A Previous Life Read online

  For Quinn, and to the memory of a great love

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Forgetting Elena: A Novel

  The Joy of Gay Sex (coauthored)

  Nocturnes for the King of Naples: A Novel

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

  A Boy’s Own Story: A Novel

  Caracole: A Novel

  The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis

  The Beautiful Room Is Empty

  Genet: A Biography

  The Burning Library: Essays

  Our Paris: Sketches from Memory

  Skinned Alive: Stories

  The Farewell Symphony: A Novel

  Marcel Proust: A Life

  The Married Man: A Novel

  The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris

  Fanny: A Fiction

  Arts and Letters: Essays

  My Lives: A Memoir

  Chaos: A Novella and Stories

  Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel

  Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

  City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s

  Sacred Monsters: New Essays on Literature and Art

  Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel

  Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

  Our Young Man: A Novel

  The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

  A Saint from Texas: A Novel

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One: The year 2050

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  They both suffered at the idea of practicing a deception on her, but deception, to a quite unexpected extent, gets easier with practice.

  —PENELOPE FITZGERALD, INNOCENCE

  But me and my true love will never meet again.

  —“LOCH LOMOND,” SCOTTISH FOLK SONG

  Ruggero was my muse. He always encouraged me as a writer, never gave me negative remarks. The only things he corrected were errors of fact or tone or inconsistencies. As a trained musician he could feel the structure of my work—and often improve on it. He always showed me respect. When I made suggestions about his writing, he always took them with gratitude and humility. Gertrude Stein said that writers need only praise, and Ruggero followed her advice without perhaps knowing it was hers. He read every word I wrote as soon as I wrote it—for an insecure egomaniac like me, that was the ideal response.

  He left me probably because he was lonely. Everyone liked him but he didn’t make friends easily.

  I was the reckless suicidal bitch because I disturbed our “arrangement.” I wanted to be the wife, not the other woman.

  CHAPTER 1

  The year 2050

  She came back into the room where the fire was blazing and looked with admiration at the familiar face. Yes, he was in his seventies but still slender and handsome with his strong profile (big Italian nose, huge dark eyes, full lips still red).

  She was laughing to herself as she sat on the taboret next to his high-backed tapestried chair.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked, looking at once wary and charmed; was she laughing at him (which she sometimes did) or had she noticed some new, never-remarked-on-before endearing trait?

  “All evening I kept looking up from my book and wondering if you ever slept with anyone for money.”

  He stood, expressionless (this was how he showed indignation). “Have you forgotten I’m a lord from Sicily? Why do you ask?”

  “Calm down. You’ve always been so handsome.” She was smiling now but not laughing. “Surely someone must have offered you some money, if only to see your strong body. And you’ve always been—well, not amoral but a good sport. If you’re so attractive now, you must have been irresistible at thirty or forty. I’ve seen the photos. I know.”

  With each flattering supposition, he relaxed. He sat back down. He looked at her as if verifying her degree of sophistication. At last he smiled. “Well, yes, once, when I was forty and still looked thirty, Edmund White, we were great friends but he was already in his eighties, paid me twenty symbolic dollars. I undressed though he kept his clothes on. He wrapped the bill around my member. The situation, unique in my experience, made us both laugh; he loved pretending. And I was, and am, as you know, such a narcissist that it made me hard.”

  “And?” she asked, after denying that he was a narcissist.

  “Well, I don’t need to spell it out. I kept the twenty dollars. He loved to play—that night he decided he was a naïve American tourist in shorts with a camera around his neck and I a wily, not very clean scugnizzo.”

  She’d heard the word but forgotten what it meant.

  “A street boy in Naples, always cheerful, looking like Caravaggio’s Bacchus, dirty feet, a hungover green color, who will do anything for a few lira. Of course I was the one who ended up with the expensive camera.”

  “I’ve performed fellatio on you,” she said, a bit too blunt for his taste. “Did you like it when he did it? Did he?”

  “Remember we were great friends, and though I knew he was an invertito, we usually talked books. Or baroque music. He didn’t know as much about music as I did, but like most European writers he was widely cultured and a good conversationalist.”

  “But he was American,” she objected.

  “Yes, but he lived in France and Italy more than half his long life—so long, he told me, that he’d forgotten his Social Security number.”

  “Didn’t submitting to his attentions make you a bit of an invert, too?”

  “In those days, in that century, especially in the old Mediterranean world, our idea was that it was the part you played that determined your identity, not the gender of your partner.”

  She got up and poured them a bit of brandy, and while concentrating on her little task and not looking at him, she said, “And were you always the active one?”

  He laughed. “Guess.”

  “You were always the active one.”

  He patted his crotch; the conversation was exciting him. “I don’t mean to be crude, but with this I would never have been allowed to be passive. By definition, I suppose, with a woman a man is usually active unless she wears a strap-on or ties him up, and undergoing penetration or bondage never appealed to me. The few men I granted happiness to, once they saw Bruce”—their nickname for his penis—“ils ont voulu chaque fois en profiter.” Like his ancestors who spoke Latin when they said dubious things in front of the ladies, Ruggero reverted to French, the language of his nursery and his grandfather’s table, when he said anything off-color. She wasn’t as at home in French as he was (although she’d spoken a patois as a girl), but she knew he meant all the pederasts and most of the ladies had been eager to submit to that hard, giant member.

  He sipped his drink and slouched slightly back in his chair. She could see the outline of his penis, held by his trousers in a bent position, which made it look even thicker. He said, “But at the risk of being indiscreet, may I ask, did you ever take money for sex?”

  He was forty years older. She’d been married twice and he once and they’d both agreed soon after they met never to talk about their past lives; transparency had destroyed their earlier marriages. He’d said he “detested nostalgia,” but she thought that was just an indirect way of saying he wanted to avoid the penalties of frankness. Their avoid-the-past rule had led them into frustrating impasses. He’d begin, “I knew a woman who traveled all the way to Shanghai in search of the perfect orgasm—” and he broke off. Or she’d
say “My cousin dated a woman I myself had seen for a while—” and again she had “to nail the beak shut,” as the French said. They strode past each other clothed in great black capes of mystery. If Ruggero was in one of his possessive moods, he could turn what she reported as one of her innocent little vacation romps into a major orgy; she’d learned to avoid such reminiscences. We all model ourselves, trying to be more agreeable, on what one’s partner praises or damns in a previous lover. In their case, they were flying blind, since they had none of the usual cues given by the other one’s recollections. Now, though, they’d found such harmony together that, though by nature he was secretive and compartmentalized, she liked to think he could be bullied into confessing. Her love for him was so all-consuming and her respect so great that she assumed he’d be honest about himself and accepting of her avowals. Which of his impulses would win out? she wondered. The secretive or the frank, the honest (she dared not repeat the troublesome “transparent”) or the retouched? He was too honorable to enter a contract he wouldn’t remain faithful to. Then she remembered he’d cheated on Edmund and left him for the substitute teacher.

  “You like to write,” she said, touching his thigh, “and I’d like to try. You’ve always said my emails were entertaining, especially when we were apart and writing each other five times a day. You read my silly little novel about my ex … Even then, when we met, you were in your late sixties and I would have imagined you would have already sussed out all your emotions, but I always felt your urgency, your questions, your intensity—which made our correspondence exciting.”

  “Yes, well, I feel that way now, and though we’re absurdly happy all the time I’m never bored. It turns out happiness isn’t boring. We’re always discovering new things.”

  “But once you said you were easily bored.”

  “By ideas—even musical ideas—that unfold in an obvious way, a way I can easily second-guess, but not by the emotions of the woman I love; I feel I hang on your every word, as if every word will determine my fate.”

  “But you must know by now,” she smiled, “that with me your fate has long since been sealed in your favor.” She noticed that whenever she said something to him that was deeply felt, she could feel tears welling up at the back of her eyes. Why? Perhaps she was just expressing her own ardor, or maybe honesty about such serious, unchanging matters suggested their opposite, the transience of all things human. Nothing could last forever, not even the life of a beloved man already on the near end of his seventies, despite his taking such good care of himself, as he did partly out of vanity, partly out of consideration for her, largely because he hated leaving the party. Since he didn’t believe in the afterlife, he accepted that this was the only action in town. Like Achilles he thought it was better to be a living peasant than the lord of the underworld—and he was no peasant, but a Sicilian magnifico from Castelnuovo. His surname was Castelnuovo, his palazzo was called Castelnuovo, and he lived on Castelnuovo Street, something that the university registrar that time had thought must be a joke.

  “But what should we write?” he asked with a slightly false respectfulness, as one might ask a child which color one should paint a room.

  “Our confessions,” she said. “In an edition of one, for each other’s eyes alone. To be burned after a single reading. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Of course we know the broad lines of each other’s life, but we’ve never been able to put in the fine shading. Oh, come on, don’t look so solemn. It will be fun.”

  “Let’s shake on that.” He extended his hand, which she grasped. “And when will the delivery date be? We must present our confessions to each other on the same date. And read them out loud. I have to see your reactions to what I read.”

  “In two months? At the New Year’s?”

  “It’s a little unfair since I’ve lived so much longer.”

  “But you’ve forgotten more,” she said, keeping up the bantering tone.

  “Can we skip childhood? I find childhood so tedious and predictable.”

  “But that’s the part I remember best,” she objected, then said, afraid he’d back out if he had to write something that didn’t amuse him, “All right. So we’ll begin with early adolescence.”

  “D’accord,” he said, which she knew meant he agreed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Six months had gone by and the day was fast approaching when they’d agreed to read their memoirs in alternating chapters out loud to each other. They were in the Engadin, in the little town of Sils Maria. Around the corner, in a two-story house painted white with green trim, Nietzsche had lived briefly in the upstairs room. Now the Engadin was a costly ski resort, twice the site of the Winter Olympics, but in Nietzsche’s time, it must have been one of the most remote places on earth, reachable from Italy only by a steep, perilous road through the Maloja Pass in a carriage, then a sleigh pulled by six lathered-up horses baring their big yellow teeth around the bits, their breath visible in the cold mountain air (a sleigh ride was disagreeably called a Schlittenfahrt in German). The most famous village in the area was St. Moritz.

  They had no visible servants there, though an expensive service washed the sheets, shoveled the roof and walkway, watered the plants, ran the sweeper, aired the rooms (throwing back the heavy duvet), turned up the heat a day in advance of their return, dusted everything (though there was no dust so high up in the mountains). The simple priceless side tables inlaid with split reeds and designed in the 1920s, the overhead lamp from the 1950s made in Milan, sprouting multicolored metal cups of light, the matronly restuffed 1950s couch from Paris in green velvet, the polished wood zigzag chairs, the huge painting of the naked, dagger-wielding artist himself with Italian words spilling out of his mouth—all of it materialized before their eyes as Ruggero turned on the track lighting and disarmed the security system. The room looked glaring and guilty as a police photo of a murder scene. Not one thing in it had Constance chosen. She had put up a favorite Chagall poster of a red rooster, but it had mysteriously disappeared and found its way into the unused maid’s room. She knew the house represented the high point of taste (she knew it because connoisseurs exclaimed over it and shelter magazines often asked to photograph it but were always turned down. Ruggero was worried about thieves and tax collectors).

  This afternoon they’d arrived in their four-wheel drive, so suited for navigating through the snow. Ruggero had insisted on skiing right away. Constance didn’t really ski. She’d taken lessons but was afraid of heights, and even the mountain lifts made her sick. The only reason to ski was to keep Ruggero company, and after she discovered he found her ineptness annoying she abandoned the unpleasant effort. Whereas he had gone on ski holidays with his distant cousins every January since he was six, she had never even put on a ski boot until she was twenty-eight—and had promptly broken her toe and had to sit slightly drunk by the fire with a lap robe and a brandy snifter (how delightful!), watching through the windows the dying light illuminate the downhill racers.

  Ruggero liked to be in control and reveled in his superiority—athletic or intellectual or social. As long as his partner wasn’t embarrassingly crude or dense, he seemed to think it normal that he’d outshine everyone around him. Of course he liked that his wife was beautiful and young enough to be his daughter, though he didn’t like it when people thought she really was his daughter; it didn’t matter she didn’t speak proper French or Italian or Spanish (no one spoke Sicilian and almost everyone spoke English). She wore clothes well, never put on too much jewelry or weight or makeup or perfume, had the perfect laugh and an unaffected, unobtrusive American accent. She’d learned about entertaining from him but never tried to exaggerate her origins and was quick to acknowledge how humble they were. She knew that the only acceptable thing to give a host at a dinner party was a small box of chocolates, that after-dinner drinks were vulgar, and that a thermos of hot herbal tea should be prepared in advance and left in the study. She knew not to serve raw oysters to Midwesterners and
to avoid red meat with guests from the coasts.

  That there should be no music over drinks, that candlelight gave people headaches, that too many forks or glasses looked forbidding.

  She took a nap. In her dreams she was walking through a mysterious foreign city under windowed closed-in wooden balconies that protruded out over the sidewalks on either side (could it be a Turkish city?) when suddenly the telephone was ringing. It was like a huge black insect crouching beside the bed. She reached for the heavy Bakelite receiver and said hello, though she couldn’t remember for a second which language was appropriate (Pronto or J’écoute or Guten Tag) but then to her relief it was Ruggero, speaking in English: “Don’t panic, darling, but I’m in hospital. I broke my leg skiing. I’m a hundred percent okay.” She was suddenly wide-awake and wished she had a cigarette, though she’d given them up ten years previously.

  He explained that he’d broken his promise to her and hired a helicopter to fly to the very top of the mountain, where there were no pistes, in fact nothing he could see but a line of wolf tracks. Once he’d moved from the flurry and commotion of the helicopter and it had glided away, he was all alone with the purity of the mountaintop, this pristine unmarked snow, no other skier in sight, the only other living creature a huge eagle floating by on motionless, extended wings. He found the solitude and the windless cold exhilarating as he slalomed down across the treeless heights. The snow was firm and trackless and his feeling of entitlement—of his sole possession of these unblemished slopes, entirely imperial, his lungs burning with the thin, chilled air—provided him with the acme of excitement.

  Now, after ten or twelve minutes of the unsullied pleasure of heli-skiing he could spot the first other skiers getting off the lift—and suddenly his right ski struck something and he was flying through the air and he landed on his back and felt a terrible shooting pain scorching his spine as if it were no longer fretted bone but a single bolt of lightning. He thought, Will I be paralyzed for life? Better to be dead, he told himself, he who’d always been the fittest, most attractive example of whatever age he was passing through. But he banished that thought. Now he looked down on his splayed body as an angel might loom above a recently abandoned corpse. Was his leg broken? Back? Was he bleeding?