by Edmund White
Austin gave Julien a glass of red wine once they were back at the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. He rubbed Julien’s shoulders; though he disliked them for being hairy, he loved this man. Austin was convinced that his own squeamishness about hairy shoulders was something puritanical and body-hating that persisted in him. The randy, big-hearted, life-embracing men he admired in books and movies would have kissed every follicle, tongued every black pore; only a stinting petite nature like his own would object to this sign that the beloved wasn’t an eternal boy.
The night was cool, even foggy on their island, and Austin held Julien in his arms. He could feel Julien’s heart beating in his chest and when he stroked his face in the dark there was the nail-file rasp of his beard and there, shockingly, the hot slipperiness of his mouth (he was sucking Austin’s little finger). The pulse in the long, lean neck, the intermittent warm streams of breath on Austin’s left shoulder, the moth-like brush of his fluttering eyelids—here was this vulnerable life in his hands, as mysterious as was his own. Austin strove to like himself, but the very familiarity of his habits of mind, the perfect attendance pin his eternal physical presence had won, revolted him or, worse, bored him so much he was repelled.
In spite of himself Austin farted, whispered, “Pardon,” and Julien murmured drowsily, “Petit…” with a thoroughly indulgent tone of reproach. Later, they both seemed to wake up. Their embrace turned sexual.
Chapter Nine
In August Austin rented an apartment in Venice, one that was so many stories high that even though it was on the Grand Canal it was relatively quiet. Julien had never been to Venice, but he said he was sure it would be “majestueux,” and he was delighted to be going, if only for a week.
Although Austin and Julien spent almost every night together, they hadn’t said, “I love you,” nor talked about their future. All along Austin had felt he couldn’t exact (or express) any promises until Julien’s divorce had gone through. Perhaps if he’d been more insecure, or more desperately in love, Austin would have demanded reassurances.
Austin had accepted a position teaching the history of European furniture at the New England School of Fine Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, a job that was due to begin next January, just five months off, but he hadn’t asked Julien yet to accompany him to the States, even though Julien knew Austin was leaving Paris. Julien’s English was very approximate. Would he want to trade in his sure-fire job with a big Paris architectural firm for something vague in Boston or Providence? Would he need a work permit? A visa? And what about Julien’s HIV status? What if he turned out to be positive? Weren’t people who were known to be positive denied entry to the United States?
Austin had also invited Peter, his old lover, to fly from New York to Venice. Peter and Austin had been to Venice many times before in the previous decade and Austin hoped it would cheer him up. Venice suited Peter with its quiet strolls in back streets, its vegetable stalls under tents baking in the August sun like an African village hastily thrown up in a square bordered by settling, tilting palaces and the unseen but overheard lapping of out-of-sight canals. Hordes of tourists shouted and shoved into one another around San Marco and the Rialto, but San Trovaso and Santa Margherita and a dozen other backwater piazzi were so quiet and empty that sometimes the only sound was of two old women lazily talking together as they strolled home for lunch with their shopping carts rattling along behind them, one wheel in need of oil.
Peter wasn’t working, his health was deteriorating and his mother told Austin that his prospects of living more than a year were dim. Though apparently he was rather frail he could still get about. He clung to his status as someone who had ARC, an AIDS-related condition, not AIDS, although that distinction was now dismissed by scientists as meaningless. He had only 103 T-cells and it was an anomaly that he hadn’t already come down with a major opportunistic disease. Austin knew Peter was taking a risk by flying to Europe and back (long flights were supposed to be bad for the immune system) but he had to give Peter a treat. Peter wasn’t a realistic, hard-headed sort of guy anyway. He lived for treats, surprises, parties, sprees, even miracles.
Austin loved him and wanted to be with him. Many of their friends, especially women, accused Austin of loving Peter like a son. That was a comprehensible relationship, father-son, and given their age difference it put a respectable gloss on a visual disparity that if it were simply sexual might have seemed indecent. But Austin wasn’t clear and convinced enough about his own experience to assume the paternal role. Unlike a straight man of forty-nine, his own children hadn’t ratcheted him year after year another notch toward death.
Austin didn’t like ordering anyone around, or teaching anyone, and without an appetite for authority where lay the interest in being a father? If he were a genetic father of a real son, at least he’d enjoy the benefits of being a recognizable player, but no one except a few indulgent friends were prepared to take their hats off to an aging queer and his thirty-something ex-toy boy. Real fathers must feel a steadying, nurturing pleasure in instructing, correcting, guiding their offspring, but such a pleasure started with being certain about what constitutes good and bad, about which values to inculcate. Austin didn’t like traditional values (or thought he didn’t).
Anyway, when Peter and he were together they were both kids, not even venturesome teens but timorous tots, little kids unconsciously holding hands as they stumbled toward the unknown. They assumed nursery voices with each other, reassured each other in a fantastic but pleasant way, baby-talked in an embarrassed parody of their very real affection. True, Austin was the one who had always worked and supported Peter—maybe that was the only kind of paternity that society could grasp: the economic.
Peter flew into Milan from New York, then changed planes for Venice. He even took the boat all alone from the airport to San Marco, but perhaps because he was frail and tired and a bit less eagle-eyed, someone knocked into him as everyone was surging off the vaporetto onto the pontoon landing—and stole his wallet. He found the empty wallet twenty feet farther along with his passport and credit cards inside but plucked clean of his money.
Not that he had much. Through planning and sacrifice Peter had managed to accumulate three hundred dollars—“getting-around-town money,” he called it.
He looked taller and older. As he stood in the repeating volleys of tourists who were following their flag-wielding leaders, his hair gleamed white in the bright midday sunlight. His eyes shone a paler blue as though the sea were now flowing faster and shallower over whiter sand. Even his hand felt bony and breakable when Austin clasped it.
“I can’t believe the bastard—all my money—I know which one he was, too.” Peter’s eyes filled with tears and a few vaguely curious passersby stared for a second at a rising drama, their sympathy almost stirred.
“Don’t worry, Pete,” Austin said, “I’m loaded.”
“It’s just so damn frustrating. If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I rationed myself to just one beer at the bar when I went out, saving, saving, or how I never had anyone over for dinner or went to a movie, just so I’d have a little getting-around-town money and not be a complete burden to you.”
Austin hugged him and felt the delicate ribs and exposed backbone jutting their way through his clothes. “Poor Pete, don’t worry.” He grabbed his bag and scooped him onto the local vaporetto that would deposit them in front of their palazzo on the other side of the Grand Canal. They stood on the central deck as the boat zigzagged up the canal from side to side (the Salute, the Giglio, the Accademia …) and passengers pressed around them at every stop, leaving or entering the vaporetto. Peter looked more and more frightened and angry, as though these hostile foreigners might steal his suitcase next.
“You’re just tired, Pete. That’s a wicked flight.” Austin had put on his baby-talking voice.
“Actually, it wasn’t bad,” Peter said in a grown-up, matter-of-fact way. “I slept a little and the movie wa
s some sentimental thing that made me cry. I don’t understand why I cry all the time now.”
Austin knew not to ask him the name of the film; Peter forgot so many things these days, which bothered him, since he’d always been proud of his grasp of pop culture, as though he’d been preparing himself for the ultimate trivia quiz. He wasn’t like Austin, who’d sacrificed his knowledge of the twentieth century to his mastery of the seventeenth and eighteenth and who, by living cross-culturally, was never expected by his compatriots to know much about recent American crazes, nor by the French to recognize the names of their pop singers or movie stars. The funny thing was that Austin could recall the very name of the court ballet Louis XIV had danced in when he was twelve (the first time he’d dressed up as the Sun King), but he’d never knowingly heard any house music or techno or whatever they were calling it.
When Austin got Peter down the alleyway at the bottom of an architectural chasm six stories deep and just three feet wide, and through the surprisingly grandiose door of their palace and into the elevator just big enough for two passengers, then down the windowless corridor upstairs and into the ultra-modern apartment with its woven brown leather and chrome chairs, then and only then did Peter begin to relax. He opened the windows giving onto the Grand Canal and peered out with a fragile invalid’s hesitant, carefully dosed curiosity at the plash and play of gondolas floating four abreast while an aging, wobbly-voiced tenor sang “O Sole Mio” into a microphone for Japanese tourists.
From this high window he could see half a dozen churches and the very top of the Campanile as well as a few of the lacy spikes bristling along the domes of San Marco. The mysterious topography of Venice, typified by street signs that pointed both to right and to left for the path to the Rialto or to San Marco, suddenly looked decipherable from this height.
Peter turned back from the window, a thin, very thin silhouette pressed like a tall, unlit candle against the Venetian sky, Tiepolo blue with fleecy Bellini clouds. “You look great, Pete,” Austin said, hoping to sound casually convinced that nothing had changed, that he didn’t even notice the twenty pounds shed since the last time they’d gotten together. His reassuring noises weren’t a lie if taken to mean that a new, birdlike nobility had descended on his features, as though the victim, before he was sacrificed to the gods, had to be encased in an avian mask.
“When is Jules—” Peter asked.
“Julien. He’s arriving two days from now. In the evening. He’s taking the train from Paris. It’s his first time here, in Venice,” Austin added, hoping to avoid the whole awkward business of having a new lover by directing his old lover’s attention to some minor matter, the surprising fact that Julien had never been to Venice before.
Peter perched on the chair beside Austin. His breathing was shallow and fast and his eyes were racing here and there. With the force of a falling stone it came over Austin that they were occupying entirely different places. Austin, though positive, was still bloomingly healthy, making enough money to travel and invite his friends along, embarked on a new love affair, whereas Peter was markedly ill, frightened and disoriented by the all-night flight and the pickpocket who’d welcomed him to Venice. Possibly Peter was alarmed by Austin’s busy life in Paris, crowded more and more with men and women he didn’t know. Austin had a present, even a future, whereas Peter had only a past in which Austin bulked large.
While Peter slept Austin hurried out to the Rialto and bought fruits, vegetables and a white, flat fish with tiny, lusterless eyes, as though they were just pale photosensory pores rather than proper image-isolating eyes. In the backed-up bilge of August, everyone moved slowly through the viscous heat. The greengrocers under the Rialto open-air market, which was held aloft by squat columns topped by dolphin capitals, misted their lettuce and basil with a garden hose, but even so everything looked parched. Someday August would be over, the aimless, milling three-day bargain tourists would be hauled away in their buses, the real Venetians would come back from the Dolomites, the rich international gay and social population (i settembrini) would alight once more for the season. Once again the shopkeepers would walk briskly, sliding wood crates of produce off barges, smiling and waving at their regular customers, calling out their marvels in their husky dialect, all hollow, resonant vowels deboned of every last shaping consonant and the market would smell of shameless white truffles in rut and the poultry butcher would hold up soft brown feather puddles of tiny game birds, as though offering fistfuls of molding autumn leaves as a delicacy.
Now Austin contented himself with the albino fish, some fresh, pliant eggy tagliatelle, a bag of tomatoes and onions and a bottle of olive oil for the sauce, an overblown lettuce the color and cut of a glam-rock singer’s hair after a three-hour concert (he smiled at his rare contemporary comparison). As he hurried home high-up shutters closed and a disembodied hand pulled a canary’s cage into the cool, marble-lined fastness of a dim apartment before bolting shut curious, cut louvers, jig-sawed to fit the flame-shaped window frame. Two cats hissed and growled, squabbling over a small bundle of garbage neatly tied in a transparent blue plastic bag and dumped, all by itself, in the middle of the pavement. Shop after shop, all selling commedia dell’arte masks and kitschy Murano glass, filed past; metal grills were rumbling down over the display windows. The long, sweaty reign of the afternoon siesta was beginning, a time for desultory family squabbling, suffocated sex, tiring, dreamless sleep.
By six in the evening Peter had awakened, showered and shaved and was sitting up, lean and dressed-up and sipping a chemically correct martini. He’d always looked like a New England patrician but now his higher cheekbones, whiter hair, bonier shoulders and the birdlike way he cocked his head from side to side made him resemble the patriarch of a ruling clan, someone outraged by fin de siècle depravity or the immorality of abroad.
But in fact he was none of these things. He only looked that way. He was still a kid—the ultimate boy with his sweet seriousness and his steadily gazing concentration on the people around him. He could also be silly with his entranced enthusiasm for TV soap operas, his long, overly detailed stories of personal martyrdom, all the ways former friends or deranged relatives had done him in; it was hard to know where the hopped-up resentments manifested by the soaps stopped and his own real travails began.
Austin had cashed a few traveler’s checks and stuffed Peter’s wallet with a sum that matched what had been stolen. Peter got tears in his eyes and said, “You’re so nice, Austin, you’ve always been so nice to me. My life wouldn’t have been half so fun without you, and you’re steady and loyal, you don’t forget your old friends.” They sat side by side in the wide, matching leather and chrome chairs and held hands intermittently, though they each had a certain fastidiousness about prolonged touching; Austin associated it with an unwanted display of affection even when, as now, he wanted it.
He knew Julien couldn’t fathom this American puritanism, mixed as it was with American licentiousness.
They went for a stroll down the echoing pedestrian walkways that contracted into a sordid little path smelling of cat urine, then dilated into a proper calle lined with elegant shops selling marbleized paper, men’s silk pajamas and, further on, multi-hued summer sweaters of silk and wool. A standing gondolier glided past, but neither the canal nor his barque were visible and he looked as though he were a moving target in a shooting gallery. It was a city of unchecked fancy—the doors were large or tiny, grilled or painted, the knocker a bronze fist or a Moor’s turbaned head or a sword-pierced heart. No two bridges were alike, not even any two street lamps. Austin wondered if Julien was the sort of architect who thought form should follow function; if so, he’d be sure to detest Venice.
Now that the long siesta was ending the streets were reviving and even the shopkeepers’ faces looked sponged clean by an oblivion that renewed all the necessary illusions. The evening tide would soon inundate the whole system of canals, even the narrowest and most remote, and the eccen
trically shaped chimneys, widening as they rose, and oddly cut crenelations of the city roofline were casting their mysterious shadows across the treeless squares and sidewalks and the sealed marble wells, their polluted waters capped.
Austin bought Peter a beige silk sports jacket and a belted raincoat and three dress shirts on sale. When they emerged from the shop with its English look—the polished wood shelves, green library lamps and brass-fitted counter—they were plunged back into the true Venice, the constant murmur of a thousand muted human voices ricocheting off stone pavements and walls, of stray sunbeams irradiating a window display of colored glass trinkets and projecting rainbows, of sweating tourists in shorts, their faces baked red. Darting quickly through them were elegant locals already in evening clothes as they rushed, bejeweled and coiffed and perfumed, towards an early dinner before an opera at La Fenice, a house that had burned down so often it had a stake in its name: the Phoenix.
Austin cut short their walk when he felt Peter losing strength. As they were threading their way through the narrow chasm leading to the door of their palazzo, Peter bent down stiffly to stroke a puppy muzzled with a little wicker cage over its mouth and nose. His master was trailing not far behind. Peter looked like a very old general tousling the hair of a child who’d brought him flowers.
Once upstairs Austin set to work making dinner while Peter perched on the roomy windowsill, sipping a wine so pale it resembled water. He was looking down at the Canal, its noise and activity so far below they were generalized into a picturesque haze.
Peter went to his bedroom to hang up his new jacket and raincoat. He came into the kitchen, tears standing in his eyes, and said, “I’m sorry I’m being so emotional, but you offered me new clothes and that suggests you think I’m going to go on living for a while….”