Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  As for Juan, at the age of twenty-seven he was still a college student. He clung to that, but he was on shaky ground, making slow progress, and Marymount, which had already reduced his grant, was soon to close its doors on him as a failure. In 1980 the apartment he had maintained for the best part of ten years was sold, or he fell behind with his rent, depending on whose story one believes. Either way, the result was the same. He was evicted. Sibley the cocker spaniel was given away. He packed his household goods and his fur into a couple of tea chests and stored them in a warehouse on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge for fifty dollars a month. He bundled his clothes into a carry bag and left it in a locker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He was on the street.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A prodigal summer, though the gardens dried.

  Burdened with so much happiness,

  I knew the web of joy must sometime tear.

  —Barbara Giles, ‘Cobweb Summer’

  On Friday 3 July 1981 I went to early Mass. By the end of the Mass the priest was sweating. Summertime in New York, I was discovering, was drenched with sweat, though it was rarely so pure an essence as the kind that impregnated the wafer I received from the priest’s damp hand. On the subway, sweat sickly mingled with cheap scent; in the gay bars on Christopher Street it hit you in a mixture of amyl or diffused in the acrid drift of marijuana smoke; on the streets it came at you out of peripatetic hot-dog stands or the open doors of greasy-spoon cafes.

  Walking home from church, with my shirt already wet on my back, I bought a copy of the Times and turned in at Nick the Greek’s for my usual eggs and coffee. On the eve of a holiday weekend it was less than normally busy. There was room at a corner table to spread out the paper, a small but significant luxury which disposed me cheerfully to the day ahead. There was no news of any moment, which may explain why I spent so long reading the almost full-page advertisement of the Independence Savings Bank. ‘Sing out on the Fourth!’ it said, and to encourage this holiday spirit it printed the music and three verses of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’:

  What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows half conceals, half discloses?

  So much glory is hard to take at breakfast and so the Times, which is a newspaper of impeccable taste, balanced this rich fare with a thin column of more astringent medical reporting. Doctors in California and New York had diagnosed among homosexual men forty-one cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. The cancer appeared in violet-coloured spots which might be taken for bruises and which often turned brown before they spread through the body. Eight victims had already died, but other cases might have gone undetected because of the rarity of the condition and the difficulty even dermatologists might have in diagnosing it. It seemed to have something to do with promiscuous sex. Most of the cases had involved homosexual men who had had multiple and frequent sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.

  By the time I had arrived at the bottom of the column I felt reassured. The Times made it sound like an exercise in mental arithmetic. If x men have sex y times a night and on z nights each week, calculate the number of encounters that will take place in New York in a year. This was definitely not serious. Or at least, it did not concern me. I was not in the violet-spot league.

  Three weeks later I met Juan. That was not very serious either, a chance encounter, much like any other, except that it was on 14th Street by the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s chapel. I was on my way to the Public Library; he was on his way home, as he put it, from a disco. He was going out to sleep on the sofa of a friend in New Jersey. When we spoke, he took me to be English which, on his carefully calibrated scale of sophistication, was better than average, though he would have preferred me to be French. He established that I was, as he called it, a professor of history, though he found it odd that I had no printed card to corroborate the fact. Where did I live? ‘On Eighth Avenue, just around the corner.’ We had reached the point in this ritual exchange of detail where someone had to make a move. Suddenly he reached out his arm and squeezed the left nipple through my blackwatch tartan shirt. ‘Let’s go to your place,’ he said. So we did, and after we had had sex he fell asleep and slept till late in the afternoon, when he woke up and said, ‘I’m hungry.’

  It happened that 25 July, the day which we always kept as our anniversary, was the Feast of St James. To celebrate the occasion, our undistinguished stretch of 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, before it crosses into no-man’s land towards the river, was holding a party. More salubrious neighbourhoods in the heart of the Village timed their street parties for the autumn, and they sold mixed-grain breads and gourmet salads and herbal oils decanted into little stoppered bottles. But 14th Street is Spanish, and in the evening, when we reappeared, it was filled with the aroma of roasting pork, and there were stands selling tamales and convivial groups drinking beer at the pavement tables outside the cafes. We lingered over a meal for which, in an unspoken agreement, I picked up the bill. And when the dancing was becoming ragged and the coals on the charcoal grills were dying, and it was nearly midnight, we went home again, and he never left.

  Michel. He was called Michel. An unexpected name, I thought, for a Cuban. I was uncomfortable with it. It might have sounded fine in Paris but here, well, it struck me as unconvincing, stagey and—quite frankly—too transparently camp. Of course in America you never ceased to be surprised by names. My own landlord had been christened Gaylord, which had not prevented him from having a discreet and mildly successful career in the State Department. And it was true that, with use, even a name like that could begin to take on the sober and serious characteristics of the person to whom it was attached. But Michel? I resisted it.

  It was several days before I learned that he had another name. He was sitting at my desk, filling out a college application form.

  ‘Juan Gualberto?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s my official name.’

  He thought it was common, and no doubt in Cuba it was. Yet I liked the way it sounded, full-bodied and rich like red wine.

  ‘I’d like to call you Juan,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘With my friends I am Michel,’ he countered. Still, if that was what I preferred, he wouldn’t object. It was no big deal.

  There comes a moment in a casual encounter when the energy in which it was conceived exhausts itself; the small talk dries up, and by mutual consent the meeting is deemed to be without significance. To my surprise the conversation with Juan continued to flow, to eddy with unexpected surges and to relapse into comfortable silences. I liked the manner of his speaking, the richly eccentric idiom, the unpredictable syntax, the smattering of Spanish curses. When he reproached me with not listening, as occasionally he did, he underestimated the pleasure that his voice alone could give.

  Without ever having decided to do so, we were living together. It was a convenient arrangement. He had no home; I was alone; and in his company the city seemed to acquire a fresh charm, as though August had turned into magical May. He knew the streets like the back of his hand, and together we roamed spaciously through Soho and Chinatown and the East Village. He knew cheap places to eat, and introduced me to the women at the Pink Tea Cup and then to the cook at Chino’s, a dowdy little Chinese Cuban cafe with a decor, if you could call it that, so authentically fifties that it was in danger of becoming chic. He was upset to hear that I had been mugged on my second day in New York, though he considered I had been inexcusably careless and volunteered himself as a survival guide. I had to get street-smart.

  ‘But that was months ago!’ I protested.

  ‘No matter,’ he said, ‘don’t dawdle; avoid eye contact.’

  ‘But what if I hadn’t looked at you?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘with faggots it’s different.’ His concern touched me, and I was attracted to a strange sense of innocence in him, though of what he was innocent I could never quite decide.

  As we began to unpack our pa
sts, he was curious to hear about my travels. I had been to India. Why would I go there, he wanted to know. Wasn’t it full of hippies and crazy gurus and miserable poverty? No, he disapproved of India; they had no right to spend all that money on nuclear weapons when the people were living in poverty. But when he heard that I had spent some time in Israel, he was all attention. I told him about Jerusalem and how its walls were golden in the light of the morning sun and white in the light of the moon; how I had walked in a procession of palms that came down from the Mount of Olives and made its way through St Stephen’s gate to the courtyard of St Anne; and how the Arab boys sat on the walls on either side of the entrance to the city, swinging their legs and waving to their friends in the procession. He was interested in the Arab boys. ‘Do they make out?’ he wanted to know. I supposed that they did.

  Sometimes, if I asked him, he would talk about Cuba. He told me the story of his escape, and of his dismissal from the Ballet School, and of the one time he had seen Fidel and cheered for him along with the rest of the crowd. And he talked about the Yoruba, his people, who had come across the sea in chains from Nigeria, bringing their religion with them, the religion of Changó and Obatalá, the white creator of the world, and Babalú Ayé, the god of illness.

  ‘But I thought Cuba was a Catholic country?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘we are Catholics. But there it’s different. We have St Bárbara and Lázaro and the Virgen de la Caridad.’

  ‘But don’t you have them here?’

  My questions exasperated him. ‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand.’

  In my ignorance I had no idea that we were verging on the subject of santería, that fusion of African and Catholic belief that pervades the religious imagination of Cuba. Whenever we came close to this mystery he shied away, embarrassed by this evidence of Third World primitivism, or shy of my intolerance, unable or unwilling to say how the gods may be propitiated by the sacrifice of cocks and pigeons, how they may enter the body of initiates, and how they may be worshipped in a trance to the beating of sacred drums. I let the matter drop.

  Sometimes the balance of our conversations was reversed, and it was he who asked the questions for which I had no answer. Like, ‘Why did Hitler hate the Jews?’ That question arose when I was telling him about the research that had brought me to New York. I was working on the history of a dynasty of German-Jewish industrialists, a classic tale of rags to riches acted out over three generations. In the last generation, before the Nazis brutally intervened and ‘Aryanised’ the firm, the three heirs to the family fortune were already well on the way to squandering their inheritance. Clara’s husband invested her share in a bank which crashed in the depression; Klaus led a drifting existence on the fringes of the Weimar literary scene; and Hans, who managed the firm, was more preoccupied with society life in Berlin than with the industrial realities of the provincial town on which the family fortunes depended. After each day at the archive I recounted the next episode, the latest detail, in the saga of the family’s gathering disaster, and Juan was always ready for more. For Klaus in particular he had a soft spot. He was impressed when I discovered that in 1933 Klaus had acted as a secret courier for Thomas Mann in Switzerland; he was delighted when I was able to report that Klaus had escaped the Nazis and joined the Foreign Legion; and he was puzzled to learn that he finally saw out the war in hiding as a gardener to a Vichy comtesse. What was the nature of the relationship? we wondered. I inclined to a Lady Chatterley solution. Juan, on the other hand, had long since formed the opinion that Klaus was gay.

  This mystery prompted him to drop in at the archive one afternoon. If he could see a photograph of Klaus, he was sure he would be able to establish his sexual identity. Surprised by this unannounced visit, this sudden escape of our private life into the workplace, I came downstairs from the reading room to find him in sympathetic conversation — which is to say that he was politely listening—with the receptionist. She was a lady of advanced middle age, and as she had also to attend to membership subscriptions and the regular mailing lists, it was generally if uncharitably supposed in the Institute that the repetitive nature of her job had imprinted itself on the operation of her mental processes. I arrived in the lobby in time to catch the end of the story of her Uncle Karl who had been an officer in the Luftwaffe, so it was strange, wasn’t it, she said to Juan, that she was working in a Jewish institute? He agreed that indeed it was, which pleased her, and we went upstairs past the portraits of the German-Jewish Nobel Prize winners to inspect the photos.

  He became a regular visitor to the Institute, and the receptionist was always pleased to see him. ‘That nice young man is here to see you,’ she would say to me over the internal phone. Although he never acquired the distinction of a name, she accepted him into the routine of her day as unquestioningly as she aired each of the nine rooms in her apartment for precisely five minutes each morning. It was not for her to comment on the dynamics of a cross-colour, cross-class, same-sex relationship that had materialised in her lobby.

  In this respect the bishop was less reticent, and certainly more knowing. I am not in the habit of entertaining bishops, but when they cross your path there is no reason why they should not be shown the same consideration as lesser mortals. This prelate was a friend of a common friend; and as he happened to be passing through Manhattan and had no pressing ecclesiastical business on a Saturday afternoon, he invited himself to tea. It was rumoured that he had left his island diocese under a cloud, and whether it was this hint of scandal, or simply the grandeur of the occasion (which would greatly impress Hiram in the retelling), that attracted Juan, I cannot say; but he determined to overcome his shyness and stay in to meet the bishop.

  In his usual unhurried way he was still in the shower when the doorbell rang. There was therefore no opportunity to effect the usual introductions. The bishop settled into our single armchair and proceeded to relate to me the latest theological enterprise on which he had embarked. He was writing a work on the spirituality of sex or—given his celibate condition—perhaps it was a study of the sexuality of the spirit. In any event, it was a subject much under-investigated by religious writers. At this point, the bathroom door opened, and in a billow of steam and a cloud of aftershave and a hint of some more elusive fragrance that he had probably picked up from a demonstration in Bloomingdale’s cosmetic department, Juan made his entrance. ‘This’, I said to the bishop, ‘is Juan,’ which seemed the very least I could offer by way of explanation. They exchanged brief pleasantries, and then, when he had satisfied himself that it was a real bishop with an amethyst ring, Juan was gone, looking more youthful than ever.

  ‘How old is that child?’ the bishop enquired.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ I replied, and supposed from the arching of his eyebrows that I stood doubly convicted, not only of pederasty but untruthfulness as well!

  In fact, though not in the way that the bishop implied, it was difficult to know what the truth of our situation was. I had never imagined a relationship like this. I did not see myself in the role of the priest or the engineer. Nor did I feel any special affinity with Christopher Isherwood chasing his working-class boys in Berlin, or with E. M. Forster doting on his Alexandrian tram conductor. On the contrary, I brooded over the disparity in our backgrounds and the divergence of our interests, to say nothing of the fact that our homes—that word again—were half a world apart. When I thought about it rationally, I could not avoid the conclusion that there was no future in this. It was no more than a summer fling, not so much an affair as a diversion in place of the holiday that I couldn’t afford to take out of town. The summer had thrown us together, and now that the August days were at an end, it was time to part. Fond of him as I was, he was not the lover I was obscurely looking for. Nor, I was sure, did I measure up to the man of his dreams, a rich man with a house and a car who would give him a diamond ring and keep him in ease. In fairness to us both—that is how I put it to myself—I should ask him to go.

&n
bsp; That was my mood—or rather one of my moods—on the last day of summer. ‘I am fitfully devising a strategy of withdrawal,’ I wrote to my friend Rickard, who was holed up in the English countryside at a place called Rabbit Hill, where there was nothing to do but write.

  I did ask him to leave. It was late in the afternoon when I broached the subject. He was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, sewing buttons on a shirt. Coolly, as objectively as I could manage, I said that I had been thinking. About us. And about where we were heading. And that, well, there wasn’t really room for two people in this tiny studio apartment. I felt cramped.

  Then, sensing what was coming, he counter-attacked on an unexpected flank. ‘What about that fat woman from the church? She takes up space. She’s been here twice this week. What does she want?’

  ‘She only wants to talk.’

  He didn’t believe me. ‘She’s disgusting. I don’t want you to bring her here.’

  He was sitting upright now, growing tense, preparing to defend himself.

  ‘She needs a good shampoo,’ he said.

  It suddenly dawned on me that, incredibly, he was jealous, that he saw a competitor in this woman who wanted only to discuss theology and join the South American missions.

  ‘Well, this is ridiculous,’ I replied, ‘I mean, whose apartment is this? You can’t just invite yourself into someone’s apartment and take it over as if you intend to stay for ever.’

  ‘I didn’t invite myself. We came together.’

  That was stretching a point, though it was at least as close to the truth as my version of events.

  ‘I don’t care how we came here. What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t room for both of us. I can’t live like this.’