I was in love with Paul, of course. I say 'of course' because that's how it felt to me, natural, honest, and so inevitable that it hardly seemed worth talking about. But my friends were nowhere near so matter of fact about it. They behaved as if some tiny, previously undetected flaw in my makeup had suddenly opened up to become an emotional chasm as deep and as dangerous as the san Andrea's fault.
"I can't believe it," was Xavier's first comment when I told him. " Have you gone batty?"
"No battier than usual, " I said. Besides, darling, everyone should fall in love once in a while."
"You've confused love with multiple orgasm," he said, shaking his head with bitterness that I found quite surprising. " If three means love, then I suppose at five you get married and move to the suburbs."
"I have no such plans, and I haven't bothered to count the orgasms," I said, and walked out without another word.
Xavier's attitude -- which was mirrored by that of the great majority of my friends -- disturbed me at first, but only momentarily. I was quite simply too happy with my newborn love to have my bubble burst by something as trivial as other people's opinion.
And we were happy. I underline it now because it was a happiness so short lived as to make one wonder if it had every existed at all. But it was real enough then, in those first few months, as we explored one another's spirits and minds and found them just as delightfully suited to each other as our bodies proved to be.
I left my apartment on Park Avenue in New York (this alone flabbergasted Xavier, who had been used to my complaints about the slack jawed mindlessness of the typical southern Californian) and moved into a crow's nest apartment that had once belonged to Isadora Duncan. Paul continued to maintain his studio, but we in effect lived together in the little white perch of an apartment with its serene view of the Lonnie canal bridges.
I painted a great deal during those months, the first time I had been able to discipline myself along these lines since I had ended my girlhood in Vermont. The results were encouraging enough to make me think I could make a career of my art if everything else in my life suddenly evaporated. In the meantime Paul continued to develop his own art, which I always saw -- and still do see -- as the most difficult, time consuming, and individual in the world.
His dedication was astounding. He would spend hours, even days, perfecting the simplest of mime movements -- running his hands along an invisible wall, for example, or descending a set of imaginary stairs into an imaginary cellar. He had an intensity and an ability to concentrate that positively unnerved me at times, as if he could turn his senses of sight and sound on and off at will, and simply plunge into the heart of himself where he could be neither disturbed nor distracted. There were times when I swore he had stopped breathing entirely, so still could he stand and so great a control could he exert over what are supposed to be involuntary functions. It even seemed that he could say 'yes ' or 'no' to the messages sent from brain to muscle, could, in effect, hibernate on his feet.
But as impressive as Paul's raw talent and his mental discipline were to me, I was even more impressed by his unswerving integrity. Talent is not specialized; it's a crude, undifferentiated force that can be channeled in almost any direction. Paul could have been a wonderful actor, or dancer, or comedian, all potentially more lucrative than mime, which most people (most Americans, at any rate) saw as a curiosity, a sort of circus-y activity that belonged in the same category with tightrope walking -- at which Paul also excelled -- and pink touted ladies doing toe dances on horseback.
Paul knew all this, of course. He knew that had he chosen an easier, broader route he could easily have been a major star -- on television, if nothing else. (God forbid that this should have come to pass.) But he was convinced that he could educate the public, could show them through his own performance that mime was the deepest, most universal form of drama that the world of the stage had to offer.
"I know it," he would say suddenly, as we lay in each other's arms after a sweet afternoon's lovemaking." I know I can do it."
"Do what, darling?" I would murmur, rolling my spent body against the hard muscles of his chest.
"Take mime with me," he would say. "Right to the top."
"Of course you can, darling."
"What?" he would say, startled out of his reverie. At such times I think he truly forgot my existence, so feverish was he in his devotion to what he saw as his life's goal.
"Never mind," I would say, and slide my lips down the length of his gorgeous torso until I enveloped his freshly stirring cock in my soft lips.
It seemed I could never quite get enough of the man. As lush and as powerful and as ultimately satisfying as our lovemaking was, there was something about his body, about the essence of his maleness, that stirred my own sexuality as no other had before. We would screw each other until we nearly dissolved in a pool of sweat and cum, and still I could not keep my hands to myself -- I had to be touching him, fondling him, fanning the flame in him until his proud cock stood ready once more to plunder my almost insatiable pussy.
There were times when something as simple and as seemingly innocent as a kiss, or even a slight brushing of the hands, would lead to a session of roaring sex that could last hours, days, in some instances. Some button had been pushed deep inside each of us, some central force had been activated, and it sometimes seemed that we were truly alive only when he was inside of me, when our bodies were melded in a fusion of the flesh, when we were screaming out our climaxes as inauguration to a deep new morning of love.
During those first few ecstatic months there was only this, only the lovemaking and the labor of love, the Siamese twins of art and romance joined at the belly. What little time remained was for the mandatory, eating, sleeping, and dealing with the nagging demands of the world at large. We saw friends (my friends, it seemed, had, for the moment, deserted me entirely, while Paul was quite content to live almost entirely without friends of his own), went to few shows, took absolutely no vacations, and wrote no letters home. We were an island, glad of our isolation, knowing it only served to increase the intensity of our feelings for one another. The rest of the world now seemed pallid, colorless, as if we were draining it of its sap to feed the hungry fibers of our love.
But in fact the world was still there, and Paul especially was forced to continue to deal with it. For me, of course, money from ownership of the world magazine continued to pile up automatically in my bank account, gathering dust and interest as I continued to simplify my economic needs. The truth was Paul still went out to auditions several times a week, concentrating purposely on the sort of small, arty club whose audience could never appreciate his astounding skill in mime, he avoided agents, the screen actors guild, anything that smacked of equity.
He got a few jobs that way, by answering small, self-conscious ads in grammalogue and the casting news, and occasionally by riding the coat tails of some better-established acquaintance of his. These jobs -- to Paul's everlasting credit, he never once called them 'gigs' -- were generally cameo appearances where a mime was needed for some idealistic little play in some struggling little playhouse, or for instructional showcases at one of the more arcane classes in the local drama schools. Paul was always genuinely happy to get these parts, and always touchingly earnest in his belief that each one was going to launch him on the path to stardom.
"Richard Lyon's going to be there," he would say, referring to the famous drama critic who had somehow been lassoed into attending a class called ' the unspoken theatre ' at U.C.L.A. and when Richard Lyon was observed nodding off during the middle of Paul's performance, my lover would simply shrug it off as extremely bad taste on the critic's part and go buoyantly off to another audition.
I rarely went with him. Although I shared his unquenchable hope and his charming optimism, I had had too much close hand experience of show business to want to expose myself to its heartlessness, especially when that heartlessness was directed at the man I loved. Rick Dempsey had been a lover of mine when I was eighteen, and through his eyes I had seen enough of the sordid cynicism of the star-making machine to last several lifetimes. Jason Larue, the producer who still holds the record for money spent on an independent film -- $45 million dollars on ' the war of the roses ' -- was another of my paramours, and although he was extremely kind to me, I could see his personality take on a razor's edge as he slashed his way through the competition. Even simonescu, the Rumanian ballet dancer who everyone hails as the new Nikiski, had a hard and vicious streak that appeared simultaneously with each new promising understudy. So now I chose not to subject myself to the crushing indifference of a buying public that did not and could not understand the fierce power of Paul's art. I did not want to hear the ' leave your phone number with Lydia's ' and the ' we'll get back to you's ' that to Paul were hopeful signs of continued interest but to me were the kiss of death.
It was selfish of me, I suppose. I could have warned him, could have tried to make him realize how heartbreakingly difficult was the task he had taken on. I could even have used my influence, accomplished for him with a few quick phone calls (and perhaps a casual screw in some Malibu swimming pool) what he himself would never accomplish in two lifetimes of trying. But the reward would have been nothing more than a bit part for him in some yawning sitcom or perhaps some work as a mime model in a service piece for world mag. and my help would have been particularly pointless because Paul would have refused the jobs anyway, and if he ever found out I raised even a finger on his behalf he would have been beside himself with fury.
So I held my peace, and tried to make up ever more creative excuses when he asked me to go with him to this audition or that showcase. I don't think he ever fully understood my reluctance -- I made it a point never to tell him about my ' exalted ' past -- but he seemed to explain it to himself as my wanting to stay out of his way, which was fine with me as long as it didn't trouble him too much.
One night, though, I simply ran out of excuses. He insisted, in his calm but steely way, that I go with him to a showcase at a famous improvisational club, the whipping boy. A number of unusually good, intelligent comedians had gotten a start there, and Paul was sure he had found a place where both the management and the audience would appreciate and understand him. He was so excited in his touchingly childlike way, so sure that his big break was staring him in the face, that I swallowed my well-founded reservations and went with him.
The room was too small, too dark, and too smoky, as such rooms tend to be, but I was glad of anything that would obscure my identity. I was mildly concerned about running into someone I knew (god, Christina what are you doing here?), but I was much more worried that Paul would seek out my face at some unguarded moment during his performance and see the perhaps heartbreaking concern that I might well be unable to hide.
Luckily, neither of those things happened. Paul introduced me to the manager of the club, a thin, fey looking man who had once taught at the royal academy of drama. Despite myself, I was somewhat encouraged by his apparent devotion to classic art forms and by his air of rumpled pedagogy, and even found myself thinking, " well, maybe this time there's really something to it."
Paul's performance was little short of magnificent. For once the audience seemed to sympathize with what he was doing, and it even appeared as if they understood what heroic effort it had taken Paul to perfect his routine. " Raise the level of your game," they say in tennis, and that's exactly what Paul did that night, he raised the level of his art until mime itself became something transcendent, and, with the urging of an appreciative audience, he nearly soared across the stage.
