by Edmund White
On the way back Julien spoke for the first time in his halting English. Austin suspected it was to impress the driver. Although the sky directly above was still roiling with gray clouds, the low, early evening sun had an unimpeded access to every passing object—a medieval, honey-colored, time-pitted church porch, a 1940s shop front, pedestrians escorted by their own long shadows, a warmly glowing farmhouse.
For a while Julien spoke of his mother, her way of treating Julien and his brother Robert when they were teenagers as though they were already adult men and she was an older sister, ready to laugh at their misadventures and to wink when their grandparents lectured them. “My brother,” he said, “was a tall, slender boy who dieted frequently, never took the sun and wore black turtlenecks to frame his pale face. He wore a curious, long-waisted coat from England with dark brown velvet trim. He’d worked out a peculiar, gliding way of walking. His hair he brushed three hundred times a day and groomed with Yardley’s lavender-scented brilliantine. He hated our father and refused to speak to him. He called him a Philistine.”
“I thought you said the four of you were so happy.” A village glided past, looking in the warm, late light as though it were leaning slightly toward them, awake and shining for a Sunday snapshot. The driver, it turned out, was a Pole in his fifties who liked classical music and had tuned in a plangent Beethoven violin sonata.
“When we kids were younger, everything was ideal, but my brother infuriated my father when he became so … styled. I suppose he was already sleeping with adult men. I myself received a love letter from a man, but I’d never even smiled at him, he’d just become obsessed with me. Our parents read the letter, which for some reason sounded as though I’d actually slept with the man. Our father was furious. I promised my father I’d never done anything like that and he was eager to believe me. I was his favorite. He took me flying with him. He and three other men owned a two-seater plane together and he liked to scare me, dip and show me all the sights of Nancy and the countryside. He was born in a village in the Franche-Comté.”
“Did you sleep with your brother?”
“No, he liked men, not boys. He never talked about it, one way or the other. He was very sweet to me—he’s three years older. My big brother. But I was always a good student, being some years at the very top of my class, and Robert was never any good at school. He couldn’t do math—”
“—Me, either,” Austin blurted out, but he saw right away that he’d been foolish to suggest there were parallels between the tale of Julien’s family and the accidents of his much more ordinary life—an American life, what’s more, and therefore a bit comic and folkloric, in any event too far off the map to be as eternal as the Lives of France. The countryside had now lost its glow and was turning blue and shadowy.
“He was disastrous as a student, he wouldn’t play sports, he refused to speak to our father, he glided around with his strange gait almost as though he were ice skating. One day our father lashed out at him, hit him with his fist between his shoulder blades. But Robert never said anything and the next day he was gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“Our grandmother paid for him to go to a cooking school, a pastry school, in Saint-Paul de Vence. He was just sixteen. That’s when he met Fabrice, his lover. They’re still together, years and years later. But he didn’t much like cooking. Then he worked in a men’s clothes store in Cannes. At last he was able to indulge his taste for designer clothes, including hats and scarves.”
Day after day Julien told Austin the story of his family. Sometimes there were new details about another subject such as the guys at work or the time in Ethiopia, but Julien never pursued them with the same zeal he lavished on his family chronicle. Austin wondered if he weren’t a little bit in love with Julien; how else could he concentrate on all these stories? He heard about Julien’s father’s mother, a widow who lived with her daughter, Julien’s aunt, a maiden lady who never said she was going to the toilet but rather, “I’m going somewhere” (Je vais quelque part). She and her mother wore navy blue to Mass every Sunday and would inspect each other for a full ten minutes before leaving the house, checking for lint and collecting it with a sticky roller.
Austin heard, again and again, about the two-seater plane, the boat on Belle-Île, the holiday that one time in Alicante—and especially, endlessly, painfully, about his mother’s suicide on Belle-Île. Once when Austin said he was going to go on a strenuous diet, Julien said, “Don’t, Petit, you’re perfect as you are. Diets frighten me. Our mother was on a long diet, a fast, really, when she disappeared.” The French used the word disappeared for “died” or “passed away.” “You can become severely depressed if you diet.” He thought about it, about her. “The poor woman. She thought if only she was a bit more beautiful our father would come back to her. But she was perfect, exquisite already.”
Austin liked this new way Julien had, now that he’d started to talk about Robert, of saying “our mother,” “our father.” Maybe he sounded just a bit less isolated.
One day an old friend of Peter’s named Herb Coy, an American who lived in a houseboat and worked as a secretary to a rich, prolific but unpublished writer, called to ask if he could make a short film about Austin. It was just a twenty-minute black-and-white film, a silent, which he needed to hand in as his Master’s thesis. Austin agreed.
In one scene Herb, seated in a wheelchair and holding a camera, was pulled by a friend backwards as Austin walked, in a long “tracking” shot, toward him and along the back of Notre-Dame and its massive flying buttresses that looked like the scaffolding surrounding a rocket that would fall away during blast-off.
Austin, pretending he was alone and carefree, suddenly lit up with amateurish, overdone excitement. A second later he was pounding on the back a young, handsome Julien, dressed in a suit. Julien wasn’t feeling well that day and had had to be talked into acting. They smiled at each other. The wheelchair was jerkily pivoted, the camera swooped and dipped and then settled down long enough to show the hammy Austin, chattering away, walking off toward the Île Saint-Louis with the modest, beaming Julien.
When Herb was about to reload the camera he realized the used film had unspooled in the magazine and been exposed to light when it was unloaded. He feared the film might be destroyed.
Chapter Eight
They went to Nancy for a weekend but they stayed in a hotel and never met Julien’s paternal grandmother, much less his father. They walked all over the beautiful small city and again it wasn’t the history of the Dukes of Lorraine they pursued, not even the sites sacred to the École de Nancy, the local Art-Nouveau movement propounded by Émile Gallé, Louis Majorelle, Victor Prouvé and the glassmaker Daum. They had almost no time for the Place Stanislas, a public square laid out like a chessboard and one of the most perfect ensembles of buildings from the eighteenth century, nor could they even visit the famous Gothic church of the Cordeliers. No, they had to see all the various apartments Julien’s family owned or had ever owned, the studio here, the two-room on the fourth floor rear there. They had to walk through the big verdant nineteenth-century park with its formal statues to public figures and see the very steps where Julien had kissed his first girlfriend.
“By the way, when did you sleep with your first woman?” Austin asked.
“Girl or woman?”
Unprepared for the distinction, Austin blurted, “Both. Tell me about both.”
“The first girl was Clémence, the one I kissed here.” They both looked up at the step leading to the fountain as though they might see the scene replayed if they stared hard enough.
“How old were you?”
Julien shrugged, then turned toward Austin, frowning either from the sun or impatience. “Twelve?”
“And the first woman?”
They sat down on the step, as though they’d already forgotten about Clémence. “Her name was Monique and she was our mother’s best friend. Even as a very
little boy I admired her intensely. I always had to be near her. I played on her lap. She showed me all of her playing cards, sewing things. We never spoke out loud but whispered in each other’s ear. That was our little game—whispering in each other’s ear. And then when I was fourteen I became friendly with her son Étienne. I was always going over, asking after Étienne, although I guess I hoped I’d find Monique alone. She wore white linen trimmed in red and blue and drove an American station wagon and had an old-fashioned dog, a collie. There was something of the 1940s about her. Inside her house she even had indirect lighting. Well, I finally found her alone and almost immediately I was kissing her and then she was pulling me into her. It was less romantic than it had been with Clémence, maybe because she needed me and knew it. She wasn’t fooling herself. We kept whispering into each other’s ear—it was our only way of communicating.”
If Austin asked for erotic details Julien merely smiled right through him as though he’d just gone both deaf and partially blind. Austin remembered that heterosexual men sometimes had a quaint “gentlemanly” reserve about appearing caddish. They preferred their private pleasures—and the immunity in which to pursue them—to any gross advertisement of their conquests. Of course only a few men had such scruples, but they were precisely those who deemed themselves and one another of the better sort.
“What happened to end it?” Austin asked. They were eating lunch under an awning at the entrance to the Place Stanislas; Austin suspected that Julien both feared and hoped he’d be recognized by a school chum or a relative. A city of just one hundred thousand, Austin thought, must be unbearably stifling. Back in America he’d wondered why French novelists and poets, decade after decade, had railed against the bourgeoisie. Surely the middle class wasn’t all that oppressive, he’d thought, and weren’t the artists themselves from middle-class families? But once he’d moved to France he’d discovered that, first, the word bourgeoisie did not refer to the middle class, not in the American sense, but to the very rich, the people who could and might buy their way into the aristocracy, and that this class was much more static and self-satisfied and exclusive than its American counterpart. With his usual vagueness Julien never explained how or why his affair with Monique had come to an end. Probably he’d hurt her and that wasn’t something he’d want to tell another lover, who was also much older and just as vulnerable.
“Why can’t I meet your grandmother?” Austin asked.
“No, I don’t want anyone to know we’re here. You don’t understand about French families. It’s all very … complicated.”
As they walked one more time through the center of town, Austin asked, “Has your family been here for long?”
“Centuries. On both sides.”
“Were they merchants?”
Julien frowned. “Many different things. One thing’s certain—I couldn’t join the Knights of Malta; to do that you need to have at least sixteen relatives who are aristocrats.”
Austin thought he should look Julien’s family up in the social register, but he recognized he was too lazy. He was too lazy to pursue any interest, truth be told, and he’d learned to sneer at his American infatuation with titles. As a boy he’d daydreamed endlessly about someday discovering his mother or father was descended from Huguenot nobility, but since his university years he’d sublimated this fantasy into a concrete study of the French families for whom the greatest furniture had been made. He knew that half the current French titles had been invented. “Was your family noble?”
“Minor nobility. La petite noblesse. See that church tower over there?” He pointed to a Gothic belfry. “My ancestors paid for it to be built, but the part of the story that always interested me was the architect’s fate. The tower started to settle and—see?—it tilts slightly. It tilted the first time the bells were rung. The architect committed suicide, though as it turned out the tower has never had another mishap in several centuries.”
On the train back to Paris Austin suddenly became impatient with all the mystery and, after Julien had drunk half a bottle of red wine, decided to clear up at least one thing. He said, “I must know why you’re getting divorced.”
“Christine is so petit-bourgeois—”
“So you’ve said. But in what way?”
“She was fine in Ethiopia, but once she was sucked back into the gravitational pull of her greedy parents—”
“Greedy? What do you mean by greedy?”
“They were the ones who thought she should be the co-owner of my apartment.”
“What apartment?”
Julien blinked, perhaps for once astonished by his own secretiveness. “Why, do you mean you don’t know that I have an apartment of my own?”
“Where you live with Christine?”
“I don’t live with her anymore. My grandmother bought me my own apartment in Montreuil.”
“Where?”
“It’s a working-class neighborhood; it’s actually an independent community, not part of Paris. They have a famous flea market where they sell a shoe without its mate, old magazines, lighters that don’t work, that sort of thing, though they do have—”
“But Julien, you mean you bought this apartment when you were still happily married and you didn’t want Christine’s name on the—” He didn’t know the French word for deed.
Julien withdrew into an offended silence. As their train hurtled along past a village apparently devoid of inhabitants, Austin drew a breath and queried his own vexation. He rather admired his style in defending Christine’s rights when to do so was against his own interests. No, he didn’t have an interest, since he would never inherit anything from Julien, nor did he want to. He wanted for nothing, he’d probably be dead in two or three years—or in a year, if he was less lucky. Yet even if he had been negative and in perfect health, even if he’d been younger than Julien and likely to outlive him, he’d never want to enter into one of those grotesque French family squabbles over an inheritance.
His mind slid away from the painful subject of the future. He had no future, which meant that he couldn’t fully immerse himself in the present. He’d signed a contract to write the book on eighteenth-century French furniture, in which six long, heavily illustrated essays were meant to be followed by entries on each of the principal furniture-makers of the period, the maîtres ébénistes, though few had worked in ebony. But he couldn’t bring himself to write the book, even though he’d long since spent the sizable advance. He knew that some people were galvanized by the prospect of an imminent AIDS death, but he’d become even lazier and more disorganized than previously. He couldn’t even convince himself that he was the only man for the job; there were at least three other “experts” who were as qualified as he. Nor would such a book sell many copies, since the great French furniture of the eighteenth century was already in museums all over the world and investors needn’t bother with it. Riesener desks could hardly be considered “collectible.”
As a peace offering he pawed Julien’s leg. They sometimes did that: held their fingers pressed together and slightly curved and then touched the other’s leg or body gently, clumsily as a dog might seeking attention. Austin pawed Julien just once, humbly, but Julien broke into a smile, though he refused to look at Austin. Finally Julien voiced in a rush all the things he’d been thinking: “You don’t understand. It was my grandmother’s money. After the way my father pushed our mother to kill herself and now he enjoys her apartment on Belle-Île and the house in Nancy—why should my grandmother give anything to that garce?”
“Christine? Well, you’re not committing suicide. She’s your wife.”
“But we’re getting divorced. I supported her the whole time she was working on her thesis. We have no children. I owe her nothing.”
“But if you’d put everything fifty-fifty in both your names, maybe you’d still be married.”
“Things don’t work that way in France. In America everything is the married coupl
e, but in France it’s the … dynast.”
“Dynasty?”
“Many wives sign prenuptial agreements renouncing all interest in the husband’s property.”
Suddenly Austin was bored by the discussion. He didn’t want to fill his mind with questions of succession over which he’d have no control. He’d always been generous in love; he still paid Peter’s rent and bought him clothes and sent him a few hundred dollars every month. He couldn’t imagine letting a marriage turn sour over whose names were on a deed. He lost respect for Julien—or rather he told himself never to count on him for anything. Then again, when he made an effort to understand, he conceded that a member of an old French family could hardly be expected to have a devil-may-care attitude to something sacred like property. Aristocrats didn’t usually earn money anyway; the most they could do was preserve, hand down and improve property. He suddenly felt that the American entrepreneurial spirit was more manly, “bigger,” as his mother used to say.
A few days after their return to Paris Austin had a chance to see two aristocrats in action. He introduced Julien to Vladimir d’Urbino. Vladimir’s grandmother had lived in a twelve-room apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo that looked down on an immense reservoir in which the Eiffel Tower was reflected at night. It was rent-controlled under a law that had been passed just after the war, and she paid less than the going rate for a studio. The only problem was that she’d died two years earlier, but Vladimir kept her “disappearance” a secret and paid the rent every month with a money order in her name. Most of the time he himself lived in Geneva or in the house he’d built at Évian on Lake Léman.
Vladimir had changed nothing in the Paris apartment. It remained an embalmed specimen of pre-war taste—rickety side tables decorated with sentimental panels of rosy-cheeked shepherds courting pale shepherdesses, frayed beige silk oriental rugs, paintings of Paris street urchins by Bastien-Lepage framed in heavy gilt and suspended on dusty ribbons from the cornice, a chaise longue upholstered in blue silk that was soiled and worn at the arms, a white marble fireplace soot yellowed by a century of updrafts. The apartment smelled of face powder and unemptied garbage.