The Married Man (45 page)

He saw old friends—Gregg and Pierre-Yves—but now, for the first time, he felt the age difference as distracting and absolute. Joséphine tended to him constantly, almost as if he was one of those fussy, hypochondriacal but adorable old men in a Jane Austen novel. She was by turns tender and funny,
légère
in the best Parisian manner—but he felt even her ministrations could not reach him.

A weightlessness came to modify all his actions; he walked lightly, silently around the apartment and found, after his months of nursing, he now had big, dilute prisms of free time to swim through. He was light, hushed, insulated, and even so he’d find he was buried at unexpected moments under a falling drop curtain of sleep—yes, sleep would fall on him and engulf him in its quilted silk.

One day Austin looked at a video version of the home film that
Herb Coy had made of Julien and him behind Notre-Dame. There was Julien—fresh-faced, smiling, looking years younger—and there was a still dark-haired Austin, greeting each other with obvious love in their eyes, a secret understanding uniting them as well as a shared self-consciousness. And then the camera was opened and the screen looked as if it had caught on fire.

Austin received almost a hundred condolence letters, which he read avidly, as if they’d provide him with still more revelations about Julien, about what they’d lived through together, about what he’d confided to other people regarding him, Austin, and their relationship, but the letters seldom rose above the conventions of sympathy and when they did it was only to idealize Julien in terms that obliterated any likeness. Lucy, married and the mother of a baby girl, wrote him to say that Julien and she had shared a secret spiritual sympathy. He wanted to answer them all with a personal note; when he couldn’t bring himself to write anyone, he intended to print up a response in his name and Robert’s; in the end he did nothing. He asked MarieFrance if it was permissible not to acknowledge condolence letters. She laughed, disconcerted, and said, “No.” She said he
had
to do something, but finally he was too weary, his attention too scattered, to compose a message, print it up and address a hundred envelopes. He kept all the letters in a big folder, almost as if he was going to show them to Julien someday; Julien would be pleased that he’d brought in such a heavy load of mail.

He wrote to Sarah, Julien’s English girlfriend, the older woman he’d met in Ethiopia and to whom he’d sent bits of jewelry during the year before he died. She wrote back, saying that she’d scarcely known Julien, they’d spent such a short time together, and she had no idea why he’d singled her out for special attention from among all the hundreds of women he must have known, but she was grateful—“if a bit embarrassed by”—the gifts he’d showered on her. She sent Austin photographs of a very boyish Julien in Ethiopia.

Austin felt that an enormous thing had happened to him, Julien’s death, and he wanted to share it with the most important person in his life: Julien. His frustration about Julien’s silence made him talk out loud to him.

The summer months at last were blown out of the skies by the big
advancing clouds of autumn. Because he’d been alone he hadn’t known what to do with summer and the long holidays. He’d stayed in Paris all through August.

The first cold spell excited him. Something new was about to happen, children were returning to school, the red-faced tourists in shorts to whom the city had been lent were chased away, he was about to come back—he?

Who? Julien?

He visited the church across the street several times a day, bought candles and lit them before a painting of the Virgin. In the winter the church was unheated and Austin was sometimes the only worshipper. The painting was a sentimental work of the early nineteenth century, all in tones of blue, picturing a sweetly smiling young woman who seemed almost bathed in the smell of human milk, the one odor that works on most men as an anti-aphrodisiac. As if to protect her further from human desire, she was flanked by the heads of angels supported by wings. The angels were rendered harmless not only by their lack of bodies but also by their age, for they could not have been more than two or three years old.

She, of course, noticed no peripheral danger since she was focused serenely, even smugly, on Baby Jesus, who slept in her arms, sated after a hearty feeding. Austin could almost picture a tiny lactic bubble about to pop blissfully from between his lips.

Austin hated the Catholic Church, the nineteenth-century church that smelled of washed blackboards and sauerkraut farts under soutanes, as much as the medieval church with its plagues and plain-song, its greed and self-flagellations. But he needed it, or rather he needed its altars, candles, music, holy water and poor boxes, so that he could blast it into bits in his mind and fashion out of the ruins his own infantile faith, one that required the believer (the sole member of the cult) to kiss his thumb twice, sketch in a loopy, cursive cross from forehead to waist, pocket to pocket (“Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch,” as he used to chant in a singsong when he was a child), to light a five-franc candle before the painting and then stand back and watch, almost as if he’d baited a trap for someone else. If no one was around, he’d draw closer to the altar, his hands folded in front of him
in semi-respect, and he’d look at the painting for what he knew it to be: proof that Julien had been reunited with his mother, a saint whose symbols were the accordion and hot comb (not pictured).

Julien had often said he wanted to outlive Peter, and he had assumed he would since Peter had already been ill for several years when Julien had first been diagnosed. But Julien had died first. Although Julien stopped mentioning his rival, Austin suspected that he was still brooding over him. That was the unpredictable aspect about AIDS: the robust man nursing the invalid could end up being buried by the very person he’d helped.

Austin had never stopped calling Peter nor sending him little gifts, including money, but Peter only forgave him for his treachery after Julien died. In January, ten months after Julien’s death, they agreed to meet in Miami. Peter would fly down from Boston, which wasn’t far from his parents’ house in Concord; Austin would fly there direct from Paris. From Miami they’d rent a car and drive on down through the Keys to Key West.

Austin brought along a twenty-two-year-old English gerontophile he’d met on the street in Paris. His name was George, he was six foot four and worked as a personal instructor for the gym clients at the Ritz. He’d been a successful soccer player on an amateur team back home in a London suburb—but had moved to France when he was nineteen in order to come out (that was Austin’s interpretation, because George would never have tolerated any part of the subject to be mentioned in his presence, nor the word
gay
pronounced).

George wanted to be an actor and had paraded as a rabbit at EuroDisney, had toured the malls of France for Reebok in a crack gymnastics team dressed, of course, in Reebok products, and had gone to every film audition the few times a six-foot-four youth with an English accent had been required. Although he had a classical profile he wore his smudged glasses on the tip of his straight nose at a weird angle and stooped a bit when he wasn’t reminding himself to stand up straight. He wore loose, baggy clothes of odd English colors (grape-purple sweatpants, celluloid-tan short-sleeve shirts with anemic blue
vertical stripes). He leaned right into someone’s face, as if he was slightly deaf, and laughed with more general enthusiasm than specific hilarity. He could have played a rustic in Shakespeare—or stripped of all his funny clothes and mannerisms, a god or prince, since he had a noble face and a body worthy of Praxiteles.

He’d studied acting with a woman in the seventeenth
arrondissement
and Austin had attended a presentation of various scenes there, adapted from films, TV shows, novels and even plays. George had been the only actor with a grain of talent. In fact he was very good—or so Austin thought, though he admitted he was besotted with lust.

George wasn’t sleeping with Austin, although they held each other for hours fully clothed on the sofa. Austin thought he had nothing to offer someone as young, athletic and desirable as George—until he saw the wrecks George would cruise on the street, men even older and rounder than Austin. No, George claimed he was holding Austin off because he was faithful to an obscure lover, Pierre-Henri, a florist in Coulommiers (a town near Paris famous for its cheese, as Austin loved to say in order to torment George). As George told the story: “I was living out at EuroDisney, I was determined to meet a
man
, I took the train into Paris on my one night off. I sat down on a bench in the little square next to the Bibliothèque Nationale, a toff sat next to me, a pleasant-looking chap, and I panicked and started running. I ran and ran and ended up in the park near the Tour St.Jacques and the first person who spoke to me was Pierre-Henri—and we became friends. He was my first friend. He lives in Coulommiers with his mother but he comes to Paris one day a week. He’s got a studio he bought in Paris, Place de la République, and that’s where I live. The bed is kept up against the ceiling but at the push of a button it descends automatically and fills the entire apartment. In the morning I have to stand in the loo and wait for the bed to go back up.”

Austin gloried in George’s youth—his thick blond hair which he could pull in great handfuls, his sweet breath, clear eyes, coltish ways, quirky intelligence (though he wasn’t at all educated). George was a creature of nothing but instincts, and he could become angry and flushed over nothing at all. Frustrated because George had decided to be faithful to poor old Pierre-Henri, Austin would tease George: “Darling
your phone message in French is rather elegant, but then when you give it the second time in English—my
dear!
Are you a cockney?”

“But I can talk posh if I want, me mum’s frightfully posh,” George would say, and tears would spring into his eyes. He was a very sensitive, slightly crazy boy whose father had been murdered—or had he committed suicide? George was vague about it. George could cry if a friend teased him but beat up two men who tried to rob him on the métro and forget to mention it until the cut on his cheek and his bleeding knuckles drew Austin’s attention. He was quite routinely paranoid and was convinced strangers were discussing—and acquaintances plotting against—him. He hung out with macho gym instructors from around town and got drunk with them in an Irish pub and picked up girls in their presence—he probably would have beat up fags if it had come to that. He was afraid to be seen by one of these guys on the street with Austin, so Austin cooked for him at home. He always arrived with idiotic gifts for Austin—bad chocolates tasting of powdered cocoa and emulsifiers, a ceramic Loch Ness monster in three curving sections, stuffed animals with silk bows, once even a barometer set into a pressed plastic anchor. Greeting cards of hearts, flowers and Cupids arrived in the mail every day.

Austin invited George to come along with Peter and him to Key West. He explained that Peter was very ill and had some dementia and would be dead in a month or so in all probability. “I want you to help me make him happy, to cheer him up, to drive the car, to laugh a lot—but above all to help me out with the shopping. This trip must be perfect.”

At the chaotic Miami airport they met a skinny, trembling Peter dressed in new clothes his mother must have bought him but which had already become two sizes too large. Retrieving everyone’s luggage and finding the bus to ferry them to the car-rental agency—all that took time and effort and the responsibility fell entirely on Austin, since George had never been to America before and Peter was in a benign haze. But George drove well and the January sun wasn’t too hot and the two-lane highway through the Keys never got bogged down too much in traffic.

The house they’d rented was big, cool and quiet and had been
built in the middle of the last century. It had a giant tree in the back yard which was so stalwart it squeezed every last bit of sunlight out and its falling leaves had paved the garden, but the house lived under its reassuring tutelary presence. A small Abyssinian Baptist church was next door and its few members, all old, flung open the doors whenever they congregated and wailed to the accompaniment of an organ, tambourine and drums. When their preacher talked his voice was scarcely audible from their back porch, but when the little orchestra and the half-dozen quavery voices lurched into song, then their sweet, gay sounds floated around the seated, smiling, silent Peter and Austin.

Not around George. No sooner had he arrived in Key West than he began popping No-Doz and drinking vast quantities of beer. He seemed determined not to consecrate a single valuable moment to sleeping. All his fears of being considered gay had vanished the moment he’d arrived in the New World—along with his vows of fidelity to Pierre-Henri. If he’d ever made such vows in the first place.

Handsome men in their forties and fifties were casually dropping by for him; George had met them at the 801 Bar on Duval Street. George was never at home. He came stumbling in at three a.m., angry and cursing, stomping up the stairs in his boots. If Austin asked him to buy some orange juice or bread, he’d be sure to forget. Once he came back before dawn, danced alone to a very loud Phil Collins CD, then stormed out and drove away. The car was never around, so Austin either walked or called the same bicycle-powered carriage he’d hired for Julien; the cheerful cyclist with the prodigious buttocks and strong legs remembered Austin but was too discreet to ask him what had happened to Julien. Perhaps he thought Austin was someone whose profession called for him to accompany the dying.

Austin apologized to Peter for having invited George along. “You can’t believe how sweet and shy he is back in France. I thought he’d be a nice addition, Peter. I had no idea there’d be this appalling transformation. He’s surly, tempestuous, randy, not even grateful for the airline ticket.”

Peter said, “He’s certainly the belle of the ball. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’ll settle down.”