by Edmund White
Austin invited Big Julien away for the weekend. In his Michelin guide he’d found a luxury hotel only forty-five minutes by train outside Paris, not far from the royal château of Rambouillet. They didn’t need to rent a car to get there; theoretically they should be able to find a taxi at the train station. Fatuous as it sounded, Austin was relieved to be going away, for once, with a capable adult male, one who regularly submitted construction plans to the mayor’s office and traveled by train to other cities.
It was the beginning of May. They took an electrified double-decker commuter train that quickly left the historic city behind and rushed past planned communities in the suburbs, the ugly apartment blocks oriented to one another at rakish angles (to prove how humane the planner had been) rather than laid out in the usual stultifying cemetery grid. When Austin said something dismissive about the buildings and the orange and black supergraphics on an aubergine-colored wall in the station shelter, Julien said he knew the architect, an Albanian refugee famous for his sound engineering skills (“No division of labor in Tirana,” Julien said matter-of-factly), and his remark put paid to Austin’s facile sneering. Austin was happy to have this handsome man beside him, someone so eccentric in his views, his way of referring everything back to Ethiopia, his indifference to gay life and his ignorance of its tyrannies, his unlikely clothes; Austin thought maybe Julien didn’t even notice a detail like age: their twenty-year age difference. For Austin was wired very peculiarly. He wasn’t like some of his contemporaries who felt they could reduce the gap by doing three hundred sit-ups every day until their thickened waists and slack skin looked like melting chocolate bars, the hot flesh oozing over the lines between the tablets. He didn’t want to dance all night on drugs, his steps an anthology of four decades of approximated wriggling. He didn’t want to shed his dated slang, the words groovy, mellow or get down, girl.
He liked this intense, brooding married man with the unclassifiable preoccupations, which permitted Austin, by contrast, to appear relaxed and relatively normal, even of a normal age. As they rode side by side in the train they kept stealing glances at each other. They were virtually alone on a Saturday morning in this commuter train heading out of the city. The walls lining the tracks were like ramparts; if Austin looked up he could see the windowless sides of houses rising above. Austin’s only other French lover, Little Julien, had never gone anywhere with him in France, perhaps out of fear of being recognized by friends in the company of a much older foreigner. But Big Julien was here with his dark blue eyes, black hair, neat, courtly gestures, his deep, deep voice thrumming and resonating in Austin’s ear, his sudden, utterly fake booming laugh, so out of character that Austin assumed it must be a private homage to a friend or relative he’d emulated in the past. No, he wasn’t interested in the general impression he was making, even if he was playing to Austin, the unique member of his audience. Julien was a loner, seriously alone now that he was getting divorced, alienated from his father, too, for some reason. Austin would look over at this man whose body he’d never held and imagine they were about to be married, as old-fashioned virgins were once married; he daydreamed his way into the mind of a nineteenth-century bride who looked at these pale male hands beside her, tufted with glossy black hair, and thought she’d know them the rest of her life, that he’d explore her body with them for fifty years.
They had to phone for a taxi from the suburban station and drive out beyond Versailles, but the hotel was worth the trip: a former abbey with its low stone-faced Gothic buildings looming up over an ornamental lake with swans. The chapel was roofless, the empty, glassless rose window nothing but brambles of vacant masonry, the colorful petals long since shed and swept up. Separating the grounds and the fields beyond was a partially destroyed wall, once perhaps the side of a cloister garden; at least it had empty windows and under them stone seats worn smooth and deep by centuries of monastic meditation. The man at the desk, who had registered them with impassive good manners, now added, as a well-judged hint at friendliness, “The death scene of Depardieu’s Cyrano was shot out there by the ruined cloisters.”
A moment later they were in their suite with its copper tub and its long antechamber leading to double doors and, beyond, the bedroom with its double bed and its flung-open gauze-covered high windows that floated like panels of bird-riddled silence, empty and twittering, twin paintings by an abstractionist who’d turned wryly metaphysical. They couldn’t wait for the bellboy to leave them alone.
They’d gone so long without ever having had sex that Austin felt a certain stage fright, but for the next two days they were all over each other, above, below, behind, like two boys wrestling with hard-ons they don’t know how to discharge. Half the hotel had been turned over to a giant wedding party and whenever they descended for another long meal with its succession of courses they were always isolated from the other diners with their flowered dresses, big hats and corsages, their decorous toasts and gentle teasing, their restless children in rumpled organdy or clipped-on bow ties and their game old grandparents. No, Austin and Julien were blissfully irrelevant to the machinery of a big country wedding and as they wandered the grounds, feeling formal and drained from their furious, tangled bouts of lovemaking, they were always gliding past uniformed waiters stacking rented chairs or testing the microphone in the ballroom by tapping on it and whispering numbers. The weather shifted unpredictably between moments of magnifying-glass heat and cold, cloud-propelling wind.
They sat at opposite ends of the big copper tub in daylight that was filtered through smoked glass. The bubble bath lost its suds to reveal their strong, intertwined legs and their body hair undulating like algae.
They’d lie in the hotel’s white terry-cloth robes on the bed and Julien would talk about his divorce. “We were fine in Ethiopia—”
“Except you had that affair with the Englishwoman. How happy could you have been?”
“No, no, mon pauvre petit,” Julien said, smiling at Austin’s touching gay naïveté. “I loved her, Sarah, the English know the names of all the birds and plants, we French are always astonished by their expertise. We went with her children in her old car to a wonderful lake crowded with pink flamingos. But that doesn’t mean I ever hesitated in my feelings for Christine…. She’s dying to meet you, by the way.”
Austin could feel the blood flooding his face and neck. “Me? But—”
“She’s very interested in old furniture,” Julien said.
“I’m not exactly a bergère Louis XV, even if I am slightly tubby,” Austin joked, his voice suddenly turning hoarse. He knew if he was back in America his friends would croak, “Drop him. Married men are poison. You’ll see. He’ll go running back to her after he’s finished experimenting with you.” But over here, in France, in these posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days, Austin no longer expected anything to work, certainly not to be ideal; he would share a man with a woman and even meet her if need be, though he was afraid of her anger. “What went wrong, then?” Austin asked.
“She’s a bitch. In Ethiopia she was fine. But the moment we came back—starting with the wedding!” His eyes shifted from side to side, as though looking for the best escape route; then he sighted it and ran. “My grandmother was revolted. She didn’t want me to do something so bourgeois as get married.” Inspired, he laughed his laugh, a hollow tocsin of mirthless pleasure. “They wanted me to be gay—anything rather than marry that petit-bourgeois bitch and her stuffy, petty family. They were so disappointed I was marrying that they wept. My grandmother pulled up her skirts at the reception and danced like Marilyn over the subway grill and my brother’s lover clapped and crouched and shouted, ‘Go, Granny, show them your pussy!’” (Allez, Mémé, montre ta moule!)
Austin smiled painfully. He didn’t see anything funny in the scene and wondered if it had ever happened. If it did, he thoroughly sympathized with Christine and her parents. “But how old is your grandmother?”
“Oh, not that old,” Jul
ien said with his usual vagueness. “Her legs were still good then and she cut a fine figure, although now she’s gone to fat. It’s all the fault of that lover of hers, a real vulgarian called Modeste.”
“It’s nice, I think, that your grandmother has a lover. In America people stop having sex at a surprisingly young age. Few of us can say the words, ‘my grandmother’s lover.’”
But Julien wasn’t paying attention. He’d turned on his stomach and was laughing, repeating to himself, “Allez, Mémé, montre ta moule!” The ugly words and the self-amused booming laugh didn’t really go with his body, with the fine swirls of hair on his boyishly full buttocks, nor did the laugh fit the small ears pinned back to his head as though he were standing still in a ferocious wind, nor with the delicate architecture of his shoulder blades, lightly dusted with black hair.
If Austin was always alert to Julien’s mood, feared boring him and followed his conversational lead, Julien wallowed, oblivious, in his own worries and obsessions. He seemed to be sick with worry. His skin had broken out on his face, two red welts on his forehead and small pimples clustering around the follicles where his beard was growing in. His nose was always oily. Gregg, who had all sorts of fetishes, had said to Austin, “That Big Julien is so randy and young he even has acne, slurp, slurp.” Gregg always pronounced the words for his sound effects, and said such things as “Sob” or “Drool.”
“My mother committed suicide ten years ago,” Julien was saying. “She and I loved each other—she was the great love of my life. That’s why I don’t speak to my father. I hate him. It was his fault. He’d married her young. He didn’t like it that she was—” He hesitated, then revised his thoughts. “That she was a concert pianist. He made her give it up. She sacrificed everything for him. Her family gave him money to start his pharmaceutical company. They gave them their house. She killed herself in Belle-Île at the summer house her mother had bought her.” He pounded the mattress and said into the pillow, “The thought—”
“What?”
Julien looked up, astonished, as if awakened. “The thought that he is living there now with that slut, his mistress—”
“His wife?”
“Yes, I suppose he married her. The thought …”
Austin felt it would turn out to be a very long story and he wasn’t sure Julien would be a reliable narrator. This Latin man with his black hair, with his lean neck shaggy because he’d long been overdue at the barber, with his low unstoppable voice that sometimes seemed the inefficient, power-guzzling motor draining his body of all its fuel—oh, he wasn’t an impartial, objective American, respectful of the truth and impressed by any fair challenge to his version of things, ready to chuckle at his own absurdities. Julien was never the butt of his own jokes. No, he was a passionate Latin male whose body seeped anguish and oil and whose voice hypnotized his mind into believing whatever it had proposed and was elaborating.
“My mother’s death was such a powerful thing for me,” he was saying; now he was sitting up and hugging a surprisingly shiny knee above leggings of hair—there was even hair on the knuckle of each of his toes. It occurred to Austin that Julien had rubbed his knee bare with worry, but he knew that couldn’t have been the case. “I was the one who found her dead. It was during my final exams for my architecture diploma, so I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention to her. I knew she was unhappy. She’d asked my father if it was all over between them. She’d said, ‘Tell me. I’m still young, I can find someone else.’ In fact she was just forty-three, and she looked so young that when I’d take her out dancing everyone would ask if she was my sister.”
Austin thought he’d heard the same story all his life, about the young mother, a story that always seemed so odd to him. His own mother had died of ovarian cancer when he was still a teenager, but he’d never wanted to pass for her brother, nor did she dance. Of course she’d been nearly forty when he’d been born, a plump graying woman locked into another epoch by her elegant Tidewater accent and soft, unambitious ways, whereas Julien’s parents had been in their twenties and his father even now was just five years older than Austin.
The story had reached a head and Austin hadn’t been listening. He figured out that Julien’s father had lied and pledged his renewed love to his wife, but in truth all he’d wanted was continued access to her money. “When she realized he’d left her for that other bitch, not moved out but was spending all his time with her—that’s when and why she attempted suicide. She survived and I just dismissed her when she asked me if I thought she should see a psychiatrist. I laughed at her and told her to pull herself together.”
“You were at an entirely different juncture in your life,” Austin said. “You had to marshal all your forces to pass your exams, you couldn’t afford to be swamped by feelings, hers or yours.” He’d learned in other, earlier affairs with confused younger men that a few words, wise to the point of banality, uttered at the strategic moment, could become talismanic for years to come.
“I still feel so guilty. Of course she needed to see a shrink.” The French said, “unpsy,”pronouncing separately the p and the s, like the sound of a slashed balloon. “But my brother was far away, off in Nice with his lover, and my father was with his slut and I was in architecture school in Nantes. Mother drove all the way across the country from Nancy to Belle-Île, you have to take a ferry over—”
“Isn’t that Sarah Bernhardt’s island?”
“Yes.” He moved so that his head was pillowed on Austin’s stomach, almost as though he wanted to stop Austin’s distracting questions. “My brother was the one who started to worry about her and he told me to drive over there—it’s not that far from Nantes. Nobody had heard from her in three days.” He got up and went to pee, then came back, walking slightly knock-kneed, as though he was concentrating on a failing inner voice. He climbed down onto the bed and lay with his back to Austin, knees slightly curled up toward his chest. Austin could see his vertebrae mounting his spine, one by one, like drops of water growing smaller and falling faster. “She was dead. She’d been dead for three days. There was a note. The police took it, they promised to give it back to me, but they never did. I must file an official complaint. I want that note back—it’s mine. I found it. She wrote it to me.” He propped himself up and drank a glass of water.
“How terrible for you,” Austin said, bending down to touch him but then quickly drawing his hand back. They’d made love so often this weekend that Austin feared Julien wouldn’t see a touch as a neutral, friendly gesture.
“She was dressed in a pretty silk dress, but she must have choked on her own vomit. Her face was blown up as though her features had been stretched over a soccer ball. The apartment stank. My brother flew up to Rennes and rented a car but missed the last ferry. When he got there the next morning, luckily for him the body had already been removed.”
“Where did you sleep that night?”
“In a hotel. I would have stayed in the apartment but the police had cordoned it off. I was glad it was off-season. There was nobody else in the building.”
Night had fallen as he talked and added its high seriousness to his words. The window was still open and they were cold and Austin slid behind him and held him. Then he pulled a sheet over them. He asked himself if Julien was glad to be laid out on this slab, sheeted and cold but alive and in another man’s arms.
Later that night, after they’d showered and dressed and dined, all alone now that the wedding party had left, Julien said, “You know, when I was a kid I always had a best friend, one friend; you have so many friends but I’m not like that. You’re always saying, ‘So-and-so is one of my best friends.’ I don’t have series of best friends. Of course I know a lot of people, but I always wanted just one friend, who’d be loyal to me, and I’d tell him everything.”
Austin must have waited for the obvious conclusion with such wide, yearning eyes that Julien finally laughed and said, “But, Petit, you look like a
puppy.”
“I’m sorry,” Austin said, offended.
Julien just ran over his prickliness and squeezed Austin’s right leg between both of his and said, “You’re really such a bout de chou.”
“A bout?”
Julien explained that “the end of the cabbage” was an affectionate nickname for a little kid.
“I’m hardly little,” Austin objected sweetly, thrilled with his new name.
Chapter Six
During their first weekend together, they took a taxi and visited the gardens and forests around Rambouillet (the unimpressive château itself, which belonged to the President of the Republic, was off limits). Austin remembered (because it had happened during his century) that Marie Antoinette had had built here her Laiterie, a small classical temple in which she could drink milk—the milk jars were kept cool in an inner sanctum under a flowing fountain, dense with allegorical figures. He and Julien finally found it and went in; even on a warm day it was ten degrees cooler. The queen didn’t live to see the Laiterie, which was finished not long before she was guillotined, but if she had she would have discovered nearby the Veuverie of her friend (enemies said, her lesbian lover), the Princesse Lamballe, a small cottage in which the inner walls were decorated with pictures composed of shells—a strangely irrelevant setting for the princess to mourn in (veuverie meant “widowhood”). Austin knew a bit about the history of the place. As an architect, Julien took a more austere approach and analyzed the Laiterie formally, as though its merits were conceptual, not associational.