Any Woman's Blues (37 page)

A rail-thin greyhound of a socialite (with leathery ocher skin, prominent hips, jaw, elbows, nose, knees) floats in wearing a red Valentino and rubies, on the arm of a ruby-nosed fag. She is Mrs. Rentier, the famed “Slim” Rentier—famous for her slimness, her ruby-nosed walker, the exercise coach she keeps on Ninth Street, the banker husband who never goes out. He’s in the air-conditioned den on Park Avenue, watching tapes of old Super Bowl games and fondling the Pakistani houseman (Ismail, age twenty-two). Tonight he seems smarter than all these sweating hordes.

And here comes Mrs. Leventhal, the size-two socialite from Beekman Place, Pound Ridge, and Port Antonio. She’s the charity disease queen of New York—a hotly coveted title. And she’s here with her designer, whose new collection her husband is financing, the punky adorable midget Mij Nehoc (Jim Cohen spelled backward), who wears a white Nehru jacket, a hoop in his left ear, an emerald stud in his right, and emerald satin harem pants with emerald slippers whose toes curl, phallically, up.

Mij Nehoc’s last collection out-Lacroixed Lacroix. He brought out Maori models in baskets for skirts, coconut halves for bras. The Back-to-Nature Noble Savage Look,
Vogue
called it. (“After too many seasons of frippery, nature looks terribly fresh again, and natural materials have won the day!”)

And here is Lady Eglantine Brasenose from Melbourne, the widow of the shipping king of the South Pacific. And Prince and Princess Rupert of England, known from Kensington to Mustique to Hong Kong for their open marriage. And Pia Le Quin, the voluptuous, tawny American actress who nearly married a Rothschild. But didn’t. (Her career came first—although her career’s in the toilet, as they say in Hollywood.)

And here comes Renzo Pisan with his principessa, who has organized this fete along with her opposite number from New York—the very slim, almost embalmed-looking Mrs. Rentier, society mummy!

Renzo is no mummy. Even in his “smoking,” he
exudes
sex, sex, sex: his eyes half closed, his piqué dress shirt discreetly twinkling with antique diamond studs, a gray silk cummerbund at his slim waist, a gray silk tie at his golden throat, a “smoking” cut to show his snake hips and his broad shoulders, and gray silk loafers to let him dance, dance, dance. (
Ballare, ballare, ballare
—sounding in Italian almost like what it most resembles.)

The principessa is toweringly tall and stately in a yellow silk Ungaro sheath, rampant with huge fuchsia flowers. Her golden hair entwined with jewels, her scrawny lifted neck ablaze with canary diamonds, her arms enslaved in bracelets, her fingers pinched in rings.

He guides her by one bony elbow, a stalwart tugboat pushing the
QE II
(although he is more cigarette speedboat than tug). His eyelids flicker like lizards’ tails when he sees me.
Apri,
they say.

Julian and I float up to greet the principessa and my “gondolier.”

She assesses my dress, a sea-blue Emanuel of London, with big sleeves and a boned bodice that pushes up my breasts for Renzo’s delectation. Julian is in his Hong Kong tux, made by a twenty-four-hour tailor specifically for this fete. It has a scarlet lining, a scarlet cummerbund, and matching bow tie.

Julian bows to Renzo, Rumpelstiltskin bowing to Cinderella’s prince. He has no idea that this slithery, small-hipped apparition with the tousled ebony curls is my “gondolier,” who flicks his eyelids, saying,
Dai, dai, dai.

“Piacere,”
says the principessa, holding out a manicured hand, ablaze with jewels.

And then we’re swept away on the crest of the crowd, sweating in their finery beneath a thousand dripping candles.

The heat of all these bodies is amazing! I think of un-deodorized sixteenth-century Venice, when this palazzo was new, and I am not so sure I’d take a ticket in a time machine and go back to that epoch, if invited.

And here is André McCrae, swept up on the tide, wearing a wonderful pair of tails and still calling me “Tsatskeleh!”

“This is Julian Silver, the composer,” I say to André, “my dearest friend.”

“What are
you
doin’ here, Silver?” asks André. “You’re supposed to be on Mars!”

“Leila’s saving Venice, and I’m saving Leila,” says Julian.

And our laughter sweeps us up the red-carpeted stairs.

Candles blaze, people sweat, ten-thousand-dollar dresses are trampled and torn beneath feet caressed in custom-made shoes. I think of how much better all this will sound in the society pages than it is in life. In newsprint, there will be no sweat, no small talk—just glittering names and glittering places to provoke the envy of those lucky ones who stayed home.

But that is why they’re here, isn’t it? To provoke the envy of those who stayed home.

A world of winners provoking the envy of the losers (who are really the winners in some sense, because they get to stay
home
). Oh, how complex it all is—and how simple!

Up the stairs we go, slowly, slowly,
piano, piano,
waiting on line to be photographed so that the losers can envy us when those photographs appear.

Thank heavens you can’t photograph sweat!

And who is that before me on the stair? A jaunty man in a little tux, with a resplendent wife in cherry-pink chiffon.

Can it be Lionel Schaeffer? And how will I ever greet him after the night of the black candle?

He turns suddenly and peers down the stairs as if he has caught my thought.

“Leila!”
he calls gaily, as if Mistress Ada did not exist.

“Lionel!” I call gaily, as if Mistress Ada did not exist.

Is this what we call Western civilization—to pretend not to acknowledge our secret lives?

In a room ablaze with candles, people turn and group and talk and turn away—like figures on a music box, doing their stilted and repetitive dance.

Oh, how
boring
it all is!

At least I am with Julian, so I can say, “Oh, how
boring
it all is!” He laughs, assenting, then fetches me a Bellini from the bar. I put it down without taking a sip. I know that if I sip, my head will only start to pound and before long my sane mind will desert me.

“I can’t drink anymore,” I tell Julian.

“Then don’t,” he says. “In the Trobriands, we’ll chew betel.”

“I can’t wait,” I say.

And Lionel Schaeffer and his lovely wife, Lindsay, are suddenly before us in the crowd.

Lionel opens the jacket of his tux and points. “Turnbull and Chung,” he says.

Lindsay makes a hideous face.

“Can’t take him
any
place,” she says.

I wonder if she has a clue about Mistress Ada, his visit to Litchfield County,
any
secret place in Lionel’s soul. Apparently not. But she is wearing the Paloma Picasso necklace of peridot and diamonds, and I am not, so apparently that is the price of her not knowing—and for all my knowing, my throat is bare. Women are paid to look away, not to see, or to see and not say. I will paint something of this someday. Oh, to be Hogarth, Goya, Daumier! This fin de siècle needs a satirist’s eye. Even Roly-poly Rowlandson would do!

“Julian, Lionel,” I say. “Lindsay, Julian.”

“Leila, Lindsay,” says Lionel.

“Of
course
I remember Leila,” says Lindsay. “Who could forget such a talented artist?”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Don’t thank
me
,” says Lindsay. “
You’re
the gifted one.”

I see her attitude toward me has changed. When last we met, at the McCraes’, she was determined to cut me, to counteract Lionel’s interest. Now her strategy has altered. She is
wooing
me to counteract his interest. I remember doing something of the same with Dart’s bimbos once. Oh, how far away that all seems now! The obsession with Dart has been broken by the obsession with Renzo! Is this progress? It
feels
like progress, but I fear it is merely The Land of Fuck.

Off to the bathroom I go in my azure silk. A line of ladies snakes around a screen. Here in Venice, as in New York, the ladies’ facilities are less adequate than the gents’. The gentlemen’s lounge is unoccupied. I decide to liberate the
gabinetto degli uomini
. In I go in my huge blue skirt, and who should be coming out at just that moment but Renzo il Magnifico? In a moment, he is back in the men’s room with me, barring the door and coyly hiding his eyes while I avail myself of the facilities and wipe, wash and dry my hands. And then, with incredible swiftness, he has fallen to his beautiful brown knees, has whipped under my crinolines, unsnapped my crotch, and is pulling moans out of my mouth with his practiced tongue. It happens with the swiftness of a dream. (Perhaps, indeed, it is a dream?
Sane mind:
I hope so.) Under his tux, he wears no underclothes. The rest is silence, interspersed with moans.

I fix my makeup. He adjusts his tie and cummerbund. He leaves the men’s room first, eyes demurely downcast. I leave next. Two gentlemen wait outside, looking terribly blasé, as if this happens every day in Venice (which it does).

And back to the ball we go!

In due course, Julian and I are ushered to our table. It is not a good table. Upstairs, with the hangers-on, the grifters and drifters, we have been seated as far away from Lionel as possible. Is this a mistake? Didn’t he invite us to sit at his table? Or is this Lionel’s stratagem to keep me far from Lindsay? (Not that we could talk anyway in this din.)

Julian surveys the table. One deaf old man with false teeth that click. One minor chairlady of a minor New York ball, one fashion designer whose star has fallen, one washed-up Italian actress—a table of has-beens at the winners’ ball! Julian, who claims not to care about these things, is furious.

“We are too old,” he says, “and too rich to sit for three hours on these rickety gold chairs!” And seizing my arm, he leads me through the stifling rooms, down the red-carpeted stair and to a waiting
motoscafo
.

“Let’s eat at Harry’s Bar,” he says, “and then let’s hire a gondola, with three musicians.”

So off we go to Harry’s in tux and ball gown, I feeling wicked both for leaving the ball and for my interlude with Renzo in the gents’ (how much do I owe my analyst now?), and Julian feeling terribly pleased with himself for protesting the bad table.

“I thought you didn’t care about such
mishegoss
as bad tables,” I say to Julian when we are duly settled in at Harry’s with
acqua minerale
and buttery rolls.

“I don’t, really,” says Julian. “We’ve just got too little life left to spend it sitting on those
chairs
, with those
people
—see no evil, hear no evil, speak all evil.”

“You care,” I say. “
Admit
you care.”

“Leila, really, I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I refuse to argue the point.”

“Okay,” I say. But I am angry. I invited Julian to
my
gig—and it feels as if he left to spite me. Or did he get a whiff of my gondolier?

I let the matter drop. Life’s too short. We order
risotto, fegato alla veneziana
. We banter with each other, we survey the room. The usual stylish Venetians and garish Americans. The usual riffraff at the bar. Two young gay blades with matching punk haircuts—one black with green streaks, one platinum blond with fuchsia streaks. An English lady of a certain age, who is a dead ringer for Vita Sackville-West. A Chinese gentleman with pink cheeks and old-fashioned silk pajamas.

And then, at a table in the corner, we spy the Happy Couple.

She is about forty, he about fifty. Or perhaps they are the same age and he has aged worse than she. They are toasting each other with Bellinis, locking arms, looking deep into each other’s eyes.

“Remember Saint-Paul-de-Vence in ’eighty-four?” he asks.

We don’t hear her reply; but from her smile, we know she does.

“Are they married, do you think?” I ask Julian.

“Never in a million years,” he says. “They live in the same city. They’re both married to different people. They see each other Wednesday afternoons and on holidays like this. For twenty years, they’ve come to Venice every September.”

“What a romantic story!” I say.

“But not better than sleeping in boxes, is it?”

“I wonder what the truth is. . . .”

“Better not to know,” says Julian.

“I want to know. I’m going to ask.” I get up, but Julian restrains me, pulling me back.

“I’ve made my living for forty years
scoring
these fictions,” Julian says. “I’ve
created
what we call romance. It’s all in the chord structure. Certain melodies pull at the heartstrings.
Trust
me. It’s better not to know.”

“For God’s sake, Julian, I just want to know if they’re
married
.”

“No you don’t,” he says. “It’s better not.”

“And if they
are
?”

“If they are, I’ll marry you, take care of you forever, and buy you your own island in the South Pacific.”

I get up and go over to the Happy Couple.

“Excuse me,” I say. “My friend and I have a curious bet. Please don’t think me rude—but are you married?”

“Yes,” says the woman.

“No,” says the man.

I go back to Julian and report her “yes.”

 

 

We sing our way along the Grand Canal, accompanied by accordionist, guitarist, fiddler. Singing in a boat again—this time with Julian—I am outrageously happy.

The wobbly palaces greet us upside down in the amazing moonlight. I think of Renzo and embrace Julian, as I might be embracing Renzo, thinking of Julian, and I realize that if I can hold on to myself I will have what it takes to make myself content for the rest of my life.

(
Sane mind:
You said it—two men adding up to one whole human being! Every woman’s cure for the blues!)