Love in the Loire Read online

  Which is to say, I guess, you can be in the Val de Loire, or not, upon occasion. The call is yours. But once you are in the low forests filled with little lakes of the Sologne, which starts only some three miles from Cornichons, you know that this brooding, shadowy sadness has nothing to do with the glazed brightness of the valley.

  And some days you know that you are in the Val de Loire and you could be nowhere else. I always feel there’s a special mood about Sunday. And if you had been in a coma for twenty years and you came to on a Sunday afternoon, you would know that it’s Sunday afternoon. The Val de Loire is a bit like that. The light seems full of gold dust, and the clouds are fat like cotton balls or a flock of sheep upside down, just overhead and completely motionless. The color of the sky is what I call Tiepolo blue. You know that blue he always used for those big ceiling paintings in Venice? I was there with my mother and the man I call “her present husband,” although I know they will be together forever, and nobody else ever painted with that sweet pale baby blue that could be lavender if you blinked. That’s the color of the skies on a summer day in the Loire Valley.

  Nina said some people she knew, not well, came to visit and while they were driving across the fields of full sunflowers and grain the woman in the backseat said, “I don’t know why everyone comes here to paint. It looks just like Ohio to me.” Nina said she wanted to stop the car and order her out of it. And when they passed through an enchanted forest that looked like a stage set for Giselle, with all the branches of the trees interlaced overhead and ivy winding around the trunks, Nina said, “I think this is the most beautiful place in all the Loire Valley, and if anyone in the car disagrees with me, please keep it to yourself.” Graham says she can be sec when she wants to. Sec defines something in French we don’t really have in English. Somewhere around “sharp,” “pointed,” and “put you in your place,” I guess. She worked in advertising. That can’t be all sweetness and light.

  Nina says that on summer mornings, when she throws open the old green wooden shutters and looks out at the chapel steeple almost touching the clouds and the sun is shining on the slate roof of the Abbey and there is the smell of roses in the air, she says to herself, “If you can’t be happy here, you can’t be happy anywhere.”

  Toca States His Case

  “When I look at men and I realize every single one of them has a penis it makes me dizzy,” Toca Sacar said.

  I was having dinner with him at La Toque Verte in the nearby town of Charlestour-sur-Epingle. The festival students called it Charleston. It was a good bit larger than Cornichons, perhaps five thousand people. As Nina said of Cornichons, “There are supposedly a thousand people living here, but I’ve only seen thirty of them.” Well, at least four thousand eight hundred of the Charlestouriens remained invisible any time I was there.

  Charlestour did have, however, many amenities. So did Cornichons, for that matter. A town of a thousand people in the United States might have a gas station and a party supply store. Cornichons sported two grocery stores, a meat market, two charcuteries (a very French kind of shop that sells endless kinds of cold cuts, precooked chicken, and other dishes, pâtés, pickles, you name it), two hair salons, three cafés, two bistros, a small hotel with a really excellent restaurant, three garages, a number of private homes that sold wine directly from the surrounding vineyards, either by the bottle or an overwhelmingly large plastic container that looked like it contained about five gallons. There was also a notions store (thread, zippers, yarn, brassieres, you know).

  Even so, the locals felt they had to go to Charlestour for a first-class meal, which was the reason I was there with Toca, who wanted to discuss my playing the role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

  But first we had to finish his discussion of penis-dizziness. “Is it that ‘So many men, so little time’ syndrome?” I said.

  “Not really. It’s more like realizing that every woman had a fabulous emerald necklace, which she was wearing concealed by a turtleneck sweater. Fantastic things right there, with no one seeing them and no one really to think about them, except me.”

  “First, I feel quite sure that many people of both sexes are thinking about that concealed treasure. And secondly, a lot of those treasures aren’t so lavish, you know,” I said.

  “That’s the problem with being gay,” he said. “One always believes the best of other men, even though you know the truth. And how would you know anyway at your age?”

  “I’ve played sports. I’ve been in the showers with lots of guys. So much for penis fantasies,” I said.

  “You make me feel so immature. Shall we talk about Portia? If you played the role, it would be like true Shakespeare. A young man must have played the role originally.” All this took place in the car on our way to Charlestour, which was only about five miles away.

  “Watch the road, Toca,” I said. “Many people have been killed on this stretch between Cornichons and Charlestour.”

  “How do you know that?” Toca kept his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead when he spoke instead of turning to look at me, as he had been doing repeatedly. But he couldn’t keep it up. He turned and the car veered sharply.

  “Eeek!” I said.

  “Well, all right. I know I drive terribly. My friends say I just get in and steer. Which I’ve never really understood. Isn’t that what driving is?”

  I said, “Only partially. Besides, Toca, that whole Shakespearean boys-playing-girls thing is so passé. Once the fashion magazines have stopped doing it, you have to turn on the lights. The party is over.”

  “But you’d be great and unlike anyone ever to do it before.”

  “And then my career would be in the toilet. I’d be ‘That guy who is good at playing girls.’ I’d be like Rupert Everett. Started playing a gay guy in London, was honest and said he was gay, and that was it for him. Works all the time as ‘That guy who plays the good-looking gay that women like.’”

  “His mouth is too small,” Toca said.

  “For what? Sorry, cancel that. There’s a parking place there.” We had slid down the hill into Charlestour along the sleepy Cher River and stopped in front of La Toque Vert. Toca said, “I was here last year visiting Cranston Muller with Isabel Flamington. You know, she did the musical version of The Little Foxes? Last year.”

  “I’ve never met her,” I said, but I knew who she was. She’d made a career out of doing shows Tallulah Bankhead would have done if she were still living. “Renard. Was that what they called it?”

  “Exactly. Every time we came down this hill Isabel would say, ‘Oh, this is a pretty village. What is it?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s still Charlestour, Isabel. Again.’ Everything looked alike to Isabel. Makes you wonder how she ever learns a script,” Toca said.

  “Actors are only alive once they’re on stage,” I said.

  “Who said that?” Toca said.

  “I did,” I replied and went into the restaurant.

  Once seated Toca began discussing penises again. I guess he looked around the room and noticed the good-looking waiters.

  “Please,” I said, “not while we’re ordering food. Maybe after dessert.”

  “You’re pretty smart-alecky for a young actor having dinner with a famous director,” Toca said.

  “Perhaps I won’t want to be an actor once I fully realize actors are only alive when they’re on stage,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind doing some real living, too.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” Toca said.

  I ordered a green salad and some salmon. Life in France seems to be largely eating, with brief intervals between for getting the food together for the next meal. France is a country where cleaning up after the meal is actually briefer than preparing the meal, the opposite of the United States. There’s something wrong there in our country. “We eat a lot here,” I said.

  Toca thought for a moment and said, “In France, you can be fired from your job, your doctor can tell you that you have cancer, and when you get home, your wife tells yo
u she’s leaving you, and you can still go out and have a great meal. That is always there. It’s quite a cultural achievement, actually.”

  “But they make such a to-do about sex in the same way as they do about food. As though you should do it. They have an expression un baise de sante, a health fuck.”

  “It’s definitely secondary to food. Sex for the French is like a girls’ basketball game. There’s a lot of jumping about and shouting, but nobody ever scores. As long as that menu is there before you in a restaurant, you know you’re going to score.”

  “You’re really quite amusing, Toca. And you’re actually capable of paying some attention to another person, which is quite unusual in the theater,” I said.

  “Some,” Toca said. “Usually when I’m trying to get laid.”

  “But somehow I don’t think you really care that much,” I said.

  “You’re right. It’s love, love, love I’m after.” He reached across the table and grasped my hand. “Are you the one that is going to save me, Hugo?”

  “How’d you like a slap, Toca?” I said, pulling my hand away.

  “We’d be heading in the right direction,” he said. The food came in the nick of time.

  Toca had ordered the vichyssoise and then pasta. I said nothing. He said, “This way I’m getting all three food groups. Carbohydrates, carbohydrates, and carbohydrates.” When we finished he said, “Why don’t you order the chocolate mousse? Then I can have one bite.”

  “Then I’ll have just one bite, too,” I said. “I have a feeling, Toca, if I said I was crazy about you and wanted to sleep with you more than anything on earth and stay with you forever, you’d run like a startled deer.”

  “More like scream like a wounded panther,” he said.

  “Seriously, my job is to remain the impossible dream, right?”

  “Well, we might have a brief and unsatisfactory romance that I could mourn over for years. And tell my friends about endlessly. While I picked up unattractive strangers on the street and had some unsatisfactory sex with them.”

  “You must be Catholic,” I said.

  “You only have to have been Catholic for a few years as a kid and you never get over it,” Toca said. “I was an altar boy for a while, but nothing ever happened.”

  “You probably have a deep-seated feeling of rejection because no priest ever tried to slap the make on you,” I said.

  “Something like that. Imagine with all the news that’s in the papers and you realize that you slipped through with no early sexual experiences at all. You can see how it would make you feel unwanted. Ummm. This mousse is good,” Toca said.

  “Or lucky,” I said, pushing the dish his way. “Here, have a little more. Your body is fine. Or your line as the French would say. You can use a few more calories.”

  “Strange, isn’t it, how the French talk about your line, instead of your weight. I guess it’s all in the silhouette,” Toca said.

  “Or your tailoring. You stand up and suck it in. Just don’t let them ever catch you sitting down,” I said.

  “Yes, what is that?” Toca said, finishing the mousse. “The minute you sit down your waist line doubles.”

  “Crunches,” I said. “You must do crunches. Tell me about Graham and his porn star career.”

  “You never saw his films I suppose. You’re too young. He worked under the name Chase Manhattan. He was quite something. Great dick. He kind of specialized in those multisex films.”

  “Orgies?”

  “No, the ones where there are two guys and a girl in a threesome. Then one guy and a girl in a bathtub, then two guys in a shower. Those things. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know,” I said.

  “He used to do club appearances, too.”

  “Where he jacked off on the bar?” I said.

  “I don’t know if he was ever that crass. I saw him at the Warsaw Ballroom in Miami Beach once. He wore a towel, and you could look up under it, and he was semihard. That’s all. I never heard that he sold it.”

  “But I thought that was how they made money.”

  “Not in the old days. I guess we were all too naïve to suggest it. He was very godlike, and you would have been almost embarrassed to have him stick it in you.”

  “Or stick it in him.”

  “Out of the question. A little blowjob? Maybe. Stop, Hugo. You are cruel. You’re making me hot.” Toca signed the receipt and pushed his chair back. It was still light as he drove erratically back to Cornichons.

  “You’re right about this road being dangerous,” he said. “Everyone told me, but I never believed them. Then last summer I was coming back from Charlestour one afternoon and there was a car turned upside down right over there.” He gestured vaguely off to the left as we rounded a curve, veered, really. “There was a woman in a pink dress waving her arm out the driver’s side window. Then I realized that this road was dangerous.”

  “You didn’t stop?” My hands automatically checked my seat belt.

  “Other cars were stopping. Nina called the police when I got home. They already knew about it.”

  I thanked Toca for dinner as we parted in front of Cranston Muller’s house, where he was staying. Definitely a leave-the-scene-of-an-accident kind of guy, I thought.

  I walked around the curve by the village church toward Graham and Nina’s. Nina had told me that when they first bought the house this little downward street had been called Passage du Salut. “Salvation’s Way.” And that under the macadam pavement she understood there were broad stone steps. She had been told that by someone in the village. They had been paved so cars could drive down the little passage which no longer had any name at all. I felt sad and decided when I had a million dollars I would pay to have the macadam removed and make it a national monument. Or something.

  When I let myself in with my clunking key, Nina and Graham and Theo were out. I went to my attic room and opened the window. There was a new moon just rising behind the Charles the Seventh Tower. I wondered if there was some connection with the name of Charlestour just down the road. The tower stood squatly right across the street. I could see one star through the buttresses of Our Lady of the Snows. It must be about eleven o’clock, I thought. It’s getting dark at eleven in July.

  The swallows were still darting through the buttress arches, beaks open to snatch unsuspecting insects. It must take a lot of snatching to make a dinner, I thought.

  Did you know swallows can’t fly up from the ground? They must drop from their nests under the eaves. Graham and Nina had nests in the walls of their courtyard garden, too, and a box on a stone shelf by the back door for the babies who fell from their nests. They kept them there a few days on breadcrumbs and water, and then Graham would take them to the upper bedroom window and throw them high into the air, hoping they were ready to fly. “Do they always fly?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Not always, but usually,” Graham had said.

  “I can’t do it,” Nina had said. “I can’t have the guilt of their plunging to their deaths on my conscience.”

  “But you’d let them starve in the garden,” Graham said.

  “Yes. Somehow I can see that as God’s will.” She added, “When you fall into Graham’s hands you always face the fatal plunge.”

  “That’s only because you love me,” Graham said.

  I looked at the moon, which had moved slightly. We’re both moving, I thought. The earth and the moon. Strange. There may be trouble ahead. I went to bed, leaving the casement window open. I sensed the empty foreboding of this old house. The backstairs ascended from far below, stopping at the doors to the lower rooms beneath mine, all of which had been closed with large hand-hewn planks long ago. Only the small door in my bedroom still opened onto those creaking wooden stairs. I checked the bolt, just in case, and fell asleep before Graham, Nina, and the baby returned home.

  Mary, Queen of Scots

  I’ll bet I know some things about Mary, Queen of Scots, you don’t know. Did you know she was s
ix feet tall? The Cluny Museum in Paris has one of her jackets in a glass case. She was a large woman. A foot taller than most of the women about her. When she married she became the granddaughter-in-law of Francis the First (François Premier) and he was famous for being six feet tall, so that gives you some idea. She was famous for her beauty, but she probably felt like some kind of freak.

  Her mother was Mary of Guise, from a noble family in Blois. They were all tall evidently. So much for the better diet of the wealthy.

  It was probably an indication of rank to be tall. When Francis the First met Henry the Eighth on the Field of Gold in Normandy it must have been quite a sight. Two behemoths surrounded by hordes of little footmen and courtiers. When Mary was chosen to marry Francis II, it was probably in part because she was so tall. In hopes that she would propagate tall kings. When you saw a king, you knew one in those days.

  Mary was, in fact, French, although half Scottish by birth. Her mother was the Queen of Scotland, having been married to James the First of that country for some reason. When you were beautiful and tall it must have been hard to resist marrying the ruler of a country. Particularly when you were a woman. The royal couple’s only child was also called Mary, and she saw almost nothing of Scotland in her youth. She had already been Queen of France before she returned ill-fatedly to take the throne of Scotland. In France a woman couldn’t inherit a throne but in Scotland she could, so off she went. To wind up finally in the grip of that other woman who had inherited a throne, Elizabeth the First of England.

  Mary’s first husband was Francis II. He was the oldest son of Henry the Second who was killed in a jousting accident. (Does that sound suspicious to you? It did to people then, too.) His son, Francis II, became king. Young, spindly, dominated by his mother Catherine de Medici. Was he syphilitic? Could easily have been in those days. He was promptly married to the eighteen-year-old Mary, heiress to the throne of Scotland, in a very splendid ceremony culminating with a fabulous party at the Château of Chenonceaux.