Episode 85 | Survival strategy

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nudity and sex

"Painful, Carlo?" I had expected adjectives like 'shocking', 'bold', which in fact would be used in newspapers and magazines articles, along with 'coarse' and 'scandalous'. I was hoping to become famous with 'Portraying Dorian G', and I did not worry about becoming infamous -- though I would hate the nickname 'The Dark Room' that was to give me so much exposure. 

But instead of my offensively explicit nudity, and the impressive set of enrapturing beautiful men I had collected along my sex life, had Carlo seen my exposed, fragile soul? 

"So you are to be the contemporary incarnation of Dorian Gray?" Carlo was referring to Oscar Wilde's famous character, implied in the title of the show.

I had rehearsed a challenging and nonchalant speech about the ugliness of the soul of our present days. How shallow and uncultivated it was, hiding behind the cult to the body and the apology of a very artificial beauty that slipped back into ugliness, unable to masquerade our souls, after all. Oscar Wilde had published his book in 1890, but Dorian Gray was one of the most iconic characters to that early XXI century, with its superficial aesthetics, the immensely alienating consumerism, a myriad of empty and equivocated values  -- I had an arsenal of topics to address critics and journalists, to at least intellectually justify my presence in such an important museum. Dan Charmand had prepared me to turn my exhibition into a public statement.

But with Carlo I decided to be personal -- and it was the only time I did it, regarding that exhibition. Not even with Dan.  Clearly, I felt that one painter had already spoken to the other painter about technical matters -- now it was the father talking to his son.

"To be honest with you, Carlo... I am the portrait of Dorian Gray. The painting itself. The picture that in the book suffers decadence, instead of the portrayed. I am the image that becomes monstrous, while the man remains beautiful. I'm the torn soul of the beautiful Dorian... and Gray, in this case, would be Angelo Vivace, my ex-boyfriend." I felt like pacing the room, but my father stood quietly at my side, and I just shifted my weight back and forth, feeling the unrest of my extemporaneous sincerity. "For, while he cheated me, lying with dozens of guys in Vice City," I closed my eyes briefly to that stinging memory, and gulped, "I was alone in our bed, tossing and turning and shedding tears, and crying his name... He would come back to our room radiant from anonymous sex, as I was in tears, having worried about him. While he felt horny, I just felt hurt... He smiled and exulted, while I just tormented myself... He enjoyed it all, while I was just suffering." So many years gone by, and my anger was still there, mingled with a lot of self-pity, too.

In fact, a decade or so having gone by, I had remained being the portrait of Dorian Gray, I thought. Even after my relationship with Angelo had ended. Dan Charmand had pointed that out, once. 

"Why are you trying to look ugly and older, Laurent?" Like Angelo, Dan preferred that I used contact lenses instead of glasses, though he would never go with his own spectacles. "You cannot actually believe that your love life ends with Angelo. And I don't even want to know about these one-night stands you're addicted to, though they become very powerful portraits. What is good for your art might not be good for your soul, have you reflected on that? Your poser image of cruel lover and serial seducer is very amusing, but a hardened heart definitely does not suit you well." Dan had scolded me.

Thus it was that Angelo was present in all my paintings -- although, in fact, there was no image of him on display at 'The Dark Room'. 

He was in every man with whom I went to bed and then dumped -- a continuation of the contempt with which he had treated me.

 I had been remotely inspired by the Hindi tale about Sita and her two beheaded lovers, as retold by Thomas Mann, when purposefully I had kept my face out of that exhibition -- the only faces on display were of my ex-lovers, while the only body to be seen, in all its crude nakedeness, was mine. But with great insight and sensitivity, Carlo had interpreted the show as a portrait of my soul. A wounded, lacerated soul. 

"Did I hurt you that much, Laurent?" He seemed moved, and worried. He saw me puzzled at his question, and added that he had been wondering if he was the cause of the suffering he was seeing depicted in my paintings. "This is clearly destructive, Laurent. You are trying to take revenge on these guys, trying to make them suffer by turning them into mere minced meat... Am I wrong? I mean, have you been hurting them because in fact you'd rather hurt me? Hurt people hurt other people. Does that sound too psychological?"

I almost whined, and glanced at the other side of the room to avoid crying. When my eyes were met by Andrei's, an Slavic beauty and a fierce lover, I regained self-control. "Yeah, you hurt me, Carlo." My father's words had given me goosebumps. He had been twenty years absent, and still, he could read me like an open book? "But all this has nothing to do with you..." Why did I have to lie, at that moment? Everything I had gone through during those years had to do with my father's absence, in a way or another, be it good or bad. "I mean, of course I ended up becoming a painter by your influence, but... the suffering that you seem to identify here has nothing to do with you." Andrei's stare captured in my painting contained all the selfish vanity that made him so superficial, and doubting he would ever have any deep psychological issues, I wished to be just like him at least once. "No." 

We continued walking through the exhibition in thoughtful silence. Until, as we stood before the marmoreal elegance of slender and tall, nerdish Finnish Timo, Carlo exclaimed, "Your depiction of flesh is extraordinary, Laurent! Not the torn flesh of Francis Bacon, nor Lucien Freud's decay, no. Instead, you portray an enrapturing beauty, but so that it looks... harmful, perhaps? Instead of being in a museum, I have the impression of being in a butcher's shop, and all these guys look like ground beef... This amount and variety of gorgeous and anonymous men, whose only point in common is having had sex with you..." Tilting his head, Carlo again looked carefully around the room, taking in the portraits of my numerous ex-lovers. "Your sexual consumerism, Laurent, is a shocking statement. Serial seducer, you said? Perhaps this is as dangerous as being a serial killer, although it sounds like just a funny pun." He shook his head. His voice was neutral still, if fatherly, but it seemed like he was getting judgmental. "All these guys you have consumed and discarded... And that in the title of the paintings it doesn't appear their names, just a number!" Carlo snorted. I had titled the paintings simply as Portrait # 1, Picture # 2, up to a number well above four hundred, though there were only 45 on display. "Is it then right, Laurent, that with this exhibition you are seeking vengeance against your ex-boyfriend? Or actually, finally making it public to him?"

I gasped loud. It was an idea I had not yet had. Maybe in the back of my mind, but I had never admitted it to myself to be my main motivation. Would Dan have helped me to put up an exhibition that was an act of vengeance -- against one of his ex-lovers, too? Of course, I was pretty sure that Angelo, as a journalist, would learn about my exhibition at such a prestigious museum, whose director he had known very intimately. And I would very much appreciate should he visit it. Just to realize how many men I had put between me and him -- the distance being measured in beds, but not just. 

But then, he would understand that he had forever conquered and defeated me. I had been faithful to Angelo for eight years. Since then, I had had only one night stands and explosive love affairs that never lasted more than a couple of weeks. My exhibition, as pointed out by Carlo, was the confirmation that my ex-boyfriend had hurt me indelibly, beyond the possibility of any cure, relegating me to the curb of promiscuity, while he had married the perfect woman, socialite supreme Laura von Tschimmel. 

I startled at Carlo's voice, who wanted to continue sharing his insights with me.

"There is one boy that is repeatedly portrayed, though." Carlo observed, with much wit. "This one young man here... Portrait # 172...And that over there is also another painting on him, isn't it? And I believe in the other room there is another..." It was impressive that Carlo had noticed that it was the same man, because two of the portraits were quite dirty and disfigured. "Is he Angelo?" 

Actually, Carlo had been anticipating a picture of my ex-boyfriend, and seeking for it because, as he later clarified, "this guy who made ​​you suffer so much, my son, is who I wanted to see the most."

"No, Carlo. There is no portrait of Angelo here." Exactly just like how in an exhibition there might be no portrait of the photographer, but he is behind all the photos, always present behind the lens, thus Angelo was in all the men I had portrayed -- I had just realized that. What a peremptory defeat for me, and a definitive victory for my ex-boyfriend, if I were to accept Carlo's interpretation of my work, derived from my promiscuity. "This is Marton... He was..." Also Portrait #193, #224 and a couple more, "a little more special... and lasted a bit longer... than the others."

"But he also was committed to another relationship, as I discovered later." Perhaps only for Marton, had I fallen in love during the last decade. But he hadn't been available for a relationship, although he was always available for sex. "We got together quite a few times in Samsara Heights, when he had business there. But it did not work right for us." Nor wrong, actually, I thought, as he had done with me just as I did with all the other guys, using me and dumping me.

It would have too much of an infraction for Ted to have turned the air conditioning on, too, and both Carlo and I were sweating. I suddenly realized a stream of perspiration going down my back and into my trousers when I saw Carlo drying the back of his neck with a handkerchief. The bottom of his hair was wet too, but despite the discomfort, he didn't seem willing to drop our conversation nor leave my show.

"There are so many beautiful men in this exhibition!" Carlo complimented. More the guys than me, however, for he did not seem impressed nor proud of my sexual achievements. Instead, he seemed deeply worried and faintly stunned. "They all are, actually. But their stares... Many of them stare back at us with defiance, others in disbelief. That one over there, for instance," He pointed Rhys, a professional model who had, however, not charged me for his painting, leaving it even after a good and long, hard session on the carpet of my atelier, "appears to be disdainful, but there are also those who stare with... love... even as if worshiping... Were they posing for you, Laurent?"

It strikes me as almost surreal to be chatting about my love life -- actually, my sex life -- with my father. I had always talked about my affairs with Catherine, for she seemed to take pride in my conquests. "It looks like you have beaten me, mon cher." She had joyfully declared one day over the phone, as if she had been counting the men I had gone to bed with, comparing to her own figures. It had been the survival strategy we had shared, after her partner Edoardo had died and Angelo had dumped me. Death to her, and an end that seemed like death to me, though we were living oceans apart, had united us in our respective celebrations of the continuation of life, that consisted mainly on relishing a wide variety of men.

But confiding in Carlo had a quite different feeling to it -- more existential, as if for the first time I was weighing and measuring the extent of my wrongdoings. On those matters, Carlo was the flawless one, while Catherine and I had been accomplices in our careless freedom. My mother might have demanded that I dress and speak and write and behave to her standards of perfection, but when it came to sex, Catherine's norm was still that of l'amour libre.

I hesitated. How earnest could I be with Carlo? "Some of them... yes." It were so many years, countless memories of the different circumstances on how I had met those men and taken them to bed and then to the easel. Yet, I remembered each one of those guys I had portrayed. "I painted some from photographs. Piers, for example," He was Portrait # 265, "posed for me. We were at a nudist beach in Greece, where we crossed paths. I made several drawings of him in one of the sketchbooks that I always carried with me, and later used them as a reference to paint his portrait, back in Samsara Heights. That blond one is Lars." Or Portrait #311. "I met him in a vegetarian restaurant in Stockholm. I took pictures of him after we had sex. Lars was nervous, tense, restless, and I tried to depict him just so..."

"Then Piers must have been the opposite?" My father had observed. "Tranquil, maybe shy?" His effort to name my lovers and go beyond the number was not just to humanize them -- it sounded a bit moralistic, too. In his mind, names seemed to soften the more voluptuous, sensual aspects of the portraits. What if he started naming them at the vernissage? I doubted Carlo would be very talkative then, among a crowd. He was better in connecting to one person at a time, like with Gabriel at the Nirvana Lounge. A few of my ex-lovers and models still lived in Vice City, and I was hoping some of them might show up -- in those years, how much would they have changed? How many Dorian Grays would we have? Anyway, I calculated Carlo wouldn't play the host and greet them by their names, so I had nothing to worry about. 

Since my childhood, Carlo was aiming at reading the painter behind my painting. Or maybe, was it my heart that he could still read so easily? Where had my father been, all those years? I wouldn't have run into so much trouble, I thought, if he had been there, with his sensitivity and clarity of mind illuminating my path, clarifying my own emotions, leading me out of confusion and delusion. Pacifying me by just being there, simply being there for me.

"That's right, Carlo. Piers was quiet... and sweet, too." I still recalled that, when Pier smiled, his gaze saddened. And not just when we had said goodbye at the port, before boarding different ferry boats. Piers was one of those guys who refused to have sex, and I had enacted beautiful and tender sessions of love making with him, but all along his gaze had been full of melancholy, even when his mouth twisted and moaned, in anticipation to the end of our vacations, when we would forever part.

"You never fell in love again, Laurent?" Carlo asked each question carefully. As if sentence by sentence trying to rebuild his fatherly figure and reconnect. 

"No, Carlo. Never." I uttered, with a vehemence that left me wondering. 

"But this won't have prevented some of these guys from falling in love with you..."

"Maybe, Carlo. But I never enticed them with the promise that I would love them back." I again recalled Piers; how even in the raunchiest moments of sex he was trying to stare right into my eyes, as if losing eye contact must have turned love making into plain sex. "And like I said, many of them were committed. For this reason, I won't ever be able to state that they are all my ex-lovers, in these portraits. But neither shall I deny it..." I laughed. "It's in my commercial contract with my marchand! Part of our marketing strategy, you see?" Carlo twisted his mouth, clearly disapproving that association of Art and selling techniques. "And of course, many of the guys I had sex with did not want to be portrayed. So this here..." I made a gesture encompassing the whole exhibition, "is just a part of my life." 

No, it was not seeing an exhibition, no matter how explicitly autobiographical, that my father would scoop my whole life into his hands again.

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Episode 81 | Ill-fated kiss

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"There is something I wanted to ask you, Carlo. About my childhood..." I hesitated, trying to sense whether my father would be open to it or not. "It is a very intense memory, and a little... upsetting. May I?"

My father was silent for a few moments, watching the metropolitan landscape of high rises violently lightened that paraded behind the windows of the cab. He wouldn't make any comment, but I could imagine how distinct it was for him, coming from our ancestral lands where, instead of buildings, the walls to meet his eyes were the beautiful high mountains.  For years I had lived in Vice City, and never before realized how rudely artificial it was. Having arrived in the town egress from rural France, and having spent my childhood on an island where only public buildings had a second floor or a third floor, the skyscrapers had seemed a portent to me. Like I would later perceive after the blackout, the prodigies of our artificial civilization were based on fragile lies.

Carlo's silences often prolonged so that I was led to doubt whether he had heard my question. Apart from the air conditioning that hissed like it were having an asthma attack, it was practically silent inside the cab. The driver had lowered the radio to a minimum, to listen in on our conversation, I feared -- and I couldn't care less. But had my father been so engrossed in his memories that my voice had not reached him? 

"I know what you want to ask, Laurent." Carlo sighed. "Your response was startling, both for Catherine and me. It was the first time you were seriously sick, not just a child's flu. You spent days in bed, perhaps even two weeks," My father would make a terrible biographer, I thought, with his inaccuracy for time, "having outbursts of crying while Catherine and I unskillfully quarreled outside of our chalet." He paused. "But after that, she never dated in the house again."

"Who was he, Carlo?" After so many years, it seemed pathetical that my voice trembled in asking that question. But the question had remained stuck in my throat, and it was the voice of the five years old boy speaking through me, at the age of  thirty three.

"Who was the guy my mother was kissing, Carlo?" I choked on the words again. 

I had kept that question to myself for almost thirty years. I probably would have talked to my dad about it before, if he had not left home. But things had not happened that way. Catherine had kept her privacy from me behind a wall of cynicism and practicality, and there had never been space to pose any question about her affairs. The therapist I had tried in Vice City was too lost in his own emotional maze to actually achieve intellectually deconstructing mine. My healing would have to waiting two decades to start, in the back of a taxi.

It was my first year at school, terrifying enough to an only child like me who lived in a world of adults, and was not used to competing with other kids. 

One day, I had come home to walk on my mother kissing another man, on a pavilion at a corner of the pool where the sauna was located, that was rarely used when the house was not full of guests.

No one used to go there, and thus had I chosen that spot as my favorite hideout, where I could play my solitary games without anyone seeing nor hearing me. No one had ever found me there, either. And I would leave it only if I heard someone calling my name. Until that kiss, it had been the safe harbor of my childish fantasies. From then on, I lost it to the blunt reality of the adults' wrongdoings. 

At that pavilion that I considered my refuge, I had seen Catherine and a guy kissing -- although they had not seen me. 

And since I had never seen my mother kissing my father, I was completely confused and perplexed.

Inconspicuously, I sprinted to the back of the property. I was running for my survival, because it seemed that the ground before had turned into quicksand, and I'd be dragged and forever disappear from the world -- I guess I felt I had already disappeared from my mother's life -- if I couldn't reach the safety of home. Home being a rundown cottage we had to once in a while abandon for the kitchen in the main house, during the worst storms, fearing it would collapse.

 Just when I saw myself inside the empty chalet -- Carlo was working in the garden of someone else's house, Catherine entertaining herself with that man -- had I started crying. Then sobbing, and for hours I went on crying, all alone, lying on my little bed jabbed next to the bathroom door, until I had finally slept, exhausted. 

And it took me several days to begin to reveal my suffering.

"Do you kiss Aunt Joanna in the mouth, Dad?" I remember asking Carlo. Joanna, the maid, was the other woman in my life, apart from occasional appearances from Clothilde, and the teachers at school. 

Although I'm sure I did not know what kissing was. Maybe first I had asked him what a kiss was, for I remember having shown him the cover of one of Catherine's books, where a passionate kiss between a man and a woman was depicted.

"Of course not, Laurent!" Carlo had been intrigued with my unexpected question. "Aunt Joanna is married to Uncle Will, and they only kiss between themselves... Do you understand it?" Carlo answered honestly. "Why are you asking me this?" At first, he had thought I had had my first stolen kiss at school.

For days, my parents were trying to understand where my suffering came from. I went on crying, I stopped eating, I even developed a baffling, insistent fever that medicine would not bring down and kept me from going to school for days.

"Then why was mommy kissing that other man?" I asked Carlo, perhaps many days later, when we were just the two of us in the chalet. 

That's when I unleashed the first serious crisis in our small family.

"Mark." Carlo finally replied. "His name was Mark."

"Who was he?" I insisted. Carlo could very well think that by just saying the guy's name, he would be answering my question. Almost thirty years later, my perplexity and my sorrow were the only things I could recall from the episode. That name did not ring any bells.

"He was the only son of Johnny and Clothilde." My father sighed before continuing, his voice drenched with melancholy. "He used to come to Punaouilo when his parents were not there. To feel free. He enjoyed racing fast cars around the island, to drink and to spend the night at the clubs." Carlo was describing what seemed like a spoiled brat, yet he uttered no word of criticism. "I think he was the one who introduced Catherine to heavy drinking, for he would take your mother with him to the best restaurants and the pool bars of the resorts... and pay for everything, of course. All the glamour that Catherine had been missing, she found it again in Mark's company."

"You knew about it, Carlo?" To be honest, what I wanted was to ask how Carlo could have accepted Catherine's infidelity. It seemed shocking that she was already unfaithful to Carlo in such an early stage of their relationship.

But anyhow, it was enough to think about my own reasons for having stayed with Angelo for eight years, during which he had constantly cheated on me -- "I'm exercising my freedom", he used to say, which meant having sex with other guys whenever he felt like it -- and he always felt like it! Angelo had 'opened' our relationship, although I had never agreed to it.

"We have had a child together. We're not married, Carlo! Catherine had stated the conditions of our relationship very clearly." Carlo sighed. "To stay in a relationship with me, she had to remain feeling free, and act according to her own desire. Ultimately, for us to be a family, to remain being a family, she had to feel free... Even when she wasn't so free... Do you understand me, Laurent?"

I closed my eyes, inhaling and exhaling deeply -- and almost choked on the mixed scent of damp leather and lousy air freshener. A cab was no place to tentatively practice mindfulness, I guessed.

Carlo's response that he had accepted Catherine cheating on him so that we could remain a family, implied and reiterated not only the love he felt for her, but above all, the love he felt for me.

"Catherine did not want to give up her practice of free love. I guess she saw in Punaouilo the same flow of transient foreigners that had constituted the river of her sex life in Paris. But after all, Punaouilo was not Paris. There was a small local society, who had never heard about l'amour libre, watching and judging her, all the time." Carlo reflected in silence, before resuming. "Actually, I think that Mark was Catherine's only boyfriend in Punaouilo. Even so, she was unpopular and poorly spoken of on the island, and it led her to further isolate herself from the local society, which she considered old fashioned, primitive and stuck."

"How long did it last, Carlo?" I tried to encourage my father's unusual openness on that subject, and watched as we progressed along the avenues of Vice City. Maybe I would need to ask the driver to stop at an ATM, if I wanted him to keep on driving. I'd do anything, pay whatever needed, to keep the words coming from my father. Compared to a therapist, it was still considerably cheaper. 

"A couple of years. When Mark met Catherine, he started coming twice or three times a year, to his own family's surprise, until their affair finally came to an end. 'They are so rude', Catherine had said one day, returning home almost in the middle of the morning, after a night out with Mark. Sometimes, the couple would spend the night at a hotel, since you had caught on them. Your mother was experiencing an unusual freedom with you spending your mornings at school, Laurent, and the affair had reached a peak. That day, I was home in between jobs, as usual worrying about not having enough money. I had never seen Catherine so scared and saddened. Apparently, Mark had 'recommended' her for his American friends visiting the island. 'They think l'amour libre is just an easy fuck. Fuck them all!' she had yelled. It was one of the very few times I saw Catherine crying." 

You might have heard the gossip about your grandmother Celeste, and I suppose Catherine was specially offended for being considered herself a first rate hooker, the only European and top of her class in Puanouilo, according to Mark. It was the end of the line for them -- and we both feared we would be thrown out of the house after that. But that fear existed only in our fantasies -- Mark wasn't a resentful man, nor did he like Catherine that much to mention her to his parents. He simply never came back to Punaouilo.

Anyway, after that, I think she never got involved with another man in Punaouilo, except perhaps for an occasional sailor or a tourist.

I had stomach cramps, and I knew it was not the impeccable food from the Nirvana Lounge. But even if I developed diarrhea,  I could not have hopped off my own emotional roller coaster, and I kept on questioning Carlo. "I imagine she wouldn't tell her lovers that she had a son..." With that, I implied not only the years in Punaouilo, but Catherine's love life in France, too. 

I had a clear memory of our bedroom, or 'the chalet' as my parents preferred to romantically -- or had it been ironically -- refer to. Quite small and cramped. Even on the sunniest days, it was dark inside, and always damp. I remember the perfect silence that Catherine demanded of me when I was in there, or even nearby, and that obligation had always made me tense and apprehensive. I tried to never displease her, and trying to get her affection, I was possibly the most obedient boy that has ever lived. Sometimes I think my mother realized it, and my silent begging that kept me under strict obedience was quite to her liking. Yes, I mean it -- maybe Catherine was never very affectionate so that I would remain obedient and docile. And she might have handled my father just the same.

But suddenly I realized that the strain I felt in that room was not only my struggle to be a good boy. There was a constant tension between Carlo and Catherine, and to that the horror with which I anticipated their quarrels. But even their silence was stressed and uncomfortable.

"Nor even mention that she had a..." Carlo thought for a moment before answering me. What had he been for Catherine? Not her husband, for they never had married. Companion, partner? Hardly ever. In fact, since my father had told me that Catherine had tried to treat him as an employee from the very beginning at the Île du Blanchomme, I was considering whether she hadn't succeeded, after all. "I suppose she wouldn't mention it, no..." Carlo replied simply, and then he quit talking. 

Cheating on her own child might not have been very appealing to Catherine, but it seemed like she had enjoyed cheating on Carlo... "It's so sexy, babe!" Angelo had thus justified his constant cheating on me, in the final years of our relationship. I wondered if she had felt the same. He seemed to delight from sharing with me other men's fluids, that he would come home drenched with -- and howl from pleasure when I'd penetrate to find him already lubricated.

For the first time, I thought that maybe I had found and taken 'my own Catherine' for my first love affair -- and that thought seemed so depressing and wicked. I had never developed an Oedipus complex, but now that I was associating Angelo to Catherine's updated image -- I felt sick. 

I hadn't been a victim, it is what dawned upon me during that taxi ride through Vice City -- I had volunteered to suffer in Angelo's hands. Was it because I might have been used to suffering in Catherine's hands? Or because I had gotten used to seeing my father suffering in my mother's hands? My head was spinning, and I knew I couldn't blame it on the driver's sharp turns.

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