by Edmund White
She said she was from Lawrence, Kansas, had met Georges there at the university, where he’d been studying civil engineering and she’d been majoring in pharmacology. He was from Annecy, in the mountains, not far from the Swiss border. His father was a minister in the church of Zwingli. Oh, you’ve never heard of Zwingli? He was a Protestant from Zurich, I think.
“How did you meet Adhéaume?” I asked.
She giggled and said, “He didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“We met him just two blocks away.”
I turned and saw Addy had locked eyes with Sally and had raised a warning finger to his lips, which he lowered the instant I looked his way. He pretended he was scratching his lip.
“We met him on the Place Dauphine. You know people go there for wife-swapping? Les échangistes?”
“I think I’ve heard of it,” I lied, smiling. Adhéaume launched into a long disquisition on the wine, how he’d discovered twelve bottles in the cellars of an uncle’s château in the Dordogne and realized they were prewar Bordeaux; he hoped they didn’t taste of the cork (le bouchon).
“You were saying?” I said to Sally.
“So we have a huge old Buick. We live in it, truth to tell. Sometimes we park it in the Place Dauphine and lock the doors, turn on the overhead light, and make love.”
“How amusing,” I said. “In the nude?”
“Of course. Would you make love in your clothes?”
“Never,” I said encouragingly.
“You’d be surprised how many gents gather around and like to watch.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Sometimes they’re breathing so hard and jerking off so furiously while we’re going at it that the windows are all cloudy with breath. When we drive off and park in the Cité des Fleurs, we get out and find buckets of sperm on our fenders.”
“How exciting!” I exclaimed. “And Addy was one of your spectators?”
“He’s a regular. We’re there three times a week around midnight and he’s always there, so well dressed and always smiling, wearing a nice felt fedora and silk scarf; one night we unlocked a door and said, ‘Hop in,’ and he did, which is most unusual, believe me, but we wanted to know him.”
“How nice,” I crooned. “And now he’s invited you to dinner.”
Georges squinted at me and murmured, “I hope you’re not too shocked.”
“Not at all,” I said serenely. “But you’ve barely touched your food. Are you vegetarians?”
“We don’t eat too much,” Sally volunteered. “We never do.”
“What about dessert? I have a coconut crème caramel.”
“We both have a sweet tooth,” Georges said, and for the first time I noticed several of his teeth were missing, though they were usually covered by his long upper lip.
Once we’d tucked into our pudding, I asked, “But how do you survive? Paris is an expensive city.”
“Well, Addy has been very generous with small amounts of money and Georges receives a minuscule allowance once a month to stay out of Annecy. Different gentlemen we’ve met allow us to take showers at their place, wash out our undies, which we collect a day or two later, and even spend the night on the couch when it’s really cold. Most of Addy’s money goes to repairing and fueling the Buick. If we’re desperate I turn a few tricks, but Georges doesn’t like that, he’s so possessive.”
“Men are like that,” I said with a smiling complaint in my voice. “Have you ever turned a trick with Addy?”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “You know him. He likes just to watch.”
“And touch?”
Georges said, “Sometimes he likes to stroke my buttocks, mon cul quand j’enfonce Sally.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, bluffing, “he likes that.”
“Should I open another bottle?” Addy asked. “It’s a different vintage. A little impertinent burgundy. I’ll call for new glasses. Of a sweet Château d’Yquem? Or champagne.”
“Let’s stick with the red,” Sally said, “and we can use the same glasses.” She’d pushed aside all pretense of being an oenophile; she just wanted to get high.
Georges said, “I like people who are a little perverted. No blood, no shit, no pain, I always say, but everything else is fine.”
I smiled and said, “That’s what I always say, too.”
“Sometimes we go to a nice little échangiste club right off the Rue Saint-Martin. Ladies get in free and so do I if I’m with Sally, but single men have to pay a hundred francs and their first drink is another hundred.”
“But it’s a solid investment,” I said, “if you like to watch or knock off the occasional woman … or man.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Georges said. “I never touch a type, though I don’t mind if he touches me, but not my sex, ce n’est pas permis, that’s for the meufs only.”
“You have to have your principles,” I added cordially.
I told them I had a headache, red wine always did that to me. Sally asked if I wanted them to join me and maybe give me a back rub, but I declined, whispering very girl-to-girl that it was that time of the month, though it wasn’t.
Sally said, “Georges says no blood but I don’t mind it.”
I stood, took each of them by the hand (I couldn’t bear to kiss them, as if they were infected, though I blew a kiss at Addy). “But don’t let me spoil your fun. I’m sure Addy is roaring to stroke Georges’s buttocks.” I swirled away and double-locked both bedroom doors. When I couldn’t sleep I tiptoed into the nursery, saw Marguerite asleep and snoring in a frightful many-colored nightgown of a slippery synthetic fabric and my adorable Ghislaine (who coughed slightly) and my brave little Foulques, both of them in matching white gowns and white knit booties, Ghislaine on her back and Foulques on his side. I bent down to kiss them each on a cool cheek and hoped I didn’t reek of wine. Foulques stirred in his sleep and raised his tiny hand with the seed-pearl fingernails, as if a fly had troubled him. I thought, Maybe Addy and I are foul, but at least we’ve produced these angels, as rasa as any tabula.
The next day at breakfast I said ironically to a sheepish Adhéaume, “I hope your friends approved of me.”
“I thought you’d like Sally, since she’s American.”
“And a part-time whore?”
“You always exaggerate (tu exagères toujours).”
“Did they stay on? I hope you were able to clock in some butt-stroking time.”
“No reason to put too fine a point on it. Pity you had a headache.”
“I hope you had a chance to hose them down first. They rather smelled.”
“All right. I won’t invite my friends to dinner.”
“But Adhéaume, I thought you liked women, aristocratic women, or just rich, refined, educated, beautiful women, I didn’t know you had a weakness (une faiblesse) for mud (la boue) or for male ass (le petit cul d’un homme).”
“Really, Yvonne! You go too far!”
“I’m just worried about your health. How do you know they’re not heroin addicts—”
“I’m afraid of needles.”
“Or riddled (cribblé) with syphilis?”
“I don’t touch their genitals.”
“Yet!” I emphasized.
“You won’t sleep with me.”
“Now I certainly won’t. I can’t trust you. I hope you can be satisfied with just two heirs, a boy and a girl.”
“So you release me?”
“Like a big fish. But into a clear stream, not a mud bath, one would hope.”
“I mean from my vows?”
“You’ve already broken them, I notice. Surely two little Courcys are sufficient to hold me forever, as you put it.”
As if to prove his power over me, Addy began the restoration of his family château, which turned out to be a bottomless pit to fill with my money. Although I had an allowance of several hundred thousand dollars a year, all of my accounts were overdrawn and the tradesmen’s bills came in every day. The newspapers
were commenting with sly pokes and even my most discreet acquaintances would pause and raise an eyebrow when Addy’s name was mentioned. The servants must have also been gossiping about it, since they often broke off their intense conversations and blushed when I walked in. I found out some of them hadn’t been paid, an omission I corrected.
I didn’t really care at first, though if I thought about it for a moment anxiety would creep over me like a skin rash or ivy. Daddy, who’d been brought up poor, always worried about money, even after Bobbie Jean convinced him to invest in Dallas real estate and he became seriously rich. He worried about “white flight” and what he called “unreal estate,” though the French think there’s no safer investment than in stones (pierres) and they seem really talented at perpetuating the “patrimony.” For the French the stock market is what’s precarious; Daddy thinks so, too, and doesn’t trust anything except gold bars in the wall safe.
Daddy monitored my checking and saving accounts, which were in both my husband’s and my names. He’d write me little warning notes on stationery he’d had printed up: FROM THE DESK OF PETER MARTIN CRAWFORD … He’d say, “What the hell is your husband spending a fortune on? You’ll soon be bankrupt and tell him not to count on me no more to fill up them coffers, that count no-count of yours. Glad to hear the twins are happy and healthy. From the photos they look as cute as the dickens, especially that little girl of yourn.” Daddy always was partial to little girls; when he was sixteen and she five, my aunt Bunn told me, he used to play with her hole. He’d make her sit on the fence and he’d stick his finger in and jiggle it. She liked it, she said. Her little female hole, not the dirty one. I’ll never leave him alone with my children.
Adhéaume was busy rebuilding his family château, Quercy, in the Var. Those were our closest moments, when he’d excitedly discuss his plans and unroll the architect’s drawings. I’d make a big pot of his favorite blackberry tea, which he drank with lots of sugar and which exuded the syrupy smell of the dunes on the Lido. The color returned to his cheeks, his drawl hastened into a trot, he couldn’t unscroll the plans fast enough, so great was his enthusiasm. He was convinced, I’m sure, that he was restoring not only the château but his place in history. He talked about those ancient kings of France as if they were cousins he’d played with just yesterday and for whom he harbored a certain schoolboy contempt. Hauteur was his strong suit, but it was almost appealing if it was joined with excitement. He was excited that after years of sneering at everyone and envying them their good or middling fortune, he and his family once more counted in the great world (i.e., in France, the only monde he took seriously). Of course, he admired the English, their foul mouths and willfulness and eccentricity—the result, he’d always explain, of a country gentry rather than the nobility of the court, as in France. “We’re always currying favor whereas they don’t give a damn” (“give a damn” he’d say in English)! Did he entirely admire the surliness of the English? Perhaps he liked their independence, but he preferred the eternal politeness of the French, which often concealed a barb in its silky tail.
Addy loved his own geneology; working alone, spending many days at it, he traced out his family tree and made ten copies. When his aunt, the countess of Beaulaincourt, saw it, she said slyly, “You’ve left off Adam de Courcy and Eve de Courcy!”
Addy was thrilled to re-create the family château. He must have had a whole army of craftsmen working there—as many as fifty at times, perhaps more. It had been built originally in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance; Addy hired skilled painters to gild the galleries and antechambers. I used to imagine I could hear the drumbeat of cleated metal boots on the stone staircases and on the tiled floor of the salle de gardes as armored knights rushed in (Addy carefully restored the tiles from an extant scrap in one corner). He took me on a tour of the château. From the slits in the thick walls, darkened by the centuries, where archers once stood and shot their arrows, I could look out at the sun-dried fields, the barely trickling river—more a brook than a river—the evening volleys of starlings and the glaring white gashes left in the dust by the plaster quarries.
The library, with its gilt mottoes exclaiming from the cornices, VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LE ROI!, was lined with bookshelves behind ornate doors painted in faded blue with scenes of lanky shepherds and saucy peasant girls. Weirdly, the shelves displayed hundreds of bound volumes from the eighteenth century in English! And in German up to Schiller and Goethe. Not a single volume in French. Addy explained that an ancestor of his, Adalbert de Courcy, was a tremendous bibliophile and had agents buying up everything in Weimar and London, though he couldn’t read either language.
Addy was very solicitous of his army of workers (or thought he was) and was always saying an encouraging word or providing them with a coup de rouge from a local vineyard. He had an easy way with them, acquired from dealing so much with game wardens, no doubt. One of his pet projects was re-creating a majestic marble fountain fed by allegorical figures representing the five continents—an Asian man with an elephant, a hooded Arab with a camel, a European knight with a horse, an Australian woman with a kangaroo, and a big-breasted American squaw with an alligator—all streaming water from mouths and even nipples! The arms of France surmounted it all. Addy was determined that all these masterpieces would someday be sold to collectors rather than museums, which he considered art cemeteries. Unfortunately tastes have changed and just as the price of rare stamps has gone down because fewer people collect stamps now, in the same way this sort of “colonial” art is less in fashion than formerly. When I first arrived in Paris, people still talked about the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931—the fountain would have been perfect there!
Other rooms were far more beautiful because they followed the taste of Henri III—a zodiac room, for instance, and a room of ancient Roman busts of emperors. My favorite was the handsome Commodus, with his beard and curly hair, till I read about him and discovered that he renamed Rome (and the twelve months) after himself, fought in the ring as a gladiator (and charged Rome for the pleasure—and nearly bankrupted it), decapitated ostriches and Roman citizens who were missing feet for one reason or another. He sounded like a bad ruler and I came to despise him, despite his good looks. He thought he was a reincarnation of Hercules and our bust showed him holding a club and wearing an animal skin.
I would commute from Paris to the Var by train, changing from an express to a local in Marseille, and on one trip I saw Helen, the American I’d met at the Red Duke’s. She was very friendly and sat beside me; first class was nearly empty.
I noticed she had a large, bluish diamond, which looked distinctly familiar. I was certain it was a ring Addy had given me because he’d based a whole lecture on it, about a diamond’s “angle of incidence,” its “dispersion,” and “pavilion facets,” something I’d paid close attention to because I thought his self-esteem was linked to that sort of expertise (when I still cared about propping up his ego). I’d never liked the ring because it was so large and square that I couldn’t get a glove over it. I’d stopped wearing it. I’d never noticed it had gone missing.
“What a lovely ring,” I said, my heart pounding. The sunlit landscape was streaming past, little farms, antiquated farm equipment, impoverished French villages with fading signs on blind walls (SUZE with a ten-foot-tall picture of a woman’s hand holding a cocktail glass of yellow liquid, the whole advertisement losing color by the instant). When I looked at the poor, sunbaked villages, devoid of people and traffic, the shutters closed against the heat, and in my mind contrasted them with the manicured luxury of Paris, its pale limestone façades and sweeping boulevards, I thought of the capital as a fiery carbuncle growing on the pale, flaccid bum of the nation.
“It looks familiar,” I said, “but I know nothing about jewels.”
She looked stunned, then laughed suavely and said, “I don’t wonder. Addy gave it to me for my birthday last October.”
“Yes, he must have showed it to me for a moment before he gave
it to you,” I lied. I could feel my face burning. “I knew I had seen it somewhere.”
In my own jewel box, I thought.
“It’s such a delight to see you again.” I said. “How was that trip to Marie-Galante?”
“Where? Oh, okay. Henri loves it. Miles of untouched white beaches and palms, but no decent hotels. They’re good cooks, though they put Grand Marnier in everything.”
“Are you Adhéaume’s mistress?”
“Was. I was years ago. Then he found out I was the only poor American in Paris.” She looked me over from alligator shoe tips to frosted curls. “He moved on to bigger and better things.” She smiled, remembering something. “When you two took this very train on your honeymoon to go to look at the family château, I was traveling in the car behind yours. Of course, later, he became more and more devoted to you.”
“Of course,” I whispered. “Did you stay with … the wedding party?”
“Yes. I stayed in the village hotel at the foot of the château, speaking of indecent. You must have noticed his long nocturnal walks. I wore no scent and even bought the worst unscented soap so you would suspect nothing. What could be worse than having your groom cheat on you?” Her teeth were very shiny.
“Of course now I’m inured.”
“Evidently. I would never have dared being so honest otherwise.”
“That’s my ring,” I said.
“What a devil, that Addy. Are you very fond of it? Do you want it back? You could wear it without saying anything; that would shock him, if he bothered to look at your hand.” She started to pull the ring off.
“No, no, you must keep it. It looks so well on you. My hand’s too little for it,” I said, a bit cruelly.
“If you’re sure …? It must be wickedly valuable. I insist you take it back.”
“All right. You’ve spared me having to observe Adhéaume’s old age.”
“You’re putting him out to pasture?” she asked. I just smiled a dazzling smile.
It was such fun wearing that ring at breakfast the next day.