The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Two weeks later Christine called back to say she was negative and the baby would be safe. Now that she was relieved about her own future she had the leisure to become concerned about Julien’s. He said, “My future? Six months of it. I’ve had it.” But then he laughed and said, “We’re going to buy a dog.”

  During the academic exam period in early February, which came soon after Julien’s arrival in Providence, they hopped a small plane to New York through a storm (Julien was airsick all the way and vomited three paper sacks full). At La Guardia they met Peter and flew in a 747 to Miami and from there they took yet another flight to Cancún in the Yucatán. Originally Austin and Julien were going to travel to Mexico alone, as a couple, to relax after the ordeal with the Immigration authorities and Julien’s discovery of his HIV status. But Peter had been so palpably hurt that Austin had felt bad. “Are you going to push me out of your life now that Julien is finally by your side again?”

  Their hotel, which looked as though it had just opened, loomed over the beach, balcony after balcony. On each balcony a hot tub bubbled and steamed, lit from within.

  Most of the rooms were dark and empty and the few tourists in the lobby were speaking French Canadian. A mile inland tiny Mayans with silky black hair and wizened faces were sitting and sweating in the dark, eating tortillas in a smoky room with a beaten earth floor. Along the coast these massive hotels, which looked like battle stations that had just landed from alien solar systems, throbbed with air-conditioning and glittered with lights beyond open ditches smelling of sewage. A few of the Mayans in uniform crept timidly across the vacant lobby wielding brass dustpans and brass-handled brushes, but all of the waiters and bellboys were big, laughing Americans with sideburns and sunburns.

  The next morning Peter drove them in a rented Volkswagen down the coast. It was hot, in the nineties, and he opened his window. Julien, who was in the back seat, said, “Would you mind closing it?”

  “Closing? Why? It’s boiling hot.”

  “I’m not well. I have very delicate … poumons.”

  “Lungs,” Austin translated.

  “The fresh air will do you good,” Peter said. He turned to Austin for a confirming smile, but Austin just raised his eyebrows ambiguously. He wanted to stay out of it. He pointed out the occasional entrances to ranches, marked with unobtrusive hand-painted signs. “Do you think they have cattle? The underbrush is so thick—it’s really a jungle. Why would anyone call this jungle a ranch?”

  Austin kept translating bits and pieces into French, but Julien stared stonily ahead and once Peter made a little click of irritation with his tongue, as though French had been an understandable weakness in Europe but now Julien must stop being indulged.

  Julien was wearing two winter scarves and had his collar turned up. At last, his voice choked with emotion, he said, “I’m asking you once more to close your window. You’re endangering my health.”

  “Why? How?” Peter snapped. “Look, we’re all three positive, and I have AIDS or at least ARC, but if you’re worried that fresh air will cause pneumonia you’re wrong. That’s just some crazy French superstition about drafts. What’s draft in French?”

  Austin stared at his lap and muttered, “Courant d’air.”

  “You told him I’m ill?” Julien spluttered, glaring at Austin. “You promised me you wouldn’t tell him or anyone else.”

  “Look,” Peter said, driving faster and clenching the wheel so hard his gaunt knuckles turned white, “we don’t go in for that secrecy here.”

  “I won’t tell anyone else,” Austin said, “but since we’re all three traveling together for ten days …”

  “Merde!” Julien shouted. “Merde! Austin, you do break la promesse you made me. Do you think I want—” he stretched out his hand toward Peter, toward the back of his head, silvery, the hair thinning—“him to know my life? It’s my life. My death.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Peter said.

  “I won’t say nothing if you closes la fenêtre.”

  “The window,” Austin translated dully.

  “It’s ninety degrees!” Peter wailed in his high, girlish voice.

  Julien put his hands over his ears, lowered his head and kept up a low chant of “Merde, merde, merde, merde….”

  “Close the window, please,” Austin said. “We can open the vents. Close it for now.”

  “Jeez,” Peter grumbled. He rolled it up, nearly to the top, leaving an inch open, however. His face was blotchy red with anger, his jaw set and his chin poking forward.

  They arrived at a luxurious house Austin had rented for two nights. It was part of a gated compound that had its own well-lit, curving suburban streets named in English after North American birds (Robin, Bluebird, Oriole …). It had a food store stocked with Coke and hamburger buns. The only Mayans to be seen were roaming the carefully raked, white sand beach selling ponchos slung over their shoulders. No one bought them. It was too hot for ponchos.

  The main bedroom had one wall, on the sea side, that folded back so that one could sit on the mammoth, sybaritic bed and gaze out at the water, but Julien bolted it shut since he preferred excluding Peter to contemplating the waves (“So childish!” Peter hissed).

  Austin went first with Julien, then, while Julien slept, with Peter for long walks down the beach.

  Julien said, “You promised me. Do you think I want that little girl with his squeaking little voice and his old man’s head and his bird brain to know the details of my personal life? How can you do this to me?”

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea you disliked Peter so much. I would never have—” Austin wanted to say “invited you to the States,” but he said, “—invited you both on the same long trip. As for your secret, you have to realize that we’ve been apart for several weeks and I’ve been frantic about getting you into the States and I’ve been worried about your health. Peter has been my only confidant all this time. He’s my ex-lover, he’s my best friend, he’s very ill with AIDS himself, so of course it seemed natural—”

  “I don’t care. Merde! It’s my life. Once you break your promise you could find another reason just as convincing—to you!—to tell another person, then another.” They sat on the white sand beach and looked out at the evening sky. Julien sighed, smiled slightly, then said, “I’ve seen the sun set over the sea all my life. It’s so strange to think the Atlantic lies to the east of us now and the sun is setting behind us.”

  On his walk with Peter, Austin said, “You’re so used to having your own way all the time, but you and Julien are both brats and one of you has to compromise and adjust a bit, just a—”

  “So it should be me, I guess, who adjusts,” Peter muttered angrily, “since he’s your boyfriend and he’s schtupping you.”

  Austin was shocked by the Yiddish word. Too much New York, he thought.

  Day after day they drove along the coast of the Yucatán, then one afternoon they headed inland to a half-buried Mayan site. When they got out of the car Peter went off in one direction, plunging down a faintly marked path that was being taken back by the jungle, almost visibly. It was hot and humid but the sky was cloudy and the light a dull gray. Lizards shot across the path. Julien had found a pyramid no more than twelve feet high and was sitting on a wide, crumbling step halfway up, his face lifted to the light, his eyes closed. He was posed as if for a photo of the sensitive young man communing with the feathered serpent. Wasn’t that what these Aztecs (or Mayans) worshipped? Perhaps he was daydreaming about human sacrifice, Peter’s.

  Austin felt an unbearable tightening of his shoulders. He didn’t know if he was supposed to follow Peter into the jungle or stay behind here with Julien. They scarcely spoke to one another now beyond the simplest exchanges at the table and even in the domain of politeness things had broken down. Last night Julien, going through the dining-room door before Peter, had muttered, “Pardon.” It was his tenth pardon in half an hour, as though he
wanted to prove that not even his distaste for Peter could make him abandon his aristocratic politeness.

  “I hope you’re not going to say pardon every five minutes for the rest of the trip. It’s not necessary. It’s even very annoying.” The whole dinner was spent in silence except for the weak enthusiasm generated by the headwaiter who made them a flaming dessert and cut the orange peel in a long, unbroken ribbon with a certain sullen flourish.

  In bed Julien had hissed to Austin, “Merde, he can’t force me to give up my manners. I’m sorry, but that’s the way my mother brought me up. That’s who I am.”

  Austin had wanted to say, “We were all brought up only too well, Peter as a little Concord patriarch, me as fallen Virginia gentry, you as a member of the petite noblesse of Nancy. Perhaps one of us would be a bit more accommodating if only he felt a jot less entitled.” But Julien was incapable of understanding the concept of an “American aristocracy” and had once sneered and guffawed when he’d heard those two words pronounced together.

  Now as Austin stood in the jungle he wished he could be torn in two so that one part could joke with Peter, jostle against him, talk like a speedy but flaky kid about the “neat” ruins, and the other part could muse with the more romantic, serious Julien over the evanescence of human glory.

  Neither of them would accommodate the other. Peter suspected but hadn’t fully grasped that he no longer ruled over Austin. In the past other guys had gone rapidly through Austin’s life and, like Little Julien, had maintained a distance and didn’t want to spend all their time with him. Peter imagined he reigned over the harem if not always over the sultan’s affections.

  But even if Peter were to understand that things had changed, that he’d made himself unwelcome, nevertheless he was so given to collecting and preserving grievances, he so relished and resented his martyrdom, that he’d simply go off bewailing the injustice of it all rather than try to repair the damage. His horror stories about Mexico would soon enough provide him with choice dialogue in his finest soap opera performance ever. The pity, Austin thought, is that a soap, like life, is fated to go on and on. Even the most zealous fans forget earlier episodes and eventually people stop objecting when one actress replaces another in the same role.

  That night they stayed in a peaceful, nearly deserted hotel built around a pool on which bright bougainvillea blossoms floated, like little gifts for the dead. Even after the sun had set and the sky had darkened with tropical speed, the purple flowers glowed with more and more intensity, as though they were paper ships lit by candles within. The rooms were cool and austere, monks’ cells—high plaster walls, unstained but varnished wood desk, door, ceiling, worn-down terracotta tiles, scrubbed so clean the grouting shone bone-white around them in squares that seemed to advance in the quickly dying light, a bed raised high on spindly metal legs and covered with mosquito netting floating like a bridal veil down from a gathered point on the ceiling. The air smelled of grilled corn. Outside, a dog barked in the humble village between the hotel and the archaeological site.

  Austin and Julien lay in the thickening darkness side by side on the bed that squeaked every time they moved. The dog barked with the sort of persistence that Austin had devoted to crying when he was a child.

  Julien said, “This is a nightmare. This is the worst trip of my life.”

  “I’m sorry,” Austin said. “It’s pretty terrible for me, too. You and Peter are the two people I care for the most—”

  “Well, I don’t care for him. I just hope I have the satisfaction of seeing him die before I do.”

  Austin was stunned. He lay in the windless night that had finally descended over them and stared out through the gauze mosquito netting at the dark room. It felt almost as though a cone of ether were being pressed down over him, as though he might swoon into a sleep, never to awaken.

  Austin wanted to die. He’d always half-believed he could charm anyone into doing anything, but Julien’s hatred for Peter now appeared to be unshakable. Peter was lying in his room down the tiled corridor that was open on one side to the big onyx-smooth slab of the pool, scummed with its wilting flowers. Peter was frail and coughing, spindly, fragile, even breakable, yet his spirit was strong, blazing, stubborn. He could, if happy and relaxed, cock his head to one side, smile with his blurred smile and let his eyes wander, embarrassed and tender, somewhere along the floorboards up to the chair rail. But if he was vexed he could become angry and righteous as a patriarch and his new leanness, as well as the white whiteness of his hair, only made him blaze all the more indignantly as he stared up at the ceiling in exasperation.

  Here was Austin, entering his fifties, making a new start in life back in America, infected but healthy, even chubby, and he had invited along Peter and Julien, both years younger than he but much more immediately endangered. He wondered if he’d infected both of them—it was certainly possible. Maybe his virus was benign to him but lethal to everyone else.

  Right now he couldn’t bear the tension. If only one of them were a bit more diplomatic! Austin had spoiled Peter for so many years, always indulging him, reassuring him of his love, that now, as a result, he was incapable of any self-restraint—

  No, Austin wasn’t being fair. Poor Peter had no one except Austin to look after him now that he was approaching death. They’d made a pact, not sworn in blood but in time, a more solemn fluid, to look after each other. But now Austin was reneging—not because Julien was “schtupping” him (he wasn’t)—but because he feared he’d been the one to infect Julien. Austin was acting out of guilt.

  And Austin couldn’t forget that soon after they’d first met, Julien had promised to nurse Austin all the way through to the end. Back then Julien had just assumed he himself was negative.

  There was nothing Austin could do.

  In the silence broken only by the dog’s tireless barking, Julien said, “Merde! I haven’t gone through all this just to share every waking moment with this stupid—he is stupid, you know. Profoundly stupid. Cretinous. I’ve made every effort to be polite, but now he’s called even that into question. Does he think I want to emulate his quacking voice, his rudeness, his stupid shopgirl talk?”

  Austin laughed experimentally and said, “There, there,” as though he were a mother calming down an angry child, but the tone irritated Julien even more, who whispered, in the perfect blackness of this high-ceilinged room, “You can see him all you want but he can’t come to our house.”

  “That would break his heart.”

  “Well, he’s breaking my balls.”

  Austin wished he’d never met Julien. He wished he’d devoted himself with more generosity to Peter during the last year and returned to New York then, twelve months ago. If he’d obeyed his contract with Peter to the letter he would never have had this tragic dalliance and he wouldn’t be facing this lacerating dilemma now.

  Maybe because his father had been an alcoholic, given to alternating hug fests and the accelerating drums of rage, Austin had never trusted people who didn’t possess what he called “a court of higher appeals.” People who mainlined passion scared him. He wanted to be able, as a last resort, to call on some cool, unfluctuating sense of justice in them.

  Maybe Austin was now too afraid of losing Julien to love him. Maybe he preferred to think of him as a charge, a foreign visitor, even a patient, rather than as a lover. People praised Austin for the “maturity” that had allowed him to survive the deaths by AIDS of so many friends, but he knew that the minute someone became ill he began, secretly, to withdraw larger and larger sums of love from that person’s account. Oh, Austin went on being kind and confiding and amusing, but he no longer counted on that person for anything except gratitude.

  Not that things were so clear with Julien. He loved Julien—and he certainly resented him.

  Julien didn’t have a court of higher appeals. He had so many other qualities—loyalty, self-respect, charm, a taste for beauty, vividness, good manne
rs—but he had no more a sense of justice than he had a sense of humor. Perhaps a sense of justice was the gift of Protestants, those people who set themselves up as universal legislators for humanity. In a Catholic country like France where the state did everything for its citizens, they were never called on to be fair or fine. They could alternate between being fiercely partisan or bovinely passive.

  When they were driving the next day through the countryside toward Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, Austin was musing in the tense silence within the Volkswagen about Catholics and Protestants in France. This led him to think about André Gide. He recalled that when Gide betrayed his wife Madeleine by staying away from her too long with a boy, the first boy he was truly in love with, she took her revenge by burning all his letters to her. Gide had always delivered himself on the page to her fully and intimately, and he’d counted on assembling those letters into his finest book. But she burned them, acting like a woman in a Greek tragedy, knowing that in doing so she was committing the worst crime imaginable against a writer. With this one act she evened the score and needed never to talk about her grievances.

  That was it! he thought. He would act like Madeleine Gide. This half-effaced memory of what a woman had done sixty years earlier would guide him now. Austin decided that if he never ever made love to Julien again this absence of physical affection would mark the exact spot where he refused to accept Julien’s cruelty toward Peter. Julien might puzzle over Austin’s coldness but he couldn’t ask him why he was being so distant. Julien was too discreet or too proud to mention it. He might think it was because he’d lost his looks or Austin’s love, but he’d never know and Austin would never tell him why. Or he might think that by becoming positive he, illogically, was scaring Austin off. If Austin made this one resolve he wouldn’t need to reproach Julien or even say how appalled he was by his lack of magnanimity. No, Austin could go on being pleasant, kind, even loving to Julien. Obviously he couldn’t abandon Julien now, nor would he forgive himself if they lived together with a palpable hostility between them year after year, or however long it would take. They could sleep side by side, hug, spoon, kiss, but everything must remain familial.