The Married Man (6 page)

The worst thing about knowing he was positive was that now he was under an obligation to tell his partners. Not that he informed the man he picked up in the park or the guy he lured over on the phone-chat line. Austin had an American friend in Paris, a well-known gay novelist, who’d come out as positive on TV and in the press, and now he was obliged to be honest with everyone, but Austin was a nobody. At least he’d never made any public statements. His friend the writer was apparently having trouble getting laid these days—so much for honesty.

No, truly the worst thing was studying one’s body every morning in the shower for auguries. Even in that regard he envied all those hysterical gay guys back in New York or San Francisco who knew to become alarmed about the slightly raised, wine-colored blemish, not the flat, black mole or whatever, who could tell just when a cough became “persistent” enough to be worrying or whether a damp pillowcase and a wet head counted as “night sweats.”

He both feared and embraced the French silence in the face of this
disease (and of all other fatal maladies). Something superstitious in him whispered that if you didn’t think about it, the virus would go away. From one month to the next he never heard the dreaded three letters
(VIH
in French rather than HIV, as if the French version of the disease itself were the reverse mirror image of the American, just as the French acronym
SIDA
was an anagram of AIDS). Americans sat up telling each other horror stories, but they were later astonished when their worst fantasies came true, as if they’d hoped to ward off evil by talking it into submission or by taking homeopathic doses of it. The French, however, feared summoning an evil genius by pronouncing its name. Neither system worked. When the lioness awakened and felt the first hunger pains, she would show her claws.

He knew in his heart that the French approach was especially unsuited to the epidemic. His friend Hervé last year had been so
ashamed
of falling ill that he’d slunk back home to his village in the Dordogne without calling a single friend. Only his ex-lover Gilles had stayed in touch, although Hervé’s grandmother irrationally blamed Gilles for having given him AIDS. Each time Gilles called she’d say that Hervé was sleeping but would call back later. A month later, the next time Gilles phoned, Hervé had already been dead and buried for eleven days.

It was as if a few young men in the provinces managed to escape to Paris where they lived for a few seasons, where they clipped their heads, lifted some weights, danced on Ecstasy, tattooed one haunch with a butterfly and had sex with hundreds of other underemployed
types
—and then they were driven home to Sarlat by their somber families, all dressed in black as if out for their Easter duties, and they disappeared in a whispered diminuendo, the score marked
ppppp…
.

What didn’t work out about this system was that no young bright kid coming up to Paris ever saw his predecessor, skinny and crippled, hobbling back down to the provinces. The best prevention, the most convincing proof of the necessity for safe sex, was ocular evidence, actually
seeing
KS blotches on skinny arms or watching rail-thin old men of twenty staggering into a restaurant on two canes, sharpened cheekbones about to rub through the parchment-thin skin, the eyes as bulbous as an insect’s. But in Paris, magical city of elegance and
romance, men with AIDS were no more visible than the retarded, the mad or the lame—they’d all been whisked off to some shuttered house in Aquitaine. The French were masters of silence, and as ACT-UP claimed, “Silence = Death.”

Austin invited Big Julien away for the weekend. In his Michelin guide he’d found a luxury hotel only forty-five minutes by train outside Paris, not far from the royal château of Rambouillet. They didn’t need to rent a car to get there; theoretically they should be able to find a taxi at the train station. Fatuous as it sounded, Austin was relieved to be going away, for once, with a capable adult male, one who regularly submitted construction plans to the mayor’s office and traveled by train to other cities.

It was the beginning of May. They took an electrified double-decker commuter train that quickly left the historic city behind and rushed past planned communities in the suburbs, the ugly apartment blocks oriented to one another at rakish angles (to prove how humane the planner had been) rather than laid out in the usual stultifying cemetery grid. When Austin said something dismissive about the buildings and the orange and black supergraphics on an aubergine-colored wall in the station shelter, Julien said he knew the architect, an Albanian refugee famous for his sound engineering skills (“No division of labor in Tirana,” Julien said matter-of-factly), and his remark put paid to Austin’s facile sneering. Austin was happy to have this handsome man beside him, someone so eccentric in his views, his way of referring everything back to Ethiopia, his indifference to gay life and his ignorance of its tyrannies, his unlikely clothes; Austin thought maybe Julien didn’t even notice a detail like age: their twenty-year age difference. For Austin was wired very peculiarly. He wasn’t like some of his contemporaries who felt they could reduce the gap by doing three hundred sit-ups every day until their thickened waists and slack skin looked like melting chocolate bars, the hot flesh oozing over the lines between the tablets. He didn’t want to dance all night on drugs, his steps an anthology of four decades of approximated wriggling. He didn’t want to shed his dated slang, the words
groovy, mellow
or
get down, girl
.

He liked this intense, brooding married man with the unclassifiable
preoccupations, which permitted Austin, by contrast, to appear relaxed and relatively normal, even of a normal age. As they rode side by side in the train they kept stealing glances at each other. They were virtually alone on a Saturday morning in this commuter train heading out of the city. The walls lining the tracks were like ramparts; if Austin looked up he could see the windowless sides of houses rising above. Austin’s only other French lover, Little Julien, had never gone anywhere with him in France, perhaps out of fear of being recognized by friends in the company of a much older foreigner. But Big Julien was here with his dark blue eyes, black hair, neat, courtly gestures, his deep, deep voice thrumming and resonating in Austin’s ear, his sudden, utterly fake booming laugh, so out of character that Austin assumed it must be a private homage to a friend or relative he’d emulated in the past. No, he wasn’t interested in the general impression he was making, even if he was playing to Austin, the unique member of his audience. Julien was a loner, seriously alone now that he was getting divorced, alienated from his father, too, for some reason. Austin would look over at this man whose body he’d never held and imagine they were about to be married, as old-fashioned virgins were once married; he daydreamed his way into the mind of a nineteenth-century bride who looked at these pale male hands beside her, tufted with glossy black hair, and thought she’d know them the rest of her life, that he’d explore her body with them for fifty years.

They had to phone for a taxi from the suburban station and drive out beyond Versailles, but the hotel was worth the trip: a former abbey with its low stone-faced Gothic buildings looming up over an ornamental lake with swans. The chapel was roofless, the empty, glassless rose window nothing but brambles of vacant masonry, the colorful petals long since shed and swept up. Separating the grounds and the fields beyond was a partially destroyed wall, once perhaps the side of a cloister garden; at least it had empty windows and under them stone seats worn smooth and deep by centuries of monastic meditation. The man at the desk, who had registered them with impassive good manners, now added, as a well-judged hint at friendliness, “The death scene of Depardieu’s
Cyrano
was shot out there by the ruined cloisters.”

A moment later they were in their suite with its copper tub and its long antechamber leading to double doors and, beyond, the bedroom with its double bed and its flung-open gauze-covered high windows that floated like panels of bird-riddled silence, empty and twittering, twin paintings by an abstractionist who’d turned wryly metaphysical. They couldn’t wait for the bellboy to leave them alone.

They’d gone so long without ever having had sex that Austin felt a certain stage fright, but for the next two days they were all over each other, above, below, behind, like two boys wrestling with hard-ons they don’t know how to discharge. Half the hotel had been turned over to a giant wedding party and whenever they descended for another long meal with its succession of courses they were always isolated from the other diners with their flowered dresses, big hats and corsages, their decorous toasts and gentle teasing, their restless children in rumpled organdy or clipped-on bow ties and their game old grandparents. No, Austin and Julien were blissfully irrelevant to the machinery of a big country wedding and as they wandered the grounds, feeling formal and drained from their furious, tangled bouts of lovemaking, they were always gliding past uniformed waiters stacking rented chairs or testing the microphone in the ballroom by tapping on it and whispering numbers. The weather shifted unpredictably between moments of magnifying-glass heat and cold, cloud-propelling wind.

They sat at opposite ends of the big copper tub in daylight that was filtered through smoked glass. The bubble bath lost its suds to reveal their strong, intertwined legs and their body hair undulating like algae.

They’d lie in the hotel’s white terry-cloth robes on the bed and Julien would talk about his divorce. “We were fine in Ethiopia—”

“Except you had that affair with the Englishwoman. How happy could you have been?”

“No, no,
mon pauvre petit,”
Julien said, smiling at Austin’s touching gay naïveté. “I loved her, Sarah, the English know the names of all the birds and plants, we French are always astonished by their expertise. We went with her children in her old car to a wonderful lake crowded with pink flamingos. But that doesn’t mean I ever hesitated in my feelings for Christine…. She’s dying to meet you, by the way.”

Austin could feel the blood flooding his face and neck. “Me? But—”

“She’s very interested in old furniture,” Julien said.

“I’m not exactly a
bergère Louis XV
, even if I am slightly tubby,” Austin joked, his voice suddenly turning hoarse. He knew if he was back in America his friends would croak, “Drop him. Married men are poison. You’ll see. He’ll go running back to her after he’s finished experimenting with you.” But over here, in France, in these posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days, Austin no longer expected anything to work, certainly not to be ideal; he would share a man with a woman and even meet her if need be, though he was afraid of her anger. “What went wrong, then?” Austin asked.

“She’s a bitch. In Ethiopia she was fine. But the moment we came back—starting with the wedding!” His eyes shifted from side to side, as though looking for the best escape route; then he sighted it and ran. “My grandmother was revolted. She didn’t want me to do something so bourgeois as get married.” Inspired, he laughed his laugh, a hollow tocsin of mirthless pleasure. “They wanted me to be gay—anything rather than marry that
petit-bourgeois
bitch and her stuffy, petty family. They were so disappointed I was marrying that they wept. My grandmother pulled up her skirts at the reception and danced like Marilyn over the subway grill and my brother’s lover clapped and crouched and shouted, ‘Go, Granny, show them your pussy!’”
(Allez, Mémé, montre ta moule!)

Austin smiled painfully. He didn’t see anything funny in the scene and wondered if it had ever happened. If it did, he thoroughly sympathized with Christine and her parents. “But how old is your grandmother?”

“Oh, not that old,” Julien said with his usual vagueness. “Her legs were still good then and she cut a fine figure, although now she’s gone to fat. It’s all the fault of that lover of hers, a real vulgarian called Modeste.”

“It’s nice, I think, that your grandmother has a lover. In America people stop having sex at a surprisingly young age. Few of us can say the words, ‘my grandmother’s lover.’”

But Julien wasn’t paying attention. He’d turned on his stomach and was laughing, repeating to himself,
“Allez, Mémé, montre ta moule!”
The ugly words and the self-amused booming laugh didn’t really go
with his body, with the fine swirls of hair on his boyishly full buttocks, nor did the laugh fit the small ears pinned back to his head as though he were standing still in a ferocious wind, nor with the delicate architecture of his shoulder blades, lightly dusted with black hair.

If Austin was always alert to Julien’s mood, feared boring him and followed his conversational lead, Julien wallowed, oblivious, in his own worries and obsessions. He seemed to be sick with worry. His skin had broken out on his face, two red welts on his forehead and small pimples clustering around the follicles where his beard was growing in. His nose was always oily. Gregg, who had all sorts of fetishes, had said to Austin, “That Big Julien is so randy and young he even has acne, slurp, slurp.” Gregg always pronounced the words for his sound effects, and said such things as “Sob” or “Drool.”

“My mother committed suicide ten years ago,” Julien was saying. “She and I loved each other—she was the great love of my life. That’s why I don’t speak to my father. I hate him. It was his fault. He’d married her young. He didn’t like it that she was—” He hesitated, then revised his thoughts. “That she was a concert pianist. He made her give it up. She sacrificed everything for him. Her family gave him money to start his pharmaceutical company. They gave them their house. She killed herself in Belle-Île at the summer house her mother had bought her.” He pounded the mattress and said into the pillow, “The thought—”

“What?”

Julien looked up, astonished, as if awakened. “The thought that
he
is living there now with that slut, his mistress—”

“His wife?”

“Yes, I suppose he married her. The thought …”