Authors: Edmund White
Back “home” he saw that all the houses on his block were completely dark; the patch of woods across the street was frighteningly black. He unpacked his bags and put his clothes away in the emptied chest of drawers. Straight pins and even a stray paperclip were wedged into the cracks in the corners of the wood drawers, which smelled very dry. In the bathroom the professor’s wife had simply pushed all her ointments, sprays and beauty utensils to the back of a six-foot-deep shelf. She’d erected a barricade of cardboard shirt boards, leaving the front of the shelf—painted but chipped and greasy—for his toiletries. He thought, Julien is
still
at the airport, with nothing to read, nothing to think about except how I betrayed him.
On every wall in every room were lace “paintings,” collected by the professor’s wife. She was Polish and, according to a monograph she’d left out for Austin, these works were embroideries and laces that Polish women had made over the centuries—“A Portable Matrimony” was the title of the essay (“matrimony” was considered to be the female form of “patrimony”). One sentence read, “Tormented by wars, pogroms and Cossack raids, such laces were the sole matrimony beleaguered Polish women, proto-feminists all, could carry with them in a single suitcase. ‘Lay not up your treasures on earth’—unless they can fit into a suitcase, we might revise the saying!”
The professor and his wife, it turned out, were devout Catholics. He had been decorated by the Pope and there were photos of the Vatican ceremony everywhere, and a nearly life-size wood statue of the Virgin beside the bed. She was dressed in a gilt robe and wearing a detachable gilt crown set with glass “jewels.” Austin tried it on. He wondered how the professor and his wife must feel about two men sleeping in their bed—they must have been desperate for a sublet, he thought.
He called Peter in New York and told him the whole long story.
“Don’t worry, Austin, it will all work out. Tomorrow morning you can phone your Paris lawyer. Then call the president of your school.”
“Oh. I will.”
“Then call Jules.”
“Julien.”
“Sorry. So how does it feel to be back home?”
“Appalling. Everyone seems to be sleeping all the time. The only living creatures are giant squirrels bounding insolently over the lawn. This house is huge and hideous. There’s the locked-up wine cellar in the basement, the locked-up computer room in the attic, everything else has a film of grease on it.”
“Why are you being so brittle?” Peter asked.
“Because I’m so unhappy.” The minute he was no longer able to be satirical he felt old and tired, as though he’d been brightly lipsticked and someone had sponged off all his make-up. He cooked sausages and instant mashed potatoes and ate them in the dining room under another lace picture. The Master Bed was so high he had to climb up on it by means of a three-step wood ladder; he fell asleep on top of the impeccably white chenille bedspread while the furnace roared somewhere far below and poured its costly heat up through the floor vents.
Next day he rang Julien to say that he’d be flying back to Paris the following evening and that they could stay in the Île Saint-Louis apartment. The provost of his college in Rhode Island had told him that America wasn’t a “banana republic” like France and that if Austin tried to pull any strings he’d be hanged by them (a curious image, Austin thought). “No, seriously,” the provost had added, “I wasn’t able to do anything to get Dubuffet in years ago, and I had Sargent Shriver himself on my side. Pull doesn’t work here. You’ve got to be patient. I’ve consulted the school’s legal counselor and he says you could demand an instant hearing from an immigration judge but it could easily backfire and your friend might
never
get in. If you just wait for things to take their own course, he’ll be here with us in Providence within a month. So just relax and enjoy all the cultural advantages of our city. Oh, and how does it feel—are you glad you gave up Paris for Providence?”
Austin laughed a dry laugh, a hard laugh of pained regret and
humiliation. He’d always thought that someday he should move back to America. He’d thought that even before he’d tested positive. Maybe because the French commented on his accent he’d never stopped thinking of himself as a foreigner. He voted nowhere since he’d been a tourist in France and without a proper long-term visa he couldn’t vote through the American Consulate in stateside elections—or so he thought (he’d never bothered to inquire). He’d lived an irresponsible life, the foreigner in France, the expatriate in America.
That night he walked restlessly through the rooms in Providence. Here he was in this cold, empty city with its boxy houses, their windows glowing dimly at night, this city with its abandoned, windswept downtown, with the dark, dangerous woods across the street. He was exhausted from jet lag. For him it was three in the morning. The house with its smell of mildew, its plastic poppies, its framed Polish laces, spoke of other people’s lives, the poverty of an academic couple who’d raised two children and sent them to expensive universities and never modernized the kitchen. There were few books beyond the brittle paperbacks they’d bought in college thirty years ago—all those Turgenevs and Dostoevskys, for a Russian Lit. course, probably, and the vogue books of the 1950s
(The Outsider, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit)
and of the sixties
(Growing Up Absurd
, Marshall McLuhan).
It was an outpost of an alien culture and for the first time in his thoughts about Americans he could hear himself saying “them.” He even said to one of his colleagues, “Americans don’t like that sort of thing.” The remark won him a funny look.
H
e arrived back in Paris four days after he’d left it. He went to his old apartment on the Île Saint-Louis and called Julien from the street (the phone had been turned off). Julien rushed right over. Without a word they went to bed and they made love with a feverish desperation that precluded pleasure or at least sensuality. It had been years since Austin had had sex in which every kiss stood for an effort to swallow the other person, every fluttering of tongue on nipple could be deciphered as laying balm on a sore heart, and the simultaneous explosion of two orgasms meant marriage.
Even after they’d come Austin kept feeling critical (as when an accident victim is said to be “in critical condition”). He needed love or was it help, and he butted his head under Julien’s arm and into his side, he hooked his fingers, critical, searching, onto and over Julien’s small, white lower teeth. He closed his eyes and felt his way into his wet fingers and thought he was pulling a hard, bony baby out of a bloody womb.
“Petit,”
Austin said, “I’m so miserable without you. I keep worrying that you’re going to go back to Christine.”
Julien laughed a laugh of recognition and in the dark involuntarily shrugged his shoulders in a complicated Gallic way that seemed
half-apologetic: “It’s true she’s so kind to me and the whole experience of being rejected by the Americans was so humiliating—in Europe we have the false idea that Americans are sweet and kind, but I never saw such unsmiling, hard faces—real fascists. And who are they to assume we’re so desperate to get into their country? We’re not Haitian refugees on a raft. Our standard of living in Europe is higher than theirs and France is such a garden, so rich and varied with its crickets and olive groves in Provence, its mist and castles in Brittany, its
thousands
of castles—they have nothing to compare with it.”
Austin was happy that at least Julien was railing against
them
, not against a
you
that would include him. “No, it was disgusting; I just hope it won’t turn you off America forever. Someone told me if we’d come through JFK in New York you would have been shooed through in all the confusion. But Boston in January? Not exactly thronged with European tourists.”
Suddenly Austin could seriously envision Julien staying in France and even reuniting with his wife. Perhaps she’d won him back after all just by calmly waiting. Or had she been the one to reject Julien originally? Austin would never know. She’d certainly wasted no time finding an Italian lover and becoming pregnant. If she’d been waiting for Julien to come back, would she ever have become pregnant with little Allegra?
Austin wasn’t a fighter. The prospect that Julien might leave him hardened his heart. He pulled away from him, ashamed that he’d showed so much emotion to this man who wasn’t the convinced lover he’d imagined, the person with whom he could finally feel safe. No, Julien was weighing his possibilities, still hesitating, and that symptom of the famous French realism sickened Austin.
They were ghosts who’d come back to haunt their former lives; some higher dispensation allowed them to inhabit this old apartment for just five days, but it, too, was ghostly—shabby without its soft lamps and bohemian throws tossed over the mammoth metal heater that no longer worked. The apartment was dusty and resonant. Given how small the rooms were, the resonance sounded odd, as though they were in the antechambers to a mammoth cave. The windows were curtainless, the worn carpet denuded of the two sumptuous silk
rugs Austin had brought back from a holiday in Istanbul, the kitchen empty of its dishes and cutlery.
And the city, too, was ghostly, since none of their friends knew they were there. They called no one and just walked and walked, visiting all their favorite places, crunching along the formal gravel paths at the Jardin des Plantes between beds of dead flowers, all neatly labeled, or descending the escalator under the Louvre’s glass pyramid into a necropolis of art miles and miles long, or standing under the high, illuminated glory of the narrow Sainte Chapelle, its walls of stained glass housing a precious holy relic, a single splinter of the True Cross. When they jostled their way through the crowds under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, Austin was disturbed to see the buses in front of ParisVision disgorging so many fellow Americans, as though he feared being confused with them. He spoke loudly to Julien in French to insulate himself against this confusion.
“I only have to teach two days a week,
Petit,”
Austin said. “You could stay two weeks in Montréal, which is supposed to be beautiful, and I could fly up twice and spend five days with you each time. By then things will be sorted out and you’ll be coming to the United States.”
Julien looked at him with a flash of intensity and said,
“D’accord.”
He had a sharp way of biting into that word, which in his mouth became a form not of aggressiveness but of conviction. Simple, matter-of-fact acceptance, so at odds with what Austin had perceived the previous night as a wavering commitment to their love and the move to Providence.
In one way he knew Julien well, his erect but supple posture, his deep voice and hollow, mirthless laugh, his sensitive nipples, his pain over his mother’s death, his anger over his failed marriage, his romantic posturing, his dandified distance from all moral questions, a disdain which often made him seem capricious, even cruel, his fascination with other people’s glamor, not as an abject admirer but as a powerful generator of personal glamor himself. Austin knew inside-out everything about Julien’s intense secretiveness. When Austin would press him on a point he didn’t want to talk about, he’d smile and turn his head slightly to one side with a sort of royal unreachability.
They walked and walked through the crowds, past rich Arabs followed by their silent, shrouded women and their fashionably dressed children, big black soft eyes in open peony faces. Past old tourists from the provinces, stiff-jointed, blinking but smiling good-naturedly despite their feeling of sudden disorientation as they entered a swirl of gypsy girls, rushing around and through their group, whining and jabbing open hands at them. Julien and Austin walked and walked past the smell of heated chocolate wafting out of Angelina’s and the half-glimpsed movement of waitresses in white aprons darting between the Louis XVI chairs, past the windows of a men’s shop and the sight of the tailor in vest and shirtsleeves, a yellow tape measure dangling around his neck, standing alone, apparently entranced, in the center of the empty room, past the English-language bookstore with its windows piled high with a local bestseller,
French or Foe
. Then the arcade ended and opened up into the immensity of the Place de la Concorde with its seated matronly statues representing the cities of France gathered in a serene circle around the Egyptian obelisk and the tangle of revolving traffic and the distant gold glow of the Tomb of the Emperor and the columned splendor of the Madeleine, at the end of a wide street, the rue Royale. Maybe because there were no buildings on the west side of the square, the eye was led up, up above the massed chestnut trees to the gray skies, as intricately contoured as the brain’s thinking cortex and as active.
Austin felt intensely uneasy. He couldn’t, wouldn’t stay in Providence alone. Only two people living as a couple could survive there in one of those big, dim, lonely wood houses. He’d already slept on the high bed twice, listened to the furnace, pulled back the blind to look at the leafless trees across the street. He wouldn’t eat Grape Nuts alone under the ancient fluorescent lamp in the grease-impregnated kitchen and then drive in his Volkswagen Sirocco alone to the campus or to the supermarket to push his cart up rows of unripened vegetables.
He loved Julien and wanted to be with him all the time. If Julien came they’d have fun—Providence would be an adventure, or at least a big laugh.
Austin flew back the evening before his classes began. After the bourgeois propriety of Paris, where girls strove to resemble their mothers
and wore suits and low heels and stockings and garter belts and painted their nails with pearlescent pink polish and twisted a scarf elegantly around their shoulders like a heavy napkin around champagne, the students at the New England School of Fine Arts and Brown University with their loud voices (“Excellent, Dude!”), their layers of ripped and stained clothes (they looked like dirty, creeping haystacks), and their prickly politics shocked him. He was told that some of these kids were from rich families, often of the English or European aristocracy, and when he’d find himself alone with one of them, especially if he or she was French, the youngster would slip into an Old World deferential politeness and virtually drop a curtsy. But whenever the students were in groups they were loud, rude, hilarious and in the classroom they were witch hunters in full cry after the slightest sign of political incorrectness, especially in their professor.