by Edmund White
They left the hotel for Paris on Monday morning.
As they saw each other with greater and greater frequency, until they were getting together nearly every night, Austin realized that he had indeed become Julien’s little sidekick, his one best friend, his confidant, not his father. Julien had no idea of deference—nor of reciprocity. He never cooked Austin dinner or even offered him a coffee, and certainly he never asked Austin a question about his family or past lovers. Was his discretion evidence of his incuriosity and egotism or did he hope to win with it an immunity from Austin’s prying? Austin never saw his apartment, the one where he lived alone. He covered Austin with kisses and smiled with a solar warmth, just as though he were the sun setting down closer and closer and peering directly into his eyes. He’d whisper, “Petit,” and “Mon bout de chou,” or say, “Comme tu es mignon!” (How cute you are!), but Austin knew it wasn’t his face or body that was being praised, just his presence, his docility. Austin understood that straight men, married men, were used to partners who listened or half-listened to their monologues. Anyway, Austin liked listening, which he could always pass off as a language lesson since the words were in French.
Because Gregg had been the one to suggest the trip to the abbey-hotel, Austin called him when they got back to Paris.
“Well, Mother, you went and got yourself a nice Mother’s Day present, I see.”
“What? Oh, Gregg … Daughter! I honestly forgot the day. It’s only Mother’s Day back in the States, isn’t it? Gregg, it was a great suggestion. I never pick out guys who might actually like me.”
“I hear you. Your daughter’s no better when it comes to doing for herself. So how’s the meat?”
“Average. Like mine.”
“Like mine! Like mother, like daughter—a small clit family. But we know how to thrum that little thing, right, Mom? Did you top him or did Mother get to serve—I know she loves to serve.”
“We had lots of sex, but of course it was safe, safe, safe. Tons of frottage, touche-pipi, soul-kissing. No fucky-fucky—actually it was terribly romantic.”
“Do you think he’s hooked enough to tell him you’re positive?” Gregg asked.
This entirely cynical question opened a door inside Austin’s mind. He laughed and said, “Not yet. Maybe it’s because I’m not really in love or because that beastly Little Julien dropped me so brutally, but I’ve never been shrewder. I’m determined to open up new sexual horizons for him—”
“Meaning?”
“His nipples are more sensitive than his wife’s. He told me that. She used to play with his—”
“—perky little devils,” Gregg added.
“They do just perk right up,” Austin said. He knew Julien would be horrified if he could hear this tacky, heartless camp exchange. But he, Austin, was so insecure in an affair—so eager to please, so intense in his devotion, so quick to accept the first sign of boredom as an irrevocable rejection—that in sacrilegious chatter he could reassert, at least for a moment, his freedom. “But I want to discover his bottom for him. Not to mention the beauty of bondage.”
“Bondage!” Gregg shouted with outraged amusement. “You old Stonewallers are such shameless hussies.”
“Oh, like your generation is so pure. Excuse me. Hellowwuh….” Austin was merrily imitating the new Mall Girl slang or his very dim idea of it, but it was a fashionable reference designed as an implicit rebuke to Gregg’s dismissal of Austin’s “generation.”
“But won’t he be horrified by bondage?” Gregg asked. “Not that I should question Mother’s millennium of experience….”
Strangely, through all this talk of meat, tits, ropes and sexual technique, Austin knew he was communicating to Gregg his timid happiness and his fear of losing Julien whenever he would discover Austin’s HIV status. In America, of course, Austin thought bitterly, they would have met at a Positive Boutique or on an HIV cruise and that would have been that, the introduction equivalent to an admission.
Julien complained of his health at dinner the next night (a blanquette de veau, mushrooms, pearl onions, carrots and veal swimming in an egg yolk and cream sauce that had taken Austin all afternoon to elaborate). “I can’t seem to make this acne go away—Petit, this fish is excellent! I’ve been hacking away all day with this terrible cough, that’s why I can’t stay over, I’d keep us both awake. I think I’m coming down with the flu.”
Austin felt a cringing, a tightening around his heart, as though someone were inching him gently closer and closer to the airplane’s open hatch. He got up and cleaned the dishes. He suggested Julien lie down while he made some herbal tea—did he like verbena? Alone in the kitchen he felt his heart pounding, exactly as if he’d been accused of treachery by an old friend. He took his time putting the pretty but mismatched tea things on an old tray with sides that were inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Mentally he ran through all their sexual positions over the weekend but could find nothing unsafe. He hadn’t let Julien suck him. They’d kissed, but was that dangerous? Julien had held their erect penises close together in his hand, but surely that wasn’t “at risk” behavior, as the pamphlets called it. Or was it? Anyway, the disease took months or at least weeks to declare itself, didn’t it?
Of course the unconscionable thing was that they were both involved in a deadly game Austin had already lost and that Julien didn’t know he was playing.
Usually Austin could forget the virus but it kept ringing back like a bill collector on the phone, calling at all hours, insisting upon its claim.
“Why don’t you stay home tomorrow? And I’m sorry about the rich dinner.”
“But I love pike in a beurre nantais.”
Austin thought he should say it was veal, but that would destroy the illusion they both fostered that Julien, as a Frenchman, knew everything about food, wine and fashion. And because Austin felt guilty about his continuing silence on the subject of his HIV status he couldn’t bring himself to irk Julien in any way. He was pleading with Julien to forgive a crime he’d not yet confessed. He’d heard of men who’d gone on a killing spree when they’d found out their lovers had infected them. If Julien was just a nice married man gambling with gay sex, shouldn’t he know the stakes? The stakes that he’d already accepted, all unknowingly?
Austin made an appointment with his doctor for Julien. They went to see him together. The office was just across the street from the Buttes-Chaumont, that vast park for the working class that Napoléon III had benignly inserted into a former quarry. Now, of course, the workshops and the little villages of workers’ cottages on the streets leading off the park housed up-and-coming artists and photographers—Austin knew a gay couturier who’d filled his cottage with medieval kitsch (shields, tapestries, suits of armor). Even so, the neighborhood felt forgotten and Austin had no idea why Dr. Aristopoulos lived and worked there. His cabinet was up three flights, a cheerless suite of dim rooms, unmatched chairs, a student’s lamp and a coffee table covered with last year’s magazines and more recent HIV brochures. Somewhere in the neighborhood, no doubt, Dr. Aristopoulos had found a comically hostessy receptionist, a woman in her fifties who wore puffy dresses and had dyed her hair an egg-yolk yellow and who walked around in very high heels, bowing and welcoming the skeletally thin AIDS patients as though to a Pensioners’ Ball.
When Julien came out of his appointment he was red in the face and almost cross-eyed with anger. As they were escorted to the door by their bobbing, tripping, smiling hostess (“À bientôt, messieurs!” she sang out in a fruity voice), Julien said nothing, but on the dark stairs, smelling of the concierge’s salted cod dinner, he hissed, “But he’s an idiot!”
“But why?”
“He wanted me to have the test.”
“The test?” Austin asked stupidly.
“The AIDS test.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s worried about my acne and my cough and that wart I ha
ve on my penis.”
“But that’s absurd. Unless …”
“Yes, it’s absurd!”
“Unless you had a lot of sex with men these last few years.”
Julien didn’t say anything. When they were outside he took Austin by the elbow and steered him across the street and into the park. Two Indian women in saris were pushing strollers in which solemn, brown-faced babies were propped up like gingerbread men with big sultana eyes. The mothers were conversing so loudly that they reminded Austin how most Parisians whispered.
Had Julien not responded because he was irritated that Austin—and probably Dr. Aristopoulos—had asked him direct questions about his sex life? Or did he think the test cast doubts on his honor?
“I have to tell you something,” Austin blurted out. “I’m HIV positive. Don’t worry that you might have—from me….”
“No, no, of course not,” Julien said as a polite reflex. “How long have you known?”
“Two years already. My counts are very good, surprisingly good.” His voice wobbled and he was short of breath. “They don’t seem to be going down. I hope you’re not angry that I didn’t tell you right away, but I could never seem to find the right moment.” Hey, how about the moment just before we had sex? Julien might be thinking, or so Austin imagined. “I’m sure Dr. Aristopoulos wasn’t asking you to have the test because of me.”
“No, no, of course not,” Julien said, his politeness now striking Austin as ominous. Would Austin ever see him again? All he had was his work number and Julien could instruct the receptionist to say he’d call him right back or that he was out of the office for a few days—no, for an “indefinite leave.” That’s what she would say. They ambled under a promontory surmounted by a Greek temple. On every side there were flowers and flowering bushes, perfectly assorted and groomed, many of them probably transferred for a few weeks only out of the city’s greenhouses until they were replaced by still newer plantings in bloom.
Julien sprawled on the grass just beside a sign that forbade doing so. An old Vietnamese man walking past shook his finger at him, laughing. Austin stood just on the other side of the foot-high fence of metal hoops, then felt foolish and joined him and felt foolish.
“Please don’t worry about Dr. Aristopoulos. He’s positive himself; some people say he’s ill, though he looks fine to me. He probably is overly cautious.”
“I don’t think he’s competent. Why aren’t you seeing a famous specialist?”
“Several of my friends with HIV see him—”
“You have several friends with AIDS?”
“They’re all in good health for the moment,” Austin said primly.
“I’ve never met—or even heard of—someone infected until now, until you. It just seemed to me a media circus, just some new puritanical horror invented by the Americans.” He thought about it for a while.
“Are you worried about Christine? Have you gone on having sex with her?”
“Christine?” He smiled a mild, studied, imperturbable smile that Austin read as a signal that he had gone too far with his grubby American questions.
Austin changed tactics: “You know, don’t worry about … if you want to drop me … I should have been honest from the beginning.” He propped himself up on his elbows and wondered if the grass was staining his seersucker jacket and the seat of his trousers. Julien was wearing his liverish green linen sports coat. “Do you like linen?” Austin asked wildly, then hastened to add, lying, “I do.” He was chattering out of fear and embarrassment.
“Yes, it’s a noble material.”
By now Austin had learned that Julien liked cotton, linen and silk, that he revered natural wood and stone, especially marble but even the ubiquitous Parisian sandstone extracted from this very quarry in the last century, that he despised brick and concrete—oh, Austin thought, I’ll miss him.
Maybe because Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief, if only through contrast, or maybe because he would soon turn fifty and was seropositive, he now had a heightened sense of the swathe his life was cutting. In the past he’d been casual about himself. He’d never wanted to shine. He’d never been known for anything—neither his books, which were ordinary, nor his accomplishments, which amounted to nothing more than a nearly photographic memory of particular pieces of furniture and ceramics and a low-energy charm that allowed him to pass hours with the rich idlers who usually owned those things. Although he’d done well in everything related to the history of furniture itself, he couldn’t talk a good line about Louis XVI as a great patron, about Mme de Pompadour’s “rapacious curiosity” or her “exigent tastes,” which constituted an “enlightened tyranny”—no, he wasn’t a phrasemaker nor was he ambitious like those chaps at Sotheby’s in London. And he preferred spending an evening with his overgrown adolescent friends than with the countesses who owned the last great bits of eighteenth-century furniture in private hands—finding the furniture was always the problem. It sold itself. Over the years he’d acted as a middleman between countesses and museums in a few transactions, but he wasn’t interested enough in money to persist—or rather he was too quickly bored by grown-ups, officials, heterosexuals (or rather by all those people, straight or gay, who kept their sexuality hidden).
No, he’d always seen himself as an amateur and his life as formless, but now, today, here in this suddenly hot sunlight and grass laid like velvet over the raw, gouged surfaces of the old stone quarry, Austin was alive for the first time since his high-school days to the question of his “destiny.” Yes, he probably would die soon, probably in France in a charity ward since he didn’t have French insurance nor the official residency that would entitle him to national health coverage. He had a panicky fear that he’d forget French, that his brain would start bubbling like alphabet soup, scrambling all the words he knew in the reverse order he’d learned them, so that French would be the first to go, then the language of furniture, next all adult conversation until he ended up with just a few nursery rhymes, the song his mother had sung him to make him sleep, “When Johnny comes marching home.”
Julien was chewing a blade of grass and squinting up at the bright hazy sky. With his right hand he alternately tugged at Austin’s seersucker lapel and smoothed it, but he wasn’t looking at Austin. The gesture appeared isolated from his thoughts and the immobility of the rest of his body. Julien even stopped chewing. The rancid, cooking smell of grass reminded Austin of bitter Japanese green tea, the tang so inherently rank that sugar seems laughably inadequate to it.
For the next few days Julien was sick with a bad case of the flu. He called Austin every day to tell him he was getting better, but each time he stayed on the line only a moment. The one time he did linger was to tell him the plot of a Fluide Glacial he was reading. Like so many adult Frenchmen he read comic books filled with grotesque sex scenes and anarchistic violence, an art form that had largely replaced fiction for many Latin men in their teens and twenties. At the giant music and literature emporium, the FNAC, enraptured solitary men, unemployed no doubt, stood or sat cross-legged on the floor for hours in the aisles of the section for comics, reading and chuckling or sucking in their breath with amazement.
At last Julien was better. Once again he started coming by several evenings a week for dinner. One night Austin took him along for a formal dinner at the house of Marie-France, a woman he’d known for five or six years. They’d met when Austin had written an article about her vast apartment along the Quai d’Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis, twelve rooms with lamps, tables and even bronze bookcases that had been designed by Diego Giacometti, the sculptor’s brother. The apartment was on the second floor and the drawing-room windows looked out on the Seine through leaves—the movement of the wind-stirred leaves and the racing, faceted water created a pointillism of living light.
It was a formal dinner for twenty served at two separate tables by two Filipino servants but Marie-France made i
t all seem comical, even improvised. Julien and Austin were seated apart, each beside glamorous divorcées “of a certain age.” Austin’s dinner partner kept raving about everything—her key words were “sublissime,” which he gathered meant “very sublime,” and “la fin du monde” (“the end of the world”), which also seemed to be a sign of enthusiasm. Philippe Starck’s new toothbrush was sublissime and Claude Picasso’s carpets were la fin du monde.
Marie-France and all her friends were so civilized that they smiled discreetly and benignly when Julien and Austin stood by the piano after dinner drinking a brandy together. On the phone the next day Marie-France said her old uncle Henri had been delighted to meet them and thought he’d bring his own boyfriend to the next gathering, which had never occurred to him previously in half a century. “Of course his friend is a gardener whereas yours is an architect and so amusing.” Although she was tall and sturdy (her ex-lover, a polo-playing dandy, used to call her “the good soldier”), she used some of the social words, if somewhat less frequently than her women friends. Marie-France could say, “You’re a love” or “You’re too adorable,” if he’d rendered her the slightest service, but she wasn’t mannered, her expression was lively and self-satirical and she was quick to shrug off even the most reasonable compliment. Nevertheless, he wasn’t certain she returned his affection until one day her cousin said, “You know, Marie-France considers you to be one of her best friends.”
He knew that Marie-France had married an aristocratic twit very young and divorced him soon after their second child was born. She’d raised them without remarrying, though she’d always been open about her modest succession of lovers (three in fifteen years). She had the soul of an artist and had decorated her apartment and her house in the Luberon with exquisite taste and a quiet sense of the dramatic. She respected Austin’s opinion, though she collected only things from the twentieth century, and she was delighted when he pressed her to explain how she’d restored a painting, refinished a split-straw table top by Jean-Michel Franck or mended the white calf-skin wall panel. Her convent education and her very old, strict father had made her yearn, when she was an adolescent, to meet foreigners and bohemians and anyone connected, however peripherally, to the arts; at the same time, her considerable fortune and her name were privileges she was preserving, in a near-custodial fashion, for her children. She could laugh at her stuffier friends, but she always invited them back, though she mixed the dukes and the financiers in with pretty actresses, famous writers, even an American. Austin had been stung when he overheard an old aristocrat, who was deaf and speaking louder than he thought, say to someone, “I’ll never understand why Marie-France invites her suppliers to the house.”