The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Austin realized that everything Julien had said about his family had been compounded of lies. His parents had not been aristocrats but a beautician and a shipping clerk, just as his maternal grandparents had been a railway man and a farm worker. That was why Julien hadn’t let Austin meet his grandmother that time they’d gone to Nancy. That was why Julien had heaped such contempt on Josephine’s origins (which turned out to be more elevated than his) and had doted on all of Austin’s rich or titled friends, such as Henry McVay, MarieFrance and Vladimir. Maybe that’s why Julien had dropped all of his friends—perhaps he was worried they’d make allusions to his plebeian past in front of Austin. Poor Julien, Austin thought. He felt he had to lie in order to appear worthy of me.

  Robert must have notified their father that Julien was dead, for soon afterwards Austin received a letter from him, saying he would like to come to Paris to meet Austin. The letter astonished Austin since it had two spelling mistakes and two mistakes in grammar. And in it Julien’s father said, “I know my sons blame me for their mother’s death, but what killed her was the knowledge that both her boys were homosexual.” Dutifully, Austin read the letter over the phone to Robert, who became indignant about their father’s accusation and said, “Don’t answer him. He’s a crook. He wants to visit the apartment so he can figure out what belongs to him as Julien’s heir.” Austin didn’t respond to Julien’s father, though he felt bad about his silence.

  A month after Julien’s cremation his grandmother came to Paris and stayed with Austin. Robert flew up yet again from Nice, this time using the small amount of money Julien had left him—small but all his earthly treasure. Maman, as they called her, was at first intimidated by someone as learned and important as Austin. He was so unused to the idea that anyone could be impressed by his status, which was both low and uncertain, that at first he couldn’t understand why she stared at him as though he were a zebra who’d been trained to whinny oui and non.

  She had pretty plump hands and small wrists, wide hips and a quick, agile way of moving. She was like one of those octogenarian former ballerinas who come hobbling into the room but can throw their head back at a defiant angle and still demonstrate the raised arms required for correctly performing the tarantella. She sketched in lightly the merriment a good-time gal must have known how to turn on in the 1930s—and then suddenly she was red-faced and sobbing silently against Robert’s broad chest, her eyes, when she looked up, flashing forth a clear, shockingly girlish blue.

  Austin had seldom met elderly ladies in Paris who weren’t countesses, as exquisitely transparent as their own bone china, their bodies carefully coiffed and molded inside couture clothes constructed around darts, seams and stays. They were ladies who had opinions, mannerisms, pasts and who goaded themselves on to keep up, to read this season’s novels, take in the latest movies; but here was an old lady from the provinces with a face as fresh as today’s bread and who was … well, humble. She was afraid of Austin, this exotic son-in-law she’d met too late and whom she’d always associate with her third loss, the last act of a life that had the clean trajectory of a dynastic tragedy.

  They all hugged and sniffled their way through two long evenings, recalled the adorable things Julien had said as a child, trotted out once more the story about his running away with his teddy bear and heading for the airport where he hoped to be transported to Africa in order to become a veterinarian. And then there were other stories.

  Austin had almost dozed off when suddenly he realized they were talking about Julien’s lovers—the effeminate Spaniard named Edgardo and the—“But who were these guys?” he asked. “Of course I know who they were….”

  “You met Jean-François on the street one day, right here on the rue de Rivoli,” Fabrice said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, he was with him a long time,” Granny was saying. “They lived together next to the Cordeliers. Jean-François’s family owned that shoe store.”

  “And Edgardo,” Fabrice said. “Don’t you remember how effeminate he was? He thought he was Julien’s wife. He’d cling to his arm in public and make Julien blush.”

  “Yes, yes,” Austin said, heartsick, with a big smile on his face, “I can just see Julien, always so proper, so aristocratic….”

  “Don’t you remember, Maman,” Robert asked, “how he’d always write the address of your apartment block as the Palais Fitzwilliam, when it was just the plain old Fitzwilliam. Oh, that Julien (sacré Julien), he liked to hint that everything was grander than it was. No harm there, of course; he never used it to his advantage. It was just a dream world he was living in.”

  After the grandmother had gone to bed, Austin asked Fabrice and Robert, “When Julien would come to Nice, would he go wild with the boys?”

  Fabrice smiled. “Well, you know the mountain behind our house where we walk Ajax? That’s a famous cruising spot. Julien would come to visit us when he was in his last year of high school and run in and out of the bushes till four in the morning. He couldn’t get enough.”

  “But why did he ever get married?”

  Robert said, “Why not? You don’t like Christine? What’s wrong with Christine?”

  “These brothers!” Fabrice exclaimed, appealing to Austin in shared grievance. “They both claim they’re bisexual. They’re always coy about which sex they prefer, even Robert talks about getting married someday. I’ll tell you, Austin, these brothers will be the death—” And then he remembered Julien was dead. He stubbed out his cigarette and knocked a tear out of his eye with the back of his hand.

  Austin liked Maman and loved Robert and Fabrice, but he felt that he and Julien’s family members were all a bit lackluster without Julien, as if the only thing that had raised them all above the ordinary was existing in Julien’s consciousness, exactly as if his mind had been a stage—small, floored with reflecting black stone, lit with inquisitorial intensity—and they’d been allowed to appear on it only as figments of Julien’s imagination.

  At last they all left, full of solicitude for Austin, the foreigner and widower, doubly isolated. And Austin did feel less integrated into French life without Julien. As long as Julien had been alive Austin was always learning things, not necessarily reasoned or researched information but rather all those thousands and thousands of brand names, turns of phrase, aversions and anecdotes that make up a culture as surely as do the moves in a child’s game of hopscotch. Now, without Julien he was a tourist again.

  He was too distracted to read anything but he often sat, vacantly, with the Koran in his lap. He liked the curving, cursive strokes under every third or fourth word and bristling vowel marks above them, as if ferryboats loaded with standing passengers were floating on long, swelling waves. The dots were the passengers’ heads against the sky.

  Austin missed Julien—not the Julien of the last months, a skeleton turned malign from suffering, a death’s head shaking on a stick—but the Julien who’d called him Petit, who’d first made love with him on the lumpy bed in the Île Saint-Louis apartment under the clenched fist of the great stone volute of the church across the street, the curled hand thrusting up through the roof like a military salute. He remembered when Julien, that summer in America, had told Lucy he didn’t mind living a short life so long as he could live it with Austin.

  Julien’s death wasn’t a sentimental loss, a sweet, fierce absence, and in no way was it an aesthetic loss, if that meant his life was less agreeable without Julien. No, it was as if they’d fused, as if Julien had been an alien who’d snatched his body, encoded his nervous system and changed his blood type, colonized his organs and rescripted his memory bank. He wouldn’t be able to go on living now that the alien inside him had died. The only thing that still belonged to him, that resembled his old self, was his face, his arms and legs, his body, but they, too, had been impaired by this devastating inner metamorphosis.

  Once Austin had read a description of couples who were deemed “co-dependent.” The
description sounded like Austin’s idea of love. Hadn’t Romeo and Juliet been co-dependent? Tristan and Isolde?

  Christine had him to dinner. Her baby, Allegra, sat and stared at him with the immobility of a doll. In fact, she resembled, with her plump, cool cheeks and long-lashed eyes, an old-fashioned doll with a porcelain head and hands. Christine said that she was glad Julien had known Austin. “With me he was never happy. We squabbled over little things. You gave him the big, glamorous life he wanted.”

  Christine’s Italian husband had apparently moved back to America, where he and his brother were running a successful restaurant. She was living on a small stipend from the National Center for Scientific Research and was planning to move to Montpellier to be closer to her parents.

  Seeing her reminded Austin that she’d remained seronegative. If Julien had become positive while jumping in and out of the bushes in Nice before his marriage, wouldn’t he have infected Christine? But even up until a few weeks before he’d definitely been diagnosed as positive, he’d continued having sex with Christine, yet she’d never seroconverted. Why should that be?

  He saw old friends—Gregg and Pierre-Yves—but now, for the first time, he felt the age difference as distracting and absolute. Joséphine tended to him constantly, almost as if he was one of those fussy, hypochondriacal but adorable old men in a Jane Austen novel. She was by turns tender and funny, légère in the best Parisian manner—but he felt even her ministrations could not reach him.

  A weightlessness came to modify all his actions; he walked lightly, silently around the apartment and found, after his months of nursing, he now had big, dilute prisms of free time to swim through. He was light, hushed, insulated, and even so he’d find he was buried at unexpected moments under a falling drop curtain of sleep—yes, sleep would fall on him and engulf him in its quilted silk.

  One day Austin looked at a video version of the home film that Herb Coy had made of Julien and him behind Notre-Dame. There was Julien—fresh-faced, smiling, looking years younger—and there was a still dark-haired Austin, greeting each other with obvious love in their eyes, a secret understanding uniting them as well as a shared self-consciousness. And then the camera was opened and the screen looked as if it had caught on fire.

  Austin received almost a hundred condolence letters, which he read avidly, as if they’d provide him with still more revelations about Julien, about what they’d lived through together, about what he’d confided to other people regarding him, Austin, and their relationship, but the letters seldom rose above the conventions of sympathy and when they did it was only to idealize Julien in terms that obliterated any likeness. Lucy, married and the mother of a baby girl, wrote him to say that Julien and she had shared a secret spiritual sympathy. He wanted to answer them all with a personal note; when he couldn’t bring himself to write anyone, he intended to print up a response in his name and Robert’s; in the end he did nothing. He asked MarieFrance if it was permissible not to acknowledge condolence letters. She laughed, disconcerted, and said, “No.” She said he had to do something, but finally he was too weary, his attention too scattered, to compose a message, print it up and address a hundred envelopes. He kept all the letters in a big folder, almost as if he was going to show them to Julien someday; Julien would be pleased that he’d brought in such a heavy load of mail.

  He wrote to Sarah, Julien’s English girlfriend, the older woman he’d met in Ethiopia and to whom he’d sent bits of jewelry during the year before he died. She wrote back, saying that she’d scarcely known Julien, they’d spent such a short time together, and she had no idea why he’d singled her out for special attention from among all the hundreds of women he must have known, but she was grateful—“if a bit embarrassed by”—the gifts he’d showered on her. She sent Austin photographs of a very boyish Julien in Ethiopia.

  Austin felt that an enormous thing had happened to him, Julien’s death, and he wanted to share it with the most important person in his life: Julien. His frustration about Julien’s silence made him talk out loud to him.

  The summer months at last were blown out of the skies by the big advancing clouds of autumn. Because he’d been alone he hadn’t known what to do with summer and the long holidays. He’d stayed in Paris all through August.

  The first cold spell excited him. Something new was about to happen, children were returning to school, the red-faced tourists in shorts to whom the city had been lent were chased away, he was about to come back—he?

  Who? Julien?

  He visited the church across the street several times a day, bought candles and lit them before a painting of the Virgin. In the winter the church was unheated and Austin was sometimes the only worshipper. The painting was a sentimental work of the early nineteenth century, all in tones of blue, picturing a sweetly smiling young woman who seemed almost bathed in the smell of human milk, the one odor that works on most men as an anti-aphrodisiac. As if to protect her further from human desire, she was flanked by the heads of angels supported by wings. The angels were rendered harmless not only by their lack of bodies but also by their age, for they could not have been more than two or three years old.

  She, of course, noticed no peripheral danger since she was focused serenely, even smugly, on Baby Jesus, who slept in her arms, sated after a hearty feeding. Austin could almost picture a tiny lactic bubble about to pop blissfully from between his lips.

  Austin hated the Catholic Church, the nineteenth-century church that smelled of washed blackboards and sauerkraut farts under soutanes, as much as the medieval church with its plagues and plain-song, its greed and self-flagellations. But he needed it, or rather he needed its altars, candles, music, holy water and poor boxes, so that he could blast it into bits in his mind and fashion out of the ruins his own infantile faith, one that required the believer (the sole member of the cult) to kiss his thumb twice, sketch in a loopy, cursive cross from forehead to waist, pocket to pocket (“Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch,” as he used to chant in a singsong when he was a child), to light a five-franc candle before the painting and then stand back and watch, almost as if he’d baited a trap for someone else. If no one was around, he’d draw closer to the altar, his hands folded in front of him in semi-respect, and he’d look at the painting for what he knew it to be: proof that Julien had been reunited with his mother, a saint whose symbols were the accordion and hot comb (not pictured).

  Julien had often said he wanted to outlive Peter, and he had assumed he would since Peter had already been ill for several years when Julien had first been diagnosed. But Julien had died first. Although Julien stopped mentioning his rival, Austin suspected that he was still brooding over him. That was the unpredictable aspect about AIDS: the robust man nursing the invalid could end up being buried by the very person he’d helped.

  Austin had never stopped calling Peter nor sending him little gifts, including money, but Peter only forgave him for his treachery after Julien died. In January, ten months after Julien’s death, they agreed to meet in Miami. Peter would fly down from Boston, which wasn’t far from his parents’ house in Concord; Austin would fly there direct from Paris. From Miami they’d rent a car and drive on down through the Keys to Key West.

  Austin brought along a twenty-two-year-old English gerontophile he’d met on the street in Paris. His name was George, he was six foot four and worked as a personal instructor for the gym clients at the Ritz. He’d been a successful soccer player on an amateur team back home in a London suburb—but had moved to France when he was nineteen in order to come out (that was Austin’s interpretation, because George would never have tolerated any part of the subject to be mentioned in his presence, nor the word gay pronounced).

  George wanted to be an actor and had paraded as a rabbit at EuroDisney, had toured the malls of France for Reebok in a crack gymnastics team dressed, of course, in Reebok products, and had gone to every film audition the few times a six-foot-four youth with an English accent had been r
equired. Although he had a classical profile he wore his smudged glasses on the tip of his straight nose at a weird angle and stooped a bit when he wasn’t reminding himself to stand up straight. He wore loose, baggy clothes of odd English colors (grape-purple sweatpants, celluloid-tan short-sleeve shirts with anemic blue vertical stripes). He leaned right into someone’s face, as if he was slightly deaf, and laughed with more general enthusiasm than specific hilarity. He could have played a rustic in Shakespeare—or stripped of all his funny clothes and mannerisms, a god or prince, since he had a noble face and a body worthy of Praxiteles.

  He’d studied acting with a woman in the seventeenth arrondissement and Austin had attended a presentation of various scenes there, adapted from films, TV shows, novels and even plays. George had been the only actor with a grain of talent. In fact he was very good—or so Austin thought, though he admitted he was besotted with lust.

  George wasn’t sleeping with Austin, although they held each other for hours fully clothed on the sofa. Austin thought he had nothing to offer someone as young, athletic and desirable as George—until he saw the wrecks George would cruise on the street, men even older and rounder than Austin. No, George claimed he was holding Austin off because he was faithful to an obscure lover, Pierre-Henri, a florist in Coulommiers (a town near Paris famous for its cheese, as Austin loved to say in order to torment George). As George told the story: “I was living out at EuroDisney, I was determined to meet a man, I took the train into Paris on my one night off. I sat down on a bench in the little square next to the Bibliothèque Nationale, a toff sat next to me, a pleasant-looking chap, and I panicked and started running. I ran and ran and ended up in the park near the Tour St.Jacques and the first person who spoke to me was Pierre-Henri—and we became friends. He was my first friend. He lives in Coulommiers with his mother but he comes to Paris one day a week. He’s got a studio he bought in Paris, Place de la République, and that’s where I live. The bed is kept up against the ceiling but at the push of a button it descends automatically and fills the entire apartment. In the morning I have to stand in the loo and wait for the bed to go back up.”