Free The Fifth House of the Heart by Ben Tripp Page A

instead, a hotbed of Trotskyites and radicals and bearded youths trying to overthrow the tyranny of the paintbrush by making dreadful pictures without it. Andy Warhol was there, amongst some other interesting people; he said he was going to retire from painting. There was a certain amount of drinking early in the evening, then smoking of grass, which always rendered Sax completely helpless. He spent at least an hour talking to a most extraordinarily beautiful woman with skin like porcelain, who knew all about antiques and claimed to have the best private collection of Caravaggio paintings in the world, mostly studies and sketches, but including the lost masterpiece The Magi in Bethlehem .
    She must have been as stoned as he was. Sax was under the impression he was talking to one of Warhol’s people, Edie Sedgwick or Baby Jane Holzer—he didn’t yet know the habitués of “the Factory,” although he would later spend a fair amount of time with them. Someone eventually told him the woman was a countess from Germany, the Gräfin vonThingummy Somethingorother, a title as long as Hindenburg’s pimmel , in any case. Events went by in a colorful, noisy rush. He met the real Edie Sedgwick, who rearranged his kerchief. Sax was content. He was in the middle of things again, a party to the happening, a happening to the party. Still, he was ashamed of himself. It was supposed to be a quiet evening.
    The next morning (with five minutes to spare before the noon bells rang), Sax crawled out of bed and drew a lukewarm bath. If it was hot, he would fall asleep in it. He despised himself. The carousing he could live with. That was the price of being an attractive, interesting person with such notorious friends. What brought out the real,hundred-proof self-loathing was what had happened afterward. He’d picked up a young Arab in front of an all-night tabac ; the lad, prodigious in his endowments, applied himself to his host avant et arrière until well after dawn, then stole the contents of Sax’s wallet on his way out of the room.
    Despite a detour to the bank, Sax arrived at the café precisely on time. He was freshly dressed in a trim bespoke suit from Millings in Great Pulteney Street. Unfortunately he was trembling and greenish in the face, and the circles around his eyes looked like cigar burns. A more obvious hangover would have been hard to effect. Sax sat at a table on the sidewalk, placed several of the brand-new silver ten-franc pieces on the table to keep the service brisk, ordered a glass of tea, and begged a cigarette from the waiter. Business attended to, he sat and smoked and brooded on his own shortcomings with such concentration that he was startled to discover a man standing at the other side of his table. Sax rose.
    â€œYou look just like that actor,” the man said. He was broader than Sax, and shorter, with brief, iron-colored hair. The man’s suit was double-breasted, cut in the postwar style, the color of river water. Brown shoes. Trilby hat. He wore a cream cashmere scarf around his thick neck. The overall effect, Sax thought, was part gangster, part bank teller. In other words, he looked like a man who had spent time in prison.
    â€œThank you,” said Sax, entirely uninterested in which actor. He wanted to be ill on the sidewalk. Must resist that, if only for professional reasons. “Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” he added, and held out his hand.
    â€œYou’ll pardon me if I identify myself only by my Christian name,” the man said. “Jean-Marc. I feel like I’m back in the Resistance, but there it is. Discretion is of the uttermost importance.”
    Jean-Marc ordered a glass of wine and smoked foul SNTA cigarettes from Algeria. He said he had become addicted to them duringhis time there. He did not say what he had done in Algeria, besides smoke. There was little small talk in him.
    â€œAllow me to describe the property first,” Jean-Marc said.