Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch Page A

Marat in his tub of blood. Arnaud would fuss, languish, and occasionally erupt, quite the hothouse flower. Mostly kind, he snapped at me only once: “Why do you have no wrinkles? Has nothing happened to you in life?”
    Although the apartment belonged to Arnaud, and his moods hung over the place as pervasively as weather, Melinda was the lady of the place, its animating wife, and typhoon. (Note: I identified her as the apartment’s wife, not Arnaud’s.) Then thirty-six, American, but having lived in Paris ten years, she spoke along an ascending scale of high notes and trills. “Oh my deaaaaar,” she began when she bustled in later that day with supplies for a dinner party that evening, and then just kept bustling. Soon I came to know Melinda’s routine, beginning with when she stirred in late morning (except on days when she went to French class, a joke in itself as she had lived in Paris for a decade without getting as far as the subjunctive). She would make a bowl of café au lait, dial a round of phone calls, then work on her watercolor drawings, mostly illustrations from Proust—looking like Aubrey Beardsley’s, but in color—into the afternoon. She did drawings on commission for rich people, or restaurant menus. A friend requested Wagner, so she concocted a drawing of an India-ink concert grand with a bust of Wagner atop and two dashing men playing together four-handed, their coattails swaying behind.
    Melinda’s prime time was evening, when she either went to a dinner party, or made one herself. She was intensely social. Many of her friends were homosexual men. She was most in love with Colin McMorty, doting on his blond hair and striking intelligence. Colin was Arnaud’s business partner and was both knowledgeable andwitty. Most of Melinda’s friends were witty. Her social circle was a mélange of American and English expatriates (well, Colin was Irish) and native-born Parisians who got together to create a replica of ancien régime society, the foreigners even more convincing than the French. These friends are difficult to describe, though they already acted and sounded as if coming off the pages of antique novels. Playing roles so much, they knew well the difference between public and private, the divide making for most of their nuances and jokes. If I had only met Melinda at parties, I might dismiss her as a “fag hag,” or think we had little (except Howard) in common. But the staged dialogue at dinners was nothing like our sweet, cooing daytime talks in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil. In the apartment, water often was boiling on the stove, either for coffee or tea. I usually bought honey for the tea, as well as milk, endives, pâté. Arnaud bought wine, cigarettes, and flowers. Melinda bought everything all at once for her dinner parties and always served, for dessert, a baked apple covered in cream and sugar.
    I was working some modeling gigs. In those first few weeks I booked all the shoots I could manage—beginner’s luck—for the remainder of my time in Paris. I lay in bed in a tux with a negligee-clad woman wrapped in Christmas tinsel, the photographer on a ladder, looking down from the ceiling. When I asked if I should look at the camera or the woman, her breasts level with my eyes, he answered, “Look at the girl. The viewer doesn’t know I’m here.” I suppose I was overthinking the situation. Or I stood barefoot in Lee jeans on a cold afternoon at five o’clock in a high wind, eating tomatoes out of a picnic basket with two women and another guy in the Bois de Boulogne. Gossip circulated on that shoot about my first photographer, Deborah Turbeville, havingthat summer marched her female models around hot, stinking Venice all day until they collapsed on some café chairs, and at that point said, straight-faced, “That’s it, that’s what I want,” and took the shots. I posed as a goofy groom (with a woman this time) for an image that wound up on the curved walls of Paris