by Edmund White
“But what about academic freedom?”
“Forget it. These are battles you can’t win. If you’re accused of racism, anti-Semitism, child abuse or just flirting with your students or if you’re perceived as a male chauvinist, you’ve already lost, it doesn’t matter who’s right or even if you’ve been falsely accused. Just give in, submit to a humble re-education, and hope the harridans move on.”
“The funny thing is that I actually believe in feminism,” Austin said, staring gloomily into his mug of watery coffee.
“You do? Whatever for?” The other man raked his beard with his ringed hands.
“No, I love all these French women in the eighteenth century, the first feminists such as Olympe de Gouge and Thorigny de—”
“Never heard of them. I’m a potter and I just show them how to throw pots. If they want to see Astarte’s wide hips in a pot, I encourage them. I’ve been properly re-educated.”
Austin jotted off a short letter of contrition and kept all traces of jocularity out of it. After three in the afternoon he had the much more serious problem of going back to the house at the end of the street, just where the woods began. When he had told the bearded colleague where he was living, the man had sung, “There are fairies at the bottom of your garden.”
“What?”
“That’s the biggest cruising ground in town, the woods across the street. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that when you rented there.”
“Honestly….”
“The man you’re renting from, Hal Devereaux? He hates the fags down there and is always running in the woods chasing them off in the name of Christian decency.”
“You mean all that still goes on?”
“More than ever. You’re in Reagan country now.”
When he got home Austin put in a call to the Hungarian architects, Istvan and Laszlo, to make sure they’d sent in their promise to hire Julien, but they hemmed and hawed (they were each on a different extension, proof of how little work they had or perhaps how upset they were). One of them (Austin couldn’t recognize their voices, just their accent, which was the same) said, “We’re too worried … we spoke to our lawyer … our own status … and now you say that Julien is having immigration troubles … best to lie low.”
Austin cried, frustrated and frightened. The worst of it, he realized in his bitterness, was that these cowards and traitors would get their Elle Déco article out of him after all; it was too late to reverse the process without arousing the editor’s suspicions and, anyway, the photos of their Brooklyn house had already been shot.
It was ten in the evening in Paris; he couldn’t contact Howard, his Paris lawyer, who wouldn’t be in his office. He could call Henry McVay, who might know how to help.
“What a mess!” Henry exclaimed. “Why don’t you call my friends Phil and Bob—they’re architects. You remember Phil Bluet, who’s the heir to the Bluet soap-powder fortune? No, listen, Sweetie, I’ll phone him myself. I’ll sort of … feel him out.” His voice suddenly took on a confidential tone and Austin could picture him squinting and wriggling his hand in the air as if to demonstrate how he’d auscultate his friends. Austin admired Henry’s worldly competence, something Henry himself, with his normal bashfulness, would have dismissed completely if it had been brought to his attention. “No, it’s nothing, don’t be silly,” he’d say, casting his eyes down and to one side. Then he’d look up to see if Austin had been taking the piss out of him.
As Austin waited for Henry to call him back, his mind raced like hands playing scales—methodical and irritating. Any day now Julien would be getting his test results: what if he was positive? They’d be together a few days in Montréal and Austin would be able to comfort him then. But how would Julien make out alone two or three days in a big, unknown, winterbound city, with no one to call and nothing to do but brood?
Henry called back and talked to Austin with a calm decency, a grown-up sobriety so at odds with his usual spluttering (Henry’s favorite mode was comic indignation). “Phil is out on the West Coast but Bob—you remember him? Tall and handsome as Gary Cooper?—well, Bob will be driving up to see a client in Concord, Mass., and he said he could have lunch with you this Friday afternoon at the Olde Concord Inn.”
“Do you think he’ll sign it? He isn’t really committing himself to anything, my lawyer assures me there’s no government follow-up and the—”
“Your lawyer,” Henry said reproachfully.
“Yeah. Incompetent fool.”
“Well,” Henry sighed, “I hope to God, Sweetie, that he does help you and darling Julien, but you won’t blame him, will you—”
“Lord, no,” Austin said, the soul of generosity, although in his heart he loved everyone who helped them and cursed everyone who failed to do so.
Austin had moved easily, hand over hand, through the last decade, and if he complained less than his contemporaries about being gay and fifty it was because he had never tested his mettle at a bar or sauna but lived inside his charming circle of young, affectionate friends. Now, here he was, in Providence, alone, separated from his friends and Julien—and if he had to go out to find a new lover, here, what would he find?
His colleague’s mention of the cruising across the street piqued Austin’s curiosity. Not because he was feeling desire; the trauma of returning to America had frozen his libido. No, he wanted to see if he could attract anyone. And what if Julien could never get through Immigration?
Austin walked for an hour through the cold, leafless woods, kicking up dead leaves and the smell of soil and mold. He thought that only in America would one find, even near the heart of the city, these big, neglected woods. In France the trees were planted in neat rows, like crops. But everything in France had been observed and regulated for centuries; only America was so shaggy, so unsystematic, so full of surprises.
Austin’s surprise was a twenty-four-year-old six-foot-four guy with a forehead that sloped back and heavy jowls as though his brains had fallen out of his cranium but couldn’t pass through his narrow neck. He carried around a swollen, round belly on his otherwise normal body. He was wearing trousers in which the cuffs had been let out—not for him, certainly. They’d been let out for someone else, the previous owner—that’s how old the pants were. Even remade, the trousers stopped at mid-calf, like pedal-pushers. He had the look of someone who’d been dressed in hand-me-downs by an orphanage, for his shirt was plain dark-blue wool, unbuttoned to reveal a classic white T-shirt stretched over his belly (maybe the shirt wouldn’t button up over this mature watermelon). He wore a standard-issue Navy pea coat, also unbuttoned. The trousers, a gray cotton, had a big hole in front through which the white pocket fabric could be seen, spotlessly clean. The trousers were carefully ironed and pressed, even if they were too small all over, not just too short. The waist was pressed down and partially folded back by the weight and heft of the belly, the zipper was bulging. The thighs looked gigantic in the stretched fabric. His hands were small, almost blue from the cold; they appeared to be boneless. His ears were also surprisingly small, as if they hadn’t grown at all since childhood.
The man kept walking deeper and deeper into the woods, looking back over his shoulder from time to time. At last, at a turn that smelled of sewage for some reason, he stopped and just stood there. This sort of tentative, step-by-gradual-step cruising was something Austin had thought had vanished from the world.
“Hi,” Austin said, more huskily than usual.
“How’s it going?” the man asked, unsmiling, his eyes crinkled as if from the mental effort of talking. Or was he, too, apprehensive?
“Getting cold, huh?” Austin said.
“Sure is.”
“You work around here?”
“Looking.”
“What?”
“I’m looking for work.”
“What do you do?”
“Transportation.”
The woods, the
failing light, the distant sound of a slow, rumbling train and its whistle, the smell of sewage, the wariness of this man so pale he looked bled white—Austin suddenly felt plunged back into the snot-nosed, sandy-eyed squalor of childhood, that age when you don’t choose your company but accept whoever comes your way.
Austin stood so close to the man while they talked about the weather that it was a provocation. The man backed away. He seemed uneasy.
“You live near here?” the man asked.
“Yeah. Just up there. The brown house.”
“You live in that big house alone?”
“No,” Austin said. “My wife and son are out of town but they’re coming back next week.” Austin thought that would sound more normal, less intimidating, to the man than the idea he was a self-declared fag all on his own. Anyway, the guy wouldn’t try to drop in for a visit, a handout or blow job after next week; if he saw Julien he’d assume he was Austin’s son.
“Want to come up for a coffee?”
“Sure. It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
“Not much work out there?” Austin asked. It was 1990 and lots of Americans were out of work, especially in the Northeast.
He said, “I’ve had some bad luck.”
“That right? Mighty sorry to hear it.” Austin was saying lines, as though he were in a stage adaptation of Tobacco Road, but he scarcely noticed. He was a born seducer of strong men, which meant he was gifted with abundant negative capability. Now that he was older, he was attracting a different sort—big, husky working men who picked up on something well-spoken and sober about him and who found his white hair, barrel chest and black glasses reassuringly paternal, married, as if he were the neighborhood dentist.
They drank their coffee and then Austin said in a soft voice, “Wanna go upstairs?”
Austin felt mildly guilty, but Julien’s rule of discretion gave him a certain immunity. Julien would never expect him to confess anything; he’d probably even stop him from telling. And this cloak of discretion, possibly, had been drawn over Julien’s own adventures. He was young and virile; he surely wasn’t waiting chastely in Paris for Austin.
The man stood up, stretched nervously and said, “Lead the way.” But when they got upstairs he asked where the “bathroom” was; he left the door open and the sound of his pissing excited Austin. He came into the bedroom and unconvincingly mimed weariness by stretching first one arm, then the other above his head; his mouth formed a circle but not in a genuine yawn—he wasn’t even inhaling.
He climbed up onto the bed, still fully clothed and shod, and stretched out and closed his eyes. Austin undid the man’s laces, removed his shoes, then unfastened his belt and inched the tight fly zipper down, afraid to snag it in his underwear. Even though the man, “Herb,” was pretending to have fallen asleep, as if a wand had been waved over him, he still obligingly lifted his pelvis from the mattress so that Austin could slide his trousers off.
Later, they drank a beer together. Herb said he’d just gotten out of prison for writing bad checks and had nothing, no one, and no hope except for a beat-up truck an uncle had given him reluctantly. Austin said he’d pay two hundred bucks if they could drive into the Boston airport together and bring back his trunk. “It weighs a ton—I mean, almost a ton, seriously.”
Herb said, “The load don’t bother me. I’m strong enough. But I don’t know if the truck can make the round trip. If it breaks down we’d be up the crick.”
“Yeah, but what’s the use of having a truck if you can’t make money off it?”
Austin noticed that Herb was unsure of himself, disoriented, fearful, and Austin thought, Prison doesn’t harden men but weakens them, eats away at their confidence.
Herb promised to come back the next day around noon, after Austin’s class. When he’d gone, Austin said out loud, “So, that’s what you’ve come to, Aussie,” which is what his mother had called him. He was left with nothing but the man’s coal-tar smell and a sense of bleakness, as though the world’s wattage had been cut, as though he’d been returned to his American past, but a black-and-white small-screen version of it. He kept feeling he was dreaming a feverish half-dream which took place in the dim, shabby, empty corridors behind the brilliantly lit set.
Herb showed up the next day at the very moment Austin was on the phone with Julien. Austin realized that sexually he preferred servicing this big fat man who smelled of defeat to dominating Julien, but the comparison became irrelevant, even ridiculous. He loved Julien and he could hear in Julien’s voice his pleasure and excitement. “That’s the driver,” Austin said in French, “who’s going with me into Boston to pick up my trunk from U.S. Customs.”
The mention of Customs drove Julien into another diatribe against America, which excited him so much he didn’t ask details about the driver.
“What was that stuff you were talkin’?” Herb asked when Austin had hung up. “Spanish?”
“French.”
“Ooh-lah-lah. But you’re American, right? Canuck?”
“No, just plain old American. Scotch-Irish. Heinz 57 variety. Mutt. No, I just lived in France. For business reasons.”
“Oh.”
Herb was so nervous about his truck and how it would perform on the highway that his thoughts seemed remote from sex. The truck was big, very big, but it could go no faster than forty-five miles an hour. The motor coughed twice, then lurched back into play. Cars that were backed up behind in the slow lane, preparing to turn off, honked at them. “Fuckin’ bastards! Goddamn rich bitches!” Herb shouted. But at last they reached the long metal shed where arriving goods were stored and an official, not even looking at them because he was talking to another Customs officer, stamped Austin’s form. Herb backed the truck up to the loading dock and wrestled the trunk into the back of the truck. Austin noticed the big, burned hole in the wood floor, through which the pavement was visible. On the way back Herb talked rarely, and then only to the truck.
Once they arrived at the house, he relaxed, smiled. Austin made him a ham sandwich while he showered. Then, once again, he pretended to sleep on the high bed, while Austin knelt between his legs. When Austin glanced up his body, his head was entirely blocked out by his immense, swollen belly. They ate and drank beer and Austin gave him the two hundred dollars, which he’d put loose in his pocket so that he wouldn’t have to display a tempting wallet in front of Herb. They had talked for a while over their beers and the conversation had been bluff but easygoing. Now, however, when Austin paid him, Herb retreated back into sullen servility. Herb would be going off to sleep in his truck, whereas Austin would remain in his big, heated house, presumably awaiting the return of his wife and son. In Herb’s eyes even a family looked like an acquisition beyond his means.
On Thursday night Peter arrived by train from New York and on Friday they drove over to Concord together. Austin was terribly nervous about the meeting with Bob, Henry McVay’s friend. They’d met only once before, in Paris, at one of Henry’s cocktail parties. But there was all the difference in the world between a soirée in Paris and the request of a large personal favor in Concord.
The Inn had so many rooms tacked on that Austin, nearly feverish and out of control with anxiety, was worried that Bob wouldn’t find them. He kept hopping up from their table to make another tour of the Inn—up two steps, down one, racing around and around through all these women with their wide hips in black trousers below hand-knit cardigans, their strong jaws and lined faces framed by glossy, pure white pageboy haircuts.
At last Bob cut through the crowd like a tall ship sailing gently into a harbor full of anchored dinghies, and indeed everyone bobbed in his wake, gawking at this elegant country gentleman, so poised, so quietly virile. Austin of course noticed right away that Bob appeared fractionally less effusive than he had been in Paris, as though steeling himself to refuse the favor Austin would ask.
They ordered iced tea although it was cold and windy ou
tside. The waitress served them crusty, steamy chicken potpie. Peter said, “My family lives here in Concord. When I was a kid I’d do grave rubbings and sell them to the tourists. And I’d take them out to Walden Pond.”
They chit-chatted during the meal, as businessmen do, and after the dishes were cleared Austin said, smiling easily, as though it were all a matter of just a detail between gentlemen, “We’re so grateful you’re willing to sign this form for us.”
“Well, what is it exactly?” Bob asked, looking at his watch. He had an appointment with his client.
Austin explained as quickly and as offhandedly as possible that Bob and Phil would need to sign the document (it’s right here!) promising to hire Julien to help them submit plans for major French building competitions.
Bob read through everything, his face suddenly as severe as that of his Puritan preacher forefather, the famous one who’d known Emerson and who’d been photographed by Brady, his body held in place against blurring by scarcely visible metal clamps. Here, in this Inn, which had been reconstructed, rewired, redecorated countless times, Bob’s expression was the only authentic Concord antique, a genuine heirloom. At last he said in a voice that was noticeably softer, “I’d like a Xerox of this.”
“No problem!” Austin shrieked, grabbing the paper out of his hands and racing to the restaurant’s hostess, then, following her directions, running coatless down the street to the copy shop two blocks away. Within ten minutes he was back, red-faced, panting. He was sorry to appear so desperate—that might scare Bob off. In fact, he was convinced Bob was going to refuse, which of course was the prudent thing to do.