The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Outside the car were the swirling, laughing crowds and inside two somber men, one as gaunt as a saint or his relics. The big, leering faces swam up to the closed windows like those of sharks in an aquarium that swerve away only at the last minute, oblivious to the passive expressions of human visitors just on the other side of the glass—except here the Muslims were the ones who appeared animated and fully human, whereas the Christian tourists were stunned into nearly mineral torpor and indifference.

  They drove past one adobe casbah after another as they skirted the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Some of the villages appeared abandoned, others flourishing. If there were inhabitants they were dressed in all their finery, the Berber women in hoods hung with gold coins, two clown-like circles of rouge painted on their cheeks.

  Hour after hour went past and still they didn’t reach Ouazarzate, which was only half the distance to Marrakesh. Austin said, “We’ll have to stop at our hotel in Ouazarzate for the night. It was comfortable, air-conditioned. We’ll order up room service and watch CNN and make our calls to Paris. Maybe we’ll even find a doctor who can fax in the necessary documents.”

  Julien didn’t say anything. In Erfoud, Austin had washed out his robes, which had dried out quickly in the desert air and looked as fresh as those of the celebrants in the streets. When they’d stopped for lunch he’d eaten nothing but had sipped an orange soda. Austin had nearly carried him to the roadside table. Two truck drivers at the next table stared and one said, “He’s very sick, you need to get him to a hospital.”

  Austin started to explain that he was recovering from an operation and looked worse than he was—but suddenly Julien, eyes swimming with morphine, pain and weakness, stood up and was trying to walk toward the car. Austin helped him into the car and ran back to throw some money on the table, smile at the truckers and shrug. Julien saw the smile and shrug with cold, ancient, unforgiving eyes.

  Now he asked Austin to pull over so he could piss. Austin said, “Not here, wait a minute, here the roadbed is too high, there’s a steep slope—”

  “Here!” Julien roared.

  Austin did as ordered, though when Julien opened the door he had to run down the gravel hill and lost his footing and nearly fell. The urine splashed out of him; obviously he was becoming incontinent. What did that mean? Was this the end?

  He asked to sit in the back seat where he could stretch out and sleep, which sounded reasonable but Austin felt he was angry and wanted to have some separation from his tormentor, his enemy.

  Julien even said, “I just figured when I must have first contracted the HIV virus. Remember that terrible flu I had?”

  Austin couldn’t remember it, but the implication, not wasted on him, was that Julien had been infected since knowing Austin—infected by Austin. Because Austin knew nothing about Julien’s other dalliances with men, if any, he had to ascribe the blame to himself.

  When they arrived in Ouazarzate at last, Julien said he couldn’t walk into the hotel.

  “You can and you will!” Austin shouted angrily. “We just need to get to the room and you’ll feel better. We’ve got to spend one more night in a hotel—”

  “No,” he whispered. “I can’t. Don’t you see it’s over?”

  “It’s not over. We’re going to get that plane back to Paris—”

  “I hate you!” Julien hissed. “Je te déteste!” was what he said in French, the exact words. “Don’t you see? I’m covered in shit.”

  “I’ll clean you up.” Austin lifted him up, stood him beside the car, threw his dirty robes on the ground and helped him step into trousers.

  “Now we’re just going to walk normally past the desk and to the room.”

  “I can’t,” Julien wailed. “Can’t you see? It’s over. Why won’t you let me go?”

  Austin, grim and determined and cold with fury, put his arm around Julien’s waist and walked him toward the entrance to the hotel, but suddenly Julien fainted and crumpled onto the grass. A Frenchman who was walking by said, “What’s happened? Call an ambulance. For God’s sake, I’ll call an ambulance,” and he ran into the hotel and insisted the clerk phone the hospital.

  Austin looked down at this tiny, shit-stained effigy in the grass and he sobbed, “I can’t, I don’t—” but he didn’t know what he was saying and his whole body was seized with a violent fit of trembling which was only more sobs and at last tears. It was as if his will, so long screwed up to its highest, tautest pitch, had at last snapped and now was hanging down as useless as a violin string. After so much tuning and sawing and plucking, after so much rapture and suffering had been wrung out of it, at last it had snapped and no one was more surprised than the instrumentalist himself.

  Two bellboys and the clerk had gathered around Julien. It was they who were stroking him, giving him human comfort and holding him. They were the ones to show poor Julien some normal human sympathy rather than this cold, neurotic Austin, who despised himself. He heard those words again, “I hate you.” The three Moroccans were crouching down beside Julien and looking, looking into his face, as if memorizing him, like those intense, scrutinizing figures painted by Giotto. Austin, so bizarrely dissociated from his feelings during this crisis, could not help thinking that the attitudes of these men were Biblical and that for thousands of years, until the recent past in Europe, people had had no idea of privacy, no social distance between them, and that when they looked at an afflicted man, a dying man, they drank him in with their eyes, studied him as if to memorize him, leaned in closer and closer and closer, peeling back a veil from the eyes so that they might truly see and know this suffering creature, about to disappear. Austin felt ineffectual and broken as well as devoid of normal feeling. He thought maybe he was crazy. Yes, he’d gone crazy during the long, intense vigil of these last few months, and he hadn’t even noticed at what moment he’d passed over the line. He felt out of control now, slightly awed by his own jangled, broken organism; he couldn’t predict its next responses.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, an ambulance, fly-blown and ancient, a big white truck hand-painted with red crescents (the Muslim equivalent of a red cross, Austin half-remembered), came rolling up, its red light revolving and its siren shrieking. Two male orderlies in white, short-sleeved, semi-transparent polyester uniforms put a stretcher on the ground beside Julien, lifted him onto it and slid him into the back of the ambulance. Austin asked if he could ride beside him and they said yes. He noticed they didn’t take Julien’s blood pressure or give him oxygen or glucose through an intravenous tube.

  When they arrived at the hospital, an Arab hospital, Julien was shoved into a dirty room and left unattended. Austin wandered the corridors, asking questions, and soon learned that the hospital was understaffed, did not provide food, and had few nurses. The families of the patients camped outside the main door and cooked for their sick relatives and looked after most of their needs. Austin bought bottled water and a candy bar from the man in the kiosk near the main gate and took them back to Julien, who’d now reawakened. He was alone in his room, but his sheets looked as if someone else had slept on them. There were no towels in the bathroom and the shower didn’t work. The toilet was a foul-smelling hole in the ground, what was called a Turkish toilet. Austin thought that the French tourist who’d insisted they call an ambulance must have imagined there was a conventional European hospital in town, not this third-world mouroir, the French word for a place to die in.

  Austin tore one of the sheets off the bed and moistened it in the sink and used it to wash Julien’s body clean. “It’s not impeccable,” Austin said, “but it’s much, much better.”

  Two Arab doctors came by on their rounds, one of them young and handsome, the other corpulent and middle-aged. The older one did all the talking and meant to be cheerful and reassuring. “Well, well, who do we have here? Was your holiday interrupted by a touch of dysentery?”

  “He has AIDS and he’s dying. We must get him in an am
bulance and to a fully equipped hospital in Marrakesh,” Austin said. “Our insurance will pay for the ambulance and even a private plane back to Paris, but we need an affidavit from you, Doctor, saying he is gravely ill. If I pay—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” the doctor exclaimed, holding up his hands comically as if to stop an avalanche of words and looking with exaggerated incredulity at his colleague, who merely pulled at his very black mustache trimmed with surgical precision above his embarrassingly pink, dry lips. “Why do you say he is dying, Monsieur? Only God, whom we call Allah, can give or take a life, and the most important thing for us to do is to hope. We must never lose faith.”

  Austin was sure that in another mood he’d have taken an epicurean delight in this display of folkloric wisdom, but now he was seized with rage and impatience at the old blowhard, though he was determined to be as polite as possible. “Yes, of course, your words remind me of our duties to God—and to ourselves! But I assume you agree with me that this is an emergency and I am responsible for the welfare of my friend, whom I’ve raised as a son. If I get the insurance official in Paris to phone you here, Doctor, uh, Doctor—”

  “Ayoub.”

  “Dr. Ayoub, would you explain his condition to the authorities?”

  “Of course. But you can’t phone out of this hospital to Paris. We’re—uh, we can’t!” He opened his hands with comic resignation, as if to evoke the principle of human helplessness once again.

  Austin said he’d dash back to his hotel, make the necessary calls from there to Paris and give them the hospital phone number and the name of Dr. Ayoub, who promised he’d be on duty at least for another half hour.

  The man at the food kiosk said taxis rarely came out in this direction, but even as he was explaining the problem, Austin spotted an old Peugeot with a green light on the roof, packed with passengers. He squeezed into the front seat next to the driver, whose right hand was soon traveling up Austin’s left thigh. From time to time he’d take his eyes off the teeming streets and look at Austin meltingly and flash a big gold smile. Austin thought how grotesque sex could be and how inept its timing.

  People got out of the car and into it every few minutes. The driver took Austin’s hand and placed it on the lump under his pale blue djellabah. No one could see what he was doing. At last they arrived at the hotel. Austin rushed in and called the insurance people in Paris. With a voice boyish from hysteria he gave the number of their dossier, waited for the woman to call it up on her computer, then said, “Now we can’t put this off any longer. He’s dying. He’s in a terrible Arab hospital where they don’t even have nurses and have never treated anyone with AIDS before, or so they claim.”

  He gave her Dr. Ayoub’s number and begged her to arrange for an ambulance to be sent to his hotel. She said she’d call their representative in Marrakesh, a Mr. Azzit. Azzit telephoned ten minutes later and they made detailed plans for the drive through the mountains to Marrakesh, a seven-hour trip.

  Austin ran out to the rented car in the hotel lot with a plastic wastepaper basket full of warm water and soap. With a washcloth he scrubbed the shit stains that Julien had left in the back seat. He then dashed back to their room, washed out the cloth and basket and gathered up their luggage. He gave the desk clerk a very large tip and the car keys and the contract. “Tell them that the car is here and they must send someone to pick it up. They won’t object, since we’ve already paid up for another week’s rental.”

  The ambulance had pulled into the parking lot. Austin loaded it up with their baggage and instructed the driver to go over to the hospital. There he and Austin loaded Julien onto a stretcher and carried him out to the car. At least, Austin thought, the stretcher’s been made up with fresh sheets. Dr. Ayoub waved goodbye, assuring them he’d given all the necessary information.

  All night long they drove through the mountains, twisting and turning and ascending higher and higher. The weather turned bitterly cold and Julien began to tremble. Austin hoped he’d say something tender, but he seemed obsessed with the problem of having too many medications. “Don’t let anyone see the bag of drugs in your suitcase,” Julien whispered, “or we’ll never get our private plane.”

  Austin knelt close to his knife-thin, foul-smelling body and whispered, “I love you, Julien.”

  But Julien wouldn’t say anything affectionate. He kept obsessing about the excess drugs and where he’d concealed them. He didn’t move much or even seem to be breathing, but his mind was obviously racing. At last he exhausted himself and fell asleep. Austin was perched on a hard, small jump seat beside the stretcher in the back of the ambulance, just behind the driver. He was mesmerized by the green glow of the dashboard up front and the brilliance of the headlights on banks of snow.

  “It’s freezing back here. Can’t you turn up the heat?”

  The driver didn’t reply but fiddled with the dial. They went slowly past an all-night truck stop and gas station where loud men in caftans over jeans, their faces covered with red and white checked kaffiyehs, probably to stay warm, were shouting to one another, laughing and either clapping their hands together against the cold or sipping from steaming glasses of mint tea.

  When the lights swerved away behind them and they began their ascent, Julien awakened and complained about something sharp and painful poking into him, under him. Austin was exhausted and mumbled, “It will be all right, Julien,” but Julien raised his voice indignantly and said, “It’s hurting me.”

  “What’s that?” the driver asked loudly. “What’s he saying?” He didn’t ask Julien directly but addressed his question to Austin.

  “Something hurts him. It’s under him. I’ll feel under him and see if there’s anything wrong.” Too late Austin realized he hadn’t said, “… and see if I can fix it,” but rather, “… and see if there’s anything wrong.” These two healthy men were in cahoots against this terminal patient and his absurd demands invented just to annoy them. That’s how it must sound to Julien.

  The driver stopped and got out, opened the side doors and shouted at Julien, “Where is it? Where’s the pain? What’s hurting you?” Brusquely he jabbed his hands under Julien, then announced to Austin, “There’s nothing wrong,” as if to say, “Just as I suspected.”

  After that Julien wouldn’t talk to Austin at all, although Austin knew this would be their last chance in this life to say something important. Austin felt excruciatingly guilty for having sided with the driver, and now Julien was punishing him by remaining silent.

  At long last they were just pulling into Marrakesh when a tire blew out and the driver was forced to bring them to a bumpy, gravel-spitting halt by the roadside. He swore and sighed and talked to himself in Arabic as he jacked the ambulance up and changed the tire. At least it was hot again. Finally they pulled into the back of the Clinique du Maroc, which was not at all the clean, modern, fully staffed hospital Austin had expected. Some time passed before the driver returned with an orderly, who helped him carry the stretcher into the lobby, where they left it on the floor. A nurse emerged and looked at Julien contemptuously: “What on earth does he have?” she asked, as if dying were comical, certainly a humiliation. “Is he still alive?”

  “Alive and conscious,” Austin said with controlled fury. “Didn’t the insurance people alert you to our arrival?”

  “Yes, but I had no idea the patient was in this condition,” she said.

  A young doctor in a white coat came through swinging doors and he, too, looked at Julien as if he were a bit of garbage a greengrocer had had the audacity to offer for human consumption. “Are you sure he’s alive?” he asked.

  “He’s alive,” Austin said. “He can hear everything you’re saying. He has AIDS. He’s very ill.”

  “Oh, yes, AIDS,” the doctor said. “They’re treating that with something now, we don’t have it yet, what’s it called?”

  “AZT.”

  “Yes, AZT,” the doctor said, pl
eased, continuing in fluent French, “But as I said—”

  “I can’t stand this!” Julien shouted in English with surprising force. The doctor understood what Julien had said and looked abashed. He no longer acted bemused and speculative but suddenly sobered up and said, “Take him in for a chest X-ray, then put him in a private room and give him a glucose transfusion.”

  The man from the insurance company arrived, though it was very late at night, a short, bald, bespectacled Arab in a frayed three-piece suit and food-stained tie. “Mr. Azzit,” Austin said, “why are we here? I thought you were going to prepare a private plane for us.”

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said, waving his hand as if to shake off flies. “Tonight he must rest up for the trip. A trip like that is very tiring.” He began to shout in Arabic at the nurse but perhaps his words weren’t as angry as they sounded, for she merely shrugged without changing expressions.

  Julien and Austin had to wait for a long time before the X-ray machine was free. Again the operator, a black man with a bulbous nose and hard, disapproving eyes, shook his head in disgusted disbelief at Julien’s condition.

  At last Julien was wheeled into a bright, modern room with a window and a clean bathroom and a crank-up bed. The nurse said that Austin could sleep in the bed beside Julien’s. The ambulance driver brought their luggage up. The nurse was incapable of finding a vein in which to insert the intravenous tube. She tied Julien’s arm up with a red rubber tourniquet, she slapped the inside of his arm with the back of her hand, but nothing came up.

  The ambulance driver said, “Here. Let me do it. I can always find a vein when no one else can.” He huddled over Julien. A minute later Julien let out a scream and sat up, galvanized: “He’s killing me!” He spoke again in English.

  And then they were gone. Austin glanced at his watch, which read four a.m. The lights were dimmed. The sheets rustled with starch and cleanliness. Far away soft chimes signaled nurses to their various duties. Although his eyes were swimming with weariness, Austin sat beside Julien and said, “The glucose is going to help you, Petit. It will give you energy and nourishment for the trip. Tomorrow we’ll be on the plane to Paris and this ordeal will be over.”