Inwardly I castigated myself for having neglected Gwen over the past couple of years. I had not been much of a correspondent; I had received better than I had given. In my mind’s eye, I conjured what had befallen her here. While I had been lying groggily in my bed, losing time, Gwen and John had entrapped each other, had fallen into each other’s arms, but not into love. Because, I told myself, Gwen was out of sorts, not herself, and because John was a passive lad, so easily led, they had succumbed to each other. It was easy for them to wind up in each other’s arms, though they were uneasy lovers; they were both at loose ends. In any case, Gwen was wound up, about something. So they had coupled. Alicia must enter into this somehow, but I didn’t expect ménage à trois to be the right term for the involvement. Three Americans could never become a ménage à trois, to me. Frankly I can’t imagine the three of them in bed together. No doubt the failure is mine; I lack a certain type of imagination. I am a bit of a prude. Perhaps they employed a bundling board?
Gwen interrupts my mental meanderings, my wandering mind.
He’s Billy Budd, Lulu, really, Billy Budd. You see, he’s good and means well but he is deeply stupid. Naiveté oozes out of him. He’s like butterscotch syrup. He’s almost a drugstore sundae. Bittersweet naiveté—he drools it. He’s sweet but thick — and of course, you know, drop-dead gorgeous. When we left you at your door — you were out of it, Lulu — I’d already slapped him. You probably don’t remember, you never remember the vicious moments, Lulu. He went limp, like a kitten, and I saw the scene immediately. You know, one of those masochistic Catholic boys who wants his mother, anyone, to treat him like dirt, to punish him, to tell him to clean up his room — that must be why he followed Helen here. I’ll take bets she whipped him and chained him to his bed. And he loved it.
At this I went pooh-pooh, involuntarily, a reflex, and then lifted my eyebrows, the way she usually does. Gwen just snorted, the way she does. In any case, according to Gwen, John’s not sure who Helen is, or what her history is; she’s told him things, but he doesn’t know what to believe. John met up with her again in Athens by chance; they’d had a scene in New York, but nothing heavy. Anyway, he thinks she’s incapable of saying anything straight. So he’s not sure what’s what. Helen first told him her sister died in a bathtub in a college dorm, but when Gwen questioned him, John admitted Helen said something else later, about the sister nearly dying. It may have been a nervous breakdown but Helen is very secretive, especially about it, because she has a shrink for a father, Gwen suggests. The sister may have nearly died at home, of an overdose of pills the father stored all around the house, like candy. Gwen calls it an occupational hazard. John and Helen traveled to Crete together from Athens, but she never wanted him as a boyfriend. He did try to kill himself, that’s true, but it wasn’t about Helen. John was adamant that he didn’t really care about her; it was because his mother wrote him a letter saying that she’d finally seduced the parish priest back home, and his father knew and was going to have her committed. Isn’t that too much? Gwen exclaims. He’s impotent with Alicia, Lulu, which makes sense.
Instead of blurting out, again, But why would John lie to me? I ask, but what about Helen’s abortion? I am impatient. Gwen never inquired.
I can’t imagine he’d care, Lulu. Or if he cared, he’d never admit it — he’s too cool, rehearsing hard to be cool. He’s a lapsed Catholic, after all, and it’s his mother he’s in love with. And she didn’t abort him, at least not in the usual sense, n’est-ce pas? Alicia is the perfect mom but that’s why he can’t get it up with her, it’s obvious. Quel obvious. With us, anyway, it was a long night and then day and then night. He was all right with me, not for long, but he was able to, as we say, enter, to do it, and then he cried. It was bad and sad. He collapsed on me and whimpered like a puppy. I don’t think I could go through it again. We talked. Or I talked.
Gwen galloped on. She reminisced about sex with the mentally sick musician she loves, for eternity, it seems, how great it and he were, how disappointing bad sex was, then she backtracked and recalled that Alicia had been waiting up for John, so that she — Gwen — was a surprise, yet Alicia took it all gracefully, at first.
We had civilized conversation, Lulu, some laughs for a while, we drank ouzo and ate bread and cheese, that mestizo — your get-your-goat cheese — fabulous. The evening was pleasant, if a night like the one I finally had could ever be considered pleasant, even in retrospect, or if any night is pleasant, Lulu, considering the peculiarity of modern nights.
Ultimately I believe Gwen segued to pictures. I suppose it had to do with her conjuring pleasant images after describing the pleasantries between her and Alicia. Gwen finds art restorative simply because it isn’t life or even like life. The more artificial it is, the better Gwen likes it. She admires Warhol precisely because of the falsity of his work, which actually makes it true, to her way of seeing and thinking, which is not mine. To her Warhol is the modern-day equivalent of Rembrandt, doing precisely what the Dutchman did in the seventeenth century — painting the rich and advertising them and their possessions. She’s rather adamant about all this. I don’t see it her way. Gwen next expounded on “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”—perhaps the three of them, Gwen, John and Alicia, had had a nude picnic on Alicia’s floor? — and how that painting made Gwen crave, to eat ravenously or to make love, because in its center was an empty space as great as lost love, a hole that the figures created through their position, they encircled it, and had I never noticed it…?
But the mention of absence made me think of Helen and about whether or not to leave immediately for the south. The phrase — the south of Crete — had a resonance it had never had before. The South. I was lost in thought for a moment or two, and then, as if a heavy curtain had been pushed aside roughly, I perceived an expression on Gwen’s face that alarmed me. I had never seen it before. At least I was not aware that I had.
Are you all right? I ask her, furiously turning my attention to her, to focus on her, on her pain, her putative trouble, her fugitive absence from New York. I believe this surprised my dear friend. This sudden intensity may not have been like me. Or perhaps it was irregular for me to admit such concern.
Gwen assures me she is absolutely fine and insists grimly that it is because she can laugh. But she was not laughing when she spoke.
I can always laugh, Lulu, and as long as a person can laugh, a person can survive, in a manner of speaking, even as one is peaking, which I am. Peaking, peek-a-boo, here comes another gray hair. It is funny beyond endurance, n’est-ce pas? Sometimes I laugh myself to sleep. Sometimes I laugh so hard I begin to pant and lie panting on the floor, hysterical. Completely hysterical. In the best sense of the word, of course. This is the flip side to my unhappiness, ordinary or otherwise. It can always be said of me, Gwen maintained her sense of humor. It could be a badge, a badge of honor, or it could be engraved on my tombstone: she’s grave here but she laughed until she died. I have fun, Lulu, I really do, in spite of my misery. I am determined to stay amused. I hate to be bored. To liven things up — this will horrify you, Lulu — I even smoke grass occasionally, though rides on subways, which I avoid as much as possible, subway rides are très treacherous. When I’m stoned, people look like so many different kinds of animals. And I can’t stop myself from laughing. People’s faces are très bizarre, aren’t they? We’re all jammed together — one great jam in New York. Here, the faces are so boringly similar except for what colonialism the cat brought back. You could call that the return of the oppressed. For me, alcohol is the superior high.