The Married Man (31 page)

Before they’d left Providence, Joséphine had asked if Aaron, the Israeli architecture student, could come down and stay with them. Julien had said no, absolutely not, he was a cold, cruel man, that was obvious, who didn’t even like Joséphine. And besides he, Julien, had to have some peace. “I don’t have much time left,” he said. “I have to be selfish with every moment.”

Joséphine went cross-eyed with stubbornness, or rather she was so hell-bent in her obsessiveness that she just set her jaw and jammed every incoming signal. So they shouldn’t have been surprised when one afternoon Aaron—black curls crawling down his neck over his T-shirt collar, affable, confident, showing a bit of sexy paunch—showed up in a rented car. Joséphine put on her best debutante manner, as if she were wearing a large blue satin bow; maybe she thought by holding her head high and steady she could induce a tone of good manners that would preclude any surliness on Julien’s part.

It didn’t work. Julien was furious. He shouted at Joséphine in French, which Aaron didn’t understand. “I told you, no guests: you have absolutely no respect for our privacy. Nor for my health.”

Like a goddess Joséphine flashed anger from her beautiful fierce eyes: “You’re just a brat! I must lead my life! Your health has made you a tyrant.” She turned to Austin. “If Aaron goes I go, too.”

Aaron, hearing his name, shrugged. Then he stretched and yawned, showing his gold fillings and his pink, healthy tongue. Although he was just twenty-three he had the majestic Babylonian look that suited a man in his forties—the heavy, immobile forehead, the big, ice-cutter nose, the sprouting beard filings that swarmed below his Adam’s apple to join the ringlets rising up from his chest. What was pathetic, Austin thought, was that Aaron didn’t care one way or another about the outcome of this argument, which was tearing their little family apart. Even Ajax managed to hold his usual effusiveness in check and to study the newcomer with his head cocked to one side.

Austin refused to decide for or against Joséphine. They’d always
been so fond of each other, even if Austin’s feelings of affection, as was usually his way with his women friends, were more willed than spontaneous, or rather slightly ceremonial, based on constant declarations and very public reassurances. Of course Austin thought that
all
of his friendships had something remote about them. One of the things he liked about aging was that those young people who needed an older man to approve of them were so easily satisfied. They were convinced by the frail, gloved hand vaguely sketching a sign in the incense-heavy air and didn’t require the close huddle of sustained warmth. Or he frequented people who were themselves removed, even remote. Julien, for instance, was dandified and cool, at least in his outward manner, which suited Austin. Who knew, would ever know, what Julien was feeling inside?

A lot, it seemed, this evening. He rushed about the house shouting,
“Merde!”
Austin, who’d only lose by saying anything, retreated to the kitchen to trim and steam some vegetables. When he emerged with a big bowl of brown rice he discovered the house was empty. Julien’s bike was no longer chained to the front porch pillar.

Austin ate. Hours went by. Joséphine had no doubt taken Aaron with her to the gay tea dance. They’d eat a burger on the dock and come straggling home at midnight, giggling and drunk on rum punches, secretly amused by all the gay eccentrics they’d danced with.

But Julien? He never stormed off like this. He wasn’t warmly dressed—just his skimpy white gym shorts, the very ones he’d been wearing when they first met in Paris. And a Virginia Woolf T-shirt, the name and portrait nearly worn away from repeated washings. He had on sneakers—no sweater. Maybe he’d taken some money with him, slipped into his jockstrap.

Where is he? Austin wondered. Julien could so easily kill himself. He could swim out to sea. After all, he has nothing to lose—he’ll be dead two years from now in any event. Why not die now, while he’s still handsome, intelligent, intact? His brother would even think he’d died in imitation of their mother rather than from a disease, a banal disease, the disease of the moment. Of course that would be harder for Robert to accept—but would also strike him as more glamorous.

He’ll swim out to sea—that’s the sort of fool-romantic fate he
would embrace. Where is he? He has no identification on him, no one on the island knows him, no one would be able to identify his body. And Joséphine would rather put her own pleasure first. Well, wouldn’t I? My mistake was to give up sex, put on weight. Better to be the least little housewife in one of these trailers getting banged every night than a full (very full) professor of design who has forsworn sex.

He realized that both he and Julien resented Joséphine. She was having sex with Thomas, now with Aaron. Julien called her a “nympho,” but she was doing what they wanted to do.

At last, toward three in the morning, after the bars closed, Julien returned in a horse-drawn carriage. He was very drunk.

“Where’s your bike?” Austin asked, instantly hating himself for bringing up something so petty at a time like this.

“I left it at the harbor. I was too drunk to ride it home.”

Austin paid off the driver, an English young man in shorts and top hat, a lock of blond hair hanging down his forehead. “Cheers?” he said as his horse clip-clopped away. Julien stumbled, laughing, into Joséphine’s room.

“Julien, I was so worried, I kept imagining all the worst things—what are you doing?”

Julien was pulling Joséphine’s clothes out of her drawers and stuffing them into her duffel bag. He threw the bag out into the street along with Aaron’s suitcase.

“What are you doing?”

“There!” he shouted. “They’re no longer welcome here.”

While he was still shouting, Joséphine and Aaron drove up in his car. The smile faded from her face the instant she saw her things protruding from the duffel bag:
“Julien! Quand même! Tu exagères—vraiment….”

When Julien laughed wildly and hung all his weight from the white porch pillar, turning and turning, she came to a quick decision and said, “Very well. We’re not welcome here, Aaron. Let’s go find a motel room.”

“But you said I was invited to stay here. I don’t have much money with me. If I’d thought I’d have to pay for a room I would never have driven all the way down here. You promised me—”

“We can stay with Thomas, the Haitian painter, the one you met at Sloppy Joe’s. He’s a nice guy—
il ne fera pas toutes ces histoires, lui.”

“What are you saying? Talk English,” Aaron said. “You promised I could stay down here for my holiday—”

“But it’s not up to me.”

“Get out! Get out!” Julien muttered. He then stumbled and fell. He picked himself up and went over to sit on the swing at the dark end of the porch, as if he were an actor who’d just left the stage and fallen out of character. He nursed his knee. The tree behind him on the neighbor’s lot was lit with a pink spot; Julien’s dark hair was in the shadows but, posed against the pink light, it picked up a red halo.

Aaron didn’t have his French friends’ sense of drama. They were willing to make proud, noble, possibly foolish decisions, but he wanted to hash it all out. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced for the sake of a gesture. Anyway, Joséphine seemed to mean nothing to Aaron; Julien was right about that: he was engaged to a woman back home who was finishing her military service.

Two days later Aaron drove on to Naples, Florida; he’d been invited there by a rich uncle who owned a garment-manufacturing plant in Indonesia. Joséphine moved back from Thomas’s studio, where she and Aaron had been camping out.

“So,” Julien said, his face frozen in a hard smile, “did you get your
foufounette
fucked by a big circumcised dick?”

Joséphine shook her head sadly and screwed her face up into a nauseated expression. “You’re sick,” she said. “And truly disgusting.” But Austin realized that by using the child’s word for the vagina,
foufounette
, a cute word, Julien was in his meager fashion trying to apologize or at least send out a friendly signal. And Joséphine, by responding to him as a little sister would to her irritating big brother, had broken through the formality of hate.

They stayed in Key West for three weeks. Julien never drank again—in fact, his one night of wandering around town in his gym shorts was the only time he interrupted his sobriety. Joséphine shifted her affection back to Thomas and didn’t mention Aaron again, but it was obvious she was brooding about him. She worked every day on the illustrations she was doing for a children’s book—big, bold pastels,
some in extreme close-up, of two snowy-haired, full-aproned but remarkably agile grandmothers, capable of turning somersaults and doing handsprings and drawing a little neighbor girl into their network of crime-fighting.

Julien and Joséphine had promised to drive back with Ajax five days before the end of the vacation; they were supposed to cede the house to Peter and Austin, but as it turned out they didn’t want to leave Key West until the last possible moment. Austin rented them a suite in an old house on Eaton Street and told them firmly not to come by the little house with the tin roof and the tourist tree. “This is Peter’s time with me.”

Peter was even thinner but he was more sharply focused than he’d been at Disney World. He wanted to bike to the beach on the army base every day; he was an experienced tanner who knew how to work his way efficiently toward less and less sunblock. They rode past the military guard in a narrow house in the middle of the road, paid their few dollars, glided under the wind-twisted pines and spread their towels on the narrow strip of sand beside the blue-green, rapidly flowing water. The beach was not far from a narrow channel that led into the harbor. Sailing boats glided past just thirty or forty feet away, their white sails strangely close and all out of proportion, like monsters in bad process shots in old Japanese horror films.

“Oh, Austin,” Peter said, once they were lying calmly side by side, “I’m determined to live as much as I can. Thanks for bringing me down here. I know you’re still not drinking, but I hope you’ll go with me to the bars.”

“It’s years since I’ve been to a bar. And look at me, how out of shape I am. Won’t they turn me away?”

“Oh, but people like a bit of heft now, Austin. It shows you’re not sick.”

“Everyone says that,” Austin grumbled, smiling, “but it’s not strictly speaking true.”

He rubbed oil on Peter’s narrow shoulders and even up his long, long neck, on which his elegant, white-haired head was posed, regal as a bewigged young woman’s seen from behind in a Fragonard. His head was at once stubborn and vulnerable. That was the strange contradiction
that characterized Peter. He was this slightly dazed kid, like a cartoon character who’d just been slammed on the head with a massive hammer and stunned out of malevolence into a goofy affability. Austin could almost see the stars dancing around his head. But he was also willful and the least contradiction sent him spinning into paroxysms of outrage. He not only collected injustices but had also invented new ways of making them pay handsome dividends.

“Anyway, won’t you go with me to the bars?” Peter asked. “I hate going alone. I get attacks of vertigo. The doctor says it’s nothing that can be controlled. It’s the virus working directly on the central nervous system. I guess I always was a dizzy blond.”

Austin said, “Sure, I’ll go. It’ll be fun. Maybe I’ll even get laid. Peter, you’re my tempter.”

Austin was stunned by Peter’s way of talking about the virus so candidly. It was easy to forget that there actually was a virus that existed, grew, outwitted its enemies, invested its host, had designs on new hosts, ate nerves and polluted blood. Usually the virus controlled its empire only through intermediaries, through
ukases
relayed along synapses or by orchestrating the slow collapse of immunities as it inched past the inner sanctum of the blood barrier so that it could reorder—simplify in some monstrous, radical way—the chemistry of the brain. But if the effects of the virus could be felt everywhere, in the dimming of an eye, the whittling down of all the fingers so they couldn’t fill out their old rings, which just slid off, or in temporary gusts of deafness that reminded the invalid of the long, reverberant silence to come, the virus itself was seldom referred to and even less often did it make a “personal” appearance. It was the silent partner, the unnamed investor, the power behind the throne.

Life was easier with Peter than with Julien. Peter didn’t draw attention to himself. He dressed with conventional good taste, a taste which Americans called
preppie
and the French
BCBG (bon chic bon genre)
. Peter was thankful to the waiters, he was efficient and self-effacing when buying something in a store, soft-spoken in public places, never obscene, full of “thank yous” and “you’re welcomes,” a bit colorless. Around him Austin wasn’t expected to come up with an opinion on every aesthetic topic, nor were people themselves treated as “amusing”
or “elegant” or “beautiful.” People (unless they belonged to the very narrow band of black men Peter cruised) were classified as “nice” or “not specially nice.” In the disco on Duval Street Peter could be counted on to know the words to the songs, which he’d sing along to soundlessly, and the proper steps, whereas Julien made a wide swathe on the floor if he bothered to dance at all; his numbers were all showstoppers.

Perhaps the real difference was that Peter respected gay life as it was—mindless, sexual if not sexy, procrustean—whereas Julien was too much of a lawgiver to accept the rules handed down by the tribe. Austin knew that gay life had little left to offer someone his age but he found it more restful, a reflex, to dance in the normal, invisible way, as he’d been dancing for some thirty years now.

That night Austin spotted Julien and Joséphine at the club, just a dim
instantané
in a strobe flash. Julien looked young, younger than such a strong personality would warrant. Although Austin wanted to take off with them, he didn’t dare; he was worried about a repetition of the Disney World debacle. It made him nervous that they were lurking about at all. Poor Peter.