“Bambina,” he says sadly, “you did not come all the way to Roma to talk to old man about his clothes, did you?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you want. What this besotted old lover can do for you to make amends for his sins.”
“I need your help.”
“So I am guessing. What do you need? Some money? Some work for new model?”
“Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. It’s my sister, Iris. I think she’s in terrible trouble.”
He frowns. “Your sister? Little brown mouse with luscious tits?”
“The same.”
“What kind of trouble? She needs husband? My son Giovanni—”
“A husband? God, no. The husband’s the trouble.” I set the empty wineglass on the floor and lean toward him, bracing my folded arms on my knees. “I need your help to go to Moscow and rescue her.”
Let’s return, for just a moment, to those sins Orlovsky mentioned.
As I said, I have some moral advantage over Orlovsky, which I never intended to use. Moral advantage has its own priceless value, after all, a hefty solid weight in the column of your assets, and if you cash it in, you don’t possess this credit any longer. You’re no longer wealthy in the only currency that human beings really care about.
On the other hand, isn’t it merciful to allow others a chance to pay their debts?
When I first met Orlovsky, he made no secret of his hatred for the Bolsheviks. Obviously Russia needed to reform, he said, needed to modernize its archaic ways and make way for the lower classes to escape the terrible poverty that was the legacy of serfdom. But the Bolsheviks were no more than brutes, he went on, whose vision of world Communist revolution was a grotesque and indeed opportunistic twisting of an idealistic political movement to achieve both vengeance on their ideological opponents and power—always power—for themselves. He was absolute on this point, that bolshevism was corruption, was a psychological pathology. I remember how he used to pace naked around the studio—pale and compact and somewhat paunchy—still ravishingly masculine inside his field of bristling energy. He waved his arms and told me stories about neighbor informing on neighbor, about a petty party official he knew who delivered an impassioned speech at dinner about Communist principles—From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, that kind of thing—when everyone at the table knew that he sent his wife to obtain goods at the special shops available only to party officials in favor with Comrade Lenin.
“Well, why shouldn’t he, if he could?” I said, because I loved to bait Orlovsky—if I wound him up enough, he would turn on me like a tiger. “It’s human nature to want more and better things than your neighbor.”
“Because of the hypocrisy, don’t you see!” he raged.
“That’s human nature, too.”
“They turn citizen against citizen in name of solidarity! Is diabolical! They want everyone to be loyal only to state—not to his mother or father, not to his child, not to his neighbor, not to God. Only state!”
So I told him to come over here and demonstrate his loyalty to his lover, and he turned on me like a tiger. Oh, it was the most passionate affair I’ve ever had, before or since. We were insatiable together, and the businesslike way he treated me during photo shoots and fitting sessions only made us more concupiscent in private. All through the winter and early spring we carried on, dirty as hell, until one day at the end of March, not long before Iris’s accident, when he rolled off me, lit a cigarette, and informed me in a regretful voice—this after making love twice during the course of a rainy morning!—that his wife had put her foot down and said enough with this new mistress of yours, you’re neglecting your family.
“So what does that mean?” I said.
“It means we must go separate ways for some period of time, bambina.”
“For how long? A week or two?”
“Longer, my love. After baby is born.”
I sat up. You see, for a peculiar moment I thought he meant our baby, the one I was about to reveal to him, once I worked up the nerve. I had it all planned out. Dinner with a nice Bordeaux, a lively tussle on the couch, and then the news dropped casually, as a compliment to his virility, just look what you’ve done to me, you wanton beast. And then of course I don’t expect you to leave your wife, that kind of thing, but we’ll get a nice cozy place somewhere, she’ll come to accept the arrangement.
After all, you told me the marriage is only in name. You told me this.