The Married Man (37 page)

Despite his apparent recovery, Julien’s stats were sinking—had, in fact, sunk. His medical appointments now devoured his days and when Austin peeked into Julien’s calendar, just the abbreviated notes he carried around with him, Austin read about appointments with the
“pneumologue”
(the lung doctor?), the
“opthalmologue”
(he was taking three different drops for his eyes). In addition, he was taking one Bactrim a day (a sort of super-strong antibiotic, wasn’t it?), Immodium to control the diarrhea (two in the morning and two at night), two Rifabutine a day, one Malocide every day except Saturday and Sunday, half a sachet of Actapulgite three times a day (but not with the other medicines), two Kaleorid morning, noon and night, five Zovirax pills four times a day (against herpes, Austin remembered), a Zovirax cream for the face, a child’s dose of Humagel in sachet form three times a day, one Vivamyne every morning, one Osfolate per week, one Buscopan three times a day maximum … Austin reeled at the thought of keeping it all straight: once a week; not on weekends; thrice daily maximum; not to be taken with the other pills….

There were notations about a Neomycine-Bacitracine pomade, about two Ciflox a day for one month only, about two Doliprane a day (a kind of aspirin, Austin thought), about Lexomil and Triflucan. There were blood cultures that revealed he had 0.7 T4-cells and just 23 T8s (the lab wrote
soit!
after each number, meaning
sic
or “this is the real number, not a mistake”). He had suppositories to insert, creams to spread, artificial tears to drop into his eyes, Retin-A to rub into the red skin stretched over his cheekbones. If the Immodium didn’t stop the diarrhea he could swallow up to ten drops every four hours of deodorized tincture of opium. The last resort was a skin patch of slowly secreting morphine analogue.

Besides the prescriptions were all the forms from the social worker signed, “I wish you lots of courage and I beg you,
Monsieur
, to accept my distinguished salutations.” The “distinguished salutations” were normal; what struck Austin as almost eerily human in an official letter was any mention of “courage.” There were his applications to the French state for “medical aid” and “medical aid in the home.” He had stickers to put on all his prescriptions from an organization called ARTS, which had nothing to do with painting or music but stood for “Association of Research for the Treatment of Seropositives.”

Whenever Julien would go out for a while in the late afternoon, Austin would call Peter in New York. One day Peter was so choked up he could barely get the words out.

“What’s wrong, Petes?”

“Alex, my beau …?”

“The preppie guy? The Mayor’s assistant? The furniture designer? Running for alderman …?”

Austin had half-wanted to tease Peter about his paragon of a lover, the consummate young black man on the rise, but his words only made Peter cry all the harder.

“What happened?”

At last Peter pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “Alex has broken my heart. He’s killed me.”

“What do you mean, Peter?”

“I mean he was my last chance.”

It took half an hour for Austin to reconstruct what had happened. Alex, apparently, had been an obsessive worker who seldom slept. He was managing his building, he was constantly dancing attendance on the Mayor, he had to stay up all night in his big studio in Queens where he and his two assistants were fashioning the prototypes for an entire collection of furniture which Bloomingdales might buy and manufacture, final decision pending. He loved Peter and admired him, but Peter, after all, wasn’t working. Peter had lots of leisure on his hands. He wanted to spend “quality time” with Alex.

“I don’t know which factors counted the most,” Peter said solemnly. “But I told Alex one night I was positive.”

“How long ago?” Austin asked. He thought this Alex must be one of the least observant people in the world if he needed to be
told
that Peter was positive. Probably only Peter could imagine his disease was invisible.

“Two weeks ago. I think. I’m having lots of trouble keeping track of things—of time. But Alex was great about that—he said he didn’t mind, that he would take care of me. But I’m sure he
has
to mind. I can’t remember: did I tell you his last lover died just a year before we met? He can’t be too thrilled about nursing and burying another lover.”

“C’mon,”
Austin said. “You’ll bury us all.”

Peter sighed, didn’t comment, went on: “Then, last Wednesday, brother, there’s a date I remember, I invited him to dinner, just the
two of us, I’d gone to Dean and DeLuca’s for the first asparagus, I had bay scallops, a bottle of champagne, raspberries—and he didn’t show up. You know I don’t have much money. With a dinner like that I can shoot my whole week’s allowance—
your money
, though my parents are helping me now and I get money from the city. Alex kept calling. He was in the Mayor’s limo. It was nine, then ten, then midnight, some emergency. I lost it. I just completely went ballistic. I told him to forget it.
Then
I didn’t hear from him for two days. Then I got this letter. Want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“‘Dear Peter—

“‘We’re both in our thirties, we’ve always been honest with each other, we’re grown-ups, I owe you the truth.

“‘Though in some ways you’re perfect for me—you’re interested in design, it’s magic in bed, you’ve got the European sophistication I like—I’m afraid we have entirely different rhythms and expectations.

“‘You want someone around all the time, at least in the evenings, and given your health prospects you’ve got a perfect right to that. I, on the other hand, am very ambitious, busy and getting busier. If I make you unhappy now, you’ll be miserable in the future as I take on more and more responsibilities. We must stop seeing each other—totally. Let’s make a clean break of it. We weren’t meant to be friends. Lovers or nothing.’”

“Oh, Petes, I’m so sorry….” Austin took note of the gallant sound of “lovers or nothing,” which just marked Alex’s cowardice.

The worst of it was that the more Austin discussed it with him, the more he realized that this really and truly would be Peter’s last stab at romance. He’d been hanging on, keeping his health and looks and cheerfulness as intact as possible, just barely remaining a member of the middle class, all in an effort to “bag” Alex. But now that he’d lost him he’d never try again—nor would he be able to. He’d lost his reason for living. Now he’d sink into the shabbiness and senility of AIDS, no matter how much Austin did for him. Austin could see that Peter had lost Alex because he, Peter, was too impatient, too subject to quick rages—too spoiled, which was something Austin had done to
him (even that a child’s word such as
spoiled
could be applied to Peter proved how thoroughly Austin had babied him). Peter was convinced that Alex hadn’t been put off when he learned Peter was positive: “After all, he’d taken care of one lover with AIDS.”

Precisely
, Austin thought to himself. Maybe Alex couldn’t face burying another lover and ending up alone all over again.

Over the next few weeks Austin phoned Peter every other day, but then Peter stopped answering during a whole long weekend in May. He’d been complaining of unbearable pains in his feet, which felt as if he were walking on hot wires, he said. The discomfort was caused by “neuropathy,” which in Julien’s case made his extremities go numb but in Peter’s caused him to suffer agony. So violent was the pain that the doctor had had him try the same morphine-analogue patches that Julien sometimes resorted to (“analogue” because real morphine was too addictive? Or was morphine too hard to prescribe legally? Could addiction really be such a problem for someone about to die?)

Austin phoned one of Peter’s friends, Mick, a big raunchy computer expert who was also very ill but would never discuss it, who virtually came running out of the hospital onto the disco floor, trailing IV tubes, exchanging his oxygen feed for a popper. “I don’t know where she is, that saucy lass,” Mick said casually, as if they were discussing nothing more serious than a deb’s early departure from the ball. Throughout the anxious conversation Mick maintained his flippant tone and female nouns and pronouns for Peter (“Pierette”). That’s one way of coping, Austin thought, though one that shades into insanity.

But Mick, despite his rigidly silly manner, made dozens of calls until he located Peter in a private room on the psychiatric floor of Doctors’ Hospital.

“Psychiatric!” Austin exclaimed when Mick called to report in.

“Well, after Alexandra dumped her ass—”

“Alexandra? Oh, Alex.”

“Then Pierette started slapping those morphine patches all over her body like they were beauty spots. She
claims
she got confused, but if you ask me she wanted to off herself; after all, she was
done dropped
and that can humiliate one of today’s smart young career gals who’s determined to have it all! Very Valley of the Dolls….”

When Austin called Peter in his hospital room, Peter said, “Those patches are
dangerous
, Aussie. I couldn’t remember how many I’d put on. The next thing I knew I was completely
delirious
. I’d wake up on the floor. Then some time would go by and the downstairs neighbor was having the door removed because I’d left the water on in the kitchen and flooded her out. I found myself at night in Harlem. Oh, Austin—” He burst into tears. “It’s been such an ordeal.”

It seemed the moment for Peter to move back home with his parents. He couldn’t take care of himself any longer, obviously, and his sexual and romantic ambitions had burned out as if destroyed by fever. Now he had no reason to stay on in New York, sex capital of the States.

Austin phoned Peter’s parents, who picked up on two different extensions, listened to everything Austin had to say and responded with a sweetness, a tender concern. They said they would set out for New York as soon as they hung up.

“But I wouldn’t tell him to give up the New York apartment right away, if I were you,” Austin said. “Nor would I say this move up to your place is permanent. He needs time to adjust.”

Once he was living with them in the glass house in Concord they’d built for their old age above a stream in the woods, Peter sounded much more tranquil. New York, city of transience, had seemed all too evanescent to him, now that his hold on life was so tenuous. New York, city of ambition, had felt like a marathon in which he alone was walking.

Austin’s six-hundred-and-twenty-page, heavily illustrated book,
French Furniture of the Eighteenth Century
, was at last published that fall, bearing a dedication to Julien; when it won a prize Julien framed the piece of parchment lettered in red. Julien’s paintings were exhibited quietly in Passy in October and received three short reviews, two enthusiastic, one merely descriptive. Though his teeth were chattering and his face was nothing but teeth, cheekbones and glittering eyes, Julien stood for two hours at the reception and discussed his work with solemnity. Some of his friends hadn’t seen him in a year or more
and were visibly shocked by the transformation of his looks; everything he said they were quick to agree with, nodding constantly and murmuring a nearly unbroken hum of assent. He looked like the Ottoman Empire in a turn-of-the-century political cartoon.

He began to prepare to die. He became obsessed with the English woman he’d had an affair with so many years ago in Ethiopia. He wrote Sarah long letters in his broken but by now highly expressive English. He sent her some of his mother’s jewelry; she wrote back, somewhat startled by this renewed interest and touched by the imminent death he faced. He’d apparently told her all about his love for Austin. That was the one way Austin had affected him—he’d made Julien more honest about his sexuality, even about the disease.

He talked all the time to Austin about his gold watch, one of the few things of great value he possessed. Should he change the gold-link bracelet for a crocodile band? Should he give the watch to his brother Robert? Now or in his will?

Now that his paintings had been shown (the exhibition had been accompanied by a catalogue Austin had written but not signed), now that he’d even sold two canvases to Henry McVay (who promptly put them in storage), Julien lost interest in his art. For him it had been a way to press his signet ring into the molten stuff of life before it hardened. He’d also redirected some of his energies as an architect into painting.

Not that he’d forgotten his first profession. He and Austin drove out to Levallois-Perret, one of the new middle-class suburbs to the west of Paris, to see a massive apartment block that Julien had designed and that only now was being erected. This rickety, shivering old man with the protuberant eyes, the thinning, dry hair, the huge rack of shoulders hanging out over a wisp of a torso was, after all, only thirty-two years old, under ordinary circumstances just a youngster coming into his own, not this shuffling ancient without hips and a twenty-seven-inch waist, shoes too heavy for his feet, belt too cutting for his tender skin, leather coat too heavy for his frail frame. He looked at the cold, concrete forms of the ten-story building beneath two slender cranes and partially sheathed in scaffolding, and blinked emotionlessly. His eyes registered everything, he even took half a
dozen snapshots, but it meant nothing to him, the building—at least he had no feelings to spare for it or to express.

Julien was suffering more and more from the pancreatitis he had developed as a side effect of the DDI. Both he and Austin remembered the doctor’s warning that the drug could be life-threatening, but only occasionally did they acknowledge that he could be expected to do nothing other than get worse and die. They clung to their ingrained notion of improvement, made almost plausible by the fact that each individual crisis caused by herpes, toxoplasmosis or micobacteria had in fact been treatable.

Julien had always been open to new experiences—new fashions, new arts, new countries, new friends—that Austin might present to him for his delectation, but now his energy wasn’t sufficient to understand and absorb the new. They went to an avant-garde opera in a theater just two blocks away, but after the first act Julien shuffled away toward home and after the second act Austin, worried, followed. They would go to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which was in the neighborhood, for an opening, but each new style of painting (new to them, at least) demanded extra energy; it was a promissory note that would be redeemed only years from now, if ever. Julien just tore it up.