Patron of the Arts

The elemental decor was a stimulant and people joined us, laughed and drank and tripped, and left, and others came. Madelon was a magnet, attracting joy and delight, and I was very proud. We came to the surface at dawn and I triggered a tag-along for Bowie. We drove out to watch sunup over the Bay, then went to my hotel. In the elevator I said, “I’ll have to make that up to Bowie, I don’t often stay out like that.”

“Oh?” Her face was impish, then softened and we kissed outside my door. She began undressing as we entered, with great naturalness, and laughingly pulled me into the shower even as I was learning the beauty of her lithe young figure. We soaped and slid our bodies over one another and I felt younger and more alive than I had in godknows. We made love and music played. Outside, the city awakened and began its business. What can you say about two people making love for the first time? Sometimes it is a disaster, for neither of you knows the other, and that disaster colors the subsequent events. But sometimes it is exciting and new and wonderful and satisfying, making you want to do it again and again.

It changed my life.

I took her to Triton, the bubble city beneath the Mediterranean near Malta, where we marveled at the organic gill research and watched the plankton sweeper-subs docking. We donned artificial membrane gills and dived among the rocks and fish to great depths. Her hair streamed behind her like a mermaid, and we dipped and rose with a school of swift lantern fish. We “discovered” the crusted remains of a Phoenician war galley and made love at twenty fathoms.

At Kos, the birthplace of Hippocrates, Hilary gave a great party at her villa, and we “premiered” a tape by Thea Simon, and ate fruit on the terrace and watched the ships go into space from Sahara Base.

“That’s so beautiful,” she said, looking at the firetrails of the shuttles, left behind by the arcing ships. The trails were twisted and spread by the jet winds, becoming neon abstracts in the early evening light.

I nodded in the faint light. Behind us I heard Respighi’s Fountains of Rome replace the dreamy Bird of Visions. Madelon and I sat in the companionable night silence.

The calligraphic neon scrawls had almost faded away when someone turned on a computerized kinetic sculpture in the garden below. It was a wildly whirling dazzle of lights and reflections by Constantine 7, a currently popular kineticist. Its many dipping, zipping, flashing parts were controlled by a random numbers tape, so that it was never repetitive.

Madelon looked at it awhile, then said, “My life used to be like that. Oh, yes. Running around, rushing about, getting nowhere, very bright and au courant. I suppose I was trying to find out who I was. I was . . . am . . . very ambitious, but I felt guilty being so.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “Without ambition nothing ever gets done.”

“I’m still not certain . . . that I know who I am. Or even what I want.” She reached out a hand and touched me. “I know I love you and I want to be with you—”

“But—” I said.

“You are not the world, but you give me the biggest world I know about.” Her voice was serious and low as the kinetic sculpture was dialed into darkness, probably by someone putting it out of its misery.

“You have always been different,” she said. “Because you are always the same. You’re . . . a rock.”

I grinned at her in the night. “I sprang full-grown from Jupiter’s forehead.”

She smiled back at me, and patted my arm. “You know, trying to find out who you are is the loneliest thing there is. If you are not you, who are you?” She sighed, and was quiet a moment. “I have been many people,” she said. “But each of those roles was me, a facet of me. But you are always you. I’ve watched you talk to the famous and the infamous, the nobodies and the somebodies. You’re just the same. I’ve only seen you impatient with the fools and the time wasters. You share your joy and you hide the hurt, but you are always you.”

“That’s the impression people always have of others, that they are full and complete, but that you are uncertain, fragmented, incomplete. But it isn’t true. We are all in the process of growth. Even a rock becomes gravel, and gravel sand, and sand becomes sandstone, and sandstone becomes rock.” Then I laughed in the dark and grumbled that I slipped off the edge and got my foot wet in philosophy.

“What were you like as a little girl?” I asked. I knew the photographs from her dossier, but not her.

“I was plain and I had no breasts and I wanted breasts and hips so that I could be a real woman. Then, when I got breasts and hips and all the rest, I found out there was more than that to being a woman. I learned. I survived. What were you like as a boy?”

I thought a moment and said, “Small. Isolated. Full of dreams. Ignorant. Pig-headed. Inquisitive.”

“Did you want to be an artist?”

“Yes. But some connections were missing.”