Chapter 8

I arrived at the Plaza late that afternoon. I took a suite on the fourteenth floor. The bedroom overlooked the Central Park lake; the sitting room, with its corner bay windows, overlooked both the park and the Plaza's plaza. The plaza's trees were in full leaf (London plane trees); it's fountain, as usual, was dry.

Amy arrived at six. She arrived with twelve pieces of luggage. She was chic, radiant, relaxed, affectionate.

"Love," she said, "fix me a drink and draw me a bath."

I mixed her a Johnnie Walker black and soda, kissed her, turned on the bathwater.

"I have so much to tell you," she said, dropping into an armchair, taking the drink, leaning back, dimpling her cheeks, crossing her legs.

"You have."

I made myself a drink, caressed the crossed legs, kissed the caressed knees, sat down in the opposite chair.

Rushing in through the opened windows was the roar of Fifth Avenue, so different from the roar of the Seabrook surf.

"I was jealous when I first heard," she said.

"About what?"

"About Elza and June ... but especially June."

"Why June?"

"Her bosom is bigger. And it was my bosom that first turned you on, wasn't it? Not the tattoo."

"Well...."

"And the nipples. Don't lie to me."

"I liked you all over."

"I was terribly jealous when I first heard."

"How did you hear?"

"Larrine told me. She thought it would amuse me."

"And it didn't?"

"Of course it didn't. I'm not like Cloris that way. I'm primitive. Old-fashioned. Possessive."

"But..."

"You've heard that I've been unfaithful to you." She stuck out her tongue to me in a way that was at once pert, disarming, creative.

I made a few meaningless sounds, because I wanted to indicate that I had heard, yet did not want to risk seeming prim, insensitive, or alarmed.

"Did you enjoy the twins?"

"Yes."

"Both twins."

"Both."

"Every way?"

"Every way. They 'modeled.' "

"I hate you." She wrinkled her nose to tell me she loved me. "Now you'll think I'm too old for you."

"Shall I part my hair behind?" I chanted. "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

She took a hearty slug of her drink, unbuttoned the top buttons of her dress. "I have been unfaithful. I concede it. I confess it. And this is my punishment. You go to bed with two girls whose vaginas cling to you like the little fingers of a pair of rubber gloves."

Her eyes glowed as she said this. The sunset from behind the towers of West End Avenue plunged across the park, cut through our Central Park South windows (in the bay), glowed like red coals in the depths of her eyes.

I thought of the Countess of Liechtenstein's eyes, when I first saw them, glowing in a similar dusk, on the Via Mazzini, in Taorminia. And immediately I checked my thoughts, wiping out specificities by closing my mind to concrete images and saying to myself, interminably: One, One, One, One, One. (I could, of course, have chanted the traditional Aum, mane patime, Aum. But this would have been an affectation and a condescension to the East Wind.)

I blanked out counterthoughts because I loved Amy; loved her deeply, with permanent lust and locked-in understanding. To compare her to other women, to compute the relativity of vaginal diameters, did violence to my image, violence to my faith in a beauty which defies humdrum comparisons and the accountings of profit and loss.

No more could I imagine Helen of Troy fitted for a diaphragm. Or Athena emerging from Zeus's forehead with tarnish on her armor. Or Venus, in heat, in armor. Or Eros in heat or armor. Or Amour embracing Swift.

"I was unfaithful." She rolled the word around her tongue. She rolled it with pride and fortitude.

"I was ... I am ... a recorder of infidelities," I said consolingly. Which was-is-the case. A novelist puts in word, with appropriate punctuation, what he hears and sees. And what he hears and sees is a violation, ongoing, ever present, of the chivalric code. In such a way did Sir Thomas Mallory describe the fornications at Camelot, and the tragic vigil of Tristram, at Cornwall, for King Mark's wife-by rights his le-man.

"I was unfaithful to you." Amy smiled, nodded, rolled her tongue around her lips (a gesture she had picked up from Cloris). "And because I was unfaithful, I have forfeited a mistress's dower rights ... so how can I complain?"

Her eyes moved from mine to the window; from the window to the space hovering over the lake. A half-century had passed since a young girl named Dorothy Arnold strolled past that lake and never again was seen. A half-century had passed since the first and only black trumpeter swan was seen swimming on the placid waters of that lake.

She unbuttoned another button of her dress. She pushed her relaxed hair to a fresh point of vantage. "But I have been a good mistress ... am a good mistress ... in spite of my strangeness. Have I not been? Am I not?"

She handled difficult sentences, I thought, with immaculate syntactical precision. Such authority goes beyond whim and random sex.

Aristocracy, in the long run, I have tardily come to concede, is reflected in a person's mastery of syntax, when times interweave and images are aghast.

I nodded.

I sipped my drink.

Amy took a hard slug of her own drink. "I have been a good mistress, have I not?" I nodded.

"I am your mistress, am I not? You don't mind the word?"

I agreed, affirming the first, affirming the negation of the second.

"And I am a good mistress."

"Bellissima," I said.

"Better mistress than wife. We must never marry." A wife, I suggested, is a former mistress who, after sanctification, is always in the adversary position. And she held that the missionary position sooner or later leads to the adversary position.

"I am good for you ... really good for you."

I agreed. She was beautiful, succulent, experimental, and kind.

"And I have not changed. In any way. Not an iota."

"Not a jot."

She smiled. "If you have any doubts..." She lifted the hem of her skirt. "None," I assured her.

"I was unfaithful." She jangled the word the way Tchaikovsky jangled bells in the 1812 Overture. Had her breasts been bare, she would have beaten them.

I suggested that "unfaithfulness" had little meaning in an age of little faith.

"It does," she insisted. "I have no right to complain about Elza and June. No right at all. I've forfeited a mistress's dower rights."

I said nothing. "Yes" would be tactless; "no" would be empty.

Happily she had more to say. She found a feeling of wrongdoing highly tonic. "And I have been a good mistress ... am a good mistress. Have I not been? Am I not?"

There was syntactical precision in her conjugal conjugations. How happy it might be (I thought, in passing), if Amy, without embarrassment, ire, umbrage, would edit my manuscript.

I nodded. I was becoming adept in nonverbal communication.

She finished her drink, handed me the glass. I put in more ice, more whiskey.

"Thanks," she said absently. Then, looking out of the window at cumulus clouds emigrating from Brooklyn, she began to fit together odd facts that were happy enough in isolation. "Cloris is also your mistress. I, then, am not only your mistress, but your mistress's mistress. And because I also love Cloris, Cloris is also a mistress's mistress."

She stopped to take the first sip of the second drink. "It's all very complicated, isn't it?"

Amy was now obsessed with her two Victorian words, "unfaithful" and "mistress." She repeated them with obscene glee, as if to wring from them a confirmation of wickedness. Proper ladies are not mistresses. Proper ladies are always faithful. But proper ladies are also sad, cold, unfufilled, and unfulfilling.

I translate: She had lived with me long enough to make our relationship conventional. She was slipping into a torpor. She needed the tonic slap of sin.

"You know my weakness," she said.

She was appealing to me, now, to think of her as one bearing psychic cross. She cultivated the notion of compulsion. On Walpurgis night the succubi and in-cubi take over. Her will fails her. Against her will, she must give herself; and in this giving, she is born again.

"Yes."

"I always want to be a good lover to you ... mistress, whatever." She had leaned back in her armchair, stretched out her Ziegfeld ("Long-stemmed roses") legs, directed her words upward-to the clinking crystal chandelier.

"You always are."

"Not always. Before I went away, I wasn't any good at all. That's why I went away."

"Who did it."

"Don't you know."

"Miss Wescott?"

She smiled. She ran her hand across her thighs. "You do know, don't you? And you know how and why." She looked at me with her special Low Country turn of the Giaconda smile-teasing, knowing, and slightly sad.

"Of course."

"She was good for you."

"She is always good for me." She kissed her fingers, and threw the kiss to my penis. "And all of this, exaggerated by your own loving, obscene imagination, will go into your next book."

"Do you mind?"

My empty question, more a punctuation mark than a question, struck her as quite funny. I knew so much about her, so many details; yet so little. "Mind? How could I mind? What greater flattery can a woman have than to have the vagaries of her vagina immortalized in a book?"

She stood up. She was majestic, it seemed to me. I had forgotten how majestic she could look, how striking.

"And now..." Her enrapturing smile coiled itself around me. "And now ... if you will forgive this unforgivable interruption ... il faut faire pee-pee."

Lifting her skirt in anticipation of the gestures to follow, she went into the bedroom.

A moment later I heard the bathwater turned off.

I finished my drink and went to the window. I looked down at the sunken plaza of the General Motors Building. I looked idly at the scurry of traffic on Fifth Avenue, of the thousands of harried housewives and office workers, anxious, as always, to move rapidly from one unsatisfying place to another. How different, I thought, was the tranquillity of the bare, upturned bottoms of Elza and June on the Seabrook beach-even, in the clear morning light, over a Charleston cannon.

Gradually there formed in my mind the image I had so long sought. I saw Amy as the orchestration of her differences. It had been clear to me for some time that there was a multiplicity of Amys: an Amy demure and pristine; a career Amy, political and strong; a maenadic Amy, exquisite, amoral, licorice; an exhibitionistic Amy, the natural actress, in full flower only before an audience.

What I now saw was a cluster of personalities in which each had a life of its own. Each was insulated from the others, yet had an awareness of the existence, needs, advantages, disabilities of the others.

The separation was so distinct that each Amy, like a physical "other," could be a companion to the other. She could, if need be, be her own lover.

No one husband or lover could ever be enough for her, because none could satisfy all the needs of all the selves, as each temporarily replaced another within a body that, to any outsider, was exquisite and unchanging.

For me, of course, whether or not I could alone satisfy the variety of "her" needs (I qualify the "her" because of an unavoidable need to assume a central Amy, a persona), she was infinitely desirable. And I could share her, as I did with Cloris, without having any of my possessions diminished because there was an infinity of richness in her poetic lusts.

If there was such an infinity of richness in Amy, why did I, almost in front of Amy, make love to Elza and June?

I had a better understanding of Amy, or thought I did, than I had of myself. Nor was this in any way odd. I was writing about Amy, not about myself-except to the extent that I had to account to myself for the role I was playing in accounting for Amy.

I mentioned much of this to Amy when, a short while later, in the queen-size bed that faced the windows overlooking the park, I was deep inside her.

She constricted her vagina. "You know my weakness." This was an elusive comment, which might mean anything.

I said nothing-which could mean anything. She then wound her long legs around me. "I want always to be a good lover to you."

"You always are."

"I was not, when I went away from you ... that night."

"You were."

"I was, later ... not before."

"What happened?" I had a reasonable insight about what happened. But an "insight," if such it was, could in no way match the excitement created by an honest (or dishonest), detailed report. (Cloris understood this well; which is why, after battiedore and shuttlecock exchange of details, we developed, together, such successful motion pictures.)

"I let myself be whipped."

"Why?"

"I told you. Besides, Tve told you before. Besides ... you once saw for yourself ... at the Contessa Borromini's villa, at Civitavecchia."

Now, in the light of my new theory, the whipping in the Borromini chapel had more symbolic meaning. The ritual offering of her body, for admiration, pain, embarrassment, possession, combined elements from the separate fantasies of each of the discrete Amys. Amy the exhibitionist found pleasure in the unveiling of her body-before strangers. The demure and pristine Amy-which was the Amy who arrived with Cloris, with me, at the villa-was incapable of opening herself to the pleasures demanded by the other Amys. The whipping was the magic act which cut away the inhibitions of the first Amy. It opened her, as it were (assuming that the substitution of the frenzied, loving

Amy for the prim, constrained Amy is an "opening").

More, the whipping was prepayment for pleasures later to be had. In giving over her body to be hurt, a body so publicly, conspicuously naked, Amy forestalled guilt. She was being had, against her will; she was overcome by some perverse, superior force. The later pleasures were her right, her due, a rounding out of equities.

"Besides..." Amy had a Pandora's box of besides.

"Besides what?"

"Watching me that way..."

"Like that afternoon in the chapel?"

"You know what it does to you ... even talking about it." And as if in resonance with the thought, her hands began to shake. Her tongue snaked into my mouth. Her hips rose. Inward muscles churned in sly peristalsis. I felt coming over me the great Hokusai wave.

And there it was; three consecutive, convulsive spasms.

"You're a bastard," she said. "I'm not ready yet." To the multiplicity of my loves, I was multiply apologetic.

Now that I had gained new "understanding," I had intended to be more understanding; to be, with whatever Amy I embraced, more tender, patient, loving; kissing more, nibbling, stroking, caressing (as Cloris loved her)-keeping my flushed erection hidden, as Mary Queen of Scots' executioner kept his sword hidden until the apocalyptic moment.

And now I had blundered, as a virgin schoolboy sometimes blunders after his first kiss.

"I don't think," she said, "we should talk any more about my weakness."

Later we went out for dinner. It was dusk. The last red rays of the sun, setting behind the Hudson, were reflected from the upper windows of the General Motors Building. Horses harnessed to shabby barouches were eating, from feed bags, their evening oats.

I walked with Amy to the Copenhagen, at Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue-a block west. It was a nice feeling, walking with her again on the streets of New York. A year had passed since we were first together in New York. And here, after Charleston, it pleased me to play host, guide, mentor, boulevardier. I knew New York the way Amy knew the birds of the Low Country; the lintels and architraves of the houses Below-Broad-Street.

When we had been here before, I had taken her, one by one, to my favorite saloons and eating places: P. J. Clarke's, P. J. Moriarty's, Liichow's, Sun Luck East, Gallagher's, the old Grand Ticino, Costello's, Sardi's, 21. We had had late sandwiches at Reuben's, hot dogs at Nathan's, butterfly shrimp at Bo Bo (on Pell Street), lobster fra diavolo at the Grotta Azzurra.

For no intelligible reason, we had not been to the Copenhagen.

Otto Plume, the proprietor, recognized me from years past, when I met there with editors and possible publishers. He is one of the world's greatest fanciers of finnan haddie; a suave, gracious man, who has always maintained that a restaurant should be run with the perfection you expect of a space module.

"It's good to see you back, Mr. Benton," he said, holding out his hand.

"It's good to be back." It was good to shake hands with him again. I had been more homesick for New York than I had realized, sequestered and feted on and about Seabrook, Amy, Elza, and June.

"Where have you been so long."

"Charleston."

"In South Carolina?"

"Charleston ... in South Carolina."

Mr. Plume wrinkled his nose. "Great hospitality, cold food. Always a Bicentennial, never a chafing dish."

I introduced Amy.

Mr. Plume, not hearing the last name, not caring, kissed her hand and addressed her as "Madame Benton."

"I like being called Madame Benton," Amy said as we sat down at a corner table, angled to face the festive smorgasbord spread.

"Very European, very domestic."

She unrolled her napkin. "And there's a title for your next book."

"What?"

"The Birching of Madame Benton."

I assumed I was talking with Amy No. I, who could view her ritual migration into Amy No. 2 with a certain salty detachment.

"Not dignified," I said.

"After what you've written about me, what you are now writing. And after the exposure I had in the movie ... dignity doesn't have much meaning."

"Venus rose from the sea, naked on a cockleshell ... and she was the very spit of dignity."

"Cockleshell nakedness is nice."

It became clear to me now why I wrote so much about Amy. It was not the money; I had plenty of money by now. Certainly not reputation; if anything, what I wrote built antireputation, a smirking kind of notoriety that I sometimes found annoying. Nor was it any cryptic sexual satisfaction-at least not in the ordinary piston-and-cylinder sense. It was the cockleshell idea-to capture before it was gone, to hold for all time, the essence of Amy's rapturous nakedness, as Botticelli has captured and held the raptus of Simonetta Vespucci.

On second thought, it became clear that I was lying to myself.

"Tve only been whipped five times in my entire life."

"You kept count?"

She flushed. "Five or six."

"But why?" My questions were parliamentary, part of the play the two of us instinctively acted out. I wanted Amy, as ever, to tell me, with her own imagery, why she did what she did-knowing well that what she told me would be more imagine than fact, a confession to be discounted, interpreted, translated into a fantasy of my own. Amy, in turn (whichever "Amy"), had a need to be urged.

"There was Larrine. Larrine was the first. In her house on East Battery. In the drawing room where we first met."

I nodded.

"I was very uptight, then. I? You still think of me as uptight, don't you?"

"I don't think of you as uptight. You have never been uptight with me. Only loving. Open, exquisite, loving."

"I was uptight. Too uptight to give myself. Larrine knew this. She knows much. Much ... much."

"She took over."

Amy took a deep swallow of her martini, as if to find in its depths old memories and courage. Then she looked absently, impersonally over her glass toward a platter of smoked eel.

"She took over. I was undressed. You read that. Everything. Then she had me pulled half over that Louis Quatorze escritoire. You've seen it?"

I had. It was directly in front of it, as I recall, that

Larrine first introduced me to the uncovered neatness of June's figure. Dramatic forays, in Charleston, so often repeat themselves. "It hurt?"

Obviously it hurt. My tactic, obscene as it was obvious, was to urge Amy to provide a scenario in her own words; to stir me, arouse herself, and simultaneously develop for me the dialogue of my book.

"Only at first." She knew, now, what I was about, and her cheeks dimpled in acknowledgment. "Only at first. Then..." She had now the hesitation that only comes with artifice.

I thought back to the scene in the contessa's chapel at Civitavecchia. The posture, I daresay, was the same. What was in her mind, I had no way of knowing; even now, in retrospect, my guess would shed fight on nothing more than the oddities of my own biography. Frankly, I no longer have viable theories. I have run clean out of theories. My treatment of Amy, in print, fascination, hex, is Simon-pure Zen. I could as well write of Zen and the art of swordsmanship. To take hold of Amy, to sense Amy from the inside, is like painting bamboo from the inside, like letting the sword, without thought, cleave the dew.

"Oh, Lord," she said, "I shouldn't tell you all this."

"Why not?"

"Why not?" She turned, now, and looked at me. "I really don't know why not Eventually I tell you everything, don't I?"

"And eventually I write about it." This, I knew, Amy no longer minded. There was vanity, sometimes, in her madness. She was not always unwilling to be undone. And this, too, she knew I knew.

She sighed. "All my private places have gone public, haven't they? And oddly, quite oddly, I don't seem to mind."

The world has changed radically, I suggested. Time was when much beauty was born to blush without benefit. Today, in new ways, we try to look on beauty bare. I said something or other about a hard, gem-like flame. I suggested, with shameless plagiarism, that at every moment some form grows perfect-even the Giaconda smile of the most secret place; and that not to discriminate it, on this short day of frost and sun, is to sleep before evening.

"You do want to know, don't you? Everything."

"Everything." Particularly, I wanted to know what each "Amy" knew about the others, how one replaced itself with another.

(I think, sometimes, that Amy is the only woman in modern times who has taken it on herself to act out, in flesh, the imagery of The Hound of Heaven: "Naked, I wait Thy love's uplifed stroke!I My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,I And smitten me to my knee;I I am defenseless utterly.I I slept, methinks, and woke,I and, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep." She acted it out, in times past, without awareness of her acting; or, at most, in the vague penumbra of awareness. But of late, it seemed to me, there was both awareness and guile. The change, I thought, was chic, sly, and charming.)

"Order us another martini," she said, drumming on the table as if wrestling with conflicting urges. "I'm already drunk ... but I'd like to be a little drunker."

I caught the attention of our waiter, a middle-aged man with white hair who looked, as do most waiters in Scandinavian restaurants, like a retired ambassador. I pointed to our two glasses. He nodded.

"Why should I try to hide anything from you?"

"There's no reason," I said.

"You've had me about as naked as any woman can be ... you and Cloris. You've made love to me every possible way a woman can be made love to ... as if positions and openings made any possible difference..."

"Not really," I conceded. Positions and openings made differences only as dream symbols. Yet Amy knew, and I knew, that the subtleties I sought are never fully given. Art is an ongoing account of the infinite variations of feeling.

She stroked my hand. "You know I love you."

I knew.

"Totally. Completely."

"I know." I knew.

"And I always want to be a good lover to you. A hexless mistress."

I assured her that she was.

She shook her head. "Not always. That's why I left you that night ... went to Isabelle's. That's why I let her ... you knew I let her, didn't you?"

I nodded.

"And when I came back, I was good for you. Wasn't I good for you?"

"You must try the finan haddie," the waiter said, stopping by our table to empty a perfectly clean ashtray. The waiters at the Copenhagen are perfectionists.

During our trips back and forth to the smorgasbord table, and after, when we had shifted from martinis to Carlsberg beer, we had much to talk about We always, it seemed, had much to talk about-so much that it seemed a pity to interrupt to stop to make love, just as when, making love, it seemed a pity to stop and talk. Yet what we talked about, for the most part, were the fine points of making love. Amy seemed to have the feeling-and this I shared-that talk about making love is not as much talk about making love, qua love, as talk about the whole human comedy, as it turned up, in the spasm of a thigh, in the quickening eye.

She wanted to know about my feelings for June; what I thought about when I first found her open and ready; whether or not, when I found myself inside her, I compared my feelings with the feelings I had when making love to her, or to Cloris. Elza, for intangible reasons, did not stir her interest, suggest competition.

She told me more about the night at Miss Wes-cott's. The chief spectator had not been Senator Ashmead. Ashmead was old, impotent, and at that time on a junket, at taxpayers' expense, to Tanzania (ostensibly looking for chrome). The chief spectator was a nineteen-year-old bearded College of Charleston student whom Larrine had been using as a model, and with whom Larrine had been having an affair.

In the middle of the romantic journey, when Amy No. I had vacated the naked, spread-eagled body of the collective Amy-and when the maenadic Amy was raising her splendid spirit-the spread-eagled body was penetrated properly, but from behind, by the tumescent manhood of the ninteen-year-old boy.

"I understand so well, Bill, how you felt ... how you must have felt ... the first time in June. And although I'm jealous as hell, I don't say a word."

It was after that that she had come back to me and been so passionately loving.

"I want," she said, "always to be a good lover to you."

"You are," I said, repeating myself, as she repeated herself, and with the same sincerity. Love is loving; and no woman in the world was more loving than Amy-the collective Amy, in any stage or transition. No woman gave more of herself in spite of herself ... or "selves."

"And now, Mr. Bones, I have a question for you

... you who know so much ... and want to know so much."

"What?"

"If I love you so much ... want only to be a good lover to you ... why do I have to give myself to someone else ... to be to you the complete lover that I want to be to you?"

"And Cloris?"

"Cloris is you."