THAT SUMMER MARTIN AND I WENT to stay with Serena in Polly’s castle in Italy. About fifty miles north of Rome, Rocca Sinibalda had belonged to Polly’s extraordinary mother, Caresse Crosby, who had converted it into an “artist’s colony” (like many rebellious Americans with generous trust funds who fled to Europe between the wars, Caresse had been mad about artists), and now that her mother was dead, it was Polly’s. Actually “extraordinary” does not even begin to do justice to the wild decadence—and ultimate tragedy—of Harry and Caresse Crosby’s life together. They had both been born into haute Boston society—van Rensselaers, Lowells, Peabodys—but when they fell in love they knew it was their destiny to run away, to leave behind that repressed, dreary, philistine world forever.
Paris was where they belonged. What did it matter that Caresse was already married with two children, and that their families were horrified? In Paris, Harry would be liberated, and his true genius as a poet would finally be realized. They would live in a hôtel particulier on the rue de l’Université, with their whippets, Narcisse and Clytorisse, where they would entertain other artists of his caliber, like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound. They might even start a small press and publish their new friends’ work on handwoven paper, with special inks from Japan and illustrations by Cocteau or perhaps Picasso. It was pure madness. And yet some part of the dream came true. The Black Sun Press did publish all those writers and artists (as well as Proust), the books were exquisite, and the Crosbys’ parties were legendary. The genius thing was less easily acquired—no matter how impressive the account at J. P. Morgan.
Although Harry was serious about his poetry, and knew that a great talent should never be squandered, there were just too many distractions—the bar at the Ritz, cocaine, a pretty girl walking down the rue de Rivoli, opium, an impromptu expedition to Venice, absinthe. Like Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he believed it was imperative to give in to temptation, otherwise an artistic soul would surely atrophy for lack of stimulation. Happily that was never Harry’s problem. The opium was supposed to unleash his imagination—just as it had done for Coleridge and Baudelaire—but as De Quincey pointed out, “If a man whose talk is of oxen, should become an opium eater, the probability is that (if he’s not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream of oxen.” Harry’s dreams and poetry unfortunately never transcended their mad but still oxlike nature. Yet when it came to a night out on the town, there was nobody more inspiring than Harry Crosby. Every summer in Paris, when the art schools packed up for the year, the students and anybody else who was around would celebrate at a huge, bacchanalian party called the Four Arts Ball. In 1926 the theme was the Inca, and Harry came up with one of his typically brilliant ideas. He rubbed red ocher all over his body and, dressed only in a loincloth, wearing three dead pigeons around his neck, he set off with his beautiful wife, Caresse—topless, in a turquoise wig—for the ball.
In 1929 Harry—comparing himself to Icarus—took up flying, which rather satisfyingly combined his twin obsessions with death and the sun. He was punishing his body with oxlike quantities of drugs and alcohol, his fragile grasp on reality became increasingly frayed, and his lifelong fixation with suicide began to take over. He started to look around for a woman who loved him enough to follow him to “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” He found her in the newly married Josephine Bigelow. (Caresse had already declined to jump from the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York with him.) The day after his wife’s refusal he received a note from his mistress, which ended with the words “Death is our marriage.” On December 10 he borrowed a friend’s apartment in the Hotel des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street, where he shot Josephine and then—a couple of hours later—turned the gun on himself. The revolver had a golden sun engraved on its handle.
Devastated, Caresse published various posthumous editions of Harry’s oeuvre and eventually moved to Italy, where she died forty-one years later. Which is how Martin and I came to be in a pinball arcade in Rome in the summer of 1970. Unencumbered by anything as dull as a guidebook, or a single word of Italian, or any desire to waste our time gawking at Roman ruins or the Vatican, we headed straight for the Eternal City’s tawdry underbelly. Billiards, pinball, cocktails, bar football—what more could we have asked of the one day we had in Rome? Enchanted by our degeneracy—it felt like going to a dirty movie on a sunny day—I eagerly followed my guide into this exciting new world. The improbable combination of dazzling intellect and a profound nostalgie de la boue—he could have been Harry Crosby, but with more brains and less craziness—has always been one of Martin’s most endearing, and enduring, characteristics. And one that I quite naturally found irresistible.
Rocca Sinibalda—the setting for Martin’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, in which the hero, Keith (Martin), spends the summer with his pots-and-pans girlfriend, Lily (me), “34-24-34,” and, quite understandably, lusts after her tall and lubricious friend Scheherazade, “37-23-33” (Serena)—grew straight up out of the rock like some monstrous medieval prison. This is how he describes it:
So here was the castle, its battlements kept aloft on the shoulders of the four fat-girthed giants, the four towers, the four terraces, the circular ballroom (with its orbital staircase), the domed pentagonal library, the salon with its six sets of windows, the baronial banqueting hall at the far end of the implausibly and impractically long corridor from the barnyard-sized kitchen, all the antechambers which receded, like facing mirrors, into a repetitive infinity. Above was the apartment (where Oona [Polly] spent almost all her time); below was the dungeon floor, half submerged in the foundational soil, and giving off the thinnest mist of what smelled to Keith like cold sweat.
Way, way down below, the village curled around the base of its massive windowless walls, and the only approach was up a steep, narrow ramp that really should have had a rusty portcullis at the top, but didn’t. The gate opened onto a cobbled courtyard, with four Rapunzel towers, and in the main building, an endless enfilade of enormous frescoed rooms culminated in a terrace that jutted out, like the prow of a ship, where we would sit at dusk and watch the swallows swirling around in the sky beneath us. When Caresse had bought the castle it apparently came complete with a title—Principessa—and staying there, I kept thinking of my mother’s favorite line in the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”—“the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.” “Jesus Christ, no wonder the English can’t escape their goddamn class system, if they sing songs like that.” Yet she herself had never been averse to the odd weekend in a castle. It was extremely confusing. So much simpler to be like Polly, who knew precisely on which side of the moat she belonged. But since Martin and I would soon be huddled within the all-too-genuine peasant walls of La Migoua, surely a girl was allowed a few days of innocent fun in this palatial citadel?
A few days stretched into more than a week, and then it was back to Rome for more pinball before catching a creaky, sweaty train for Toulon. At La Migoua, instead of our romantic bedroom in one of the Rapunzel towers, Martin and I occupied a corner of Freddie’s study. The ground-floor window gave us a panoramic view of Francette’s terrace, where she took her breakfast—coffee, Gauloise, and lots of shouting at Sorgue—and the plywood door, which had never closed properly, was all that separated us from the raucous early-morning and late-night chaos of the kitchen. Never lazy when it came to his work, Freddie would read Nick a rousing chapter of Lucky Luke—“Dad, I told you to talk in English”—around seven, and then liked to be at his desk tackling the foundations of empirical knowledge no later than eight thirty. Sexy, semi-somnolent lingering in bed was not an option. In any case we had to get ready to go to Bikini Beach.
At Rocca Sinibalda we had been a long way from the Mediterranean, so the question of Martin’s seaside wardrobe had not arisen. Used to seeing him in his ubiquitous velvet “strides,” diaphanous shirts, and snakeskin boots—or naked—I had never really thought what he’d wear while lounging on one of Monsieur Maurice’s blue-and-white-striped “mistresses.” Since it was much too hot for velvet and Martin was way too cool for sneakers, here’s what he came up with: snug little pale blue shorts, a chiffon flower-patterned shirt, unbuttoned, and the snakeskin boots, unzipped and flapping about to let the breezes in. Heaven. Apart, that is, from the boiling, red Mount Etna of a “big boy” (as he called them) suppurating on the side of his nose; but I can’t imagine that was what set Freddie off. Normally the most mild mannered of men, he exploded when he saw Martin standing in the kitchen: “You cannot possibly go out dressed like that. That is not what one wears to the beach, or anywhere else, for that matter!”
A little odd coming from somebody whose own anything-but-snug pale blue underpants were, at that very moment, extending a good three inches from the top and bottom of his “shorts.” Maybe he was just fed up with us sleeping in his study. Martin ignored the outburst and, declining to debate the Wykeham Professor of Logic on the topic of beachwear, we climbed into the back of the car, along with Nick and his inflatable crocodile, a plastic bag full of buckets and spades, an air mattress, some filthy towels, and the picnic basket.
Even though the French refused to come around to the notion of collecting garbage—the dreaded Bandol dump was still an inescapable part of our lives—they were very good at delivering letters. Every morning, you could hear the postman down in the valley, approaching on his farting motorized bike, and by the time he rounded the corner we would all be out on the terrace hopping about with excitement. Since we had no telephone, letters were our only link to the outside world. (Being French, Francette had, through her connections at la mairie, managed to get a telephone installed in her vertical shed, but we were allowed to use it only in the most extreme emergencies.) That summer I noticed that Freddie was unusually happy to see Monsieur le Facteur, greeting him by name, and he even assumed the role of Monsieur’s assistant, handing out the letters with his very own hands. It was quite touching to watch him wrestle with the intractable elastic bands on the package of mail, and then deliver each envelope to its recipient with a cheery smile on his face. He must have decided that this was the one household task that he could master.
The night after the beach-wardrobe assault, Freddie came up with a new plan of attack and challenged Martin to a game of chess. Dinner was over, the marble kitchen table had been cleared—except for the ashtrays and wine bottles—and the chessboard was brought out. Neither of the players was smiling. They each lit another cigarette, filled their wineglasses, and settled down to plot how best to kill the man on the other side of the table. Did I understand the moves? Of course not. But I could see very clearly what was going on. Freddie reached nervously for his silver chain, the one he twiddled whenever his ferocious concentration went into overdrive, and Martin’s right hand started shaking with an almost imperceptible tremor. Their eyes never left the board. As I bustled about—doing the dishes, emptying ashtrays—the only sounds I heard were an occasional groan, or yelp of victory, and whichever one of them had just lost would say in a perfectly reasonable voice, “I think we should have one more game, don’t you?” How could the winner refuse? And then the whole murderous testosterone-fueled battle would begin all over again. I have no recollection of how many games they played, or which of them walked away triumphant in the end. But I suspect they were both convinced that they had put the arrogant little shit/vain old geezer in his place, and that the vexed question of who was the grand master had been settled in an entirely satisfactory manner.
Thirty years later Martin found himself sitting in a pub called the “Jeremy Bentham,” while his father lay dying in a nearby hospital, and his thoughts naturally turned to Freddie. This is what he wrote about playing chess with him:
A. J. Ayer was the stepfather of my second great love: the dedicatee of my first novel. He used to play chess with me.… And he almost always won. Your only hope was to make it into the endgame with your knights intact. Then you could get him so frazzled by proliferating possibilities that he would disgustedly resign or even throw the whole set in the air.
UNTIL I MET MARTIN I thought that Freddie was the most intellectually—and sexually—competitive man on earth. Apparently I had been mistaken. A bargain-basement shrink might conclude that the sex part is related to the humiliating and terrifying idea that you aren’t—and never will be—attractive enough to persuade anyone to go to bed with you. If this notion gets you in its pernicious grip early enough in life, and then if you wake up one day (I suspect that this either happens quite suddenly—or never) to discover, miraculously, that lots of people want to do just that, is it any wonder that you can get a bit carried away? At least that was what happened to me. And once it did I finally understood that long ladderlike list of ladies’ initials I had discovered on Freddie’s desk so many years before. (As far as I know, Martin’s long ladderlike list is safely locked up inside his head, where such things should remain.)
All of which brings me back to Freddie’s new job as an assistant postman. One evening that summer, I was in the kitchen enjoying a well-deserved glass of rosé while starting on dinner. I hacked the heads off some mackerel we had bought in the market that morning, slit them open, and yanked the slimy entrails out of their silvery bellies. I chopped up garlic, parsley, and fennel; shoved them inside the corpses; sprinkled them with olive oil, sea salt, and pepper, and laid their bodies to rest inside a nice hot oven. I wrapped the fishy remains in some newspaper, took it out to the shed where the hateful dustbins lived, and was about to throw it on top of a pyramid of moldy artichoke leaves, when I stopped. There teetering on the summit were two pieces of blue paper. If I hadn’t been me I would have dumped the mackerel innards, put the lid back, and gotten on with cooking dinner. But I was born evil, so instead I joined the two halves of the paper together and started to read a letter that I should never, ever have picked up. Seemingly written in haste, the words tumbled over one another in their desire to describe the upheaval inside the writer’s heart, and every detail of the lovers’ last meeting. Intimate, thrilling, pornographic, touching—it was the kind of letter you would want to snatch right out of any postman’s hand.
I looked at the signature—a scrawled V. Vanessa. Queen Nefertiti in her Jane Austen muslin dress with the little puff sleeves, whom I had run into that day crossing the quad in New College. Wicked old Freddie, happy old Freddie, clever old Freddie, but old—at sixty—he undoubtedly was. Imagine being in love at that age! Freddie never gave up his lifelong dance of romance with women, which was yet another reason why I loved him so much. And yet, as I tore the letter up and shoved the minuscule bits deep inside the mackerel mess, I did have to wonder what exactly he had learned in MI6. Weren’t you supposed to burn or better still eat incriminating pieces of paper, to prevent the Gestapo’s getting their evil hands on them? And talking of the Gestapo, did Freddie never stop to think about the blitzkrieg from hell that would have been unleashed if his wife, instead of his forgiving stepdaughter, had taken out the garbage that night?
Apparently not. Silly old Freddie. Extremely lucky old Freddie.
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO Oxford that fall, Martin moved with Adam and Kevin, another college friend, into a rose-covered cottage beside a trout-filled stream in a picturesque Cotswold village, about twenty-five miles outside Oxford. He had written to Jane earlier in the year, “The prices are around 12 pounds … I’m sharing with two other boys (I can’t look far enough ahead about Gully) so that’s about 4 pounds each on rent.” We had never talked about my joining them, so I stayed in Saint Hilda’s and went out to the Old Forge on the weekends and any night in the week when I didn’t have an early tutorial in the morning. But quite naturally I dreamed of the day when Martin would finally come to his senses and beg me to come and live with him. (Why is it that when girls fall in love their thoughts—almost inevitably and usually unwisely—become consumed with visions of geraniums on kitchen windowsills and gleaming copper pots and pans?) The house had two big bedrooms upstairs overlooking the garden and the babbling brook, and a small, dark airless one under the stairs. Since Martin and Adam obviously needed to entertain ladies in their rooms and Kevin had no girlfriend, it seemed only fair that he should live in the closet under the stairs. Or at least that’s what happened, and Kevin didn’t argue. In fact Adam no longer had any ladies to entertain because over the summer he had gotten married (how grown-up! well, not very, as it turned out) to a bossy, histrionic, but presumably sexy woman named Angela. It did not take long for the Old Forge to turn into a madhouse.
The insanity culminated in one unforgettable weekend. I guess drugs must have been involved, sex certainly was, and rock and roll was an entirely innocent bystander. It all started on the Friday when Kevin had become a tad agitated after he’d found some girl he was—unrequitedly and unrealistically—in love with in bed with Martin’s best friend, Rob. Here’s how Martin described what Kevin did next in a letter to Jane,
Saturday: prolonged loony behavior (stealing my car for the afternoon, spending all his money) followed by a suicide bid (some sleeping pills) us trying to make him sick and keep him awake, and then an 80 mph dash to the Radcliffe [hospital] with me at the wheel. He seemed to be O.K. and Sunday he returned while only Gully and Angela were here, a scuffle ensued (with Angela) and after this becoming scene she called the police.… He went to the local loony bin (where he has since had a fit) and Angela has gone to the London Clinic.
He went on to add, “I hope Gully can come soon and live here which would be better in every imaginable way.”
So, thanks to Kevin and his opportune fit, my dreams came true and I moved into the madhouse.
ALTHOUGH STILL DEEPLY MIRED in the outrageous doings of my old friends the Tudors and Stuarts, I was allowed some choice when it came to European history, and naturally gravitated toward France and a course taught by Theodore Zeldin, at Saint Antony’s College. How could I ever forget that night in Paris with Raymond Carr when I had stood there, not daring to speak, on that shady terrace between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Professor Zeldin, who had looked just like one of the glass-eyed stuffed owls in the window of Deyrolle et Fils? And now I was being invited to study the social fabric of the Third Republic—so different in every way from the dreary litany of great men that Monsieur le Professeur at the Sorbonne had droned on about—with this paragon.
Between Martin and the Owl, I was the luckiest girl in the whole of Oxford.
In his study at the top of a gloomy Victorian house in north Oxford, Theodore guided us through Swann’s Way, illuminating Proust’s inimitable words with asides on the real people from whom the author had taken the disparate strands that went into the creation of his characters. We looked at photographic portraits by Paul Nadar and thought we detected in Charles Haas’s birdlike features, slightly quizzical expression, and upturned mustache, clues to Swann himself. When Proust wrote of Elstir’s paintings, “The rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were those from which his work was created,” we knew that he must have been thinking of Monet, which took us, in turn, to the impressionists. We saw aspects of Odette, Swann’s mistress, one of the grandest of the grandes horizontales, in Madame de Benardaky, who had been photographed with an extravagant arrangement of ostrich feathers and pearls perched on her head, and plenty more jewels decorating her expansive alabaster poitrine. The subject of mistresses naturally led us to President Félix Faure, who had been lucky enough to expire while entertaining a young lady in his office in the Élysée in 1899. The rumors that flew around Paris claimed she had been giving him a blow job, which allowed Georges Clemenceau, his longtime political opponent, to write, “Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée,” a double entendre that could be translated as, “He wished to be Caesar, but was only Pompey” or, far more wittily, “He wished to be Caesar, but was only pumped.”
Clemenceau hated Faure for many good reasons, but principally for his support of the guilty verdict against Alfred Dreyfus, in that infamous miscarriage of justice in 1895. The Dreyfus Affair allowed us to study anti-Semitism under the Third Republic, which led us to the novels of Émile Zola, who had launched the campaign to reopen the case in 1898, with his incendiary open letter, “J’Accuse … !” The letter was published on the front page of L’Aurore, a newspaper owned by none other than Georges Clemenceau, who also happened to be one of Monet’s closest friends.
Everything was connected and it was all, quite simply, thrilling.
Less thrilling was our life in the madhouse. Martin was in his final year, and if he was going to get a first (which he did; even better, he got a congratulatory first, meaning the examiners skip the questions and just stand up and clap instead) he needed to work. And work extremely hard in a quiet place a long way from the hysterical atmosphere at the Old Loony Bin. Why we felt compelled to escape in the middle of the night, without telling Adam and Angela, I don’t know, but I’m sorry to admit that’s what we did. The plan was to find our own flat in Oxford. While Martin battled Beowulf, and marveled at Marvell, I would bring him perfectly poached eggs on whole-grain toast and fortifying cups of tea, before we retired to our softly lit bedroom for delights that Félix Faure could have imagined only dans ses rêves.
Curiously, over the Christmas vacation Martin stopped calling me. It was so unlike him, what could possibly be wrong? Far too cowardly to pick up the telephone myself, I consulted his friend, Rob, who mumbled and rumbled, telling me nothing, and so I decided—extremely ill advisedly and extremely uninvitedly—to go to the “citadel of riotous solvency” and find out what I should already have known. It was pitch dark when I arrived, cold, windy, raining, sleeting—the weather had thoughtfully gone out of its way to come up with the appropriate gloomy backdrop for my despair. And Martin did the rest. No, it wasn’t some other girl (unless you count Aphra, Jane, and George as my rivals, which of course they were), he just needed to move back into Exeter College and get a first. He didn’t want the eggs, he didn’t want the bacon or tea, and he most certainly didn’t want me. What he did want was to walk into that room and watch those examiners stand up and clap. He wasn’t heartless or cruel, but that was how it had to be.
I couldn’t go on sitting around in his room crying, and I was much too sad and exhausted to get on the train and go home, so I went downstairs in search of comfort. Jane was busy in the kitchen cooking dinner, but not too busy to give me a long hug, a large glass of wine, and a little Byron—“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” Yes! Yes! Had anything truer ever been written in the whole history of love? I sat there nodding and sniffing as she told me all about the first time her heart had been broken. It had mended, been shattered several more times, and now here she was standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing potatoes, married to a man who no longer wanted to make love to her.
The man in question was sitting in his study, dark velvet curtains muffling the sound of rain slashing against the windowpanes, holding a glass of whiskey that was illuminated like stained glass by the cozy glow of the lamp on his desk. Of course he already knew the whole story—“Christ, Dad, what am I going to do? She says she’s getting on a train and will be here in an hour”—having lived through the same scenario himself more times than he cared to recall. I imagined that he might have calmed Martin down with some story from his own past. Who knows, maybe he had even made him laugh? Because Kingsley was incapable of not making you laugh. But with me he didn’t say anything at all, just folded me in his arms, poured me some whiskey, patted my hand, and listened with endless patience. Which was all he could do, and all that I needed.
Dinner passed by in a blur of misery and embarrassment and surprisingly, nobody seemed at all eager to linger at the table. Butter pecan ice cream with hot fudge sauce? Port? Brandy? Coffee? There were no takers. I suppose I must have helped Jane wash up as best I could, and then, horrifyingly, it was time for bed. Where all Martin longed for was the oblivion of sleep and an end to the nightmare. And you might have thought I would have felt the same way. But oh no, I had an entirely different plan in mind for how we might best pass the hours until dawn. It involved a great deal more talking, not acrimonious of course, just deeply emotional, combined with stroking and kissing, which would culminate in the most profound act of lovemaking that either of us had ever experienced in our entire lives. But even I realized that this was probably a long shot, and I was prepared to compromise and settle for an all-night session of cuddling, a long heartfelt conversation, and a few totally innocent kisses. As soon as we got into bed it became clear that not a single part of either of these scenarios was ever going to happen.
Where was the man who was going to put his arms around me and kiss my tears away? Martin was not a candidate. He had been banished from my life. Forever. (History had already been rewritten, and I was now the one doing the banishing.) I was never, ever going to see, or speak to him again. But what about dear Kingsley? He had always liked me, he had been so kind to me that evening, and personally I had absolutely nothing against (extremely) older men. What if I slipped into his side of the bed? Even with my diminished sanity I knew that was nuts.
Which left Monkey.
Colin—always called “Monkey”—was Jane’s funny, sweet, handsome brother, who, along with their considerably less appealing mother, was a permanent fixture in the Amis ménage. Monkey did something complicated with electronics and hi-fis, was rather partial to the tanning bed, and with his absurd good looks was a huge hit with everyone. He was also one of my favorite men in the entire world, and I’d always liked to think that this affection was reciprocated. Monkey had a big heart—you had only to look into his beautiful eyes to see that—and I knew he would understand what I was going through. So I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around me, tiptoed across the passage and silently opened his door.
The room was pitch dark and freezing cold, but there in the corner was a mountain of blankets, and from beneath it came the sound of Monkey’s gentle, decorous snoring. I dropped the towel on the floor, lifted up the edge of the mountain and snuggled up close to his lovely warm—vyella-pajama-encased—body. Poor Monkey. Not at all what he had expected or wanted or needed to find in his bed in the middle of the night. But I’d been right about his good heart. He did put his arms around me (asking him to kiss away the tears would have been pushing my luck), he calmed me down, and eventually (Christ, he must have been relieved!) I was able to creep back to Martin’s room.
The next morning it was still dark when I left the house, punch-drunk from Dr. Kingsley’s patent medicine and my turbulent night, and stumbled onto the train back to London. “ ’Tis woman’s whole existence.” How could that Byron have known what was going on in my heart? He must have been just like Martin. The brilliance, the dangerous sex appeal, the carefully arranged filthy hair, the constant scribbling—a man who needed to keep his love apart from his life. And if a girl interfered with those poems, she would have been bundled into a carriage at dawn and sent on her way through the swirling early morning mist. Leaving her whole existence behind her. I pressed my throbbing head against the cold glass of the train window and started to cry all over again.