ON THE GREEN LINE

I was in Cyprus, in a bare boards pension right on the green line separating edgy Turks from edgy Greeks in Nicosia. I would cross the line, going through an opening in a wall there, nod at the Canadian or Irish UN soldiers, who never nodded back – on to a big cheap meal, heavy on red meat and very cheap wine, and sometimes then on to one of the more depressing, by world if not small island standards, red light districts. In the day I would sometimes roam about the more functioning Greek side of Nicosia, my only contact there usually being with foreign cult people – Moonies or Children of God proselytizers who for some reason congregated here. I never did see the Moral Re-armament people who were said to be all around.

Jeff Price, old drinking buddy, appeared in Cyprus. He was about to switch from his job with the Baltimore Sun in Beirut to the same thing in Jerusalem. He had to go by way of Cyprus because Arab countries would not clear planes for Israel. We connected on the morning after his arrival and a man at an outdoor coffee stand looked at us, shook his head, and poured us morning brandies. I saw Jeff off, going from the vagueness of the Levant into the hands of the Israeli’s at the El Al section of the airport – who did everything so fast and efficient, checking everyone for bombs or weapons or evil intentions, that you could hardly see how much they accomplished to stay alive in a part of the world where so many people wanted to kill them.

I got drunk one night with a vibrant Canadian journalist wife I knew from Cairo. I don’t know what I said to her or did, but when I called the pool at her hotel the next day, and called again and again, she would not come to the phone

At the same time I was avoiding an Australian couple, friends of friends, who drank hard and seemed always on the verge of splitting up, and had a teenage daughter who smiled like a warm hearted, freckled Madonna and kept the family going, despite her mother’s penchant for swarthy Greek men. I was ashamed of myself for feeling relief that they were Australian, not English, for if they were not English, it seemed, I could let my guard down.

They had introduced me to an amazingly smart and trim English girl who worked as a D.J. for the Cyprus radio station. I was in a coffee pace with a Moonie I could not get rid of when she came in to tell me she was canceling our date for that night because she was going back to England soon and this was no time for new relationships.

The horoscope column in a little English language daily in Nicosia spoke to me each day about what I should expect at home with loved ones and in the office with co-workers.

Since I was alone most of the time, I thought of many other places – romantic times as in living on the side of the acropolis in Greece or on the river in Bangkok, abandoned times in Bangkok too, and Taipei, wonderfully dangerous times in Haiti and Beirut, Cuba and Laos, and while going overland all the way across Africa at the time of the Congo troubles and up a great river into the heart of Borneo where headhunters were on the march. I did not think about the family I had come from, only a little about past girlfriends, and I did not think at all about what were branded on my brain as happy young days in the White Mountains of new Hampshire.





I was too broke to go around to the Nicosia Flying Club, though I knew everyone there for I had come over from Beirut to get my pilot’s license in Nicosia a year ago. It had been handed to me by Nikos, the co-owner of the club, where you paid to learn how to fly before being checked out for your license. Nikos gave kickbacks to Michelle Abboud at the Aeroclub de Liban in a deal whereby Abboud flunked people taking their written flying tests in Lebanon and told them to go to Cyprus. Nikos was also the official inspector who checked you out for your license, and in addition he ran the control tower at Nicosia’s small international airport, where hijackers had been known to set down for refueling. I didn’t go to the club now, but I did go to a party given by Milton, who handled flight instruction with Nikos and was also part owner of the flying club and worked as an air traffic controller in Nikos’s control tower. The party was outdoors at night at a for-profit place Milton owned that was the first old folks home in Cyprus, a big old tile-roofed building with a walled garden. Folding chairs were in an oblong pattern in the darkened garden, with men all together on one side, the women all together on the other. No one speaking much and then only to others in their segregated side. Milton, would go around, apparently treading softly because some of the old people beyond the garden still had their hearing, moving from person to person with a bottle of scotch that had a stopper in it with a replica of the Brussels pissing boy statue. As he poured, the whisky came out the boys penis and each time people receiving their drinks snickered.

I went to outdoor movies and I used the American propaganda library for reference. I was being supported by an American manufacturer in Beirut who asked me to ghost write his story of being on one of the planes recently hi-jacked by the Palestinians. I had gone quickly to New York on Lufthansa, the airline he had been hi-jacked on and that because of it gave him unlimited free tickets. While in New York, while getting the hijack book project moving, I also put together the start of two plans for new books of my own – one that was a publisher’s idea about American ambassadors, the other my idea, a book about American expatriates making them more interesting then in the ways they were usually presented.

While in the American library in Nicosia I looked through an article about the guy who had recently shot George Wallace. He had all the signs of a potential assassin, according to academic studies. He was alone far too much of the time for it to be healthy. And, moreover, he spent his time quite happily in countries, like me here in Cypus (or Greece or Thailand or Egypt) where he did not speak the language. I was reminded of the time a doctor had given me a drug that was incorrectly labeled as being for alcoholics.

Once I got wildly drunk, even for me, on the Turkish side, where the restaurant I went to had thick purple wine that tasted like prone juice. I was throwing up all night at the pension, where the board walls were thin. So all this was heard by the others staying there, who that night had been soft-voiced members of yet another group out to bring peace to this part of the world, a Canadian Quaker delegation trying to help in places so uninterested in peace as Greek Cyprus, and Maronite Lebanon. The next day the Canadians were kind to me, almost indulgent. I seemed to be just the sort of unenlightened person they were looking for.

Later in the day, feeling better, I laid down in my bare room here on the green line, turned on a radio, listened to a BBC play about young Indians in love, drifted off hearing words of, of all unlikely people, my distant mother saying “ It’s time you had a really good rest.”

It felt as if she were seeing me off, as gently as possible, into my death. This was in 1973 when I was very old. 39.

AS I WRITE 'THE AQUA MUSTANG'

As I write I think I have to keep underscoring the dramatic things – Deidre repeatedly fucked and beaten by her brother, Elka and Fitz John and perhaps also Paul killing themselves, and other the horrible endings, drugged out and/or choosing to die, to so many still young lives. And there must be ties to what must have been going on when they were really young, decades go, in a perfect seeming summer place surrounded by familiar parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents and great uncles and great aunts and all those sometimes accomplished cousins – the rotating people of my blood who filled the dinner table slots at White Pines, all of whom knew what to do with finger bowls.

This sort of gothic novel version that was emerging from the perfect summer place version of childhood summers in the rarefied White Mountains. This being the proof I needed not so much to convince myself that there had been something wrong but to be able to convince anyone else. These dark memories that were there all along, joined by even darker ones that came into focus only as I wrote.

These dark Gothic things were needed. For the small things, that I knew without any further probing, might not be enough. Small things such as those that had caused the supposed lesser brother in the movie, to lose his voice when he needed it – these small things, being the non-favored brother, being detested by caregivers who adored the favored brother – being alone in a place with many cold people – these small things, these were the things that made it impossible for the guy in the movie to speak – or so the brilliant clinical speech expert in the movie discovered. Things that a Bertie never would have talked about until, at the end, unable to speak without a painful stutter, he had to speak and found he could never speak clearly unless he brought these things into the light. My brother ridiculed me, just like Bettie’s brother made cruel fun of him. And in the way the world was seen through my brother, my laugh was merely a nervous attempt at laughing, and the mistakes I made, always telling myself it was for the last time, would forever be repeated.

There were relatives including a grandmother who like people in Bertie’s childhood, adored my brother and mad it clear they did not like me. And this negative version of me was even worse outside the family – where I could not pass a course – so embarrassing to the favored brother to whom academic honors came – me, so slow, and unable to speak at crucial moments, as in meeting almost anyone,. When I could not speak, not even stuttering speech. And it seemed to me later I would never have spoken if I had not been spotted outside the family, if I had not, aware that outsiders would not always see me the way the family did, have gone from silence to a regional debating championship when I was 15, less than year after I was the dumbest kid in the school, just over a year since I had started spending most of my time, not in the family but in boarding school.

These small things. The family slights. It went on well past childhood. It was fixed in place in childhood and never stopped. My brother the chosen one, no matter where I stood in the outside world. These small things. Not incest and molestation and suicide. Just small gestures of cruelty – a cruel nickname, Speedy, relayed to the world by my brother, small slights, such as the time my father went to see an old friend who was dying and took along for company my brother, but pointedly not me.

I see myself in Connecticut. I am in my room, beside a wardrobe decorated by a folk artist the family had hired when they moved into this rather ramshackle old dormer farmhouse and former boarding house and removed the front porch and changed the focus from the road to the back yard. I am in my room, which has a shaky outside staircase left over from boarding house days that do not seem to link in anyway to the house in its current commuter town incarnation.

My mother is telling me sternly that I should have pride in myself, and I don’t believe anything she says. She knows how I am taunted at schools, and probably by the bother too, and she feels the need, apparently, to put something in place. Whatever they say about you in school, she says, you must realize that you are as good as any of them. I cannot believe she believes something so clearly not true.

Years later when I was finally putting the past together in other ways I told her during a visit to Florida that I went through childhood and into adolescence thinking myself so unaccomplished, and despite having many interests, such as learning cartooning and fishing and sleight of hand magic, I went through al those years berating myself for being so stupid. One detail I did not tell her it that for a long time I would under my breath imitate Mortimer Snerd, a comically stupid ventriloquist’s dummy in the popular Sunday night Edgar Bergin radio show in which he was the number two dummy, t he number one being the very sharp and witty Charlie McCarthy. Like Mortimer Snerd I would repeat over and over, but always directed at myself, the words, the sounds , deer dah duh. Dee dah duh, Speedy. In Florida I told my mother for the first time how until I had been away at boarding school for a time and was getting some recognition I had considered myself –in fact and in any person’s possible perception – to be mentally defective.

She drew back and adopted a haughty tone that I remembered from that long ago time when she told me I was as good as anyone else in a way that did not convince me. This time there was touch of anger behind her words. “I don’t know how you could have had such an idea as that, she said. “It certainly did not come from us.”

THE KING'S SPEECH, AND MINE

I.

Sometimes I wonder will anyone, even a normally sympathetic reader, hear my stories and not think I am in lala land, building mountains from molehills, feeling sorry for myself. These thoughts come despite all evidence, for somewhere I am being told that a decent person – or maybe a cultured person, or maybe a Poole person – should keep personal matters to himself and that my life is far too small to be taken seriously by anyone except perhaps someone paid to listen.

So the tears began as the movie, The King’s Speech, began. I mentioned this on Facebook and one reaction was from a very old friend from Asian days whom I never see who is now with his final wife in a remote part of Australia. I knew him in the sixties as a wild rebel writer, so I am not sure if he was being facetious: his comment to what I said was that he always tears up during the Queen’s Christmas Day speech. It reminds me of when someone reads something I have written about the formal family I came from and the writing includes some scenes of horror, and the reader says something about how great for me to have come from such worthy and cultured people.

In the movie the royal family’s regular dinner table in the palace looked exactly like the dinner table at White Pines, the seat of my family’s self image. The queen placed at the head, just like my grandmother, and on either side a half dozen lesser people in evening clothes. Of course the dinner table at White Pines would be like the table in England, my wife said, for that was their model.

And it is all there in the movie. Patriarchs and matriarchs defining the limits to life.

And the children, two boys, in this awful rivalry. One of them stutters badly, and other children make fun of him, and his elders think they can will him to stop. His brother, the favored brother, the one who is in line to be king, this brother chortles and himself makes fun of his stuttering sibling.

That’s why in that scene I was I crying. One of the reasons this movie got to me.

I wasn’t going to see it. More channel 13 anglo-envy hogwash about genteel people in past times in England, I assumed. But I had to go for it was written by a very old friend of mine, David Seidler who now seems on the verge of an Academy Award. David and I saw each other often long ago when roaming about sixties New York – before we went off for various writing reasons, he to do a TV pilot in the South Seas, me to go to Bangkok. I see him about every 10 or 15 years, but we keep up through a mutual friend, really two mutual friends, through whom we met.

I was not going to see his movie because I can’t stand fictionalized versions of anything, genteel Brits or not. And yet this I did know: That the movie is about the royal family’s second son who may be thrust into being king, but who has never been able to do what he wants and needs to do because he stutters so badly. His public appearances are an embarrassment.

And meanwhile the best writers write what they know. It should come as no surprise to someone not obsessed with fiction that David Seidler had been a stutterer.

II.

Bertie, the disparaged son who stutters, Bertie who will become King George VI, even his older brother makes fun of him. His father seems to take his stuttering as evidence of weakness. Bertie tries. He goes before an audience, an event repeated over and again, and he is expected to say a few words to the crowd, and he can’t.

I had so many times when I simply could not speak. Not even a stutter. Until I amazed them all by going from the bottom of the school to the top and winning trophies that said I was the best debater in New England. There was a turning point day when the whole school was assembled to see my team take on the best in New England, which was from Portland, Maine where they had a coach who wrote a book on each year's debate topic that was used by secondary school debaters and their coaches all over America. I was on the varsity debate team even though I was only a fourth former, which translates as sophomore. And not only did we win but the judges, nice ladies from the Plymouth, New Hampshire, League of Woman Voters chapter, named me the best speaker.

The next morning, a Saturday, I was waiting in a school van to go to a more casual debating event to which all the school’s debaters on all levels would also be going. My brother, the anointed twin, looked in the van and said “Speedy,” much the way Bertie’s brother mocked his stuttering. Speedy was the nickname I had nearly escaped but had suffered with for a year and a half when I was the most despised and dumbest boy in the whole little Anglophile boys boarding school.

Earlier that season one person had spoken to me much the same way the stuttering expert had spoken to Bertie in the movie. In my case it was a debate coach, in his a more clinical speech expert. The coach had said it was not true that I was doomed to forever be slow and dull, always lagging behind my twin, who was at the top of the class and I was failing. When the speech expert told Bertie that it was traumatic things his past that kept him from speaking, Bertie had at first been angry but not long afterwards he had started talking for the first time about such things as being close as a child not to family but to a nanny, and that the main nanny of his childhood adored his brother and did not like him. Reminded me not to much of my nanny – though I had such a thing. (We were so refined we called them nurses rather than nannies.) Not so much of my nanny as of the grandmother who lived with us, my mother’s mother, not one of the Pooles but a languid Southern lady who drank a great deal and was our baby sitter after a certain point and adored my brother and detested me.

These were the sorts of things Bertie never spoke of to anyone until he was egged on to do so by that speech expert – who said there was no such thing as a baby who stuttered when he first started talking.

I never talked about such things – not counting some drunken rambles – until I had passed 50, until this time I write about, 1986, when it became a matter of life and death to find out what had happened.

Once the investigation was underway, I had thought that the parts about suicide and molestation, incest and grand scale betrayal, would be the evidence that would be convincing. But nothing was bigger than the small things I knew all along but never talked about.

LIVING NOWHERE

On a clear November day Danielle and I go up to the Cloisters, sit on a bench high above the river watching little old New Yorkers promenading in their Sunday best, and then on to a funny movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. We are splitting the house sitting duties of this quite fancy co-op a mutual friend from the Middle East, a guy with the London Observer, had purchased in an elaborately renovated loft building in a no-man’s land just west of Union Square that is now, for real estate promotion purposes, called the Flat Iron district. We have known each other for years. Danielle was married for a time to an old friend of mine from Athens days,. and we once helped sea turtles lay their eggs on an endless deserted sand beach on the little known east coast of the Malay Peninsula. Another time we were in the same building in Beirut. She is fun and she is gorgeous – French Vietnamese.

Sadly she is just a friend. People we have known from various exotic places, some of them my friends, more of them hers, keep coming through the co-op. Danielle is sometimes with a distinguished guy who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work for the L.A. Times on China and sometimes she is with an intense guy who won his Pulitzer for New York Times things in Central America. These and other war loving journalists, whom I had never expected to see again. But for the moment I’ll take who I can get. I am just out of a marriage and really living nowhere yet.

After the movie Danielle and I head down to West 79th Street to a casual dinner gathering of New Yorkers I have known for years, at the Upper West Side apartment of Walter Karp, who has become a somewhat celebrated political writer in books and magazines and is never at a loss for verbal versions of what he is about to write. His current wife is blond, quick and wonderfully Brooklyn human. Alex Bespaloff is there too, a well known wine writer now. I used to never drive far out of town with getting a case of wine selected by Michael Aaron, who was in line to inherit the big wine merchant place Sherry Lehman. Michael had been in a wine tasting group where I had met Alex when I was first living in New York and I had this amazing artist girlfriend whom I though I might never leave, though it fell apart. Everything seems long ago now in this time I am not living anywhere.

At this dinner with old New York friends, Walter’s best friend since long ago Columbia Days, Marvin, is present. Marvin is a brilliant manic-depressive literary guy who now leads historical walking tours in the city even though he recently turned blind. With him is his long-time Japanese wife Rose.

One day at the place near Union Square Danielle strides in in early evening – a tall young woman with waist-length hair who knows how to look erotic in high boots – and she says my almost ex-wife Claudia had just appeared at Magnum, where Danielle holds court with famous photographers. Claudia had been in a fury. She had said that Rose, her fellow Asian, had seen us at Walters’ and had told her “everything.” So Claudia burst into Magnum demanding loudly that Danielle release me.

My first thought was that I deeply wished that everything my almost ex-wife had ever suspected were true – even though just before we separated she said that in her culture violence would be acceptable if she caught me doing what she thought I was doing.

JACQUELINE 4

I am convinced for a moment that all this puts my life on track. I present the good news about the new girlfriend to this young therapist David Yammer, but he does not share the enthusiasm I am trying to project. Still, I do not feel foolish.

She connects me with her friends, a cinematically good looking French couple who mysteriously are in an apartment, a very ordinary looking apartment, in an office building adjoining Rockefeller Center. She invites over one night Wayne Sorce, a intense, friendly photographer she represents who like me had been with the opposition in the Philippines. And now that things were worse than ever there she thinks maybe Wayne and I can work together and go back. Also, she seems to be ready to read anything I write.

She shows me an old American cookbook that has the most disgusting things in it from the19th century. Bloody ways of killing animals, the steaming of the flesh of those just killed, gooey things made from their bleeding inner organs. She asks if these things ring a bell with me since this is apparently what prominent Americans used to have done in their kitchens, and I am apparently from an old line, non-ethnic American family.

She tells me everything she tells her therapist, who she says is a delightful man. She says she has her sessions with him not in his office but while on the move around various parts of New York.

She says she will help in every way she can my plan to quit using sleeping pills.

She backs me up when one day I bring out a tie to wear to a funeral of someone who has died of something he should not have died of but everyone knew he would – my first experience with what AIDs was doing.

She goes to the Carlyle for power breakfasts while I stay in bed in the big room where we spend our time – these high curtains that are always rustling, the teletype and telex machines always clicking away, the phone ringing, never answered right away but the volume of the answering machines always turned up. How life has changed since you and I met, she keeps saying.

One night before we get to bed she says she wants to read to me from Lao-tzu, who she says is her favorite. Once again I can make no sense of what is going on around me and so cannot think of anything to say. She reads about how the fool is always talking, the wise man stays silent. "When I read this I know it is about you," she says.

We decide to stay in on New Year’s eve. We are in her bed again and still. The sex really justifies all this, I think. And then both of us stay there still naked if not quite ready for the next round, I am lying on my back, and she is sitting up on a pillow, her upper thigh and rump against my ear. New Years Eve. A milestone time in our lives. Or so I think it seems to her. I wish I could rise to it. I am speechless again.

JACQUELINE 3

So here we were now in Chez Napoléon eating bifteck and pomme frits, right near the Etoile, the bar restaurant where 25 years back I had gone with a boozed up crew after we saw my girlfriend off on the France. We had stayed for hours drinking cheap wine and listening to the sad songs of Edith Piaf. These old places. The Etoile, and also the Brittany and the Brittany du Soir. And now years later, Chez Napoléon. And only now do I learn it is more cool to order bifteck and pommes frits than escargot.

Here in this French part of town where once I was hiding out with another man’s wife. I had chosen as our trysting place the last place I thought anyone would look for me or Marnie, the big Henry Hudson Hotel, way over on 57th almost by the river, a place used mainly by non-New Yorkers who were about to sail to Europe.

I think of that timeless time of sex in the Henry Hudson Hotel. I am picturing Marnie slipping out of her with-it no-bra and rolling about the hotel bed. The mere sight of her bare arm could get me aroused and now here she was, slippery and sliding and smelling like I had thought a woman could.

Here in Chez Napoléon, 1985, not 1963, Jacqueline talks of her old boyfriend, a somewhat known director, who had made a somewhat known small film from a big Henry Miller book. She says this guy would look at other women constantly while they were together, even when she was talking. Had she noticed I was looking at a dark girl two tables over?

While I try to give the impression I am listening, I am conjuring up an old scene. That night when Marnie was late coming to the hotel and I drank alone into oblivion. When I came to, my head was in her bare lap and she was bent down looking at me, amused, her hair tickling my chest. You were a sight last night, she said, using one of those southern expressions she often used. A sight, she repeated. I had to do my work, she said. I lapped you like a cat.

Jacqueline is asking me if I have ever had sex with a man, and when I say no, I don’t think I ever did though I cannot be sure about times in blackouts, she is telling me how she had sex with a woman just once to see what it was like. And she is telling me about how when she was vacationing alone on St. Bart’s last year there was this very young and very beautiful half-French island boy who worked at the hotel. A virgin. She had taken him to a deserted beach, undressed him, inducted him into manhood. Something of which she is intensely proud, she says.

We start to talk about this sudden life that she says we have together. She says we have this life together. She calls it a romance. Actually I have phoned a couple of people to tell them I have a new girlfriend but it didn’t come out sounding anything like the way it sounds when Jacqueline talks.

JACQUELINE 2

That first night at Jacqueline’s I slept without a pill for the first time in more than 20 years. The first time back in the time when almost any doctor would prescribe almost any quantity of barbiturates or, as a change of pace, chloral hydrate – and anyway I had been living in places where you could buy anything over the counter. In 1971 I had never heard of Quaaludes and did not know there was a fad, complete with dire warnings, for them in America. I got a hefty stash simply by asking for something new at a pharmacy across the street in Beirut. I knew these pills were good ones, if a little worrisome, because if I took a couple of them and stood up I would fall down. A new law was passed in Lebanon while I was there requiring prescriptions for such things. This meant only that for a modest fee my neighborhood pharmacy would throw in a prescription, supposedly written by a doctor upstairs in the pharmacy's shop building, though no ever saw such a doctor in the neighborhood.

Jacqueline’s place just off Fifth was also her office – this grand-scale high ceiling room where teletypes and telexes were always running – the nerve center from which she would deploy photographers when there was a sudden sighting – such as of King Don Carlos skiing in Gstaad. At the head of her bed, which was not really separated from the office aspects of the big room, there was a TV set hooked up to a VCR, which was still something new. This bed where I found I could sleep without the pills that, my wife had been saying, before we separated, had something to do with slowed down sexual activity. But maybe my wife had gotten this the wrong way around, maybe I was sleeping now because suddenly now sex was back. So everything is all right, I thought.

It was an early December of cold nights now, and at Jacqueline’s the long curtains rustled even though the high vertical windows that reached almost to the high ceiling were closed. A place haunted with secrets, a formal building, like a consular building in Venice or Paris but right here in New York. I
lay there on my back. She, naked, was sitting up on pillows, my ear against her thigh.

Her wonderful chubby gray tiger cat, who had a French name and was her greeter, was everywhere but never intrusive. And always the click clack of the teletype and telex machines, and the muffled ringing of the phones. All there in that same room – just down from the Carlyle, where she had power breakfasts with the editors of the famous photographers she represented.


One of the famous photographers gave us a video, not yet released to the public, of the Truffaut film Small Change, which we watched from bed, as we also watched the constant runnings of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and the new ABC late night news program devoted to an anchor's patriotic efforts at getting the goods on the Ayatollah Khomeini.

We watched Small Change from bed, and in the scene where the compassionate Lyon schoolmaster is explaining to the children about how a child who had just been taken away had been badly abused at home, while that scene was playing tears came. I was not sure yet why this should make me cry, me who hardly ever showed tears. "Were you an abused child?" she asked. "I was," she said. She said when she was still living in Algeria, where her French Jewish family had been since the 19th century, her grandmother would corner her in a shower stall and beat her black and blue.

Were you an abused child, she asked again.