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 want 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 fish-hound 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 naïve 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 how 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 Christina, the Sister Anne, 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.