White - The Married Man

Fiction

The Married Man

The Farewell Symphony

Skinned Alive

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (with Adam Mars-Jones)

Caracole

A Boys Own Story

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

Forgetting Elena

Nonfiction

Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (with Hubert Sorin)

The Burning Library

Genet: A Biography

The Joy of Gay Sex (with Dr. Charles Silverstein)

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

Marcel Proust

To
Matthias Brunner
and
Stephen Orgel

A ustin was twenty years older than everyone else in the gymand the only American. It was a place for serious people who wanted a quick workoutpairs of students from the nearby branch of the Paris university system or solitary young businessmen who trudged about with Walkmen plugged into their ears making a dim, annoying racket. Not very many Frenchmen wanted to build huge muscles, at least not very many straight guys.

This was by no means a gay gym. It was just a small workout room that looked down through smudged glass panes onto a public pool below. The pool was Olympic size and even through the glass still reeked of hot chlorine. It had been built in the Belle Epoque and recently restored. Austin thought there might be more action in the pool and the shower rooms, but he didnt like swimming and hed sort of given up on cruising. He wasnt young enough and what he had to offerhis accent, his charming if broken-down apartment, his interesting profession, his kindnesswasnt visible in a shower room.

For some time Austin had been looking occasionally at a particular newcomer. They had already exchanged two smiles and many glances, brilliant little flashes of curiosity in this unfriendly place where looks never lingered and even those guys who stood watch over someone lifting dangerously heavy weights never used the occasion as an excuse for striking up a conversation.

Now the younger man was struggling under a bar loaded with too much weight, nor had he secured the metal plateshe was about to let the whole thing go crashing to the floor. Austin came rushing up behind him, lifted the bar and put it safely back on the stand at the head of the board where the stranger was lying on his back. None of the other men seemed to have registered the near crisis; Austin could hear the Walkman of the guy next to them jittering away like cicadas in a tin can.

Thank you! the young man exclaimed in French as he stood up. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice, the sort of voice from the balls that so many Latin men cultivate. He scrutinized Austin intensely. Austin was highly flattered by the attention. Hed long admitted to himself that he was the sort of man who needed constant transfusions of interest and affection. If his phone didnt ring for a day or if he didnt have a dinner date lined up he was suicidal by dusk. If his date yawned he was ready to bolt from the restaurant or do a tap dance on the table. Now here was this young man who, if he wasnt exactly Austins type, had become so by taking an interest in him.

I could see that you were, perhaps, unfamiliar

Its all completely new to me, the young man exclaimed. Austin noticed that his white shorts were cut high, which only emphasized the power of his legs, not in a sexual but rather in a boyish way. Are you English? he asked.

Austin had come to count on French people commenting on his accent. It not only provided them with a safe topic but he knew everyone under forty in France wanted to live somewhere in the English-speaking world, at least for a year or two.

American. He anticipated the next question and said, New York. Then the next and added, Although Ive been here eight years. Finally, he offered, As you can hear, its difficult to learn another language after forty. He wasnt fishing, he just wanted to lay to rest right away the question of his age. Is this your first time here? Austin asked.

Yes. My wife comes here to swim. Shes down there somewhere.

He waved toward the pool with a vague hand, although his glance remained fixed on Austin.

The young man asked Austin to show him how to do the exercise properly, but, though observing the demonstration politely, he scarcely took it seriously, as his bright eyes and slight smile suggested. He seemed too alive to the moment to pay any attention to it.

When asked, Austin said that he was a cultural journalist who was writing a book on French furniture of the eighteenth century.

The Frenchman happened to be in the small locker room dressing to leave at the same time as Austin. He turned modestly away when he pulled on his bikini underpants and revealed nothing but the expected hairy buttocks, full, even luscious. Austin was ordinarily alert to even the grubbiest sexual possibility. Thats what he was always on the lookout for, but today hed already picked up a hint of romance, as though this guy could be courted but not groped. They kept up their banter which, if overheard, would have sounded forced, schoolboyish, but it was melded and, somewhat, liquefied by the flow of their exchanged smiles, glances, nods.

When they were on the street the Frenchman said he had to rush back to work. He was an architect on the other side of Paris.

Id love to see you again, Austin said, knowing he had nothing to lose except his dignity, which he didnt care much about.

Me, too.

Heres my number.

Oh, you Americans are always so well organized with your calling cards. If you give me another, Ill write my number on it for you.

Your home number? Austin asked, pressing his advantage.

My work number, the man said with a big smile.

Austin was surprised by the slight stiffening of his own penis. For weeks hed been nearly impotent even in expert arms, and here he was, excited by a strangers mere presence and the hint of a date. He liked that they were both dressed in coats and ties on a strangely warm day early in April at the wrong end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Hey, whats your name anyway?

Julien.

Really? Austin said. Thats the name of the guy who just dropped me.

Julien smiled, Austin guessed, not at his misfortune but at the explicitness of his remark. Sometimes its okay to be American, Austin thought; we have a reputation for being brazen we must live up to.

A ustin was a forty-nine-year-old writer who lived in a two-room apartment on one of the islands in the Seine. His island was the le Saint-Louis and the apartment was a third-floor walk-up with three big windows that gave onto the back of a seventeenth-century church. Austin could lie in bed and look at the churchs slate-covered roof, pitched sharply, and a huge volute of stone almost ten feet in circumference that had been carved to resemble a spiral closing in on itself and slightly squashed on the top. Since it was almost always raining, Austin thought of the volute as a giant snail that might someday inch forward on its big, sticky foot. Pigeons took shelter from the rain in the gutter just outside the window and cooed comfortably, their little red eyes glancing up at Austin matter-of-factly if he stood just inside the window or opened it like a pair of doors and leaned out on the guard rail. At such moments he would have lit a cigarette, if he still smoked.