Read Answered Prayers for Free Online Page A

artist, labors that left the quinine-elegant Mr. W. stretched in stark-awake comas of jealousy and delicious despair. The Beloved even used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson, while forced to supply the money that supported a habit he deplored, was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The Beloved from a heroin grave. When The Beloved truly desired a turn of the screw, he had merely to turn to his medicine chest.
    Apparently it was concern for Denny’s welfare that led Watson to insist, in 1940, at the start of the German bombing, that Denny leave London and return to the United States—a journey Denny made chaperoned by Cyril Connolly’s American wife, Jean. The latter couple never met again—Jean Connolly, a bountiful, biological sort, passed out and on in the aftermath of a rollicking soldier-sailor-marine-marijuana-saturated Denny-Jean cross-country high-jinks hegira.
    Denny spent the war years in California, several of them as a prisoner in a camp for conscientious objectors; but it was early on in the California days that he met Christopher Isherwood, who was working in Hollywood as a film scenarist. Here, quoting from the previously mentioned Isherwood novel, which I looked up at the public library this morning, is how he describes Denny (or Paul, as he calls him): “When I first set eyes on Paul, as he entered the restaurant, I remember I noticed his strangely erect walk; he seemed almost paralytic with tension. He was always slim, but then he looked boyishly skinny, and he was dressedlike a boy in his teens, with an exaggerated air of innocence which he seemed to be daring us to challenge. His drab black suit, narrow-chested and without shoulder padding, clean white shirt and plain black tie, made him look as if he had just arrived in town from a strictly religious boarding school. His dressing so young didn’t strike me as ridiculous, because it went with his appearance. Yet, since I knew he was in his late twenties, this youthfulness itself had a slightly sinister effect, like something uncannily preserved.”
    Seven years later, when I arrived to live at 33 rue du Bac, the address of a Left Bank apartment Peter Watson owned in Paris, the Denham Fouts I encountered there, though paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe, was not much changed from Herr Issyvoo’s California friend: he still looked vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which Fouts was permanently incarcerated.
    How was it, though, that P. B. Jones found himself in Paris, a guest in the high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms?
    ONE MOMENT, PLEASE: I’M GOING downstairs to the showers. For the seventh day, Manhattan’s heat has hit ninety or higher.
    Some of our establishment’s Christian satyrs shower so frequently and loiter so long they look like water-logged Kewpie dolls; but they are young and, by and large, well formed. However, the most obsessed of these hygienic sex fiends, and a relentless shuffle-shuffle hunter-haunter of the dormitory corridors as well, is an old guy nicknamed Gums. He limps, he’s blind in his left eye, a runny sore persists at the corner of his mouth, pock-marks pit his skin like some diabolic, pestilential tattoo. Just now he brushed his hand against my thigh, and I pretendednot to notice; yet the touch created an irritating sensation, as though his fingers were splints of burning nettle.
    ANSWERED PRAYERS
HAD BEEN OUT several months when I received from Paris a terse note: “Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is Cecil Beaton’s portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed is a first-class passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth, sailing New York–LeHavre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton: he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham Fouts.”
    As I’ve said, I’d heard a lot about Mr. Fouts—enough to know it was not my literary style that had stimulated his daring missive but the photograph of me