by Edmund White
He’d also reverted to Catholicism, but one that wasn’t the mystical, incense-swinging camp to be found at “Smoky Mary’s,” but rather the pinched, shabby, willfully ugly Catholicism of his Florida youth, the church of glow-in-the-dark dashboard Madonnas and plastic flowers, of sin management and grace accountancy, of confession in a booth with Father Mike, the smell of dirty feet and unwashed bodies. This was the church of an angry deity, the neighborhood bully who sent fags and unwed mothers straight to Hell for eternity, who kept minor sinners in Purgatory for dreary centuries but who sped bigots and old, holy-water frogs straight to a Heaven that smelled of chalk dust and wet blackboards and that rang out with the excited voices of constant bingo winners.
Leonard saw me reluctantly and when I stood hesitantly in the sickroom doorway he mumbled while saying his black rosary and he kissed the silver crucifix that dangled from it. He didn’t look up at me. I was broken-hearted and angry to see my big, brave boy reduced to this cranky, creaking prayer wheel. I was sorry that he had lost his confidence, his belief in everything he’d so beautifully achieved.
ONE YEAR in France led to a second, third, fifth. The longer I stayed the more difficult it appeared to jump back on the Manhattan merry-go-round, whirling ever faster past me. France seemed a bit dim and dreary, almost as though I’d already died. My first psychiatrist, Dr. O’Reilly, had said that the unconscious does not distinguish between leaving and being left, and that the child who goes off on a trip from home feels abandoned by his parents; by that reasoning I felt rejected by the States. I was in a pout that America had let me go so easily.
When I did go back to New York, it was shockingly noisy but it no longer seemed the dingy, dowdy city I’d known, as comfortable and smelly and graceless as old loafers. Even the writers were becoming younger and younger, their advances bigger and bigger. But when I looked at the few aging leathermen of my generation still alive and creaking around, stiff-jointed in their supple pelts, I thought that in New York the charming eccentricity of someone in his twenties can become a grotesque deformity when he enters his fifties, since this is a city where no one conforms to a general, civilized code of behavior, which in any event exists only as one “look” or another, to be taken up as a form of travesty—the “executive look,” the “broker look,” the “pimp look,” or the “rapper look.” In a 1992 documentary about Harlem drag shows, the skinny black gays not only got all dolled up in Vogue fashions but also did a turn as young Wall Street lawyers in three-piece suits and button-down shirts and briefcases.
In the past New York had been a city where even rather respectably dressed old men were always rooting through the garbage in search of food or newspapers with that supercilious, suspicious look on their faces of idlers picking up books in a bookstore just to kill time. Now new buildings were springing up everywhere. The women looked chicer than Parisiennes although their voices and especially their laughter remained as raucous and nasal as ever. Money poured out of every doorway with the surging crowds or swept uptown in every stretch limo.
My friend Tom, the poet, died, bitter and angry. He’d discovered that Daniel, his handsome young lover, had for years been seeing someone his own age on the side. Instead of being understanding about a young man’s needs and tastes and grateful for his love, no matter how partial, Tom had broken off with Daniel in a fit of wounded pique—and died six months later of self-pity and an early heart attack. I thought no Frenchman “of a certain age” would have made such a blunder. France instructed its men and women early and thoroughly in the cold, unblinking art of realism.
At first Paris seemed untouched by AIDS. Another American told us to pretend to be English, since presumably the French were afraid of having sex with Americans, but that warning proved to be irrelevant. If Parisians had rather despised us when I’d first come to Paris in the sixties, that was because everyone then was a Communist; now, with the suddenness and thoroughness that characterizes a French about-face, no one was a Communist and not a single qualified candidate, for instance, could be found for a chair in Marxist history at a state university. People believed Americans were funny, cheerful people, “harmless” or très bon enfant, which was far from being a compliment, since Parisians preferred those who were nasty, or méchant, to those who were uniformly nice, or gentil. At the very least one should strive to be malin, or “sly.” Of course, as I pointed out to French friends, Americans had to be ceaselessly nice in order to avoid promoting murderous rages in the people around them. Every argument in America could end in a knife fight.
Michel Foucault was in the hospital one winter. When he came out he seemed much thinner and weaker and racked by a constant cough, but he was determined to give a dinner party for William Burroughs and twelve of the band of young Parisian men who were always gathered around the philosopher. Foucault could speak English wonderfully well, but his success with the language was a sustained performance demanding complete concentration, the sort of intensity that made his seminars in the States so exhilarating (and exhausting). I’d attended a seminar at New York University in 1982 and I remembered how much Foucault had had to rely on written notes and words precisely produced by a mouth glittering with silver fillings, as though the metal helped him to chew out the difficult foreign words. What he wasn’t equipped to do was chat idly or understand mumbling; as the evening wore on Burroughs began to slip into slangy, stoned incoherence and I had to “translate” Burroughs’s English into Foucault’s.
Two months later Foucault was dead. An article on the front page of Libération denied that he’d died of AIDS, as though it would be a calumny against France’s leading philosopher to suggest he’d succumb to such an ignominious disease. Only very slowly did the truth emerge; all I could think of was his patience, trudging back and forth from the kitchen to the salon to serve the dinner without vegetables he’d bought at the caterer’s downstairs. I remembered his patient smile and cocked head as he listened to Burroughs’s stoned murmurs; he was trying unsuccessfully to understand what this American writer whom we all admired so much was saying. His humility in serving dinner to friends was in complete contrast to his fiery temper, bordering on madness, when he thought he was being criticized by a member of an enemy conspiracy of intellectuals.
In Venice I stayed with Joshua in the new apartment he’d rented, the top floor of a historic palace. My bedroom, which gave onto the Grand Canal, was pink; the bed had a pink baldacchino held up by chubby cupids. We fell back into our old habits, working in the mornings, at noon eating cheeses and cold cuts that came from the delicatessen manned by the handsome clerk, swimming in the afternoons, usually at the Cipriani. We had our little routine, our way of standing steadily in the traghetto as it was oared from one bank of the Grand Canal to the other, our habit of saying andemmo, in Venetian, instead of andiamo, our conformity to the European practice of ordering cut flowers only in odd numbers (no dozen red roses for Italians), and of slipping into our places at the opera while facing the people already seated rather than turning our backs on them as we might do in America.
Joshua was happy with Sergio, il tesoro, who invited us to his village to meet his mother, a toothless old crone in black who told us she’d stopped going to church since the cardinals had elected a Polish pope, of all things. We saw in the mother’s house the big silk lampshades Joshua had bought as well as countless little cast-off things, as though this high, roomy peasant house in the Veneto were the Sargasso Sea that preserved all the flotsam that floated down from Venetian palace life.
In Venice I met a German film producer and fell in love with him. When Hajo would come to Paris, we’d stay in an apartment one of his friends would lend us; I didn’t want to wound Ned. Most often I’d go to Berlin, but there a reciprocal situation existed, since Hajo’s ex, a prosperous art dealer, was still the center of Hajo’s life. This art dealer, Gerhardt, had left Hajo for a handsome young Italian who was studying law in New York, but since Italo was seldom in Europe and Gerhardt got to New York on
ly once a month, there were a lot of cold nights when Hajo and Gerhardt still shared a bed, though now their love was chaste. They both came from the mountains in Bavaria and spoke the same dialect. They despised the Mercedes-mink-coat style of German prosperity and preferred to spend their considerable wealth on new art, French furniture from the thirties and forties and clothes made for them by the King of Spain’s tailor.
I eventually realized that there wasn’t much room left over in Hajo’s heart for me. He was embarrassed that I was overweight and greying and invited me to a clinic in the mountains where we fasted for two weeks. We ate nothing at all, ingested nothing but tea made from apple peels, and every morning we were awakened by a nun who gave us enemas. We were forbidden to use deodorant or cologne, since our starving bodies would have seized on these powerful chemicals. Anyway, we didn’t smell.
After a week at the clinic a dirty-haired, cigar-smoking German film director insisted we accompany him to a restaurant where he ate fried sausages and sauerkraut in front of us. We were nauseated—and of course wanly covetous of the rich, dripping food.
Hajo became so skinny that he looked like the survivor of a camp; I dropped twenty pounds and three years and looked as thin and pensive as writers are supposed to look. The whole time I dreamed of pizzas running with hot cheese.
One night, feeling amorous, I said, “You know, the night before I met you in Venice I’d picked up a Spanish kid and we’d had sex all night long. But after I met you I exchanged a few letters with him and then tore up his name and address. I never did that before, I guess I was never so in love before….”
An ominous silence was building up. At last Hajo exploded, “Now I remember. The night I met you your nipples were too raw to touch. I guess that Spaniard had been … chewing on them. Really, you said you were a gay leader and never took risks.”
He was angry. When he calmed down he insisted we have the AIDS test, which had just become available. As it turned out, he was negative and I positive, which at least proved we’d mastered safe-sex techniques, though no one really knew what they were. Most of the smart gay money lay on the idea that getting come up your ass was fatal and sucking was safe; in Australia a gay group had even printed up a poster that said, “Suck, don’t fuck,” but the government pulled it, because there were a few cases, it seemed, of people who’d contracted AIDS from oral sex.
Until I actually learned the results of the test I kept thinking I’d somehow squeak by; I knew perfectly well that I’d been getting fucked by strangers several times a week for years, never with condoms, and that I’d been most active in New York during what turned out to be the particularly dangerous years just before the disease began to manifest itself and was at last identified.
I’d always counted myself lucky, as a privileged white man born into a century that had defeated syphilis and tuberculosis, as the son of a mother who’d encouraged him, fervently if sometimes blindly, to follow a career in the arts, as a New Yorker who now lived in Paris, as a writer who not only finally got published but also lived by his pen. I’d somehow thought that this luck would hold out—but it hadn’t. My natural Texan robustness, or some mysterious antibody that I alone possessed, or some unnamed sensory device that teleprompted me, despite my drugged stupor night after night, to select only healthy partners—I’d half believed in all these fanciful talismans and systems until the day when I heard the long-denied but long-anticipated truth.
I went to bed for a month. I just pulled the covers over my head and prepared myself for dying. Other writers I knew who’d been diagnosed flung themselves into feverish activity, determined to write in the two or three years that remained to them all the books they would have written had they been allowed to live to eighty (“Even if I have to write them badly,” said the dying Hervé Guibert). But my ambition had been not only to express myself and create ingenious artefacts but also to pay my admission into a club that, now I was ill, had caught fire and dissolved into ashes.
Suddenly I was very alone. Hajo and I were still technically lovers but I saw that he was reluctant to admit it, especially when there were attractive people around whom he hoped to impress. I was venerable, famous, but old. Although he was just five years younger, he had not yet stopped wanting to be “young.” He worked out every day, danced at the discos, swam off the Isle of Silt or sunned nude in the English gardens in Munich; his elegant, conservative suits gave way to extravagant outfits by Jean Paul Gaultier and Paul Smith. But if he was pulling away from me it wasn’t because he was ashamed of me; no, he was afraid. There seemed to be fewer and fewer sexual practices he was willing to indulge in. We made the trip between Berlin and Paris less and less often.
At the same time I published a bitter novel that satirized some of the people I’d known in New York. Max decided he was one of my principal targets, although the character he thought was based on him actually had been meant as a self-portrait. He and the other injured parties turned against me. Perhaps out of respect for them, journalists were silent about my book, although the blackout may have been just an expression of general confusion, since I’d become identified as a gay novelist and this book had no gay characters. When the eighty-year-old French-American poet Edouard Roditti read it he said, “It’s a very fine novel and if you publish another one like it your career will be over.” My editor gave a masked ball in New York to launch the book and one of the offended people I’d based a character on came to it with a bullwhip to beat me; fortunately he was turned away by two guards.
My editor, Marston Higgs, was ten years younger than I. He was from a good Southern family, and had the manners to show for it, but he also had a New Yorker’s impatience. He was always swearing under his breath, but his spells of vexation, during which his face would turn dangerously red, were deflated by the sudden pinprick of his laugh. “God, I’m getting to be so Type B, or is it Type A?” he’d say. He had been struck in the left eye when he was a kid, I think; anyway it was white and motionless, which made his cute grin, muscular little body, charming laugh all the more appealingly ambiguous, as though he’d once seen something tragic and been half-blinded by it. He was fascinated by his writers and regarded them as nearly mythical beings, whereas at the same time he could take a fully human interest in their declining health, the vagaries of reputation, the misfortunes of love. He was so much the image of the popular swimming star whom most of us geeky writers had lusted after in high school that the realization he liked us, even admired us, seemed—delightfully—like the world upside-down.
Marston would come to Paris and invite me to all the best restaurants on his expense account. He took a year off and traveled around North Africa and up through Italy and France in a luxurious trailer. He tried to write a novel, but abandoned it after fifty pages; this failed effort made him admire his authors all the more. His lover of many years, a handsome older man who worked as a model on ads for life insurance in which he’d pose with his “wife” and high-school age “children,” dropped him for a still younger man, an opera singer. Marston, who was naturally secretive, made a deliberate effort to confide his unhappiness to me, almost as though his shrink (if he had a shrink) had told him to open up to his friends. What he didn’t tell me was that he was seropositive and that his numbers were rapidly declining, which accounted perhaps for many of the changes in his life—his trip, his writing, his break-up. He’d always had a wild sex life; he burned with a simmering sensuality and I’d catch him sizing up even the most ungainly men and women. He brought a wispy, small-boned blond kid to Paris, but soon he was in love with a famous ballet dancer his age with whom he’d had a brief affair twenty years earlier.
Then suddenly Marston lost his job and was hired elsewhere, but soon afterwards became too ill to work. I hired him freelance to edit a new novel I was working on; he appeared to be surprised that I wasn’t able to offer him more money for the job. I gave him the going rate, yet now he found everything disappointing. I visited him in the hospital; it puzzled him that I
was still in such obscenely good health.
After he died I remembered I’d told him that I was sure he was going to beat this disease. My reputation as a writer, even my age, now lent my words a weight they hadn’t had in the past. I realized that reluctantly, hopefully, Marston had believed me.
He shouldn’t have. I was wrong. He did die, as did the writers from my literary club, the guys in advertising I knew, the lawyers, the fellows at the gym, the men I’d shared houses with on Fire Island—they were all dying, even though they’d all been told they wouldn’t. I heard stories of a friend leaving his loft to his surviving lover, who was then ousted by the dead man’s parents. I heard of a group of friends who decided to help their buddy die. He was blind and incontinent, weighed just seventy pounds and had nothing to look forward to except dementia. But at the last moment one of the angels of mercy cracked, called an ambulance. The dying man was resuscitated, only to die a month later in howling pain. Even so, whenever Dick, the one who’d cracked, saw the others on the street or at a nightclub, he started shouting, “Murderers.” Perhaps Dick himself was already succumbing to dementia; in any event he died six months later. I heard of men who spent all their money having their “chakras” tuned by a charlatan with a flute, of those who ate apricot pits in Mexico, cucumbers in China, macrobiotic food in Japan. They all died.
NED WAS GRADUATED from his design school and returned to the States to look for a job as a decorator. An American could never get work papers in France. Besides, he was determined to plunge back into watching American soap operas on television, listening to the latest American pop music, enjoying American humor and sex. I put him in my old studio apartment, which I’d been subletting to someone else (the Norwegian steward) all these years.