Forgetting Elena by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76450-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

CHAPTER 6

I recognize my crosswalk by the black house flying purple pennants.

“Hello, there,” someone calls from the balcony. “We’re having a drink. Care to join us?”

“No thanks. I’m on my way home.”

“What are you wearing?” a theatrical voice asks out of the depths of a chair, his mouth a thin ring around the planet of a brightening cigarette.

“What?”

The red glow, dimmed now, travels to the balcony rail: powerful legs engorging leather pants, a leather jacket flung open to expose a muscular chest, crew-cut white hair fringing a bald dome. The dangling buckle of his jacket strikes a post. “It’s Jimmy. I’m Jimmy.”

“Hi, Jimmy.”

“What are you wearing?”

“A swimsuit and a robe.”

“Been swimming?”

“Come on.”

“Don’t tease him,” admonishes a thinner male voice from another chair.

Jimmy runs a hand over his chest and the dangling belt buckle touches the post again. Spreading his legs slowly, settling into a solid stance, he cocks his head to one side and asks, “Just one drink?”

“All right,” I tell him, unable to resist his calm baritone but afraid that I’m missing dinner at home, afraid that I still smell of the woman. As I head up the slanting walk to the gate, his “Just one drink?” vibrates in my ear, as though he had activated the lobe by pitching his words at exactly the right timbre. “Just one drink?” I feel for the latch inside the gate, find it and lift it. “Just one drink?”

Jimmy is propped against the rail. Closer to me, a hand, emerging out of the recesses of a covered chair, holds a wineglass by its stem. Inside, a middle-aged woman sits at a massive desk doing crosswords under a lamp held by a servant in livery. Behind the servant an open doorway reveals a still larger room. Three more men in livery dart past the open door and disappear. They return in an instant and set a folding screen in place—smoke-darkened brocade veined with lines of green gilt. Beside the woman a young man is thumbing through a pocket dictionary.

“What’ll you have?” asks the Hand.

“Campari?” Jimmy suggests. “We’re drinking Campari.”

“Fine.”

Jimmy lifts a bell from the table and rings it. A Russian wolfhound at the other end of the balcony peers intently out of the shadows at a wind chime above him, its colorless rectangles of glass turning lazily and throwing the lights from the living room over the porch walls and straw floor. Everything smells of straw and Braggi.

“What’s a verb, six letters, meaning ‘to brutalize’?” shouts the boy from the living room.

“Savage,” says the Hand. “To savage.”

The Hand sits forward so that his face comes into view: a simple mouth that lacks a line to mark off the upper lip, like a man’s mouth in a fashion illustration; a bump in the nose, a flexed knuckle, paler than the surrounding skin; and ears swept aerodynamically close to the skull. “We’re quite interested in your house,” he says. “I can see your bathroom window from my bedroom. I’d prefer a view into your living room, or bedrooms, any place in fact where several people congregate at once.

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