The Married Man (12 page)

“Why can’t I meet your grandmother?” Austin asked.

“No, I don’t want anyone to know we’re here. You don’t understand about French families. It’s all very … complicated.”

As they walked one more time through the center of town, Austin asked, “Has your family been here for long?”

“Centuries. On both sides.”

“Were they merchants?”

Julien frowned. “Many different things. One thing’s certain—I couldn’t join the Knights of Malta; to do that you need to have at least sixteen relatives who are aristocrats.”

Austin thought he should look Julien’s family up in the social register, but he recognized he was too lazy. He was too lazy to pursue any interest, truth be told, and he’d learned to sneer at his American infatuation with titles. As a boy he’d daydreamed endlessly about someday discovering his mother or father was descended from Huguenot nobility, but since his university years he’d sublimated this fantasy into a concrete study of the French families for whom the greatest furniture had been made. He knew that half the current French titles had been invented. “Was your family noble?”

“Minor nobility.
La petite noblesse
. See that church tower over there?” He pointed to a Gothic belfry. “My ancestors paid for it to be built, but the part of the story that always interested me was the architect’s fate. The tower started to settle and—see?—it tilts slightly. It
tilted the first time the bells were rung. The architect committed suicide, though as it turned out the tower has never had another mishap in several centuries.”

On the train back to Paris Austin suddenly became impatient with all the mystery and, after Julien had drunk half a bottle of red wine, decided to clear up at least one thing. He said, “I must know why you’re getting divorced.”

“Christine is so
petit-bourgeois—”

“So you’ve said. But in what way?”

“She was fine in Ethiopia, but once she was sucked back into the gravitational pull of her greedy parents—”

“Greedy? What do you mean by greedy?”

“They were the ones who thought she should be the co-owner of my apartment.”

“What apartment?”

Julien blinked, perhaps for once astonished by his own secretiveness. “Why, do you mean you don’t know that I have an apartment of my own?”

“Where you live with Christine?”

“I don’t live with her anymore. My grandmother bought me my own apartment in Montreuil.”

“Where?”

“It’s a working-class neighborhood; it’s actually an independent community, not part of Paris. They have a famous flea market where they sell a shoe without its mate, old magazines, lighters that don’t work, that sort of thing, though they do have—”

“But Julien, you mean you bought this apartment when you were still happily married and you didn’t want Christine’s name on the—” He didn’t know the French word for
deed
.

Julien withdrew into an offended silence. As their train hurtled along past a village apparently devoid of inhabitants, Austin drew a breath and queried his own vexation. He rather admired his style in defending Christine’s rights when to do so was against his own interests. No, he didn’t
have
an interest, since he would never inherit anything from Julien, nor did he want to. He wanted for nothing, he’d probably be dead in two or three years—or in a year, if he was less
lucky. Yet even if he had been negative and in perfect health, even if he’d been younger than Julien and likely to outlive him, he’d never want to enter into one of those grotesque French family squabbles over an inheritance.

His mind slid away from the painful subject of the future. He had no future, which meant that he couldn’t fully immerse himself in the present. He’d signed a contract to write
the
book on eighteenth-century French furniture, in which six long, heavily illustrated essays were meant to be followed by entries on each of the principal furniture-makers of the period, the
maîtres ébénistes
, though few had worked in ebony. But he couldn’t bring himself to write the book, even though he’d long since spent the sizable advance. He knew that some people were galvanized by the prospect of an imminent AIDS death, but he’d become even lazier and more disorganized than previously. He couldn’t even convince himself that he was the only man for the job; there were at least three other “experts” who were as qualified as he. Nor would such a book sell many copies, since the great French furniture of the eighteenth century was already in museums all over the world and investors needn’t bother with it. Riesener desks could hardly be considered “collectible.”

As a peace offering he pawed Julien’s leg. They sometimes did that: held their fingers pressed together and slightly curved and then touched the other’s leg or body gently, clumsily as a dog might seeking attention. Austin pawed Julien just once, humbly, but Julien broke into a smile, though he refused to look at Austin. Finally Julien voiced in a rush all the things he’d been thinking: “You don’t understand. It was my grandmother’s money. After the way my father pushed our mother to kill herself and now he enjoys her apartment on Belle-Île and the house in Nancy—why should my grandmother give anything to that
garce?”

“Christine? Well, you’re not committing suicide. She’s your wife.”

“But we’re getting divorced. I supported her the whole time she was working on her thesis. We have no children. I owe her nothing.”

“But if you’d put everything fifty-fifty in both your names, maybe you’d still be married.”

“Things don’t work that way in France. In America everything is the married couple, but in France it’s the … dynast.”

“Dynasty?”

“Many wives sign prenuptial agreements renouncing all interest in the husband’s property.”

Suddenly Austin was bored by the discussion. He didn’t want to fill his mind with questions of succession over which he’d have no control. He’d always been generous in love; he still paid Peter’s rent and bought him clothes and sent him a few hundred dollars every month. He couldn’t imagine letting a marriage turn sour over whose names were on a deed. He lost respect for Julien—or rather he told himself never to count on him for anything. Then again, when he made an effort to understand, he conceded that a member of an old French family could hardly be expected to have a devil-may-care attitude to something sacred like property. Aristocrats didn’t usually
earn
money anyway; the most they could do was preserve, hand down and improve property. He suddenly felt that the American entrepreneurial spirit was more manly, “bigger,” as his mother used to say.

A few days after their return to Paris Austin had a chance to see two aristocrats in action. He introduced Julien to Vladimir d’Urbino. Vladimir’s grandmother had lived in a twelve-room apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo that looked down on an immense reservoir in which the Eiffel Tower was reflected at night. It was rent-controlled under a law that had been passed just after the war, and she paid less than the going rate for a studio. The only problem was that she’d died two years earlier, but Vladimir kept her “disappearance” a secret and paid the rent every month with a money order in her name. Most of the time he himself lived in Geneva or in the house he’d built at Évian on Lake Léman.

Vladimir had changed nothing in the Paris apartment. It remained an embalmed specimen of pre-war taste—rickety side tables decorated with sentimental panels of rosy-cheeked shepherds courting pale shepherdesses, frayed beige silk oriental rugs, paintings of Paris street urchins by Bastien-Lepage framed in heavy gilt and suspended on dusty ribbons from the cornice, a
chaise longue
upholstered in blue silk that was soiled and worn at the arms, a white marble fireplace soot
yellowed by a century of updrafts. The apartment smelled of face powder and unemptied garbage.

Vladimir was only thirty but Austin had already known him for more than a decade. They’d met in Venice where Vladimir (the son of a Serbian princess and an Italian baron) was just emerging out of adolescence.

He was tall, well-made, slender, and his green eyes, glowing above his slightly crooked nose, looked out at you with intimacy and impertinence. His lips were a light coral and tipped down at one end, as if they’d been torn when he was a child and skillfully mended, and his tenor voice had a slight nasal quality, which Austin later realized was the true sound of the French nobility.

Three years after Austin met him in Venice, Vladimir was living in New York for sixteen months in order to perfect his English and, more importantly, to frequent Studio 54, since the years were 1978 and ’9 and he was under twenty-five, too handsome and slender to suit New York tastes until he opened his mouth and revealed he was a foreigner, a prince or something, possibly Russian—at which point he could do no wrong. That he liked women and seemed flattered by the attentions of other men doubled his popularity. Austin remembered seeing him once at someone’s house on Washington Mews and a lady beside Austin asked, “Who
is
that young man entering the room like a prince in a Turgenev novel?”

Austin had known Vladimir in Venice, New York and now Paris.

Vladimir and Julien hit it off immediately. They were the same age and they seemed to have the same romantic notions, as though they’d read the same Frederick Uhlman novel about boyhood friendship. They liked the same vulgar jokes about “pussies” and “cocks,” a bawdy taste that alternated with a twilit respect for art, the afterlife and good manners. They liked the same tacky music of the early 1980s, especially the songs of Princess Stephanie, they automatically dismissed any major film from Hollywood as a vulgar crowd-pleaser, and as adolescents they had each kept vague, poetic journals in which they nursed unnamed sorrows. They both went for long walks alone.

It wasn’t a mutual sexual attraction, of that Austin felt certain. Perhaps their peculiar mix of values was so seldom encountered
nowadays that what drew them to each other was the simple reassurance they weren’t alone. They were cultured, rarefied aristocrats but not effeminate; they were sexually ambiguous but by no means about to clarify the mystery they’d created; they could laugh cruelly at what they considered petty, but they weren’t cruel; they were as refined in bawdiness as in their elegiac dreaminess; but only they knew exactly where to put the accent according to a private scansion they alone could hear or work out. Of course they didn’t discover this complexity, even congruity, right away, but by the end of their first encounter Julien was almost completely under Vladimir’s spell. Julien had been impressed right away by Vladimir’s mixture of elaborate attentiveness and a certain breeziness.
Arrivistes
, Julien said, could be mannerly and servile or brisk and rude; only a
gentleman
(he used the English word) knew how to indicate he was conceding none of his proud independence by showering his guests with constant acts of kindness.

Nothing much happened during that first meeting on the Avenue Victor Hugo beyond Vladimir’s lengthy (really
too
lengthy) explanations about his current career impasse. Austin didn’t pay much attention and he was certain that Julien was too busy absorbing everything from the oddly pastoral view of the Eiffel Tower beyond the reservoir to the sheen on Vladimir’s old, hand-made shoes to listen to what he was actually saying. Not that Julien would have objected to Vladimir’s self-absorption.

As they were leaving Vladimir’s, Austin said, “You know, I should introduce Joséphine to Vladimir. They’d make a beautiful couple.”

“Joséphine? Why her? She’s terribly common.”

“But she’s not at all. I once introduced her at the Opéra Comique as the Princess Radziwill and everyone believed the imposture.”

“No one,
mon pauvre petit
, who was an aristocrat himself would believe she was anything other than what she is, the daughter of schoolteachers. Anyway, family background is absurdly unimportant in itself, but Joséphine … she’s sweet. But she’s not exactly the most stimulating conversationalist. Nor is she so beautiful. She has that strong jaw and those wide, paranoid eyes.”

“If people talk about her the way you do,” Austin said, vexed, “she
has good reason to be paranoid. I think she’s beautiful, kind and entirely natural.”

The next afternoon Austin called Joséphine. They talked for a while about their friends. Then Austin said, “I think I’ve found someone perfect for you. He’s an Italian aristocrat but he speaks French as well as you do, and you’re from Tours. He’s only a year or two older than you, tall, slender, funny when he’s not going on and on about his investments. Then he can be rather decorously dull. Why don’t you come to Geneva with us at the end of the month and meet him?”

“Is he gay?” Joséphine asked.

“Of course not. I
said
he was dull.” They laughed and Austin went on. “I met him ten years ago when he was just a boy and he was already in love with Diana, a Venetian woman I know who heads up a foundation, and then I knew him in New York where—no, he’s definitely not gay.”

“You have the worst gaydar,” Joséphine said, using the new word from America she’d already learned from Gregg. It meant “gay radar.” She pronounced it “guy-dah.” She said, brightly, “The odd thing is that Gregg will be in Geneva that same weekend. He has a Spanish boyfriend, José, who’s teaching aerobics there.”

Austin phoned Vladimir in Geneva, who seemed happy to receive them all, but Austin insisted they’d be staying at a hotel, where he’d already made a reservation. Austin said, “My friend Julien was delighted to meet you. I don’t think he’s responded so enthusiastically to any of my other friends. He found you so—do you know the word
dashing
in English?”

“Darling?”

“That, too,” Austin laughed. “Yes, you are darling. Now, listen, I’m coming with a beautiful blond girl from Tours, she lives in Paris, her name is Joséphine….”

“I’ll be delighted to encounter any of your friends, darling Austin,” Vladimir said in English. Austin wasn’t sure that Vladimir had registered she was coming in order to meet him, or that Austin was offering her as a serious candidate for his hand.