Inside a Pearl (2 page)

I'd met John in a formal or at least old-fashioned way, long before I'd thought of moving to Paris. I'd been lonely in New York and Rudy Kikel, a Boston poet, introduced us. Rudy had said, “John is young and unbelievably sweet and cute and he'll cost you about ten thousand a year.” John was in his mid-twenties and I was forty-three when we moved to France.

John had been studying design at Parsons in New York, and he transferred to Parsons Paris without much fuss. He wanted to be an interior designer, but only in a vague way since he had no immediate plans to work. What he liked was to build intricate models of houses and apartments that he would furnish in a glamorous way with tiny chaises longues and sofas. But what he liked even more was meeting preppy, muscular men, preferably black or Mediterranean, who'd court him in a traditionally romantic way and buy him lots of drinks. God should have made me aggressive in bed, since I was always attracted to passive boys but could never satisfy them. John was sexually a bit more versatile than I and for a while things worked out, but soon enough I'd
fallen into my usual sexual indifference. For me, familiarity bred friendship, even love, but inevitably the incest taboo set in. If I went to London or Rome for work, John would often greet me on my return to Paris with passionate kisses, enacting scenes he imagined I expected. Or maybe he was trying to “save our marriage.” He was entirely dependent on me financially and perhaps he feared I'd fall for someone else.

John and I had a lot of silly fun. We had a ratty-looking antique teddy bear named Peter, then Peters and eventually Petes. It was very important that Petes should see Europe; we were proud parents or maybe godparents introducing him to the Continent. We had lots of snapshots showing Petes looking out the windshield at Mont Blanc or the Duomo in Florence, back when private cars could still drive inside the city. We called each other Petes, too. Sometimes we put words in Petes's mouth: “Petes doesn't like it when you're grumpy. It scares him.” When John was elated nothing was more exhilarating; a cartoonist depicting him would have had to plant rays of light in his eyes, his words dancing off his lips.

He always wanted me to tap my razor after I'd shaved to make sure the whiskers washed off the blade. He'd sing a little Disney sort of song, “Tap-tap-tap!” and I think of that even now every morning after I've shaved, although he's been dead for many years—just as when I pee for the first time in the morning I think of a friendly colleague at Time-Life Books who'd said he once passed out after urinating. Or whenever I go up a set of stairs I remember a character in a Scott Spencer novel who vows he won't hang on to the banister, in order to make his leg muscles work harder.

When I told John that I was worried about dying from AIDS, he said, “Don't worry, Petes, we'll take care of each other and have fun.”

I'm not sure John wanted to save our marriage, but he did love soap operas. He'd gone to boarding school with a couple of rich girls who'd remained friends and, while we were still in New York, he'd get together with them to watch
As the World Turns
or
The Doctors.
His girlfriends lived on unsalted, unbuttered popcorn, which was filling but not fattening, and they'd sit around in Brooks Brothers shirts hugging their pretty, hairless legs and shake their curls and munch popcorn, their eyes huge,
trained on the next adultery. Both girls were from famous families and bore the names of concert halls founded by their grandmothers or academic buildings where an ancestor had devised the “science” of sociology, although neither of them claimed to be a “brainiac” (their word). They talked about clothes and friends and boys, and they followed their soaps and little else. I can remember when Derek Granger, a British Granada Television producer, came to the States for the American launch of his miniseries
Brideshead Revisited
. I introduced him to the girls and John and they kept asking him what he did in life. Finally Derek sputtered, “I've been on every major American interview show and on the cover of half a dozen American magazines—but none of it seems to have gotten through to you!” Still, Derek invited us all to join him for an evening with the owners of the Leslie Lohman gay art gallery, in whose apartment everything including the ceramic ashtray and the corkscrew was either a penis or pair of buttocks. On one wall hung a big nude portrait of the same two men forty years earlier. The girls were intrigued but, I could tell, slightly revolted.

Once we were living in Paris, John was so frantic about missing out on plot twists of his favorite shows that he'd call the girls from a pay phone using a five-franc piece (less than a dollar); John called these quickies “five-frankers.” For the allotted two minutes he would speak to them as fast as possible and one of the girls would respond with equal speed: “Helen has seduced Robbie and neglected her dying mother, who died, and her stepmother hates her and is trying to get the will annulled. Vanessa was hired to be a top model in New York and Ted has become an alcoholic and tried to beat her up and ruin her face so she won't leave him. Their baby turns out to be her
father's
child—yes! Vanessa slept with her own
father
!” Suddenly the line would go dead, leaving John with a look of bemused amazement. His eyes, which were appealingly asymmetrical and of two different colors, blue and brown, now looked even more dazed. “My God, Vanessa's son is her own brother!”

I tried to get excited about this amazing fact, but it spoke to me no more than my own books spoke to John. He'd been carrying
A Boy's Own
Story
around for a month but never got beyond page 10. He said he was dyslexic, the vogue word of that decade for lack of literary
curiosity, just as attention deficit disorder is the term now. I was with him when I received the first printed copy of the book, in a rented room in a crumbling house in Martha's Vineyard that belonged to some
nouveau pauvre
family John knew. It was the sort of house where a pine tree was growing up inside an abandoned Volkswagen on the lawn and where scions of old families inhaled oxygen from tanks every morning upon awakening to get over their hangovers. At the time, John had seemed genuinely excited about my book and all the other young inhabitants of the house passed it around from hand to hand as if it were a curious new fruit, possibly poisonous.

John didn't like Paris. He couldn't speak French and he thought of the language as an annoying habit contrived to irritate him. He'd lived in Florence for one year and was used to linguistic affectations, but that didn't mean he approved of them. He'd even made up an Italian word of his own,
traversiamo
, which meant “Let's cross the street.” Television, his main source of amusement, was useless to him in French. He liked Venice but when I took him to Crete for a summer, he was so bored I had to send him to the gay resort island of Mykonos for a week of R&R. He came back with a camera full of snapshots of a hairy-chested Athenian he'd met on the beach and had a romance with. When we went to an island near Istanbul another summer, I sent him off to the southern coast of Turkey for a “vacation” from our vacation. I was a writer and went to quiet places to write, but what made them appealing to me maddened John.

For tax reasons I seldom went back to the United States during the many years I lived in France. If I stayed out of my native country and returned no more than thirty days a year, I owed no American taxes on the first seventy-five thousand dollars I earned—it was as if someone were handing me an extra twenty thousand dollars a year, especially as I paid no taxes in France. The small amounts I earned through my French publisher went through my agent in New York and counted as dollars. Susan Sontag, after we started feuding, used to say I could afford to live in Paris only because I worked for the KGB—how else could you explain my elaborate style of life? Somehow I qualified as a tourist in France by leaving the country at least once every ninety days, but only to go to London or Zurich or Venice, never far. I never had a
permis de séjour
and
I remember the American writer and poet Harry Mathews, who'd been in Paris since the fifties, telling me that neither did he. Although one year when he'd tried to go legit and apply for a visa, a government employee said it was all just too complicated and he might as well skip it.

John was at loose ends and would have liked to visit the States much more often. He walked around the city for hours every day. He said he was trying to memorize all the street names. His path would often take him to the Hotel Central, one of the few gay bars in Paris at that time. What he'd liked in New York were the early evening bars, especially Julius', where older businessmen, just getting off work, would buy him endless drinks late into the night. There were no such fun men in Paris. He took a course at the Cordon Bleu, which was what many Americans on extended stays did in Paris. The French couldn't understand the American mania to open restaurants; in France, a chef was the son of a chef. No one would willingly seek out a life of unending toil and perilous investment. At the Cordon Bleu the master chefs worked under ceiling mirrors and all the American ladies (as most of the pupils were) looked up and followed the procedures while a handsome young Canadian poet translated the chef's instructions. Eventually, everyone would work on her pie crust and the professors would walk among them, making their corrections. Every sort of teacher, it seemed, was called a
professeur
in France. At the gym, we were instructed by a
professeur du sport
. Our dog trainer was called, quite simply,
le professeur.
John came home from the Cordon Bleu after a month of classes with just two recipes under his belt. The one I recall fondly was for lobster bisque, which required hours of “reduction” and the employment of every last squirt of the lobster's coral or carapace. Of course the small European lobsters were so expensive that many middle-class French people ate them only once or twice in a lifetime, and then in a Norman restaurant beside the sea where the spiny versions were halved and broiled under a layer of buttery breadcrumbs, Lobster Thermidor. Later, when I was teaching for a brief time at Brown University, my first trick as host was always to take visiting French people to a lobster shack as soon as their plane from Paris had landed.

I worried that I was infantilizing John by not encouraging him to work, but a job would have been next to impossible for him to arrange
in France. He took a course at the Alliance Française, as did I, and there he met a beautiful American lipstick lesbian. He went out with her to all the dyke bars, where he was often the only man, though several of the customers looked like men. He didn't have work papers. All the Americans we met working under the table were either fitness professors or personal assistants to rich American writers. Our friend Bill Corey lived on a houseboat, a
péniche
, tied up near the boulevard Saint-Michel. Bill typed manuscripts and took dictation from a Mr. Miller, and although Bill was mailing Mr. Miller's manuscripts off all the time to editors in the UK and the States, already there were a dozen unpublished novels in Mr. Miller's bottom drawer. Bill, who was a gee-whiz kind of guy, said loyally, “Mr. Miller's books are really, really good. He just needs a break. Mr. Miller is patient and confident—we just know he's going to get his big break someday soon and then he'll have a dozen novels to publish, one every month, as a follow-up to his first success. You laugh, but I really admire him. Of course, I don't know much about the publishing scene, but Mr. Miller says it's a tight, closed little world.”

Whenever Mr. Miller was away in England visiting friends, or in Virginia inspecting his polo ponies, Bill would give cocktail parties on the deck of the
péniche
. It felt like the set of Puccini's
Il Tabarro.
The boat was permanently tied up in its prime location; the stairs descending from the quay (which was thronged with cars and pedestrians) led down into a quiet village of rotting ropes, uneven paving stones, the smell of gasoline, and the lapping of waves when a Bateau Mouche would slide by and rock the moored boat. We'd be down here on the water, five degrees cooler than the street, and looking up at historic buildings from an unusual angle, while that typically Parisian sound of someone playing a jazz saxophone under a bridge serenaded us. After many drinks, we'd all want to read Mr. Miller's novel manuscripts out loud, but Bill would forbid us to touch the beautifully typed pages. “That's private.” Later, as a film student, Bill made a silent black-and-white short of me and my friends. For a dolly he rented a wheelchair and had someone pull it backward behind Notre Dame while with a handheld camera he shot me walking away from the cathedral.
A Day
in the Life of Edmund White
was eventually shown at some of the earliest gay film festivals.

We were all afraid of AIDS—even straight people in those first years. Two foreign women I'd known in New York, famous for their orgies, had suddenly become monogamous. Even in Paris, the least hysterical and most fatalistic city in the world (“We all have to die sometime”), people, straight and gay, were suddenly circumspect. I had been one of the six founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, in 1981, and its first president, and like everyone I'd seen the numbers swell. At that point no one knew what caused it—one exposure or multiple exposures. One just seemed too unfair and harsh; we voted for several, on the blame-the-victim theory that promiscuity was to blame. Cold comfort for me, since I had had literally thousands of partners.

Friends from America came to visit, including a huge, brainy bodybuilder named Norm who'd been my lover, who ordered two of everything in French restaurants. David Kalstone, my best friend from New York, came; I served him and others a giant tray of shellfish, a
plateau de
fruits de mer
, on New Year's Eve, which made him wretch violently and which seemed to announce the onslaught of the AIDS that killed him. J. D. McClatchy wrote about the few feeble gatherings I could put together in those early days in an article in the
Yale Review
that made us all sound important and worldly.