by Edmund White
He said he found her to be a bore, a chieuse (“pain in the ass” was perhaps the best translation), and whenever the phone would ring he’d call out, “Bonjour, les chieuses!” He liked to complain about Lucy, about her whiny chicken-farmer accent, her fake ladylike airs, her limp hand on the steering wheel, but he loved it when she prepared him a genuine Southern goulash (though he hated the result). “Inedible!” he whispered rudely when Lucy went “to the little girl’s room,” as she called it. Her mother and aunt were identical twins, bony Southern ladies with white hair they still wore in the same cut. Julien adored studying their photo and marveling over their interchangeable looks. He liked to hear about the South, although he would have preferred more plantations with Greek columns and fewer twisters, trailers and red-neck atrocities.
Lucy was his first real friend in America and a thoroughly intimidated, besotted woman friend at that. She fell for their French allure and she often said, “oui, oui,” in the midst of an English sentence. Donna, who was one of Lucy’s friends and Austin’s student, said, “Gosh, I hear Lucy has learned French from Julien. She runs around saying, ‘oui, oui,’ all the time now, then clapping her hand over her mouth as though it just slipped out. Then she says, ‘Pardon,’ with a French accent.”
Julien talked to her for hours and hours about his mother and wicked ex-wife. Lucy wanted to hear all the sordid details and was expecting an American-style confession, but Julien had his own way of telling a story and certainly wasn’t soliciting sympathy. He didn’t want to “spill” about his mother, have a “good cry” and “get it all out.” No, for Julien his mother’s death was his identity. He had made mourning a way of life. Although he wore his bright scarf, he’d sewn black ribbons to his innermost soul.
Nor was he hoping to “let go” of his rage against his wife; he hoped for revenge and, as he liked to say, “Revenge is a plate to be eaten cold.” Or rather, on some days he was angry with Christine, though on others he wondered how she was faring and he hoped her pregnancy was going well. When he was alone with Austin, he liked to talk about sex with women; it amused him that Austin had never slept with a woman. “Pauvre petit,” he chided, using a deep voice and pursing his lips. “Il était mignon,” he said (“He was cute”), that weird third person and past tense French grandmothers used when addressing a baby. Austin would blush and that would make Julien laugh even harder. Austin suspected that most gay men of his generation were embarrassed by women, and elaborately polite to them, because they didn’t desire them; they’d insulted women by not wanting to make love to them. Younger gay guys, who’d grown up in co-ed dorms with women, treated them casually, guiltlessly, as sisters. But Julien liked them not as sexless sisters but as horny, lusty ladies.
Ajax took months to be housebroken and left piles of shit on all the carpets which, as luck would have it, were pale. When at last he’d been trained, he started to chew everything. He was teething, and soon he’d sharpened his teeth on the legs of every chair and the upholstery of every couch and armchair, even the sacred blue bucket chairs reserved for television viewing. Summer came and Julien was always outdoors with Ajax in the hammock or sprawling on the lawn in very tight white shorts and no shirt. A teenage boy—one of those Rhode Island kids who’d never left the state even though it took only an hour to drive from one end of it to the other—hung around for hours on his bike, chatting up Julien. He was obviously attracted to Julien, who encouraged him until one afternoon the boy, aroused, said he was hungry and slouched into the kitchen and went through the fridge.
That night Julien was outraged. “How dare he take things out of our frigo?”
“Americans do that,” Austin explained. “At least kids do. It’s called ‘raiding the icebox.’”
“Have they no education?”
“No. None.”
But despite this fit of pique Julien had been pleased to see he could still attract someone, a young man, irredeemably American, an idiot who thought Paris and France were two separate countries, but who had velvety eyes set in a baby-fat face covered with blond down, someone whose short, wide erection showed through his shorts when he looked at Julien too long. Julien was still in the running.
They spent June and July in Providence. Austin had forgotten about hot, humid American summers but he and Julien enjoyed sleeping late in the air-conditioned bedroom, then taking long walks in the sticky early evening with Ajax under the huge, leafy trees past the big wood houses, which seemed even less inhabited in summer than in winter. No one was around, although sprinklers rotated on lawns and garbage was collected and sometimes the radio, tuned to a baseball game, crackled through an open window. Julien said it reminded him of Addis Ababa.
At night, after darkness fell at last and a breeze came up off the river, they’d eat a salade niçoise made of seared fresh tuna from the Healthy. They put out mosquito-repellent citronella candles in tin buckets on the porch, which Julien called la terrasse, and they’d set speakers on the windows and listen to Mozart CDs and stroke Jax’s tummy as he dozed after a strenuous day of destroying the furniture. “Did you notice how he never barks?” Austin asked admiringly.
“Of course he doesn’t bark—though one day an ambulance went past and Jax started to bay, exactly as though he’d heard a hunting horn. The hunt is in his genes.”
In August they rented a beach shack on an island nearby. The shack smelled of kerosene and every dish in it was chipped. The construction had obviously been done half a century earlier by a ship’s carpenter—the staircase was snug and Austin, at least, had to turn sideways to mount it. The upstairs windows were portholes and the night lights were beautiful old port and starboard lights glowing a dull ruby-red and a dirty emerald within verdigrised brass fixtures.
When it was foggy they’d walk down the empty beach (“la plage sauvage,” as Julien called it, to distinguish it from a raked beach with cabanas for hire, the kind one found in Nice or Cannes). Ajax was afraid of the water and fascinated by it; it was a moving, noisy thing to chase but he didn’t like to be wet. He looked abashed and licked his salty coat with deep chagrin.
One morning they awakened late to see through the porthole a man on a wood barge hauling cages up out of the water. Ajax was barking joyously on the muddy shore, turning round and round as if to reel in this big, unknown catch. Austin and Julien slipped on shorts and strolled out to see what he was doing. The day was so calm and misty that no one was around.
“Hey, how you doin’?” Austin said. He was surprised how his voice carried.
“Good.”
“What are you fishing?”
“Eels.”
“Seems like you got a lot of them.”
“I’m the only one round here fishes for ’em.”
“Whatcha do with ’em? Sell ’em to rest’rants?”
“Hell, no—folks round here won’t touch ’em. No, I pack ’em on ice and we fly ’em direct to Brussels. Them Belgians pay top dollar for eels, don’t you know?”
“Right. Sure we know. This fellow here’s French. We know all about eels. They’re great. Smoked. Or in green sauce.”
“Wouldn’t know myself.”
He went back to his work without any need, apparently, to wind up what they’d been saying. He was a big man, Austin’s age, grizzled, wearing grease-stained overalls. He was so close, at least so audible, that Austin could hear him breathe as he dredged the cages up out of the cold, silted water. Austin wanted to change places with him. He thought of his young, fat truck-driver, the guy who’d driven him to get his trunk in Boston. Ajax looked solemnly up at them as the mist laid down strip after strip of softening gauze over the scene—this wound—for Austin thought the morning light was achingly bright.
That night in bed they could hear Ajax gnawing feverishly at the base of his tail, harvesting fleas. “Have you heard about Lyme disease?” Julien asked.
“No.”
“It’s very dangerous. It�
��s from tiques—”
“Ticks.”
“The kind on deer.”
“Deer? But there are no deer on this island.”
“Oh.” He was silent. Austin could almost hear him blinking beside him. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
Lucy visited them for a weekend. Julien arranged her clothes so that he and she looked alike. He tied her blouse in such a way that it would expose a bit of her stomach. They both wore French sailors’ berets that Julien had found in a harbor-front store, dark blue with red pompoms. He made her buy expensive lizard-skin sandals like his. He tied a red silk neckerchief around her pale throat, as he tied one around his own swarthy one. They rode bikes the five miles into town and Lucy made him buy her a chocolate soda from an old-fashioned soda shop decorated with a black counter, chrome stools and a pale-green neon-bordered wall clock. Julien was outraged that in America dogs could not go into restaurants. When Austin explained that they were excluded for reasons of hygiene, Julien said, “But Ajax is much cleaner than most of their clients.”
Back home they barbecued swordfish and ate it with béarnaise sauce off a card table they’d hauled outside. Lucy drank too much white wine. A foghorn was hooting. The big lighthouse just across the straits was like a geometer turning a compass round and round, one that drew on the air with cheerful futility. Lucy became kittenish and asked Austin to go fetch her sweater from the cottage. When he came trudging back up the short hill to the promontory that looked down on what they now called “Eel Bay,” he saw their faces illumined from below by a match as Julien lit them after-dinner cigarettes; they looked like children staring down into Japanese lanterns. Ajax was stretched out, his black chin balanced on a white paw; he seemed troubled because it was obvious he didn’t approve of the dew settling on the grass or of the fog rolling in in palpable waves around him, as though there were a ghostly atmospheric surf that moved to its own independent tide.
“Are you happy?” Lucy asked Julien. She was a self-conscious girl, never very spontaneous, and made these strange stabs at depth from time to time. Of course Julien liked her way of talking, maybe because no one French would risk such a gambit. Austin could also tell she was awkward because she felt so much. She was sweet and sensitive, which made her oddly remote despite her Southern gush; obviously she’d learned not to show her feelings. She seemed in love with Julien.
He said, “Of course I’m sad I have to die, but I love Austin so much. I’d rather live with him for just two or three years than live a whole long life without him.”
“And you, Austin?”
He was staggered by Julien’s honesty and the simple, manly certainty with which he’d talked. He wanted to be just as honest and loving. He found himself saying, “I could never really give myself to someone before. Not really. Maybe because I wasn’t sure they needed me or maybe I was afraid of being suffocated. But now, because our love, Julien’s and mine, is short and intense, I’m not afraid of it, even though if I outlive Julien I’ll probably be terribly—not just hurt. Cast down. Destroyed.” Austin was surprised by the honesty of what he’d just said. Strange that Lucy’s questions should have made him speak so clearly and feelingly, whereas his private thoughts were just turbulent murk, like this fog rolling in.
“Pauvre petit,” Julien said. “You’ll have Ajax.” He whispered to the dog, while holding one front paw in each hand and staring into his eyes, “You’ll be a brave toutou, won’t you, and take care of Papa, won’t you? Won’t you?” Ajax looked very solemn for an instant, then embarrassed. He pulled free and walked away.
Chapter Fourteen
Early in the autumn Austin offered to take Peter anywhere he wanted. “We can go to Paris or San Francisco or Rome or London—you name it.”
“Disney World.”
“In California?” Austin asked, his heart sinking.
“No, dummy. Disney World is in Florida.”
“Do you want to stay there just a night or two and then go on down to Key West for the weekend?”
“Gosh, no, are you crazy? Disney World takes a whole week to do properly.”
“What is it, exactly? Rides?”
“You don’t know anything, you’re not even a real American. There’s the Epcot Center, for instance, which is made up of pavilions from all over the world. It’s like traveling to Asia and Africa and Europe without ever leaving America. Each country has a fabulous restaurant.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t want to go, you offer me my choice, then when I choose a place I want, you’re too snobbish even to try—”
“Don’t be absurd, Peter, I’m delighted to discover Disney World.”
Julien had said repeatedly that Austin was free to see Peter anywhere he liked, so long as he, Julien, would never have to lay eyes again on that “whiny little girl” (cette petite fille pleurnicharde). Now he could hardly object to the trip to Orlando, though he said, “You could probably go to London for the same amount of money. It seems a waste. But I guess Peter wants to ride on the rides.”
Austin would be away only for a week. He left plenty of money with Julien (who also had the American Express card Austin had given him). “I’ll call every day,” Austin said. “Lucy has instructions to look after you.”
“I don’t want that chieuse around the house all the time,” Julien said; he routinely insulted all his friends. For him only the family existed. Friends were seen as false gods, sacrilegious rivals to the true cult of Mother-Father-Brother—or now, under the new dispensation, of Ajax and Austin. Julien allowed himself to find friends “amusing” or “diverting,” as though they were saltimbanques in a perpetual circus of wasted time and distracted feelings. But he could drop them in an instant and thought he owed them nothing.
“Well, you might get lonely. Let her prepare you a meal.”
“Her? La chieuse can’t cook, all those dreadful spices that make you cry and give you a stomachache. When I was still healthy—”
“In Addis Ababa?”
“Precisely. Then I could experiment with spicy foods, but not now, not one of Lucy’s little bayou gumbos, oh, no, that I can’t survive. Besides, I want to be alone. With my thoughts. My past. Thoughts of my mother. Now, no one exists for me except my brother and you and Ajax. And my memories of my mother. My wife is dead for me. And so is my father.”
Austin flew to New York, changed planes and according to a prearranged plan found himself sitting beside Peter on the New York-Orlando flight. Peter was noticeably thinner but carefully dressed and groomed. He was testy with Austin, although Austin was calm and resigned to everything. He’d dedicated this week to his old friend.
They had a rented car that came with the package—flight, hotel, amusement park admission. Their hotel was one of the more modest ones, but Austin still found it expensive. Of course he realized that all these big families came to Disney World for their dream vacation and, if there were five of them, spent five thousand dollars in a week, a fifth of a normal salary. Or so he imagined. Perhaps there was a save-in-advance layaway plan. Perhaps a normal salary was fifty thousand.
Peter and he were the only pair of adult men in what was otherwise a world of strollers and harnesses, diaper-changing areas even in the men’s toilets, high chairs at table and unbreakable plastic glasses in the bedrooms. They parked their rented car and had no further need of it, since they were ferried from the hotel to the rides in Disney buses.
Because they’d come during the last week of September the crowds were smaller and they seldom had to wait more than twenty minutes to get on a ride. Peter and Austin sat in a boat that was just inches above water level and were jerked and dragged by chains through a fun house—except the displays weren’t scary, unless you found dolls singing songs about world unity frightening. All the dolls were singing the same jingle in high, chipmunk voices that later he couldn’t get out of his head. He kept picturing the dolls—Chinese in cool
ie hats, Russians in white fur toques—tilting forward in a sudden glare, singing the words in various ethnic accents.
They spent a whole day in a special section devoted just to the movies. Disney cartoon characters were impersonated by costumed youngsters in mouse or dog heads (Pluto made Austin think of Ajax). They ran up to children and cavorted with them. For Austin, these encounters were highly embarrassing because he could hear the heavy breathing of a real, smaller human being under the frozen smile and could see the round, unblinking eyes through the plastic nostrils and he wondered what the performer looked like, what was his name, if he was an actor with aspirations.
“How’s your boyfriend?” Peter asked one afternoon as they were returning to the hotel on the bus.
“I should call him—oh, he’s okay.”
“What does he do all day? Watch soaps like me?”
“He spends a lot of time walking and grooming Ajax. He even engaged a dog trainer—he calls him le professeur, remember how even a gym teacher in France is called le professeur de sport?”
“Obedience training.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t work. Ajax learned nothing, not even the commands to sit, certainly not to come when called. Julien believes Ajax will someday obey, but only if he says the words of command in English—‘cawm,’ ‘seet,’ ‘gude boh.’”
“I know,” Peter said. “We had a basset when I was a kid, named Relentless. My mom had to give him away. He was too destructive. And she said all she ever saw was his fat butt as he was waddling away while she screamed herself hoarse.”
Austin resented the callous way Peter was talking about his basset—and then, for no reason at all, Austin felt, as if an elevator had just dropped a floor, that soon (in a year?) he’d never hear Peter’s high-pitched voice again nor see his lopsided, loopy expression, one blue eye bigger and higher than the other gray one, never again would he be so pleasantly jostled along in the rapid boil of Peter’s bubbling chatter, nor feel Peter’s indignation burning steadily under it. Time was meant to be lived patiently, one step at a time, and those who lived in it were meant to walk with their eyes trained on their feet. But something about being here, in this unreal place dedicated to such cheerless, standardized pleasure, a place that was just a hot, sunny void in central Florida, a joy that was paid for, dollar by dollar, as a meter ticked rapidly and chains tugged the boat violently around the corner and yet another wall of dolls lurched forward in a brightening, then dimming light, their mechanical mouths timed to the high, wailing song about a small, small world—something about this place made time break into shards, bits of the regretted past lying next to bits of the feared future.