Love in the Loire Page 2

  I said, “Maybe it will be the Germans who will sweep through here on their way to Bordeaux.”

  “Please, Hugo,” Nina said. “You haven’t been here a full day, and you already are proposing spy theories of your own. Now we’ll all be wondering if poor Franz Burkhardt is even really German, let alone Austrian. He could be a Russian.”

  “He might very well be a spy,” Graham said. “His painting is terrible.”

  “You don’t like the fact that he uses old cars as canvases and then paints them to look like other cars?” Nina said.

  “He sounds great,” I said.

  “Actually, that old Peugeot that he painted the word ‘Police’ on the side with red paint that was all drippy and looked like a five-year-old had done it I thought was pretty amusing,” Nina said.

  “Do people buy them?” I said.

  Graham got up and went over to the sink that looked as though it might date back to 1600 with the rest of the house. Nina and Graham were not kitchen and bathroom fanatics, which you might expect from Americans. Nina had explained to me they only had their tiny refrigerator because their American guests expected ice cubes. Otherwise, they shopped every day and didn’t really need it. From the sink Graham said, “He claims his cars are in all the major museums. We’ll have to check it out one of these days.”

  “It’s not every piece of art you can drive to the museum that buys it,” I said.

  “The biggest art star we have here is Dick Submariner. He really sells.”

  “The local smart set calls him ‘Deeck Subleem.’ The sublime Dick. I don’t want to go there myself,” Nina said.

  “And his paintings?” I said.

  “They’re duplicates of French postage stamps. Exact duplicates. To size.”

  “So you could frame a postage stamp and put it on your wall and say it was sublime.” I said I had to go. I got up from the table and put my cup and dish in the Stonehenge-period sink. It was very dark and cool in their kitchen. I liked it very much.

  “Or you could mail a letter with a fifty thousand-dollar painting,” Graham said. “That would show a sublime indifference to the relative value of things.”

  “I must away,” I said. “I’ll report back after my day with an entirely different order of artist. I’m sure no one is going to display a sublime indifference to the relative value of anything,” I said.

  “Say hello to Toca Sacar for us,” Nina said. “He’s your director. I think we’re the only people that get his sense of humor. Maybe you will, too.”

  “It’s almost undetectable,” Graham called after me.

  Baby Theo was sitting in a small cardboard box in the lavender living room pretending he was driving a car when I left. Perhaps the talk of painted cars had inspired him.

  Toca Sacar

  “My mother was killed in a stampede in Norway,” Toca Sacar said. This is more information than I need, I thought.

  “When?” I said. I thought perhaps it had happened recently and that he was still mourning. I would have to ask about the details. A stampede in Norway wasn’t that usual. A reindeer stampede? It was possible.

  “Years ago. 1974.” He didn’t seem to want to elaborate, even though he’d brought the subject up without any preliminary.

  Let’s flip for it, I thought. “Was your mother Norwegian?” I said. “Or a Laplander?” I love the idea of someone being a Laplander. It suggests so many things. Expert at lap dancing. Etcetera. And I wanted to know in case the reindeer scenario developed.

  “No, she was on vacation. They were visiting a glacier in horse-drawn carriages. And the horses bolted onto the glacier. Carriages overturned. People fell out on the ice. I never got the details. I was very young.”

  In your dreams, I thought. Toca Sacar had to be fifty-something. He had to have been something like my age when the careening carriages flew across the ice. If it ever happened at all.

  “I’m sorry. Did she fall into a crevasse?” I said.

  “No, I think she just hit her head on the ice.”

  I thought of my own mother and said, “That must have been hard for you. To have had to grow up without a mother.”

  “Oh, she hardly figured in my life anyway. She had been a child star in vaudeville as Baby Marie and spent the rest of her life trying to regain her stardom. She was there with some Norwegian impresario who had told her he could launch a comeback for her in Oslo. It wouldn’t have happened anyway. She didn’t speak a word of Norwegian. And I can’t imagine her ever learning.” He added sighing, “No, it was probably for the best that she left this world before she had completely lost her looks.”

  “Was she beautiful?” I said.

  “No. But she thought she was. Which is really the same thing. It all has to do with confidence. She wasn’t beautiful the way you are,” he said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” I said.

  “I can’t help myself,” he said.

  “Oh, Toca, I’m sure you can help yourself. What should I tell you? That I’m promised to another? That I’m not gay? That I have deformed sexual organs? Which one would you like?” I said.

  “Well, the deformed sexual organs add a certain piquant touch to the whole conversation. But I’m sure you don’t. I’m sure . . .”

  “Don’t go there, Toca. To be direct, you don’t have a Chinaman’s chance at a Japanese gang bang.”

  “That’s a great expression! You are quite wonderful, Hugo. If I have to be mooning around after someone this summer I think it’s going to be you.”

  “Toca, you put me in a very awkward position. You’re the director here at the Festival. I’ll wind up playing Bottom if I don’t bottom I suppose, in that famed production of Midsummer Night’s Dream you’re planning.”

  “Oh, not at all, darling. I’m not that stupid. You’re going to add a lot to all the productions we’re doing out here at the end of the earth, and I’m not going to cut off my nose to inspire my face by sticking you in the back row of anything.”

  “To spite my face,” I said.

  “In spite of your face? But your face is one of your best attributes.”

  “The expression is, ‘Cut off my nose to spite my face.’”

  “Is it? I wish I spoke English as well as you do, Hugo. But, of course, it is your first language.”

  I said, “It’s not yours?”

  “Yes. But you know I never learned to speak it very well.”

  Toca Sacar was our director for the Festival. He had a good name in New York for bizarre fringe offerings. He had done Romeo and Juliet on skates long before anyone else was putting skates on stage. He had done the stage version of Lawrence of Arabia in a swimming pool, which I, for one, thought was inspired. In the press he was quoted as saying, “I wanted to do away with everyone’s preconceptions.” Putting a horde of good-looking dark guys naked in a swimming pool with a camel hadn’t hurt business at all, either. That song they did, “Humping,” even got a certain amount of notice.

  And then he did a revival of A Chorus Line and had everyone in edible underwear, which they took off and threw into the audience. People were fighting for them. Who knew chewing someone’s knickers was such a big thing?

  He seems quite normal, Toca. Average height, dark hair and eyes, with something slightly mechanical about him. As though he had programmed himself to be normal. And there were many other programmings possible. That’s where all those directing ideas came from. All those other channels lurking in there.

  “Who brought you up, Toca?” I said. We were taking a break from our rehearsal of The Trojan Women. So far, none of the women’s roles were being played by men, everyone had their clothes on, and it wasn’t going to be performed in Nazi costumes. So far. Toca and I were sitting on a bench in front of the Abbey’s main façade, which for some reason faced across empty fields, which made it invisible from any viewpoint unless you approached it on foot across tho
se same fields. Few did. It, too, looked like the train station in Blois but an earlier version and much, much bigger. The Abbey had been a boys’ school for eight hundred years, and the boys had lived here all year-round. No vacations in those days. It was pleasant sitting on the bench with Toca. Since it was July it was warm but far from tropical. There’s a lot to be said for France in the summer.

  “My grandfather,” Toca said. “He was a barber, and I used to help him around the shop.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “In New Jersey.” He said, “Newark, to be exact.”

  “That made it easy to get into New York.”

  “He would never let me go. He had let my mother go and look what happened.”

  “Death in Norway,” I said.

  “Worse than that. My grandmother took her into the city, and the two of them never came back. Except to drop me off.”

  “So you are really an orphan,” I said.

  “Did I say that my grandparents are dead?”

  “They’re not?”

  “I’m not that old. No, they reconciled. My grandfather always said she’d come back someday when she got tired of fooling around.”

  “So what do they do now?” I said.

  “He’s still cutting hair. And she’s calling almost every day to see what’s happening with my career. She’s my stage mother now.”

  “So how did you get started, Toca?” I said. It was getting time to go back to the other students, but now I was interested.

  “I was in A Chorus Line like everybody else. I did the ‘Buffalo’ speech.”

  “I remember ‘I was going to commit suicide, but I was already in Buffalo and decided it was redundant.’”

  “Yeah. But it was ‘I was going to kill myself . . .’”Toca said.

  “And how’d you get that?” I said.

  “I’d done it in college. And this wasn’t the original company. As I said, I’m not that old. This was about the fourth touring company. But one of the guys in the show wrote a play and I fucked him to get a chance to direct it. The critics liked it although it only ran for about four nights in the Irish Repertory Theater. I could write a better show myself right now standing on my head.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas. I want to do a musical called Radium. The life story of Marie Curie. She fucks Alfred Nobel to get the Nobel Prize for her husband for his discovery of radium. And they fall in love. Albert and she. The big number that ends the second act is called ‘Meet Me at the Maginot Line.’ It’s pre–World War I. The chorus girls are in French and German uniforms. Mark Morris could choreograph it. Very combative.”

  “I think the Maginot Line was France’s defense in World War II,” I said.

  “Who remembers that stuff? They’re all dead.”

  I said nothing.

  Toca said, “There isn’t a part in it for you.”

  I said, “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “I have another show I want to do. The working title is No, No, Gustave. It’s about the building of the Eiffel Tower and Gustave Eiffel. You know a lot of people didn’t want it built. And it was always planned to be temporary. It’s a dramatic subject.”

  “Could I play Gustave?” I said.

  “I was thinking that.”

  “But you’ve never heard me sing.”

  “Who cares? Those electronic guys can make your Aunt Bessie sound like Celine Dion. It’s all faked nowadays.”

  “I’d hate to think that,” I said.

  “It’s all for the audience. They like fake. They want it fake. Otherwise, Celine Dion would be in the toilet. All that crap. Cirque du Soleil. All that stuff. And most of it comes from Canada. Did you ever think of that? There they are up there where they’ve got eleven months of snow and one month of poor skating, and they turn out all this drivel.”

  “They’ve got their finger on the pulse, I guess.”

  “Yeah, and it’s hardly beating.”

  “You don’t seem to think very highly of the American public, Toca,” I said. I stood up and turned toward the Abbey. I could see the other students gathered around the entrance waiting for us. They probably were hating me for being the teacher’s pet.

  “That’s not my concern. For me, when you say ‘show business,’ the emphasis is on business. Who was it said, ‘Irony. That’s what closed last Saturday night’? If it doesn’t run, there really isn’t much point in doing it.”

  “So why are you here?” I said.

  “Cranston Muller is a great friend of mine. He needs a name? He can have mine. And who knows? Maybe I’ll find a new property. Or a new star like yourself.”

  “You’re a real dollars-and-cents kind of guy, aren’t you, Toca?” I said.

  “Not really. But I don’t like hanging around with people who have big plans and then don’t deliver. If you’re going to do it, then bust your ass and try.”

  “What was the worst time of your life?” I said. We were almost at the front door. I was right. The students were glowering.

  “I came to in the backseat of a taxi in the Bronx wearing pink panties and a cross.”

  “That was the worst?”

  “That or once I came to on a beach completely naked and the last thing I remembered was going to a party in Spokane.”

  “Where were you?” I said.

  “San Francisco.”

  “You seem pretty adept at extricating yourself from difficult situations,” I said.

  “Fortunately, I was still good enough looking that I could sleep my way out of it. You have to hang onto your body. You never know when you’re really going to need it.” Turning to the students he said, “So, how are they hanging? Are you as bored with this production as I am? Let’s go inside and you can all choose the role you want to play. And we’ll perform it that way. If we’ve got two or three people for the same role, we’ll get all intellectual and tell the audience that it represents the different aspects of the character: conscious, unconscious, id, all that crap. Whaddya say?”

  No one said anything. We went inside. As he passed me Toca turned and said, “By the way, did you know that your host used to be a porn star?”

  “Graham?” I said.

  “You never heard of Chase Manhattan?” And he moved into the group.

  The Loire Valley

  Let me tell you about the Loire Valley. The Val de Loire. For one thing, it isn’t a valley. There are no mountains in that part of France, two hours directly south of Paris.

  Technically, I guess it’s a triangular area of flat land between the Loire and the Cher rivers before they meet at Tours, bordered on the northeastern base of the triangle by the Sologne, pine forests full of lakes and fishermen. Not so big, really. You could surely drive from the Sologne to Tours in an hour. Perhaps less.

  It is famous for its beautiful skies and beautiful light, the Val de Loire. And its gentle climate. Supposedly warm air from the Atlantic comes up the Loire River and settles there, making the light filmy and keeping the flowers blooming well into winter. Nina says it is claimed to have a “microclimate” and also said that one winter coming down from Paris by train, she looked out of the window and saw a line across the countryside where the snow stopped and the brown and green fields of the Loire began.

  Graham says it was the Miami of the Renaissance and that is why all the châteaux are here. It’s true. There are many châteaux, and they are hard to remember as they all start with “Ch”: Chenonceaux, Chaumont, Cheverny, Chambord.

  Cornichons is situated so that there is a château in one direction or another within fifteen minutes to a half an hour max. Nina told me she has only two requirements of her guests. Either they speak French or they can drive a car. If they can speak French, she drops them off at a château and collects them later. If they drive, they can borrow an ancient Peugeot and go to do battle on their own. A guest who can do neither is little favored in the household of Nina and Graham, who have visited the châteaux all t
oo often.

  I can drive the Peugeot because my mother always had some sort of old stick-shift car. And I have a smattering of French from college, so I can at least order meals, ask directions, and am not hopelessly lost in a bakery.

  There are many bicyclists in the Loire Valley because it is for the most part flat. In fact, I would call it the Loire Plateau. Once you bike up the steep clifflike hill from either the Loire River to the northwest or the Cher River in the southwest, the large fields and the small forests reach off with little incline. When I see German couples (they must be German) on bicycles built for two, I always wonder what resentment the hard-peddling husband in the front must feel for his lard-assed spouse in the rear, trying valiantly and red-faced not to be a burden, and failing. What does a bicycle built for two say about a marriage anyway? Most of the couples are on separate bicycles, zooming along independently. Though I notice the husband is always in front. It would be hell to spend your entire adult life being deferential, however slightly, to another person just because they are the opposite sex.

  Then there are the trim men in lycra knee-length shorts and bright racing jerseys; quite old under their half-melon biking helmets. I’ve never found anything at all sexy about cyclists. Even champions. I’ve never envied Sheryl Crow’s making off with Lance Armstrong. No drugs? Why should he be the only one to abstain? Maybe if you have something going on with strong thighs, which I don’t particularly.

  What is curious about the Val de Loire is that it is in a vague way equated with the Touraine, the region around Tours. And that it can include châteaux many kilometers from either the Cher or the Loire. In France, there is no need to really nail down one region from another. Under Napoleon the First, the Departements were established and are used by the government and the postal service. But the regions established in the early reign of the Capet kings remain the same in the people’s minds. You are only clearly out of the Touraine (and the Val de Loire) when the low, choppy, steep hills of the Berri to the south capture your car. Or the really endless wheat-covered plains of the Beauce to the north drag your eye to horizons that seem ever more distant.