by Edmund White
But Austin had guessed right that Joséphine would make them all more accessible. People seemed to call more often, invite them to dinner more readily, as though a woman were a door thrown open into the previously sealed house. Frequently Austin would come home to discover Joséphine over tea with Lucy and Julien, for even though he complained of the noise and smoke and confusion Joséphine had introduced into their lives, Julien liked that she was the one who arranged everything; now he could get up suddenly, pleading weariness, and vanish to another floor of the house and Joséphine would be stuck with these lingering American students. Unlike French people, they didn’t know when to leave. Austin said, “Well, we’re so close to the soil, to our farming past, that when we visit we make an occasion out of it—” but he suddenly realized he didn’t know how to explain either canning or sewing bees in French.
In bed one night Julien asked, whispering, “Why did you invite her to live with us?”
“For your sake. So people wouldn’t think we were lovers.”
“But I’m proud to be your lover.”
“But you were married—”
“I’m not the way you imagine. I’m much more evolved (évolué). I don’t give a damn what people think. I chose you, Petit, and after that there were no more choices to make.”
They had to give up their house at the end of December. The Professor of Aesthetics and his wife were coming back from Spain. Austin panicked when he looked around at the damage. He found a carpenter who sanded down and revarnished the many chair legs Ajax had gnawed on during his teething. A young woman from the weaving department found fabric that roughly resembled the couch upholstery and attempted to darn the holes. A team of house cleaners dusted, steamed and swept. “You’re going too far,” Julien complained.
But the professor was furious. He wrote that he’d been tempted to sell the house, it was in such bad condition. “I’ve hated to bring it up and have spent many an hour (this will no doubt slay you) in prayer seeking guidance (that’s the kind of guy I am).”
Austin showed the letter to Julien, who instantly started disputing it, line by line. “But it was all just Salvation Army junk and—he thought he could take advantage of you, you’re too naive, the house looks better now than when we moved in, then the floors looked like a bowling alley, all varnish, we added some character, we’re French, we know real parquet, the so-called balloon ceiling is just a normal hallway—”
“Okay, okay.”
Austin wrote out a check for eight thousand dollars. He realized that his American year had cost him money; he’d earned nothing and spent almost all his savings. He begged Julien to respect the new house they were moving into for the spring semester, small, elegant and built at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a chimney in the center that opened up on three sides to fireplaces in the main rooms. The living room was just two steps up from the sidewalk on a busy street and when Austin was reading the paper he could hear students hurrying past, shouting and talking—a relief after the furtive silence of the cruising woods. Upstairs, next to their bedroom, was suspended a glassed-in porch perched in the treetops, looking out over the slanting, snow-hung roofs and the neighbor’s black cat slithering through fence pickets as if patrolling the back alley. The Christmas season was dark and cold, but their new house, with its bright red front door, had put a jolly frame around the dour picture. The furniture was Shaker-austere to the point of spindliness; Julien admired it and sketched one particular highback chair again and again.
During the six-week vacation in late December and all of January they drove to Key West in the Sirocco, taking turns scrunched up with Ajax in the back seat. Later Joséphine confessed that it was during this trip that she had come to love the dog. He was such a fine doggie, naturally she’d given in to him. They saw an exhibit of Erik Fischl’s works on paper in New Haven, a big Francesco Clemente retrospective in Philadelphia, a great Titian exhibit in Washington. They stayed with friends until they arrived in the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, and, the next day, Daytona, Florida—in both cases they sought out obscure, understaffed motels where they could drive Ajax right up to the door at night and no one would notice or complain when they ushered him into their room.
They took turns driving, singing songs, lapsing into long silences. In Georgia they turned off the I-95 onto a country road and ate in a family-style restaurant that smelled of kerosene and that served salty ham and grits. “We could live here,” they’d say, “or here,” every time they’d see a quiet town that looked as if time had soared right over it. But all the while they knew that what they lacked wasn’t a place to do their living in but life itself.
When at last they pulled into Key West, the weather had gradually changed from freezing to hot, the trees from bare oaks to luxuriant traveler’s palms and crumpled pink hibiscus party favors. The clothes of passersby on the street had gone from parkas to shorts. Austin sighed, happy to smell the unclean brackish sea all around them, to look at the sloppy, slow walk of a black woman idling down the sidewalk, her heels gray as an elephant’s knees above the soiled blue of her worn-down slippers. He sighed to observe a big yellow cat crossing Whitehead Street, ignoring everything—cars, tourist buses, the rush of clouds overhead—everything in order to concentrate on a clump of weeds in an empty lot that was vibrating to a suspicious rhythm.
Their rented house huddled under a big tree that the neighbor, an old hippy with a sparse white beard and bad teeth, called “a tourist tree” because “it turns red and peels.” The garden was composed of gravel, white and dusty, and schefflera plants that were twice as large as any Austin had ever seen, as if nourished on plutonium. Strings of miniature white bulbs festooned the trees; they cast a pewter glow onto the new tin roof and made the painted porch pillars look like perfect sticks of blackboard chalk fresh out of the box. The earth smelled of mildew; it was so wet that the dead just a block away in the cemetery had to repose in sealed cement vaults above ground.
For Austin Key West was the South, or something like the South. He recognized the house trailers hoisted up on cement blocks and the gray hamburger patties soaking through slices of Wonder Bread, the Sno-Queen stand squatting under a giant plastic cone, two fat ladies seated, overflowing the peeling planks on a park bench as they waited for the bus, the sound of a Hammond organ bleating inside a narrow Pentecostal church. All this was smalltown Southern life as he knew it, but it was tucked in the corners or around walls of tumbling bougainvillea, purple as a Mardi Gras cloak, coconuts rotting in their husks at the tide line and buckets of little rock shrimp boiled in beer, their spicy shells a mortification to greedy fingers.
They rented bikes and sped down shaded streets bordered by the white wooden houses with their high crescent windows—“eyebrow windows” people called them—and their jigsaw porch frieze of sawed-out gingerbread men or starfish. Old cars rebuilt out of fenders of different bleached colors chugged past without silencers under lianas dangling from trees worthy of Tarzan. Cuban sandwich shops reeked of frying pork and plantains. At the end of a road lined with street lamps and squeezed between luxury hotels hung the sea, a dull gray panel of mist streaked green, like an infusion of tart spring herbs in a tarnished cauldron.
As they threaded their way down the Keys a transformation came over Joséphine. She put aside her little-girl politeness, tucked a cigarette behind one ear, suffocated Ajax with fierce affection and switched into a T-shirt white as baking powder that revealed she wore no bra. She rolled up the sleeves. She squeezed into faded jeans that emphasized her boyish butt and snaky hips. She painted her lips a faded purple. When she drove she squealed around corners and at the lights she pushed the accelerator to the floor.
Within a day she’d met a local painter who did big canvases of voodoo altars—bits of leather, beer bottles, even cigarettes were offered to black-skinned gods and goddesses with thick hair standing on end; sometimes the gods were mounted on the backs of horses with
red eyes. Thomas was a light-skinned black man with blue eyes, delicate caramel-colored hands intricately rigged and triggered with blue veins and fine muscles visible through the thin skin. He had no buttocks at all—he was forced to keep tugging his trousers back up to his waist, which was no thicker than Austin’s upper arm. Thomas had a strange gait—nothing noticeably wrong if you focused on it but if you observed it from the corner of your eye it was a movement that seemed partially paralyzed or even performed by a plastic knee or hip replacement—or perhaps it was just the effect of his hipless body stiffly casting forth his legs as he walked.
Thomas was in his early forties, or so he said, though he appeared to be ageless. He was interested in their French-speaking household and invited them to come to his studio, an old house in Bahama Village, the black part of town. He said his mother was Haitian and he could speak some of the patois but not proper French. The walls of his house were built out of thick planks of Dade Pine separated by white lines of cement or caulking. Voodoo candles were flickering in the mouths of sun-shaped scrap-metal disks; the air was thick with the acrid smoke curling off a green mosquito-repellent coil.
Joséphine lingered that first evening and said she wanted to study the paintings more thoroughly. She began to sway interpretively to an old recording of Steve Reich’s “Drumming.” She’d adopted the ostensibly inward but actually exhibitionistic motions of a woman who knows she’s being looked at with desire. She’d be fun to tease later, Austin thought (“Of course you slipped out of your shoes, Joséphine, it was part of your Graham training”), but for now she didn’t care what Austin and Julien thought, she was obviously glad to exist once more as an exciting body in the pale blue gaze of this heterosexual man, a black artist who must have his pick of all the ofay tourist chicks. She closed her eyes and threw her head back, bobbed up and down in place, letting her arms weave the air around her; all her movements were calculated to make her breasts rise and fall inside her T-shirt.
Before they’d left Providence, Joséphine had asked if Aaron, the Israeli architecture student, could come down and stay with them. Julien had said no, absolutely not, he was a cold, cruel man, that was obvious, who didn’t even like Joséphine. And besides he, Julien, had to have some peace. “I don’t have much time left,” he said. “I have to be selfish with every moment.”
Joséphine went cross-eyed with stubbornness, or rather she was so hell-bent in her obsessiveness that she just set her jaw and jammed every incoming signal. So they shouldn’t have been surprised when one afternoon Aaron—black curls crawling down his neck over his T-shirt collar, affable, confident, showing a bit of sexy paunch—showed up in a rented car. Joséphine put on her best debutante manner, as if she were wearing a large blue satin bow; maybe she thought by holding her head high and steady she could induce a tone of good manners that would preclude any surliness on Julien’s part.
It didn’t work. Julien was furious. He shouted at Joséphine in French, which Aaron didn’t understand. “I told you, no guests: you have absolutely no respect for our privacy. Nor for my health.”
Like a goddess Joséphine flashed anger from her beautiful fierce eyes: “You’re just a brat! I must lead my life! Your health has made you a tyrant.” She turned to Austin. “If Aaron goes I go, too.”
Aaron, hearing his name, shrugged. Then he stretched and yawned, showing his gold fillings and his pink, healthy tongue. Although he was just twenty-three he had the majestic Babylonian look that suited a man in his forties—the heavy, immobile forehead, the big, ice-cutter nose, the sprouting beard filings that swarmed below his Adam’s apple to join the ringlets rising up from his chest. What was pathetic, Austin thought, was that Aaron didn’t care one way or another about the outcome of this argument, which was tearing their little family apart. Even Ajax managed to hold his usual effusiveness in check and to study the newcomer with his head cocked to one side.
Austin refused to decide for or against Joséphine. They’d always been so fond of each other, even if Austin’s feelings of affection, as was usually his way with his women friends, were more willed than spontaneous, or rather slightly ceremonial, based on constant declarations and very public reassurances. Of course Austin thought that all of his friendships had something remote about them. One of the things he liked about aging was that those young people who needed an older man to approve of them were so easily satisfied. They were convinced by the frail, gloved hand vaguely sketching a sign in the incense-heavy air and didn’t require the close huddle of sustained warmth. Or he frequented people who were themselves removed, even remote. Julien, for instance, was dandified and cool, at least in his outward manner, which suited Austin. Who knew, would ever know, what Julien was feeling inside?
A lot, it seemed, this evening. He rushed about the house shouting, “Merde!” Austin, who’d only lose by saying anything, retreated to the kitchen to trim and steam some vegetables. When he emerged with a big bowl of brown rice he discovered the house was empty. Julien’s bike was no longer chained to the front porch pillar.
Austin ate. Hours went by. Joséphine had no doubt taken Aaron with her to the gay tea dance. They’d eat a burger on the dock and come straggling home at midnight, giggling and drunk on rum punches, secretly amused by all the gay eccentrics they’d danced with.
But Julien? He never stormed off like this. He wasn’t warmly dressed—just his skimpy white gym shorts, the very ones he’d been wearing when they first met in Paris. And a Virginia Woolf T-shirt, the name and portrait nearly worn away from repeated washings. He had on sneakers—no sweater. Maybe he’d taken some money with him, slipped into his jockstrap.
Where is he? Austin wondered. Julien could so easily kill himself. He could swim out to sea. After all, he has nothing to lose—he’ll be dead two years from now in any event. Why not die now, while he’s still handsome, intelligent, intact? His brother would even think he’d died in imitation of their mother rather than from a disease, a banal disease, the disease of the moment. Of course that would be harder for Robert to accept—but would also strike him as more glamorous.
He’ll swim out to sea—that’s the sort of fool-romantic fate he would embrace. Where is he? He has no identification on him, no one on the island knows him, no one would be able to identify his body. And Joséphine would rather put her own pleasure first. Well, wouldn’t I? My mistake was to give up sex, put on weight. Better to be the least little housewife in one of these trailers getting banged every night than a full (very full) professor of design who has forsworn sex.
He realized that both he and Julien resented Joséphine. She was having sex with Thomas, now with Aaron. Julien called her a “nympho,” but she was doing what they wanted to do.
At last, toward three in the morning, after the bars closed, Julien returned in a horse-drawn carriage. He was very drunk.
“Where’s your bike?” Austin asked, instantly hating himself for bringing up something so petty at a time like this.
“I left it at the harbor. I was too drunk to ride it home.”
Austin paid off the driver, an English young man in shorts and top hat, a lock of blond hair hanging down his forehead. “Cheers?” he said as his horse clip-clopped away. Julien stumbled, laughing, into Joséphine’s room.
“Julien, I was so worried, I kept imagining all the worst things—what are you doing?”
Julien was pulling Joséphine’s clothes out of her drawers and stuffing them into her duffel bag. He threw the bag out into the street along with Aaron’s suitcase.
“What are you doing?”
“There!” he shouted. “They’re no longer welcome here.”
While he was still shouting, Joséphine and Aaron drove up in his car. The smile faded from her face the instant she saw her things protruding from the duffel bag: “Julien! Quand même! Tu exagères—vraiment….”
When Julien laughed wildly and hung all his weight from the white porch pillar, turning and turning, she ca
me to a quick decision and said, “Very well. We’re not welcome here, Aaron. Let’s go find a motel room.”
“But you said I was invited to stay here. I don’t have much money with me. If I’d thought I’d have to pay for a room I would never have driven all the way down here. You promised me—”
“We can stay with Thomas, the Haitian painter, the one you met at Sloppy Joe’s. He’s a nice guy—il ne fera pas toutes ces histoires, lui.”
“What are you saying? Talk English,” Aaron said. “You promised I could stay down here for my holiday—”
“But it’s not up to me.”
“Get out! Get out!” Julien muttered. He then stumbled and fell. He picked himself up and went over to sit on the swing at the dark end of the porch, as if he were an actor who’d just left the stage and fallen out of character. He nursed his knee. The tree behind him on the neighbor’s lot was lit with a pink spot; Julien’s dark hair was in the shadows but, posed against the pink light, it picked up a red halo.
Aaron didn’t have his French friends’ sense of drama. They were willing to make proud, noble, possibly foolish decisions, but he wanted to hash it all out. He didn’t want to be inconvenienced for the sake of a gesture. Anyway, Joséphine seemed to mean nothing to Aaron; Julien was right about that: he was engaged to a woman back home who was finishing her military service.
Two days later Aaron drove on to Naples, Florida; he’d been invited there by a rich uncle who owned a garment-manufacturing plant in Indonesia. Joséphine moved back from Thomas’s studio, where she and Aaron had been camping out.
“So,” Julien said, his face frozen in a hard smile, “did you get your foufounette fucked by a big circumcised dick?”