The Married Man (33 page)

Austin was glad to be back in France. Providence had been a wasps’ nest, burnt over and nearly extinct but still feebly menacing. The houses pulsing in the dark, the eerie silence of the streets in which voices carried with the presence of sound across water, the deserted, windswept plazas downtown, slowly filling up with snow, the dowdy, malicious but nearly invisible professors—oh, he had to laugh at it from the safe distance of Paris with its glittering cafés spilling out into the street, its two hundred curtains rising every night on cabarets and theaters and opera houses, its exuberant populace overconfident about exactly how to eat and dress and make love.

Austin loved walking the streets again and buying prints and old books along the quais. He knew France was entering a major decline and for the first time he was meeting young people eager to emigrate, but he didn’t care; his own prospects were too dim to trouble himself about the future. He lived in the eternal, pearl-gray present of Paris under slanting-cold rain, of dark-blue lacquer doors guarding graveled gardens and soot-streaked walls of pale sandstone. Once again he assembled his little band of friends who, unlike Americans, practiced the courtesy of almost impersonal gaiety, whooping with laughter, excitedly recounting their misadventures. Joséphine had already turned her unhappy passion for Aaron into a hilarious anecdote, emphasis on the Coward Tree.

They found a large place on a noisy corner between the Tour St.-Jacques and the Centre Georges Pompidou (the priory and the oil refinery). Although Austin was very short of money and even had to borrow some from Henry McVay, he wanted Julien to live in this spacious apartment with its back bedroom that could serve as a studio. The room had a white marble fireplace and casement windows looking
out on stiffly pitched roofs; just across the way, a fashionably bald boy with beautiful eyes lived with an elderly—well, with a man Austin’s age. They would sit up in bed, the bald boy and the elderly man with his full jowls and white hair, and watch television; at night by the flickering colored light Austin could see them holding each other, propped up in bed.

One night Austin read a novel by a French friend in which Dr. Aristopoulos, his old French general practitioner, was a character. At two in the morning Austin discovered, albeit from a piece of fiction, that Aristopoulos had died of AIDS. Austin was devastated. He said to himself in a comic voice, “What’s the world coming to when even the croakers start croaking?” but he cried in strange spurts of sadness. At eight in the morning he called the novelist, who confirmed the news.

A friend from Boston lent them his two-room farmhouse near Vendôme and they spent July and August there. One long day stretched into another. In the main room Julien set up his easel, but most of the time he worked at a wooden table under the tall, open windows, drawing and looking up occasionally at the hay fields under a haze in the distance or at the barn to the left in the foreground, which two roofers came to repair with old tiles in the medieval tradition; Julien drew them crouched on the slanting surface, rebuilding the system of wood slats that supported the overlapping, weathered ceramic squares. In his drawings, dressed in their blue overalls, they looked like man-shaped jigsaw pieces that, when filled in, would be part of the seamless blue heavens.

Each room had a big Dutch door. Just outside one of the doors was a patch of stinging nettles (“Good for soup,” Julien invariably said). An old wooden hay cart was abandoned in the nettles, tipping forward from its shoulder-high wheels and resting on its poles. When Ajax went exploring the cart, which was dozing under pinwheels of attendant butterflies, he stung his paw with the nettles:
“Mon pauvre petit bébé,”
Julien crooned as he extracted them.

The main room had a stone fireplace so tall a man could walk into it, and even in summer, especially after a rain, it smelled of ashes. It was one of those fireplaces that never draws properly; the wrong geomancer had been consulted, apparently. The narrow galley kitchen
was perfectly functional, with its bottle of butane to fuel the stove and its ancient fridge, which had to be washed free of moss and fungus before it could be plugged in again. In the bathroom the tiny spiders and their fine webs had to be hosed down. It was as though the whole house was always about to be engulfed again by nature. In the summer minuscule wildflowers crept over the wide stone threshold.

Austin carted six boxes of reference books down to the country. He was determined to finish his long-overdue furniture encyclopedia. Only by doing so could he ever bail them out again.

The big day every week was Wednesday, when Julien and Ajax and Austin piled into their old but recently acquired Renault 5 and went to the village market. In temporary stalls erected on the graveled main square, merchants were selling hot quiches right out of the oven, thirty kinds of fish right out of the sea, vegetables right out of the garden, including loamy white onion bulbs, plump and sprouting grass-green shoots as stiff as paper fans. The local watery goat cheese, locally cured hams and bacon, even the perch out of the nearby river—everything was fun to buy, rush home and eat.

Other than that once-a-week excursion, they stayed close to home and worked. Sometimes Joséphine would drive over from her parents’ house in Tours and stay with them two or three days. She’d draw her illustrations. Julien would be at his easel, she’d be bent over one table before one big window and Austin at the other.

Around noon the heat became more intense and the world seemed to hold its breath like a child hiding in a dusty closet. Bees hovered around the wildflowers, the heat-haze thickened over the fields, Ajax found the only cool, shadowed patch of the stone floor to stretch out on, the radio murmured on the only station they could get. Every day an announcer with a warm, soft, civilized voice recited another long, eventless episode from a novel about a happy if sometimes tedious family. When Austin sank onto the creaky old bed for a nap, he’d half-listen to that seductive narrative voice, making its reassuring distinctions (“On the other hand,” “Not only…but also,” “Needless to say …”).

Julien and Austin had never been closer. In the late evenings they prepared their supper, slicing the ripe tomatoes and covering them
with shredded mint leaves, which grew just outside the back door, or elaborating an old-fashioned chicken fricassee with mushrooms and pearl onions. Afterwards, while the light still held, they walked down the two-lane rural route with Ajax off the leash, past the fields where grazing cows, irritated by Ajax’s defiant barking, loomed up to the barbed wire fence and sent him off, cowering, ears pressed back and tail tucked between his ample buttocks. They’d wander past the woods where an owl hooted and a slender moon was hanging like a Christmas ornament on the highest branches. Inevitably Ajax, hypnotized by a dried-out cow turd or a long-dead, thoroughly excavated rabbit’s carcass, fell behind. He was so intrigued by these ripe, unfamiliar smells that his hearing clicked off and he could not pull out of his trance until, suddenly, he’d discover himself alone on a darkening strip of country road and he’d race back to them, heart thumping, ears flying.

Or Julien would want to walk through the garden of the nice woman who lived across the road but only came out once a week for a rendezvous with her married lover; he lived in another town, too. When she was not there, Julien used to lift the latch of the garden gate and visit the herb garden right next to the house, aromatic with thyme and tarragon, the rows of beans, potatoes, cabbage, carrots and the small stand of fruit trees. He admired the tidiness and freshness of the garden, and visited it with all the didactic seriousness any Frenchman devotes to a mineral collection, say; Austin even heard him instructing Ajax on the names of every vegetable. Each visit had the sweet dignity of a ritual, as when a grandmother shows a child all the treasures in her china cabinet, one by one.

Once they walked so far—just to see an abandoned Romanesque chapel at the crossroads they had glimpsed from the car—that night had fallen entirely and the walk home past the woods on the other side of the stream was frightening. They heard angry voices in the woods and saw the glow of a flashlight held by someone crashing through underbrush. Austin had goose bumps as if a dead hand had brushed across his nape.

At night they lay in bed and read to each other from an old warped book they’d found on the kitchen shelf, a dictionary of French
insults. Whereas Americans were supposed to be friendly and popular and any nastiness was considered a treatable flaw, in France people admired those who had the courage to be tart or difficult; Julien read out the insults in his booming voice with obvious relish.

In the fall they were back in Paris. Austin had worked hard during the summer, inspired by Julien’s example, and the encyclopedia was almost finished. He still had six months to go on the notes and bibliography, which would be difficult to reconstitute since he had jotted everything down on bits of loose paper, coffee-stained and inserted into a blotter.

Julien had finished five striking paintings of dark, brooding young men posed, often in silhouette, in an open doorway against a salmon-pink evening sky or along the girding of an industrial-era metal bridge. In one of them the man was walking a leashed dog, who was already straining halfway out of the composition. An American friend of Austin’s who had a gallery in Passy met with Julien. She encouraged him to do more of his satirical sketches and fewer of his brooding paintings, although it occurred to her she might plan, for a year from now, a show of “Bitter Boys and Sweet Sad Men.” She was proud of her title. Austin thought the date was perhaps tragically distant.

Julien responded to the possibility with a renewed determination to do his best work. This would be his one chance; he didn’t want to miss it. He visited the Louvre—only a half-hour walk away—almost every day. So that he could avoid waiting in line, Austin bought him a membership card, which gave him special entry through the new French sculpture wing. Austin kept loading him up with art books that might excite his imagination—Aubrey Beardsley, John Singer Sargent, Francesco Clemente. Julien used them in an entirely practical way, not out of respect for each man’s place in art history but for motifs they might suggest.

He was struggling to refine his taste in painting at the same time as he was wrestling to improve his technique. That was the dreadful thing—he knew he didn’t have enough time to master this demanding medium and yet he was too honest to cheat. He’d become a passionately serious man. In Julien’s neat desk and meticulous working habits Austin saw the architect he’d been, that professional who is half
artist and half engineer. But what struck him was Julien’s happy studiousness, his humming, arts-and-crafts independence and pleasure, as though he were a jeweler with his vice, pliers and blowtorch.

In November Austin was in London for a few days, authenticating a desk for Sotheby’s, when he called Julien, who’d stayed home in Paris to work. “Things are sort of strange,” Julien said in a light, bemused voice. “I got turned around in the street and couldn’t find our apartment. I couldn’t remember my brother’s phone number this morning, though I know it by heart. Then just now I was trying to write something, but all the letters look as unfamiliar as hieroglyphics….”

“Count backwards down from twenty,” Austin said as calmly as possible.

Julien couldn’t get past seventeen and he laughed, not in panic but as if he found his predicament droll, goofy. Austin decided to take his cue and said, “That’s funny, but you may have toxoplasmosis—”

“Toxi—?”

“It’s a parasite in the brain, but it’s highly treatable. Can you get in a taxi and go see Dr. Verneuil at Hôpital Villejuif? Do you have money? Can you get there on your own or should I call Joséphine? I’ll be back tonight.”

Austin rushed back on the very next plane (the tunnel train wasn’t working yet). In the apartment he found scraps of paper scattered around, covered with Julien’s efforts to write normal, coherent sentences. One of them read, “This is very bizarre, but one no help why yes….”
(C’est très bizarre, mais on pas d’aide pourquoi oui….)

Julien had been hospitalized. Austin barreled into a taxi and found him in the cheerful AIDS wing, the Hôpital du Jour, already less delirious, his thoughts slowly unscrambling. It was almost exactly a year since the herpes attack on his face.

Now he began to lose weight visibly. Austin would cook him all his favorite dishes—couscous, paella,
navarin
—but he’d become sick eating them and blame Austin. Although Austin followed the recipes and refrigerated everything when he wasn’t working with it, Julien was certain that he’d let the meat spoil or used too much butter. Salmonella, botulism, maggots were only a few of the diseases Austin had courted with his American ineptness.

One day Julien looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “I’ve lost my nice round, firm buttocks. You can see them in photos from when I was a boy in Alicante in Spain or a young married man in Ethiopia on the lake with pink flamingos in the background. Women always commented on them—they were narrow but rounded. And now I’ve lost them, I guess for good.”

His weight had sunk from one hundred and sixty-five pounds to one hundred and thirty-five and though his face was not yet cadaverous his body would have looked blade-thin if he’d not dressed so carefully. He’d always favored the layered look but now he wore two or three shirts over a thermal T-shirt and under an unstructured jacket. His trousers were baggy, of wide-wale corduroy. Since his neck had become so scrawny his scarves and ascots had become more and more layered as well, tied with more and more extravagant knots.

He was always cold and after a walk with Ajax through the mist or a light December rain he’d come back trembling so violently that he’d huddle in bed under an eiderdown, wearing gloves and outdoor wool scarves. He looked like the gaunt Proust. He stopped shaving more than once a week; perhaps he thought his heavy black stubble would protect his face from the elements. Austin remembered someone had said Proust’s face looked as if it was being “devoured” by his beard.