by Edmund White
But a day later Bob phoned and said, “I don’t really like doing this, since it might jeopardize our business if we’re ever investigated, but Henry asked us to help out and Phil and I are incapable of refusing him anything.”
When Austin called Julien in Paris to tell him the good news, Julien’s voice sounded very small. Austin was sitting upstairs in the Providence house.
“What’s wrong?” Austin asked.
“It’s just that—I talked to the doctor at the Hôpital Saint-Louis today and he wants to redo my tests, but he says they’re not very promising.”
“He thinks you’re positive?”
“Not just positive, but my T-cells are way down, just above one hundred.”
“A thousand, you mean. Normal is one thousand.”
“No,” Julien said, irritated, frightened. “No.”
“But I don’t see—”
“How many do you have? How many T-cells.”
“Seven hundred,” Austin said. “Something like that.”
“I guess you’re lucky. You must be one of the rare lucky ones.”
“My time will come,” Austin said. Austin looked out at an old woman who was walking her dog. She refused to slow up when the dog began sniffing. She dragged him along, angrily, it seemed.
He wanted to ask if the doctor had said how long Julien must have been ill, because suddenly Austin was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. He tried to remember all the times they’d had sex. On perhaps five or six occasions they’d been seriously stoned. Could he have slipped up and touched Julien’s ass with a fingertip which he’d doused in his own precome?
“Well, they need to verify their tests.” He didn’t want to say it would probably all turn out to be a false alarm. He blurted out, “You must be … devastated.”
“No, why?” Julien asked brightly. He had regained his steely poise.
Austin paused, lost in thought, then said, “I wish I could be there with you.” He disliked the sound of his own voice, as if the only problem was sincerity or its convincing simulacrum.
Austin had rented a room in a gay guest house in Montréal, and when they arrived a week later, at the end of January, the neighborhood of two-story turn-of-the-century buildings looked like the dreary outskirts of Milwaukee, not the “fun” city he’d heard so much about. The snow on the sidewalks had melted and refrozen several times until it appeared glazed and dirty and nibbled from within, as if by arctic termites. Julien was repelled by the manager, a short, tattooed, bald Munchkin with a handlebar mustache who smelled of garlic, and by his young, willowy boyfriend, who slumped to hide his height and who constantly feigned amazement because someone must have told him once that his eyes were more attractive when wide with wonder.
“Why do we have to stay here?” Julien asked. Guiltily, Austin realized that he’d always chosen gay hotels, no matter how sordid, out of a fear that he and his kind would not be welcome elsewhere and a prejudice that with gays he’d be closer to “the action,” even though now the clubs opened only after his bedtime and if he could get past the doorman he’d be shunned by the young clientele. Austin had a lover, a married bisexual who detested most gays, certainly those who lived within the ghetto.
Austin had heard so much about the Gallic “charm” of Montréal that he was shocked to see that it was just one more medium-sized North American city with tall buildings, elevated highways, neon, a rusting port and outlying miles of small, nearly identical houses. Carefully preserved, like the remains of a saint in a crystal coffin at the center of a modern brick church, was the historic district with its narrow streets and antique stores and imposing Hôtel-Dieu. The cathedral, Notre-Dame, had a glowing, starry blue ceiling; it seemed the home of a church entirely devoted to the cult of the Virgin. God the Father was nowhere to be seen and Christ only as a child and then only to picture Mary at work as the Blessed Mother.
Julien had cut his hair penitentially short; he’d also let his beard grow an inch long and the effect was hearty, masculine, in keeping with the swirls of snow that kept rising, curiously, through the lamp light, as though snow were steam. He wore a knit, blue-black merchant-marine cap, which he could roll down over his ears when he and Austin went out walking, and fleece-lined gloves which hung straight down from his shoulders as if weighted.
He wanted to see Indians, which made Austin cringe, since he’d already been through all this with French friends in America. He’d taken them to a housing development near Albuquerque and cruised slowly past the shoddy bungalows. They’d caught a glimpse of a paunchy middle-aged man in jeans and T-shirt and had seen some kids coming out of school laughing and shoving each other. One of the French tourists had turned big sad eyes, confused, toward Austin, sprouted two fingers behind his head like feathers and made a slow, mournful war whoop with the other hand fluttering over his silent mouth. Austin, unsmilingly, had shaken his head firmly. “Non?” the disappointed tourist had asked.
“Non,” Austin had said.
Today it was the same story, although on the “reservation,” a colorless suburb, someone at the filling station directed them to a small factory where Indians were making snowshoes (raquettes). The wet, varnished wood, careening past on an assembly line, rose up into a windowless loft where the shoes were unloaded and left to cure. An old guy, who had one blind eye that had turned blue, showed them around; Julien was elaborately polite to him, as if to make up for centuries of oppression and to mark the difference between a liberal Frenchman and racist North Americans. Everything smelled of turpentine.
The following weekend Julien was waiting for Austin at the airport. “I can’t bear this city another second,” he said. “Those stupid fags at the guest house are planted every waking hour in front of the television. And they hate me because I speak normal French, not their ghastly, sing-song joual. In Paris everyone says how open and kind the Canadians are, but they’re not—they’re Catholic fanatics, they detest English-speaking Canadians, all Americans, all real French people, and the only things they like are their inedible saucisses de Francfort. Anybody who likes frankfurters, as my father says, has never visited the factory.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Sitting in my room and thinking.”
“About what?”
“About how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. I called my doctor in Paris. He had the results of the second test. It’s certain: I am infected. And my counts are even lower—ninety-five.”
Austin had a strong urge to turn on the car radio, to tune in the loudest possible rock music. He wanted to say, “Oh, but T-cells go up and down, most doctors pay no attention to them,” but he knew that was a lie Julien wouldn’t believe.
“Anyway,” Julien said, “let’s just drive north to Québec City.”
Julien was the worst driver Austin had ever known but now, instead of cringing at every misjudgment or infringement, Austin welcomed the heightened sense of danger, of lost control.
Soon they were on the highway in the big new American rental car. It glowed and bubbled in the dark like a jukebox. Snow began to fall so thick that it created in the beams of their car lights a rippling white banner. Cars descending from the north crept past, tiny under thick white carapaces. The radio warned of snowstorms, but Julien and Austin were too excited to pay any attention. For so long they’d been hemmed in by legal restrictions, for so long almost everything they’d done had been according to a schedule or to advance their interests, for so long they’d sat in dim rooms feeling alone and scared that now they surrendered to a surge of energy, a loud, boyish joy, archaic, rude. “Yes!” Austin shouted, pushing half his body out the window and giving a power salute to the elements.
Soon the snow was falling so fast and heavy that they could no longer see the road or the place where their lane spilled over onto the gravel embankment. Austin got out of the car and walked ahead, locating the gravel edge with his steps. Julien drove the c
ar slowly, following Austin. After twenty minutes of inching along, Austin on foot and Julien behind the wheel, they were overtaken by a team of snow-plows, wheeling red and yellow lights and sweeping both lanes clear. They followed in the path of the plows, their radio station consecrated to Motown’s greatest hits, which they turned up louder and louder. Julien—his face bright under his knit cap and his smile all the whiter framed by his beard coming in so black and full—laughed and looked younger and happier. He was still just a young guy, just twenty-eight, and all this talk of dying seemed suddenly pretty abstract. The music was so loud they couldn’t talk but they kept looking at each other, their smiles cinematic in the whirling brilliance of the plow lights. Austin decided they should never talk about AIDS; it was an abstract thing that would never take hold if they ignored it.
Around ten o’clock they entered Québec at the height of its winter carnival. A parade of little kids tootling on small, one-note trumpets marched past in red parkas. People were selling “caribous,” a hot mulled drink, and crowds surged into and out of bars, which were covered with tiny, twinkling lights, and carried off plastic cups. Floats rolled down the steep, stony streets—here was a Styrofoam Asterix with his pals in striped blue and white trousers, all wearing blond, drooping mustaches and silver helmets, seated on a papier-mâché camel, heading across the desert away from an onion-domed palace toward—well, the sign read “GAULE CMX. KM.”
The buildings, as best they could see by the electrically wired gas lamps, were all constructed of stone from which protruded wooden window frames that housed small panes, frosted over. Icicles dangled from the gutters and one long icicle even hung from Snoopy’s giant cheek as he glided past on a float.
Julien’s face lit up from within. His eyes sparkled, even his skin shone in the flash of lights and cameras, and there was something solid in his bearing as they threaded their way just beyond the city’s old fortifications. All around them were giant ice sculptures carved and molded by artists from every arctic land, including Siberia and Iceland—ten-foot-high ice tables and chairs, a bathtub-sized ice replica of the Queen’s crown, an ice ski resort complete with ice lodges and ice figures descending icy slopes.
They wandered through the streets, getting drunk on caribous. The little kids, no longer marching, blew their trumpets at random and laughed. All the picturesque guest houses were full but they found a room in a twelve-story modern tower outside the gates and from their balcony they could look down on the entire town twinkling with fairy lights as whole families, cocooned in their matching quilted down coats, moved like gaudy, segmented caterpillars across the white streets under a sumptuous black sky.
Chapter Twelve
After that happy weekend in Québec City, Julien flew home to Paris. There, three weeks later, he received his American papers and once again headed for Boston. Austin met him at the airport—this hateful prison he knew too well—and drove him in the Sirocco to Providence. Julien was fascinated by the big, wooden houses; he said, “In Paris there were so many fires in the Middle Ages that wood was made illegal. Here, if things aren’t wood they’re made of brick, but back home brick isn’t considered a noble material, although at the time of Louis XIII it had a brief fad. No, for us stone is the only acceptable material, the only noble material.”
Austin said, “That’s because the French were building for the centuries to come. Americans once believed in the future, but that was two hundred years ago and they were too poor to build anything big and ambitious.”
Julien added pleasantly, “You have to be religious to build for the future.” He was struck—even disconcerted—by the big lawns that flowed over from one house to the next with no walls to fence off each property; this lack of wariness seemed unnatural to him.
He had nothing but contempt for the aesthetic philosopher’s house, which he saw as jerrybuilt and filled with junk. He was appalled by the “formal” dining room with its ten chairs placed symmetrically around the oak table. He decided if things weren’t so symmetrical they’d already be better. He took up the frightening orange rug and then pushed the table against one wall.
“But, Julien, you’re destroying the parquet!” Austin shouted. “You’ve gouged it—look!” He could already picture the philosopher’s bill for damages.
“Parquet? These are just slats (lattes).”
Austin tried to convince Julien that this ugly store-bought furniture was expensive in America and that even if he held it in contempt it was obviously precious to the professor who, after all, was an aesthetician.
Julien just snorted and assured Austin that no one could conceivably have reflected even an instant on this odious decor. He banished several armchairs to the dank, sooty basement, stabbed wildly at the stereo controls until he’d broken something, even attempted to take down Mrs. Professor’s lace pictures but discovered that their frames were screwed into the wall and ended up covering them with brown wrapping paper.
Through a rich friend of Austin’s they’d been lined up with the leading AIDS specialist in New Haven. Julien drove them into the city, though he cursed the low speed limit and the inadequate or misleading road signs.
Dr. Goldstein’s AIDS research laboratory had received a major gift from Austin’s friend and so he was extremely deferential, though he would have been warm in any event because he was that kind of guy. Tall, slim, sixty, he told them that he swam a mile every morning at six, that he taught at Yale, that he’d just come back from Israel, where he’d lectured and toured with his son. He pointed to a photo of his son in which the kid was dressed in a dark suit with an embroidered prayer shawl around his shoulders and a white yarmulke hairpinned in place.
He became more and more expansive and Austin’s powers as a simultaneous interpreter were put to the test. Julien never once looked at Austin and even seemed annoyed by his translating, as though he were interrupting. He nodded and smiled and drank in everything the great man was saying and even murmured, “Merci, Docteur, merci infiniment.”
When the conversation devolved toward AIDS, Dr. Goldstein gave them a tour of his lab, which involved twenty technicians at work on different floors of the hospital, including one sterile zone where the technicians had to be gloved, masked and even vacuumed clean on the way in. On the way out their paper clothes, once shed, were put into sealed coffins and their street clothes and especially their shoes were meticulously sterilized.
Austin in all fairness couldn’t imagine how the doctor could be more human, attentive or informative; maybe Austin resented him only because Julien was so obviously under his spell. He then examined them separately. When Austin had stripped off all his clothes, the doctor looked him up and down and said, “A fine figure of a man,” which surprised Austin, since he was convinced he was nothing but a collection of flaws, starting with his age.
He spent much more time with Julien, then brought them both back to his office for a final chat. “Do you have health insurance?” he asked Julien.
“No. I—no.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.”
“Merci infiniment.”
“Think nothing of it. You know, AIDS is no longer the death sentence—”
“Le SIDA n’est plus la condamnation à mort que c’était autrefois,” Austin whispered as unobtrusively as possible.
“Ah, non? Tiens,” Julien said coolly, as though he’d just learned a surprising if incidental fact.
Dr. Goldstein talked about the important work that was being done, not just in his own laboratory but even (here he smiled ecumenically) at the Institut Pasteur.
“Pasteur,” Julien said, nodding with pleasure in advance of Austin’s translation.
“Today we think of AIDS as a serious but by no means necessarily fatal disease, like diabetes.”
Austin translated the words, but in his heart he knew they were false.
Dr. Goldstein prescribed AZT for Julien as well as a Pentamadine i
nhalation every two weeks as a prophylaxis against the kind of galloping pneumonia associated with AIDS. Julien was sent off to have a blood sample taken. While they were waiting Austin asked, “Don’t you think Julien must tell his ex-wife that he’s positive?”
“Yes, of course.”
“She’s pregnant,” Austin said. “Presumably not by Julien. At least she says it’s by someone else.” He paused. “But he and she have … made love until very recently.” Austin wasn’t sure at all of what he was saying. “Is there a chance I might be the one who infected Julien?”
“Yes,” Dr. Goldstein said. “An extremely remote one.”
On the way home Julien said, “I feel so much better. He’s a great man, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He agrees with me you should phone Christine.”
“I will. Of course. I must.” He drove silently for a while, mile after mile of forest scrolling past them on the highway. “It’s just very difficult.”
“Of course it is.” Austin realized he’d never seen Julien so ill at ease. Usually he’d just push a situation aside, scornfully, if it made him feel guilty; certainly he never admitted he might be wrong or have endangered someone else.
Now he squirmed and smiled as he spoke into the telephone, said “Oui” solemnly, many times, lowering his head and voice, started to defend himself, then interrupted his high-pitched objection and sighed, “You’re right. Of course. You’re perfectly right.” When he hung up he said, “She’s very worried about little Allegra. If she’s positive she may try to abort, even though she’s in the second trimester.” He didn’t eat dinner and went to bed early. When Austin tiptoed into the bedroom three hours later he saw the pale street light reflected in his open eyes. He blinked. Austin left quietly and slept in another room.