The Married Man (10 page)

She talked about how many of the men had left wives behind in Italy, some of whom were living. “One old guy was sick and wanted to go back to his wife in Ancona and be nursed by her, but she wrote him a bitter letter saying, ‘Where you have summered, there you must winter.’” Austin nodded and repeated the words, as he would have done after one of his Virginia aunts told him a mildly funny story.

They chattered on about one thing or another. Christine had a way of lingering over her words—especially Austin’s name, which she pronounced with an impeccable American accent—as though she was afraid he wouldn’t understand otherwise. The effect was, however, slightly menacing. Was she drawing out what she said in order to expose, or at least suggest, the threat to him it might contain? She cocked her head to one side and squinted when he said something, almost as if she were facing the evening sun; he didn’t know whether she was frowning or whether, like a German, she felt no need to produce little social smiles. She’d delivered a talk on Ethiopia at the
National Center for Scientific Research; perhaps her frown was a way of indicating that as an intellectual she took nothing in without skepticism. She had to analyze everything before she assimilated it.

After he’d paid the bill Austin remembered he knew a rich woman nearby, up towards Passy, who had some extraordinary Coptic art—or was it Nestorian?—from Ethiopia, hanging in her hallway (in the
salon
she had several Renaissance Italian masterpieces). Austin promised to arrange a visit—probably just a drink. He also said he’d get an editor he knew at Gallimard to read Christine’s thesis. In truth, the “editor” he knew was an ex-trick of Little Julien’s, and he was not working at Gallimard but at Grasset.

Suddenly they were all on the sidewalk saying goodbye. Christine kissed Austin on the cheek but not Julien, an omission that probably indicated unreflecting intimacy between Julien and her rather than an intentional rebuff. She’d left a trace of her scarlet lipstick on Austin’s cheek and she rubbed it off with the back of her hand.

They all laughed suddenly as though admitting to one another how sophisticated they were, and how easy it had turned out to be. But as Austin walked away he thought, Yes, but it’s not over. Will she be angry if she has to hand him over to me for good? Austin knew that he thought about Little Julien at least twice a day, and he wondered if Big Julien or Christine had similar sessions of quiet longing for each other.

Maybe not. They were so bitter. At least Big Julien railed against her all the time. That night over dinner he seemed genuinely pleased that Austin had found her attractive and intelligent, but a second later, as though he were discussing someone completely different, he said, “You know I never really mourned my mother’s death until now. I was finishing architecture school, and then I went to Ethiopia to teach, then we married, and years have gone by, I never let myself feel anything, but now—” He ran his hand over his face.

“Now?”

“Maybe it’s because all that’s come to an end and my marriage is collapsing, but now, suddenly, I miss not Christine but my mother. You know, we were everything to each other, my mother and I. I sometimes wondered why we didn’t have more friends, my family,
but we had each other. My mother, my father, my brother and me. We did everything together. My father had a boat on Belle-Île and we’d go to Brittany, to the Morbihan, where my grandmother had an old, primitive house on a river—the house didn’t even have electricity and you could reach it only by water. Our mother did everything so well—she changed the decoration of our house in Nancy every few months. Her cooking was superb. And of course she played … the classical piano. We’d go on car trips together to La Baule or Honfleur or down to the Côte d’Azur—how my mother loved the beach! She and my father would go to a nudist beach at La Baule. I remember one of her friends was walking nude down the beach one day with handcuffs around her wrist and the other half around her husband’s penis and scrotum.”

Austin had to remind himself that Julien’s parents were his age and, like him, pure products of the 1960s. “Did your parents walk around the house nude?”

“Oh, yes, of course!” Julien exclaimed, honestly happy to be recalling something—anything at all—about his happy childhood. “Everything we did was very natural. No false modesty.”

Austin’s own childhood was remote, and both his parents were dead; it was difficult for him to remember that he’d ever been given over to thoughts about them. In fact, at no time had he ever taken himself so seriously as this young man did. It was part of his appeal, this gravity of Julien’s, this certainty that every old score must be settled, every memorial visited, a flower placed before every fond thought. Julien was a legend in his own eyes. If Austin had been French he might have been bored by such self-centeredness, but at least half of what attracted him to Julien was that knowing him represented a total immersion into France. Austin not only had to read Julien’s favorite adult comics, but he also had to learn songs such as
“Paris est une blonde”
and
“Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance.”
Not that Julien ever knew the lyrics after the first line or two, but that didn’t keep him from singing along with made-up nonsense lyrics. He belted every tune out vigorously in his stentorian baritone. Before, Austin had thought of France as female—as perfume, cooking, Renoir mothers in the garden, as silky underthings and fancy fashions, as the soft valley of Paris itself, lying, inviting and seductive, below the stiff
male lingam of the Eiffel Tower. Or he’d thought of
his
women—the Princesse de Lamballe and Marie Antoinette—women who acted through strange alternations of piety and snobbishness, who out of faddishness received the very philosophers whose ideas would soon enough cost them their heads. Women who rejected the stern standard of magnificence from an earlier epoch for the comfort of grace and intimacy. Bluestockings. Taste makers.

In this roseate vision of a France ruled by a feminine sensibility compounded out of caprice and pleasure, men had always struck Austin as playing the duller role. Only since meeting Julien with his very male curatorial concern with women’s clothes, minds and manners had Austin glimpsed the male hands straightening the corsage or clasping the pearls at the base of the swan-like neck or rotating the naked woman on her raised pedestal so that she might present the painter with a better angle. Like landscape architects in a formal French garden, men were shaping and disciplining women, torturing them into unexpected forms.

Julien wasn’t terribly traditional (after all, he’d lived in Ethiopia, he was at least partially homosexual and he’d entirely rejected the Church). But he was French in his tics—his fear of drafts, to the point of changing his seat two or three times in a restaurant if need be, his knowledge of cheeses, wines, mushrooms, his old-fashioned, deliberate way of speaking—all these habits and practices seemed rooted in the soil of
“la douce France,”
a soil he so cherished that he always defended the “peasants” when they marched in Paris in protest against the tumbling protectionist barriers raised to keep out foreign livestock and produce. Julien, who’d never spent more than a summer day in the country and then usually at the sumptuous
châteaux
belonging to his friends, could still go misty-eyed once
la campagne
and
les paysans
entered into the conversation. Austin was reminded of Colette’s Julie de Carneilhan and the moment when this middle-aged aristocrat who has lived a slightly sordid bohemian existence in Paris for years is awakened one morning by her country brother, the squire, who’s down below her window with horses, one for her. He’s come to take her back to the family
domaine
now that war has broken out. Behind all the fads and follies of Paris lies the country.

Of course Austin recognized that he was constantly applying more
and more layers of mythic lacquer to his idea of Julien, but a love affair between foreigners is always as much the mutual seduction of two cultures as a meeting between two people. Julien was an exception to the normal French way of doing things (even the assumption that such a norm existed), but with every eccentricity he confirmed or revised Austin’s sense of the national character. If Julien said he liked artificial Parisian vamps, not big-toothed, tanned American gals, it was Baudelaire—the first aesthete in history who’d preferred artifice to nature—who was speaking through his lips, even if Julien had never read the essay on cosmetics. If Julien loved Paris with a young man’s conviction that it would confer wealth and glory on him, he was echoing (at least to Austin’s ears) Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré. And in Julien’s constant pronouncements on the merits of this orange juicer design over that one, this Andrée Putman chair over that one by the thoroughly American Charles Eames, he was only indulging in the national pastime of judging—of feeling required and
licensed
to judge—everything from a mantelpiece to morality. If he was unsmiling and grave in talking about “design” (the French invoked the English word) he was shockingly irresponsible and unconcerned in discussing ethical questions. “Why
not
rape the child?—she’s probably begging for it,” he’d say of the latest Belgian atrocity, arousing Austin to genuine fury. Austin had a Kantian (and probably American) certainty that he was a universal legislator of morals; Julien knew perfectly well that the positions he took would affect no one and so should at least be “amusing.” Maybe that was the reason
amusant
was the French word that sounded the most supercilious and disgusting to American ears.

He took Julien into the bedroom, which he’d prepared carefully. They sat on the edge of the bed and smoked some of the marijuana that Austin had mailed himself the last time he was in Florida in an ordinary business envelope without a return address. After Julien had come, he flopped back on the bed and said, “I never experienced anything like that before.” He swallowed. He was staring at the ceiling. One nerveless hand briefly rumpled Austin’s hair. “What about you?”

“It was great for me, too.”

“But don’t you want to come?”

“Not now. Maybe later.”

But Austin hadn’t enjoyed it so much. He knew exactly what Julien had experienced. And he did like having Julien so completely in his power. Nor could Julien worry that their sex hadn’t been safe.

“I never knew—I’m amazed,” Julien muttered as he stretched and Austin covered him with a sheet and a light blanket. Austin went into the bathroom, undressed, jerked off, washed up, stopped off in the kitchen for a glass of milk, then stumbled back to bed, consumed by the objective melancholy of the sadist.

Austin was able to garner for Christine a serious reader’s report at Grasset’s and a polite, encouraging rejection. When he sent the evaluation along he asked in his note if he could read the manuscript.

“I
told
her she had to make it less academic!” Julien exclaimed. “Should you be wasting your time reading it? I doubt if you’ll find it interesting.”

“I’d be surprised if she’d care what a furniture historian thought about Italians in Algiers—I mean, in Abyssinia….”

“No, of course she’d like your opinion,” Julien said, unaware of Austin’s irony and the nuances of self-deprecation. “After all, you’re the only professional writer she knows, even if your field is somewhat different.”

Julien had just come from work, still in coat and tie, his face drained from twelve hours at the drafting table. The three-day spell of hot weather had been swept away by the coarse, scratchy broom of wind, wetness and cold that had descended on them overnight. Austin had always been alive to the appeal of the young male office worker in a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular arms, the silk tie at half-mast, the top button pushed open by clamorous chest hairs that need to escape, the smell of effort breaking through the fading decency of a deodorant. Perhaps because Julien was so slender, the plastron of his shirt falling straight down from his breastbone like a plumb line, perhaps because he was so poor (Austin now knew he earned just two thousand dollars a month, got meal tickets from work for lunch and wore the green linen jacket every day because that was all he had), these vulnerabilities, physical and material, made all his posing just that much more touching.
Despite the strange, extenuating details—an intellectual for a wife, another man, much older, for a husband—Julien was still the Latin male, not the shoulder-rolling Italian model but the French version, elegant and refined, though masterly nevertheless. Austin loved the way Julien, exasperated on the telephone, raked his hand through his straight black hair, raised his eyebrows above disabused eyes, drained cheeks and a chin of resurgent black whiskers, and then scolded his brother or Christine. Austin admired the way this man spoke in such a low, resonant voice that it shook his entire frame whenever Austin held him in his arms, as though the life force was boiling water that made the whole kettle throb.

Austin registered, with some relief, that their new sex games never got translated in Julien’s mind into anything psychological. It didn’t occur to Julien to want to be Austin’s slave. Not even during the drama of the moment did Julien ever roll Magdalen-bright eyes up at Austin. No, all he was relishing were the new sensations pouring through his body. His egotism was so sturdy, so carapace-hard, that he was incapable of imagining that his status, his own sacred status, could fall. When he looked at himself in the mirror during sex it was with intense fascination and only after he’d come did it occur to some responsible part of his mind to notice that Austin was still dressed and to wonder if he had felt any pleasure.

Austin’s pleasures were all performative—the sort he imagined a straight stud must feel when he’s racked a woman with yet another orgasm; he walked away with much fingernail-buffing vanity at having provoked such ecstasy and gratitude. Perhaps because Julien himself had always been encouraging Christine to flutter up to higher and higher sexual perches, he’d never stopped to wonder whether his own body was capable of the same buoyancy. Now that he knew it was, he, too, was grateful. He followed Austin’s movements with big, adoring eyes, though the adoration wasn’t pathological. It was frank, the same kind of admiration one athlete might feel for another.