“Only from the ladies’ room.” She kissed me and whispered into my ear: “I’ve been with you for twenty minutes. When are you going to fuck me?”
I immediately undid more of her buttons and parted her skirt to each side: curtain going up at the majestic theater of lust. I loosened my own clothing, shifted and slid her lengthwise on the seat and maneuvered myself between her open and upraised legs. The cab driver screeched his brakes, pulled off into the breakdown lane of Grand Central Parkway.
“That’s enough of that,” the driver said. “You wanna behave like a couple of dogs, get out on the highway and do it, but not in my cab.”
I saw a crucified Jesus dangling from the driver’s rearview mirror, and a statue of the virgin glued to the top of the dashboard. The first time in my life I try to make love in a taxi, and the driver turns out to be a secret agent for the pope.
“This is my wife,” I said. “I haven’t seen her in six months. It’s her first time in this country.”
“I don’t care if she’s your long-lost mother. Not in my cab.”
Giselle was sitting up, buttoning up, and I tucked in my shirt. The driver pulled back onto the parkway and turned on the radio. Bing Crosby came through singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
“I’m overcome by irony and chagrin,” I told the driver. “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect a big tip.”
“Just what’s on the meter, buddy. I don’t take tips from creeps like you.”
Condemned by taxi drivers. A new low in moral history. I took Giselle’s hand in mine and put them both between the opening in her skirt, then covered her lap with my topcoat. Clandestinely, I found the passage to the Indies, stroked it as passionately as a digit would allow, and made my wife sigh with some pleasure. Life has never been easy for immigrants.
I directed the cab to my father’s apartment, and Giselle was barely inside when she told Peter Phelan, “I must photograph you.”
“What for?” asked Peter.
“Because you cry out to be photographed. Has anybody ever done a portrait of you in this studio?”
“Never.”
“I’m surprised.”
“You’re naïve. I’m not important enough to be photographed.”
“I disagree,” said Giselle. “I love the paintings of yours I’ve seen. I like them better than some of Matisse. I took photos of him a month ago in Paris. He was a charmer.”
“Orson,” said Peter, “I know why you like this girl. Her lies are as beautiful as she is. How did you convince her to marry you?”
“He didn’t convince me,” Giselle said. “He wooed me, and carried me away to Never-Never Land.”
“You still hang out there?” Peter asked.
Giselle looked at me. “I don’t know, do we? Don’t answer that.”
“Why not answer?” Peter asked.
“I want to talk about Matisse,” Giselle said. She opened her camera bag, took out her Rolleiflex, and looped its strap around her neck.
“I’m struck that you know Matisse,” Peter said.
“When I went to see him he was in his pajamas. I fell in love with his beard.”
“He says light is the future of all art,” Peter said. “I thought that was pretty obvious, but he must understand darkness in some new way or he wouldn’t think that was an original idea.”
“The only thing I understand is photographic light. I once heard a lecturer say that without light there is no photography. How’s that for obvious?”
“I avoid lectures on art,” Peter said. “It’s like trying to ice-skate in warm mud.”
“Orson,” Giselle said, “I’m falling in love with your father.”
“Gee,” I said, “that’s swell.”
Peter leaned on the table and stared at Giselle. She focused her camera, snapped his picture.
“Orson,” she said, “stand alongside your father.”
“Father in a manner of speaking,” I said.
“However,” said Giselle. “Just move in closer.”
I so moved, and there then came into being the first photograph ever taken of Peter Phelan and Orson Purcell together. In the photo, it was later said by some who saw it, the two men bear a family resemblance, though Peter’s mustache destroys any possibility of establishing a definitive visual link. My full head of dark brown hair has a torsion comparable to Peter’s, and our eyes both shine with the dark brown pupils of the Phelan line. By our clothing we separate themselves: Peter, in his bohemian uniform, I a spruced dude in double-breasted, gold-buttoned black blazer, gray slacks (retrieved that morning from the cleaners) with razor-edge creases, black wingtips burnished bright, black-and-white-striped shirt with winedark four-in-hand perfectly knotted, and red-and-black silk handkerchief roiled to a perfect breast-pocket flourish as the finishing touch.
I had not groomed myself so well since I’d arrived in New York as a basket case. This was a gift to Giselle: a vision of myself in meticulous sartorial health: no longer the manic, self-biting spiritual minister to the rabble; now Orson Purcell, a man in command of his moves, a surefooted, impeccable presence ready to enter, at a highly civilized level, the great American future, with his beautiful wife beside him.
It had been my plan to use the one hundred dollars my mother gave me to pay for a weekend at the Biltmore with Giselle, maybe even ask for the room where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald had spent their honeymoon. This was a harebrained idea, but I thought the ambience of that outlandish marriage might serve as a psychic prod to our own marital adventure, which seemed as blasted from the outset as the Fitzgeralds’ most vulnerable union.
I broached the matter in the taxi back from the airport, but Giselle had scant memory of Scott or Zelda (though I had lectured her on both).
“Anyway,” Giselle said, “we already have an apartment on the West Side. Twelfth floor, three bedrooms, view of the river. A Life editor I met in Paris offered it to us. He was doing a story on Matisse the same week I was there to photograph him. You know I knew Matisse when I was little, did I ever tell you that?”
“No,” I said. “Lots of things you’ve never told me.”
“The editor’s in Japan for two months,” Giselle said. “We can have his place for the whole time, if we want it.”
Giselle’s steamer trunk had arrived ahead of us, and was already inside the apartment. I wanted only to make love to her, immediately and fiercely, but she flew into instant ecstasy at seeing the place, which was a triumph of modern decor, full of paintings, photos, books, mirrors, bizarre masks, pipes, stuffed birds, shards and estrays from around the world, the collections of a cultured traveler, Picasso on one wall, a sketch by Goya on another.
“It’s such a stroke of luck he and I were both in Paris at the same time,” Giselle said.
“You’re good friends, then,” I said.
“Well, we’re friends.”
“He’s most generous to you.”
“He’s like that.”
“Are you lovers?”
“Orson, please.”
She opened the steamer trunk and rummaged in it for a folder with several dozen photographs. She stood them on end, one by one, on the sofa and on chairs, laid them on the dining-room table for viewing.
“This is why they want me to work for Life,” she said.
I looked through the photos Giselle had not put on exhibit and found more quality work; also two portraits of one Daniel Quinn, in uniform sitting on a pile of rubble, somewhere in Germany, and in mufti at a sidewalk café, somewhere in Paris? I then looked carefully at each of the photos Giselle had put on display, a photo of my sugar whore fellating the handless man; a photo of me biting myself; a group portrait of the rabble in the Garden of Eden; a photo of a smiling Henri Matisse in pajamas on his sofa, and on the wall above the sofa a painting of a cross-legged nude woman; industrial images — great gears and machines of unfathomable size and function in a German factory; a barge on a German river with a deckhand waving his hat and pissing toward the sky; a woman sitting in a Bierstube perhaps exposing herself to two American soldiers; two seated women in their seventies, elegantly garbed, aged beauties both, in tears.