The Married Man (13 page)

No matter. Better he should think it was his own idea. And given his present financial difficulties, perhaps he couldn’t afford to choose a beautiful, appealing but poor woman for love alone.

They took the train from Paris to Geneva where a festival, “Say It With Flowers,” had festooned every balcony and doorway and bus shelter with roses and attracted thousands of people to a city which otherwise struck them as an empty, dead expanse of banks—in fact, the flowers, already beginning to rot, seemed like arrangements piled high on up-ended coffins. Holidaymakers, quiet and strangely unexcited, were gliding tranquilly in boats across the lake, as though they were painted in a canvas by Böcklin, Hitler’s favorite painter. “The Isle of the Dead,” wasn’t that the name of that foggy, kitschy work?

After their lunch in a restaurant in the city center, Joséphine said she was very impressed by Vladimir. But she said, “Are you
positive
he’s not gay? He’s so refined, so charming, even elegantly dull.”

“Dull!” Julien thundered. Then he twisted his mouth to one side sarcastically, “I suppose you
would
find him dull….”

“I don’t
know
him, Julien,” Joséphine wailed. “I was only repeating what Austin said. Why do you attack everything I say?”

“I’m surprised, that’s all, that you find one of the most refined men in Europe to be
dull.”

“Anyway,” Joséphine said, confused, “I like him. It was Austin who said he’s dull. I like him very much….”

They had dinner that night at an Alsatian restaurant. Joséphine invited Gregg (and José if he was free) to drop by the restaurant around nine-thirty or ten for dessert. During the meal Joséphine felt slightly nauseous from the smell of the cooking sauerkraut and of the canned Sterno heat under their platter of meat and sauerkraut. Vladimir showed her such consideration in ordering the food to be whisked away (which Austin was sad to see disappear before thoroughly consumed) that soon Julien was also imitating his courtliness. “Yes, yes,” he said, “Alsatian food is much too heavy for this season. Anyway, as Byron said, a woman should never eat anything in public but lobster and champagne.”

“Really?”
Joséphine asked, astonished.

“He meant a lady,” Julien said, lapsing back into rudeness.

“Then he must have had you in mind,” Vladimir added, smiling at her with his gentle, teasing smile. Soon Julien and Vladimir were competing to shower Joséphine with the choicest compliments,
attentions which only made her more suspicious and paranoid than usual.

At that point Gregg and José came wheeling up on bicycles. They were wearing sweatshirts with stretched-out neck-holes and cut-off sleeves over flimsy, shiny basketball T-shirts. They were in black Lycra biking pants molded to their powerful thighs and wore fluorescent green bracelets and anklets. They had on baseball hats turned backwards, the bills curving down over their tanned, sweaty necks. Gregg displayed his usual, shoulder-rolling, gum-chewing arrogance; his eyes were hooded and a satirical smile was playing over his beautifully carved mouth. José was much shorter, darker, younger and stared out at the world through two huge black eyes like bullet holes singed into his face under a shiny cloche of black hair. They didn’t touch each other, Gregg and José; they didn’t even look at each other; but they shifted their weight from foot to foot almost in rhythm, unconsciously echoing and accommodating each other’s movements as though they were colts in the same herd.

Vladimir had turned pale. He said, with an intensity focused on Joséphine, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve taken some sort of malaise and I must be up by seven tomorrow morning.” He stood, took her hand and said, “Julien will tell us we’re not supposed to kiss a lady’s hand in public, but maybe he—and
you!
—will forgive me if I take this precious liberty.” He even brushed her hand with his lips, which wasn’t done, and waved vaguely at the others and stumbled off into the night.

Jose whispered something to Gregg, who then burst out laughing.

“What? What is it?” Joséphine demanded, fairly spooked by now.

“You guys crack me up,” Gregg said.

“How?” Austin asked.

“Well,” Gregg continued, sitting down, shaking his head, thrusting his gym shoes out into the aisle so that the white-aproned, black-vested waiters had to step over them, “well, José says that your friend is a little crazy.”

“Fou comment?”
Julien asked, already offended. “Crazy in what way?”

Gregg laughed and literally slapped his knee. “What’s his name?
Vladimir d’Urbino? The count of Urbino? Well, José knows him very well—”

“You
do?”
Joséphine asked.

“Yes,” José said, “he paid me to sleep with him.”

“Sleep!” Gregg snorted. “Is that the word you’re searching for? You told me you had to pee on him. He’d sit in the bathtub and—”

“No details!” Joséphine said. Then she turned to Austin, “So
this
is your famous heterosexual fiancé you hand-picked for me!”

Julien was so irritated with everyone that he stormed off alone and walked half the night before he came back to the hotel silent, cold and grim. Austin pretended to be asleep.

A week later, back in Paris, Julien arrived late at a dinner party. When he’d come in, Julien had whispered to Austin, “It’s done. I’m divorced.”

“What!”

“I had to spend the whole afternoon at court. In six months it will be finalized. We don’t even need to go back there.”

“Where is it?” Austin asked with wild irrelevance.

“The Île de la Cité. Everyone gets divorced there. It was very easy. Christine and I had worked everything out in advance. I paid the court costs.”

“Did you go out with her afterwards for a drink?”

“A drink? No. Why?”

“Do you feel all right? Should we just slip away now?”

“I would never do that to Henry. He organized everything, didn’t he?”

“As you wish….”

Their murmured exchange had already attracted curious glances and smiles of complicity; Julien broke away and made his rounds. He refused to kiss the proffered cheeks and merely shook hands. He looked startled, even a bit hunted, when Henry patted the empty space on the couch beside him. Austin couldn’t help noticing the contrast between all of these sleek, rested, satisfied middle-aged men and this exhausted young man in his creased green linen blazer, with his oily, inflamed forehead and his dark, sunken eyes.

A bald man in his seventies named Bébé drew Julien down beside him. For an instant Julien, smiling out of embarrassment, half-resisted, but Bébé was stronger than he, at least for the moment, and Julien, clowning, made a big show of losing his balance and falling onto the couch.

“Hmnn,” Bébé said, “so here’s the married man. And do you really like to travel both by sail and steam?”
(à voile et à vapeur)
, which was the French way of referring to bisexuality.

Austin said, “He just got divorced. In six months it will be final.”

“Oh, Austin,” Bébé exclaimed, “what a heavy responsibility for you! What’s the English expression:
home-wrecker?”

“Except we don’t say that to our friends,” Austin reminded him, smiling.

“And does your wife know she’s been abandoned for a
man?”
Bébé had no eyebrows to arch, but his voice performed the job nicely for him.

“Very warm day today, isn’t it?” Julien said drolly.

“Very?—Oh, you sly devil!
Quel diable malicieux
. No, that’s not fair. We want the full story: Was your wife
au courant
about your steam side?”

“She’s a very sophisticated woman.”

Austin could see Julien was becoming cross and hastened to add, “Christine and I know each other and like each other. She’s a fine writer and ethnologist.”

“Ethnologue!”
Bébé chortled. “And have we queers become
une ethnie
now?
Une tribu?”

“It’s true,” Horace, an old poet, interjected, slurring his speech, “we do wear rings through our nipples now—”

“And eyebrows!” Henry called out.

“And foreskins!” Bébé added. “Why are they called ‘Prince Albert,’ Austin? Is that why Queen Victoria mourned the prince’s memory for decades?” Bebe narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips flirtatiously, as he leaned toward Austin. Then he swiveled back and returned his attention to Julien. “Do
you
have such a ring in your foreskin?”

“Very
hot today,” Austin interjected. Everyone laughed uncomfortably.

By the time they’d all adjourned to the bistro on the corner Julien had retreated into a stormy silence, which no one but Austin noticed, but during their walk home to the Île Saint-Louis the silence was maintained. They walked through the Place Dauphine, where a few stragglers were still seated at outdoor tables sipping their coffee while their tired-looking waiters glowered at them, wishing them away.

“That’s where I was this afternoon,” Julien said in a small voice, sketching a feeble gesture in the direction of the massive, white, late-nineteenth-century Palais de Justice, which formed an ugly side to this otherwise sober triangle of residences and awninged cafés.

“Was it very depressing?” Austin asked.

“Depressing? No. Why? No, the only depressing thing was that I had to pay the court costs.”

“But no alimony? No settlement? The apartment still belongs to you?”

“Of course! Why do I owe her anything? I supported her for many years while she worked on her thesis. She was so lazy. I was the one who made her work. I drove her to work—but I’ll never do that again. I think I damaged our marriage. That’s why I never get after you to write
your
furniture encyclopedia. But—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Austin was touched that Julien had made such an easy link between him and Christine, even if it was to scold him. That must mean Julien thought he’d exchanged Christine for Austin. Between two men, Austin believed, no union could ever be a matter of course. Everything had to be invented, reimagined—unless one of those two men had Julien’s sort of background and confidence. Julien wasn’t harried by the homosexual’s lurking fear of offending society, of being denounced or mocked or excluded or ever so gently chided—or, worse, “pitied” by well-meaning Christians who’d decided to love the sinner while castigating the sin. Or, still worse, “accepted” by liberals on a politically correct field trip in search of new, previously overlooked minorities. Only in upper-class French life had Austin found the exact shade of inclusion he had craved for. Maybe it was natural in a society where a king had been surrounded by cute boys, his
mignons
,
and in which the brother of Louis XIV,
“Monsieur,”
had maintained an all-male shadow court. Or maybe acceptance was characteristic of a class that made a shared randiness—which was rigorously sealed off from all outsiders—a sign of its coherence and exclusivity. Whenever Austin had to go out to dinner with a
Vogue
or
Architectural Digest
editor from the States, he had to remember to censor his dirty stories and suppress the casual sexual banter he was accustomed to, though the same talk had long been his passport into the exalted circles of France that these very Americans craved to crash. Or thought they did. The bawdy tone of French aristocrats would undoubtedly have shocked them.

Julien believed he shared nothing with other gay men. In fact he rejected all group identity—as an architect, as a Frenchman, even as a minor aristocrat. His independence of spirit, however, was something Austin ascribed to his status as a privileged French man. Julien was a romantic individualist, whereas Austin was an amateur sociologist. Julien thought he’d invented himself, whereas Austin saw him as simply an unusual recombination of herd traits.

Austin gave Julien a glass of red wine once they were back at the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. He rubbed Julien’s shoulders; though he disliked them for being hairy, he loved this man. Austin was convinced that his own squeamishness about hairy shoulders was something puritanical and body-hating that persisted in him. The randy, big-hearted, life-embracing men he admired in books and movies would have kissed every follicle, tongued every black pore; only a stinting
petite nature
like his own would object to this sign that the beloved wasn’t an eternal boy.

The night was cool, even foggy on their island, and Austin held Julien in his arms. He could feel Julien’s heart beating in his chest and when he stroked his face in the dark there was the nail-file rasp of his beard and there, shockingly, the hot slipperiness of his mouth (he was sucking Austin’s little finger). The pulse in the long, lean neck, the intermittent warm streams of breath on Austin’s left shoulder, the moth-like brush of his fluttering eyelids—here was this vulnerable life in his hands, as mysterious as was his own. Austin strove to like himself, but the very familiarity of his habits of mind, the perfect
attendance pin his eternal physical presence had won, revolted him or, worse, bored him so much he was repelled.

In spite of himself Austin farted, whispered,
“Pardon,”
and Julien murmured drowsily, “Petit…” with a thoroughly indulgent tone of reproach. Later, they both seemed to wake up. Their embrace turned sexual.

I
n August Austin rented an apartment in Venice, one that was so many stories high that even though it was on the Grand Canal it was relatively quiet. Julien had never been to Venice, but he said he was sure it would be
“majestueux,”
and he was delighted to be going, if only for a week.

Although Austin and Julien spent almost every night together, they hadn’t said, “I love you,” nor talked about their future. All along Austin had felt he couldn’t exact (or express) any promises until Julien’s divorce had gone through. Perhaps if he’d been more insecure, or more desperately in love, Austin would have demanded reassurances.

Austin had accepted a position teaching the history of European furniture at the New England School of Fine Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, a job that was due to begin next January, just five months off, but he hadn’t asked Julien yet to accompany him to the States, even though Julien knew Austin was leaving Paris. Julien’s English was very approximate. Would he want to trade in his sure-fire job with a big Paris architectural firm for something vague in Boston or Providence? Would he need a work permit? A visa? And what about Julien’s HIV status? What if he turned out to be positive? Weren’t people who were known to be positive denied entry to the United States?