Moreover, Miss Langman prepared these stories, nine of them, groomed them to a champion-show finish, then reviewed them, Answered Prayers and Other Stories, once in Partisan Review and again in The New York Times Book Review. The title was her decision; though there was no story called “Answered Prayers,” she said: “It’s very fitting. St. Teresa of Avila commented, ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ Perhaps that isn’t the precise quotation, but we can look it up. The point is, the theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate it, is of people achieving a desperate aim only to have it rebound upon them—accentuating, and accelerating, their desperation.”
Prophetically, Answered Prayers answered none of mine. By the time the book appeared, many key figures in the literary apparatus considered that Miss Langman had oversponsored her Baby Gigolo (Boaty’s description; he also told everyone: “Poor Alice. It’s Chéri and La Fin de Chéri rolled into one!”), even felt she had displayed a lack of integrity appalling in so scrupulous an artist.
I can’t claim my stories were one with those of Turgenev and Flaubert, but certainly they were honorable enough not to be entirely ignored. No one attacked them; it would have been better if someone had, less painful than this grey rejecting void that numbed and nauseated and started one thirsting for martinis before noon. Miss Langman was as anguished as I—sharing my disappointment, so she said, but secretly it was because she suspected the sweet waters of her own crystalline reputation had been seweraged.
I can’t forget her sitting there in her perfect-taste parlor, with gin and tears reddening her beautiful eyes, nodding, nodding, nodding, absorbing every word of my mean gin-inspired assaults, the blame I heaped on her for the book’s debacle, my defeat, my cold hell; nodding, nodding, biting her lips, suppressing any hint of retaliation, accepting it because she was as strong in the sureness of her gifts as I was feeble and paranoid in the uncertainty of mine, and because she knew one swift true sentence from her would be lethal—and because she was afraid if I left, it would indeed be the last of any chéri.
OLD TEXAS SAYING: WOMEN ARE like rattlesnakes—the last thing that dies is their tail.
Some women, all their lives, will put up with anything for a fuck; and Miss Langman, so I’m told, was an enthusiast until a stroke killed her. However, as Kate McCloud has said: “A really good lay is worth a trip around the world—in more ways than one.” And Kate McCloud, as we all know, has earned an opinion: Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, she’d look like a porcupine.
But Miss Langman, R.I.P., had completed her segment in The Story of P. B. Jones—A Paranoid Release in Association with Priapus Productions; for P. B. had already encountered the future. His name was Denham Fouts—Denny, as his friends called him, among them Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, both of whom, after his death, impaled him as a principal character in works of their own, Vidal in his story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal” and Isherwood in a novel, Down There on a Visit.
Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.
When Denny was sixteen, he was living in a Florida crossroads cracker town and working in a bakery owned by his father. Rescue—some might say ruin—arrived one morning in the fattish form of a millionaire driving a brand-new built-to-order 1936 Duesenberg convertible. The fellow was a cosmetics tycoon whose fortune largely depended upon a celebrated suntan lotion; he had been married twice, but his preference was Ganymedes between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. When he saw Denny, it must have been as though a collector of antique porcelain had strayed into a junkshop and discovered a Meissen “white swan” service: the shock! the greedy chill!
He bought doughnuts, invited Denny for a spin in the Duesenberg, even offered him command of the wheel; and that night, without having returned home for even a change of underwear, Denny was a hundred miles away in Miami. A month later his grieving parents, who had despaired after sending searching parties through the local swamps, received a letter postmarked Paris, France. The letter became the first entry in a many-volumed scrapbook: The Universal Travels of Our Son Denham Fouts.
Paris, Tunis, Berlin, Capri, St. Moritz, Budapest, Belgrade, Cap Ferrat, Biarritz, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Moscow, Morocco, Estoril, London, Bombay, Calcutta, London, London, Paris, Paris, Paris—and his original proprietor had been left far behind, oh, away back yonder in Capri, honey; for it was in Capri that Denny caught the eye of and absconded with a seventy-year-old great-grandfather, who was also a director of Dutch Petroleum. This gentleman lost Denny to royalty—Prince Paul, later King Paul, of Greece. The prince was much nearer Denny’s age, and the affection between them was fairly balanced, so much so that once they visited a tattooist in Vienna and had themselves identically marked—a small blue insignia above the heart, though I can’t remember what it was or what it signified.
Nor can I recall how the affair ended, other than that The End was a quarrel caused by Denny’s sniffing cocaine in the bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne. But by now Denny, like Porfirio Rubirosa, another word-of-mouth myth on the Continental circuit, had generated the successful adventurer’s sine qua non: mystery and a popular desire to examine the source of it.
For example, both Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton had, in effect, paid a million dollars to find out if other ladies were lying when they praised that kinky-haired piece of trade His Excellency the Dominican Ambassador Porfirio Rubirosa, groaning over the fat effectiveness of that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker thick as a man’s wrist (according to spinners who had spun them both, the ambassador’s only peer in the pecker parade was the Shah of Iran).
As for the good late Prince Aly Khan—who was a straight dealer and a fine friend to Kate McCloud—as for Aly, the only thing that Feydeau-farce brigade shuffling through his bed sheets really wanted to know was: is it true this stud can go an hour a time five times a day and never come? I’m assuming you know the answer; but if you don’t, it’s yes—an Oriental trick, virtually a conjurer’s stunt, called karezza, and the dominant ingredient is not spermatic stamina but imagistic control: one sucks and fucks while firmly picturing a plain brown box or a trotting dog. Of course, one ought also to be always stuffed with oysters and caviar and have no occupation that would interfere with eating and snoring and concentrating on plain brown boxes.
Women experimented with Denny: the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, the American Singer Sewing Machine heiress, lugged him around the Aegean aboard her crisp little yacht, the Sister Anne; but the principal contributors to Denny’s Geneva bank account continued to be the richest of the double-gaited big daddies—a Chilean among le tout Paris, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, our planet’s chief supplier of guano, fossilized bird shit, and the Marquis de Cuevas, road-company Diaghilev. But in 1938, on a visit to London, Denny found his final and permanent patron: Peter Watson, heir of an oleomargarine tycoon, was not just another rich queen, but—in a stooped, intellectual, bitter-lipped style—one of the most personable men in England.
It was his money that started and supported Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon. Watson’s circle was dismayed when their rather severe friend, who had usually shown a conventional regard for simple sailor boys, became infatuated with the notorious Denny Fouts, an “exhibitionistic playboy,” a drug addict, an American who talked as though his mouth were busy with a pound of Alabama corn mush.
But one had to have experienced Denny’s stranglehold, a pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate slumber, to appreciate its allure. Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that was all he had ever been. So, except for his sporadic barterings with maritime trade, had this Watson been The Beloved, a besieged fellow whose conduct toward his admirers contained touches beyond De Sade (once Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum).
Of course, as is true of most men sadistically streaked, Watson had paralleling masochistic impulses; but it took Denny, with his púttána’s instinct for an ashamed client’s unspoken needs, to divine this and act accordingly. Once the tables are turned, only a humiliator can appreciate humiliation’s sweeter edges: Watson was in love with Denny’s cruelty, for Watson was an artist recognizing the work of a superior artist, labors that left the quinine-elegant Mr. W. stretched in stark-awake comas of jealousy and delicious despair. The Beloved even used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson, while forced to supply the money that supported a habit he deplored, was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The Beloved from
