Inside a Pearl (24 page)

I called Si Newhouse, who owned all the various periodicals I wrote for, and asked him if anything could be done for Hubert. “That will backfire in the States,” he said. “This isn't a banana republic like France where you can use pull or bribe officials. Just wait for the normal procedures to work.” I was astonished that Si, one of the richest Americans, couldn't influence someone; everybody in the countries I knew, France, Italy, or Spain (the “Garlic Belt”), could be bought. If I wore my French honor (Officer of Arts and Letters) I could get a seat on a full Air France flight; Paris was the capital of the Garlic Belt.
Egalité
and
fraternité
were fictions.

Hubert could get into Canada, and to be with him I flew to Montréal for a weekend. It was January. January in Canada (at least before global warming) was a trial. I'd found him a B and B in the gay part of town, which he detested. He was snooty about Canadian French (
un ami
became
un chum
in Canada,
une voiture
became
un char
because it sounds like “a car,” although in French the word means “chariot” or “tank”). He seemed to hate queens of any sort, the peroxided workers in the B and B who talked about cock size and getting drunk and who smoked Kools and filed their nails all day long. To break the monotony on my second visit I rented a car and drove him through a blizzard to Québec City, the only walled town in the Americas. The snow was so blinding that I couldn't see the edge of the road. He had to walk ahead, feeling for the edge with his boot, and I had to follow him at a snail's pace. It must have been the beginning of February, because our arrival coincided with the Winter Carnival; everyone was blowing toy trumpets and drinking potent Caribous and visiting the huge ice sculptures from various Nordic countries and even China. Finally we found a room in a modern tower on the outskirts of town.

Hubert was happy. The city was old, the eighty or so ice sculptures were unique, everyone was merry and slipping and sliding up the
cobblestone streets, and the trumpets were echoing off the stone walls. We had great sex as always. I felt guilty that my lawyer had misadvised us.

Finally his work visa came through. Though he got into the States at last, he was angry at the whole country and bitter. “No one wants to come here anymore, at least not from the first or second world. France is superior to America.”

My nephew's heart had been broken by his wife in Tokyo. He flew to Providence and joined us. Hubert couldn't bear him. Keith would get drunk and scream at his wife, Tomoko, in Japan over the phone round about two in the morning. The worst was that they communicated in pidgin English: “Me no wanty come back Japan!” he would shout. Neither he nor Hubert had any respect for our landlord's house or furniture. “It's all store-bought furniture, new, it's worth nothing,” Hubert declared.

“Americans spend a lot of money on store-bought furniture,” I said. “They're very proud of it.” In one of the bedrooms there was a spooky, life-size doll of a grandmother, reminiscent of Mrs. Bates in
Psycho.
My nephew hauled it down to the basement, where it became filthy. I could see an invisible adding machine touting up vast sums I would owe the landlord for the damages. Eventually the sum came to ten thousand dollars. The parquet floor was thin and easily scarred. Hubert didn't like the placement of the dining room table and shoved it to a new place, leaving behind deep grooves in the floor. We bought a basset puppy who gnawed holes in the upholstery. The balloon ceiling in the entrance hall filled with overflow water from the bathtub above, although our landlord had warned us of that possibility.

Finally Hubert threw my nephew out of the house after he said patronizing things about the Italians, as if they were all stupid day laborers. My nephew had never traveled to Italy, but his self-esteem was so low he needed to feel superior to someone. Was it Stendhal who said the French were Italians in a bad mood? Certainly the bond between the Italians and the French is a very tight one, ever since Catherine de Médici arrived in Paris with her pastry chefs, or perhaps since Petrarch fell in love with his Laura (who may have been an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade), or even since Caesar conquered Gaul.

But Hubert was sort of compassionate. He introduced my nephew to a Finnish weaver twenty-five years older than Keith, a woman who he realized would take care of Keith, as she did for the next twenty years. They became lovers.

I'd met a woman in Paris named Christine, a teacher in a
maternelle
(kindergarten), and invited her to accompany me to Providence, all expenses paid, so she could develop her talent as an illustrator while I started my teaching job at Brown. I thought she'd be good company for Hubert, who until recently had had a wife. And after all, both Hubert and Christine wanted to be illustrators. As a woman, she'd take the curse off an all-male household. It was an experiment that resulted in Christine becoming an important, in-demand children's book artist (she ended up doing children's books with Julie Andrews and her daughter), but was otherwise something of a disaster.

In fact, Hubert didn't like her—either this or he wanted me all to himself.

Christine was constantly irritating Hubert, though she did her best to soothe him. She was always desperately in love, and there was no reasoning with her if she was in hot pursuit of a man. She'd met an Israeli, a grad student at Brown, and, in spite of Hubert's specific prohibition against inviting anyone to the small house we'd rented in Key West for the month of January, she secretly asked him down for a weekend. When it turned out she'd ignored Hubert's will, he became furious and disappeared, riding his bike across the island for twenty-four hours. I was terribly anxious and sensed that somehow he thought this was all my fault.

In turn, Christine was hurt that what Hubert called her nymphomania so vexed him. As a man used to flirting with women and sleeping with them, he wasn't afraid of them or on distant, polite terms with them as I was. He talked openly and crudely with women about their pussies and their “insatiable” needs. Which never struck me as funny, though he laughed a lot with a big, hollow laugh.

Because Christine was so nakedly needy, she seemed to me like another gay man—like me whenever I was infatuated. Both she and Hubert, so young and so good looking, were frustrated because no one
in Providence cruised them. I explained that in America it was considered rude (or gay) to look fixedly at someone. It seemed symptomatic of the national differences to me that the word “cruise” in English applied only to gays, whereas the French equivalent,
draguer
, applied to heterosexuals as well.

“But have we lost our looks?” Christine asked.

In some ways very sophisticated, she could also be naïve and credulous. When she'd first moved to Paris, a chubby, middle-aged Turk offering to “audition” her had made her parade around for him in a sheer dress, then a bikini, then nude–-explaining that he wanted to make her a “top model” (the two English words are always said together by French speakers, as if they constitute a necessarily bound form). When it got late and Christine could see he was agitating something in his lap, she started to cry, wailing, “I don't want to be a
topmodel!
”

She'd gathered up her clothes and fled. The man lived in the place des Victoires, which was deserted at midnight, and she looked back over her shoulder to see if he was pursuing her.

The least French-seeming thing about Christine was her love of telling tales that exposed her own naïveté, which she mocked and gloried in. Hubert and I teased her about the Israeli grad student, who was portly, trying to hide from her behind a tree.

“The pregnant tree,” Hubert said, and in the air he drew a tree with a stomach.

Christine's drawings were of childhood innocence and would often show children with their grandmothers or would illustrate idyllic memories of her grandfather's estate beside the Loire and long summers playing there with her girl cousins.

Hubert's drawings were satirical of grown-ups saying pretentious or fatuous things. It was as if, since he was obliged to say farewell to this world, he must first denigrate it. As a favor to me, Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje printed some of Hubert's drawings in their magazine
Brick,
but several readers found them so offensive they canceled their subscriptions. I thought it was heroic that Hubert still cared enough about the world to satirize it.

John Purcell, who'd been living in my old apartment in New York, had become ill with AIDS. I took him and Hubert both on a trip to the Yucatán where they squabbled the whole time. I had promised John I would take care of him if he ever became ill, but Hubert forbade him to visit our house in Providence. In the Yucatán John wanted to open the window of our rented VW Bug but Hubert, with his French fear of drafts, insisted he close it. Then Hubert was constantly saying, “Pardon, pardon,” whenever he entered a door first, and John exploded that he mustn't keep saying that. Hubert wailed that John was trying to denude him of his exquisite manners. I was ready to tear my hair out.

I had to fly to Mexico City to interview the ageing movie diva María Félix. She kept me waiting for a day while she washed her hair. I couldn't contact John and Hubert, who were clawing at each other in Mérida, to say I'd be delayed. I couldn't find the hotel phone number. I contemplated jumping from my hotel's thirteenth-story balcony. I'd been in Mexico City with my father in 1953, when it was a beautiful Art Nouveau city of a million. Now it was a polluted slum of twenty million with some of the world's richest people living behind barbed wire protected by guard dogs and swarms of the poor clamoring to sell lottery tickets at every traffic light. It wasn't so much that I
wanted
to jump as that I felt drawn against my will to the balcony. I had to lock the glass doors and pull the curtains.

I'd been chosen to interview María Félix because she spoke French but not English.
Vanity Fair
was looking for a sad
Sunset Boulevard
portrait. They'd sent Helmut Newton to shoot her, but he was so old he
couldn't brave the capital's thin air; María Félix had to descend to her villa in Cuernavaca so that he could shoot a hostile photograph of her ropy hands around the neck of her young Polish lover (no face-lifting for the hands). The problem was: I liked María Félix. Sartre had written a film for her. When Carlos Fuentes wrote a bitchy novel about her, she asked to play the part in the movie version. When I asked her how she could walk through the Bois de Boulogne at night and risk being attacked by huge, fierce Brazilian transvestite whores, she replied, “Oh, Monsieur White, I admire them so. We are just biological women; they are artistic,
constructed
women. They are the real women.”

When I returned to Mérida, we drove to a primitive little town on the north of the peninsula and saw pink flamingoes at dawn; Hubert had seen bigger flocks in Ethiopia. We went to the pyramids in Chichen Itza; both men seemed attracted to the idea of human sacrifice. In Cobá we stayed in a former Club Med, the Villas Arqueologicas, where bougainvillea blossoms floated on infinity pools and Mayan ruins punctuated the jungle nearby. I rented us a modern house between Playa del Carmen and Tulum. John found a bar with congenial drunks nearby; Hubert went on poetic walks alone along the beach in white pedal pushers. Europeans could never master the casual American beach look.

I was so happy to get back to freezing, dreary Providence. Hubert had been so hateful to John that I wondered how I could take my revenge on Hubert without leaving him. I couldn't leave him; he depended on me completely. I remembered Gide's wife had punished him for running off with a teenage boy by burning the hundreds of letters he'd sent her over the years—his best writing, he claimed. I decided to stop sleeping with Hubert. I'm sure he thought I had a real distaste for him now that he was ill. My “solution” was as pointlessly cruel as Madeleine Gide's. Soon enough he really was too ill to have sex.

A few months later I told John I would take him any place he wanted. India? France? He chose Disney World in Orlando. I thought it might be a hoot, but I found it intolerably boring and tacky. At Epcot, we went to some horrid replica of the Eiffel Tower when we'd lived in the real Paris for years. After standing for hours in queues, we went on a fun-house ride past leering dolls popping out of the wall, singing “It's
a Small World” in chipmunk voices. The only authentic pavilion was the Morrocan restaurant, where we ate couscous, spoke French to the waiters, and made dates with them. John was happy because he seduced a black preppy father pushing a pram.

Then Christine phoned me that Hubert was hospitalized in Boston. I rushed to his side on the next plane. John was furious, as if Hubert had staged this illness to spite him. In those days Brown did not have domestic partner health coverage, so the doctor very kindly had risked charges of fraud by registering Hubert under my name. It was a very curious thing having to address Hubert as “Edmund.” He had had to invent a whole story of a lost GI father in order to explain why he was called Edmund White but could barely speak English.

We knew we had to go back to France, for the great, inexpensive medical care, if nothing else. Diane Johnson let us stay in her charming Paris apartment, a block away from Marie-Claude's. MC had come to visit us once in Key West, but she was always worried she'd run into her ex-husband and his new wife. Laurent and Phyllis had a beautiful house there and were very popular, but for a decade MC forbade me to see them, which was silly. At last she relented. I'd always liked Phyllis, who was bright and inquisitive and who'd turned herself into a talented photographer; Laurent, of course, was an old friend.

John Purcell returned to the Catholic church. His mother had found a kindly priest to play his spiritual guide, Father Mike, whose brother had died from AIDS. John moved back to his parents' home in Concord. I saw him twice more—in Venice, where we spent a week alone and where he cried because I bought him expensive new clothes (“That shows, Petes, that you think I'll go on living”), and in Key West, another vacation I ruined by bringing along a twenty-two-year-old English soccer star who was terribly jealous of John—though he was helpless and bedridden—and shockingly rude to him. Oh, and once I took John to a French island in the Caribbean, Marie-Galante, but in those days it didn't have the luxurious accomodations an invalid needed. John's only regret was that he'd been in love with the ultimate black preppy in New York, and that man had dropped him (“I wanted just one affair to work out before I died”). John's high voice,
boyish body, and youthful way of dressing—the very thing that attracted many older gay men, the guys who bought him drinks at Julius'—put off straight women and many educated gay men. I tried to get him a job with a top New York decorator, but there was no work. My friend Nathalie was going to hire him to represent a line of furniture she wanted to launch in New York, but she was spooked by his “young girl's voice” over the phone. Hubert despised him as “a cretin.” I was shocked that these guys didn't have compassion for each other, since they were dying of the same disease.