A Legendary Blanche

By Julian Silva

A gay American teacher/writer undergoing a midlife crisis takes a sabbatical year in London where he teams up with an old friend from Anniston, Alabama, four years his junior and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but currently acting as a London theatrical agent and undergoing her own personal crisis with considerably more cause. The book traces the various stages of their growing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julian Silva
• Release date: Jan 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465820549

Julian Silva

BIRTH AND EDUCATION I was born in San Lorenzo, CA, (fictionalized in my novel as San Oriel) in 1927 of Portuguese-American parents. All of my grandparents and one great-grandmother were born in the Bay Area, their ancestors in the Azores. My father taught history at St. Mary’s College for twelve years, then moved for the remainder of his professional life, to San Francisco City College. I attended San Lorenzo Grammar School (there were seven of us in my mid-year graduation class, so San Lorenzo was not exactly a teeming metropolis at the time). I then attended St. Joseph’s in Alameda, leaving in 1944 without a diploma, since I was accepted by St. Mary’s College on a scholarship without one. I attended St. Mary’s for the 1944/45 academic year and in May of 1945, enlisted in the medical corps of the U.S. Naval Reserve. In January of 1947 I finished my lower division work in one semester at SFCC, moved on to USF, from which I graduated in 1949. After graduation I spent six months traveling in Europe and upon returning did a year of graduate work at U. C. Berkeley. PUBLICATIONS My first publication was a short story in Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1964, a study for one of the main characters in THE GUNNYSACK CASTLE. The University of Colorado’s WRITERS FORUM has published seven of my stories over the years, one of which, “The Minimalist” has been anthologized in HIGHER ELEVATIONS: Stories from the West, by Swallow Press, 1993. Stories have also been published in KANSAS QUARTERLY and the San Francisco Chronicle (March 3, 1985). THE GUNNYSACK CASTLE was published by Ohio University Press in 1983 (after the original publisher in Colorado went bankrupt). DISTANT MUSIC: TWO NOVELS (The Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos) was published by the Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, (2007) and MOVE OVER, SCOPES AND OTHER WRITINGS, was also published by Tagus Press, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2011)

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A LEGENDARY BLANCHE

A NOVELLA AND SEVEN SHORT PIECES

by

Julian Silva

Copyright 2012 Julian Silva

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Table of Contents

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Part One

Part Two

SEVEN SHORT PIECES

The Waxworks Show

Malignancies

The Year of the Rat

Tea on the Balcony

A Visit to Haworth

Someone To Watch Over Me

Final Curtain

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Part One

London

Prologue

At the very least I was guilty of hubris. Midlife Crisis I had scorned as an invention of hucksters. A self-indulgent fashion for the pampered middle class. Then life set me up for a fall. And fall I did.

It began with the return of my first—and in a romantic sense, only—love. Had he lived, Romeo might, after Juliet, have gone on to any number of rich and fulfilling encounters, but one cannot imagine him ever again suffering from that particular form of delirium experienced beneath the Capulet’s balcony. Such delicious and self-immolating madness comes, if it comes at all, but once.

Out of the distant past he reappeared, my Romeo, like some Arthurian knight in tarnished armor, stouter and grizzled, but as laconic as ever, a slightly seedy Lohengrin luminous still with the same Christ-eyes and dimpled chin that had turned me to mush a quarter of a century earlier. Overnight I was twenty again, moving through my mid-century in a kind of euphoric daze, both feet always at least a fraction of an inch above ground in what seemed a perpetual high. Waking and sleeping were one. Life was a dream from which I hoped never to wake.

With scarcely a demur I broke off a relationship of twenty years’ standing. Granted, it had already been crumbling from dry rot and was desperately in need of structural changes, if not the sudden and brutal demolition order it received. But I was too deliriously happy to be much or long touched by anyone else’s pain. What was was. You do not stop a force of nature with an upraised hand; you ride the crest of a tidal wave or you are drowned. The wave itself is indifferent. And so was I. Or almost.

Turning fifty was nothing if one’s heart could still be twenty, but a richer, fuller twenty than any twenty-year-old ever imagined. It was emotion that endured. Love.

Balls!

So smitten was I, I could not recognize at the time that my grizzled and timeworn knight was himself already well into his own crisis. It was not me he had come in search of, but his own lost youth. My resurrected love made him young again. For awhile. When the scales fell from his eyes and he discovered I was no longer the lithe, sunburnt and totally submissive ephebe I once was, the knight-turned-bastard presented me, literally, with a bill of accounting for our resurrected romance.

Upon the instant, I fell victim to what proved to be very nearly a terminal case of déjà vu. For the first time since our first meeting on a New Year’s Eve in the early fifties, the scales fell from my own eyes and I saw him at last for what he was and surely must always have been: a cheap con-man with a too easy smile, the mind of a tight-fisted, nit-picking, toothpick counting CPA, and the soul of a small-time sadist too timid to explore his own dark impulses except from a position of absolute security. A stunning blow to the head followed by a quick attack where it was most apt to hurt—the purse.

My first reaction was fury at my own stupidity. To have so readily, so eagerly, even, let myself open to this second burning from the same fire deprived me of my own sympathy. Fools are not deserving of pity.

Self-contempt gave way to rage when The Bastard presented me with a full, itemized accounting of our joint expenses. Not so much as a grain of rice had been purchased without his recording pen taking note in his secret black ledger. The bill presented was so ludicrous even laughter seemed an inadequate response. To have been played for a fool and then asked to pay for our mutual folly down to the last penny seemed the ultimate insult. But not quite.

The second blow was physiological. As ye sin so ye shall be punished. Though I long ago lost my faith in salvation, I have never quite relinquished my belief in damnation. Heaven may be illusory, hell is only too real.

Alone at last I took stock of the wreckage strewn by the tidal wave of my fiftieth birthday. Shamed by the magnitude of my folly, I was left to brood in misanthropic solitude, my house stripped of lover, pictures, furniture, my friends alienated by the abruptness, and what many considered the brutality, of my divorce. I had made a very public fool of myself and must now suffer the consequences in solitude.

Pride, however, was not all that pained me. How much of the rest was physiological and how much psychological only a psychiatrist with preternatural powers would be able to sift out, but whatever its cause, something was very wrong. What for one mad moment I feared might be venereal proved instead to be only an infection of the bladder.

There was, I soon discovered, little comfort in that only. So enlarged so rapidly had my prostate become, infection became chronic, and though the chances of malignancy were slight, any chance at all seemed chance too much, and I quickly, foolhardily, consented to the recommended surgery.

A great hulking teddy bear of a man with the thick, brutal hands of a butcher, the surgeon gave new and exquisite meaning to the word pain with his exploratory catheter, which he manipulated with all the finesse of a riot policeman brandishing a truncheon. I should have been forewarned by the ineptness of his initial examination, but fear as well as ignorance led me blithely into his clutches. Later described by a doctor friend of mine (unprofessionally and far too late to benefit me) as a bull in a china shop, he did indeed end by smashing most of my personal china, leaving me for the first two years a virtual eunuch.

In the light of subsequent events, I have been forced, albeit reluctantly, to revise my thinking about my bullish urologist, for had he been anything like the artist he should have been, I would almost certainly be dead by now. For lonely and bitter, faced with the reality of lost youth and the grim prospect of ever-diminishing powers, I was a prime candidate for a wild and promiscuous fling just at the time the AIDS virus was clandestinely incubating in the steam baths of San Francisco, New York, and just about every other city of the western world. As I was not at the time gifted with foresight, he vied mightily with The Bastard as my prime candidate for extinction, until the latter very soon won out, hands down.

What most offended me about the court summons announcing his lawsuit demanding half of all our mutual expenses, full repayment for the restoration of my stripped house (including the bed and sheets we slept upon), court costs, lawyers’ fees, damages, and just about anything else he could think of was the underhanded and insidious invasion of my privacy. On my front stoop I was greeted by a smiling stranger, who, without apparent malice but with a decidedly sadistic glint in his eye, proceeded to fling a trowelful of shit in my face. Even as I reeled from the blow, one part of me wondered what sick and secret impulses could drive so ordinary looking a man to make his living serving summonses to strangers.

If there was in the world in which circumstances had forced me to live a code of honor, (and I was romantic fool enough to believe there was), its first principle had always been that you solved your difficulties among your own kind. Because we had all in those antediluvian days before Stonewall been compelled to live outside the law, quite literally as outlaws, any recourse to that same law that had once proscribed our very existence was unthinkable. It was a betrayal of an ideal as well as an individual. That The Bastard and I would on our own come to some kind of agreement I had never doubted. With my revision of his reckoning, I had already offered him what I considered my just portion of his outlandish claim, considerably less than a third of the bill presented; but once I became the subject of his lawsuit, he forfeited in my eyes any moral claim to so much as a penny. He was only trying to frighten me, I thought. And I was frightened. The prospect of having to bare the details of my grand folly in a public courtroom turned me clammy with terror; but stronger than the terror was my resolve never to let him be a witness to it. And never myself even to consider giving in. If he was indeed going to send me to the stake, I meant to burn in glory—and with a hard, gemlike flame—before I would bend my knee to his will.

Of the law’s delay the world has already had ample evidence. Though there had been moves and countermoves, nothing had yet been resolved by the time I arrived in London for my sabbatical. Even with justice on one’s side, and I firmly believed at least moral justice was mine, lawyers do not act without retainers. But more depressing than any real or prospective cost was the uncertainty. All I could be sure of by now was that The Bastard was not bluffing. That our dispute would go to trial I no longer doubted. Only the time and the outcome remained uncertain.

It was like having a tiny, elusive mouse gnawing away at my pantry, not large enough to pose a real threat to my survival, but nightly leaving his droppings to taunt me with his continued existence. He would not be trapped, and miniscule as his droppings were, they yet tainted my every joy.

I was almost ready to believe at last in Zelda’s overworked stars, that some governing planet had come in conjunction with other obviously malign astral forces and my fate was now their plaything. If luck was a lady, she was certainly having her revenge.

The final blow was professional. After twenty-one years at the same school, the last seven as head of my department, I found myself suddenly in a kind of no man’s land. A long, bitter, and costly strike had left the entire teaching force, both strikers and non-strikers, at wit’s end when not at each other’s throats. Within a week of the settlement, I was told by my principal, in what was transparently a personal effort by a mean and vindictive man to exacerbate the already-rampant dissension, to submit the name of one member of my department for consolidation. The term is an administrative euphemism for a transfer to what is invariably a more onerous assignment. Since every class in the department was already filled well beyond the district limits, I had no other honorable choice than to call his bluff and submit my own name. And the principal, for whose tyrannical incompetence I had never been quite able to hide my contempt, accepted it with dismaying alacrity.

So rife was suspicion, not to say paranoia, throughout the district, I could not convince the department head at my new assignment that I had not been brought in at the instigation of his principal eventually to replace him. Thus I was given the kind of program reserved for teachers you hope will opt for a transfer to almost any other assignment with relief: five different classes in four different rooms, in four very different parts of a very large campus. I expended so much energy simply running from one classroom to the next there was little left over for teaching. Even worse was the blow to my esteem. I had moved from a school where my classes had been prizes eagerly sought to one in which I was a nonentity. At fifty-two and under the worst possible circumstances I had to prove myself all over again. I was a rooky. I was low man on the totem pole. I was tired. So I applied for a traveling sabbatical, and to everyone’s relief, mine most of all, it was granted.

Thus I arrived in London battered, bloody, and desperate for something, anything, to restore my faith in myself and give me back some sense of life’s joy. Had I been younger I would undoubtedly have chosen Italy or France or possibly Greece, where the living would have been cheaper and the challenges more stimulating, but so shattered had the last three years left me, I feared that if I were confronted with the additional barrier of a foreign tongue (and both my Italian and my French are rudimentary, while my Greek is non-existent) I might very well have retreated into a state of catatonic melancholia.

Beside the ready gift of language, London offered at least two friends: Roger Tubbs, an old actor friend who had once, years before, put me up after a too-indulgent tour of the Middle East, and Zelda. But the week of my arrival, the former took off for a six-month stint in Hong Kong with some traveling theatrical group to air his usual blood-and-guts repertory among the colonial holdovers. And my London friends were suddenly reduced to one.

That she would, all on her own, more than make up for a legion, I had at the time no cause to suspect. Of our fortuitous conjunction at what proved a propitious time for both of us, she would have said (and undoubtedly did say, many times over): It was all written in the stars.

And who am I to contradict?

What follows is a love story. An odd one, perhaps, but the richest my life has to offer. And as Swann was ruefully given to musing about his Odette: She wasn’t even my type. For one, she was a woman.

1

My stay did not begin well. The North Sea oil boom had driven the pound to such ridiculous heights that half my monthly allowance went to pay for my tiny basement flat on Lincoln Street just off the Sloane-Square-end of the King’s Road. It had little to offer beside location. But that, I soon learned, was virtually everything in London. There were two rooms and a bath. The kitchen, which served also as laundry room for the master house above, would never have passed muster at home, but it proved adequate to my modest needs, a Sainsbury meat-or-mushroom pie and ready-made cole slaw being about the extent of my culinary adventures. The prospect onto the tiny, north-facing formal garden that I was not allowed to use was pleasant but hardly sunny enough to make me truly resentful of the proscription, which seemed in the long run gratuitous since I cannot remember ever seeing anyone during my entire stay use the area.

There was one other perk. The cockney char who did for the elegant gents above, the short, doughty, henna-rinsed Mrs. O’Reilly (Irish, but no papist, mind you.) was not against throwing my skivvies into the wash along with theirs; and were I prepared to listen to her morning chatter, she was even willing to wash up the previous evening’s dishes, taking careful note of every one of Zelda’s lipstick-imprinted cups and cigarette butts. Thus it was that I learned any number of arcane facts about life among the Chelsea poor (and despite appearances to the contrary, there do seem to be a few). But the single nugget of information that most intrigued me was the secret of her remarkable complexion. Though she was certainly no beauty and probably never had been, were she truly the seventy-two she claimed to be, her skin was indeed remarkable. It would have been remarkable for a woman ten years her junior.

I never let soap touch it. Not since I was sixteen.

The I’s more closely approximated the sound oy than the pronoun most of us are familiar with and the letter h was not a noticeable part of her alphabet.

In America, I assured her, she could undoubtedly make her fortune going on the telly to tout whatever substitute she employed in place of the scorned soap.

So delighted was she by this notion, nudging me not too gently in the arm as she giggled, Get on with you, I never did learn what it was she actually used to clean that remarkable skin of hers, undoubtedly some arcane concoction of squashed cucumbers and culled cream passed down from cockney mother to cockney daughter for countless generations.

The other room, a combination living room, dining room, drawing room, and bedroom all rather too compactly rolled into one was freshly painted white and decorated with the kind of floral prints one associates with genteel hotels of modest price to add color without making any definite stylistic statement. They were not offensive, simply innocuous. The limited space was more than amply filled with a small dining table capable of feeding two, an easy chair, and a tangerine-colored sofa-bed that made a far more comfortable sofa than it did a bed.

Since the room faced southwest, whatever sun there was that gray autumn I got. Though it sometimes cheered my spirits, it had virtually no effect on the pervading damp; nor did the gas heater in the chimney piece do more than warm the upper half of my body so that I was soon forced to acclimatize myself to the disconcerting combination of flushed cheeks and chilblained feet. But the address was SW3 and people have been known to kill for less.

There was the additional problem of what I was to do in this room—besides, that is, sleep, eat, and read. I did go so far as to rent an electric typewriter and occasionally pretended to write, but my ego was far too bruised for any serious effort, and I finished no more than an occasional letter. Even those were rambling, discursive efforts to reach out tentatively to anyone receptive enough to respond and thus confirm my continuing existence in some world or other that could with some justification be labeled real.

Nor was the common language an unmixed blessing. There were times, on the bus, for example, and I spent an inordinate amount of time aimlessly riding buses, watching, listening, getting the feel of London, I would have said if anyone had bothered to ask, when I would have to zero in on a conversation with my most sensitive antennae before I could assure myself it was indeed a version of English the strangers were speaking, so different were the rhythms as well as the sounds. And when the young Italian waitress at the Chelsea Kitchen on the nearby King’s Road, the ink on whose green card was scarcely dry, made me feel as if it were I who was speaking a foreign language rather than she, I would be suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of not belonging. Anywhere. Here or in America. For my brief stopover in New York had, if possible, made me feel even more acutely than in London a sense of exclusion. I was clearly in a bad way.

There was Zelda, but so keen was my sense of impending disintegration, I approached her at first warily. Since she was, in this vast metropolis, now the sole anchor to my own identity, the last thing I wanted to do was frighten her off with the desperation of my need. Whatever else I did, I was determined I would not in any way foist my depression onto her.

Then, to my astonishment, and well before she