by Edmund White
Once he’d made that decision he slept peacefully.
Chapter Thirteen
When they were back in Providence, Julien wanted to find work as an architect, but he and Austin quickly discovered that the Northeast was in the grip of a recession, that unemployment in general was high and nowhere more so than in the building trades. In every office architects were being let go. Austin thought, How stupid we are. How out of touch. Anyone else would have known about the economy or found out about it before moving. All this anguish over Julien’s work visa was pointless. He’s never going to be able to work.
Through Elle Déco Austin lined up a story on a prominent Israeli architect who had an immense atelier in an old brick factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The architect walked them through his many projects, past the impressive models, and touched their shoulders with warmth and politeness as he guided them around corners. But later, as they sat in his office, he explained that he had no American projects and was able to keep his large staff on thanks only to his foreign commissions. But even for him, the most successful architect in the region, the immediate future looked grim.
Through that long cold February and March Julien stayed in bed in a silent, shaded room. It was as though he’d decided that if he expended the least amount of energy possible, the virus would become drowsy, dormant.
Or perhaps he was just depressed.
He found something that resembled a café a few blocks from campus and he’d go there in the afternoon after an elaborate toilette. He’d arrive in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a coat he wore over many layers—a waistcoat, a shirt, a T-shirt and his aquamarine silk scarf from Ethiopia decorated with gold hunting horns. He would sit at a corner table, sipping his coffee and sketching the people around him or reading a two-day-old copy of Le Monde.
But more often than not when Austin would come home from art school he’d find Julien stretched out in bed, lying on his back like a gisant, a recumbent figure on a tomb. He was motionless, as though under a mud pack or in a trance.
“Are you sleeping?” Austin would whisper.
Sometimes Julien wouldn’t respond, even though his eyelids would always flicker. Occasionally he’d say in a soft voice, “I’m resting.”
After years of idleness—or rather undisciplined bursts of activity that followed his whims alone, alternating with naps and squalid bouts of TV watching—Austin was overwhelmed by the demands of teaching. He had to prepare two two-hour lectures every week. Other professors, he found out, filled the time by raising easy-to-answer questions and calling on students to hazard an opinion, but Austin couldn’t remember their names and he was afraid of their feminist denunciations. He had spent so many years entertaining his young friends in Paris that he now confused the classroom with a dinner party, feared boring his “guests” and hopped lightly, amusingly, from one topic to another. He spoke so quickly, so glancingly, that he’d exhausted his entire knowledge about French furniture in the first class, at least every general idea that could be turned into a snappy summary or droll anecdote.
Of course he remembered that his own professors thirty years ago had been foully dull, had reeked of pedantry, had said everything twice and filled up blackboards by jotting down at random a few of the nouns they’d happened to say. They’d called on students solely to catch them napping or daydreaming. Down time hadn’t troubled them in the least. The sweating, squirming kids stammered and struggled to get a word out while the teacher walked about predatorily, rapidly thrumming his fingertips together. Those teachers hadn’t had friends the age of their students and they never worried about entertaining them or even winning them over—that was long before the era when students evaluated their professors at the end of the semester.
Exhausted, in a panic, squeezed in behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Sirocco, Austin would come home trailing student papers and lecture notes to find Julien lying in bed, the six grandfather clocks in the house ringing out the hour in slight discrepancy. Julien, like any good French husband, expected two hot meals on the table every day, each with a starter, a main course, a cheese and a sweet. And he wanted Austin to do the shopping every day; he refused to eat anything frozen. Luckily, in the first few weeks they were in Providence, a luxury supermarket opened that sold nothing but organic food. They dubbed it “The Healthy” (Le Sain) as opposed to the big chain store, “The Unhealthy” (Le Malsain), where they had to go for white flour, white sugar, white rice—in fact, anything white. The Healthy they liked not because the products were pesticide-free but because they had a bit of flavor. The apples weren’t brightly lacquered, one could hope that someday the cheeses might ripen, the fish was fresh, the chickens had been allowed to run through a barnyard at least once.
Julien stopped drinking and Austin followed suit. From one day to the next they became entirely sober. At first Austin had a hard time sleeping without wine, but after two weeks he was sleeping more profoundly than at any time since childhood. So well that he had the impression he was never fully awake. His vision began to cloud up with floaters, not just vagrant specks but larger, roiling bits of milky tapioca that swirled as restlessly as the snow in the paperweights Joséphine collected. If he’d sit down to prepare a lecture (and that was virtually all he ever did when he wasn’t cooking) the white paper boiled and sank away as though seen through a rain-speckled window. His half-asleep brain seemed no better than his eyes. Feeble, unfocused impressions floated by, leaving him untouched. Silly thoughts loomed closer and waned, all of them fuzzy around the edges as though his mental prescription needed to be revised, sharpened. He had more and more difficulty remembering names—but those lapses he blamed not so much on age as on living, more than ever, in two languages at once. Every thought, every reference, every experience had to be filed away (and retrieved, even if with difficulty) in French and English—oh, sometimes his head ached from the effort. Even his research for his lectures (and for his long delayed and now indefinitely deferred book) was invariably in French, which he had to translate instantaneously.
His students, he discovered, were interested in something they called “theory,” some post-structuralist (or had they said “postmodernist”) gobbledygook. One guy—who was studying at Brown but who’d signed up for his course—had said, “I’m not really thrilled to be wading into all this detail in your class. I’m a semiotics major and I’ve had five semesters of theory—Topology and Topos in Proust was last semester.”
“Oh, I love Proust,” Austin gushed. “Don’t you? That scene in which Charlus becomes King Lear—”
“Uh, I’ve never read Proust, actually, but I’ve read Derrida, Sontag and Gérard Genette on Proust.”
“Sontag?”
“Maybe that was Barthes. I took a course on Barthes’s S/Z, too, and that was way excellent.”
“So you were expecting to learn the semiotics of furniture from me?” Austin asked with acid charm, though the student missed the edge.
“Yeah … or, you know, deconstruct furniture….”
“I’m afraid I’m only interested in how it was constructed.”
“I figured as much. Guess I’m going to hafta drop the course.”
Several other students followed suit. Austin realized that now he’d never be offered a permanent position. He’d lived abroad too long in a chatty, self-deprecating milieu in which even the most profound knowledge had to be worn lightly. His students, he thought, had picked up a smattering of French thought but nothing of salon manners. In America, he discovered, people believed what they were told. When Truman Capote (or Frank Sinatra) had said, “I’m the greatest living stylist,” everyone in the States went on repeating this bizarre self-promotion for the rest of time. Or when Austin said, “I’m not used to simplifying my humble scraps of knowledge into a few generalizations for eighteen year olds,” a colleague, nodding reproachfully, said, “Oh, so you don’t know that much about your field? You did too much facile journalism ov
er the years, I guess.” Austin had no doubt that he and two French fruits he knew who worked for Didier Aaron, the antiquaire, were in fact the only three people in the world who could date and authenticate eighteenth-century French furniture with absolute authority—but he couldn’t make that claim for himself, now could he? In France enough people knew something about his subject to be able to recognize his perfect expertise, but in America the whole field was too exotic to measure.
His friend, the beringed bearded potter, said over coffee, “These really are the last days of civilization.”
“People have been saying that all my life,” Austin objected with a smile.
“And people were right. Things were going from bad to worse and now they have arrived at worst. These kids never read anything. They wouldn’t even know which end the book opens at. If you suggest they look at a reference work they smile at you with indulgence, as though you’d suggested they consult an astrolabe or a map of phrenological bumps.”
“And what is all this about theory?”
“Of course these theories are all such rubbish that not even their professors could say what they mean. They just throw abracadabras in each other’s teeth and wait to see if it goes down—or passes, as my mother used to say about hard-to-digest food. Naturally they can’t read French, they don’t bother to read any of what they quaintly call texts … and theory of the French sort is far from the most harmful kind. Where it’s really lethal is when it touches on feminism or queer theory.”
“I never needed to theorize about being queer,” Austin said, batting his eyes.
“Don’t for a moment imagine that the fact you actually are queer gives you a leg up. In fact for most of them the idea that their professor is a sexually active being amounts to an admission of rape or at best sexual harassment. How’s your own case going?”
“Well, I did exactly as you suggested. I organized a study club devoted to a feminist re-examination of eighteenth-century taste—”
“And no one came?”
“Well, one woman came.”
“Tough luck. But she’ll desist soon enough; they don’t like to do anything singly. Once they’ve looked you in the eye they get this uncomfortable inkling that you might be a human being, too, which queers all their theories.”
Julien drove them to New Haven at the end of March for his half-hour Pentamadine spray session, a treatment to prevent PCP, the “gay pneumonia.” Dr. Goldstein also examined them both. To Austin he said, “Have you noticed anything about your weight?”
“Uh, no, not exactly.”
“You’ve put on thirty pounds in two months. And you know at your age it may never come off again.”
“In Paris I didn’t have a car and here there are such big servings—”
“No portion control,” Dr. Goldstein nodded.
“And Julien likes big French meals but then he never eats anything and I end up taking seconds and thirds. Portion control be damned!”
Dr. Goldstein didn’t smile. He said, “I swim a mile every morning at six in the university pool.”
And read three books by noon and have two perfect orgasms to your wife’s four by your nine o’clock bedtime, Austin thought bitterly. Oh, and treat two hundred sick fags.
On the way home, as the dark forest of evergreens rolled past, Austin thought, I’m fat so that I won’t be tempted to have sex with anyone else. America has neutered me. No, I’ve done it to myself.
Julien said, “Do you think I’ve lost my looks?”
“Not at all. You look exactly the same. Even better. More rested. Why?”
“Because when I go to the café no one ever looks at me. Nor on the street.”
“In America only New Yorkers cruise each other. They have a special dispensation. In any other American city it’s a Federal offense.” Austin had never really thought about it before, but of course it was true. This lack of lust or at least inquisitiveness meant that no one expected anything to happen on an American street, except rape or murder.
In Paris people thought you might be a celebrity or a connection or a possible fuck—or at the very least they hoped to borrow a few fashion hints from you. In the métro Austin had seen a seated girl slip her phone number to a standing man. In a queue hands were busy—not such a pleasure for women, perhaps, although Austin had never heard any Frenchwoman complain of it except good-naturedly.
“In France,” Julien said, “we believe in the art of seduction.”
Later when he came to think of that late winter and early spring in Providence, Austin saw the big wood house with its many windows staring out at the leafless trees like Lot looking back at all the still nearly human pillars of salt. He thought of Julien stretched out on his sepulchral bed. He remembered his own frantic sessions late at night as he scribbled down more and more notes for his less and less well-attended courses. He pictured Julien, pale and big-eyed, dressed in silks and cashmeres and an intricately tied ascot, descending the wood staircase to the dining room. There he’d taste the asparagus experimentally, holding each stem between his fingertips in the elegant French way while like a true American Austin sawed away at his. In a soft, back-from-the-grave voice Julien would ask him about the day’s adventures (“Of course I don’t have any,” he said, “on a day like today when I didn’t go to the café”).
Julien thought Austin had lost his talent as a “cooker,” as he said in English, and he appeared to find his gossip less spicy than in France; Austin couldn’t make him understand that the local ingredients were inferior. Julien was, of course, quick to concede that everything that happened “over here” was simply material for future anecdotes to be told later around the Paris dinner table. Austin didn’t think of it that way. This wasn’t a half-humorous field trip for him. He was back among his own people. He realized, when they invited the bearded colleague for dinner and the instructor from the Brown French department along with his boyfriend, that in America (at least outside New York) people didn’t feel the Parisian necessity to be “brilliant” in conversation—and Austin’s efforts had a chilling effect on the others. In fact, the table talk kindled only when Austin left the room to slice the free-range turkey. When he returned, he cast everyone into a fit of self-consciousness; he interrupted, he translated, he wheeled out a sure-fire old Paris anecdote that fizzled without provoking any response other than confusion. The professors began to discuss an enemy of theirs, someone who’d chained an undergraduate to a radiator and thrashed him. When the boy had complained to the Dean of Sexual Harassment and Gender Infringement Issues, the professor had impenitently insisted that the boy had “begged for it” and the Department of Humanities had tried to hush everything up since the sadist was a leading Elizabethan scholar—irreplaceable, apparently.
Despite the juicy possibilities of this gossip, the professors didn’t know how to serve it up. They got bogged down in detail, they introduced too many names, and they never told the end. Their main activity was to work up indignation over the minor players. Although the French professor spoke French to Julien over drinks, at the table he reverted to a voluble, joky English and frowned when he caught Austin mistranslating him.
Most nights they were alone and watched TV from the revolving chairs. Since the aesthetics professor specialized in popular culture the TV was state-of-the-art and, as promised, fully loaded with fifty channels. Julien was specially fascinated by the shopping channel—all those ropy, arthritic hands displaying diamond chips, the strange household appliances, the ghastly pantsuits in fabrics that resembled shower curtains. He laughed with his bass rumble.
Julien said, “In France we have only five channels, but here, where you have fifty, people don’t even have the focus of the same few programs to discuss the next day at the office. In France there are a handful of cultural events everyone must know about and discuss—the Goncourt Prize book, the latest Alain Resnais movie, a William Forsythe ballet, a Bob Wilson staging of an oper
a. But here you have so many cities and so few national newspapers—in fact there’s not much press.”
They were going past a kennel in the Massachusetts countryside when Julien begged to stop. They’d already discussed the possibility of buying a dog. Julien picked up a basset hound puppy. “Look how he presses his little pink belly against me. Let’s get him!”
“What will you name him?”
“Ajax. I’ve always wanted a basset. But you wanted a collie, non?”
“Only because I had one as a child. But they’re rather stupid dogs.”
The tiny puppy staggered uneasily about the big, drafty house, stepping on his long ears. Julien was delighted with Ajax; he declared him the most intelligent and affectionate dog who’d ever lived, almost human in his sensitivity.
But he wouldn’t eat. Julien was certain that he’d been weaned too early. “Merde! He’s just a baby! These people are criminals! I’m going to sue them!”
“Spoken like a true American,” Austin said. “You’re learning quickly.”
One of Austin’s students, a girl with a classically beautiful face, red hands and split, over-treated blond hair, came by from time to time. Eleanor had a fascinatingly hoarse voice and a sly, dirty laugh; she laughed all the time as though Austin had just said something ironic and nuanced, although his years of living abroad had made him, on the contrary, wonderfully straightforward—“You’re wicked,” she’d exclaim and point at him with a badly bitten nail. She had a reputation for drugs and lying. She’d dropped out because she was shooting heroin and this semester was her first back in school after a year-long hiatus. Her stories about her father sounded possibly exaggerated. “He’d stolen away a big Mafia type’s girlfriend. Oh, no. Unh-unh. Hello-oh! I mean: please. So, he was, like, with her in some fabulous suite, like, overlooking the Mediterranean, fourth floor up. He was out on the balcony in his cool smoking jacket, like, sipping champagne. Suddenly the girl, like, wasn’t there anymore. She’d, like, vanished. No one ever saw her again. And Dad was suddenly, like, on the sidewalk below—splat!—he’s a hopeless quadriplegic now. That’s how he got into drugs, helping him fight the pain.”