Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(58)

“Ilena,” she replied.

I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty—it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.

“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”

Ilena may have been her name or it may have been simply the name she wore, like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, a mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent.

Farouk’s days had started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. He liked fine cars—he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.

It was clear that she had been fond of him. They had travelled to Monte Carlo together, to the chemin de fer tables, where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in a restaurant on Via Cassia she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.

Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be—she had already played great roles.

We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a gelato on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.

We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.”

In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late; she had an appointment in the morning at Elizabeth Arden and wanted to go home.

“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers—she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said.

We went on to the Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her—she could do him perfectly. I could hear the rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice that I knew from his documentary on the battle of San Pietro.

“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”

“Of course, John,” she answered.

In an album were clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone—someone who likes to be babied—and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said. He was also lonely. He would call on the phone: “What are you up to, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“Come right over. Right away.”

He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. “John,” she would ask him, “do you want some girls?”

“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”

She brought three, one of them eighteen years old—she liked young, tender girls, she explained. The late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”

Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.

“No, he didn’t.”

“But he did. He’s told me stories.”

“He was a film director in the war. He never fought.”

“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”

I liked her generosity and lack of morals—they seemed close to an ideal condition of living—and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” There was, I discovered, besides Huston, an Italian businessman supporting her.

There was a film festival in Taormina. She had looked forward to it for days, and when she finally went I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice—I did not know where Taormina was, exactly—on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace; she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale—I understood what all that meant—and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.