In Search of Love and Beauty (8 page)

His latest lover was a youth called Kent who suited him better, he thought, than anyone he had yet met. It must be admitted that he had thought this more than once before, but had been disappointed. Kent fulfilled the first requisite to perfection—he was beautiful. Immensely tall, with broad chest and shoulders, he appeared very manly; but although his head was as perfectly modeled as his figure and sat on his shoulders like a Roman emperor's, his lovely eyes and mouth were full of a soft, feminine expression. And as if all this were not enough, he was also intelligent and talented. It was his ambition to be a photographer, and Mark was eager to help and encourage him. Kent had already been helped and encouraged by a previous patron, a much older man who was a documentary film maker. Mark had met both of them at the opening of a new gallery, and at once the skirmish had begun. The older man was desperately in love with Kent, but Mark was desperate too. When the older man became too hysterically importunate, Kent began to hate him and begged Mark to rescue him. This Mark was glad to do; and he was also
glad to replace the cameras the previous lover had bought with more advanced and expensive equipment. Although there were some ugly scenes when Kent moved out of the other man's loft and into Mark's—at one point it almost came to the police being called in—in the end the older lover had resigned himself, as perhaps he had already learned to do from previous occasions, and Mark and Kent began their life together.

Mark's loft was in a late-nineteenth-century building which had once been a warehouse. Each floor had been bought separately and converted into an apartment, and since two of the owners were interior decorators and one was an architect, they vied with each other as to the beauty and ingenuity of their conversions. Mark had the topmost story—an enormous space into which his architect had been able to fit as many rooms as into a complete town house, though at the same time leaving it open to a surge of cityscape. The warehouse windows, tall as a cathedral's, gave out onto a different scene on every side. There were round water towers and a round Greek Orthodox church, a Romanesque tower, an unconverted warehouse and another converted one, a neon-lighted airline, a building with a silver spire, another like a black glass pencil with an adjacent Gothic old hotel mirrored in its side—all crowding and jostling together as they rolled away toward the horizon where the river flowed into the sea.

Mark left early in the mornings, leaving Kent to spend the day as he pleased. When Mark came home again—quite late, for his business drew him into many activities—he often found Kent in the darkroom he had fitted up for him. They were both excited by the work Kent was doing, but sometimes, as they looked at the photographs together, Mark's eyes strayed from the work of art to the artist, inspiring him with a different ardor. And often Mark wished he were an artist himself—for instance when he left in the mornings and
gave a last look at Kent still sleeping in the bed they shared. Although this bed was high and gilt and luxurious, Kent, lying naked on the designer sheets, looked as innocent and pastoral as a boy lost in a wood and sleeping on moss.

Over the years, Mark had worked out a compromise with his mother. She had had to accept the fact that he had his own place; that he was not to be pursued there; that he would be with her when he could—certainly whenever she truly needed him; but that in return not too many demands should be made on him nor questions asked. It had not been easy for Marietta to accept these terms—yet in the end she did, and was perhaps even glad to, for fear of having to accept others that she didn't even want to let herself know about.

Natasha moved more freely in and out of the different areas of Mark's life; probably because he felt safer with her. In earlier days too, when he had gone off on his various trips, although he never told Natasha where he was going or with whom—she didn't ask—he always took care that she had a number where he could be reached if absolutely necessary. Natasha never told Marietta that she had this number, for she knew that if she did, Marietta would very soon have found it absolutely necessary to use it.

Now, in these later years, Natasha did not tell Marietta about her visits to Mark's loft, nor about his friends whom she met there. Some of these friends she did not like, though she never told Mark so—not even later when he broke with them. And she was wary of those whom she did like because she knew from experience that sooner or later something would happen and Mark would suffer. It was strange, his suffering—she had seen it since he was a boy at school and had quarreled with his friends there. Even then it had struck her as so at variance with the rest of him, or with that aspect of him that they knew at home: where, always, from childhood on, he was strong and resolute and manly. But when his friends were cruel to him, he wept—yes, Mark wept like a girl! And at such
times there was nothing she could do for him, though she would have undergone any torment suggested to her to save him from those unbecoming tears.

She met Kent shortly after he had moved in with Mark. Afterward Mark asked her, trying to sound casual the way he always did when he introduced her to a new friend: “How do you like him?”

“Yes, he's nice.”

“ ‘Nice.' What a word.”

He turned from her as though she were not worthy to be talked to any further. But she couldn't bring herself to say more, for fear of what might happen later and what she then might have to retract. Besides, she knew he would return to the subject—and of course he did, just five minutes later.

“Do you think he's handsome?”

“Very.”

“Yes.” And Mark smiled into the distance as though he saw Kent there in all his glory. After a while he said, “But it's not only looks, you know. He's very talented too. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he turned into a really good photographer. I mean, really great. Famous.” Natasha tried to make the right noises but obviously did not succeed. Mark began to sound testy: “Well, you saw his pictures. What did you think? You must have
some
opinion,” he said when she thought nothing.

“You know I don't understand these things,” she excused herself; and it was true, she didn't, she had no appreciation of visual art at all.

“No, and you won't learn. You won't make an effort.”

She knew he was cross with her because he wanted her to say more, to be more enthusiastic, to sing Kent's praises; nothing less at this stage would have served. But she couldn't, she wouldn't, though she minded him less than some other friends whom Mark had taken to live with him in the past.

Mark didn't remember much about Tim, his father, who had died when Mark was seven. It was a characteristic of Tim's family that in the last few generations the male members of it had died young and either violently or under mysterious circumstances. Tim's father had driven his car over a cliff; his grandfather had died by drowning in the ocean at Southampton; and Tim himself had combined both these violent deaths by falling with his car, one perfectly still summer night, into Lake Kennebago after a party in a cabin there.

Another characteristic of that family was that none of them had ever really gone in for a career, either in business or in the professions or any occupation whatsoever. This may have been in reaction against their ancestors who had very strenuously made money in farming, property, and whatever trade had been currently profitable. They had built themselves handsome classical houses, but since their descendants applied themselves to spending rather than making money, these were gone now—either torn down, or fallen into decay, or taken over as institutions. And besides the houses and the fortunes, the family itself had disappeared. The only relatives Mark ever knew were his father's mother and two sisters, Mary and Evie. These three led spare but active lives in a converted farmhouse standing on the few acres of land which were all that was left of the original family holdings.

As a boy, Mark sometimes went to stay with them, but he always got restless and left earlier than intended. He missed the city and his two homes there—Louise's and Marietta's—and his life with both these women and with Natasha. It was only when he was grown up that he began to think more about the other side of his family. Then it was too late. The mother had died of a carefully concealed cancer when Mark was twelve; Mary had gone to live on Martha's Vineyard where she set up in the antiques business with a friend; and Evie had to be checked into a mental home for a while, from which she emerged only to take an overdose of her tranquilizers
in an apartment hotel on West Twenty-sixth Street. Their house was sold and its contents scattered among family members who turned out to be more numerous and to have stronger claims than anyone had suspected. Mary even had to fight a lawsuit with one very clamorous cousin over a Federal chest of drawers. By the time everyone was through, only a few pieces were left for Mark; but these he cherished, and when he grew up, carried them to the various lofts in which he established himself.

He also developed an attachment to his father's part of the country that became in due course proprietary. It was here that he found the house for Leo's Academy; and when he came to visit there, he drove around the countryside and got out of his car to look not only at houses with a view to acquiring them but also at the landscape, as though he wanted to buy that as well. It pleased him to think that a part of him belonged here; and often on a summer day he parked his car on some overlook and got out and filled his gaze with the view of grassland shimmering green and yellow in the sun and cows grazing as peacefully as the clouds that floated in the sky above them. When he got back into his car he drove slowly and lingered especially through villages where the white clapboard houses—some of them converted into antiques shops—clustered around an only slightly larger church, also white and clapboard with a modest spire attached to it vertically and a modest green graveyard horizontally.

As he drove, Mark liked to daydream that he had spent more of his boyhood here than he actually had. He had never stayed long enough with his paternal grandmother to make any friends—these he made in the smart prep schools he attended—but imagined what it would have been like if he had, and what sort of boys they would have been who knew how to do all sorts of country things. And more and more it was this sort of boys, or as he imagined them, whom he chose for his closest friends: fair, wholesome, Anglo-Saxon, from simple
families from somewhere within the heart of the country; so that, in being with them, he also felt he was acquiring a greater share of something—a landscape, a country, a way of being—that he longed for but only half possessed.

“Are you sure you want that?” Mark asked Kent as he watched him open a bottle of Sauterne.

Kent didn't answer; he didn't have to, the way he poured himself a very full glass was in itself enough.

“You ought to have a glass of milk or something,” Mark half scolded, half coaxed.

Kent lay on a sofa, drinking his wine and sinking into one of his silences. Mark had learned to live with these silences, though he still wasn't sure what they portended. Sometimes it seemed as though Kent were thinking nothing at all; but then again it might be that he was descending into deep, dense territories within himself that he couldn't share with anyone. The only thing one could be sure about was that he didn't like to be disturbed—Mark knew that perfectly well, but he was always doing it.

“You ought to be reading something,” he said. “There are all those copies of
Art Forum
you haven't even opened. What's the matter with you? I thought you were supposed to be interested. I thought that's why we got all those subscriptions. I thought you wanted to learn.” Mark could hear himself, and he sounded like someone else—like his own mother, like Marietta when she was trying to get some reaction out of him, Mark.

And predictably, just like he himself did with her on such occasions, Kent got up and announced: “I'm going out.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Out.” Kent spoke in an accent as flat as the midwestern plains his forefathers might have come from. Actually, he wasn't sure where they came from, for he had never met his father and in fact didn't know who he was.

“Don't be silly,” Mark said. “You know perfectly well all these people are coming. Lincoln and Christopher and all. . . What, you don't want to be here? I think you should. You certainly should. It's time you mixed with a finer type of person.” Mark hated this phrase and himself for using it. But he couldn't help himself—it was too exciting to have Kent towering over him in this way, scowling. He kept his eyes fixed on the glass of wine in Kent's hand; he wanted to bring him to the point of smashing it to the floor and stamping on it, perhaps even first flinging its contents in Mark's face.

Sensing that this was what he was being tempted to do, Kent carefully put the glass down. He went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, regarding his chin. But he left the door open for Mark to follow him.