Chapter 10

Yet it was not easy to work in Charleston. Charleston has no secrets. It is an open city. Everyone sooner or later knows what everyone does with everyone else; when, where, how, and for how long. This is a splendid matrix for book-writing, as I well knew; for each book wrote itself-all I had to do was put in faithful words, carefully chosen, a simple account of what I saw and heard. But the making of a motion picture has other requirements. It requires privacy. It requires a cloak of secrecy under which moods can be probed, subtleties voiced.

The first time we set June astride a cannon, albeit fully clothed, we drew such a large crowd that traffic was stopped from White Point Gardens to lower Broad Street-and this, mind you, without nudity or action.

"It's your books," June said, with the resentment of a girl admitted belatedly to a scandal, admitted after the astonishment had worn off. "You wrote too much about Amy."

This, of course, was petulance, petulance simple, pure, unrelieved by guile. I photographed her, wrote about Amy.

The crowds had nothing to do with me, or my books, or the unveiling of Amy. Nor were they related directly to the fact that June was astride a cannon, her draped bosom pointing toward Fort Sumter.

It was the cameras, the crew, the trailers, the lights. All we were shooting were "establishment" shotsthose vague, wandering, listless scenes of action which establish locale. The nude scenes would be made later, in Cloris' studio in England (at Ramspaugh), in Cine-citta, possibly even in Spoleto.

Account for excitement how you will, it put a decisive end to intimacies between June and me. June was watched, admired, publicized, chaperoned. Her picture appeared almost every other day in the pages of the Charleston Mercury, or its sister paper, the Gazette. She was interviewed at least once a week on one of the local television shows, explaining, with childish enthusiasm, how it felt to be a star; how a lifetime of hard work led to her current success; that her burning ambition was to have seven children and bake Cordon Bleu upside-down cakes.

Moreover, she lived at home, with her parents, in a condominium they had bought in the Fort Sumter House. The Poltergrues' balcony, by one of life's grim caprices, overlooked the cannon that, in a happier moment, had propped up their daughters' naked bottoms; had contributed, in short, to the dramatic success of the daughter with the larger bosom.

Even I came in for belated publicity. The Charleston Mercury sent a reporter to interview me (in Larrine's house, on East Battery), and announced, on the front page, that the writer of the daring books about Mrs. Dellmore was something of a disappointment. He was not found contemplating Amy's beauties, as Amy made such beauties available, recumbent on a curving couch. He was not surrounded by suave, naked nymphs, as in the Fragonard and Boucher boudoir scenes; not even a single half-draped Venus, as in Titian's intimate palazzi. He was simply a tweedy, slightly absentminded writer who drank overmuch and frequently said, "Ah, so."

I was staying, with Amy and Cloris, in Larrine's place because the Spoleto Festival had preempted all hotel rooms. I had a bedroom on the third floor, overlooking the harbor. Amy and Cloris shared a canopied bed (posts carved in the Charleston "rice-bed" manner) on the floor below. And those evries in the Mills-Hyatt House where, in times past, I had enjoyed honeyed pleasures with Amy, with June and Elzathese now were quarters of Italian impresarios and jumping jacks. Carnavaron was housed twenty miles away in the inn on Kiawah Island, not far from Seabrook. The camera crew was in a rented cottage on the beach at the Isle of Palms, a resort north of the harbor and considerably distant from Seabrook.

Theoretically we were all.set to begin production. Amy and June, our stars, were on location. We had cameramen, sountimen, grips on call.

This was our plan: We would set the tone for the film by taking establishing shots more or less in line with the pictures I took of June and Elza for my own entertainment. (In art, I was delighted to note, nothing is ever entirely wasted.) We would also take mood pictures of the Low Country marsh, the Charleston streets, the plantations, the dunes and palmettos. The nude scenes featuring Amy and June, we all agreed, could be filmed anywhere; nevertheless, it seemed fitting, sentimental, even an emotional spur to start them in Charleston. Although by now it is reasonably clear, as Wilde argued, that nature imitates art, it is always stimulating to start with nature. Amy may have learned to crouch, when stripped, even cover her breasts, from an unconscious memory of the stance of the Cnidos Venus; nevertheless I prefer, in lustier momerits, the inspiration of the fleshly model. Carnal is as carnal seems.

Amy, for once, had no inhibitions. I put this down to the psychological skills of Cloris, a growing professionalism (inspired by the success of Monna Vanna), and sexual exhaustion. We shot the porch scene at Seabrook on the precise porch where the primal scene had been enacted; and Amy played her part with grace, serenity, aplomb.

From the painting department of the College of Charleston art school we borrowed a well-proportioned male model to play the surf scene with Amy. ("You must be careful with Gene," Mary McCory, the head of the department, warned Amy. "He's a soupgon trigger-happy. Eighteen, you know.")

Amy assured me that the love scenes in surf and on sand would only be "simulated." She found the word assuring. But in the actual filming, possibly because of forgetfulness, possibly because of her new passion for professional veritude, she seemed to let herself go. A retake of the scene, which Cloris demanded, had to be delayed until our fledgling model recovered his virility.

(It later occurred to me that there had been no need whatever for a retake of this scene. The repetition had been for Cloris' entertainment and Amy's pleasure. And the latter, if it had been the case, hinged largely on exhibitionism and whim, for she had once agreed with me that lovemaking in the surf should be of interest only to hydraulic engineers.)

No simulation was possible, however, in the scenes that called for the simultaneous naked presence of both of the Poltergrue twins. "Bribe Elza," June suggested. She had acquired, in an excessively short space, so much of Cloris' calculating wisdom.

A salary of two thousand a week proved to be a splendid persuader; an ointment and a balm. The latter, I was to learn, was essential; for Elza, it had appeared, was no longer at college wrestling with her psychology (or drama?), as she had announced. Elza, parading her newly acquired, or carefully hidden, worldliness, had been living in Chattanooga with a newly acquired (or carefully hidden) boyfriend who blew glass.

"Papa and Mamma will kill us when this picture comes out," Elza announced, with commendable frankness, when she arrived. "But by that time we'll all be living in Rome."

"Rome today," June chanted, "Gomorrah tomorrow." She had become sensitive to some of the finer shades of sibling rivalry.

By and large our work went well in Charleston. The city-aroused by the many and cultural farragoes of the Spoleto Festival; by the fanfares and folderols of a current Miss USA Universe contest; by the mongoloid hordes of money-spending tourists-welcomed us. The whole Low Country welcomed us. There was news about us each day in the papers. Cloris, Amy, June. Elza, even Carnavaron and I, were interviewed regularly, in all media, separately, paired, and tutti. June and Elza, severally and together, gave personal and pontifical opinions on modern art, women's rights, and acne. June declared it unwise for a nice girl to kiss a man on her first date; Elza spoke up for Geritol.

But publicity, as I implied earlier, made much of our work difficult. We had many visitors turning up, unannounced, on set; many delegations of culture seekers, arriving with authentic credentials from earnest church and Sunday-school organizations. And for such kith and ilk it was important to maintain a front. When important visitors arrived, we would sometimes stage a scene taken literally from the pages of The Bobbsey Twins or Little Women. Sometimes we would dress June and Elza in crinoline, put Amy in a farthingale, or improvise a cotillion.

There was, in consequence, much wasting of time, much duplication of duplicities. ("Dry runs," June called them.)

In the interest of economy, an interest altogether untypical of her, Cloris insisted that all such scenes be shot, pro forma, with no film in the cameras. The gesture was ironic, a matter of spirit, not budget-because our production was budgeted at two to three million, all funds advanced by Acme-International. Relative to such an amount (and to the fact that all business expenses were tax-deductible), the cost of a few hundred feet of film was scarcely an item to panic the company's accounting department.

One day Senator Ashmead came on set. He had been invited by the officials of the Seabrook Island Corporation, who had the feeling that our publicity would do for Seabrook what Homer's did for Troy.

Ashmead arrived with a party. In his entourage were Jeff Dellmore and the Poltergrues, all tanned, all smiling. We had been forewarned. Amy wore a demure swimsuit of a style you would have expected Princess Grace to have worn at a pool party on Philadelphia's Main Line-when Eisenhower was president. The twins were in blue jeans and a dudgeon.

Cloris was introduced. Much was made of the fact that she was Lady Cholmondeley, "of Ramspaugh." Dellmore, pleased that his wife now had a more or less intimate association with English aristocracy, was anxious to trace kinships. "Weren't the Cholmonde-leys related, via bar sinster, to LLewellenfors of Crag-shire? To the Earl of Sandwich? The Marquis of

Queensbury?" Poltergrue said that he could not understand how a country which could produce a Shakespeare and the sandwich should want to go socialist.

Cloris smiled and said nothing; and Ashmead found her irresistible, on the theory that only a woman who does not teach, who does not persuade, who does not argue or condescend, or explain, is irresistible.

"You are," he said, "the greatest thing to hit Charleston since the earthquake of 1886."

Cloris answered him by looking at Amy and slithering her tongue around the edges of her lips.

It seemed to Ashmead that now that Charleston had Lady Cholmondeley and the Spoleto Festival, all that remained was to make Charleston the motion-picture center of the East Coast. "All we need is money. And with the Arabs all around us, there is plenty of that." He referred to the Kuwaitis who had bought Kiawah and the takeout shish-kebab chain kiosks he and Dellmore had launched.

"In time," Poltergrue said, "we'll want everything en brochette."

I looked at June, and she smiled at me in that innocent, detached, Girl Scout way that girls have when smiling in the presence of their fathers.

I felt, that morning, quite good about our work-the pictures Cloris and I made together, the books I wrote about Cloris and Amy (and now about June and Elza). Sometimes I have doubts; so much enjoyment goes into their making that little thought or energy is left for the product. (I speak for myself, of course. Cloris, as I have noted, had of late come to take our films-more properly, her films-with high seriousness. She believed our notices, cherished her prizes. Not to no end had she been compared to Fellini and Bergman-or to the Bufiuel who made Belle de Jour.)

This much I conceded. We had as our subjects, I in my novels, extraordinary women; women shaped well in the ways of wonder and beauty. To celebrate and record such spirit, limited as our ways might have been, rough sometimes as were my phrasings ("Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish-I in lean, unlovely English....") was enough. What matters is the essence.

Had I been a Yeats, a Hemingway, a Proust, I might have done better. Amy would have emerged as Maude Gonne, Cloris as Brett, June as Albertine. As it is, I have had to resign myself to given limits, to record roughly, sometimes in confusion, the span of my eye and some overtones of feeling.

If this were all, I do not think Amy, as the years passed, would forgive me; or June or Elza; nor would forgiveness come from those bound to them by ties of blood and sentiment. For convention presses hard on all of us. We prefer our idol in chiseled cameos, bloodless and proper. But life is not that way. Venus has come down to us naked on a cockleshell, Helen as an immortal adulteress, Lady Godiva as the exquisite rider. And Cloris, with an unabashed lens, has seen to it that our present beauties, like the touted music when soft voices die, will still vibrate in memory.

So much for this aside.

From time to time I tend to lapse into a self-justifying soliloquy.

"What is the plot of your movie?" Poltergrue asked, his mind leaping ahead to Academy Awards. Already he saw June clasping an Oscar to her bosom. Already he heard her neat Charleston voice saying, "I want to thank my mother and my father, who gave me so much loyal support when I was still a drama student...." (Or was it "psychology"? ) Even now he saw her weeping, salt tears (or glycerine) coursing down the television screen. "None," I said.

Fortunately, he did not hear me. His mind was still attuned to June's gracious acceptance speech: "And I want to express my special thanks to Miss Marcelle Moncks, who was my drama teacher when I was still a schoolgirl at Ashley Hall ... and who gave me my love for Shakespeare."

"We can set up a permanent Charleston-Spoleto Film Festival-an annual event," Dellmore said. "With Kuwait money ... in escrow, of course."

A long line of pelicans floated past us in solemn array, and I was reminded of my old philosophical question: What does a pelican have to do to become the lead pelican?

"Look at all them fuckin' skimmers," Ashmead said exuberantly. Then, realizing he was among ladies, one of them English, he blushed.

("None," I realized, was not a proper syntactical answer to the question "What is the plot of your movie?" I should have said, "There is no plot"-meaning that the picture would be a string of vignettes featuring his daughters in shimmering undress.)

As soon as our guests left, Cloris stripped the girls. "What a relief," June said, patting her liberated bottom.

"Wow," said Elza.

Carnavaron, explaining that only art can make flesh photograph like flesh, rubbed Pan-Cake makeup over their bodies. Cloris performed her tasks with professional glee. She rouged June's nipples to make them more prominent, whitened Elza's to make them less.

Cloris never for long let her mind stray far from the paths of picture-making. Even in throes of convulsive delight, she saw herself, and those with her, through the eye of the camera, presented her best lines to the lens. And now (I could see her mind at work), she was concocting a visual trick, a twist of misdirection.

A tint was put on June's scarcely noticeable pubic blondeness, a dark tint to inspire an image of fire and thrust. Elza she shaved. This was the twist, the symbolic misdirection: The girls were almost indistinguishable when viewed from the rear. (Had I not discovered that singular fact, our first manage-a-trois night in the Mills-Hyatt House?) The camera would make its first foray from the rear. We, the camera, would survey all the identities, frame in our eye the Tweedledum and Tweedledee body lines, imagine Tweedledum and Tweedledee personalities. Then, lo! The girls would turn.

When the cosmetic chores had been completed (and Cloris given the sensitive places more care than duty required), we went out to the dunes.

It was then early afternoon.

"I itch," Elza said, wiggling.

"Wow," June said, sampling the smoothness. "And indubitably groovy."

We worked that day without crew. Carnavaron alone handled the camera. A platform had been built as an approach to a spot where two low dunes came together, their slopes identical to the curvings of the twins' bottoms. ("Sweets to the sweet"-that had been Cloris' comment.) The only prop was a palmetto log. This had been placed in front of the dunes; and in time the girls were posed, bent over the logs, as if praying to Allah.

This was to be the pivotal scene in a sequence of related shapes. Photographed earlier was a pair of white herring gulls. These were to be shown soaring over the surf. Innocence, perhaps. Pure spirit? Who knows? The film, when cut and edited, would show the white gulls. Camera would then pan to the paired white dunes, linger for a moment, then pan down to the paired white buttocks. The change of field was to be so gradual, so unexpected, that, at first sight the girls' bottoms would not be identified as bottoms. They would glide into the viewer's consciousness as abstractions. The viewer would see them as a pattern of patterns, form without content.

Carnavaron held his light meter in front of June's left buttock, then Elza's right, which was partially in shadow. He went back to the camera, set the diaphragm, checked his focus.

"Shoot," said Cloris.

The camera purred. And for a while all I was aware of was the sound of the camera, the crash of the surf, and the heart-shaped confluences of poetic mounds.

(According to my plan, my program notes, the girls' bottoms were not, at first, to be recognizable for what they were. No viewer was to be aware that his eyes were centered on gluteal curves, a cardioform, pure-albeit ill-used by a venal male. I proposed that these suave, notched, creased orbs be presented to the camera, to the audience, as abstractions-form innocent as a Greek vase, succulent as a handful of eggs.)

The camera then dollied back. Only when the girls' thighs, backs, flowing hair came into the field was it to be evident that the camera's eye had moved from pure form to warm flesh.

On direction from Cloris, the girls rose. "Rise and shine."

The girls came back on their haunches, rose, their backs still to the camera, their bodies almost identical. The camera panned to twin palmettos, back to twin dunes, back to the twinned backs. Then the girls turned. At this moment, and only then, were we, the viewers, made aware of the difference-June, full-bosomed, flaming nipples, insouciant bosk; Elza with no bosom at all, no pubic hair whatever. The camera retreated back along the platform. The zoom lens zoomed in reverse; and the combined optical effects of retreat and negative zoom soon diminished the figures into minuscule detail. Ongoing nature would once again take over; all that would be left to the viewer would be the panorama of dunes, palmettos, wax myrtles-and overhead the fleece of clouds, the gliding strings of birds.

"What does it all mean?" Cloris asked later, when, at Larrines's, we sipped our drinks. "Nothing," she answered. "Nothing at all. That's why it will gross five million dollars ... and probably win a couple more prizes."

"Meanwhile..." I began.

"Meanwhile we are all going to have a magnificent, intangible, municipal ball."

"Runcible." I had in mind a spoon with two prongs.

Nor was Cloris wrong. Cloris was seldom wrong.

I read the reviews in Amalfi. Most significant was the notice in Time (which always arrives in Amalfi three weeks late).

The Spoleto Festival had come and gone; Charleston had returned to its accustomed quiet, and we had finished our location shooting without serious disruptions. We completed our establishing shots in town, our symbol extravaganzas on Seabrook and in the tidal creeks behind Seabrook and Kiawah. There were some scenes from which I was excluded. These were shot at Miss Wescott's plantation, Berkeley Hall. (I had been excluded for the same reason that I had been excluded from the final scenes in Monna Vanna. "You inhibit her," Cloris argued. "There are certain things Amy does not want you to see her do-at least, on camera. If she thinks you are watching, she freezes. She becomes the old Amy ... the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.") We had taken care of odds and ends, done the cutting and editing in Cinecitta.

"once again cloris." This was the headline on the Time item. There was a picture of Amy in the pose of Ingres's Odalisque. There was a picture of June, nude, astride a cannon.

The article spoke of Cloris' "transcendence." It gave Time's special "kudos" to her subtle use of symbols, her sensitivity, her gift for implications. "No frenetic trompe I'oeil manner here. No quick cuts and crazy angles. No exploitation of sex qua sex. Only the poetry of line and movement ... with players properly and obviously not born to blush unseen."

It seemed to me, somehow, that I had read all this before. Praised be I can still stop and wallow in the brashness of Cloris' whim. She could always stir old flags with a fickle whim.

So much nowadays is done mindlessly.

I felt almost abandoned that night. I stress almost. Actually I had, as ever, little call for complaint. What I had to deal with, as a psychic event, was change. Change for me is always disturbing. So much had happened in short space. So much was unpredicted, bizarre. Amy, for example, had elected to rejoin her husband. ("I need some rest, my love. Really I do.")

They were now somewhere in the Bahamas. The incident with Cesare, I think, relived in memory, disturbed her. like Emma Bovary, Amy was a conventional woman. Left to herself, she would have remained conventional, an admired, decorous pillar of the Establishment. (Fenwick Weston, a poetic Charles-tonian, who, when Amy was younger, loved her from a distance, expressed what most Charlestonians felt. He referred to her classic beauty, only partly human, toward whom an overt approach was forbidden by totem and taboo.)

But Amy, as we know well by now, was not left to herself. There is no need, at this page of the biography, to list all the devices, princes (and princesses) who or which stirred the sleeping beauty, who or which replaced sleep with sundry enchantments. Subterranean Amys arose. Bacchic Amys. Amys of unexpected talents, urges, guile. Yet at some point in these wayfarings, there was always an upsurge of the conscience of the Establishment Amy, a need to go home again. ("Amy was so beautiful as a young girl..." I quote Fenwick. "So pure, so unearthly, so unapproachable-Botticellian. But odd things happen, don't they?")

Nor was the performance with Cesare all. There was the bizarre publicity, the pictures of her in various stages of undress which were featured in magazines (a full-length, full nude on the cover of Oqgi), complimentary but scandalous references to her in the gossip columns. The combination, I believe, was too much.

Cloris, meanwhile, had gone back to England. She had met Lord Cholmondeley in Monaco, sailed back with him on the same yacht from which she had absconded a few seasons before (and hidden out in my room in the Hotel Luna Convento, in Amalfi). It was Cloris' theory that love affairs require occasional interruptions and infinite variations. Unfortunately, she had taken June with her. "It will be good for June to see more of the world," she said, "and she'll be all the more loving when she comes back to you. Besides ... you can't expect me to go to bed with Cholly-Boy."

Now, here I was in Amalfi, once again in Amalfi, once again writing about Amy; trying, in my confused way, to set in order odd facts and purple fancies. Elza had been good enough to spend a few days with me before going back to her boyfriend in Chattanoogaor wherever it was that he lived. (I have no great interest in young girls' boyfriends; I think of them all, collectively, as pimply, whisper-voiced, stammering idiots.)

I showed the Time item to Elza. "Formidable," she said. Wow and groovy had by now gone the way of Caesar's legions and the duckbilled platypus.

We were sitting at a table in the Piazza Sant'Andrea; behind us was a gurgling fountain, in front of us the Sicilian-Arab-style columns of the cathedral.

"Tell me about Amy and Cesare," she said. Art, I assumed, could wait.

"What do you want to know?" I thought it well to let her block out the parts of the story that interested her most. But, as historian, I was clearly interested in the travels of the story. How had Elza heard about it? I had been discreetly quiet. Amy, certainly, would not have discussed it; to herself, even, would insist that it never happened.

"Was it really that big?"

"Bigger."

"Golly." She sucked sexually on the straw of her Pernod, then winked at me in Scout camaraderie. "Formidable. ... You watched?"

"Yes."

"She let you?" I nodded.

"Weren't you embarrassed?" I said, "No."

She put her hand, her curious hand, on the fly of my trousers and said, "Oh, my God."

Size, I attempted to assure her, is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of life. I spoke belittlingly of the great hairy mammoth, of the brontosaurus.

"Still and all..." Young girls are incurably romantic. "Wow!"

I called over the waiter and paid the check. "Grazie molto," the waiter said, looking at Elza's blouse. It was a beige blouse, fashioned like a man's shirt. Elza had unbuttoned it to the navel. Arrivederci, Mrs. Grundy.

"Let's have a brandy," Elza said.

The waiter looked puzzled.

"We're ordering something more," I said.

"Bene."

"Formidable," said Elza.

"How about a Strega?" I had learned never to take Elza too literally. For her any word could have a host of meanings; mood was what mattered.

"What's a Strega?"

"Due Strege."

Over the liqueurs, I told Elza how I had first come to Amalfi, how I had spent a dav at Capri, returned to my hotel and found Cloris standing in the lobby-the Lady Cholmondeley, whom I had known so briefly in New York. (Turning, Cloris' eyes rested on me. She was unsmiling and gave me no sign of recognition; but she said to the clerk in a voice intended for me to hear, "I'm so sorry, but my husband and I intend to drive to Paestum tomorrow." Then she nodded in my direction. "Please have the porter take my bags to my husband's room. I'm sure he told you that I was expected.")

Elza asked many questions, intimate questions. We continued, in fact, the indelicate give-and-take which had begun, in early summer, in our room at the Mills-Hyatt House. Details were now more meaningful; she was no more the untested child waiting to be starred in my book. She had been tested; tested and found savory and sound. More; as the Time magazine item implied, along with the ravaging Amy, she, like June, had become a star in her own right. Any week now she might appear in television commercials telling her less-informed mother what to take for occasional irregularity.

The wind had freshened suddenly, a west wind, sweeping in from Spain. Waves thrashed over the edges of the road leading from the piazza to the hotel. Other waves, caught between boulders, shot fountains of spray high above the road. At one place, where the waves had taken over, only a narrow path was dry. Elza went ahead of me, hair flying, her tight pants, sausage-skin-snug, conspicuous under the streetlights. And it heartened me to note again, as often before on the sands of Seabrook, that when viewed objectively from the rear, Elza and June were exuberantly indistinguishable. It also occurred to me that both bottoms were more or less heart-shaped, and could be described by a simple mathematical formula:

sin _0_

r = 2

This, in short, is a kind of cardioid curve; r is the radius vector-in this case an imaginary line whose point of origin would be Elza's minuscule opening.

It occurred to me that I could call this curve "The lemniscate of June," and so inform the Journal of Recreational Mathematics-thus assuring June of a certain figurate immortality. On the other hand, it seemed hardly fair to exclude Elza, who at this moment promised instant pleasure.

"Pretend I'm June," Elza said, once we were in bed. "It really won't make any difference."

I protested. Manners demand such protest; and manners, not style, are the man. This fact, amply established in Charleston, is no less relevant in Amalfi.

To dramatize her point, Elza rolled over, her face now buried in the pillows, the top sheet kicked down. With my fingers I retraced the cardioid curve, caressed the lemniscate; and I realized that from the very young we have so much to learn.

The next morning I took Elza to the quay which extended out from the Piazza Sant'Andrea. She was to take the vaporetto to Naples, then an Alitalia plane to Rome. From Rome she would have a direct flight to New York. Perhaps her boyfriend would meet her.

The vaporetto, which came up the coast from Salerno, was late. I knew it well. It had been either this, or its sister ship, that had brought me from Capri to Amalfi that signal afternoon when I came upon Cloris in the hotel lobby.

"Come as far as Naples with me," Elza said, as the boat backed up to the quay. "I've been good for you, haven't I? Even if I'm not June?"

She kissed me. I was bribed. I hated to see her go. "If you like," she added, "I will pose for you ... in the buff and for free."

We sat on the deck munching pizzas, drinking beer, watching the gulls.

She took my hand, kissed the fingers, ran her tongue voluptuously to the notch where fingers join. "Remember Seabrook?" she asked, with a brave attempt to create nostalgia. The question was personal, but obviously quite broad.

I remembered. I remembered much more than I thought it tactful to recount, such as Amy's odd foray in the middle of a Seabrook night.

"Last night was something special, too," she said. "I will always remember it."

I thought this quite sweet, a sterling sentiment, and assured her my feelings were much the same. I also told her that I thought she was altogether wrong, masochistically wrong, in saying there was no actual difference (except bosom size) between the erotic charms of identical girl twins. Her theory (sororal parallelism) was nonsense.

I paid her extravagant compliments.

Her mind, however, was on other things. "Funny," she said absently, "all the time you were making love to me last night, I pretended you were Cesare."

Postorgasmic emptiness is an old complaint-at least, among men. I doubt very much that it exists among women; there may be some parallel to it, as, say, the sense of loss of a nest, of a partnership, security. None of these have the same meaning. The emptiness I speak of is a loss of virility. The feeling that follows suggests a Gotterdammerung. Function is over; the broadsword is sheathed: life has no purpose.

Such, at any rate, was my feeling on the slow voyage back. I sat at the little bar of the vaporetto sipping Stock brandy. Through the windows I watched the fringe of the Lattari Mountains move slowly by, wondered, as probably wondered all mariners who sailed this rocky coast, why and how people lived their lives out in small huts festooned, like wasps' nests, on the sides of cliffs. On my right, a fat young girl with two gold teeth held hands, silently, with a fat young man whose pores exuded garlic.

The vaporetto stopped at Positano, backing phlegmatically toward the concrete quay, then pulling against hawsers while the gangplank was lowered. My companions, still silent, departed, hand in hand. Love, in Italy, is seldom demanding. Italy has the sirocco, Vesuvius, 117 varieties of pasta; but, as yet, no post-orgasmic emptiness.

I felt, in short, very sorry for myself.

I watched a bevy of herring gulls skirl around the stern of a returning fishing boat, watched the sun set in the mist beyond Capri, and it occurred to me that this is what Faust is all about. John Faustus was never satisfied; his fullness was his emptiness. He who through fantasies and deep cogitations was able to woo and win a woman who died long before his birth, "this stately pearl of Greece," still had no surcease. Nor did Helen stay with him long. Ultimately, even in imagine, she went back to her plowboy husband, much as Amy went back to Jeff Dellmore, Elza to her pimply, addlepated student. ("Eventually," she once told me, "he's going to go in his father's exterminator business.")

I thought of this boy putting his grimy hands on that beautiful golden lemniscate, and I shuddered. Not, as I told myself, that I could ever be everywhere at once, constant lover to infinity; but it disturbed me, somehow, to envision a temple defiled.

I thought the concierge eyed me oddly when I picked up the key to my room. Italian concierges, as I have observed elsewhere, are prescient. If I had a fraction of their understanding of motives and byplays, I would not have the trouble I have writing about Amy and Cloris.

"Grazie," I said; and he, of course, "Prego."

I opened the door and turned on the light.

On my bed, arms enlaced, legs enlaced, deep, deep asleep, were June and Cloris. Their clothes lay in demure heaps on the floor. Around the room, on various chairs, were traveling bags, unmistakably Gucci; and throughout the room was the pungent, bold scent of Givenchy.

June was on the side of the double bed facing me; and since the front of her body was pressed against Cloris', I had, once again, an unobstructed view of her bottom. And once again I noted that it was indistinguishable from Elza's. And suddenly, like John Faustus, I found myself insatiable. Slowly, deliberately, with fantasies and deep cogitation, I took off my clothes. Then I turned off the light.

The lemniscus twitched slightly in greeting; that was all.