Afternoon of a Faun Read online

  He was evidently his old self again. The Brexit vote had happened while he was in London, and he described how he’d taken advantage of the collapsing pound to go on a spree at Selfridges where he’d picked up some new outfits, including the dandyish rust-colored cashmere jacket he was wearing. (I don’t mean to portray him as an opportunist, just to convey the unguarded tone we relaxed into when it was only the two of us.)

  “Look . . .” He opened the jacket to show me a silk lining patterned with bright fishing lures.

  “Very nice.”

  Just then the waitress came back with our cocktails.

  “Is that a Ted Baker?” she asked.

  “Good guess!”

  “I love Ted Baker.” She ran her thumb over the fabric with quick, easy familiarity. “It’s gorgeous.”

  We ordered our food and got straight into the details of his London trip. I’m always interested in the minutiae of such stories and I pushed Marco to remember everything he could. He seemed to enjoy being pushed, even when the details didn’t reflect well on him. Most people use self-deprecation as a clever way to look good, but the stories Marco told against himself seemed genuinely intended to make him look bad, and I had some respect for that.

  The idea that had come to him that night in our guest room arose from our conversation earlier in the day. It had to do with Julia’s university boyfriend—the apparent cause of her change of heart in Marco’s bedroom.

  “His name came back to me,” Marco said. “Gerald Woolley.”

  “I know that name. Isn’t he an architectural critic?”

  “He may be now. Yes, I think that was his subject. Don’t tell me he’s become famous . . .”

  “He’s fairly well-known, in that world.”

  “Your dad knew him?”

  “Yeah, but he was banned from our house after praising someone he shouldn’t have. Some postmodernist, no doubt . . .”

  Marco laughed—the embattled lives of the men and women of our parents’ generation, with their lofty principles constantly requiring indignant defense, was a source of amusement to us both.

  “Well, I suddenly remembered he’d written to me.”

  “A letter?”

  “Yes an actual letter! Remember those? I’d totally forgotten about it till that night at your house. I was lying in bed scrabbling through the past for the zillionth time in search of any scrap of evidence that might help prove my version of the events—”

  “I’d been thinking you might try to track down that cameraman.”

  “Oh, I did. He’s dead. He must have been in his forties when I worked with him, so—a drag but not totally surprising. Anyway, the boyfriend’s name popped into my head and for some reason I seemed to be seeing it handwritten in ink on cartridge paper, and I remembered this letter he’d written me. Julia had told him about our affair, and he wanted to meet.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  “To fight a duel?”

  Marco chuckled, filling our glasses.

  “To discuss the situation, see what sort of person I was, what my intentions were.”

  “That must have been quite a meeting!”

  “It didn’t happen. I don’t think I even answered him. I imagine I dismissed him in my mind as a chump who didn’t merit the effort of a reply from someone as busy and grand and generally superior as myself. No doubt I was further puffed up by the fact that I was shagging his girlfriend. That’s the way I was in those days—very arrogant, very contemptuous. I also took it for granted I was going to be massively famous one day and that biographers were going to be beating a path to my door, so I kept every scrap that had anything to do with my life or career. Every press cutting, every contract—everything short of bus tickets, basically, and probably some of those, too. And certainly every letter. I stopped after I moved here, but I’d packed it all up in my parents’ attic when I left London, and no one’s touched it since.”

  “Nice!” I said.

  A busboy cleared our appetizers and the waitress appeared with our main courses: mine was a pasta dish with chorizo and clams in a bright orange sea urchin sauce.

  “How were your appetizers, gentlemen?”

  “They were extremely rich,” Marco said.

  She looked upset.

  “But we like rich,” he told her.

  “Oh, good. Me too.”

  “Then we’ll consider allowing you to join our club.”

  She gave a laugh with a flirty ripple to it that seemed genuine enough, even allowing for the transactional aspect of these exchanges. Marco gazed after her for a moment as she left; not leering, but with an impassive reflexiveness, as if he were unaware of it. There was nothing of the aging roué about him, except, in some lights, a slight antique coloration in his teeth, which were also crowded and uneven, like mine: little crooked monuments to 1970s English dentistry.

  “So the letter,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You found it?”

  “Yes. Here, you can read it.”

  He brought up a picture of the letter on his phone. It was written in a neat, legible hand on unlined writing paper, with the date in small roman numerals at the top. I scrolled through it.

  Dear Marco (if I may), I believe you know who I am. I hope you will forgive this intrusion, but I am trying to settle a matter of great importance concerning the future: my own but also that of our mutual friend Julia Gault, and perhaps yourself too. As you know, Julia and I have been together for several years and have been planning to get married after I finish my doctorate. I don’t need to tell you that Julia is enormously attracted to you and has possibly fallen a little in love with you. Obviously this has been painful for me to discover. It is painful to acknowledge too. But I accept that these things happen, and I ask you to believe that my greatest concern here is for Julia’s happiness, not my own. I want only what is best for her, and since she is in a state of some confusion about her own feelings at the moment, I feel I should try to bring some clarity to the situation myself. To that end I would like to ask you to give me an hour or so of your time. I realize I have no right to question you about your “intentions,” and that anyway Julia is free to do as she pleases, regardless of what those intentions may be. But it would be enormously helpful to me to meet you in person, and sound you out on this delicate matter. I assure you I bear you no hostility: quite the reverse. I have long admired your work in television, and I am more than prepared to accept Julia’s high opinion of you, expressed to me in a long and very honest conversation we had yesterday, in which she described you as an exceptional human being: “exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented.” I do hope this request will not sound too strange to you, and that you will consider granting it. I would be greatly honoured. Yours, Gerald Woolley.

  “That’s quite a letter,” I said.

  “I know. Even better than I remembered! ‘Exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented.’ How extremely helpful is that?”

  I was referring to the letter’s honesty and candor, not its practical utility, but I let that pass.

  “I mean, I know victims sometimes send weirdly affectionate messages to their attackers,” Marco continued. “The Gomeishi case fell apart because of that. But this is her talking to a third party, not me. And look at the date. That’s after the Belfast program was aired, meaning after that night in the hotel. ‘Exceptionally decent’— i.e., not some fucking caveman. You can imagine how relieved I was to find this!”

  He’d brought the letter to the Messenger in person as soon as he unearthed it, taxiing across London to their offices near the embankment. The elaborate security in the lobby made it impossible to surprise Sauer as he’d have liked. Reception had to call up with his name. An assistant had to come down to verify that Marco was who he said he was. A photo of him had to be taken and printed onto a pass. But none of this diminished the pleasure of confronting his nemesis.

  “I knew I had the fucker!”

&
nbsp; “What was he like?”

  “Bland. Early forties I’d say. A bit overweight. Gingery hair and eyebrows. Puffy face without a lot going on in it. He started out in that ridiculous flowery mode of his, telling me what a pleasant surprise it was to meet me in person. He even complimented me on a program of mine he claimed to’ve seen as a student. I shoved the letter at him. You should have seen him as he read it. He was trying to look unimpressed, but these giveaway signs were twitching all over him. He was swallowing, darting his little tongue out to wet his lips, drumming his fingers on the desk . . . When he was finished he cleared his throat and sort of tucked his chin into his neck, looking at me with this weird expression that I think was supposed to be gently reproving, as if he’d caught me trying to pull a fast one. He started questioning the authenticity of the letter, arguing that I could have written it myself, or that Gerald Woolley might be somehow in cahoots with me after all these years. I didn’t bother arguing back—just told him he could think what he liked and that if he still wanted to go ahead and publish the piece, that was his call but he could expect a robust reaction from me. He’d gone bright pink in the cheeks by this point. ‘I’ll show it to legal, if it’ll make you more comfortable,’ he says, still trying to sound like he doesn’t believe it’ll make any difference. I told him I wasn’t going to leave the original but that he could make a copy if he wanted. He said in that case he wouldn’t bother, since he was only offering for my sake. I got up to leave, basically calling his bluff. I’d just turned my back when I heard him say in this strangled voice, ‘All right. We’ll make a copy.’ So that’s what we did. I didn’t hear from him after that. In fact I haven’t heard a word from him since. He’s apparently too much of a prick to let me know they’ve pulled the piece. But they have.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Julia told me.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. She called me at my parents’ house a couple of days later—Sauer must have told her about my visit. I recognized her voice immediately even though she sounded like she’d been through the wringer a few times, which no doubt she has.”

  He paused, looking a bit blank suddenly, as if he’d lost his thread. Or possibly he was just exhausted.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t remember exactly. Something about me being vindictive, wrecking her one chance at getting back in the game, I don’t know. She wasn’t very coherent.”

  “She must have known you weren’t going to like the article . . .”

  He shrugged.

  “I guess she hadn’t considered it from my point of view. Maybe Sauer never told her I was putting up a fight. Though he did get her to change that one line. Well, who knows? Anyway, that’s how I learned they’d pulled the piece.”

  “It must have been weird, talking to her after all these years . . .”

  “Extremely weird.”

  “Was she . . . was her point just that you’d stopped her getting published, or was it still about the, you know, the accusation itself?”

  He looked nettled for a moment, but then nodded somberly as though to acknowledge an obligation to satisfy my curiosity. I was his appointed auditor, after all.

  “Well, both,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “So you talked about it? The accusation?”

  “I mean, nothing new. She said what she’d written was true and that she had a right to publish it, and I told her it wasn’t and she didn’t. That’s basically all.” He closed his lips, breathing in through his nose, his fierce features expressing the affronted dignity that I’d come to recognize as his way of showing pain. After a moment, he added:

  “But I guess hearing her say it, hearing her actual voice in my ear telling me I’d made her do something she didn’t want to do, was different from reading it in Sauer’s email.”

  “You mean more . . . real?”

  “Something like that.” He smiled dryly. “She hung up on me before we could get too deeply into it.”

  The waitress came to refill our glasses, and he paused, observing her with his coolly appraising eye as she poured and withdrew.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t get satisfaction from the thought of Julia being upset, however much she maligned me. That I can promise you.”

  I believed him, and said so.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “defeating Sauer after the shit he put me through—that was pure joy!”

  I raised my glass. I wasn’t certain I’d extracted every significant nuance of his conversation with Julia, but I felt I’d pushed him as far as I could without spoiling the atmosphere.

  “Well, to victory,” I said.

  “To victory!”

  We finished the bottle and Marco ordered crème brûlées and gorgonzola with Vinsanto and then some grappa. I’d drunk more than I wanted, but I was experiencing a resurgence of that irrational negative reaction I’d felt when he first told me the news, and I thought alcohol might help suppress it. I didn’t understand this lurking animus. He’d been wrongly accused. He’d defended himself—fought back single-handedly against a national newspaper, and won. Why would I begrudge him his feeling of triumph? It wasn’t as if I had any reason to doubt his version of events. And I didn’t doubt it. There just seemed to be some resistance on my part to actual rejoicing. Had I internalized the campus outlook, I wondered, with its endless, tedious refinements of anxiety over power and privilege? I suspected this must be the case: these virtuous attitudes have a way of insinuating themselves even as you resist them, as if the very act of resistance creates the pathways they need to establish themselves in your psyche.

  Back at his house he smoked a cigar in his partitioned living room with its mismatched charity shop furniture and odd remnants of ornate wood paneling. (He’d bought the building, a former single-room occupancy with warrens of tiny rooms on every floor, long before gentrification had spread to the neighborhood, and was defiant about not restoring it to its pre-SRO condition, or in any other way tarting it up.)

  I made my excuses as soon as I politely could, and staggered upstairs where I had the sparsely furnished top floor to myself. Passing his bedroom on the second floor I noticed several pairs of scuffed leather ankle boots, all stylishly pointed at the toe as if to address an idea of locomotion inseparable from that of impalement, lined up in pairs against the wall, and a sort of cheap amusement passed through me, the hostility of which I preferred not to examine too closely. I was feeling surfeited, bloated—not just with food and drink but teeming, incoherent thoughts. My head started spinning as soon as I got into bed. The ceiling tilted ominously. A vivid sense of the viscous orange sauce on my pasta came back and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up our celebratory dinner. I held it down, just, overcome by the still stronger urge to sleep.

  7

  THE SUMMER PASSED, and in September I resumed my regular weekly stayovers at Marco’s house. Alicia, his daughter, had moved in recently, along with her partner. Hanan was also staying there, having given up the lease on her own apartment. She was a Lebanese-born Australian, with a background in finance, who’d got into film after raising money for a documentary on the looting of antiquities in war zones, and divided her time between Sydney and New York. She always seemed a bit absent when I met her. Polite but distracted. I attributed this to the remoteness of her origins from the little world of Brooklyn, which I imagined must have seemed a bit frivolous to her—a village of pampered neurotics. But it might just as easily have been jet lag, or a lack of interest in me personally (she did seem to have trouble remembering why I came to stay at the house every week). She and Marco had a quiet, undemonstrative relationship. She was quite a bit younger than him, but they seemed content, and well matched. She’d taken over the money side of his A Crime and a Place series, which was by now officially in development after preliminary financing had been agreed on by a consortium she’d put together. The household was livelier than usual, and Marco seemed to be thriving in it.r />
  True, he had a lingering, somewhat morbid tendency to talk about his “ordeal,” but he’d been badly shaken by it, so perhaps that was natural enough. Sometimes it was the moment of victory he’d want to relive, and he’d go back over his meeting with Mel Sauer with voluptuous relish, as if there were still vital juices to be sucked from its memory. Sometimes it was the dread that had come before—the sense of imminent ruin. Meanwhile he’d become more obsessed than ever with the assault and harassment scandals that seemed to be breaking just about every week in the news. The stories triggered violently contradictory responses in him, all of them transparently visible as he sat at breakfast in his shabby blue bathrobe, reading the New York Times. The progressive liberal in him would rejoice in the fall of some dinosaur mogul or smug college jock, drunk on their sense of unassailable omnipotence. But then, as he began reappraising the story from the point of view of his own experience, misgivings would seize him. Might the accusations be false? Or at least exaggerated? Or oversimplified? If the truth happened to be complicated, could that complication ever be addressed by a process that recognized only the strictly differentiated categories of predator and victim? Was it possible to get a fair hearing in the current climate, where a good chunk of the populace seemed to have come to a tacit agreement that it was better that a few innocent men should be ruined than a single guilty one go free? He’d remark on his own quickness to condemn accused men; his willing—even exultant—participation in the ritual of public denunciation that these stories offered would make him shudder at how close he’d come to being the victim of that quickness and willingness, himself. Then, as if catching himself sliding into sympathy with that week’s proven sleazeball staring at him from the pages of the Times, he’d frown and toss the paper aside, muttering “Fuck this asshole, anyway.” And then a week or so later the whole cycle would start up again.