The Apprentice Lover (12 page)

Patrice would have liked to complete, sexually, the experience he'd set in motion that night. I understood that, but held back, refusing to let myself surrender in that way, even when he straddled me to get better leverage as he massaged my shoulders. The weight of him, the pressure of his body lengthening against my own, was overpowering and affecting, but I kept a hand firmly on my internal rudder, intent upon steering this skiff (which could easily get out of control) in ways that would not torment me in the morning.

“Go to sleep,
ami
,” he said. “You are tired, I see that. You must dream now.”

Trusting him enough to let myself go, I floated away on a dark swell of exhaustion, entering a dream as one enters a warm bath, relaxing into the contours of a phantasmagorical world that seemed only a brief step from where my hash-filtered mind had been in the last couple of hours anyway. Like a child in some magical library, I wandered from volume to volume. I kept meeting Father Aurelio in these books. He kept inviting me to the confessional, and I went. I confessed to all sorts of sins, real and imagined. And I was forgiven. Over and over.

Throughout the night I was vaguely aware of Patrice beside me: the musty smell, the tight skin and unwashed hair, the smoky breath. It was soothing, as when Nicky and I, as children, would sleep in the same bed on special nights, when our parents were out of town or, unforgettably, on the nights before Christmas. When I woke just before dawn, I realized I had an arm around Patrice's waist, but was not upset because we were friends after all. We were very good friends.

F
ather, I have sinned.

Tell me, son. What have you done?

It's of a sexual nature.

Be explicit, please. Remember, it's God you are talking to, not me.

I've been fucking goats, Father.

Goats are bad. I mean, for fucking. Anything else?

I have not loved my neighbors as myself.

On Capri? You've neglected your neighbors? The place is crawling with neighbors. Not like it used to be. I remember the old days, when—

Father?

Yes, my son?

You're ignoring me. I have sinned.

Tell me, child. What have you done?

I've abused myself.

Masturbation…

No, I've been killing people, stealing things, and so forth. My neighbor's wife, I fucked her and her goats as well.

Masturbation is worse.

It is?

Theoretically. That's the one thing I remember from seminary.

You masturbated in seminary?

No, I was taught never to masturbate. It comes between you and God.

God really cares?

Very much so, my child. He cares about all His creations.

I am wicked, Father.

Nonsense. I mean, we're all wicked.

Even you?

I'm a priest. What do you expect?

I want absolution.

That's hard.

I thought the confessional was ideal for that sort of thing.

Only if you believe.

You think I don't?

I know it. That goat thing. And the neighbor's wife. The killing, the thieving.

I was only kidding.

You shouldn't have done that. I believed you.

You're gullible.

I'm a priest.

Now
you're
kidding. Are you kidding?

Forget it.

If I hurt your feelings, Father—

I said, forget it. I'm going to absolve you. Go home, child, and lead a clean life. Say ten Our Fathers.

What about Hail Mary?

Do what I tell you.

Thank you, Father.

Good man. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, your sins are forgiven. Go with God.

Amen.

Amen.

I
kept hitting roadblocks with my own writing—failures of nerve, mostly—and was incapable of finishing anything. One morning, sitting in the piazzetta beneath the candy-striped awning of a favorite café, I wrote a long story about two young men (closely modeled on Patrice and myself); they were both reading Sartre's monumental work
Being and Nothingness
and their conversation was meant to represent two opposing philosophical camps. That afternoon, in Grant's study, I asked him if it were possible to hold a reader's attention for a dozen pages or so with a detailed conversation about Sartre's philosophy. He did not hesitate with his reply: “Only if the two chaps are sitting in a railway car,” he said, “and the reader knows there is a bomb under the seat.”

I had, of course, no metaphorical bomb under the seat, and I put the story in a drawer. Writing became a dreaded activity most days, but I could always read with pleasure, and it pleased me to read the novels and poems of Rupert Grant while living beside him. He had been generous with his books. “Take whatever you want,” he said. “Just put it back when you've done.” I burrowed my way through the novels I'd not yet read, and lingered in his
Collected Poems: 1930–1968
. The poems, in particular, gained weight and resonance by having Grant's actual voice in my head, its Scottish whimsicality, with a mandarin pause at certain points in the delivery. My original respect for Grant,
as a writer, enlarged, bordering on naked hero worship by the end of June. This expansion coincided with a continuing disillusion with the man himself.

As a poet, he had come of age in the heyday of Georgian verse, with its simple lines, regular meters, and a sentimental view of nature. But even his early work had a tinge of modernity, as in “Ancient Lovers,” a lyric from his undergraduate days:

One could see the influence of Yeats there, of course—early Yeats, in particular, whose young apples would certainly have been “green and gold.” That “windy fen” seemed straight from the
Georgian Anthology
, and the sentimentality of the last stanza had roots in the Victorian age. But “day by dream,” that odd sleight of mind, anticipated the work of
Dylan Thomas. The transition from “earnestly” to “urgently,” however, was pure Auden.

I asked him about this one afternoon when I found him under a tattered straw hat that, with the large sunglasses, obscured his face to such a degree that I only knew it was him by the angle of his sloping shoulders and the rough, dark hands. He sat beneath his favorite lemon tree, in a folding chair, with a book spread on his lap. I seemed to wake him from a dream, and repeated the question about Auden. Had that early poem been influenced by Auden?

“Auden? Hadn't heard of him when I wrote that poem,” he said, “but tell me something, Lorenzo. Did you try to fuck my wife when I was away?”

Flabbergasted, I denied that any such thing had happened.

“Just checking,” he said. “I gather she likes you. No harm done, if you had. Free love, and so forth.”

“Well, I didn't.”

“Don't go moral on me. You're a young chap. Young chaps like to fuck, don't they?”

“When they can.”

“That's it. You've had your opportunity. You muffed it.”

I was feeling more than a little frustrated now. “We never talk about poetry,” I said.

“Literary chitchat, is that what you're after?” He took off his sunglasses, and I saw that I had annoyed him. “You and Holly are alike, you know. Always want a lesson in literary history. Marisa's easier there. She wants nothing that is not absolutely phallic.”

“She seems lonely,” I said.

“A sulky girl.” He used his hand to shade his eyes from the sun. “I don't mind that, as long as she does her work.”

I had yet to notice that Marisa did much of anything, despite her ambitions as a journalist. She apparently spent time for Grant at the Cerio library, near the piazzetta, digging up tidbits about Capri for his novel, though I had difficulty visualizing this. Her bedroom, I had noticed on my one visit there, was littered with fashion magazines, and she was often seen carrying one or two. Holly, by contrast, worked hard, but
focused exclusively on her own manuscript, which became heavier each week. As far as I knew, she did no research for Grant whatsoever.

“I know you admire Holly,” Grant said, “but I should tread softly. She thinks you're silly.”

Silly? “I'm afraid I interrupted you,” I said, failing to conceal my annoyance.

“I was reading.” He held up the book. “Tony Powell,
From a View to a Kill
. Magnificent.” I scrutinized the spine. He pronounced Powell to rhyme with Lowell. “I recommend Powell—the early ones, in particular. He's gone a bit soft lately. They call him the English Proust, but that's a compliment to neither England nor Proust.”

“I'm sorry I disturbed you,” I said, having had my anger somewhat deflected.

“For Chrissake, don't keep saying you are sorry. It makes
you
sorry when you say that.”

I could think of no response.

“Lorenzo, dear boy,” he said, managing to get some affection into his voice. “Go to your cottage. Type my manuscript, or read, or wank, or write something of your own. I'll pick over it, if that's what you want.”

The whole conversation was too confusing, too troubling, and I couldn't digest the large lump Grant had put into my emotional stomach. Tactfully, he ignored my distress, putting on his sunglasses as a way of dismissing me. His head dipped forward, into the book, and his finger moved down the page to locate the exact place where he had left off.

I went back to the cottage, determined to go my own way. I didn't need his literary conversation or counsel. The fact that he'd known so many writers, that he knew so much about the craft of writing, was an accident of personal history. I would make my own history, independent of him, and not be reduced to a mere satellite in his universe, a minor moon revolving around his planet. The Sun King could go fuck himself.

L
ate one afternoon, toward the end of May, I came upon Holly and Marisa on the beach. They sat beside each other in low canvas chairs, an empty bottle of wine between them, and their glasses tipped in the sand. Except for meals, I rarely found them together, and was surprised to see them here. (My assumptions about their rivalry—which existed more in my head than in reality—were hard to disrupt.)

“Swimming?” I asked, kneeling beside them.

“My head is,” said Holly. She wore a two-piece suit that exposed a slender, pale belly.

Marisa leaned toward me, her dark hair falling forward across her eyes. “The sea is too cold,” she said. “I am not so British. They can swim in the ice!”

“Has he been mean to you?” asked Holly.

I looked at her blankly.

“Rupert is a wicked old man,” she said. “He says he offended you. You wanted a tutorial, and he refused.”

“I wasn't offended,” I said, though my voice betrayed my feelings. “And I wasn't looking for a tutorial.”

“He should be punish,” said Marisa. Her toenails shimmered like cherries.

“He's a bear of very little brain,” Holly said. “Pay no attention to him.”

I sat on the pebbles beside them, leaning back with my weight on my wrists, staring at the sea—a bronze shield of light, with a sailboat stalled on the horizon. “He doesn't know it, but I'm learning a lot from him,” I said.

Marisa raised her eyebrows. “For me, I am learning nothing,” she said. “My work is a disaster.”

“You're not working hard enough,” Holly told her.

“So I am,” she said, thrusting her jaw forward. “It's my concentration that is broken.”

I was surprised by this adamantine aspect of Marisa, a hardness and self-conscious assertion of herself. Before this, she had struck me as pouty and distracted, a purely sensual creature. Like Grant, I had thought of her, and Holly as well, as physical more than spiritual beings, and my shallowness upset me.

Suddenly Rupert Grant stepped from the water, not twenty yards away, shaking his head to clear his ears. He was already as tanned as most lifeguards in July, although his skin was leathery and dry. The flabbiness in his stomach suggested that he'd once been much heavier.

“The great white god himself,” Holly said, as he walked toward us on the pebbles, stepping carefully.

“I see my little class has gathered,” he said, wiping his face with a towel. I could see the blue veins in his legs bulging—the skin translucent in places. There was a yellow fungus growing in his toes.

“We're at your feet,” said Holly.

“I hope you're taking care of Lorenzo, what? He requires some shepherding,” Grant said.

“I'm happy to do it,” said Marisa.

Grant leaned toward me. “Be careful, she bites. I've got the wounds to prove it.”

“I'm not as edible as I look,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Grant. “You're perfectly delicious. Like a sweet from one of Vera's cookbooks.”

“I'm going to swim,” I said, racing toward the cool, metallic surf. I needed to cleanse myself, to clarify the muddy waters sloshing about my brain. I still believed the Villa Clio was a good place for me, and that I
would improve as a writer in the presence of a master. And I was still fascinated by the world that Grant, like Prospero, summoned from the air around him. Yet the seeds of disquiet had been planted in the past weeks, and I was afraid they would soon mature into towering, unwelcome plants.