The Married Man (16 page)

“Don’t worry, Austin, Little Julien will come back to you. You used to be his lover and he cheated on you. Now he’s Marius’s lover and he’ll cheat on him with you. Don’t forget I slept with Marius that one time six years ago when I was dazzled by his mansion and servants and paintings, but he’s not a nice guy and he’s got a minuscule dick, really tiny.”

“Well, mine’s no great shakes….”

“Compared to Marius you’re a sex machine.”

Peter’s comments had soon raised a rather different doubt in Austin. He thought that as long as he’d been courting Julien, his gaze had been turned inward toward the thrilling, unfamiliar machinery of all
these new sexual experiments. But now that they’d become more romantic, which Austin considered far more intimate and exciting, Julien might just be stifling a yawn. Or he might suddenly have become unpleasantly aware of the furry, sagging, graying body beside him.

That night in bed Austin couldn’t sleep. He got up and sat naked in the window and looked down at the commotion on the Grand Canal, boats traversing streaks of light like water insects trampolining the surface tension. He wondered if he was so superficial, even now, as he was approaching fifty (as he was approaching death!), that he didn’t know what he really wanted. Little Julien had been confused when they were together; he was still dating girls or at least flirting with them and saying he wanted to get married. Now he was living happily—or at least openly—with Marius; of course when Marius traveled to India or Egypt he always invited along two or three women, possibly as a cover.

Big Julien was different—less self-sufficient, more vulnerable. He was suffering over his divorce and a decade ago he’d been cruelly disoriented by his mother’s suicide. The divorce was bringing back all that old pain. Maybe Julien associated women with pain now. He was grateful to Austin for cooking him dinner, listening to the long, maniacally detailed stories of his past, laughing at his jokes, even if his humor was more malice and Rabelaisian excess than wit. Considering he was more a practicing bisexual than Little Julien, whose attraction to women seemed mainly theoretical, Big Julien was much less confused. He knew what he wanted: Austin. He loved Austin and called him
mon chou
and
petit
and said he was the leading expert on French furniture. If Austin mentioned that he didn’t have a doctorate and that his reputation in America was shaky, Big Julien would set his jaw and become angry on his behalf. “What do these Americans want? They know nothing. We French are in awe of your expertise—you must be given the Légion d’Honneur! Get Henry to recommend you; he knows Élie de Rothschild, who’s an officer. It’s only a matter of time. Those Americans should get down on their knees before you, kiss your feet with gratitude….”

Most important, Big Julien had said he’d take care of Austin if
ever he became ill.
When
he became ill, rather, since no one escaped AIDS, it seemed. Austin mustn’t entertain false hopes. He must train himself to accept the inevitable. Big Julien would be a devoted nurse, he was sure, as long as it took, although he’d certainly be tyrannical as well, fussy about schedules and expenses and critical of every doctor. Austin hoped his position in Rhode Island would become permanent, even tenured; he needed the health insurance. He had to be cool-headed and prudent, although his first instinct was to kill himself, quickly, cleanly. Austin had always taken care of other people, his alcoholic father and Peter, all his young friends in Paris; he couldn’t bear the prospect of depending on someone else. And for what? To grow old overnight, turn into a precocious skeleton, lose his strength, sight, mind?

After their five extra days alone, Austin put Peter on his plane to Milan and New York, then boarded the Cisalpine Express that ran through Switzerland on the way to France. He felt more and more invigorated after Chur as they ascended the snow-covered mountains and the air became thin and cold. He dismissed Peter’s warnings about Big Julien; they were too transparently self-serving. Julien wouldn’t reject him; Austin had become his sidekick, his only friend. Maybe he’d also become something like Julien’s mother, but that wasn’t something you could say. Not to anyone.

B
y the middle of December everything had been decided. The six-month wait for Julien’s and Christine’s divorce to be finalized had flowed smoothly by and she even invited Austin and Julien over to a nearly inedible dinner on December fifteenth, not exactly to celebrate but at least to solemnize the occasion. A month earlier Austin had put her in touch with a Paris-based Brazilian-born cinematographer who had obtained for her a small
bourse
from the National Center for Scientific Research, which would enable her to go with him, Carlito, to Ethiopia to make a half-hour film about the Italian soldiers who’d stayed behind in Abyssinia. Austin enjoyed helping her, as if his assistance would stave off the day when she’d denounce him for destroying her marriage.

Christine had met in Paris an Italian restaurateur from Calabria. Her second-best language, as she’d said, was Italian, since she’d lived in Rome from the age of ten to sixteen; even more important, she added, she preferred being an Italian and couldn’t help remembering that Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood. Well, she wanted to be constantly in a good mood. She liked drinking and laughing loud and dancing all night. She liked running her hands through her thick hennaed hair and wearing a top cut so high it
revealed her slightly pudgy stomach and the gold chain she wore around it like a tummy anklet. She said she knew it was “naff” and she didn’t care. He was short, her Italian, Angelo, just her height, but he had deep-set dark eyes that were ever so slightly crossed, which made him look mysterious, and his face was so unusual that he resembled three entirely different men depending on which angle you looked at him from. He used orange-water to wash his face every night, and the smell made her feel calm, since when she was a child her mother had always given her
fleur d’oranger
tea at bedtime.

“I went to Calabria with Angelo and stayed on this ghastly little farm with his mother.”

“How did you get along with her?” Julien asked.

“She treated me exactly as one of her own children: like shit.”

Julien laughed a long time.

“I’m going to have Angelo’s baby,” Christine said.

“Congratulations,” Austin and Julien chimed in almost together.

“If it’s a girl I’ll call her Allegra.”

“My favorite name for a girl,” Austin said truthfully, though the name had a sad association—Byron’s daughter, who’d died young.

For a moment Austin felt old and sterile next to this ripe young woman. He wondered if she thought that, too; that this gay couple at her table were stiff and bachelorish, sapless. He wondered whether Julien was regretting losing her. Julien, however, appeared sincerely happy, but mildly so, as though he was no longer magnetized to her fate. The only question he asked was, “When is the little girl’s birth expected?”

“The little girl!
La Petite?”
Christine exclaimed, delighted, scandalized. “How typically male to assume it will be a girl….” Her laugh died away and she said in her firm, emphatic way, “June. She’s due in June.” Christine spoke with all the pedantic clarity of a reformed stammerer, not just now, but all the time. Austin thought she’d make a very bad actress; she’d sound as though she was reading her lines with great deliberation, off a teleprompter.

“Are you sure Angelo is the father?” Julien asked.

“A hundred percent sure.”

The walk back from the Bastille, where Christine was living, to the
Île Saint-Louis was barely ten minutes long. Austin said, “When I think of all the beautiful women in Paris like Joséphine who can’t find a man, I’m stunned that Christine’s already found her Angelo.”

“She’s always been surrounded by men, even when she’s overweight and pasty-faced and in a foul temper.”

“What’s her secret?”

“She’s very involving. Almost immediately she’s got you sitting front row center watching her personal drama. She knows how to make you feel everything she’s feeling. She’s never coquettish and she’s never self-pitying, the two worst female sins. And she plays her tigress sex card—she’s very passionate and leaves scratch marks on your back. It’s an absurd, corny act, and it works every time.” He said “corny” in English, a word Austin had taught him, though its meaning was as difficult for a foreigner to grasp as
camp
or
nerd
.

Austin looked for signs that Julien wished he’d stayed with her or that he might be the future father of little Allegra, but Julien seemed entirely, almost unconsciously happy with Austin. He didn’t talk about Christine or Allegra.

The next day Julien went alone to his farewell party at the architectural firm. He came back very late, toward three a.m., quite jovially drunk and full of tag-ends of stories. Bizarrely, Julien had never told his co-workers he was married until now, when at last he was getting divorced. He’d shown his new divorce certificate to everyone; one of the secretaries, who’d been courting him for the whole year he’d been there, became retrospectively jealous. Petulant, she left the party early. The draftsman he often worked with late, who was called Christopher McMahon after a Scottish grandfather though he couldn’t speak more than two words of English, seemed relieved to know that Julien was—or had been—a married man. At the party they kept hugging each other, and
le Petit
McMahon, after they’d stained their teeth with Bordeaux, even kissed Julien on the lips more than once, as though he’d just been waiting for evidence of Julien’s heterosexuality in order to make love to him.
Le Petit
McMahon (“Mahk-Mah-OWN” was how it came out) was married, too, of course. When Austin asked if McMahon was handsome, Julien came out with the usual consolation prize, “Not handsome, but he has a certain charm.” Austin was sure that’s what his French friends said about him.

Clumsy with drink, Julien pulled a big flat balloon out of a paper bag. It had been his farewell gift from his office chums. It was an inflatable sex doll, a female one, of course, with red hair (perhaps, after all, he had told them Christine was a redhead or maybe he’d just said he was drawn to them). It wasn’t quite life size and it had a hole for a mouth and big startled eyes painted on (the red hair, too, was painted on). It had another hole, just one, between its legs. Julien held it up, half-inflated, and laughed his big, booming, unfunny laugh. Austin smiled weakly, but he did smile; he’d learned when he was a kid and his father had come back home from a party stumbling, laughing, then shushing himself and trying to tiptoe comically through the darkened corridors though he could scarcely walk—little Austin had learned then to come sleepily to his bedroom door with a big grin, as though joining in with Silly Daddy, though Daddy’s violent way of crashing into things and the sharp oak-cask smell rising off him had been scary. The rule down South was never to be a spoilsport.

Julien had given notice to his firm six weeks earlier; he’d said he was off to New York to serve an apprenticeship with a major architect (he was not yet at liberty to say which one). He and Austin had in fact flown to New York for a lightning visit to see a pair of gay Hungarian architects in their forties who lived in Brooklyn Heights in austere penury and were revered by a handful of other young architects for the highly conceptual designs they’d submitted to international competitions. They were currently building a model that showed how they would turn the ugly nineteenth-century monument to Christopher Columbus in Genoa and its crowded square near the train station into a peaceful pedestrian island with great symbolic significance by installing three towers of different heights (allusions to the three masts of Columbus’s fleet).

Over drinks Austin cut the crudest deal he’d ever concocted. He told the Hungarians, though not in so many words, that he’d write an article on their house in the Heights (virtually their only piece of “realized” work) for
Elle Déco
if they’d fill out a U.S. government form saying they needed to hire Julien in order to enter the big, lucrative architecture contests in Paris; no American would do, since only a French architect would be familiar with the thorny Parisian building codes and could write up the proposal in French. The exchange was as
imaginary as any of their building projects, given that they hadn’t a penny to pay Julien.

The Hungarians looked willing but frightened. They obviously needed the journalistic “exposure” in the States but as intellectuals who’d only recently left a Communist state they were wary of attracting government attention. “But you don’t understand!” Austin cooed with a giant, reassuring grin. “There’s no follow-up in America. Getting in the first time may be a slight problem, but once you’re past Immigration no one ever looks at your documents again. After all, we’re all immigrants over here.” Istvan and Laszlo (now “Steve and Larry” to their forty-something gay neighbors in the Heights) nodded warily. They looked very hungry and when they left the room for a moment Austin whispered in French to Julien not to eat their hors d’oeuvres, since the chunks of Cheddar probably also constituted their dinner.

Julien was applying for a professional visa, a much more delicate affair than a three-month tourist visa, which Europeans could obtain on the plane over if they declared they had no intention of working in the States, had no criminal record, were not pregnant, Communists, homosexual or HIV-positive—and if they could prove they were solvent and had a return ticket. For a foreigner to obtain a professional visa, however, he had to convince a genuine American resident to sign a statement saying he or she would be hiring the foreigner—and that the job could not possibly be performed by an American. The safest career for an immigrating Frenchman was pastry chef, since everyone in official Washington circles apparently believed that no native-born American could make a convincing coffee-flavored
religieuse
.

Julien and Austin had been carefully coached by Austin’s Paris lawyer, a French woman educated at Harvard who handled Americans’ tax problems and their real-estate deals in France. Mathilde had little experience with U.S. immigration matters, however, especially those concerning a French citizen moving to the States.