Among my compatriots and semi-compatriots (I mean Americans), four were to play an important role in the story I have to tell. There were others, sure, of lesser consequence to it. There was Chris Streeter, a Bristol-born boy with eyes as pink as a rabbit’s and cheeks as rosy as a baby’s buttocks, who’d already been nicknamed, long before my arrival, ‘Christopher Street’ after New York’s envied hub of gay goings-on. There was Raoul de something, French-born but English-educated, broodily handsome, bilingual and bisexual. And there was Peter Hirschfeld, a young, shaven-headed American, homosexual but physically of no interest to me. (Also, he had one characteristic that drove me bananas. Wherever he might happen to live, it unfailingly turned out to be, by his own account, next door to the best butcher, the best charcuterie, the best patisserie, whatever, in Paris. This oneupmanship of his became such a tic that, whenever he moved, and he did a lot of flitting about, he would insist no less unfailingly that his new local butcher, charcutier or patissier was even better than the one he’d assured us had been the best before.)
But since, unlike the lives of those I’m about to introduce, theirs were never to be intimately interlinked with mine, I feel it would make better sense if I were ruthlessly to screen them out of my narrative and concentrate on the Big Four.
The doyen of the English staff, as he affected to refer to himself, always within quotation marks – ‘Ahem, as the “doyen” … ‘– was an American, George Schuyler. Schuyler (nobody ever called him George) was an individual of whom everybody in the school, myself included, grew fonder and fonder as we spent more and more time in his company but whom none of us ever really got to know. Even his age was a conundrum: it could have been anything between thirty-five and fifty. He was certainly gay – and was supposedly writing a novel when not teaching, a novel of which he would divulge only the catchy title, The Quarterback of Notre-Dame – but he never had the inclination either to confirm or deny the common-room rumour that he was the ‘scion’ of some colossally well-off Park Avenue dynasty (that surname) who had had to exile himself from the States in the wake of a hushed-up and most likely sexual scandal. He had, it’s true, a patrician veneer which sat incongruously with his also being an ill-paid Berlitz hack. That veneer, at least, we could see; as for what might be behind it, each of us had no more than his own personal hunch to go on.
Schuyler had been working at the Berlitz longer than anybody else; none of the older teachers could remember a time when he wasn’t already the doyen. A half-empty paper coffee-cup and a copy of the International Herald Tribune in front of him, its crossword puzzle smudgelessly inked in, he was equally always there when you arrived, no matter how early the hour, like those people mysteriously installed when you enter a plane – their seat-belts fastened, their bags stowed away in the overhead lockers – even though you know you were among the first in the queue to board. His still boyish face was as endearingly crumpled as a seersucker suit on a muggy fourth of July. He invariably wore a smart, charcoal-grey blazer and a sometimes blue, sometimes pink shirt with a button-down collar and striped tie, the stripes diagonal. And he would say reparteeish things like ‘Oh God, I’ve just split an infinitive!’; or, when you returned from a class after less than an hour, ‘Short time no see’; or else, if you added ‘No pun intended’ to some remark that could have been misconstrued, ‘And none taken, I’m sure.’
There was one thing which made him testy, and that was smoking. Since he chewed gum – or, rather, he moved his lips as though he were chewing gum, for I never once saw any evidence of the gum itself – he may well have been an ex-smoker. But several packets of cigarettes were consumed in the common room in a single day; the ashtrays, which regularly overflowed, were less regularly emptied; and as the day diminished, so did Schuyler’s patience with the vile addiction. Considering his natural amiability, it couldn’t have been easy for him to publicise his irritation. But by four o’clock or so, when even we smokers would start to find the fug sickening, you could see him peevishly waving a loose curl of smoke away with his hand; though, even then, he did it too late to have any real effect, like a back-kicking dog, unaware that its instincts have led it astray, trying to bury a turd under a cement pavement.
Schuyler was the least ‘anecdotal’ person I’ve ever met. Like everybody else – we would all talk about him a lot – I never ceased to wonder, given how well I knew him, at how very little I knew about him. Did he live alone or with a ‘companion’, a ‘partner’? When he took (grudgingly, it always felt) a holiday, did he return to the land of his fathers, travel in Europe or venture farther afield? Did The Quarterback of Notre-Dame exist or was it meant to distract us all from what was really going on in his life? Did he even speak French? The unavoidable casier apart, I never heard him utter a word in the language, not even merci or s’il vous plaît or ça va, not even when it was called for (as when, addressing a teacher of another nationality, we’d naturally adopt the one language common to all of us); but it was impossible to believe that after living so many years in the country he didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t.
The only story I heard Schuyler tell about his past was of his original arrival in Paris. It was in April 1968 and, just three weeks later, barricades had been raised, de Gaulle had disappeared and the country teetered on the brink of anarchy. And Schuyler? ‘I was relaxed,’ was all he would say, dry as ever. ‘Sure, there were those barricades, but what do you expect of the French? I minded my own business.’ What, though, we asked ourselves, was his business? Mystère.
A mystère, let me advise you, reader, that won’t be resolved in these pages. There was to be no revelation, no second-act curtain line. George Schuyler was, perhaps, a Sphinx without a secret, and all the more enigmatic for that.
If Schuyler was, as I say, the colleague most present in my life, to the point where I cannot imagine my years at the Berlitz without him, I felt closer to another American, who, the son of an Iranian mother and a Canadian father, a diplomat at the United Nations, had the wonderful name of Fereydoun Fuller.
Fereydoun was short, dark, compact, soft-spoken and as mild-mannered as a superhero in mufti, one of those boys (actually in his early twenties) made sexier, more vulnerable, more rapeable, by having to wear glasses, itsy-bitsy granny ones in his case. His slimline ties were so long they plunged right inside his trousers (how far down did they go?) and his jet-black hair was always brilliantined. He was terribly polite. He would rush to hold a door open for you if you were carrying three coffee cups at once and apologise if ever you bumped into him. Schuyler put it well. ‘Ferey,’ he said, ‘is the sort of guy who’d say “Bless you” if you farted.’
Unlike Schuyler, Ferey couldn’t have been more openly homosexual and was my first real guide to the Paris scene. If we never became lovers, it was partly because of my own congenital shyness but mostly because I wasn’t at all his type: as he once confessed to me, on that same café terrace where I made Consuelo’s acquaintance, he had an incurable yen for men who were not only straight but actually homophobic, vicious gay baiters who would pulverise his pliant puniness under their boorish macho virility. The homosexual experience has ever been one of compromise but, poor Ferey, he was obliged more than most to settle for less than best, making do with married milquetoasts who fancied a walk on the shadier side of the street – of which, reader, I assure you that there are many, many more than you would believe.
Even so, what I found so singular about his sexual psychology was that for a masochist, which he literally was, for somebody who routinely fantasised about having his little bronzed body mangled by thuggish goons with necks as thick as thighs, he was also an incorrigible hypochondriac, one whose motto in life, inherited from his mother, was ‘There’s no such thing as a safe mole.’
You would forever find him fretting over which of his many pills to pop and when. My suspicion was that he was even – and this I’d never come across before nor ever have since – a dental hypochondriac. No matter when you spoke to him, he had e
ither just had an appointment with his dentist or else another was looming. Since, in spite of the fact that his teeth looked fine to me, he went so often, I can’t believe he didn’t look forward to it. Yet, one evening, when I picked him up in his studio apartment in a side street not far from the place de la Bastille (we were off to the theatre together), and he asked me if I wanted to see an image of his ideal lover – of course I did – what he showed me was a snapshot clipped from an American wrestling magazine. This ideal lover, a bald, black-masked, grotesquely obese bruiser, stage name ‘Attila the Hunk’, bulged every which way out of his torso-hugging costume, but what caught my eye was the ugly crossword-puzzle grin visible through his mask’s scary mouth-slit.
Ferey also had, hanging up in his apartment, and directly facing its front door, so that it was what you encountered the instant you stepped inside, a large print of Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘The Man in the Polyester Suit’, the photograph of a black man wearing the titular three-piece suit out of whose open flies protruded a penis of Zeppelin-like proportions. ‘Zeppelin’, certainly, was the word which crossed my mind when I took a quiet moment to study it. I thought of the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg airship crash over New York in 1937 and the newsreel commentator’s famous ‘Oh! the humanity!’ That’s what I said to myself too – Oh! the humanity! – as I gawked at the size of the black man’s prick. (When, this first time I entered his apartment, thinking to be clever, I remarked, ‘That photograph’s well-hung’, Ferey gave me the sort of look that suggested I was about the sixty-third visitor to have made the same joke.)
He was, finally, exasperatingly faddy about food. He wasn’t quite a vegetarian – that would have been too cut-and-dried – but he would fuss over the precise composition of a dish, even in the kind of inexpensive restaurants we all ate in, restaurants whose waiters and waitresses had never in their lives been asked whether there were almonds in the curry or whether the skin could be removed in advance from the roast chicken. He – Schuyler, rather – once made the common room roar. We were talking about sex, as per usual, and Ferey piped up (and, as I now recall his voice, ‘pipe’ is what it did) that he would try anything once except eat human excrement. ‘Eat human excrement?’ Schuyler exclaimed in mock-shock. ‘You won’t eat raisins!’
The third of my Musketeers was an Englishman calling himself Mick Morrison. Mick, however, I took a long time to warm to despite his many kindnesses to me. For a while I thought him fundamentally bogus, the sort of bullshitter who, at twenty-five, claims he won’t survive thirty, at thirty-five that he won’t survive forty, etc., etc., decade after decade, until he dies in his bed an octogenarian. (Perhaps, too, I always knew he’d be the first, as he was, to see through my own phoney façade.) His name, I discovered, peeking at his passport one day when it itself was peeking out of the decrepit overnight bag he carried over his shoulder at all times, wasn’t Morrison at all but Hurdle, Michael Hurdle, born, improbably, in High Wycombe. Since rock was one of his passions – his feet propped up on the common-room table, he would never not be swaying, gyrating, snapping his nasty nicotiny fingertips, the filter tips of his long, bony, cigarette-slim fingers, to unheard melodies – I assumed he’d chosen the name of ‘Morrison’, intrinsically less memorable as it surely is than ‘Hurdle’, as a tribute to either Jim or Van, just as ‘Mick’, instead of ‘Michael’ or ‘Mike’, was likely intended as a homage to Jagger.
In his mid-thirties, he had the precociously stooped and streaky appearance of somebody who has spent too much of his life in a pop-music milieu. His thinning hair was worn shoulder-length, his chin was permanently stubbly and, except during a freakish heatwave one July, when the common room windows were left open all day for the first time in living memory, he would always turn up sporting a long black cloak lined with scarlet satin, one which lent him, as it was meant to, a cod-Draculaesque air. Altogether, Mick toiled industriously at being thought of by those around him as a demonic individual, snapping shut, for example, if ever you chanced to walk past him, a dog-eared diary he’d been writing in, even though you hadn’t the least interest in learning what it might contain.
To be fair to him, I must admit that – while it was with Ferey I explored the city’s respectable homosexual clubs (the Fiacre on the rue du Cherche-Midi, the oldest-established of all and by my time deadly square; the Nuage, off the place Saint-Germain; the Bronx, rue Sainte-Anne; the Soledad, rue du Dragon; and the trendiest, so trendy we were turned away more often than we ever squeaked in, the Palace, faubourg Montmartre), with him, too, I spent a package-deal weekend in London where we shared a chaste king-sized bed in a lugubrious Paddington B-&-B and where he, a foreigner, introduced me to the most congenial of the local dives (the pis-elegant Rockingham in Soho, with its snooty Cardin-suited gigolos, smooth rather than rough trade; a raunchy club called Heaven in the Charing Cross Road; the King William IV pub in Hampstead, none of which I’d ever been to when I was briefly London-based) – it was Mick, generously, I can see now, for I held no interest for him as a prospective sexual partner, who let me hang out with him on some of his regular ‘descents’ (his word) into what he was also pleased to define as the ‘underbelly’ of the Parisian gay scene.
He was an indefatigable cottager. He knew all the best and busiest of Paris’s pissotières, even the very one, still reekingly extant, which, a century before, the composer Saint-Saëns would visit in the morning carrying a loaf of fresh bread – which he left hidden out of sight beneath one of the urinals – then revisit the same evening to retrieve the baguette, now porous with pee, with which, in the plush fastness of his hôtel particulier, he got up to who knows what deliriously disgusting pranks. Mick also took me to bathhouses and seedy saunas and seedier porn cinemas, where he would breezily pull out his cock, as plump, cylindrical and symmetrical as a pepper-pot in a pizzeria, and start to masturbate in front of me without so much as a by-your-leave. And he invited me once to accompany him on an excursion, one wintry Sunday afternoon, to that perennial cruising ground, the Jardin des Tuileries.
Was the excursion a success? I can’t speak for Mick, though he vanished from my view in no time at all and, next morning at the Berlitz, treated me to a horrible sidelong leer. For me it might have been judged a half-success since, cruising for the first time in my life, I had an interesting afternoon but one which ended, as ever, by my going home alone.
As I experienced it, cruising was less a moveable feast than a moveable fast, an exchange of glances replacing instead of foretokening an exchange of caresses (or even phone numbers). Except that, when I write ‘as I experienced it’, I do myself an injustice. The fact is that, in those leafless, lifeless gardens which looked on to the place de la Concorde, lifeless, that is, except for two or three dozen cruising gay men, nobody, nobody at all, not just I, picked up anybody else. Or so it appeared to me. If they did (which I suppose they must have done, otherwise why would they bother going again and again?), when and how did it happen? It was as though immediately hitting the jackpot would have been to win the game too quickly, thereby negating the thrill, the very raison d’être, of the pursuit; as though, even if the hopes of each and every one of my fellow-cruisers were ultimately pinned on being paired off, none of them cared for it to happen just yet. That theory, certainly, would account for the distance they all took care to maintain from one another throughout the long afternoon. Watching them soundlessly dart from tree to tree, turn away from the world for a brief moment to light up a cigarette, disappear behind – then suddenly reappear from behind – the museum of the Orangerie, was like watching the courtship of statues.
Yet somehow, somewhere, at some time, unobserved by me, these statues did make contact and did go off together two by two, while I went home alone to my room in the Voltaire. Again, mystère.
And so we come to Ralph, Ralph Macavoy, so cute and baby-faced that fondling his privates – and my lecherous fingers instantly craved to get, so to speak, their hands on them – would have been like seducing Cupid
himself. ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream,/ Make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen …’ Ralph, oh, Ralph was the cutest that I’d ever seen, my own ideal lover, without whose ravishing presence Paris for me would have seemed as perpetually deserted as Paris in August.
My eye was drawn to him on my very first day in the Berlitz common room. A Londoner, he was twenty-five but looked sixteen. He had thick black hair and a luscious lower lip which could have served as a model for a Dalinian sofa and on which I’d have loved to curl up and fall asleep. He was short, even stocky, yet he had the sort of soft, quasi-feminine features we associate with an androgynous torso and lean, long legs. By some that combination – stockiness and ethereality – would have been judged ungainly. To me it was, I repeat, perfection. For the first time I didn’t just want to fuck somebody of my own sex but to kiss him, to drench him with kisses, suffocate him with kisses, kill him with kisses. I dreamt of kissing him on the palm of his hand, on his wrist, along his arm up to his elbow and beyond, I dreamt of kissing him the entire length of that arm with the same lip-smacking relish as I’d eat a corn-on-the-cob!
Calm down. Come back to earth. Piano, piano.
No, no, Ralph really was marvellously cute. He’d walk into a crowded gay bar, scan the room for somebody who caught his fancy, march right up to the chosen one and, dispensing with all the coded, time-honoured preliminaries, as though it never crossed his mind that he might be rejected, say, ‘I want to be fucked by you.’ And, inevitably, he would be.
For a time there, I was insanely jealous (ah, unrequited love – the root canal of the soul) of every man and boy Ralph slept with, of anybody at all in his good graces, of anybody with whom he exchanged a word. I was jealous of Pippa the long-haired dachshund who pined for him back in Chiswick, of the dramatis personae of his wet dreams, of the very noodles, especially those gossamer Chinese ones the French call cheveux d’anges, that his tongue, like an anteater’s, would slurp up past his glossy teeth and deliver deep into his throat – a single deft whoosh! and they were gone. Of course I never did succeed in ‘having’ him. Not only was there, in the background, some sort of boyfriend – a wealthy, middle-aged protector was what we all imagined, for Ralph was the only one of us to possess a car of his own, even if it looked like a second-hand vacuum cleaner, and, in general, he had more money to throw around than might have been expected of an impecunious English-language teacher – but also, I insist, he was just such a dish he could have had anybody he wanted.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 3