The Married Man (18 page)

“No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Can’t you tell me what the problem is?”

“What is your relationship to the gentleman?”

“Friend.”

“No, in that case no.”

“Should I just wait here, then?”

“That’s entirely up to you.”

“Could you be so kind as to come back eventually, I mean after everything’s been decided, and tell me what to expect?”

The man, who refused to return Austin’s social smiles and seemed impervious to Austin’s charm or even his quandary, looked at him coolly and said in French, “We’ll see.”

“Merci infiniment,”
Austin said. It seemed grotesque that two Americans
in America were speaking French to each other. Did he think that Austin was really French? Was he, this official? Why wasn’t he wearing a uniform? He looked like an Interpol agent.

Reluctantly, Meg looked at her watch after an hour and said, “I’ve got to get home eventually and prepare dinner for my husband and kid. Dick … you remember Dick? He took the day off to look after the baby, but he’s hopeless in the kitchen. Unless you need me?” Here she patted his arm in a psychiatric way, at once reassuring and distant. Austin felt sorry for her; she’d wanted to do a favor for the man who’d lived with her brother so many years. He knew that all the sisters had grown closer since they’d found out Peter had AIDS. Perhaps Meg had planned to discuss Peter’s health with him. She was barely thirty and she already had to accept the imminent death of her only brother, the only boy of the five children, this strangely unsuccessful, unmotivated, Europeanized problem in an otherwise hardworking American family (Meg was an award-winning kindergarten teacher with her own weekly educational television show in the Boston area; Alice had taken over her grandparents’ pharmacy; Ellen banded migrating birds in a Tidewater reserve; Toni was a Chicago fabric wholesaler …)

But Meg’s kindness, even her clearly indicated American “concern” in the way she knitted her unlined, silken brow to suggest how she felt for him, irritated Austin; irrationally he blamed her for “America’s” rejection of his lover. Austin’s heart was pounding, he’d soaked his way through his shirt and he was caught up in alternating gusts of frenzy and lassitude. He’d start to gossip in a chummy way with Meg, then suddenly erupt in a panic over what was happening. “What do you think it could be?”

“Maybe there’s something funny about his passport?”

“That’s it!” Austin exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “Ethiopia! He lived in Ethiopia and these Boston goons are going bananas over the stamps—a spy! A bomb! Communism!” But then Austin immediately regretted what he’d just said; what if Interpol had highly sensitive directional microphones picking up everything he was saying? For their benefit he added, just in case, “Of course I’m joking. It must be something else.”

At last Meg left. Austin was secretly relieved, because he feared that if and when Julien came out he’d be too shaken to make polite conversation with a stranger in English. Nor would he like to find Austin smiling and nodding while he, Julien, had been so anxious. More than once Julien had accused Austin of being more concerned about pleasing a stranger than loyally helping a friend—or his lover.

Eventually the sign on the big board announcing the arrival of their plane was effaced. A popcorn machine somewhere (he couldn’t see it) filled the warmed air with its distinctive movie-theater smell. A family of redheads, speaking with penetrating
R
-less Boston accents, was standing next to him. They looked as though they’d been dressed by Goodwill: the mother wore a dirty gray parka with a hood lined in orange quilting. Her black stretch trousers were covered with cat hairs and her black boots had been bleached in patches by snow-melting salt. Her hair was flattened on the side where she must have slept. The older boy, dressed in a shirt stiff with dried orange juice, was coolly dribbling an imaginary basketball and, when their mother wasn’t looking, quickly socking his little brother in the ribs. The little boy would start wailing each time. His face was filthy from crying and from rubbing snot over it. “Jason!” the mother shouted. Outside, through the plate-glass windows, he could see that night was falling rapidly. Car lights were pivoting as they turned through the thickening darkness and shone on the slushy road.

After two hours went by the same balding man came up to Austin and said in French, “He’s being sent back on the next plane to Paris at his expense. You can talk to him for ten minutes. Come with me.” The man led him and his luggage cart not through the baggage and Immigration section but by a back corridor; they had to stop three times while the man tapped a code into a lock and swiped his badge through a magnetic-band detector. At last they arrived at a higher floor and a hallway of plain metal doors and curtained windows. It seemed deserted. The only smell was of Lysol. A uniformed soldier armed with a rifle was stationed outside one door. The balding man unlocked the door and let Austin in. “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said.

“What a warm welcome America has extended,” Austin said. Julien looked smaller and dirtier, his beard growing in quickly. They held
hands for a moment but Julien, looking around nervously for a concealed camera, drew away.

“What went wrong?” Austin asked.

“Our stupid lawyer didn’t tell us that if you apply for a professional visa you can’t come in on a tourist visa while you’re waiting for it to come through. You really should demand your money back from that madwoman. You like people like that, you think they’re funny, but look at the mess she’s gotten us into. When I was going through the line they typed in my name and saw I’d applied for a professional visa. Thanks to your advice I was all dressed up as if for a job interview with my entire portfolio under my arm. If I’d had on shorts and a Hawaiian shirt they probably would have waved me through.”

“When do you go back?”

“On the very next plane. Which we have to pay for. It’s the same plane we arrived on. It won’t be ready till tonight.”

“Can you pay with your credit card?” Austin had made him a partner on his American Express account.

“They’ll accept the return ticket I already had.”

“Petit
, don’t worry,” Austin said. “I’ll call my landlady and get my apartment back for a few days and I’ll fly back to Paris in a day or two. I’ll call the president of the college here and get him to put pressure on our senator to hurry up your visa. Here, take this money.” He gave him the two thousand francs he still had in his wallet. “Was that man difficult?”

“He made me speak in English for hours and then only at the end did he say something in perfect French. I think maybe he
is
French. The bastard….”

“Where will you go in Paris?”

“I’ll stay with Christine,” Julien said.

Of course he had no choice, since he’d already sublet his apartment, but the words crossed Austin’s mind,
I’ll lose him to his wife
. He knew she had only a double bed and her couch wasn’t long enough or stable enough to sleep on. In another week Julien would be learning his HIV test results. He’d given up his job, his wife, his apartment, his country and his language—maybe even his life—to follow Austin, but it hadn’t worked out. “I’ll call Christine to tell her you’re on your way. She should be there tomorrow morning when you arrive.”

“Tomorrow?—Oh. I’m so tired. Anyway, I have my own key.”

“You do? To her apartment?”

“It was also
my
apartment. She never changed the locks. Why should she?”

The man came to the door. Austin stood up. “I’ll call you tomorrow when you’re back in Paris.”

He had to load up his nine duffel bags in a taxi. Night had fallen, even though it was only four-thirty in the afternoon. The driver was a turbaned Sikh. Austin sat huddled in a corner of the back seat, hating the Sikh and his loud voice as he shouted in his language into a radio phone. He sounded furious but from time to time, amazingly, he laughed, so apparently it was a pleasant conversation he was having with another Sikh. Austin tried to imagine the dog’s dinner of dirty hair under the pomegranate-colored turban—they never cut their hair, did they? And how the hell did
he
get into the U.S. of A. with his dog’s dinner hairdo and gold teeth, shouting away in his own language, when a well-dressed, well-behaved French architect was kept under armed guard and sent home over a technicality? They should never have applied for a professional visa. During all his years in France Austin had been a tourist.

They were traveling on the very dark, forest-lined highway toward Providence at just fifty-five miles an hour, which seemed unbearably slow compared to French speeds. Luckily the Sikh’s telephone signal had faded. Austin told him the story. The driver said, “Yes, Immigration is a bother. But don’t lose faith.”

“How did you get in?”

“My wife is American.”

“How did you meet her? Was she a tourist in India?” Austin imagined a blond hippy.

“It was an arranged marriage. She’s Sikh, too.”

The highway, which had been dug ten feet lower than the surrounding town, wound gently through the outskirts of Providence. All the houses were of wood and looked huge. Despite their size they had almost no space between them, though he could scarcely see anything, so dimly lit were the streets. Here it was, just five or six in the evening and the streets were deserted. It was much colder than in Paris. The streets had been cleared of snow, which was piled high in
banks on the sidewalks. Now they’d turned off the highway and the driver was looking for someone he could ask directions from. But there was no one around. Presumably this was the downtown, but half the stores were boarded up. They went all around a three-block-long esplanade between unlit government buildings—Austin had forgotten Providence was the state capital. Someone had said Rhode Island was one of the poorest states in the union, but then again
Time
had ranked Providence as among the ten most livable cities in the country. The thought made Austin laugh ghoulishly. Finally they spotted a brightly lit chrome diner, or rather it was a take-out truck; several white teenagers were standing in front of it, blowing on their hands and stamping their feet against the cold. “We’ll ask them,” Austin said, but in a moment the car was surrounded by the kids, who were pounding on the roof.

“Lock the doors,” the driver said.

“Go home, Towel Head.” The Ayatollah had recently aroused American ire, Austin had read in the
Herald-Tribune
. When they drove off, the teens shouted, “Faggots!”

“Very nasty,” the driver said.

At last a filling-station operator gave them directions and they arrived at the proper address. The house belonged to the Professor of Aesthetics at the college; he and his wife were on a sabbatical in Italy. Austin’s key worked. The Sikh helped him with the duffel bags. Austin paid him and he left. “Cheerio,” he said. “Best of very good luck with your friend.”

The aesthetics professor had left a long list of instructions on the dining-room table. It would be necessary to feed the green leather couch, but not the brown cloth one, with “hide food” once a week. All the flowers in the kitchen and the green plants in the “sitting room” were plastic, so they required no care, although Mrs. Professor had mixed in some real moss with the fake tiger lilies in the big brass bowl in the “sewing room,” so would he mind terribly “moistening it from time to time—if it comes to mind?” There were very worrying paragraphs about what to do in case the water system flooded—all sorts of green-marked levers and two red ones to turn counterclockwise in closets on different floors. The tub in the bathroom above the entrance
hall must not be filled more than halfway, since the water that slopped over into the safety drain went directly into the crawl space above the “balloon-suspended” ceiling (classified by the historical society) and would fissure it if it accumulated and would flood the parquet and the oriental carpet below—and to “refloat” the ceiling would cost “thousands, if it could be done at all.” There were fifty-two channels available on the three television sets and a closetful of classic films (“everything from Dreyer’s
Joan of Arc
to
Rashomon”)
.

Austin stood in the dim house. His body was convulsed with sobs, which drove him from room to room like spurs dug into his ribs. “What arrogance,” he said. “I thought I could live anywhere. I built my perfect little life in Paris and I threw it all away to come to this shit hole.” He found the heat and turned it up to seventy, though the instructions warned that to “maintain the house above sixty could run into the hundreds! Wear a sweater. The English do.”

“Pauvre Petit,”
he said, staring at his own drawn face and red eyes in the downstairs bathroom mirror. He didn’t know whether the
“Petit”
was Julien or him. “The arrogance,” he wailed. “The sheer arrogance.”

He went out to the garage, unlocked the door and rolled it back, for the first time saw his four-year-old Volkswagen Sirocco (rather ominously, someone had told him it wasn’t being manufactured anymore). He figured out how to make it work and drove it to the supermarket, following the professor’s map. He thought, “I must get some food or I’ll go hungry. There probably aren’t any restaurants open after sundown.” He half-imagined that the homeboys were turned loose after the sun set. He rolled his cart up and down the aisles, looking at the cellophaned meat and pallid vegetables and the cans of “chunky” soup and loaves of packaged “whole-grain” bread and he wept when he thought he’d given up his butcher with his pot of rabbit in mustard sauce and his
Veau Orloff, the
pastry shop with the
croissants au beurre
and the greengrocer with his five kinds of mushrooms and the fishmonger with his smoked mackerel for salads; he could hear mentally the way one would call out cheerily,
“Bonsoir, messieurs-dames,”
on entering a shop, even though it was vulgar to do so. Now he was approaching the checkout girl who, he could see on drawing closer, had set tiny brilliants in her fingernails and painted swirling white
lines radiating out from each gem through the purple gloss. He looked at her narrow, pimply face under a tumbleweed of sprayed hair, stared at her nails again and burst into sobs. The girl looked right through him and said something to the boy who was “bagging.” In France one bagged one’s own groceries; Austin was slightly scandalized by this babying service.