Chapter 7
What did Elza and June think about when they were not with me? Or, for that matter, when they were with me, naked or clothed, in bed or out?
Nor did I yet know, after these many months, what went on in the secret places of Amy's mind. Nor why she had gone away from me that signal night, returned before dawn with electric strength. Nor did I know now why she was away from me. Her political concerns were bloodless, it seemed to me, and suspect.
I have always envied those writers who could see every flutter in the hearts of the characters they wrote about. Tolstoi knew Anna Karenina inside and out; Flaubert knew the turnings of each flick of Emma Bo-vary's thoughts, as she combed her perfumed hair, or sat, in loneliness, on her china commode.
Such, as any rate, was my drift when, back in June's and my bedroom at the Mills-Hyatt House, I watched the girls strip and shower. They had a passion for showering; a passion for perfuming and powdering.
Thev emerged shimmering with golden innocence.
With them, I was sure, I could lead a life of study, and of kindly, unostentatious acts.
I paid them their usual modeling fees.
Each, still naked, curtsied and said, "Thank you, sir."
Each then proposed that she "model" a bit more in bed. "Modeling," said June, "is more fun without quondams."
Elza thought it would be nice if they modeled some more, the way June suggested, and that I would write about it and make them immortal.
June had a thoughtful suggestion. "Squeeze us in the book you're writing about Amy."
"We'd do anything to become immortal." Elza pointed, in turn, to all the sensitive parts of her body. "Really."
"And without a modeling fee. Because we love you."
They wanted to know the details, mundane and lurid, of my relations with Cloris; how I balanced an intimacy with Cloris and the intimacy with Amy. Were there not conflicts, jealousies, resentments? In many ways they were more naive than I would have expected; they were modern girls; college girls; one majoring in psychology, one in drama. In other ways, they never ceased to startle me. They were imaginative, bold, experimental; had read, remembered, twisted an astonishing amount of the world's most worldly writing. All such was most unexpected in two girls whose readiest comments were "groovy" and "wow."
I told them. Between my books and Cloris' motion pictures, there were few details among us still secret or taboo. Cloris and Amy, in my mind, were much like Auden's innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, made solely for pleasure. The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide.
They wanted to know how I met Cloris, how Amy; but particularly they were interested in Cloris, who seemed to them today's counterpart of Hemingway's
Lady Ashley-the Brett of The Sun Also Rises. ('I've always done just what I wanted.") But more avid, more talented. And who gave and took what she wanted without brooding or regrets.
I told them how I had met Cloris. There was a light snow falling, a sharp wind blowing. She had sat next to me at a bar on Charles Street, a few blocks from my place in the Village. She had come back with me to my apartment. In front of the glowing logs she had said, stretching out her legs, "I don't go to bed with men, but if it will give you any pleasure, I will undress for you."
"Just like us," June said.
"But she did go to bed with you, didn't she?"
"Yes," I said.
"How come?"
I explained that in first meetings, iourneys' ends, many things are said tentatively. Their aim is not to establish eternal truths, but to needle, provoke, explore.
Cloris left my apartment the next morning, I told them. The good-bye had been terse, blithe, impersonal. I knew by then only her first name and three biographical facts: I. She had been born in North Carolina. 2. Her father was a professor. 3. She had left Chapel Hill the year "North Carolina discovered oral sex."
"What," asked June, "is oral sex?"
I showed her.
"We've been speaking prose all this time and never knew it." June was ecstatic.
"Now," said Elza, "you've got her all brillig in the slythy toves."
"The Tiuntum tree."
"Time now for the vorpal blade."
"Oh beamish boy," June said, kissing me. "Oh frabjous one."
She then disappeared from my life, I told them. I put her out of mind. Then, a year or so and some two novels later, I was in Amalfi writing a book to be called The Affair at Amalfi. I had spent the day across the bay, among herds of broad-bottomed American and German tourists, at Capri. Returned, tired, fed up with views of Vesuvius, the Bay of Naples, tired villages clinging like ivy to indifferent cliffs, I climbed the hill to the special cliff on which my hotel (the Luna Convento), a former convent, was perched. Guests reach the hotel by means of a small lift which ascends the cliff in a perpendicular line from the Amalfi Drive, some ninety feet below. I entered the lift, pressed the button for the lobby floor.
When the door opened, I saw Cloris, alone, handing her passport to the manager.
"Did she recognize you?" June wanted to know how protocol is handled when random lovers meet after long, dry separations.
"Not directly, not personally," I said. "Not with smiles, hugs, and kisses. She simply pointed to me and said to the concierge, 'Please have the porter take my bags up to my husband's room.'"
"Wow," said Elza.
"We went up in the lift together, in silence-the two of us, the porter, two Gucci suitcases, a hatbox, a vanity case."
I told them that Cloris, as might be expected, made no attempt to explain herself. She unpacked her bags, hung her dresses in the armoire, put small things in the dresser, then said, with splendid aplomb, "Darling, I'm so sticky. Please draw me a bath."
There was much detail to recount. The girls wanted as much as I would give. Scandal, I suppose, has a special charm to those about to be involved in it. It is roseate, cheering, an invitation to a second life. It raises the sights of the very young, rejuvenates the old.
The pleasures of lovemaking grow in retrospect. Cloris and I had discovered this soon after our second meeting. Which is why we told each other so much, maintaining no fidelity except in verbal reconstructions of our infidelities. Cloris had always demanded of me a movement-by-movement report on every affair I had had outside her field of vision-even the feelings I had, thoughts, fantasies, during affairs she witnessed, promoted. She returned the gesture in kind. Every erotic incident thus had a rebirth, reincarnation; ultimately a reenactment.
And now I was telling Elza and June the same subtle things about Cloris I would eventually tell Cloris about Elza and June.
I told them that to me nothing was more exciting, and at the same time more fulfilling, than instant intimacy. To behave with a girl whose last name you did not know as warmly, open up as completely, explore as fully, as one to whom you had been married for twenty years, is to grasp, in the foam of a wave, the ongoing unity of life. Neither the spume of the sea nor the skirl of a gull is a marital secret. Love is loving.
They brought to a close this session of exchanged intimacies with a cheerleader routine they had evidently practiced in some other connection. June leaned over to me, took my detumesced part in her hand, dandled it, eyed it with the wonder reserved for a strange, infantile bird.
June: "O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice?" Elza: "State the alternative preferred, With reasons for your choice."
For the next few days I worked hard at my book; too hard. Writing should not be worked at. This was the lesson Stendhal taught the world. The suave, capable, capricious Duchessa Sanseverini was not a woman whose spirit was to be entrapped with spit and polish. Nor speared with a fork and hope. It was to be-and was-caught on the wing.
Yet I had set for myself the arduous, endless, impossible task of understanding Amy; and of impounding this grasp in solid, if uneven, prose.
Why? I asked myself, with monotonous, repetitive skills, this rhetorical question. My study of Amy would never rival Stendhal's of the Duchessa, Flaubert's of Emma Bovary, much less Homer's Helen. An eager, hungry public was not awaiting my discoveries. Amy was indifferent. She humored me. She may, of course, have found some devious delight in my reports about the splendors of her body, the anatomy of her raptus-the torsions, perhaps, and the diluvial wonder, on which I floated like Noah's ark.
So much happier, wiser, epicurean was Cloris' approach. Cloris merely undressed her, feted her, filmed her. No fervent probing for the blind man's black box in the dark room-the black box that was not there.
Behind and flanking the City Hall, which houses the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, is Washington Park, better known as City Hall Park. The park is a quiet, shaded, ghost-ridden place, lined with live oaks to placate the spirits of historic warriors and statesmen. Within its confines is a statue of William Pitt, the right arm of which was shattered by a British cannonball. There is, dead center, an obelisk dedicated to soldiers who died in defense of the Confederacy. Collinear with the two monuments is a memorial to my namesake, General BeauregardPierre Gustave Beauregard-who commanded the Confederate forces during the attack on Fort Sumter. The monument is an odd structure. It is more or less a framed niche, over which is emblazoned the name Beauregard. The niche, if deepened slightly, could house a life-size statue of General Beauregard. It contains some chiseled writing, eroded and illegible, but no--likeness of the general-an omission that modern Charlestonians, in their concern for modern issues (such as an ordinance to diaper horses), have relegated to benign neglect. How many Charlestonians, it might be asked, are aware that a--likeness of the heroic General Beauregard is absent from this city? That his niche is unfilled?
The answer: One. June.
We were walking through the park early the next morning. Elza, nursing a hangover, was still in bed in our room at the hotel. And June was wearing, as usual, her working clothes, which is to say raincoat and sandals, nothing more.
"Look!" She pointed. There was my name over the empty niche. There was the empty niche. And June, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.
Off came the raincoat. Flying went the sandals. And there was June, enniched-decorous, naked, militant, her right hand to her right brow in smart, disciplined salute.
I swung the Mamiya into action, hand-held-f. 8 at 250th of a second. I took three shots of the salute. June then obliged with a cancan pose.
Just then two tourists strolled by; standard tourists, the woman plump, in shorts, heavy jowls, sunglasses even with the sun scarcely risen; the man, with mustache and bulging stomach, wearing the same shorts and sport shirt he customarily wears on the boardwalk at Asbury Park.
"Oh," the woman said, pointing.
"Advance publicity for the Spoleto Festival," I said. "We're putting on Barefoot in the Park."
June, turning around, patted her stomach. "Beauregard," she said, "I think I'm just a wee, winchy bit pregnant."
She was not, of course. She was merely, as a well-bred Charleston girl, making the kind of small talk that puts a stranger at ease.
I was, I discovered, a literary masochist.
Scarce wonder, then, that I found writing so difficult. That I bemoaned, ad nauseam, my inability to sense character; my insensitivity to feeling; my obsession with physical detail, much of which it would be more fitting, certainly more literary, to leave veiled.
And each night Amy would phone me. Each night she would say more or less the same thing, but say it with her special music, her patented endearing young charms. She loved me. She missed me. She was hungry for me. Was I working? Did I have an erection? Would I meet her, somewhere, soon? Would I please not ask any questions?
(Did Henry James, I asked myself, ever undress any of his heroines? Much less follow them to bed? Much less share with them quixotic, episodic, traumatic throes of the parries and ripostes that occur in bed? Was he right in implying that all orgasms, like all pelicans, are more or less the same?)
I had had much leisure, these few days, more time for indecisions. ("We can't do any modeling for you for the next three days," Elza had announced sweetly over the telephone. "We have the curse.") I wrote, puzzled, rearranged the indistinct images in my private blur.
Meanwhile, John delivered me eight-by-ten enlargements of my pictures. I was astonished. The quality was unbelievably good. I do not think of myself as a photographer; but voyeurs and lechers, I think, have an instinctive feel for this kind of picture-making; lust leads the eye, the Devil guides the hand. Moreover, in early morning, when streets are deserted, the sun is scarcely above the horizon. The light, consequently, is parallel light-the rays parallel to the ground. This light, I discovered (as had Edward Wescott before me), is ideal for figure photography. The erect body is illuminated from one side, rather than from above; roundnesses thus are accentuated; body details (nipples, navels) facing east are portrayed with little or no shadow-while deep shadow falls to the west, establishing striking contrasts.
And, again, Elza and June were exceptionally photogenic, even handsomer in the camera's eye than in flesh. And in every pose they seemed, effortlessly, to fall into the curves of grace.
Possibly, after all, I had a book. Perhaps I could repeat the poses, actions, in the historic places of Spo-leto.
I telephoned my agent in New York, asked him what he thought of the idea: a photo essay-twinned beauties, twinned festivals, Southern exposures.
"Bill," he said, "you're doing well enough with Amy. Don't screw it up with another nonbook, by a nonphotographer, for a nonpublisher."
Thus ended my one effort to be legitimate with June and Elza. ("Tough titty," June was later to say.)
Cloris wrote me from England, asking what I was doing on Seabrook without Amy. (I had written her that Amy had gone to Washington, presumably to promote the Spoleto Festival, pick up an ambassadorship, or do whatever else a wayward imagine suggested. I had also enclosed some of the nudes of Elza and June. Cloris had an imagination never dull. And where it impinged on youth and wayward beauty, she had an excess of ideas.) Why did I not come to England? Why did I not meet her in Rome? Anyplace? I could even bring the twins with me. We could star them as Romulus and Remus, the Gracchi, the Bobbsey Twins.
I, after a night at the Mills-Hyatt House, between them, wrote her something about Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
June and Elza, as the days passed, entertained me with many inventions, private poems, autobiographical bonbons They were not really the children of Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue; they were twin princesses, stolen in infancy by gypsies who later settled on Watimelaw Island. In an earlier incarnation they had been twin monks in the service of the great Daruma, the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch, who imported Dhva-na (Zen) to western China in the time of the short-lived Liang Dynasty. Before that they had been stallions. Their favorite food was South Carolina caviar, a little-known delicacy found in the sturgeon of the Waccamaw River.
One morning I called on Pollexfen. He had no telephone. To reach him, you went to his house, scratched on the downstairs window.
We went to Henry's for lunch. (In Charleston, when you have something serious to talk about, habit takes you to Henry's. There you have quiet, conveniently slow service, good seafood, as many hours for your meal as you care to take.)
"I say," he said, over a hush puppy, "I read your book about Amy ... your last book, I assume. Not bad. Not bad at all."
"How is your writing getting on?" I left out specifics. It was enough to express interest, change the subject.
"Of course you see Amy in a way quite differentindeed, quite different-from mine." He smiled modestly, to accent his understatement.
"Tell me something about your nieces ... Elza and June."
Pollexfen, for whatever reason, was wedded to my book. "You have quite a way ... really quite a way. You really caught the nub-if I may use such an unfortunate word-of Amy. The spell. The wistfulness. The contradictions."
He paused to order a glass of milk. I asked for a Bloodv Mary-with lots of ice.
"Of course there was much, much sex ... almost a little shocking at times. This was out of character. But I suppose the publishers made you put that in."
I mumbled something about nature imitating art, but Pollexfen was not listening.
"I am not criticizing, mind vou. I'm a realist. I'm not good at that sort of thing. That's why I publish my own books. If you are your own publisher, you don't have to kowtow to the public."
He was, he informed me, planning a book on Confederate jessamine. "Confederate jessamine, that is."
Pollexfen was much given to daydreaming.
"About the Poltergrue twins..." Nothing more was to be learned from Pollexfen about Amy. His data were dated. His daydreams were already turning yellow around the edges. Soon they would become brittle and break apart.
"Very smart girls. Both of them. But inhibited. Terribly inhibited. I'm afraid they're afraid of men. Some girls are like that, you know." I knew.
"You saw how shy they were when I brought them over. It's their Charleston upbringing, I suppose. Most Charleston girls are shy. It's the English in them. The Puritanism of the Rump Parliament. Shy is chic."
"They're very pretty."
"And very handsomely put together. You just saw them in street clothes. Wait till you see them in swimsuits!"
The prospect, I informed him, interested me.
"There's poetry in those drumbeat bodies. like flowers. like my blessed jessamine ... Confederate jessamine. No sex yet. Not a glimmer. But what grace. Would that once again 'Omer could smite his bloomin' lyre."
Delusions of grandeur swept over me. Would that I could smite a bloomin' lyre. One such, thus smote, could make them immortal.
Flaubert, come to think of it, gave immortality to the sordid and sentimental amours of a silly woman-the wife of a stupid country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near Rouen. Fragonard and Boucher, as I noted earlier, turned the little peasant girls of Versailles and thereabouts into eternal reminders of Bourbon delights.
How much more I had to work with. Amy was no silly woman, nor were her amours, however sentimental, ever a whit sordid. Nor were Elza and June, kindlers of Benton's delights, in any way peasant. Products of the modern temper, the pill, the wonderful world of Wilhelm Reich, they were mistresses of the beau geste.
How fortunate I was-even if I had nothing whatever to say!
"The aim of criticism..." Pollexfen droned on, quoting Wilde's paraphrase of Arnold, and after several abrupt turns in subject, "the proper aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is."
I saw before me Elza, June, as of on or about the first day in June-the day when they both submitted themselves to my critical eye.
I saw, clear as the Alpine Valley of the moon, under high power, their delicate, conchoid openings-each innocent, articulate, serene. I saw Amy's nipples, stalagmite in passion. I saw a pelican gh'ding over the surf, a laughing gull sitting on its back.
"What is the object as in itself it really is?" I, by chance, came to my senses.
"I really haven't the faintest idea. If everything is always changing, there is no really is for anything in itself to really be."
"Rough," I said.
I ordered another Bloody Mary and a dish of crabmeat au gratin. Pollexfen ordered a refill of milk. ("My stomach, you know.")
I raised a point which I have discussed elsewhere (in writing about Amy and Cloris). Since everything constantly changes, is never twice the same, it is never possible to make love twice to the same girl-a point dramatically illustrated in my lovemaking with Amy. Even once is questionable; Amy changes, I change, in the middle of the river's flow.
"Panta rei," I said pompously. "Everything changes."
(This simple fact, now cliche, is not always as self-evident as one would assume-especially among the very young. "Why isn't II standing up anymore?" June had asked, one late afternoon, after some hours of foreplay, middle-play, and aftermath; and she and Elza, severally and in tandem, had subdued my arrogance, had drained every minim of unspent love. "Is something the matter?" And Elza, generously, had added, "Please partake of the ptarmigan.")
"I hope I'm not boring you," Pollexfen said, swirling around his glass his last few drops of milk. He had, with exquisite courtesy, not heard my pomposity.
His mind was on other things.
Solemnly he sat across from me, steeped in soliloquy. Solemnly he gave me much useless information. He told me, for example, that Elza and June's father, who was in the insurance business, called himself A. Lionel Poltergrue. That his initials, obviously, were ALP. And these corresponded to the ALP in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
"ALP, of course, stands for Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is also Eve, Iseult, Ireland, and the River Liffey."
He paused to smile, savor the joys of coincidence.
His head in half-profile, I noticed, resembled some of the best heads on Roman coins. His porpoise-fin nose was ample, eloquent, disdainful.
"I could imagine myself someday doing a book about my nieces ... something, perhaps, like your book about Amy. Not as intimate, perhaps ... not as intimate..." He stopped to frame his imaginary project.
"No?" I used the monosyllabic question to show interest. Without it, Pollexfen might move to another subject: the Welch epic, for example; or the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.
"I would be Joycean, I think. Very Joycean. Use the same obscure symbolism. One should always be a bit foggy, shouldn't one?"
I nodded. Disagreement would get me nowhere.
"I would create a symbol that stood for life's eternal twoness ... say, JOEL. JOEL would mean June or Elza, yang and yin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, light and darkness, good and evil, thesis and antithesis, hammer and anvil, and-irony of ironies-the two centuries that together give us our Bicentennial."
"Love," I said, with equal and fraternal obscurity, "is a beast with two backs. And much loving is much duplicity." (The beauty of the obscurity game is that it lends itself to infinite combinations.)
"It can also," I added, as memories stalked me, "be a beast with three backs."
("Do you ever think I'm Amy when you're in me, in the dark?" June had once asked me. To which Elza added, "Or that the second time in me was the first day in June?")
Pollexfen did not, however, hear me. Soliloquy had overcome him.
Yet his introverted musings were not altogether without use to me. I learned much about recent local happenings that affected Amy; much about Stendhal-ian intrigues. In politics Charleston is nowise different from Stendhal's Parma.
I learned that Amy's husband, Jeff Dellmore, once Senator Ashmead's campaign manager, and once nominated for a high-court judgeship (despite his ignorance of law), had been arrested for certain inappropriate offers made to a decoy police officer in the men's room of an airport. After a romantic rendezvous in some nearby woods, where he appeared in women's clothes, he claimed "entrapment." ("We need police officers who are one hundred percent red-blooded he-men ... fearless and virile. How do we know we've got them ... unless we make periodic spot checks?")
I learned that Senator Ashmead had, since the demise of the last administration, lost much of his political clout. The "Southern strategy," with which he had been terminally linked, was no more. Change was in the wind; change and newer gambits.
"Women's rights is a big issue today," Frank Hib-bard, his new campaign manager (a six-foot-two former Navy commander) had told him. "Remember: fifty-one percent of the registered voters are women."
The Bicentennial was then in full swing. Hibbard suggested that Ashmead beat the big drum for all the famous women in American history: Betsy Ross, Martha Washington, Molly Pitcher, Carrie Nation, Princess Grace, Topsy. ("Topsy, it's true, was only a girl in Uncle Tom's time. But in the intervening hundred and thirty years, she has matured.") There was also Lola Montez.
The senator had a penchant for Lillian Russell.
Much of this discussion took place at Berkeley Hall, Isabelle Wescott's plantation, up the Ashley River. And it was Vanderhoff ("the guru"), Miss Wescott's amiable, scholarly, and irresponsible houseguest, who first focused attention on Amy.
"Everybody knows and respects her in this part of the country." This was his initial argument. "After all, she's been South Carolina's commissioner of consumer affairs ... Charleston's Woman of the Year ... for some very good year, like the year the Citadel won the pennant, played in the Cotton Bowl, and fired the fewest cadets for cheating."
"True, so true," Ashmead is reported to have said with a faint, nostalgic suggestion of a drool.
"And now ... I don't know how many of you have seen her in the new motion picture? ... she is, in a very special way, an international figure ... like Florence Nightingale and Lady Godiva."
(I quote from Pollexfen's monologue.)
There were many elaborations, suggestions. A place could be made for her on Ashmead's staff. ("Team," he called it, not yet-having shaken free from the last-elected president's fondness for the argot of the playing field.)
It was then that Miss Wescott called Amy-a frolicsome perversity. In the direct middle of my Vesu-vian moment.
"Incidentally," he said finally, asking more or less what I had asked him, "what is concluded that we should conclude anything about it?" (A rather garbled sentence, I thought-and a quotation, at that.)
Pollexfen, in honest and realistic fashion, was always trying to discover himself. Sometimes he babbled dithyrambic nonsense, stretching unduly the sense of a plain word. Sometimes he returned to the fixation of his youth, the image of Amy, in black tights, playing Hamlet. The latter, it seemed to me, gave him a full and selffulfilling sex life.
I began to see, now, a picture, or at least fragments of a mosaic, emerging from the recent fog. Yet, the more details became clear, the more the reasonings behind them became obscure.
Apparently Amy was undressed before Ashmead, more properly for Ashmead. She rose from our bed to dress-to go to Miss Wescott's to undress. (How much easier it would have been simply to get into the car without dressing! How dramatic to have worn gloves; long black gloves-nothing else. And to have shielded herself with necklace and parasol!)
And now there were the novelist's problems, the burdens I have inflicted on myself: to answer the questions I could never answer; to account for whim, mood, motivation. If Amy actually undressed on request (Miss Wescott's?) in front of Ashmead, bent over, the better to display her taunting tattoo, to make her milk-white roundings available to sight and touch, what went on in her mind? What quaint imagine danced in her secret places?
Was she saving herself from herself, to yield up the melancholy Amy to her other self, the self-gaiety and passion? Was she merely pleasing Miss Wescott because Miss Wescott, for reasons established before my time, still wielded some irresistible erotic force?
Moreover, I had Ashmead to evaluate.
As a novelist, viewing all events with the pathos of distance, I had to account to myself for his continued interest in Amy in spite of embarrassing failure, awkward failure (as I had heard), in his one attempt to make love to her in a hotel room in Washington. (According to the story, she had made this purported sacrifice at the urging of her husband, and for the sake of her husband, whom she despised, but to whom she was bound by masochistic loyalty, a Victorian sense of duty, and a proper Charlestonian's concern for appearances. It is ironic, I think, that the habit of propriety can lead so easily, so swiftly, to the ultimate impropriety-the offer of the full use of one's naked white body, not for love and glee, but for rites of passage. )
Why, I asked myself, would Ashmead risk a second show of impotence?
Perhaps-and this struck me as probable-Ashmead had no desire to make love to Amy. He simply wanted her undressed and paraded before him. Perhaps he would touch her here or there, kiss the fleur-de-lis, elevate a nipple. This was the year of the bizarre congressional sex follies, America's long-delayed answer to the Profumo affair. To savor, by sight and touch, the bright, intimate wonders of Amy's body was perhaps, for Ashmead, no more than a routine use of senatorial privilege. Usufruct.
"Why does Charleston accept with such grace," I asked Pollexfen, "such tolerance, everything that Amy does?"
Charleston, by structure and intent, is a staid, conventional, mannered city. And in full view of the public Charleston eye, Amy had indulged in antics few conservative societies would tolerate. She had had a flagrant, incestuous affair with her nephew. She had had, was still having, an open affair with me. She had held, was still offered, public office, yet she appeared, was appearing, fully nude in Cloris' and my well-publicized motion picture. I pass over the peccadilloes.
"Charleston is very English," Pollexfen said. "It treasures tradition as England does. And what passes for tradition in England is nothing more than pride in the history of its heresies."
"You see Amy as typical--? "
"Not typical. A model. like Lady Godiva, who set the fashion for feminist noblesse oblige ... and whom British ladies, for some nine hundred years, honored by riding side-saddle."
He nodded to himself a bit; then he summarized. "Grace. That's the keystone. Grace. Stark, overwhelming grace."
I felt, for the first time, a streak of jealousy, a sense of loss. I had, without awareness of the change inside me, become possessive of Amy. I had with her an intimacy that was not to be shared, except with Cloris. And I had never reason to be jealous of Cloris, because Cloris and I shared everything. An infidelity, so called, was not diminution of our shared pleasures, but an extension, a fantasy made flesh, to be recounted, examined, explored, reenacted.
Amy, however, had her secret life, secret lives. She had not told me what went on at her secret meeting in the dead of night when she went alone to Miss Wescbtt's. Had she undressed herself? Had Miss Wescott stripped her? What was the expression on her face as she stood naked in the drawing room? Did she take her hair down? Did she, as usual, make the empty gesture of covering her breasts? Her pubic umbra? Did she at any time have to go to the bathroom? And, if so, did she make the long trek naked, and return naked, saying, in effect, "Here I am, relaxed, relieved, ready. Where do you want me?"
Pollexfen's urge to communicate with himself fed on silence; and for some minutes, absorbed in the penumbra of Amy, I had said nothing.
He turned, for no apparent reason, to Milton. "Interesting parallel, come to think of it, between Milton and Joyce..."
(Chance words so swiftly evoke unsought images. I saw Elza and June bent over a Battery cannon, their bare bottoms tangent, the vertical creases parallel. Each buttock pair, a disembodied rump, acquired a personality of its own; each a surname. "Milton."
"Joyce."
"Joyce" I assigned to June-repressing, in-stanter, the obvious puns.)
"Amazing parallel, come to think of it, between Paradise Lost and Finnegans Wake. In both, what counts most is sound, not sense; words, not ideas."
"About Amy..." I had no more heart for a long excursion.
"Yes. Amy. Your book. Come to think of it, you could learn from both. Both. I read some of you ... think I told you. You have a weakness. You try too hard to make sense. A flaw, I think. Bad ... very bad-because nothing ever makes much sense."
Whatever Amy's political future was to be was still a matter for readers of tea leaves. But one dilemma loomed clearly. She was a Democrat, a proper delegate from South Carolina, one designated to raise her voice at the Democratic Convention, in New York. Senator Ashmead was a Republican. In making proposals to Amy (If indeed he made proposals), he would be crossing party lines. Moreover, the Democratic Convention was about to begin. Amy's presence was required. And Amy, by phone, had asked me to meet her in New York. ("We will make up, darling, for borrowed time. I will exhaust you. Then we'll fly back to Italy.")
By coincidence, the morning after Amy had called me, the morning newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, had published, on its front page, two bizarre photographs. The first was my shot of June and Elza, bottoms high, bent over the northernmost cannon on the Battery. (The one supposedly pointing toward Fort Sumter, but actually angled below the walkway of the sea wall-thus, in case of a sudden revival of the War Between the States, destined to blow malingering strollers into polluted harbor.)
This picture was harmless, because few viewers, much less parents, are capable of establishing identity, given as clue nothing more than the dual contours of parallel behinds (the lines of parallelism being the crevices, vertically aligned).
The second picture was my undoing. Here were my naked models in full frontal exposure, framed by the wrought-iron gates of the church cemetery. Obviously, because Charleston is Charleston, the prints had been retouched to obscure pubic detail; a nebulous, misplaced shadow absorbed breasts.
Caption: "Eve and Eve in the City of Gardens. Tourists visiting Charleston this Bicentennial Year find beauty everywhere-the new intertwining with the old."
All of this caught my eye as I was sitting in the lobby of the Mills-Hyatt House. I had driven into town to draw money at the bank and to pick up my plane tickets.
It was clear, by now, John Young, my studio friend, sometime friend, had made himself prints of all my negatives. I could not with tact, with wisdom, protest. If now there were to be a "book," could be a "book," the tome would be his. John Young's Naked Charleston, "An Intimate Portrait of a Fabulous City."
An hour later I was at the airport. It was a clear, feckless, municipal day; and the mockingbirds were singing.