Insatiable (28 page)

After lunch, we walked endlessly, exploring nearby Lausanne, racing across bridges, desperate to get enough exercise before the reckless gluttony of dinner. After all, to come so far and not stay for dinner was not thinkable. It was as if I’d never seen Lausanne before seeing it with Jamey. “I can’t believe it,” he said, pinching me, then pinching me again. “I have to pinch myself to keep control,” he told me. “I didn’t realize I was pinching you. . . . It must be a compliment. I’m sharing with you.”

I marveled at the intricacies of his thinking. I marveled at how easily I adjusted to it. Well, they were just light pinches. I started seeing everything through his eyes. The women were beautiful. A young girl parked her bicycle nearby and he was mesmerized. He stopped, struck dumb, pulled me close, pinched my arm, kissed my neck. She looked up at us as if she could feel his stare. I pulled him along. At the top of the hill, there was a fruit stand with perfect fruit, exquisitely displayed. “Oh my, what a town. It has everything. Fruit and asses.” There was a melon we had never seen anywhere—a green cantaloupe. Called a “honey melon,” it was from Israel, the vendor said. Jamey had to have it, and two kinds of passion fruit.

Back in the hotel, there was only time to shower, suck the juice from a passion fruit, and change for dinner. I liked to make love before dinner, and I’d imagined a seduction scenario where I would forbid Jamey to taste the melon . . . until. To most mortals, that would be a non sequitur. But it might turn him on, I thought. The night before, he had ignored me, turned away and lay there reading one of his sex magazines till I finally fell asleep.

“I have needs, too,” I said as we drove back to the suburb of Crissier. “Like the way you needed that passion fruit. It was there. You had to have it. I know you need to have sex at least once a day. You told me so. It’s in my notes. It’s not as if you don’t want it, too.”

“But I’m happy just jerking off to a magazine,” he said, catching my mouth about to go off. “And we do have sex,” he said. “You get more sex from me than Andrea. She’s content if we have sex every four or five days. I’ve never been with anyone this close, this intimate for so long. It’s not what I’m used to. You do realize that what turns me on are very young girls.”

“I thought young girls were just one of your turn-ons. What about the Lindner woman?” I had given him a postcard of one of the artist’s cold and menacing women, which he carried in one of his pockets.

“I can get into that, too. But it’s really very young girls. Like the twelve-year-olds in David Hamilton’s photographs. I don’t even know what I would do with them. I would never scare or shock them. Unless they are little sluts, begging for it.”

“You’re scaring me. The girl on the bike. Is she a slut?”

“It’s difficult to tell from far away.” He looked at me. “Just kidding.”

There was some residual tension as dinner began, though now we were seated at a larger table, side by side on the banquette. “Can’t you get Frédy to let us order some French wine?” Jamey said in a baby voice I was starting to dislike. Girardet would not hear of it. Switzerland should have knighted him for forcing all those unthrilling wines on his worshipful clients. We’d ordered the duck for two. But now, Jamey spied a gorgeous rack of lamb being carved by a captain across the room.

“I want to go over and pick up a chop,” he said, squeezing my thigh. “Stop me.” Fortunately, the artful nonchalance of the maître d’hôtel, Louis, carving our duck breast distracted the gourmand’s gourmand. Jamey sat there fascinated, as if he were watching Fred Astaire, his eyes filling with tears. Turned carrots, turnips, the tiniest onions tossed in butter to achieve a caramel glaze surrounded thin, perfect pink duck slices. The legs would be served separately with more of the same vegetables and a certain awe for our stamina.

“It would be nice if we could set aside a few hectares in New York to raise ducks, and maybe lambs and the haricots verts,” Jamey said. “I wonder where I get my good taste?” he mused. “Frédy’s food is a miracle. I could kill the guy in the kitchen at Regine’s, trying to pass off their schlock work.” I had to smile, thinking how quickly he had become a food critic. “What I hate is schlock work. I have to work with a lot of people who don’t care what they do.”

“Is there anyone in porn who loves it as much as you do?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

As always, wherever we went, we found a place to dance after dinner. As always we, or certainly I, raised the mean age of the crowd considerably. We were better dancers, too, Manhattan disco pros, looser than these tight little Swiss and even the French. “Dance with whomever you want. I’m going to the loo,” I told Jamey, suddenly taken with the idea that letting him go would keep him closer. When I got back, the music had slowed to a Sinatra croon. I saw Jamey holding some twentyish thing close, not an inch between them, their cheeks pressed together.

“My turn,” I said, cutting in, trying to hide my despair.

He let her go and walked to the bar, lighting a cigarette.

“You gave it to me,” he said. “You had no right to take it away. Stupid. Stupid. It was such a wonderful night, and you took it away.”

He was like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When he was good, he was very, very good, and when he was bad, he was horrid. One evening at dinner, a woman came in selling roses. He bought one with his own money, gave her an extra franc. For a moment, I almost melted. Then I realized, of course, he’d bought the rose for himself. He sniffed it, smiled, set it beside his plate. I decided not to take his need for a rose personally.

I noticed he seemed to be taping his diary every day, as he’d promised. He would walk on the street with the tape recorder or stand on the balcony. One day, he couldn’t make the recorder work. “I dropped it,” he explained. “Maybe if I drop it again, it will start working.” He dropped it on the carpet. He dropped it again. Switched it on. “Well, that did it.” He seemed very pleased with his technological breakthrough.

He was sulky and wanted to wear shoes without socks to dinner at Père Bise in Talloires. “I came here once with the most romantic man,” I said, remembering a night in this same hotel with Murray. “I must have been crazy to bring you here to denigrate that memory.”

“I bet my cock was bigger.”

“Well, to be honest, actually, it wasn’t.”

He sat in shocked silence.

There were amazing highs, a stunningly excessive picnic at the side of the road, the stirring dinner at Alain Chapel’s in Mionnay, when our every gesture seemed in sync. “I love how needy we are,” he said. “You’re searching for something rare and wonderful. I’m searching for something wonderful, too. The wonderful thing is that we know when it’s wonderful. Some people don’t even recognize when they’re in the middle of heaven. We do. It’s a gift, you know, to live life in the present.”

But by the time we reached Cannes, nerves were frayed. Both of us were suffering. With no control over his daily existence, Jamey was starting to unravel. He didn’t want to make love anymore. “I’m like a prisoner,” he said. “I’ve never been with just one person for three weeks.”

I had not seen the downside of a prolonged play date with Jamey. I was exasperated. “I didn’t kidnap you. I invited you for an extraordinary adventure. The boat made it longer.” At home, I knew, he picked up street girls, slept with girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, even had sex with the photographer and reporter from
Porn Times.
It was his idea of a perfect interview—and theirs, too. I had it all written in my notes. Yet it had never occurred to me that we couldn’t find enough ways to do it to keep him content. I would be the daddy. He would be the little girl. He would be the daddy and I would be the little girl. I was the madam. He was the john. I pretended to hate men. There was no way he could please me. I had fantasies to spare. I was game. But he was feeling more and more deprived, caged, all those beautiful girls on the beach, in the shops, at Dino de Laurentiis’s table inches from ours at Tétou, the bouillabaisse restaurant in Golfe Juan. All those possibilities, such a short leash. By denying me sex, he was at least somewhat in charge.

Julia Child invited us for lunch on the hillside of the home she and Paul had built on the property of Simone Beck at Plascassier, overlooking the Mediterranean. The Becks had given them the land with the understanding that the Childs, who had no children, would will the house to the Becks’ offspring.

“We’re going to have a nice
salade composée,
” said Julia in that rolling profundo that promised if she could cook it, you could, too. And if she dropped the duck and picked it up and wiped it off . . . well, so could you. I read someone else’s essay about lunch with Julia, and she raved about the
salade composée.
I must admit I was disappointed. Disappointed? Shocked. What did I expect? Nothing complicated. A lovely cold pork roast. A deviled chicken. I was not demanding a suckling pig turning on a spit or a laborious
ballotine
requiring birds be boned and gelatin gelled. It was a glorious sunny day, perfect for chilled rosé. The baguette was excellent, and that platter of perfect tomatoes, impeccable hard-boiled eggs (not a tinge of green), smart French tuna, and haricots verts at the precise moment of doneness was, I admit, the sensible, even elegant, lunch on a hill overlooking the town of Mougins. We sat under a tree, gazing down to the sea. Paul took photographs of us together. I look serene and happy. To be with Julia . . . it should have been enough. What an ingrate I am to have expected lukewarm
loup de mer
with a sauce
gribiche
. Forever the Insatiable Critic.

Oh what a surprise: In Cannes the next day, we just happened to run into Jon, Jamey’s friend from the boat. Not an accident at all, I suspected, but I said nothing and invited Jon to dinner. Jamey took my arm, energized with excitement. “If I can exchange my return ticket for the next sailing, I might stay on and go to Sweden.”

“What a wonderful idea,” I said. “You’ll miss your audition for acting school that the agent arranged, but . . .”

“I’ve never been to Sweden. Have you? There will be more auditions in the fall. Jon says there are blondes lining the streets, just waiting for bad boys with curly black hair.” He planned to take all the cash he still had, a few hundred dollars, and gamble it to make enough money for his trip. I followed them into the casino in Nice. It was shabby and smelled of cleaning fluid, stale smoke, and desperation. Instead of Cary Grant and Greta Garbo look-alikes dressed by Edith Head, there were swarthy sheiks in shiny tuxedos and overbleached blondes with chipped nail polish.

Jamey was cautious, circling the blackjack tables, sniffing out the play, looking for a lucky spot. He would play a chip or two and then, if he lost, move on. It was very boring.

“I’m going to find the disco,” I said. In Europe, you didn’t need to stand on the edge of the dance floor looking eager, hoping someone might ask. You just whirled in. Even if you weren’t young and beautiful, if you were a good dancer, you could find a partner. You could dance with him or drift away without serious insult. A rangy dark-haired youth in a many-zippered jacket skittered my way. We began a rhythmic pantomime of advance and retreat to an anthem of Gloria Gaynor. She was everywhere we went in France that spring, even in a small whiskey bar in an isolated town fifteen miles from Saulieu, where the chef Bernard Loiseau had taken us in his tin can of a car after dinner. He had two stars, and was struggling for three, but Loiseau’s water cuisine was too intellectual for his own good, I’d thought.

Jamey and Jon were circling the floor. I saw them in the distance and, saying au revoir to my partner, caught up with them.

“We didn’t want to interrupt,” said Jamey, “in case you had big plans for later.”

“Would we share him?” I asked. “You caught me weighing my options,” I teased, using his favorite line. I could scarcely remember the guy’s face. Sharp, thin, with a dimple, snapping his fingers. “I guess I’ll keep looking.”

After Jon sensed that Jamey was distracted, he said good night. We walked on. “I’m in shock,” Jamey said. He’d been up almost a thousand dollars and then lost everything . . . lost the four hundred he’d started with. He had maybe forty dollars left.

“I’m so sorry, darling.” I squeezed his arm. “Isn’t it true it’s always fixed in favor of the house? It’s so hard to win.” He collapsed into an easy chair in our room, as if stupefied. I went into the bathroom to change. He was sitting in the dark when I emerged.

“You are such a bad boy, you can’t sleep with Mommy tonight,” I said.

“Bad boy,” he said, falling to his knees and holding on to my leg. “Bad boy. Sorry. Please sleep with Mommy.”

“No. Bad boys can’t sleep with Mommy.”

He kissed my knee. “Please.
Please.
”

“Well, all right. If you promise not to do anything dirty.” I was improvising. Sexual fantasies take two, after all, and he didn’t believe in rehearsal. “Shall I read to you?” I picked up one of his
Penthouse
magazines. “Gina thinks she is a pussycat,” I read, flipping a page. “Don’t look; it’s too dirty for you.” He snuggled against me, kissing my breasts.

“Good boy. Good boy. Mustn’t tell Daddy,” he crooned.

The next morning, I decided to loan him money for Sweden because it seemed so important to him. “After all, to come this far . . . to be so close to all those blondes. I think you should go.” He seemed to have forgotten our big plans to make him a star in the straight world. Or maybe the possibility of success was too much for him to contemplate, requiring too much effort on his part. “I wouldn’t want to be too successful,” he had said to me. “I wouldn’t want to be like Paul Newman, so that I couldn’t wander around Bloomingdale’s panty department without causing a riot.” I warned him the agent might interpret his delayed return to mean he wasn’t serious. But we both knew there would always be work in porn whenever he got home.

“Come to Scandinavia with me,” he said.

“I would never go to Scandinavia. Not even with my husband. I don’t need to be in a place where the streets are paved with gorgeous blondes.”