Girl in the Moonlight (10 page)

I nodded, trying to picture such a scene. “How did she seem to you when you saw her?”

He laughed. “Pretty much as she always seems. Leaving a trail of disappointed men in her wake.”

I changed the subject. “Is everyone else well? Are they all around?”

“Come by tomorrow. They’ll all love to see you.”

“I will.”

“Come to my studio first. I want to show you my new work.”

I went the next day. He was very excited. It was easy to see why. His paintings were better than ever—luminous, sensual, moving. Portraits of men and women, most of them nude. He
told me that many of them were prostitutes. Some defiant, some vulnerable. One had a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. A man, thin as a blade, had an enormous member. There were a few others. An old man, his hands bent with arthritis.

“What are you going to do with these?” I asked.

“I’ve got a meeting with a gallery owner in the city next week. I finally think I’m ready. If he likes my work, he may represent me.”

I breathe out silently. “That’s very exciting, Lio. When do you go in?”

“I will take the train in Tuesday. The gallery’s in the East Village.”

“Would you like a lift to the station?”

“I was hoping you’d ask,” he replied with a smile. It was like old times.

A few days later at the station, I helped him onto the train, his canvases tied together. “Good luck,” I said, shaking his hand. I meant it. I was happy for him. No one I knew worked harder than he did, or cared more deeply. The success of a friend runs two ways. It can cause jealousy or it can inspire. I saw Aurelio as a light on the path, leading me on. If he could do it, maybe I could too. When one is young, anything is conceivable, no matter how ambitious it seems. What is not yet understood is that most fail, even the talented ones.

As the summer wound down, I visited the Bonets often. Aurelio let me work in his studio with him. He would spend the whole day there, forgetting about eating, about everything else. Only Kitty could rouse him. “Come in for lunch,” she would say. “Wylie, make sure he doesn’t forget.” When he finally ate, he would fall on his food like a starving man.

One night I was invited to dinner at the big house. Roger was there with his new wife, an Englishwoman named Diana. Dot was by herself. Kitty was with Randall. Cosmo, Carmen,
Aurelio, and me. The only one missing was Cesca. Izzy was faltering. He used a cane now, around his shoulders a shawl. His hair was thinner, the skin like paper. There were sores on his forehead and hands. His mind went in and out. I shook hands with him gently, introducing myself. It was like holding bone.

“Mitchell’s son,” explained Kitty in a loud voice.

The old man nodded his head and said, “I always liked your father. Give him my best, will you?”

Ruth sat there like an empty shell, recognizing no one. Dot led her in and out. At dinner she carved her food for her.

After dinner I found myself talking with Dot, her dyed blond hair outlined in the lamplight. She had many bangles on her wrists, which rattled when she moved. She also wore long earrings and a reddish halter dress tied at the neck revealing leathery shoulders. Her face was lined and tired, but there were still traces of her former prettiness. Everyone else had gone inside. The stars were out, and it was time for me to go. There was no sign of Aurelio. I kept craning my neck to look for him. He had probably slipped away to his studio. Dot was saying something.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I said I used to fuck your father.” She drew on a cigarette.

I had no idea how to respond.

“He was pretty good. What he lacked in technique he made up for in enthusiasm.”

“Well . . .”

“What about you?” she continued.

“What about me what?”

“You want to fuck?”

“Um . . .”

“Still a virgin, right? I thought so. You can always tell. Come on. We’ll fix that.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t . . .”

She put out her cigarette and stood up. “Suit yourself. You’re missing out though.”

“Thank you. But . . .”

“Are you queer?”

“No.”

She leaned over and grabbed my crotch. “Well, if you change your mind, I’ll leave my door unlocked. I’m in the little red house.”

I watched her leave. When I told my father about it the next day, he laughed and told me it had been a long time ago, but it was true. “What a family,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re beautiful, talented, rich. It’s all very seductive. But they’re like spoiled children. They’ll take everything and give nothing in return.”

I
N THE FALL I WENT TO COLLEGE AND CESCA DID MOVE TO
London. Ostensibly she was there to study painting at the Chelsea School of Art, but it seems more likely now that she was lost and was simply trying to give her life some direction. Studying set design at Barnard and living in New York had not proved to be satisfactory. Aurelio was in Barcelona. She wanted to make her own way. London seemed as good a place as any. This was in the early eighties. The King’s Road swarmed with punks in Mohawks and Doc Martens. Nightclubs and pubs pulsated with loud, angry music. Thatcher was in office, the economy was beginning its long climb out of recession, and the IRA had bombed Harrods. As for the reason for studying painting, Cesca told me once later: “You know I’m not a bad painter. The problem is that there were people in my family who were much better than me.”

She moved with the aristocracy, as she would. Most of them were old friends of the family, new friends she met at parties. Her face was her passport. Every Monday she would come to
class exhausted and hungover from the weekend. Most of her classmates were serious students who didn’t know what to make of her. She rented a furnished apartment on Lower Sloane Street that belonged to a friend of her mother’s. It was on the first floor and looked out over the Duke of York’s Barracks. There was shopping at Vivienne Westwood and Harvey Nichols, late nights at Tramp and the Cod. Ronnie Scott’s. Dancing at Annabel’s. Once she flirted with Richard Harris, who took her to a pub he knew near Billingsgate that was open all night and where fishermen and dockworkers would come in for an early pint and say, “Awright then, Richard?” and he would tell a joke or sing a song.

She had one friend in particular, a heavy girl who had recently come down from Oxford. Emma was her name. She dyed her spiky hair purple and wore ripped stockings and heavy leather bands studded with spikes on her arms. Her father was a cabinet minister. They lived in a large house on Cheyne Walk. In the dining room was a Canaletto. “You have to meet Ems,” one of her friends in New York, an English woman Cesca had met at Studio 54, told her. “She’s simply outrageous.”

A week after arriving in London, Cesca rang, introducing herself. “Do come round,” said Emma. “We’ll have a spot of lunch.”

She took Cesca to an Italian restaurant near her house where they drank two bottles of Pinot Grigio. Emma loved New York, especially the club scene. She also knew Spain a little. Had been to the Marbella Club but in general the country was too full of Arabs for her tastes. Had she been to Venice? Cesca had not. “You must go,” Emma declared. “I’ll take you. We’ll go together and stay at the Cip. That’s where we always stay. They always make a big fuss about Daddy. And the boys are divine. Just watch them. Remember, they’re all buggerers at heart.” She giggled. “
Anale,
they call it. Haven’t you ever done it?”

“Never.”

Emma winked and smiled. “Filthy beasts. They do it all the time. The girls do it to preserve their virginity. I know a principessa who did it with her cousin up until the time she was married. Takes some getting used to, but you learn to enjoy it. The trick is to relax.”

Emma introduced Cesca to many of her friends. Through the fall, she took her to weekend house parties in the country. Emma’s family had a “pile,” as she called it, in the Cotswolds, near Chipping Campden, but she preferred visiting other people. Most days it rained, the men shooting pheasant while the women walked along behind and watched. After her first weekend, Cesca bought a Barbour jacket and Hunters. At night the men wore black tie at dinner, and the women smoked Silk Cut and danced barefoot. The rooms were large and drafty, and the hot water ran out quickly.

Most of the men she met were Old Etonians working in the City or managing their own estates. They struck her as overgrown schoolboys who drank too much and had bad teeth. But not all of them were like that. Emma had a friend whose family owned a large Georgian villa in Buckinghamshire. He played guitar in a rock band that had yet to release an album. His name was Desmond. He was her third cousin. Emma shrieked: “We used to play doctor!”

Desmond occupied one wing of the house. The rest was shuttered and the furniture covered in dust sheets. The rooms unheated. There were dirty dishes in the sink and dirty sheets on the beds. They arrived while the band was rehearsing. Desmond was the lead singer. He had long blond hair and wore leather pants. Emma had told Cesca he was a viscount. His parents were divorced. The earl lived in Italy for tax purposes. The mother, a fading beauty, had remarried. The sister lived on an ashram in India.

Cesca thought Desmond very handsome. They all huddled
in a large, nearly empty room in front of an impressive mantel in which burned an inadequate fire. She was wearing a short skirt that showed off her legs. There were two other men and a young woman. The men had long hair. One was German, and he played bass. He had a high forehead and a long pinched nose. The last name well known to students of history. They sprawled on a few old chairs and sofas, drinking vodka. Desmond was looking at her and ashing his cigarette on the floor. “There’s no food,” he announced languidly. “It’s boring, but we’ll have to go to the pub before it closes if we want any supper.”

Cesca rode in his car, an old, mud-spattered Land Rover. It had almost been a command. “You,” he said, “you can ride with me.”

She had looked at Desmond and then at Emma, with whom she had driven down. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked Emma as Desmond started the engine. Already she knew that she would sleep with him.

After dinner, back at the house, they were once again sitting around. There was wine. Someone had produced a hash pipe. The German was strumming a guitar. It was getting late. Cesca was tired and looked around for Desmond, but he had disappeared from the room. “Have you seen Desmond?” she asked. No one had. Emma was missing too.

She went upstairs. There was a long hallway decorated with dusty old prints with several doors leading off it. On the other side were sash windows. She called their names. The hallway was dimly lit. She knocked on each door and then opened it. The last one she opened revealed Desmond and Emma sitting on a bed together. Desmond’s forearm was extended, pale and veiny. A rubber hose tied tightly around it. In his other hand he held a syringe that he was pressing into his arm. When she entered, they both looked up in surprise.

“Close the fucking door,” said Desmond.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What does it bloody look like I’m doing?”

“Sorry,” she said, quickly closing the door behind her and running downstairs. That night she slept with Clemens, the German, instead. In the morning, while it was still early, she had him drive her to the station. She never spoke to Emma again. Several years later Cesca read about her death in the newspaper.
PEER
’
S DAUGHTER FOUND DEAD IN DRUG DEN
, ran the headline. Desmond had been arrested and convicted for supplying the heroin. He spent six months in jail.

Shortly after Christmas, Cesca met Freddie Blackwood. Tall with rakish, dark hair and a long pointed nose, he was half-American and half-British. His mother was the daughter of a baronet, and his father was a film producer who had returned to the States after the divorce. Freddie had gone to Harrow and then Yale. Now he was at Cazenove, the Queen’s brokers. That was his job, but his passion was speed, as he liked to say. At his mother’s house in Surrey he kept a small collection of vintage sports cars. At a nearby airfield, an old Sopwith Camel. Cesca first saw him at a nightclub surrounded by girls, several empty champagne bottles on the table, his black tie slightly askew.

“What’s your name?” he asked. His eyes shone with good humor and self-assurance.

He drove her home that night in his 1963 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint Speciale. She invited him up. “Never on a first date,” he said and asked if she had any plans at the weekend.

She did.

“Cancel them. You’re coming with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m not telling. But now I know where you live. I’ll pick you up around nine on Saturday morning. And dress warmly.”

He walked her to her door and kissed her lightly on the lips, smelling of musk and cigarettes and something else she couldn’t quite define but which she liked very much.

He picked her up in the same car. “Ready for an adventure?” he asked. “I’ve brought all the necessary supplies. You look absolutely stunning, by the way. There’s a rug behind you in case you get cold. I bought the car for her graceful lines and powerful engine, not for her heater.”

They turned up the Brompton Road to the M3, heading south. The car sped along. The day was cold but fair.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. One of the most beautiful places in England, maybe even the world.”

While they drove, he told her about his life. He was very funny and put her at her ease. He was only a few years older than she was. He thought it was amazing they had never met. He had lived in New York for a few years as a young child. His parents had owned a large farm in Connecticut before the divorce. He was an only child.

“Weren’t you lonely?” she asked him.

“Alone but never lonely,” he said and smiled.

She told him about her family, her brothers and sister. It was impossible to imagine her life without them. She tried to describe them. “They say being an only child makes you selfish. Is that true?”

“Absolutely. I must always have my way. Fortunately, what I want is usually good fun so no one complains.”

Like many Englishmen of his class and background, he was uninterested in art. His taste in fiction ran to Dick Francis and Ian Fleming. In paintings, to portraits of horses and race cars. Music was to dance to. He did, however, have style. He dressed beautifully. His suits were from Huntsman, his shoes from Lobb. He knew how to entertain, even cook. There were
one or two dishes he could whip up quickly. Balsamic chicken. Herb-crusted rack of lamb. And, of course, the right wines. He could ride, sail, shoot, and fox-trot. He was a decent fast bowler, and had played polo at Yale and now at Hurlingham. After college he had worked for a year on a vineyard in Bordeaux. He was never happier than when he was elbow deep in grease fixing an old car.

They drove to Salisbury, the great spire of the cathedral white against the sky. “Have you ever been inside?” he asked.

“Never.”

“Let me show you.”

He drove into the car park. “Come on.”

They entered, necks craned up to the vaulted ceilings. “Not bad, eh?” he asked. For the first time, she took his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

There was a tour already under way. They followed close behind, giggling like naughty schoolchildren. “The spire is the tallest in England,” the guide said. “It is 123 meters high. The cathedral was built in only thirty-eight years. The foundation stone was laid on the twenty-eighth of April 1220. The clock”—they all turned their heads—“is the oldest working medieval clock in the world. It is no longer possible to climb to the spire.”

On the way out, they passed the little gift shop. He bought her a postcard of Constable’s painting. “Here,” he said, “to remember.”

They parked in a field, the cathedral in the distance. He spread the rug on the grass. She sat, bundled in her coat, a thick scarf around her neck. “Look what I have,” he said. He withdrew a hamper from the boot. Inside, a cold chicken. A loaf of bread. A tin of foie gras. A bottle of Saint-Émilion. Two glasses. “Here, try this,” he said, smearing a wedge of foie gras on a hunk of bread. “Best in the world, eh?”

“Mmmm, delicious,” she answered.

He opened the wine.

Later, they drove home in the rain. That night he did come upstairs with her. The next day was Sunday. They both slept in. When they awoke, they made love again. Later, he went to the store and brought back eggs, bread, and cheese, and they had a picnic in bed. Miles Davis and Roxy Music on the stereo. She didn’t put her clothes back on until she left the next morning.

He took her places. They drove through Cornwall to Arthur’s castle. The Brenner Pass. The Ardennes. The cold coastline of Normandy past the unending forest of white crosses. They stayed in a hotel in Caen, and Cesca could barely suppress a giggle as he registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Dickwood, her hands in her pockets. His French was better than hers. They could hardly wait to get upstairs.

Before dinner they wandered the streets, admired William the Conqueror’s castle. In the restaurant they ordered
tripes à la mode
and goose
en daube
. In between courses, they drank calvados, which was, as he explained, the local custom. They finished the meal with Pont-L’Évêque and a ripe Camembert, washed down with even more calvados. He admired the way she could eat, heartily like a young girl or an athlete in training yet never gaining an ounce.

Some weekends they didn’t drive at all. Instead one time they flew from Heathrow to Verbier, another to Lech. He was a good skier. But so was she, maybe even a little better. Other weekends they did nothing. Went to a movie, dined at London restaurants. She met his friends. Slept in on gray London mornings and while having tea in bed listened without guilt to the peal of church bells.

Some of the trips were less successful. In early spring on a drive through Holland, the Alfa broke down in Scheveningen, and they had to wait three days in a nearly empty, hideous modern hotel that was operating with a skeleton staff because
it was off-season. The stretch of beach was deserted, the chairs stacked. Freddie was constantly on the phone with his mechanic back in London. They spent a lot of time drinking Bols in the bar and watching the roil of the North Sea through the windows. The manager, a plump blonde, kept apologizing and telling them to come during the summer. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” she said.

“Never trust a country that doesn’t make its own wine,” Freddie said on their second day. “England excepted, of course.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“I wouldn’t mind being stuck in France, but this is bloody awful.”