Answered Prayers

I UNSPOILED MONSTERS

Somewhere in this world there exists an exceptional philosopher named Florie Rotondo.

The other day I came across one of her ruminations printed in a magazine devoted to the writings of schoolchildren. It said: If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth, and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I'd look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then I'd move to the country. Florie Rotondo, age eight.

Florie, honey, I know just what you mean—even if you don't: how could you, age eight?

Because I have been to the middle of our planet; at any rate, have suffered the tribulations such a journey might inflict. I have searched for uranium, rubies, gold, and, en route, have observed others in these pursuits. And listen, Florie—I have met Unspoiled Monsters! Spoiled ones, too. But the unspoiled variety is the rara avis: white truffles compared to black; bitter wild asparagus as opposed to garden-grown. The one thing I haven't done is move to the country.

As a matter of fact, I am writing this on Y. M. C. A. stationery in a Manhattan Y. M. C. A., where I have been existing the last month in a viewless second-floor cell. I'd prefer the sixth floorso if I decided to climb out the window, it would make a vital difference. Perhaps I'll change rooms. Ascend. Probably not. I'm a coward. But not cowardly enough to take the plunge.

My name is P. B. Jones, and I'm of two minds whether to tell you something about myself right now, or wait and weave the information into the text of the tale. I could just as well tell you nothing, or very little, for I consider myself a reporter in this matter, not a participant, at least not an important one. But maybe it's easier to start with me.

As I say, I'm called P. B. Jones; I am either thirty-five or thirty-six: the reason for the uncertainty is that no one knows when I was born or who my parents were. All we know is that I was a baby abandoned in the balcony of a St. Louis vaudeville theater. This happened 20 January 1936. Catholic nuns raised me in an austere red-stone orphanage that dominated an embankment overlooking the Mississippi River.

I was a favorite of the nuns, for I was a bright kid and a beauty; they never realized how conniving I was, duplicitous, or how much I despised their drabness, their aroma: incense and dishwater, candles and creosote, white sweat. One of the sisters, Sister Martha, I rather liked, she taught English and was so convinced I had a gift for writing that I became convinced of it myself. All the same, when I left the orphanage, ran away, I didn't leave her a note or ever communicate with her again: a typical sample of my numbed, opportunistic nature.

Hitchhiking, and with no particular destination in mind, I was picked up by a man driving a white Cadillac convertible. A burly guy with a broken nose and a flushed, freckled Irish complexion. Nobody you'd take for a queer. But he was. He asked where I was headed, and I just shrugged; he wanted to know how old I was -1 said eighteen, though really I was three years younger. He grinned and said: "Well, I wouldn't want to corrupt the morals of a minor."

As if I had any morals.

Then he said, solemnly: "You're a good-looking kid." True: on the short side, five seven (eventually five eight), but sturdy and well-proportioned, with curly brown-blond hair, green-flecked brown eyes, and a face dramatically angular; to examine myself in a mirror was always a reassuring experience. So when Ned took his dive, he thought he was grabbing cherry. Ho ho! Starting at an early age, seven or eight or thereabouts, I'd run the gamut with many an older boy and several priests and also a handsome Negro gardener. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore—there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate.

Though I lived with him for several months, I can't remember Ned's last name. Ames? He was chief masseur at a big Miami Beach hotel-one of those ice-cream-color Hebrew hangouts with a French name. Ned taught me the trade, and after I left him I earned my living as a masseur at a succession of Miami Beach hotels. Also, I had a number of private clients, men and women I massaged and trained in figure and facial exercises-although facial exercises are a lot of crap; the only effective one is cocksucking. No joke, there's nothing like it for firming the jawline.

With my assistance, Agnes Beerbaum improved her facial contours admirably. Mrs. Beerbaum was the widow of a Detroit dentist who had retired to Fort Lauderdale, where he promptly experienced a fatal coronary. She was not rich, but she had money—along with an ailing back. It was to alleviate these spinal spasms that I first entered her life, and remained in it long enough to accumulate, through gifts above my usual fee, over ten thousand dollars.

Now that's when I should have moved to the country.

But I bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus that carried me to New York. I had one suitcase, and it contained very little—only underwear, shirts, a bathroom kit, and numerous notebooks in which I had scribbled poems and a few short stories. I was eighteen, it was October, and I've always remembered the October glitter of Manhattan as my bus approached across the stinking New Jersey marshes. As Thomas Wolfe, a once-admired and now-forgotten idol, might have written: Oh, what promise those windows held! — cold and fiery in the rippling shine of a tumbling autumn sun.

Since then, I've fallen in love with many cities, but only an orgasm lasting an hour could surpass the bliss of my first year in New York. Unfortunately, I decided to marry.

Perhaps what I wanted in the way of a wife was the city itself, my happiness there, my sense of inevitable fame, fortune. Alas, what I married was a girl. This bloodless, fishbelly-pale amazon with roped yellow hair and egglike lilac eyes. She was a fellow student at Columbia University, where I had enrolled in a creative-writing class taught by Martha Foley, one of the founder/ editors of the old magazine Story. What I liked about Hulga (yes, I know Flannery O'Connor named one of her heroines Hulga, but I'm not swiping; it's simply coincidence) was that she never wearied of listening to me read my work aloud. Mostly, the content of my stories was the opposite of my character-that is, they were tender and triste; but Hulga thought they were beautiful, and her great lilac eyes always gratifyingly brimmed and trickled at the end of a reading.

Soon after we were married, I discovered there was a fine reason why her eyes had such a marvelous moronic serenity. She was a moron. Or damn near. Certainly she wasn't playing with a full deck. Good old humorless hulking Hulga, yet so dainty and mincingly clean—housewifey. She hadn't a clue how I really felt about her, not until Christmas, when her parents came to visit us: a pair of Swedish brutes from Minnesota, a mammoth twosome twice the size of their daughter. We were living in a one-and-a-half-room apartment near Morningside Heights. Hulga had bought a sort of Rockefeller Center-type tree: it spread floor to ceiling and wall to wall-the damn thing was sucking the oxygen out of the air. And the fuss she made over it, the fortune she spent on this Woolworth's shit! I happen to hate Christmas because, if you'll pardon the tearjerker note, it always amounted to the year's most depressing episode in my Missouri orphanage. So on Christmas Eve, minutes before Hulga's parents were supposed to arrive for the Yuletide hoedown, I abruptly lost control: took the tree apart and piece by piece fed it out the window in a blaze of blown fuses and smashing bulbs—Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration—have you noticed? — is my least vice.) Told her what I thought of her, too-and for once those eyes lost their idiot purity.

Presently, Mama and Papa appeared, the Minnesota giants: sounds like a homicidal hockey team, which is how they reacted. Hulga's folks simply slammed me back and forth between them—and before I conked out, they had cracked five ribs, splintered a shinbone, and blackened both eyes. Then, apparently, the giants packed up their kid and headed home. I've never heard a word from Hulga, not in all the years that have gone by; but, so far as I know, we are still legally attached.

Are you familiar with the term "killer fruit"? It's a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. Diaghilev, for example. J. Edgar Hoover. Hadrian. Not to compare him with those pedestal personages, but the fellow I'm thinking of is Turner Boatwright—Boaty, as his courtiers called him.

Mr. Boatwright was the fiction editor of a women's fashion magazine that published «quality» writers. He came to my attention, or rather I came to his, when one day he spoke to our writing class. I was sitting in the front row, and I could tell, by the way his chilly crotch-watching eyes kept gravitating toward me, what was spinning around in his pretty curly-grey head. Okay, but I decided he wasn't going to get any bargain. After class, the students gathered around to meet him. Not me; I left without waiting to be introduced. A month passed, during which I polished the two stories of mine I considered best: "Suntan," which was about beachboy whores in Miami Beach, and "Massage," which concerned the humiliations of a dentist's widow grovelingly in love with a teen-age masseur.

Manuscripts in hand, I went to call on Mr. Boatwright—without out an appointment; I simply went to the offices of the magazine and asked the receptionist to tell Mr. Boatwright that one of Miss Foley's students was there to see him. I was certain he would know which one. But when I was eventually escorted into his office, he pretended not to remember me. I wasn't fooled.

The office was not unbusinesslike; it seemed a Victorian parlor. Mr. Boatwright was seated in a cane rocking chair beside a table draped with fringed shawls that served as a desk; another rocker was placed on the opposite side of the table. The editor, with a sleepy gesture meant to disguise cobra alertness, motioned me toward it (his own chair, as I later discovered, contained a little pillow with an embroidered inscription: MOTHER). Although it was a sizzling spring day, the window curtains, heavy velvet and of a hue I believe is called puce, were drawn; the only light came from a pair of student lamps, one with dark red shades, the other with green. An interesting place, Mr. Boatwright's lair; clearly the management gave him great leeway.

"Well, Mr. Jones?"

I explained my errand, said I had been impressed by his lecture at Columbia, by the sincerity of his desire to assist young authors, and announced that I had brought two short stories that I wished to submit for his consideration.

He said, his voice scary with cute sarcasm: "And why did you choose to submit them in person? The customary method is by mail."

I smiled, and my smile is an ingratiating proposition; indeed, it is usually construed as one. "I was afraid you would never read them. An unknown writer without an agent? I shouldn't think too many such stories ever reach you."

"They do if they have merit. My assistant, Miss Shaw, is an exceedingly able and perceptive reader. How old are you?"

"I'll be twenty in August."

"And you think you're a genius?"

"I don't know." Which was untrue; I was certain I was. "That's why I'm here. I'd like your opinion."

"I'll say this: you're ambitious. Or is it just plain push? What are you, a yid?"

My reply was no particular credit to me; though I am relatively without self-pity (well, I wonder), I've never been above exploiting my background to achieve sympathetic advantage. "Possibly. I was raised in an orphanage. I never knew my parents."

Nevertheless, the gentleman had knee-punched me with aching accuracy. He had my number; I was no longer so sure I had his. At the time I was immune to the mechanical vices-seldom smoked, never drank. But now, without permission, I selected a cigarette from a nearby tortoise-shell box; as I lighted it, all the matches in the matchbook exploded. A tiny bonfire erupted in my hand. I jumped up, wringing my hand and whimpering.

My host merely and coolly pointed at the fallen, still-flaming matches. He said: "Careful. Stamp that out. You'll damage the carpet." Then: "Come here. Give me your hand."

His lips parted. Slowly his mouth absorbed my index finger, the one most scorched. He plunged the finger into the depths of his mouth, almost withdrew, plunged again-like a huntsman drawing dangerous liquid from a snakebite. Stopping, he asked: "There. Is that better?"

The seesaw had upended; a transference of power had occurred, or so I was foolish enough to believe.

"Much; thank you."

"Very well," he said, rising to bolt the office door. "Now we shall continue the treatment."

No, it wasn't as easy as that. Boaty was a hard fellow; if necessary, he would have paid for his pleasures, but he never would have published one of my stories. Of the original two I gave him, he said: "They're not good. Ordinarily, I'd never encourage anyone with a talent as limited as yours. That is the cruelest thing anyone can do-to encourage someone to believe he has gifts he actually doesn't possess. However, you do have a certain w,)rd sense. Feeling for characterization. Perhaps something can be made of it. If you're willing to risk it, take the chance of ruining your life, I'll help you. But I don't recommend it."

I wish I had listened to him. I wish that then and there I had moved to the country. But it was too late, for I had already started my journey to the Earth's interior.

Am running out of paper. I think I'll take a shower. And afterward I may move to the sixth floor.

I have moved to the sixth floor.

However, my window is flat against the next-door building; even if I did step over the sill, I'd only bump my head. We're having a September heat wave, and my room is so small, so hot, that I have to leave my door open day and night, which is unfortunate because, as in most Young Men's Christian Associations, the corridors murmur with the slippered footfalls of libidinous Christians; if you leave your door open, it's frequently understood as an invitation. Not from me, no sir.

The other day, when I started this account, I had no notion whether or not I'd continue it. However, I've just come from a drugstore, where I purchased a box of Blackwing pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a half-dozen thick copybooks. Anyway, I've nothing better to do. Except took for a job. Only, I don't know what kind of work to look for-unless I went back to massage. I'm not fit for much anymore. And, to be honest, I keep thinking that maybe, if I change most of the names, I could publish this as a novel. Hell, I've nothing to lose; of course, a couple of people might try to kill me, but I'd consider that a favor.

After I'd submitted more than twenty stories, Boaty did buy one. He edited it to the bone and half rewrote it himself, but at least I was in print. "Many Thoughts of Morton," by P. B. Jones. It was about a nun in love with a Negro gardener named Morton (the same gardener who had been in love with me). It attracted attention, and was reprinted in that year's Best American Short Stories; more importantly, it was noticed by a distinguished friend of Boaty's, Miss Alice Lee Langman.

Boaty owned a roomy old brownstone town house; it was far east in the upper Eighties. The interior was an exaggerated replica of his office, a crimson Victorian horsehair mélange: beaded curtains and stuffed owls frowning under glass bells. This brand of camp, now démodé, was amusingly uncommon in those days, and Boaty's parlor was one of Manhattan's most populated social centers.

I met Jean Cocteau there-a walking laser light with a sprig of muguet in his buttonhole; he asked if I was tattooed, and when I said no, his overly intelligent eyes glazed and glided elsewhere.

Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty's, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I'd met when he photographed me for Boaty's magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, "The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking." Garbo, after a mournful pause, "Ali, if only I could say the same").

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

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

And Alice Lee Langman died last year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and I'm sure that many of us, even most of us, share this condition of dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us—those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us. "That's better better and better Billy let me have Billy now that's uh uh uh it that's it only slower slower and slower now hard hard hit it hard ay ay los cojones let me hear them ring now slower slower dradraaaaagdrag it out now hit hard hard ay ay daddy Jesus have mercy Jesus Jesus goddamdaddyamighty come with me Billy come! come!" How can 1, when the lady won't let me concentrate on areas more provocative than her roaring roiling undisciplined persona? "Let's hear it, let's hear them ring": thus the grande mademoiselle of the cultural press as she bucked her way through a sixty-second sequence of multiple triumphs. Off I went to the bathroom, stretched out in the cold dry bathtub and, thinking the thoughts necessary to me (just as Miss Langman, in the private quietude beneath her public turbulence, had been absorbed in hers: recalling… a girlhood? overly effective glimpses of the Reverend Billy? naked except for his shirt and socks? or a honeyed womanly tongue lollipopping away some wintry afternoon? or a pasta-bellied whale-whanged wop picked up in Palermo and hog-fucked a hot Sicilian infinity ago?), masturbated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Texas saying: Women are like rattlesnakes—the last thing that dies is their tail.

Some women, all their lives, will put up with anything for a fuck; and Miss Langman, so I'm told, was an enthusiast until a stroke killed her. However, as Kate McCloud has said: "A really good lay is worth a trip around the world-in more ways than one." And Kate McCloud, as we all know, has earned an opinion: Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck in her, she'd look like a porcupine.

But Miss Langman, R. I. P., had completed her segment in The Story of P. B. jones-A Paranoid Release in Association with Priapus Productions; for P. B. had already encountered the future. His name was Denham Fouts-Denny, as his friends called him, among them Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, both of whom, after his death, impaled him as a principal character in works of their own, Vidal in his story "Pages from an Abandoned Journal" and Isherwood in a novel, Down There on a Visit.

Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.

When Denny was sixteen, he was living in a Florida crossroads cracker town and working in a bakery owned by his father. Rescue—some might say ruin—arrived one morning in the fattish form of a millionaire driving a brand-new built-to-order 1936 Duesenberg convertible. The fellow was a cosmetics tycoon whose fortune largely depended upon a celebrated suntan lotion; he had been married twice, but his preference was Ganymedes between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. When he saw Denny, it must have been as though a collector of antique porcelain had strayed into a junkshop and discovered a Meissen "white swan" service: the shock! the greedy chill! He bought doughnuts, invited Denny for a spin in the Duesenberg, even offered him command of the wheel; and that night, without having returned home for even a change of underwear, Denny was a hundred miles away in Miami. A month later his grieving parents, who had despaired after sending searching parties through the local swamps, received a letter postmarked Paris, France. The letter became the first entry in a many-volumed scrapbook: The Universal Travels of Our Son Denbam Fouts.

Paris, Tunis, Berlin, Capri, St. Moritz, Budapest, Belgrade, Cap Ferrat, Biarritz, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Moscow, Morocco, Estoril, London, Bombay, Calcutta, London, London, Paris, Paris, Paris-and his original proprietor had been left far behind, oh, away back yonder in Capri, honey; for it was in Capri that Denny caught the eye of and absconded with a seventy-year-old great-grandfather, who was also a director of Dutch Petroleum. This gentleman lost Denny to royalty-Prince Paul, later King Paul, of Greece. The prince was much nearer Denny's age, and the affection between them was fairly balanced, so much so that once they visited a tattooist in Vienna and had themselves identically marked-a small blue insignia above the heart, though I can't remember what it was or what it signified.

Nor can I recall how the affair ended, other than that The End was a quarrel caused by Denny's sniffing cocaine in the bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne. But by now Denny, like Porfiro Rubirosa, another word-of-mouth myth on the Continental circuit, had generated the successful adventurer's sine qua non: mystery and a popular desire to examine the source of it. For example, both Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton had, in effect, Paid a million dollars to find out if other ladies were lying when they praised that kinky-haired piece of trade His Excellency the Dominican Ambassador Porfirio Rubirosa, groaning over the fat effectiveness of that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lai sinker thick as a man's wrist (according to spinners who had spun them both, the ambassador's only peer in the pecker parade was the Shah of Iran). As for the good late Prince Aly Khan-who was a straight dealer and a fine friend to Kate McCloud-as for Aly, the only thing that Feydeau-farce brigade shuffling through his bed sheets really wanted to know was: is it true this stud can go an hour a time five times a day and never come? I'm assuming you know the answer; but if you don't, it's yes-an Oriental trick, virtually a conjurer's stunt, called karezza, and the dominant ingredient is not spermatic stamina but imagistic control: one sucks and fucks while firmly picturing a plain brown box or a trotting dog. Of course, one ought also to be always stuffed with oysters and caviar and have no occupation that would interfere with eating and snoring and concentrating on plain brown boxes.

Women experimented with Denny: the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, the American Singer Sewing Machine heiress, lugged him around the Aegean aboard her crisp little yacht, the Sister Anne; but the principal contributors to Denny's Geneva bank account continued to be the richest of the double-gaited big daddies—a Chilean among le tout Paris, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, our planet s chief supplier of guano, fossilized bird shit, and the Marquis de Cuevas, road-company Diaghilev. But in 1938, on a visit to London, Denny found his final and permanent patron: Peter Watson, heir of an oleomargarine tycoon, was not just another rich queen, but—in a stooped, intellectual, bitter-lipped style—one of the most personable men in England. It was his money that started and supported Cyril Connolly's magazine Horizon. Watson's circle was dismayed when their rather severe friend, who had usually shown a conventional regard for simple sailor boys, became infatuated with the notorious Denny Fouts, an "exhibitionistic playboy," a drug addict, an American who talked as though his mouth were busy with a pound of Alabama corn mush.

But one had to have experienced Denny's stranglehold, a pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate slumber, to appreciate its allure. Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that was all he had ever been. So, except for his sporadic barterings with maritime trade, had this Watson been The Beloved, a besieged fellow whose conduct toward his admirers contained touches beyond De Sade (once Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed-that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum).

Of course, as is true of most men sadistically streaked, Watson had paralleling masochistic impulses; but it took Denny, with his púttána's instinct for an ashamed client's unspoken needs, to divine this and act accordingly. Once the tables are turned, only a humiliator can appreciate humiliation's sweeter edges: Watson was in love with Denny's cruelty, for Watson was an artist recognizing the work of a superior artist, labors that left the quinine-elegant Mr. W. stretched in stark-awake comas of jealousy and delicious despair. The Beloved even used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson, while forced to supply the money that supported a habit he deplored, was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The Beloved from a heroin grave. When The Beloved truly desired a turn of the screw, he had merely to turn to his medicine chest.

Apparently it was concern for Denny's welfare that led Watson to insist, in 1940, at the start of the German bombing, that Denny leave London and return to the United States—a journey Denny made chaperoned by Cyril Connolly's American wife, Jean. The latter couple never met again—Jean Connolly, a bountiful, biological sort, passed out and on in the aftermath of a rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny-Jean cross-country high-jinks hegira.

Denny spent the war years in California, several of them as a prisoner in a camp for conscientious objectors; but it was early on in the California days that he met Christopher Isherwood, who was working in Hollywood as a film scenarist. Here, quoting from the previously mentioned Isherwood novel, which I looked up at the public library this morning, is how he describes Denny (or Paul, as he calls him): "When I first set eyes on Paul, as he entered the restaurant, I remember I noticed his strangely erect walk; he seemed almost paralytic with tension. He was always slim, but then he looked boyishly skinny, and he was dressed like a boy in his teens, with an exaggerated air of innocence which he seemed to be daring us to challenge. His drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie, made him look as if he had just arrived in town from a strictly religious boarding school. His dressing so young didn't strike me as ridiculous, because it went with his appearance. Yet, since I knew he was in his late twenties, this youthfulness itself had a slightly sinister effect, like something uncannily preserved."

Seven years later, when I arrived to live at 33 rue du Bac, the address of a Left Bank apartment Peter Watson owned in Paris, the Denham Fouts I encountered there, though paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe, was not much changed from Herr Issyvoo's California friend: he still looked vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which Fouts was permanently incarcerated.

How was it, though, that P. B. Jones found himself in Paris, a guest in the high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms?

One moment, please: I'm going downstairs to the showers. For the seventh day, Manhattan's heat has hit ninety or higher.

Some of our establishment's Christian satyrs shower so frequently and loiter so long they look like water-logged Kewpie dolls; but they are young and, by and large, well formed. However, the most obsessed of these hygienic sex fiends, and a relentless shuffle-shuffle hunter-haunter of the dormitory corridors as well, is an old guy nicknamed Gums. He limps, he's blind in his left eye, a runny sore persists at the comer of his mouth, pockmarks pit his skin like some diabolic, pestilential tattoo. just now he brushed his hand against my thigh, and I pretended not to notice; yet the touch created an irritating sensation, as though his fingers were splints of burning nettle.

Answered Prayers had been out several months when I received from Paris a terse note: "Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is Cecil Beaton's portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed is a first-class passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth, sailing New York-LeHavre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton: he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham Fouts."

As I've said, I'd heard a lot about Mr. Fouts-enough to know it was not my literary style that had stimulated his daring missive but the photograph of me Beaton had taken for Boaty's magazine and which I had used on the jacket of my book. Later, when I knew Denny, I understood what it was in that face that had so traumatized him he was ready to chance his invitation and underwrite it with a gift he could not afford—could not because he'd been deserted by a fed-to-the-teeth Peter Watson, was living in Watson's Paris apartment on a day-to-day squatter's-rights has' is, and existing on scattered handouts from loyal friends and old, semi-blackmailed suitors. The photograph conveyed a notion of me altogether incorrect—a crystal lad, guileless, unsoiled, dewy, and sparkling as an April raindrop. Ho ho ho.

It never occurred to me not to go; nor did it occur to me to tell Alice Lee Langman I was going—she came home from the dentist to find I had packed and gone. I didn't say good-bye to anybody, just left; I'm the type, and a type by no means rare, who might be your closest friend, a buddy you talked to every day, yet if one day you neglected to make contact, if you failed to telephone me, then that would be it, we'd never speak again, for I would never telephone you. I've known lizard-bloods like that and never understood them, even though I was one myself, Just left, yes: sailed at midnight, my heartbeat as raucous as the clanging gongs, the hoarsely hollering smokestacks. I remember watching Manhattan's midnight shine flicker and darken through shivering streamers of confetti-lights I was not to see again for twelve years. And I remember, as I swayed my way down to a tourist-class cabin (having exchanged the first-class passage and pocketed the difference), I remember slipping in a mass of champagne vomit and dislocating my neck. Pity I didn't break it.

When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded pissoir, as tempting as a strangled nude floating in the Seine. Memories of it clear and blue, like scenes emerging between a windshield wiper's languid erasures; and I see myself leaping puddles, for it is always winter and raining, or I see myself seated alone skimming Time on the deserted terrace of the Deux Magots, for it is also always a Sunday afternoon in August. I see myself waking in unheated hotel rooms, warped rooms undulating in a Pernod hangover. Across the city, across the bridges, walking down the lonesome vitrine-lined corridor that connects the two entrances of the Ritz hotel, waiting at the Ritz bar for a moneyed American face, cadging drinks there, then later at the Boeuf-sur-le Toit and Brasserie Lipp, then sweating it out until daybreak in some whore-packed nigger-high grope joint blue with Gauloises bleu; and awake again in a tilted room swerving with corpse-eyed exuberance. Admittedly, my life was not that of a workaday native; but even the French can't endure France. Or rather, they worship their country but despise their countrymen—unable, as they are, to forgive each other's shared sins: suspicion, stinginess, envy, general meanness. When one has come to loathe a place, it is difficult to recall ever feeling differently. Yet for a wisp of time I held another view. I saw Paris as Denny wanted me to see it, and as he wished he himself still saw it.

(Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman's apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, the top of the Empire State Building, the Stat en Island Ferry, feed her Nathan's Coney Island hot dogs, baked beans at the Automat, all that junk. Now I remember it with a salty nostalgia; she had a great time, Daisy did, and I had a better one, for it was as though I'd climbed inside her head and were watching and tasting everything from inside that virginal observatory. "Oh," said Daisy, spooning a dish of pistachio ice cream at Rumpelmayer's, "this is crackerjack"; and "Oh," said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, "oh, this really is crackerjack.")

Me, I was Daisy in Paris. I spoke no French and never would have if it hadn't been for Denny. He forced me to learn by refusing to speak anything else. Unless we were in bed; however, let me explain that, though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual; nor was he disposed toward anyone else; he said he hadn't had his circle squared in two years, for opium and cocaine had castrated him. We often went to Champs Elysées movies in the afternoon, and at some juncture he always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men's room and dosed himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crusts of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.

Perhaps, at night's end, with approaching daylight edging the drawn bedroom curtains, Denny might lapse a bit and carom off into a curvaceous, opaque outburst. "Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it's some after-hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by some name, and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a year meditating in a California monastery. Under the super-supervision of His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this… Meaningful Thing. This… God Thing. I did try. No man was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayers prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off. And all that ever came of that putrid torture was.:. Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café. There it is: right where they throw you off at the end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump. Watch your step: don't step on the severed head. Now knock. Knock knock. Father Flanagan's voice: 'Who sent ya?' Christ, for Christ's sake, ya dumb mick. Inside… it's… very… relaxing. Because there's not a winner in the crowd. All derelicts, especially those potbellied babies with fat numbered accounts at Crédit Suisse. So you can really unpin your hair, Cinderella. And admit that what we have here is the drop-off. What a relief! Just to throw in the cards, order a Coke, and take a spin around the floor with an old friend like say that peachy twelve-year-old Hollywood kid who pulled a Boy Scout knife and robbed me of my very beautiful oval-shaped Cartier watch. The Nigger Queen Kosher Café! The cool gre en, restful as the grave, rock bottom! That's why I drug: mere dry meditation isn't enough to get me there, keep me there, keep m e there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, Thousands, him and all the other dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except-the price is too high, I'm killing myself." Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: "I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn't object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it is a risk. I've done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin'. I've always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. it would be real quiet, and you could write stories. Basically, I'm pretty healthy. I'm a good cook, too."

Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: "Scared?" Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny's derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a born bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn't free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I'd have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn't want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.

So I told him to take the cure. But added: "Let's not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that's my destiny." How optimistic I was in those sheltered days! — battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I've since withstood.

It was decided that Denny would travel alone to the clinic in Vevey. We said good-bye at the Gare de Lyon; he was somewhat high on something and looked, with his fresh-colored face-the face of a severe, avengeful angel-twenty years old. His rattling conversation ranged from filling stations to the fact that he had once visited Tibet. At the last Denny said, "If it goes wrong, please do this: destroy everything that's mine. Burn all my clothes. My letters. I wouldn't want Peter having the pleasure."

We agreed not to communicate until Denny had left the clinic; then, presumably, we could meet for a holiday at one of the coastal villages near Naples—Positano or Ravello.

As I had no intention of doing so, or of seeing Denny again if it could be avoided, I moved out of the rue du Bac apartment and into a small room under the eaves of the Hotel Pont Royal. At the time the Pont Royal had a leathery little basement bar that was the favored swill bucket of haute Boheme's fatbacks. Walleyed, pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, De Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned pair of ventriloquist's dolls. I often saw Koestler there, never sober; an aggressive runt very free with his fists. And Camusreedy, diffident in a razory way, a man with crisp brown hair, eyes liquid with life, and a troubled, perpetually listening expression: an approachable person. I knew that he was an editor at Gallimard, and one afternoon I introduced myself to him as an American writer who had published a book of short stories—would he read it, with the thought of Gallimard printing a translation? Later, Camus returned the copy I sent him, with a note saying that his English was insufficient to the task of passing judgment but that he felt I had an ability to create character and tension. "However, I find these stories too abrupt and unrealized. But if you should have other material, please let me see it." Afterward, whenever I encountered Camus at the Pont Royal, and once at a Gallimard garden party that I gate-crashed, he always nodded and smiled encouragement.

Another customer of this bar, whom I met there and who was friendly enough, was the Vicomtesse Marie Laure de Noailles, esteemed poet, a saloniste who presided over a drawing room where the ectoplasmic presences of Proust and Reynaldo Hahn were at any moment expected to materialize, the eccentric spouse of a rich sports-minded Marseillais aristocrat, and an affectionate, perhaps undiscriminating, comrade of contemporary Julien Sorels: my slot machine exactly. Mais alors—another young American adventurer, Ned Rorem, had emptied that jackpot. Despite her defects-rippling jowls, bee-stung lips, and middle-parted coiffure that eerily duplicated Lautrec's portrait of Oscar Wilde—one could see what Rorem saw in Marie Laure (an elegant roof over his head, someone to promote his melodies in the stratospheres of musical France), but the reverse does not hold. Rorem was from the Midwest, a Quaker queer—which is to say, a queer Quaker—an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and self-righteous piety. He thought himself Alcibiades reborn, sunpainted, golden, and there were many who seconded his opinion, though I was not among them. For one thing, his skull was criminally contoured: flat-backed, like Dillinger's; and his face, smooth, sweet as cake batter, was a bad blend of the weak and the willful. However, I'm probably being unfair because I envied Rorem, envied him his education, his far more assured reputation as a coming young fellow, and his superior success at playing Living Dildo to Old Hides, as we gigolos call our female checkbooks. If the subject interests you, you might try reading Ned's own confessional Paris Diary: it is well written and cruel as only an outlaw Quaker bent on candor could be. I wonder what Marie Laure thought when she read that book. Of course, she has weathered harsher pains than Ned's sniveling revelations could inflict. Her last comrade, or the last known to me, was a hairy Bulgarian painter who killed himself by cutting his wrist and then, wielding a brush and using his severed artery as a palette, covered two walls with a boldly stroked, all-crimson abstract mural.

Indeed, I am indebted to the Pont Royal bar for many acquaintances, including the premier American expatriate, Miss Natalie Barney, an heiress of independent mind and morals who had been domiciled in Paris more than sixty years.

For all those decades Miss Barney had lived in the same apartment, a suite of surprising rooms off a courtyard in the rue de l'Université. Stained-glass windows and stained-glass skylights—a tribute to Art Nouveau that would have sent good old Boaty into mad-dog delirium: Lalique lamps sculpted as bouquets of milky roses, medieval tables massed with photographs of friends framed in gold and tortoiseshell: Apollinaire, Proust, Gide, Picasso, Cocteau, Radiguet, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Stein and Toklas, Stravinsky, the queens of Spain and Belgium, Nadia Boulanger, Garbo in a snuggly pose with her old buddy Mercedes D'Acosta, and Djuna Barnes, the last a luscious pimento-lipped redhead difficult to recognize as the surly author of Nightwood (and latter-day hermit-heroine of Patchin Place). Whatever her calendar age, which must have been eighty and more, Miss Barney, usually attired in virile grey flannel, looked a permanent, pearl-colored fifty. She enjoyed motoring and drove herself about in a canvas-topped emerald Bugatti-around the Bois or out to Versailles on pleasant afternoons. Occasionally, I was asked along, for Miss Barney enjoyed lecturing, and she felt I had much to learn.

Once there was another guest, Miss Stein's widow. The widow wanted to visit an Italian grocery where, she said, it was possible to buy a unique white truffle that came from the hills around Turin. The store was in a distant neighborhood. As our car drove through it, the widow suddenly said: "But aren't we near Romaine's studio?" Miss Barney, while directing at me a disquietingly speculative glance, replied: "Shall we stop there? I have a key."

The widow, a mustachioed spider feeling its feelers, rubbed together her black-gloved hands and said: "Why, it has to be thirty years!"

After climbing six flights of stone stairs inside a dour building saturated with cat urine, that Persian cologne (and Roman, too), we arrived at Romaine's studio—whoever Romaine might be; neither of my companions explained their friend, but I sensed she had joined the majority and that the studio was being maintained by Miss Barney as a sort of unkempt shrine-museum. A wet afternoon light, oozing through grime-grey skylights, mingled with an immense room's objects: shrouded chairs, a piano with a Spanish shawl, Spanish candelabra with partially burnt candle s. Nothing occurred when Miss Barney flicked a light switch.

"Dog take it," she said, suddenly very prairie-American, and lighted up a candelabrum, carrying it with her as she led us around the room to view Romaine Brooks' paintings. There were perhaps seventy of them, all portraits of a flat and ultra realism; the subjects were women, and all of them were dressed identically, each fully outfitted in white tie and tails. You know how you know when you're not going to forget something? I wasn't going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes, all of whom, to judge from their coifs and cosmetics, were painted between 1917 and 1930.

"Violet," the widow stated as she examined the portrait of a lean bobbed blond with a monocle magnifying an ice-pick eye. "Gertrude liked her. But she seemed to me a cruel girl. I remember she had an owl. She kept it in a cage so small it couldn't move. Simply sat there. With its feathers bursting through the wire. Is Violet still alive?"

Miss Barney nodded. "She has a house in Fiesole. Looks fit as a fiddle. I'm told she's been having the Niehans treatment."

At last we came to a figure I recognized as the widow's lamented mate—depicted here with a Cognac snifter in her left hand and a cheroot in the other, not at all the brown mother-earth monolith Picasso palmed off, but more a Diamond Jim Brady personage, a big-bellied show-off, which one suspects is nearer the truth. "Romaine," said the widow, smoothing her fragile mustache, "Romaine had a certain technique. But she is not an artist."

Miss Barney begged to differ. "Romaine," she announced in tones chilled as Alpine slopes, "is a bit limited. But. Romaine is a very great artist!"

It was Miss Barney who arranged for me to visit Colette, whom I wanted to meet, not for my usual opportunistic reasons, but because Boaty had introduced me to her work (kindly keep in mind that, intellectually, I am a hitchhiker who gathers his education along highways and under bridges), and I respected her: My Mother's House is masterly, incomparable in the artistry of its play upon sensual specifics—taste, scent, touch, sight.

Also, I was curious about this woman; I felt anyone who had lived as broadly as she had, who was as intelligent as she was, must have a few answers. So I was grateful when Miss Barney made it possible for me to have tea with Colette at her apartment in the Palais Royal. "But," warned Miss Barney, speaking on the telephone, "don't tire her by overstaying; she's been ill all winter."

It's true that Colette received me in her bedroom—seated in a golden bed a la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee; but otherwise she seemed as indisposed as a painted Watusi leading a tribal dance. Her maquillage was equal to that chore: slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The too in smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said: "jicky. The Empress Eugénie always wore it. I like it because it's an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it's witty without being coarse—like the better conversationalists. Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not too reliable"), of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains.

Tea was brought by a maid, who settled the tray on a bed already burdened with drowsing cats and correspondence, books and magazines and various bibelots, especially a lot of antique French crystal paperweights-indeed, many of these precious objects were displayed on tables and on a fireplace mantel. I had never seen one before; noticing my interest, Colette selected a specimen and held its glitter against a lamp's yellow light: "This one is called The White Rose. As you see, a single white rose centered in the purest crystal. It was made by the Clichy factory in 1850. All the great weights were produced between 1840 and 1900 by just three firms—Clichy, Baccarat, and St. Louis. When I first started buying them, at the flea market and other such casual places, they were not overly costly, but in the last decades, collecting them has become fashionable, a mania really, and prices are colossal. To me" — she flashed a globe containing a green lizard and another with a basket of red cherries inside it—"they are more satisfying than jewelry. Or sculpture. A silent music, these crystal universes. Now," she said, startlingly down to business, "tell me what you expect from life. Fame and fortune aside—those we take for granted." I said, "I don't know what I expect. I know what I'd like. And that is to be a grown-up person."

Colette's painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. "But that," she said, "is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all mischief—envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire, even Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony… dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows? Of justice and eternity and mature matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grownup moments, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death certainly sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what's left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here" — she nudged the flowered crystal toward me—"drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human."

Once I showed this gift to Kate McCloud, and Kate, who could have worked as an appraiser at Sotheby's, said: "She must have been barking. I mean, whyever did she give it to you? A Clichy weight of that quality is worth… oh, quite easily five thousand dollars."

I would as soon not have known its value, not wanting to regard it as a rainy-day reserve. Though I would never sell it, especially now, when I am ass-over-backward down-and-outbecause, well, I treasure it as a talisman blessed by a saint of sorts, and the occasions when one does not sacrifice a talisman are at least two: when you have nothing and when you have everything—each is an abyss. Throughout my travels, through hungers and suicidal despairs, a year of hepatitis in a heat-warped, fly-buzzed Calcutta hospital, I have held on to The White Rose. Here at the Y. M. C. A., I have it hidden under my cot; it is tucked inside one of Kate McCloud's old yellow woolen ski socks, which in turn is concealed inside my only luggage, an Air France travel bag (when escaping Southampton, I left pronto, and I doubt that I'll ever again see those Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes; not that I care to, for the sight would make me strangle on my own vomit).

Just now I fetched it out, The White Rose, and in its winking facets I saw the blue-skied snowfields above St. Moritz and saw Kate McCloud, a russet wraith astride her blond Kneissl skis, streak by in speeding profile, her backward-slanting angle an attitude as elegant and precise as the cool Clichy crystal itself.

It rained night before last; by morning an autumnal flight of dry Canadian air had stopped the next wave, so I went for a walk, and whom should I run into but Woodrow Hamilton! — the man responsible, indirectly anyway, for this last disastrous adventure of mine. Here I am at the Central Park Zoo, empathizing with a zebra, when a disbelieving voice says: "P. B.?" and it was he, the descendant of our twenty-eighth President. "My God, P. B. You look…"

I knew how I looked inside my grey skin, my greasy seersucker suit. "Why shouldn't I?"

"Oh. I see. I wondered if you were involved in that. All I know is what I read in the paper. It must be quite a story. Look," he said when I didn't reply, "let's step over to the Pierre and have a drink."

They wouldn't serve me at the Pierre because I wasn't wearing a tie; we wandered over to a Third Avenue saloon, and on the way I decided I wasn't going to discuss Kate McCloud or anything that happened, not out of discretion, but because it was too raw: my spilled guts were still dragging the ground.

Woodrow didn't insist; he may look like a neat nice celluloid square, but really, that's the camouflage that protects the more undulating aspects of his nature. I had last seen him at the Trois Cloches in Cannes, and that was a year ago. He said he had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and was teaching Greek and Latin at a boys' prep school in Manhattan. "But," he slyly mused, "I have a part-time job. Something that might interest you: if appearances speak, I expect you could use some extra change."

He consulted his wallet and handed me first a hundred-dollar bill: "I earned that just this afternoon, playing ring around the maypole with a Vassar graduate, class of '09"; then a card: "And this is how I met the lady. How I meet them all. Men. Women. Crocodiles. Fuck for fun and profit. At any rate, profit."

The card read: THE SELF SERVICE. PROPRIETOR, MISS VICTORIA SELF. It listed an address on West Forty-second Street and a telephone number with a Clrcle exchange.

"So," said Woodrow, "clean yourself up and go see Miss Self. She'll give you a job."

"I don't think I could handle a job. I'm too strung out. And I'm trying to write again."

Woodrow nibbled the onion in his Gibson. "I wouldn't call it a job. just a few hours a week. After all, what kind of service do you think The Self Service provides?"

"Stud duty, obviously. Dial-a-Dick."

"Ah, you were listening—you seemed so fogbound. Stud duty, indeed. But not entirely. It's a coed operation. La Self is always ready with anything anywhere anyhow anytime.

"Strange. I would never have pictured you as a stud-for-hire."

"Nor I. But I'm a certain type: good manners, grey suit, horn-rimmed glasses. Believe me, there's plenty of demand. And La Self specializes in variety. She has everything on her roster from Puerto Rican thugs to rookie cops and stockbrokers."

"Where did she find you?"

"That," said Woodrow, "is too long a tale." He ordered another drink; I declined, for I hadn't tasted liquor since that final incredible gin-crazed session with Kate McCloud, and now just one drink had made me slightly deaf (alcohol first affects my hearing). "I'll only say it was through a guy I knew at Yale. Dick Anderson. He works on Wall Street. A real straight guy, but he hasn't done too well, or well enough to live in Greenwich and have three kids, two of them at Exeter. Last summer I spent a weekend with the Andersons—she's a real good gal; Dick and I sat up drinking cold duck, that's this mess made with champagne and sparkling burgundy; boy, it makes me churn to think of it. And Dick said: 'Most of the times I'm disgusted. Just disgusted. Goddamn, what a man won't do when he's got two boys in Exeter!"' Woodrow chuckled. "Rather John Cheeverish, no? Respectable but hard-up suburbanite shagging ass to pay his country-club dues and keep his kids in a proper prep."

"No."

"No what?"

"Cheever is too cagey a writer to ever risk a cock-peddling stockbroker. Simply because no one would believe it. His work is always realistic, even when it's preposterous—like The Enormous Radio or The Swimmer.

Woodrow was irritated; prudently, I deposited his hundred dollars inside an inner pocket, where he would have had some trouble retrieving it. "If it's true, and it is, why would anyone not believe it?"

"Because something is true doesn't mean that it's convincing, either in life or in art. Think of Proust. Would Remembrance have the ring that it does if he had made it historically literal, if he hadn't transposed sexes, altered events and identities? If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable, but" — his was a thought I'd often had—"it might have been better. Less acceptable, but better." I decided on another drink, after all. "That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."

"Maybe you ought to skip that other drink."

"You think I'm drunk?"

"Well, you're rambling."

"I'm relaxed, that's all."

Woodrow kindly said: "So you've started writing again. Novel?"

"A report. An account. Yes, I'll call it a novel. If I ever finish it. Of course, I never do finish anything."

"Have you a title?" Oh, Woodrow was right there with all the garden-party queries.

"Answered Prayers."

Woodrow frowned. "I've heard that before."

"Not unless you were one of the three hundred schlunks who bought my first and only published work. That, too, was called Answered Prayers. For no particular reason. This time I have a reason."

"Answered Prayers. A quote, I suppose."

"St. Teresa. I never looked it up myself, so I don't know exactly what she said, but it was something like 'More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.'"

Woodrow said: "I see a light flickering. This book—it's about Kate McCloud, and gang."

"I wouldn't say it's about them—though they're in it."

"Then what is it about?"

"Truth as illusion."

"And illusion as truth?"

"The first. The second is another proposition."

Woodrow asked how so, but the whiskey was at work and I felt too deaf to tell him; but what I would have said was: as truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion—but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion)-and of the two, the illusion is the truer.

Around five that afternoon, as offices were emptying, I found myself trawling along Forty-second Street, looking for the address listed on Miss Self's card. The establishment turned out to be located above a ground-floor pornographic emporium, one of those dumps plastered with poster portraits of dangling dongs and split beavers. As I approached it, an exiting customer, someone of respectable and unimportant appearance, dropped a package, which opened, scattering across the pavement several dozen black-and-white glossies—nothing extra, the usual sixty-niners and marshmallow gals getting a three-way ride; still, a number of pedestrians paused to stare as the owner knelt to recover his property. Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn't develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways—it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men "on the muscle," as they say in horse-breeding circles.

A Puerto Rican pimp stood sneering at the stooped man ("What you want with that when I got nice live puta?"), but I felt sorry for him: he looked to me like some youngish lonely minister who had embezzled the whole of last Sunday's collection plate to buy those jack-off snaps; so I decided to help him pick them up-but the instant I began, he struck me across the face: a karate chop that felt as if it must have shattered a cheekbone.

"Beat it," he snarled. I said: "Jesus, I wanted to help you." And he said: "Beat it. Before I bust you good." His face had flushed a red so bright it pained my eyes, and then I realized it wasn't exclusively the color of rage but of shame as well—I thought he'd thought I meant to steal his pictures, when really what had infuriated him was the pity implicit in my proffered assistance.

Though Miss Self is a most successful businesswoman, she certainly doesn't squander on display. Her offices are four flights up in an elevatorless building. THE SELF SERVICE: a frosted-glass door with that inscription. But I hesitated (really, did I want to do this? Well, there wasn't anything I'd rather do, at least to make money). I combed my hair, creased the trousers of a just-bought fifty-dollar Robert Hall herringbone two-pants special, rang, and walked in.

The outer office was unfurnished except for a bench, a desk, and two young gentlemen, one of them a secretary-receptionist seated behind the desk and the other a beautiful mulatto wearing a very contemporary dark blue silk suit; neither one chose to notice me.

"… so after that," the mulatto was saying, "I stayed a week with Spencer in San Diego. Spencer! He is oooee some rocket, wow. One night we were parachuting along the San Diego Freeway, and Spencer picked up this spade marine, a real country-boy piece of smoked Alabama beef, so Spencer was like LoinLy after it in the back seat, and afterward the guy says: 'I sho can see what I git outta it. It feel good. But what I sho can't see is what you fellas git outta it.' And Spencer tells him: 'Ah, man. It's deelicious. Jes pussy on a stick.'»

The secretary languidly turned upon me a disapproving pair of wintergreen eyes. A blond, and how! — his skin had the golden oleo gleam that comes from long Cherry Grove weekends. yet, overall, he seemed decidedly moldy—a sort of suntanned Uriah Heep. "Yes?" he inquired in a voice that crawled coolly through the air like an exhalation of mentholated smoke.

I told him I wanted to see Miss Self. He asked my purpose, and I said I had been recommended by Woodrow Hamilton. He said: "You will have to fill out our form. Are you applying as a client? Or as a prospective employee?"

"Employee."

"Mmmmm," mused Black Beauty, "that's too bad. I wouldn't have minded scrambling your eggs, daddy." And the secretary? prissily pissed-off, said: "Okay, Lester. Shove your sore ass off sister's desk and hustle it down to the Americana. You've got a five-thirty. Room 507."

When I had completed the questionnaire, which asked nothing beyond the customary Age? Address? Occupation? Marital Status? Dracula's daughter evaporated with it into an inner office—and while he was gone, this girl ambled in, an overweight but damned attractive girl, a young boul de suif with a pink creamy round face and a fat pair of boobs squirming inside the bodice of a summery pink dress.

She cuddled down next to me and tucked a cigarette between her lips. "How about it?" I explained if it was a match she wanted, I couldn't help her as I'd stopped smoking, and she said: "So have I. This is just a prop. I meant how about it, where's Butch? Butch!" she cried, rising to engulf the returning secretary.

"Maggie!"

"Butch!"

"Maggie!" Then, coming to his senses: "You bitch. Five days! Where have you been?"

"Didja miss Maggie?"

"Fuck me. What do I count? But that old guy from Seattle. Oy vey, the hell he raised when you stood him up Thursday night."

"I'm sorry, Butch. Gee."

"But where have you been, Maggie? I went to your hotel twice. I called a hundred times. You might have checked in."

"I know. But see… I got married."

"Married? Maggie!"

"Please, Butch. It's nothing serious. It won't interfere."

"I can't imagine what Miss Self will say." And at last he remembered me. "Oh, yes," this secretary said, as if flicking lint off a sleeve, "Miss Self will see you now, Mr. Jones. Miss Self," he announce, opening a door for me, "this is Mr. Jones."

She looked like Marianne Moore; a stouter, Teutonized Miss Moore. Grey hausfrau braids pinioned her narrow skull; she wore no makeup, and her suit, one might say uniform, was of prison-matron blue serge—a lady altogether as lacking in luxury as were her premises. Except… on her wrist I noticed a gold oval-shaped watch with Roman numerals. Kate McCloud had one just like it; it had been given her by John F. Kennedy, and it came from Cartier in London, where it had cost twelve hundred dollars.

"Sit down, please." Her voice was rather teacup-timid, but her cobalt eyes had the 20/20 steeliness of a gangland hit man. She glanced at the watch that was so out of keeping with her inelegant texture. "Will you join me? It's well after five." And she extracted from a desk drawer two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila, something I'd never tasted and didn't expect to like. "You'll like it," she said. "It's got balls. My third husband was Mexican. Now tell me," she said, tapping my application form, "have you ever done this work before? Professionally?"

Interesting question; I thought about it. "I wouldn't say professionally. But I've done it for… profit."

"That's professional enough. Kicks!" she said and hooked down a neat jigger of tequila. She grimaced. Shuddered. "Buenos Dios, that's hairy. Hairy. Go on," she said. "Knock it back. You'll like it."

It tasted to me like perfumed benzine.

"Now," she said, "I'm going to roll you some clean dice, Jones. Middle-aged men account for ninety percent of our clientele, and half our trade is offbeat stuff one way and another. So if you want to register here strictly as a straight stud, forget it. Are you with me?"

"All the way."

She winked and poured herself another shot. "Tell me, Jones. Is there anything you won't do?"

"I won't catch. I'll pitch. But I won't catch."

"Ah, so?" She was German; it was only the souvenir of an accent, like a scent of cologne lingering on an antique handkerchief. "Is this a moral prejudice?"

"Not really. Hemorrhoids."

"How about S. and M.? F. F.?"

"The whole bit?"

"Yes, dear. Whips. Chains. Cigarettes. F. F. That sort of thing."

"I'm afraid not."

"Ah, so? And is this a moral prejudices?"

"I don't believe in cruelty. Even when it gives someone else pleasure."

"Then you have never been cruel?"

"I didn't say that."

"Stand up," she said. "Take off your jacket. Turn around. Again. More slowly. Too bad you aren't a bit taller. But you've got a good figure. A nice flat stomach. How well hung are you?"

"I've never had any complaints."

"Perhaps our audience is more demanding. You see, that's the one question they always ask: how big is his joint?"

"Want to see it?" I said, toying with my super-special Robert Hall fly.

"There is no reason to be crude, Mr. Jones. You will learn that although I am someone who speaks directly, I am not a crude person. Now sit down," she said, refilling both our tequila glasses. "So far I have been the inquisitor. What would you like to know?"

What I wanted to know was her life story; few people have made me so immediately curious. Was she perhaps a Hitler refugee, a veteran of Hamburg's Reeperbahn, who had emigrated to Mexico before the war? And it crossed my mind that possibly she was not the power behind this operation but, like most American brothel keepers and sex-café padrones, a front for Mafioso entrepreneurs.

"Cat got your tongue? Well, I'm sure you will want to understand our financial agreement. The standard fee for an hour's booking is fifty dollars, which we will split between us, though you may keep any tips the client gives you. Of course, the fee varies; there will be occasions when you will make a great deal more. And there are bonuses available for every acceptable client or employee you recruit. Now?" she said, aiming her eyes at me like a pair of gun barrels, "there are a number of rules by which you must abide. There will be no drugging or excessive drinking. Under no circumstances will you ever deal directly with a client—all bookings must be made through the service. And at no time may an employee associate socially with a client. Any attempt at negotiating a private deal with a client means instant dismissal. Any attempt at blackmailing or in any way embarrassing a client will result in very severe retribution—by which I don't mean mere dismissal from the service."

So: those dark Sicilian spiders are indeed the weavers of this web.

"Have I made myself understood?"

"Utterly."

The secretary intruded. "Mr. Wallace calling. Very urgent. I think he's smashed."

"We are not interested in your opinions, Butch. Just put the gentleman on the line." Presently she lifted a receiver, one of several on her desk. "Miss Self here. How are you, sir? I thought you were in Rome. Well, I read it in the Times. That you were in Rome and had had an audience with the pope. Oh, I'm sure you're right: quel camp! Yes, I hear you perfectly. I see. I see." She scribbled on a note pad, and I could read what she wrote because one of my gifts is to read upside down: Wallace Suite 713 HotelPlaza. "I'm sorry, but Gumbo isn't with us anymore. These black boys, they're so unreliable. However, we'll have someone there shortly. Not at all. Thank you."

Then she looked at me for quite a long time. "Mr. Wallace is a highly valued client." Once more a prolonged stare. "Wallace isn't his name, of course. We use pseudonyms for all our clients. Employees as well. Your name is Jones. We'll call you Smith."

She tore off the sheet of note pad, rolled it into a pellet, and tossed it at me. "I think you can handle this. It's not really a… physical situation. It's more a… nursing problem."

I rang Mr. Wallace on one of those sleazy gold housephones in the Plaza lobby. A dog answered—there was the sound of a crashing receiver, followed by a hounds-of-hell barking. "Heh heh, that's just mah dawg," a corn-pone voice explained. "Every time the phone rings, he grabs it. You the fellow from the service? Well, skedaddle on up here."

When the client opened the door, his dog bolted into the corridor and hurled himself at me like a New York Giants fullback. It was a black and brindle English bulldog-two feet high, maybe three feet wide; he had to weigh a hundred pounds, and the force of his attack hurricaned me against the wall. I hollered pretty good; the owner laughed-. "Don't be scared. Old Bill, he's just affectionate." I'll say. The horny bastard was riding my leg like a doped stallion. "Bill, you cut that out," Bill's master commanded in a voice jingling with gin-sluffed giggles. "I mean it, Bill. Quit that." At last he attached a leash to the sex fiend's collar and hauled him off me, saying: "Poor Bill. I've just been in no condition to walk him. Not for two days. That's one reason I called the service. The first thing I want you to do is to take Bill over to the park."

Bill behaved until we reached the park.

En route, I considered Mr. Wallace: a chunky, paunchy booze-puffed runt with a play mustache glued above laconic lips. Time had interred his looks, for he used to be reasonably presentable; nevertheless, I had recognized him immediately, even though I'd seen him only once before, and that some ten years earlier. But I remembered that former glimpse of him distinctly, for at that time he was the most acclaimed American playwright, and in my opinion the best; also, the curious mise-en-scène contributed to my memory: it was after midnight in Paris in the bar of the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, where he was sitting at a pink-clothed table with three men, two of them expensive tarts, Corsican pirates in British flannel, and the third none other than Sumner Welles—fans of Confidential will remember the patrician Mr. Welles, former Undersecretary of State, great and good friend of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It made rather a tableau, one especially vivant, when His Excellency, pickled as brandied peaches, began nibbling those Corsican ears.

Autumn strollers eased along the park's evening paths. A Nipponese couple paused to spend affection on Bill; in a way they went out of their minds, tugging his twisted tail, hugging him—I could understand it because Bill, with his indented face and Quasimodo legs, his intricately contorted physique, was an object as appealing to an Oriental sense of the aesthetic as bonsai trees and dwarf deer and goldfish bred to weigh five pounds. However, I myself am not Oriental, and when Bill, after luring me onto the grass and under a tree, suddenly again sexually attacked me, I was not appreciative.

Being no match for so determined a rapist, it was expedient just to lie back on the grass and let him have his way-even encourage him: That's it, baby. Give it to me good. Get your rocks off." We had an audience—human faces bobbed in the distance beyond my frolicking lover's bulging passion-doped eyes. Some woman harshly said: "You filthy degenerate! Stop abusing that animal! Why doesn't anybody call a policeman?" Another woman said: "Albert, I want to go back to Utica. Tonight." With slobbering gasps, Bill crossed his chest.

My drenched Robert Hall trousers were not Bill's only offense against me ere the eve was o'er. When I returned him to the Plaza and entered the foyer of the suite, I stepped into a big pile of wet shit, Bill's shit, and skidded and fell flat on my face—into a second pile of shit. All I said to Mr. Wallace was: "Do you mind if I take a shower?" He said: "I always insist on that."

However, as Miss Self had suggested, Mr. Wallace, like Denny Fouts, was more conversationalist than sensualist. "You're a good kid," he advised me. "Oh, I know you're no kid. I'm not that drunk. I can see you got mileage on you. But never mind, you're a good kid; it's in your eyes. Wounded eyes. Injured and insulted. Read Dostoevski? Well, I guess that's not your racket. But you're one of his people. Insulted and injured. Me too; that's why I feel safe with you." He rolled his eyes around the lamplit bedroom like an espionage agent; the room looked as if a Kansas twister had just gone through—messy laundry everywhere, dog shit all over the place, and drying puddles of dog piss marking the rugs. Bill was asleep at the foot of the bed, his snores exuding postcoital melancholy. At least he allowed his master and his master's guest to share the bed a bit, the guest naked but the master fully dressed, down to black shoes and a vest with pencils in the pocket and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. In one hand Mr. Wallace gripped a toothpaste glass brimming with undiluted Scotch and in the other a cigar that kept accumulating trembling lengths of ash. Occasionally he reached to stroke me, and once the hot ash singed my navel; I thought it was on purpose, but decided perhaps not.

"As safe as a hunted man can feel. A man with murderers on his trail. I'm liable to die very suddenly. And if I do, it won't be a natural death. They'll try to make it look like heart failure. Or an accident. But promise me you won't believe that. Promise me you'll write a letter to the Times and tell them it was murder."

With drunks and madmen, always be logical. "But if you think you're in danger, why don't you call the cops?"

He said: "I'm no squealer"; then he added: "I'm a dying man, anyway. Dying of cancer."

"What kind of cancer is it?"

"Blood. Throat. Lungs. Tongue. Stomach. Brain. Asshole." Alcoholics really despise the taste of alcohol; he shivered as he bolted half the Scotch in his glass. "It all started seven years ago when the critics turned on me. Every writer has his tricks, and sooner or later the critics catch them. That's all right; they love you as long as they've got you identified. My mistake was I got sick of my old tricks and learned some new ones. Critics won't put up with that; they hate versatility-they don't like to see a writer grow or change in any way. So that's when the cancer came. When the critics started saying the old tricks were 'the stuff of pure poetic power' and the new tricks were 'shabby pretensions.' Six failures in a row, four on Broadway and two off. They're killing me out of envy and ignorance. And without shame or remorse. What do they care that cancer's eating my brain!" Then, quite complacently, he said: "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I can't believe in seven years of galloping cancer. That's impossible."

"I'm a dying man. But you don't believe it. You don't believe I have cancer at all. You think it's all a problem for the shrinker." No, what I thought was: here's a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total Strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself—everyone else is an audience. "But for your information, I've been to a shrink. I spent sixty bucks an hour five days a week for two years. All the bastard did was interfere in my personal affairs."

"Isn't that what they're paid to do? Interfere in one's personal affairs?"

"Don't get smart with me, old buddy. This is no joke. Dr. Kewie ruined my life. He convinced me I wasn't a queer and that I didn't love Fred. He told me I was finished as a writer unless I got rid of Fred. But the truth was Fred was the only good thing in my life. Maybe I didn't love him. But he loved me. He held my life together. He wasn't the phony Kewie said he was. Kewie said: Fred doesn't love you, he loves your money. The one who loves money is Kewie. Well, I wouldn't leave Fred, so Kewie calls him secretly and tells him I'm going to die of drink if he doesn't clear out. Fred packs and disappears, and I can't understand it until Dr. Kewie, very proud of himself, confesses what he's done. And I told him: You see, Fred believed you and because he loved me so much he sacrificed himself. But I was wrong about that. Because when we found Fred, and I hired Pinkertons who found him in Puerto Rico, Fred said all he wanted to do was bust me in the nose. He thought I was the one who had put Kewie up to calling him, that it was all a plot on my part. Still, we made up. A lot of good it did. Fred was operated on at Memorial Hospital June seventeenth, and he died the fourth of July. He was only thirty-six years old. But he wasn't pretending; he really had cancer. And that's what comes of shrinkers interfering in your private life. Look at the mess! Imagine having to hire whores to walk Bill."

"I'm not a whore." Though I don't know why I bothered protesting: I am a whore and always have been.

He grunted sarcastically; like all maudlin men, he was coldhearted. "How about it?" he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. "Roll over and spread those cheeks."

"Sorry, but I don't catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no."

"Ohhh," he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet-potato pie, "I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar."

Boy, did I beat it out of there! — hustled my clothes into the bathroom and bolted the door. While dressing, I could hear Mr. Wallace chuckling to himself. "Old buddy?" he said. "You didn't think I meant it, did you, old buddy? I don't know. Nobody's got a sense of humor anymore." But when I came out, he was snoring slightly, a soft accompaniment to Bill's robust racket. The cigar still burned between his fingers: probably someday when no one is there to save him, this will be the way Mr. Wallace will go.

Here at the Y a sixty-year-old blind man sleeps in the cell next to mine. He is a masseur and has been employed for several months by the gym downstairs. His name is Bob, and he is a big-bellied guy who smells of baby oil and Sloan's Liniment. Once I mentioned to him that I had worked as a masseur, and he said he'd like to see what kind of masseur I was, so we traded techniques, and while he was rubbing me with his thick sensitive blind-man's hands, he told me a bit about himself. He said he'd been a bachelor until he was fifty, when he married a San Diego waitress. "Helen. She described herself as a gorgeous blond piece-ass thirty-one years old, a divorcée, but I don't guess she could have been much, else why would she have married me? She had a good figure, though, and with these hands I could get her plenty hot. Well, we bought a Ford pickup and a little aluminum house trailer and moved to Cathedral City—that's in the California desert near Palm Springs. I figured I could get work at one of the clubs in Palm Springs, and I did. It's a great place November to June, best climate in the world, hot in the daytime and cold at night, but Jesus the summers, it could go to a hundred twenty, thirty, and it wasn't dry heat like you'd expect, not since they built them million swimming pools out there: them pools made the desert humid, and humid at a hundred twenty ain't for white men. Or women.

"Helen suffered terrible, but there was nothing to do—I never could save enough in the winter to get us away from there in the summer. We fried alive in our little aluminum trailer. just sat there, Helen watching TV and coming to hate me. Maybe she'd always hated me; or our life; or her life. But since she was a quiet woman and we never quarreled much, I didn't know how she felt till last April. That's when I had to quit work and go into the hospital for an operation. Varicose veins in my legs. I didn't have the money, but it was a matter of life and death. The doctor said otherwise I could have an embolism any minute. It was three days after the operation before Helen come to see me. She doesn't say how are you or kiss me or nothing. What she said was: 'I don't ant anything, Bob. I left a suitcase downstairs with your clothes. All I'm taking is the truck and the trailer.' I ask her what she's talking about, and she says: 'I'm sorry, Bob. But I've got to move on.' I was scared; I began to cry—I begged her, I said: 'Helen, please, woman, I'm blind and now I'm lame and I'm sixty years old-you can't leave me like this without a home and nowhere to turn.' Know what she said? 'When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.' And those were the last words she ever spoke to me. When I got out of the hospital, I had fourteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but I wanted to put as much space between me and there as ever I could, so I hit out for New York, hitchhiking. Helen, wherever she is, I hope she's happier. I don't hold anything against her, though I think she treated me extra hard. That was a tough deal, an old blind man and half lame, hitchhiking all the way across America."

A helpless man waiting in the dark by the side of an unknown road: that's how Denny Fouts must have felt, for I had been as heartless to him as Helen had been to Bob.

Denny had sent me two messages from the Vevey clinic. The script of the first was all but unintelligible: "Difficult to write as I cannot control my hands. Father Flanagan, renowned proprietor of Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café, has given me my check and shown me the door. Merci Dieu pour toi. Otherwise I would feel very alone." Six weeks later I received a firmly written card: "Please telephone me at Vevey 46 27 14."

I placed the call from the bar of the Pont Royal; I remember, as I waited for Denny's voice, watching Arthur Koestler methodically abuse a woman who was seated with him at a table-someone said she was his girl friend; she was crying but did nothing to protect herself from his insults. It is intolerable to see a man weep or a woman bullied, but no one intervened, and the bartenders and waiters pretended not to notice.

Then Denny's voice descended from alpine altitudes-he sounded as if his lungs were filled with brilliant air; he said it had been rough-going, but he was ready now to leave the clinic, and could I meet him Tuesday in Rome, where Prince Ruspoli ("Dado") had lent him an apartment. I am cowardly-in the frivolous sense and also the most serious; I can never be more than moderately truthful about my feelings toward another person, and I will say yes when I mean no. I told Denny I would meet him in Rome, for how could I say I never meant to see him again because he scared me? It wasn't the drugs and chaos but the funereal halo of waste and failure that hovered above him: the shadow of such failure seemed somehow to threaten my own impending triumph.

So I went to Italy, but to Venice, not Rome, and it wasn't until early winter, when I was alone one night in Harry's Bar, that I learned that Denny had died in Rome a few days after I was supposed to have joined him. Mimi told me. Mimi was an Egyptian fatter than Farouk, a drug smuggler who shuttled between Cairo and Paris; Denny was devoted to Mimi, or at least devoted to the narcotics Mimi supplied, but I scarcely knew him and was surprised when, seeing me in Harry's, Mimi waddled over and kissed my cheek with his drooling raspberry lips and said: "I have to laugh. Whenever I think about Denny, I got to laugh. He would have laughed. To die like that! It could only have happened to Denny." Mimi raised his plucked eyebrows. "Ah. You didn't know? It was the cure. If he had stayed on dope, he would have lived another twenty years. But the cure killed him. He was sitting on the toilet taking a crap when his heart gave out." According to Mimi, Denny was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Rome-but the following spring when I searched there for his grave, I couldn't find it.

For many years I was very partial to Venice, and I have lived there in all seasons, preferring late autumn and winter when sea mist drifts through the piazzas and the silvery rustle of gondola bells shivers the veiled canals. I spent the whole of my first European winter there, living in an unheated little apartment on the top floor of a Grand Canal Palazzo. I've never known such cold; there were moments when surgeons could have amputated my arms and legs without my feeling the slightest pain. Still, I wasn't unhappy, because I was convinced my work in progress, Sleepless Millions, was a masterpiece. Now I know it for what it was-a dog's dinner of surrealist prose saucing a Vicki Baum recipe. Though I blush to admit it, but just for the record, it was about a dozen or so Americans (a divorcing couple, a fourteen-year-old girl in a motel room with a young and rich and handsome male voyeur, a masturbating marine general, etc.) whose lives were linked together only by the circumstance that they were watching a late-late movie on television.

I worked on the book every day from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, and at three, no matter what the weather, I went hiking through the Venetian maze until it was nightfall and time to hit Harry's Bar, blow in out of the cold and into the hearth-fire cheer of Mr. Cipriani's microscopic fine-food-and-drink palace. Harry's in winter is a different kind of madhouse from what it is the rest of the year—just as crowded, but at Christmas the premises belong not to the English and Americans but to an eccentric local aristocracy, pale foppish young counts and creaking principessas, citizens who wouldn't put a foot in the place until after October, when the last couple from Ohio has departed. Every night I spent nine or ten dollars in Harry's-on martinis and shrimp sandwiches and heaping bowls of green noodles with sauce Bolognese. Though my Italian has never amounted to much, I made a lot of friends and could tell you about many a wild time (but, as an old New Orleans acquaintance of mine used to say: "Baby, don't let me commence!").

The only Americans I remember meeting that winter were Peggy Guggenheim and George Arvin, the latter an American painter, very gifted, who looked like a blond crew-cut basketball coach; he was in love with a gondolier and had for years lived in Venice with the gondolier and the gondolier's wife and children (somehow this arrangement finally ended, and when it did Arvin entered an Italian monastery, where in time he became, so I'm told, a brother of the order).

Remember my wife, Hulga? If it hadn't been for Hulga, the fact we were legally chained, I might have married the Guggenheim woman, even though she was maybe thirty years my senior, maybe more. And if I had, it wouldn't have been because she tickled me—despite her habit of rattling her false teeth and even though she did rather look like a long-haired Bert Lahr. It was pleasant to spend a Venetian winter's evening in the compact white Palazzo dei Leoni, where she lived with eleven Tibetan terriers and a Scottish butler who was always bolting off to London to meet his lover, a circumstance his employer did not complain about because she was snobbish and the lover was said to be Prince Philip's valet; pleasant to drink the lady's good red wine and listen while she remembered aloud her marriages and affairs—it astonished me to hear, situated inside that gigolo-ish brigade, the name Samuel Beckett. Hard to conceive of an odder coupling, this rich and worldly Jewess and the monkish author of Molloy and Waiting for Godot. It makes one wonder about Beckett… and his pretentious aloofness, austerity. Because impoverished, unpublished scribes, which is what Beckett was at the time of the liaison, do not take as mistresses homely American copper heiresses without having something more than love in mind. Myself, my admiration for her notwithstanding, I guess I would have been pretty interested in her swag anyway, but the only reason I didn't run true to form by trying to get some of it away from her was that conceit had turned me into a plain damn fool; everything was to be mine the day Sleepless Millions saw print.

Except that it never did.

In March, when I finished the manuscript, I sent a copy to my agent, Margo Diamond, a pockmarked muffdiver who had been persuaded to handle me by another of her clients, my old discard Alice Lee Langman. Margo replied that she had submitted the novel to the publisher of my first book, Answered Prayers. "However," she wrote me, "I have done this only as a courtesy, and if they turn it down, I'm afraid you will have to find another agent, as I feel it is not in your own best interest, or mine, for me to continue representing you. I will admit that your conduct toward Miss Langman, the extraordinary manner in which you repaid her generosity, has influenced my opinion. Still, I would not let that deter me if I felt you had gifts that must at all costs be encouraged. But I do not and never have. You are not an artist—and if you are not an artist, then you must at least show promise of becoming a truly skilled professional writer. But there is a lack of discipline, a consistent unevenness, that suggests professionalism is beyond you. Why not, while you are still young, consider another career?"

Slit-slavering bitch! Boy (I thought), would she be sorry! And even when I arrived in Paris and found at the American Express a letter from the publisher rejecting the book ("Regrettably, we feel we would be doing you a disservice to sponsor your debut as a novelist with so contrived a work as Sleepless Millions. .. ") and asking what I wished them to do with the manuscript, even then my faith never faltered: I just supposed that, owing to my having abandoned Miss Langman, her friends were now making me the victim of a literary lynching.

I had fourteen thousand dollars left from my various swindles and savings, and I did not want to return stateside. But there seemed no alternative, not if I wanted to see Sleepless Millions published: it would be impossible to market the book from such a distance and without an agent. An honest and competent agent is more difficult to secure than a reputable publisher. Margo Diamond was among the best; she was as chummy with the staffs of snobrags, like The New York Review of Books, as she was with the editors of Playboy. Maybe she did think I was untalented, but really it was jealousy—because what that fishhound had always wanted to do was T the V with La Langman herself However, the prospect of going back to New York made my stomach lurch and dip with roller-coaster aggressiveness. It seemed to me I could never reenter that city, where I now had no friends and many enemies, unless preceded by marching bands and all the confetti of success. To return droop-tailed and toting an unsold novel required someone with either lesser or greater character than I had.

Among the planet's most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long, are those Americans who elect, out of vanity, or for supposedly aesthetic reasons, or because of sexual or financial problems, to make a career of expatriation. The fact of surviving abroad year upon year, of trailing spring from Taroudant in January to Taormina to Athens to Paris in June, is, of itself, the justification for superior postures and a sense of exceptional achievement. Indeed, it is an achievement if you have little money or, like most of the American remittance men, "just enough to live on." If you're young enough, it's okay for a couple of years-but those who pursue it after age twenty-five, thirty at the limit, learn that what seemed paradise is mere scenery, a curtain that, lifting, reveals pitchforks and fire.

Yet gradually I was absorbed into this squalid caravan, though it was some while before I recognized what had happened. As summer started and I decided not to return but to try to market my book by mailing it around to different publishers, my head-splitting days began with several Pernods on the terrace of the Deux Magots; after that, I stepped across the boulevard into Brasserie Lipp for choucroute and beer, lots of beer, followed by a siesta in my nice little river-view room in the Hotel Quai Voltaire. The real drinking began around six, when I took a taxi to the Ritz, where I spent the early evening hours cadging martinis at the bar; if I didn't make a connection there, solicit an invitation to dinner from some closet queen or occasionally from two ladies traveling together or perhaps from a naive American couple, then usually I didn't eat. My guess would be that, in a nutritional sense, I consumed less than five hundred calories a day. But booze, particularly the sickening balloons of Calvados I emptied every night in writhing Senegalese cabarets and bent-type bars, like Le Fiacre and Mon Jardin and Madame Arthur's and Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, kept me looking, for all my disintegrating interior, well-filled and sturdy. But despite the waterfall hangovers and constant cascading nausea, I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time, the kind of educational experience necessary to an artist-and it is true that a number of those persons whom I encountered in my carousings cut through the Calvados mists to leave scrawled across my mind permanent signatures.

Which brings us to Kate McCloud. Kate! McCloud! My love, my anguish, my Götterdämmerung, my very own Death in Venice: inevitable, perilous as the asp at Cleopatra's breast.

It was late winter in Paris; I had returned there after spending several unsober months in Tangier, most of them as a habitué of Jay Hazlewood's Le Parade, a swanky little joint operated by a kind and gangling Georgia guy who had made a moderate fortune from dispensing proper martinis and jumbo hamburgers to homesick Americans; he also, for the favored of his foreign clientele, served up the asses of Arab lads and lassies—without charge of course just a courtesy of the house.

One night at the bar at Parade, I met someone who was to influence future events immensely. He had slicked-down blond hair parted in the middle, like a hair-tonic ad published in the twenties; he was trim and freckled and fresh-colored; he had a good smile and healthy teeth, if a few too many of them. He had a pocketful of kitchen matches that he kept lighting with his thumbnail. He was about forty, an American, but with one of those off-center accents that happen to people who are used to speaking a number of languages: it's not an affectation but rather more like an indefinable speech defect. He bought me a couple of drinks, we rolled some dice; later I asked Jay Hazlewood about him.

"Nobody," said Jay in his deceptive red-clay drawl. "His name is Aces Nelson."

"But what does he do?"

Jay said, and said it so solemnly: "He's a friend of the rich."

"And that's all?"

"All? Shit!" said Jay Hazlewood. "Being a friend of the rich, making a living out of it, one day of that is harder than a month's worth of twenty niggers working on a chain gang."

"But bow does he make a living out of it?"

Hazlewood widened one eye, squinted the other—a Dixie horse trader—but I wasn't joshing him: I really didn't understand.

"Look," he said, "there are a lot of pilot fish like Aces Nelson. There's nothing special about him. Except that he's a little cuter than most of them. Aces is okay. Comparatively. He hits Tangier two, three times a year, always on someone's yacht; he spends every summer moving from one yacht to another—the Gaviota, the Siesta, the Cbristina, the SisterAnne, the Creole, you name it. The rest of the year he's up in the Alps-St. Moritz or Gstaad. Or the West Indies. Antigua. Lyford Cay. With stopovers in Paris, New York, Beverly Hills, Grosse Pointe. But wherever he is, he's always doing the same thing. He's sweating for his supper. By playing games—from lunch till lights-out. Bridge. Gin. Cutthroat. Old Maid, Backgammon. Beaming. Flashing his capped teeth. Keeping the Geritols happy in their oceangoing salons. That's how he makes his walking-around money. The rest of it comes from pumping broads of various ages and hungers—rich quim with husbands that don't give a damn who does them as long as they don't have to."

Jay Hazlewood never smoked: a true son of the Georgia hills, he chewed plug tobacco. Now he spouted a brown stream into his special private spittoon. "Hard work? I know. I've damn near fucked cobras. That's how I got the pesetas to open this bar. But I was doing it for myself. To make something of me. Aces, he's lost in the life. Right now he's here with Bab's bunch."

Tangier is a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a Mountainside facing the Bay of Gibraltar. One descends from the top of the mountain, through a middle-class suburb sprinkled with ugly Mediterranean villas, to the «modern» town, a broiling miasma of overly wide boulevards, cement-colored high-rises, to the sleaky maze of the sea-coasted Casbah. Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the essential risks have been removed.

At that time, the five reigning queens of the Casbah were two Englishmen and three American women. Eugenia Bankhead was among the females-a woman as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor. And Jane Bowles, that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf. Author of a sinisterly marvelous novel, Two Serious Ladies, and of a single play, In the Summer House, of which the same description could be given, the late Mrs. Bowles lived in an infinitesimal Casbah house, a dwelling so small-scaled and low-ceilinged that one had almost to crawl from room to room; she lived there with her Moorish lover, the famous Cherifa, a rough old peasant woman who was the empress of herbs and rare spices at the largest of Tangier's open-air bazaars-an abrasive personality only a genius as witty and dedicated to extreme oddity as Mrs. Bowles could have abided. ("But," said Jane with a cherubic laugh, "I do love Cherifa. Cherifa doesn't love me. How could she? A writer? A crippled Jewish girl from Ohio? All she thinks about is money. My money. What little there is. And the house. And how to get the house. She tries very seriously to poison me at least every six months. And don't imagine I'm being paranoid. It's quite true.")

Mrs. Bowles' dollhouse was the reverse of the walled palace that belonged to the neighborhood's third genetically authentic queen, dime-store maharani Barbara Hutton-the Ma Barker of Bab's bunch, to quote Jay Hazlewood. Miss Hutton, with an entourage of temporary husbands, momentary lovers and others of unspecified (if any) occupation, usually reigned in her Moroccan mansion a month or so each year. Fragile, terrified, she rarely voyaged beyond its walls; exceedingly few locals were invited inside them. A wandering waif-Madrid today, Mexico tomorrow-Miss Hutton never traveled; she merely crossed frontiers, carting forty trunks and her insular ambiente with her.

"Hey there! How'd you like to go to a party?" Aces Nelson; he was calling to me from a café terrace in the Petit Socco, a Casbah piazza and great hubble-bubbling alfresco salon from noon to noon; it was past midnight now.

"Look," said Aces, who wasn't high on anything but his own high spirits; in fact, he was drinking the Arabé. "I have a present for you." And he juggled in his hands a wiggling plump-stomached bitch puppy, an Afro-haired pickaninny with white rings circling both her big scared eyes—like a panda, some sort of ghetto panda. Aces said: "I bought her five minutes ago from a Spanish sailor. He was just walking past with this funny thing stuffed in the pocket of his pea jacket. Head flopping out. And I saw these lovely eyes. And these lovely ears—see, one drooping, the other perked up. I inquired, and he said his sister had sent him to sell it to Mr. Wu, the Chinaman who eats roasted dogs. So I offered a hundred pesetas; and here we are." Aces thrust the little dog at me, like a Calcutta beggar woman proffering an afflicted infant. "I didn't realize why I bought her until I saw you. Sauntering into the Socco. Mr…. Jones? Have I got that right? Here, Mr. Jones, take her. You need each other."

Dogs, cats, kids, I had never had anything dependent upon me; it was too time-consuming a chore just changing my own diapers. So I said: "Forget it. Give her to the Chinaman."

Aces leveled at me a gambler's gaze. He set the puppy on the center of the café table, where she stood a moment, trembling traumatically, then squatted to pee. Aces! You son of a bitch. The nuns. The bluffs above St. Louis. I picked her up and wrapped her in a Lanvin scarf Denny Fouts had given me long ago and held her close. She stopped trembling. She sniffed, sighed, slumbered.

Aces said: "And what are you going to name her?"

"Mutt."

"Oh? Since I brought you together, the least you might do is call her Aces."

"Mutt. Like her. Like you. Like me. Mutt."

He laughed. "Alors. But I promised you a party, Jones. Mrs. Cary Grant is minding the store tonight. It'll be a bore. But still."

Aces, at least behind her back, always referred to the Huttontot (a Winchell coinage) as Mrs. Cary Grant: "Out of respect, really. He was the only one of her husbands worthy of the name. He adored her; but she had to leave him: she can't trust or understand any geezer if he isn't after le loot."

A seven-foot Senegalese in a crimson turban and a white jellaba opened iron gates; one entered a garden where Judas trees blossomed in lantern light and the mesmeric scent of tuberoses embroidered the air. We passed into a room palely alive with light filtered through ivory filigree screens. Brocaded banquettes, piled with brocaded pillows of a silken lemon and silver and scarlet luxury, lined the walls. And there were beautiful brass tables shiny with candles and sweating champagne buckets; the floors, thick with overlapping layers of rugs from the weavers of Fez and Marrakech, were like strange lakes of ancient, intricate color.

The guests were few and all subdued, as though waiting for the hostess to retire before tossing themselves into an exuberant freedom-the repression attendant upon courtiers waiting for the royals to recede.

The hostess, wearing a green sari and a chain of dark emeralds, observed in persons long imprisoned and, like her emeralds, a mineralized remoteness. Her eyesight, what she chose to see, was eerily selective: she saw me, but she never noticed the dog I was carrying.

"Oh, Aces dear," she said in a wan small voice. "What have you found now?"

"This is Mr. Jones. P. B. Jones, I believe."

"And you are a poet, Mr. Jones. Because I am a poet. And I can always tell."

And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty—a prettiness marred by her seeming to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain. I remembered reading in some Sunday supplement that as a young woman she had been plump, a wallflower butterball, and that, at the suggestion of a diet faddist, she had swallowed a tapeworm or two; and now one wondered, because of the starved starkness, her feathery flimsiness, if those worms were not still gross tenants who accounted for half her present weight. Obviously she had somewhat read my mind: "Isn't it silly. I'm so thin, I'm too weak to walk. I have to be carried everywhere. Truly, I'd like to read your poetry."

"I'm not a poet. I'm a masseur."

She winced. "Bruises. A leaf drops and I'm blue."

Aces said: "You told me you were a writer."

"Well, I am. Was. Sort of. But it seems I'm a better masseur than a writer."

Mrs. Hutton consulted Aces; it was as if they were whispering with their eyes.

She said: "Perhaps he could help Kate."

He said, addressing me: "Are you free to travel?"

"Possibly. I don't seem to do much else."

"When could you meet me in Paris?" he asked, brisk now, a businessman.

"Tomorrow."

"No. Next week. Thursday. Ritz bar. Rue Cambon side. One-fifteen."

The heiress sighed into the banquette's goose-stuffed brocades. "Poor boy," she said, and tapped curving, slavishly lacquered apricot nails against a champagne glass, a signal for the Senegalese servant to lift her, lift her away up blue-tiled stairs to firelit chambets where Morpheus, always a mischief-maker to the frantic, the insulted, but especially to the rich and powerful, joyfully awaited a game of hide-and-seek.

I sold a sapphire ring, also a gift from Denny Fouts, who in turn had received it as a birthday present from his Grecian prince, to Dean, the mulatto proprietor of Dean's Bar, the principal rival of Le Parade for the colony's haute monde trade. It was a giveaway, but it flew me to Paris, and Mutt, too—Mutt stuffed into an Air France travel bag.

On Thursday, at one-fifteen precisely, I walked into the Ritz bar still toting Mutt in her canvas satchel, for she had refused to remain behind in the cheap hotel room we had moved into on the rue du Bac. Aces Nelson, slick-haired and gleamingly good-humored, was waiting for us at a corner table.

He patted the dog and said: "Well. I'm surprised. I didn't really think you'd show up."

All I said was: "This had better be good."

Georges, the head bartender at the Ritz, is a daiquiri specialist. I ordered a double daiquiri, so did Aces, and while they were being concocted, Aces asked: "What do you know about Kate McCloud?"

I shrugged. "Just what I read in the junk papers. Very handy with a rifle. Isn't she the one who shot a white leopard?"

"No," he said thoughtfully. "She was on safari in India, and she shot a man for killing a white leopard—not fatally, fortunately."

The drinks appeared, and we drank them without another word between us, except Mutt's intermittent yaps. A good daiquiri is smoothly tart and slightly sweet; a bad one is a vial of acid. Georges knew the difference. So we ordered another, and Aces said: "Kate has an apartment here in the hotel, and after we've talked I want you to meet her. She's expecting us. But first I want to tell you about her. Would you like a sandwich?"

We ordered plain chicken sandwiches, the only variety available in the Ritz bar, Cambon side. Aces said: "I had a roommate at Choate—Harry McCloud. His mother was an Otis from Baltimore, and his father owned a lot of Virginia—specifically, he owned a big spread in Middleburg, where he bred hunting horses.

Harry was very intense, a very competitive and jealous guy. But anybody as rich as he was, and as good-looking, athletic—you don't hear many complaints. Everybody took him for a regular guy, except for this one strange thing—whenever the guys started bullshitting about sex, girls they'd laid, wanted to lay, all that stuff, well, Harry kept his mouth shut. The whole two years we roomed together he never had a date, never mentioned a girl. Some of the guys said maybe Harry's queer. But I just knew that wasn't the case. It was a real mystery. Finally, the week before graduation, we got loaded on a bunch of beer—ah, sweet seventeen—and I asked if all his family were coming for the graduation, and he said: 'My brother is. And Mom and Dad.' Then I said: 'What about your girl friend? But I forgot. You don't have a girl friend.' He looked at me for the longest while, as if he were trying to decide whether to hit me or ignore me. At last he smiled; it was the fiercest smile I ever saw on a human face. I can't explain, but it stunned me; it made me want to cry. 'Yes. I have a girl friend. Nobody knows it. Not her folks, not mine. But we've been engaged for three years. The day I'm twenty-one I'm going to marry her. I'll be eighteen in July, and I'd marry her then. But I can't. She's only twelve years old.'

"Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller; I felt Harry would turn against me for having coaxed, or shall I say permitted, his confession. But once started, there was no surcease. He was incoherent, the incoherency of the obsessed: the girl's father, a Mr. Mooney, was an Irish immigrant, a real bog rat from County Kildare, the hand groom at the McClouds' Middleburg farm. The girl, that's Kate, was one of five children, all girls, and all eyesores. Except for the youngest, Kate. 'The first time I saw her—well, noticed her—she was six, seven. All the Mooney kids had red hair. But her hair. Even all scissored up. Like a tomboy. She was a great rider. She could urge a horse into jumps that made your heart thump. And she had green eyes. Not just green. I can't explain it.'

"The senior McClouds had two sons, Harry and a younger boy, Wynn. But they had always wanted a daughter, and gradually, without any resistance from the girl's family, they had absorbed Kate into the main household. Mrs. McCloud was an educated woman, a linguist, musician, a collector. She tutored Kate in French and German and taught her piano. More importantly, she took all the ain'ts and Irish out of Kate's vocabulary. Mrs. McCloud dressed her, and on European holidays Kate traveled with the family. 'I've never loved anyone else.' That's what Harry said. 'Three years ago I asked her to marry me, and she promised she would never marry anyone else. I gave her a diamond ring. I stole it from my grandmother's jewel case. My grandmother decided she had lost it. She even claimed the insurance. Kate keeps the ring hidden in a trunk.'»

When the sandwiches arrived, Aces pushed his aside in favor of a cigarette. I ate half of mine and fed the rest to Mutt.

"And sure enough, four years later, Harry McCloud married this extraordinary girl, scarcely sixteen. I went to the wedding—it was at the Episcopal church in Middleburg-and the first time I saw the bride was when she came down the aisle on the arm of her little bog-rat dad. The truth is she was some kind of freak. The grace, the bearing, the authority: whatever her age, she was simply a superb actress. Are you a Raymond Chandler fan, Jones? Oh, good. Good. I think he's a great artist. The point is, Kate Mooney reminded me of one of those mysterious enigmatic rich-girl Raymond Chandler heroines. Oh, but with a lot more class. Anyway, Chandler wrote about one of his heroines: 'There are blondes, and then there are blondes.' So true; but it's even truer about redheads. There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it's the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin-it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby—or a flawed one, for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow. And the only redhead I've ever seen with a complexion to compare with hers was Pamela Churchill's. But then, Pam is English, she grew up saturated with dewy English mists, something every dermatologist ought to bottle. And Harry McCloud was quite right about her eyes. Mostly it's a myth. Usually they are grey, grey-blue with green inner flickerings. Once, in Brazil, I met on the beach a light-skinned colored boy with eyes as slightly slanted and green as Kate's. Like Mrs. Grant's emeralds.

"She was perfect. Harry worshiped her; so did his parents. But they had overlooked one small factor-she was shrewd, she could outthink any of them, and she was planning far beyond the McClouds. I recognized that at once. I belong to the same breed, though I can't pretend to have one-tenth Kate's intelligence.'"

Aces fished in his jacket pocket for a kitchen match; snapping it against his thumbnail, he ignited another cigarette.

"No," Aces said, responding to an unasked question. "They never had any children. Years passed, and I had cards from them every Christmas, usually a picture of Kate smartly saddled for some hunt-Harry holding the reins, bugle in hand. Bubber Hayden, a guy we'd known at Choate, turned up at one of those chatty little Joe Alsop Georgetown dinners; I knew he lived in Middleburg, so I asked him about the McClouds. Bubber said: 'She divorced him-she's gone abroad to live, I believe some three months ago. It's a terrible story, and I don't know a quarter of it. I do know the McClouds have Harry tucked away in one of those comfy little Connecticut retreats with guarded gates and strong bars at the windows.'

"I must have had that conversation in early August. I called Harry's mother-she was at the yearling sales in Saratoga-and I asked about Harry; I said I wanted to visit him, and she said no, that wasn't possible, and she began to cry and said she was sorry and hung up.

"Now, it happens that I was going to St. Moritz for Christmas; on the way I stopped off in Paris and called up Tutti Rouxjean, who had worked for years as vendeuse for Balenciaga. I invited her to lunch, and she said yes, but we would have to go to Maxim's. I said couldn't we meet at some quiet bistro, and she said no, we had to go to Maxim's. 'It's important. You'll see why.'

"Tutti had reserved a table in the front room, and after we'd had a glass of white wine she indicated a nearby unoccupied table rather ostentatiously set for one. 'Wait,' said Tutti. 'In a moment the most beautiful young woman will be sitting at that table, quite alone. Cristobal has been dressing her for the last six months. He thinks there has never been anything like her since Gloria Rubio.' (Note: Mme. Rubio, a supremely elegant Mexican who has been known in various stages of her marital assignments as the wife of the German Count von Fürstenberg, the Egyptian Prince Fakri, and the English millionaire Loel Guinness.) 'Le tout Paris talks about her and yet no one knows much about her. Except that she's American. And that she lunches here every day. Always alone. She seems to have no friends. Ah, see. There she is.'

"Unlike any other woman in the room, she wore a hat. It was a glamorous soft-brimmed black hat, large, shaped like a man's Borsalino. A grey chiffon scarf was loosely knotted at her throat. The hat, the scarf, that was the drama; the rest was the plainest, but best-fitted, of Balenciaga's box-jacketed black bombazine suits.

"Tutti said: 'She's from the South somewhere. Her name is Mrs. McCloud.'

"'Mrs. Harry Clinton McCloud?'

"Tutti said: 'You know her?'

"And I said: 'I ought to. I was an usher at her wedding. Fantastic. Why, my God, she can't be more than twenty-two.'

"I asked a waiter for paper and wrote her a note: 'Dear Kate, I don't know if you remember me, but I was a roommate of Harry's at school and an usher at your wedding. I am in Paris for a few days and would like so much to see you, if you care to. I am at the Hotel Lotti. Aces Nelson.'

"I watched her read the note, glance at me, smile, then write a reply: 'I do remember. If, on your way out, we might talk a minute alone, please have a Cognac with me. Most sincerely, Kate McCloud.'

"Tutti was too fascinated to be offended by her exclusion from the invitation: 'I won't press you now, but promise me, Aces, you'll tell me about her. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I thought she was at least thirty. Because of her "eye"-the real knowledge, taste. She's just one of those ageless creatures, I suppose.'

"And so, after Tutti had departed, I joined Kate at her solitary table, seated myself beside her on the red banquette, and to my surprise she kissed me on the cheek. I blushed with shock and pleasure, and Kate laughed—oh, what a laugh she has; it always makes me think of a brandy glass shining in the firelight—she laughed and said: 'Why not? It's been a long time since I've kissed a man. Or spoken to anyone who wasn't a waiter or chambermaid or a shopkeeper. I do a great deal of shopping. I've bought enough stuff to furnish Versailles.' I asked how long she had been in Paris and where she was living and what her life was like in general. And she said she was at the Ritz, she'd been in Paris almost a year: 'And as for my day-to-day affairs—I shop, I go for fittings, I go to all the museums and galleries, I ride to the Bois, I read, I sleep a helluva lot, and I have lunch here every day at this same table: not very imaginative of me, but it is a pleasant walk from the hotel, and there are not too many agreeable restaurants where a young woman can lunch alone without seeming somewhat suspicious. Even the owner here, Monsieur Vaudable—I think at first he imagined I must be some kind of courtesan.' And I said: 'But it must be such a lonely life. Don't you want to see people? Do something different?'

"She said: 'Yes. I'd like to have a different kind of liqueur with my coffee. Something I've never heard of. Any suggestions?'

"So I described Verveine; I thought of it because it is the identical green of her eyes. It's made out of a million-odd mountain herbs; I've never found it anywhere outside France and damn few places here. Delicious; but with a kick like bad moonshine. So we had a couple of Verveines, and Kate said: 'Yes, indeed. That certainly is different. And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be… well, not bored, but tempted: afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself. Everybody wanted me to go to a hospital; and I would have done anything to please Harry's mother, but I knew I could never live again, be tempted, until I'd tried to do it unaided by anyone but myself.'

"Suddenly I said: 'Are you a good skier?' And she said: 'I might have been. But Harry was always dragging me to this horrible place in Canada. Gray Rocks. Thirty below zero. He loved it because everybody was so ugly. Aces, this drink is a marvelous discovery. I feel a decided thawing in my veins.'

"Then I said: 'How would you like to spend Christmas with me in St. Moritz?' And she wanted to know: 'Is that a platonic invitation?' I crossed my heart. 'We'll stay at the Palace. On floors as far apart as you like.' She laughed and said: 'The answer is yes. But only if you'll buy me another Verveine.'

"That was six years ago—Lord, all the blood that's flowed under the bridge since then. But that first Christmas in St. Moritz! Really, the young Mrs. McCloud from Middleburg, Virginia, was one of the most important things that had happened in Switzerland since Hannibal crossed the Alps.

"In any event, she was a fabulous skier—as good as Doris Brynner or Eugénie Niarchos or Marella Agnelli: Kate and Eugénie and Marella became Bobbsey triplets. They used to helicopter up to the Corviglia Club every morning and have lunch and ski down in the afternoon. People loved her. The Greeks. The Persians. The Krauts. The Spaghettis. At every dinner party, the Shah invariably asked to have her at his table. And it wasn't just men—women, even the great rival young beauties like Fiona Thyssen and Dolores Guinness reacted warmly, I think because Kate's attitude was so carefully correct: she never flirted, and when she went to parties she went with me and left with me. A few idiots thought it was a romance, but the cleverer ones said, and rightly so, that a swan of Kate's feather would never bother with a backgammon bum like Aces Nelson.

"And anyway, I didn't aspire to be her lover. But a friend; a brother, perhaps. We used to go for snowy walks in the white forests around St. Moritz. She often talked about the McClouds and how good they'd been to her and to her sisters, the homely Mooney girls. But she avoided Harry's name, and when she did speak of him the references were casual, though bitter-tinted—until one afternoon, as we were strolling around the frozen lake beneath the palace, a passing sled horse slipped on the ice and fell and broke its front legs.

"Kate screamed. A scream you could have heard the length of the valley. She started to run, and ran straight into another sled that was rounding the corner. She wasn't physically wounded, but she went into a hysterical coma-she was virtually unconscious until we got her to the hotel. Mr. Badrutt had a doctor waiting. The doctor gave her an injection that seemed to start her heart again, refocus her eyes. He wanted to order a nurse, but I said no, I would stay with her. So we put her to bed, and he gave her another piqûre, one that totally erased all trace of terror; and it was then I realized that swimming below the soigné surface, there had always been a fearful, drowning child.

"I lowered the lights, and she said please don't leave me, and I said I'm not leaving, I'm going to sit here, and she said no, I want you to lie down here beside me on the bed, so I did, and we held hands and she said: 'I'm sorry. It was because of the horse. The one that fell on the ice. I'd always wanted a palomino, and Mrs. McCloud gave me one on my birthday two years ago, a mare—such a great hunter, so brave-hearted; we had such fun together. Naturally, Harry hated her; it was all part of his crazy-man jealousy, the way he'd felt toward me since we were children. Once, the summer after we were married, he tore up a flower garden I'd planted; at first he said it was a fox, but then he admitted he had done it: he said the garden took up too much of my attention. And that was why he didn't want me to have a baby; his mother was always bringing up the subject, and one Sunday at dinner, right in front of the whole family, he shouted at her: "Do you want a black grandchild? Or don't you people know about Kate? She fucks niggers. She goes out in the fields and lies down and fucks niggers." He went to law school at Washington and Lee and flunked out because he couldn't concentrate unless he had me under surveillance; he opened and read all my letters even before I had a chance to see them; he monitored all my telephone calls: you could always hear him slightly breathing at the other end of the line. We'd long since stopped being invited to parties; we couldn't even go to the country club—drunk or sober, Harry was ready to throw a punch, usually at some man who had asked me to dance more than once. The worst of it—he was convinced that I was having an affair with his father and with his brother, Wynn.

A hundred nights he shook me and woke me up, holding a knife at my throat-and he'd say: "Don't lie to me, you slut, you whore, on nigger-fucker. Admit it, or I'll cut your throat from ear to ear. I'll slice your head off. Tell the truth. Wynn's a real stud, the best you've ever had, and Dad, too, he's a great stallion." We'd lie like that for hours, Aces—that cold knife at my throat. Mrs. McCloud, everybody, knew about it; but Mrs. McCloud would cry and beg me not to leave, she was so sure Harry would kill himself if I did. Then the thing happened about my palomino, Nanny. Even Mrs. McCloud had to open her eyes to the real extent of Harry's insanity-this insane jealousy. Because what Harry did was, he went down to the stable and he broke all of Nanny's legs with a crowbar. Even Mrs. McCloud saw it was useless, that Harry would kill me sooner or later; she chartered a plane and we flew out to Sun Valley, where she stayed with me the whole while it took to get an Idaho divorce. A wonderful woman; I called her Christmas Day, and she was happy I was in St. Moritz and going out and seeing people: she wanted to know if I'd met any interesting men. As if I'd ever marry again!'

"But you know," said Aces, "she did marry. And less than a month later."

Yes: I was remembering a mass of magazine covers at Paris kiosks: Der Stern, Paris Match, Elle. "Of course. She married…?"

"Axel Jaeger. The richest man in Germany."

"And she has since divorced Herr Jaeger?"

"Not exactly. That's one of the reasons I wanted you to meet her. She's in considerable danger. She needs protection. She also needs a masseur who can travel with her permanently. Someone educated. Presentable."

"I'm not educated."

He shrugged and glanced at his watch. "May I ring her now and say we're on our way up?"

I should have listened to Mutt; she whined, as if warning me. Instead, I let myself be led off to meet Kate McCloud. Kate, for whom I would lie, steal, commit crimes that could have, and still could, put me in prison for life.

A weather change; showers—an enlivening spray dispelling Manhattan's heat-wave stench. Not that anything could ever get rid of the jockstrap and Lysol aromas here at my beloved Y. M. C. A. I slept till noon, then called The Self Service to cancel a six P. M. booking they had made for me with some john staying at the Yale Club. But the sun-kissed bitch, the golden Butch, said: "Are you gaga? This is a C-note gig. A Benjy Franklin with no problems." When I still demurred ("Honest, Butch, I've got a blue-balls headache"), he put Miss Self herself on the phone, and she gave me a real Buchenwald, Ilse Koch castigation ("Ali, so? You want to work? You don't want? Dilettantes we don't need!").

Okay, okay. I showered, shaved, and arrived at the Yale Club with a button-down collar, clipped hair, discreet, not fat, not femme, aged between thirty and forty, fairly well-hung and well-mannered: just what the john had ordered.

He seemed pleased with me; and it was no hassle—a reclining labor, shuttered eyes, occasionally a spurious appreciative grunt as one fantasized toward the obligatory spasm ("Don't hold back. Let me have it").

The "patron," to use Miss Self's terminology, was hearty, balding, hard as a walnut, a man in his middle sixties, married, with five children and eighteen grandchildren. A widower, he had married his secretary, someone twenty years younger, perhaps a decade ago. He was a retired insurance executive who owned a farm near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he bred cattle, and, as a hobby, «unusual» roses. He told me all this while I was dressing. I liked him, and what I liked most was that he didn't ask me a single question about myself. As I was leaving, he gave me his card (unique for the anonymity-aware Self Service clients) and said if I ever felt like dusting the city off my heels to ring him up: I was welcome to vacation at Appleton Farms. His name was Roger W. Appleton, and Mrs. Appleton, he informed me with a pleasant, entirely unvulgar wink, was an understanding woman: "Alice is a fine person. But restless. She reads a lot." By which I understood that he was suggesting a threesome. We shook hands—his handshake was so muscular my knuckles were numb a solid minute—and I promised I'd think about it. Hell, it was something to consider: meandering cattle, green meadows, roses, the absence of…

All this! Snores. Soiled breathings. Asphyxiation. The lugubrious slapslap of searching feet. On my way "home," ha ha, I bought a pint of clearance-sale gin—the kind of raw ambrosia that would gag a slew of skid-row throats. I killed half of it in two gulps, then began to nod, began to remember Denny Fouts and to wish I could dash downstairs and find a bus, the Magic Mushroom Express, a chartered torpedo that would rocket me to the end of the line, zoom me all the way to that halycon discotheque: Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café.

Stop. You're pissed, P. B. You're a loser, an asshole dumb drunk loser, P. B. Jones. So good night. Good night, Walter Winchell—in whatever hell you're baking. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea—in whatever sea you're sinking. And a very special good night to that wise philosopher Florie Rotondo, age eight. Florie—and I mean this, honey—I hope you never reached the interior of the planet Earth, never discovered uranium, rubies, and Unspoiled Monsters. With all my heart, what there is of it, I hope you moved to the country and lived there happily ever after.