It wasn’t a front tooth – really, it must have been way at the back, as the gap wasn’t at all visible when he tugged at the left corner of his mouth to show it to me – but it was a healthy one, he insisted, and it’s true, given his penchant for dentists, he couldn’t have had an unhealthy tooth in his head. It appears the engineer had been a good sport about the accident. In fact, the way Ferey told it, he was the type of brass-balled buddy-boy who would have gone off bragging about how he’d fucked some poor chump till his teeth fell out – literally. But he himself had instantly fought free of his partner’s phallic clench, made a dash for the bathroom, his own prick still tinglingly erect, and thrown up into the toilet bowl.
I repeat, I didn’t know what to make of it. I resisted cracking a joke, one I’d just thought of, about the tooth fairy (or tooth Ferey), since I could appreciate how traumatic the experience must have been, particularly for somebody given to making mountains out of molehills, or out of just moles, or even just molars. Instead, what I said to him was that a tooth falling out might be nothing more than that – a tooth falling out. It happens. It had happened to me (though not during sex). And, anyway, if he really was afraid it could be an early symptom of … what neither of us was willing to enunciate, why didn’t he just go and have a thorough check-up?
It was then he said something that shocked me. Naturally, the first course of action he’d planned to take, he told me, was to consult a doctor – but scarcely a day passed when Ferey didn’t think about consulting a doctor over some ailment or other. This time, though, he was too scared.
Ferey, the hypochondriac’s hypochondriac, the invalid incarnate, the Platonic ideal of the malade imaginaire, too scared to consult a doctor? I couldn’t believe it.
‘What’s the point of seeing a doctor,’ he went on, ‘if it’s too late?’
‘Listen to me, Ferey,’ I said, ‘your tooth fell out when you were having sex. Okay, I agree, it’s not very nice, but perhaps you just had a rotten tooth and you never knew it. I mean, you do realise we all think you’re a hypochondriac, don’t you?’ A hangdog expression on his face, he nodded. ‘Well then, for Christ’s sake, just do your hypochondriac thing. Go to the doctor and put your mind at rest.’
‘People always say that,’ he whispered fiercely, his lower lip quivering like a scolded child’s. ‘People always say, “Go to the doctor and put your mind at rest.” You’d think nobody ever went to the doctor and had his worst fears confirmed. That happens too, you know.’
I argued with him for over an hour (which sounds like an exaggeration, but isn’t) before his hypochrondriacal instincts gained the upper hand and, after one last endeavour to wriggle out of the ordeal with the proposal, swiftly shot down by me (but why? – it made perfect sense), that maybe he should see his dentist first, he agreed that nothing less than a medical examination would put an end to his misery one way or the other. But he added that, if he went, it was on condition that I accompany him. I was touched, and of course I agreed.
As we said goodbye (he had no appetite for dinner), he took my hand in his and said, ‘Give it up, Gideon.’
I asked him what he was talking about.
‘The heavy sex you’ve been doing. Leave it alone. It’s dangerous. I know.’
I couldn’t prevent myself from smiling at that. But the smile faded from my face when I noticed, almost invisible on the brow-line of his brilliantined hair, a rash of tiny blotches, some white as confetti, others pink like rose petals. Then we went our separate ways.
To my everlasting shame I forgot all about Ferey’s appointment. His doctor, typically, proved to be a swanky GP whose clinic looked on to the parc Monceau. And, as Ferey had requested the soonest possible appointment, he’d been asked to turn up at this clinic at twenty-to-eight in the morning, exactly twenty minutes before the doctor’s regular working day was due to start. Ferey had told me all that, he’d told me twice, and – even if it was with a stifled groan at the unholy hour that I’d nodded yes, I’ll be there – I had agreed, I had promised to lend him my support.
But I forgot. On the day of Ferey’s appointment I awoke at the same hour I usually did; and, my first class scheduled at noon, took myself off to Le Divan, the Gallimard bookstore on the place Saint-Germain, not even to buy a book but to ogle one of the store’s assistants, an auburn-haired honeybun of eyeball-distending sex appeal. And it wasn’t until halfway through the afternoon, smack in the middle of one of my classes, that I recalled at last what it was I’d had to do that dawn. I recalled, too, at the same instant, that I hadn’t seen Ferey in school all day.
When he didn’t surface the next day either, I started to hear, inside my head, a faint whisper of alarm. I told myself at first that my anxieties about his health were just as hypochondriacal as his own. There existed lots of legitimate reasons for any teacher’s temporary absence from the school. Colleagues came, went, even occasionally came again; and though one had to assume that somebody in their lives was au courant of the logic behind all these comings and goings, it was seldom anybody in the common room. I would have rung him up had I known his number, but we’d never got so far in our friendship as to exchange coordinées. And I’d have gone to see him that evening if only I could have remembered the name and number of the Right Bank street – rue Marigot? rue Mérigeau? 21? 31? – in which his apartment, one I’d visited just the once, a year before, was located. I could of course have made an immediate enquiry at the Berlitz’s personnel department. But I was reluctant, only forty-eight hours into his absence, to take a step so ‘official’ it felt like calling the police. I didn’t come first for Ferey, that was for sure – I didn’t come first for anybody – and I told myself that the task of finding out what the matter was lay with the person or persons unknown to me, if any, who did.
On the third day, however, Ferey still having made no reappearance, I did go to Personnel, where I learned from a preppy, bow-tied young man, who already had to look up poor Ferey’s name in one of the ledgers to remind himself who I was referring to, that he had left. Left the Berlitz. Resigned. The very day of his check-up. Without giving notice or claiming what meagre back pay there was owing him.
I was devastated. I had a dreadful vision of Ferey, a hypochondriac hearing at last the news towards which he had undoubtedly persuaded himself his whole life had been converging, stepping out into the air and the sun and nobody there to reassure him that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. At that moment I resolved to find out what had become of him, and I asked Mick to help me. Somewhat to my mean-spirited surprise, he instantly agreed. But first of all, the preppy young man in Personnel refusing to pass on to us the information we sought, we had to figure out for ourselves where Ferey lived.
On the sole occasion I’d been to his apartment I had carefully followed his instructions as to how to reach it. But what were they? The first stage, anyway, I hadn’t forgotten – take the metro to Bastille. Once there, I recognised the broad, windswept avenue I’d walked along on emerging from the metro station a year before; and even though, as I suddenly recalled, Ferey had laughed at me for taking what, it turned out, was the long way round, I decided that Mick and I should take it again and trust that my dormant memory of that initial visit would enable me to tick off each landmark as I encountered it. That, at least, was the plan. Except that it was an extremely long avenue and I was starting to fear we’d taken a wrong turning, or else missed the right turning, when I spotted an old-fangled bicycle-repair shop which I seemed to recollect (a dozen men’s bikes strung up vertically side by side in the window like a row of can-can dancers); then a corner café whose menu de dégustation, taped to its glass door, had been tarted up with painting-by-number illustrations of its stale specialities (choucroute, omelette aux fines herbes, that sort of thing); then, running parallel to the avenue on which we ourselves were walking, an equally long but much narrower street: the rue de la Folie-Méricourt. We were there.
Tracking down Ferey’s apartment building was not
a problem. In spite of the fact that its number was neither 21 nor 31 but 10, being in the street itself was all I needed to have it come back to me. We climbed the three flights of stairs I’d climbed before and I rang Ferey’s bell.
I can’t say now what it was I expected to see when he opened the door, but I was even more struck than before by his physical frailty, his mousy weeness. He was also blotchier. And above all, when he spoke, which he didn’t do for quite a few seconds, he was a little bit breathier – a fact that made me realise that, in the three months or so prior to our conversation in the café, I had already detected in his voice, but obviously not known I had detected, an almost inaudible wheeze that would punctuate the blank spaces between his spoken sentences.
Since the curtains were drawn, the apartment was in pitch darkness – why? – and Ferey had to fiddle for some time with an inconveniently positioned bedside lamp before bathing the three of us in a creepy blue light. This was carried out in silence. He had motioned us in, but he hadn’t said hello or expressed what would surely have been understandable astonishment at our presence at his front door. As he tried to locate the lamp-switch in the dark, the only remark he did make – and he was somebody I couldn’t recall ever having used a four-letter word – was ‘Why’s the fucking thing never on the same side as your fucking finger?’
‘Ferey,’ I said after a moment, ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ he answered dully, and I was unsure if he understood what it was I was apologising for.
‘I mean I’m sorry I didn’t go to the doctor with you. It’s not as though I had a good excuse. I didn’t. So I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s okay. Forget it.’
There was a short silence. Then Mick, bursting with an impatience in which his compassion for a friend in distress battled, as I could tell, with his prurient curiosity as to what precisely was the matter with him, asked him straight out what was going on, why he had resigned from the Berlitz, what the doctor had told him.
Ferey had Aids.
Not that he’d been diagnosed with Aids. He hadn’t yet been diagnosed with anything. But he ‘knew’ he had Aids.
It appears his consultation at the parc Monceau hadn’t even lasted half the twenty minutes allotted it and had consisted altogether of an unaggressive probe of the back of his throat with a glinting instrument resembling a pocket-sized shaving mirror. After which examination, the doctor had scrubbed his hands, sat down behind his desk, started to write up his report and, while still writing it, told Ferey he had some kind of yeast infection on his gums. Then he asked him, virtually in an aside (‘an articulate cough’ was Ferey’s description), if he was a homosexual. Ferey had replied no. Gazing at him over the rims of his spectacles for so long Ferey was convinced he was offering him a second go at the question, the doctor eventually referred him to a colleague of his, an eminent immunologist at the Hôpital Cochin.
When I heard that, I felt something shiver inside me. We were all now aware of the Cochin’s reputation as the centre of French research into Aids.
Ferey also informed us that, at the Cochin (to which he’d gone straight from the clinic), when he’d glanced round the waiting room before his turn was called, he’d recognised a podgy, curly-haired man pacing to and fro, fro and to, who though he was in reality no longer podgy except in his lower abdomen where, whenever he sat down, an unmistakable colostomy bag would cause his lap to balloon up like a double-page spread in a pop-up book, and though, as well, the tide was ebbing on the once opulent mane, was nevertheless the same podgy, curly-haired estate agent he had been fucked by several nights in a row five months before. It was quite a coincidence, except that, with Aids, there were no coincidences.
It was unthinkable now for either Mick or myself, after listening to Ferey, to try and persuade him that he was only being his old hypochondriacal self; after, too, I’d gone into his lavatory and observed, smearing the bowl’s inner rim, a not so very small star-shaped blob of blood-streaked shit. Oddly, it wasn’t so much the blood as the shit that disturbed me. I’d never used Ferey’s loo before but, had I given the matter any thought, I’d have assumed it must be as cloyingly hygienic, even when no visitors were expected, as he himself always was.
He’d already had a biopsy, a sliver of his gum had been removed and he was waiting for the results. But he also told us – calmly – that if he was calm it was because there was no suspense to be on tenterhooks about. He absolutely knew what the tests would show. As for the Berlitz, well, there were those spots breeding on his face and that wheeze that both Mick and I could hear plainly enough.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ Mick asked him.
‘What do you think I’m going to do?’ Ferey said. ‘I’m going to die.’
Aplomb wasn’t his forte, however. He wasn’t Schuyler. Immediately after saying what he did, he soundlessly slithered to the floor and, before either of us had time to make a move in his direction, he began to scream, so loudly we both jumped.
‘I’m twenty-four!’ he screamed up at us. ‘I’m twenty-four! I’m fucking twenty-four!’
For a few seconds I stupidly stood there, listening to him scream, not knowing how to handle him, which end to pick him up by. Then Mick pushed me out of his way with a snort of ‘Oh, really!’, gently lifted Ferey off the carpet by his armpits, sat him on the sofa, sat down beside him, laid his head on his own shoulder and stroked him like a dog while he sobbed. He himself said nothing. He just cradled and hugged Ferey, all the while disentangling strands of un-brilliantined hair from his damp forehead.
It was about half an hour later when Mick and I left the apartment, Ferey having composed himself sufficiently to ask us to go. (‘Yes please. Yes, I’m fine. Yes, I’ll be all right. I just need to be alone.’) We walked back to the Bastille metro station by the same circuitous route we’d come. For a fair stretch of that miserable grey avenue neither of us said a word. Finally, I turned to Mick and told him how sincerely impressed I had been by his having found just the right way to deal with Ferey.
‘You know, you’re really good at it.’
‘I ought to be,’ he said, with a grin so wide its two ends actually seemed to jut out beyond his cheeks. ‘I’ve been a father figure since I was twelve years old.’
We parted inside one of the corridors of the metro.
To whoever is reading me let me say that I narrated the scene above at length because, as I was even then aware that it would, so it did constitute a new turning point in my life. Even now, I still find myself thinking of that walk along the windswept avenue, of the bicycle shop, the corner café, its menu’s painted choucroute, and the sight of Ferey’s face, not yet ‘ravaged’, no, but already polluted by the illness we knew was hibernating behind it. I’d long believed that the true distinction between a serious disease and one that wasn’t serious was that the former was something you yourself got and the latter was something other people got. Be honest, I’d say to myself – nobody else’s disease is ever quite as serious as anything you yourself have to cope with. But that was because I’d known nobody of whom I could have said that his affliction had also become mine. For the first time in my life (not, I know, the first time I’ve committed that phrase to print), I understood what it meant to suffer, to mourn, for another as for myself. And I realised that this – ‘solidarity’, I guess, is the word for it – that this solidarity could be traced to the fact that Ferey, dear to me as he was but not personally more than that, was gay and I was gay and he had Aids and gays had Aids and his condition (homosexuality or Aids) was my condition, however different our tastes, however different our ‘difference’.
In any case, that was the very last time I ever saw him. In his apartment, while Mick was cradling and comforting him, I myself had at least had the presence of mind to make a mental note of his telephone number and, in the weeks following our visit, I regularly rang him up. Nearly as regularly, though, my calls went unanswered, to the point where, mo
re than once, I wondered whether he might have packed up and returned to the States. (What I did know was that he wasn’t an in-patient at the Cochin, as, despairing one day of ever being able to re-establish contact, I actually phoned the hospital and asked – in vain, to my relief – to be put through to him.) Then, when I was about to give up altogether, he unexpectedly would answer. We’d talk, but non-committally. When I enquired how he was, I was naturally thinking of his health above all. But I tiptoed around the essential and that’s how he chose to respond. ‘Oh, not too bad,’ he’d say. Or ‘As well as you’d expect.’ Never more than that. Even when I suggested our spending an evening together, his reply was never a categorical yes or no. ‘Oh, sure. Sure. We’ve got to get together. Maybe have dinner at Chartier. I’ll call you.’ I gave him the Voltaire’s number, but he didn’t call.
For me, there was to be one unforeseen consequence of Ferey’s departure, and that was my own belated rapprochement with Mick. Obsessed as I’d always been with our set – Schuyler, Ferey, Mick, myself and, more marginally, Ralph Macavoy – I’d forgotten the constancy with which the Berlitz’s cast of supporting characters would replenish itself every five or six months. The gap opened up by Ferey’s absence, the offstage rumble of tumbrils, the introspective silences that had begun to mark even our most humdrum exchanges – though we all continued to brag about our sexual exploits, real or imagined, our hearts were less and less in it – suddenly made me realise that I was now surrounded by faces which were as familiar to me as those I’d been exposed to when I arrived at the school but which belonged to lately appointed teachers whom I hadn’t bothered getting to know, so content was I with my own clannish little clique. Without quite noticing it had happened, I’d become one of the doyen’s cronies – I was shocked to overhear a recent recruit refer casually to ‘that old fart Schuyler’ – and new sets had meanwhile formed which prided themselves on being just as exclusive as ours. There was something else, too, which went beyond these petty intramural rivalries. Because of the spread of Aids the whole atmosphere in the common room had changed. The high spirits, the joie de vivre, the jazz and pizzazz, dash and panache, that even now I would claim were inherent properties of homosexuality, and properties that had been for me, considering my woeful track record, almost more important than the physical ones, had evaporated. Since the quotient of homosexuals on the teaching staff was visibly (and audibly) as high as it had ever been, the collective mood and morale could scarcely avoid reflecting in miniature that of the gay world at large. The gay world? Gays weren’t any longer very gay.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 9