The Married Man (21 page)

He climbed up onto the bed, still fully clothed and shod, and stretched out and closed his eyes. Austin undid the man’s laces, removed his shoes, then unfastened his belt and inched the tight fly zipper down, afraid to snag it in his underwear. Even though the man, “Herb,” was pretending to have fallen asleep, as if a wand had been waved over him, he still obligingly lifted his pelvis from the mattress so that Austin could slide his trousers off.

Later, they drank a beer together. Herb said he’d just gotten out of prison for writing bad checks and had nothing, no one, and no hope except for a beat-up truck an uncle had given him reluctantly. Austin said he’d pay two hundred bucks if they could drive into the Boston airport together and bring back his trunk. “It weighs a ton—I mean, almost a ton, seriously.”

Herb said, “The load don’t bother me. I’m strong enough. But I don’t know if the truck can make the round trip. If it breaks down we’d be up the crick.”

“Yeah, but what’s the use of having a truck if you can’t make money off it?”

Austin noticed that Herb was unsure of himself, disoriented, fearful, and Austin thought, Prison doesn’t harden men but weakens them, eats away at their confidence.

Herb promised to come back the next day around noon, after Austin’s class. When he’d gone, Austin said out loud, “So, that’s what you’ve come to, Aussie,” which is what his mother had called him. He was left with nothing but the man’s coal-tar smell and a sense of bleakness, as though the world’s wattage had been cut, as though he’d been returned to his American past, but a black-and-white small-screen version of it. He kept feeling he was dreaming a feverish half-dream which took place in the dim, shabby, empty corridors behind the brilliantly lit set.

Herb showed up the next day at the very moment Austin was on
the phone with Julien. Austin realized that sexually he preferred servicing this big fat man who smelled of defeat to dominating Julien, but the comparison became irrelevant, even ridiculous. He
loved
Julien and he could hear in Julien’s voice his pleasure and excitement. “That’s the driver,” Austin said in French, “who’s going with me into Boston to pick up my trunk from U.S. Customs.”

The mention of Customs drove Julien into another diatribe against America, which excited him so much he didn’t ask details about the driver.

“What was that stuff you were talkin’?” Herb asked when Austin had hung up. “Spanish?”

“French.”

“Ooh-lah-lah. But you’re American, right? Canuck?”

“No, just plain old American. Scotch-Irish. Heinz 57 variety. Mutt. No, I just lived in France. For business reasons.”

“Oh.”

Herb was so nervous about his truck and how it would perform on the highway that his thoughts seemed remote from sex. The truck was big, very big, but it could go no faster than forty-five miles an hour. The motor coughed twice, then lurched back into play. Cars that were backed up behind in the slow lane, preparing to turn off, honked at them. “Fuckin’ bastards! Goddamn rich bitches!” Herb shouted. But at last they reached the long metal shed where arriving goods were stored and an official, not even looking at them because he was talking to another Customs officer, stamped Austin’s form. Herb backed the truck up to the loading dock and wrestled the trunk into the back of the truck. Austin noticed the big, burned hole in the wood floor, through which the pavement was visible. On the way back Herb talked rarely, and then only to the truck.

Once they arrived at the house, he relaxed, smiled. Austin made him a ham sandwich while he showered. Then, once again, he pretended to sleep on the high bed, while Austin knelt between his legs. When Austin glanced up his body, his head was entirely blocked out by his immense, swollen belly. They ate and drank beer and Austin gave him the two hundred dollars, which he’d put loose in his pocket so that he wouldn’t have to display a tempting wallet in front of Herb.
They had talked for a while over their beers and the conversation had been bluff but easygoing. Now, however, when Austin paid him, Herb retreated back into sullen servility. Herb would be going off to sleep in his truck, whereas Austin would remain in his big, heated house, presumably awaiting the return of his wife and son. In Herb’s eyes even a family looked like an acquisition beyond his means.

On Thursday night Peter arrived by train from New York and on Friday they drove over to Concord together. Austin was terribly nervous about the meeting with Bob, Henry McVay’s friend. They’d met only once before, in Paris, at one of Henry’s cocktail parties. But there was all the difference in the world between a
soirée
in Paris and the request of a large personal favor in Concord.

The Inn had so many rooms tacked on that Austin, nearly feverish and out of control with anxiety, was worried that Bob wouldn’t find them. He kept hopping up from their table to make another tour of the Inn—up two steps, down one, racing around and around through all these women with their wide hips in black trousers below hand-knit cardigans, their strong jaws and lined faces framed by glossy, pure white pageboy haircuts.

At last Bob cut through the crowd like a tall ship sailing gently into a harbor full of anchored dinghies, and indeed everyone bobbed in his wake, gawking at this elegant country gentleman, so poised, so quietly virile. Austin of course noticed right away that Bob appeared fractionally less effusive than he had been in Paris, as though steeling himself to refuse the favor Austin would ask.

They ordered iced tea although it was cold and windy outside. The waitress served them crusty, steamy chicken potpie. Peter said, “My family lives here in Concord. When I was a kid I’d do grave rubbings and sell them to the tourists. And I’d take them out to Walden Pond.”

They chit-chatted during the meal, as businessmen do, and after the dishes were cleared Austin said, smiling easily, as though it were all a matter of just a detail between gentlemen, “We’re so grateful you’re willing to sign this form for us.”

“Well, what is it exactly?” Bob asked, looking at his watch. He had an appointment with his client.

Austin explained as quickly and as offhandedly as possible that Bob and Phil would need to sign the document (it’s right here!) promising to hire Julien to help them submit plans for major French building competitions.

Bob read through everything, his face suddenly as severe as that of his Puritan preacher forefather, the famous one who’d known Emerson and who’d been photographed by Brady, his body held in place against blurring by scarcely visible metal clamps. Here, in this Inn, which had been reconstructed, rewired, redecorated countless times, Bob’s expression was the only authentic Concord antique, a genuine heirloom. At last he said in a voice that was noticeably softer, “I’d like a Xerox of this.”

“No problem!” Austin shrieked, grabbing the paper out of his hands and racing to the restaurant’s hostess, then, following her directions, running coatless down the street to the copy shop two blocks away. Within ten minutes he was back, red-faced, panting. He was sorry to appear so desperate—that might scare Bob off. In fact, he was convinced Bob was going to refuse, which of course was the prudent thing to do.

But a day later Bob phoned and said, “I don’t really like doing this, since it might jeopardize our business if we’re ever investigated, but Henry asked us to help out and Phil and I are incapable of refusing him anything.”

When Austin called Julien in Paris to tell him the good news, Julien’s voice sounded very small. Austin was sitting upstairs in the Providence house.

“What’s wrong?” Austin asked.

“It’s just that—I talked to the doctor at the Hôpital Saint-Louis today and he wants to redo my tests, but he says they’re not very promising.”

“He thinks you’re positive?”

“Not just positive, but my T-cells are way down, just above one hundred.”

“A thousand, you mean. Normal is one thousand.”

“No,” Julien said, irritated, frightened. “No.”

“But I don’t see—”

“How many do you have? How many T-cells.”

“Seven hundred,” Austin said. “Something like that.”

“I guess you’re lucky. You must be one of the rare lucky ones.”

“My time will come,” Austin said. Austin looked out at an old woman who was walking her dog. She refused to slow up when the dog began sniffing. She dragged him along, angrily, it seemed.

He wanted to ask if the doctor had said how long Julien must have been ill, because suddenly Austin was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. He tried to remember all the times they’d had sex. On perhaps five or six occasions they’d been seriously stoned. Could he have slipped up and touched Julien’s ass with a fingertip which he’d doused in his own precome?

“Well, they need to verify their tests.” He didn’t want to say it would probably all turn out to be a false alarm. He blurted out, “You must be … devastated.”

“No, why?” Julien asked brightly. He had regained his steely poise.

Austin paused, lost in thought, then said, “I wish I could be there with you.” He disliked the sound of his own voice, as if the only problem was sincerity or its convincing simulacrum.

Austin had rented a room in a gay guest house in Montréal, and when they arrived a week later, at the end of January, the neighborhood of two-story turn-of-the-century buildings looked like the dreary outskirts of Milwaukee, not the “fun” city he’d heard so much about. The snow on the sidewalks had melted and refrozen several times until it appeared glazed and dirty and nibbled from within, as if by arctic termites. Julien was repelled by the manager, a short, tattooed, bald Munchkin with a handlebar mustache who smelled of garlic, and by his young, willowy boyfriend, who slumped to hide his height and who constantly feigned amazement because someone must have told him once that his eyes were more attractive when wide with wonder.

“Why do we have to stay here?” Julien asked. Guiltily, Austin realized that he’d always chosen gay hotels, no matter how sordid, out of
a fear that he and his kind would not be welcome elsewhere and a prejudice that with gays he’d be closer to “the action,” even though now the clubs opened only after his bedtime and if he could get past the doorman he’d be shunned by the young clientele. Austin had a lover, a married bisexual who detested most gays, certainly those who lived within the ghetto.

Austin had heard so much about the Gallic “charm” of Montréal that he was shocked to see that it was just one more medium-sized North American city with tall buildings, elevated highways, neon, a rusting port and outlying miles of small, nearly identical houses. Carefully preserved, like the remains of a saint in a crystal coffin at the center of a modern brick church, was the historic district with its narrow streets and antique stores and imposing Hôtel-Dieu. The cathedral, Notre-Dame, had a glowing, starry blue ceiling; it seemed the home of a church entirely devoted to the cult of the Virgin. God the Father was nowhere to be seen and Christ only as a child and then only to picture Mary at work as the Blessed Mother.

Julien had cut his hair penitentially short; he’d also let his beard grow an inch long and the effect was hearty, masculine, in keeping with the swirls of snow that kept
rising
, curiously, through the lamp light, as though snow were steam. He wore a knit, blue-black merchant-marine cap, which he could roll down over his ears when he and Austin went out walking, and fleece-lined gloves which hung straight down from his shoulders as if weighted.

He wanted to see Indians, which made Austin cringe, since he’d already been through all this with French friends in America. He’d taken them to a housing development near Albuquerque and cruised slowly past the shoddy bungalows. They’d caught a glimpse of a paunchy middle-aged man in jeans and T-shirt and had seen some kids coming out of school laughing and shoving each other. One of the French tourists had turned big sad eyes, confused, toward Austin, sprouted two fingers behind his head like feathers and made a slow, mournful war whoop with the other hand fluttering over his silent mouth. Austin, unsmilingly, had shaken his head firmly.
“Non?”
the disappointed tourist had asked.

“Non,”
Austin had said.

Today it was the same story, although on the “reservation,” a colorless suburb, someone at the filling station directed them to a small factory where Indians were making snowshoes
(raquettes)
. The wet, varnished wood, careening past on an assembly line, rose up into a windowless loft where the shoes were unloaded and left to cure. An old guy, who had one blind eye that had turned blue, showed them around; Julien was elaborately polite to him, as if to make up for centuries of oppression and to mark the difference between a liberal Frenchman and racist North Americans. Everything smelled of turpentine.

The following weekend Julien was waiting for Austin at the airport. “I can’t bear this city another second,” he said. “Those stupid fags at the guest house are planted every waking hour in front of the television. And they hate me because I speak normal French, not their ghastly, sing-song
joual
. In Paris everyone says how open and kind the Canadians are, but they’re not—they’re Catholic fanatics, they detest English-speaking Canadians, all Americans, all real French people, and the only things they like are their inedible
saucisses de Francfort
. Anybody who likes frankfurters, as my father says, has never visited the factory.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Sitting in my room and thinking.”

“About what?”

“About how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. I called my doctor in Paris. He had the results of the second test. It’s certain: I am infected. And my counts are even lower—ninety-five.”

Austin had a strong urge to turn on the car radio, to tune in the loudest possible rock music. He wanted to say, “Oh, but T-cells go up and down, most doctors pay no attention to them,” but he knew that was a lie Julien wouldn’t believe.

“Anyway,” Julien said, “let’s just drive north to Québec City.”

Julien was the worst driver Austin had ever known but now, instead of cringing at every misjudgment or infringement, Austin welcomed the heightened sense of danger, of lost control.