The Married Man (24 page)

That was it! he thought. He would act like Madeleine Gide. This half-effaced memory of what a woman had done sixty years earlier would guide him now. Austin decided that if he never ever made love to Julien again this absence of physical affection would mark the exact spot where he refused to accept Julien’s cruelty toward Peter. Julien might puzzle over Austin’s coldness but he couldn’t ask him why he was being so distant. Julien was too discreet or too proud to mention it. He might think it was because he’d lost his looks or Austin’s love, but he’d never know and Austin would never tell him why. Or he might think that by becoming positive he, illogically, was scaring Austin
off. If Austin made this one resolve he wouldn’t need to reproach Julien or even say how appalled he was by his lack of magnanimity. No, Austin could go on being pleasant, kind, even loving to Julien. Obviously he couldn’t abandon Julien now, nor would he forgive himself if they lived together with a palpable hostility between them year after year, or however long it would take. They could sleep side by side, hug, spoon, kiss, but everything must remain familial.

Once he’d made that decision he slept peacefully.

W
hen they were back in Providence, Julien wanted to find work as an architect, but he and Austin quickly discovered that the Northeast was in the grip of a recession, that unemployment in general was high and nowhere more so than in the building trades. In every office architects were being let go. Austin thought, How stupid we are. How out of touch. Anyone else would have known about the economy or found out about it before moving. All this anguish over Julien’s work visa was pointless. He’s never going to be able to work.

Through
Elle Déco
Austin lined up a story on a prominent Israeli architect who had an immense
atelier
in an old brick factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The architect walked them through his many projects, past the impressive models, and touched their shoulders with warmth and politeness as he guided them around corners. But later, as they sat in his office, he explained that he had
no
American projects and was able to keep his large staff on thanks only to his foreign commissions. But even for him, the most successful architect in the region, the immediate future looked grim.

Through that long cold February and March Julien stayed in bed in a silent, shaded room. It was as though he’d decided that if
he expended the least amount of energy possible, the virus would become drowsy, dormant.

Or perhaps he was just depressed.

He found something that resembled a café a few blocks from campus and he’d go there in the afternoon after an elaborate
toilette
. He’d arrive in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a coat he wore over many layers—a waistcoat, a shirt, a T-shirt and his aquamarine silk scarf from Ethiopia decorated with gold hunting horns. He would sit at a corner table, sipping his coffee and sketching the people around him or reading a two-day-old copy of
Le Monde
.

But more often than not when Austin would come home from art school he’d find Julien stretched out in bed, lying on his back like a
gisant
, a recumbent figure on a tomb. He was motionless, as though under a mud pack or in a trance.

“Are you sleeping?” Austin would whisper.

Sometimes Julien wouldn’t respond, even though his eyelids would always flicker. Occasionally he’d say in a soft voice, “I’m resting.”

After years of idleness—or rather undisciplined bursts of activity that followed his whims alone, alternating with naps and squalid bouts of TV watching—Austin was overwhelmed by the demands of teaching. He had to prepare two two-hour lectures every week. Other professors, he found out, filled the time by raising easy-to-answer questions and calling on students to hazard an opinion, but Austin couldn’t remember their names and he was afraid of their feminist denunciations. He had spent so many years entertaining his young friends in Paris that he now confused the classroom with a dinner party, feared boring his “guests” and hopped lightly, amusingly, from one topic to another. He spoke so quickly, so glancingly, that he’d exhausted his entire knowledge about French furniture in the first class, at least every general idea that could be turned into a snappy summary or droll anecdote.

Of course he remembered that his own professors thirty years ago had been foully dull, had reeked of pedantry, had said everything twice and filled up blackboards by jotting down at random a few of the nouns they’d happened to say. They’d called on students solely to
catch them napping or daydreaming. Down time hadn’t troubled them in the least. The sweating, squirming kids stammered and struggled to get a word out while the teacher walked about predatorily, rapidly thrumming his fingertips together. Those teachers hadn’t had friends the age of their students and they never worried about entertaining them or even winning them over—that was long before the era when students evaluated their professors at the end of the semester.

Exhausted, in a panic, squeezed in behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Sirocco, Austin would come home trailing student papers and lecture notes to find Julien lying in bed, the six grandfather clocks in the house ringing out the hour in slight discrepancy. Julien, like any good French husband, expected two hot meals on the table every day, each with a starter, a main course, a cheese and a sweet. And he wanted Austin to do the shopping every day; he refused to eat anything frozen. Luckily, in the first few weeks they were in Providence, a luxury supermarket opened that sold nothing but organic food. They dubbed it “The Healthy” (Le
Sain)
as opposed to the big chain store, “The Unhealthy” (Le
Malsain)
, where they had to go for white flour, white sugar, white rice—in fact, anything white. The Healthy they liked not because the products were pesticide-free but because they had a bit of flavor. The apples weren’t brightly lacquered, one could hope that someday the cheeses might ripen, the fish was fresh, the chickens had been allowed to run through a barnyard at least once.

Julien stopped drinking and Austin followed suit. From one day to the next they became entirely sober. At first Austin had a hard time sleeping without wine, but after two weeks he was sleeping more profoundly than at any time since childhood. So well that he had the impression he was never fully awake. His vision began to cloud up with floaters, not just vagrant specks but larger, roiling bits of milky tapioca that swirled as restlessly as the snow in the paperweights Joséphine collected. If he’d sit down to prepare a lecture (and that was virtually all he ever did when he wasn’t cooking) the white paper boiled and sank away as though seen through a rain-speckled window. His half-asleep brain seemed no better than his eyes. Feeble, unfocused impressions floated by, leaving him untouched. Silly thoughts
loomed closer and waned, all of them fuzzy around the edges as though his mental prescription needed to be revised, sharpened. He had more and more difficulty remembering names—but those lapses he blamed not so much on age as on living, more than ever, in two languages at once. Every thought, every reference, every experience had to be filed away (and retrieved, even if with difficulty) in French and English—oh, sometimes his head ached from the effort. Even his research for his lectures (and for his long delayed and now indefinitely deferred book) was invariably in French, which he had to translate instantaneously.

His students, he discovered, were interested in something they called “theory,” some post-structuralist (or had they said “postmodernist”) gobbledygook. One guy—who was studying at Brown but who’d signed up for his course—had said, “I’m not really thrilled to be wading into all this
detail
in your class. I’m a semiotics major and I’ve had five semesters of theory—
Topology and Topos in Proust
was last semester.”

“Oh, I
love
Proust,” Austin gushed. “Don’t you? That scene in which Charlus becomes King Lear—”

“Uh, I’ve never read Proust, actually, but I’ve read Derrida, Sontag and Gérard Genette on Proust.”

“Sontag?”

“Maybe that was Barthes. I took a course on Barthes’s
S/Z
, too, and that was way excellent.”

“So you were expecting to learn the semiotics of furniture from me?” Austin asked with acid charm, though the student missed the edge.

“Yeah … or, you know, deconstruct furniture….”

“I’m afraid I’m only interested in how it was
constructed.”

“I figured as much. Guess I’m going to hafta drop the course.”

Several other students followed suit. Austin realized that now he’d never be offered a permanent position. He’d lived abroad too long in a chatty, self-deprecating
milieu
in which even the most profound knowledge had to be worn lightly. His students, he thought, had picked up a smattering of French thought but nothing of
salon
manners. In America, he discovered, people believed what they were
told. When Truman Capote (or Frank Sinatra) had said, “I’m the greatest living stylist,” everyone in the States went on repeating this bizarre self-promotion for the rest of time. Or when Austin said, “I’m not used to simplifying my humble scraps of knowledge into a few generalizations for eighteen year olds,” a colleague, nodding reproachfully, said, “Oh, so you don’t know that much about your field? You did too much facile journalism over the years, I guess.” Austin had no doubt that he and two French fruits he knew who worked for Didier Aaron, the
antiquaire
, were in fact the only three people in the world who could date and authenticate eighteenth-century French furniture with absolute authority—but
he
couldn’t make that claim for himself, now could he? In France enough people knew something about his subject to be able to recognize his perfect expertise, but in America the whole field was too exotic to measure.

His friend, the beringed bearded potter, said over coffee, “These really are the last days of civilization.”

“People have been saying that all my life,” Austin objected with a smile.

“And people were right. Things
were
going from bad to worse and now they have arrived at worst. These kids
never
read anything. They wouldn’t even know which end the book opens at. If you suggest they look at a reference work they smile at you with indulgence, as though you’d suggested they consult an astrolabe or a map of phrenological bumps.”

“And what
is
all this about
theory?
”

“Of course these theories are all such rubbish that not even their professors could say what they mean. They just throw abracadabras in each other’s teeth and wait to see if it goes down—or
passes
, as my mother used to say about hard-to-digest food. Naturally they can’t read French, they don’t bother to read any of what they quaintly call texts … and
theory
of the French sort is far from the most harmful kind. Where it’s really lethal is when it touches on feminism or queer theory.”

“I never needed to
theorize
about being queer,” Austin said, batting his eyes.

“Don’t for a moment imagine that the fact you actually are queer
gives you a leg up. In fact for most of them the idea that their professor is a sexually active being amounts to an admission of rape or at best sexual harassment. How’s your own case going?”

“Well, I did exactly as you suggested. I organized a study club devoted to a feminist re-examination of eighteenth-century taste—”

“And no one came?”

“Well, one woman came.”

“Tough luck. But she’ll desist soon enough; they don’t like to do anything singly. Once they’ve looked you in the eye they get this uncomfortable inkling that you might be a human being, too, which queers all their theories.”

Julien drove them to New Haven at the end of March for his half-hour Pentamadine spray session, a treatment to prevent PCP, the “gay pneumonia.” Dr. Goldstein also examined them both. To Austin he said, “Have you noticed anything about your weight?”

“Uh, no, not exactly.”

“You’ve put on thirty pounds in two months. And you know at your age it may never come off again.”

“In Paris I didn’t have a car and here there are such big servings—”

“No portion control,” Dr. Goldstein nodded.

“And Julien likes big French meals but then he never eats anything and I end up taking seconds and thirds. Portion control be damned!”

Dr. Goldstein didn’t smile. He said, “I swim a mile every morning at six in the university pool.”

And read three books by noon and have two perfect orgasms to your wife’s four by your nine o’clock bedtime, Austin thought bitterly. Oh, and treat two hundred sick fags.

On the way home, as the dark forest of evergreens rolled past, Austin thought, I’m fat so that I won’t be tempted to have sex with anyone else. America has neutered me. No, I’ve done it to myself.

Julien said, “Do you think I’ve lost my looks?”

“Not at all. You look exactly the same. Even better. More rested. Why?”

“Because when I go to the café no one ever looks at me. Nor on the street.”

“In America only New Yorkers cruise each other. They have a special dispensation. In any other American city it’s a Federal offense.” Austin had never really thought about it before, but of course it was true. This lack of lust or at least inquisitiveness meant that no one expected anything to happen on an American street, except rape or murder.

In Paris people thought you might be a celebrity or a connection or a possible fuck—or at the very least they hoped to borrow a few fashion hints from you. In the métro Austin had seen a seated girl slip her phone number to a standing man. In a queue hands were busy—not such a pleasure for women, perhaps, although Austin had never heard any Frenchwoman complain of it except good-naturedly.

“In France,” Julien said, “we believe in the art of seduction.”

Later when he came to think of that late winter and early spring in Providence, Austin saw the big wood house with its many windows staring out at the leafless trees like Lot looking back at all the still nearly human pillars of salt. He thought of Julien stretched out on his sepulchral bed. He remembered his own frantic sessions late at night as he scribbled down more and more notes for his less and less well-attended courses. He pictured Julien, pale and big-eyed, dressed in silks and cashmeres and an intricately tied ascot, descending the wood staircase to the dining room. There he’d taste the asparagus experimentally, holding each stem between his fingertips in the elegant French way while like a true American Austin sawed away at his. In a soft, back-from-the-grave voice Julien would ask him about the day’s adventures (“Of course
I
don’t have any,” he said, “on a day like today when I didn’t go to the café”).