The Married Man (9 page)

But now Austin couldn’t help him out anymore. He couldn’t be expected to fabricate his own walking papers.

“In any event, I realized you could—you
will
—become ill and it’s a long illness …”

Austin felt he was being lectured at by an aunt or the Episcopalian minister back home about the ghastly consequences of his excesses, and his thoughts emigrated inward. He was caught out not paying attention when he heard Julien saying, “Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to stay with you. I’ll take care of you.”

“You shouldn’t be too hasty—” Austin protested.

But Julien interrupted and said, “No, that’s what I’ve decided. I can’t imagine leaving you. I’m already too hooked on you.” Austin felt a warmth spreading through his whole body, as though he’d rushed naked through snow into a sauna.

A
ustin had dinner with Henry McVay at least once a week. The ritual was always the same. The butler, Michel, would answer the downstairs door and show Austin up. He’d say,
“Bonsoir
, Monsieur Smith,” which he pronounced
“Smeet.”
They’d run into each other once in a gay bar and had a long chat and after that, one or two times, Michel had said,
“Bonsoir
, Ostend,” and even peeled off his right glove to shake Austin’s hand. But since the friendship didn’t really take, Michel soon enough went back to calling him “Monsieur Smeet.” Not that Austin didn’t admire the powerful hands that barely fit into the gloves or the strong arm that could be detected through the white uniform sleeve when he bent forward to serve at dinner.

Henry liked his guests to arrive at precisely seven forty-five. That would give them a full hour to eat pretzels, passed in elegant silver bowls by Michel, and to drink a bottle of champagne from a crystal flute for the guests and a normal glass for Henry, who didn’t like glasses with stems. Henry would invariably sit under a portrait of his grandmother by Sargent in which she had just turned, as though answering a startling call, toward the viewer, her cheeks flushed but the rest of her face white, two strawberries surfacing in a bowl of
cream. Her hair was swept up simply from her narrow, surprisingly contemporary face. Henry had her pale blue eyes and a small, almost prim mouth like hers.

He didn’t like to talk about his “things,” his furniture and paintings and his irreplaceable collection of snuff boxes and other
bibelots
, all scattered in profusion on the old marquetry. Or rather, Henry’s natural pride as a collector and his desire to confide all the juicy details of his skill in obtaining a treasure conflicted with his equally strong reserve as a gentleman. If some heavy-breathing New York dealer with a nipped-in waist and wide silk tie asked too many questions (“Tell me, Hank, where did you find this adorable miniature bronze Bacchus?”), Henry would roll his eyes toward Austin and say, “Oh, it was just something my grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday.”

“The grandmother in the Boldini?”

“You mean the Sargent. No.”

Henry was a rich man who had been kicked out of some of the best prep schools and two second-rate Ivy League universities for bad behavior and who’d arrived in Paris at the end of the war as everything the French wanted an American to be—handsome, wealthy, French-speaking and humbled before the monument of French culture. “You know, I met Gertrude Stein almost immediately,” he’d say, “and I remember I thought, ‘The old cow has been here forty years and she
still
has that frightful American accent!’ And here I am, all these years later, and I’m no better than she. I live in an entirely French world—you’re virtually my only English-speaking friend—and I’m completely comfortable in French though I’d never dare write anything in it other than a personal letter unless I had a friend go over it, but even though I now sometimes forget a word in English and have to look it up in a French-English dictionary—”

“Me, too!” Austin exclaimed.

“But I
still
have this weird accent. I even took a course in phonetics—all to no avail.”

“But no one,” Austin said, “has a problem understanding you. And that’s what counts. Look at poor Yves Montand who tried to play
in movies in America, but no one could understand him, though his English was otherwise very fluent.”

Henry nodded, smiled, said, “More bubbly?” He called champagne “bubbly” or “champers” and it wasn’t too clear whether those were words natural to his class and age or whether he was making a humorous allusion to old, dotty dowagers he’d known as a boy, so Austin always laughed just a bit in acknowledgment of a possibly witty allusion. There was just a fifteen-year age difference between them and Austin would gallantly say, “People our age—” but Henry would always interrupt him and drawl, “You’re
hardly
my age, Sweetie.”

“Of course your accent in English is equally bizarre,” Austin offered.

“Bizarre!” Henry thundered. “How do you mean, bizarre? I speak like a normal American guy—”

“From the Philadelphia Main Line circa 1935, possibly.”

“It’s true I don’t have your elegant Tidewater drawl.”

“Do I really drawl? I thought only when I was drunk.” They liked exchanging these mild, amicable insults, which only proved the efficiency and the elasticity of their friendship, trial signals sent out to test the lines. Austin was regarded as the father by his other friends, all of whom were younger. To them he was the source of favors and approval, occasionally of information. Only with Henry could he play the good student, eager to work his professor for hints and anecdotes. Or the favorite son, invited out by Dad to dinner in a good, old-fashioned restaurant.

A grand silence descended over them. Austin always feared boring Henry, especially since Henry was interested in such a narrow range of topics—gallery gossip (change of personnel and important upcoming sales, but no prices, please, unless it was a mythic sum), gay scandals (but no sexually explicit details, please), movies—and the past, the past, everything about Henry’s own past, the occasional clarification Austin might be able to shed on Peggy’s last Italian lover, the sports-car racer, or details about the secret queer life of a certain steel tycoon, though more often the past figured in Henry’s anecdotes, recounted at length in response to Austin’s persistent questioning. Maybe it was because he was an art historian, as fascinated by general truths as by minute iconographic details, but Austin could never hear enough
about the people Henry had known, including all those he’d entertained at his historic house in Normandy in the 1960s, the Cecil Beatons and Garbos and Rothschilds.

Henry was always immaculately turned out in his tailored suits. But he was terminally bored. He went through his days systematically, with dignity and attention to detail, but it was never in doubt how tedious he found everything. His highest praise was “distracting” or “entertaining.” “It’s a wonderful evening, that film,” he’d say. “Most entertaining. I found it marvelously distracting.” He had a lover but no one had ever met him. If Austin went into the kitchen to make himself a drink, he’d see the lover’s plate set for dinner and the prepared meal in the pot, ready to be heated up, but Austin knew nothing about him except that he was terminally shy, a discouraged painter, in his mid-forties.

Henry could become fussed, but only when the gay butler accused the straight chef of stealing, padding his bills, double-ordering meat and fruit so that he’d have extras to take home to his own family. The chef, a prima donna who’d worked at a two-star restaurant in the Perigord, refused to help Michel clean the silver or run the sweeper; he would do nothing but cook, but unfortunately there was precious little of that. “He’d be delighted if I had eight people to dinner every night. Then he could strut his stuff. He’d like nothing better. But I hate eating at home. I like going to restaurants—it’s more gay and you never know whom you might run into.”

Right now Henry looked so bored that Austin said in the isn’t-this-exciting tones of a kindergarten teacher, “Well, my dear, I’m going to meet the wife tomorrow.”

“What!” Henry exclaimed, miming shock. “Are you
mad?”

“Possibly, but Julien absolutely insists.”

“I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a cat fight.”

“Oh, I think she must know how to behave. Her father’s a diplomat of sorts. And she
loves
old furniture. I told Julien indignantly that I’m not exactly a
bergère
, though I am slightly
bombé,”
he said in allusion to his tummy.

Having mimed laughing, rocking forward and throwing his hands up, then slapping his knees, Henry screamed, “No!” He mimed stifling
a laugh with one hand pressed over his mouth and eyes and with the other he blindly groped for Austin’s knee and slapped it, too, for good measure. “Stop it!” he shouted. “It’s too killingly funny.” Mentally, Austin overheard a dim echo of Peggy Guggenheim, who’d been much more imperturbable, but who’d always greeted a shocking story with the routinely thrilled words (phrased as a schoolgirl interrogative), “Really? Truly? No! That’s
most
amusing.”

“Aren’t you
afraid
of her?” Henry asked, suddenly soberly.

“Yes, a bit,” Austin conceded. “I keep feeling I’ve stolen her husband away from her and that she’ll never forgive me.”

The next day they met at the Bistro de l’Alma, just around the corner from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; Austin had chosen it as a point midway between his apartment on the Île Saint-Louis and Julien’s office at La Défense. Julien was already there in a booth with his wife, the two of them smiling. They stood for the introductions. Austin said, “It’s fantastic to meet you at last. Julien’s said so much about you.”

What he’d neglected to say was that she would be dressed in a short black leather jacket, the motorcycle kind that the French call
“un Perfecto”
and that has snapped-down epaulettes, a fitted waist and a belt with a chrome buckle. Her hair was dyed a bright magenta and chopped off to expose her nape; her lips were painted a fire-engine red. Her unexpected punky look threw him off; all the comments he’d prepared suddenly seemed hopelessly conventional. So he said, “You lived in London for a while, didn’t you?” because at least her
Perfecto
would look more normal in London than in Paris, where there was no youth culture and girls wore pearls under their printed silk scarves.

“Yes, did Julien tell you that?” she asked in French, delighted—or was she wary?

“You can speak to each other in English,” Julien threw in proudly, though Austin knew he’d have been furious if they’d actually excluded him by speaking anything other than French. “Christine,” he added, still proud, “was the girlfriend of the lead singer in The Quick.” Austin assumed The Quick must be or have been an English band. If he admitted he’d never heard of it, they’d ascribe his ignorance to age, whereas at no time in his life had he ever known the names of pop
groups; his unfamiliarity with The Quick might also “rumple”
(froisser)
Christine, as the French said, as though he was suggesting her one brush with fame hadn’t been so close after all.

“But you speak lots of languages,” Austin continued in French, “even certain languages of Africa, no?” In fact, Julien had said more than once, the
five
languages of Ethiopia, but since Austin didn’t want to seem to be verifying Julien’s word by turning to Christine, he left his remark vague and a question.

Christine nodded and said, “My father works for the World Health Organization, so I grew up all over the world. For instance, I spent my teenage years in Rome and Italian, I guess, is my best language after French.” She had a well-brought-up young lady’s way of deferring (and flirting) with him, the Interesting Older Man and Foreigner, but every once in a while she appeared to remember her
Perfecto
, her slutty make-up and Bad-Girl dyed hair, and she’d thrust her chin out and pucker her mouth into an expression halfway between a snarl and a moue.

But they were all three, he realized, caught between two roles or more. He, Austin, wanted to win Christine over but not collude with her against Julien. For his part, Julien was half-proprietary about Christine’s skills as a linguist and intellectual, but on the other hand he was introducing to her his fascinating older lover who, if he wasn’t fascinating, would have no appeal at all, since he wasn’t rich or famous or handsome.

After they ordered, Julien told a joke about four nuns trying to get past St. Peter into heaven, a long story that dealt with holy water and various body parts. When he’d finished (“The fourth nun shoved the third aside and said, ‘Before she sticks her cunt into the holy water I’ve got to gargle’”), Julien laughed enough for all of them. His big booming laugh rang out, which made Christine only smile complacently, since she was obviously used to it. “Now you tell a story, Austin,” Julien said.

“I can’t think of any.”

“You used to have such great stories,” Julien complained. Austin pinched off a little smile; he’d never told anyone a joke in his life. He was totally confused. What did these young people want, from him
or from each other? Apparently they really were getting divorced, although Julien had said they still spent many evenings together—nights, too, he suspected. When Julien talked about Christine he complained bitterly of her
“petit-bourgeois”
family and of her tendency to put on weight. They’d pass an obese woman on the street and Julien would say, “There’s Christine in five years.” But obviously he wanted to keep her friendship and even arrange for her to shine in public.

Maybe, Austin thought, he expects me to help publish or publicize her books on those Italian soldiers under Mussolini who stayed on in “Abyssinia.” If Christine was published, would Julien feel less responsible for her future? And would he then continue to be just as interested in me? Of course, as Austin knew, he had no power, no influence and not even any contacts in French publishing.

Austin accordingly brought the subject around to her thesis. She said that she had interviewed nearly fifty of the remaining soldiers, all very old men, who’d stayed on, usually for the black girls. “With their tiny soldier’s pension they can live—not
well
but they can
survive
in Ethiopia, and they often live with young, pretty girls. They say about themselves they’re
‘sanded
in,’ the way we might say someone was
‘snowed
in.’
Insabbiati
in Italian;
ensablés
in French.”