Skinned Alive (9 page)

Sometimes his laugh was like a shout—boyish, the sound, but the significance, knowing and Parisian. He laughed to show that he hadn’t been taken in or that he had caught the wicked allusion. When I was in the kitchen preparing the next course, I’d smile if I heard his whoop. I liked it that he was my husband, so at home, so sociable, so lighthearted, but our marriage was just a poor invention of my fancy.

It reassured me that his sexuality was profoundly, not modishly, violent. He told me that when he had been a child, just seven or eight, he had built a little town out of cardboard and plywood, painted every shutter and peopled every house and then set the whole construction afire and watched the conflagration with a bone-hard, inch-long erection. Is that why just touching me made him hard now (bone-hard, foot-long)? Could he see I was ablaze with ardor for him (ardor with a silent
h)?

The violence showed up again in the comic strips he was always drawing. He had invented a sort of Frankenstein monster in good French clothes, a creature disturbed by his own half-human sentiments in a world otherwise populated by robots. When I related his comics to the history of art, he’d smile a gay, humiliated smile, the premonitory form of his whooping, disabused Parisian laugh. He was ashamed I made so much of his talent, though his talent was real enough.

He didn’t know what to do with his life. He was living as ambitious, healthy young men live who have long vistas of time before them: despairingly. I, who had already outlived my friends and had fulfilled some of my hopes but few of my desires (desire won’t stay satisfied), lived each day with joy and anguish. Jean-Loup expected his life to be perfect: there was apparently going to be so much of it.

Have I mentioned that Jean-Loup had such high arches that walking hurt him? He had one of his feet broken, lowered and screwed shut in metal vices that were removed six months
later. His main reason for the operation was to take a break from the bank for a few weeks. His clinic room was soon snowed under with comic strip adventures. After that he walked with a bit of a Chaplinesque limp when he was tired.

I often wondered what his life was like with the other young Bordelais counts and countesses at Saint-Jean-de-Luz every August. I was excluded from that world—the chance of my being introduced to his childhood friends had never even once entered his head—which made me feel like a demimondaine listening avidly to her titled young lover’s accounts of his exploits in the great world. Although I presented Jean-Loup to my literary friends in London, he had few opinions about them beyond his admiration for the men’s clothes and the women’s beauty and apparent intelligence. “It was all so fast and brilliant,” he said, “I scarcely understood a word.” He blamed me for not helping him with his English, though he hated the sounds I made when I spoke my native language. “You don’t have an accent in French—oh, you have your little accent, but it’s nothing, very charming. But in American you sound like a duck, it’s frightful!”

I suppose my English friends thought it was a sentimental autumn-and-spring affair. One friend, who lent us her London house for a few days, said, “Don’t let the char see you and Jean-Loup nude.” The warning seemed bizarre until I understood it as an acknowledgment of our potential for sensual mischief. Perhaps she was particularly alive to sensual possibilities, since she was so proud of her own handsome, artistic husband.

After I returned to Paris, I spent my days alone reading and writing, and in fair weather I’d eat a sandwich on the quay. That January the Seine overflowed and flooded the highway on the Right Bank. Sea gulls flew upstream and wheeled above the turbulent river, crying, as though mistaking Notre Dame for Mont Saint-Michel. The floodlights trained on the church’s
façade projected ghostly shadows of the two square towers up into the foggy night sky, as though spirits were doing axonometric drawings of a cathedral I had always thought of as malign. The gargoyles were supposed to ward off evil, but to me they looked like dogs straining to leap away from the devil comfortably lodged within.

I went to Australia and New Zealand for five weeks. I wrote Jean-Loup many letters, in French, believing that the French language tolerated love better than English, but when I returned to Paris Jean-Loup complained of my style. He found it
mièvre
, “wimpy” or “wet.”

He said I should write about his ass one day, but in a style that was neither pornographic nor wimpy. He wanted me to describe his ass as Francis Ponge describes soap: an objective, exhaustive, whimsical catalog of its properties.

I wanted someone else, but I distrusted that impulse, because it seemed, if I looked back, I could see that I had never been happy in love and that with Jean-Loup I was happier than usual. As he pointed out, we were still having sex after two years, and he ascribed the intensity to the very infrequency that I deplored. Even so, I thought there was something all wrong, fundamentally wrong, with me: I set up a lover as a god, then burned with rage when he proved mortal. I lay awake, next to one lover after another, in a rage, dreaming of someone who’d appreciate me, give me the simple affection I imagined I wanted.

When I broke off with Jean-Loup over dinner he said, “You deserve someone better, someone who will love you completely.” Yet the few times I had been loved “completely” I’d felt suffocated. Nor could I imagine a less aristocratic lover, one who’d sit beside me on the couch, hand in hand, and discuss the loft bed, the “mezzanine,” we should buy with the cunning little chair and matching desk underneath.

But when I was alone night after night, I resented Jean-Loup’s
independence. He said I deserved something better, and I knew I merited less but needed more.

It was then I saw the redhead at the reading. Although I stared holes through him, he never looked at me once. It occurred to me that he might not be homosexual, except that his grave military bearing was something only homosexuals could (or would bother to) contrive if they weren’t actually soldiers. His whole look and manner were studied. Let’s say he was the sort of homosexual other homosexuals recognize but that heterosexuals never suspect.

The next day I asked the owner of the bookstore if she knew the redhead. “He comes into the shop every so often,” she said, with a quick laugh to acknowledge the character of my curiosity, “but I don’t know his name. He bought one of your books. Perhaps he’ll come to your reading next week.”

I told her to be sure to get his name if he returned. “You were a diplomat once,” I reminded her. She promised but when I phoned a few days later she said he hadn’t been in. Then on the night of my reading I saw him sitting in the same chair as before and I went up to him with absolute confidence and said, “I’m so glad you came tonight. I saw you at the last reading, and my
copine
and I thought you looked so interesting we wished we knew you.” He looked so blank that I was afraid he hadn’t understood and I almost started again in French. I introduced myself and shook his hand. He went white and said, “I’m sorry for not standing up,” and then stood up and shook my hand, and I was afraid he’d address me as “sir.”

Now that I could look at his hair closely I noticed that it was blond, if shavings of gold are blond, only on the closely cropped sides but that it was red on top—the reverse of the sun-bleached strawberry blond. He gave me his phone number, and I thought this was someone I could spend the rest of my
life with, however brief that might be. His name was Paul.

I phoned him the next day to invite him to dinner, and he said that he had a rather strange schedule, since he worked four nights a week at a disco.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m the physiognomist. The person who recognizes the regulars and the celebrities. I have to know what Brigitte Bardot looks like
now.
I decide who comes in, who stays out, who pays, who doesn’t. We have a house rule to let all models in free.” He told me people called him Cerberus.

“But how do you recognize everyone?”

“I’ve been on the door since the club opened seven years ago. So I have ten thousand faces stored in my memory.” He laughed. “That’s why I could never move back to America. I’d never find a job that paid so well for just twenty hours’ work a week. And in America I couldn’t do the same job, since I don’t know any faces there.”

We arranged an evening and he arrived dressed in clothes by one of the designers he knew from the club. Not even my reactionary father, however, would have considered him a popinjay. He did nothing that would risk his considerable dignity. He had white tulips in his surprisingly small, elegant hand.

All evening we talked literature, and, as two good Americans, we also exchanged confidences. Sometimes his shyness brought all the laughter and words to a queasy halt, and it made me think of that becalmed moment when a sailboat comes around and the mainsail luffs before it catches the wind again. I watched the silence play over his features.

He was from a small town in Georgia. His older brother and he had each achieved the highest score in the statewide scholastic aptitude test. They had not pulled down good grades, however; they read Plato and
Naked Lunch
, staged
No Exit
and brawls with the boys in the next town, experimented with hallucinogens and conceptual art. Paul’s brother made an “art-work”
out of his plans to assassinate President Ford and was arrested by the FBI.

“I just received the invitation to my tenth high school reunion,” Paul said.

“I’ll go with you,” I said. “I’ll go as your spouse.”

He looked at me and breathed a laugh, save it was voiced just at the end, the moving bow finally touching the bass string and waking sound in it.

Paul’s older brother had started a rock band, gone off to New York where he died of AIDS—another musician punished. He had been one of the first heterosexual male victims, dead already in 1981. He contracted the disease from a shared needle. Their mother, a Scottish immigrant, preferred to think he had been infected by another man. Love seemed a nobler cause of death than drugs.

“Then I came to Paris,” Paul said. He sighed and looked out of my open window at the roofs of the Ile Saint-Louis. Like other brilliant young men and women he dissolved every solid in a solvent of irony, but even he had certain articles of faith, and the first was Paris. He liked French manners, French clothes, French food, French education. He said things like “France still maintains cultural hegemony over the whole world,” and pronounced “hegemony” as
hégémonie.
He had done all his studies as an adult in France and French. He asked me what the name of Platon’s
Le Banquet
was in English (that’s what they call
The Symposium
, for some reason). He had a lively, but somewhat vain, sense of what made him interesting, which struck me only because he seemed so worthy of respect that any attempt he made to serve himself up appeared irrelevant.

He was wearing a white shirt and dark tie and military shoes and a beautiful dark jacket that was cut to his Herculean chest and shoulders. He had clear eyes, pale blue eyes. The white tulips he brought were waxen and pulsing like lit candles, and
his skin, that rich hairless skin, was tawny-colored. His manners were formal and French, a nice Georgia boy but Europeanized, someone who’d let me lazily finish my sentences in French
(“Quand même”
we’d say,
“rien à voir avec
…”). His teeth were so chalky white that the red wine stained them a faint blue. His face was at once open and unreadable, as imposing as the globe. He nodded slowly as he thought out what I said, so slowly that I doubted the truth or seriousness of what I was saying. He hesitated and his gaze was noncommittal, making me wonder if he was pondering his own response or simply panicking. I wouldn’t have thought of him panicking except he mentioned it. He said he was always on the edge of panic (the sort of thing Americans say to each other with big grins). Points of sweat danced on the bridge of his nose, and I thought I saw in his eye something frightened, even unpleasant and unreachable. I kept thinking we were too much alike, as though at any moment our American heartiness and our French
politesse
would break down and we’d look at each other with the sour familiarity of brothers. Did he sense it, too? Is that why our formality was so important to him? I was sure he hadn’t liked himself in America.

Speaking French so long had made me simplify my thoughts—whether expressed in French or English—and I was pleased I could say now what I felt, since the intelligence I was imputing to him would never have tolerated my old vagueness. Whereas Jean-Loup had insisted I use the right fork, I felt Paul would insist on the correct emotion.

Sometimes before he spoke Paul made a faint humming sound—perhaps only voiced shyness—but it gave the impression of muted deference. It made me think of a student half raising his hand to speak in a seminar too small and egalitarian to require the teacher’s recognition. But I also found myself imagining that his thought was so varied, occurring on so many levels at once, that the hum was a strictly mechanical downshift
into the compromise (and invention) of speech. After a while the hum disappeared, and I fancied he felt more at ease with me, although the danger is always to read too much into what handsome men say and do. Although he was twenty years younger, he seemed much older than I.