The Married Man (30 page)

He decided to be completely open about his HIV-status, if not with his brother then with the young Americans he was meeting. He said, “It’s easier that way. You showed me the value of honesty, Austin.” He told Lucy that he was positive, which she had of course already suspected. He had met several students in the French department and he confided to them the nature of his disease. Perhaps America itself didn’t seem quite real to him. Would he be this honest back in France?

He and Austin joined an exercise class that met three times a week. They continued with their total abstinence from liquor and tobacco. Even when the cold weather blew in, they spent hours walking Ajax. Gradually they came to know every street of Providence, or at least the area around the universities.

Joséphine came to stay with them just before Christmas. When Austin had originally invited her to move with them to Providence he’d felt that her presence would make things easier for Julien and take the curse off his having to live openly with another man. He and
Julien never discussed her arrival, no more than they ever talked about their lives together. Julien had been married before, and though he may have announced to his classmates that he was homosexual when he’d just been sixteen, the avowal had probably sounded to them more like a manifesto than a confession. After all, that had happened in the 1970s when kids, even in the conservative French provincial town of Nancy, had taken weird stands. Julien had never had to live out his homosexuality as a public act, as a declared member of a despised minority. No, he’d been the married man, half of an attractive, dynamic couple in the professions who’d spent their two years in exotic Ethiopia and returned to Paris with an advanced degree (Christine) and a job as a gifted architect (Julien). Now he’d turned into the unemployed foreigner, the young, skinny partner of a portly man in his fifties who himself enjoyed no prestige beyond his unwritten credentials as a furniture expert. Of course Julien would prefer living in a household that included the blond, beautiful, talented Joséphine.

Of course. Except Austin had figured everything out wrong. Almost within a day of Josephine’s arrival Julien was irritated with her. She smoked and he thought her habit endangered his fragile lungs. She flirted with every man she met—or rather, since she was afraid Austin and Julien would mock her if she cocked her head to one side and cooed, she stared at her victims and hoped her housemates wouldn’t notice. Julien did notice, of course, and warned her off the young man she liked the most, an Israeli architectural student named Aaron who was engaged to someone back home.

Joséphine pretended to like Ajax but found his long, licking kisses disgusting and his constant desire to sleep on her lap, though by now he weighed almost a hundred pounds, less than endearing. He mounted her leg and unsheathed his penis as if it were a new lipstick shade, Glamorous Glans. Ajax had picked up a peculiarly funky smell, something reminiscent of pea soup, that was concentrated in his hindquarters, possibly in a gland near the root of his tail. At least that’s what Austin’s uncle, a hunting and fishing man, had said over the phone: “A basset? Hell—” (pronounced “Hail”)—“them bassets ain’t dawgs, them’s
hounds
. And if’n a hound dawg ain’t hunted he starts to stink.”
He let out a muted rebel—well, not a rebel
yell
, but a hoarse Confederate grunt. He dropped the cornpone accent, lowered his voice and said, “They store up stink in a gland near their tail, which they secrete so the rest of the pack can pick up their scent. But if they’re not out running they can get real
high.”

Julien refused to acknowledge it and Austin liked it, but poor Joséphine washed her hands ten times a day and sprayed the air with “Jacky.” When she came home from a walk one day, Ajax leapt up on her and tore her tights with his claws. Finally her exasperation came flashing out—which excited Julien into a rage.

“He was just being friendly—he
loves
you,” Julien shouted. He squatted to kiss Ajax’s unperturbed, smiling face.
“Pauvre petite bête.”

When Austin saw Ajax’s silky brown head from behind with its narrow skull and notched occipital bone he thought of him as a retarded child. That image touched him but made him feel guilty; he thought there was something cruel about turning a much less intelligent creature into Man’s Best Friend, something akin to the King’s pleasure in his Fool. When they’d all be talking Austin would glance down at Ajax’s eyes straining to comprehend, the small, feeble brain more nose than knowing, the warm eyes sympathetic, baffled.

But Austin had guessed right that Joséphine would make them all more accessible. People seemed to call more often, invite them to dinner more readily, as though a woman were a door thrown open into the previously sealed house. Frequently Austin would come home to discover Joséphine over tea with Lucy and Julien, for even though he complained of the noise and smoke and confusion Joséphine had introduced into their lives, Julien liked that she was the one who arranged everything; now he could get up suddenly, pleading weariness, and vanish to another floor of the house and Joséphine would be stuck with these lingering American students. Unlike French people, they didn’t know when to leave. Austin said, “Well, we’re so close to the soil, to our farming past, that when we visit we make an occasion out of it—” but he suddenly realized he didn’t know how to explain either
canning
or
sewing bees
in French.

In bed one night Julien asked, whispering, “Why did you invite her to live with us?”

“For your sake. So people wouldn’t think we were lovers.”

“But I’m proud to be your lover.”

“But you were married—”

“I’m not the way you imagine. I’m much more evolved
(évolué)
. I don’t give a damn what people think. I chose you,
Petit
, and after that there were no more choices to make.”

They had to give up their house at the end of December. The Professor of Aesthetics and his wife were coming back from Spain. Austin panicked when he looked around at the damage. He found a carpenter who sanded down and revarnished the many chair legs Ajax had gnawed on during his teething. A young woman from the weaving department found fabric that roughly resembled the couch upholstery and attempted to darn the holes. A team of house cleaners dusted, steamed and swept. “You’re going too far,” Julien complained.

But the professor was furious. He wrote that he’d been tempted to sell the house, it was in such bad condition. “I’ve hated to bring it up and have spent many an hour (this will no doubt slay you) in prayer seeking guidance (that’s the kind of guy I am).”

Austin showed the letter to Julien, who instantly started disputing it, line by line. “But it was all just Salvation Army junk and—he thought he could take advantage of you, you’re too naive, the house looks better now than when we moved in, then the floors looked like a bowling alley, all varnish, we added some character, we’re French, we know real parquet, the so-called balloon ceiling is just a normal hallway—”

“Okay, okay.”

Austin wrote out a check for eight thousand dollars. He realized that his American year had cost him money; he’d earned nothing and spent almost all his savings. He begged Julien to respect the new house they were moving into for the spring semester, small, elegant and built at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a chimney in the center that opened up on three sides to fireplaces in the main rooms. The living room was just two steps up from the sidewalk on a busy street and when Austin was reading the paper he could hear students hurrying past, shouting and talking—a relief after the furtive silence of the cruising woods. Upstairs, next to their bedroom, was
suspended a glassed-in porch perched in the treetops, looking out over the slanting, snow-hung roofs and the neighbor’s black cat slithering through fence pickets as if patrolling the back alley. The Christmas season was dark and cold, but their new house, with its bright red front door, had put a jolly frame around the dour picture. The furniture was Shaker-austere to the point of spindliness; Julien admired it and sketched one particular highback chair again and again.

During the six-week vacation in late December and all of January they drove to Key West in the Sirocco, taking turns scrunched up with Ajax in the back seat. Later Joséphine confessed that it was during this trip that she had come to love the dog. He was such a fine doggie, naturally she’d given in to him. They saw an exhibit of Erik Fischl’s works on paper in New Haven, a big Francesco Clemente retrospective in Philadelphia, a great Titian exhibit in Washington. They stayed with friends until they arrived in the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, and, the next day, Daytona, Florida—in both cases they sought out obscure, understaffed motels where they could drive Ajax right up to the door at night and no one would notice or complain when they ushered him into their room.

They took turns driving, singing songs, lapsing into long silences. In Georgia they turned off the I-95 onto a country road and ate in a family-style restaurant that smelled of kerosene and that served salty ham and grits. “We could live here,” they’d say, “or here,” every time they’d see a quiet town that looked as if time had soared right over it. But all the while they knew that what they lacked wasn’t a place to do their living in but life itself.

When at last they pulled into Key West, the weather had gradually changed from freezing to hot, the trees from bare oaks to luxuriant traveler’s palms and crumpled pink hibiscus party favors. The clothes of passersby on the street had gone from parkas to shorts. Austin sighed, happy to smell the unclean brackish sea all around them, to look at the sloppy, slow walk of a black woman idling down the sidewalk, her heels gray as an elephant’s knees above the soiled blue of her worn-down slippers. He sighed to observe a big yellow cat crossing Whitehead Street, ignoring everything—cars, tourist buses, the rush of clouds overhead—everything in order to concentrate on a
clump of weeds in an empty lot that was vibrating to a suspicious rhythm.

Their rented house huddled under a big tree that the neighbor, an old hippy with a sparse white beard and bad teeth, called “a tourist tree” because “it turns red and peels.” The garden was composed of gravel, white and dusty, and schefflera plants that were twice as large as any Austin had ever seen, as if nourished on plutonium. Strings of miniature white bulbs festooned the trees; they cast a pewter glow onto the new tin roof and made the painted porch pillars look like perfect sticks of blackboard chalk fresh out of the box. The earth smelled of mildew; it was so wet that the dead just a block away in the cemetery had to repose in sealed cement vaults above ground.

For Austin Key West was the South, or something like the South. He recognized the house trailers hoisted up on cement blocks and the gray hamburger patties soaking through slices of Wonder Bread, the Sno-Queen stand squatting under a giant plastic cone, two fat ladies seated, overflowing the peeling planks on a park bench as they waited for the bus, the sound of a Hammond organ bleating inside a narrow Pentecostal church. All this was smalltown Southern life as he knew it, but it was tucked in the corners or around walls of tumbling bougainvillea, purple as a Mardi Gras cloak, coconuts rotting in their husks at the tide line and buckets of little rock shrimp boiled in beer, their spicy shells a mortification to greedy fingers.

They rented bikes and sped down shaded streets bordered by the white wooden houses with their high crescent windows—“eyebrow windows” people called them—and their jigsaw porch frieze of sawed-out gingerbread men or starfish. Old cars rebuilt out of fenders of different bleached colors chugged past without silencers under lianas dangling from trees worthy of Tarzan. Cuban sandwich shops reeked of frying pork and plantains. At the end of a road lined with street lamps and squeezed between luxury hotels hung the sea, a dull gray panel of mist streaked green, like an infusion of tart spring herbs in a tarnished cauldron.

As they threaded their way down the Keys a transformation came over Joséphine. She put aside her little-girl politeness, tucked a cigarette behind one ear, suffocated Ajax with fierce affection and switched
into a T-shirt white as baking powder that revealed she wore no bra. She rolled up the sleeves. She squeezed into faded jeans that emphasized her boyish butt and snaky hips. She painted her lips a faded purple. When she drove she squealed around corners and at the lights she pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Within a day she’d met a local painter who did big canvases of voodoo altars—bits of leather, beer bottles, even cigarettes were offered to black-skinned gods and goddesses with thick hair standing on end; sometimes the gods were mounted on the backs of horses with red eyes. Thomas was a light-skinned black man with blue eyes, delicate caramel-colored hands intricately rigged and triggered with blue veins and fine muscles visible through the thin skin. He had no buttocks at all—he was forced to keep tugging his trousers back up to his waist, which was no thicker than Austin’s upper arm. Thomas had a strange gait—nothing noticeably wrong if you focused on it but if you observed it from the corner of your eye it was a movement that seemed partially paralyzed or even performed by a plastic knee or hip replacement—or perhaps it was just the effect of his hipless body stiffly casting forth his legs as he walked.

Thomas was in his early forties, or so he said, though he appeared to be ageless. He was interested in their French-speaking household and invited them to come to his studio, an old house in Bahama Village, the black part of town. He said his mother was Haitian and he could speak some of the
patois
but not proper French. The walls of his house were built out of thick planks of Dade Pine separated by white lines of cement or caulking. Voodoo candles were flickering in the mouths of sun-shaped scrap-metal disks; the air was thick with the acrid smoke curling off a green mosquito-repellent coil.

Joséphine lingered that first evening and said she wanted to study the paintings more thoroughly. She began to sway interpretively to an old recording of Steve Reich’s “Drumming.” She’d adopted the ostensibly inward but actually exhibitionistic motions of a woman who knows she’s being looked at with desire. She’d be fun to tease later, Austin thought (“Of course you slipped out of your shoes, Joséphine, it was part of your Graham training”), but for now she didn’t care what Austin and Julien thought, she was obviously glad to exist once more as an exciting body in the pale blue gaze of this heterosexual
man, a black artist who must have his pick of all the ofay tourist chicks. She closed her eyes and threw her head back, bobbed up and down in place, letting her arms weave the air around her; all her movements were calculated to make her breasts rise and fall inside her T-shirt.