Ben liked to reveal, in near-comic confidence, snippets of his life with Clara. He did this, or so I believe, in the hope that I would tell Clara what he’d told me, and so irritate her into thinking that he and I had managed some sort of fragile rapport that wholly excluded her. Sometimes I would pass Ben’s confidences on to her, sometimes not; sometimes I’d embroider or condense Ben’s stories, and sometimes invent things that he’d never even hinted at.
One of the things he told me, at a time when I was sure that he knew of my affair with his wife, was that Clara had always, and without fail, faked her orgasms. He was enormously amused by this, for, or so he said, he was delighted that Clara thought that she was duping him into thinking that he was a perfect lover. But Ben was as duplicitous as he claimed she was, for his gratified and satisfied response to her moans and gasps and soft screams, to her sated smile, was utterly counterfeit. His fake-masculine response to her fake-feminine pleasure filled her with a sense of, in his pleased words, “smug triumph.” At bottom, then, he was unconcerned with her sexual pleasure or the lack of it, and it amazed him — I can almost hear his laughter — that Clara, Clara for Christ’s sake! — held to the notion that he cared whether she came or not, and that, unbelievably, she was disturbed lest he discover her deception. But Ben was interested only in his own orgasm: as far as he was concerned, Clara could have stupendous, wracking orgasms, real or pretend, by the score, lie in bed a mannequin, fall, for Christ’s sake, asleep—all was immaterial to him, so long as he came. What Clara did or did not do was Clara’s affair. That she worked so hard at her conjugal dramatics somehow — how can I put this—touched Ben, so much so that he never even came close to suggesting that he even suspected that she might be faking. “Deluded, pathetic girl,” is what he once called her.
He most certainly, though, wanted me to tell Clara this story, of course, and he also wanted me to fret over whether Clara was faking with me. But I didn’t tell her, because I realized, despite my attempts to deny and then to rationalize it, that I felt the same way as Ben: I didn’t care, either. I once lightly asked Clara what sort of lover Ben was, and she said that he was more of a masturbator than a lover. I think I might have gone a little red at this, for that was what Ben had once said about Clara, and I wondered to whom Clara had said this about me. Outside of, doubtlessly, Ben.
The occasions were rare on which I angered and irritated Clara, and when I did, she’d let me know it, as they say, in devious, often astonishingly petty ways, which she never, of course, recognized at all. To describe them is unimportant to the point I want to make, such as it is.
Sometimes Clara would wear an expression of bored smugness, barely but not noticeably concealed by “good manners.” It was quite a face. It was at such times that I would obliquely suggest — in different ways, using different words and emphases and approaches — that her expression was very much like that of a clutch of well-off and marvelously dim white Protestants she unaccountably admired. This was an expression developed and trained early on, at about the time, in fact, that these people find that the world has been constructed and arranged for their pleasure, but that it is also filled with others who want to partake of that pleasure — which is certainly not their due! — without permission.
Such a comment would mildly annoy Clara, but she would become angry only when I’d suggest that many of her pals’ mundane pleasures quite wonderfully killed at least some of the bastards off: to wit, alcohol, cocaine, polo, fast cars, horses, skiing, sex, mountain climbing, etc. I would add that although this was surely just, it wasn’t nearly enough to even the score in terms of the grief and misery they caused just by being alive, with their prep schools and sailboats, monopolies and stock-exchange seats, securities and trust funds, private beaches and stables, custom-last shoes and shark lawyers; and, of course, their terror of knowledge, contempt for art, and the polite fucking Jesus that they trot out when needed. Despite the fact that I would run through this routine, with slight variations, at, as one might say, the drop of a top hat, it would always, always get to Clara. She’d sit back in her chair, or lean on the bar, or turn toward me in bed, to treat me to that perfectly constructed face: it was all I could do not to call it cruelly to her attention. But to what purpose? Her anger at my venom — often, but not always, real — toward her beloved idiots was weirdly felt, offered up on what was, figuratively speaking, a tasteful Episcopalian altar. Clara was, for Christ’s sake, Jewish! And still, and still, her vapid, excruciatingly imitative expression was an homage to and defense of that ghastly cadre that, quite naturally, thought of her — when forced to think of her — as a vulgar bitch who would not, no, not ever do.
The showgirl with whom I lost my virginity when I was sixteen was only two or three years older than I, but she was so overwhelmingly sophisticated, sexually, that I was awed throughout the entirety of the night I spent with her. We did a number of things that I had hitherto known of only as escapades in pornographic stories and pictures — those rare few I had seen. I was so thoroughly made to realize my own naïveté, that years passed before I could even begin to admit to my callowness. Until that time of candid acceptance, I had managed to turn that night into a liaison of sexual equals, although, as I say, it was nothing of the kind. Her influence, if that’s the word, was so profound that I afterward often felt dumbstruck and inept before women with whom I was about to go to bed: that is to say that they would sometimes “become” her, or, more accurately, I would revert to the flustered youth of that night. Such situations, which occurred without warning, usually proved disastrous, as one may well imagine.
My father had arranged this adventure for me, and such was his presence in my life at the time that I thought this arrangement wholly reasonable, even judicious. I can’t recall how the night was planned, but I’m quite certain that my father did not ask my opinion. He didn’t know if I was a virgin or not, but assumed, given the era and his knowledge of his own life and those of his peers, that I was. He was correct. He clearly believed that it was his paternal duty to introduce me to sex in, as he would surely have put it, “the right way.” And so he arranged for me to spend the night with a showgirl from the Copacabana, in those days a glittering tawdry nightclub near the Plaza, emblematic of flashy, four A.M. New York, whose clientele was predominantly made up of tough men in silk shirts packing wads of cash, little of which had been honestly come by.
I should make it clear that my father had not asked me my thoughts concerning his plans, not because he held me cheap or thought of me as insignificant, but because, as a Sicilian, he knew that his decision was unerringly correct, beyond cavil, and that this was so because he was, all in all, perfect. Sicilians, as somebody said, cannot be “reformed” or taught anything because they know that they are gods: and it was as a god that my father planned my entrance into manhood. Sicilians are essentially serious people, never moreso than when smiling and chatting pleasantly with strangers, that is, with people who are not part of their lives in any way that matters. The smiles and warm, intimate stories are but devices that serve as charming barriers behind which little can be seen or known. A Sicilian can talk with someone for years and deliver a sum total of information over this time that, considered objectively, comes to a handful of comic anecdotes and a gigantic mass of the most elaborately empty details. And all of these data seemed deeply personal, private, and revelatory. Under the easy conversational brio, the Sicilian has been continuously sizing up his interlocutor, and arranging the stories and putative intimate details that will be perfect just for him. I have no way to analyze or explain such odd behavior: it is simply the fact. My father, being this way, wanted me to be this way, expected it, really. And so, the loss of my virginity as a prerequisite to becoming a passable man, could not be the result of some dalliance with a “nice girl,” both of us a little drunk after a party. Such frivolity was for The Americans, as my father called those citizens who, whatever else they may have been, were surely not gods. These digressions lead me to another, a kind of exemplar of my father’s way of thinking. When he was an old man, some few months before his death, I heard him tell some men with whom he had struck up a kind of friendship in the hospital while recovering from a triple-bypass operation, that he had been a trapeze flyer in his native Italy but had been forced to flee Mussolini because of his Jewish mother, who had been one of the great equestriennes in the Hungarian circus world. He told this story with such an expression of wistful regret that for a moment I thought it might be true, that he had kept some fantastic secret from me and my mother, that he was actually Jewish! But it had to do with his lack of concern about what he told these hospital acquaintances. They were, in his mind, mere Americans, with no idea of what a man’s life is and should be. He was, that is, amusing himself by seeing how far he could go with these childish men, eager to swallow childish lies in the same way that they swallowed childish games on television. I now believe that what he wanted, at all costs, was to assist me in avoiding such American childishness, and thus help me into his ideal of manhood in what he knew to be the only proper way.