Authors: Edmund White
Austin had scarcely heard about political correctness while he was in France throughout the eighties. The French, probably wrongly, thought it was retrograde to focus on the rights of special interest groups since everyone, every abstract, universal citizen, was theoretically equal in the eyes of the French state. For the French to talk about the rights of blacks or lesbians or Asians was only to reduce their legal and political equality (their “freedom,” as more than one French person had put it to Austin, though he never understood exactly what they meant). At the New England School of Fine Arts during his course on eighteenth-century French architecture and furniture-making, Austin angered the young women in class by stressing the importance of French women during this period of history.
“Only aristocratic women!” one red-faced fat girl in overalls shouted.
“Yes. Naturally,” Austin replied.
“Why naturally?”
“Because they were the only ones who hired architects to build their
châteaux
or cabinetmakers to make their—”
“Are you denying male oppression in this period?”
“In
all
periods,” a bubblegum-blowing girl, slumped deep into her chair, snarled, not looking at anyone, her bubbles bursting angrily.
“Look,” Austin said, “I’m not interested in sexual politics—”
“When you say French women were privileged or powerful you’re making a political statement, buddy, even if it’s wrong.”
“Shall we go back to our discussion of André-Charles Boulle and to his four sons, Jean-Philippe, Pierre-Benoît, André-Charles and—”
But three of the women in the class had walked out of the room, slamming the door behind them. Austin felt like running after them and shouting, “But I’m
gay
, I’m not the enemy.”
A few days later he received a note in his box (which he would have ignored had the department secretary not told him he
had
a box and that a very important message was in it). It was from the Dean of Sexual Harassment and Gender Infringement Issues (Austin tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a funny anagram). He was told that three “female” students (he winced since in French only animals are designated as
femelle)
had reported his “sexist reading of history” and his “insensitivity to feminist issues.”
Austin bridled at the injustice of it all, he who had never had any designs on women and had offered them only disinterested friendship, he who had published important monographs titled “Woman as Taste Maker in Eighteenth-Century France” and “Madame de Pompadour—Slut or Savant?” Indignant, he showed the letter to a gay colleague over lunch, who shook his head and said, “Boy, are you in a fine mess!”
“I am? But I was just making a simple historical observation, which has the advantage of being
true. En plus
, why wouldn’t feminists be
pleased
to know that women once reigned over the crucial domain of taste?”
His colleague, a bearded man who, incongruously, wore a ring on every finger, even his thumb, waved his decorated hands over his head as though fighting off bees (or the Furies, Austin thought). He said, “Just send a contrite letter to the Dean admitting your error and promising to reform. Imagine you’re in China during the Cultural Revolution and have just been accused of bourgeois pseudo-objectivity. No way to win. Just crawl and eat dirt and maybe it will all blow over. Maybe you should organize a discussion group after class on “Sexism in Historical Hermeneutics” and announce that you hope to
learn
from it. No one will come to it, least of all those disruptive cows who
walked out of your class, because they’re all too fucking lazy here, but it will look like you’re eagerly soliciting to be
re-educated
after your years of wandering through the Black Forest of European pre-feminism.”
“But what about academic freedom?”
“Forget it. These are battles you can’t win. If you’re accused of racism, anti-Semitism, child abuse or just flirting with your students or if you’re perceived as a male chauvinist, you’ve already lost, it doesn’t matter who’s right or even if you’ve been falsely accused. Just give in, submit to a humble re-education, and hope the harridans move on.”
“The funny thing is that I actually believe in feminism,” Austin said, staring gloomily into his mug of watery coffee.
“You
do?
Whatever for?” The other man raked his beard with his ringed hands.
“No, I love all these French women in the eighteenth century, the first feminists such as Olympe de Gouge and Thorigny de—”
“Never heard of them. I’m a potter and I just show them how to throw pots. If they want to see Astarte’s wide hips in a pot, I
encourage
them. I’ve been properly re-educated.”
Austin jotted off a short letter of contrition and kept all traces of jocularity out of it. After three in the afternoon he had the much more serious problem of going back to the house at the end of the street, just where the woods began. When he had told the bearded colleague where he was living, the man had sung, “There are fairies at the bottom of your garden.”
“What?”
“That’s the biggest cruising ground in town, the woods across the street. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that when you rented there.”
“Honestly….”
“The man you’re renting from, Hal Devereaux? He
hates
the fags down there and is always running in the woods chasing them off in the name of Christian decency.”
“You mean all that still goes on?”
“More than ever. You’re in Reagan country now.”
When he got home Austin put in a call to the Hungarian architects,
Istvan and Laszlo, to make sure they’d sent in their promise to hire Julien, but they hemmed and hawed (they were each on a different extension, proof of how little work they had or perhaps how upset they were). One of them (Austin couldn’t recognize their voices, just their accent, which was the same) said, “We’re too worried … we spoke to our lawyer … our own status … and now you say that Julien is having immigration troubles … best to lie low.”
Austin cried, frustrated and frightened. The worst of it, he realized in his bitterness, was that these cowards and traitors would get their
Elle Déco
article out of him after all; it was too late to reverse the process without arousing the editor’s suspicions and, anyway, the photos of their Brooklyn house had already been shot.
It was ten in the evening in Paris; he couldn’t contact Howard, his Paris lawyer, who wouldn’t be in his office. He could call Henry McVay, who might know how to help.
“What a mess!” Henry exclaimed. “Why don’t you call my friends Phil and Bob—they’re architects. You remember Phil Bluet, who’s the heir to the Bluet soap-powder fortune? No, listen, Sweetie, I’ll phone him myself. I’ll sort of …
feel
him out.” His voice suddenly took on a confidential tone and Austin could picture him squinting and wriggling his hand in the air as if to demonstrate how he’d auscultate his friends. Austin admired Henry’s worldly competence, something Henry himself, with his normal bashfulness, would have dismissed completely if it had been brought to his attention. “No, it’s nothing, don’t be silly,” he’d say, casting his eyes down and to one side. Then he’d look up to see if Austin had been taking the piss out of him.
As Austin waited for Henry to call him back, his mind raced like hands playing scales—methodical and irritating. Any day now Julien would be getting his test results: what if he was positive? They’d be together a few days in Montréal and Austin would be able to comfort him then. But how would Julien make out alone two or three days in a big, unknown, winterbound city, with no one to call and nothing to do but brood?
Henry called back and talked to Austin with a calm decency, a grown-up sobriety so at odds with his usual spluttering (Henry’s favorite mode was comic indignation). “Phil is out on the West Coast but Bob—
you remember him? Tall and handsome as Gary Cooper?—well, Bob will be driving up to see a client in Concord, Mass., and he said he could have lunch with you this Friday afternoon at the Olde Concord Inn.”
“Do you think he’ll sign it? He isn’t really committing himself to anything, my lawyer assures me there’s no government follow-up and the—”
“Your
lawyer,” Henry said reproachfully.
“Yeah. Incompetent fool.”
“Well,” Henry sighed, “I hope to
God
, Sweetie, that he does help you and darling Julien, but you won’t blame him, will you—”
“Lord, no,” Austin said, the soul of generosity, although in his heart he loved everyone who helped them and cursed everyone who failed to do so.
Austin had moved easily, hand over hand, through the last decade, and if he complained less than his contemporaries about being gay and fifty it was because he had never tested his mettle at a bar or sauna but lived inside his charming circle of young, affectionate friends. Now, here he was, in Providence, alone, separated from his friends and Julien—and if he had to go out to find a new lover, here, what would he find?
His colleague’s mention of the cruising across the street piqued Austin’s curiosity. Not because he was feeling desire; the trauma of returning to America had frozen his libido. No, he wanted to see if he could attract anyone. And what if Julien could never get through Immigration?
Austin walked for an hour through the cold, leafless woods, kicking up dead leaves and the smell of soil and mold. He thought that only in America would one find, even near the heart of the city, these big, neglected woods. In France the trees were planted in neat rows, like crops. But everything in France had been observed and regulated for centuries; only America was so shaggy, so unsystematic, so full of surprises.
Austin’s surprise was a twenty-four-year-old six-foot-four guy with
a forehead that sloped back and heavy jowls as though his brains had fallen out of his cranium but couldn’t pass through his narrow neck. He carried around a swollen, round belly on his otherwise normal body. He was wearing trousers in which the cuffs had been let out—not for him, certainly. They’d been let out for someone else, the previous owner—that’s how old the pants were. Even remade, the trousers stopped at mid-calf, like pedal-pushers. He had the look of someone who’d been dressed in hand-me-downs by an orphanage, for his shirt was plain dark-blue wool, unbuttoned to reveal a classic white T-shirt stretched over his belly (maybe the shirt wouldn’t button up over this mature watermelon). He wore a standard-issue Navy pea coat, also unbuttoned. The trousers, a gray cotton, had a big hole in front through which the white pocket fabric could be seen, spotlessly clean. The trousers were carefully ironed and pressed, even if they were too small all over, not just too short. The waist was pressed down and partially folded back by the weight and heft of the belly, the zipper was bulging. The thighs looked gigantic in the stretched fabric. His hands were small, almost blue from the cold; they appeared to be boneless. His ears were also surprisingly small, as if they hadn’t grown at all since childhood.
The man kept walking deeper and deeper into the woods, looking back over his shoulder from time to time. At last, at a turn that smelled of sewage for some reason, he stopped and just stood there. This sort of tentative, step-by-gradual-step cruising was something Austin had thought had vanished from the world.
“Hi,” Austin said, more huskily than usual.
“How’s it going?” the man asked, unsmiling, his eyes crinkled as if from the mental effort of talking. Or was he, too, apprehensive?
“Getting cold, huh?” Austin said.
“Sure is.”
“You work around here?”
“Looking.”
“What?”
“I’m looking for work.”
“What do you do?”
“Transportation.”
The woods, the failing light, the distant sound of a slow, rumbling
train and its whistle, the smell of sewage, the wariness of this man so pale he looked bled white—Austin suddenly felt plunged back into the snot-nosed, sandy-eyed squalor of childhood, that age when you don’t choose your company but accept whoever comes your way.
Austin stood so close to the man while they talked about the weather that it was a provocation. The man backed away. He seemed uneasy.
“You live near here?” the man asked.
“Yeah. Just up there. The brown house.”
“You live in that big house alone?”
“No,” Austin said. “My wife and son are out of town but they’re coming back next week.” Austin thought that would sound more normal, less intimidating, to the man than the idea he was a self-declared fag all on his own. Anyway, the guy wouldn’t try to drop in for a visit, a handout or blow job after next week; if he saw Julien he’d assume he was Austin’s son.
“Want to come up for a coffee?”
“Sure. It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
“Not much work out there?” Austin asked. It was 1990 and lots of Americans were out of work, especially in the Northeast.
He said, “I’ve had some bad luck.”
“That right? Mighty sorry to hear it.” Austin was saying lines, as though he were in a stage adaptation of
Tobacco Road
, but he scarcely noticed. He was a born seducer of strong men, which meant he was gifted with abundant negative capability. Now that he was older, he was attracting a different sort—big, husky working men who picked up on something well-spoken and sober about him and who found his white hair, barrel chest and black glasses reassuringly paternal, married, as if he were the neighborhood dentist.
They drank their coffee and then Austin said in a soft voice, “Wanna go upstairs?”
Austin felt mildly guilty, but Julien’s rule of discretion gave him a certain immunity. Julien would never expect him to confess anything; he’d probably even stop him from telling. And this cloak of discretion, possibly, had been drawn over Julien’s own adventures. He was young and virile; he surely wasn’t waiting chastely in Paris for Austin.
The man stood up, stretched nervously and said, “Lead the way.”
But when they got upstairs he asked where the “bathroom” was; he left the door open and the sound of his pissing excited Austin. He came into the bedroom and unconvincingly mimed weariness by stretching first one arm, then the other above his head; his mouth formed a circle but not in a genuine yawn—he wasn’t even inhaling.