On the other hand, isn’t it merciful to allow others a chance to pay their debts?
When I first met Orlovsky, he made no secret of his hatred for the Bolsheviks. Obviously Russia needed to reform, he said, needed to modernize its archaic ways and make way for the lower classes to escape the terrible poverty that was the legacy of serfdom. But the Bolsheviks were no more than brutes, he went on, whose vision of world Communist revolution was a grotesque and indeed opportunistic twisting of an idealistic political movement to achieve both vengeance on their ideological opponents and power—always power—for themselves. He was absolute on this point, that bolshevism was corruption, was a psychological pathology. I remember how he used to pace naked around the studio—pale and compact and somewhat paunchy—still ravishingly masculine inside his field of bristling energy. He waved his arms and told me stories about neighbor informing on neighbor, about a petty party official he knew who delivered an impassioned speech at dinner about Communist principles—From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, that kind of thing—when everyone at the table knew that he sent his wife to obtain goods at the special shops available only to party officials in favor with Comrade Lenin.
“Well, why shouldn’t he, if he could?” I said, because I loved to bait Orlovsky—if I wound him up enough, he would turn on me like a tiger. “It’s human nature to want more and better things than your neighbor.”
“Because of the hypocrisy, don’t you see!” he raged.
“That’s human nature, too.”
“They turn citizen against citizen in name of solidarity! Is diabolical! They want everyone to be loyal only to state—not to his mother or father, not to his child, not to his neighbor, not to God. Only state!”
So I told him to come over here and demonstrate his loyalty to his lover, and he turned on me like a tiger. Oh, it was the most passionate affair I’ve ever had, before or since. We were insatiable together, and the businesslike way he treated me during photo shoots and fitting sessions only made us more concupiscent in private. All through the winter and early spring we carried on, dirty as hell, until one day at the end of March, not long before Iris’s accident, when he rolled off me, lit a cigarette, and informed me in a regretful voice—this after making love twice during the course of a rainy morning!—that his wife had put her foot down and said enough with this new mistress of yours, you’re neglecting your family.
“So what does that mean?” I said.
“It means we must go separate ways for some period of time, bambina.”
“For how long? A week or two?”
“Longer, my love. After baby is born.”
I sat up. You see, for a peculiar moment I thought he meant our baby, the one I was about to reveal to him, once I worked up the nerve. I had it all planned out. Dinner with a nice Bordeaux, a lively tussle on the couch, and then the news dropped casually, as a compliment to his virility, just look what you’ve done to me, you wanton beast. And then of course I don’t expect you to leave your wife, that kind of thing, but we’ll get a nice cozy place somewhere, she’ll come to accept the arrangement.
After all, you told me the marriage is only in name. You told me this.
“What baby?” I said.
“I did not tell you? Laura is having baby.” He counted on his fingers. “November, I think?”
I smacked him across his bottom. “I’m having a baby, you son of a bitch!”
He was surprised and apologetic. He said it was an unfortunate coincidence, but he had promised his wife he would give me up, and he could not go back on his word to Laura—she would tear his balls off—and anyway theirs was a sacred union ordained by God. I asked what was our union, chopped liver? The idiom perplexed him so he didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t wait for him to puzzle it out. I saw at once that I had been an idiot. I put on my clothes and stormed out, which solved Orlovsky’s problem rather neatly, now that I think about it, and after some dithering—naturally he wrote to me and offered money, naturally I ignored him—I consulted one of the other models and found a reputable doctor to perform an abortion. I know you’ll hate me for that, but the situation seemed impossible to me. Aside from being unsuited to motherhood, aside from the practical difficulties, aside from my irrational, outsized fear of the physical travails, in what possible hell could I give birth inside some shabby Italian hospital at the exact same time the Princess Orlovskaya was giving birth inside the grand villa she and Orlovsky shared in the hills outside of Rome? I scheduled the procedure for the beginning of May, when Iris was going away on her dirty weekend with Digby in Tivoli—adorably, she told me she was headed for some kind of artist holiday—and after that I had no wish to remain in Rome at all, war or no war. I simply couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.
So you see, in addition to the great moral debt Orlovsky owes me for acting like such a skunk, I know he’s disposed to hate the Soviet Union with a passion peculiar to exiles. In former days, I even suspected that he did what he could to undermine the Communist regime from time to time, by passing along whatever interesting tidbits came his way. I don’t know if this might still be the case—the espionage, I mean—but nobody changes his political views once his hair starts to turn gray. If anything, those views harden into obstinacy in the face of any contrary evidence. It’s almost as if that entire painful episode with Orlovsky—which I refused to think about afterward, so that it took on the quality of a dream and I had to remind myself that it really happened—has perhaps found some purpose after all. The sacrifice of young love and nascent life wasn’t for nothing.
Orlovsky is more skeptical.
“To Moscow?” he says, incredulous. “Do you know what you are asking?”
“Obviously there’s some difficulty—”
“Difficulty? Bambina cara, is suicide. Do you speak Russian?”
“Nyet a word.”
He smacks his forehead. “Gran Dio. What do expect me to do?”
“Please. I know for certain you’ve got contacts in the Soviet embassy.” (This is a bluff—it’s not impossible he might have a friend on the inside, but who can know for certain?) “I need a tourist visa and maybe a name or two, people who might be able to help me.”
“You are nuts. Who is going to risk his life for strange American woman and her sister?”
“Then forget the names. I just need a visa. You can do that much for me, I know you can. You hate the Soviet system. And you owe it to me, Orlovsky. You know you do.”
He gives me a tormented look and rises from the couch. I think about how he used to pace naked across that floor, raging at the Soviet Union and its barbarous occupation of the human spirit, and then make love to me over the arm of the sofa or the drafting table or the rug, or downstairs in the courtyard against the lemon tree, and it occurs to me that the one place we never had intercourse was a bed. Orlovsky walks to the table without speaking and lifts the wine decanter. Even in his torment, he’s a gentleman. He returns to me and refills my wineglass first, and then his own. Instead of resuming his seat, he continues to the window overlooking the courtyard, and I don’t know, maybe he’s thinking of the past, too. Maybe he’s thinking of all the places he loved me, and how brutally he stopped.
“I might know somebody,” he says softly.
Iris
July 1948
London