Lost Property by Ben Sonnenberg

Author:Ben Sonnenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

I hated myself for behaving like that.

Mike and I drove to Montauban, to see the Ingres museum, and to Albí where on a rampart of the Bishop’s Palace I affected to be entranced. I quoted one of Pound’s versions of Arnaut Daniel (or Bertran de Born?): Breathing, I draw the air to me I know comes from Provence. There were roses there on a trellis, I held out a rose to Mike. Sounding like W. C. Fields, he said, “Yessir, a real smell-a-roo.”

•

Soon after Sally came to New York, I met someone else and Sally and I broke up. That was Maria, an actress. She lived on Jane Street in the Village, not far from the White Horse. Her father knew my father. “I just don’t want to get married,” I told Sally. We were going down in the elevator at the Tuscany. I was carrying a bottle of champagne wrapped in paper from Sherry-Lehmann.

Mike came to stay with me at Granja Amos the next summer. So did Maria.

Once at La Consula, Annie Davis said to me, “That Maria’s a beautiful girl.”

“Touches more than quickens the heart,” I said in my long-practiced old roué voice. “Beautiful is Ava Gardner, Silvana Mangano—”

“Well, if she isn’t beautiful,” Annie said, “she’s right next door.”

She was indeed a pretty girl. Her only flaw was she wasn’t prepared to be as interested in me as I was prepared to be interested in her.

One day Mike told me that after I’d left New York he’d gone to bed with Sally. “Nothing much happened,” Mike said, “but coming out of the White Horse Tavern one night, Sally and I met—” He mentioned a writer we both knew. “He smiled at Sally, she smiled at him, so I left them together.” He said, “I gave her to him.”

I was hurt but said nothing. Then one night I drove Mike and Maria to Granada. I drove on back roads, expertly. I bribed a guard at the Alhambra to let us into the gardens. I did that expertly, too. It was August. We walked alone in the gardens. The moon came up. My arm was around Maria’s waist. A nightingale? Why not? My arm is around Maria’s waist. The moon is full. A nightingale sings. Mike is walking behind us by himself. That was my revenge on Mike.

Sally’s revenge on me was that in the year after we broke up, I fell in love with her.

•

LA CONSULANot only had Ernest Hemingway stayed at La Consula. So had Cyril Connolly, whom Bill Davis called “my brother-in-law,” though Annie Davis’s sister Jean was long dead; so had Sinbad Vail, Peggy Guggenheim’s son; and Caresse Crosby, who with her husband had run the Black Sun Press and published James Joyce. After breaking up with Sally, I started to go there a lot.

Bill Davis looked American. He wore blue deck shoes and white duck trousers and that kind of short-sleeved shirt which everyone wears nowadays but which then used to remind me of the polo player Tommy Hitchcock.

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