The Married Man (36 page)

Marie-France was brisk and perfectly turned out as always in a Chanel suit, with a black bow gathering her hair up behind, her skin radiant and unlined. Nothing about her seemed rushed or artificial; her low voice was self-deprecating, alive to every possibility of wit, even at her own expense. She asked them all about Rome, as if they had been normal rich tourists, the sort she knew, seeking distraction, checking out their Italian cousins. “Did you see the Contarinis?” she asked. “Teeny and Dukie?”

She herself was more interested in actresses, writers and painters, people who would make her laugh and would cast a bohemian glamor over her
salon
, crowded as it inevitably had to be with old relatives and good tailoring and bank presidents who were, for once, intimidated by the commingling of so much artistic talent and so many aristocratic titles.

If Marie-France was shocked by Julien’s protruding bones, brown face and stubble, his layers of shirts stuffed above his hipless jeans and slat-thin legs, she didn’t let on at all. She was courteous, merry, light, although her deep voice made her frivolous remarks sound like fife music rearranged for the bassoon, and the gray light of Paris filtering through windows on two sides of the room crammed with row after
row of white marble busts and couches upholstered in candy-striped velvet or pale blue satin imprinted with still paler peonies—this dim, liquid light in a room in which lamps had not yet been turned on lent a peacefulness, even a sadness, to every one of her starchy movements, even to her perfect posture. She always looked as if she was about to rise and tiptoe away.

Then Marie-France’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Hortense, the one who hoped to compete as a horsewoman in the Olympics, came in. She would have let the two men kiss her rosy cheeks, as any upper-class girl was trained to do, but she shrank back, just a millimeter, from the ruin of Julien’s looks and in blushing confusion half-sketched in a shy, comic curtsy. Immediately she curled up against her mother, as a much younger child would have done, and after studying them without seeming really to hear what they were saying, she hurried away, dropping another perfunctory curtsy on her way out.

The
shame
of disease, of their loathsome, terminal,
sexual
disease, overwhelmed Austin and he felt his cheeks burning. Marie-France even appeared to him to have turned fractionally colder, as if she regretted that her innocent daughter had been sullied by the contact.

Did Julien notice anything? No, he seemed very happy with their visit and several times on the way home said they must see more of Marie-France. When he’d gone to the toilet for a moment, she’d astonished Austin by saying, “Poor fellow…. Listen, if ever you need money, even a lot of money, remember, I have it.” Austin was especially touched by her remark because he knew how painful it was for her to mention money at all.

Julien became extremely ill with a microorganism, a kind of tuberculosis, in the blood; it was called “avian micobacteria.” His remaining cushion of flesh, no matter how slight, was boiled off his bones; he looked like a ramshackle infant. One day he was standing in the shower, studying his big, naked bones in the mirror beside the tub, and he said, “Look what’s happened to my body. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t. A new treatment for this particular disease had just kicked in and it was so effective that two weeks after he’d started it his raging fevers were calmed and he was eating like a horse. The weight flowed back onto his body and he looked better than he had in a year.

His energy came back, too, and when Lucy flew over to visit them he took a real pleasure in showing her Paris, though later he complained that she was sapping his last blood, snacking on a dying man’s bones. He said she was a vampire and an idiot and he’d even heard her saying to her mother on the phone, “Now we have to go out for another
French
meal,” spoken in such peevish, weary tones, as if this particular ordeal was well known back in
L’Amérique profonde
. But for Julien, complaining put him in high spirits; it was a form of creativity; it was even a form of affection. Lucy and Julien conferred for hours—on her poetry, her clothes, her decision to marry, her desire to have a baby. Julien insisted she have a baby; being childless was the one thing he regretted, he said.

He found out through a mutual friend that Vladimir had committed suicide. The friend didn’t know the details but he said that Vladimir had lost his looks, his face had been covered with what appeared to be boils, all very mysterious, though he’d undoubtedly contracted AIDS. He just didn’t want to admit in so many words that he was gay and dying of the usual gay disease. Nor did he want his friends to pity him. Julien looked often at the photo Vladimir had inscribed to him and created a minor cult around it. Austin would find him staring at it, tears in his eyes. Austin remembered Vladimir as he’d been as a young man in Venice, barely out of his adolescence, or in New York, when someone had glanced up to see him entering the room and had asked, “Who is this young man who looks like a prince in a Turgenev novel?”

Now that he’d seen death at such close quarters, smelled its sour breath and felt the twitch of its flank in the dark, Julien didn’t want to be backed into a corner by it. Through Joséphine he met Patty, a South American poet in her fifties who was willing to help him out. Patty was unhappy, had gone through a mastectomy, her husband had left her, she drank too much and one of her two daughters had become very ill. To say that much, of course, to make a clear list of woes like that, was terribly American on his part, Austin realized. He’d found out whatever he knew about Patty from Joséphine. Patty herself wallowed in the
non-dit
of unnamed suffering. If anyone came close to formulating a question about what she was going through,
she would dissolve into a fit of cigarette coughs and glide out of the room, mumbling something about the bottle of whiskey she was trying to locate.

She had beautiful manners, a proper Buenos Aires upbringing despite her foul language (so typical of the radical but bourgeois heirs to 1968), the overflowing ashtrays, the unkempt hair and badly bitten nails and the thin, flushed face of an alcoholic. Her apartment was on the edge of the Sentier, the garment district, anything but a fashionable address, but it was huge and furnished with fine old family things she hadn’t polished or even dusted in ten years. She looked out at the world from under a fringe of hennaed hair, her huge eyes made bigger with kohl she’d applied with more expertise than her shaky hand would seem to vouch for. She liked them both, especially Julien, and welcomed them with a sympathetic glance that spoke of all she’d lived through and was too proud to talk about—or perhaps she was too disdainful of language to confide her feelings to words.

Often Austin would come home from walking Ajax to discover Patty and Julien “talking death.” They’d be huddled over Earl Grey for him, Johnnie Walker for her, and the air would be pungent from her Gitanes (he never objected when she smoked at their place, as if she alone had earned the right). The afternoon sunlight, reflected off the top windows and the stone of the buildings across the way, would be applying knives to the rising entrails of smoke that twisted above their heads. She’d shake a little smoker’s cough out of her pinched chest and mouth, which radiated lines out away from the opening. She’d laugh, or in a hoarse spasm indicate laughter, and she and Julien would wait almost silently, certainly nervously, until Austin was out of earshot.

She told Julien he should go to Amsterdam, where doctor-assisted death was legal for those suffering from a terminal disease, but when Austin telephoned a Dutch euthanasia society the man who answered was curt and possibly suspicious. “No, no,” he said, “euthanasia is only legal for Dutch citizens, and a minimum of three doctors must sign a release form. Anyway, euthanasia is only administered to patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and they usually belong to a club and have written a living will years before they begin to lose their mental competence.”
This was the same Dutch singsong complacency Austin had met years before in an Amsterdam leather bar when a lantern-jawed, gum-chewing blond with bad skin had asked him in a bored voice, “And would you like to be beat?” just as if he’d been saying, “And would you like more fries?”

When Austin mentioned the suicide problem to Henry McVay during one of their almost daily phone conversations, Henry said, “Yes, killing oneself is far more difficult than most people suspect.”

“Have
you
ever contemplated it?” Austin asked. He suspected that Henry would laugh in his face, but on the contrary Henry said in a low, matter-of-fact voice, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

“Oh?” Austin said on a high, cracked note. “You?”

“And
, Sweetie, what’s more: I’ve belonged to a Hemlock Club for over a decade.”

“A hemlock …?”

“What!” Henry exclaimed, surprised to the point of mild indignation, his strongest suit. “The Hemlock Society has meetings in every civilized city around the globe,” Henry said in his old-fashioned, deliberate manner, one that foreigners, not incidentally, always prized; he was the opposite of a mumbler. He spoke in all-caps, even to a fellow American, which lent the present conversation a macabre emphasis.

“But why, Henry? Why should you of all people long for death?”

“Everything is fine up till now. I’m enjoying myself immensely. But what if I begin to lose my health, my mobility, my
faculties
, for God’s sake!” He laughed, remembering, as a good Parisian, to add a frivolous note: “What if I become terminally
bored?
”

It was easy to blame Henry for being too much of a hedonist, incapable of devoting any heroism merely to enduring—but Austin couldn’t think of any good reason to disagree with him or disapprove of him. Henry had always lived for pleasure. Even his connoisseurship had been a rarefied form of pleasure since it combined knowledge with possession.

“I’ll give you the Hemlock booklet,” Henry said, “but you won’t find it of much use. The
cocktail
, if you get my drift, is maddeningly
vague. Has to be. Legal reasons. It appears some demented teens began to kill themselves on yet another American death trip. They’d discovered the formula from an earlier Hemlock Society publication—completely crazy, of course, and a perversion of our purposes, which are humanitarian.”

Indeed, when Austin read through the reassuring, reasonable, grim booklet he realized that there was no recipe for a fatal brew in these sad pages.

Julien was in despair. “I no longer have the courage to throw myself off a bridge into the Seine. I would have done it six months ago, but I didn’t want to leave you. Our life has been wonderful together,
Petit
. But now that I almost died I know the horrors that lie in wait for me. And it’s a question of dignity. I admire Vladimir. I don’t want to be a victim just waiting for this virus to have its way with me.” Perhaps, Austin thought, he wants to join his mother as rapidly as possible and in a manner worthy of her own self-destruction. Dying slowly from this disease, Austin told himself, is done by losing more and more control, day by day, whereas the act of suicide is a way of taking charge again.

“But, Julien,” Austin said, “you’ve been so sick but now you’re well. You almost lost your vision and you’ve regained it, you almost lost your mind and then it came back, and now you almost died from your bird fever—” (that’s what they jokingly called the avian micobacteria,
fièvre de l’oiseau)
—“but you’re better than ever. Who’s to say they won’t just keep finding one cure after another?”

“No, no,
Petit,”
Julien said, kissing each one of Austin’s fingers with a dreamy indifference, as if he were telling beads while falling asleep.

And then Patty came up with the pills. There were some thirty pills, all sizes and colors, Valium blue, aspirin white, candy pink, held in a blue silk Chinese bag that snapped shut and was embroidered with a gold dragon. The dragon had red eyes. The bag was a sky blue, the color called “cerulean.” It probably wasn’t even silk, just a shiny Taiwanese synthetic—a cheap sewing kit but with pills instead of needles and
threads (needles to pierce the heart, Austin thought, and threads to snip). Inside were instructions typed with a bad ribbon on a smudged piece of paper, folded in with the pills; the pills felt heavy but yielding in the hand, like a scrotum. The instructions said:

1. Take the Valium first (blue) to calm the gag reflexes
   .
   

2. Wait 20 minutes, then take the remaining pills with a glass of champagne
   .
   

The pills were put in the drawer of the black Art-Nouveau desk with its legs as slender as a colt’s, but Austin couldn’t imagine Julien taking them. He couldn’t picture coming home one day and finding Julien dead on the couch, his face bluish-white under his black beard visibly coming in, thicker and thicker.

Now that he had his pills Julien withdrew slightly from Austin.

He also went out for longer and longer walks and treated Ajax more as a younger brother whose loyalty could be taken for granted and less as a fat, impossible baby to be spoiled. Sometimes Julien seemed more than aware that other people found his cuddling of Ajax excessive, even repellent; people shook their heads when Julien talked of raising Ajax to be the next pope or called him
“Sa Sainteté Pie VII.”
People thought it was disgusting the way Julien would throw half a broiled chicken on the parquet for Ajax to gnaw on and gulp. But Julien liked to show how
legislative
his love was; it set its own laws. And as Julien became thinner and more reedlike and more and more fastidious about food, Ajax, his creature, gnawed more and more fiercely at the fat bodies of cooked fowl. They complemented each other, the anorexic devil and his gross familiar, but they went well together, one all flesh and flesh-eating, the other a pile of shambling bones.

At a party Austin met someone who’d known Vladimir years before; she said that she had heard the business he’d started had failed and that he’d turned into a monster, with big lumps all over his body.