Inside a Pearl (23 page)

I passed the Théâtre du Châtelet—where Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had danced—and the Théâtre de Ville, which the Nazis renamed; before, it was called the Théâtre de Sarah Bernhardt, after the Jewish actress. I always thought it should go back to its original name. Finally, the Hôtel de Ville, a reconstructed Renaissance building that the Communards had burned down in 1870.

At last I crossed the pont Louis-Philippe to the Île Saint-Louis where I lived for eight years. It was often wrapped in fog and was five degrees cooler than the mainland.

This sumptuous route home was the most beautiful I'd known, with its historic buildings displayed like diamonds on the black velvet of the
sky—nearly soundless except for the whir of passing cars and the lapping waves caused by Bateaux Mouches with their lights engulfing the façades they passed and the running commentary in English, French, Italian, and German.

There were almost no people on my route except the guitar-playing, pot-smoking young tourists sitting cross-legged with their mangy dogs on the pont des Arts. Everywhere the light emanating or reflected from the buildings was refracted by the river, which itself was divided by the two islands in the Seine. The night was haunted by the smooth sound of an alto saxophone with its oddly human sound under the bridge.

This is confusing, but I had a lover named Hubert, whom I was with for five years and whom I wrote about under the name of Brice in
The Farewell Symphony
and Julien in
The Married Man
. He was sick the last four years I knew him.

I met him at the gym above the Pontoise public swimming pool. He started to let some weights he was pushing collapse on his chest when I rushed over to help him. He was very young, in his late twenties, dark, with a permanent five-o'clock or rather seven o'clock stubble, and had the rather sepulchral voice that certain Latin men have trained to be deep (as opposed to the boyish piping of so many educated American males), a sound that comes off as Boris Karloff creepy when they laugh. He was slender, a bit of a poseur, and very hairy, as I quickly discovered in the locker room. I also learned that his wife was swimming downstairs.

He was intrigued by my accent. I don't think he'd known many Americans, but in his traditional French way he thought of us as breezy, modern, on the right side of history.

When he told me his name was Hubert Sorin and handed me his business card (but not his home phone number), I said, “I had a lover who was called Hubert,” lest there be any mistake as to my orientation. I also recognized that as a married man he needed to be discreet.

It turned out he was the very definition of discretion. I never found out much about his past amorous or sexual history, not from him directly at least, and his family history was a tissue of lies. The French have a relatively benign word,
mythomane,
which suggests someone who is a spinner of myths, which aren't necessarily self-serving or designed to
conceal the truth but are spun for the pure pleasure of spinning. Some friends of his told me they thought he was overwhelmed by my “fame” and that's why he invented so many glamorous facts about himself.

Hubert came to dinner alone and we ended up in bed. He seemed delighted by my apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, its casement windows giving onto the church of Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, with its huge stone volute, slate tiles, and somber, apparently uninhabited adjoining nunnery. Up under the eaves of the church lived a blue-haired pot-smoking youngster and his girlfriend, maybe the sexton's son. They would wave feebly at us; perhaps they weren't quite sure whether we were swingers or squares.

I was used to buying clothes for Brice; now I bought a few suits and jackets Hubert selected. He had strange taste; he was hell-bent on acquiring a double-breasted green linen jacket with gilt tin buttons, two rows of them.

He was very slim, with a full head of hair he wore long and carefully brushed. He must have once had very bad acne; like many oily-skinned Mediterraneans he had some interesting facial scars and the odd boil on his back. He was a poor young architect without a personal fortune, but it was clear he would have been a dandy if he could have afforded it. I bought him some Church's shoes he practically enshrined in his closet in protective bags and engorged with shoehorns. He had a blue silk scarf covered with a pattern of gold trumpets he wore as a foulard, although it was too thick and long to fold neatly at the neck. He had found it in an Egyptian's shop full of sun-faded goods in Addis Ababa, an item that had been in the fly-blown window since the 1930s and probably was a bolt of fabric meant to be sewn into a formal blouse.

He showed me photos of himself in Nantes, where he went to architecture school—in them he was even thinner and his hair (which had a will and a density of its own) was even longer. He wore white cambric pirate shirts loosely laced at the neck, with mutton-sleeves, the whole stuffed into wide-wale corduroy trousers, the sort Rodolfo might wear in Act I of
La Bohème
—bohemian and elegant, an amusing variation on a worker's costume. He also had black-and-white snapshots of a reedy naked young woman toiling in a fisherman's net on the parquet.
In some of the same pictures he was striding through nearly empty rooms in highly polished hip-high black boots. His shabby student apartment had been the piano nobile of an eighteenth-century town house, he explained, on the Île Feydeau in Nantes, complete with the stone masks of slaves under the windows who'd been transported and temporarily housed on the island until the French Revolution ended the slave trade. Nor is the island an island anymore; the rivers around it were filled in after World War II. But Hubert had loved the aristocratic history of the town house, even though he lived there without heat or even electricity.

All that was before I met him, as were his years in Addis Ababa. He went there in a sort of Peace Corps alternative to military service; he was teaching architecture to Ethiopians in French.

“Do they know French?”

“No, but they think they do. Knowing French is part of their cultural heritage.”

“Did they learn anything?”

“No, I just threw their finals out the window without reading them.” He laughed his deep, unconvincing laugh.

“Could you speak any of their languages?”

“That's how you could tell the spies: they spoke Amharic. The rest of us spoke English or French or both. My wife speaks five Ethiopian languages—she's not a spy, she grew up there.” He explained that her father was an expert on deserts, and they'd lived many places where deserts were encroaching on the land.

He had peculiar relics of those days, which now belong to me: a tiny gold lion, the emperor's symbol; a painting of Communist soldiers holding red flags, all looking the same way; a giant ostrich foot with a lethal spur; a postcard of the famous underground churches carved into the living rock. No guest ever guesses the painting of the soldiers is Ethiopian. Most people think it's Haitian. It was done by Haile Selassie's court painter, who went Communist when the emperor (whom Hubert called “the Negus”) was deposed. Hubert used to have a double-exposed snapshot of the painter, as skinny in his robes as an ebony stick mummified in cloth. The double image made him look somewhat ghostly. In
his opinion the Ethiopian women were beautiful, whereas the men were balding and either pudgy or starving.

He claimed he was from the
petite noblesse
(I suppose he thought the lie was more plausible if it was modest). He said that his mother had been a promising concert pianist but his evil father had forced her to give up her career. He said that his ancestors had built the medieval church in Nantes; when the tower had tilted the architect had committed suicide. He said that his father's infidelities had driven his mother to suicide. He said that he attended a reunion of the Knights of Malta in the Opéra-Comique and that six of your eight great-grandparents had to be aristocrats in order to belong. He spoke fondly of some impoverished blue-blooded friends in the sixteenth arrondissement who lived without hot water in a vast noble apartment with an open water basin flowing in the kitchen.

I asked Hubert why he never sought out these friends and he said he preferred to visit them in his thoughts. He was a very poetic young man, a sort of Hamlet-Byron-Tristan. He would never tolerate a mean word said of my few titled friends. He always insisted in a seemingly innocent but actually tendentious way on Marie-Claude's Jewishness; once he asked, “Elle est juive d'ou?” (She's a Jew from where?). I became angry and said, “She's French, just like you!” He was very proud of the fact that of the fifty or so architects who worked for his
boîte,
he was the only one who had all four grandparents born in France. And yet he suspected his own father was a Jew. He was circumcised and his grandfather's name was Isaiah; had the family converted for safety reasons?

He loved to talk negatively about his wife, and when a real fatso would waddle past, he'd say, “There goes Fabienne in five years.” And yet he insisted we meet her for lunch. She had unruly dyed red hair and wore black leather; the combination seemed to me more German than French. She'd been the girlfriend of an English punk rocker, apparently a famous one. She made a living screening African political refugees. She regaled us with imitations of their bad French and tall horror stories contrived to win sympathy, usually implausible and absurd; it reminded me of my Texas grandfather's “nigger jokes,” full of dialect and instances of “the cute things they say.” She didn't seem
nearly beautiful or refined enough to be Hubert's wife, but since I was neither beautiful nor refined I thought he merely had odd taste. He divorced her within months of our meeting. They were already separated and had been for about a month. They lived apart.

He loved me, and since my ego had taken a bruising from Brice and I already thought I was impossibly old for gay life, I felt grateful and happy. Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion. We had very hot sex, but I figured out he wanted to be dominated (only in bed), which wasn't my natural role, though I hoped to bind him to me by playing it. For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing—an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts. I have such a geisha temperament that I long to please men; I always assume that in a marital squabble my friend, whether male or female, is at fault in failing to please The Man. I'm not talking about sex roles, much less dominance in real life. I'm talking about the submission I feel and project onto my friends.

Hubert was so mysterious. If I'd ask him a direct question about his sexual experiences in the past with other men or women, he'd just grow silent. He wouldn't say anything. I felt I was being a nosy American. He was always tired and losing weight, though he was already skeletal. Then he developed a chancre on his penis that wouldn't go away. I made him go to my gay doctor, who told him he must have the test for HIV. Hubert was indignant. How impertinent!

Maybe we wouldn't have stayed together if he'd been negative. He loved me, but we weren't really compatible. I was liberal, he was a royalist. I had a nearly automatic American respect for minorities; he was scornful of difference. I was compulsively social; he was a one-man dog who hated to share me. But then I believed maybe he really was an inexperienced straight man whom I'd infected, though we used condoms and practiced “safe sex,” whatever that was.

No one I knew could give a straight answer to the question of what was safe. Was oral sex safe? Was kissing? Was pre-come dangerous? Were we both going to die? The doctor said his T-cell count was so low, below a hundred, that he'd obviously been positive for many years, longer than me. And yet, since I knew nothing of his past, there was
always the possibility I'd slipped up and handed him a death sentence. It may have served his purposes to keep me in his thrall through ignorance about his past and guilt. He was a strategist in love, whereas I, like most Americans of my generation, was always eager to blab the truth in the name of honesty.

I got a job as a full (if underpaid) professor of creative writing at Brown. Hubert wanted to accompany me and live in America. We'd been together only a year. I was touched that he was willing to leave his job, his language, his family—all for me. He had already divorced his wife. Of course he and I both thought we had only two or three years to live.

Hubert wanted to work as an architect in America. Little did we know that the American Northeast was going through a severe recession that had hit particularly hard the building industry. In order to get him a professional visa to work, we had to find an architect in Boston to say he was indispensable. I convinced two Boston-based South American architects I had profiled for
House & Garden
to say they needed his expertise in order to enter big international architectural competitions. Then they backed down, saying they were afraid their own visas might come under scrutiny. After a brief panic I located an American architect friend of James Lord's, a handsome, kind millionaire who didn't actually practice architecture but signed the voucher out of amiability.

My stupid American lawyer in Paris didn't know that an alien couldn't enter America on a tourist visa if he was waiting for a work visa. Hubert was turned back at the Boston airport and held under armed guard for eight hours until he was sent back to Paris at his own expense. After anxious hours spent in vain in the airport, I remember the lonely taxi ride to Providence through the winter snows with a Sikh taxi driver. To ask directions we pulled up to an aluminum-sheathed snack trailer, the only thing open in downtown Providence. Steam was rolling off the trailer's windows and it was surrounded by drunks, who began to pound on the top of the car and shout, “Go home, towelhead.” I cried and cried. I'd rented the big, dowdy house of another writer professor on sabbatical. I'd also bought his VW Sirocco. I had to drive through the sleet to the supermarket to buy provisions. There the canned music was scratchy and the aisles were fluorescent lit and empty.
The gum-chewing checkout clerk looked in her teens but was coiffed with an enormous helmet of teased hair; her fingernails were painted with swirly colors and had zircons somehow implanted in them, one jewel per nail. I wept as I ate a whole carton of cottage cheese, which you can't find in France. I'd also bought a Sara Lee carrot cake, which didn't exist in Paris either.