My Summer With George (2 page)

“You are an ignoramus! You speak drivel! Giorgione is a master!” cried Mitch, holding his head with both hands, his chins quivering. “Consider just the draftsmanship!”

Over the course of the weekend, David quite wittily impaled every artist from quattrocento Siena through to Picasso (only Giotto, Goya, and Rembrandt were for some reason immune to his abuse). It seemed to me that he was really insisting that Western art—as he defined it—truly began with him, an assertion that drove Mitch wild. If he had seen clearly, even momentarily, what David was claiming, he could immediately have ended the argument by laughing. Instead, they went round and round. Rolling his eyes, Mitch appealed to all of us to agree that David was mad, a lunatic egomaniac, but no one else took David seriously and we were all enjoying his brilliant malice, as well as Mitch’s outrage, so no one intervened.

The sculptor, Willy Schlag, was a soft-spoken hunched-over middle-aged man with a tire of fat around his middle and a humble manner. He looked at me with round blue eyes and told me how much he admired and respected women. He said he was one of the folk, like Walt Whitman, part of the common mass of humanity. Eyeing David and Mitch, he said he hated artists who were nothing but walking egos.

I mistrust humble people. I believe they are monsters in the privacy of their own souls. In this case, I had some reason, because Willy sculpted winged bronze phalluses fifteen to twenty feet high and six to eight feet in diameter. Like Arp’s eggheads, they were his claim to fame. I suspected that his name had traumatized him. The Altshulers owned one of his phalli. It stood in the center of the formal garden in front of the house, rather than in the back, on the water, where we spent most of our time. Thank heavens.

Willy quite took to me; perhaps he thought that being alone, I would be grateful for his attentions. But his “attentions” consisted entirely of informing me of his humility and bemoaning the failure of the art-critical world to set him beside Giacometti, where he felt he belonged. So much for humility. I had had to sigh and smile sympathetically at him for much of Friday night and Saturday. I determined to avoid him on Sunday.

George wasn’t himself invited to the party, I found out later. He didn’t live in the area; he was from Louisville, Kentucky, where he edited a newspaper. He had come north to a conference of journalists and was spending the weekend with his old college friend Edgar Allen, the actor, who brought him along to the party. Edgar, a southerner originally, was a tiny man with a sweet face framed by dark curls. He became famous in the sixties, playing the Merman in the counterculture play
The Little Merman.
He still appears in an occasional Broadway play or cameo film role. He lives near the Altshulers, in a tiny eighteenth-century house. Small as it is, its age gives it—and him—cachet. And in this part of Connecticut, cachet is everything.

The usual activities were planned for Sunday: sailing, boating, waterskiing, or swimming in the Sound. But most people just lolled in deck chairs making idle conversation, and drank and ate. I had an early-morning swim, then a roll and coffee on the terrace. Afterward, I went back to my room for a few hours to work on my little laptop computer. I like to work every day; it makes me feel I’ve exercised my insides. Besides, I cannot spend an entire day in company—I have to be alone for a few hours. Around two-thirty, when most of the guests had arrived, I put on white linen pants and a beautifully cut black linen top and went downstairs. Taking a gin and tonic and some little cheese things, I began to socialize. Willy eyed me from a corner, but I just smiled and turned to greet some people I knew.

I was standing near the huge windows facing the water, talking to Elliott Morris, the composer, when I saw a man standing alone, leaning on the railing that surrounded the balcony off the library. He was tall, with thinning blondish hair, and wore a white suit. When he turned my way, I saw he had a beautiful face, sweet and thoughtful in repose, but what struck me most was the dejection of his posture. I thought I had never seen such a disheartened human being, and my heart immediately turned over in sympathy. But then June Morris joined us, and the composer Elizabeth Harris, and I got caught up in the chatter and forgot him.

Several hours later, Janice grabbed out at me desperately as I passed her on my way to the bar. I was familiar with that particular grasp and the look on her face: she was about to foist someone who didn’t mix well on her old dependable friend. She tried to pull someone forward, but he stood immobile, head sunk almost to his chest. “Hermione darling, I want you to meet Edgar Allen’s dear friend—” Pausing, she turned to see if he was still there, obviously having forgotten his name. His shrinking wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t a physical motion, but it was palpable just the same. He didn’t want to meet anyone, I thought. He was the man I’d seen leaning on the railing.

“George Johnson,” he mumbled. “How’re you.” Janice fled and he looked around, fixing me with intense penetrating turquoise eyes. “This is a hell of a house,” he announced in what seemed to be an angry tone. He was good-looking enough to be one of my heroes (if a little too old), but too intense. Heroes are never intense, only villains are. Heroes are bemused, a bit distant, given more to laughter than passion, except about the heroine, of course. But neither my heroes nor my villains are ever reluctant. They would not dream of shrinking from an encounter, as George did. They are always at the ready, sure of themselves, in control, oozing charm. Their bellies never hang a little over their belts, nor their ties askew, as George’s was. But precisely the qualities that made George unsuitable as a romance hero made me breathe a little more quickly.

For if there’s one thing I can’t stand in people, men or women, it’s a posture of control. People who act as if they have themselves and the situation completely in hand tend to take over every situation, take
you
over as if you were a child. Whenever I’m around someone like that, I tend to drift away—physically if I can, mentally if I can’t. The appearance of total control is appealing only in fairy tales—adventure or military stories or romances, written or cinematic. In the make-believe world, people
can
have total control: the story makes it true. But in life, no one can possibly have total control. People who pretend to it are pretentious and fake, and I loathe them. You adore the hero who assumes control in the movies, because he really has the supernatural powers he claims: the movie gives them to him. Only godly power can make control bearable, can redeem it, and godly power is found only in fiction. George’s obvious
lack
of control—his flustered manner, the discomfort he could not or did not try to mask—deeply appealed to me, a person whose social graces, painfully acquired over the years, conceal scars from self-inflicted wounds. So I challenged him with a smile.

“What do you mean, a hell of a house? A hell of a nice house or a hell of an awful house?”

“A hell of a
big
house!” he exploded, his head pivoting as he examined the ceiling, the staircases, the dining room, with its table that seated forty.

“Ah, yes, that it is.” I dredged up the usual question for breaking the ice at parties. “How do you know the Altshulers?”

“Don’t. Never heard of ’em. Who are they? Was that woman who grabbed me and dragged me over here an Altshuler?”

I laughed. “You sound as if you feel dragooned.”

“I don’t like being dragged—or dragooned,” he said grumpily, looking around him warily. He returned to me. His eyes began to focus on me. “I’m visiting Edgar Allen. The actor—you know him? We’ve been pals since prep school. He’s a hell of a good actor. Did you see him in
The Little Merman?
He was great. Terrific.”

My mind, as always when I meet someone new, was whirring with deductions. That he was socially uncomfortable was immediately apparent. He had a strange vocabulary—very enthusiastic and male and American, full of
great
s and
terrific
s and
a hell of
s—the kind of language one hears from men who had problems learning to become men, who had had to learn how to speak something they consider the language of men, like boys who learn in prep school to call each other bro and invite each other to go out for a brewski. But since I had spent many years learning how to be a woman, I was not entirely without sympathy for such men. He sounded enthusiastic, sincere, and a little naive, like the open palm of a hearty handshake, suggesting good intentions, good wishes. His speech was the male equivalent of the lockjaw speech so prevalent among Connecticut matrons, or the gushing effusiveness of middle-class women in Atlanta or Charleston. I dislike fake tones of voice; I prefer voices that reflect reality, that reveal a bit of edge, bitterness, sorrow, anger. But George’s display of innocence and openness seemed to me self-protective, masking and deflecting attention from the intensity that showed in his piercing eyes and the tiny, tremulous lines around his mouth. And those drew me mightily.

He’d gone to prep school. I always note class markers. That meant he’d probably prefer light chat, meaningless conversation. Most men liked to talk about sports—it was the only dependable subject, actually, with men—but I had cultivated an ignorance of sports as carefully as men cultivate knowledge of them, and I could not converse in that language. Politics was tricky, since one never knew, and I take politics too seriously to discuss it lightly. Money is a boring subject, and I refuse to discuss it
or
its markers—cars, houses, boats, acquaintance with Alan Greenspan or David Geffen. So all that was left was persons or the arts. Persons was safer.

At this point, I had merely a certain sympathy for and interest in George Johnson, a little quickening of attention, a heightening of the hormones, and it was easy enough for me, with my long, self-conscious training in party conversation, to extract the relevant facts about him. He’d been born in Louisiana but now lived in Kentucky and edited the Louisville
Herald.
He was, it seemed, in his mid-fifties (god, he looked good), and
he was not married
and
did not appear to be gay.
And—wonder of wonders in a man—he asked me questions about myself! I was always vague about my distant past and, if pressed, would lie about it. But I didn’t need to lie about the past thirty-odd years. For that period, my record was socially impeccable.

“So you’re a writer?” he exploded. “And you write novels! God, I respect that! I edit a first-rate newspaper, but I’ve always wanted to write novels. You know, in novels you can tell the truth about things. You can’t do that in a newspaper, not really. You can tell certain facts, but not the truth. Well! That’s great!”

I could be wrong, but I believe that around this point, his glance became a little brighter, he peered at me with more interest, even some intensity. Strangely, his way of speaking contradicted his appearance: his language suggested someone burly, muscular, red-faced, outgoing, his hand extended to greet every stranger; not a lanky, pale, delicate-limbed, slightly potbellied man.

“And I envy you your work. How thrilling to edit a newspaper! I would love to do that in my next life.”

“Do it in this one. Come on down to Louisville, and I’ll give you a shot.” A half-smile played around his mouth.

It had been a long time since anyone had flirted with me, so long that I could not be certain that was what he was doing.

“That would be fun,” I said, smiling back at him with a certain glint.

“Be great. We’d have a ball. Show you the town.” His eyes glittered unmistakably. At least, I thought it was unmistakable. But then he looked around uncomfortably.

Time to backtrack, perhaps. I looked around too. “Is there someone here you’d like to meet? I know almost everyone,” I offered.

He brought his eyes back to me. “Somebody said Ellis Porter was here. God, I respect him! That book of his on the CIA, that was great stuff—he really probed for that book, he broke all the taboos. I tell you, that book made him a hero of mine!”

“Yes, he is.” I searched the room, finally spotting Ellis near the bar, talking to Martin Samuels, the publisher. From the look of them, this would not be a good time to interrupt them: Ellis was speaking intensely, and Martin was riveted by him. They looked as if they had just discovered mutual passionate love, although neither had previously shown inclinations toward the same sex.

“We could meander toward the bar,” I suggested to George. “He’s over there engrossed in conversation, but we could wait until they finish.”

It took some time for us to get to the bar—the room was still crowded, although the party was several hours old. But Ellis’s voice reached us even before we reached the bar.

“Fucking goddamned liar told me I was getting the highest advance any journalist had gotten since Woodward and Bernstein, and I believed him—fuck, you believe your agent!”

Martin raised his hand. “Listen, it was a damned respectable advance, Ellis! I don’t know what Billy told you, but the advance was the best we could come up with—we worked the figures. I don’t like to go into all this, it’s so unpleasant, but your last couple of books didn’t do all that well…”

Ellis’s face was deep red. He seemed to be exploding and I feared he would have a stroke. “What kind of promotion did you give those books, Samuels, just how much did you extend yourself for them, huh? You didn’t get me a
Time
interview, you didn’t get me the
Today
show…”

“We agreed on an advertising budget of a hundred thousand, Porter, and we abided by that agreement. We can’t deliver major media, you know that, they’re independent…”

Both men were yelling now, drawing the attention of half the room. I glanced at George: he was staring at them, open-mouthed. “Would you like to see the gardens?” I asked.

He nodded.

As I led him past the arguing men, Leo Altshuler stepped in between them, put his arms around them, and whispered something. But Ellis yelled even louder and smashed his glass down on the bar and stalked out. Martin stood transfixed. We moved toward the glass doors and down the terrace steps. We paused at each level while I pointed out the flowers growing there, the ones whose names I knew, anyway. We reached the dock. A breeze had sprung up. It had apparently sent everyone else indoors, but I found it refreshing.