I had been raised not to complain. When I was beset with woe by aspects of reality that were usurping the authority of my own sensations, my parents were steadfastly loyal to what the general consensus prescribed that a boy ought to be rather than to the boy I was. My virtue, as my parents and teachers were delighted to agree, was that I was easy to bend. Not to complain or to defy became, from my early teen years, when I became eager to cast a recognizable and admirable image of my identity, one of the defining traits of my character. In school, teachers, even the ones everyone else found onerous, unbending, and oppressive, especially in their expectations of us, to me were surprisingly generous, flexible, even affable. My disposition was the way it was not because there were not many things with which I could not find fault, but I was not one of those for whom finding fault seemed to be a spice their disposition craved in order to relish itself all the better. I was obedient. Obedient, not slavish, I would say, not fawning, not dumbly good. Being intellectually alert, being able to see the reasoning in another system, one even that you yourself do not agree with, being able to make a good argument and to defend it against other good arguments -- these were things we were taught in our classes and were taught to value. Teachers filled us with the belief that independence of thought, mastery of detail, suppleness of imagination, clarity of insight are the holy requisites for responsible citizenship, for participating in, defining, and governing democratic institutions, and -- the two are inextricably connected -- for being an authentic person. I took it seriously, but not boisterously. I was militant in nothing. I was even-keeled, low-key, quiet, but not shut out. I liked keeping to myself. I was aloof but never cold, nasty, or haughty. I was on good terms with everyone, and it seems everyone was glad to be on good terms with me. It was not in my nature to be a firebrand on any issue.
I tended to escape harassment from the kind of guys who look askance at scholastic success and thoughtfulness, who ring their identity out of rambunctious disobedience in class and the frightening self-assertion achieved by bullying everywhere else. I had charmed them. My indifference was an armor. They could not enjoy frightening me because I was not frightened. That made them, apparently, want me to know them. They wanted to show me that behind their frightening sneers, that they did exist. I drew to me some of the toughest and nastiest, and ย how strangely are characteristics mixed ย sexiest, guys in the school ย as friends.
"I don't know what it is about you," Mervin Graff said, slumped against a brick wall outside the school and lighting a cigarette with a defiant masculinity that made smoking seem special. He tolerated my calling him Mervin. No one else dared. He was Buzz to everyone.
"Merv," I said to him one evening as we walked in Washington Square Park, "You come off as one tough motherfucker, but you are really a pussycat."
"I scratch hard," he answered.
"But not when someone scratches your belly just right," I said grinning.
"I don't know what it is about you," he said, grinning himself, taken with me despite himself.
I think I was lucky that he saw it that way: that he did not know what it was "about me." I had the sense not to suggest that it might be something, actually, that he did not know about himself. I had no need to make points. Best, it seemed to me, in every case, is to keep your own counsel.
When we were required to sign loyalty oaths in school that fall as one of the conditions for graduation, I complied. It was crazy. But you keep out of the way when you encounter crazy. Confronting crazy can be dangerous. I don't do dangerous.
"I was surprised to see you sign," Harry Delmar of the school's Liberty Club, to none of whose meetings I had ever gone, said to me as we were going from calculus to English.
"It's not a big deal," I said, dismissively.
"But it means something," he said earnestly.
"What does it mean?" I said dismissing him.
"That you are acquiescing in the face of injustice.
"I'm keeping my head down as I plow homewards through the storm," I said.
I was to graduate in the spring. When I made it clear that I had no intention of going on to college, I drew upon myself enough derision as would have distressed me, were it not for my confident belief that I knew what I did and did not want. The derision turned to envy when it happened a few months before graduation, in a special Easter fashion supplement, that my picture appeared in an ad for tailored suits featured in the Sunday Times Magazine.
It was chance. That November, I did Thanksgiving at my mother's. It was her year. She worked as an editor now at one of the most-known high-fashion magazines. At the table, across from me, she had seated a young associate of hers at the magazine who worked in graphics, Derby Phillips. She had been interested in him, herself; become friends; and when he told her he did not sleep with women ย "he had the grace not to say `older women,'" she said to me when she confided it to me -- she thought of me. I had told her when I was twelve. Rather than upsetting her, it confirmed the free-thinking streak she was cultivating as she was proceeding to separate from and then divorce my father. It was very generous of her. Phillips was a young man only some five years older than I was, but he already had made a name and a well-paying niche for himself, unlike me, for I had a future to make, if I could. His was established.
He winked at me across the table.
"I have heard a lot about you," he said. "We should get together."
I blushed. "Ok," I said. He was a wind blowing me the way it would. I smiled.
"I'll be in my office tomorrow; no holiday for me. Can you meet me there at 2?"
I nodded.
"I'll let security know, and you can sign in in the lobby. I'm on the 17th floor. 1745. It's easy to find. We'll talk then. Tonight I have to polish my brand." He said not another word until at the door, shaking my hand, he said, winking at me again, "tomorrow."
The city was not quiet the following afternoon. Swarming were the crowds in the stores and on the streets. Window displays and the lust for consuming indicated the season of uncontrollable elation and euphoria was beginning.
The guards in the building where Derby had his office were sweet. It's perhaps an odd thing to say. But they were. They were young and bored and bitter, and they had a sense that they had no more function in the building than the elevators.
The guard who made that quip shook my hand as I turned to the bank of odd-floor elevators, for I had looked at him with affectionate admiration when he said it. The corporate front room on the 17th floor ย the magazine actually took the seventeenth to twenty-first floors -- was grand and like an art deco movie set.
Derby was waiting there for me like a leading man.
"I'm glad you came," he said. "I've got a proposition for you."
I felt the excitement of sensing myself as the object of his desire.
Modeling, not sex, however, was his proposition.
"I'm infallible," he said as I gasped in derision at his proposal.
A little more than a month later there I was, modeling clothes for magazines and the web. My future had been established by a push from fortune. But I did not know then just how strong a push. I was judicious, finished out the school year, graduated, and continued afterwards a career that was already going and successful.
Derby was my mentor. He took me under his wing and brought me out. He monitored my assignments and chose which calls I ought to answer and which I should decline. His sensibility was impeccable and his sense of what to do unerring and inspired. Even after his immodest commission, my income was reprehensibly high. He taught me which clothes to wear and how to wear them. He sent me to a gym and set me up with a trainer. He took me to dinner, ballet, theater, and the movies. I easily adapted to style, but never attained it with quite the perfection that he had.
I'm sorry to write that we were not lovers. "I won't touch you, kid," he said to me at the beginning, "not even after you get to legal age."
"Don't you want to?" I said.
"Don't camp flirt with me," he said, and set the course of our succeeding relationship by the steel in his voice, the invincible tone, when he said it. But I wasn't camping. I was pining for him with a desire that was setting me on edge. It gave my looks a raw and hungry quality. The cameras loved it.
Marlowe Davidson, that Marlowe Davidson, yes, the fashion photographer who rejects more assignments than he accepts, and still is overworked, asked for me. His secretary called Derby.
Davidson's entire operation, office, studio, darkroom, was located in a nineteenth-century brownstone on Eighty-Fourth Street, where he also lived. You could see the river from his office, which was on the fifth, the top floor. A male secretary, lean nearly to the point of gaunt led me up a snaking oak staircase with marvelously carved balustrades, and knocked at Davidson's office door. A buzzer sounded. The gaunt young man turning the knob showed long delicate and strong fingers and an exquisite, blue veined wrist.
"Sir," he said opening the door and allowing me to enter before he did. It was unclear whether the word "Sir" referred to Davidson or to me.
"I'm so glad you could find the time," Davidson said.
To the young man, who stood almost as if at attention by the open door, he nodded, and said, "Thank you, Bobby, you may go."
"Sir," Bobby nodded and withdrew, closing the door behind him.
"Let me see you," Davidson said, clamping his palms around my biceps and holding me at arm's length.
"Pout," he said.
"Pout?"
"Pout."
"More," he said. "Anger, frustration, desire, bring them all together in one burning look."
He continued to hold me and tightened his grip. For a moment I was afraid. I saw his eyes and felt them as threatening. I felt like he was going to kiss me, but he drew back and still held me at arms length.
"Almost," he said, "but not yet," he paused and regarded me some more. The he spoke again. "Remember, you deserve everything. You have a right to get, to have, to be given anything you want. Frustration is not an option, and here you are being toyed with and what you want is dangled in front of you just out of reach. There's nothing you can do about it but pout so fetchingly, so seductively begging to get it. That's it," he said. "That's what I want from you. Take your shirt off."
"My shirt," I said.
"Take it off."
It was an order. I obeyed.
Once I was bare chested he led me over to a low platform with a huge white screen behind it.
He directed me as if it were a movie, coaxing me, teasing me, exciting me, clicking his camera with staccato rhythms to match the directorial patter that did not stop until he was finished. Then he seemed to slump, to drop like someone coming down. I felt it, too. Then he took my hand: "You were great," he said, and squeezed it.
Two hours were over and I had to go. Marlowe had a shoot scheduled and I planned to go to the beach, for August was nearing its end. The weather was hot.
I had met Marty in Chelsea, not cruising but in the bakery. He has a place he inherited from his parents on Fire Island and asked me if I wanted to spend a long weekend there. I said, "sure."
He looked at me and I knew what he wanted, but I didn't.
"You are a friend, you are a wonderful person, but for me it is not love, and if there isn't love, it isn't enough," I said, when he looked at me, mooning, and I could tell waiting for my kiss, for the kiss from me that would set him free. (It is unkind to him for me to characterize his passion for me by a bad rhyme, but that I can demonstrates what made it so sad for him.)
He looked at me as if he would cry.
"It hurts me to say it, " I said, "but I have to. I have to be honest, and I couldn't possibly think that I might be leading you on despite..."
He grimaced and smiled. It really was painful. I was tempted to force myself to feel love for him, but it wasn't love. Don't ask me what it was, then. Some things you can't say, but you know, your body knows.
"I understand," he said, withdrawing his desire but not his friendship. He smiled with a glow I had not seen before.
"At least I can look at you openly," he said.
I only smiled, but in that smile was the hint of a secret.
We went for a swim. He looked at me with longing and regret. It could not stop me from feeling a surge of the happiness of life. That made it worse for him when he looked at me, and because I looked at him, I felt it, it was excruciating for him.
Back on the beach, we saw a furtive young man with a camera wandering along the water's edge taking pictures of people on the beach.
"A voyeur?" I said to Marty with a knowing smirk.
"He's saving it for later," Marty said, unable to keep the tail of bitterness out of his voice.
"Shall we give him this day his daily bread?" I suggested.
"What do you mean?" Marty said.
I answered him by cupping his face with the palms of my hands and bringing his lips to mine.
"I thought you said," Marty began, but I touched my lips to his and silenced him. He shivered. I said, "This is different. We're in the movies. It's an act."
"It's an illusion, even though it's really happening?" Marty said. I answered only with a kiss, overcoming him and felt him swoon.
"You'll ruin me for anybody else," he said, his eyes glazed and unfocused.
"Exactly what I want to do," I said. "And it's what you wanted."
"I still do," he said, timidly.
"So do I," I said. "I like teasing you. I like the thought of capturing you, breaking you in, and discarding you when I'm finished. You've been warned." But it did him no good. I teased him with near-kisses. When I kissed him at last, rather than refusing my kiss and protecting himself from the ultimate loss, he responded helplessly.
From his perch in the crags, now, of a flinty protuberance, the young photographer shifted and twisted himself in a fever of taking our pictures.
"That's enough," I said. "He has enough excitement stored in his camera to last him forever, and you have a sense of what cannot be."
I grinned, and he thought that I loved him but would never surrender myself to him. He knew I was not interested in overcoming him more than I already had. There was no challenge. There was no impassable force in him that could hold me in my place.
People are taught they deserve the trouble they have. I made him realize that he lacked something ย it could be no more defined for him than that -- something that would have made him worthy of my reciprocation.
"We all have our burdens to bear," he said, "and you are mine."
"I am not willing to hear sentences like that," I said to him, startling him by the never-before-heard- sharpness of my tone. "There is a certain degree of respect I demand from everyone, and that excludes gratuitous criticism." I said nothing more. In my heart Marty was changed. I decided to play with him, to lead him on, keep him off balance, make him salivate, and then have the rug pulled out from under him.
I made a date to see him again after we got back to the city, but I was unable to keep it. The International Intelligencer, the internet tabloid, had posted a series of obscene pictures taken of me with another young man ย it was Marty ย and doing that was 1) an invasion of my privacy and 2) free and unremunerated use of my image.
They were the pictures taken at the beach with Marty. I had been careless and acted without thinking. I had been speeded up with desire. I forgot who I was, what a public commodity I had become, that my image had an existence independent of me and that I was responsible for it. Now there was a mess. But was there?
"I don't care about what the pictures show," I told Derby. "Generating a little envy is not bad for my career either. As for the non-paid use of my image, I agree, but I can let it go. We'll make more money because of this." Which was true and exactly what happened.
Derby did not see it that way. He was for being tough and reprimanded me for lacking a spine. I did not answer except to say that I would keep his criticism in mind. I certainly did not say that I had invited the voyeurism.
"The lawsuit is not about money," he said. "It serves notice on others that this is not the Wild West where you get by taking, but a society governed by covenants mutually negotiated."
"It won't involve you, just copyright law. I'm taking care of it," he added.
"Why have you changed?" Marty asked.
"Have I changed?" I said without answering.
"To me you have."
"How?" I asked.
"You don't seem to like me anymore."
"I warned you."
"It seemed impossible."
"I know."
"Why can't it still be?"
"Because you are not enough."
"What if I'm as much as there is?"
"But I have the faith that you aren't. And if you were I would withdraw inside myself to live in the existential grand stillness that surrounds a turtle. Nothing personal."
Marty was confused.
"I'm confused," he said. "Why have you turned against me? I'm not trying to tie you down. I just want to be in your life, willing to accept the boundaries and conditions that you determine."
"But you want more."
"I'll try not to."
"What good is that? It's what makes me a burden to bear. You bear the burden of self-repression and you blame it on me, and then blame yourself for blaming me, and then blame me for blaming you ย until you are going around and around in the confusion of unresolvable thought."
"It would be peace of mind to break free of you."
"I'm not holding you."
Derby, of course, won the case. He gloried in the newspaper photographs and the quotes that were printed. He turned ringing phrases in
defense of personal identity and individual liberty. He emphasized the need to protect them both vigilantly by keeping control of how one's image, whether visually or verbally rendered, was protected and under what conditions it could be used.
"A person's image belongs to him or her as much as he or she belongs to himself or herself. To appropriate and to violate the image is a direct assault on the person," he wrote in a widely circulated op-ed piece.
If anything it propelled my career into higher strata. Derby, who had already been a denizen of just about everywhere, was invited now absolutely everywhere. He always took me with him as if I were his date. It was assumed that we were lovers, and it would have been fine with me had that been the case, but it wasn't.
"You look beautiful tonight," Derby said as he walked me trough the corporate hallway in which crystal chandeliers were pendant from molded ceilings, and into the grand ballroom. I was overwhelmed by plush burgundy drapes framing the many windows in their royal buntings and by the amount of polished wood.
"This is magnificent, I said as we sat on the dais. I felt how everyone was looking at us hungry with admiration, envy, and desire.
Derby spoke, serious and witty, getting the room to respond to him with laughter, solemnity, awe, and appreciation. He referred to me as an irreplaceable image, and made me stand for everyone to look at. I did and was embarrassed at the applause. The event made the morning news. Derby allowed the television cameramen. Coincidentally, Fashion Hills began a new campaign for FH Men's Cologne, with my face splashed all over New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Barcelona, Rome, and Paris. The Arts and Leisure section of the Times did a spread on me, and in Vogue, Vogue, there was a six-page underwear and lingerie spread in which I was featured.
I had several more sessions with Marlowe Davidson. They were exhausting. Although they were always intensely erotic and electrified by the current running between me and Davidson, we went no further beyond our work. The pictures were gripped by desire just on the edge of explosion.
Derby kept my schedule and never overworked me, although had he wanted to, there were numerous assignments for me he declined. At the same time, he always negotiated top dollars for me. Nor did our relationship go beyond that. It was not overloaded with electricity as my association with Marlowe was. It was defined, rather, by its formality, dignity, and discipline. I knew that Derby had invented me and determined how I was to be. I was a commodity. He had made me a commodity. I was his commodity. He had the authority to guide me and I had the respect for him to comply. I liked it.
I thought of Marty. With him there was corporal satisfaction. The discipline of an encounter ended with fiery explosiveness. I had no doubt that he would come if I called...despite...everything. I wasn't sure I wanted to. I had nothing to prove. I knew my prowess.
2
The day was balmy and the world was in buzz. The branches of the trees in the park were unbuttoning green furls that sometimes in the sunlight were gold. I was walking with unhappy thoughts circling my brain and a dull cast of spirits oppressing me. Not characteristic of me, but, unfortunately, recently, not too much out of the ordinary for me. It was not altogether a new phenomenon. At first, nearly a year ago, it took me completely by surprise Floored me. It was unlike me. I did not understand it. But that did not prevent recurrences of the event and the consequent losing of its capacity to surprise.
On Fifth Avenue, in the vicinity of the museum, a crowd was gathered watching a parade that was passing. I did not know what it was for, but the general commotion, congestion, and what seemed to me as a pervasive and vacuous merriment were further oppressive. It was hard to take the blue of the sky. I stood in a crush in front of the museum, uneasy, behind one of the barricades looking at marching bands and surveying the crowd. I was riveted. The parade was uninteresting, and I had an uncomfortable anxiety about being noticed despite my slouched hat and baggy overcoat. But I could not move away. I could not decide where to go. There was nowhere I wanted to go. I could go anywhere. It was all the same. Anywhere was nowhere. I was everywhere and nowhere. Actually. Only the one who was everywhere was not me. And the one who was nowhere was, being nowhere, nothing -- nothing aware of its own nothingness.
I had never been this disconsolate. There must, I thought dully, be a reason for feeling like this, without having a guess what it was. I could not, however, remain in my quagmire. My phone vibrated. It was Derby asking me where the hell I was. How could it have slipped my mind that I was scheduled for a shoot at Marlowe's at that very moment? Where the hell was I?
I got a cab immediately and crossed the park. Ten minutes later, I was in Marlowe's studio and ready. Marlowe was cool. He told me he was concerned that I was under too much stress, that my success was too meteoric. Despite my lapse, we worked with our usual intensity, and the results showed it.
"That's beside the point," Derby said through clenched teeth as I stood in his office and said that my memory lapse was nothing to Marlowe and a puzzle to me. I said nothing about the dejection that had probably fostered it. Derby sat behind his desk, a lit cigarillo in his fingers giving the room a smoky chocolate ambience. I stood before him with a sunken heart.
"If you think your career is secure and that you can continue it on your own, be prepared to discover that it is not so. Advertisers want you now because I have set you up as something for them to want. I have made everyone want you. The moment I withdraw my imprimatur, you're in the dustbin of history."
I did not want to challenge him. I was a little afraid of him. But I did not believe that I could not continue my career on my own, by virtue of my own popularity, celebrity, without him, had I chosen to. It did not occur to me that he might use his influence to destroy me just as he had used it to create me. But, as I say, I did not think of this. Besides, his fear, if I may call it that, that I would leave him was irrelevant. I did not have a thought of leaving him. I had a debt to him. I was aware of it, and I honored it.
"I don't want to try to go out on my own," I said. "I want you to guide my career, me, as you see fit. The question of whether I would or would not have a career without you does not apply. If it weren't for you I wouldn't be who I am. So the success of my career is irrelevant, and not what determines my desire to stay with you. You know my feelings for you and also my respect for you by repressing them."
"You don't repress them as well as you think."
My heart leaped up when I saw the suggestion of a smile in his eyes when he said that.
"I try."
"Yes, you do," he said, "and I give you credit for that. But you slip up, too, and that's unpardonable. It ruins perfection; the scratch on an otherwise gleamingly polished tabletop robs the table of its value."
"But you can still eat on it, or do your homework."
"It may be utilitarian," he said, "but it has no value."
"You are marred by your past," Derby said after several moments of silence passed uncomfortably, a discomfort we evaded by gazing at the television at the end of the bar.
"The past," I asked, "is irrevocable, always has to be there to mar the present and the future?"
"It keeps you in your place," he said.
But I wanted to change my place, I realized, afterwards, becoming aware of my discontent, astonished at myself for feeling discontented, even as I denied it. I felt unappreciative and without a right to feel discontentment.
I kept still as Derby sat back, pulled on his cigarillo and looked at me. I had no more to say. Nor did I really know what I meant or felt. But the indisposition that I had felt on the afternoon when I had sunk into a blue mood caused me to sense that I felt compelled to leave the comfortable present and direct myself into anxious, uncomfortable territory. Was I crazy?
I did not have a free moment from that day on for nearly a month. I was seldom without people around me, dressing me, waxing me, combing me, putting make up on me, giving me one pill or another, telling me how to sit, stand, glare, leer, smirk, flirt, and smile, which hand to extend, and how I should position my abs, my hips, my thighs, my ankles.
My image was all over the place and despite that, the demand for it was not diminishing. It was more than I could endure. Slowly, and then not so slowly I found I could not identify with myself. I was not what I seemed to be. I could not penetrate in any way to a sense of who I actually was. I was a fad that showed no signs yet of fladding.
"I can't go on like this," I told Derby.
"What do you expect to go on like?" he said with a condescending smile.
"I don't know," I answered as if what he asked was a serious question, "and I'm not sure I know how to find out. I always can worry that I am making a mistake, but I am still young and I am incomplete." I had hit on it. The word, however, I realized, was not "incomplete." It was "empty." I did not go on. Derby had risen from his upholstered leather swivel chair from behind his desk and said, poking his eternal cigarillo at me, "I would like to know what you think you are doing?
"I don't know, except I know I could leave it all up to you and then I would not have to know. But I feel like I cannot do that. I need my identity, and that's something else."
It was an assertion I did not believe I could make. Neither did Derby, but we both realized I had.
My disappearance when I took a plane for Crete from Kennedy airport was not noticed because my image had not disappeared from the commercial sphere and to the public view. It was being regularly released, fed out in well-spaced installments. I continued to exist and grow, but as an image. As such I was the composition of an alien narrative, or of a set of alien narratives, created by others. I had put my own story into suspension and now was idling, waiting to receive signals from myself that revealed something I needed to know.
I won't tell you where I went in Crete. Some things I want to keep for myself. It is not important where I went as long as you understand it was somewhere where there was sea and sunshine and a sense of removal, of life removed from the generation of anxiety, confusion, and ill-comfort. The life I had found at the top of a pyramid of prestigious possibilities was fraught nevertheless, or in consequence, with anxiety, confusion, discomfort, and a sense that something was not enough, but that I did not know what it was that was missing.
"You are a fantasy, not a reality," Gregory said.
Gregory! How did it happen that he and I, each unaware of the other's existence, had both happened to choose this isolated village, both unaware that we were on our way to meet each other, as if already agreed upon? He was twenty-four, graceful, dark-eyed and magnetic. He had sold men's clothing on commission ย doing very well -- in a boutique on Madison Avenue. At night in his studio in Park Slope he drank coffee and wrote a novel that was accepted for publication and just about to be released.
"You are a fantasy," Gregory repeated. "That's the way you are defined by the world, a template for other people's desires."
"What do they desire when they desire me?"
"They don't desire you. You do not exist. You are an image. They put your picture all over the place and then it gets reconstituted in people's heads. It lives in their minds. But it really has nothing to do with you. You get nothing out of it but a great deal of money. Of course, if you become your image," Gregory began. I cut him off. "You evaporate," I said, "and I'm half non-existent as it is, already."
He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me as if to contradict me, as Dr. Johnson kicked the rock in refutation of Bishop Berkley.
"Do you desire me?"
"You're solid," Gregory said. We had taken a room together on a hillside rising steeply from the beach and overlooking the Libyan Sea.
"Do you have to go back?" I said, hoping for a happy flood to lift my heart out of the mud.
"I want to go back," he said with a tender and inviting smile.
Despite the light in his face, mine darkened into a brood.
"Why don't you come with me," he said. "There's ample room in my place, and I'm good at sharing. I have a twin sister. Come on. We can get concrete together."
"I better stop you before you have us evaporating in each other's caresses," I said sounding more sardonic than I had intended to.
But Gregory was unfazed. "That would be nice," he said, quietly but not at all inaudibly. "Don't stay alone here. Go back with me."
"You think so?"
"Yes."
I did. We stayed another three weeks and then flew back to New York. In Athens, the day before the day of the flight, we were frightened at how much presence Golden Dawn had on the streets. There was an edge of anxiety and anger that had cracked the air. I think, even as I note this interruption in the middle of my story, of the artist in his mid thirties with a dark well-trimmed beard and eyes of an inescapable blue whom we met in a tavern nestled along the steps and alongside the park, on the way up to the Acropolis.
"It is not comfortable," he said in smooth English, "when everything you do and everything that happens to you is subject to comparison with a mythological, classical, over-cultured society that continuously represented itself in architecture, art, literature, and philosophy, and citizenship, and which you feel inferior to. Do you know what it does to a Greek to feel inferior?"
After all that sunlight, it was gray and rainy in New York, and that was a blow. I pulled my jacket over my chest as Gregory stretched out his arm and got us a cab. Inside, he looked at me to check, and saw I was despondent. He slid over towards me and drew me to him. Surprising myself, I began to cry. He held me and kissed me. It made me cry more and tremble. I found my breath and slowly controlled it taking smooth long drafts of air through my nose and stilled myself, leaning into him as I did.
"You are a baby," he said. It was an observation, not a reproach.
"I don't know what I'm doing here -- it's gloomy -- or why I followed you back. It was one thing to live each day free under the open sky. I was charmed. It was not real. But this is real, and I am deflated. I don't like it."
"You'd rather be an image," he said.
"Is that what you think?" I said in anger, pulling away.
Inside myself I was perplexed with the amazement of having gone in the blink of an eye from melting in his embrace with pleasure beyond myself to this dangerous anger, broken off entirely from him.
He looked at me. "Are you finished?" he said evenly.
"That's a very condescending thing to say," I said with contempt.
The cab stopped in front of his house. Gregory paid him. I got out and stood there. The cab drove away. Gregory stood across the street having gotten out the other door. He looked at me expectantly, but I did not move.
"Come up, please." When I did not move, he said. "It's raining." I remained motionless, immobile as he crossed over to me and took me by the arm. I writhed. He held me more firmly and I followed him up the steps into the brownstone.
"Don't ever do that again," he said. There was no rancor in his voice. It was calm. But he demanded control.
I was torn between demanding what "that" referred to and outrage at his presumption to tell me how to behave, and, as well as I could hear, with something of a threat lurking in it.
"Are you threatening me?" I said.
He took me in his arms and my body broke. I fell into him. "I am tormented," I said.
"You are home. Be easy. I am going to take care of you. Everything will be alright."
Gregory went off on a book tour and I was on my own. I had no idea whether I wanted to continue being a model. I thought of dummies in store windows. I'd rather be a person, I thought, especially since the money I have already earned and will continue to earn from past work frees me from the need to do anything. With this in mind I considered what I wanted to do without success.
When Gregory returned I felt a return in me of the feelings that made me yield to him. I looked at him. I was glad to see him. It showed. And I saw by how he glowed that he saw it. And was glad, too.
"What did you do while I was gone?" Gregory asked one evening as we sat snuggled in front of the fire in the uncovered brick fireplace.
It was not a question about my sexual fidelity but about what I had been doing, what sort of work would I undertake for myself now that I had removed myself from the career I had been on.
"I did nothing," I said.
This was not entirely true. I had bought a sketch pad, charcoal, colored pencils, and had begun sketching everything I looked at. After a while, I thought, I might begin to paint.
"I don't know what I want," I said, buying time, "but when I find out what it is, I am going to take hold of the situation and get it. Until then, I will float."
"I understand," Gregory said, caressing my chest and making me melt into him and yearn for him all at once.
He did understand, despite his sexual mastery. It is not so much that he was generous but he knew that I lived in compartments and that each compartment guarded itself from invasion by any of the others.
"I will be slow with you, give you all the time you need," he said acknowledging any objection or anxiety I might adduce.
I kissed him. My heart reached for him.
The winter was long and difficult for me. The streets were always full of snow, or it seemed like always. Gregory pampered me like I was in a very expensive rehabilitation center.
"I want to see you being more feminine," he said.
The feelings of yielding he induced in me depended on him for their life, and they clamored to be awakened, as they were each time he approached me.
It was snowing. I walked from one window to the other and watched it fall on the leafless trees that line our street. Gregory was at his desk turning an idea around and around, twisting it this way and that, as if he were working a piece of modeling clay, first getting a feel of it. I watched him. He was doing well. He was entering whatever transpired onto the keyboard of his laptop and by that into an eternal storage.
He turned around and looked at me when he was satisfied by what he had done. "You are restless," he said.
"I can't help it," I said. "I am not doing anything."
He looked at me as if he would contradict me but restrained himself. Instead, he said, "You miss the old days, the excitement."
"I hardly want to admit it," I said, "after everything, and I am afraid that I burned my bridges. But I'm not sure I miss that, only that I feel empty and like I miss something I never had."
"You don't like being cared for?"
"I feel trapped."
"Yes," he said.
"I was wrong to leave Crete."
"You can go back there."
"Yes. I can."
I did. It felt weird until I got to Crete. In the sunlight I took a breath, closed my eyes, exhaled, expanded into myself, and bathed in the golden world around me. I was alone. I had nothing to do and no one to be. But it no longer felt like I had to do anything or be anyone. There was no distance anymore between the idea and the reality. I was through with doing and not doing, with being and not being. Here I was. I felt life complete, and I a part of it.
I stayed like that for a year. Except for Gregory, no one knew where I was. He visited me during the summer.
"It goes well with you," he said when he first saw me when I picked him up with a taxi at the airport in Heraklion.
I grinned. I liked him a lot and seeing him next to me now with a grin on his face made me realize how much. I took him by the arm and took hold of the handle of his on-wheels-valise and steered us out to the taxi.
I bought the house I lived in within weeks of settling. It was a little mountain house near the edge of the village overlooking cliffs overhanging the Libyan Sea. We stood and looked out upon it in joyous awe.
He knew I would not go back with him, and I knew he would go back, and that hallowed the time we had.
He held me and I felt his breath fill me.
When he left I spent long evenings and nights sitting outside watching the sky, seeing it flare with evening scarlet and settle in its own darkening blue, edging towards night. I was content. I got up in the mornings. I showered. I sat out in the high sunshine looking at the horizon sweep itself in front of me. I painted. I felt my heart absorb the world and then send it through me as I painted it. I swam in the afternoons and stretched in the sun on the sable. At night, I looked at the stars and kept my notebook. I'd eat octopus. I'd yawn. The air was sweetened by the scent of the abundant bougainvilliers spilling everywhere. It was hypnotic to breathe. I'd sleep until morning and wake with the first light.