The Married Man (26 page)

Julien, Austin thought, had bad, heterosexual values. As the new wife he, Julien, assumed he had the right to insist that Austin never talk to the ex-wife, Peter, much less shower the castoff with attentions and presents. Only heterosexuals could be so cruel; among male homosexuals friendship ruled supreme.

In France Austin had had a busy sex life before he met Julien. He’d gone from one affair to another, the most exciting and memorable (and longest) one having been with Little Julien. He’d frequented a sauna for older men and their sometimes much younger admirers. He’d made love two or three times a week, just as when he’d been twenty years old, except now he couldn’t just walk out the door and trick; now he had to plan ahead, buy a few opera tickets, cook a few meals, be prepared for rejection, go somewhere that had a special clientele.

He’d fallen in love with Big Julien, perhaps just a bit because Gregg had told him Julien was “husband material.” If Gregg hadn’t
suggested that Austin invite Julien away for the weekend and “hold onto that one, hon,” would Austin have made a play for him? Maybe not, since Austin was still pining over Little Julien and still, even here in Providence, jerked off thinking about him. When he’d called Little Julien once from Providence he’d said, in a romantic tone, “I think of you often.”

“Yeah, every night just before going to sleep,” Little Julien had said with his wicked laugh that almost submerged his words in a rushing flood of hilarity.

Austin felt less alive than he had in years. It was as though his pulses were racing (so many department meetings, private conferences, lectures, so many papers to grade) while at the same time his feelings had never been so dim, so nearly extinct. He longed for sleep. When Julien fell asleep, Austin would sneak out of the room into one of the other bedrooms. If Julien complained, Austin said, “The other rooms feel neglected,” but so much silliness only concealed his need to be alone. Once Julien said, “I suppose it would be wrong if I … made love to someone now that I’m positive.” It was his only acknowledgment of their chastity, which he ascribed, possibly, to Austin’s fear of “reinfection.” He once said something that revealed he chalked up Austin’s sexual indifference to his own becoming positive. Did he think Austin was repelled by infected meat? Julien was so close-mouthed there was no way of knowing what he was feeling.

Back in Paris Austin had had hours and hours every day to marinate on his daybed but here, in Providence, he was always expected to be on tap. Only in bed in the spare room could he masturbate and recall every detail of Little Julien’s body, as well as his coarse sensuality, which coexisted so neatly with his civilized behavior. Or he’d replay erotic encounters that went back all the way to his early adolescence in Virginia….

Some nights he was too tired even to masturbate, though he was convinced he needed to, not because he required the physical release but because he was thirsty for privacy, introspection, for the lavish pleasure of looking inward.

He who’d stayed young because he’d had so few responsibilities
was now hurtling through time, as a meteorite scorches its path when it enters the earth’s atmosphere, burning his way into maturity and beyond, into age.

His students never looked at him as a human being, except Eleanor who, when she’d been a freshman at a college in New York, had had an affair with an ancient English philosopher and cultivated the knack of regarding her elders as contemporaries. But otherwise no one ever commented on his moods, clothes, remarks. Nor did Julien, who now spent more and more time with Ajax walking the gray sidewalks under gray skies. Julien loved him—loved their sexless good-night kisses, loved it when Austin came home from school, loved watching TV in the matching bucket chairs, Ajax belly-up across his lap, whiskers twitching to the broadcast roar of a gunfight, his long, silky ears quickening into life when Lassie barked on screen in an ancient rerun. But Julien didn’t study Austin or even really notice him; he had been as surprised as Austin that Austin had gained ten kilos and even made a show of indignantly denying it, not just out of kindness but also out of indifference or rather inattentiveness.

Sometimes, of course, Austin’s days went well and he felt happy to be dashing about campus, but then he’d catch himself as he commented on new departmental regulations and schedules or he’d realize that this was a life, yes, but a lesser one. Paradoxically, he’d never felt so understimulated intellectually as here, at a university. Professors produced books and papers, but they had no idea how to serve up their ideas in conversation. They were specialists, not intellectuals. They’d even looked especially worried when Austin once referred to them unthinkingly as “intellectuals.” They reacted as though the word carried a nerdy, rabbinical weight and suggested something unwashed and unathletic. They were all just regular guys, and those who’d been born in Europe were particularly dull, as if they’d taken the pledge not to introduce anything tricky or insufficiently bland into a social evening, much less something stimulating, which they would have called “pretentious.”

Perhaps because they never talked about their work to non-specialists, they never submitted their writing to a standard of common sense. They were alone in a private hell populated only by
sycophantic graduate students, loyal colleagues and spiteful rivals—not one of whom would ever have said, “Hey, wait. What does all this mean? And what earthly application does it have?” Austin thought that his sort of scholarship, concerned with dates, methods, attributions, was unimportant but at least honest.

The bigger problem was what he’d just heard described for the first time as “the dumbing-down of America.” He recognized that precisely in the years he’d been away Americans had lost interest in the game of high culture. Europe concerned them not at all except as an optional but fun theme park. People no longer pretended to a wide general knowledge; each academic had his specialty, which he learned as a baker might learn baking, but no one claimed now to have mastered all the culinary techniques of culture.

One afternoon Austin found Julien talking to a young red-haired woman who resembled Christine, not just because they shared the same coloring but in something particular—the large mouth, perhaps, or the deliberate way of talking.

The woman’s name was Lucy and she was from Hot Springs, Arkansas. She was a graduate student at Brown in creative writing, even though she was already forty-two and a professional accountant.

“But, Lucy, how can you
learn
writing?” Julien asked as he poured her more tea. He’d taken extra pains with his
toilette
today, Austin noticed. He was wearing not one but
two
scarves around his neck. He had on his heavy, ankle-high, pale brown Church shoes with the brass side buckles, polished to a high gloss. He didn’t seem as interested in the conversation as in the pose he was striking.

Lucy said, “What do you mean? What do you mean,
learn?
”

“Yes,” Austin chimed in, “we French people are convinced literature is divine and is inspired directly by God or Racine, we’re never sure which.”

“Racine?” Lucy looked confused.

“Just teasing.”

“Oh. You were teasing?”

“Moving right along,” Austin said, standing up. “I have a few quizzes to grade. I’ll leave you two youngsters to your tea party and literary conversation.”

After that Julien was constantly crouched over pots of jasmine tea with Lucy. He liked her because she liked him, because she resembled Christine—and because she spoke very slowly. Her talk was as slow as her metabolism. In fact, Julien learned English from Lucy. She was never in a rush and quite routinely expressed the same thought in two or three slightly varied ways, as an Italian woman might. Instead of over-articulating or shouting, as Americans usually did when addressing foreigners, Lucy just kept buttering a thick salve of words over every subject that came up. She reminded Austin of his paternal grandmother, who’d always said, “Now take your time telling me about it. I want all the details.”

Lucy had a big white BMW which she’d bought second-hand. She drove it with just one hand in her lazy, soft-boned way; Julien was very good at imitating the way she held her hand, the elbow close to her breasts, the wrist curved like a swan’s neck. He even learned her way of checking herself out in the rear-view mirror, of letting her face go inert in a professional model’s deadpan.

He said he found her to be a bore, a
chieuse
(“pain in the ass” was perhaps the best translation), and whenever the phone would ring he’d call out,
“Bonjour, les chieuses!”
He liked to complain about Lucy, about her whiny chicken-farmer accent, her fake ladylike airs, her limp hand on the steering wheel, but he loved it when she prepared him a genuine Southern goulash (though he hated the result). “Inedible!” he whispered rudely when Lucy went “to the little girl’s room,” as she called it. Her mother and aunt were identical twins, bony Southern ladies with white hair they still wore in the same cut. Julien adored studying their photo and marveling over their interchangeable looks. He liked to hear about the South, although he would have preferred more plantations with Greek columns and fewer twisters, trailers and red-neck atrocities.

Lucy was his first real friend in America and a thoroughly intimidated, besotted woman friend at that. She fell for their French allure and she often said,
“oui, oui,”
in the midst of an English sentence. Donna, who was one of Lucy’s friends and Austin’s student, said, “Gosh, I hear Lucy has learned French from Julien. She runs around saying,
‘oui, oui,’
all the time now, then clapping her hand over her
mouth as though it just slipped out. Then she says,
‘Pardon,’
with a French accent.”

Julien talked to her for hours and hours about his mother and wicked ex-wife. Lucy wanted to hear all the sordid details and was expecting an American-style confession, but Julien had his own way of telling a story and certainly wasn’t soliciting sympathy. He didn’t want to “spill” about his mother, have a “good cry” and “get it all out.” No, for Julien his mother’s death was his identity. He had made mourning a way of life. Although he wore his bright scarf, he’d sewn black ribbons to his innermost soul.

Nor was he hoping to “let go” of his rage against his wife; he hoped for revenge and, as he liked to say, “Revenge is a plate to be eaten cold.” Or rather, on some days he was angry with Christine, though on others he wondered how she was faring and he hoped her pregnancy was going well. When he was alone with Austin, he liked to talk about sex with women; it amused him that Austin had never slept with a woman.
“Pauvre petit,”
he chided, using a deep voice and pursing his lips.
“Il était mignon,”
he said (“He
was
cute”), that weird third person and past tense French grandmothers used when addressing a baby. Austin would blush and that would make Julien laugh even harder. Austin suspected that most gay men of his generation were embarrassed by women, and elaborately polite to them, because they didn’t desire them; they’d insulted women by not wanting to make love to them. Younger gay guys, who’d grown up in co-ed dorms with women, treated them casually, guiltlessly, as sisters. But Julien liked them not as sexless sisters but as horny, lusty ladies.

Ajax took months to be housebroken and left piles of shit on all the carpets which, as luck would have it, were pale. When at last he’d been trained, he started to chew everything. He was teething, and soon he’d sharpened his teeth on the legs of every chair and the upholstery of every couch and armchair, even the sacred blue bucket chairs reserved for television viewing. Summer came and Julien was always outdoors with Ajax in the hammock or sprawling on the lawn in very tight white shorts and no shirt. A teenage boy—one of those Rhode Island kids who’d never left the state even though it took only an hour to drive from one end of it to the other—hung around for
hours on his bike, chatting up Julien. He was obviously attracted to Julien, who encouraged him until one afternoon the boy, aroused, said he was hungry and slouched into the kitchen and went through the fridge.

That night Julien was outraged. “How dare he take things out of our
frigo?
”

“Americans do that,” Austin explained. “At least kids do. It’s called ‘raiding the icebox.’”

“Have they no education?”

“No. None.”

But despite this fit of pique Julien had been pleased to see he could still attract someone, a young man, irredeemably American, an idiot who thought Paris and France were two separate countries, but who had velvety eyes set in a baby-fat face covered with blond down, someone whose short, wide erection showed through his shorts when he looked at Julien too long. Julien was still in the running.

They spent June and July in Providence. Austin had forgotten about hot, humid American summers but he and Julien enjoyed sleeping late in the air-conditioned bedroom, then taking long walks in the sticky early evening with Ajax under the huge, leafy trees past the big wood houses, which seemed even less inhabited in summer than in winter. No one was around, although sprinklers rotated on lawns and garbage was collected and sometimes the radio, tuned to a baseball game, crackled through an open window. Julien said it reminded him of Addis Ababa.

At night, after darkness fell at last and a breeze came up off the river, they’d eat a
salade niçoise
made of seared fresh tuna from the Healthy. They put out mosquito-repellent citronella candles in tin buckets on the porch, which Julien called
la terrasse
, and they’d set speakers on the windows and listen to Mozart CDs and stroke Jax’s tummy as he dozed after a strenuous day of destroying the furniture. “Did you notice how he never barks?” Austin asked admiringly.

“Of course he doesn’t bark—though one day an ambulance went past and Jax started to bay, exactly as though he’d heard a hunting horn. The hunt is in his genes.”

In August they rented a beach shack on an island nearby. The
shack smelled of kerosene and every dish in it was chipped. The construction had obviously been done half a century earlier by a ship’s carpenter—the staircase was snug and Austin, at least, had to turn sideways to mount it. The upstairs windows were portholes and the night lights were beautiful old port and starboard lights glowing a dull ruby-red and a dirty emerald within verdigrised brass fixtures.