Except that it never did.
In March, when I finished the manuscript, I sent a copy to my agent, Margo Diamond, a pockmarked muffdiver who had been persuaded to handle me by another of her clients, my old discard Alice Lee Langman. Margo replied that she had submitted the novel to the publisher of my first book, Answered Prayers. “However,” she wrote me, “I have done this only as a courtesy, and if they turn it down, I’m afraid you will have to find another agent, as I feel it is not in your own best interest, or mine, for me to continue representing you. I will admit that your conduct toward Miss Langman, the extraordinary manner in which you repaid her generosity, has influenced my opinion.
Still, I would not let that deter me if I felt you had gifts that must at all costs be encouraged. But I do not and never have. You are not an artist—and if you are not an artist, then you must at least show promise of becoming a truly skilled professional writer. But there is a lack of discipline, a consistent unevenness, that suggests professionalism is beyond you. Why not, while you are still young, consider another career?”
Slit-slavering bitch! Boy (I thought), would she be sorry! And even when I arrived in Paris and found at the American Express a letter from the publisher rejecting the book (“Regrettably, we feel we would be doing you a disservice to sponsor your debut as a novelist with so contrived a work as Sleepless Millions…”) and asking what I wished them to do with the manuscript, even then my faith never faltered: I just supposed that, owing to my having abandoned Miss Langman, her friends were now making me the victim of a literary lynching.
I had fourteen thousand dollars left from my various swindles and savings, and I did not want to return stateside. But there seemed no alternative, not if I wanted to see Sleepless Millions published: it would be impossible to market the book from such a distance and without an agent. An honest and competent agent is more difficult to secure than a reputable publisher.
Margo Diamond was among the best; she was as chummy with the staffs of snobrags, like The New York Review of Books, as she was with the editors of Playboy. Maybe she did think I was untalented, but really it was jealousy—because what that fish-hound had always wanted to do was T the V with La Langman herself. However, the prospect of going back to New York made my stomach lurch and dip with roller-coaster aggressiveness. It seemed to me I could never reenter that city, where I now had no friends and many enemies, unless preceded by marching bands and all the confetti of success. To return droop-tailed and toting an unsold novel required someone with either lesser or greater character than I had.
Among the planet’s most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long, are those Americans who elect, out of vanity, or for supposedly aesthetic reasons, or because of sexual or financial problems, to make a career of expatriation. The fact of surviving abroad year upon year, of trailing spring from Taroudant in January to Taormina to Athens to Paris in June, is, of itself, the justification for superior postures and a sense of exceptional achievement. Indeed, it is an achievement if you have little money or, like most of the American remittance men, “just enough to live on.” If you’re young enough, it’s okay for a couple of years—but those who pursue it after age twenty-five, thirty at the limit, learn that what seemed paradise is mere scenery, a curtain that, lifting, reveals pitchforks and fire.
Yet gradually I was absorbed into this squalid caravan, though it was some while before I recognized what had happened. As summer started and I decided not to return but to try to market my book by mailing it around to different publishers, my head-splitting days began with several Pernods on the terrace of the Deux Magots; after that, I stepped across the boulevard into Brasserie Lipp for choucroute and beer, lots of beer, followed by a siesta in my nice little river-view room in the Hotel Quai Voltaire.
The real drinking began around six, when I took a taxi to the Ritz, where I spent the early evening hours cadging martinis at the bar; if I didn’t make a connection there, solicit an invitation to dinner from some closet queen or occasionally from two ladies traveling together or perhaps from a naïve American couple, then usually I didn’t eat.
My guess would be that, in a nutritional sense, I consumed less than five hundred calories a day. But booze, particularly the sickening balloons of Calvados I emptied every night in writhing Senegalese cabarets and bent-type bars, like Le Fiacre and Mon Jardin and Madame Arthur’s and Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, kept me looking, for all my disintegrating interior, well-filled and sturdy. But despite the waterfall hangovers and constant cascading nausea, I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time, the kind of educational experience necessary to an artist—and it is true that a number of those persons whom I encountered in my carousings cut through the Calvados mists to leave scrawled across my mind permanent signatures.
WHICH BRINGS US TO KATE McCloud. Kate! McCloud! My love, my anguish, my Götterdämmerung, my very own Death in Venice: inevitable, perilous as the asp at Cleopatra’s breast.
It was late winter in Paris; I had returned there after spending several unsober months in Tangier, most of them as a habitué of Jay Hazlewood’s Le Parade, a swanky little joint operated by a kind and gangling Georgia guy who had made a moderate fortune from dispensing proper martinis and jumbo hamburgers to homesick Americans; he also, for the favored of his foreign clientele, served up the asses of Arab lads and lassies—without charge of course, just a courtesy of the house.
One night at the bar at Parade, I met someone who was to influence future events immensely. He had slicked-down blond hair parted in the middle, like a hair-tonic ad published in the twenties; he was trim and freckled and fresh-colored; he had a good smile and healthy teeth, if a few too many of them. He had a pocketful of kitchen matches that he kept lighting with his thumbnail. He was about forty, an American, but with one of those off-center accents that happen to people who are used to speaking a number of languages: it’s not an affectation but rather more like an indefinable speech defect. He bought me a couple of drinks, we rolled some dice; later I asked Jay Hazlewood about him.
“Nobody,” said Jay in his deceptive red-clay drawl. “His name is Aces Nelson.”
“But what does he do?”
Jay said, and said it so solemnly: “He’s a friend of the rich.”
“And that’s all?”
“All? Shit!” said Jay Hazlewood. “Being a friend of the rich, making a living out of it, one day of that is harder than a month’s worth of twenty niggers working on a chain gang.”
“But how does he make a living out of it?”
Hazlewood widened one eye, squinted the other—a Dixie horse trader—but I wasn’t joshing him: I really didn’t understand.
“Look,” he said, “there are a lot of pilot fish like Aces Nelson. There’s nothing special about him. Except that he’s a little cuter than most of them. Aces is okay. Comparatively. He hits Tangier two, three times a year, always on someone’s yacht; he spends every summer moving from one yacht to another—the Gaviota, the Siesta, the Christina, the Sister Anne, the Creole, you name it. The rest of the year he’s up in the Alps—St. Moritz or Gstaad. Or the West Indies. Antigua. Lyford Cay.
With stopovers in Paris, New York, Beverly Hills, Grosse Pointe. But wherever he is, he’s always doing the same thing. He’s sweating for his supper. By playing games—from lunch till lights-out. Bridge. Gin. Cutthroat. Old Maid, Backgammon. Beaming. Flashing his capped teeth. Keeping the Geritols happy in their oceangoing salons. That’s how he makes his walking-around money. The rest of it comes from pumping broads of various ages and hungers—rich quim with husbands that don’t give a damn who does them as long as they don’t have to.”
Jay Hazlewood never smoked: a true son of the Georgia hills, he chewed plug tobacco. Now he spouted a brown stream into his special private spittoon. “Hard work? I know. I’ve damn near fucked cobras. That’s how I got the pesetas to open this bar. But I was doing it for myself. To make something of me. Aces, he’s lost in the life. Right now he’s here with Bab’s bunch.”
Tangier is a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a mountainside facing the Bay of Gibraltar.
One descends from the top of the mountain, through a middle-class suburb sprinkled with ugly Mediterranean villas, to the “modern” town, a broiling miasma of overly wide boulevards, cement-colored high-rises, to the sleaky maze of the sea-coasted Casbah. Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the
