The Married Man (35 page)

When Austin came home, even if it was no later than ten, Julien had fallen asleep while the old black-and-white movie was noisily winding down.

For a long time Julien claimed he adored all the French classics—
Atalanta, The Rules of the Game, Dr. Knock
—but one evening he said, “I don’t want to see anything old anymore.”

That single statement, presented without preamble or explanation, read to Austin as a cry to survive, to live vividly in the present. He was right: the past was a luxury only the healthy could afford.

One day the doctor prescribed an estrogen patch, which was designed to revive Julien’s appetite. He slapped a fresh one to his forearm every morning. “But he said a side effect was that it would probably kill off my sex drive,” Julien admitted in a deliberately neutral, scientific, almost offhand voice.

Austin didn’t say anything. He felt too guilty for having neglected Julien’s body for so many months. If they’d continued making love, perhaps Julien would have fewer regrets now.

Julien said, “Well, I guess I can say goodbye to all that. To sex.” Something in his tone made Austin wonder if Julien had gone on having occasional adventures, enjoying some of the countless erotic possibilities Paris offered its citizens every day. He hoped so.

Even though Austin accompanied him on every third visit to the doctor, Julien was remarkably self-reliant. He and the social worker who’d been assigned to his case filled out all the forms; Austin would have been lost if he’d been faced with this very French form of bureaucratic business. Not that the system wasn’t benign. If a patient had fewer than two hundred T-cells (and Julien had never been tested with so many) the state reimbursed one hundred percent of his medical expenses, even his taxi fares to and from the hospital. In addition, Julien (and thousands of other out-of-work people with HIV) received unemployment benefits, which gave him pocket money. Even the man who came to the house to massage him was paid by a government agency.

Julien sold his apartment but with little profit—the market was bad and then, at the last moment, the Communist mayor of his township put in a low preemptive bid that could not be disputed or rejected. Even sold so disadvantageously, the apartment brought him in some money. He was determined to spend it all before he died so that his hated father would inherit nothing. (Under Napoleonic law parents could not disinherit children, but neither could children disinherit parents.) Julien bought the video machine, a full-length leather coat that was so heavy he looked exhausted just standing up in it, a luxurious white terry-cloth bathrobe for Austin that was so thick it filled an entire suitcase, then a holiday to Rome over Easter.

They stayed in the Villa Médicis, the Renaissance
palazzo
near the top of the Spanish Steps that belonged to the French government. In its huge reception rooms and extensive gardens the young French writers and painters and sculptors who won the Prix de Rome circulated for the two years they lived there. A friend of Austin’s, a furniture curator at a museum in the south of France, arranged for them to stay at the Villa as guests during Holy Week. Julien paid the low daily fee as well as the airfare.

They were virtually alone in the great palace. The French had all gone back to France for Easter. A tiny, studded door set into a larger one let them into an impressive lobby ending in stairs that led up to a bust of Louis XIV before branching off to right and left and ascending on up to the reception rooms and ultimately the bedrooms. As for the artists’ studios, they were each independent little buildings tucked away in corners of the huge garden.

Julien and Austin could come back at night after a dinner on the Piazza del Popolo and open the dwarf door set into the giant
portone
. The lights would spring on when they touched the timed meter. After ascending several floors they’d cross a slender, shaky
passerelle
, a suspended metal walkway, and then they’d reach their room, sober, barely furnished, although with a twenty-two-foot-high ceiling, coffered and as neatly carpentered as a ship’s hull. The room’s single wide window looked out on the garden. The first night they were there a bolt of lightning hit a hundred-year-old pine and splintered it in half. As so often these days, they said, “Too bad it didn’t hit us. Instantaneous.
Dramatic. A fine death.” They’d become connoisseurs on the ways of dying and after a story someone would tell to invoke pity and terror, they would cock an eye at each other, smile and say, “That sounds attractive,” or “Not bad. Quick and to the point.”

The fiction was that Austin himself would die soon after Julien, even very soon. And some days Austin hoped that he would fall down a manhole or double over from a heart attack the day after he buried Julien. That would all be so much simpler. In that case he wouldn’t have to rebuild a new life. The tackiness of survival—which led, inevitably, to forgetting and faithlessness—could be obviated. He had no savings, no one to look after him, no close surviving relatives, no job prospects; he was
counting
on dying quickly.

Julien still had sums of energy to draw on. There was so much they had to see: the Caravaggios in the French Church, Michelangelo’s
Moses
, the dome of St. Peter’s and the Pietà, the Forum and the Colosseum, the marble Renaissance vastness of St. John Lateran, the miniature medieval cloisters of a silent order of nuns who cared for the deaf at Quattro Santi Coronati, the lamp posts dangling baskets of pink azaleas around the bottom of the Spanish Steps, the creamy lubricity of Canova’s nudes on exhibit in a museum along the Corso, the perverse splendors of the Carracci brothers’ paintings inside the fortress-like French Embassy, the Palazzo Farnese (which a friend arranged for them to see). Julien was too skinny to sit on an uncushioned metal chair in a café. His face, gaunter and browner than a Navajo’s, frightened the Romans; even the flirtatious young men around the Campo dei Fiori averted their eyes, they who invariably looked up from their fruit and flower stands with black eyes wincing from the vulnerability of narcissism.

In the mornings, Austin could tell, Julien was often tempted to stay in bed but then, by heroic dedication to experience for its own sake, he’d rise, dress, shake the rust out of his joints and set his slowly atrophying muscles once more in motion, for the only way to live at all was by pretending there was going to be a future worth preparing for. That future was so past belief that only the most grimly abstract sense of duty could prod him now through all this onerousness. He was a bit like a Frankenstein monster slowly coming unstitched.

One evening the Easter holiday was over and the
palazzo
began to fill up with the returning
pensionnaires
—pale Parisians in black, murmuring in hushed voices rich with insinuation and knowing, so different from the loud querulousness of Rome and its verbal shrugging. The French, who consider even the mildest day too hot and who have no stoic scruples about complaining, were all saying,
“Chaud
…
trop chaud
…
comme il fait chaud!”

Then, the next afternoon, after a long, dreamy walk through the Pincio looking down on the entire city as it spread out all the way from the spun-sugar battlements of the monument to Victor Emmanuel to the opening crab claw of colonnades in front of St. Peter’s, as they were ambling down the hill to the Villa Médicis, suddenly Julien doubled over. He said it felt like sharp needles piercing his eyeball, the left one, the one that had so nearly been blinded by herpes in Boston.

It wasn’t too late to call their travel agent in Paris. They were locked into a low-fare air ticket that permitted no changes, but the agent phoned Air France and talked about Julien’s AIDS emergency. Within ten minutes she phoned back to say they had two seats on the last plane of the day if they could be on it in an hour and a half.

They threw their clothes in a bag and rushed down the hill to the taxis clustered in front of the expensive German hotel on the street at the top of the Spanish Steps. Julien was in excruciating pain, writhing on the back seat of the taxi. Austin sat beside him, not even daring to hold his hand lest the pressure of his skin (or even the mere fact of his presence) add to the reality of his suffering, as though pain, like the atmosphere, could be measured in pounds per cubic inch. Julien had long since put behind him all play-acting, exchanging it for a wooden-ness worthy of the cigar-store Indian he’d come to resemble, so brown and hard was his skin, so inexpressive his features. But now he twisted and turned in his seat, grimaced and thrashed from side to side. If someone had dared to annoy Julien, even unintentionally, Austin would have gone for his throat. But now he could help in no way except to pray silently that they’d get to the airport in time.

They did. They’d even been upgraded to first class. As soon as the plane took off Julien felt better. As the cool, compressed air came
rushing through the overhead nozzles and the soft voices of the French stewardesses were asking them with formulaic politeness for their choices, Julien’s whole body uncoiled and stretched. He scarcely trusted his good luck, but it seemed he was intent on proving that pleasure, after all, is nothing except the cessation of pain. He smiled. Now he was at home only in this pressurized world of propulsion and purely symbolic comfort. Even when they landed the symptoms didn’t come back.

Despite his greedy sight-seeing, he now admitted he’d been disappointed by Rome, although Paris, too, struck him as more pedestrian than he’d remembered. “It seems so colorless after Italy,” Julien said. Everything looked standardized and well-maintained, compared to the baroque shabbiness of Rome, its broken pediments incised against the blue sky or its marble thresholds half-sunk into the red earth. It occurred to Austin that Julien was being so fastidious to justify to himself why he was unhappy in both cities.

They went to the Hôpital du Jour where Julien was welcomed exuberantly by the nurses and the shy Iranian intern; Austin realized with a slight shock that with them Julien was still being as charming as ever, whereas at home he’d long since given up the effort. The Iranian could find nothing wrong with Julien’s eye.

A
ustin no longer slept with Julien. He’d put sheets on the couch in Julien’s studio. The mattress was lumpy but Austin was usually so exhausted that he fell asleep immediately. No matter how tired he was he remained alert to the slightest signal Julien made. If Julien had a gasping fit behind his door, Austin was suddenly there, hovering in the hallway, listening, verifying. If the floorboard creaked, Julien would call out,
“Petit?”

“Oui?”

“I’m okay. Go back to bed.”

Only once in the whole long period of his illness did Julien ever say, “Would you sleep with me tonight? I’m afraid.”

Austin stopped drawing the curtains and turned to look at Julien. He was so moved by this naked demand for comfort that he acquiesced without a comment. He realized how brave Julien had been on all the other nights, how brave in his endurance and silence.

Austin had bought some pornographic magazines and dutifully masturbated to them, even though he didn’t like still photography of men (he preferred dirty movies or, best of all, stories). He said out loud, “I’m so physically lonely.” Maybe he found sexual despondency easier to admit to than just plain loneliness.

One night at a reading someone gave at the Village Voice, an English-language bookshop on the Left Bank, he met an American gay man in his early forties who was in the audience and they’d exchanged numbers, not with the idea of sleeping together (Austin knew Rod wasn’t attracted to him), but simply because they’d laughed so hard and in such an exhilarating, spontaneous, thoroughly American way while sipping white wine after the reading. “Oh, the best people,” Austin told Rod, “are Europeanized Americans.”

Now Austin phoned him at all hours during the night to laugh and whisper. He never had a free moment to see Rod and even forgot what he looked like, but they told each other everything, week after week, in those alternating joky and confessional riffs peculiar to Americans that no foreigner can ever successfully duplicate. Austin fell half in love with Rod and appreciated his way of diverting even the most solemn facts about Julien’s illness into irrelevant or irreverent remarks. In Austin’s place Julien would have been indignant at the “liberties” that Rod was taking, but Austin appreciated their softening effect, as if someone kept playing waltzes on the piano as the ship sank. He could tell that Rod was eccentric, a big reader who had had little formal education, a peddler of drugs at the clubs who maintained a strict regime of working out and homeopathic medicine, someone who was obsessed with what no longer existed: the deejays who’d died of AIDS in the eighties, the forgotten hit songs of the seventies, the magically seamless segue from one song to another on a certain night at the Saint in 1980.

Rod had heard of an acupuncturist in Toulouse who was supposed to work miracles with AIDS patients. He even produced a friend from the clubs who came by one day to sing Dr. Kado’s praises to Julien and Austin. They flew down to Toulouse and saw the doctor. Dr. Kado was partially crippled. He told Julien that the world had been good when it was green, and at first they thought he was an ecologist. But no, he meant that the creatures, the dinosaurs, had been green and that then there’d been white people who’d “degenerated” into yellow people who were further degraded into the blacks. But not to worry. Through acupuncture and proper channeling, people were ascending back toward pure reptilian green and saurian virtue. Homosexuals them
selves were degenerate forms but with proper therapy and meditation Julien could look forward to a cure. “A cure of AIDS?” Julien asked.

“No,” the doctor said, “of your homosexuality. I’ve had a startling degree of success. You must eat only things that are—”

“Green,”
Austin said, interrupting. “Come on, Julien, let’s get out of here.”

One day Austin’s aristocratic friend Marie-France invited him and Julien to tea. Her sitting room was situated between an inner and an outer garden—the inner one made up of trimmed boxwoods and raked gravel paths around a verdigrised fountain of a nymph, the outer one composed of twin
allées
of trees, leafless now, and enough varied ferns as ground cover to please any Victorian. Although it was almost spring the days were still short and cold and in the afternoon the French doors opening out from the
salon
looked like stretched panels of gray, watered silk, each slightly brighter or darker, fractionally different shades of twilight.