by Edmund White
Vladimir was only thirty but Austin had already known him for more than a decade. They’d met in Venice where Vladimir (the son of a Serbian princess and an Italian baron) was just emerging out of adolescence.
He was tall, well-made, slender, and his green eyes, glowing above his slightly crooked nose, looked out at you with intimacy and impertinence. His lips were a light coral and tipped down at one end, as if they’d been torn when he was a child and skillfully mended, and his tenor voice had a slight nasal quality, which Austin later realized was the true sound of the French nobility.
Three years after Austin met him in Venice, Vladimir was living in New York for sixteen months in order to perfect his English and, more importantly, to frequent Studio 54, since the years were 1978 and ’9 and he was under twenty-five, too handsome and slender to suit New York tastes until he opened his mouth and revealed he was a foreigner, a prince or something, possibly Russian—at which point he could do no wrong. That he liked women and seemed flattered by the attentions of other men doubled his popularity. Austin remembered seeing him once at someone’s house on Washington Mews and a lady beside Austin asked, “Who is that young man entering the room like a prince in a Turgenev novel?”
Austin had known Vladimir in Venice, New York and now Paris.
Vladimir and Julien hit it off immediately. They were the same age and they seemed to have the same romantic notions, as though they’d read the same Frederick Uhlman novel about boyhood friendship. They liked the same vulgar jokes about “pussies” and “cocks,” a bawdy taste that alternated with a twilit respect for art, the afterlife and good manners. They liked the same tacky music of the early 1980s, especially the songs of Princess Stephanie, they automatically dismissed any major film from Hollywood as a vulgar crowd-pleaser, and as adolescents they had each kept vague, poetic journals in which they nursed unnamed sorrows. They both went for long walks alone.
It wasn’t a mutual sexual attraction, of that Austin felt certain. Perhaps their peculiar mix of values was so seldom encountered nowadays that what drew them to each other was the simple reassurance they weren’t alone. They were cultured, rarefied aristocrats but not effeminate; they were sexually ambiguous but by no means about to clarify the mystery they’d created; they could laugh cruelly at what they considered petty, but they weren’t cruel; they were as refined in bawdiness as in their elegiac dreaminess; but only they knew exactly where to put the accent according to a private scansion they alone could hear or work out. Of course they didn’t discover this complexity, even congruity, right away, but by the end of their first encounter Julien was almost completely under Vladimir’s spell. Julien had been impressed right away by Vladimir’s mixture of elaborate attentiveness and a certain breeziness. Arrivistes, Julien said, could be mannerly and servile or brisk and rude; only a gentleman (he used the English word) knew how to indicate he was conceding none of his proud independence by showering his guests with constant acts of kindness.
Nothing much happened during that first meeting on the Avenue Victor Hugo beyond Vladimir’s lengthy (really too lengthy) explanations about his current career impasse. Austin didn’t pay much attention and he was certain that Julien was too busy absorbing everything from the oddly pastoral view of the Eiffel Tower beyond the reservoir to the sheen on Vladimir’s old, hand-made shoes to listen to what he was actually saying. Not that Julien would have objected to Vladimir’s self-absorption.
As they were leaving Vladimir’s, Austin said, “You know, I should introduce Joséphine to Vladimir. They’d make a beautiful couple.”
“Joséphine? Why her? She’s terribly common.”
“But she’s not at all. I once introduced her at the Opéra Comique as the Princess Radziwill and everyone believed the imposture.”
“No one, mon pauvre petit, who was an aristocrat himself would believe she was anything other than what she is, the daughter of schoolteachers. Anyway, family background is absurdly unimportant in itself, but Joséphine … she’s sweet. But she’s not exactly the most stimulating conversationalist. Nor is she so beautiful. She has that strong jaw and those wide, paranoid eyes.”
“If people talk about her the way you do,” Austin said, vexed, “she has good reason to be paranoid. I think she’s beautiful, kind and entirely natural.”
The next afternoon Austin called Joséphine. They talked for a while about their friends. Then Austin said, “I think I’ve found someone perfect for you. He’s an Italian aristocrat but he speaks French as well as you do, and you’re from Tours. He’s only a year or two older than you, tall, slender, funny when he’s not going on and on about his investments. Then he can be rather decorously dull. Why don’t you come to Geneva with us at the end of the month and meet him?”
“Is he gay?” Joséphine asked.
“Of course not. I said he was dull.” They laughed and Austin went on. “I met him ten years ago when he was just a boy and he was already in love with Diana, a Venetian woman I know who heads up a foundation, and then I knew him in New York where—no, he’s definitely not gay.”
“You have the worst gaydar,” Joséphine said, using the new word from America she’d already learned from Gregg. It meant “gay radar.” She pronounced it “guy-dah.” She said, brightly, “The odd thing is that Gregg will be in Geneva that same weekend. He has a Spanish boyfriend, José, who’s teaching aerobics there.”
Austin phoned Vladimir in Geneva, who seemed happy to receive them all, but Austin insisted they’d be staying at a hotel, where he’d already made a reservation. Austin said, “My friend Julien was delighted to meet you. I don’t think he’s responded so enthusiastically to any of my other friends. He found you so—do you know the word dashing in English?”
“Darling?”
“That, too,” Austin laughed. “Yes, you are darling. Now, listen, I’m coming with a beautiful blond girl from Tours, she lives in Paris, her name is Joséphine….”
“I’ll be delighted to encounter any of your friends, darling Austin,” Vladimir said in English. Austin wasn’t sure that Vladimir had registered she was coming in order to meet him, or that Austin was offering her as a serious candidate for his hand.
No matter. Better he should think it was his own idea. And given his present financial difficulties, perhaps he couldn’t afford to choose a beautiful, appealing but poor woman for love alone.
They took the train from Paris to Geneva where a festival, “Say It With Flowers,” had festooned every balcony and doorway and bus shelter with roses and attracted thousands of people to a city which otherwise struck them as an empty, dead expanse of banks—in fact, the flowers, already beginning to rot, seemed like arrangements piled high on up-ended coffins. Holidaymakers, quiet and strangely unexcited, were gliding tranquilly in boats across the lake, as though they were painted in a canvas by Böcklin, Hitler’s favorite painter. “The Isle of the Dead,” wasn’t that the name of that foggy, kitschy work?
After their lunch in a restaurant in the city center, Joséphine said she was very impressed by Vladimir. But she said, “Are you positive he’s not gay? He’s so refined, so charming, even elegantly dull.”
“Dull!” Julien thundered. Then he twisted his mouth to one side sarcastically, “I suppose you would find him dull….”
“I don’t know him, Julien,” Joséphine wailed. “I was only repeating what Austin said. Why do you attack everything I say?”
“I’m surprised, that’s all, that you find one of the most refined men in Europe to be dull.”
“Anyway,” Joséphine said, confused, “I like him. It was Austin who said he’s dull. I like him very much….”
They had dinner that night at an Alsatian restaurant. Joséphine invited Gregg (and José if he was free) to drop by the restaurant around nine-thirty or ten for dessert. During the meal Joséphine felt slightly nauseous from the smell of the cooking sauerkraut and of the canned Sterno heat under their platter of meat and sauerkrau
t. Vladimir showed her such consideration in ordering the food to be whisked away (which Austin was sad to see disappear before thoroughly consumed) that soon Julien was also imitating his courtliness. “Yes, yes,” he said, “Alsatian food is much too heavy for this season. Anyway, as Byron said, a woman should never eat anything in public but lobster and champagne.”
“Really?” Joséphine asked, astonished.
“He meant a lady,” Julien said, lapsing back into rudeness.
“Then he must have had you in mind,” Vladimir added, smiling at her with his gentle, teasing smile. Soon Julien and Vladimir were competing to shower Joséphine with the choicest compliments, attentions which only made her more suspicious and paranoid than usual.
At that point Gregg and José came wheeling up on bicycles. They were wearing sweatshirts with stretched-out neck-holes and cut-off sleeves over flimsy, shiny basketball T-shirts. They were in black Lycra biking pants molded to their powerful thighs and wore fluorescent green bracelets and anklets. They had on baseball hats turned backwards, the bills curving down over their tanned, sweaty necks. Gregg displayed his usual, shoulder-rolling, gum-chewing arrogance; his eyes were hooded and a satirical smile was playing over his beautifully carved mouth. José was much shorter, darker, younger and stared out at the world through two huge black eyes like bullet holes singed into his face under a shiny cloche of black hair. They didn’t touch each other, Gregg and José; they didn’t even look at each other; but they shifted their weight from foot to foot almost in rhythm, unconsciously echoing and accommodating each other’s movements as though they were colts in the same herd.
Vladimir had turned pale. He said, with an intensity focused on Joséphine, “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve taken some sort of malaise and I must be up by seven tomorrow morning.” He stood, took her hand and said, “Julien will tell us we’re not supposed to kiss a lady’s hand in public, but maybe he—and you!—will forgive me if I take this precious liberty.” He even brushed her hand with his lips, which wasn’t done, and waved vaguely at the others and stumbled off into the night.
Jose whispered something to Gregg, who then burst out laughing.
“What? What is it?” Joséphine demanded, fairly spooked by now.
“You guys crack me up,” Gregg said.
“How?” Austin asked.
“Well,” Gregg continued, sitting down, shaking his head, thrusting his gym shoes out into the aisle so that the white-aproned, black-vested waiters had to step over them, “well, José says that your friend is a little crazy.”
“Fou comment?” Julien asked, already offended. “Crazy in what way?”
Gregg laughed and literally slapped his knee. “What’s his name? Vladimir d’Urbino? The count of Urbino? Well, José knows him very well—”
“You do?” Joséphine asked.
“Yes,” José said, “he paid me to sleep with him.”
“Sleep!” Gregg snorted. “Is that the word you’re searching for? You told me you had to pee on him. He’d sit in the bathtub and—”
“No details!” Joséphine said. Then she turned to Austin, “So this is your famous heterosexual fiancé you hand-picked for me!”
Julien was so irritated with everyone that he stormed off alone and walked half the night before he came back to the hotel silent, cold and grim. Austin pretended to be asleep.
A week later, back in Paris, Julien arrived late at a dinner party. When he’d come in, Julien had whispered to Austin, “It’s done. I’m divorced.”
“What!”
“I had to spend the whole afternoon at court. In six months it will be finalized. We don’t even need to go back there.”
“Where is it?” Austin asked with wild irrelevance.
“The Île de la Cité. Everyone gets divorced there. It was very easy. Christine and I had worked everything out in advance. I paid the court costs.”
“Did you go out with her afterwards for a drink?”
“A drink? No. Why?”
“Do you feel all right? Should we just slip away now?”
“I would never do that to Henry. He organized everything, didn’t he?”
“As you wish….”
Their murmured exchange had already attracted curious glances and smiles of complicity; Julien broke away and made his rounds. He refused to kiss the proffered cheeks and merely shook hands. He looked startled, even a bit hunted, when Henry patted the empty space on the couch beside him. Austin couldn’t help noticing the contrast between all of these sleek, rested, satisfied middle-aged men and this exhausted young man in his creased green linen blazer, with his oily, inflamed forehead and his dark, sunken eyes.
A bald man in his seventies named Bébé drew Julien down beside him. For an instant Julien, smiling out of embarrassment, half-resisted, but Bébé was stronger than he, at least for the moment, and Julien, clowning, made a big show of losing his balance and falling onto the couch.
“Hmnn,” Bébé said, “so here’s the married man. And do you really like to travel both by sail and steam?” (à voile et à vapeur), which was the French way of referring to bisexuality.
Austin said, “He just got divorced. In six months it will be final.”
“Oh, Austin,” Bébé exclaimed, “what a heavy responsibility for you! What’s the English expression: home-wrecker?”
“Except we don’t say that to our friends,” Austin reminded him, smiling.
“And does your wife know she’s been abandoned for a man?” Bébé had no eyebrows to arch, but his voice performed the job nicely for him.
“Very warm day today, isn’t it?” Julien said drolly.
“Very?—Oh, you sly devil! Quel diable malicieux. No, that’s not fair. We want the full story: Was your wife au courant about your steam side?”
“She’s a very sophisticated woman.”
Austin could see Julien was becoming cross and hastened to add, “Christine and I know each other and like each other. She’s a fine writer and ethnologist.”
“Ethnologue!” Bébé chortled. “And have we queers become une ethnie now? Une tribu?”
“It’s true,” Horace, an old poet, interjected, slurring his speech, “we do wear rings through our nipples now—”
“And eyebrows!” Henry called out.
“And foreskins!” Bébé added. “Why are they called ‘Prince Albert,’ Austin? Is that why Queen Victoria mourned the prince’s memory for decades?” Bebe narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips flirtatiously, as he leaned toward Austin. Then he swiveled back and returned his attention to Julien. “Do you have such a ring in your foreskin?”
“Very hot today,” Austin interjected. Everyone laughed uncomfortably.
By the time they’d all adjourned to the bistro on the corner Julien had retreated into a stormy silence, which no one but Austin noticed, but during their walk home to the Île Saint-Louis the silence was maintained. They walked through the Place Dauphine, where a few stragglers were still seated at outdoor tables sipping their coffee while their tired-looking waiters glowered at them, wishing them away.
“That’s where I was this afternoon,” Julien said in a small voice, sketching a feeble gesture in the direction of the massive, white, late-nineteenth-century Palais de Justice, which formed an ugly side to this otherwise sober triangle of residences and awninged cafés.
“Was it very depressing?” Austin asked.
“Depressing? No. Why? No, the only depressing thing was that I had to pay the court costs.”
“But no alimony? No settlement? The apartment still belongs to you?”
“Of course! Why do I owe her anything? I supported her for many years while she worked on her thesis. She was so lazy. I was the one who made her work. I drove her to work—but I’ll never do that again. I think I damaged our marriage. That’s why I never get after you to write your furniture encyclopedia. But—”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
Austin was touched that Julien had made such an easy link between him and Christine, even if it was to scold him. That must mean Julien thought he’d exchanged Christine for Austin. Between two men, Austin believed, no union could ever be a matter of course. Everything had to be invented, reimagined—unless one of those two men had Julien’s sort of background and confidence. Julien wasn’t harried by the homosexual’s lurking fear of offending society, of being denounced or mocked or excluded or ever so gently chided—or, worse, “pitied” by well-meaning Christians who’d decided to love the sinner while castigating the sin. Or, still worse, “accepted” by liberals on a politically correct field trip in search of new, previously overlooked minorities. Only in upper-class French life had Austin found the exact shade of inclusion he had craved for. Maybe it was natural in a society where a king had been surrounded by cute boys, his mignons, and in which the brother of Louis XIV, “Monsieur,” had maintained an all-male shadow court. Or maybe acceptance was characteristic of a class that made a shared randiness—which was rigorously sealed off from all outsiders—a sign of its coherence and exclusivity. Whenever Austin had to go out to dinner with a Vogue or Architectural Digest editor from the States, he had to remember to censor his dirty stories and suppress the casual sexual banter he was accustomed to, though the same talk had long been his passport into the exalted circles of France that these very Americans craved to crash. Or thought they did. The bawdy tone of French aristocrats would undoubtedly have shocked them.
Julien believed he shared nothing with other gay men. In fact he rejected all group identity—as an architect, as a Frenchman, even as a minor aristocrat. His independence of spirit, however, was something Austin ascribed to his status as a privileged French man. Julien was a romantic individualist, whereas Austin was an amateur sociologist. Julien thought he’d invented himself, whereas Austin saw him as simply an unusual recombination of herd traits.