I remember we made love twice that night, and then once again in the morning. Cleve was adamant that he should wear a contraceptive: he had come prepared. And I remember, on the drive back to Manhattan, the almost drug-like mood of happiness I was in. I hunched over on the bench seat and leant up against Cleve as he drove, feeling his warmth, my hand on his thigh. I looked through the windscreen at the commuter traffic heading back into Manhattan idly noting details: the colours of the cars — mushroom, mouse-grey, glossy black, dull crimson — and the sky with great rafters or bars of cloud set against the blue, almost as if measured and deliberately spaced. I looked with unknowing, innocent eyes, it seemed to me and, as I touched my throat, I felt my skin was hypersensitive, tingling, frictively alive, because, I assumed, of the feeling of bliss inside me: it was almost as if I were coming down with flu.
I remember Phil Adler asking me if I was all right when I came into the office. Why do you ask? You just seem different, as if you’re not quite here, he said. You take about three seconds to answer my questions. Oh. Then I said I wondered if maybe I was coming down with flu. He sent me to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge for the third time. There were a lot of repairs going on and I strayed from my brief. It was one of my first ‘abstract’, compositional photographs. Maybe I was inspired. Phil said it was unusable.
2. THE HOTEL LAFAYETTE
MY DINNERS WITH CHARBONNEAU took on a pattern. Missing Paris, he always tried to seek out a French restaurant and, however well we dined there, he always claimed to be vehemently disappointed; that what had been presented was a travesty of French cooking, an American fiasco. I often contradicted him just to set his indignation raging — to my British palate everything seemed delicious. He was very analytical about the food he ate — even the bread rolls and the salt claimed his gourmet’s focussed attention. Almost without trying I began to learn a lot about what one could demand from the necessities of eating: the meat, the fish, the vegetables that we masticated and swallowed to allow us to live. But Charbonneau gave the process so much forensic thought it seemed almost unhealthy to me.
In search of the perfect French cuisine in New York we ate our way through the French restaurants that the Village had to offer: Le Champignon, Charles, Montparnasse — and numerous others. Pas brillant, was his mildest judgement.
One night we were in the Waldorf Cafeteria on 6th Avenue, where Charbonneau claimed to have tracked down an ‘acceptable’ Bordeaux, a 1924 Château Pavie. He was in a strange unruly mood and had already criticised me for my choice of lipstick — ‘It doesn’t suit you, it makes your mouth look thin’ — but I paid no attention. I was in an odd state of mind myself as I hadn’t seen Cleve for over three weeks — he was off on a GPW trip to Japan and China — and I wasn’t at my most tractable.
‘Don’t you live near here?’ Charbonneau asked, abruptly.
‘Washington Square. A few blocks away.’
‘Would you show me your apartment?’
‘Why do you want to see it?’
‘I’d just like to see where you live, Amory. To fill out the picture, you know.’
So we wandered home and I showed him in. He prowled around and looked at my photographs for a while and then stuck his nose in my bedroom. I was pouring him a Scotch and water when he came up behind me, cupped my breasts and nuzzled my neck.
‘What the hell are you doing, Charbonneau?’ I said, angrily, wheeling round and pushing him away.
‘I think it’s time we got to know each other better.’
‘So, your sexual vacation is over?’
‘Yes. It seems to be. Back to work.’
He tried to grab me again but I snatched up the ice pick from the drinks table and thrust it out at him.
‘French novelist stabbed to death by English photographer,’ I said. ‘Stop this now!’
‘But I want you, Amory. And I think you want me.’
‘Why are you trying to spoil a beautiful friendship like this?’
He sagged. ‘I don’t want a “beautiful friendship”,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I want something much more complicated and interesting than that. More dangerous. Now, if we can just go to your bedroom—’
‘No, Charbonneau! Non, merci. I’m in love with somebody else.’
‘Love. What does that have to do with anything?’ He picked up his Scotch and sat down, muttering irritatedly to himself. Then he apologised. He was tired, out of sorts, I was a pretty girl, his libido was alive and kicking once more.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Amory.’
‘I’m not angry. Just don’t do this again.’
‘I promise, I promise.’
The now familiar paradoxical aspect about the Charbonneau ‘pass’ and its conspicuous failure was that we became firmer friends as a result. Something had come out into the open and had been pointedly shooed away — but the fact that it had appeared changed our future encounters for the better. We now talked with a frankness and abandon as if we had actually been lovers. The air had been cleared in every way.
Cleve came back from his trip to the Orient. ‘I just don’t understand that world,’ he said, in a strange, baffled voice. ‘I can see what’s happening in front of my eyes in Shanghai or Tokyo but can’t analyse it. I might as well be on Mars or Neptune.’
He paused and looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Much the better for seeing you, after all these years.’
We’d spent the afternoon making love in my apartment; now we were in the café of the Hotel Lafayette on University Place. I was drinking gin and orange, Cleve had an Americano. On the table next to us two old men were playing chequers. I lit a Pall Mall.
‘Did anything happen while I was away?’ he asked, aware of my mood — prickly, almost resentful.
‘Lots of things happened. The world didn’t stop turning, Cleve.’
‘You seem different, somehow.’
‘People can change in a couple of months. You haven’t seen me for a long while. Likewise.’
I looked down at the small lozenge-shaped tiles on the café floor: pale cream with a dirty magenta flower effect dotted regularly across the room. Cleve said something, softly.
‘What did you say? I didn’t catch it.’
‘I said, I love you, Amory. I want you to know that. That’s what being away from you has brought home to me.’
I looked at him and felt a huge weakness sweep through me as I stared at him across the table, this handsome, super-competent, confident man with his thin straight nose and thick wet-sand-coloured hair. I think I was a bit shocked because I never thought he would say it to me first. I was always certain, in my predictive fantasies about our life together, about this moment, that I would be the one to make the declaration and that he would respond. But no — he said it first.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You know I feel the same about you.’
He reached across the table and took my hand.
‘When I saw you that night — at your exhibition in that strange gallery — I knew something had happened to me.’
I felt emboldened. ‘And here we are,’ I said, ‘over two years later. Something happened to you, then — but something has to happen to us, now, Cleve, don’t you see?’ I said with deliberate emphasis.
‘I know,’ he said, frowning suddenly. ‘I know. I’ve not been fair.’ He signalled for another drink. ‘I want you to come to the house. I want you to meet Frances.’
‘Are you completely out of your—’
‘It’s her birthday next week. We’re having a big party. There’ll be a hundred people there. You just need to see for yourself. Meet her.’