I enjoyed all of it, and, after chatting with the designer, whom I’d known slightly in my previous body, I was offered a job in one of his shops, with the prospect of becoming a buyer, which I declined. I did ask him, though, whether, by any chance, as I was a ‘student’, he’d read any of ‘my’ — Adam’s — books or seen ‘my’ plays or films. If he had, he couldn’t remember. He didn’t have time for cultural frivolity. Making a decent pair of trousers was more important. He did say he liked ‘me’ — Adam — though he had found me shy at times. He said, to my surprise, that he envied the fact that women were attracted to me.
The following day, my new catwalk acquaintance thought it would be a good idea to take me shopping. I had told him I had a small inheritance to blow, and he knew where to shop. In our new gear we went to bars suitable for looking at others as we enjoyed them looking at us — those, that is, who didn’t regard us dark-skinners with fear and contempt.
I didn’t stay; I wasn’t like these kids. I didn’t want a place in the world and money. One day, because it rained, I thought I should go to Rome. There, as I attended a lecture and dozed in the front row in my new linen suit, the queer biographer of an important writer, leaning over me enormously, asked me out for a drink. At dinner, this British hack said he wanted me to be his assistant, which I did agree to try, while insisting, as I’d learned I had to, that I would not be his lover. He claimed that all he wanted was to lick my ears. I thought: why not share these fine pert ears around? They’re not even mine, but a general asset. I closed my eyes and let his old tongue enjoy me. It was as pleasant as having a snail crawl across your eyeball. It was more difficult being a tart than I’d hoped. Tarts are trouble, mostly to themselves.
I could experiment because I was safe. If you know you’re going home, you can go anywhere first. I went with him, imagining tall, glass-fronted bookcases and long, polished library tables on which I would work on my version of The Key to All Mythologies, in the way I’d browsed in my father’s books as a teenager. That, indeed, was what I was doing, ‘browsing’ or ‘grazing’ in the world. The job was less demanding than I’d hoped. Mostly it involved me wearing the clothes he bought for me to parties and dinners. I was his bauble or pornography, to be shown off to friends — intelligent, cultured queens I’d have liked to talk with. As a young man I didn’t much enjoy the company of my peers; I liked being an admired boy in the theatre, surrounded by older men.
Therefore this fantasy of Greek life suited me, except that my ‘employer’ refused to let me out of his sight. When I did get the opportunity to read in his library, I could see his bald pate bobbing up and down outside, as he tried to watch me through the window from an uneven box. His adoration of me became nothing but suffering for him, until I began to feel like an imprisoned princess from The Arabian Nights. Beauty sets people dreaming of love. If you don’t want to be in someone else’s dream you have to clear off.
I got a job working as a ‘picker’ at the door of a club in Vienna. I tended to point at the inpulchritudinous and lame until a lunatic kicked me in the stomach. A few days later, having been taken to a casino by another acquaintance, I was boredly smoking a cigarette outside and wondering why people were so keen to rid themselves of their money when a woman came to me. She said she’d been watching me. She liked my eyes. She wanted to make love to me.
She was not old. I must have been looking doubtful. (I wasn’t always sure whether my expression matched my feeling. I wasn’t, yet, convinced of my ability to lie.)
‘I will pay you,’ she said.
‘Have you paid for such love before?’
She shook her head. My deal with myself was not to turn down such offers. I looked at her more closely and said no one had ever offered me a better exchange.
‘Come, then.’
She had a chauffeur, and she took me with her. I sat in the back of the car, being driven through the night to an unknown destination.
She was an American heiress with a partially collapsed villa outside Perugia. She hired an octogenarian pianist to play Mozart sonatas out of tune while she painted me nude looking out at the olive groves. Few portraits can have taken longer. I listened to her for days and strode about in shorts and workmen’s boots, pretending I could mend things, though everything seemed fine as it was. (Is it only in Italy that ruin itself can seem like art?)
There were always her eyes to return to. I still liked having people fall in love with me. There are moments of life you get addicted to, that you want over and over, but then you get frustrated when you can’t go any further, when the thing you’ve most wanted bores you.
My real labour was at night, in her room, where, after taking hours to prepare for me, she’d await my knock. I went at my employment seriously, limbering up, bathing, meditating, a proud professor of satisfaction. What internal trips I took, pretending to be a dancer or rock climber. It was dangerous work, sex, but, as always, it was the terrors and uncertainties which made it erotic. For her there had to be safety at the end, some hours of peace in her mind. I looked out for this on her face when she was asleep, like a blessing, and was pleased, waiting beside the bed to assess her temperature, her hand in mine. Then I would sleep well, alone. My pleasure was in her pleasure. After a few weeks, she wanted me to live with her in New York, if Italy got too slow for me. It did, but I didn’t. I could satisfy her, but only at the cost of disappointing her. I walked away in my boots through the olive trees. Her eyes were on my back; she did not know where her next love would come from, if at all.
I was glad to have the time to walk around the cities, listening to music, always my greatest passion, on my headphones, particularly as, in my previous body, I’d been suffering from some deafness. I went to clubs and made the acquaintance of DJs. I talked about music. But to be honest, in my former guise I could get to meet more interesting people.
However, I loved this multiplicity of lives; I was delighted with the compliments about my manner and appearance, loved being told I was handsome, beautiful, good-looking. I could see what Ralph meant by a new start with old equipment. I had intelligence, money, some maturity and physical energy. Wasn’t this human perfection? Why hadn’t anyone thought of putting them together before?
Like many straights, I’d been intrigued by some of my gay friends’ promiscuity, the hundreds or even thousands of partners. A gay actor I knew had once said to me, ‘Anywhere I go in the world, one glance and I can see the need. A citizen of nowhere, I inhabit the Land of Fuck.’ I’d long admired and coveted what I saw as the gays’ innovative and experimental lives, their capacity for pleasure. They were reinventing love, keeping it close to instinct. Meanwhile, at least for the time being — though it was changing — the straights were stuck with the old model. I had, of course, envied all that sex without a hurting human face, and in my new guise I had plenty of open bodies in close proximity. On one particular day and night I had sex with six — or was it seven? — different people. It’s not something you’d want to do often. Once in a lifetime might just do it.
In Switzerland, through a woman I’d been talking to in a bar, I became acquainted with a bunch of kids in their late twenties who were making a film about feckless young people like themselves. I helped the group move their equipment and was interested to see how they used the new lightweight cameras their parents had financed.
They began to shoot long scenes of banal, everyday dialogue. I was never one to believe that Andy Warhol’s films could be a fruitful model, but I encouraged them to keep the camera still and photograph only the faces of their subjects, letting them speak while I sat behind the camera, asking questions about their childhood. I took these away to a studio, cut some of them together, and put music on. The best version was one where I took the sound of the voices off altogether, but kept the music going. The unreachable, silent, moving mouths — someone trying to be heard, or not being attended to — were oddly affecting. When it was my turn in front of the camera I had myself painted white, with a black stripe down the middle, and called it ‘zebra piece’. One night, we showed the films in a club and the naked zebra danced on stage with a local thrash band.