The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Joséphine shook her head sadly and screwed her face up into a nauseated expression. “You’re sick,” she said. “And truly disgusting.” But Austin realized that by using the child’s word for the vagina, foufounette, a cute word, Julien was in his meager fashion trying to apologize or at least send out a friendly signal. And Joséphine, by responding to him as a little sister would to her irritating big brother, had broken through the formality of hate.

  They stayed in Key West for three weeks. Julien never drank again—in fact, his one night of wandering around town in his gym shorts was the only time he interrupted his sobriety. Joséphine shifted her affection back to Thomas and didn’t mention Aaron again, but it was obvious she was brooding about him. She worked every day on the illustrations she was doing for a children’s book—big, bold pastels, some in extreme close-up, of two snowy-haired, full-aproned but remarkably agile grandmothers, capable of turning somersaults and doing handsprings and drawing a little neighbor girl into their network of crime-fighting.

  Julien and Joséphine had promised to drive back with Ajax five days before the end of the vacation; they were supposed to cede the house to Peter and Austin, but as it turned out they didn’t want to leave Key West until the last possible moment. Austin rented them a suite in an old house on Eaton Street and told them firmly not to come by the little house with the tin roof and the tourist tree. “This is Peter’s time with me.”

  Peter was even thinner but he was more sharply focused than he’d been at Disney World. He wanted to bike to the beach on the army base every day; he was an experienced tanner who knew how to work his way efficiently toward less and less sunblock. They rode past the military guard in a narrow house in the middle of the road, paid their few dollars, glided under the wind-twisted pines and spread their towels on the narrow strip of sand beside the blue-green, rapidly flowing water. The beach was not far from a narrow channel that led into the harbor. Sailing boats glided past just thirty or forty feet away, their white sails strangely close and all out of proportion, like monsters in bad process shots in old Japanese horror films.

  “Oh, Austin,” Peter said, once they were lying calmly side by side, “I’m determined to live as much as I can. Thanks for bringing me down here. I know you’re still not drinking, but I hope you’ll go with me to the bars.”

  “It’s years since I’ve been to a bar. And look at me, how out of shape I am. Won’t they turn me away?”

  “Oh, but people like a bit of heft now, Austin. It shows you’re not sick.”

  “Everyone says that,” Austin grumbled, smiling, “but it’s not strictly speaking true.”

  He rubbed oil on Peter’s narrow shoulders and even up his long, long neck, on which his elegant, white-haired head was posed, regal as a bewigged young woman’s seen from behind in a Fragonard. His head was at once stubborn and vulnerable. That was the strange contradiction that characterized Peter. He was this slightly dazed kid, like a cartoon character who’d just been slammed on the head with a massive hammer and stunned out of malevolence into a goofy affability. Austin could almost see the stars dancing around his head. But he was also willful and the least contradiction sent him spinning into paroxysms of outrage. He not only collected injustices but had also invented new ways of making them pay handsome dividends.

  “Anyway, won’t you go with me to the bars?” Peter asked. “I hate going alone. I get attacks of vertigo. The doctor says it’s nothing that can be controlled. It’s the virus working directly on the central nervous system. I guess I always was a dizzy blond.”

  Austin said, “Sure, I’ll go. It’ll be fun. Maybe I’ll even get laid. Peter, you’re my tempter.”

  Austin was stunned by Peter’s way of talking about the virus so candidly. It was easy to forget that there actually was a virus that existed, grew, outwitted its enemies, invested its host, had designs on new hosts, ate nerves and polluted blood. Usually the virus controlled its empire only through intermediaries, through ukases relayed along synapses or by orchestrating the slow collapse of immunities as it inched past the inner sanctum of the blood barrier so that it could reorder—simplify in some monstrous, radical way—the chemistry of the brain. But if the effects of the virus could be felt everywhere, in the dimming of an eye, the whittling down of all the fingers so they couldn’t fill out their old rings, which just slid off, or in temporary gusts of deafness that reminded the invalid of the long, reverberant silence to come, the virus itself was seldom referred to and even less often did it make a “personal” appearance. It was the silent partner, the unnamed investor, the power behind the throne.

  Life was easier with Peter than with Julien. Peter didn’t draw attention to himself. He dressed with conventional good taste, a taste which Americans called preppie and the French BCBG (bon chic bon genre). Peter was thankful to the waiters, he was efficient and self-effacing when buying something in a store, soft-spoken in public places, never obscene, full of “thank yous” and “you’re welcomes,” a bit colorless. Around him Austin wasn’t expected to come up with an opinion on every aesthetic topic, nor were people themselves treated as “amusing” or “elegant” or “beautiful.” People (unless they belonged to the very narrow band of black men Peter cruised) were classified as “nice” or “not specially nice.” In the disco on Duval Street Peter could be counted on to know the words to the songs, which he’d sing along to soundlessly, and the proper steps, whereas Julien made a wide swathe on the floor if he bothered to dance at all; his numbers were all showstoppers.

  Perhaps the real difference was that Peter respected gay life as it was—mindless, sexual if not sexy, procrustean—whereas Julien was too much of a lawgiver to accept the rules handed down by the tribe. Austin knew that gay life had little left to offer someone his age but he found it more restful, a reflex, to dance in the normal, invisible way, as he’d been dancing for some thirty years now.

  That night Austin spotted Julien and Joséphine at the club, just a dim instantané in a strobe flash. Julien looked young, younger than such a strong personality would warrant. Although Austin wanted to take off with them, he didn’t dare; he was worried about a repetition of the Disney World debacle. It made him nervous that they were lurking about at all. Poor Peter.

  Peter and Austin went to the outdoors bar where some Virginia college boys, three of them, each six foot three and skinny, hair in brush cut, pressed khakis, buffed penny loafers, were talking loudly, a whole mouth full of … if not exactly mush, then something coarser, of oatmeal. One of them was trying to get an older man, a stranger, to arbitrate a dispute. He kept asking the man politely to help settle the matter but the boy was making no sense at all and the arbiter was shrugging with a grin.

  “Austin,” Peter said, “all I can think about is Alex, my new beau.”

  “What! And you haven’t told me a thing.” Austin was drinking tonic without the vodka but it still brought back the old exhilarating bar taste. “Who’s Alex? Black, of course….”

  “I hate when you say that.”

  “But he is black, right?”

  “Yes, but you make it sound so kinky, like a fetish, like a thing: Peter and his preppie blacks. But it’s not like that.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.”

  Austin wasn’t sure how far he should go in teasing Peter, who liked people to notice him and talk about his habits, as though he existed in the eyes of observing friends as a character. But he didn’t want to be typecast as a “dinge queen,” as people used to call white men inebriated with blacks, as someone consumed by “Black fever.”

  “Anyway,” Austin said, “so he happens to be black and a little bit preppie—”

  “Little bit?” Peter exclaimed. “Oh, brother, you can’t imagine how preppie he is. He’s the Mayor’s assistant, don’t ask me what he does because I can never get that straight—” Peter was obviously very drunk. He’d turned on his smile, which hummed and glowed like a neon bar a
nd his gestures—eyebrows raised, lips pursed, emphatic hands with the fingers spread so wide they almost bent back—were performed with the drunk’s insistence on accuracy and order.

  “Let’s start all over: Who is Alex?”

  Peter perched on a stool at the bar and patted the empty one beside him. “He’s a native New Yorker. He’s thirty-eight, shorter than me, just a wee bit paunchy.” In his drunkenness Peter overdid his indications of “weeness.” He stooped a bit to squint at an inch squeezed between thumb and middle finger. His face was rosy, his eyes beginning to cross, a lock of hair had fallen over his brow: he was drunk and happy. “Not that I mind. No, he’s cute. He’s interested in—he designs furniture. He has only one fault. He’s a workaholic. No, two: he’s negative and I haven’t told him yet that I’m positive. Of course we’re always very, very safe.”

  “Does he like you?”

  Peter grabbed his hand. “Oh, I hope so, Austin, because I want to have one happy affair before I die. That’s mean. You and I had a great affair. But we’re more like family than lovers. Not that it isn’t terrifically romantic being here in Key West with you under a moon—well, I think that’s a moon over there someplace.” He held his hand up over his eyes to indicate looking.

  They drifted across the street and down a back alley to a bar known to attract an older set. Peter had nothing against older men, who’d always been good for buying drinks and handing out compliments. They’d make all the moves, which suited his nature. Nor did Austin mind his fellow seniors—in fact he sometimes said all his problems originated from his interest in kids.

  The door to the bar gave access to an area open to the night sky but enclosed by ten-foot-high wood palisading. The lights were low, the music deafening. Most of the customers were in their forties. Inside, in the shuttered part of the club, a single bare-chested, barefoot boy in a kilt was dancing lasciviously on the bar. Austin watched him, mesmerized. He realized how long it had been since he’d even held someone in his arms or been kissed full on the mouth. Of course it was all the fault of the decision he himself had made in Mexico never to touch Julien again. Nevertheless, even if he’d been the one to choose physical solitude, it was hard to bear.

  In the back room an old-fashioned mirror ball turned, casting its banal shards of light above an empty dance floor.

  Austin exchanged glances with a man in a black cowboy hat who had on new jeans and old boots. Do I know him? Is that why he’s looking at me funny? Austin said good night to Peter and left; Peter said he’d be home in an hour or so. But on the way out Austin noticed the man was following him. Austin slowed up and turned back to say, “That go-go boy was ready for Las Vegas, if you want my opinion.”

  “Yeah, he sure was,” the man said in a very deep voice with a touch of a Southern accent, if not drawl.

  “Where you from?”

  “Dallas. You?”

  “Virginia, originally,” Austin said, to establish a Southern affiliation. “Right now I live in Providence, which ain’t the same.”

  “Guess not. Like to get together?”

  “Sure, why don’t we grab this cab and go to my place.”

  “Why not.”

  Austin left his bike chained where it was in front of the Cuban Cultural Center.

  In the back seat of the car Austin half-turned toward the man and smiled at him. He looked to be no more than forty, with a long, lean but underexercised torso, a wooden face that cracked and split audibly around even the most minor smile, and a voice deep and expressionless that reminded Austin of a closed cedar chest. When Austin took his hand, he surrendered it easily and even stroked Austin’s thumb with his own, but he looked out the window simultaneously. Austin was worried they might stop at a light and Julien would come cycling up beside them. It was such a small town. At the same time nothing seemed more natural than sitting beside this man with the dry, warm hand. There was a simple no-bullshit manliness between them and not a trace of flirtatiousness.

  Back in the house Austin offered him a drink. He said he didn’t drink.

  “Neither do I!” Austin exclaimed joyfully, as if it were the most extraordinary coincidence.

  Peter had made Austin a joint. Austin asked dubiously, “Should we smoke this?” But by now the man had pressed his mouth onto Austin’s. They kissed in the ordinary way, their hands explored each other’s body in the usual fashion—but then, suddenly, Austin felt safe enough, present enough, to lean on this man with the full weight of his desire. It wasn’t even that he was releasing his lust; it was more that he’d found it.

  After a moment the man drew back. It was so obvious they’d each met his sexual match. Even in the old days not more than one in twenty men had been this hungry, this available. The man smiled hugely. “Wow,” he said, like a diver coming up for air and, like a diver, shaking his head abruptly to one side to get his hair out of his face. “We better smoke that joint after all. Hell, I ain’t got no right to but I want to.”

  At first when they were naked in bed Austin knelt on the floor between his legs, as if all he had to offer was an expert mouth and a discreetly absent body. But the man said, “Hey! You! C’mon on up here. Yeah. That’s right. Climb up here. Right into my arms.”

  He was a very nice man—oh, Austin knew, he’d most likely turn into a humorless accountant if questioned, even a deacon in the gay Metropolitan Community Church, something solemn and ghastly, but as a creature, as a guy, he was relaxed and neighborly, a set of young muscles under skin that age had untuned just a bit. But he was a comfortable grown-up in his baggy skin suit, and this ordinariness, this Southern ordinariness, which Austin had almost forgotten, struck him as miraculously sexy. He never thought he’d feel this big, roomy man covering him again, tongue a wet, muscular fluke mooring one face into another, hands taking root along Austin’s back. Austin’s nipples, his penis, his mouth, his arms were all glowing; a heat-seeking missile would have found five sites to bomb.

  Because he was stoned he also became just a bit metaphysical. He floated here, above their writhing bodies and above the sound of their voices, too astounded to make much sense. He thought it was like a symphony, which existed up here, ideally, as a silent score, eternal and unchanging, and down there, as a performance, noisy, imperfect, plangent with feeling.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They returned to France. In Providence, things at the college had fizzled out. Although a few of his colleagues, mainly other art historians, had uttered regretful noises about Austin’s imminent departure, no one seemed to mind it. After all, he’d made a few waves. There had been his sexist remarks. And then he and Julien had not been the sort of dotty, aging gay couple an academic community likes—great cooks, kindly uncles to faculty children, demon bridge players. And then AIDS (for they had made no secret about their health), didn’t AIDS suggest that they hadn’t been faithful? No one would say that, naturally; in fact everyone pulled long faces and spoke of the tragedy, the holocaust, and vaguely blamed the Reagan administration, but the presence of AIDS did imply, didn’t it, that there’d been lurid promiscuity sometime in the past, not just the once-a-week domestic squirt-and-giggle that was usual on Providence’s East Side. Austin was, shockingly, almost twice Julien’s age, which hinted that Austin was susceptible to the charms of youth—not appreciated in a professor. And wasn’t there something about Julien having been married? Did that mean Austin had taken him away from his wife and infected him?

  Worse, Joséphine, though almost thirty, was endlessly walking Ajax past Aaron’s door, and he really was a student. Apparently Aaron had told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, but she kept traipsing up and down Benefit Street on the off chance she’d run into him. Once she and Austin did see him puffing up Planet Street, but when he caught sight of their familiar silhouettes at the top of the hill—slim girl in a pea jacket, blond hair flying like a pennant; round bespectacled man trailing a long knit scarf; and fat basset hound straining at t
he very end of an extendible blue leash—Aaron had hid behind a tree. The only problem was that the tree was a sapling and Aaron was becoming more and more paunchy.

  “Look, Joséphine,” Austin said loudly enough to be heard by Aaron, “that tree is pregnant! Have you ever noticed a pregnant tree before? We call it the Coward Tree.”

  For Joséphine the joke was a bitter one. She longed to bear Aaron’s baby, to learn Hebrew, to live on a kibbutz, to circumcise every finger if that would make Aaron look at her. One night she stood outside Aaron’s door, buzzing and buzzing him, pleading to be let up. After Aaron stopped responding over the speakerphone, Joséphine began to beat her head against the lamp post. The people on the ground floor called the cops.

  For Austin the presence of this suffering girl, driven by her longing, gave a beautiful face to his own shameful desires, which had been reawakened by the man in Key West. The night after they’d met, the man had showed up at the tea dance as arranged, but Austin had already promised to invite Peter out to a final dinner at Louie’s Back Yard facing the sea. Austin kept regretting that he’d failed to tell the man how much he liked him and to line him up for another date, another life, a life to come.

  In Paris Julien began to paint seriously. He wanted to make some small mark on life. He couldn’t work as an architect again—he didn’t even want his former colleagues to know he’d never been able to work in the States or that he was ill or that he’d come back to Paris, ingloriously.

  He’d become interested in architecture as a painter manqué. When he was nineteen and had been living in the historic heart of Nancy in an unheated noble house with no electricity or running water or toilet except in the courtyard, a house that had been virtually abandoned, Julien had stridden about the decrepit salon over rain-damaged parquet missing slats, wearing tall boots, long hair and a flowing white pirate shirt. He’d painted by candlelight, standing before his easel while drinking mulled wine and trying to stay warm. He’d rented a floor of the house for just a few francs but let it be divined that it was a family property, for if to be an aristocrat was a good thing, to be a ruined one was even better. In England, say, a baronet might have felt dubious about practicing an art, but the French, used to a court society, forgave their aristocrats the possession of talent. Austin had seen some of Julien’s arty photos from this period, foggy black-and-white shots of larval girls in leotards wrapped in fishermen’s nets in the attic under the massive beams supporting the mansard roof.