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Authors: Edmund White

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Austin thought that if Big Julien, this new Julien, was still married and had never lived openly as a gay man, then he’d surely be less spooked by a dinner at which there were three attractive, stylishly dressed women. And everyone was close to Big Julien’s age, which might make him forget that Austin was some two decades older.

For years now Austin had been inviting these young men and women to his apartment every week or two for the evening. Because they were not earning much and were living on snacks, he knew the women liked putting on their best dresses and heels and heavily painting their eyes and lips to head across the Pont Marie to the dim, fog-wrapped splendors of the Île Saint-Louis. The men could be very open about their sexuality
and
shockingly flirtatious with the girls—behavior that appeared inconsistent, even self-contradictory to American eyes but that Latins, with their love of seductiveness, deemed perfectly natural.

On the phone next day each of them could be a bit bizarre—Joséphine paranoid as usual, Antoinette prudish, even pig-headed, Pierre-Yves hypercritical, Gregg as irritable as someone critically sleep-deprived. But in a group, when they’d drunk lots of wine, they were convivial, outrageous, and above all
light
—light as only Parisians knew how to be. They argued only about politics. But otherwise no one preached on a pet subject as Americans were wont to do when they weren’t chattering about house remodeling or global warming. If Austin held forth on a topic he’d just been researching there’d be a
furious exchange of winks and giggles or they’d all tuck their hands under their arms and lower their heads as though waiting for it to go away. Pierre-Yves had once seen an American movie of the fifties replayed on television, in which teenage hoodlums bedeviled their instructor whenever he started lecturing them by saying, “Gee, thanks, Teach,” and now he would call Austin “Teach,” too, at the first ugly sign of New World didacticism.

Austin had put together this circle to please Little Julien but now he was hoping it would set Big Julien at ease and amuse him, too. Not that everyone liked his friends. “I don’t know what to think, Austin, of your teen evening,” one older man had said the day after a dinner. He was a writer and had wanted, apparently, to talk books and literary prizes and discuss his recent rather stylish conversion back to Catholicism. For a moment Austin had felt foolish for all the hundreds of hours he’d devoted to chopping mushrooms, pouring out good Bordeaux and rolling joints for this band of kids.

His rowdy French friends, he imagined, might be taken aback by the reality of Big Julien’s marriage, for even though they discussed their own bisexuality at length and their conveniently hazy and remote plans to marry one day, they would surely be confused by an attractive young man who was actually living with a wife.

The bell rang. It was Julien with small yellow roses in his hand. “Sorry, I’m early,” he said. “I came right from work.”

“Not at all,” Austin said. He leaned forward to peck him on both cheeks but Julien shook his hand. Julien even smiled with mild satire, as if to say that he, at least, was too
virile
, too “old France”
(vieille France)
to kiss any man other than his father and brother. Austin steered him in with a friendly hand just grazing his back, his face impassive, as though he hadn’t registered the minute rejection. Strangely enough, Little Julien had also disliked all these pecks (
bises)
among men, which he’d seen as effeminate Parisian insincerity. When Austin came back from the kitchen with the flowers in a vase and a glass of wine for his guest, he saw Julien standing by the window looking out. “What do you think of my parish church?”

Julien turned eagerly and seemed almost disappointed by the
ironic smile on Austin’s lips. It was obvious that as an architect he was impressed by the massive, twisting stone volute.

Austin said, “Not that I’m a Catholic. Are you?”

Julien said, “Atheist. I’m from a long line of atheists on both sides. I just admire the force of the roof.” He took the wine and seated himself in the chair Austin indicated. Julien was wearing an unbecoming pear-green linen blazer, double-breasted, with gold buttons that were too heavy and tugged at the thin fabric. The color was all wrong for his complexion—he looked sallow, oily, tired.

“I’m an atheist, too,” Austin said. “I hate it when people say they’re agnostics, don’t you? It’s so weak-kneed.” He almost added, “Especially gays, the pathetic nitwits, who’ve been tortured and insulted by every known religion,” but he directed his thoughts away from that dangerous subject, which might seem glib to Julien and not evoke the same associations for him. Austin was already sure that Julien was an individualist, as opinionated as he was unpredictable, and that his beliefs must be pieced together carefully. Maybe he didn’t even use the word
gay
. Maybe he didn’t even
think
that word. Maybe he was one of those men, like Lohengrin, who loved you only so long as you didn’t name them.

“I know nothing about religion,” Julien said with that sort of sweet gravity men use when they admit to a shortcoming they don’t take seriously.

He went off to wash his hands—and
face
, Austin noticed, since he came back with a nose and forehead visibly less oily. Not that Austin minded physical imperfections now. On the contrary, he found them reassuring, as though they were credits that offset the huge overdraft he had run up by allowing himself to get so old. When he’d been young and appealing, Austin had used someone’s slightest fault as a reason to reject him, just to weed out the ranks of admirers. But even then his natural inclination had been to respond to anyone who liked him, and now that there were so few men who even looked at him as a sexual being he could respond to them all with equal enthusiasm. In fact, he’d been so afraid of dressing too young or touching up his hair, which was beginning to gray, that he always wore suits and had even exchanged his contact lenses for donnish glasses, thereby thickening
the erotic distance between himself and other men. Maybe it was only those who dreamed of punishing Daddy or of finally becoming teacher’s pet who were pulled toward him.

Big Julien, he could see, now that he had him once again before his eyes and could study him, was handsome if not exactly his type. But did he, Austin, even have a type now? He used to say that he fell in love with blonds but lusted after brunets. But in recent years he’d slept with so many different kinds of men, and sometimes, unexpectedly, kindled to their unfamiliar touch, that more and more often he’d look at the least likely man and think, Maybe him? Maybe he could make me feel good? For in sex he was now less interested in a trophy-boy and more attracted to the man who might bring him pleasure. He wanted pleasure, not prestige.

While he ran around with drinks and canapés the other guests arrived. He was delighted to see how effortlessly Big Julien fitted into this group despite the difficulty of everyone else already knowing one another. Or rather Julien appeared almost indifferent to fitting in. He was kindly, polite, smiling but dignified, and he seemed older than the other guests, as though he were a soldier back from the front among kids too young to have fought—or in fact, what he was, a married man.

Unlike Americans, French guests all smoked, drank red wine, ate red meat and white rice, white bread and white sugar. They had almost no food dislikes except white wine or sweet things (such as cranberry sauce) served before the dessert course or fiery spices offered no matter when. Salsas and curries were not acceptable. Garlic could be a problem anywhere north of the Loire.

Austin served his guests a first course of smoked fish and salad in a mustard vinaigrette and a second of lamb shoulder stewed with onions, tomatoes and white beans. Then he passed around a big smelly platter of oozing cheeses, though privately he knew that chalky goat cheeses dusted in cinders were more “distinguished” than these runny Bries and Camemberts, and that skipping the cheese course altogether was still more aristocratic, but he also recognized that he had to fill his skinny young guests up. For dessert, like all Parisians, he bought bakery sweets, since no one in his own kitchen could rival the layered and
unidentifiable
mousses
that the French admired (and Americans dismissed as “synthetic”). Then there were
petit fours
served with the coffee and chocolate-covered coffee beans and
truffes
, those dense, bitter balls of cold butter and cocoa, as if the table would be declared indecent were it left undressed even for an instant. Austin liked the formula he’d worked out here at home of formal food and dressy attire in a cozy, broken-down apartment at the chic-est address, an event attended by high-spirited kids with unleashed tongues, high aspirations and a dawning worry about whether, just now, that bowl was for washing the fruit or their fingers. Oh, he was all for making them talk freely and volubly but he didn’t want them to forget that tonight, like all the other nights here, was some sort of occasion. Since he never led the conversation (he was running back and forth from the kitchen too often and besides his French wasn’t agile and funny enough), he needed to impose his personality through what the French called “the arts of the table.”

Despite the blur and hubbub of service, he noticed that Big Julien seemed irritated by Pierre-Yves’s excessive self-assurance. During their hundreds of gym classes together, Austin had carefully studied PierreYves, who seemed almost too predictably torn between his French father and Russian mother, between a Cartesian trust in method and reason and a Slavic impulse toward intense feeling and self-destruction. The result was that he was always smiling coolly, pityingly at his interlocutor’s “errors in taste” (the French side), when he wasn’t running out for debilitating revels on acid or submitting slavishly to a cruel Brazilian lover, who actually beat him.

Big Julien and Pierre-Yves had drifted into an argument about politics. Since Austin had been trapped into another noisy conversation with the very drunk (and always slightly mad) psychiatrist Hubert, who was insisting for some reason on talking about photography “as a form of contamination,” he couldn’t follow Julien’s and Pierre-Yves’s dispute. But he could tell it was heating up to an uncomfortable degree.

And then it was over. The kitchen sink was piled high with dirty dishes, everything smelled of cigarettes, the pillows on the daybed had been pummeled to half their normal plumpness and the round white
tablecloth had been stained red in one place, as though Caesar had been stabbed through his toga just there. Big Julien, the married man, did nothing to help. He stood between the open French windows and looked out at the immense stone snail shell, the steeply pitched church roof beyond and the roiling clouds above ignited by the city lights. Although the day had been unseasonably warm, the night was cool. Austin worried that Julien might catch cold after the flushed excitement of all the talk and wine and heavy food, especially since he was wearing only his ugly green linen jacket and he looked pale. And it was a weekday; Julien would have to go to work early tomorrow: he’d said the whole office was
en charrette
, which was architect’s lingo for a round-the-clock blitz.

“Did you like Joséphine?” Austin asked him, standing next to him in the cold window, listening to the clip-clop of high heels as a solitary, determined walker passed by on the street below. He could smell the dish detergent on his hands, an acidic, grease-cutting citron, and he worried that it might offend Julien.

“Charming,” he said. “But those opinionated men—have you known them for long?”

“Years.”

“And do you find them fascinating?”

“Well. They’re
friends
. I don’t stop to wonder whether a friend is ‘fascinating’ or not.”

“No. Of course not. Childhood friends are exempt from all criticism.”

“They’re not exactly
childhood
friends—I came to France only eight years ago. Do you have lots of old friends?”

“Yes, but I never see them.”

“Why not?”

“I prefer to think about them. My friends mean so much to me, but only in my thoughts, in my memory.”

“What a poetic idea,” Austin murmured dreamily with a soft smile, because he thought Julien might kiss him. At a less romantic moment Austin might have objected strenuously to such a chilly notion. He wondered if it wasn’t just an affectation Julien had invented on the spot so that he himself could sound “fascinating,” a quality he apparently rated highly.

But Julien didn’t kiss him and a moment later he was gone, but not before Austin had lined him up for dinner two nights later. At the door Julien gave him a big, helpless smile and let his hand sketch out something indecisive, between a hug and a handshake, which ended up as a sort of clumsy pat on the arm—the only awkward gesture Austin had seen this terribly conscious man make.

Chapter Four

T
he next morning at ten Pierre-Yves, dressed in new jogging shoes and a blue nylon track suit and crisp white T-shirt, was at the door, playfully exasperated because Austin was barely awake and not yet in his gym clothes. Pierre-Yves beat his hands together rhythmically and called out,
“Vite, vite, vite.”
He’d been an Olympic ice-skating coach and retained a vigorous manner, though with Austin he was obviously working with hopeless material. Their whole “routine” (vaudeville, not workout) consisted of Austin’s irrepressible desire to gossip in mid-exercise, whereas Pierre-Yves, at least in his official capacity, demanded that his student finish all twenty repetitions before jabbering anymore. When Austin said, “So I see you’re not bruised today,” or “What on earth were you and my guest Julien fighting about last night?” Pierre-Yves raised a warning finger and pronounced the next number louder
(“Dix
, onze,
douze
…”). He’d assumed the role of outwardly stern, secretly amiable taskmaster. Austin spent so much of his workout on his pale blue rubber mat on the floor, looking up at Pierre-Yves, that he constantly had a perverse, child’s-eye view of this man with the lean, muscled legs, the compact torso, the smooth, hairless arms, the powerful jaw and small, neat features. When he was younger, in the pre-AIDS days, he’d seldom hesitated
to touch another man seductively, a big grin on his face, but now he’d trained himself to recognize that he was positive, that other men were more reticent sexually than he, and that even if they weren’t it was hardly likely that he would be their first choice.

BOOK: The Married Man
5.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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