by Edmund White
It was hard for Austin to look mournful about a cliché that had occurred to a figment, but Julien, who couldn’t follow the story but appreciated its setting on the Riviera, smiled with alternating bursts of sympathy and pleasure. He also liked Eleanor (who’d been in the weaving department) because she wore an old Chanel suit and a pillbox hat. Her very high heels, her bare, scratched legs, the soiled suit with the trademark gold buttons (they were sewed on very badly and one was missing), the Jackie Kennedy hat, bobby-pinned into her over-processed hair, her splashed-on Shalimar—oh, even Austin could see it was all supposed to be a big camp, but Julien just assumed this poor misguided American wanted to be chic in the authentic French manner but hadn’t yet mastered a few crucial details. Her grown-up clothes failed to disguise her extreme youth, and her constant tremor. She had a boyfriend—a lean, pasty-faced, long-haired boy who slithered when he entered a room—whom she called “Dybbuk” for some reason. Maybe he was the one who’d infected Eleanor with the idea that lurking under every bland statement was a dangerous steel trap of irony, since he punctuated every burst of mumbled speech with a bass chortle. He painted big scary canvases that were partially burned. Eleanor assured Austin that Dybbuk’s erections were “alabaster hard” since he’d started shooting up. Austin found it hard to believe that such an exhausted youth, who sat whenever he had a chance or just hunkered with his back to a wall if no other resting place presented itself, could manage even the most cursory Play-Doh erection.
Austin liked her because she wasn’t a PC harpy and because she saw him as an equal. She had tidbits of gossip about people they knew, about herself if necessary, and she assumed that Austin’s life (or at least thoughts) must be agreeably scandalous.
Two days after they bought Ajax Eleanor came by and saw the puppy lying mournfully in its wicker nest.
“He hasn’t eaten a bite since he got here,” Austin said. “I’m afraid he’s going to starve to death.”
“Let me handle this,” Eleanor said. She warmed up some milk and sugar and then fed the formula to him with an eyedropper. Suddenly he came back to life, tail wagging, nails slipping and clacking on the linoleum. Julien had tears in his eyes.
“He was weaned too early,” Eleanor said.
“Yes, I am of … agreement,” Julien said loudly. “Mon pauvre petit bébé,” he said to Ajax, cuddling him. “Can he eat something solid?”
“Do you have any turkey?”
“Turkey?”
“Dinde,” Austin translated.
“I’ll drive over to the Healthy, right now.” Julien raced around the house looking for his keys and sunglasses. He dashed back into the kitchen to kiss Eleanor on the forehead.
Ajax never stopped eating after Eleanor, as Julien put it, “opened his appetite.” “That is a woman,” Julien declared. “We men are nothing beside the powerful maternal instinct. Only Woman can save us, civilize us, give us life.”
Nor was Julien ever far from his dog after that. He took him out for long walks. “Jax” would pull on his leash toward the sound of children’s voices. There was a preschool playground nearby and Jax would begin to whine and tug as soon as he heard that constant high hum. The kids would pretend to be scared of him, which was absurd, he was so small; their high-pitched cries would send Jax into ever more vigorous paroxysms of barking and yearning.
When they’d come home Julien would recount their adventures (“An old lady came down off her porch and offered him raw hamburger, but I told her he’d just been fed. Ajax was furious with me, but you can’t be too cautious”). Julien treated Jax as an invalid, though one who’d made a splendid recovery. He’d wash his ears, especially the tips which had dragged through the dust. He loved his paws and marveled over their four-leaf-clover pads. “Look at his giant curving nails, he’s like a pterodactyl. He’s a very primitive animal, one of the very first dogs.” On the first sunny day, though it was still cool, Julien took his nap with Ajax in a big ecru hammock they’d brought back from Mexico. Austin took pictures of a dozing Julien and a wideawake Ajax peering out over the taut fabric.
They visited the vet for vaccinations and heart-worm pills. “Heart-worm” was the one English word calculated to defeat Julien (since it contained an initial aspirated h, an unfamiliar o, two hard r’s and too many other strong consonants in strange places), but he said it often out of anxiety. Ajax was outfitted with a thick, metal-studded leather collar to which an ID tag was attached giving their address and phone number. Julien said it was a very “butch” collar; Austin was surprised he knew the word and wondered if he’d learned it from a gay American.
The very next day Julien was walking in the woods with Ajax off the leash when the puppy heard the cry of children and took off like a bolt. Julien ran as quickly as possible after him but Ajax had soon outpaced him. By the time a panting Julien came jogging up to the playground, Jax had terrorized all the little kids. He would run toward them, jumping up on them, which would set them off in spasms of screams. He would then become all the more excited, turning and turning, looking for new playmates. As he wheeled around, his protruding tongue spattered the children with drops of saliva. His eyes were intelligent but vulnerable; his mouth appeared to be smiling. A teacher had come out with a broom to drive him away. Julien intervened and dragged Jax off on the leash. He was spluttering with rage against the sadistic teacher, but he hadn’t known how to denounce her in English.
“Pauvrepetite bête,” Julien crooned to an exhausted Jax when they were back home. He wrapped the dog in his arms as Jax lightly snored. Every few seconds Julien swooped down to kiss his pink, freckled stomach. “He smells like hot popcorn,” he said.
“A boy I met out walking with Ajax,” Austin said, “told me he’d known lots of bassets. He says they are the most stubborn dogs alive. And always running away.”
“What nonsense!” Julien said, indignant. “Le pauvre petit just thinks he’s a human child. That’s why he wanted to play with the other children. But these neurotic American children just start to scream when they see him—what’s wrong with them?”
“Ajax is American, too, Julien.”
Julien kissed his stomach again as Ajax dozed on. “Mon pauvre petit américain. And he’s black, too. That’s why he wants to move to France. He’s heard that American blacks are better treated in France. I’ve already read him the life of Joséphine Baker.”
Austin had never heard any whimsy coming out of Julien’s mouth before, but now it never stopped. Julien decided that he would raise Ajax to be the next pope. He was constantly on the lookout for pious deeds and minor miracles, which would confirm his calling. Julien started calling him Pius VII, which in French was pronounced “Pis-sette” and also meant “little pisser.” The whole idea was mad and in the worst taste, but Julien clung to it so long that Austin suspected he took it half-seriously.
One day, while talking on the phone in his office at school with Peter, Austin mentioned Ajax. It just slipped out.
“Who’s Ajax?”
“A dog.”
“Whose dog?”
Austin didn’t want to say ours so he said, “Mine.”
“Your dog? You bought a dog?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s really a dog you and Julien bought.”
“You could say that.”
“A puppy?”
“Yes. It’s a basset hound.”
“How old?”
“Probably just two months old.”
“That’s a big commitment, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
“Dogs live to be twelve or fifteen years old. It must have been Julien who wanted it. You’re too egotistical to want a dog, though I suppose you’re attached to him by now.”
“How do you know?”
“Who wouldn’t get attached to a puppy? Anyway, I know you. If you’re in love the person can talk you into anything. Although you’d never buy me a d
og. When we were together you refused to buy me a dog.”
“Well, at first we were living in a one-room apartment in New York, then in two rooms in Paris. A third-floor walk-up.”
“I would have walked him. It’s good exercise. Good cruising.” Peter said the word cruising with a bitter explicitness, as though only by making such a sexual allusion could he hope to communicate with someone as depraved as Austin. Peter was silent for a moment, then Austin realized he must be crying.
“What’s wrong?” Austin asked.
“You never loved me enough to give me a dog. For a gay couple a dog is like a child. You and Julien have a child now. I guess he’s won.”
“Won what?”
Suddenly Peter was angry. “Oh, nothing. If you can’t figure that one out you’re even more out of touch than I thought.” He hung up.
Austin didn’t know what to do—send him flowers, call him back, fly down there? Now that he was far away from his Paris friends (and given that almost all his New York friends were dead), Austin contemplated with horror his new break with Peter. His world was shrinking rapidly. Soon he’d be all alone, and for Austin aloneness was the equivalent to death. He felt bad that he’d hurt Peter in so many ways—but he was even angrier that Julien should have treated Peter so high-handedly.
Julien, Austin thought, had bad, heterosexual values. As the new wife he, Julien, assumed he had the right to insist that Austin never talk to the ex-wife, Peter, much less shower the castoff with attentions and presents. Only heterosexuals could be so cruel; among male homosexuals friendship ruled supreme.
In France Austin had had a busy sex life before he met Julien. He’d gone from one affair to another, the most exciting and memorable (and longest) one having been with Little Julien. He’d frequented a sauna for older men and their sometimes much younger admirers. He’d made love two or three times a week, just as when he’d been twenty years old, except now he couldn’t just walk out the door and trick; now he had to plan ahead, buy a few opera tickets, cook a few meals, be prepared for rejection, go somewhere that had a special clientele.
He’d fallen in love with Big Julien, perhaps just a bit because Gregg had told him Julien was “husband material.” If Gregg hadn’t suggested that Austin invite Julien away for the weekend and “hold onto that one, hon,” would Austin have made a play for him? Maybe not, since Austin was still pining over Little Julien and still, even here in Providence, jerked off thinking about him. When he’d called Little Julien once from Providence he’d said, in a romantic tone, “I think of you often.”
“Yeah, every night just before going to sleep,” Little Julien had said with his wicked laugh that almost submerged his words in a rushing flood of hilarity.
Austin felt less alive than he had in years. It was as though his pulses were racing (so many department meetings, private conferences, lectures, so many papers to grade) while at the same time his feelings had never been so dim, so nearly extinct. He longed for sleep. When Julien fell asleep, Austin would sneak out of the room into one of the other bedrooms. If Julien complained, Austin said, “The other rooms feel neglected,” but so much silliness only concealed his need to be alone. Once Julien said, “I suppose it would be wrong if I … made love to someone now that I’m positive.” It was his only acknowledgment of their chastity, which he ascribed, possibly, to Austin’s fear of “reinfection.” He once said something that revealed he chalked up Austin’s sexual indifference to his own becoming positive. Did he think Austin was repelled by infected meat? Julien was so close-mouthed there was no way of knowing what he was feeling.
Back in Paris Austin had had hours and hours every day to marinate on his daybed but here, in Providence, he was always expected to be on tap. Only in bed in the spare room could he masturbate and recall every detail of Little Julien’s body, as well as his coarse sensuality, which coexisted so neatly with his civilized behavior. Or he’d replay erotic encounters that went back all the way to his early adolescence in Virginia….
Some nights he was too tired even to masturbate, though he was convinced he needed to, not because he required the physical release but because he was thirsty for privacy, introspection, for the lavish pleasure of looking inward.
He who’d stayed young because he’d had so few responsibilities was now hurtling through time, as a meteorite scorches its path when it enters the earth’s atmosphere, burning his way into maturity and beyond, into age.
His students never looked at him as a human being, except Eleanor who, when she’d been a freshman at a college in New York, had had an affair with an ancient English philosopher and cultivated the knack of regarding her elders as contemporaries. But otherwise no one ever commented on his moods, clothes, remarks. Nor did Julien, who now spent more and more time with Ajax walking the gray sidewalks under gray skies. Julien loved him—loved their sexless good-night kisses, loved it when Austin came home from school, loved watching TV in the matching bucket chairs, Ajax belly-up across his lap, whiskers twitching to the broadcast roar of a gunfight, his long, silky ears quickening into life when Lassie barked on screen in an ancient rerun. But Julien didn’t study Austin or even really notice him; he had been as surprised as Austin that Austin had gained ten kilos and even made a show of indignantly denying it, not just out of kindness but also out of indifference or rather inattentiveness.
Sometimes, of course, Austin’s days went well and he felt happy to be dashing about campus, but then he’d catch himself as he commented on new departmental regulations and schedules or he’d realize that this was a life, yes, but a lesser one. Paradoxically, he’d never felt so understimulated intellectually as here, at a university. Professors produced books and papers, but they had no idea how to serve up their ideas in conversation. They were specialists, not intellectuals. They’d even looked especially worried when Austin once referred to them unthinkingly as “intellectuals.” They reacted as though the word carried a nerdy, rabbinical weight and suggested something unwashed and unathletic. They were all just regular guys, and those who’d been born in Europe were particularly dull, as if they’d taken the pledge not to introduce anything tricky or insufficiently bland into a social evening, much less something stimulating, which they would have called “pretentious.”
Perhaps because they never talked about their work to non-specialists, they never submitted their writing to a standard of common sense. They were alone in a private hell populated only by sycophantic graduate students, loyal colleagues and spiteful rivals—not one of whom would ever have said, “Hey, wait. What does all this mean? And what earthly application does it have?” Austin thought that his sort of scholarship, concerned with dates, methods, attributions, was unimportant but at least honest.
The bigger problem was what he’d just heard described for the first time as “the dumbing-down of America.” He recognized that precisely in the years he’d been away Americans had lost interest in the game of high culture. Europe concerned them not at all except as an optional but fun theme park. People no longer pretended to a wide general knowledge; each academic had his specialty, which he learned as a baker might learn baking, but no one claimed now to have mastered all the culinary techniques of culture.
One afternoon Austin found Julien talking to a young red-haired woman who resembled Christine, not just because they shared the same coloring but in something particular—the large mouth, perhaps, or the deliberate way of talking.
The woman’s name was Lucy and she was from Hot Springs, Arkansas. She was a graduate student at Brown in creative writing, even though she was already forty-two and a professional accountant.
“But, Lucy, how can you learn writing?” Julien asked as he poured her more tea. He’d taken extra pains with his toilette today, Austin noticed. He was wearing not one but two scarves around his neck. He had on his heavy, ankle-high, pale brown Church shoes with the brass side buckles, polished to a high gloss. He didn’t seem as interested in the conversatio
n as in the pose he was striking.
Lucy said, “What do you mean? What do you mean, learn?”
“Yes,” Austin chimed in, “we French people are convinced literature is divine and is inspired directly by God or Racine, we’re never sure which.”
“Racine?” Lucy looked confused.
“Just teasing.”
“Oh. You were teasing?”
“Moving right along,” Austin said, standing up. “I have a few quizzes to grade. I’ll leave you two youngsters to your tea party and literary conversation.”
After that Julien was constantly crouched over pots of jasmine tea with Lucy. He liked her because she liked him, because she resembled Christine—and because she spoke very slowly. Her talk was as slow as her metabolism. In fact, Julien learned English from Lucy. She was never in a rush and quite routinely expressed the same thought in two or three slightly varied ways, as an Italian woman might. Instead of over-articulating or shouting, as Americans usually did when addressing foreigners, Lucy just kept buttering a thick salve of words over every subject that came up. She reminded Austin of his paternal grandmother, who’d always said, “Now take your time telling me about it. I want all the details.”
Lucy had a big white BMW which she’d bought second-hand. She drove it with just one hand in her lazy, soft-boned way; Julien was very good at imitating the way she held her hand, the elbow close to her breasts, the wrist curved like a swan’s neck. He even learned her way of checking herself out in the rear-view mirror, of letting her face go inert in a professional model’s deadpan.