“Helen suffered terrible, but there was nothing to do—I never could save enough in the winter to get us away from there in the summer. We fried alive in our little aluminum trailer. Just sat there, Helen watching TV and coming to hate me. Maybe she’d always hated me; or our life; or her life. But since she was a quiet woman and we never quarreled much, I didn’t know how she felt till last April.
That’s when I had to quit work and go into the hospital for an operation. Varicose veins in my legs. I didn’t have the money, but it was a matter of life and death. The doctor said otherwise I could have an embolism any minute. It was three days after the operation before Helen come to see me. She doesn’t say how are you or kiss me or nothing. What she said was: ‘I don’t want anything, Bob. I left a suitcase downstairs with your clothes.
All I’m taking is the truck and the trailer.’ I ask her what she’s talking about, and she says: ‘I’m sorry, Bob. But I’ve got to move on.’ I was scared; I began to cry—I begged her, I said: ‘Helen, please, woman, I’m blind and now I’m lame and I’m sixty years old—you can’t leave me like this without a home and nowhere to turn.’ Know what she said? ‘When you’ve got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.’
And those were the last words she ever spoke to me. When I got out of the hospital, I had fourteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but I wanted to put as much space between me and there as ever I could, so I hit out for New York, hitchhiking. Helen, wherever she is, I hope she’s happier. I don’t hold anything against her, though I think she treated me extra hard. That was a tough deal, an old blind man and half lame, hitchhiking all the way across America.”
A helpless man waiting in the dark by the side of an unknown road: that’s how Denny Fouts must have felt, for I had been as heartless to him as Helen had been to Bob.
DENNY HAD SENT ME TWO messages from the Vevey clinic. The script of the first was all but unintelligible: “Difficult to write as I cannot control my hands. Father Flanagan, renowned proprietor of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café, has given me my check and shown me the door. Merci Dieu pour toi. Otherwise I would feel very alone.” Six weeks later I received a firmly written card: “Please telephone me at Vevey 46 27 14.”
I placed the call from the bar of the Pont Royal; I remember, as I waited for Denny’s voice, watching Arthur Koestler methodically abuse a woman who was seated with him at a table—someone said she was his girl friend; she was crying but did nothing to protect herself from his insults. It is intolerable to see a man weep or a woman bullied, but no one intervened, and the bartenders and waiters pretended not to notice.
Then Denny’s voice descended from alpine altitudes—he sounded as if his lungs were filled with brilliant air; he said it had been rough-going, but he was ready now to leave the clinic, and could I meet him Tuesday in Rome, where Prince Ruspoli (“Dado”) had lent him an apartment. I am cowardly—in the frivolous sense and also the most serious; I can never be more than moderately truthful about my feelings toward another person, and I will say yes when I mean no. I told Denny I would meet him in Rome, for how could I say I never meant to see him again because he scared me? It wasn’t the drugs and chaos but the funereal halo of waste and failure that hovered above him: the shadow of such failure seemed somehow to threaten my own impending triumph.
So I went to Italy, but to Venice, not Rome, and it wasn’t until early winter, when I was alone one night in Harry’s Bar, that I learned that Denny had died in Rome a few days after I was supposed to have joined him. Mimi told me. Mimi was an Egyptian fatter than Farouk, a drug smuggler who shuttled between Cairo and Paris; Denny was devoted to Mimi, or at least devoted to the narcotics Mimi supplied, but I scarcely knew him and was surprised when, seeing me in Harry’s, Mimi waddled over and kissed my cheek with his drooling raspberry lips and said: “I have to laugh. Whenever I think about Denny, I got to laugh. He would have laughed.
To die like that! It could only have happened to Denny.” Mimi raised his plucked eyebrows. “Ah. You didn’t know? It was the cure. If he had stayed on dope, he would have lived another twenty years. But the cure killed him. He was sitting on the toilet taking a crap when his heart gave out.” According to Mimi, Denny was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Rome—but the following spring when I searched there for his grave, I couldn’t find it.
FOR MANY YEARS I WAS very partial to Venice, and I have lived there in all seasons, preferring late autumn and winter when sea mist drifts through the piazzas and the silvery rustle of gondola bells shivers the veiled canals. I spent the whole of my first European winter there, living in an unheated little apartment on the top floor of a Grand Canal palazzo. I’ve never known such cold; there were moments when surgeons could have amputated my arms and legs without my feeling the slightest pain. Still, I wasn’t unhappy, because I was convinced my work in progress, Sleepless Millions, was a masterpiece.
Now I know it for what it was—a dog’s dinner of surrealist prose saucing a Vicki Baum recipe. Though I blush to admit it, but just for the record, it was about a dozen or so Americans (a divorcing couple, a fourteen-year-old girl in a motel room with a young and rich and handsome male voyeur, a masturbating marine general, etc.) whose lives were linked together only by the circumstance that they were watching a late-late movie on television.
I worked on the book every day from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, and at three, no matter what the weather, I went hiking through the Venetian maze until it was nightfall and time to hit Harry’s Bar, blow in out of the cold and into the hearth-fire cheer of Mr. Cipriani’s microscopic fine-food-and-drink palace. Harry’s in winter is a different kind of madhouse from what it is the rest of the year—just as crowded, but at Christmas the premises belong not to the English and Americans but to an eccentric local aristocracy, pale foppish young counts and creaking principessas, citizens who wouldn’t put a foot in the place until after October, when the last couple from Ohio has departed. Every night I spent nine or ten dollars in Harry’s—on martinis and shrimp sandwiches and heaping bowls of green noodles with sauce Bolognese. Though my Italian has never amounted to much, I made a lot of friends and could tell you about many a wild time (but, as an old New Orleans acquaintance of mine used to say: “Baby, don’t let me commence!”).
The only Americans I remember meeting that winter were Peggy Guggenheim and George Arvin, the latter an American painter, very gifted, who looked like a blond crew-cut basketball coach; he was in love with a gondolier and had for years lived in Venice with the gondolier and the gondolier’s wife and children (somehow this arrangement finally ended, and when it did Arvin entered an Italian monastery, where in time he became, so I’m told, a brother of the order).
REMEMBER MY WIFE, HULGA? IF it hadn’t been for Hulga, the fact we were legally chained, I might have married the Guggenheim woman, even though she was maybe thirty years my senior, maybe more. And if I had, it wouldn’t have been because she tickled me—despite her habit of rattling her false teeth and even though she did rather look like a long-haired Bert Lahr. It was pleasant to spend a Venetian winter’s evening in the compact white Palazzo dei Leoni, where she lived with eleven Tibetan terriers and a Scottish butler who was always bolting off to London to meet his lover, a circumstance his employer did not complain about because she was snobbish and the lover was said to be Prince Philip’s valet; pleasant to drink the lady’s good red wine and listen while she remembered aloud her marriages and affairs—it astonished me to hear, situated inside that gigolo-ish brigade, the name Samuel Beckett.
Hard to conceive of an odder coupling, this rich and worldly Jewess and the monkish author of Molloy and Waiting for Godot. It makes one wonder about Beckett … and his pretentious aloofness, austerity. Because impoverished, unpublished scribes, which is what Beckett was at the time of the liaison, do not take as mistresses homely American copper heiresses without having something more than love in mind. Myself, my admiration for her notwithstanding, I guess I would have been pretty interested in her swag anyway, but the only reason I didn’t run true to form by trying to get some of it away from her was that
