And then, another three or four months later, during which the dynamics of the common room would alter almost out of recognition – that end of the table, for example, that had long been ‘reserved’ for us, for Schuyler and Ferey and Mick and me, had gradually been usurped by a half-dozen unobtrusive gays, the kind who couldn’t have made their wrists limp if their lives depended on it, ‘straight’ gays, straight in everything but their sexual orientation, buttoned-up in both the sartorial and the psychological sense – then it was the turn, inevitably, of Mick himself.
On the night he confided in me, our roles for once were reversed. It was he whose last class finished earlier than mine, and it was he who beckoned to me, when I passed it on my way home, from inside the same café on whose terrace I had so often lain in wait for somebody, anybody, to talk to. He had installed himself, moreover, at the very same window table I myself had sat at when striving to reassure poor Ferey he wasn’t at death’s door, and as I crossed the café floor from the entrance to his table I noticed him leering at a couple standing together at the bar – leering, rather, at one half of the couple, a superb specimen of blond, pale-skinned Aryanism, German, Austrian or Swiss, twenty or thereabouts, ridiculously fetching in finickily stitched lederhosen, his hair gorgeously blow-dried, an upturned tiara of a grin affixed to his freckled features like a smiley-face lapel badge. (The other half was a goateed middle-aged man, French, with a red woollen scarf wrapped around his neck varsity-style.) So, I thought to myself when I sat down opposite a blearier and more unshaven-looking Mick than I was used to, whatever his problems might have been – and I already had an idea what they were – at least he hadn’t lost his eye for a pretty face.
Indeed, when I was about to ask what was up, he immediately shushed me to remain silent so we could both follow, as he’d already started to do before my arrival, the woo that was being pitched alongside the otherwise unoccupied bar. The middle-aged Frenchman, naturally, was doing most of the talking, and what we could hear of his pitch was straight out of a user’s manual to the protocol of the gay pick-up. It was all there – the preliminary chat about everything save the matter at hand, the coy comparison of ages (the boy, Franz, was nineteen), the indulgently avuncular tut-tutting over youthful bad habits (‘Tu fumes trop, tu sais’), the obligatory allusion to the sexual mores of the ancient Greeks (‘Ah oui, les Grecs …,’ murmured Franz in his guttural French, the pfennig finally dropping) and, just when Mick and I were wondering if it was ever going to happen, the unambiguous pass.
It worked, as they say, like a charm. After about seven seconds of dutiful self-counsel, freckly Franz nodded, stubbed a half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray, bent down to insert his crumpled pack of Marlboros inside the top of one of his thick woollen stockings, just under a sexily scarred knee, then followed the dirty old frog out of the café.
Mick tipped his chair back and smiled at me.
‘Couldn’t have done better myself,’ he said. ‘I trust you listened and learned?’
‘What was it you wanted to see me about?’ I asked him.
We were interrupted for a moment while a waiter took my order. Then Mick, his smile as brusquely swept from his face as by a windscreen wiper (the quick-change artist again), said, ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’ A brief pause. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘You’ve got what?’
‘Jesus Christ, Gideon, what the fuck do you think I’ve got? Rhythm?’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Aids, what else. Oh, and please, don’t say anything silly and’ – perched in mid-air like crows on a washing line, his fingers mimicked a pair of inverted commas – ‘well-meaning. It’s official.’
In reality, though I didn’t of course say this to him, his announcement came as little surprise to me, and all I could think of to begin with was the belief I already had that, so long as somebody like Mick had been spared, somebody who got up to what he got up to, Aids couldn’t really be the plague it was said to be. Now that he had it, I knew for certain it was.
But I was to discover, too, that it was still possible to be shocked even when you weren’t surprised, and it wasn’t simply a matter, as it’s so often been with me, of codified grief, of putting on my solemnest face, which is how Barrie would have phrased it. I’ve already written that I’d initially resisted warming to Mick – basically, I suppose, he just wasn’t ‘my kind of person’ – but I’d now known him a good while and, as somebody said, our best friends aren’t those we like the best but those we’ve known the longest.
I was also, as at Ferey’s, struck by the total absence of hysteria, of mawkishness, in the tone in which he talked of his symptoms – in particular, of the diarrhoea that he’d had for several weeks, that was making his life at the Berlitz a daily torment (his constant fear, he said, was of shitting his pants in class) and that had finally impelled him to consult the doctor who, just the day before we met, had given him the bad news. Mick, in short, who had treated endless numbers of ‘bootiful boys’, if he himself was to be believed, like so many wads of gum, chewing them up then spitting them out when he’d extracted all their succulence and flavour, was now able to speak to me – of what was, after all, a terminal illness – with a maturity he’d never shown in the sex life that had, precisely, brought him to this pass.
He left the Berlitz soon after but, unlike Ferey, he didn’t lose contact with me. He’d ring me at the Voltaire eager for common-room gossip (of which, by this time, I could supply him with next to none), then tell me his own gossip, less of his health, about which he was uncharacteristically reticent, than of his voluntary involvement with one of the many new Aids-related bureaux and organisations. And, one day, he asked if I’d care to attend its twice-weekly gathering. I agreed and we arranged to have a drink first at the Flore, ‘for old times’ sake,’ he said. Then, on the point of hanging up, he also said, ‘Don’t be too taken aback if you find I’ve changed.’ He wouldn’t reveal what he meant by that and I didn’t insist. But I did prepare myself for the worst.
I couldn’t, though, have got things more hopelessly wrong. The Mick I saw on the terrace of the Flore, saw with an amazement bordering on stupefaction, looked ten years younger and healthier than the one I’d always known. He’d had his hair cut off until all that remained was a smooth, even bristle that made him appear not terminally ill but terminally cool and contemporary. He’d exchanged that never too thrilling scarlet-lined cloak of his for a Bogartian trenchcoat, its rakish collar framing the shoulder-straps of a freshly laundered boiler-suit. And instead of the Rameses cigarettes he affected at the Berlitz he was smoking a cornpaper Disque Bleu. As for his complexion, it was what you might call interestingly pale. Aids, I couldn’t help thinking, became him.
When I told him how much I preferred this new ‘look’ of his, endeavouring to sound as though I truly meant it (which I did) and were not paying him an easy, lazy compliment, he was amused that I thought his ‘work clothes’, as he referred to them, might have represented some sort of fashion statement. Under normal circumstances, I’d have taken such offhandedness as just another of his poses, but now I found myself believing him, especially as, with frequent glances at his wristwatch, he was clearly itching for us to get going.
I swallowed the last of my coffee, paid for both of us – Mick was unemployed, after all – and was preparing to leave when he turned to me.
‘Look, Gideon,’ he said calmly, ‘I hope you realise you’re going to be a bit of an outsider tonight.’
‘An outsider?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t get you. It’s for gays only, isn’t it?’
‘What I mean is, you don’t have Aids.’ He stared at me boldly. ‘You don’t, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, you’ll be the only one there who doesn’t. Now do you understand?’
‘Let me get this right. What you’re saying –’
‘What I’m saying is that you’ll be there as a guest, not as one of us. They’re all militants, don’
t forget. You know the type of gay who’d only talk to other gays? Well, now the only gays some of these guys’ll talk to are gays with Aids. So best not to mention you don’t have it.’
This was unbelievable. Like every other homosexual, I’d had to learn how to live with exclusion from the straight majority. Now, because I still had my health, and because the pleasures of gayness had had to capitulate to the politics of what might be called Aids-ness, I was to be excluded all over again – and from my own kind!
‘Things have changed, Gideon,’ said Mick. ‘We’ve found a cause – we’ve become a cause. Anybody who isn’t with us is against us.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Mick, I’m with you!’
‘Not if you’re clean you aren’t. For them’ – and for you, Mick? I wondered – ‘you’re an anachronism. You’re irrelevant. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. So say as little as possible, okay? In fact, just be your own sweet little self.’
‘I’ll positively ooze charm,’ I muttered.
‘Don’t ooze anything,’ said Mick, gathering from the tabletop a thick loose-leaf folder out of which bulged a sheaf of papers. ‘Just be nice.’
The gathering was held inside a disaffected, gasometer-grim atelier situated in a Montparnasse street from which every trace of Bohemian local colour, assuming it had ever had any, had been expunged: the sole vestige of a shady past was an indelible sweatshop stink that subtly hung over the room. When we arrived, late despite our precautions, Mick, seemingly a born activist, at once left my side, just as at the partouze, to confer with his ‘comrades’ about the distribution of some roneotyped tracts, and I was suddenly on my own again, feeling as superfluous and conspicuous – conspicuous by my own absence, as it struck me – as I’d once felt at The Scarlet Pimp.
The attendance was a motley mix. I noticed a sleepy-eyed stumblebum who’d probably wandered in solely for the coffee and sandwiches; a half-dozen gaunt young scarecrows, three of them on crutches, all of them visibly in the last stages of their illness; a few dowdy business types, suede-gloved and paisley-scarved, who would have been more at home at some accountancy firm’s annual dinner-dance, if such things are ever held in Paris; a tall, genial, handshaking, silver-templed gent in his sixties, parodically Texan, who wore a denim suit and a Stetson hat and spoke in a foghorn bass that I could still hear booming away from the far side of the room; a pair of (I assumed) ballet dancers whose scrawny volupté was set to advantage by the most elegant garments in the world – the tights, sweaters, vests and leggings of backstage rehearsal togs – and whose beady, greedy piglet eyes never stopped darting about them, taking the measure of anybody not too far gone to be picked up; and even, standing to one side as I was, two women, a statuesque stunner in her mid-twenties, chaste and sculptural, and (I again assumed) her wealthy, plain, not to say plug-ugly, if exquisitely mannered and manicured, sugar-mommy.
But Mick – for whom I found myself, to my bewilderment, feeling strangely happy – was right. I was an outsider, an irrelevance, even an insult, to these Aids sufferers – more so, in point of fact, than the pair of Les Girls (as male homosexuals, stressing the ‘s’ of ‘Les’, like to call their female counterparts), since they at least turned out to be on close kissy-kissy terms with virtually all of those present, including Mick himself. And in a way that, as I say above, reminded me of evenings I’d spent at the Pimp, so here I tried hard to appear casual, at my ease, an old hand, as though I were attending the meeting for the same reason as everybody else, not because of the natural tribal sympathy any healthy gay might be expected to have for those of his fellows who had fallen victim to an incurable disease – more than one speaker from the floor insisted on the importance of practising what they all referred to as ‘safe sex’ (an admonition accompanied by rueful moans from the audience) – but because I too was one such victim. I tried, in short, as I realised with something approaching panic, to look as though I myself had Aids.
From that very evening on, I was assailed by the most fantastic of apprehensions. Night after night, sweating and sleepless, slathered in a hot-and-cold, sweet-and-sour sweat, I would turn my predicament over and over in my head. For consider: not only was I once more as isolated as I’d been before lying my way into a spurious intimacy with my fellow gays, it gradually started to dawn on me that, because I’d left Schuyler and Mick and Ralph Macavoy, all that was left of the original band, as well as any of the others at the Berlitz who had ever bothered to listen to my boasting, with the impression that I’d been leading a sexual life just as rich, raunchy and violent as theirs, why – it would eventually occur to one of them, Mick, say (it was bound to be Mick), to ask me – why didn’t I have Aids?
The height of perversity it may seem – when what any sensible person would expect would have been for me to be above all relieved, relieved more than words could ever convey, that every single one of those tales of mine of being fistfucked till I was blue in the bum was merely the squalid fantasy of a haggard, hollow-eyed masturbator – but my primary concern at this stage was that I was finally going to be caught out. I saw myself, the one gay man in the world not to have Aids, the lone survivor of a veritable Pompeii of petrified lovers, shown up at last for the wretched mythomaniac that I had always been in reality. I fantasised that ailing and dying gays, repelled by my insulting good health, hence by my lack of solidarity with the cause, the only cause which any longer mattered to the homosexual community, would begin sending me white – or maybe pink – feathers through the post. I started – it’s fantastic, as I say, but it’s also true – I started half-wishing I might actually catch the bloody disease myself if it meant I could once again feel part of a family, part of a set. I even flirted with the folly of ringing up Mick and making the solemn but wittily worded announcement, wisecracking through my tears like a born fag, just as the simpering heroines of Victorian romances used to smile through theirs, that I had caught it.
Not only that. I entertained a notion that was crazier still, a notion that, had I ever had the nerve to act on it, would, I knew, have destroyed my already compromised capacity for rational thought and action. I told myself that, if I actually were to ring Mick – and he were to gather me, as he doubtless would, under his capacious father-figure wing – then there would inevitably have to arrive that moment when the ‘deterioration’ of my health would begin taking its irrevocable, visible course, and I wondered, I seriously wondered, whether I could go as far as to make myself up to look the part, faking a web of picturesque lesions on my face and hands!
That period of delirium proved to be of mercifully brief duration, thank God. Or thank, instead, my unbridled libido, which raged on oblivious of the dangers it would expose me to were I capable of satisfying, outside my fantasies, its increasingly intemperate appetites. For so unignorable did the risks now appear, so terminal and unconditional was the disease, admitting of so few exceptions and mitigations, so clearly had it dug in for the long haul, I soon found myself with a whole new set of apprehensions to contend with. Considering how becalmed the gay scene was becoming, considering the stories we’d all heard of promiscuous homosexuals, friends, friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, metamorphosing overnight into paragons of monkish abstinence and chastity, I was now seized with terror at the prospect that if I didn’t have my share of sex at once I might never have it at all.
That, I made a vow to myself, I would not, I could not, let happen. And one stifling summer night, as I lay naked on top of my bed’s cool quilt, it suddenly came to me how I might turn a public calamity to my own private advantage.
Oh, this resolve of mine wasn’t anything like as calculated as I make it sound. I never deliberately set my sights on emulating Don Giovanni’s mil e tre. But if (I excitedly told myself) the blanket of fear and foreboding that had settled on the scene meant that fewer and fewer homosexuals continued to play the field, it meant equally (now I could actually feel the hairs tingle on the nape of my neck) that those who were still up for a regula
r fuck – for all that they had been forewarned a hundred times about the dangers of unsafe sex – had had of necessity to lower the threshold of their expectations where the quality of their partners was concerned.
From having glimpsed the odd, and not notably furtive, flirtation at Mick’s meeting, which I’d seen openly exploited for its pick-up potential by more than a few of those who attended it, I knew that there still existed such homosexuals. And I was also reminded of the anecdote that Barrie Teasdale had been telling us at the Flore when he interrupted himself to watch Mick kiss his waiter friend. Remember: if a bomb were to have dropped on the Night of 1000 Stars, it would have been Pia Zadora’s big chance. Well, it finally hit me – and I realise that the straight mindset, should any straights be reading me, will regard as the epitome of faggoty superficiality my yoking together in this fashion a piece of showbiz trivia and a major human tragedy, but what the hell – it finally hit me that a bomb had dropped on the homosexual world. So why shouldn’t Aids be my big chance?
It was in a bookstore that I met Kim. Le Minotaure, run by a pair of fortyish queens in the rue des Beaux-Arts, specialised in movie memorabilia, ‘intellectual’ comic-strip albums, art-historical monographs and porny surrealist arcana, and the most prestigious of its habitués – all I mean by that is that I chanced to see him there more than once – was the director Alain Resnais. One morning, on my day off from the Berlitz, I was browsing through a pile of tattered old editions of the film journal Positif, some of them dating back to the early fifties, when I heard a feminine-sounding if nevertheless patently masculine voice put a question, or what was certainly pitched like a question, that left both owners – and me too, first time I caught it – baffled. ‘Lady Putty?’ was what we heard. And when the customer was invited to repeat his query, and could only say simply, blankly, ‘Lady Putty, pliss?’, the older of the two queens (longtime companions, I surmised) shrugged his shoulders, said in a languorous tone just this side of rudeness, ‘Désolé, mais …‘, and turned his attention back to the paperback novel he had already been reading when I entered the shop fifteen minutes before.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 11