by Edmund White
Fabrice wore a strange wig that no one, not even Robert, had ever seen him without. It was a pale, chemical brown, synthetically straight, although his real hair, around his ears and down his neck, was graying and curly. He told jokes constantly, mainly peepee-caca jokes, but pussy and cock jokes, too.
And yet their love of Julien and Austin, certainly Ajax, was sincere and intense. They were kind people whose lives had been turned down so low, the flame sometimes threatened to go out.
But their lives weren’t static. They were living through a dramatic change, although one that was creeping by so slowly that only the participants took heed of it. As Julien had told Austin, until three years ago Robert had remained the skinny, stylized, perfumed boy who had so infuriated their father, the businessman and amateur pilot. Until three years ago Robert had starved himself still skinnier and had used Fabrice’s bulk and cheerfulness and endless anecdotes about the stars of the past to fill every corner of silence and space around him. In Nice, while Fabrice laughed with a client over the phone and set up appointments to redo a lawn or a herbaceous border, Robert had looked down on the old port at night or trimmed his box tree. Most of the time he lay on the couch with his hands behind his head and daydreamed so poetically that strangers were startled to hear his rumbling voice and his pedantically well-turned sentences.
Then, nearly three years ago, Robert had joined a gym near the Cours Saleya. Perhaps he’d noticed he was turning fewer heads, not only because he was approaching thirty, which for gay men is the Cape of Lost Hope, but also because his kind of stylized elegance was no longer sought after; it had been replaced by body-built buffed broncos, hot little guys (les p’titsmecs) with stretch T-shirts, black jeans, power boots, bald heads, a gold earring or two, and a bull tattoo.
There were minor choices, parachutist or grunge, basketball or (as the French said) “destroy,” but no matter where the accent was placed over the syllables, the word remained the same: muscles.
As Austin had observed during his fourteen days in Nice, Robert brought an unexpected fanaticism to his workouts. He admitted that within six months he’d gained fifteen kilos, all in the chest, shoulders and upper arms, without adding a centimeter to his waist (he despaired over his legs, which refused to bulk up). At the gym he spoke to no one at first, then began to joke with some of the women in their forties and early fifties, bleached blonds in leopard-skin body suits and lipstick-pink tights who wore extra-long false eyelashes and applied their lipstick with brushes. They “revived” their tans in the winter with an iodine-colored bronzer. If other gay men asked him to partner them in precarious squats, he apologized in his thrilling voice but said he was on far too rigorous a schedule to be able to participate in someone else’s program—all said in his most “Old France” manner, so polite and severe it froze the blood of the imprudent.
Before long he found he was making sotto voce jokes with the blond ladies about the little fags. He agreed to escort one of the ladies to a Beauticians’ Ball in Cannes but hinted that he lived with a woman closer to his own age who was very jealous. He moved out of the bedroom where he’d slept for thirteen years beside Fabrice; or rather he found he’d fallen asleep yet again on the couch and then, when Fabrice complained, Robert said that now that he’d put on all this weight he was too hot and big to bunk up with someone else. He liked the couch. He let Fabrice wash his back every night. In Vermont Austin glanced through the half-open bathroom door and saw Fabrice, special sponge in hand, working over Robert’s mammoth back. Robert sat perfectly still in the water, leaning forward to unfurl the full cape of his lats. Fabrice, completely clothed, a cigarette in his mouth pouring smoke into his left eye, sat on the edge of the tub, proud, content, delighted with his role. Austin for some reason thought of those steers in Japan that produce Kobe beef—weren’t they massaged day and night to render the finest marbleized meat?
Julien whispered to Austin that he found Robert’s Mediterranean machismo tiresome, although there was no question about the depth of Julien’s devotion to his brother. “He was never like that in the past. He fought violently with our father to defend his way of being, but now he makes faggot jokes and turns his head to follow the passage of a provocative woman. It’s all so silly. He’s never been to bed with a woman—he’s like you, Petit, a purist.” Austin had to admit to himself that he found Robert’s machismo sexy.
One day, Austin tweaked Robert by referring to Fabrice as “your lover.” He asked, “How long have you and your lover been together?”
Robert blinked his gray-blue eyes and said, “Whom might you have in mind when you refer to my lover?”
“To Fabrice, of course.”
Fabrice himself mimed a tiny curtsy.
Robert, unsmiling but patient, as if speaking to a confused child, said, “But Fabrice is not my lover. That word would totally misrepresent our relationship. For me Fabrice is more like a father. Fabrice is, yes, my father.”
As soon as the words were out of Robert’s mouth, Austin regretted he’d ever provoked the discussion. Fabrice was obviously hurt; he hadn’t needed to know this bitter final truth. Austin touched Fabrice’s shoulders when he walked past him.
That night they ate quail and venison in the restaurant a mile away with its great chef and countrified waiters, reedlike, red-faced teenage boys who seemed weighted down by enormous feet as if someone had poured too much lead into the tin soldiers’ boots. At every window there was a fake candle, just an up-ended scroll of ivory cardboard and a forking, flickering filament in the light bulb, but the effect, seen from the road as they approached, was welcoming and calm. The Frenchmen liked the plain board floors, redolent of beeswax, the faded hooked rugs and the big fire in the old stone fireplace. Of course they also liked the self-conscious boys with their clip-on ties and white shirts, the cheap kind through which their thin torsos could be seen, boys as crushed by their high calling as acolytes at Easter Mass. Their own waiter, “Bob,” turned out to be a history major from Bennington, which puzzled the foreigners. “Even the servants go to university here?” Fabrice asked.
“He’s not really a servant,” Austin said. “The very word makes us laugh. He’s just earning some spending money. His father could even be rich—in America rich parents want their children to work.”
“How cruel,” Fabrice said. “He inherited, he didn’t make it—”
“But perhaps he did make it,” Austin said. “You forget how many nouveaux riches we have.”
“But can’t you tell if that boy’s rich or poor?” Fabrice asked. “In France I would know right away, just by the way someone talked and moved, not only who his parents were but who his grandparents were as well.”
“No, in America there’s such a general style—”
“But his table manners, Petit,” Julien objected, “his way of holding himself at table.”
“No, no,” Austin laughed. “There’s absolutely no way of telling. I know how essential all that is to you, to families like yours—”
“Quail, I want quail,” Julien exclaimed, almost as though he was heading off a delicate subject, any mention of their noble family’s history. “Do you like quail, Fabrice?”
Fabrice told a long story about his grandfather, who’d hunted quail in the Alpilles and who’d covered himself with glory as a maquisard sniping at the Nazis.
In bed that night Austin stayed awake, looking at the high, pitched ceiling of sloping wood beams. He couldn’t sleep because he kept remembering Fabrice’s silly smile and the panicked expression in his eyes with which he’d greeted Robert’s remark, “For me Fabrice is more like a father.” Fabrice was barrel-chested, but even so thinner than Austin, who was so heavy now that all his clothes felt tight on him, even the roomy Yamamoto jacket he’d bought precisely because he’d swum around inside it a year ago. And Fabrice was still out cruising every night on the Montburon above Nice, at least if Robert’s jokes were to be believed, whereas Austin ha
d given up sex altogether. He masturbated occasionally but only because the eternal flame cannot be allowed to go out—that would be a bad omen, surely. And this talkative, endlessly congenial Niçois had been forced to hear and swallow that he wasn’t his lover’s lover but rather his father.
“Petit,” Austin whispered experimentally in the dark.
“Yes?” Julien was awake, too.
“Do you think of me as your father?”
“Of course not, Austin. Oh—I see. No, but Robert’s lying. He doesn’t think of Fabrice as his father, either. He’s completely dependent on him. Petit?”
“Yes.”
“When I die I want you to promise me you’ll do everything to make sure Robert stays with Fabrice. Robert is such a dreamer, such a child. He can’t earn a living and now he’s too old to learn how. He may be attracted by some younger man he meets at the gym and have … an affair. Why not? But promise me you won’t allow him to leave Fabrice, who truly loves him and will care for him as long as he’s alive.”
“I promise—but you’re not going to die, Julien.”
“Yes, I am. The end is already beginning. You must accept that, Petit.” He drew Austin’s balding head to him, to his chest, which did feel fractionally leaner, harder. Julien might be a poseur, just a bit, but why not? His affectations might see him through all this with a few tatters of gallantry to clothe his suffering—well, if not all the way to the end, then at least far, very far along the cold way.
In the beginning Austin had been thrilled to have such a handsome, mature young man paying him court, or rather accepting his, Austin’s, attentions. Then, before Austin had had time to transpose his affection up a fifth into love, the tune had changed. Julien had learned he was not only positive but already well advanced into this fatal illness. They’d been separated by Immigration, reunited only after great difficulty, and then Peter and Julien had quarreled….
Austin had never shirked his duty toward Julien (a grave duty if Austin had been the one to infect—say it!—to kill him). But moving back to this farcical America, to this witless academy and its Savonarola students, had thrown him off balance. When he came back to the house after a long day (“Who’s heard of Chippendale chairs? No one? Sheraton? The Bauhaus? Foucault?—Ah, that’s better”), he sometimes resented Julien and his siestas, his elaborate toilettes, his sepulchral tone as he whispered, “I’m just resting.”
Now all that was past. Austin felt committed to Julien, joined to him: married.
Julien winced in the autumn light filtering through all these brilliant falling leaves, but he took long, happy walks with his brother and an Ajax as excited as a slum child on a farm. The two brothers—one dazed, massive, trudging under his howdah of musculature, the other slender but sparkling with electricity—leaned into each other, laughing and chattering as they had during their childhood in Nancy (Austin dubbed them the “Nancy Boys,” but they didn’t get it). They walked down the dirt road between maples on fire, touching off sudden gasps of recollection and easy laughter.
Later, when they all drank tea inside the gloomy A-frame and looked out through glass at the intensely glowing embers of the leaves, the brothers’ eyes glazed over. They forgot Vermont and were transported back to the pop songs of their adolescence, which they bawled out, though neither could hold a tune. Robert was bigger but dimmer, whereas Julien burned with a feverish excitement.
Julien was proprietorial about America in explaining it to Robert. When they’d go off somewhere in the car, it was Julien who would have to speak to the waitress in a diner or ask directions of a passerby. They’d spend hours “doing” the antique stores—and at every point Julien demonstrated the advantages of America (its friendliness, its efficiency, its charm and variety) and especially its natural beauty.
Julien was fascinated by Shaker furniture. He discovered a factory not far away in New Hampshire that still followed the old Shaker designs, and all four of them toured the workshops. “Oh, sure,” one of the workmen said, “we get lots of the French here, don’t you know?”
“It’s so strange, Petit,” Julien said when at last they’d bid farewell to their guests, “but when I was married I always dreamed about how wonderful it would be to spend time as part of a gay couple with Robert and Fabrice. They used to tease me all the time about Christine; they never really liked her. She was too smart, too argumentative, not glamorous enough. Too sexy in a female way.”
“And now?”
“Of course, it was wonderful, and thank you for renting the house and taking everyone out to dinner, but Robert’s macho nonsense—enfin, you see, I thought we’d be two gay couples together, two brothers with their older lovers, but now, bon bref, Robert has decided he’s straight. You know, most of the guys at his gym are afraid of him. They think he’s a queer basher.”
Every week Julien took the car into New Haven and Dr. Goldstein examined him and ran more tests. Never for an instant did Julien forget that he was being cranked up the first high Russian mountain of the roller coaster and that any moment now he’d start his steep, fatal descent. But at the same time he wanted to enjoy every hour that remained.
He decided to be completely open about his HIV-status, if not with his brother then with the young Americans he was meeting. He said, “It’s easier that way. You showed me the value of honesty, Austin.” He told Lucy that he was positive, which she had of course already suspected. He had met several students in the French department and he confided to them the nature of his disease. Perhaps America itself didn’t seem quite real to him. Would he be this honest back in France?
He and Austin joined an exercise class that met three times a week. They continued with their total abstinence from liquor and tobacco. Even when the cold weather blew in, they spent hours walking Ajax. Gradually they came to know every street of Providence, or at least the area around the universities.
Joséphine came to stay with them just before Christmas. When Austin had originally invited her to move with them to Providence he’d felt that her presence would make things easier for Julien and take the curse off his having to live openly with another man. He and Julien never discussed her arrival, no more than they ever talked about their lives together. Julien had been married before, and though he may have announced to his classmates that he was homosexual when he’d just been sixteen, the avowal had probably sounded to them more like a manifesto than a confession. After all, that had happened in the 1970s when kids, even in the conservative French provincial town of Nancy, had taken weird stands. Julien had never had to live out his homosexuality as a public act, as a declared member of a despised minority. No, he’d been the married man, half of an attractive, dynamic couple in the professions who’d spent their two years in exotic Ethiopia and returned to Paris with an advanced degree (Christine) and a job as a gifted architect (Julien). Now he’d turned into the unemployed foreigner, the young, skinny partner of a portly man in his fifties who himself enjoyed no prestige beyond his unwritten credentials as a furniture expert. Of course Julien would prefer living in a household that included the blond, beautiful, talented Joséphine.
Of course. Except Austin had figured everything out wrong. Almost within a day of Josephine’s arrival Julien was irritated with her. She smoked and he thought her habit endangered his fragile lungs. She flirted with every man she met—or rather, since she was afraid Austin and Julien would mock her if she cocked her head to one side and cooed, she stared at her victims and hoped her housemates wouldn’t notice. Julien did notice, of course, and warned her off the young man she liked the most, an Israeli architectural student named Aaron who was engaged to someone back home.
Joséphine pretended to like Ajax but found his long, licking kisses disgusting and his constant desire to sleep on her lap, though by now he weighed almost a hundred pounds, less than endearing. He mounted her leg and unsheathed his penis as if it were a new lipstick shade, Glamorous Glans. Ajax had picked up a peculiarly f
unky smell, something reminiscent of pea soup, that was concentrated in his hindquarters, possibly in a gland near the root of his tail. At least that’s what Austin’s uncle, a hunting and fishing man, had said over the phone: “A basset? Hell—” (pronounced “Hail”)—“them bassets ain’t dawgs, them’s hounds. And if’n a hound dawg ain’t hunted he starts to stink.” He let out a muted rebel—well, not a rebel yell, but a hoarse Confederate grunt. He dropped the cornpone accent, lowered his voice and said, “They store up stink in a gland near their tail, which they secrete so the rest of the pack can pick up their scent. But if they’re not out running they can get real high.”
Julien refused to acknowledge it and Austin liked it, but poor Joséphine washed her hands ten times a day and sprayed the air with “Jacky.” When she came home from a walk one day, Ajax leapt up on her and tore her tights with his claws. Finally her exasperation came flashing out—which excited Julien into a rage.
“He was just being friendly—he loves you,” Julien shouted. He squatted to kiss Ajax’s unperturbed, smiling face. “Pauvre petite bête.”
When Austin saw Ajax’s silky brown head from behind with its narrow skull and notched occipital bone he thought of him as a retarded child. That image touched him but made him feel guilty; he thought there was something cruel about turning a much less intelligent creature into Man’s Best Friend, something akin to the King’s pleasure in his Fool. When they’d all be talking Austin would glance down at Ajax’s eyes straining to comprehend, the small, feeble brain more nose than knowing, the warm eyes sympathetic, baffled.