Patou Joy

Juan-Carlos d'Urudel y Machado

A recent letter included links to a video discussion by the historian and biographer Anka Muhlstein about Marcel Proust and his regard for Balzac. Muhlstein's comparisons of Proust's character Charlus with Balzac's Vautrin, reminded me as I watched and listened and twisted a torn leaf of Thai, (Queen of Siam) basil under my nose, of another letter received months earlier from an agitated friend in France, who wrote that he was so overwhelmed by the account of an incident experienced by a mutual friend, that he could not rest until he recounted our friend's story, as best he could, almost verbatim he said, to me: It follows...

He woke and opened his iPad. Something had upset him in the middle of the night, he could not remember what. The letter from his friend cheered him. It described a dinner party given by a writer of travel novels and mentioned another guest at the party, a woman from Hollywood whose French was better than her English, and whose blond hair he observed, as he listened to her talking to the hostess, was the color of lemon juice and butter, and the perfect complement to her perfume, which clung to his hand after they'd met, Patou Joy. 

He remembered the smell of Patou Joy as he read his friend's letter. He put the letter down. He'd tricked one night with a boy who wore Patou Joy. An argument at home with Miguel, his lover, which began at the bottom of a bottle of wine, had escalated to the point of violence. After sweeping up a thrown glass, Miguel had left with the dog and the car, they'd been gone two days. 

He went out the second night and met the boy who wore Patou Joy. He approached the boy on the street, in front of a bar, at closing. He'd noticed the boy earlier, sitting alone at the bar, reading a book written in Spanish. The boy was small but fetching. Muscular, wirey, tight. They made eye contact, once. When he told N about the boy on the phone a month later he softened the description of the boys features in an attempt at humor, and likened the boy, who had left boyhood behind, to Audrey Hepburn's younger brother with 5 o'clock shadow. 

He'd not noticed that the boy carried a little dog inside the ankle length coat the boy wore, a calf skin coat, stitched with elaborate embroidery and bone buttons carved with death heads and the iron cross. Afghani, Pakistani. Goat hair fringed the collar and cuffs. He thought the boy exotic, as clever as he appeared disheveled.

He went up to the boy and said hello.

"Hello", said the boy.

"What are you reading? he asked. 

" 'Poesías completas' by Antonio Machado. I prefer Garcia Lorca but Antonio Machado was my uncle. Do you know him?"

"No....I know some Garcia Lorca...I love your coat", he replied. "I hear old music looking at your coat. What's that you're wearing? What cologne?"

"Hah! Patou Joy of course! My mamma's Patou Joy. Here it is." said the boy, pulling a bottle of Patou Joy out of the pocket of the coat. "I took it from her dressing table. She will think the maid did not pack it."

The book of poems came out of the coat with the Patou Joy and fell to the sidewalk. The boy ignored the book, unscrewed the cap of the perfume bottle and waved the bottle in the air as if giving benediction. The little dog scrambled to stay in the boy's arms. "This is mama's perfume. This is her coat. Here is her doggie. This is Chica."

He picked up the book and asked the boy where he was from. "Montevideo", the boy replied. "Mama has gone home to Punta del Este and left me and Chica alone...Antonio Machado was friends of Gracia Lorca but they were not lovers."

He flipped through the book, he held on to it. "My name is Juan-Carlos" said the boy, "Juan-Carlos d'Urudel y Machado. My friends and my lovers call me Johnny Machado."

He told the boy his name.

"Do you want to be my lover?" asked the boy. "I must warn you if you do...I have been with another tonight. I think...we only met two days ago...yes...I am in love with this man. You could help me make sure."

He held on to the book but said nothing to the boy. He got a cab. He took the boy and Chica home. Chica fell asleep on Miguel's pillow. Sitting at the corner of the bed he asked the boy to undress, then he asked the boy to put the coat back on. The boy did, but the bottle of Patou Joy fell from the pocket of the coat. The cap was loose. The Patou Joy spilled onto the bed. 

"Oh oh! Too much of poetry, too much perfume", said Johnny Machado, and then quoted Whitman: 'Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it'...Let's be pirates now and bury poems in the sheets."

At dawn the front door opened. Miguel had come home. The dogs met in the hall. There was no problem. The dogs seemed to know each other. Miguel walked into the bedroom. 

"Johnny Machado!" said Miguel.

"Miguelito!" said Johnnie. "Where have you been?"

"He told me", I read, "that (our mutual friend's) recollection had ended at the sound of the television in the other side of the house oozing under the closed door of his room. He'd closed the letter back into the iPad, had gotten out of bed, dressed, and walked through the house to the deck. The rain had stopped, the morning fog had dissolved, it was sunny outside. The Richmond-Embarcadero train on the tracks in the flats below the cemetery redwoods had reassumed the crackle of urbanity which the rain had insistently replaced. There was land to be seen again across the bay. Islands, peninsulas, cities. Ships on the water. The season had advanced, the sun was setting earlier in the day, there would still be time for the chicken to thaw before dinner. At six o'clock he took a shower and remembered again waking to a dream, still lost to him, forgotten. But he had burst into tears in the falling hot water"' my friend wrote, "and he had cried alone, like a baby: "I just want to go home...I just want to go home."