In other ways, they never ceased to startle me. They were imaginative, bold, experimental; had read, remembered, twisted an astonishing amount of the world's most worldly writing. All such was most unexpected in two girls whose readiest comments were "groovy" and "wow."
I told them. Between my books and Cloris' motion pictures, there were few details among us still secret or taboo. Cloris and Amy, in my mind, were much like Auden's innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, made solely for pleasure. The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide.
They wanted to know how I met Cloris, how Amy; but particularly they were interested in Cloris, who seemed to them today's counterpart of Hemingway's
Lady Ashley-the Brett of The Sun Also Rises. ('I've always done just what I wanted.") But more avid, more talented. And who gave and took what she wanted without brooding or regrets.
I told them how I had met Cloris. There was a light snow falling, a sharp wind blowing. She had sat next to me at a bar on Charles Street, a few blocks from my place in the Village. She had come back with me to my apartment. In front of the glowing logs she had said, stretching out her legs, "I don't go to bed with men, but if it will give you any pleasure, I will undress for you."
"Just like us," June said.
"But she did go to bed with you, didn't she?"
"Yes," I said.
"How come?"
I explained that in first meetings, iourneys' ends, many things are said tentatively. Their aim is not to establish eternal truths, but to needle, provoke, explore.
Cloris left my apartment the next morning, I told them. The good-bye had been terse, blithe, impersonal. I knew by then only her first name and three biographical facts: I. She had been born in North Carolina. 2. Her father was a professor. 3. She had left Chapel Hill the year "North Carolina discovered oral sex."
"What," asked June, "is oral sex?"
I showed her.
"We've been speaking prose all this time and never knew it." June was ecstatic.
"Now," said Elza, "you've got her all brillig in the slythy toves."
"The Tiuntum tree."
"Time now for the vorpal blade."
"Oh beamish boy," June said, kissing me. "Oh frabjous one."
She then disappeared from my life, I told them. I put her out of mind. Then, a year or so and some two novels later, I was in Amalfi writing a book to be called The Affair at Amalfi. I had spent the day across the bay, among herds of broad-bottomed American and German tourists, at Capri. Returned, tired, fed up with views of Vesuvius, the Bay of Naples, tired villages clinging like ivy to indifferent cliffs, I climbed the hill to the special cliff on which my hotel (the Luna Convento), a former convent, was perched. Guests reach the hotel by means of a small lift which ascends the cliff in a perpendicular line from the Amalfi Drive, some ninety feet below. I entered the lift, pressed the button for the lobby floor.
When the door opened, I saw Cloris, alone, handing her passport to the manager.
"Did she recognize you?" June wanted to know how protocol is handled when random lovers meet after long, dry separations.
"Not directly, not personally," I said. "Not with smiles, hugs, and kisses. She simply pointed to me and said to the concierge, 'Please have the porter take my bags up to my husband's room.'"
"Wow," said Elza.
"We went up in the lift together, in silence-the two of us, the porter, two Gucci suitcases, a hatbox, a vanity case."
I told them that Cloris, as might be expected, made no attempt to explain herself. She unpacked her bags, hung her dresses in the armoire, put small things in the dresser, then said, with splendid aplomb, "Darling, I'm so sticky. Please draw me a bath."
There was much detail to recount. The girls wanted as much as I would give. Scandal, I suppose, has a special charm to those about to be involved in it. It is roseate, cheering, an invitation to a second life. It raises the sights of the very young, rejuvenates the old.
The pleasures of lovemaking grow in retrospect. Cloris and I had discovered this soon after our second meeting. Which is why we told each other so much, maintaining no fidelity except in verbal reconstructions of our infidelities. Cloris had always demanded of me a movement-by-movement report on every affair I had had outside her field of vision-even the feelings I had, thoughts, fantasies, during affairs she witnessed, promoted. She returned the gesture in kind. Every erotic incident thus had a rebirth, reincarnation; ultimately a reenactment.
And now I was telling Elza and June the same subtle things about Cloris I would eventually tell Cloris about Elza and June.
I told them that to me nothing was more exciting, and at the same time more fulfilling, than instant intimacy. To behave with a girl whose last name you did not know as warmly, open up as completely, explore as fully, as one to whom you had been married for twenty years, is to grasp, in the foam of a wave, the ongoing unity of life. Neither the spume of the sea nor the skirl of a gull is a marital secret. Love is loving.
They brought to a close this session of exchanged intimacies with a cheerleader routine they had evidently practiced in some other connection. June leaned over to me, took my detumesced part in her hand, dandled it, eyed it with the wonder reserved for a strange, infantile bird.
June: "O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice?" Elza: "State the alternative preferred, With reasons for your choice."
For the next few days I worked hard at my book; too hard. Writing should not be worked at. This was the lesson Stendhal taught the world. The suave, capable, capricious Duchessa Sanseverini was not a woman whose spirit was to be entrapped with spit and polish. Nor speared with a fork and hope. It was to be-and was-caught on the wing.
Yet I had set for myself the arduous, endless, impossible task of understanding Amy; and of impounding this grasp in solid, if uneven, prose.
Why? I asked myself, with monotonous, repetitive skills, this rhetorical question. My study of Amy would never rival Stendhal's of the Duchessa, Flaubert's of Emma Bovary, much less Homer's Helen. An eager, hungry public was not awaiting my discoveries. Amy was indifferent. She humored me. She may, of course, have found some devious delight in my reports about the splendors of her body, the anatomy of her raptus-the torsions, perhaps, and the diluvial wonder, on which I floated like Noah's ark.
So much happier, wiser, epicurean was Cloris' approach. Cloris merely undressed her, feted her, filmed her. No fervent probing for the blind man's black box in the dark room-the black box that was not there.
Behind and flanking the City Hall, which houses the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, is Washington Park, better known as City Hall Park. The park is a quiet, shaded, ghost-ridden place, lined with live oaks to placate the spirits of historic warriors and statesmen. Within its confines is a statue of William Pitt, the right arm of which was shattered by a British cannonball. There is, dead center, an obelisk dedicated to soldiers who died in defense of the Confederacy. Collinear with the two monuments is a memorial to my namesake, General BeauregardPierre Gustave Beauregard-who commanded the Confederate forces during the attack on Fort Sumter. The monument is an odd structure. It is more or less a framed niche, over which is emblazoned the name Beauregard. The niche, if deepened slightly, could house a life-size statue of General Beauregard. It contains some chiseled writing, eroded and illegible, but no--likeness of the general-an omission that modern Charlestonians, in their concern for modern issues (such as an ordinance to diaper horses), have relegated to benign neglect. How many Charlestonians, it might be asked, are aware that a--likeness of the heroic General Beauregard is absent from this city? That his niche is unfilled?
The answer: One. June.
We were walking through the park early the next morning. Elza, nursing a hangover, was still in bed in our room at the hotel. And June was wearing, as usual, her working clothes, which is to say raincoat and sandals, nothing more.
"Look!" She pointed. There was my name over the empty niche. There was the empty niche. And June, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.
Off came the raincoat. Flying went the sandals. And there was June, enniched-decorous, naked, militant, her right hand to her right brow in smart, disciplined salute.
I swung the Mamiya into action, hand-held-f. 8 at 250th of a second. I took three shots of the salute. June then obliged with a cancan pose.
Just then two tourists strolled by; standard tourists, the woman plump, in shorts, heavy jowls, sunglasses even with the sun scarcely risen; the man, with mustache and bulging stomach, wearing the same shorts and sport shirt he customarily wears on the boardwalk at Asbury Park.
"Oh," the woman said, pointing.
"Advance publicity for the Spoleto Festival," I said. "We're putting on Barefoot in the Park."
June, turning around, patted her stomach. "Beauregard," she said, "I think I'm just a wee, winchy bit pregnant."
She was not, of course. She was merely, as a well-bred Charleston girl, making the kind of small talk that puts a stranger at ease.
I was, I discovered, a literary masochist.
Scarce wonder, then, that I found writing so difficult. That I bemoaned, ad nauseam, my inability to sense character; my insensitivity to feeling; my obsession with physical detail, much of which it would be more fitting, certainly more literary, to leave veiled.
And each night Amy would phone me. Each night she would say more or less the same thing, but say it with her special music, her patented endearing young charms. She loved me. She missed me. She was hungry for me. Was I working? Did I have an erection? Would I meet her, somewhere, soon? Would I please not ask any questions?
(Did Henry James, I asked myself, ever undress any of his heroines? Much less follow them to bed? Much less share with them quixotic, episodic, traumatic throes of the parries and ripostes that occur in bed? Was he right in implying that all orgasms, like all pelicans, are more or less the same?)
I had had much leisure, these few days, more time for indecisions. ("We can't do any modeling for you for the next three days," Elza had announced sweetly over the telephone. "We have the curse.") I wrote, puzzled, rearranged the indistinct images in my private blur.
Meanwhile, John delivered me eight-by-ten enlargements of my pictures. I was astonished. The quality was unbelievably good. I do not think of myself as a photographer; but voyeurs and lechers, I think, have an instinctive feel for this kind of picture-making; lust leads the eye, the Devil guides the hand. Moreover, in early morning, when streets are deserted, the sun is scarcely above the horizon. The light, consequently, is parallel light-the rays parallel to the ground. This light, I discovered (as had Edward Wescott before me), is ideal for figure photography. The erect body is illuminated from one side, rather than from above; roundnesses thus are accentuated; body details (nipples, navels) facing east are portrayed with little or no shadow-while deep shadow falls to the west, establishing striking contrasts.
And, again, Elza and June were exceptionally photogenic, even handsomer in the camera's eye than in flesh. And in every pose they seemed, effortlessly, to fall into the curves of grace.
Possibly, after all, I had a book. Perhaps I could repeat the poses, actions, in the historic places of Spo-leto.
I telephoned my agent in New York, asked him what he thought of the idea: a photo essay-twinned beauties, twinned festivals, Southern exposures.
"Bill," he said, "you're doing well enough with Amy. Don't screw it up with another nonbook, by a nonphotographer, for a nonpublisher."
Thus ended my one effort to be legitimate with June and Elza. ("Tough titty," June was later to say.)
Cloris wrote me from England, asking what I was doing on Seabrook without Amy. (I had written her that Amy had gone to Washington, presumably to promote the Spoleto Festival, pick up an ambassadorship, or do whatever else a wayward imagine suggested. I had also enclosed some of the nudes of Elza and June. Cloris had an imagination never dull. And where it impinged on youth and wayward beauty, she had an excess of ideas.) Why did I not come to England? Why did I not meet her in Rome? Anyplace? I could even bring the twins with me. We could star them as Romulus and Remus, the Gracchi, the Bobbsey Twins.
I, after a night at the Mills-Hyatt House, between them, wrote her something about Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
June and Elza, as the days passed, entertained me with many inventions, private poems, autobiographical bonbons They were not really the children of Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue; they were twin princesses, stolen in infancy by gypsies who later settled on Watimelaw Island. In an earlier incarnation they had been twin monks in the service of the great Daruma, the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch, who imported Dhva-na (Zen) to western China in the time of the short-lived Liang Dynasty. Before that they had been stallions. Their favorite food was South Carolina caviar, a little-known delicacy found in the sturgeon of the Waccamaw River.
One morning I called on Pollexfen. He had no telephone. To reach him, you went to his house, scratched on the downstairs window.
We went to Henry's for lunch. (In Charleston, when you have something serious to talk about, habit takes you to Henry's. There you have quiet, conveniently slow service, good seafood, as many hours for your meal as you care to take.)
"I say," he said, over a hush puppy, "I read your book about Amy ... your last book, I assume. Not bad. Not bad at all."
"How is your writing getting on?" I left out specifics. It was enough to express interest, change the subject.
"Of course you see Amy in a way quite differentindeed, quite different-from mine." He smiled modestly, to accent his understatement.
"Tell me something about your nieces ... Elza and June."
Pollexfen, for whatever reason, was wedded to my book. "You have quite a way ... really quite a way. You really caught the nub-if I may use such an unfortunate word-of Amy. The spell. The wistfulness. The contradictions."
He paused to order a glass of milk. I asked for a Bloodv Mary-with lots of ice.
"Of course there was much, much sex ... almost a little shocking at times. This was out of character. But I suppose the publishers made you put that in."
I mumbled something about nature imitating art, but Pollexfen was not listening.
"I am not criticizing, mind vou. I'm a realist. I'm not good at that sort of thing. That's why I publish my own books. If you are your own publisher, you don't have to kowtow to the public."
He was, he informed me, planning a book on Confederate jessamine. "Confederate jessamine, that is."
Pollexfen was much given to daydreaming.
"About the Poltergrue twins..." Nothing more was to be learned from Pollexfen about Amy. His data were dated. His daydreams were already turning yellow around the edges. Soon they would become brittle and break apart.
"Very smart girls. Both of them. But inhibited. Terribly inhibited. I'm afraid they're afraid of men. Some girls are like that, you know." I knew.
"You saw how shy they were when I brought them over. It's their Charleston upbringing, I suppose. Most Charleston girls are shy. It's the English in them. The Puritanism of the Rump Parliament. Shy is chic."
"They're very pretty."
"And very handsomely put together. You just saw them in street clothes. Wait till you see them in swimsuits!"
The prospect, I informed him, interested me.
"There's poetry in those drumbeat bodies. like flowers. like my blessed jessamine ... Confederate jessamine. No sex yet. Not a glimmer. But what grace. Would that once again 'Omer could smite his bloomin' lyre."
Delusions of grandeur swept over me. Would that I could smite a bloomin' lyre. One such, thus smote, could make them immortal.
Flaubert, come to think of it, gave immortality to the sordid and sentimental amours of a silly woman-the wife of a stupid country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near Rouen. Fragonard and Boucher, as I noted earlier, turned the little peasant girls of Versailles and thereabouts into eternal reminders of Bourbon delights.
How much more I had to work with. Amy was no silly woman, nor were her amours, however sentimental, ever a whit sordid. Nor were Elza and June, kindlers of Benton's delights, in any way peasant. Products of the modern temper, the pill, the wonderful world of Wilhelm Reich, they were mistresses of the beau geste.
How fortunate I was-even if I had nothing whatever to say!
"The aim of criticism..." Pollexfen droned on, quoting Wilde's paraphrase of Arnold, and after several abrupt turns in subject, "the proper aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is."
I saw before me Elza, June, as of on or about the first day in June-the day when they both submitted themselves to my critical eye.
I saw, clear as the Alpine Valley of the moon, under high power, their delicate, conchoid openings-each innocent, articulate, serene. I saw Amy's nipples, stalagmite in passion. I saw a pelican gh'ding over the surf, a laughing gull sitting on its back.
"What is the object as in itself it really is?" I, by chance, came to my senses.
"I really haven't the faintest idea. If everything is always changing, there is no really is for anything in itself to really be."
"Rough," I said.
I ordered another Bloody Mary and a dish of crabmeat au gratin. Pollexfen ordered a refill of milk. ("My stomach, you know.")
I raised a point which I have discussed elsewhere (in writing about Amy and Cloris). Since everything constantly changes, is never twice the same, it is never possible to make love twice to the same girl-a point dramatically illustrated in my lovemaking with Amy. Even once is questionable; Amy changes, I change, in the middle of the river's flow.
"Panta rei," I said pompously. "Everything changes."
(This simple fact, now cliche, is not always as self-evident as one would assume-especially among the very young. "Why isn't II standing up anymore?" June had asked, one late afternoon, after some hours of foreplay, middle-play, and aftermath; and she and Elza, severally and in tandem, had subdued my arrogance, had drained every minim of unspent love. "Is something the matter?" And Elza, generously, had added, "Please partake of the ptarmigan.")
"I hope I'm not boring you," Pollexfen said, swirling around his glass his last few drops of milk. He had, with exquisite courtesy, not heard my pomposity.
His mind was on other things.
Solemnly he sat across from me, steeped in soliloquy. Solemnly he gave me much useless information. He told me, for example, that Elza and June's father, who was in the insurance business, called himself A. Lionel Poltergrue. That his initials, obviously, were ALP. And these corresponded to the ALP in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
"ALP, of course, stands for Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is also Eve, Iseult, Ireland, and the River Liffey."
He paused to smile, savor the joys of coincidence.
His head in half-profile, I noticed, resembled some of the best heads on Roman coins. His porpoise-fin nose was ample, eloquent, disdainful.
"I could imagine myself someday doing a book about my nieces ... something, perhaps, like your book about Amy. Not as intimate, perhaps ... not as intimate..." He stopped to frame his imaginary project.
"No?" I used the monosyllabic question to show interest. Without it, Pollexfen might move to another subject: the Welch epic, for example; or the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.
"I would be Joycean, I think. Very Joycean. Use the same obscure symbolism. One should always be a bit foggy, shouldn't one?"
I nodded. Disagreement would get me nowhere.
"I would create a symbol that stood for life's eternal twoness ... say, JOEL. JOEL would mean June or Elza, yang and yin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, light and darkness, good and evil, thesis and antithesis, hammer and anvil, and-irony of ironies-the two centuries that together give us our Bicentennial."
"Love," I said, with equal and fraternal obscurity, "is a beast with two backs. And much loving is much duplicity." (The beauty of the obscurity game is that it lends itself to infinite combinations.)
"It can also," I added, as memories stalked me, "be a beast with three backs."
("Do you ever think I'm Amy when you're in me, in the dark?" June had once asked me. To which Elza added, "Or that the second time in me was the first day in June?")
Pollexfen did not, however, hear me. Soliloquy had overcome him.
Yet his introverted musings were not altogether without use to me. I learned much about recent local happenings that affected Amy; much about Stendhal-ian intrigues. In politics Charleston is nowise different from Stendhal's Parma.
I learned that Amy's husband, Jeff Dellmore, once Senator Ashmead's campaign manager, and once nominated for a high-court judgeship (despite his ignorance of law), had been arrested for certain inappropriate offers made to a decoy police officer in the men's room of an airport. After a romantic rendezvous in some nearby woods, where he appeared in women's clothes, he claimed "entrapment." ("We need police officers who are one hundred percent red-blooded he-men ... fearless and virile. How do we know we've got them ... unless we make periodic spot checks?")
I learned that Senator Ashmead had, since the demise of the last administration, lost much of his political clout. The "Southern strategy," with which he had been terminally linked, was no more. Change was in the wind; change and newer gambits.
"Women's rights is a big issue today," Frank Hib-bard, his new campaign manager (a six-foot-two former Navy commander) had told him. "Remember: fifty-one percent of the registered voters are women."
The Bicentennial was then in full swing. Hibbard suggested that Ashmead beat the big drum for all the famous women in American history: Betsy Ross, Martha Washington, Molly Pitcher, Carrie Nation, Princess Grace, Topsy. ("Topsy, it's true, was only a girl in Uncle Tom's time. But in the intervening hundred and thirty years, she has matured.") There was also Lola Montez.
The senator had a penchant for Lillian Russell.
Much of this discussion took place at Berkeley Hall, Isabelle Wescott's plantation, up the Ashley River. And it was Vanderhoff ("the guru"), Miss Wescott's amiable, scholarly, and irresponsible houseguest, who first focused attention on Amy.
"Everybody knows and respects her in this part of the country." This was his initial argument. "After all, she's been South Carolina's commissioner of consumer affairs ... Charleston's Woman of the Year ... for some very good year, like the year the Citadel won the pennant, played in the Cotton Bowl, and fired the fewest cadets for cheating."
"True, so true," Ashmead is reported to have said with a faint, nostalgic suggestion of a drool.
"And now ... I don't know how many of you have seen her in the new motion picture? ... she is, in a very special way, an international figure ... like Florence Nightingale and Lady Godiva."
(I quote from Pollexfen's monologue.)
There were many elaborations, suggestions. A place could be made for her on Ashmead's staff. ("Team," he called it, not yet-having shaken free from the last-elected president's fondness for the argot of the playing field.)
It was then that Miss Wescott called Amy-a frolicsome perversity. In the direct middle of my Vesu-vian moment.
"Incidentally," he said finally, asking more or less what I had asked him, "what is concluded that we should conclude anything about it?" (A rather garbled sentence, I thought-and a quotation, at that.)
Pollexfen, in honest and realistic fashion, was always trying to discover himself. Sometimes he babbled dithyrambic nonsense, stretching unduly the sense of a plain word. Sometimes he returned to the fixation of his youth, the image of Amy, in black tights, playing Hamlet. The latter, it seemed to me, gave him a full and selffulfilling sex life.
I began to see, now, a picture, or at least fragments of a mosaic, emerging from the recent fog. Yet, the more details became clear, the more the reasonings behind them became obscure.
Apparently Amy was undressed before Ashmead, more properly for Ashmead. She rose from our bed to dress-to go to Miss Wescott's to undress. (How much easier it would have been simply to get into the car without dressing! How dramatic to have worn gloves; long black gloves-nothing else. And to have shielded herself with necklace and parasol!)
And now there were the novelist's problems, the burdens I have inflicted on myself: to answer the questions I could never answer; to account for whim, mood, motivation. If Amy actually undressed on request (Miss Wescott's?) in front of Ashmead, bent over, the better to display her taunting tattoo, to make her milk-white roundings available to sight and touch, what went on in her mind? What quaint imagine danced in her secret places?
Was she saving herself from herself, to yield up the melancholy Amy to her other self, the self-gaiety and passion? Was she merely pleasing Miss Wescott because Miss Wescott, for reasons established before my time, still wielded some irresistible erotic force?
Moreover, I had Ashmead to evaluate.
As a novelist, viewing all events with the pathos of distance, I had to account to myself for his continued interest in Amy in spite of embarrassing failure, awkward failure (as I had heard), in his one attempt to make love to her in a hotel room in Washington. (According to the story, she had made this purported sacrifice at the urging of her husband, and for the sake of her husband, whom she despised, but to whom she was bound by masochistic loyalty, a Victorian sense of duty, and a proper Charlestonian's concern for appearances. It is ironic, I think, that the habit of propriety can lead so easily, so swiftly, to the ultimate impropriety-the offer of the full use of one's naked white body, not for love and glee, but for rites of passage. )
Why, I asked myself, would Ashmead risk a second show of impotence?
Perhaps-and this struck me as probable-Ashmead had no desire to make love to Amy. He simply wanted her undressed and paraded before him. Perhaps he would touch her here or there, kiss the fleur-de-lis, elevate a nipple. This was the year of the bizarre congressional sex follies, America's long-delayed answer to the Profumo affair. To savor, by sight and touch, the bright, intimate wonders of Amy's body was perhaps, for Ashmead, no more than a routine use of senatorial privilege. Usufruct.
"Why does Charleston accept with such grace," I asked Pollexfen, "such tolerance, everything that Amy does?"
Charleston, by structure and intent, is a staid, conventional, mannered city. And in full view of the public Charleston eye, Amy had indulged in antics few conservative societies would tolerate. She had had a flagrant, incestuous affair with her nephew. She had had, was still having, an open affair with me. She had held, was still offered, public office, yet she appeared, was appearing, fully nude in Cloris' and my well-publicized motion picture. I pass over the peccadilloes.
"Charleston is very English," Pollexfen said. "It treasures tradition as England does. And what passes for tradition in England is nothing more than pride in the history of its heresies."
"You see Amy as typical--? "
"Not typical. A model. like Lady Godiva, who set the fashion for feminist noblesse oblige ... and whom British ladies, for some nine hundred years, honored by riding side-saddle."
He nodded to himself a bit; then he summarized. "Grace. That's the keystone. Grace. Stark, overwhelming grace."
I felt, for the first time, a streak of jealousy, a sense of loss. I had, without awareness of the change inside me, become possessive of Amy. I had with her an intimacy that was not to be shared, except with Cloris. And I had never reason to be jealous of Cloris, because Cloris and I shared everything. An infidelity, so called, was not diminution of our shared pleasures, but an extension, a fantasy made flesh, to be recounted, examined, explored, reenacted.
Amy, however, had her secret life, secret lives. She had not told me what went on at her secret meeting in the dead of night when she went alone to Miss Wescbtt's. Had she undressed herself? Had Miss Wescott stripped her? What was the expression on her face as she stood naked in the drawing room? Did she take her hair down? Did she, as usual, make the empty gesture of covering her breasts? Her pubic umbra? Did she at any time have to go to the bathroom? And, if so, did she make the long trek naked, and return naked, saying, in effect, "Here I am, relaxed, relieved, ready. Where do you want me?"
Pollexfen's urge to communicate with himself fed on silence; and for some minutes, absorbed in the penumbra of Amy, I had said nothing.
He turned, for no apparent reason, to Milton. "Interesting parallel, come to think of it, between Milton and Joyce..."
(Chance words so swiftly evoke unsought images. I saw Elza and June bent over a Battery cannon, their bare bottoms tangent, the vertical creases parallel. Each buttock pair, a disembodied rump, acquired a personality of its own; each a surname. "Milton."
"Joyce."
"Joyce" I assigned to June-repressing, in-stanter, the obvious puns.)
"Amazing parallel, come to think of it, between Paradise Lost and Finnegans Wake. In both, what counts most is sound, not sense; words, not ideas."
"About Amy..." I had no more heart for a long excursion.
"Yes. Amy. Your book. Come to think of it, you could learn from both. Both. I read some of you ... think I told you. You have a weakness. You try too hard to make sense. A flaw, I think. Bad ... very bad-because nothing ever makes much sense."
Whatever Amy's political future was to be was still a matter for readers of tea leaves. But one dilemma loomed clearly. She was a Democrat, a proper delegate from South Carolina, one designated to raise her voice at the Democratic Convention, in New York. Senator Ashmead was a Republican. In making proposals to Amy (If indeed he made proposals), he would be crossing party lines. Moreover, the Democratic Convention was about to begin. Amy's presence was required. And Amy, by phone, had asked me to meet her in New York. ("We will make up, darling, for borrowed time. I will exhaust you. Then we'll fly back to Italy.")
By coincidence, the morning after Amy had called me, the morning newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, had published, on its front page, two bizarre photographs. The first was my shot of June and Elza, bottoms high, bent over the northernmost cannon on the Battery. (The one supposedly pointing toward Fort Sumter, but actually angled below the walkway of the sea wall-thus, in case of a sudden revival of the War Between the States, destined to blow malingering strollers into polluted harbor.)
This picture was harmless, because few viewers, much less parents, are capable of establishing identity, given as clue nothing more than the dual contours of parallel behinds (the lines of parallelism being the crevices, vertically aligned).
The second picture was my undoing. Here were my naked models in full frontal exposure, framed by the wrought-iron gates of the church cemetery. Obviously, because Charleston is Charleston, the prints had been retouched to obscure pubic detail; a nebulous, misplaced shadow absorbed breasts.
Caption: "Eve and Eve in the City of Gardens. Tourists visiting Charleston this Bicentennial Year find beauty everywhere-the new intertwining with the old."
All of this caught my eye as I was sitting in the lobby of the Mills-Hyatt House. I had driven into town to draw money at the bank and to pick up my plane tickets.
It was clear, by now, John Young, my studio friend, sometime friend, had made himself prints of all my negatives. I could not with tact, with wisdom, protest. If now there were to be a "book," could be a "book," the tome would be his. John Young's Naked Charleston, "An Intimate Portrait of a Fabulous City."
An hour later I was at the airport. It was a clear, feckless, municipal day; and the mockingbirds were singing.
CHAPTER 8
I arrived at the Plaza late that afternoon. I took a suite on the fourteenth floor. The bedroom overlooked the Central Park lake; the sitting room, with its corner bay windows, overlooked both the park and the Plaza's plaza. The plaza's trees were in full leaf (London plane trees); it's fountain, as usual, was dry.
Amy arrived at six. She arrived with twelve pieces of luggage. She was chic, radiant, relaxed, affectionate.
"Love," she said, "fix me a drink and draw me a bath."
I mixed her a Johnnie Walker black and soda, kissed her, turned on the bathwater.
"I have so much to tell you," she said, dropping into an armchair, taking the drink, leaning back, dimpling her cheeks, crossing her legs.
"You have."
I made myself a drink, caressed the crossed legs, kissed the caressed knees, sat down in the opposite chair.
Rushing in through the opened windows was the roar of Fifth Avenue, so different from the roar of the Seabrook surf.
"I was jealous when I first heard," she said.
"About what?"
"About Elza and June ... but especially June."
"Why June?"
"Her bosom is bigger. And it was my bosom that first turned you on, wasn't it? Not the tattoo."
"Well...."
"And the nipples. Don't lie to me."
"I liked you all over."
"I was terribly jealous when I first heard."
"How did you hear?"
"Larrine told me. She thought it would amuse me."
"And it didn't?"
"Of course it didn't. I'm not like Cloris that way. I'm primitive. Old-fashioned. Possessive."
"But..."
"You've heard that I've been unfaithful to you." She stuck out her tongue to me in a way that was at once pert, disarming, creative.
I made a few meaningless sounds, because I wanted to indicate that I had heard, yet did not want to risk seeming prim, insensitive, or alarmed.
"Did you enjoy the twins?"
"Yes."
"Both twins."
"Both."
"Every way?"
"Every way. They 'modeled.' "
"I hate you." She wrinkled her nose to tell me she loved me. "Now you'll think I'm too old for you."
"Shall I part my hair behind?" I chanted. "Do I dare to eat a peach?"
She took a hearty slug of her drink, unbuttoned the top buttons of her dress. "I have been unfaithful. I concede it. I confess it. And this is my punishment. You go to bed with two girls whose vaginas cling to you like the little fingers of a pair of rubber gloves."
Her eyes glowed as she said this. The sunset from behind the towers of West End Avenue plunged across the park, cut through our Central Park South windows (in the bay), glowed like red coals in the depths of her eyes.
I thought of the Countess of Liechtenstein's eyes, when I first saw them, glowing in a similar dusk, on the Via Mazzini, in Taorminia. And immediately I checked my thoughts, wiping out specificities by closing my mind to concrete images and saying to myself, interminably: One, One, One, One, One. (I could, of course, have chanted the traditional Aum, mane patime, Aum. But this would have been an affectation and a condescension to the East Wind.)
I blanked out counterthoughts because I loved Amy; loved her deeply, with permanent lust and locked-in understanding. To compare her to other women, to compute the relativity of vaginal diameters, did violence to my image, violence to my faith in a beauty which defies humdrum comparisons and the accountings of profit and loss.
No more could I imagine Helen of Troy fitted for a diaphragm. Or Athena emerging from Zeus's forehead with tarnish on her armor. Or Venus, in heat, in armor. Or Eros in heat or armor. Or Amour embracing Swift.
"I was unfaithful." She rolled the word around her tongue. She rolled it with pride and fortitude.
"I was ... I am ... a recorder of infidelities," I said consolingly. Which was-is-the case. A novelist puts in word, with appropriate punctuation, what he hears and sees. And what he hears and sees is a violation, ongoing, ever present, of the chivalric code. In such a way did Sir Thomas Mallory describe the fornications at Camelot, and the tragic vigil of Tristram, at Cornwall, for King Mark's wife-by rights his le-man.
"I was unfaithful to you." Amy smiled, nodded, rolled her tongue around her lips (a gesture she had picked up from Cloris). "And because I was unfaithful, I have forfeited a mistress's dower rights ... so how can I complain?"
Her eyes moved from mine to the window; from the window to the space hovering over the lake. A half-century had passed since a young girl named Dorothy Arnold strolled past that lake and never again was seen. A half-century had passed since the first and only black trumpeter swan was seen swimming on the placid waters of that lake.
She unbuttoned another button of her dress. She pushed her relaxed hair to a fresh point of vantage. "But I have been a good mistress ... am a good mistress ... in spite of my strangeness. Have I not been? Am I not?"
She handled difficult sentences, I thought, with immaculate syntactical precision. Such authority goes beyond whim and random sex.
Aristocracy, in the long run, I have tardily come to concede, is reflected in a person's mastery of syntax, when times interweave and images are aghast.
I nodded.
I sipped my drink.
Amy took a hard slug of her own drink. "I have been a good mistress, have I not?" I nodded.
"I am your mistress, am I not? You don't mind the word?"
I agreed, affirming the first, affirming the negation of the second.
"And I am a good mistress."
"Bellissima," I said.
"Better mistress than wife. We must never marry." A wife, I suggested, is a former mistress who, after sanctification, is always in the adversary position. And she held that the missionary position sooner or later leads to the adversary position.
"I am good for you ... really good for you."
I agreed. She was beautiful, succulent, experimental, and kind.
"And I have not changed. In any way. Not an iota."
"Not a jot."
She smiled. "If you have any doubts..." She lifted the hem of her skirt. "None," I assured her.
"I was unfaithful." She jangled the word the way Tchaikovsky jangled bells in the 1812 Overture. Had her breasts been bare, she would have beaten them.
I suggested that "unfaithfulness" had little meaning in an age of little faith.
"It does," she insisted. "I have no right to complain about Elza and June. No right at all. I've forfeited a mistress's dower rights."
I said nothing. "Yes" would be tactless; "no" would be empty.
Happily she had more to say. She found a feeling of wrongdoing highly tonic. "And I have been a good mistress ... am a good mistress. Have I not been? Am I not?"
There was syntactical precision in her conjugal conjugations. How happy it might be (I thought, in passing), if Amy, without embarrassment, ire, umbrage, would edit my manuscript.
I nodded. I was becoming adept in nonverbal communication.
She finished her drink, handed me the glass. I put in more ice, more whiskey.
"Thanks," she said absently. Then, looking out of the window at cumulus clouds emigrating from Brooklyn, she began to fit together odd facts that were happy enough in isolation. "Cloris is also your mistress. I, then, am not only your mistress, but your mistress's mistress. And because I also love Cloris, Cloris is also a mistress's mistress."
She stopped to take the first sip of the second drink. "It's all very complicated, isn't it?"
Amy was now obsessed with her two Victorian words, "unfaithful" and "mistress." She repeated them with obscene glee, as if to wring from them a confirmation of wickedness. Proper ladies are not mistresses. Proper ladies are always faithful. But proper ladies are also sad, cold, unfufilled, and unfulfilling.
I translate: She had lived with me long enough to make our relationship conventional. She was slipping into a torpor. She needed the tonic slap of sin.
"You know my weakness," she said.
She was appealing to me, now, to think of her as one bearing psychic cross. She cultivated the notion of compulsion. On Walpurgis night the succubi and in-cubi take over. Her will fails her. Against her will, she must give herself; and in this giving, she is born again.
"Yes."
"I always want to be a good lover to you ... mistress, whatever." She had leaned back in her armchair, stretched out her Ziegfeld ("Long-stemmed roses") legs, directed her words upward-to the clinking crystal chandelier.
"You always are."
"Not always. Before I went away, I wasn't any good at all. That's why I went away."
"Who did it."
"Don't you know."
"Miss Wescott?"
She smiled. She ran her hand across her thighs. "You do know, don't you? And you know how and why." She looked at me with her special Low Country turn of the Giaconda smile-teasing, knowing, and slightly sad.
"Of course."
"She was good for you."
"She is always good for me." She kissed her fingers, and threw the kiss to my penis. "And all of this, exaggerated by your own loving, obscene imagination, will go into your next book."
"Do you mind?"
My empty question, more a punctuation mark than a question, struck her as quite funny. I knew so much about her, so many details; yet so little. "Mind? How could I mind? What greater flattery can a woman have than to have the vagaries of her vagina immortalized in a book?"
She stood up. She was majestic, it seemed to me. I had forgotten how majestic she could look, how striking.
"And now..." Her enrapturing smile coiled itself around me. "And now ... if you will forgive this unforgivable interruption ... il faut faire pee-pee."
Lifting her skirt in anticipation of the gestures to follow, she went into the bedroom.
A moment later I heard the bathwater turned off.
I finished my drink and went to the window. I looked down at the sunken plaza of the General Motors Building. I looked idly at the scurry of traffic on Fifth Avenue, of the thousands of harried housewives and office workers, anxious, as always, to move rapidly from one unsatisfying place to another. How different, I thought, was the tranquillity of the bare, upturned bottoms of Elza and June on the Seabrook beach-even, in the clear morning light, over a Charleston cannon.
Gradually there formed in my mind the image I had so long sought. I saw Amy as the orchestration of her differences. It had been clear to me for some time that there was a multiplicity of Amys: an Amy demure and pristine; a career Amy, political and strong; a maenadic Amy, exquisite, amoral, licorice; an exhibitionistic Amy, the natural actress, in full flower only before an audience.
What I now saw was a cluster of personalities in which each had a life of its own. Each was insulated from the others, yet had an awareness of the existence, needs, advantages, disabilities of the others.
The separation was so distinct that each Amy, like a physical "other," could be a companion to the other. She could, if need be, be her own lover.
No one husband or lover could ever be enough for her, because none could satisfy all the needs of all the selves, as each temporarily replaced another within a body that, to any outsider, was exquisite and unchanging.
For me, of course, whether or not I could alone satisfy the variety of "her" needs (I qualify the "her" because of an unavoidable need to assume a central Amy, a persona), she was infinitely desirable. And I could share her, as I did with Cloris, without having any of my possessions diminished because there was an infinity of richness in her poetic lusts.
If there was such an infinity of richness in Amy, why did I, almost in front of Amy, make love to Elza and June?
I had a better understanding of Amy, or thought I did, than I had of myself. Nor was this in any way odd. I was writing about Amy, not about myself-except to the extent that I had to account to myself for the role I was playing in accounting for Amy.
I mentioned much of this to Amy when, a short while later, in the queen-size bed that faced the windows overlooking the park, I was deep inside her.
She constricted her vagina. "You know my weakness." This was an elusive comment, which might mean anything.
I said nothing-which could mean anything. She then wound her long legs around me. "I want always to be a good lover to you."
"You always are."
"I was not, when I went away from you ... that night."
"You were."
"I was, later ... not before."
"What happened?" I had a reasonable insight about what happened. But an "insight," if such it was, could in no way match the excitement created by an honest (or dishonest), detailed report. (Cloris understood this well; which is why, after battiedore and shuttlecock exchange of details, we developed, together, such successful motion pictures.)
"I let myself be whipped."
"Why?"
"I told you. Besides, Tve told you before. Besides ... you once saw for yourself ... at the Contessa Borromini's villa, at Civitavecchia."
Now, in the light of my new theory, the whipping in the Borromini chapel had more symbolic meaning. The ritual offering of her body, for admiration, pain, embarrassment, possession, combined elements from the separate fantasies of each of the discrete Amys. Amy the exhibitionist found pleasure in the unveiling of her body-before strangers. The demure and pristine Amy-which was the Amy who arrived with Cloris, with me, at the villa-was incapable of opening herself to the pleasures demanded by the other Amys. The whipping was the magic act which cut away the inhibitions of the first Amy. It opened her, as it were (assuming that the substitution of the frenzied, loving
Amy for the prim, constrained Amy is an "opening").
More, the whipping was prepayment for pleasures later to be had. In giving over her body to be hurt, a body so publicly, conspicuously naked, Amy forestalled guilt. She was being had, against her will; she was overcome by some perverse, superior force. The later pleasures were her right, her due, a rounding out of equities.
"Besides..." Amy had a Pandora's box of besides.
"Besides what?"
"Watching me that way..."
"Like that afternoon in the chapel?"
"You know what it does to you ... even talking about it." And as if in resonance with the thought, her hands began to shake. Her tongue snaked into my mouth. Her hips rose. Inward muscles churned in sly peristalsis. I felt coming over me the great Hokusai wave.
And there it was; three consecutive, convulsive spasms.
"You're a bastard," she said. "I'm not ready yet." To the multiplicity of my loves, I was multiply apologetic.
Now that I had gained new "understanding," I had intended to be more understanding; to be, with whatever Amy I embraced, more tender, patient, loving; kissing more, nibbling, stroking, caressing (as Cloris loved her)-keeping my flushed erection hidden, as Mary Queen of Scots' executioner kept his sword hidden until the apocalyptic moment.
And now I had blundered, as a virgin schoolboy sometimes blunders after his first kiss.
"I don't think," she said, "we should talk any more about my weakness."
Later we went out for dinner. It was dusk. The last red rays of the sun, setting behind the Hudson, were reflected from the upper windows of the General Motors Building. Horses harnessed to shabby barouches were eating, from feed bags, their evening oats.
I walked with Amy to the Copenhagen, at Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue-a block west. It was a nice feeling, walking with her again on the streets of New York. A year had passed since we were first together in New York. And here, after Charleston, it pleased me to play host, guide, mentor, boulevardier. I knew New York the way Amy knew the birds of the Low Country; the lintels and architraves of the houses Below-Broad-Street.
When we had been here before, I had taken her, one by one, to my favorite saloons and eating places: P. J. Clarke's, P. J. Moriarty's, Liichow's, Sun Luck East, Gallagher's, the old Grand Ticino, Costello's, Sardi's, 21. We had had late sandwiches at Reuben's, hot dogs at Nathan's, butterfly shrimp at Bo Bo (on Pell Street), lobster fra diavolo at the Grotta Azzurra.
For no intelligible reason, we had not been to the Copenhagen.
Otto Plume, the proprietor, recognized me from years past, when I met there with editors and possible publishers. He is one of the world's greatest fanciers of finnan haddie; a suave, gracious man, who has always maintained that a restaurant should be run with the perfection you expect of a space module.
"It's good to see you back, Mr. Benton," he said, holding out his hand.
"It's good to be back." It was good to shake hands with him again. I had been more homesick for New York than I had realized, sequestered and feted on and about Seabrook, Amy, Elza, and June.
"Where have you been so long."
"Charleston."
"In South Carolina?"
"Charleston ... in South Carolina."
Mr. Plume wrinkled his nose. "Great hospitality, cold food. Always a Bicentennial, never a chafing dish."
I introduced Amy.
Mr. Plume, not hearing the last name, not caring, kissed her hand and addressed her as "Madame Benton."
"I like being called Madame Benton," Amy said as we sat down at a corner table, angled to face the festive smorgasbord spread.
"Very European, very domestic."
She unrolled her napkin. "And there's a title for your next book."
"What?"
"The Birching of Madame Benton."
I assumed I was talking with Amy No. I, who could view her ritual migration into Amy No. 2 with a certain salty detachment.
"Not dignified," I said.
"After what you've written about me, what you are now writing. And after the exposure I had in the movie ... dignity doesn't have much meaning."
"Venus rose from the sea, naked on a cockleshell ... and she was the very spit of dignity."
"Cockleshell nakedness is nice."
It became clear to me now why I wrote so much about Amy. It was not the money; I had plenty of money by now. Certainly not reputation; if anything, what I wrote built antireputation, a smirking kind of notoriety that I sometimes found annoying. Nor was it any cryptic sexual satisfaction-at least not in the ordinary piston-and-cylinder sense. It was the cockleshell idea-to capture before it was gone, to hold for all time, the essence of Amy's rapturous nakedness, as Botticelli has captured and held the raptus of Simonetta Vespucci.
On second thought, it became clear that I was lying to myself.
"Tve only been whipped five times in my entire life."
"You kept count?"
She flushed. "Five or six."
"But why?" My questions were parliamentary, part of the play the two of us instinctively acted out. I wanted Amy, as ever, to tell me, with her own imagery, why she did what she did-knowing well that what she told me would be more imagine than fact, a confession to be discounted, interpreted, translated into a fantasy of my own. Amy, in turn (whichever "Amy"), had a need to be urged.
"There was Larrine. Larrine was the first. In her house on East Battery. In the drawing room where we first met."
I nodded.
"I was very uptight, then. I? You still think of me as uptight, don't you?"
"I don't think of you as uptight. You have never been uptight with me. Only loving. Open, exquisite, loving."
"I was uptight. Too uptight to give myself. Larrine knew this. She knows much. Much ... much."
"She took over."
Amy took a deep swallow of her martini, as if to find in its depths old memories and courage. Then she looked absently, impersonally over her glass toward a platter of smoked eel.
"She took over. I was undressed. You read that. Everything. Then she had me pulled half over that Louis Quatorze escritoire. You've seen it?"
I had. It was directly in front of it, as I recall, that
Larrine first introduced me to the uncovered neatness of June's figure. Dramatic forays, in Charleston, so often repeat themselves. "It hurt?"
Obviously it hurt. My tactic, obscene as it was obvious, was to urge Amy to provide a scenario in her own words; to stir me, arouse herself, and simultaneously develop for me the dialogue of my book.
"Only at first." She knew, now, what I was about, and her cheeks dimpled in acknowledgment. "Only at first. Then..." She had now the hesitation that only comes with artifice.
I thought back to the scene in the contessa's chapel at Civitavecchia. The posture, I daresay, was the same. What was in her mind, I had no way of knowing; even now, in retrospect, my guess would shed fight on nothing more than the oddities of my own biography. Frankly, I no longer have viable theories. I have run clean out of theories. My treatment of Amy, in print, fascination, hex, is Simon-pure Zen. I could as well write of Zen and the art of swordsmanship. To take hold of Amy, to sense Amy from the inside, is like painting bamboo from the inside, like letting the sword, without thought, cleave the dew.
"Oh, Lord," she said, "I shouldn't tell you all this."
"Why not?"
"Why not?" She turned, now, and looked at me. "I really don't know why not Eventually I tell you everything, don't I?"
"And eventually I write about it." This, I knew, Amy no longer minded. There was vanity, sometimes, in her madness. She was not always unwilling to be undone. And this, too, she knew I knew.
She sighed. "All my private places have gone public, haven't they? And oddly, quite oddly, I don't seem to mind."
The world has changed radically, I suggested. Time was when much beauty was born to blush without benefit. Today, in new ways, we try to look on beauty bare. I said something or other about a hard, gem-like flame. I suggested, with shameless plagiarism, that at every moment some form grows perfect-even the Giaconda smile of the most secret place; and that not to discriminate it, on this short day of frost and sun, is to sleep before evening.
"You do want to know, don't you? Everything."
"Everything." Particularly, I wanted to know what each "Amy" knew about the others, how one replaced itself with another.
(I think, sometimes, that Amy is the only woman in modern times who has taken it on herself to act out, in flesh, the imagery of The Hound of Heaven: "Naked, I wait Thy love's uplifed stroke!I My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,I And smitten me to my knee;I I am defenseless utterly.I I slept, methinks, and woke,I and, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep." She acted it out, in times past, without awareness of her acting; or, at most, in the vague penumbra of awareness. But of late, it seemed to me, there was both awareness and guile. The change, I thought, was chic, sly, and charming.)
"Order us another martini," she said, drumming on the table as if wrestling with conflicting urges. "I'm already drunk ... but I'd like to be a little drunker."
I caught the attention of our waiter, a middle-aged man with white hair who looked, as do most waiters in Scandinavian restaurants, like a retired ambassador. I pointed to our two glasses. He nodded.
"Why should I try to hide anything from you?"
"There's no reason," I said.
"You've had me about as naked as any woman can be ... you and Cloris. You've made love to me every possible way a woman can be made love to ... as if positions and openings made any possible difference..."
"Not really," I conceded. Positions and openings made differences only as dream symbols. Yet Amy knew, and I knew, that the subtleties I sought are never fully given. Art is an ongoing account of the infinite variations of feeling.
She stroked my hand. "You know I love you."
I knew.
"Totally. Completely."
"I know." I knew.
"And I always want to be a good lover to you. A hexless mistress."
I assured her that she was.
She shook her head. "Not always. That's why I left you that night ... went to Isabelle's. That's why I let her ... you knew I let her, didn't you?"
I nodded.
"And when I came back, I was good for you. Wasn't I good for you?"
"You must try the finan haddie," the waiter said, stopping by our table to empty a perfectly clean ashtray. The waiters at the Copenhagen are perfectionists.
During our trips back and forth to the smorgasbord table, and after, when we had shifted from martinis to Carlsberg beer, we had much to talk about We always, it seemed, had much to talk about-so much that it seemed a pity to interrupt to stop to make love, just as when, making love, it seemed a pity to stop and talk. Yet what we talked about, for the most part, were the fine points of making love. Amy seemed to have the feeling-and this I shared-that talk about making love is not as much talk about making love, qua love, as talk about the whole human comedy, as it turned up, in the spasm of a thigh, in the quickening eye.
She wanted to know about my feelings for June; what I thought about when I first found her open and ready; whether or not, when I found myself inside her, I compared my feelings with the feelings I had when making love to her, or to Cloris. Elza, for intangible reasons, did not stir her interest, suggest competition.
She told me more about the night at Miss Wes-cott's. The chief spectator had not been Senator Ashmead. Ashmead was old, impotent, and at that time on a junket, at taxpayers' expense, to Tanzania (ostensibly looking for chrome). The chief spectator was a nineteen-year-old bearded College of Charleston student whom Larrine had been using as a model, and with whom Larrine had been having an affair.
In the middle of the romantic journey, when Amy No. I had vacated the naked, spread-eagled body of the collective Amy-and when the maenadic Amy was raising her splendid spirit-the spread-eagled body was penetrated properly, but from behind, by the tumescent manhood of the ninteen-year-old boy.
"I understand so well, Bill, how you felt ... how you must have felt ... the first time in June. And although I'm jealous as hell, I don't say a word."
It was after that that she had come back to me and been so passionately loving.
"I want," she said, "always to be a good lover to you."
"You are," I said, repeating myself, as she repeated herself, and with the same sincerity. Love is loving; and no woman in the world was more loving than Amy-the collective Amy, in any stage or transition. No woman gave more of herself in spite of herself ... or "selves."
"And now, Mr. Bones, I have a question for you
... you who know so much ... and want to know so much."
"What?"
"If I love you so much ... want only to be a good lover to you ... why do I have to give myself to someone else ... to be to you the complete lover that I want to be to you?"
"And Cloris?"
"Cloris is you."
CHAPTER 9
Amy wanted to drive to Spoleto. She had been appointed, without my knowledge, promotion consultant to the Spoleto Festival, which was scheduled to have an annual run in Charleston. And during her stay in Washington, about which I had surmised, in my oblique way, that she had been sacrificing her body for the sake of political preferments, she had been securing federal money to underwrite the festival.
"We can be in Spoleto in an hour," Cloris said, munching her brioche in bed, in our room in the Brufani Palace Hotel (where we had all been welcomed, the night before, by the incessant chatter of chimney swifts).
"I need more time for indecisions," Amy said, also in bed, dunking her brioche in her cappuccino.
The three of us had two adjoining bedrooms, each with double bed, each with a broad balcony overlooking the Piazza della Repubblica and the green valley below. Which of us belonged in which room, to whom belonged top place in the pecking order-and in which bed-were matters of no concern to any of us. If lovemaking is sufficiently aristocratic, it becomes totally democratic-from each according to his whim, to each according to his needs.
"I've been hungry for the two of you," Cloris said.
"It is not fair, certainly not gallant, to abandon a girl to the company of her husband."
"By the way," I said, "how is Lord Cholmondeley?"
"Yes," said Amy, kissing Cloris' left breast, "how is Lord Cholmondeley?"
"Lord Cholmondeley is meek, neat, and obedient, like a camel. And still filthy rich."
Money, at this stage, meant little to any of us. Monna Vanna had been grossing astounding amounts-not so much from American exhibitors, oddly, but from the European and African markets. Amy, as starring actress, had a six-percent interest in the gross. I, as initiator of the idea and "writer" of the screenplay (which was chiefly improvised), had a corresponding percentage. The night before, Cloris had presented each of us with a check for two hundred thousand, drawn on a Swiss bank (and each made out to a numbered account-presumably untaxable).
"Money, money, money," Amy had said when Cloris gave her the check. She had kissed it, folded it, pushed it in the decollete' neckline of a velvety jumpsuit she was wearing. Cloris had reached in the opening, retrieved the check, given it a second kiss, replaced it.
We had had a good night; I thought of it later as "the enormous night." A night of writhing, reflection, recollection, trinitarianism. A week earlier Cloris had been at Ischia with the Countess of Liechtenstein. Cloris had fallen in love with Ischia, the countess with Cloris.
Cloris had driven up to meet us; driven up in her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud-the same car in which she, Amy, and I had driven from Leonardo da Vinci Airport to the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia the day Cloris first set eyes on Amy, the day Amy first set eyes on Cloris, the day Amy was first undressed before Cloris and the Contessa Borrom-ini-the day the Contessa Borromini, unendowed with pubic hair, danced a sarabande, nude, to the shadow and enclosure of her pet mongoose. The mongoose had been absurdly protective, like a bewitched virgin aunt. He had bitten the bartender.
Amy and I had flown nonstop from New York to Milan (Aerporto di Malpenso). I rented a Ferrari at the airport, smart, fast, sensual as Amy. We drove directly to Perugia, 462 kilometers by autostrada. (The autostrada takes you past Parma and Modena; past Florence. You turn off at Arezzo, where Guido di Arezzo invented the staff schema for musical notation, and first wrote, "dd, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do.")
We had met Cloris at the Brufani Palace.
The greetings had been casual. "Hello," Cloris had said, kissing each of us. "Hello," Amy had said, returning kiss for kiss.
Among old friends, greetings are ceremonial. Displays of wild passion are for people who dislike one another.
That night had been festive. We had showered together, touched probingly and with reasonable eloquence, kissed as old lovers kiss. Then we had had dinner together at Ricciotto, on the piazza Danti. We shared the specialties of the house: tortellini alia reale, zuppa di lenticchie del Casteluccio di Norcia, bracio-line alia perugina con crostini. Together we drank three bottles of red Umbrian wine (nostrano dei colli perugini). All in all, for me, a sharp change from the Low Country fare of Seabrook Island-pleasant as the fare is at the club.
"I'm always happy in Italy," Amy said.
"You belong here," Cloris said. "You're as Italian as pasta."
"I'm too decollete, aren't I?" Unconsciously, Amy checked the exposure of her bosom. And I noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing a black, velvety, low-cut jumpsuit. I am not very observant.
Each of us downed three Stregas.
On our way back to the hotel, I stopped in a small liquor store in a crooked street leading off the Piazza della Repubblica and bought a bottle of Mille Fiori. The proprietor, a genial signora, plump, mustached, pointed a pedagogical finger at the crystalline flowers inside the bottle. "Fiori." Flowers.
Once in our rooms, we drank the Mille Fiori like brandy. An urge for loving makes everything sweet seem eminently fitting. Amy, to my surprise, put a dab of it on each of Cloris' nipples.
"You are very kind," Cloris said. "When you come to England, I will buy you a dragoon."
I made love, first, to Cloris, as Amy watched; saving myself for Amy. I then made love to Amy, as Cloris watched. I had intended to "save" myself, even then-for I had long since learned that, among men, desire long outlives capacity. But in making love to Amy, whose sensuality multiplies itself in front of interested eyes (particularly Cloris'), there is no holding back. Waves of excitement meet, compound, compact, then break with cataclysmic force. There is no holding back.
("Not yet, my love. Not yet. Please, not yet." Such was Amy's running commentary as I spent myself.)
Cloris had then made love to Amy, giving cataclysm its appointed place; and Amy, stirred rather than drained by love's Niagaras, made cataclysm cliche.
Much later, alternately kissed above by one, below by the other; alternately kissing, above then below, the one then the other, I drifted, exhausted, benumbed, completed, into my private, oceanic sleep.
It took several days for us, individually, paired, in concert, to bring our appetites, programs, confessions, queries, into some sort of formal order. Cloris was divided, to some extent, between a desire for continuous lovemaking and the pressure of business. The financial success of our last two pictures, the critical success which came to her (the comparisons with Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni, even Fellini), had caused her to take seriously the folderol which she, and I, had only worked at (as I worked at the picture-taking of Elza and June) for erotic jousts.
Our major films, to date, had been Tom Brown's Schooldays, Oedipus Rex, and Monna Vanna. Each had been an afterthought to justify certain high jinks-presumably not possible (this was the illusion we shared) without the bribe of legiMmacy. In each case Cloris had presumably "bought" me a girl. She was, had been, would always be excessively generous. And generosity to excess, I have always held, still hold, is the benchmark of an anointed lady.
That these films had been box-office successes as well, each a succes d'estime, is an irony of our times.
I attributed the successes to Cloris' extraordinary taste, imagination, intelligence. Without plan, intent, she unerringly gave each X-rated incident a Botticel-lian innocence and the verve of a Diaghilev ballet. (Les Biches comes to mind.) The grave symbolism that the critics saw, as I implied earlier, was the consequence of accident. Dada. We could have done as well simply to photograph the strokes of a paintbrush tied to a donkey's tail. We are, I suppose, symbolists all, interpreting the sighting of every comet or two-headed fish as a sign that somewhere, in the ceiling of the cosmos, a superior intelligence is at work.
And now Cloris was eager to get back to work.
"Aside from enjoying ourselves," she said, "we are therapeutic."
"We also make a great deal of money."
"What, after all, is money?" Cloris, like Amy, was every inch a lady.
Elza and June, too young as yet to be professional ladies, found money useful and poetic; to their parents, the money so properly earned had justified the tedium of posing. To me, it had set aside, in a simple, bold stroke, the tedium of seduction. They were ever available, ever ready to dedicate their bodies to the service of art.
(Nor should I forget that their availability was, in a sense, a function of my writings about Amy, and of Cloris' and my pictures. It was my royalties that made their lovemaking art rather than weakness; my love-making, "discovery"-not the seduction of the very young.)
"Our motion pictures are a liberating influence," Cloris said, making a virtue out of creative debauchery. "At long last, we make sex sexual." She was speaking, of course, for women, in the spirit of women's hb. Her argument, which I knew from other moments, was that too many women, for too many generations, had too little sex left in them. "Too many no-nos from too many dodos." Every girl became a Sleeping Princess-always oversedated. "When they should have been ready for peak fucking, all they got was anxiety dreams. This is the No-No Syndrome."
Cloris spoke glowingly of our Cannes prize pictures, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Oedipus Rex, particularly our last, Monna Vanna. (Time magazine had run an account of the premiere of Monna Vanna in Liechtenstein. The article featured a nude of Amy, showing the tattoo, and announced the fact that Amy Dellmore, once Charleston's Woman of the Year, sometime South Carolina's glamorous commissioner for consumer affairs, was Lady Cholmondeley's newest naked superstar.)
"We have become an influence." Cloris was positive. "We are replacing Librium."
She referred to our pictures, my books, and our combined and intertwined seductions. She made a very convincing case for creative debauchery. It was a tonic, like tea; full of good cheer, invigorating, salubrious. It heartened me to hear, from her own lips, that what gave me so much simple, lustful pleasure was, at bottom, an act of hope and charity-a peaking of the jetsam of kindness. I began to think of Cloris as a latter-day Florence Nightingale; myself, as a synthesis of the doctors Lister, Livingston, and Spock.
"Monna Vanna-that was our best picture. At least, the most beautiful ... because of Amy."
She said this when we were sitting alone at a table outside the Cafe" Astor, on the Piazza 4 Novembre, as I was saying to myself that, someday, I must find out precisely what Garibaldi did (or was it Mazzini?) on 4 Novembre.
It was late in the afternoon. The shops were reopening, after siesta. One after another the iron shutters over the shopwindows were rolled up, creaking, whining, clanging. Amy was getting a shampoo and set at a beauty parlor, a few blocks away.
I, unfortunately, had missed much of the shooting of Monna Vanna (in Mantua). I had been in Sicily, where I had met the Countess of Liechtenstein. And I had been there at Cloris' request. ("You must get some rest, you really must," Cloris had said before I left for Taormina. Actually, she wanted me out of the way until the picture was made. My presence, she thought, inhibited Amy; reinstated the primal Amy, the Amy of the Charleston drawing rooms.)
"We could shoot the next picture in Cinecitta," Cloris said. "Anywhere."
"We could shoot it anywhere, couldn't we."
"Even in Charleston."
Her long tongue slithered around her lips. Such was the way of her tongue when deep inside her the hot sap stirred. "You know something..."
"What?"
"Amy loves you. Really loves you. Really."
"I know." Amy had been explicit, when I went from Mantua to Charleston to persuade her to come back with me to Italy. ("I don't like to talk about it. It's not the sort of thing one talks about. ... But I love you.")
"I mention this for a special reason."
"What?"
She stroked my knee. "Don't you know."
"No."
"Amy ... in front of one she loves-meaning you-freezes up."
"On camera."
"On camera."
("I did it on camera," Amy had confessed to me in Charleston, after my exile, my recuperative exile, in Sicily. "I do it on camera. It meaning everything I do. I really do. It was not simulated-I assure you.")
"That's why I went to Sicily, isn't it? To save Amy for art. My love ... for art."
"Monna Vanna was a great picture ... is a great picture."
I agreed.
"And you didn't suffer."
"I didn't suffer."
(Loving Amy, as I do; loving Cloris, as I do; I find it hard to account to myself for the great pleasure I had, without guilt, without regret, without, in fact, a moment's second thought, with Aimee, the Countess of Liechtenstein. I am beginning to believe that there is a certain Zen in lovemaking. One only loves fully when he lets go fully. And to let go is to give up the stained-glass attitudes.)
"That's why I'm going to ask you what I'm going to ask you." She smiled, slightly hesitantly, I thought; and her tongue made it's characteristic snake-like traverse.
The waiter arrived with out Pernods. We had, instinctively, fallen back into our old habits. Always, in Europe, when we drank hard liquor together, we drank Pernod. We had started that way, in Amalfi, when she was in flight from Lord Cholmondeley's yacht, then anchored at Monte Carlo. We drank Pernod in our room at the Brufani Palace, in Perugia, with Caterina-the striking girl we had found in the Abruzzi, on the road to L'Aquila.
"Signora, signore," the waiter mumbled, dusting the table, depositing the glasses. Italian waiters never deliver anything without a ceremonial mumble-which is why so many Americans, ordering no more than a cup of coffee, are convinced that they have acquired, in Italy, compassionate, concerned friends who will remain as such for life. Years may pass, snows melt, crops wither; but each waiter will continue in his preordained way, compassionate, concerned.
"You want Amy to be happy, just as I do ... don't you?" She held up her glass, clinked it against mine.
"Of course."
"You are beginning to understand some of her complexity?"
"A lovely complexity."
Again, a clink. "A lovely complexity."
She smiled. "Then you will do what I ask."
"You have not asked."
"I will. I will. Let me come to it slowly."
"What?"
"You do love her, don't you?"
"Of course I love her. As I love you."
"Then you will undress her, won't you?"
"Undress her?"
"Strip her."
I said, in clear syntax, that undressing Amy was one of the finely drawn pleasures of love and friendship, an introduction to intimacy, a preface to fore-play.
"In public, I mean."
"We've done that before." I thought back to the scenes at the Contessa Borromini's villa. There were no great psychological handicaps. Amy in vino, properly stirred, among people phvsically attractive to her, had a wayward way. Exhibitionism came natural then; came to Amy as it had come to Lady Godiva. As it had come to those actresses, established in their own right, who posed, without Victorian restraints, for the gatefolds in Playboy. Nor did all necessarily pose in vino; not more so than did Elza and June.
Long shadows dipped into the waters of the great fountain in front of our table-the fountain facing the Palazzo dei Priori.
Cloris' lips twitched. "That's not what I mean ... not quite what I mean,"
I gulped my Pernod. "What ... ? "
"What do I mean?" She had, it seemed to me, for the first time, a problem in communicating. And this was odd. Cloris was always detached, balanced, cool, forthright. One of her special appeals to me was her directness, matter-of-fact honesty.
"What do you want me to do?"
"What do I want you to do?" She, too, gulped her drink. "What do I want you to do?"
A premonition, perhaps. I heard, in the middle of this Perugian piazza, the pounding of the surf at Seabrook, the mocking skirl of the laughing gulls.
"I know you love her."
I nodded.
"I know she loves you ... dearly ... completely."
I looked straight ahead of me, at the Ghibelline fenestration on Palazzo dei Priori. It did not seem right to nod in Amy's behalf. How could I know whom Amy loved? Or which Amy? Or how much?
"That's why..." Cloris coughed. She was about, in spite of herself, to develop and defend a paradox. "That's why I want you to undress her ... then give her, naked, loving you ... to another man ... a total stranger."
"But why?" I have, as I have said before, little jealousy in me; and, on my record, little claim to jealousy. Yet about Amy ... About Amy my feeling was different. I was possessive. Not that I had any claims, any rights; not that I wanted any. I rationalized my feeling irrationally. I spoke to myself about what was right and proper, what made aesthetic sense, poetic balance. And Amy, it seemed to me, could not properly, in the eyes of the gods, make love to, be made love to, by anyone other than Cloris or me-or the two of us in congress merged.
"Why?" Her hand moved down to my right knee, and she fingered the hollow.
"Your reasons."
"First, business." Her voice, taking its cue from her word, became business-like; such is the force of autosuggestion. "Amy will not make love to anyone on camera if she thinks you would disapprove. She doesn't say that in so many words. But. . . "
"But that's what she thinks." "That's how she feels."
"As a matter-of-fact..."
"You'd rather she didn't." Cloris and I had come to know each other so well that either of us could speak the other's lines.
"I'd rather she didn't."
She pressed her finger deeper into my knee's hollow. "Bill, you're basically square ... square as this piazza. And a fucking male chauvinist." She paused, reassembled her metaphors. "I mean this literally."
"You want to start right away ... a new picture ... don't you?"
"As soon as we can. I have an itch. A need. And you know me better than you know Amy. And you know I love you as much as Amy does. Perhaps more-because there is only one of me . ... "
"The Naked Countess?"
"The Naked Countess. Or any other story ... starring Amy. You could write a new script ... starting with what I'm asking you to do."
"So much for first. What's second?"
"Second is Amy herself. Too much togetherness is bad for her. You saw what happened on Seabrook." (I had told Cloris; and I was still not clear in my mind about what happened, in what order, or why what happened had to happen.)
"She gets restless."
"Restless, anxious, a little sad."
"Then another Amy takes over."
"Tries to take over."
"And you think..."
"Exactly." She was positive. "If you're man enough to do it."
I had not told Cloris that Amy had made, on Seabrook, a veiled suggestion, more or less to the same end; that, either unconsciously, or with arch subtlety, she had put the onus on me. This was what I, in my perverse way, would like to see-voyeur that I am. And the suggestion, oblique as it was, had given me the chilling idea that she was bored. In giving her what I thought she wanted, I had not given her what she wanted-what the prevailing "Amy" wanted.
"You could write about it, remember," Cloris said.
"The way I wrote about you ... us ... even the first time we were in Perugia ... and in the same hotel."
"The same way you wrote about me ... and my anatomy ... the sounds I made. Terribly scandalous, wasn't it?"
"How did Cholly-Boy take it? I forgot to ask."
Cloris smiled her best peerage smile. "Cholly-Boy is, after all, Lord Cholmondeley. Lords are spared the middle-class morals. A lady can be hot or frigid; bewitched, buggered, and bewildered; terribly, terribly naughty-but never immoral."
She let a short silence paragraph her thoughts. Then she added, "I loved it. A cunt is not born to be uncounted, unsung."
We had more drinks.
The afternoon deepened. Perugians promenaded the length of the piazza. After the fifth or sixth tour, each became an old, familiar, unfathomable friend.
"I think you need assurance," Cloris said. "That's why you hesitate."
I needed the assurance, she thought, that Amy loved me, wanted me; that she herself loved me, wanted me; that neither was put off by what I wrote about them. She added a fillip that I interpreted as a cheap debater's trick-but one, launched by her tongue, persuasive and charming: "Jealousy is the ultimate mark of the beast; fear of loss. You're not sure of Amy."
Looking back, I call to mind a singular fact. I was astounded to find that this had not earlier left some conscious mark on me. Amy talked very little. She sported her beauty, her flirtatious, teasing gestures; she wrapped herself in dreamy mystery; at appointed moments she opened all the sluices of sadness and passion. But communication? A sparse token-except, occasionally, when unexpectedly drunk. No more did Helen speak words that Homer could quote; words whose linkage and overtones gave some clue to the cozy longings of this uncommon beauty. And in spite of this verbal restraint; knowing, even today, so little of what she felt and thought, we think of Helen as a fixture in our pantheon of poetic wonders-and this after some three thousand years.
What I am trying to say in this aside is that, in spite of my failure to understand Amy-or the cluster of Amys-there was no waning of my desires, concern, possessiveness; no waning of my attempts, repeated, revised, to write about her, interpret her, impose on her the vagaries of my irreverant imagine.
The next day Carnavaron arrived.
Carnavaron, as I have explained elsewhere, was Cloris' director. Sometimes cameraman. And sometimes, I do believe, although I have no direct evidence of this, a stand-by, impromptu lover. Not that Carnavaron had any physical interest in her, or she in him. But Cloris' body, like nature, abhorred a vacuum. If she and I were not together, she would, with no qualms, and loving me no less, fill the vacuum. "Placeholders," she called them; "tools with life in them." For the most part, she chose young boys. ("It's such fun to mother them, play with them, teach them what to do. After a while, of course, they get a little cocky . ... But that's fun, too.")
Carnavaron was as much the proper Oxonian as was Amy the proper Charlestonian. He was distinguished, immaculate, bloodless as a guppy; and when he spoke you felt that you were in the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier and gathering, for the first time, the full import of Hamlet's soliloquy. He was much too much an Oxonian to refuse Cloris, should her loins make demands of him. (Cantabrigians, they say, lean more toward science.) Moreover, he was beholden. He was Cloris' discovery. Had it not been for Cloris, and Cloris' happy hobby, he would still be huddled in some schoolroom in Burnt Norton, Little Gidding, Upper Nutting, or Cwmpryddyg, teaching the young to circumflex.
We had dinner that night, the four of us, at Ric-ciotti's, on the Piazza Danti. Carnavaron was jovial, as always; Cloris, in a suave mauve pantsuit, her long blonde hair shining, was becomingly mauve, suave, Machiavellian. Amy wore a blouse which buttoned down the front, and was more open than it needed to be. Her dimples seemed to have deepened-those wry invaginations I associated with a shy slyness. She wetted her lips frequently, was uncommonly quiet.
I wondered what June was doing this moment, some two thousand, four hundred miles due west of us.
"Fellini's slipping," Cloris said.
"So is Bergman," Carnavaron said.
Seriousness, I suggested, is not taken so seriously anymore. Soul-searching is slowly going out of style, like horseshoe-pitching, bundling, and hats.
"Young people are the moviegoers of today," Carnavaron said. "They like Cloris' kind of pictures."
"What kind is my kind?"
Carnavaron sang, "Your kind is my kind."
"Seriously."
"High seriousness on dream street. Beautiful, beautiful women ... like Amy." He nodded toward Amy. "Stark, beautifully naked. Totally, completely, unforgettably naked. A story line that is totally believable because it makes no sense whatever. La vida est su-eno-life is a dream."
In late years, I was sure, he would publish a book of aphorisms, privately printed.
"Cloris' Pix Wow Stix." Cloris remembered an old Variety headline.
"Stix Nix Clothed Pix."
"Instant tea, instant me." Amy, with a bitter rhyme, broke her long silence.
"You have," said Carnavaron, "made masturbation cultural."
"And obsolete," said Cloris, "Like bundling." She put her hand, boldly, inside Amy's blouse, and Amy blushed.
(Why, I wondered, did the word "bundling" come to Cloris' mind? It had just been in mine.)
Carnavaron then noted a singular fact: the influence of Cloris on Fellini. Fellini, the great Fellini ,of La Strada and La Dolce Vita, was now displaying his heroines as utterly, conspicuously naked as was Amy in Monna Vanna. Nakedness, indeed, was the benchmark of Fellini's newest film, Casanova. And the influence was Cloris'; Cloris', as embodied in Amy, emboldened by Amy, flaunted by Amy. And life, indeed, like nature, imitates art.
"Holy cow," Amy said.
"Let us not," said Cloris, "overdo the mammary bits." She then took some liberties which are better left undescribed.
We were, all in all, a genial group.
In the middle of the high-ceiling studio facing the j set were two wide, deep couches. "Casting couches," Cloris called them, with a trace of nostalgia. The term, moreover, was ambiguous, because in Cloris' i and my cinema jousts, every surface capable of sup-l porting weight was used, more or less, for the same i purpose.
At this point in space and time, however, there were, in this studio on the Via delle Volte della Pace, two, and only two, wide, contoured couches. And each had beside it a small table on which there was a bottle of Stock Italian brandy, and two long-stemmed Venetian goblets. The goblets were green, like a Venetian-glass nephew in a stained-glass attitude.
"Let's drink to Cesare," Cloris said.
She filled the two glasses on the table tangent to the couch closest to Amy and me, using the bottle from that table. She left them on the table, an indication, not subtle, that we should sit down. She filled the other two glasses from the bottle on the other table, as if segregation of sources was a safeguard against over-excitement and trench mouth. One of these glasses she handed to Cesare. The other she held in her own torch-holding hand; held up, in jovial toast, like the Statue of Liberty toasting pollution from New Jersey.
"To Cesare."
"To Cesare," Amy said, her voice already un-steadied by wine (Valpolicella), the axis of her breasts perpendicular to her backbone, her backbone parallel to Cloris', her glass high.
The fourth glass, Amy had handed to Cesare, who was standing naked in front of us, and who, unfortunately, did not drink.
Carnavaron had discovered him. He felt, with good reason, that Cloris needed a leading man, even if Cloris, as yet, had no leading idea for what Carnavaron called "a cinema picture."
"Put a good, leading, naked man on the set with a good, naked, leading lady, and a good cinema picture will write itself."
The sentiment. I thought, did little iustice to my talents. On the other hand, I am lazily patient.
Cesare was an Olympic high-diver. He had been on Italy's celebrated team, although little more than sixteen. Carnavaron had sighted him on television. He was symmetrical, snake-muscled, olive-skinned. And his erotic parts, as I now observed, were substantial. Cloris, with not as much as a "May I?" or "Do you mind?" had pulled down his swim trunks. Worldly women sometimes have such a wav with voung boys, using the authority of an interested mother to justify the invasion of virile privacies. ("Have you been playing with yourself? Let me see". )
Cesare's device was massive, even in relaxed indifference; a noble petard, superbly hung.
"I don't believe it," Amy said coyly, pretending the shock she felt to be expected of her-as if life and culture had led her to believe that the lifting of a fig leaf would reveal nothing more massive than a fig.
"Why buy a pig in a poke?" She touched her brandy glass to the tip of the pendant penis, then held up the glass in salute. "Bellissimo, sir. Si? Si! Si!"
"It can't be," Amy said, with added coyness. Her Charleston accent seemed unusually marked, a consequence, probably, of the resurfacing of childhood fantasies.
"It is." Cloris was positive. "It is." She added, "Est! Est! Est!" the name of a special Orvieto. She then made certain overtures to Cesare, and his massive organ stiffened and rose, ready to thunder.
Cesare jumped. "Contessa Cholmondeley!" He spoke from embarrassment, evidently feeling called on to say something. At such moments a silence is rude. But having on his tongue no sentiments fitting to the occasion, he contented himself with a ritual mouthing of her name and title.
"Oh, shut up," Cloris said. She was always ready with a proper mot, although her enunciation now was scarcely that of Mrs. Siddons, or Miss Ellen Terry, in the role of Lady Macbeth. Closer, perhaps, would be that of Ann-Margret, four sheets to the wind, while kissing the Blarney Stone.
After this, we all drank again-all except Cesare, who was in training.
Amy leaned back on the couch. I rolled close to her, kissed her, ran my hands over her.
She did not respond. "Please," she said. "Not here."
Many problems lay ahead. I had agreed, at Cloris' urging, and against my own best interest, to undress Amy in front of Cloris and the boy. When she was naked, I was to offer her to Cesare-then watch, as she let him take her. Probably, I was afraid, I would first have to get her quite drunk.
"Put your hands behind your head." Cloris put her own hands behind her head to indicate to Cesare how she wanted him to stand. He assumed the pose, looking slightly ridiculous, I thought, with his gigantic erection extended in front of him. "And keep that up." She gave his swollen member a maternal pat.
"Cloris has colossal nerve," Amy said.
"It's awfully big."
"My God. It's enormous."
"Could you take it?"
"It?"
"Yes."
"Inside me."
"Inside you."
"What an idea." Her voice soared on wings of civic virtue.
I was sorry I had asked. I had been crude. Nervousness, I think, made me say things, ask things, that are better left unsaid, unasked. In the ambience of Charleston, as in the Urbino of Castiglione, certain gestures may or may not be made; they are never talked about.
"The idea of seeing me made love to by another man still excites you. Doesn't it."
"No," I said.
Amy put her hand on my fly. "Then how come you have a hard-on."
"Would you?"
"If it gave you pleasure, I would. You know ... I would do anything for you."
Cloris went over to the camera, which was aimed at Cesare's penis. This was the small camera we always carried with us when we traveled together-a Beaulieu 5008, with an Opitivaron F I.8 zoom lens. Cloris had mounted the Beaulieu, for this occasion, on a dolly. The camera, the lights, the cables, gave the studio a professional appearance, even if Cloris' purposes (and possibly Amy's?) had nothing directly to do with picture-making. "Still," as Cloris once said to me, "you never can tell." She was a great advocate of serendipity. We had started this way, with Amy, at the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia, and ended up with Monna Vanna. Thus had we begun, lifting Jennifer Digby's skirts, in Cloris' room at the Savoy Hotel in London. The fruition: Tom Brown's Schooldays, filmed mostly in Toledo.
Cloris was business-like. She carefully focused the camera, started the motor action. Then slowly she zoomed in on Cesare's erection. I knew so well what was revolving in her mind. This was a scenic opportunity too rich to be ignored. A zoom shot of a giant penis, erect, eloquent. In some future picture that we might make with Amy, we would open with a zoom shot approaching the Eiffel Tower, dissolve to a zoom approach to the Washington Monument-then dissolve to the zoom on Cesare's penis. We then cut to Amy, lying naked, restless, and dreaming, on some Byzantine bed. After that, it would be up to me to invent a story line-say, Florence Nightingale's intimate diary, or the inside story of nights at Camelot. (Amy, it occurred to me, would be an ideal Queen Guinevere.)
I spoke elsewhere of my twinge of jealousy at the thought of Amy giving herself, for whatever reason, to Senator Ashmead, or to whom she gave herself, for whatever reason, in Washington. Nor did I ever know why she gave herself (or how). Was it for an ambassadorship? For the funding of the Spoleto Festival-a noble sacrifice for art? Was it the sheer, simple pleasure of sacrifice for its own sake-a democratic, jet-set substitute for sacerdotal harlotry? And now? Now I was coconspirator in my own jealousy. I was undressing Amy to give her, as a father gives away a bride, to another man. The man, in truth, was a boy, a phallic stripling. I was stripping her for the stripling; over her protests, against my better judgment.
My reasoning, polity, is not clear. But to all of you who are, as I am, fond of thrills, of heightened feeling, I say, "Try stripping the woman you love ... and giving her, naked and protesting, to another man. It is not for nothing that Scripture abhors stricture, and counsels the casting of bread upon waters."
Outside the studio I could hear the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of a machismo motorcycle, gunned uphill, its muffler open.
"Did you try to make love to June when I was away?" Amy kissed me as she asked this. The question was thus one of curiosity, simple, amorous.
"Yes."
"Elza, too?" Another kiss. Gentle stroking in sensitive places. "Yes."
"Together."
"Yes."
"Oh, my!" She sighed, and I unbuttoned her blouse. "Do you mind?" I took off the blouse. I unhooked the bra. Nipples, as I expected, were aroused. "June was better for you, wasn't she?" I unhooked her skirt.
"I mind very much your undressing me in public," she said.
"I'm sorry." My protocol statement. The skirt was now unmistakably unhooked.
"What we do in private is our own business. But I don't like spectacles."
"Would you like another drink?" If we were both a little drunker, whatever might happen would be justified by that lack of logic which descends on us in the penumbra of the grape.
"Yes." This was a sharp "yes," a reprimanding "yes," as if to say, "If I'm to do what apparently I must do, the least you can do is to pour me another drink."
I poured the drink.
She took the glass from my hand, put it to her lips. Meanwhile I worked the straps of her bra down over her arms. Reluctantly she cooperated, even pulling her right hand, glass in hand, through the waiting loop. Then, habit evoking the decorum of old Charleston, she raised her free arm to give a modest cover to her breasts.
"You want Cesare to take me, don't you."
"Not really." Which was the case. I was clearly acting against my own best interests. "Then why must I? Why?"
"I will not force you," I said, putting my hand under the loosened skirt, stroking the recumbent thighs, easing off the panties. She sighed, and made the disjunctive gesture-hands (one still holding the brandy glass) traveling apart to indicate helpless passivity. She even raised her hips to avoid blocking the downward trek of her panties.
"Please don't," she said, aimlessly, I thought. Then, to my surprise, she began to cry.
My conscience bothered me as I took away the skirt, leaving her totally naked.
She rolled over, turning her bottom toward me; and I looked again, with love and wonder, at the upturned tattoo. Then her whole body began to tremble. The couch shook.
"Turn over," Cloris said gently, kissing the back of her neck.
Leading him by the hand, Cloris had brought Cesare to the couch.
She took Amy by the shoulder, turned her over. Amy's face was smeared with tears; tears still poured down, like rivulets on a windshield during a spring shower. Her nipples solid as gherkins. Her arms, her hands quivering.
I began to understand Cloris' strategy, appreciate her subtlety, her insights. Amy only trembled when she was in a state of extreme erotic excitement. She had trembled, at times, when I first knew her. She had trembled, uncontrollably, when she had been undressed in front of her nephew, at Miss Wescott's plantation, Berkeley Hall, outside Charleston. But this passing summer, on Seabrook, she had been serene, too serene. She had felt no pressure, no threats, no challenges. Nor had there been a suggestion of palsied excitement. Something then had come over her, like the drabness of moon country, a Waste Land. And she had talked to herself, although without clear phrases, much as Petronius' reported the Sibyl at Cumae talking: "For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'Apothanein thelo'-'I want to die.' "
Cesare moved closer to Amy, his engorgement now so monstrous that it was almost a disfigurement, like the giant phalli sometimes extended from the dancing satyrs-on Greek vases.
"Me diver," he said to Amy. "Me dive high. Very high."
Amy sat up. Her eyes widened. She seemed for the first time aware of the imminent threat. "My God. No. I can't."
Cloris put her hands on Amy's breasts, kissed her. "You can."
"No."
"You must."
"Me diver," Cesare repeated, flexing his biceps.
"Him all pecker," Cloris said, to no one in particular. She separated Amy's thighs. Then she took Amy's hands and put them on Cesare's erection.
"Bellissima," Cesare said, either in admiration of Amy's beauty or in appreciation of her fight, timorous, trembling touch.
The penis jumped forward, burying itself in the separation between Amy's breasts.
Unfamiliar as this gesture might be to women under the aegis of Lares and Penates, always under the protective, insensitive eyes of husbands and children, it is a token of adoration and concern. It is patently sincere, impossible to force. Nor was Amy oblivious to these arcane facts. She at once stopped crying, ended her parliamentary protest. Instead, she looked up at me and smiled, smiled her wan, sly, beatific smile. Her cheeks flushed. Then, slowly, she leaned back, her maternal hand on his tumescence, her long fingers circling it, caressing, directing.
"You won't mind?" Amy, even now, could not abandon protocol.
I did not mind. So said my Jovian nod. It set at rest the faint, final stirrings of her Huguenot conscience.
"My God, he's good-looking," Cloris said. "And only sixteen."
It was not my place to agree or disagree, express approval or disapproval. I said simply, "He looks older."
Then Amy screamed.
"It's only half in," Cloris said, envy and scheming evident in her voice. "I can't believe it."
"It is big," I conceded. Men not homosexual are usually not knowledgeable in such matters, for the parts on display in college or country-club locker rooms have neither the extension nor stance of those rampant in boudoirs. This, however, was no moment to cavil.
"Almost too big." The running comment, I believe, heightened Cloris' sense of participation.
I suggested that such values are always relative, and Cloris poured herself a brandy. She sampled my reactions at the place where my reactions were most obvious and asked why Amy excited me even when I was not having her. "You will write about this, won't you? You must."
Cloris was ever the artist
"Perhaps." I had, with time, grown cautious. Sooner or later I would write too much, too openly, about my loves and pleasures; then all would be over. Even now too many who read what I wrote raised eyebrows at what I said, took exception to the detail. (My only consolation was that those who objected to the detail remembered the detail, could quote it verbatim. Nor were any one whit distressed, as I was, that I could not understand Amy as I would; could not trace with any sureness the fine veinings in her mind.)
"Amy always does this to you, doesn't she?"
I conceded that she did. It was strange-that I should be excited by what I was not having. Santa-yana, I recalled (speaking of Dante), announced that riches lie in renunciation; it is not what we have that gives us the greatest satisfaction, for too much having invokes the Law of Diminishing Returns.
"Even when you are not having her?"
"Even then."
Again Amy screamed. Again she protested that what was to be could not be, that irresistible force could not widen an immovable sphincter. (She did not, of course, use the term "sphincter," not even in the plural. She preferred, as well-bred ladies do, the impersonal, ambiguous "it.")
She opened her legs as wide as possible, even drew back her knees to dramatize her cooperation. She was not, she implied, refusing herself on the basis of Victorian reticence. Far from it; an aristocrat, certain of her status, her position, she could, with no loss of virtue, give herself even to the least of her subjects-all the more so to a youngster. The difficulty was nature's, not hers.
Cesare considered the fault his. He had not thrust hard enough. He was not gallant. His back arched.
There was an incisive, powerful thrust forward, a gargantuan heave.
Amy released a piercing penultimate scream. Then the ultima. The barrier had been broached.
Then Amy herself heaved, and threw him off. "Enough is enough. Ecco. That's it."
Not so for Cesare. Hard thrusts are aphrodisiac, especially thrusts against flesh as rounded, maternal as Amy's. Thus did the too-solid flesh melt. A geyser spurted. Amy's navel was splattered; and rivulets of viscosity trickled slowly down into the pubic bosk.
I have said much already of Amy's extraordinary beauty; the symmetry of face and body; her natural grace. Now this beauty was more than ever evident. I walked around the couch to look at her from every angle. In spite of all that had been done to her, in spite of pain, shock, of pulling her long legs up into indecent postures, she was still as powerfully beautiful as Praxiteles' Venus, serene, poised. She reminded me of what Yeats had written about his own "Amy," Maude Gonne. "When men and women did her bidding," he wrote, "they did it not only because she was beautiful, but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom."
And now, naked and tumbled, she was no whit abashed. The Charleston demon had been exorcised. "You're really awfully good to look at, Cesare." She smiled her arch, dimpled smile. "And I've been mean to you. I'm sorry." She blew a kiss to now-deflated penis.
What she was saying, in her oblique way, was that there were other ways of pleasuring him. That love-making is not limited to the missionary stance; not to the passive sheathing of a rampant piston. There were other ways. Many. But Cesare was still so young, so eager to please. Why spoil him?
Cesare was understanding, courteous, a paragon of Italian charm. "II buon tempo verm." The good time will come. He tapped his diminished organ, smiled the smile of the defeated sportsman. "Troppo grande." Too big. As if all would be forgotten, forgiven, once the reason for failure was properly aired.
"Next rime," Cloris' said to Cesare in English, knowing he would not understand, "next time ... I will have la signora stretched."
"Stitched?" He wrinkled his brow, trying, by perseverance and force of will, to extend his understanding of English: and aware that, at best, his vocabulary was limited to four words paired into the two phrases, "Me dive" and "Good-bye."
After Cesare dressed, bowed, left ("after kissing Amy's hand, and saying, again, "Il buon tempo vend"), we had a final round of brandy. Then Amy undressed Cloris.
There is no need to detail our private, shared rituals; our balancing of equities. Suffice it to say that I took Cloris, who was ripe, wet, impatient. Then Cloris took Amy. on the other couch, each making the most of the other's capacity for multiple climaxes. Then, as I recall, less energetically, but with great warmth and understanding, we reversed the sequence.
The next morning Amy was the Amy I had known when I had first gone to see her in Charleston; which is to say she was happy, amorous, suave, with no dark shadows hovering in the corners of her mind; no secret needs, no inhibition.
Cloris has sharp insights, a sensitivity that sights, instantly, intuitively, infallibly, the fine shadings of mood. And this, I do believe, is why she has been such a competent producer; why her pictures have been so effective, both in art circles and at the box office. She sensed at once, when Amy and I arrived in Perugia, the conflict of the several "Amys" inside the corporate, voluptuous body. She sensed the need for a kind of exorcism.
I do not take great stock in the various competitive theories of personality. I do not actually believe in "multiple personalities," in spite of the bulk of case records. But extreme changes in mood can almost add up to changes in personality-particularly when such changes are accompanied by a partial blacking out of memories, as is often the case in other activities. (If we drink too much, one night, our memory is scarcely reliable the next day.)
And there was no longer any doubt in my mind that Amy, under differing stresses and suggestions, or in a prolonged domestic life-style, such as the one we set up on Seabrook, changes her protective coloring. Too much safety gave her claustrophobia; the claustrophobia touched off a need to flee.
The remedy, as Cloris so well saw, was erotic shock. The high fall; the same dramatic device Cloris used, with such success, in our pictures. ("Strip the Great Lady and force her to do what she wanted to do anyway, what she would not have had courage enough to do on her own-and what male chauvinist pigs are willing to buy, at any price.")
"What a wonderful night!" Amy said, the next morning, in bed, as she dipped a brioche into her caffe con latte.
"Satisfied?" Cloris asked.
Amy laughed. "Exhausted."
"What do you want to do today?"
"More of the same."
"With Cesare?"
"Not really. At least, not in front of Bill." She turned to me. "Do you mind?"
"With Cesare? Or not watching?"
"Not watching. I'll be better with him alone."
"Do as you please," I said, running my hands over her. I am a voyeur, as I have conceded elsewhere. But I am not this kind of voyeur. I am excited by the sight of women undressed, about to be undressed, in the process of undressing. I enjoy the sight of physical change, when excitement strikes, when the tides of feeling rise and ebb. But I have no interest whatever in the simple, animal act of procreation, or facsimile thereof, between a man and a girl. Connubial wrestling, it seems to me, is of concern only to proctologists. Even in filmed scenes I found in it little charm, because the girl's body, however glamorous, is screened by the intervening man.
"It really could go in, you know."
"Of course," Cloris said.
"All Cesare needs is a little mothering and a little jelly."
"I told you once ... I was going to debauch you."
Amy raised her dimples to prominence, took a deep breath, sipped her coffee. "You told me. You did. You are."
Cloris quoted Aimee to Amy. Aimee is the Countess of Liechtenstein. "In the total fuck comes total liberation. Equality, sorority, exhaustion."
"And you will," Amy added.
"What do you think?"
"You will."
"You and Bill have been together too long." Cloris said. "You're like man and wife. That's not good."
"And you and Bill."
"I go back to my husband from time to time. I am, after all. Lady Cholmondeley."
"But Cholly-Boy only--likes little boys."
Cloris poured brandy in her espresso. "Doesn't matter. He keeps the franchise; keeps our place, Ramspaugh, near Salisbury; is handsome, suave, Eton-Cambridge; and never intrudes himself between Bill and me. He wouldn't dare."
I liked Cholly-Boy. He was civilized. Who sleeps with whom nowadays is of interest only to urologists. And Ramspaugh was one of the great country houses of England, comparable to our Monticello. There was the Inigo Jones house, the giant Cedars of Lebanon, the Palladian bridge over the river, the musicians who played Mozart from the balcony of the ballroom.
"You must not get tired of Bill ... ever. Not let yourself."
"Why do you think...? "
"You will, you know, if you don't fuck someone else from time to time." Cloris, sometimes, could expound destiny with such erotic authority that her dicta would lend themselves to pious meditation.
"I fuck you." Amy spoke with honeyed guile, as if announcing that she was forever through with the Child's Garden of Verses.
"That's different," Cloris said. She was not prepared for such simple logic.
Cloris was delighted with Charleston, as I knew she would be-much as I knew Amy would be delighted with Italy, when first I took her there, to meet Cloris. And Cloris was as much delighted with the Low Country. She--likes her country snug and neat, full of salt marshes and tunneling roads and people who, if they anymore wore hats, would touch their hats as she passed. She loved the old plantation gardens such as Magnolia and Middleton, which reminded her of her own place at Ramspaugh, and the great houses of the city, like the Miles Brewton house, on King Street, the Manigault and Nathaniel Russell houses on Meeting
Street, even Larrine's house on East Battery-although none could approach in scale and grandeur her own Inigo Jones place in England, with its four stern towers and its Palladian facade. (Nor could any boast a Palladian bridge, made entirely of marble, to span an intruding river.)
"Groovy," she announced, in imitation of June, for whom she had developed a wayward and motherly passion. ("We must treat her like a daughter; bathe her, and powder her, pat her little hindy, and tuck her in bed.")
Our transition from Perugia to Charleston had proceeded by stages. I had, it seems, created trouble. I had developed what Cloris considered "temperament"-by which she meant a flagging concern for sex. This purview had scant validity. What had been the case, as I look back, was a clash of temperaments. Cloris, obsessed now with ambition, her head turned by easy accolades, was impatient. She wanted to get on with the business of business; to outpace Fellini, Bunuel, Bergman, let alone the lesser ilk. And I, she thought, was failing her. I was too protective, perhaps, of my image of Amy; too protective, perhaps of what I could come to assume were my proprietary rights. I did not, in short, care to have Amy made love to on camera. (And in this, I concede, she was not altogether wrong-although it was late in life for me to play quoits with conventional whimsy.)
There we were in Perugia, munching Perugina chocolates each night between brandies and light fondling in our great Perugian bed. We had a promising leading man, or boy. We had standing by a director, Carnavaron, and an expensive camera crew from Cinecitta. We had a studio. Moreover-and this was most important-under Cloris' bold proding and tutelage, Amy had opened up, so to speak, like a
Venus's-flytrap in avid glory. She was ready, at any moment, for a bravura performance, on any set, with any script I might write. But write what?
I had exhausted myself in Amy. Creation calls for reverie; and reverie flows most fully when what we fantasize remains fantasy, not fulfillment. The fantasy had become flesh. Amy, it seemed to me, might have had much this same feeling, the late days on Seabrook. I could write nimbly enough now about June, about Elza, about any lynx-graced girl or woman in Charleston, London, or Rome. But not about Amy. I had rung all the changes, torn away all the veils. I had said about Amy all there was in me to say. Yet it was Amy who would have center place in any scenario I might write. I had, then as now, no gift for detaching myself from my characters; no objectivity, no derring-do.
"I have writer's block," I announced. I stroked her long blonde hair, as if stroking her long blonde hair would distract her mind from business.
Cloris squinted. (No lurid, promising slither now of that lithe tongue.) She informed me that she had an ideal, commercial, delectable cure for writer's block. She would buy me June.
With such prodding, under such auspices, I came to write The Seabrook Sextet, which is more or less a screen version of the facts and fancies I have confided to these pages. June joined us in Perugia; and in a splendid, unaccountable, exuberant way, my block disappeared.
I took June with me to Amalfi, recorded her "wows," and in ten days finished a shooting script.
Toward spring, we moved our working location from Perugia to Charleston, coordinated our publicity with the publicity scheduled for the Spoleto Festival.
The Charleston Mercury announced, with banner headlines, that "The Holy City"-as this happy place has come to be called-is fast becoming the American center for international art. "Gian-Carlo Menotti and the fabulous Cloris Lady Cholmondeley will be working side by side in festive glee." (Little did that proper paper know how prescient were its words, so idly framed!) And Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue, when interviewed, announced with glee and pride that at least one of their daughters had made it to the Big Time.
(Elza, who in the interim had acquired a serious boyfriend, had returned to college to finish her work in psychology. Or was it drama?)
CHAPTER 10
Yet it was not easy to work in Charleston. Charleston has no secrets. It is an open city. Everyone sooner or later knows what everyone does with everyone else; when, where, how, and for how long. This is a splendid matrix for book-writing, as I well knew; for each book wrote itself-all I had to do was put in faithful words, carefully chosen, a simple account of what I saw and heard. But the making of a motion picture has other requirements. It requires privacy. It requires a cloak of secrecy under which moods can be probed, subtleties voiced.
The first time we set June astride a cannon, albeit fully clothed, we drew such a large crowd that traffic was stopped from White Point Gardens to lower Broad Street-and this, mind you, without nudity or action.
"It's your books," June said, with the resentment of a girl admitted belatedly to a scandal, admitted after the astonishment had worn off. "You wrote too much about Amy."
This, of course, was petulance, petulance simple, pure, unrelieved by guile. I photographed her, wrote about Amy.
The crowds had nothing to do with me, or my books, or the unveiling of Amy. Nor were they related directly to the fact that June was astride a cannon, her draped bosom pointing toward Fort Sumter.
It was the cameras, the crew, the trailers, the lights. All we were shooting were "establishment" shotsthose vague, wandering, listless scenes of action which establish locale. The nude scenes would be made later, in Cloris' studio in England (at Ramspaugh), in Cine-citta, possibly even in Spoleto.
Account for excitement how you will, it put a decisive end to intimacies between June and me. June was watched, admired, publicized, chaperoned. Her picture appeared almost every other day in the pages of the Charleston Mercury, or its sister paper, the Gazette. She was interviewed at least once a week on one of the local television shows, explaining, with childish enthusiasm, how it felt to be a star; how a lifetime of hard work led to her current success; that her burning ambition was to have seven children and bake Cordon Bleu upside-down cakes.
Moreover, she lived at home, with her parents, in a condominium they had bought in the Fort Sumter House. The Poltergrues' balcony, by one of life's grim caprices, overlooked the cannon that, in a happier moment, had propped up their daughters' naked bottoms; had contributed, in short, to the dramatic success of the daughter with the larger bosom.
Even I came in for belated publicity. The Charleston Mercury sent a reporter to interview me (in Larrine's house, on East Battery), and announced, on the front page, that the writer of the daring books about Mrs. Dellmore was something of a disappointment. He was not found contemplating Amy's beauties, as Amy made such beauties available, recumbent on a curving couch. He was not surrounded by suave, naked nymphs, as in the Fragonard and Boucher boudoir scenes; not even a single half-draped Venus, as in Titian's intimate palazzi. He was simply a tweedy, slightly absentminded writer who drank overmuch and frequently said, "Ah, so."
I was staying, with Amy and Cloris, in Larrine's place because the Spoleto Festival had preempted all hotel rooms. I had a bedroom on the third floor, overlooking the harbor. Amy and Cloris shared a canopied bed (posts carved in the Charleston "rice-bed" manner) on the floor below. And those evries in the Mills-Hyatt House where, in times past, I had enjoyed honeyed pleasures with Amy, with June and Elzathese now were quarters of Italian impresarios and jumping jacks. Carnavaron was housed twenty miles away in the inn on Kiawah Island, not far from Seabrook. The camera crew was in a rented cottage on the beach at the Isle of Palms, a resort north of the harbor and considerably distant from Seabrook.
Theoretically we were all.set to begin production. Amy and June, our stars, were on location. We had cameramen, sountimen, grips on call.
This was our plan: We would set the tone for the film by taking establishing shots more or less in line with the pictures I took of June and Elza for my own entertainment. (In art, I was delighted to note, nothing is ever entirely wasted.) We would also take mood pictures of the Low Country marsh, the Charleston streets, the plantations, the dunes and palmettos. The nude scenes featuring Amy and June, we all agreed, could be filmed anywhere; nevertheless, it seemed fitting, sentimental, even an emotional spur to start them in Charleston. Although by now it is reasonably clear, as Wilde argued, that nature imitates art, it is always stimulating to start with nature. Amy may have learned to crouch, when stripped, even cover her breasts, from an unconscious memory of the stance of the Cnidos Venus; nevertheless I prefer, in lustier momerits, the inspiration of the fleshly model. Carnal is as carnal seems.
Amy, for once, had no inhibitions. I put this down to the psychological skills of Cloris, a growing professionalism (inspired by the success of Monna Vanna), and sexual exhaustion. We shot the porch scene at Seabrook on the precise porch where the primal scene had been enacted; and Amy played her part with grace, serenity, aplomb.
From the painting department of the College of Charleston art school we borrowed a well-proportioned male model to play the surf scene with Amy. ("You must be careful with Gene," Mary McCory, the head of the department, warned Amy. "He's a soupgon trigger-happy. Eighteen, you know.")
Amy assured me that the love scenes in surf and on sand would only be "simulated." She found the word assuring. But in the actual filming, possibly because of forgetfulness, possibly because of her new passion for professional veritude, she seemed to let herself go. A retake of the scene, which Cloris demanded, had to be delayed until our fledgling model recovered his virility.
(It later occurred to me that there had been no need whatever for a retake of this scene. The repetition had been for Cloris' entertainment and Amy's pleasure. And the latter, if it had been the case, hinged largely on exhibitionism and whim, for she had once agreed with me that lovemaking in the surf should be of interest only to hydraulic engineers.)
No simulation was possible, however, in the scenes that called for the simultaneous naked presence of both of the Poltergrue twins. "Bribe Elza," June suggested. She had acquired, in an excessively short space, so much of Cloris' calculating wisdom.
A salary of two thousand a week proved to be a splendid persuader; an ointment and a balm. The latter, I was to learn, was essential; for Elza, it had appeared, was no longer at college wrestling with her psychology (or drama?), as she had announced. Elza, parading her newly acquired, or carefully hidden, worldliness, had been living in Chattanooga with a newly acquired (or carefully hidden) boyfriend who blew glass.
"Papa and Mamma will kill us when this picture comes out," Elza announced, with commendable frankness, when she arrived. "But by that time we'll all be living in Rome."
"Rome today," June chanted, "Gomorrah tomorrow." She had become sensitive to some of the finer shades of sibling rivalry.
By and large our work went well in Charleston. The city-aroused by the many and cultural farragoes of the Spoleto Festival; by the fanfares and folderols of a current Miss USA Universe contest; by the mongoloid hordes of money-spending tourists-welcomed us. The whole Low Country welcomed us. There was news about us each day in the papers. Cloris, Amy, June. Elza, even Carnavaron and I, were interviewed regularly, in all media, separately, paired, and tutti. June and Elza, severally and together, gave personal and pontifical opinions on modern art, women's rights, and acne. June declared it unwise for a nice girl to kiss a man on her first date; Elza spoke up for Geritol.
But publicity, as I implied earlier, made much of our work difficult. We had many visitors turning up, unannounced, on set; many delegations of culture seekers, arriving with authentic credentials from earnest church and Sunday-school organizations. And for such kith and ilk it was important to maintain a front. When important visitors arrived, we would sometimes stage a scene taken literally from the pages of The Bobbsey Twins or Little Women. Sometimes we would dress June and Elza in crinoline, put Amy in a farthingale, or improvise a cotillion.
There was, in consequence, much wasting of time, much duplication of duplicities. ("Dry runs," June called them.)
In the interest of economy, an interest altogether untypical of her, Cloris insisted that all such scenes be shot, pro forma, with no film in the cameras. The gesture was ironic, a matter of spirit, not budget-because our production was budgeted at two to three million, all funds advanced by Acme-International. Relative to such an amount (and to the fact that all business expenses were tax-deductible), the cost of a few hundred feet of film was scarcely an item to panic the company's accounting department.
One day Senator Ashmead came on set. He had been invited by the officials of the Seabrook Island Corporation, who had the feeling that our publicity would do for Seabrook what Homer's did for Troy.
Ashmead arrived with a party. In his entourage were Jeff Dellmore and the Poltergrues, all tanned, all smiling. We had been forewarned. Amy wore a demure swimsuit of a style you would have expected Princess Grace to have worn at a pool party on Philadelphia's Main Line-when Eisenhower was president. The twins were in blue jeans and a dudgeon.
Cloris was introduced. Much was made of the fact that she was Lady Cholmondeley, "of Ramspaugh." Dellmore, pleased that his wife now had a more or less intimate association with English aristocracy, was anxious to trace kinships. "Weren't the Cholmonde-leys related, via bar sinster, to LLewellenfors of Crag-shire? To the Earl of Sandwich? The Marquis of
Queensbury?" Poltergrue said that he could not understand how a country which could produce a Shakespeare and the sandwich should want to go socialist.
Cloris smiled and said nothing; and Ashmead found her irresistible, on the theory that only a woman who does not teach, who does not persuade, who does not argue or condescend, or explain, is irresistible.
"You are," he said, "the greatest thing to hit Charleston since the earthquake of 1886."
Cloris answered him by looking at Amy and slithering her tongue around the edges of her lips.
It seemed to Ashmead that now that Charleston had Lady Cholmondeley and the Spoleto Festival, all that remained was to make Charleston the motion-picture center of the East Coast. "All we need is money. And with the Arabs all around us, there is plenty of that." He referred to the Kuwaitis who had bought Kiawah and the takeout shish-kebab chain kiosks he and Dellmore had launched.
"In time," Poltergrue said, "we'll want everything en brochette."
I looked at June, and she smiled at me in that innocent, detached, Girl Scout way that girls have when smiling in the presence of their fathers.
I felt, that morning, quite good about our work-the pictures Cloris and I made together, the books I wrote about Cloris and Amy (and now about June and Elza). Sometimes I have doubts; so much enjoyment goes into their making that little thought or energy is left for the product. (I speak for myself, of course. Cloris, as I have noted, had of late come to take our films-more properly, her films-with high seriousness. She believed our notices, cherished her prizes. Not to no end had she been compared to Fellini and Bergman-or to the Bufiuel who made Belle de Jour.)
This much I conceded. We had as our subjects, I in my novels, extraordinary women; women shaped well in the ways of wonder and beauty. To celebrate and record such spirit, limited as our ways might have been, rough sometimes as were my phrasings ("Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish-I in lean, unlovely English....") was enough. What matters is the essence.
Had I been a Yeats, a Hemingway, a Proust, I might have done better. Amy would have emerged as Maude Gonne, Cloris as Brett, June as Albertine. As it is, I have had to resign myself to given limits, to record roughly, sometimes in confusion, the span of my eye and some overtones of feeling.
If this were all, I do not think Amy, as the years passed, would forgive me; or June or Elza; nor would forgiveness come from those bound to them by ties of blood and sentiment. For convention presses hard on all of us. We prefer our idol in chiseled cameos, bloodless and proper. But life is not that way. Venus has come down to us naked on a cockleshell, Helen as an immortal adulteress, Lady Godiva as the exquisite rider. And Cloris, with an unabashed lens, has seen to it that our present beauties, like the touted music when soft voices die, will still vibrate in memory.
So much for this aside.
From time to time I tend to lapse into a self-justifying soliloquy.
"What is the plot of your movie?" Poltergrue asked, his mind leaping ahead to Academy Awards. Already he saw June clasping an Oscar to her bosom. Already he heard her neat Charleston voice saying, "I want to thank my mother and my father, who gave me so much loyal support when I was still a drama student...." (Or was it "psychology"? ) Even now he saw her weeping, salt tears (or glycerine) coursing down the television screen. "None," I said.
Fortunately, he did not hear me. His mind was still attuned to June's gracious acceptance speech: "And I want to express my special thanks to Miss Marcelle Moncks, who was my drama teacher when I was still a schoolgirl at Ashley Hall ... and who gave me my love for Shakespeare."
"We can set up a permanent Charleston-Spoleto Film Festival-an annual event," Dellmore said. "With Kuwait money ... in escrow, of course."
A long line of pelicans floated past us in solemn array, and I was reminded of my old philosophical question: What does a pelican have to do to become the lead pelican?
"Look at all them fuckin' skimmers," Ashmead said exuberantly. Then, realizing he was among ladies, one of them English, he blushed.
("None," I realized, was not a proper syntactical answer to the question "What is the plot of your movie?" I should have said, "There is no plot"-meaning that the picture would be a string of vignettes featuring his daughters in shimmering undress.)
As soon as our guests left, Cloris stripped the girls. "What a relief," June said, patting her liberated bottom.
"Wow," said Elza.
Carnavaron, explaining that only art can make flesh photograph like flesh, rubbed Pan-Cake makeup over their bodies. Cloris performed her tasks with professional glee. She rouged June's nipples to make them more prominent, whitened Elza's to make them less.
Cloris never for long let her mind stray far from the paths of picture-making. Even in throes of convulsive delight, she saw herself, and those with her, through the eye of the camera, presented her best lines to the lens. And now (I could see her mind at work), she was concocting a visual trick, a twist of misdirection.
A tint was put on June's scarcely noticeable pubic blondeness, a dark tint to inspire an image of fire and thrust. Elza she shaved. This was the twist, the symbolic misdirection: The girls were almost indistinguishable when viewed from the rear. (Had I not discovered that singular fact, our first manage-a-trois night in the Mills-Hyatt House?) The camera would make its first foray from the rear. We, the camera, would survey all the identities, frame in our eye the Tweedledum and Tweedledee body lines, imagine Tweedledum and Tweedledee personalities. Then, lo! The girls would turn.
When the cosmetic chores had been completed (and Cloris given the sensitive places more care than duty required), we went out to the dunes.
It was then early afternoon.
"I itch," Elza said, wiggling.
"Wow," June said, sampling the smoothness. "And indubitably groovy."
We worked that day without crew. Carnavaron alone handled the camera. A platform had been built as an approach to a spot where two low dunes came together, their slopes identical to the curvings of the twins' bottoms. ("Sweets to the sweet"-that had been Cloris' comment.) The only prop was a palmetto log. This had been placed in front of the dunes; and in time the girls were posed, bent over the logs, as if praying to Allah.
This was to be the pivotal scene in a sequence of related shapes. Photographed earlier was a pair of white herring gulls. These were to be shown soaring over the surf. Innocence, perhaps. Pure spirit? Who knows? The film, when cut and edited, would show the white gulls. Camera would then pan to the paired white dunes, linger for a moment, then pan down to the paired white buttocks. The change of field was to be so gradual, so unexpected, that, at first sight the girls' bottoms would not be identified as bottoms. They would glide into the viewer's consciousness as abstractions. The viewer would see them as a pattern of patterns, form without content.
Carnavaron held his light meter in front of June's left buttock, then Elza's right, which was partially in shadow. He went back to the camera, set the diaphragm, checked his focus.
"Shoot," said Cloris.
The camera purred. And for a while all I was aware of was the sound of the camera, the crash of the surf, and the heart-shaped confluences of poetic mounds.
(According to my plan, my program notes, the girls' bottoms were not, at first, to be recognizable for what they were. No viewer was to be aware that his eyes were centered on gluteal curves, a cardioform, pure-albeit ill-used by a venal male. I proposed that these suave, notched, creased orbs be presented to the camera, to the audience, as abstractions-form innocent as a Greek vase, succulent as a handful of eggs.)
The camera then dollied back. Only when the girls' thighs, backs, flowing hair came into the field was it to be evident that the camera's eye had moved from pure form to warm flesh.
On direction from Cloris, the girls rose. "Rise and shine."
The girls came back on their haunches, rose, their backs still to the camera, their bodies almost identical. The camera panned to twin palmettos, back to twin dunes, back to the twinned backs. Then the girls turned. At this moment, and only then, were we, the viewers, made aware of the difference-June, full-bosomed, flaming nipples, insouciant bosk; Elza with no bosom at all, no pubic hair whatever. The camera retreated back along the platform. The zoom lens zoomed in reverse; and the combined optical effects of retreat and negative zoom soon diminished the figures into minuscule detail. Ongoing nature would once again take over; all that would be left to the viewer would be the panorama of dunes, palmettos, wax myrtles-and overhead the fleece of clouds, the gliding strings of birds.
"What does it all mean?" Cloris asked later, when, at Larrines's, we sipped our drinks. "Nothing," she answered. "Nothing at all. That's why it will gross five million dollars ... and probably win a couple more prizes."
"Meanwhile..." I began.
"Meanwhile we are all going to have a magnificent, intangible, municipal ball."
"Runcible." I had in mind a spoon with two prongs.
Nor was Cloris wrong. Cloris was seldom wrong.
I read the reviews in Amalfi. Most significant was the notice in Time (which always arrives in Amalfi three weeks late).
The Spoleto Festival had come and gone; Charleston had returned to its accustomed quiet, and we had finished our location shooting without serious disruptions. We completed our establishing shots in town, our symbol extravaganzas on Seabrook and in the tidal creeks behind Seabrook and Kiawah. There were some scenes from which I was excluded. These were shot at Miss Wescott's plantation, Berkeley Hall. (I had been excluded for the same reason that I had been excluded from the final scenes in Monna Vanna. "You inhibit her," Cloris argued. "There are certain things Amy does not want you to see her do-at least, on camera. If she thinks you are watching, she freezes. She becomes the old Amy ... the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.") We had taken care of odds and ends, done the cutting and editing in Cinecitta.
"once again cloris." This was the headline on the Time item. There was a picture of Amy in the pose of Ingres's Odalisque. There was a picture of June, nude, astride a cannon.
The article spoke of Cloris' "transcendence." It gave Time's special "kudos" to her subtle use of symbols, her sensitivity, her gift for implications. "No frenetic trompe I'oeil manner here. No quick cuts and crazy angles. No exploitation of sex qua sex. Only the poetry of line and movement ... with players properly and obviously not born to blush unseen."
It seemed to me, somehow, that I had read all this before. Praised be I can still stop and wallow in the brashness of Cloris' whim. She could always stir old flags with a fickle whim.
So much nowadays is done mindlessly.
I felt almost abandoned that night. I stress almost. Actually I had, as ever, little call for complaint. What I had to deal with, as a psychic event, was change. Change for me is always disturbing. So much had happened in short space. So much was unpredicted, bizarre. Amy, for example, had elected to rejoin her husband. ("I need some rest, my love. Really I do.")
They were now somewhere in the Bahamas. The incident with Cesare, I think, relived in memory, disturbed her. like Emma Bovary, Amy was a conventional woman. Left to herself, she would have remained conventional, an admired, decorous pillar of the Establishment. (Fenwick Weston, a poetic Charles-tonian, who, when Amy was younger, loved her from a distance, expressed what most Charlestonians felt. He referred to her classic beauty, only partly human, toward whom an overt approach was forbidden by totem and taboo.)
But Amy, as we know well by now, was not left to herself. There is no need, at this page of the biography, to list all the devices, princes (and princesses) who or which stirred the sleeping beauty, who or which replaced sleep with sundry enchantments. Subterranean Amys arose. Bacchic Amys. Amys of unexpected talents, urges, guile. Yet at some point in these wayfarings, there was always an upsurge of the conscience of the Establishment Amy, a need to go home again. ("Amy was so beautiful as a young girl..." I quote Fenwick. "So pure, so unearthly, so unapproachable-Botticellian. But odd things happen, don't they?")
Nor was the performance with Cesare all. There was the bizarre publicity, the pictures of her in various stages of undress which were featured in magazines (a full-length, full nude on the cover of Oqgi), complimentary but scandalous references to her in the gossip columns. The combination, I believe, was too much.
Cloris, meanwhile, had gone back to England. She had met Lord Cholmondeley in Monaco, sailed back with him on the same yacht from which she had absconded a few seasons before (and hidden out in my room in the Hotel Luna Convento, in Amalfi). It was Cloris' theory that love affairs require occasional interruptions and infinite variations. Unfortunately, she had taken June with her. "It will be good for June to see more of the world," she said, "and she'll be all the more loving when she comes back to you. Besides ... you can't expect me to go to bed with Cholly-Boy."
Now, here I was in Amalfi, once again in Amalfi, once again writing about Amy; trying, in my confused way, to set in order odd facts and purple fancies. Elza had been good enough to spend a few days with me before going back to her boyfriend in Chattanoogaor wherever it was that he lived. (I have no great interest in young girls' boyfriends; I think of them all, collectively, as pimply, whisper-voiced, stammering idiots.)
I showed the Time item to Elza. "Formidable," she said. Wow and groovy had by now gone the way of Caesar's legions and the duckbilled platypus.
We were sitting at a table in the Piazza Sant'Andrea; behind us was a gurgling fountain, in front of us the Sicilian-Arab-style columns of the cathedral.
"Tell me about Amy and Cesare," she said. Art, I assumed, could wait.
"What do you want to know?" I thought it well to let her block out the parts of the story that interested her most. But, as historian, I was clearly interested in the travels of the story. How had Elza heard about it? I had been discreetly quiet. Amy, certainly, would not have discussed it; to herself, even, would insist that it never happened.
"Was it really that big?"
"Bigger."
"Golly." She sucked sexually on the straw of her Pernod, then winked at me in Scout camaraderie. "Formidable. ... You watched?"
"Yes."
"She let you?" I nodded.
"Weren't you embarrassed?" I said, "No."
She put her hand, her curious hand, on the fly of my trousers and said, "Oh, my God."
Size, I attempted to assure her, is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of life. I spoke belittlingly of the great hairy mammoth, of the brontosaurus.
"Still and all..." Young girls are incurably romantic. "Wow!"
I called over the waiter and paid the check. "Grazie molto," the waiter said, looking at Elza's blouse. It was a beige blouse, fashioned like a man's shirt. Elza had unbuttoned it to the navel. Arrivederci, Mrs. Grundy.
"Let's have a brandy," Elza said.
The waiter looked puzzled.
"We're ordering something more," I said.
"Bene."
"Formidable," said Elza.
"How about a Strega?" I had learned never to take Elza too literally. For her any word could have a host of meanings; mood was what mattered.
"What's a Strega?"
"Due Strege."
Over the liqueurs, I told Elza how I had first come to Amalfi, how I had spent a dav at Capri, returned to my hotel and found Cloris standing in the lobby-the Lady Cholmondeley, whom I had known so briefly in New York. (Turning, Cloris' eyes rested on me. She was unsmiling and gave me no sign of recognition; but she said to the clerk in a voice intended for me to hear, "I'm so sorry, but my husband and I intend to drive to Paestum tomorrow." Then she nodded in my direction. "Please have the porter take my bags to my husband's room. I'm sure he told you that I was expected.")
Elza asked many questions, intimate questions. We continued, in fact, the indelicate give-and-take which had begun, in early summer, in our room at the Mills-Hyatt House. Details were now more meaningful; she was no more the untested child waiting to be starred in my book. She had been tested; tested and found savory and sound. More; as the Time magazine item implied, along with the ravaging Amy, she, like June, had become a star in her own right. Any week now she might appear in television commercials telling her less-informed mother what to take for occasional irregularity.
The wind had freshened suddenly, a west wind, sweeping in from Spain. Waves thrashed over the edges of the road leading from the piazza to the hotel. Other waves, caught between boulders, shot fountains of spray high above the road. At one place, where the waves had taken over, only a narrow path was dry. Elza went ahead of me, hair flying, her tight pants, sausage-skin-snug, conspicuous under the streetlights. And it heartened me to note again, as often before on the sands of Seabrook, that when viewed objectively from the rear, Elza and June were exuberantly indistinguishable. It also occurred to me that both bottoms were more or less heart-shaped, and could be described by a simple mathematical formula:
sin _0_
r = 2
This, in short, is a kind of cardioid curve; r is the radius vector-in this case an imaginary line whose point of origin would be Elza's minuscule opening.
It occurred to me that I could call this curve "The lemniscate of June," and so inform the Journal of Recreational Mathematics-thus assuring June of a certain figurate immortality. On the other hand, it seemed hardly fair to exclude Elza, who at this moment promised instant pleasure.
"Pretend I'm June," Elza said, once we were in bed. "It really won't make any difference."
I protested. Manners demand such protest; and manners, not style, are the man. This fact, amply established in Charleston, is no less relevant in Amalfi.
To dramatize her point, Elza rolled over, her face now buried in the pillows, the top sheet kicked down. With my fingers I retraced the cardioid curve, caressed the lemniscate; and I realized that from the very young we have so much to learn.
The next morning I took Elza to the quay which extended out from the Piazza Sant'Andrea. She was to take the vaporetto to Naples, then an Alitalia plane to Rome. From Rome she would have a direct flight to New York. Perhaps her boyfriend would meet her.
The vaporetto, which came up the coast from Salerno, was late. I knew it well. It had been either this, or its sister ship, that had brought me from Capri to Amalfi that signal afternoon when I came upon Cloris in the hotel lobby.
"Come as far as Naples with me," Elza said, as the boat backed up to the quay. "I've been good for you, haven't I? Even if I'm not June?"
She kissed me. I was bribed. I hated to see her go. "If you like," she added, "I will pose for you ... in the buff and for free."
We sat on the deck munching pizzas, drinking beer, watching the gulls.
She took my hand, kissed the fingers, ran her tongue voluptuously to the notch where fingers join. "Remember Seabrook?" she asked, with a brave attempt to create nostalgia. The question was personal, but obviously quite broad.
I remembered. I remembered much more than I thought it tactful to recount, such as Amy's odd foray in the middle of a Seabrook night.
"Last night was something special, too," she said. "I will always remember it."
I thought this quite sweet, a sterling sentiment, and assured her my feelings were much the same. I also told her that I thought she was altogether wrong, masochistically wrong, in saying there was no actual difference (except bosom size) between the erotic charms of identical girl twins. Her theory (sororal parallelism) was nonsense.
I paid her extravagant compliments.
Her mind, however, was on other things. "Funny," she said absently, "all the time you were making love to me last night, I pretended you were Cesare."
Postorgasmic emptiness is an old complaint-at least, among men. I doubt very much that it exists among women; there may be some parallel to it, as, say, the sense of loss of a nest, of a partnership, security. None of these have the same meaning. The emptiness I speak of is a loss of virility. The feeling that follows suggests a Gotterdammerung. Function is over; the broadsword is sheathed: life has no purpose.
Such, at any rate, was my feeling on the slow voyage back. I sat at the little bar of the vaporetto sipping Stock brandy. Through the windows I watched the fringe of the Lattari Mountains move slowly by, wondered, as probably wondered all mariners who sailed this rocky coast, why and how people lived their lives out in small huts festooned, like wasps' nests, on the sides of cliffs. On my right, a fat young girl with two gold teeth held hands, silently, with a fat young man whose pores exuded garlic.
The vaporetto stopped at Positano, backing phlegmatically toward the concrete quay, then pulling against hawsers while the gangplank was lowered. My companions, still silent, departed, hand in hand. Love, in Italy, is seldom demanding. Italy has the sirocco, Vesuvius, 117 varieties of pasta; but, as yet, no post-orgasmic emptiness.
I felt, in short, very sorry for myself.
I watched a bevy of herring gulls skirl around the stern of a returning fishing boat, watched the sun set in the mist beyond Capri, and it occurred to me that this is what Faust is all about. John Faustus was never satisfied; his fullness was his emptiness. He who through fantasies and deep cogitations was able to woo and win a woman who died long before his birth, "this stately pearl of Greece," still had no surcease. Nor did Helen stay with him long. Ultimately, even in imagine, she went back to her plowboy husband, much as Amy went back to Jeff Dellmore, Elza to her pimply, addlepated student. ("Eventually," she once told me, "he's going to go in his father's exterminator business.")
I thought of this boy putting his grimy hands on that beautiful golden lemniscate, and I shuddered. Not, as I told myself, that I could ever be everywhere at once, constant lover to infinity; but it disturbed me, somehow, to envision a temple defiled.
I thought the concierge eyed me oddly when I picked up the key to my room. Italian concierges, as I have observed elsewhere, are prescient. If I had a fraction of their understanding of motives and byplays, I would not have the trouble I have writing about Amy and Cloris.
"Grazie," I said; and he, of course, "Prego."
I opened the door and turned on the light.
On my bed, arms enlaced, legs enlaced, deep, deep asleep, were June and Cloris. Their clothes lay in demure heaps on the floor. Around the room, on various chairs, were traveling bags, unmistakably Gucci; and throughout the room was the pungent, bold scent of Givenchy.
June was on the side of the double bed facing me; and since the front of her body was pressed against Cloris', I had, once again, an unobstructed view of her bottom. And once again I noted that it was indistinguishable from Elza's. And suddenly, like John Faustus, I found myself insatiable. Slowly, deliberately, with fantasies and deep cogitation, I took off my clothes. Then I turned off the light.
The lemniscus twitched slightly in greeting; that was all.
