Inside a Pearl Read online

  On our way out of the mosque a handsome sheik, with a handlebar mustache and a posse of thugs, grabbed Brice’s hand and made to abduct him, undoubtedly spirit him off to his harem where he’d tranquilize him on drugged sherbets. To Brice’s regret, I tugged on his other hand, trying to keep my pretty boyfriend. The sheik was soon laughing at the situation and melted into the crowd instantly. Annabelle, considered a great beauty in Paris, was miffed to be passed over in favor of Brice. The fact was that she was too skinny, what the French call “too dry” (seche), to appeal to Levantine tastes.

  We visited the ancient hammam beside a still more ancient fortress. In the hammam all the fixtures and walls were of veined marble. We also walked through the Azem Palace, now a museum but once the governor of Damascus’s elegant mansion.

  In our rented car, we drove to Homs, lately the site of so much bloodshed. Even then the people looked frightened and cowed. Although older Syrians could speak French (Syria had been a French possession between the wars), they all seemed reluctant to talk to us, as if they might be tortured afterward. We visited a water mill, but there were few other points of touristic interest. Homs had recently been repressed by the first Assad, whose photographic portrait hung from every lamppost. The only thing up to international standards was the highways, no doubt to facilitate the transport of troops. Most workingmen were in uniform, and I remembered Genet’s pleasant experiences in the thirties in Syria with boys. He’d had an affair with a boy hairdresser, his first ever that was accompanied by any affection. All the old men playing games in cafés had teased them. Now the cabdrivers in Damascus knew just enough English to ask you if you were married, and if you said no, they turned toward you from the steering wheel indicating their erections.

  A young professor of French was sent to accompany us as we went through the Grand Bazaar at Aleppo. He was our guide all day and into the evening. He invited us to his apartment to drink tea and buy carpets. My French friends all said no, they didn’t want rugs, but I felt sorry for him and bought a small carpet woven by “Christians in the desert—see the crosses!”

  In Aleppo, Annabelle decided we should stay in Shepherd’s Hotel because Lawrence of Arabia used to frequent it. The man at the front desk had waxed the long hairs growing from his ears. They stood out in sharp points six inches on either side. We were bitten alive by bedbugs and the next night stayed in a new, deserted, expensive hotel called the Pullman.

  We went to the Krak des Chevaliers, a castle built by the Crusaders. We took another trip to Palmyra, in those days an almost perfectly intact ruin from ancient times. Then, although we had rented our car in Paris for both Syria and Jordan, we were told that we had to abandon it in Damascus. When I became angry about the unexpected change the Hertz man said cheerfully over the phone, “You will always be welcome in Syria.” I sputtered, and he repeated, “You will always be welcome in Syria.” It reminded me of the matronly volunteer guides at Monticello in Virginia herding along dull, uninterested school kids and obese laggardly tourists by saying, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  And then it turned out we had to take an expensive taxi to the Jordanian border, wait three hours to pass through immigration, and hire another taxi to Amman—where we rented a new car for Petra. Annabelle was game, but usually French tourists are spoilsports who puff out their cheeks, ever bothered by the weather, and exclaim, “Ouf! Il fait chaud!” (“It’s hot!”) Or, conversely, “Il fait froid.” (“It’s cold.”) Or they’ll change their restaurant table five times to avoid the dreaded draft, un courant d’air. And you can count on them, like Americans, but unlike the English, to comment on every hardship or inconvenience along the way. Spicy or sweet food they detest. They’ll even pay extra for a special insurance that will reimburse them for a vacation spoiled by unseasonable or inclement weather. Brice didn’t seem to understand that Americans admire stoicism and sportsmanlike behavior in others—even if we can’t always rise to the occasion. On the other hand, when it comes to dying no one is better equipped or less whiny than the French. It’s a role they’ve been rehearsing their whole lives. I’m sorry if that sounds cynical; it’s meant to be admiring.

  In Syria, Brice and I had lots of sex, but he was always worried we’d be detected by the chambermaids, or by Marc and Annabelle. His sense of discretion—a quality much admired in France—seemed excessive to me. But this was a minor quibble, and Petra astonished us all.

  And then one day, back in Paris, Brice announced he was leaving me for a rich man, a famous interior decorator who owned a historic castle near Giverny and decorated apartments for rich Arabs on the place Vendôme (in the bathrooms, rubies for the hot water tap, sapphires for the cold). It really was very Balzacian, Brice’s move up in the world. Soon he was vacationing in Udaipur and was the proud possessor of Bonnard’s studio (in a walled community next to the Montmartre cemetery), where he set about fulfilling his dream of designing original furniture. He came back from one trip to India with the bust of a Sikh notable; I asked him to make a plaster copy of it for my Knopf editor, Sonny Mehta (himself a Sikh).

  I was inconsolable until I met Brice for “lunch” and we went immediately to bed.

  “Bravo!” MC said. “Now you’ll be the mistress and not the cuckolded husband.”

  MC often took a fervent, amoral interest in my affairs. She liked to think of us as the scandalous couple in Les liaisons dangereuses—calling herself Madame de Merteuil and me Valmont. I think in her day she’d had a lot of “gallant” affairs and now she was living vicariously through me. I censored most of what I did (I’m much bolder as a writer than as a conversationalist) since I never wanted our friendship to slip below a certain point of “elegance” (her word), but she knew that Brice’s defection had wounded me and she exulted in my new status as “the other woman.” The funny thing is that just before he’d left me I’d been ready to break up with him; our similar feelings of satiety didn’t keep me from feeling bereaved (as Proust observed). I guess in the battle of love the vanquished is whoever gets dumped first. The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate, but always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.

  Right on schedule Brice’s furniture-making career took off. Soon he had two assistants. Half of Bonnard’s old studio was for making things and half for living. He’d designed busts of the pharaohs for a hotel in Cannes; his own bedroom housed plaster replicas of them. In the surrounding “village” of artists’ studios, the ateliers were linked by gravel walkways, planted with old trees and entirely surrounded by walls. In the entranceway to his house there were old-fashioned vitrines filled with gleaming insects. Beside his flower-petal couches were side tables of glass posed on metal daisies. Just as a writer must find a “voice” that reproduces his own conversation, so Brice had had to discover the visual equivalent of his own playfulness. The tables were much more expressive than his big, gloomy paintings—but even they, with their superimposed layers of painted glass, couldn’t hide his originality.

  Fortunately he’d also discovered a patron—a woman who was kept by a Saudi prince in a hundred-room chateau in Provence, every room of which had to be furnished with Brice’s unique, fanciful pieces in bronze and rare inlaid woods. That assignment kept him going for a decade. Fortunately his considerable social charms and sex appeal worked on women as well as on men; usually women don’t see the attraction of a gamin. He was careful to maintain his slender body; whenever he put on a few pounds he’d make a giant pot of soup and eat it for a week. He had glittering blue eyes, an elegant litheness, a shock of straight, sandy hair, the laugh of a kid, and the swagger of a sexually powerful predator. He wore baggy khakis and loose old button-down blue shirts, usually unironed.

  He never heard me speak English except once in London, in a roomy, old-fashioned taxi when I shouted directions to the Cockney driver. Brice told me that whereas I had a charming little accent in French, in English I sounded like a rustic braying for more “white wine.” He thought every Ame
rican was shouting “white wine” all the time.

  He found a young, beautiful, successful lover. I suppose that’s the end of the Balzac story about a young man who comes to Paris from the provinces. He may sleep and work his way up the social ladder, but once he’s arrived he can afford a young beauty of his own.

  Chapter 9

  James Lord and I had instantly taken to each other. A generation older than me (back during the war he was just getting out of prep school and going into the army before I was even in grade school), James had the years and the background—the more formal, heavier-drinking world of American industrial wealth and serious cultural pursuits—to become a second father figure to me when I was convinced that I’d never want another. But now here I was in Paris in my forties, suddenly and passionately, if chastely, involved with yet another mentor. I always felt that special, privileged sense I experienced when as a boy I was (rarely) the object of my father’s interest.

  James had written a biography of Alberto Giacometti, which remains the standard one. In his apartment, which was all white like a Hollywood starlet’s, he greeted guests while sitting on a white love seat beneath a Giacometti portrait of himself. Probably his most admired book was the short A Giacometti Portrait, about the eighteen sessions during which he’d posed for this very painting in Giacometti’s grim studio devoid of heat and hot water. Few people before James had given a detailed account of an artist’s process. Giacometti did endless revisions of every work—painting or sculpture—and James was nearly unique in recording every stage, day after day. Facing him in his apartment on the wall opposite was another portrait of himself, as a young man, by Picasso. James knew that Picasso liked to draw sleeping women, and on one of his first visits to Picasso he pretended to fall asleep in the antechamber and was pleased when Picasso, perhaps catching the hint, went ahead and drew him. Then James, who recounted the episode in his memoir Picasso and Dora, pretended that he’d lost the sketch—so Picasso drew him another one. Now James had two.

  At one of James’s cocktail parties I met Claude Picasso, the son, who said to me, “But don’t you remember meeting me in the early seventies when you hired me to photograph artists and their collections? Like Andy Warhol and his Aunt Jemima cookie jars? Or Walter Darby Bannard and his scrimshaw?” I have a highly selective memory, but I surprised even myself by forgetting having met a Picasso. At another party I introduced Claude Picasso to Rachel Stella, the artist Frank Stella’s daughter. In a stage whisper I called out to him, “Her father is a famous artist!”

  So many people in Paris seemed to be the relatives or ex-wives of famous people. I met Paloma Picasso many places, once at a charity party given in Venice by Mrs. Fanfani, the wife of the prime minister of Italy. Paloma was with Karl Lagerfeld, and together they decided our table had the best position in the room and they wanted it. We all had to move, but not before they decided not to stay after all, though it seemed a pretty A-list mix to me, with Prince Albert of Monaco and the singer Dalida (a gay icon in Europe); when these two were introduced, the paparazzi went crazy.

  From that I had a bad impression of Paloma, but later I came to like her. I had a secretary from California for a few weeks. I took her to a party, introduced her to Paloma, and cringed to hear her tell Paloma, “You’re much nicer, more approachable, than your reputation.”

  Paloma replied, “I’m so short, people take advantage of me if I’m nice from the start. So I start off cold and intimidating, and then I become more pleasant, and this makes people take me more seriously.”

  A candor that made her sympathique to me.

  In those days Paloma was often seen with her small Argentine husband and another man. The trio were called Paloma and the Palomettes. They’ve since divorced.

  James wrote several memoirs near the end of his life; in my vanity I wondered if my own trilogy of autobiographical novels had encouraged him. James certainly read me faithfully, and he did claim to admire my extreme candor about my sexuality. His posthumous book, My Queer War, was about his coming out during World War II.

  For seven of the years that I knew James, I was working on my biography of Jean Genet. Both he and Bernard had known Genet slightly and they were well acquainted with several of the people who’d played important roles in Genet’s life, if only fitfully. Cocteau was the most crucial figure, since he’d discovered Genet. Later, Genet avoided Cocteau, as did Picasso, both treating Cocteau as a clever—too clever—entertainer. What they failed to see was that Cocteau wrote two good novels, two or three excellent plays, what amounted to a slim volume of great poetry, and several original autobiographies. Cocteau was the perfect impresario who promoted the careers of the talented young men around him. He also wrote—and drew!—homosexually, especially in his remarkable images of priapic sailors. And he directed one great movie, The Beauty and the Beast, and wrote and narrated another, Les Enfants Terrible. James knew how much I admired Cocteau and twice gave me letters that Cocteau had sent him, not framed or kept in glycine envelopes but just folded and placed between the leaves of a book. For his part, James was impressed with Picasso and Giacometti and almost no one else in the twentieth century, and he was especially full of contempt for his contemporaries.

  When I told him I was writing an article on Cy Twombly, James looked livid and he half levered himself out of his chair.

  “You what? But, my dear, he’s a fraud! Are you going to treat seriously those wretched daubs he’s managed to fob off on the public?”

  I told him that a Twombly recently went for a million dollars and James said wearily, “He gave me one, but I put it out in the trash.”

  “No! Why on earth did you do that?”

  “Because that’s where it belongs!”

  If he was rude about so many people, he was as polite as a potentate with me. I had to avoid admiring the tie he was wearing or else he’d take it off and hand it to me. James liked to imagine we were exactly alike—the same age and possessed of the same wealth—and he’d often refer to influential friends of his, like the American ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman, as if I must know her. I was quick to disabuse him, but he’d merely shrug it off.

  James lived on the rue des Beaux-Arts, a block-long street lined with art galleries leading to the gates of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He’d put together several maid’s rooms at the very top of his building to create his large apartment—the big living room, the modern eat-in kitchen, a dining room with a table for ten, and James’ own bedroom. There, as he put it, he slept in his own well of Narcissus, surrounded by paintings of himself by Lucian Freud, Cocteau, John Craxton, Picasso, Dora Maar, Balthus, Cartier-Bresson—and nothing by Twombly.

  James had lived for a while with Dora Maar in a big house Picasso had given her in the town of Menerbes in the Luberon, a hilly lavender-growing region in the south of France. The experience became the basis for his book Picasso and Dora. He hadn’t been back there since the late 1940s. One day my partner Michael and I drove him to Menerbes, about an hour’s ride from where we were staying in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The house sat atop one of the highest points in Menerbes and was huge and impressive and commanded the valley—and when we arrived it was full of workmen. They explained that a Texan had bought it, along with the mayor’s house at the top of the road.

  James, who was very sentimental, was tearful as we toured the shell of the old place. Then we walked up the road to the mayor’s house. A willowy young Texan working for the lady of the house was just returning with a whole pack of little dogs he was reproaching for dawdling. I’d lived in Dallas as a child and I put on my best Texas accent and accosted him. He invited us in for a second, where much of the furniture was designed by Alberto Giacometti—not his brother Diego, who usually fashioned the chairs and tables with their little birds and animals—which of course delighted James, the biographer of Giacometti. He was delighted to see the furniture, as was I to see a large Caio Fonseca, a New York friend and the brother of Isabel Fonseca, the wife of Martin Am
is.

  When we began to point out the treasures one by one and exclaim over their importance, the young man seemed completely unaware of their provenance and said, “Okay, that’s neat. But it was really the decorator who chose them.”

  James shrugged airily, though I wondered if the lack of general culture he encountered in young people—what he’d spent his own youth acquiring—wounded and deeply irritated him.

  The hundreds of evenings I spent with James Lord over the next two decades followed a ritual. As with every Paris apartment building, there was a regularly changing code to be punched in to open the solid, heavy, ornamented door from the street. In the inner courtyard, there was an intercom that James’s butler answered. Then the slow-creaking elevator that had been created a century earlier to fit into the stairwell took you up, up, up.

  The “correct” and traditionally liveried and white-gloved butler, a good-looking man in his forties, friendly but formal, took your coat and drink order. Michel was a butch gay man with closely cropped hair (a fashionably forbidding gay style the French call a para, since it was how French paratroopers kept their hair), and I joked with him once when I ran into him at a gay bar in the Marais. Even then Michel insisted on calling me “Monsieur White.”

  Michel took care of Monsieur Lord’s clothes on a daily basis and helped with the heavy housecleaning. He served drinks and James’s favorite pretzels and (on rarer and rarer occasions) dinner. For a while there was a cook, whom I never met—a man who prepared three-star meals but was frustrated because Monsieur Lord so seldom entertained at home. James liked to invite his friends to rue des Beaux-Arts for drinks and pretzels, then take them to the Voltaire, on the quai Voltaire—a small jewel box of a wood-paneled restaurant so exclusive it did not welcome evaluations from the listings magazines or the Michelin or Gault-Millau guides, and where it was nearly impossible to make a reservation unless one was already a habitué. Looking up from your plate you suddenly realized that sitting at the next table was the deeply tanned designer Valentino with a retinue of beautifully dressed, unboisterous friends. There were just a handful of booths and tables in the main room, though in the summertime there was a sidewalk café looking out on the Louvre, across the Seine. James had been coming to the Voltaire for such a long time that on the menu there was a starter named Oeuf James Lord, a hard-boiled egg in mayonnaise priced at a few francs. It had not always been called Oeuf James Lord. One day after the hard-boiled egg in mayonnaise had disappeared from the menu, James had complained so vociferously to the owner and management that the dish was reinstated and named for him.