The Married Man (44 page)

At last the body was repatriated to Paris, ten full days after Julien’s death. The coffin sat for yet another day in a warehouse at the airport. Robert and Fabrice flew back up to Paris for the cremation. Robert suddenly succumbed to an obsessional fear that Julien’s corpse was not in fact inside the lead coffin. “How do we know for sure he’s in there?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“Perhaps they switched two bodies at the clinic in Marrakesh. They wouldn’t care. One Frenchman—one Christian—is worth another. You don’t know them. In Nice—”

“Please, Robert. And anyway there’d be a terrible scandal if the other people opened their coffin and found the wrong body.” Privately, Austin thought it made absolutely no difference if they burned one dead person rather than another. He wondered whether he felt that degree of indifference because he was rational or because he was faithless.

Robert then railed about the Arabs having stolen Julien’s gold watch. Austin felt bad that he hadn’t remembered the watch; he asked the maid about it and she told him where it was. “I hid it,” she said over the phone. “Monsieur Julien left it behind and then, after he disappeared, I worried that someone would steal it.” Austin found it exactly where she said it would be and gave it to Robert.

“Are you sure you don’t want it,
Petit
Austin?” Since Julien’s death Robert had taken up his way of calling Austin
Petit
, ludicrous as it was as a nickname for a snowy-haired fat American.

“No, no, it’s for you,” Austin said, delighted to get the gold watch out of the house. He knew that Julien had revered it, but Austin couldn’t help thinking it looked terribly … well, Vegas and was … well, vulgar.

Even thinking such a thought was sacrilegious, which made Austin smile bleakly.

Julien had said he didn’t want anybody at the funeral except Fabrice, Robert and Austin. Once before Austin had been to a Père Lachaise cremation, but this time they were not required (or even allowed) to watch the coffin being lowered into the flames. As the mortician explained, the “incineration” of a
lead
coffin would take three hours and they’d have access to the chapel for only half an hour. All the actual cremation, therefore, would have been done well in advance and the ashes brought out in the alabaster urn Julien had selected that day he’d gone to the cemetery with Patty. Now the three men sat in silence in the darkened, cold vault of the chapel with its cheerlessly non-denominational windows. Austin had requested that his own tape of the Fauré
Requiem
be played, but they all three got bored before the “Paradise” section began.

A guard accompanied them down into the lower level of the crypt. The urn was placed in their niche, the guard put an official seal on it and then troweled it over with plaster. He explained that the white marble stone inscribed with recessed gold letters giving Julien’s name and dates would not be ready for another week or ten days, but at that time, it, too, would be fixed indelibly in place. Robert nodded solemnly and said, with even more deliberation than usual, “Gold letters on white marble: excellent.”

“It’s what Julien chose,” Austin said briskly, though he wasn’t at all sure that that was the truth.

Only after the funeral did Robert call his maternal grandmother in Nancy and tell her that Julien was dead. She wailed and wailed. Her husband had hanged himself, her daughter had committed suicide and now her grandson had died of AIDS.

Robert talked to her for a very long time and left out none of the details, the explanations, the lamentations or the words of comfort that were her due. After he hung up, he said, “The poor woman. She’s such a jolly little lady, always so merry, a nice little peasant lady who’s had to bear so much….”

“Peasant?” Austin asked, certain he’d misheard.

“Of course,” Robert said, smiling and even chuckling with the same laugh that Julien had used. “She worked the earth as a real
laborer when she was a girl. Then she married and worked in a little
tabac
selling cigarettes and stamps and eventually newspapers and stationery. Her husband was a train conductor all his life, but two years after his retirement he hanged himself.”

“Julien used to say it might have been an erotic strangulation, that he died at his mistress’s….”

“His what?” Robert’s eyes widened and he laughed boisterously. “He didn’t have a mistress, at least this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. No, he became melancholy after he retired and had to live at home all the time. Our poor mother was sad because her father had died….”

“And then,” Austin said, “she’d given up her career as a concert pianist—”

“As a concert pianist?” Robert asked with incredulity. “No, she was an accordionist. Our father hated the sound of the accordion and made her give it up, but I have some beautiful tinted photos of her playing the accordion when she was studying to be a beautician.”

Austin realized that everything Julien had said about his family had been compounded of lies. His parents had not been aristocrats but a beautician and a shipping clerk, just as his maternal grandparents had been a railway man and a farm worker. That was why Julien hadn’t let Austin meet his grandmother that time they’d gone to Nancy. That was why Julien had heaped such contempt on Josephine’s origins (which turned out to be more elevated than his) and had doted on all of Austin’s rich or titled friends, such as Henry McVay, MarieFrance and Vladimir. Maybe that’s why Julien had dropped all of his friends—perhaps he was worried they’d make allusions to his plebeian past in front of Austin. Poor Julien, Austin thought. He felt he had to lie in order to appear worthy of me.

Robert must have notified their father that Julien was dead, for soon afterwards Austin received a letter from him, saying he would like to come to Paris to meet Austin. The letter astonished Austin since it had two spelling mistakes and two mistakes in grammar. And in it Julien’s father said, “I know my sons blame me for their mother’s death, but what killed her was the knowledge that both her boys were homosexual.” Dutifully, Austin read the letter over the phone to
Robert, who became indignant about their father’s accusation and said, “Don’t answer him. He’s a crook. He wants to visit the apartment so he can figure out what belongs to him as Julien’s heir.” Austin didn’t respond to Julien’s father, though he felt bad about his silence.

A month after Julien’s cremation his grandmother came to Paris and stayed with Austin. Robert flew up yet again from Nice, this time using the small amount of money Julien had left him—small but all his earthly treasure.
Maman
, as they called her, was at first intimidated by someone as learned and important as Austin. He was so unused to the idea that anyone could be impressed by his status, which was both low and uncertain, that at first he couldn’t understand why she stared at him as though he were a zebra who’d been trained to whinny
oui
and
non
.

She had pretty plump hands and small wrists, wide hips and a quick, agile way of moving. She was like one of those octogenarian former ballerinas who come hobbling into the room but can throw their head back at a defiant angle and still demonstrate the raised arms required for correctly performing the tarantella. She sketched in lightly the merriment a good-time gal must have known how to turn on in the 1930s—and then suddenly she was red-faced and sobbing silently against Robert’s broad chest, her eyes, when she looked up, flashing forth a clear, shockingly girlish blue.

Austin had seldom met elderly ladies in Paris who weren’t countesses, as exquisitely transparent as their own bone china, their bodies carefully coiffed and molded inside couture clothes constructed around darts, seams and stays. They were ladies who had opinions, mannerisms, pasts and who goaded themselves on to keep up, to read this season’s novels, take in the latest movies; but here was an old lady from the provinces with a face as fresh as today’s bread and who was … well, humble. She was afraid of Austin, this exotic son-in-law she’d met too late and whom she’d always associate with her third loss, the last act of a life that had the clean trajectory of a dynastic tragedy.

They all hugged and sniffled their way through two long evenings, recalled the adorable things Julien had said as a child, trotted out once more the story about his running away with his teddy bear and heading
for the airport where he hoped to be transported to Africa in order to become a veterinarian. And then there were other stories.

Austin had almost dozed off when suddenly he realized they were talking about Julien’s lovers—the effeminate Spaniard named Edgardo and the—“But who were these guys?” he asked. “Of course I know who they were….”

“You met Jean-François on the street one day, right here on the rue de Rivoli,” Fabrice said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, he was with him a long time,” Granny was saying. “They lived together next to the Cordeliers. Jean-François’s family owned that shoe store.”

“And Edgardo,” Fabrice said. “Don’t you remember how effeminate he was? He thought he was Julien’s wife. He’d cling to his arm in public and make Julien blush.”

“Yes, yes,” Austin said, heartsick, with a big smile on his face, “I can just see Julien, always so proper, so aristocratic….”

“Don’t you remember,
Maman,”
Robert asked, “how he’d always write the address of your apartment block as the
Palais Fitzwilliam
, when it was just the plain old Fitzwilliam. Oh, that Julien
(sacré Julien)
, he liked to hint that everything was grander than it was. No harm there, of course; he never used it to his advantage. It was just a dream world he was living in.”

After the grandmother had gone to bed, Austin asked Fabrice and Robert, “When Julien would come to Nice, would he go wild with the boys?”

Fabrice smiled. “Well, you know the mountain behind our house where we walk Ajax? That’s a famous cruising spot. Julien would come to visit us when he was in his last year of high school and run in and out of the bushes till four in the morning. He couldn’t get enough.”

“But why did he ever get married?”

Robert said, “Why not? You don’t like Christine? What’s wrong with Christine?”

“These brothers!” Fabrice exclaimed, appealing to Austin in shared grievance. “They both claim they’re bisexual. They’re always coy about which sex they prefer, even Robert talks about getting married
someday. I’ll tell you, Austin, these brothers will be the death—” And then he remembered Julien was dead. He stubbed out his cigarette and knocked a tear out of his eye with the back of his hand.

Austin liked
Maman
and loved Robert and Fabrice, but he felt that he and Julien’s family members were all a bit lackluster without Julien, as if the only thing that had raised them all above the ordinary was existing in Julien’s consciousness, exactly as if his mind had been a stage—small, floored with reflecting black stone, lit with inquisitorial intensity—and they’d been allowed to appear on it only as figments of Julien’s imagination.

At last they all left, full of solicitude for Austin, the foreigner and widower, doubly isolated. And Austin did feel less integrated into French life without Julien. As long as Julien had been alive Austin was always learning things, not necessarily reasoned or researched information but rather all those thousands and thousands of brand names, turns of phrase, aversions and anecdotes that make up a culture as surely as do the moves in a child’s game of hopscotch. Now, without Julien he was a tourist again.

He was too distracted to read anything but he often sat, vacantly, with the Koran in his lap. He liked the curving, cursive strokes under every third or fourth word and bristling vowel marks above them, as if ferryboats loaded with standing passengers were floating on long, swelling waves. The dots were the passengers’ heads against the sky.

Austin missed Julien—not the Julien of the last months, a skeleton turned malign from suffering, a death’s head shaking on a stick—but the Julien who’d called him
Petit
, who’d first made love with him on the lumpy bed in the Île Saint-Louis apartment under the clenched fist of the great stone volute of the church across the street, the curled hand thrusting up through the roof like a military salute. He remembered when Julien, that summer in America, had told Lucy he didn’t mind living a short life so long as he could live it with Austin.

Julien’s death wasn’t a sentimental loss, a sweet, fierce absence, and in no way was it an aesthetic loss, if that meant his life was less agreeable without Julien. No, it was as if they’d fused, as if Julien had been an alien who’d snatched his body, encoded his nervous system and changed his blood type, colonized his organs and rescripted his
memory bank. He wouldn’t be able to go on living now that the alien inside him had died. The only thing that still belonged to him, that resembled his old self, was his face, his arms and legs, his body, but they, too, had been impaired by this devastating inner metamorphosis.

Once Austin had read a description of couples who were deemed “co-dependent.” The description sounded like Austin’s idea of love. Hadn’t Romeo and Juliet been co-dependent? Tristan and Isolde?

Christine had him to dinner. Her baby, Allegra, sat and stared at him with the immobility of a doll. In fact, she resembled, with her plump, cool cheeks and long-lashed eyes, an old-fashioned doll with a porcelain head and hands. Christine said that she was glad Julien had known Austin. “With me he was never happy. We squabbled over little things. You gave him the big, glamorous life he wanted.”

Christine’s Italian husband had apparently moved back to America, where he and his brother were running a successful restaurant. She was living on a small stipend from the National Center for Scientific Research and was planning to move to Montpellier to be closer to her parents.

Seeing her reminded Austin that she’d remained seronegative. If Julien had become positive while jumping in and out of the bushes in Nice before his marriage, wouldn’t he have infected Christine? But even up until a few weeks before he’d definitely been diagnosed as positive, he’d continued having sex with Christine, yet she’d never seroconverted. Why should that be?