The Married Man (28 page)

Only the “Moroccan” section retained its authenticity because as they ate their couscous in the high, blue-tiled restaurant with its stalactite ceiling of intricately tooled white resin, the young, brown-skinned waiter flirted with them. He spoke to them in French, he winked at them, he took their money after the meal with a long, lingering smile. While Peter and Austin looked at the brass hookahs
and hand-painted ceramics and tooled leather footstools on sale in the Moroccan “bazaar,” Austin said, “The only thing that’s authentic here is that waiter flirting with us, which would happen in exactly the same way in the real Morocco, the real Marrakesh, don’t you agree—”

But Peter had already run out to the central reflecting pool, where the closing fireworks display was illuminating his upturned face. “Oh, Austin,
thanks
for bringing me here. I know you hate it, but I wanted to come back one more time in this life.”

“This
life?” Austin asked as they walked down the wide esplanade to their bus.

“I don’t know, don’t challenge me, I’m a Catholic, Austin, you know I was raised a Catholic and Father Frank, my mom’s priest? His brother died of AIDS and he’s very understanding and not very doctrinal, he never talks about the Pope or sin or homosexuality, he just—well, I guess he wants to comfort me.” Peter looked at Austin and said, defiantly, but with a put-on How-Am-I-Doing? boldness, “And, brother, I’ll take my comfort where I can find it.”

“Of course, Pete, you know I don’t hate religion or—well, anyway, I’m happy for you. And it must mean a lot to your mom.”

“Hold on, I haven’t crawled back into the arms of Holy Mother Church, I’m just talking to a priest. He’s given me a little devotional book I read whenever I’m feeling blue.”

When they got back to the hotel they went along the outdoor corridor and over three bridges before they arrived at their room. Everything smelled of chlorine and heat and decaying plants. The red message light on the phone was blinking. “It’s Lucy,” Austin whispered, as he listened to the voicemail, “she says Julien’s in a New Haven hospital. He had a massive outbreak of herpes across his face. They’re trying to keep it out of his eyes, his brain. I’ve got to call her.”

“Oh, no, there goes our time together. It’s almost as though he’d planned it,” Peter said. “I never get anything. I can never have you two minutes to myself. Maybe I have to be hospitalized to get your attention.” Peter threw himself face-down on his bed and sobbed. The wine, Austin thought, looking at his back working in rhythm with his
sobs. He had drunk too much Moroccan rosé. Austin felt guilty—for him guilt was a physical thing, a dread in the guts, a panic headache, a moral cold sweat. Guilty that he had to leave Peter here alone. But there was no question that he must fly back to Providence tomorrow morning.

Lucy said, “Oh! I’m
so
relieved to get you on the phone. You can’t
believe
—okay, okay, I’m going to start,
calmly
, at the beginning.” She drew a deep breath and let a moment go by as she collected her thoughts, though it all sounded as stagy as some New Age guru’s “centering” of “Self.”

Austin didn’t want her to begin at the beginning—he asked, “Where is he now?”

“Connecticut State.”

“Do you have his phone number?”

“Sure. Hold on. I’ll tell you in a methodical way—”

“Of course, but first: how is he?”

“They’ve got him on a Zovirax drip for the herpes, and they’ve brought his fever down. He’s comfortable and cheerful. It looks like—I mean, it looks
as if
—it won’t damage his vision or get into the brain, but you can’t believe how close it was, it wasn’t like any herpes I’ve ever seen, it doesn’t follow a single nerve but it’s splattered across his face like he’d been thwacked by a red pepper bush.”

She told him how he’d called her at home and seemed bizarrely cheerful—“And he kept slipping into that crazy French,
not
like any French
I
know,” which was pure folly, since Lucy didn’t speak a word of French of any sort, as everyone agreed.

“He sounded delirious, so I
rushed
over there.”

Sure you rushed, Austin thought, picturing her trying on two skirts and three tops before “coordinating” them sufficiently to drive, limp-wristed, over to see Julien, whom she now called, half-seriously, her “French lover.” He imagined she’d even spent some time applying make-up to her large mouth—but why was he being so vile in his thoughts toward this girl, who’d undoubtedly saved Julien’s life?

“I’m so grateful to you, Lucy, you’re such a friend.”

“My pleasure, I’m sure,” she said in a little-girl singsong, a parody of her real feelings and manners.

“I’ll fly directly to New Haven or, I guess, New York tomorrow if I can get a plane. By the way—”

“Oh, I almost forgot,
he’s
Austin.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that since he has no health insurance someone at the hospital decided to register him under
your
name.”

“That was very nice of her. Or him,” Austin said in a soft voice.

“It sure was. He could be arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“Well, sure ’nuf, ’cuz that’s
fraud
, Austin. It’s exactly as though you robbed a bank. Julien and you and that person at the hospital could
all
be put in prison.”

“Isn’t that shocking?” Austin asked. “A man falls gravely ill, far from his country—”

“Well, that’s just the way it is,” Lucy said matter-of-factly, as though to complain were unrealistic and childish. She was right. It was.

After he’d made all his flight arrangements, Austin sat on the edge of Peter’s bed and gave him a half-hearted massage, comfort disguised as physical therapy, but Peter was inconsolable. He even shrugged Austin’s hands off his shoulders. Austin thought it was so unfair that he’d come to this appalling place just to please Peter and now he would never receive any credit for it.

He flew the next morning early to La Guardia airport and took a train and taxi to the hospital. He gave his own name, Austin Smith, as the name of the patient he wished to visit. Upstairs he found the room number easily, knocked on the door timidly and then let himself in. There was Julien in bed, watching TV, a splash of red welts across his face, extending up his cheek, just narrowly missing his eye and ending above his right eyebrow.

“You see,
Petit,”
Julien said. “You can’t ever leave me. See what happens.”

Austin sat on the edge of the bed and pawed him, his hands like a dog’s paw. He was careful not to foul the Zovirax drip and said, in English, “How are you, Austin?”

“I’m fine, Julien.” He laughed, delighted with this game of reversed identities. He explained how he’d told the Irish nurse, Meg, the one
who joked so much and treated him so well, a whole story about his father the American, his French mother, and about how he himself had been raised in France and had never really known his father after age three, when his parents had divorced. “I had to explain why I had such a strong French accent,” Julien said so solemnly that Austin—the real Austin—burst out laughing.

“It’s wonderful to see you looking so well.”

“Thank God the hospital was willing to take me in under these … special conditions.”

“Yes,” Austin said, “the clerk’s obviously a great-hearted man. Others would have politely explained why it was impossible and thrown you in the street….”

Julien held his finger up to his lips.

“How’s my sweetheart?” a fat, breathless nurse called out in an Irish brogue. “How’s my Austin? And were you named after the city in Texas?”

“No, no,” Julien said, confused by the question but smiling over the whole game, “I think it was an American war hero—my father was a soldier.”

“To be sure. And who might this be, love?”

“Julien,” Austin said, though he pronounced the name in the English fashion.

“Julian and Austin, such old-fashioned names. Nothing
common
here, I see. Just two old-fashioned toffs.”

On the train home Austin watched the ponds and trees glide past in the cold, dying light, the whole haphazard landscape, the turning leaves, halfway between solemnity and slum. If the slender trunks rose and branched against the silver and sable clouds, flexible as dancers, underfoot there was a pile of compressed, rain-soaked cartons, their metal bindings rusting into the pulp, or here, now, an automobile graveyard flickered past, the feeble sun spiderwebbing through a broken windshield.

He’ll have to go back to France, he thought. We can’t all three, the hospital clerk along with us, be packed off to prison. And I don’t want Julien to have to live through this uncertainty. Austin pictured Julien’s smiling face, still handsome under its scarlet brand—his
smile summoned up the memory of a cousin whose face was heart-stoppingly pure and white if only the right side was seen, but who was transformed into someone else, nearly a monster, when he turned and revealed a long, purple birthmark, which had somehow melted his left nostril and thickened the left corner of his lips.

T
en days after Julien was released from the hospital, his brother Robert flew over to the States with his lover Fabrice for a two-week holiday. Julien met them in New York where they spent a long weekend, then all three came up to Providence on the train.

Austin had rented a ski house, an A-frame, not far outside Bennington, Vermont; he was certain the French guests would be staggered by the colors of the Vermont leaves changing.

Ajax slept in his corner of the back seat while Robert caressed him constantly, almost unconsciously. If he heard another dog bark outside, Ajax would instantly be on the alert, his eyes on stems, a yearning treble mew in the back of his throat. He was playful and charming with human beings, but other dogs awakened in him fear and fascination. In that way he was like a snob at a reception, kind to everyone but mesmerized only by a glimpse of another Hohenzollern.

Julien wore dark glasses but still found the brilliance of the leaves in full sunlight painful to look at. He appeared healthy otherwise and was thrilled to have his brother with him. They went walking down country roads; Austin felt they were inside a badly bombed Gothic cathedral, half of the stained glass shattered and on the ground, the rest still clinging to the leadings. Austin was happy to be with Robert
and Fabrice; he’d spent two weeks with them in Nice a year earlier and felt very comfortable with them.

Julien had decided to say nothing to his brother about his illness—yes, the herpes, though he called it chicken pox, but not AIDS. “Just imagine what that would do to the poor boy,” Julien said. “He’s already had to live through our mother’s death. What if now he had to accept his little brother’s death, too? No, he’ll find out about it all too soon.”

What did Julien think about what he was living—or dying—through? He seemed to have aestheticized his fate. He struck Austin as someone who’d rocked back on his heels and raised his eyebrows in an appraising, epicurean posture; he was ignoring the dangers all around him. He was the bowler hat descending into the live volcano, the spats seen through the cobra-quick underbrush. He’d laughed his way through the hospital and had learned how to tease his nurses in the best American manner. He had nothing but praise to offer an American hospital—although he must have realized that, as Austin Smith, Visiting Professor, he was receiving special (and very expensive) treatment.

Was he afraid?

Austin knew that herpes was horribly painful but Julien never spoke of his suffering. When they first met, Julien had moaned as loudly as any French mama’s boy when he scratched his finger or pulled a muscle or came down with the flu, but now that his martyrdom was finally beginning, he said nothing. He joked like an American—and redoubled his affection toward Austin, who saw he’d become the steadying point, like a father talking his son down from the roof where he’d sleepwalked before awakening.

Julien’s dark glasses were Italian although, to be fair, he’d never been one to collect brand names or to buy costly or original baubles. No, he was able to confect a look out of scarves, tarnished brooches, an old felt slouch hat, a satin vest as brightly striped as a Christmas ornament under a corduroy jacket worn down like the bark on a rotting log.

Robert and Fabrice admired everything—the white church steeples pointing up through the gaudy autumn leaves like a pure ivory tusk in
a jumble sale, the broad highways, the country inns and little restaurants with their Brown Bettys and carrot cake—so
exotic
, all of it, especially the friendliness of waiters and families at neighboring tables, which they observed with the puzzled indifference of the deaf at the opera. They spoke no English although Fabrice, a born communicator, was always ready to make a smiling, gesturing effort or pantomime his frustration.

Robert was thirty-one, three years older than Julien, though he looked much younger. Whereas Julien had his father’s “villainous” skin, sexily scored with acne scars and permanently oily, Robert looked as if he’d just been unmolded and glazed. His hair had been mounted under a blow dryer, his nose had been thinned and restyled, his face may have been sanded—certainly it was flawless and he held it up to the world as if to show off something fragile to its best advantage and with no glare. His narcissism made him no less attractive to Austin.

Robert seemed to be dreaming most of the time, lost in vague thoughts. He wasn’t subjected to the passage of time, only to the movement of the elements. He’d blink, locate the incoming signal and start any reply with a bass, rumbling elegance, with a deliberation worthy of a monarch: “Perhaps you would like to know,” he’d say, or “Are you perhaps wondering if…?” At first Austin thought Robert could scarcely understand a foreign accent as heavy as his own, but then he realized that anyone at all, even another Frenchman, struck Robert as an alien.

In Nice, he had few friends and never varied from his routine. He rose late, he cooked plain rice for breakfast and mixed it in a bowl with cooked egg whites for protein (the yolks he threw to the birds who swarmed over the gravel roof of the next house down the hill). He clipped the sculpted bush in the window with fingernail scissors. He endured a two-and-a-half-hour workout at the gym, then put in four or five hours helping Fabrice out at the garden store or delivering plants. He never read anything, although sometimes he went to the theater or the opera at Nice or Monte Carlo. Usually he and Fabrice arrived home late, toward nine, and boiled some fish and mixed a salad, which in the summer they ate out on the verandah, which was
large enough for a table and four chairs, with a panoramic view of Nice and the old port below and, in the distance, the twinkling Promenade des Anglais. In the winter they sat indoors and watched TV or listened to Fabrice’s old 78s of French
chanteuses
.