Among the crinkled, scored photos laid out on the table, one remains mysterious to me. There’s no date, but it must have been early summer of that year. Alex and I are standing in front of his old Citroën on Hampstead Heath, dressed in narrow dark suits and wraparound sunglasses, looking a little like half of the Beatles. If this image doesn’t resolve easily, it might be because a few years ago I saw Alex again after all these years.
Alex lived in a sunny rented flat across the street from the site of the photo, studying theater and art at London’s Slade School of Fine Arts. A pianist had given me his name and number before I left Paris. Alex was Dutch, exactly my age, twenty-two, to the day. We were the same height and weight, and we even looked a little alike. It was uncanny. His father was a nuclear physicist working on top security bomb projects outside of London, he said, and his mother lived in the Amsterdam suburbs. Neither he nor his roommate, Ravi, seemed to mind if I shared their flat for a while in exchange for a little rent money.
My second night in London, I headed for the city’s one good jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s. Free of Paris and its complications, I was ready to establish myself in England as a musician. I stood at the bar listening to a tightly rehearsed English big band run through a set of standards. Dull, predictable stuff, light year behind. I was told to come back on Sunday afternoon when there were open jam sessions.
In the nights to follow, I drank with Alex and Ravi and their actor schoolmates in cheery pubs. After months among demented wanderers, weird cabalists, jaded drug merchants, and petty criminals, it was a relief to tipple pints of Guinness with clever, vain, naive students my age who laughed brightly and imagined glittering futures for themselves. It helped me pretend I was still one of them.
Sunday afternoon at Ronnie Scott’s I jammed with energetic Caribbeans, European strays, and local talent. Afterwards the owner, a decent saxophonist himself, suggested I stick around London, wend my way into the local scene, perhaps do the odd night at his club. I told him I needed to work full-time. British labor laws, he said, made it near-impossible for an American to get a work permit unless he was contracted for a fixed appearance.
My plans to drum in England were adding up to little. Soon I’d run out of money again. I was desperate to find a way to survive in Europe - anything to avoid returning to California and taking some straight job, as my father in his letters was exhorting me to do.
The next evening, Alex arrived back at the flat in a state of giddy excitement. An actor friend at school was making a lot of easy money, he said. The deal was simple. Every afternoon lonely matrons and dowagers came to a venerable London hotel across from Hyde Park to take tea and make contact with young men. His friend was plying this racket - an old Slade standby among male acting students - to great effect. Having burned through his semester’s allowance from his father, Alex, looking for ways to stay in London that summer, proposed we try it.
In Paris I’d seen the movie of Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in which Warren Beatty plays the handsome, cruel young gigolo to aging, lonely Vivien Leigh. What exactly would we have to do? Merely serve as companions to these women? Or did you have to sleep with them? It depends, said Alex. If you don’t want to go to bed with them, you don’t. Obviously he didn’t know.
There’s money to be made, Alex insisted. Besides, it would be an adventure, a lark. I was dubious. It was less the moral issues involved - I seemed to have already crossed that line with room to spare in Tangier and Paris - than that I, wildly shy, uncertain, and sunk down inside myself, lacked Alex’s preening, extroverted theatricality. I couldn’t remotely imagine romancing a woman as old as my mother. Anyway, I didn’t have the clothes for it, I pointed out. Alex ran to the closet and pulled out a second shirt, tie, and shoes - all of which fit me perfectly, because of course we were the same size.
The next afternoon, dressed as the young escorts we were to play, we drove in Alex’s black Citroën sedan to Hyde Park and parked it around the corner from the hotel. Crossing the elegant lobby, suffering the desk clerks’ supercilious stares, I regretted having agreed to do this.
Beyond, in a hushed, chandeliered anteroom, teatime was commencing. We were seated across the room from an array of powdered, bejeweled women of a certain age, sitting alone or with lady friends. A pair of waiters moved about with silver trays bearing teapots and platters of biscuits, serving as go-betweens, Alex’s friend had said, conveying messages from the ladies to the objects of their interest on the tea trays.
“We’re the only guys here,” I whispered to Alex.
“All the better,” he said coolly.
Ordering tea, I felt the women’s scrutiny. Most, richly attired and heavily made up, looked to be on the far side of fifty. The apparent pathos of their situation - reduced to such devices for companionship, attention, or sex - found little in me to mirror their need: not scorn, or charity, or a need to be mothered, or vanity in being the object of their furtive gazes. I only felt ashamed, and began scheming routes of escape.
“Why would a fancy hotel like this allow this to go on?” I said under my breath when the waiter had left.
Alex looked at me pityingly. “Tony, you are such a nice innocent boy from California.”
The room seemed eerily quiet; there was only the rattle of teacups, clinking of spoons, patter of the waiters’ feet. Alex sipped his tea calmly, a napkin on his crossed knee. I felt a rising panic. The more I tried mentally to project myself into congress with any of the women sitting opposite, the worse it became. They all became variations of my mother.
Alex was nodding toward a jowly, pink-powdered lady with a frozen coiffure. “I think she fancies you. Definitely.”
The lady fished in her jewel-encrusted purse, extracted a notepad and a small gold pen, and jotted something. She tore the paper out, folded it carefully, and flagged the waiter.
The waiter crossed to our table and proffered his silver tray with the lady’s note tucked discreetly among crumpets.
Alex took the note and unfolded it.
“I would like to invite the handsome gentleman in the blue tie to my suite for a cocktail,” it said, giving a room number on the fifth floor.
Alex glanced at his blue tie dangling from my neck.
Across the room, the woman stood up and walked to the elevators, casting a slight glance back in my direction. I watched her considerable derriere disappear into an elevator.
“Definitely rich,” said Alex.
I looked back over at the tea tables. One woman, a late arrival, sat reading a book. Simply dressed in tweeds, she looked intelligent, interesting. Perhaps sensing my gaze, she glanced up over her bifocals, then back down at her book.
“What about her?” I said to Alex. “You can go with the rich one.”
“She isn’t here for men. Can’t you tell the difference?” Alex nudged me. “Go ahead. She’s waiting.”
The waiter arrived again, this time bearing a note for Alex.
Riding the elevator to the fifth floor, I thought of Betty, our married neighbor whose swaying breasts I’d coveted at thirteen, and our silent, vaguely erotic afternoons before her television set. I’ll talk with this lonely woman for a few minutes, I thought. No harm in that. Then I’ll excuse myself and leave.
The elevator door opened onto a hushed corridor. Pale floral wallpaper and peach-toned carpet stretched off into the silence. The aroma of cut flowers in a vase on a polished wood table thickened the cloistered air.
The room was halfway down the hall, the door ajar.
I hesitated, my mind racing. Was she already in negligee, awaiting my affections?
No, I can’t do this, I decided. I started to turn away when I heard, “Come in, please.”
Numbly I walked through the door. She was sitting on a settee in the middle of a large room, dressed as before, a handkerchief clutched in her fist, looking as nervous and distraught as I was. She gestured to a tall plush chair opposite her.
I sat. The woman gazed worriedly at me in silence. Up close, her large blue eyes seemed rather kind. I watched them fill with tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, weeping into the handkerchief.
“I’m sorry too,” I said.
“You’re a lovely boy. You remind me of one of my sons. You shouldn’t be here. Please go now.”
Sobbing, she took an envelope from the table and handed it to me.
I placed it back on the table and stood up. I slipped out of the room, closing the door behind me.
Down the corridor, the elevator was still open; it made its soft bell sound as the doors closed around me.
In the lobby, there was no sign of Alex. I walked back through the tea room without glancing at the waiting women. As I crossed the lobby, the doors opened before me, letting in a heartening blast of fresh air from Hyde Park opposite.
I found the Citroën around the corner where we’d left it. Alex wasn’t there. I stood against the car, lit a cigarette, and drew deeply. It was I who had abased myself, I thought, not the woman. She caught herself in time; I’d already crossed the threshold.
I’d smoked the cigarette nearly down when I heard my name being called. I looked up to see Alex running toward me, his jacket tails flying.
“Thank God,” he said.
“What?”
They didn’t tow it.” He pointed to a posted sign. “We’re illegally parked.”
Then we were inside the old Citroën, sweeping along with the traffic circling Hyde Park. I asked Alex if he’d gone with a woman. He just said, without much conviction, “We’ll come back tomorrow. The selection will be better.”
We drove back to Hampstead Heath in the advancing twilight, chatting and laughing about anything but where we’d just been. When we got back, Ravi took the photo of us that survives: Tony and Alex, in near-identical narrow-legged dark suits and dark glasses, cigarettes dangling from pale digits, looking cool and svelte: a couple of matching young jerks.
Excerpted from the memoir Native State (Random House)
Always a pleasure to read you Tony! ❤️
I didn’t remember this from the book. And loved ‘Native States’. I’m sure I told you that years ago. Now I’m going to read it again.