Love in the Loire Read online

  “I guessed you’d found out about that,” he said.

  “Steve didn’t tell me. I just happened to open the door at the wrong moment. I could easily have never known it.”

  “It was something crazy. He came in. We were alone. I just had to do it. It was as though I was a mass of iron filings being pulled by a giant magnet.”

  Graham was sitting looking down at his feet. Good-looking feet in rubber go-ahead sandals, cross-legged in front of him. Everything about him was good looking. Graham has no faults. Physically, at least.

  “I felt I had betrayed you in some way. More than Steve in some way. We were becoming good friends. Nina loves you. And there I am fucking your boyfriend. On your bed,” he said. His voice was low.

  I reached over and touched his knee. “Steve and I didn’t have any understanding at that time. I’m not sure we do now. It just seemed so . . . unromantic somehow. Like something that had to be done.”

  “It was sort of like that. I needed to do it.”

  “It could have been me,” I said.

  He looked up at me sharply. “It could have. But I don’t think I could have pretended that it was nothing very important afterward.” The ice felt very thin beneath our feet suddenly. I didn’t want to go on in this direction.

  “Look, Graham. It’s all part of this fate, fate, fate thing that seems to be happening right now. The sun, the moon, the transit of Venus in Mercury, or whatever it is. If you hadn’t slept with Steve, if it had happened to be me that had wandered in when you were alone, who knows what would have been disrupted. Upset. Torn apart. I’m not in love with you. I probably could be, but I’m not.”

  I moved a little further away from him, “What I want to know is what about this bisexual thing? I just read about these tests that were done with three groups of men. One group said they were completely heterosexual. One group said they were completely homosexual. And a third group said they were bisexual. They showed them porn films of both heterosexuals and homosexuals having sex and had them all wired up for heartbeat, penis arousal, all that stuff.”

  “So what happened?” Graham said.

  “The heterosexuals were really straight. No interest in gay porn. The homosexuals, the same thing. If it wasn’t gay, they didn’t want to play. But the bisexuals weren’t really bisexual. Two thirds of them got woodies when they saw gay porn. The other third were only excited by the heterosexual stuff. There was no middle ground. Nobody got excited by both things. The scientists concluded that there wasn’t any such thing as bisexuality. What do you think? I’d hate to think that my stepfather isn’t really interested in getting it on with my mom. Or you with Nina.”

  Graham said, “I can assure you that I am sincerely interested in ‘getting it on,’ as you so charmingly put it, with Nina. When you make love to someone you really love, it’s quite a different thing than just responding to pretty flesh. And you have to realize that Nina is an element in the lovemaking. It isn’t just her body lying there. It’s her. We don’t even know what we are going to do. We just grab each other and begin. We want to be as close to each other as we possibly can be. We want to be one person. Fucking strangers is no substitute for that.

  “But when I see beautiful men like Steve. Like you. Even like your stepfather, Glenn, I feel something. Is it competition? Do I want to prove I’m handsomer, stronger, sexier? I don’t know. It’s nothing at all like sex with Nina. It’s apples and oranges.

  “You know, Hugo, there’s not much to me. What have I done with my life? Here I am, lost in a foreign country. I don’t really earn any money. I had sizeable savings from the porn work. It’s pretty well gone. I have a private life I think is pretty rare. But my life out in the world is pretty sad. Doing this part for Cranston Muller restores my confidence a little. I can act. That had nothing to do with how I look. But I can’t pursue my acting career here. Even if I could rise above my porn star reputation. It’s hard. I feel pretty torn up much of the time. Particularly here when I see all you young guys starting out toward what could be major careers.”

  “Come on, Graham. Let’s go,” I said, standing up and brushing the grass and twigs off my jeans. “Who knows? This may be the turning point,” I said. Toca Sacar was coming across the grass.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. “I’m really sorry that Cranston took Tea and Sympathy from me. I think you both are going to be great in it.”

  “Come have coffee with us,” Graham said. “We’ll tell you what we’re thinking for this little scene of ours. You can coach us.”

  A Visit to Amboise and Blois

  I seemed to be becoming the welcoming committee for the châteaux in the Loire Valley. It was my own fault because I love the châteaux and am always eager to visit them. The history of France is there on every stone you walk on. Every staircase you climb. Every window you look out of.

  Estelle got a cold so I had a day off. We had our scenes for Tea and Sympathy down pretty well. It was now a matter of her coaching me. Estelle is Ms. Stagecraft. Learning your lines is just the first step. Then it’s a matter of where you are on the stage. How you turn. Where you look. She coaches reactions as much as action. I learned so much from her. But now she was staying in bed for the day. And I could go do some château hopping with my mother and Glenn Elliott.

  I had some trepidations. I always do with them. If no one else is around are we going to suddenly have a meltdown? Where Glenn feels so guilty that he must confess all in front of my mother and tell her that he used to sleep with me. A lot. And still wants to. And God knows what all. Perhaps I flatter myself that he still wants to sleep with me. Perhaps nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps he is only attracted to sixteen-year-olds in the male category. And I am now an old geezer as far as he is concerned.

  Nervous or not, we set off in their rental car. They both wanted to go to Amboise to see where Leonardo da Vinci had lived. It’s not far from Cornichons. Just a hop, skip, and jump over some rolling hills and you’re there. Glenn Elliott was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. A tight tee shirt. I wish he wouldn’t do that. He has one of those bodies that every muscle is taut, and he has practically no body fat.

  Mom was in black. A full skirt and shirt. She has a very nice body, but I don’t think would ever show cleavage. Now that everyone is running around with plastic tits barely supported by some kind of squeeze-em-together bra showing everything, I know she would never do that. Of course, she is not seeking male attention. She has male attention of a first-rate kind.

  With Glenn at the wheel we came to Amboise through the crowded streets and actually found a parking spot at the foot of the château. The Château of Amboise is thrilling because it is perched high on a cliff. Walls rise up to the height of a ten-story building and there, perched on top, is the château. Very Sleeping Beauty. We walked up the wide stone staircase that runs up the side of the cliff, through a revolving iron gate, and bought our tickets. Actually, Glenn bought our tickets.

  We left the tunnel that rose through the walls and came suddenly into the central gardens of the château. It was a sunny day and the Loire Valley below us was showing itself off at its best. All leafy green and birdsong with the Loire River winding far below. They have found prehistoric remains here, and it is easy to see why. This is the highest point for many miles around. Local tribes must have camped up here to make an attack difficult. A river in front of them. Cliffs on three sides. The château must have inherited this vantage point of many earlier cultures.

  A little chapel teeters over one edge, looking down at the village. Leonardo da Vinci is buried here. Perhaps. A great church once stood beside the château, and he was buried there originally. When the church was pulled down, someone identified his bones. And they were plunked into a tomb in this chapel. Whether these bones are truly his or not, he is well remembered here in Amboise.

  Leonardo was brought to the château by the great king François Premier. François the First. A very tall man with a very large nose. His profile
was almost a triangle. Yet handsome and dashing. He was an exact contemporary of Henry the Eighth in England.

  The two kings were very similar except that François slept with everyone without marrying them. This is a basic difference between the French and the Anglo-Saxons to this day. The French don’t feel guilty. And yet, Catholics are supposedly riddled with guilt and the Protestants less so. Beats me.

  This is what the French call an aperçu. A realization. This is my realization. The French have the attitude of, “So I’m guilty. So what? What do you expect from someone who has lived a few decades or more? You think we’re going to get through this whole mess guilt free?” The Anglo-Saxons tend to sweat and whine and beat themselves up for not being perfect. That’s my thought of the day.

  Over the door of the little chapel is a very intricate stone carving of a saint who discovered a deer in the forest with a cross in the center of its forehead. The carving is beautifully done, with the surrounding trees covered with perfect little stone leaves. In the chapel the pillars that line the interior all have beautiful capitals on their tops carved in the same intricate beautiful manner. It’s called Gothic Flamboyant. Flaming Gothic. Everything twisting upward. Flickering, flying shapes, and yet all carved from stone. The guide said that the capitals were carved in place. The workmen stood on platforms and cut the blocks of stone into the delicate, twining patterns here in the damp coldness of the chapel interior. How do you design such beautiful intricacies? They were drawn on stone. By whom? The beauty is not lost but the way of creating it is.

  In the château we marched through the history of the place, century by century. Much of this château was torn down in the time of Napoleon. He gave these châteaux to his favorites, and they demolished huge sections and sold the stones. For the rebuilding of Napoleonic Paris, no doubt. It was a very money-grubbing time. Yet much remains of the château. We saw the great curving ramps on the inside of the château that were built instead of staircases. So that horses could be ridden from the ground level all the way up to the gardens above. We were told once there was a famous fire in one of these round-and-round ramps when a king was ascending. The ramp had been lined with hangings which caught fire. The king escaped. It could have been set. They were those kinds of days.

  My mother took my hand as we walked through vast rooms, sparsely furnished. Here were the wooden benches, tables, and chairs that accompanied the royal family as they moved from château to château. Her hand was warm and dry, and I thought of all the years that we have walked together. Of the times she took me to kindergarten, walks on the boardwalk in Miami, strolling down the beaches. She’s Italian, my mom, so she is not adverse to touching other people. But she is not very verbal. We don’t tell each other that we love each other a lot. But she wants to touch me when I’m near. In some ways it makes me feel like crying because I feel like the child I was. And I wonder if I’m grown up enough to handle the things that are happening in my life. The one thing I feel I owe my mother is to not bring my problems to her. I want her to think that everything is fine. She worked so hard to take care of me. I want her to think that everything is great in my life at all times. There is nothing she can do to change anything. My one gift I can give her is to allow her to believe that she was successful in raising her child.

  Amboise is the château where Charles the Seventh hit his head on a stone doorway going into the grass-filled moat to play tennis. They laid him in the grass, and he died there. They sent immediately to Contres, a village not far from Cornichons, where his cousin and heir, Louis, was living. When the courtiers arrived, Louis thought they were there to arrest him, as he was always plotting to gain the throne. But instead, they came to make him king. King Louis the Twelfth. He wasn’t such a saint that he didn’t set aside his wife and marry Ann of Bretagne, the wife of his deceased cousin and predecessor. He had to keep Brittany allied to the throne. They had one living child, Claude of France, who married her cousin François. He was the heir of the Twelfth Louis, and so the royal family continued its hold on France.

  My mother and Glenn Elliott liked the early nineteenth-century part of the château the best. This was the Louis-Philippe part. He was the last Bourbon king, followed by Napoleon the Third, the great and grand Napoleon’s nephew. You see, I do know my French history. Louis-Philippe spent his summer in the Loire Valley. His furniture wasn’t meant to be carted about. Red satin. Blue satin. Shiny rosewood. Big family portraits by Winterhalter. I have always loved Winterhalter. There is something about a hoop skirt that’s hard for me to resist. The paintings were of men, slender and staunch in blue and red uniforms, and ladies in large swooping gowns. The most beautiful was the Princess de Joinville, who married one of the younger brothers of Louis-Philippe. She was Portuguese, the daughter of the emperor of Brazil—exotic.

  The princess was brought up in sexy, sultry Brazil. She was dark and truly beautiful. What could she have thought of her chilly new adopted country? Mom stood in front of this painting for a long time. She must have been thinking the same thing. I could imagine my mother in the bare-shouldered dresses of that time, the skirts billowing about her as she walked. Sexual organs hidden away under yards and yards of cloth. The heart of the flower. The sexes were so different then. And though you might think it was hard to be gay, they actually paid little attention to it. There was a sort of understanding that some men were like that, and they left it at that. The idea that some women might be like that apparently never occurred to anyone.

  We were châteaued out, so we curved down one of those endless tower ramps and popped out into the streets of Amboise very near a little bakery-restaurant. “Let’s go there,” I said. “The omelets are delicious, and the croissants are fantastic. Let’s have lots. And finish up with Tarte Tatin.”

  I think Tarte Tatin is so underappreciated in the world. Old Mother Tatin, Mère Tatin, invented it. A kind of apple upside-down cake with lots of caramel sauce.

  After dessert Mom went to the ladies’ room. I looked at handsome Glenn Elliott and said, “Do you fool around on Mom?” He’s the kind of man who will never bring up a subject himself. One of those gliding, gleaming icebergs drifting across the ocean that we can wreck ourselves upon.

  He answered as though he was expecting the question. “Never. I really don’t. Your mother is very smart. She figured out right away that if I felt very successful somewhere else I wouldn’t have to keep reassuring myself that I was successful with sex. I love real estate, and we have been in exactly the right place at the right time. We’re big names in Miami. Paul and Bianchi. We just decided that we should move to North Bay Road. On the wet side. A house with bay frontage. We found an old beauty that needs lots of fixing up that used to belong to Micky Wolfson. The man who founded the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach. I really don’t fool around. Nobody else even looks attractive to me. Except you.”

  “Whoa,” I said.

  I could see Mom coming down the long hall that led to the ladies’ room. So could Glenn Elliott. He said, “We made love like I’ve never made love to any other man, Hugo. I’ve never really wanted to be with another man since. You were the fuck of a lifetime.”

  Mother said, “So, gentlemen, what were you discussing?” She didn’t sit down. We stood up. We were ready to leave. “Business,” Glenn Elliott said. “I was telling Hugo how much I like what we do.”

  Mom said, “Paul and Bianchi. We’re always getting calls for Paul Bianchi. We have to explain that there are two of us.”

  “It might as well be one of us.” Glenn pulled my mother over to him on the sidewalk in front of the bakery. I didn’t remember him ever being affectionate with her in front of me. She looked a little embarrassed. “We spend almost 24 on 24 together, and I never get tired of her. And if she gets tired of me she’s very good at concealing it.”

  My mother kissed him on one cheek and said, “What a pretty speech.” Then seriously, looking him right in the eye, “You know I feel the same way. I think of my life before I met you an
d every single day is very precious to me. We’ve had a lot already, Glenn. We should count ourselves lucky.” I was beginning to feel very much in the way.

  “And now off to Blois, much refreshed,” my mother said as we pushed our way through the Italians thronging the street.

  “Before we go to Blois we should stop for a moment and see where Leonardo lived,” I said. He lived in a large red brick house up the hill from the château called Clos Lucé. A truly Renaissance house, perhaps built new for him. François Premier had been in Italy when he was making war on various local princes. He had seen what the Italians were doing in art and architecture and music and was determined to bring the Renaissance to France. Surely they didn’t call it the Renaissance then. I wonder if they had a name for it? The New Wave. Something like that?

  He brought Leonardo da Vinci to France when Leonardo was quite elderly. He lived to be eighty, which must have been considered extremely ancient in those days. Leonardo brought his principal lover with him, as well as the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa wouldn’t be in the Louvre today if Leonardo hadn’t carted it over the Alps with him. He didn’t really want to come to France, but financially, it was his only possibility. François admired him greatly and supposedly visited every day. I wonder what language they spoke? Did François learn Italian? I can’t imagine that the aged Leonardo learned French. The guide at the château said it was rumored that an underground passage led from the château to Leonardo’s home, which the king used.

  We didn’t go into Clos Lucé. It was too mobbed. But we stood in front of it and imagined the old genius inside. Dreaming up flying machines, defenses for fortresses, and drawing beautiful horses and boys. We bought postcards, among them his self-portrait when he was old and bald and long bearded. What happened to the man who was so much in love with other men? Boys, really. Some of their portraits were there, also. He had a taste for pretty faces.