The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Julien smiled at Austin’s inability to grasp how young he was. “No, just two years ago. The emperor was long gone and even the Communists were already on their way out.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Then, following his own train of thought about age, Austin said, “I imagine Nina Helier must have been very beautiful when she was young.”

  “She’s still a beautiful woman!” At that Julien, indignant, relapsed into a complex silence as though he was physically uncomfortable—nursing a sore shoulder, say. Austin was conscious of this tense, melancholy man beside him as they looked down into a river as restless as Austin’s own mind. He’d known enough older men and women to realize that life and love go on and on, but he also understood that this affair with Julien, if it ever materialized, could be the last one that was thoroughly … reciprocal. Most of the old gay men he knew who had lovers were rich or famous or both and Austin was neither. He felt his time was running out. “How long have you been married?”

  “Oh, a while. Quite a while,” Julien said.

  Austin had already picked up that Julien didn’t like to be held to exact dates or if given a chance would dilate each epoch in his life in order to give every one a mythic weight, though he would have had to be forty to accommodate all the years he assigned to himself. “Was she the first woman—” Austin started to ask, then he suddenly interrupted himself, embarrassed.

  Julien laughed scornfully. “The first woman I slept with?” He turned his full, mocking glance on Austin and called him “my poor little one.” “Mon pauvre petit, do you think I’m one of those fags who tried to reform by getting married? By finally getting it up for one sisterly woman?”

  “No, of course not,” Austin answered sheepishly in a small voice.

  “You do! I can see that. When I was just sixteen I told all my classmates I was homosexual, to get that out of the way, and it really wasn’t difficult to say or to live with. But I always liked women. My older brother is homosexual, and I joined him out of solidarity. He’s been with the same man since he was nineteen, perfectly happy, so you can imagine I had no problem accepting the idea of being gay, but it wasn’t black and white for me.”

  Austin felt he was out of his depth, facing an older culture than his own, one much harder to sum up. His own assumptions struck him as shoddy. He was sorry he’d revealed his West Village smugness; he had belonged to a New York gay world for twenty years and it had left him with too many ready answers. “No,” Austin said, inspired, “I meant was she the first woman you’d ever considered marrying?”

  “Oh. It was very odd, but it was a lightning bolt. We met in Addis at the French Embassy during a reception and the very next day we left in a Jeep together for a weekend in the bush. We were heading for one of the Negus’s palaces, which is now a very shoddy hotel, half-dilapidated. But we hadn’t been driving more than half an hour when we had a flat. There we were, on a dirt path at dusk, surrounded by ostriches, which are very dangerous animals with lethal spurs, taller than a man and much faster runners, but a worry only if they feel cornered. Christine was terribly frightened and I held her in my arms. We spent a whole night near the Jeep until the next morning when at last another car came past.”

  “So that was it?” Austin asked. “Love at first sight.”

  “Yes, we were engaged to be married almost immediately and I would have married her right then and there, only Christine wanted to wait, she knew a little Romanesque chapel in Provence…. She left two months after we met to go back to France. Then I fell in love with a second woman, an Englishwoman who was there teaching English in a village. Americans laugh when I say I learned my English in Ethiopia.”

  “Did she have a very posh accent?” Austin asked, because he didn’t want to pose the obvious next question. They had begun to walk along the Quai de la Mégisserie, past the closed pet shops.

  “Bien sûr,” Julien exclaimed. “I’m certain she was from a very grand family. She’s so gentle—a bit older than I.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m hopeless about ages, but I think she was, well, anyway, too old to have children. She had two children with her, ten and eight.”

  In all his homosexual inexperience Austin rejoiced, calculating that the late forties must be past the age of childbearing for ladies; he exulted in this new proof of Julien’s airy indifference to chronological niggling.

  As they walked along, Austin took Julien’s arm, which felt very thin. Julien was warm and kind, so different from the standoffish Little Julien. Austin acknowledged that he was more attracted to Little Julien, that he thought about him every night and still masturbated remembering him twice a day—the flat chest with a few long hairs straying down the center, the olive hue of his arms, worthy of a Spanish martyr, and his delicate pink ears, which were the color of unhealthy, off-season raspberries. He remembered the hot, bitter taste of his anus, like stale cucumbers, and the heft of his buttocks. He remembered crouching on the floor below Little Julien, who lay athwart the bed on his back, legs falling over the side. Austin would look down the length of Julien’s twisting, foreshortened body, as it worked and worked its sure but devious way through pauses and accelerations toward a release that required every bit of concentration and that couldn’t skip a single one of these intermediary stages. But Austin was determined to push these thoughts aside, and to prove it he tightened his grasp on Big Julien’s arm. Here was a man, a married man, not corrupted by gay life, not standing around a smoky bar with a shaved head, an ear stud or cursory job and a cynical smile already leaching the freshness out of his face. Here was a good man coming to him without intimate tattoos, pierced nipples or other body modifications.

  “Christine and I were wild about each other sexually,” Julien was saying. “We still are now, even when we quarrel all the time; we’re separated, in a month we’ll be divorced, but we’re still so turned on by each other—”

  “—that you still sleep with her?” Austin asked.

  “No, not at all,” Julien said smoothly. “Of course not, my poor little one, mon pauvre petit. That’s all over. The bitch.”

  Austin decided he wanted to be a better wife to Julien than Christine had been, more old-fashioned, more patient, since it was precisely Julien’s masculinity—banked and dowsed though it might be—that was the fire at which Austin wanted to warm his hands.

  Chapter Five

  Joséphine, the children’s book illustrator, came over for lunch the next day. Austin wanted to know what she, as a woman, thought of Big Julien, though he realized she wasn’t very typically female. Was any woman? Would he have felt right about speaking for all men? Gay men?

  Joséphine was from Tours, reputed to be the home of the best French accent, and she did speak her own language clearly and elegantly, with not too much slang and no elisions. She had the fully awakened, gently satiric response to the absurdities of her friends that was characteristic of someone from a big family, a family of talkers and observers rather than TV watchers. Her beauty was regal: her long neck lengthened still more by blond hair swept up and stabbed haphazardly at the top by a comb or gathered into a ponytail by a red rubber band; a pointy chin and hollow cheeks, crowned by prominent cheekbones; and full breasts that visibly strained at the breastbone like two puppies pulling on their leashes in slightly diverging directions. She had long legs and disproportionately small feet, the big toe aristocratically shorter than the others. She wasn’t fussy at all or coy or full of feminine wiles.

  He’d read somewhere that women imagined men want to feel useful to women and that they delight in performing acts of gallantry; Joséphine was not laboring under any such misapprehension. She knew exactly how ungallant men could be. She was so beautiful and confident that all she needed to do was tug at her thick lustrous hair with a brush, wriggle into jeans or black pantyhose and a short skirt and pull on a tight T-shirt and she was ready to go out. Tired with bluish circles under her eyes, she was beautiful, just as f
lushed and glowing at the gym she was beautiful; she had nothing but varieties of beauty to offer. He’d seen her in a black silk dress at the Opera, borrowed pearls around her neck, and she’d been so cold and exquisite that, on a whim, he’d introduced her with gratifying, hand-kissing results, to a snobbish fag as “the Princess Radziwill.” But she was just as extraordinary at the end of a long, tiring trip (they often traveled together); she’d be beautiful even during childbirth, he decided.

  She was as naive as a Kansan in Paris. Irony sailed right over her head. She never got a joke and the least bit of teasing reduced her to tears rather than the usual sulky, annoyed amusement. No matter how much Austin exaggerated or, in a New York reflex, said the opposite of what he meant in exasperated italics, Joséphine, wide-eyed, would say, “Vraiment? Really?”

  She and Gregg had been lovers for six troubled, hilarious months full of laughter and tears. Now it was one of their successful party pieces, their tumbled, contradictory accounts of all their feelings.

  The routine, of course, hid the sharp pain Joséphine had suffered as well as Gregg’s sadness at bidding so many scalding tears to such lovely ice-blue eyes, the eyes of one of his only friends, after all.

  Now Austin talked across the restaurant table about Big Julien. “He’s very vieille France, don’t you think?”

  “Vieille …?”

  “God, Joséphine, sometimes I have the feeling I’m the Frenchman and you’re the American. You know, Old France, proper, stuffy, comme il faut.”

  She blinked, confused, in the lamplight that shed its warmth over their table on this gray, rainy late April day. “He has nice manners,” she said hopefully, afraid to venture more.

  “Do you think he’s gay?”

  “What? Isn’t he gay?” she asked, alarmed again. Until she’d moved to Paris, apparently she’d never met a single homosexual or even thought about the whole vexing subject of sexual variety. She’d dealt with impotence, premature ejaculation, violence, balding, infidelity, logorrhea, prostate problems, and all the other things men might contrive to irritate a woman, but she’d worked from the simple axiom that all these men more or less desired her.

  “Well, he says he’s bisexual,” Austin insinuated with a pretended skepticism and a vocal raised eyebrow, although in truth he had no doubts at all about either side of Julien’s sexuality; he simply wanted to provoke a spate of girl talk.

  “You have been to bed with him, haven’t you?” she asked, going with chat-deflecting directness to the sore heart of the matter.

  “Not really.”

  “Now Austin …” she admonished, raising one translucent forefinger with its clear, small, unpolished nail. She was calling for a truth that was just as unvarnished. She pronounced his name as though it were Ostend, the Belgian port. Her habit of catching him out was something she’d picked up from Gregg, a tic that she’d learned was considered generally amusing.

  “Well,” he spluttered, “I think even he is puzzled, but I don’t dare seduce him before I’ve explained to him about being seropositive. Or what would you say?” He was half-hoping for some superior French worldliness that would get him off the moral hook.

  Joséphine acknowledged Austin’s health status only during those rare times when he mentioned it. Then she’d frown and narrow her eyes as though she were staring into a sunset that had given her a very bad headache. “Yes, you must,” she said in hushed tones, but he wasn’t sure she wasn’t copying other people’s conventions of concern.

  “Should we have sex first a few times and then should I mention it? Won’t he drop me right away if I tell him first?” Austin knew that if a gay American was overhearing him he’d be horrified at Austin’s ethical wobbling.

  “Yes,” Joséphine said, as she disappointed Austin by waving off the dessert menu and ordering an espresso for both of them, a mother’s disabused glance over imaginary glasses to show she’d brook no whining objections to her spartan good sense from her greedy friend. “Maybe it would be best if you got him hooked (accroché) before you sprang on him any unpleasant news.”

  Austin was surprised to hear his possibly imminent death demoted to the status of the “unpleasant” (désagréable). In truth, he had no symptoms and even looked embarrassingly robust.

  Austin and Peter, his American ex-lover, had been tested together in Paris in 1986, three years earlier, because their French doctor with the Greek name had insisted. People said that the doctor himself was infected with the virus. Peter, a genuine escapist, had objected to the whole process, arguing Austin would be thrown out of France if positive and sent home to the States in leg irons (Peter had already decided to move back). “And you won’t be able to travel and practice your profession,” Peter said with such energy and fussy precision that Austin suspected he must be repeating something he’d read in the paranoid gay press. “In Sweden, they’re sending seropositives to a prison island.” Neither Austin nor Peter was certain you said “seropositives” in English, which Peter in particular found annoying and disorienting in his capacity as a super patriot who’d never condescended to learn any French beyond the most approximate bar-room gabbling. “In Munich they test you at the border and to stay in India more than a month you must undergo a blood test.”

  “So those places would be eliminated in any event,” Austin pointed out.

  “Anyway, who wants to go to Munich, European capital of vulgarity and fascism, all those middle-aged men linking arms and wearing lederhosen? And India is too creepy-crawly for those-who-are-positive,” he said, hoping he’d found a formula for their condition that was both graceful and good English.

  Cut off from America, from the massive protests and the underground treatment newsletters, from the hours and hours of frightened midnight conversations with friends by phone and the organized safesex and massage sessions, far from the hysteria and the solace, Austin did not know what to think of this disease that had taken them by chance, as though he had awakened to find himself in a cave under the heavy paw of a lioness, who was licking him for the moment and breathing all over him with her gamy, carrion smell but who was capable of showing her claws and devouring him today … or tomorrow.

  Even after Peter moved back to the States, he had a lingering resentment against Austin for having insisted they be tested.

  And Austin, too, felt that he’d gained nothing by knowing, since the only available treatments didn’t seem to work. He’d had a cheerfully defiant conviction that learning the truth is always liberating, but since moving to Europe he’d come to doubt his democratic frankness, his “transparence,” as the French called it, as though it were no more interesting than a clear pane of glass. He’d learned not to blurt out whatever happened to be passing through his mind and, out of the same curbing of instinct, he’d started to shy away from bald declarations of facts, even when other people made them. If another American called out anything in a loud, unironic voice, he’d exchange amused but slightly alarmed glances with his French friends—can humankind bear so much candor? he seemed to be asking. Isn’t there something inherently alarming about so much explicitness, even when the subject is safe?

  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 whe
n 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.”