The gardener looked up and beamed a wide smile at him. Tom was taken aback. The response was so warm, so unrestrained, that he staggered the next few steps: the man with the body of a decathlon athlete had practically offered himself.
Only a straight guy with no ulterior motives smiles like that.
Still, before leaving the square, Tom stopped and turned again, waited ostentatiously for Hippolyte to notice him, and gave him another seductive look. This time, Hippolyte’s expression wavered, his smile vanished, crumbling before Tom’s interrogation.
Much too handsome not to be straight, Tom concluded, forgetting that he was contradicting himself. He crossed the street and, as a consolation prize, took from his pocket the message he had received that morning.
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
These reassuring words aroused an emotion in him that was different than the previous rapture, a wave of gentleness and certainty that brought confidence in the future.
Tom walked into Number 7, called Nathan on the entryphone, then went up to the sixth floor.
Nathan was waiting for him in the doorway, hips thrust forward like a catwalk model. He was thirty years old, and wore an anise-green T-shirt over a lanky body and super-tight, low-waisted jeans, with his navel fully exposed.
“Hello.”
Nathan said hello the way people blow a kiss, with a lascivious pout, his lips spread.
They kissed and Nathan closed the door behind them.
“Do you want a coffee?”
“I already had three at school this morning.”
Tom had just come back from the philosophy class he had given from eight to nine o’clock.
“I don’t know how you manage to churn out intelligent stuff at eight in the morning,” Nathan moaned wearily. “I could never do it. Mind you, I couldn’t do a lesson on Kant or Plato at noon, either. Or at six in the evening, for that matter.”
“What about eleven at night?”
“At eleven I can do anything, and at midnight, with a few drinks in me, I can even speak Chinese.”
Tom went closer to him and nibbled his ear. Nathan let him, all the while emitting frightened shrieks.
“Well done,” Tom whispered, amused, still continuing, “that giggling is really manly!”
“If you’re after a hairy ass, then go someplace else. And if you’re after a pair of boobs, then also go someplace else, you jerk!”
Tom put a stop to his diatribe by kissing him full on the mouth. As a game, Nathan pretended to object, pushed back Tom’s tongue, shrieked again, then, just as Tom was giving up, he caught hold of him, pressed his lips to his, and abandoned himself to a kiss.
“Well, that’s done,” he sighed, getting up. “We can tick cuddling off the list. Now I can have my coffee.”
Leaving Tom sprawled on the couch, he disappeared behind the counter of his open-plan kitchen and came back with a sparkling tea set, fuchsia with light green polka dots.
He saw Tom’s eyes grow wide at his purchase. “Fab, isn’t it?”
“Well . . . ”
“David McLaren makes these. You know, the one who made dried tropical plants a must.”
“Oh . . . yes.”
Tom always fled from this kind of chatter. He wasn’t interested enough in interior decoration to remember any details at all.
Nathan feigned indignation. “I guess you don’t like it.”
“I’m surprised . . . It’s not exactly my taste.”
“Your taste?” Nathan said, gulping down a spoonful of jam. “What taste? You don’t have any.”
Tom smiled. He would never have allowed anyone else to be so rude to him but, in Nathan’s case, he not only forgave his constant taunts, but actually expected them, as proof of his affection.
The two men had nothing in common apart from the fact that they liked each other. Nathan was tall, thin as a rake, and always wore the latest fashions. His tone was affected, his opinions outrageous, and his body language totally camp. Tom, on the other hand, was well-built, economical with his words, and had an easygoing manner. While it was immediately obvious to everyone that Nathan liked men, nobody suspected that preference in Tom, who exuded the serene, classic masculinity of a pleasant thirtysomething about to be married and start a family,
What Tom found irritating in Nathan, he also found attractive. He both loved and hated his flutelike intonations, his colorful, frequently vulgar vocabulary, his slavery to fashion, his constant change of hairstyle—shape, length, color—his addiction to trendy bars, his obsession with frequenting the latest gay hotspots. Nathan’s homosexuality wasn’t just a question of his sexuality, it had invaded all aspects of his life. From morning to night, he lived as a homosexual, thought as a homosexual, talked as a homosexual, dressed as a homosexual, socialized as a homosexual, and traveled as a homosexual. Tom, on the other hand, was content just to have sex as a homosexual. And—much to his surprise—to love Nathan.
Tom joined his lover at the table, filled a cup with coffee, and had a second breakfast with him.
Seeing a pair of shoes on the floor, he nearly choked. “What the hell is that?”
“A rocket for Mars,” Nathan said, shrugging.
“You’re not going to wear those, are you? The heels are three and a half inches high. You’ll look like a—”
“Like a shepherd out on the moors?”
“Like a drag queen in civilian clothes.”
“Brilliant! That’s exactly the effect I’m after.”
“But I’m going to look like your bodyguard.”
“That’s the second effect I’m after.”
With a lascivious smile, Tom grabbed Nathan’s arm. “Swear you’ll never wear them.”
Nathan held on to his hand and stroked it. “Absolutely. I swear I’ll wear them tonight.”
“I’ll be ashamed of you.”
“Stop flattering me, I find it exciting.”
Charmed and disconcerted, Tom kissed Nathan’s fingers. “Don’t you think you’ll look like a caricature of yourself?”
Nathan pulled a face. “But you love me because I’m a screaming queen.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. It turns you on.”
Tom tried to protest but couldn’t, because Nathan might have a point.
“OK,” Nathan concluded. “Let’s just say the proverb about ‘birds of a feather’ doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head here. It’s not a gay proverb, anyway.”
Tom nodded: although he himself had no desire to be as eccentric as Nathan, he quite liked the fact that Nathan was.
“You can’t get two people more different than we are,” Nathan went on. “When people meet us, they see me as a raging fashion queen and you as a soccer fan.”
They laughed. In actual fact, Nathan was an influential adman with lots of qualifications, and Tom a philosophy teacher with no interest in soccer at all.
Tom thought of something he had recently said to one of his classes. “You have to know nothing about homosexuality to believe that man loves only himself in another man, that he cultivates his own reflection. That’s just a relic of Freudianism, to think of homosexuality as a kind of mirror eroticism.”
Nathan tapped on the table with his enormous rings. “Since you’re being serious, I’m going to say something, Tom. What worries me is that you’re not just into blatant queens, you’re also into the muscleman type.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you deny it?”
“I—”
“You should have seen yourself in the square, with the gardener. You were like a prospector unearthing a giant gold nugget.”
“Oh, so you were at the window!”
“Of course: I was looking at the same thing you were.”
“Quite something, do
n’t you think?”
“Yes, but not for us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, hands off! He’s as straight as they come. Straight through and through.”
“How would you know? Have you tried?”
“He has a daughter.”
“You’re kidding.”
“There’s often a little girl with him on the square.”
“Could be his niece.”
“Yeah, sure, his niece who calls him ‘daddy.’”
Tom lowered his eyes in frustration.
“I like your reaction,” Nathan went on, ramping up his natural hysteria. “Sorry to disappoint you, my friend, but you just get to eye up the Spartacus of Brussels, you don’t get to screw him.”
“Nor do you.”
“Nor do I. Still, I got worried there, with you looking like Bernadette contemplating the Virgin Mary in the cave. Would you be capable of going with that guy?”
“Going with him?”
“Sleeping with him!”
“Yes.”
“Asshole!”
“And you wouldn’t?”
“You asshole!”
“Answer me,” Tom insisted. “You’re standing there at the window all morning, ogling the gardener and finding out all about his family. Wouldn’t you go to bed with him?”
“Sure I would. But for me it’s normal.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m just a slut who loves anything in pants. I’m turned on by masculinity. But you . . . I don’t understand how you can screw me and eat him up with your eyes.”
“I’m not narrow-minded.”
“Imagine if my eyes popped out of their sockets when I spotted a shrimp like me! I swear it’d piss you off.”
Tom rushed to him, enchanted by his constant theatricality. “I love you.”
“Yeah, right . . . they all say that,” Nathan muttered, his eyes closed, fighting him off for the sake of it.
They kissed, then smiled at each other, all the gray clouds dispersed.
Nathan stood up and, on his way to the kitchen, whispered in Tom’s ear, “I loved your note.”
“My note?”
“The letter you sent me.”
“Me?”
“Don’t go all mysterious on me. You don’t have to sign for me to know it’s from you.”
Nathan took a letter on yellow paper out of his pocket and read out loud:
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
Delighted, he said in a squeaky voice, ‘I’ve unmasked you, Mister ‘You know who.’”
“Nathan—”
“I hope you’ll soon send me a note announcing that we’re going to live together.”
“You—”
“Because I find it absurd to live in the same place but not in the same apartment, and pay two rents!”
“Please—”
“I know, we don’t keep the same hours because you like to get up early and I like lounging in bed and don’t work until later. But precisely because we can’t synchronize our schedules, cohabiting would allow us to be together more often.”
Nathan was indulging in his favorite subject: ever since they had started seeing each other—two years ago now—he had wanted them to live together. Tom always resisted: he was set in his bachelor ways, feeling at home only amid the hundreds of books lining the walls of his studio apartment.
To halt the flood of recrimination that was sure to come, Tom stood up, took a sheet of yellow paper from his pocket, and brandished it. “Look, I received this. And I know it’s from you.”
Nathan came closer. They looked at their respective messages. Even though there were a few negligible differences in the handwriting and in the force with which the pen had been pressed on the paper, the downstrokes looked the same and the wording was identical.
Nathan smiled. “You’re pulling my leg, right?”
Tom also smiled. “No, you’re pulling my leg.”
“You wrote both of them to make me believe it didn’t come from you,” Nathan whinnied.
Tom laughed and shook his head. “No, it’s you who played this trick on me.”
They looked at each other, each trying to prove that the other was lying.
“What an actor!” Nathan cried.
“You sly baboon,” Tom said.
“Female baboon, please. Female baboons are a lot smarter than males.”
They sat back down at the table.
“Now tell me the truth.”
“No, you tell me the truth.”
15
With the giddy cacophony of parrots and parakeets as a background, two municipal employees were mowing the lawn for the first time that season. The cut grass gave off a fresh smell, not as sharp and green as it would be later on, but heavier and wearier, the smell of a convalescing lawn that had made it through the winter.
Hippolyte and Germain worked in tandem, although the local residents only ever noticed one of them. There was a reason for that: Germain was a dwarf and Hippolyte an Apollo, who put his colleague in the shade not only with his height, but also with his beauty.
Germain didn’t resent it. On the contrary. Ever since he had known Hippolyte, his life had taken on a triumphant dimension: short, disabled, and graceless as he was, a man women avoided looking at, so painfully ugly were his features, he was the friend of the handsomest man in Brussels. When he was with Hippolyte, he could temporarily forget his own hideousness, concealing it from himself and others, who paid less attention to him. Whenever Germain walked into a café or a bowling alley with him, he was moved by the fact that he provoked beaming smiles; he swooned with happiness as soon as he heard, “Hey, guys,” an expression that presumed a common element between him and Hippolyte.
“You know, my daughter’s a genius,” Hippolyte said as he filled the wheelbarrow with garbage. “I had to sign her up for three libraries so she would have enough books to read for the week. Three libraries! At the age of ten! And sometimes she goes down to the neighbor, who’s a teacher, to borrow one more. The girl’s a miracle. I’ve no idea how she could have come from me.”
Germain couldn’t help but agree. There was no point in contradicting Hippolyte’s natural modesty: he would only get angry. Because he had always been bottom of his class at school, Hippolyte saw himself as a dumb animal, with way below average intelligence. Unlike so many others, who blame their failures on their families or circumstances, he held himself solely responsible for his shortcomings. Anyone who contradicted the humility with which he lived his life threw him, made him feel sad.
Because Hippolyte was happy. Even though he earned little, even though he only rented a cramped apartment for himself and his daughter, even though the little girl’s mother had run off to Latin America and left him holding the baby, he was always smiling. He felt fulfilled by his job as gardener and road mender: firstly because he was a “civil servant,” which, for an orphan who’d grown up in care, represented a kind of ennoblement; and secondly, because he worked in the open air, doing a physical job that made him healthily tired, not in an office where he would have been bored and people would have noticed his rustic simplicity. In his stubborn, generous head, he had two bosses, the municipal council and nature, and he felt indebted to both, to the council for providing money and security, and to his beloved nature, who requested that he watch over her in a city where she was threatened by concrete, asphalt, and pollution.
And so that day, on Place d’Arezzo, he did not feel degraded picking up dog shit, gathering old beer cans, or getting fresh parrot droppings on his arms and shoulders before he mowed the lawn. It was with care that he made the square beautiful, like a woman he had to satisfy.
A young man appeared, head bowed, a worried expression on his face. “Good morning, Victor!”
Hippolyte called out.
The young man walked past without really answering, deaf to his surroundings. Hippolyte took no offense, wondering what was on the student’s mind, since he was usually so friendly.
Outside Number 12, a limousine stood waiting, double-parked. Hippolyte knew that the famous politician Zachary Bidermann lived there. Although intrigued, he only looked at the front steps through the trees, as if he had no right to look at them directly. To his way of thinking, there were only two kinds of people: the great and the humble. Zachary Bidermann played in the major league, Hippolyte didn’t. He took no offense at that situation, nor did he want it to change. Although Zachary Bidermann was clearly able to mow a lawn, Hippolyte couldn’t chair a board of economists.
Shielded by a crimson rhododendron, he saw Zachary Bidermann come down the steps in a three-piece pin-striped suit, a flowing coat over his large body, quickly greet his driver, who was holding the door open for him, and disappear into the car. Faced with this sartorial splendor, Hippolyte, who was wearing nothing but shorts, suddenly felt naked, vulnerable, socially powerless.
Rose Bidermann, round and pretty, stood on the balcony, waving her husband goodbye.
Poor woman. It’s no joke to be married to a brain. The man probably never thinks about sex.
Hippolyte glanced at the house of the writer Baptiste Monier—another one who impressed him. Whenever he made out the top of Monier’s head through the window, he thought about the thousands of pages, alive with stories and characters, that came out of that skull. How could he remain still for so long? That alone, Hippolyte thought, represented an achievement. As for his writing talent . . . Hippolyte struggled to form even a sentence without starting over several times and filling it with spelling and grammar mistakes.
He should have been my girl’s father instead of me. She’d have a thousand things to say to a writer.
Bent over an embankment, he suddenly felt a presence. He straightened up and saw a man watching him. Hippolyte greeted him with a broad smile. The man did not respond, but carried on crossing the square, then stopped, turned, and stared at him with a look of hatred.
The Carousel of Desire Page 12