The Conversion

by Joseph Olshan

  She motions me to get back into the car, and we drive the short distance around the villa’s outer walls back toward the front entrance and take the turn down the long driveway. The sienna-colored building looms in the foreground; its green shutters have been opened to air out the enormous frescoed rooms. As we come to a halt, the pack of Marina’s beloved mongrels gambol toward us over the wide emerald lawns.

  Seven

  “Una francese, a frenchwoman, called while you were at the carabinieri,” Carla announces when Marina and I enter the kitchen. The dogs are burbling and pressing against our legs. “I don’t understand her, so she tries English,” Carla laughs. “And then a miracle: Stefano actually gets on the phone and speaks to her. He never speaks on the phone unless it’s for him,” she explains as she hands me a piece of paper with a message written in European-looking chicken scratch: Mme Soyer. However, the number scribbled is not Parisian but rather a two-digit city. She is somewhere else in France, probably Brittany.

  “Phone her now,” Marina suggests, and corrals Carla into the library to explain the situation with the thief.

  When the phone is answered by a young girl, I imagine I can actually hear waves breaking in the background. Instinct urges me to cling to English, not to venture a single word into French, and once I identify myself, I hear her saying, “Maman, c’est l’americain.”

  A moment later Laurence is on the line. “Hello, Russell, give me just a second…. Put that over there, please. And then please go out and close the door behind you.” All of this is in English, as if for my benefit. During my unannounced visit to the avenue Foch, mother and daughter had enacted the same charade, when it was clear to me that their habit of conversation was primarily in French, something I would imagine Michel had insisted upon. “Hang on a bit longer, will you?”

  “Sure, but can you just tell me if Michel is okay?”

  “He’s fine … as far as I know. I haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks, to be quite honest.”

  I have no idea how expensive it is to call France and remind Laurence that I am borrowing the phone. She offers to call me straight back.

  When she does, she begins by saying, “I saw the article about your friend in Le Monde. I just want to say how sorry I am.”

  I merely thank her, waiting to hear the reason why she’s calling me. It cannot be because of Ed’s death. The last time Laurence and I spoke was when I showed up unannounced on the avenue Foch.

  “Anyway, I recently got a call from the police in Trouville. In Normandy,” she qualifies.

  “I know where it is. My French ain’t the greatest, but I know a little geography.”

  “Forgive me,” she says, suddenly docile.

  Along a seaside road the police had found an abandoned BMW motorcycle whose license plate they traced back to Michel. They’d wanted to question him about it. When they told Laurence that the motorcycle had been irretrievably damaged, she panicked. But then they reassured her that there had been a thorough investigation of the accident scene with no indication of any kind of personal injury. Michel, or whoever had been riding his motorcycle, seemed to have walked away unharmed, leaving very expensive wreckage.

  “And I haven’t heard from him since the police called. I haven’t heard from him in well over a month.”

  “And this is unusual?”

  She sighs and admits, “Quite unusual, yes.”

  “And so why are you calling me?”

  “Because I really need to locate him and I thought … you might have been in contact with him.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  There’s a hesitation on the other end. “Russell … I’m sorry to do this.” There is a noticeable plaint in her voice. “I did give him your message when you came to see me. I told him to call you.”

  “That was probably ten months ago. I never heard from him.”

  “I just figured that you had.”

  “It’s been over a year since we’ve been in contact,” I remind her.

  “I didn’t know if you’d stayed out of touch for this long. And I hope you understand….” She pauses for a moment. “When the police asked me if he could’ve been with somebody when the accident occurred, the only person I could think of was you. I gave them the telephone number you left me, but I guess your friend, the poet, had already given up his apartment by then.”

  “Oh, no!” I exclaim, momentarily worrying that to the authorities it might appear odd that I could be linked to two mishaps in France: one of them a motorcycle accident, and the other, an attempted armed robbery. I mention this to Laurence.

  “But if they thought you could be helpful in either case, they would’ve contacted you by now.”

  “But how would they find me?”

  “Well, I found you.”

  She had a point. “I hope you’re right. But now I need to ask you something.” I hesitate for a moment, staring down at a fax, recently printed and waiting to be retrieved, whose address is in Sardinia. “That day I came to see you last fall, you weren’t telling me the whole truth about yourself and Michel, were you?”

  A short pause. “No, I wasn’t. And I’m sorry,” she says, going on to explain that Michel had, in fact, already moved out and was living in the other apartment.

  “So then when I read that article about the two of you, the newspaper’s reporting was accurate.”

  She audibly winces. “It wasn’t up to me. He didn’t want you to know about it. In fact, he told me that if you ever got in contact, not to give out that information. Obviously I’d go along with this.”

  I don’t respond for a moment. Finally, I ask, “But why didn’t he want me to know? I mean, was he that afraid of … the power I might have?”

  Laurence forces a laugh. “If that were the case, it would have been … noble of him to ask my help. But, no, it was because he’d been in contact with the poet.”

  “What?” I ask, suddenly breathless.

  There is a significant pause on the other end. “I thought you knew this, at least by now.”

  This can’t be happening. I have to be dreaming. I manage to tell Laurence that I never knew. “I think you need to explain—”

  “Fine. But, Russell, I honestly don’t know how much or even when they were in contact. You have to understand that once he stopped seeing you, Michel was careful to bring up your name as little as possible. But I do know that early on, even before you came to see me, Michel tried to call you, to see how you were, or so he claimed. The poet answered the phone. Now I realize he just never gave you the message.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Whatever the poet said strongly discouraged my husband from contacting you again,” she continues. “As you know, Michel is not easily influenced. So even though I was glad that he listened to your friend, I was actually surprised that he did. And that was when he told me that if you ever called to put you off. And obviously I was happy to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him why.”

  “God damn them!” For Michel is also culpable for not having told me anything.

  “And so I’ve been worried about Michel because I have no idea where he is.”

  “But wait, how can you even know he’s okay after the accident?”

  Laurence lets out a sardonic chuckle. “Because a charge came through on our credit card for a new motorcycle.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She elaborates: 17,000 euros at a BMW dealer just outside Paris.

  “You’re saying he bought the bike but didn’t even tell you?”

  “Correct.”

  I’m still trying to assimilate the idea of Michel and Ed being in touch about me. “I wish I could help you … get hold of him. But there has been absolutely no contact. I have no idea where Michel might be.”

  Laurence now admits that although she felt differently when we’d first discussed the idea all those months ago, she now thinks that perhaps Michel could actually be involved with somebody else.

  “Did he tell you
?”

  “I never asked him this directly. But I plan to when I next speak to him.”

  I tell her, “I don’t know if this will help at all, but before he started seeing me, Michel was seeing …” I’m not sure how to elaborate on the fact that this particular person was a beautiful transsexual.

  “Yes, I know about this … other person,” Laurence says with crisp authority in her voice. “Somebody who had a sex change, from a male to female, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with her.”

  “I don’t either … I never really knew her, although I met her once. She hated me for good reason,” I say.

  Laurence’s terse response—“In case you think of something or hear about something, you have my number here”—makes me wonder if perhaps she’s heard more than enough information about another of Michel’s former lovers.

  After I take down the telephone number of the avenue Foch apartment, I say, “Before you go, I would like to know one thing.”

  “Go ahead, ask,” she says, almost as if she knows what the question will be.

  “Did you have any idea at all about Michel before you married him?”

  She quickly responds, “Of course I knew. I’m not a complete idiot! We even considered breaking off the engagement. Michel likes to joke that we got married because my father had already bought so many cases of excellent champagne, comme il faut, as the French say. And as my family has been coming to France every year since we were children, my father knew that you buy the best champagne you can afford for your daughter’s wedding. He spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on it.”

  Right after all the champagne was delivered, Michel went to Laurence and made a promise that he’d never let it affect their life together, that he would always be discreet. That if he didn’t marry Laurence, because of his family he’d be obliged to marry somebody else. Laurence discussed the situation with a wise Frenchwoman she knew “who was a dear friend of my father’s. And Madame Cremieux pointed out to me that if it were not a man on the side, it could very easily—more easily, in fact—be a woman. Because mistresses are tolerated in French society … more than they are in America.”

  Laurence was told that in good families such as Michel’s and Madame Cremieux’s, maintaining a married lifestyle with children was far too important to ever jeopardize, so much so it was guaranteed to prevent him from being openly involved with another man.

  “Madame Cremieux kept reassuring me that I was safe with him, safer than if he’d been completely straight.”

  This European logic will take a bit of getting used to, I decide after saying good-bye to Laurence.

  So Ed’s meddling was the reason why Michel never contacted me. And now that Ed has died, there is no outlet for my fury, no way of crying foul. I’m completely powerless in my rage. In order to calm down, I try to remind myself how unhappy Ed must have been to have tampered with my life. And yet I know that even if I were able to confront him now, Ed would still argue that his meddling had been for my own good. He’d regurgitate his firm belief that if I allowed myself to get involved with Michel once again, the pain of the inevitable second rupture would trump the pain of the first. “This is the kind of thing that can drive people loony,” Ed had warned me on more than one occasion, probably as firm in his conviction as wise Madame Cremieux, whom Laurence had consulted. He felt there were too many obstacles in Michel’s life that would prevent him from sustaining a relationship with any man.

  My anxiety about Michel returns, a tsunami that has been rolling and gathering strength across my mind. I retreat to my bedroom, feeling as foolish as I once felt while waiting for his phone calls when I was occupying my dreary flat in the 18th. His calls usually came between four and six in the evening when his office began to wind down, affording him an opportunity to talk privately. But even then, when guaranteed solitude, he would speak in a whisper and relied on English as a precaution. During these late-afternoon phone calls he often told me, “Je t’aime bien.” Logically, if je t’aime meant you loved somebody, then je t’aime bien should mean that you loved someone very well, meaning a lot. However, the literal words do not convey their meaning in this way. For in fact, je t’aime bien means you like somebody a lot and don’t quite love them, whereas Je t’aime means you do love them. So when Michel would say, “Je t’aime bien,” I could never really trust the sentiment. There was the odd occasion when he’d say “I love you” in English, but even then I always suspected that it was easier for him to give lip service to a sentiment in a language that he’d adopted rather than lived in.

  And now of course, I have to wonder where Ed and Michel had first met and what was said. I realize that my only source of information would be the memoir. As urgent as the need is to know more, I’m reluctant to delve into further descriptions of Ed’s unrequited love, his frustrated desires.

  But at last I grab the manuscript, carefully laying its early sections aside and finding the place where I’d last been reading. I quickly scan descriptions of Ed’s ongoing struggle to refine several poems in his Palazzo Barbaro sequence, worrying that they are not up to the standards of “Venice Sinking by Degrees,” the poem about our imbalanced affection he published in The New Yorker. Sandwiched between two long descriptions of back-to-back literary dinner parties, I find a brief interlude in which the meeting with Michel is related.

  They actually met up at the same Left Bank café where Ed and I had met for the first time. Unfortunately, Ed doesn’t give a date. He claims to have told Michel that I was still suffering over him and that he had no business contacting me again unless he knew he was completely prepared to leave Laurence. He then reminded Michel that his upbringing and his social class would never allow this to happen. Then there is a short description of Michel, himself: masculine, apparently well-hung; and that judging by his clothes, he was quite B.C.B.G.—bon chic, bon genre, the French expression that is the equivalent of yuppie. However, it quickly seemed to become clear to Ed that Michel wasn’t going to listen to him, that he was still intent on contacting me. “And so,” he writes, “I knew then that my only alternative would be at some point to tell Michel that Russell was sero-positive. And that it was I who had actually infected him.”

  His words pop and blister on the page. Stunned and whirling from this revelation, I barely manage to collate the manuscript and once again turn it over. Everything—the bookcases chock full of Pléiade, my writing desk with two Italian/English dictionaries, a stack of documents in the process of translation, an open bag of toiletries whose ingredients and directions for use are printed in several different languages—vibrates with this sense of terrible betrayal. “You didn’t care if I got slammed,” I speak to Ed aloud. “You just couldn’t bear the idea of that relationship. So you did whatever you could to keep us apart. To keep me with you.”

  I read further. From Ed’s revelation to Michel, he goes on to discuss a poem that he wrote that I never saw, and so I imagine he must have destroyed for not living up to his expectations. The poem, written at the end of October 2003, apparently personified my state of mind when I visited Sainte-Chapelle after my breakup with Michel, right before I went to get the result of my HIV test.

  For I’d told Ed about having spent an hour meditating in this, my favorite chapel in all of Paris, a vaulting jewel box of stained glass that tells various biblical allegories, how I watched the prisms of sunlight shifting through the colored panes, reminding myself that no matter what happened, I was not going to die tomorrow. Even if I were to learn that my body was full of virus, I would, at the very least, be able to return and bask in the marquise setting of this chapel. What I didn’t tell Ed was how I sat there in Sainte-Chapelle, daydreaming about Michel and all our rides through Paris. How, from the rear of his motorcycle, the architectural grandeur of the city used to fall away like a cascade of golden dominoes, blurred wonderfully by speed. I imagined myself clinging to his rib cage, nuzzling the na
pe of his neck that I so loved, so broad and long and covered with the faintest down of silver-blond hair. I constantly had to resist the temptation to lean forward and kiss it. And how when I did succumb to temptation, he’d squeeze his shoulders together and press back against me and say how good it felt to have me behind him. Roaring down boulevard after boulevard, he’d turn his head sideways and I’d see his blissful smile, his intimate words rattling against the wind. And I would shut my eyes and feel at once exhilarated and then desperately afraid of losing him. I’d begin my pathetic praying that somehow he’d be psychologically unable to sever the cord between us. Who would ever know that if we settled into a domestic arrangement whether or not we’d last, but the physical bond was so urgent that it seemed sacrilegious to harm it. And even though I always feared that he would eventually leave me, riding on the back of his motorcycle I just could never begin to fathom life without him.

  But then in the midst of all the foreign visitors, the groups of boisterous schoolchildren who suddenly stopped their clowning and fell under Sainte-Chapelle’s rapture, I imagined a pair of arms snaking around me, powerful arms gripping me the way he did when our bodies rocked together. And for a moment I actually believed that he, whom I hadn’t seen in months, was there with me. Then I shook off the illusion, spooked by it.

  Anxious about the test results, I decided to walk from Sainte-Chapelle, in the center of Paris, to the American hospital in Neuilly, on the outskirts of the city. The mid-October weather was breezy and glorious. I wandered along streets lined with trees whose leaves had turned a translucent golden and lent the city, already famous for its light, an added refraction. I like to imagine that, in comparison to the harsh purity of American sunlight, the light in certain European countries has an aged quality, like a candle flame burning on tallow rather than wax.

  It took me an hour and a half to reach the hospital. From the sumptuous à la Architectural Digest waiting lounge, I was shown to a barren examining room with a school desk and chair in the middle of it, no other chairs, a few stainless-steel cabinets filled with gauze pads and knee braces and sacks of cotton balls and dark amber bottles of purgatives and antiseptic. Walls, painted gray, suggested the utilitarian tone of a way station in some far-flung country. Sitting there in the hard, uncomfortable chair, I thought to myself: This is it, the moment whose outcome I shall never forget for the rest of my life, and how rare to know that something yet to happen will become a lasting recollection.