The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Julien didn’t respond, though Austin could see he was awake and could hear the intravenous feed slowly bubbling.

  Austin awakened in a flood of sunlight coming through the vines and flowers crossing the window. He wasn’t sure where he was, though it felt reassuringly institutional. The window was closed, the room must be air-conditioned—ah! the hospital. Too exhausted to feel anything more than mildly curious, he turned towards Julien. He looked at the glucose sack and saw it was no longer bubbling. Then he looked at Julien’s face and saw his eyes were wide open and his mouth frozen in a sudden grimace. He was half-raised out of his bed, as if responding to a sudden cry or to violent pain. He was dead.

  At the same moment a nurse (for it must have been her coming into the room that had awakened Austin) rushed over to the bed, took his pulse and said, “He’s dead.” She hurried away on crepe soles.

  Austin was too stunned to say or do anything. The dead body frightened him. He didn’t really like this stiff, gaping thing—it wasn’t Julien. He was afraid of it. He looked at it obliquely, almost as if it brought bad luck. And it was proof that he, Austin, had done something disastrously wrong.

  There was a sound of whispered consultation in the hall. Then the uniformed woman came back with another nurse. They lowered his bed, straightened his limbs, removed the drip, closed his eyes and mouth, took his pillow away, folded him inside the sheets. An orderly arrived and the whole bed was wheeled away. Later Austin realized he should have wept over the body, caressed it, at least kissed him farewell. That was the right thing to do: propriety had taken the place of emotion. Not for a moment did he imagine Julien was still in the body.

  Austin shaved and dressed, then sat on the edge of his bed with his luggage. He had his bag and Julien’s bag. A nurse brought him a cup of coffee. Mr. Azzit appeared from the insurance agency. He was extremely cold. He said, “Well, you can go now.”

  “And Julien?”

  “You can’t leave with the body,” he scoffed. “You must make the funeral arrangements in France, there’s a lot of paperwork on both ends, eventually the remains will be shipped.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Downstairs. In the morgue.”

  “Refrigerated?”

  “In Muslim countries the dead are buried within twenty-four hours in a simple sheet. We don’t practice embalming. Or cremation. The most I can do for you is to have the body sealed in a lead coffin.”

  He left. Austin realized that he had two tickets for a plane that would be flying out of Marrakesh for Paris in an hour, but the public taxi, the only one he could find, made so many stops that he missed the flight and had to wait four hours for the next one.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Back in Paris, Austin lived in a fog, one that softened feelings and even the features of friends and their words, although occasionally it would lift and light would pierce him to—well, not the quick but the slow, for everything in him had been tuned down to the lowest possible setting still sufficient to sustain life.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to live and was relieved when he found the suicide kit in the drawer of the black desk. There they were, the bouquet of many colors in the Chinese sewing kit, all the pills he’d need to push the dial down below zero.

  But first he needed to make the arrangements for Julien’s cremation and the burial of his ashes in the Père Lachaise columbarium. In America they called the ashes the “cremains.”

  The day after Austin’s return to Paris, Robert and Fabrice flew up from Nice to help him—to go with him to the funeral parlor and to fill out all the legal forms for the repatriation of the body. They’d encountered a nasty Catch-22. The Moroccans wouldn’t release the body until they knew its exact destination in France, but as Muslims they did not approve of cremation and would never send it to a Paris crematorium. Austin knew someone in the French foreign service who agreed to smooth things over. Then a second problem arose: normally a body about to be cremated was placed inside a (highly flammable) pine coffin, but Julien had been sealed inside a lead coffin. After ten days in the spring heat of Marrakesh, the corpse had probably turned into a bubbling minestrone—no time to open the lead lid. Fortunately Père Lachaise had the only crematorium ovens powerful enough to blast their way even through metal.

  Fabrice stayed in Paris only two days, long enough to do everything practical, including filling out the death certificate at the Town Hall and ordering a three-line bereavement announcement in Le Monde, to be published only after the cremation, a stipulation that followed Julien’s will. The insurance company was paying for the transport of the remains, but it sent Austin several forms to fill out as well.

  After Fabrice flew back to Nice, Robert and Austin were alone at last. They slept in the same bed and wore just undershorts, but they didn’t make love. When he was alive Julien had teased them about being attracted to each other, perhaps because he’d wanted to plant the idea in their heads. Austin certainly was attracted to Robert with his intense stare, hairy, muscular chest, powerful biceps and low voice, the sort that could set a wine glass vibrating against the water glass.

  Sleeping with Robert was cheating. He was far too handsome to be in bed with someone like Austin; it was all a dreamlike chance, like having your mother say, “Now, your cousin Chet is going to be bunking with you for a week,” and Chet is a sixteen-year-old football star too shy to meet girls. Robert and Austin were like brothers. They’d been through so much, they were both in mourning for the very man who was pushing them at each other. Some divine dispensation not only allowed but also encouraged Austin to sleep within Robert’s embrace, held by muscles that felt like warm basketballs sliding under cool silk.

  But neither of them got erections. It wasn’t sexual. It was exactly what it was supposed to be, mutual comfort in great grief. They who’d eyed each other for the last two years over the barrier of Fabrice and Julien were now enjoying their first long moments together, in bed, in each other’s arms, and nothing was happening.

  Julien had always said that after his death Austin would find someone else, almost instantly. “Just don’t forget me completely,” he’d say. “Petit, don’t forget me.” Because Julien had loved him so much, Austin had become someone as privileged, as legendary, as a member of Julien’s own family; Austin had been lulled into believing he was desirable. But his hair had turned white, he noticed one day with alarm, and he’d put on thirty more pounds. His hair was shaggy and lusterless, and all his clothes (as he discovered when he looked through his closet) were dirty, wrinkled and out of fashion. Julien’s long illness had made him shabby; Austin took the fewest, shortest steps necessary to correct his disgrace.

  But nothing seemed real. He was packed in Styrofoam peanuts, which crunched like subzero snow whenever he attempted to move. Nothing could touch him; he was wedged tight inside a weightless void. The days were becoming longer and longer, the first tourists were arriving in Paris, the cafés were thronged until late at night, but Austin considered the good weather almost as an affront. He would have preferred a Parisian winter, which was like living inside gray sand on its way to becoming a pearl.

  He thought he’d find the apartment unbearable without Julien and he was quick to offer Julien’s clothes to Robert and to contribute all his boxes and tubes and vials of medicine—thousands and thousands of doses—to the corner druggist, a mustachioed gay man who collected for an AIDS charity on the Ivory Coast. Joséphine suggested he put away some of Julien’s photos.

  “But I couldn’t!” Austin said. “The maid would be scandalized.”

  Joséphine smiled but was firm about it: “I think you shouldn’t have a rule. Put the pictures away, take them out, light candles in front of them, exactly as you like. There’s no rule, or none you must observe.”

  “I wish there was,” Austin said, “because if I followed the rule, any rule, maybe I’d feel less guilty.”

  He called Julien’s Paris doctor
, gave the exact date and hour of the day when Julien had died, as if the doctor would need that information to close Julien’s dossier.

  The doctor dropped his formal manner for a moment and said, “Mr. Smith, I’m very moved. Julien was such an … elegant man, always in good humor, never complaining, always impeccably dressed, wonderfully cheerful with the nurses and the other patients. He called me, uh, two weeks ago and said he was too ill to come see me but was he well enough to go to Morocco—well, you can see he was sending me a mixed message at best.”

  “Do you think it was a terrible mistake to go to Morocco? The last two days, he’d become incontinent and—” Austin recounted the all-day drive from Erfoud to Ouazarzate, the collapse on the lawn in front of the hotel, the horrors of the Arab hospital, the ambulance ride all night long in an unheated vehicle through the snowy mountains, the indignities Julien had suffered at the Clinique du Maroc—

  “Yes, yes,” the doctor said, “but I would have done the same—X-rayed his chest to see if he had pneumocystis and given him a transfusion of glucose for energy and a few minerals to rehydrate him—”

  “Is that what happened? Was he dehydrated?”

  “You’ve heard of those anorexic girls, Mr. Smith, who die of heart attacks? Their bodies have been stripped of all the electrolytes necessary for the basic biological functions. Now Julien’s pancreatitis had become so severe that he couldn’t absorb any nutrition. I’m sure he died of a heart attack.”

  “But if we’d been in Paris perhaps he would have received better care.”

  “And then what?” the doctor asked in his soft, beautifully modulated voice. “Died three weeks later in total isolation in a gray little hospital room? No, Mr. Smith, with you in Morocco he could share a great adventure; that was rare, suspenseful, a challenge, something you were doing together.”

  They talked some more and before he hung up the doctor said, “Pancreatitis, you know, is terribly painful. He’s well out of it. Au revoir, Monsieur Smith, et bon courage.”

  At first Austin felt exhilarated by so much concrete information, until he began to listen to the echoes. The doctor’s exoneration he was eager to embrace, but he felt he’d betrayed Julien in a dozen little ways during his last two days of life. “I hate you” (Je te déteste), he kept hearing over and over. Why hadn’t he sided with Julien against the last ambulance driver? Why had he been so willing to make bourgeois small talk with the bizarrely optimistic and fatalistic doctor in Ouazarzate and the ignoramus in Marrakesh? Why hadn’t he defended Julien against that final martyrdom when the ambulance driver had plunged the transfusion needle into his fleshless, veinless arm?

  Had he brought on the whole last illness by encouraging Julien to take DDI?

  If he’d had the right minerals, Austin thought, he would have lived. Julien died for want of a bottle of Gatorade.

  Henry McVay invited Austin and two concerned, handsome men to dinner at the Ritz, where Austin had never been before. The others kept up a tentative, merciful conversation until Austin himself indicated he wanted to tell them his story. He started at the beginning and by the time he’d arrived at Marrakesh they were drinking their decaffeinated coffee.

  “Then the ambulance pulled into the clinic,” Austin said.

  “The clinic at the Mamounia Hotel, I suppose,” Henry said, never doubting the answer.

  “No,” Austin said tonelessly. “The Clinique du Maroc.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, “the only good hospital belongs to the Mamounia. Very modern and European. French doctors. I wonder why they didn’t take you there.”

  Austin went home, climbed his steps, opened his door, hating himself, and hated himself as he undressed and brushed his teeth. Why had he trusted the travel insurance people? Why hadn’t he hired his own ambulance, his own private plane or at least phoned Henry, who was so worldly, to find out the name of the only good hospital in southern Morocco?

  “I’m sorry, Petit,” he said out loud when he was in the dark in bed. “I’m so sorry.”

  As he lay in bed he replayed every scene yet again—the encouraging recovery at the hotel in Taroudant, the appalled silence that Julien’s skeletal thinness had created among the sunburned English bathers at the luxury resort outside the city walls, the kindness of their waiter there, the tubercular guide who’d sold them the Koran…. But then Austin came up against the memory of the day when he’d invited Hermann from the Berber Palace to join them and the car had been too heavy to go up the dirt road into the mountains and Julien had been so bitterly disappointed. And why hadn’t Austin driven them back to Taroudant or even to Agadir and found a plane to Paris the instant Julien had given the first signs of weakening? Oh, that painful day in the empty, modern hotel in Zagora when Austin had had to strip and lift Julien up out of the bathtub in his arms, as if he had been cradling a Flemish Christ, brown and bony, wrists and ankles nerveless, his wet hair dripping into a crown of thorns.

  At last the body was repatriated to Paris, ten full days after Julien’s death. The coffin sat for yet another day in a warehouse at the airport. Robert and Fabrice flew back up to Paris for the cremation. Robert suddenly succumbed to an obsessional fear that Julien’s corpse was not in fact inside the lead coffin. “How do we know for sure he’s in there?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Perhaps they switched two bodies at the clinic in Marrakesh. They wouldn’t care. One Frenchman—one Christian—is worth another. You don’t know them. In Nice—”

  “Please, Robert. And anyway there’d be a terrible scandal if the other people opened their coffin and found the wrong body.” Privately, Austin thought it made absolutely no difference if they burned one dead person rather than another. He wondered whether he felt that degree of indifference because he was rational or because he was faithless.

  Robert then railed about the Arabs having stolen Julien’s gold watch. Austin felt bad that he hadn’t remembered the watch; he asked the maid about it and she told him where it was. “I hid it,” she said over the phone. “Monsieur Julien left it behind and then, after he disappeared, I worried that someone would steal it.” Austin found it exactly where she said it would be and gave it to Robert.

  “Are you sure you don’t want it, Petit Austin?” Since Julien’s death Robert had taken up his way of calling Austin Petit, ludicrous as it was as a nickname for a snowy-haired fat American.

  “No, no, it’s for you,” Austin said, delighted to get the gold watch out of the house. He knew that Julien had revered it, but Austin couldn’t help thinking it looked terribly … well, Vegas and was … well, vulgar.

  Even thinking such a thought was sacrilegious, which made Austin smile bleakly.

  Julien had said he didn’t want anybody at the funeral except Fabrice, Robert and Austin. Once before Austin had been to a Père Lachaise cremation, but this time they were not required (or even allowed) to watch the coffin being lowered into the flames. As the mortician explained, the “incineration” of a lead coffin would take three hours and they’d have access to the chapel for only half an hour. All the actual cremation, therefore, would have been done well in advance and the ashes brought out in the alabaster urn Julien had selected that day he’d gone to the cemetery with Patty. Now the three men sat in silence in the darkened, cold vault of the chapel with its cheerlessly non-denominational windows. Austin had requested that his own tape of the Fauré Requiem be played, but they all three got bored before the “Paradise” section began.

  A guard accompanied them down into the lower level of the crypt. The urn was placed in their niche, the guard put an official seal on it and then troweled it over with plaster. He explained that the white marble stone inscribed with recessed gold letters giving Julien’s name and dates would not be ready for another week or ten days, but at that time, it, too, would be fixed indelibly in place. Robert nodded solemnly and said, with even more deliberation than usual, “Gold letters on white marble:
excellent.”

  “It’s what Julien chose,” Austin said briskly, though he wasn’t at all sure that that was the truth.

  Only after the funeral did Robert call his maternal grandmother in Nancy and tell her that Julien was dead. She wailed and wailed. Her husband had hanged himself, her daughter had committed suicide and now her grandson had died of AIDS.

  Robert talked to her for a very long time and left out none of the details, the explanations, the lamentations or the words of comfort that were her due. After he hung up, he said, “The poor woman. She’s such a jolly little lady, always so merry, a nice little peasant lady who’s had to bear so much….”

  “Peasant?” Austin asked, certain he’d misheard.

  “Of course,” Robert said, smiling and even chuckling with the same laugh that Julien had used. “She worked the earth as a real laborer when she was a girl. Then she married and worked in a little tabac selling cigarettes and stamps and eventually newspapers and stationery. Her husband was a train conductor all his life, but two years after his retirement he hanged himself.”

  “Julien used to say it might have been an erotic strangulation, that he died at his mistress’s….”

  “His what?” Robert’s eyes widened and he laughed boisterously. “He didn’t have a mistress, at least this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. No, he became melancholy after he retired and had to live at home all the time. Our poor mother was sad because her father had died….”

  “And then,” Austin said, “she’d given up her career as a concert pianist—”

  “As a concert pianist?” Robert asked with incredulity. “No, she was an accordionist. Our father hated the sound of the accordion and made her give it up, but I have some beautiful tinted photos of her playing the accordion when she was studying to be a beautician.”