The Married Man (7 page)

Austin felt it would turn out to be a very long story and he wasn’t sure Julien would be a reliable narrator. This Latin man with his black hair, with his lean neck shaggy because he’d long been overdue at the barber, with his low unstoppable voice that sometimes seemed the inefficient, power-guzzling motor draining his body of all its fuel—oh, he wasn’t an impartial, objective American, respectful of the truth and impressed by any fair challenge to his version of things, ready to chuckle at his own absurdities. Julien was never the butt of his own jokes. No,
he was a passionate Latin male whose body seeped anguish and oil and whose voice hypnotized his mind into believing whatever it had proposed and was elaborating.

“My mother’s death was such a powerful thing for me,” he was saying; now he was sitting up and hugging a surprisingly shiny knee above leggings of hair—there was even hair on the knuckle of each of his toes. It occurred to Austin that Julien had rubbed his knee bare with worry, but he knew that couldn’t have been the case. “I was the one who found her dead. It was during my final exams for my architecture diploma, so I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention to her. I knew she was unhappy. She’d asked my father if it was all over between them. She’d said, ‘Tell me. I’m still young, I can find someone else.’ In fact she was just forty-three, and she looked so young that when I’d take her out dancing everyone would ask if she was my sister.”

Austin thought he’d heard the same story all his life, about the young mother, a story that always seemed so odd to him. His own mother had died of ovarian cancer when he was still a teenager, but he’d never wanted to pass for her brother, nor did she dance. Of course she’d been nearly forty when he’d been born, a plump graying woman locked into another epoch by her elegant Tidewater accent and soft, unambitious ways, whereas Julien’s parents had been in their twenties and his father even now was just five years older than Austin.

The story had reached a head and Austin hadn’t been listening. He figured out that Julien’s father had lied and pledged his renewed love to his wife, but in truth all he’d wanted was continued access to her money. “When she realized he’d left her for that other bitch, not moved out but was spending all his time with her—that’s when and why she attempted suicide. She survived and I just dismissed her when she asked me if I thought she should see a psychiatrist. I laughed at her and told her to pull herself together.”

“You were at an entirely different juncture in your life,” Austin said. “You had to marshal all your forces to pass your exams, you couldn’t afford to be swamped by feelings, hers or yours.” He’d learned in other, earlier affairs with confused younger men that a few
words, wise to the point of banality, uttered at the strategic moment, could become talismanic for years to come.

“I still feel so guilty. Of course she needed to see a shrink.” The French said,
“unpsy,”
pronouncing separately the
p
and the
s
, like the sound of a slashed balloon. “But my brother was far away, off in Nice with his lover, and my father was with his slut and I was in architecture school in Nantes. Mother drove all the way across the country from Nancy to Belle-Île, you have to take a ferry over—”

“Isn’t that Sarah Bernhardt’s island?”

“Yes.” He moved so that his head was pillowed on Austin’s stomach, almost as though he wanted to stop Austin’s distracting questions. “My brother was the one who started to worry about her and he told me to drive over there—it’s not that far from Nantes. Nobody had heard from her in three days.” He got up and went to pee, then came back, walking slightly knock-kneed, as though he was concentrating on a failing inner voice. He climbed down onto the bed and lay with his back to Austin, knees slightly curled up toward his chest. Austin could see his vertebrae mounting his spine, one by one, like drops of water growing smaller and falling faster. “She was dead. She’d been dead for three days. There was a note. The police took it, they promised to give it back to me, but they never did. I must file an official complaint. I want that note back—it’s mine. I found it. She wrote it to me.” He propped himself up and drank a glass of water.

“How terrible for you,” Austin said, bending down to touch him but then quickly drawing his hand back. They’d made love so often this weekend that Austin feared Julien wouldn’t see a touch as a neutral, friendly gesture.

“She was dressed in a pretty silk dress, but she must have choked on her own vomit. Her face was blown up as though her features had been stretched over a soccer ball. The apartment stank. My brother flew up to Rennes and rented a car but missed the last ferry. When he got there the next morning, luckily for him the body had already been removed.”

“Where did you sleep that night?”

“In a hotel. I would have stayed in the apartment but the police had cordoned it off. I was glad it was off-season. There was nobody else in the building.”

Night had fallen as he talked and added its high seriousness to his words. The window was still open and they were cold and Austin slid behind him and held him. Then he pulled a sheet over them. He asked himself if Julien was glad to be laid out on this slab, sheeted and cold but alive and in another man’s arms.

Later that night, after they’d showered and dressed and dined, all alone now that the wedding party had left, Julien said, “You know, when I was a kid I always had a best friend, one friend; you have so many friends but I’m not like that. You’re always saying, ‘So-and-so is one of my best friends.’ I don’t have series of best friends. Of course I know a lot of people, but I always wanted just one friend, who’d be loyal to me, and I’d tell him everything.”

Austin must have waited for the obvious conclusion with such wide, yearning eyes that Julien finally laughed and said, “But,
Petit
, you look like a puppy.”

“I’m sorry,” Austin said, offended.

Julien just ran over his prickliness and squeezed Austin’s right leg between both of his and said, “You’re really such a
bout de chou.”

“A
bout?”

Julien explained that “the end of the cabbage” was an affectionate nickname for a little kid.

“I’m hardly
little,”
Austin objected sweetly, thrilled with his new name.

D
uring their first weekend together, they took a taxi and visited the gardens and forests around Rambouillet (the unimpressive château itself, which belonged to the President of the Republic, was off limits). Austin remembered (because it had happened during
his
century) that Marie Antoinette had had built here her
Laiterie
, a small classical temple in which she could drink milk—the milk jars were kept cool in an inner sanctum under a flowing fountain, dense with allegorical figures. He and Julien finally found it and went in; even on a warm day it was ten degrees cooler. The queen didn’t live to see the
Laiterie
, which was finished not long before she was guillotined, but if she had she would have discovered nearby the
Veuverie
of her friend (enemies said, her lesbian lover), the Princesse Lamballe, a small cottage in which the inner walls were decorated with pictures composed of shells—a strangely irrelevant setting for the princess to mourn in
(veuverie
meant “widowhood”). Austin knew a bit about the history of the place. As an architect, Julien took a more austere approach and analyzed the
Laiterie
formally, as though its merits were conceptual, not associational.

They left the hotel for Paris on Monday morning.

As they saw each other with greater and greater frequency, until
they were getting together nearly every night, Austin realized that he had indeed become Julien’s little sidekick, his one best friend, his confidant, not his father. Julien had no idea of deference—nor of reciprocity. He never cooked Austin dinner or even offered him a coffee, and certainly he never asked Austin a question about his family or past lovers. Was his discretion evidence of his incuriosity and egotism or did he hope to win with it an immunity from Austin’s prying? Austin never saw his apartment, the one where he lived alone. He covered Austin with kisses and smiled with a solar warmth, just as though he were the sun setting down closer and closer and peering directly into his eyes. He’d whisper,
“Petit,”
and
“Mon bout de chou,”
or say,
“Comme tu es mignon!”
(How cute you are!), but Austin knew it wasn’t his face or body that was being praised, just his presence, his docility. Austin understood that straight men, married men, were used to partners who listened or half-listened to their monologues. Anyway, Austin liked listening, which he could always pass off as a language lesson since the words were in French.

Because Gregg had been the one to suggest the trip to the abbey-hotel, Austin called him when they got back to Paris.

“Well, Mother, you went and got yourself a nice Mother’s Day present, I see.”

“What? Oh, Gregg …
Daughter!
I honestly forgot the day. It’s only Mother’s Day back in the States, isn’t it? Gregg, it was a great suggestion. I never pick out guys who might actually like me.”

“I hear you. Your daughter’s no better when it comes to doing for herself. So how’s the meat?”

“Average. Like mine.”

“Like
mine!
Like mother, like daughter—a small clit family. But we know how to thrum that little thing, right, Mom? Did you top him or did Mother get to
serve
—I know she loves to serve.”

“We had lots of sex, but of course it was safe, safe, safe. Tons of frottage,
touche-pipi
, soul-kissing. No fucky-fucky—actually it was terribly romantic.”

“Do you think he’s hooked enough to tell him you’re positive?” Gregg asked.

This entirely cynical question opened a door inside Austin’s mind.
He laughed and said, “Not yet. Maybe it’s because I’m not really in love or because that beastly Little Julien dropped me so brutally, but I’ve never been shrewder. I’m determined to open up new sexual horizons for him—”

“Meaning?”

“His nipples are more sensitive than his wife’s. He told me that. She used to play with his—”

“—perky little devils,” Gregg added.

“They
do
just perk right up,” Austin said. He knew Julien would be horrified if he could hear this tacky, heartless camp exchange. But he, Austin, was so insecure in an affair—so eager to please, so intense in his devotion, so quick to accept the first sign of boredom as an irrevocable rejection—that in sacrilegious chatter he could reassert, at least for a moment, his freedom. “But I want to discover his bottom for him. Not to mention the beauty of bondage.”

“Bondage!”
Gregg shouted with outraged amusement. “You old Stonewallers are such shameless hussies.”

“Oh, like your generation is so pure.
Excuse
me. Hellowwuh….” Austin was merrily imitating the new Mall Girl slang or his very dim idea of it, but it was a fashionable reference designed as an implicit rebuke to Gregg’s dismissal of Austin’s “generation.”

“But won’t he be horrified by
bondage?”
Gregg asked. “Not that I should question Mother’s
millennium
of experience….”

Strangely, through all this talk of meat, tits, ropes and sexual technique, Austin knew he was communicating to Gregg his timid happiness and his fear of losing Julien whenever he would discover Austin’s HIV status. In America, of course, Austin thought bitterly, they would have met at a Positive Boutique or on an HIV cruise and that would have been that, the introduction equivalent to an admission.

Julien complained of his health at dinner the next night (a
blanquette de veau
, mushrooms, pearl onions, carrots and veal swimming in an egg yolk and cream sauce that had taken Austin all afternoon to elaborate). “I can’t seem to make this acne go away—
Petit
, this fish is excellent! I’ve been hacking away all day with this terrible cough, that’s why I can’t stay over, I’d keep us both awake. I think I’m coming down with the flu.”

Austin felt a cringing, a tightening around his heart, as though someone were inching him gently closer and closer to the airplane’s open hatch. He got up and cleaned the dishes. He suggested Julien lie down while he made some herbal tea—did he like verbena? Alone in the kitchen he felt his heart pounding, exactly as if he’d been accused of treachery by an old friend. He took his time putting the pretty but mismatched tea things on an old tray with sides that were inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Mentally he ran through all their sexual positions over the weekend but could find nothing unsafe. He hadn’t let Julien suck him. They’d kissed, but was that dangerous? Julien had held their erect penises close together in his hand, but surely that wasn’t “at risk” behavior, as the pamphlets called it. Or was it? Anyway, the disease took months or at least weeks to declare itself, didn’t it?

Of course the unconscionable thing was that they were both involved in a deadly game Austin had already lost and that Julien didn’t know he was playing.

Usually Austin could forget the virus but it kept ringing back like a bill collector on the phone, calling at all hours, insisting upon its claim.

“Why don’t you stay home tomorrow? And I’m sorry about the rich dinner.”

“But I love pike in a
beurre nantais.”

Austin thought he should say it was veal, but that would destroy the illusion they both fostered that Julien, as a Frenchman, knew everything about food, wine and fashion. And because Austin felt guilty about his continuing silence on the subject of his HIV status he couldn’t bring himself to irk Julien in any way. He was pleading with Julien to forgive a crime he’d not yet confessed. He’d heard of men who’d gone on a killing spree when they’d found out their lovers had infected them. If Julien was just a nice married man gambling with gay sex, shouldn’t he know the stakes? The stakes that he’d already accepted, all unknowingly?

Austin made an appointment with his doctor for Julien. They went to see him together. The office was just across the street from the Buttes-Chaumont, that vast park for the working class that Napoléon III had benignly inserted into a former quarry. Now, of course, the
workshops and the little villages of workers’ cottages on the streets leading off the park housed up-and-coming artists and photographers—Austin knew a gay
couturier
who’d filled his cottage with medieval kitsch (shields, tapestries, suits of armor). Even so, the neighborhood felt forgotten and Austin had no idea why Dr. Aristopoulos lived and worked there. His
cabinet
was up three flights, a cheerless suite of dim rooms, unmatched chairs, a student’s lamp and a coffee table covered with last year’s magazines and more recent HIV brochures. Somewhere in the neighborhood, no doubt, Dr. Aristopoulos had found a comically hostessy receptionist, a woman in her fifties who wore puffy dresses and had dyed her hair an egg-yolk yellow and who walked around in very high heels, bowing and welcoming the skeletally thin AIDS patients as though to a Pensioners’ Ball.