by Edmund White
In the mornings, Austin could tell, Julien was often tempted to stay in bed but then, by heroic dedication to experience for its own sake, he’d rise, dress, shake the rust out of his joints and set his slowly atrophying muscles once more in motion, for the only way to live at all was by pretending there was going to be a future worth preparing for. That future was so past belief that only the most grimly abstract sense of duty could prod him now through all this onerousness. He was a bit like a Frankenstein monster slowly coming unstitched.
One evening the Easter holiday was over and the palazzo began to fill up with the returning pensionnaires—pale Parisians in black, murmuring in hushed voices rich with insinuation and knowing, so different from the loud querulousness of Rome and its verbal shrugging. The French, who consider even the mildest day too hot and who have no stoic scruples about complaining, were all saying, “Chaud … trop chaud … comme il fait chaud!”
Then, the next afternoon, after a long, dreamy walk through the Pincio looking down on the entire city as it spread out all the way from the spun-sugar battlements of the monument to Victor Emmanuel to the opening crab claw of colonnades in front of St. Peter’s, as they were ambling down the hill to the Villa Médicis, suddenly Julien doubled over. He said it felt like sharp needles piercing his eyeball, the left one, the one that had so nearly been blinded by herpes in Boston.
It wasn’t too late to call their travel agent in Paris. They were locked into a low-fare air ticket that permitted no changes, but the agent phoned Air France and talked about Julien’s AIDS emergency. Within ten minutes she phoned back to say they had two seats on the last plane of the day if they could be on it in an hour and a half.
They threw their clothes in a bag and rushed down the hill to the taxis clustered in front of the expensive German hotel on the street at the top of the Spanish Steps. Julien was in excruciating pain, writhing on the back seat of the taxi. Austin sat beside him, not even daring to hold his hand lest the pressure of his skin (or even the mere fact of his presence) add to the reality of his suffering, as though pain, like the atmosphere, could be measured in pounds per cubic inch. Julien had long since put behind him all play-acting, exchanging it for a wooden-ness worthy of the cigar-store Indian he’d come to resemble, so brown and hard was his skin, so inexpressive his features. But now he twisted and turned in his seat, grimaced and thrashed from side to side. If someone had dared to annoy Julien, even unintentionally, Austin would have gone for his throat. But now he could help in no way except to pray silently that they’d get to the airport in time.
They did. They’d even been upgraded to first class. As soon as the plane took off Julien felt better. As the cool, compressed air came rushing through the overhead nozzles and the soft voices of the French stewardesses were asking them with formulaic politeness for their choices, Julien’s whole body uncoiled and stretched. He scarcely trusted his good luck, but it seemed he was intent on proving that pleasure, after all, is nothing except the cessation of pain. He smiled. Now he was at home only in this pressurized world of propulsion and purely symbolic comfort. Even when they landed the symptoms didn’t come back.
Despite his greedy sight-seeing, he now admitted he’d been disappointed by Rome, although Paris, too, struck him as more pedestrian than he’d remembered. “It seems so colorless after Italy,” Julien said. Everything looked standardized and well-maintained, compared to the baroque shabbiness of Rome, its broken pediments incised against the blue sky or its marble thresholds half-sunk into the red earth. It occurred to Austin that Julien was being so fastidious to justify to himself why he was unhappy in both cities.
They went to the Hôpital du Jour where Julien was welcomed exuberantly by the nurses and the shy Iranian intern; Austin realized with a slight shock that with them Julien was still being as charming as ever, whereas at home he’d long since given up the effort. The Iranian could find nothing wrong with Julien’s eye.
Chapter Eighteen
Austin no longer slept with Julien. He’d put sheets on the couch in Julien’s studio. The mattress was lumpy but Austin was usually so exhausted that he fell asleep immediately. No matter how tired he was he remained alert to the slightest signal Julien made. If Julien had a gasping fit behind his door, Austin was suddenly there, hovering in the hallway, listening, verifying. If the floorboard creaked, Julien would call out, “Petit?”
“Oui?”
“I’m okay. Go back to bed.”
Only once in the whole long period of his illness did Julien ever say, “Would you sleep with me tonight? I’m afraid.”
Austin stopped drawing the curtains and turned to look at Julien. He was so moved by this naked demand for comfort that he acquiesced without a comment. He realized how brave Julien had been on all the other nights, how brave in his endurance and silence.
Austin had bought some pornographic magazines and dutifully masturbated to them, even though he didn’t like still photography of men (he preferred dirty movies or, best of all, stories). He said out loud, “I’m so physically lonely.” Maybe he found sexual despondency easier to admit to than just plain loneliness.
One night at a reading someone gave at the Village Voice, an English-language bookshop on the Left Bank, he met an American gay man in his early forties who was in the audience and they’d exchanged numbers, not with the idea of sleeping together (Austin knew Rod wasn’t attracted to him), but simply because they’d laughed so hard and in such an exhilarating, spontaneous, thoroughly American way while sipping white wine after the reading. “Oh, the best people,” Austin told Rod, “are Europeanized Americans.”
Now Austin phoned him at all hours during the night to laugh and whisper. He never had a free moment to see Rod and even forgot what he looked like, but they told each other everything, week after week, in those alternating joky and confessional riffs peculiar to Americans that no foreigner can ever successfully duplicate. Austin fell half in love with Rod and appreciated his way of diverting even the most solemn facts about Julien’s illness into irrelevant or irreverent remarks. In Austin’s place Julien would have been indignant at the “liberties” that Rod was taking, but Austin appreciated their softening effect, as if someone kept playing waltzes on the piano as the ship sank. He could tell that Rod was eccentric, a big reader who had had little formal education, a peddler of drugs at the clubs who maintained a strict regime of working out and homeopathic medicine, someone who was obsessed with what no longer existed: the deejays who’d died of AIDS in the eighties, the forgotten hit songs of the seventies, the magically seamless segue from one song to another on a certain night at the Saint in 1980.
Rod had heard of an acupuncturist in Toulouse who was supposed to work miracles with AIDS patients. He even produced a friend from the clubs who came by one day to sing Dr. Kado’s praises to Julien and Austin. They flew down to Toulouse and saw the doctor. Dr. Kado was partially crippled. He told Julien that the world had been good when it was green, and at first they thought he was an ecologist. But no, he meant that the creatures, the dinosaurs, had been green and that then there’d been white people who’d “degenerated” into yellow people who were further degraded into the blacks. But not to worry. Through acupuncture and proper channeling, people were ascending back toward pure reptilian green and saurian virtue. Homosexuals them selves were degenerate forms but with proper therapy and meditation Julien could look forward to a cure. “A cure of AIDS?” Julien asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “of your homosexuality. I’ve had a startling degree of success. You must eat only things that are—”
“Green,” Austin said, interrupting. “Come on, Julien, let’s get out of here.”
One day Austin’s aristocratic friend Marie-France invited him and Julien to tea. Her sitting room was situated between an inner and an outer garden—the inner one made up of trimmed boxwoods and raked gravel paths around a verdigrised fountain of a nymph, the outer one composed of twin allées of trees, leaf
less now, and enough varied ferns as ground cover to please any Victorian. Although it was almost spring the days were still short and cold and in the afternoon the French doors opening out from the salon looked like stretched panels of gray, watered silk, each slightly brighter or darker, fractionally different shades of twilight.
Marie-France was brisk and perfectly turned out as always in a Chanel suit, with a black bow gathering her hair up behind, her skin radiant and unlined. Nothing about her seemed rushed or artificial; her low voice was self-deprecating, alive to every possibility of wit, even at her own expense. She asked them all about Rome, as if they had been normal rich tourists, the sort she knew, seeking distraction, checking out their Italian cousins. “Did you see the Contarinis?” she asked. “Teeny and Dukie?”
She herself was more interested in actresses, writers and painters, people who would make her laugh and would cast a bohemian glamor over her salon, crowded as it inevitably had to be with old relatives and good tailoring and bank presidents who were, for once, intimidated by the commingling of so much artistic talent and so many aristocratic titles.
If Marie-France was shocked by Julien’s protruding bones, brown face and stubble, his layers of shirts stuffed above his hipless jeans and slat-thin legs, she didn’t let on at all. She was courteous, merry, light, although her deep voice made her frivolous remarks sound like fife music rearranged for the bassoon, and the gray light of Paris filtering through windows on two sides of the room crammed with row after row of white marble busts and couches upholstered in candy-striped velvet or pale blue satin imprinted with still paler peonies—this dim, liquid light in a room in which lamps had not yet been turned on lent a peacefulness, even a sadness, to every one of her starchy movements, even to her perfect posture. She always looked as if she was about to rise and tiptoe away.
Then Marie-France’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Hortense, the one who hoped to compete as a horsewoman in the Olympics, came in. She would have let the two men kiss her rosy cheeks, as any upper-class girl was trained to do, but she shrank back, just a millimeter, from the ruin of Julien’s looks and in blushing confusion half-sketched in a shy, comic curtsy. Immediately she curled up against her mother, as a much younger child would have done, and after studying them without seeming really to hear what they were saying, she hurried away, dropping another perfunctory curtsy on her way out.
The shame of disease, of their loathsome, terminal, sexual disease, overwhelmed Austin and he felt his cheeks burning. Marie-France even appeared to him to have turned fractionally colder, as if she regretted that her innocent daughter had been sullied by the contact.
Did Julien notice anything? No, he seemed very happy with their visit and several times on the way home said they must see more of Marie-France. When he’d gone to the toilet for a moment, she’d astonished Austin by saying, “Poor fellow…. Listen, if ever you need money, even a lot of money, remember, I have it.” Austin was especially touched by her remark because he knew how painful it was for her to mention money at all.
Julien became extremely ill with a microorganism, a kind of tuberculosis, in the blood; it was called “avian micobacteria.” His remaining cushion of flesh, no matter how slight, was boiled off his bones; he looked like a ramshackle infant. One day he was standing in the shower, studying his big, naked bones in the mirror beside the tub, and he said, “Look what’s happened to my body. It’s over.”
But it wasn’t. A new treatment for this particular disease had just kicked in and it was so effective that two weeks after he’d started it his raging fevers were calmed and he was eating like a horse. The weight flowed back onto his body and he looked better than he had in a year.
His energy came back, too, and when Lucy flew over to visit them he took a real pleasure in showing her Paris, though later he complained that she was sapping his last blood, snacking on a dying man’s bones. He said she was a vampire and an idiot and he’d even heard her saying to her mother on the phone, “Now we have to go out for another French meal,” spoken in such peevish, weary tones, as if this particular ordeal was well known back in L’Amérique profonde. But for Julien, complaining put him in high spirits; it was a form of creativity; it was even a form of affection. Lucy and Julien conferred for hours—on her poetry, her clothes, her decision to marry, her desire to have a baby. Julien insisted she have a baby; being childless was the one thing he regretted, he said.
He found out through a mutual friend that Vladimir had committed suicide. The friend didn’t know the details but he said that Vladimir had lost his looks, his face had been covered with what appeared to be boils, all very mysterious, though he’d undoubtedly contracted AIDS. He just didn’t want to admit in so many words that he was gay and dying of the usual gay disease. Nor did he want his friends to pity him. Julien looked often at the photo Vladimir had inscribed to him and created a minor cult around it. Austin would find him staring at it, tears in his eyes. Austin remembered Vladimir as he’d been as a young man in Venice, barely out of his adolescence, or in New York, when someone had glanced up to see him entering the room and had asked, “Who is this young man who looks like a prince in a Turgenev novel?”
Now that he’d seen death at such close quarters, smelled its sour breath and felt the twitch of its flank in the dark, Julien didn’t want to be backed into a corner by it. Through Joséphine he met Patty, a South American poet in her fifties who was willing to help him out. Patty was unhappy, had gone through a mastectomy, her husband had left her, she drank too much and one of her two daughters had become very ill. To say that much, of course, to make a clear list of woes like that, was terribly American on his part, Austin realized. He’d found out whatever he knew about Patty from Joséphine. Patty herself wallowed in the non-dit of unnamed suffering. If anyone came close to formulating a question about what she was going through, she would dissolve into a fit of cigarette coughs and glide out of the room, mumbling something about the bottle of whiskey she was trying to locate.
She had beautiful manners, a proper Buenos Aires upbringing despite her foul language (so typical of the radical but bourgeois heirs to 1968), the overflowing ashtrays, the unkempt hair and badly bitten nails and the thin, flushed face of an alcoholic. Her apartment was on the edge of the Sentier, the garment district, anything but a fashionable address, but it was huge and furnished with fine old family things she hadn’t polished or even dusted in ten years. She looked out at the world from under a fringe of hennaed hair, her huge eyes made bigger with kohl she’d applied with more expertise than her shaky hand would seem to vouch for. She liked them both, especially Julien, and welcomed them with a sympathetic glance that spoke of all she’d lived through and was too proud to talk about—or perhaps she was too disdainful of language to confide her feelings to words.
Often Austin would come home from walking Ajax to discover Patty and Julien “talking death.” They’d be huddled over Earl Grey for him, Johnnie Walker for her, and the air would be pungent from her Gitanes (he never objected when she smoked at their place, as if she alone had earned the right). The afternoon sunlight, reflected off the top windows and the stone of the buildings across the way, would be applying knives to the rising entrails of smoke that twisted above their heads. She’d shake a little smoker’s cough out of her pinched chest and mouth, which radiated lines out away from the opening. She’d laugh, or in a hoarse spasm indicate laughter, and she and Julien would wait almost silently, certainly nervously, until Austin was out of earshot.
She told Julien he should go to Amsterdam, where doctor-assisted death was legal for those suffering from a terminal disease, but when Austin telephoned a Dutch euthanasia society the man who answered was curt and possibly suspicious. “No, no,” he said, “euthanasia is only legal for Dutch citizens, and a minimum of three doctors must sign a release form. Anyway, euthanasia is only administered to patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and they usually belong to a club and have written a living will years before the
y begin to lose their mental competence.” This was the same Dutch singsong complacency Austin had met years before in an Amsterdam leather bar when a lantern-jawed, gum-chewing blond with bad skin had asked him in a bored voice, “And would you like to be beat?” just as if he’d been saying, “And would you like more fries?”
When Austin mentioned the suicide problem to Henry McVay during one of their almost daily phone conversations, Henry said, “Yes, killing oneself is far more difficult than most people suspect.”
“Have you ever contemplated it?” Austin asked. He suspected that Henry would laugh in his face, but on the contrary Henry said in a low, matter-of-fact voice, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”
“Oh?” Austin said on a high, cracked note. “You?”
“And, Sweetie, what’s more: I’ve belonged to a Hemlock Club for over a decade.”
“A hemlock …?”
“What!” Henry exclaimed, surprised to the point of mild indignation, his strongest suit. “The Hemlock Society has meetings in every civilized city around the globe,” Henry said in his old-fashioned, deliberate manner, one that foreigners, not incidentally, always prized; he was the opposite of a mumbler. He spoke in all-caps, even to a fellow American, which lent the present conversation a macabre emphasis.
“But why, Henry? Why should you of all people long for death?”