The Married Man (11 page)

Julien and Christine had fucked at least once a day since they’d met; sex was the one uncomplicated thing they’d retained from that first night in the bush beside the stalled jeep, the one thing that had weathered all their fierce arguments and their present hostile truce.

Austin just knew that in his place his other gay men friends from the States would feel compelled at this juncture to ask, “Well, are you and Christine
still
doing it? Now?” He suspected they were, and since that possibility excited rather than alarmed him, he didn’t want to spoil something good by making Julien choose between them. He didn’t want to force Julien’s hand—what if the poor guy really was heterosexual? Anyway, most likely he and Christine would reconcile and break up at least half a dozen times more. There was no way to speed up the cycle.

Austin knew he’d be a lot less understanding if he was consumed by passion for Julien.

He wondered when the divorce was going to take place. Hadn’t Julien said, “in a month,” when he’d first met Austin?

And
why
were they getting divorced? Julien said she’d disfigured herself by gaining weight, but in fact she was slim and sexy. Anyway, wasn’t
weight
a pretty frivolous reason to like or dislike someone? Austin was close to fat, but Julien reassured him by saying,
“Mais, Petit
, you’re perfect like that. You’re the way a man your age should look. I don’t want a starved little queen.”

Julien said they’d been happy in Ethiopia until she’d returned to France and her
petit-bourgeois
family, but her father was a distinguished diplomat now stationed in the Ivory Coast and Christine could be considered an intellectual or even an ex-punk—anything but a greedy, conservative, lower-middle-class prig.

One day Austin convinced Julien to call in sick and to join him in a limousine hired by
Vogue
and drive to the Normandy coast.
Vogue
wanted Austin to do a thousand words on Yves Saint-Laurent’s new
dacha
at Deauville, designed by Jacques Grange.

Austin was more than used to the luxuries France could provide, though he enjoyed none of them at home, but he was delighted by Julien’s obvious enthusiasm. His very way of sitting in the car, resting his chin on the back of his hand to afford passersby the best view of his profile, attested to how he reveled in the momentary glamor of the car.

“I hope you don’t mind that I dragged you away, but I need your expertise as an architect. I can look at a building and see nothing. Just tell me everything you notice, even what seems to you laughably self-evident.” The sky had clouded over. They had to squint and even when they weren’t looking up they were aware of the deliberate progression of these big gray rollers turning over their heads, as though they and the other people around all these buildings below were inked type and the clouds moving paper. The coast had been fairly well spoiled by massive vacation apartments built block after block right up to the water line. Neon, billboards, fast-food places selling mussels, gas stations—and then, suddenly, a word from the chauffeur into the intercom and the gates to the estate were opening. “Over there,” Austin said, “is Saint-Laurent’s house, the Proust House I think he calls it, and out there is the landing strip where Pierre Bergé lands his helicopter, but we’re heading over to those birch trees and the
dacha
. It’s just been finished.” Austin raised his eyebrows and laughed:
“Vogue
has an exclusive….”

The
dacha
looked authentic from the outside, a wood house raised on stilts, with brightly painted shutters, set at the edge of a stand of trees, but inside it was a charming hodgepodge of stained-glass windows from Morocco, low settees from Edwardian America, stag’s antlers on the wall, a white porcelain corner stove from Sweden and, scattered on every table surface, hundreds of framed turn-of-the-century photographs of Slavic aristocrats sporting Vandykes, monocles and gold-epauletted white uniforms or slender girls with long hair and unplucked eyebrows in long, gauzy summer dresses. Austin held his little tape recorder up to Julien as they walked around the
dacha
and he recorded everything Julien said. Later he made Julien pose in his shirt sleeves on the front porch. But Julien wouldn’t smile or look directly at the camera. Someone must have told him that direct regard and a grin were unbecoming. Plebeian, perhaps.

On the way back Julien spoke for the first time in his halting English. Austin suspected it was to impress the driver. Although the sky directly above was still roiling with gray clouds, the low, early evening sun had an unimpeded access to every passing object—a medieval, honey-colored, time-pitted church porch, a 1940s shop front, pedestrians
escorted by their own long shadows, a warmly glowing farmhouse.

For a while Julien spoke of his mother, her way of treating Julien and his brother Robert when they were teenagers as though they were already adult men and she was an older sister, ready to laugh at their misadventures and to wink when their grandparents lectured them. “My brother,” he said, “was a tall, slender boy who dieted frequently, never took the sun and wore black turtlenecks to frame his pale face. He wore a curious, long-waisted coat from England with dark brown velvet trim. He’d worked out a peculiar, gliding way of walking. His hair he brushed three hundred times a day and groomed with Yardley’s lavender-scented brilliantine. He hated our father and refused to speak to him. He called him a
Philistine.”

“I thought you said the four of you were so happy.” A village glided past, looking in the warm, late light as though it were leaning slightly toward them, awake and shining for a Sunday snapshot. The driver, it turned out, was a Pole in his fifties who liked classical music and had tuned in a plangent Beethoven violin sonata.

“When we kids were younger, everything was ideal, but my brother infuriated my father when he became so …
styled
. I suppose he was already sleeping with adult men. I myself received a love letter from a man, but I’d never even smiled at him, he’d just become obsessed with me. Our parents read the letter, which for some reason sounded as though I’d actually slept with the man. Our father was furious. I promised my father I’d never done anything like that and he was eager to believe me. I was his favorite. He took me flying with him. He and three other men owned a two-seater plane together and he liked to scare me, dip and show me all the sights of Nancy and the countryside. He was born in a village in the Franche-Comté.”

“Did you sleep with your brother?”

“No, he liked men, not boys. He never talked about it, one way or the other. He was very sweet to me—he’s three years older. My big brother. But I was always a good student, being some years at the very top of my class, and Robert was never any good at school. He couldn’t do math—”

“—Me, either,” Austin blurted out, but he saw right away that
he’d been foolish to suggest there were parallels between the tale of Julien’s family and the accidents of his much more ordinary life—an American life, what’s more, and therefore a bit comic and folkloric, in any event too far off the map to be as eternal as the Lives of France. The countryside had now lost its glow and was turning blue and shadowy.

“He was disastrous as a student, he wouldn’t play sports, he refused to speak to our father, he glided around with his strange gait almost as though he were ice skating. One day our father lashed out at him, hit him with his fist between his shoulder blades. But Robert never said anything and the next day he was gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“Our grandmother paid for him to go to a cooking school, a pastry school, in Saint-Paul de Vence. He was just sixteen. That’s when he met Fabrice, his lover. They’re still together, years and years later. But he didn’t much like cooking. Then he worked in a men’s clothes store in Cannes. At last he was able to indulge his taste for designer clothes, including hats and scarves.”

Day after day Julien told Austin the story of his family. Sometimes there were new details about another subject such as the guys at work or the time in Ethiopia, but Julien never pursued them with the same zeal he lavished on his family chronicle. Austin wondered if he weren’t a little bit in love with Julien; how else could he concentrate on all these stories? He heard about Julien’s father’s mother, a widow who lived with her daughter, Julien’s aunt, a maiden lady who never said she was going to the toilet but rather, “I’m going somewhere” (Je
vais quelque part)
. She and her mother wore navy blue to Mass every Sunday and would inspect each other for a full ten minutes before leaving the house, checking for lint and collecting it with a sticky roller.

Austin heard, again and again, about the two-seater plane, the boat on Belle-Île, the holiday that one time in Alicante—and especially, endlessly, painfully, about his mother’s suicide on Belle-Île. Once when Austin said he was going to go on a strenuous diet, Julien said, “Don’t,
Petit
, you’re perfect as you are. Diets frighten me. Our mother was on a long diet, a fast, really, when she disappeared.” The French
used the word
disappeared
for “died” or “passed away.” “You can become severely depressed if you diet.” He thought about it, about her. “The poor woman. She thought if only she was a bit more beautiful our father would come back to her. But she was perfect, exquisite already.”

Austin liked this new way Julien had, now that he’d started to talk about Robert, of saying “our mother,” “our father.” Maybe he sounded just a bit less isolated.

One day an old friend of Peter’s named Herb Coy, an American who lived in a houseboat and worked as a secretary to a rich, prolific but unpublished writer, called to ask if he could make a short film about Austin. It was just a twenty-minute black-and-white film, a silent, which he needed to hand in as his Master’s thesis. Austin agreed.

In one scene Herb, seated in a wheelchair and holding a camera, was pulled by a friend backwards as Austin walked, in a long “tracking” shot, toward him and along the back of Notre-Dame and its massive flying buttresses that looked like the scaffolding surrounding a rocket that would fall away during blast-off.

Austin, pretending he was alone and carefree, suddenly lit up with amateurish, overdone excitement. A second later he was pounding on the back a young, handsome Julien, dressed in a suit. Julien wasn’t feeling well that day and had had to be talked into acting. They smiled at each other. The wheelchair was jerkily pivoted, the camera swooped and dipped and then settled down long enough to show the hammy Austin, chattering away, walking off toward the Île Saint-Louis with the modest, beaming Julien.

When Herb was about to reload the camera he realized the used film had unspooled in the magazine and been exposed to light when it was unloaded. He feared the film might be destroyed.

T
hey went to Nancy for a weekend but they stayed in a hotel and never met Julien’s paternal grandmother, much less his father. They walked all over the beautiful small city and again it wasn’t the history of the Dukes of Lorraine they pursued, not even the sites sacred to the École de Nancy, the local Art-Nouveau movement propounded by Émile Gallé, Louis Majorelle, Victor Prouvé and the glassmaker Daum. They had almost no time for the Place Stanislas, a public square laid out like a chessboard and one of the most perfect ensembles of buildings from the eighteenth century, nor could they even visit the famous Gothic church of the Cordeliers. No, they had to see all the various apartments Julien’s family owned or had ever owned, the studio here, the two-room on the fourth floor rear there. They had to walk through the big verdant nineteenth-century park with its formal statues to public figures and see the very steps where Julien had kissed his first girlfriend.

“By the way, when did you sleep with your first woman?” Austin asked.

“Girl or woman?”

Unprepared for the distinction, Austin blurted, “Both. Tell me about both.”

“The first girl was Clémence, the one I kissed here.” They both looked up at the step leading to the fountain as though they might see the scene replayed if they stared hard enough.

“How old were you?”

Julien shrugged, then turned toward Austin, frowning either from the sun or impatience. “Twelve?”

“And the first woman?”

They sat down on the step, as though they’d already forgotten about Clémence. “Her name was Monique and she was our mother’s best friend. Even as a very little boy I admired her intensely. I always had to be near her. I played on her lap. She showed me all of her playing cards, sewing things. We never spoke out loud but whispered in each other’s ear. That was our little game—whispering in each other’s ear. And then when I was fourteen I became friendly with her son Étienne. I was always going over, asking after Étienne, although I guess I hoped I’d find Monique alone. She wore white linen trimmed in red and blue and drove an American station wagon and had an old-fashioned dog, a collie. There was something of the 1940s about her. Inside her house she even had indirect lighting. Well, I finally found her alone and almost immediately I was kissing her and then she was pulling me into her. It was less romantic than it had been with Clémence, maybe because she needed me and knew it. She wasn’t fooling herself. We kept whispering into each other’s ear—it was our only way of communicating.”

If Austin asked for erotic details Julien merely smiled right through him as though he’d just gone both deaf and partially blind. Austin remembered that heterosexual men sometimes had a quaint “gentlemanly” reserve about appearing caddish. They preferred their private pleasures—and the immunity in which to pursue them—to any gross advertisement of their conquests. Of course only a few men had such scruples, but they were precisely those who deemed themselves and one another of the better sort.

“What happened to end it?” Austin asked. They were eating lunch under an awning at the entrance to the Place Stanislas; Austin suspected that Julien both feared and hoped he’d be recognized by a school chum or a relative. A city of just one hundred thousand, Austin
thought, must be unbearably stifling. Back in America he’d wondered why French novelists and poets, decade after decade, had railed against the
bourgeoisie
. Surely the middle class wasn’t all that oppressive, he’d thought, and weren’t the artists themselves from middle-class families? But once he’d moved to France he’d discovered that, first, the word
bourgeoisie
did not refer to the middle class, not in the American sense, but to the very rich, the people who could and might buy their way into the aristocracy, and that this class was much more static and self-satisfied and exclusive than its American counterpart. With his usual vagueness Julien never explained how or why his affair with Monique had come to an end. Probably he’d hurt her and that wasn’t something he’d want to tell another lover, who was also much older and just as vulnerable.