"The Satyr in Bungalow D"

Where does a story come from?

Drawing by Almery Lobel-Riche (1880-1950)

I knew two people when I went to work in Paris thirty-five years ago. Some weekends, I would talk to nobody but waiters. But I love flea markets and there was a great one on Sundays at Porte de Vanves and, if like me, you did not speak French, you could still pick up stories:

An American parachute — and who was that paratrooper, and did he survive, and who had hidden that parachute which is so clean decades later? A tin match holder stamped with ‘allumettes’, in a graphic style which evoked the 1930s — was it from a tiny Paris apartment, where the lady of the house made coq au vin as easily as I make toast? A painted ceramic and tin cherry bowl so beat up that the seller laughs when I buy it.

“Brocante, eh?” he says, which I understand to mean ‘junk’ but turns out to be ‘flea market.’

And then there was the etching of the satyr and the lady. Maybe he’s a devil, but perhaps that was not what I wanted to see. The lady is stretched out naked in the satyr’s lap, luxuriating in his gaze, which is adoring and absolute.

You don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to figure out why I bought this drawing. I hadn’t had a romance in Paris and wouldn’t for the six months I was there; the search would continue for the rest of my life.

Does this explain why I have written a novel about satyrs, who celebrate and adore women, whatever their age and shape? Or had that canvas been prepped long before Paris and would I have been drawn to it anywhere?

The elevator pitch for my novel, “The Satyr in Bungalow D”, which will be published next week. It’s 1963, and a secret colony of satyrs are living in the Catskills resort town of Fleischmanns. Strikingly good-looking, with short horns and delicate hooves, it is easy for satyrs to pass and in summer, when New York City ladies take solitary and hopeful walks up mountain paths, many of them do. That great-looking guy who gave a college girl the best sex of her life behind the tennis courts and refused to take off his hat? Most likely a satyr.

Coincidentally, I grew up near the town of Fleischmanns. The Maplewood House, the hotel in my novel where some of the satyrs hang out, was the name of my family’s little hotel. The hero of the book is Danny, a young satyr who is scandalizing his community because he does not want to make love to every woman he meets. Danny aches for one great love, who will gaze at him — well, I suppose the way the satyr and the lady in my Paris etching gaze at one another. The book, however, is written first person, from Danny’s point of view: A 17 year old satyr, with horns and hooves and a dick, so obviously Danny is not me.

A memory from maybe 1953, when I am five: A few middle-aged men — the sort my mother calls old goats — are setting up a card table on the lawn of our hotel, fixing maple leaves under the bridge of their sunglasses so their noses do not get burned. I find this hilarious. Why, I don’t know. I also don’t know why this image, banal, completely without drama, has stayed with me for seventy years. Sometimes the card game moves beside the pool. The men are involved with their game but there are ladies around the pool, and the men, regardless of how absorbed they are in the game, are aware of the ladies and the ladies are aware of the men.

At five, I know nothing about sex but I can pick up on the energy: Romance hits resort towns all at once, in full force, barrelling into the bus station on Memorial Day Weekend: The ambitious and horny waiters and busboys from City College and the Bronx High School of Science; the hormonal teenagers, who will quickly adapt to the mountains and find spots in the woods to get laid; the bored and ignored weekday widows, husbands back in the city, who’ve packed their tight dresses and high heels and are ready to Mambo.

“Be nice to the women,” the waiters are told and that does not mean bring them an extra dessert.

I am a solitary kid in an extended and noisy family, detached from my two brothers, who are too much younger to be companionable; frequently invisible in a family preoccupied with work. I read early and do not understand what I read. Orgasms are described as fireworks. I take this literally: When a man and woman come together (I am not exactly certain how) one will see an explosion of reds, yellows, and pinks, like July 4th.

Another memory, from a year or two later: I am in the car with my family, on a back road outside Fleischmanns, looking out at the mountains, which are so green and rich and beautiful it is painful. My parents, in the front seat, are talking with one another; my two brothers, in back with me, are tussling, as usual. I feel lonely. I want to be with someone who loves me the way the grown-ups love each other in the books I read; the love that lasts for the rest of your life. This is a crazy thought for a seven-year-old; why I have it so early, I do not know, but there it is.

An excerpt from my book, spoken by Danny, now an older satyr in the present, looking back:

Believe me or disbelieve me. Entertain the possibility these sixty years later, if you dare, that the charming fellow who took your virginity behind a bungalow colony and refused to take off his hat was not the med student he claimed to be, but a satyr in full August rut. That’s what we were there for, in the drunken green abundance of the Catskills in summer: to give the women joy.

But as I said, Danny is not me.

***

And I still love it.