The Married Man (34 page)

Austin took him back to Key West for the month of January to a house he’d rented because it had a jacuzzi. Julien would go into the tub for long sessions; the swirling water massaged his lower back, which had become intensely painful day in and day out, and finally warmed him up. Perhaps some of his medications made his skin photosensitive; he became as tan as a Mexican Indian even though he seldom went outside before evening.

The preceding year they had rented bikes and Julien had sped all over the island like a restless teenager just before he gets his first car. But this year he was so thin and weak that as he pumped his way up Elizabeth Street from the Waterfront Market with groceries in his basket, he lost control and fell. Austin came gliding up behind and scooped him up from the ground. “It’s all your fault, giving me these groceries,” Julien said. “And now I’ve lost control.”

“You’ve lost …?”

“I’ve shit in my pants.” Julien was angry and humiliated.

Austin ran into the restaurant and ordered a taxi. He locked Julien’s bike to a lamp post. The taxi didn’t come, but at last a two-wheeled rickshaw drawn by a bicyclist came along empty and Austin hailed it.

Soon they were home and Austin stood naked with Julien in the big outdoor shower and washed his soiled body clean. Julien slung an arm around Austin’s shoulder and let his knees buckle; he was ready to pass out. Austin put him to bed.

The bicycle-rickshaw man had given them his card. Whenever they had to go somewhere they called him. Riding behind him was a pleasure, watching his powerful buttocks bunching and uncoiling inside his pink shorts. He was Australian and kept up a stream of chatter that didn’t demand answers. They decided to call the foot-powered vehicle a pedophile; whenever they needed to go somewhere they said, “Let’s call the pedophile.”

Julien became so thin, so dark-skinned, and his beard grew in so thick that as they headed back to Paris people in the Miami airport stared at him. In Key West, where everyone was familiar with AIDS, no one had made a fuss. In Paris, the rule of discretion (or maybe it was just big-city indifference) meant that no one gawked. But when they were in what surely counted as “the real world” they were exposed to a hostile curiosity.

A
ll the time they were in Key West, Ajax had been boarded with Robert and Fabrice in Nice. Now they flew from Paris down to the Riviera to get their dog—and to tell Robert, at last, that Julien was dying.

Although the month was February the weather was bizarrely warm. Robert was standing in the airport, Ajax seated tranquilly beside him; Robert was wearing just a short-sleeved shirt, which barely contained his massive chest and shoulders. Austin looked for a sign that he was shocked by Julien’s appearance, but Robert’s beautiful face was impossible to decipher.

Soon Fabrice pulled up in his car and bundled them all in, but he seemed mildly offended when Julien asked him to put out his eternal cigarette. “I’m not well,” Julien said. “I’ll explain everything to you later.”

Fabrice and Robert had moved out of their bedroom and surrendered it to their guests. They said they didn’t mind sleeping on the two black leather couches in the living room.

Julien left with Fabrice, Robert and Ajax to go shopping and for an hour Austin was alone in their house. The winter sunlight was bright, pouring over the terra-cotta tiles of the roofs on the slopes below
them. A few houses down, pale red roses were still flowering in the corner of a walled garden. A skinny gray cat with paws dipped in black ink lay stretched out, half on its side, one leg extended ahead as if it were doing the sidestroke in its sleep. The sun had whited out the details of the port in a generalized glare but had left in a few picturesque elements: the faded blue-striped awning over a
bouillabaisse
restaurant on the far side, the palette-knife brilliance of a taut sail entering the harbor, the gleam off the hood of a car turning out toward the Promenade des Anglais.

Here, much closer, just below the windows rose up the olive tree, which produced the small
niçois
olives. There was the gravel rooftop where Robert tossed the cooked yolks of his eggs every morning for the birds; here and there were a few orange crumbs mixed in with the little stones.

Inside he walked around the pyramid-shaped bush, which Robert trimmed every morning with manicure scissors; it was a fine example of French topiary, which mystified the English, who liked their nature shaggy. Austin looked at the grand piano and even struck a few notes, but it was out of tune. He lay on the bed and looked at the plaster garland on the ceiling. He listened to the distant churn of traffic as it drove up the mountain. He got up and stood in a side window that looked out over hundreds of white, gray or sand-colored houses that flowed over the hills.

He realized that he was always tense these days and had been tense for months. He almost never had a moment like this for daydreaming, and his old life, the life he’d led on the Île Saint-Louis, struck him as unbelievably carefree—but also shallow. He’d been entirely self-centered then and although he’d looked his age he hadn’t felt it. He’d gone on and on, decade after decade, being a kid, though he’d filtered his boyishness through some later notion of Parisian pleasure, a notion that made pleasure take on the weight of an artistic pursuit or a proof of civilized elegance.

Now he was a “caregiver.” That was the word he’d heard in America. Someone had asked him if he was Julien’s “primary caregiver.” Startled at first, he’d finally said, “Yes. Yes, I am.” He was convinced that he had little in common with the old, irresponsible, endlessly joking
gay men he’d known in America before he ever left for France. Of course they had died or changed, too. No one was the same. They’d all changed and that old world of gay men with snappy retorts who’d committed to memory every last lyric from a Stephen Sondheim musical was gone, had fled, never to return.

The boys came back and suddenly the house was noisy with Julien’s and Robert’s rumbling voices. “Bébert!” Julien called forth. A moment later they were in a clinch in the bedroom, both of the brothers sprawled across the bed, laughing. Then Julien rushed into the living room, swept down on Austin and said,
“Mon petit bébé d’amour,”
and Austin could see Robert behind him, framed in the doorway, trying to smile, but something stricken, something broken, in his glance.

Julien had told them.

Fabrice was brushing down Ajax and talking to him in a soft voice with so much tenderness that Ajax’s eyes had gone huge and mournful. A light winter rain began to fall, in no way dimming the sun; squalls were blowing far out to sea and the palms were bending in the wind, although up here everything was calm. The rain was falling down in straight silvery lines.

The next day it was even warmer and the winds had scoured the skies clean with just a few faint swirls of cirrus clouds high, high above, as though an over-zealous housekeeper had scraped the blue enamel off the white bowl. They drove with Ajax all in one car out to Cap Ferrat and stopped at the very tip, near the Santo Sospir, the villa where Cocteau had lived so many years before. Inside, Mme Weisweiler, Cocteau’s old patron, was still living, though she was ancient and an opium addict, thanks to Cocteau himself; she’d acquired his habit without picking up his habits (of hard work, curiosity, exuberant creativity). Austin could picture Cocteau with his turned-back jacket sleeves, his beautiful “son” Edouard Dermit with his black, wavy hair and upturned nose, Mme Weisweiler in heels, hat and white linen suit trimmed in dark piping. She who had once been so svelte and stylish, who’d been the perfect smiling embodiment of sleek feminine beauty in all those black-and-white French magazine photos of the 1950s—she’d ended up an immobilized old woman half-dead in this nearly empty, dilapidated mansion. Robert
said he’d peeked into the windows more than once but had never seen her.

They descended all her stairs to the rocks and the sea. From here they could look back at the long, slow curve of the Nice beaches and the white turrets of the old grand hotels (les
palaces
, as the French called them, using the English word). The winter sea was dotted not only with pleasure boats but also with big, rusting ships hauling goods along the coast or produce up from North Africa. But they were all far away, as if this peninsula was held between cupped hands. Here, on Cap Ferrat, the massive white stone mansions glittered in the afternoon light behind dusty green umbrella pines.

Robert and Julien sat on the rocks, dangling their feet just above the water, while Fabrice stood, smoking, and Austin tipped back, stretching his whole length out on a chalky stone. He closed his eyes and absorbed the heat of the sun. Julien said to his brother, “Look at the jellyfish.”

Austin cocked open one eye and glanced down at the gently lapping water, gray-green in its depths but colorless as ether here. He could see the large white medusas, nearly a foot in circumference, floating and pulsing with the waves. They dilated and contracted like optic muscles—at least Austin saw them as something like vision: crystalline, neural, sleepless.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Julien asked. He seemed fascinated by their pulsing; they contracted and relaxed constantly, all liquid and powerfully if invisibly muscular, clear as tears. If you didn’t look carefully you wouldn’t see them at all, so transparent were they. They were like sunspots in a lens, or subaquatic spider webs. They were oil on water, if the oil was squeezed from white roses.

“I’d like to be that peaceful,” Julien said.

Fabrice, who was standing behind the two brothers, rubbed his left eye; maybe it was just irritation from his cigarette smoke.

“Bébert,” Julien said to Robert, “I want to come back after I die as one of these medusas. You like to come down here all the time. I promise: I’ll float by you one day. You’ll know. They’re so peaceful.”

But then later he touched a jellyfish with his stick and tore it. He was shocked; he had had no idea they were so fragile.

As the two brothers talked, Austin and Fabrice went for a walk all the way down to the point of the peninsula. They sat for a moment on a bench and looked out across the expanse of the Mediterranean, as uniform as a field of wheat but exhilarating, an invitation to voyage, as heady as a great draft of cold vodka.

“Ah, Ostend, you can’t imagine how hard we were hit by Julien’s news.” Fabrice rested a hand on Austin’s shoulder. “We love Julien so much. Robert is truly shattered. I can see it in his eyes. We had our doubts, of course. First with the chicken pox so near his eyes—we thought that was strange. Then when he said he had a brain tumor—”

“—But he didn’t have a brain tumor,” Austin said.

“Precisely. No, but he told us he had a tumor. I suppose he dared not mention the toxi, the intox—”

“The toxoplasmosis.”

“Precisely. So he said he had a tumor. But we talked it over with a doctor we know and told him that Julien had a brain tumor which had been
cured
and that now he was
normal
—and our friend said that was impossible. He said maybe it hadn’t been a tumor at all. Then a mutual friend of ours, someone we’ve known for years, who used to be in show business and has nursed friends with AIDS, she said it sounded like AIDS, her hairdresser had had something similar, and Robert was so angry he hit the table with his fist—oh, Ostend, how could this have happened?”

“Was Julien often active with men?” Austin asked. He’d been curious for so long; now he had a legitimate reason to ask.

Fabrice looked disconcerted by the question and said, “Why did Julien ever get married? We were very opposed to that. We’re so happy he found you. These brothers! They’re extraordinary, aren’t they?”

Suddenly Fabrice began to cry and Austin put his arm around him. He was such a kindly soul, Fabrice, and even his refusal to pay his taxes or even think about them Austin found
sympathique
. Julien complained about how lazy and disorganized his brother and Fabrice were, but Julien, too, half-admired their indifference to life’s duties and tedious details. Fabrice told so many bizarre jokes, sometimes with a cruel edge to them, that it was easy to forget he was so full of
love and tenderness. His dog, his Robert, his cousins, a few friends from adolescence in Nice—the circle was small, but his big heart constantly irrigated it with fresh, strong sentiments.

Julien and Austin hurried back to Paris; Julien had his painting to do, his show to prepare. Austin was perpetually conscious of not wasting Julien’s time, as if Austin was setting him up for eternity, as if the thoughts he was entertaining, the information or impressions he was storing up would be his to meditate on forever, mental food for the big voyage. He forgot he was heading in fact for nothing but oblivion.

Or, more recently, Austin thought that Julien’s experiences now, since there would be so few of them, should be superior to the ordinary run, so mixed and compromised. But what did that mean? Superior? How? To what? Julien was in pain from his back almost constantly. It was the result of pancreatitis, which a new drug, DDI, had caused. The doctor had warned that one out of twenty patients who took DDI developed pancreatitis, which could be fatal. American and optimistic, Austin said the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor and the danger infinitesimal, the possible benefits wonderfully promising. French and fatalistic, Julien expected the worst but realized he had no alternative. Both he and Austin, being human, invariably talked about his getting better. That was the pattern they’d absorbed since childhood: someone was ill, he submitted to treatment, he got better.

Not for a moment did Austin imagine that he was required to share Julien’s pain. He didn’t really have time to reflect on their condition. From early morning to early evening, when Julien went to bed, Austin was running. Walking the dog three times a day. Shopping for fresh food every day and cooking it. Accompanying Julien to the hospital for examinations and treatments. Receiving friends—for Julien wanted to see people, but only for short spells. Accordingly, they had worked out a plan: friends would drop by for a drink, then go off to a restaurant with Austin while Julien ate his chicken soup and stewed carrots and crème caramel in bed and watched a movie on video. The friends were always impressed by how elegant Julien looked, how warm and smiling his expression was. They said, “Usually when someone in France becomes ill, gravely ill, he retires from the world
altogether. It’s vastly to Julien’s credit that he’s stayed so open.” Did they mean that as praise? Or were they shocked he imposed his illness on them?