Chapter 9
Amy wanted to drive to Spoleto. She had been appointed, without my knowledge, promotion consultant to the Spoleto Festival, which was scheduled to have an annual run in Charleston. And during her stay in Washington, about which I had surmised, in my oblique way, that she had been sacrificing her body for the sake of political preferments, she had been securing federal money to underwrite the festival.
"We can be in Spoleto in an hour," Cloris said, munching her brioche in bed, in our room in the Brufani Palace Hotel (where we had all been welcomed, the night before, by the incessant chatter of chimney swifts).
"I need more time for indecisions," Amy said, also in bed, dunking her brioche in her cappuccino.
The three of us had two adjoining bedrooms, each with double bed, each with a broad balcony overlooking the Piazza della Repubblica and the green valley below. Which of us belonged in which room, to whom belonged top place in the pecking order-and in which bed-were matters of no concern to any of us. If lovemaking is sufficiently aristocratic, it becomes totally democratic-from each according to his whim, to each according to his needs.
"I've been hungry for the two of you," Cloris said.
"It is not fair, certainly not gallant, to abandon a girl to the company of her husband."
"By the way," I said, "how is Lord Cholmondeley?"
"Yes," said Amy, kissing Cloris' left breast, "how is Lord Cholmondeley?"
"Lord Cholmondeley is meek, neat, and obedient, like a camel. And still filthy rich."
Money, at this stage, meant little to any of us. Monna Vanna had been grossing astounding amounts-not so much from American exhibitors, oddly, but from the European and African markets. Amy, as starring actress, had a six-percent interest in the gross. I, as initiator of the idea and "writer" of the screenplay (which was chiefly improvised), had a corresponding percentage. The night before, Cloris had presented each of us with a check for two hundred thousand, drawn on a Swiss bank (and each made out to a numbered account-presumably untaxable).
"Money, money, money," Amy had said when Cloris gave her the check. She had kissed it, folded it, pushed it in the decollete' neckline of a velvety jumpsuit she was wearing. Cloris had reached in the opening, retrieved the check, given it a second kiss, replaced it.
We had had a good night; I thought of it later as "the enormous night." A night of writhing, reflection, recollection, trinitarianism. A week earlier Cloris had been at Ischia with the Countess of Liechtenstein. Cloris had fallen in love with Ischia, the countess with Cloris.
Cloris had driven up to meet us; driven up in her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud-the same car in which she, Amy, and I had driven from Leonardo da Vinci Airport to the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia the day Cloris first set eyes on Amy, the day Amy first set eyes on Cloris, the day Amy was first undressed before Cloris and the Contessa Borrom-ini-the day the Contessa Borromini, unendowed with pubic hair, danced a sarabande, nude, to the shadow and enclosure of her pet mongoose. The mongoose had been absurdly protective, like a bewitched virgin aunt. He had bitten the bartender.
Amy and I had flown nonstop from New York to Milan (Aerporto di Malpenso). I rented a Ferrari at the airport, smart, fast, sensual as Amy. We drove directly to Perugia, 462 kilometers by autostrada. (The autostrada takes you past Parma and Modena; past Florence. You turn off at Arezzo, where Guido di Arezzo invented the staff schema for musical notation, and first wrote, "dd, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do.")
We had met Cloris at the Brufani Palace.
The greetings had been casual. "Hello," Cloris had said, kissing each of us. "Hello," Amy had said, returning kiss for kiss.
Among old friends, greetings are ceremonial. Displays of wild passion are for people who dislike one another.
That night had been festive. We had showered together, touched probingly and with reasonable eloquence, kissed as old lovers kiss. Then we had had dinner together at Ricciotto, on the piazza Danti. We shared the specialties of the house: tortellini alia reale, zuppa di lenticchie del Casteluccio di Norcia, bracio-line alia perugina con crostini. Together we drank three bottles of red Umbrian wine (nostrano dei colli perugini). All in all, for me, a sharp change from the Low Country fare of Seabrook Island-pleasant as the fare is at the club.
"I'm always happy in Italy," Amy said.
"You belong here," Cloris said. "You're as Italian as pasta."
"I'm too decollete, aren't I?" Unconsciously, Amy checked the exposure of her bosom. And I noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing a black, velvety, low-cut jumpsuit. I am not very observant.
Each of us downed three Stregas.
On our way back to the hotel, I stopped in a small liquor store in a crooked street leading off the Piazza della Repubblica and bought a bottle of Mille Fiori. The proprietor, a genial signora, plump, mustached, pointed a pedagogical finger at the crystalline flowers inside the bottle. "Fiori." Flowers.
Once in our rooms, we drank the Mille Fiori like brandy. An urge for loving makes everything sweet seem eminently fitting. Amy, to my surprise, put a dab of it on each of Cloris' nipples.
"You are very kind," Cloris said. "When you come to England, I will buy you a dragoon."
I made love, first, to Cloris, as Amy watched; saving myself for Amy. I then made love to Amy, as Cloris watched. I had intended to "save" myself, even then-for I had long since learned that, among men, desire long outlives capacity. But in making love to Amy, whose sensuality multiplies itself in front of interested eyes (particularly Cloris'), there is no holding back. Waves of excitement meet, compound, compact, then break with cataclysmic force. There is no holding back.
("Not yet, my love. Not yet. Please, not yet." Such was Amy's running commentary as I spent myself.)
Cloris had then made love to Amy, giving cataclysm its appointed place; and Amy, stirred rather than drained by love's Niagaras, made cataclysm cliche.
Much later, alternately kissed above by one, below by the other; alternately kissing, above then below, the one then the other, I drifted, exhausted, benumbed, completed, into my private, oceanic sleep.
It took several days for us, individually, paired, in concert, to bring our appetites, programs, confessions, queries, into some sort of formal order. Cloris was divided, to some extent, between a desire for continuous lovemaking and the pressure of business. The financial success of our last two pictures, the critical success which came to her (the comparisons with Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni, even Fellini), had caused her to take seriously the folderol which she, and I, had only worked at (as I worked at the picture-taking of Elza and June) for erotic jousts.
Our major films, to date, had been Tom Brown's Schooldays, Oedipus Rex, and Monna Vanna. Each had been an afterthought to justify certain high jinks-presumably not possible (this was the illusion we shared) without the bribe of legiMmacy. In each case Cloris had presumably "bought" me a girl. She was, had been, would always be excessively generous. And generosity to excess, I have always held, still hold, is the benchmark of an anointed lady.
That these films had been box-office successes as well, each a succes d'estime, is an irony of our times.
I attributed the successes to Cloris' extraordinary taste, imagination, intelligence. Without plan, intent, she unerringly gave each X-rated incident a Botticel-lian innocence and the verve of a Diaghilev ballet. (Les Biches comes to mind.) The grave symbolism that the critics saw, as I implied earlier, was the consequence of accident. Dada. We could have done as well simply to photograph the strokes of a paintbrush tied to a donkey's tail. We are, I suppose, symbolists all, interpreting the sighting of every comet or two-headed fish as a sign that somewhere, in the ceiling of the cosmos, a superior intelligence is at work.
And now Cloris was eager to get back to work.
"Aside from enjoying ourselves," she said, "we are therapeutic."
"We also make a great deal of money."
"What, after all, is money?" Cloris, like Amy, was every inch a lady.
Elza and June, too young as yet to be professional ladies, found money useful and poetic; to their parents, the money so properly earned had justified the tedium of posing. To me, it had set aside, in a simple, bold stroke, the tedium of seduction. They were ever available, ever ready to dedicate their bodies to the service of art.
(Nor should I forget that their availability was, in a sense, a function of my writings about Amy, and of Cloris' and my pictures. It was my royalties that made their lovemaking art rather than weakness; my love-making, "discovery"-not the seduction of the very young.)
"Our motion pictures are a liberating influence," Cloris said, making a virtue out of creative debauchery. "At long last, we make sex sexual." She was speaking, of course, for women, in the spirit of women's hb. Her argument, which I knew from other moments, was that too many women, for too many generations, had too little sex left in them. "Too many no-nos from too many dodos." Every girl became a Sleeping Princess-always oversedated. "When they should have been ready for peak fucking, all they got was anxiety dreams. This is the No-No Syndrome."
Cloris spoke glowingly of our Cannes prize pictures, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Oedipus Rex, particularly our last, Monna Vanna. (Time magazine had run an account of the premiere of Monna Vanna in Liechtenstein. The article featured a nude of Amy, showing the tattoo, and announced the fact that Amy Dellmore, once Charleston's Woman of the Year, sometime South Carolina's glamorous commissioner for consumer affairs, was Lady Cholmondeley's newest naked superstar.)
"We have become an influence." Cloris was positive. "We are replacing Librium."
She referred to our pictures, my books, and our combined and intertwined seductions. She made a very convincing case for creative debauchery. It was a tonic, like tea; full of good cheer, invigorating, salubrious. It heartened me to hear, from her own lips, that what gave me so much simple, lustful pleasure was, at bottom, an act of hope and charity-a peaking of the jetsam of kindness. I began to think of Cloris as a latter-day Florence Nightingale; myself, as a synthesis of the doctors Lister, Livingston, and Spock.
"Monna Vanna-that was our best picture. At least, the most beautiful ... because of Amy."
She said this when we were sitting alone at a table outside the Cafe" Astor, on the Piazza 4 Novembre, as I was saying to myself that, someday, I must find out precisely what Garibaldi did (or was it Mazzini?) on 4 Novembre.
It was late in the afternoon. The shops were reopening, after siesta. One after another the iron shutters over the shopwindows were rolled up, creaking, whining, clanging. Amy was getting a shampoo and set at a beauty parlor, a few blocks away.
I, unfortunately, had missed much of the shooting of Monna Vanna (in Mantua). I had been in Sicily, where I had met the Countess of Liechtenstein. And I had been there at Cloris' request. ("You must get some rest, you really must," Cloris had said before I left for Taormina. Actually, she wanted me out of the way until the picture was made. My presence, she thought, inhibited Amy; reinstated the primal Amy, the Amy of the Charleston drawing rooms.)
"We could shoot the next picture in Cinecitta," Cloris said. "Anywhere."
"We could shoot it anywhere, couldn't we."
"Even in Charleston."
Her long tongue slithered around her lips. Such was the way of her tongue when deep inside her the hot sap stirred. "You know something..."
"What?"
"Amy loves you. Really loves you. Really."
"I know." Amy had been explicit, when I went from Mantua to Charleston to persuade her to come back with me to Italy. ("I don't like to talk about it. It's not the sort of thing one talks about. ... But I love you.")
"I mention this for a special reason."
"What?"
She stroked my knee. "Don't you know."
"No."
"Amy ... in front of one she loves-meaning you-freezes up."
"On camera."
"On camera."
("I did it on camera," Amy had confessed to me in Charleston, after my exile, my recuperative exile, in Sicily. "I do it on camera. It meaning everything I do. I really do. It was not simulated-I assure you.")
"That's why I went to Sicily, isn't it? To save Amy for art. My love ... for art."
"Monna Vanna was a great picture ... is a great picture."
I agreed.
"And you didn't suffer."
"I didn't suffer."
(Loving Amy, as I do; loving Cloris, as I do; I find it hard to account to myself for the great pleasure I had, without guilt, without regret, without, in fact, a moment's second thought, with Aimee, the Countess of Liechtenstein. I am beginning to believe that there is a certain Zen in lovemaking. One only loves fully when he lets go fully. And to let go is to give up the stained-glass attitudes.)
"That's why I'm going to ask you what I'm going to ask you." She smiled, slightly hesitantly, I thought; and her tongue made it's characteristic snake-like traverse.
The waiter arrived with out Pernods. We had, instinctively, fallen back into our old habits. Always, in Europe, when we drank hard liquor together, we drank Pernod. We had started that way, in Amalfi, when she was in flight from Lord Cholmondeley's yacht, then anchored at Monte Carlo. We drank Pernod in our room at the Brufani Palace, in Perugia, with Caterina-the striking girl we had found in the Abruzzi, on the road to L'Aquila.
"Signora, signore," the waiter mumbled, dusting the table, depositing the glasses. Italian waiters never deliver anything without a ceremonial mumble-which is why so many Americans, ordering no more than a cup of coffee, are convinced that they have acquired, in Italy, compassionate, concerned friends who will remain as such for life. Years may pass, snows melt, crops wither; but each waiter will continue in his preordained way, compassionate, concerned.
"You want Amy to be happy, just as I do ... don't you?" She held up her glass, clinked it against mine.
"Of course."
"You are beginning to understand some of her complexity?"
"A lovely complexity."
Again, a clink. "A lovely complexity."
She smiled. "Then you will do what I ask."
"You have not asked."
"I will. I will. Let me come to it slowly."
"What?"
"You do love her, don't you?"
"Of course I love her. As I love you."
"Then you will undress her, won't you?"
"Undress her?"
"Strip her."
I said, in clear syntax, that undressing Amy was one of the finely drawn pleasures of love and friendship, an introduction to intimacy, a preface to fore-play.
"In public, I mean."
"We've done that before." I thought back to the scenes at the Contessa Borromini's villa. There were no great psychological handicaps. Amy in vino, properly stirred, among people phvsically attractive to her, had a wayward way. Exhibitionism came natural then; came to Amy as it had come to Lady Godiva. As it had come to those actresses, established in their own right, who posed, without Victorian restraints, for the gatefolds in Playboy. Nor did all necessarily pose in vino; not more so than did Elza and June.
Long shadows dipped into the waters of the great fountain in front of our table-the fountain facing the Palazzo dei Priori.
Cloris' lips twitched. "That's not what I mean ... not quite what I mean,"
I gulped my Pernod. "What ... ? "
"What do I mean?" She had, it seemed to me, for the first time, a problem in communicating. And this was odd. Cloris was always detached, balanced, cool, forthright. One of her special appeals to me was her directness, matter-of-fact honesty.
"What do you want me to do?"
"What do I want you to do?" She, too, gulped her drink. "What do I want you to do?"
A premonition, perhaps. I heard, in the middle of this Perugian piazza, the pounding of the surf at Seabrook, the mocking skirl of the laughing gulls.
"I know you love her."
I nodded.
"I know she loves you ... dearly ... completely."
I looked straight ahead of me, at the Ghibelline fenestration on Palazzo dei Priori. It did not seem right to nod in Amy's behalf. How could I know whom Amy loved? Or which Amy? Or how much?
"That's why..." Cloris coughed. She was about, in spite of herself, to develop and defend a paradox. "That's why I want you to undress her ... then give her, naked, loving you ... to another man ... a total stranger."
"But why?" I have, as I have said before, little jealousy in me; and, on my record, little claim to jealousy. Yet about Amy ... About Amy my feeling was different. I was possessive. Not that I had any claims, any rights; not that I wanted any. I rationalized my feeling irrationally. I spoke to myself about what was right and proper, what made aesthetic sense, poetic balance. And Amy, it seemed to me, could not properly, in the eyes of the gods, make love to, be made love to, by anyone other than Cloris or me-or the two of us in congress merged.
"Why?" Her hand moved down to my right knee, and she fingered the hollow.
"Your reasons."
"First, business." Her voice, taking its cue from her word, became business-like; such is the force of autosuggestion. "Amy will not make love to anyone on camera if she thinks you would disapprove. She doesn't say that in so many words. But. . . "
"But that's what she thinks." "That's how she feels."
"As a matter-of-fact..."
"You'd rather she didn't." Cloris and I had come to know each other so well that either of us could speak the other's lines.
"I'd rather she didn't."
She pressed her finger deeper into my knee's hollow. "Bill, you're basically square ... square as this piazza. And a fucking male chauvinist." She paused, reassembled her metaphors. "I mean this literally."
"You want to start right away ... a new picture ... don't you?"
"As soon as we can. I have an itch. A need. And you know me better than you know Amy. And you know I love you as much as Amy does. Perhaps more-because there is only one of me . ... "
"The Naked Countess?"
"The Naked Countess. Or any other story ... starring Amy. You could write a new script ... starting with what I'm asking you to do."
"So much for first. What's second?"
"Second is Amy herself. Too much togetherness is bad for her. You saw what happened on Seabrook." (I had told Cloris; and I was still not clear in my mind about what happened, in what order, or why what happened had to happen.)
"She gets restless."
"Restless, anxious, a little sad."
"Then another Amy takes over."
"Tries to take over."
"And you think..."
"Exactly." She was positive. "If you're man enough to do it."
I had not told Cloris that Amy had made, on Seabrook, a veiled suggestion, more or less to the same end; that, either unconsciously, or with arch subtlety, she had put the onus on me. This was what I, in my perverse way, would like to see-voyeur that I am. And the suggestion, oblique as it was, had given me the chilling idea that she was bored. In giving her what I thought she wanted, I had not given her what she wanted-what the prevailing "Amy" wanted.
"You could write about it, remember," Cloris said.
"The way I wrote about you ... us ... even the first time we were in Perugia ... and in the same hotel."
"The same way you wrote about me ... and my anatomy ... the sounds I made. Terribly scandalous, wasn't it?"
"How did Cholly-Boy take it? I forgot to ask."
Cloris smiled her best peerage smile. "Cholly-Boy is, after all, Lord Cholmondeley. Lords are spared the middle-class morals. A lady can be hot or frigid; bewitched, buggered, and bewildered; terribly, terribly naughty-but never immoral."
She let a short silence paragraph her thoughts. Then she added, "I loved it. A cunt is not born to be uncounted, unsung."
We had more drinks.
The afternoon deepened. Perugians promenaded the length of the piazza. After the fifth or sixth tour, each became an old, familiar, unfathomable friend.
"I think you need assurance," Cloris said. "That's why you hesitate."
I needed the assurance, she thought, that Amy loved me, wanted me; that she herself loved me, wanted me; that neither was put off by what I wrote about them. She added a fillip that I interpreted as a cheap debater's trick-but one, launched by her tongue, persuasive and charming: "Jealousy is the ultimate mark of the beast; fear of loss. You're not sure of Amy."
Looking back, I call to mind a singular fact. I was astounded to find that this had not earlier left some conscious mark on me. Amy talked very little. She sported her beauty, her flirtatious, teasing gestures; she wrapped herself in dreamy mystery; at appointed moments she opened all the sluices of sadness and passion. But communication? A sparse token-except, occasionally, when unexpectedly drunk. No more did Helen speak words that Homer could quote; words whose linkage and overtones gave some clue to the cozy longings of this uncommon beauty. And in spite of this verbal restraint; knowing, even today, so little of what she felt and thought, we think of Helen as a fixture in our pantheon of poetic wonders-and this after some three thousand years.
What I am trying to say in this aside is that, in spite of my failure to understand Amy-or the cluster of Amys-there was no waning of my desires, concern, possessiveness; no waning of my attempts, repeated, revised, to write about her, interpret her, impose on her the vagaries of my irreverant imagine.
The next day Carnavaron arrived.
Carnavaron, as I have explained elsewhere, was Cloris' director. Sometimes cameraman. And sometimes, I do believe, although I have no direct evidence of this, a stand-by, impromptu lover. Not that Carnavaron had any physical interest in her, or she in him. But Cloris' body, like nature, abhorred a vacuum. If she and I were not together, she would, with no qualms, and loving me no less, fill the vacuum. "Placeholders," she called them; "tools with life in them." For the most part, she chose young boys. ("It's such fun to mother them, play with them, teach them what to do. After a while, of course, they get a little cocky . ... But that's fun, too.")
Carnavaron was as much the proper Oxonian as was Amy the proper Charlestonian. He was distinguished, immaculate, bloodless as a guppy; and when he spoke you felt that you were in the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier and gathering, for the first time, the full import of Hamlet's soliloquy. He was much too much an Oxonian to refuse Cloris, should her loins make demands of him. (Cantabrigians, they say, lean more toward science.) Moreover, he was beholden. He was Cloris' discovery. Had it not been for Cloris, and Cloris' happy hobby, he would still be huddled in some schoolroom in Burnt Norton, Little Gidding, Upper Nutting, or Cwmpryddyg, teaching the young to circumflex.
We had dinner that night, the four of us, at Ric-ciotti's, on the Piazza Danti. Carnavaron was jovial, as always; Cloris, in a suave mauve pantsuit, her long blonde hair shining, was becomingly mauve, suave, Machiavellian. Amy wore a blouse which buttoned down the front, and was more open than it needed to be. Her dimples seemed to have deepened-those wry invaginations I associated with a shy slyness. She wetted her lips frequently, was uncommonly quiet.
I wondered what June was doing this moment, some two thousand, four hundred miles due west of us.
"Fellini's slipping," Cloris said.
"So is Bergman," Carnavaron said.
Seriousness, I suggested, is not taken so seriously anymore. Soul-searching is slowly going out of style, like horseshoe-pitching, bundling, and hats.
"Young people are the moviegoers of today," Carnavaron said. "They like Cloris' kind of pictures."
"What kind is my kind?"
Carnavaron sang, "Your kind is my kind."
"Seriously."
"High seriousness on dream street. Beautiful, beautiful women ... like Amy." He nodded toward Amy. "Stark, beautifully naked. Totally, completely, unforgettably naked. A story line that is totally believable because it makes no sense whatever. La vida est su-eno-life is a dream."
In late years, I was sure, he would publish a book of aphorisms, privately printed.
"Cloris' Pix Wow Stix." Cloris remembered an old Variety headline.
"Stix Nix Clothed Pix."
"Instant tea, instant me." Amy, with a bitter rhyme, broke her long silence.
"You have," said Carnavaron, "made masturbation cultural."
"And obsolete," said Cloris, "Like bundling." She put her hand, boldly, inside Amy's blouse, and Amy blushed.
(Why, I wondered, did the word "bundling" come to Cloris' mind? It had just been in mine.)
Carnavaron then noted a singular fact: the influence of Cloris on Fellini. Fellini, the great Fellini ,of La Strada and La Dolce Vita, was now displaying his heroines as utterly, conspicuously naked as was Amy in Monna Vanna. Nakedness, indeed, was the benchmark of Fellini's newest film, Casanova. And the influence was Cloris'; Cloris', as embodied in Amy, emboldened by Amy, flaunted by Amy. And life, indeed, like nature, imitates art.
"Holy cow," Amy said.
"Let us not," said Cloris, "overdo the mammary bits." She then took some liberties which are better left undescribed.
We were, all in all, a genial group.
In the middle of the high-ceiling studio facing the j set were two wide, deep couches. "Casting couches," Cloris called them, with a trace of nostalgia. The term, moreover, was ambiguous, because in Cloris' i and my cinema jousts, every surface capable of sup-l porting weight was used, more or less, for the same i purpose.
At this point in space and time, however, there were, in this studio on the Via delle Volte della Pace, two, and only two, wide, contoured couches. And each had beside it a small table on which there was a bottle of Stock Italian brandy, and two long-stemmed Venetian goblets. The goblets were green, like a Venetian-glass nephew in a stained-glass attitude.
"Let's drink to Cesare," Cloris said.
She filled the two glasses on the table tangent to the couch closest to Amy and me, using the bottle from that table. She left them on the table, an indication, not subtle, that we should sit down. She filled the other two glasses from the bottle on the other table, as if segregation of sources was a safeguard against over-excitement and trench mouth. One of these glasses she handed to Cesare. The other she held in her own torch-holding hand; held up, in jovial toast, like the Statue of Liberty toasting pollution from New Jersey.
"To Cesare."
"To Cesare," Amy said, her voice already un-steadied by wine (Valpolicella), the axis of her breasts perpendicular to her backbone, her backbone parallel to Cloris', her glass high.
The fourth glass, Amy had handed to Cesare, who was standing naked in front of us, and who, unfortunately, did not drink.
Carnavaron had discovered him. He felt, with good reason, that Cloris needed a leading man, even if Cloris, as yet, had no leading idea for what Carnavaron called "a cinema picture."
"Put a good, leading, naked man on the set with a good, naked, leading lady, and a good cinema picture will write itself."
The sentiment. I thought, did little iustice to my talents. On the other hand, I am lazily patient.
Cesare was an Olympic high-diver. He had been on Italy's celebrated team, although little more than sixteen. Carnavaron had sighted him on television. He was symmetrical, snake-muscled, olive-skinned. And his erotic parts, as I now observed, were substantial. Cloris, with not as much as a "May I?" or "Do you mind?" had pulled down his swim trunks. Worldly women sometimes have such a wav with voung boys, using the authority of an interested mother to justify the invasion of virile privacies. ("Have you been playing with yourself? Let me see". )
Cesare's device was massive, even in relaxed indifference; a noble petard, superbly hung.
"I don't believe it," Amy said coyly, pretending the shock she felt to be expected of her-as if life and culture had led her to believe that the lifting of a fig leaf would reveal nothing more massive than a fig.
"Why buy a pig in a poke?" She touched her brandy glass to the tip of the pendant penis, then held up the glass in salute. "Bellissimo, sir. Si? Si! Si!"
"It can't be," Amy said, with added coyness. Her Charleston accent seemed unusually marked, a consequence, probably, of the resurfacing of childhood fantasies.
"It is." Cloris was positive. "It is." She added, "Est! Est! Est!" the name of a special Orvieto. She then made certain overtures to Cesare, and his massive organ stiffened and rose, ready to thunder.
Cesare jumped. "Contessa Cholmondeley!" He spoke from embarrassment, evidently feeling called on to say something. At such moments a silence is rude. But having on his tongue no sentiments fitting to the occasion, he contented himself with a ritual mouthing of her name and title.
"Oh, shut up," Cloris said. She was always ready with a proper mot, although her enunciation now was scarcely that of Mrs. Siddons, or Miss Ellen Terry, in the role of Lady Macbeth. Closer, perhaps, would be that of Ann-Margret, four sheets to the wind, while kissing the Blarney Stone.
After this, we all drank again-all except Cesare, who was in training.
Amy leaned back on the couch. I rolled close to her, kissed her, ran my hands over her.
She did not respond. "Please," she said. "Not here."
Many problems lay ahead. I had agreed, at Cloris' urging, and against my own best interest, to undress Amy in front of Cloris and the boy. When she was naked, I was to offer her to Cesare-then watch, as she let him take her. Probably, I was afraid, I would first have to get her quite drunk.
"Put your hands behind your head." Cloris put her own hands behind her head to indicate to Cesare how she wanted him to stand. He assumed the pose, looking slightly ridiculous, I thought, with his gigantic erection extended in front of him. "And keep that up." She gave his swollen member a maternal pat.
"Cloris has colossal nerve," Amy said.
"It's awfully big."
"My God. It's enormous."
"Could you take it?"
"It?"
"Yes."
"Inside me."
"Inside you."
"What an idea." Her voice soared on wings of civic virtue.
I was sorry I had asked. I had been crude. Nervousness, I think, made me say things, ask things, that are better left unsaid, unasked. In the ambience of Charleston, as in the Urbino of Castiglione, certain gestures may or may not be made; they are never talked about.
"The idea of seeing me made love to by another man still excites you. Doesn't it."
"No," I said.
Amy put her hand on my fly. "Then how come you have a hard-on."
"Would you?"
"If it gave you pleasure, I would. You know ... I would do anything for you."
Cloris went over to the camera, which was aimed at Cesare's penis. This was the small camera we always carried with us when we traveled together-a Beaulieu 5008, with an Opitivaron F I.8 zoom lens. Cloris had mounted the Beaulieu, for this occasion, on a dolly. The camera, the lights, the cables, gave the studio a professional appearance, even if Cloris' purposes (and possibly Amy's?) had nothing directly to do with picture-making. "Still," as Cloris once said to me, "you never can tell." She was a great advocate of serendipity. We had started this way, with Amy, at the Contessa Borromini's villa at Civitavecchia, and ended up with Monna Vanna. Thus had we begun, lifting Jennifer Digby's skirts, in Cloris' room at the Savoy Hotel in London. The fruition: Tom Brown's Schooldays, filmed mostly in Toledo.
Cloris was business-like. She carefully focused the camera, started the motor action. Then slowly she zoomed in on Cesare's erection. I knew so well what was revolving in her mind. This was a scenic opportunity too rich to be ignored. A zoom shot of a giant penis, erect, eloquent. In some future picture that we might make with Amy, we would open with a zoom shot approaching the Eiffel Tower, dissolve to a zoom approach to the Washington Monument-then dissolve to the zoom on Cesare's penis. We then cut to Amy, lying naked, restless, and dreaming, on some Byzantine bed. After that, it would be up to me to invent a story line-say, Florence Nightingale's intimate diary, or the inside story of nights at Camelot. (Amy, it occurred to me, would be an ideal Queen Guinevere.)
I spoke elsewhere of my twinge of jealousy at the thought of Amy giving herself, for whatever reason, to Senator Ashmead, or to whom she gave herself, for whatever reason, in Washington. Nor did I ever know why she gave herself (or how). Was it for an ambassadorship? For the funding of the Spoleto Festival-a noble sacrifice for art? Was it the sheer, simple pleasure of sacrifice for its own sake-a democratic, jet-set substitute for sacerdotal harlotry? And now? Now I was coconspirator in my own jealousy. I was undressing Amy to give her, as a father gives away a bride, to another man. The man, in truth, was a boy, a phallic stripling. I was stripping her for the stripling; over her protests, against my better judgment.
My reasoning, polity, is not clear. But to all of you who are, as I am, fond of thrills, of heightened feeling, I say, "Try stripping the woman you love ... and giving her, naked and protesting, to another man. It is not for nothing that Scripture abhors stricture, and counsels the casting of bread upon waters."
Outside the studio I could hear the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of a machismo motorcycle, gunned uphill, its muffler open.
"Did you try to make love to June when I was away?" Amy kissed me as she asked this. The question was thus one of curiosity, simple, amorous.
"Yes."
"Elza, too?" Another kiss. Gentle stroking in sensitive places. "Yes."
"Together."
"Yes."
"Oh, my!" She sighed, and I unbuttoned her blouse. "Do you mind?" I took off the blouse. I unhooked the bra. Nipples, as I expected, were aroused. "June was better for you, wasn't she?" I unhooked her skirt.
"I mind very much your undressing me in public," she said.
"I'm sorry." My protocol statement. The skirt was now unmistakably unhooked.
"What we do in private is our own business. But I don't like spectacles."
"Would you like another drink?" If we were both a little drunker, whatever might happen would be justified by that lack of logic which descends on us in the penumbra of the grape.
"Yes." This was a sharp "yes," a reprimanding "yes," as if to say, "If I'm to do what apparently I must do, the least you can do is to pour me another drink."
I poured the drink.
She took the glass from my hand, put it to her lips. Meanwhile I worked the straps of her bra down over her arms. Reluctantly she cooperated, even pulling her right hand, glass in hand, through the waiting loop. Then, habit evoking the decorum of old Charleston, she raised her free arm to give a modest cover to her breasts.
"You want Cesare to take me, don't you."
"Not really." Which was the case. I was clearly acting against my own best interests. "Then why must I? Why?"
"I will not force you," I said, putting my hand under the loosened skirt, stroking the recumbent thighs, easing off the panties. She sighed, and made the disjunctive gesture-hands (one still holding the brandy glass) traveling apart to indicate helpless passivity. She even raised her hips to avoid blocking the downward trek of her panties.
"Please don't," she said, aimlessly, I thought. Then, to my surprise, she began to cry.
My conscience bothered me as I took away the skirt, leaving her totally naked.
She rolled over, turning her bottom toward me; and I looked again, with love and wonder, at the upturned tattoo. Then her whole body began to tremble. The couch shook.
"Turn over," Cloris said gently, kissing the back of her neck.
Leading him by the hand, Cloris had brought Cesare to the couch.
She took Amy by the shoulder, turned her over. Amy's face was smeared with tears; tears still poured down, like rivulets on a windshield during a spring shower. Her nipples solid as gherkins. Her arms, her hands quivering.
I began to understand Cloris' strategy, appreciate her subtlety, her insights. Amy only trembled when she was in a state of extreme erotic excitement. She had trembled, at times, when I first knew her. She had trembled, uncontrollably, when she had been undressed in front of her nephew, at Miss Wescott's plantation, Berkeley Hall, outside Charleston. But this passing summer, on Seabrook, she had been serene, too serene. She had felt no pressure, no threats, no challenges. Nor had there been a suggestion of palsied excitement. Something then had come over her, like the drabness of moon country, a Waste Land. And she had talked to herself, although without clear phrases, much as Petronius' reported the Sibyl at Cumae talking: "For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'Apothanein thelo'-'I want to die.' "
Cesare moved closer to Amy, his engorgement now so monstrous that it was almost a disfigurement, like the giant phalli sometimes extended from the dancing satyrs-on Greek vases.
"Me diver," he said to Amy. "Me dive high. Very high."
Amy sat up. Her eyes widened. She seemed for the first time aware of the imminent threat. "My God. No. I can't."
Cloris put her hands on Amy's breasts, kissed her. "You can."
"No."
"You must."
"Me diver," Cesare repeated, flexing his biceps.
"Him all pecker," Cloris said, to no one in particular. She separated Amy's thighs. Then she took Amy's hands and put them on Cesare's erection.
"Bellissima," Cesare said, either in admiration of Amy's beauty or in appreciation of her fight, timorous, trembling touch.
The penis jumped forward, burying itself in the separation between Amy's breasts.
Unfamiliar as this gesture might be to women under the aegis of Lares and Penates, always under the protective, insensitive eyes of husbands and children, it is a token of adoration and concern. It is patently sincere, impossible to force. Nor was Amy oblivious to these arcane facts. She at once stopped crying, ended her parliamentary protest. Instead, she looked up at me and smiled, smiled her wan, sly, beatific smile. Her cheeks flushed. Then, slowly, she leaned back, her maternal hand on his tumescence, her long fingers circling it, caressing, directing.
"You won't mind?" Amy, even now, could not abandon protocol.
I did not mind. So said my Jovian nod. It set at rest the faint, final stirrings of her Huguenot conscience.
"My God, he's good-looking," Cloris said. "And only sixteen."
It was not my place to agree or disagree, express approval or disapproval. I said simply, "He looks older."
Then Amy screamed.
"It's only half in," Cloris said, envy and scheming evident in her voice. "I can't believe it."
"It is big," I conceded. Men not homosexual are usually not knowledgeable in such matters, for the parts on display in college or country-club locker rooms have neither the extension nor stance of those rampant in boudoirs. This, however, was no moment to cavil.
"Almost too big." The running comment, I believe, heightened Cloris' sense of participation.
I suggested that such values are always relative, and Cloris poured herself a brandy. She sampled my reactions at the place where my reactions were most obvious and asked why Amy excited me even when I was not having her. "You will write about this, won't you? You must."
Cloris was ever the artist
"Perhaps." I had, with time, grown cautious. Sooner or later I would write too much, too openly, about my loves and pleasures; then all would be over. Even now too many who read what I wrote raised eyebrows at what I said, took exception to the detail. (My only consolation was that those who objected to the detail remembered the detail, could quote it verbatim. Nor were any one whit distressed, as I was, that I could not understand Amy as I would; could not trace with any sureness the fine veinings in her mind.)
"Amy always does this to you, doesn't she?"
I conceded that she did. It was strange-that I should be excited by what I was not having. Santa-yana, I recalled (speaking of Dante), announced that riches lie in renunciation; it is not what we have that gives us the greatest satisfaction, for too much having invokes the Law of Diminishing Returns.
"Even when you are not having her?"
"Even then."
Again Amy screamed. Again she protested that what was to be could not be, that irresistible force could not widen an immovable sphincter. (She did not, of course, use the term "sphincter," not even in the plural. She preferred, as well-bred ladies do, the impersonal, ambiguous "it.")
She opened her legs as wide as possible, even drew back her knees to dramatize her cooperation. She was not, she implied, refusing herself on the basis of Victorian reticence. Far from it; an aristocrat, certain of her status, her position, she could, with no loss of virtue, give herself even to the least of her subjects-all the more so to a youngster. The difficulty was nature's, not hers.
Cesare considered the fault his. He had not thrust hard enough. He was not gallant. His back arched.
There was an incisive, powerful thrust forward, a gargantuan heave.
Amy released a piercing penultimate scream. Then the ultima. The barrier had been broached.
Then Amy herself heaved, and threw him off. "Enough is enough. Ecco. That's it."
Not so for Cesare. Hard thrusts are aphrodisiac, especially thrusts against flesh as rounded, maternal as Amy's. Thus did the too-solid flesh melt. A geyser spurted. Amy's navel was splattered; and rivulets of viscosity trickled slowly down into the pubic bosk.
I have said much already of Amy's extraordinary beauty; the symmetry of face and body; her natural grace. Now this beauty was more than ever evident. I walked around the couch to look at her from every angle. In spite of all that had been done to her, in spite of pain, shock, of pulling her long legs up into indecent postures, she was still as powerfully beautiful as Praxiteles' Venus, serene, poised. She reminded me of what Yeats had written about his own "Amy," Maude Gonne. "When men and women did her bidding," he wrote, "they did it not only because she was beautiful, but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom."
And now, naked and tumbled, she was no whit abashed. The Charleston demon had been exorcised. "You're really awfully good to look at, Cesare." She smiled her arch, dimpled smile. "And I've been mean to you. I'm sorry." She blew a kiss to now-deflated penis.
What she was saying, in her oblique way, was that there were other ways of pleasuring him. That love-making is not limited to the missionary stance; not to the passive sheathing of a rampant piston. There were other ways. Many. But Cesare was still so young, so eager to please. Why spoil him?
Cesare was understanding, courteous, a paragon of Italian charm. "II buon tempo verm." The good time will come. He tapped his diminished organ, smiled the smile of the defeated sportsman. "Troppo grande." Too big. As if all would be forgotten, forgiven, once the reason for failure was properly aired.
"Next rime," Cloris' said to Cesare in English, knowing he would not understand, "next time ... I will have la signora stretched."
"Stitched?" He wrinkled his brow, trying, by perseverance and force of will, to extend his understanding of English: and aware that, at best, his vocabulary was limited to four words paired into the two phrases, "Me dive" and "Good-bye."
After Cesare dressed, bowed, left ("after kissing Amy's hand, and saying, again, "Il buon tempo vend"), we had a final round of brandy. Then Amy undressed Cloris.
There is no need to detail our private, shared rituals; our balancing of equities. Suffice it to say that I took Cloris, who was ripe, wet, impatient. Then Cloris took Amy. on the other couch, each making the most of the other's capacity for multiple climaxes. Then, as I recall, less energetically, but with great warmth and understanding, we reversed the sequence.
The next morning Amy was the Amy I had known when I had first gone to see her in Charleston; which is to say she was happy, amorous, suave, with no dark shadows hovering in the corners of her mind; no secret needs, no inhibition.
Cloris has sharp insights, a sensitivity that sights, instantly, intuitively, infallibly, the fine shadings of mood. And this, I do believe, is why she has been such a competent producer; why her pictures have been so effective, both in art circles and at the box office. She sensed at once, when Amy and I arrived in Perugia, the conflict of the several "Amys" inside the corporate, voluptuous body. She sensed the need for a kind of exorcism.
I do not take great stock in the various competitive theories of personality. I do not actually believe in "multiple personalities," in spite of the bulk of case records. But extreme changes in mood can almost add up to changes in personality-particularly when such changes are accompanied by a partial blacking out of memories, as is often the case in other activities. (If we drink too much, one night, our memory is scarcely reliable the next day.)
And there was no longer any doubt in my mind that Amy, under differing stresses and suggestions, or in a prolonged domestic life-style, such as the one we set up on Seabrook, changes her protective coloring. Too much safety gave her claustrophobia; the claustrophobia touched off a need to flee.
The remedy, as Cloris so well saw, was erotic shock. The high fall; the same dramatic device Cloris used, with such success, in our pictures. ("Strip the Great Lady and force her to do what she wanted to do anyway, what she would not have had courage enough to do on her own-and what male chauvinist pigs are willing to buy, at any price.")
"What a wonderful night!" Amy said, the next morning, in bed, as she dipped a brioche into her caffe con latte.
"Satisfied?" Cloris asked.
Amy laughed. "Exhausted."
"What do you want to do today?"
"More of the same."
"With Cesare?"
"Not really. At least, not in front of Bill." She turned to me. "Do you mind?"
"With Cesare? Or not watching?"
"Not watching. I'll be better with him alone."
"Do as you please," I said, running my hands over her. I am a voyeur, as I have conceded elsewhere. But I am not this kind of voyeur. I am excited by the sight of women undressed, about to be undressed, in the process of undressing. I enjoy the sight of physical change, when excitement strikes, when the tides of feeling rise and ebb. But I have no interest whatever in the simple, animal act of procreation, or facsimile thereof, between a man and a girl. Connubial wrestling, it seems to me, is of concern only to proctologists. Even in filmed scenes I found in it little charm, because the girl's body, however glamorous, is screened by the intervening man.
"It really could go in, you know."
"Of course," Cloris said.
"All Cesare needs is a little mothering and a little jelly."
"I told you once ... I was going to debauch you."
Amy raised her dimples to prominence, took a deep breath, sipped her coffee. "You told me. You did. You are."
Cloris quoted Aimee to Amy. Aimee is the Countess of Liechtenstein. "In the total fuck comes total liberation. Equality, sorority, exhaustion."
"And you will," Amy added.
"What do you think?"
"You will."
"You and Bill have been together too long." Cloris said. "You're like man and wife. That's not good."
"And you and Bill."
"I go back to my husband from time to time. I am, after all. Lady Cholmondeley."
"But Cholly-Boy only--likes little boys."
Cloris poured brandy in her espresso. "Doesn't matter. He keeps the franchise; keeps our place, Ramspaugh, near Salisbury; is handsome, suave, Eton-Cambridge; and never intrudes himself between Bill and me. He wouldn't dare."
I liked Cholly-Boy. He was civilized. Who sleeps with whom nowadays is of interest only to urologists. And Ramspaugh was one of the great country houses of England, comparable to our Monticello. There was the Inigo Jones house, the giant Cedars of Lebanon, the Palladian bridge over the river, the musicians who played Mozart from the balcony of the ballroom.
"You must not get tired of Bill ... ever. Not let yourself."
"Why do you think...? "
"You will, you know, if you don't fuck someone else from time to time." Cloris, sometimes, could expound destiny with such erotic authority that her dicta would lend themselves to pious meditation.
"I fuck you." Amy spoke with honeyed guile, as if announcing that she was forever through with the Child's Garden of Verses.
"That's different," Cloris said. She was not prepared for such simple logic.
Cloris was delighted with Charleston, as I knew she would be-much as I knew Amy would be delighted with Italy, when first I took her there, to meet Cloris. And Cloris was as much delighted with the Low Country. She--likes her country snug and neat, full of salt marshes and tunneling roads and people who, if they anymore wore hats, would touch their hats as she passed. She loved the old plantation gardens such as Magnolia and Middleton, which reminded her of her own place at Ramspaugh, and the great houses of the city, like the Miles Brewton house, on King Street, the Manigault and Nathaniel Russell houses on Meeting
Street, even Larrine's house on East Battery-although none could approach in scale and grandeur her own Inigo Jones place in England, with its four stern towers and its Palladian facade. (Nor could any boast a Palladian bridge, made entirely of marble, to span an intruding river.)
"Groovy," she announced, in imitation of June, for whom she had developed a wayward and motherly passion. ("We must treat her like a daughter; bathe her, and powder her, pat her little hindy, and tuck her in bed.")
Our transition from Perugia to Charleston had proceeded by stages. I had, it seems, created trouble. I had developed what Cloris considered "temperament"-by which she meant a flagging concern for sex. This purview had scant validity. What had been the case, as I look back, was a clash of temperaments. Cloris, obsessed now with ambition, her head turned by easy accolades, was impatient. She wanted to get on with the business of business; to outpace Fellini, Bunuel, Bergman, let alone the lesser ilk. And I, she thought, was failing her. I was too protective, perhaps, of my image of Amy; too protective, perhaps of what I could come to assume were my proprietary rights. I did not, in short, care to have Amy made love to on camera. (And in this, I concede, she was not altogether wrong-although it was late in life for me to play quoits with conventional whimsy.)
There we were in Perugia, munching Perugina chocolates each night between brandies and light fondling in our great Perugian bed. We had a promising leading man, or boy. We had standing by a director, Carnavaron, and an expensive camera crew from Cinecitta. We had a studio. Moreover-and this was most important-under Cloris' bold proding and tutelage, Amy had opened up, so to speak, like a
Venus's-flytrap in avid glory. She was ready, at any moment, for a bravura performance, on any set, with any script I might write. But write what?
I had exhausted myself in Amy. Creation calls for reverie; and reverie flows most fully when what we fantasize remains fantasy, not fulfillment. The fantasy had become flesh. Amy, it seemed to me, might have had much this same feeling, the late days on Seabrook. I could write nimbly enough now about June, about Elza, about any lynx-graced girl or woman in Charleston, London, or Rome. But not about Amy. I had rung all the changes, torn away all the veils. I had said about Amy all there was in me to say. Yet it was Amy who would have center place in any scenario I might write. I had, then as now, no gift for detaching myself from my characters; no objectivity, no derring-do.
"I have writer's block," I announced. I stroked her long blonde hair, as if stroking her long blonde hair would distract her mind from business.
Cloris squinted. (No lurid, promising slither now of that lithe tongue.) She informed me that she had an ideal, commercial, delectable cure for writer's block. She would buy me June.
With such prodding, under such auspices, I came to write The Seabrook Sextet, which is more or less a screen version of the facts and fancies I have confided to these pages. June joined us in Perugia; and in a splendid, unaccountable, exuberant way, my block disappeared.
I took June with me to Amalfi, recorded her "wows," and in ten days finished a shooting script.
Toward spring, we moved our working location from Perugia to Charleston, coordinated our publicity with the publicity scheduled for the Spoleto Festival.
The Charleston Mercury announced, with banner headlines, that "The Holy City"-as this happy place has come to be called-is fast becoming the American center for international art. "Gian-Carlo Menotti and the fabulous Cloris Lady Cholmondeley will be working side by side in festive glee." (Little did that proper paper know how prescient were its words, so idly framed!) And Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue, when interviewed, announced with glee and pride that at least one of their daughters had made it to the Big Time.
(Elza, who in the interim had acquired a serious boyfriend, had returned to college to finish her work in psychology. Or was it drama?)