Inside a Pearl (36 page)

On Easter weekend he called me from a nice youth hostel near the rue Saint-Martin. I invited him right over. He thought Hubert was still alive and had no idea I was prospecting for someone. He was handsome, sweet, but not demonstrative; though he was thirty he looked twenty. Later I found out his whole family is genetically favored toward youthful looks. We shared a southern background of sorts. My parents were from Texas. I'd lived in Texas. He'd been born in Memphis. My paternal grandfather had been a college teacher because he said he wanted a job “out of the sun.” Michael's father (a year younger than I) had been the first person in his family to go to college; he manufactured wallboard. Michael had grown up in northern Florida, which is very redneck. And yet he'd had a very good education in public schools, in “gifted” classes where they'd read Greek plays, Shakespeare, the Victorians. He'd gone to grad school for English and then creative writing, but he wasn't very confident about his own stories—though he was very sure, even adamant, about his taste.

He had such a cozy, unemphatic way of becoming intimate. I read him out loud a story I'd just written and he said sensible things about it. He sat on the floor and I on the bed. We went to bed and that, too, seemed very intimate. I was fifty-five but still randy; I hadn't yet learned to wait for encouraging signs from the other person. I was far too old to be everyone's cup of tea, but I hadn't learned that yet.

I realized it had cost Michael a month's salary and sixteen hours to come on a bus to Paris from Pilsen. I insisted he move out of his hostel and stay with me. On subsequent trips I paid his airfare to Paris and back to Prague. And I flew to Prague twice to court him. I was in love with him almost instantly, but he was much cooler, which slightly miffed me. He told me that in August his term of duty in the Peace Corps would be up; I wanted him to move to Paris.

Michael and I were lying in bed at the end of August 1997 when Jonathan Burnham phoned and said, “Isn't it terrible what happened in your city?”

I'd sung a few scales before lifting the receiver and now I tried to drive the sleep out of my voice. “What happened?”

“Princess Di died in a car crash there in Paris last night,” he said.

Only a year before Jonathan had had dinner with Diana and said what a hysteric she was, gabbling and fiddling with her hands nonstop—and I'd always wanted to believe this version.

And yet I knew how compassionate she was as well. I had done a profile of Marguerite Littman, a southerner who'd joined her AIDS charity to those of Princess Diana and Elton John. Lucretia Stewart's husband's brother had died of AIDS. The princess was one of the first people who'd visited him in the hospital and had not been afraid to touch him. Somehow she knew the disease wasn't catching. Everyone who'd worked with her on her AIDS charity was awe-struck by her warmth and courage (she'd lost many friends to the disease) and her unfailing dedication.

In the next few days we were scheduled to fly to the States for the American book tour of my novel
The Farewell Symphony
, and the following winter I was planning to begin teaching on a trial basis at
Princeton. Suddenly Princess Di's death consumed the media, and gone were most of my choicest interview and coverage prospects, including an appearance on Charlie Rose.
The Farewell Symphony
took in the whole period of New York gay life leading up to the AIDS crisis, sweeping in the euphoria of gay liberation as its cruel prelude, and one by one killed off most of its characters—and it was the capstone of my autobiographical trilogy.

So much for my triumphant return to native soil.

I'd emphasized the phrase “trial basis” when relaying the news of my upcoming teaching gig, but MC, perhaps sensing my deeper hopes, wasn't buying it. Her work had advanced, and more and more I admired some new effect she'd managed to achieve in her boxes, but she had yet to find a new gallery to show her latest efforts. Though her energy never flagged, she was the same old little girl in search of approval to shore up her confidence. She turned to Michael and asked him if we weren't in fact planning a permanent move.

Then, one evening as I was saying good night to her after one of our small quiet dinners together, just the two of us, she confronted me with a mixture of command and frail emotion and pleaded, “Just give me one more year!”

I was relieved finally to have a job. I was sick of scrambling at the end of every month to pay my rent. And Michael had never taken root in Paris. His whole life he'd dreamed of living in New York, and as an aspiring young writer it seemed the perfect place for him to be. The first year we had to live in Princeton till I officially got tenure, but then we moved to New York into an apartment I bought—or rather the bank did. My hand shook as I signed the mortgage agreement, the first one I'd ever signed. Before I got tenure and we began the apartment hunt, however, we rented professors' houses in Princeton the first two semesters, and I whimpered every evening as the dog next door howled.

There we were in a subdivision. The doors to the neighbors' houses were all shut, the lights in most of the windows extinguished, and I complained to Michael, “Why don't people ever come outside?”

“What are they supposed to do when they come outside, get in their cars? It's winter.”

“But it's like they're hiding. It all seems so sordid. What are they doing in there?”

“What everybody anywhere else does. Eating, watching TV, reading, and going to bed.”

Michael had grown up in a suburb, and though it had never been his dream to stay in one, it didn't bother him as much as it did me. He enjoyed being able to drive to a grocery store that stayed open late into the evening instead of having to hurry out to the markets before dark.

At the first hint of spring, MC came for her first drily amused visit, and on our tours of the New Jersey countryside rode in the front seat next to Michael (terrified of cars and accidents, I prefer to ride in the back). She looked out at the profusion of shocking-magenta redbud bushes in bloom on the lawns and croaked, “
Mais c'est vulgaire
.”

For months she'd been ramping up her satirical and alarmist colorings of small-town life in America, which—remember—she'd had a taste of back during the Babar tours in the old days. Suburbia was where the true horrors were perpetrated, bastions of puritanical pettiness and hypocrisy, with all that wasted space and all those locked doors to help hide it.

And the food could be good or it could merely be amusing and “typical.”
Typique
was one of her favorite words to launch a zinger against the country that had bewitched and abducted us. Once she called from Paris and Michael answered. She asked him what we were having for dinner and he began to describe the main course.

“And three vegetables,” she said haughtily, “the Americans and their three vegetables!”

And of course at first I was gloomy and discontented to be back in America. My greatest accomplishment, speaking French, was useless here. I'd hear French spoken at the next table or on the street by tourists and joyfully assault perfect strangers who, as often as not, reacted coldly to this old man's effusions. And yet their very coldness seemed heartwarmingly French to me.

After sixteen years of living in Paris I was out of step with Americans. The same day a friend of mine named Hal Rubenstein wrote in his column that you must never arrive at a dinner empty-handed and must
always bring flowers or wine, I'd said to him, purely by coincidence, “I wish people would never bring flowers—the host has enough to do without finding a vase and pricking his fingers on thorns. And never wine—he's already carefully selected them. All right, some chocolates, maybe …”

I went on to explain that I'd interviewed the Duchess of Beaufort, who owns Badminton House, one of the great English country houses, and she had thought all house gifts were a preposterous, newfangled custom. “Curious, that,” she'd said.

This snobbish effusion didn't make me popular with my friend.

I was much older now, in my sixties, an age when it's difficult to make new friends. The people who were willing to befriend me, young gay writers, would eventually ask for a blurb or a Guggenheim recommendation and then vanish as soon as I delivered them. Other people would call me their “new best friend” and then stop returning my calls—not from any hostility but from negligence. Americans were so enthusiastic on first meeting; I'd forgotten that enthusiasm didn't mean anything. The cliché among Europeans was that friendships with Americans didn't go anywhere.

And I now had a fatal Old World sense of conversation—that it should be exciting and frivolous and provocative and preferably scandalous. I'd mentally prepare two or three hot topics before every evening. But my style was withering to Americans, who like to graze peacefully in conversation, and my “sparkling” style inhibited general conversation—which would revive, I would notice, whenever I went into the kitchen for the next course.

Four old friends—Marilyn Schaefer, Sigrid MacRae, Stan Redfern, and Keith McDermott—were welcoming. At Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates did everything to make me feel welcome, gradually introducing me to many people of interest at the university. A couple of times I lost old friends because I gossiped about them. I'd forgotten that Americans had the bad habit of running back and tattling to the injured party: “I think you should know there's something Edmund is saying about you …” (Usually something sexual.) I'd forgotten, too, that Americans can be puritanical and self-righteous snitches. In France most people
enjoyed sex scandals, which shocked no one but titillated everyone. Moreover, everyone knew that the
milieu
was more important than any one member of it, and no one would rock the boat to save one passenger. Or rather, no one saw any harm in a bit of spicy gossip, certainly no reason to set off feuds and cause ruptures in the group cohesion. Boris Kochno, who'd been Diaghilev's last assistant, friend to Stravinsky and Picasso, and the lover of Christian Bérard, said to me in his nineties that he could see that the most important thing was to preserve the
milieu
. Though he was Russian, he'd lived his whole life in France, and his wisdom seemed typically French. Americans, I remembered, to my chagrin, didn't esteem the group but only conceded value to the individual friendship (unless the American was old, worldly, and female, and could recognize the sanctity of the group).

I'd acquired a lot of odd habits in France. Michael and I rented a car and went on an extended tour of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, then flew home. My American friends were puzzled—were you on a book tour, they'd ask, giving a lecture? No, I'd say, we were on a pleasure trip. Pleasure? Were you visiting relatives?

Then I had too much social energy. I'd ask people to dinner and they'd say, “Dinner? Next Tuesday? At eight? Well, usually I work till seven and then work out for two hours. And remember I'm a gluten-free vegan. But yeah, I guess I could come. What's the occasion—is it your birthday?”

I ended up at first socializing with foreigners, other writers such as Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey and Francine du Plessix Gray, or Europeanized Americans like Ned Rorem. I didn't want to fall back into an all-gay ghetto, as I'd done in New York before going to Paris, but it was tempting, given the way people socialized. Many gay guys were as awkward around women as prep school boys, and straights were overeager to establish their tolerance of gays.

I was used to devoting a large part of my budget to inviting people to dinner or to the theater, but the gesture took most Americans by surprise and often confused them. In Princeton everyone went Dutch, carefully dividing the bill down to the last cent, which shocked me.

People dressed up less often, yet even Paris now was much more casual. I remember Sydney Picasso, Claude's American ex-wife, once
saying to me, “Remember how we used to dress in the eighties? All those crazy outfits? Now we wouldn't dare.”

In America I became obese, I suppose because the portions were bigger in restaurants and sugar was added to so many foods. It seemed to me that the secret of French cuisine was smaller portions, multiple appetite-quenching courses starting off with a big salad, and unexpectedly rich small indulgences—a sinfully gooey cheese or dessert. But no one in Paris took seconds, at the risk of being labeled
gourmand
(greedy). Only after I had become uncomfortably fat did I go on a diet and lose eighty pounds, though most people would say I was still heavy.

Until I became old and fat I was still going to saunas, but soon I discovered the whole paradise of cruising gerontophile chubby chasers on the Web.

People in the general public (on planes or even at dinner) had never heard of me. People said, “Should I have heard of you?” And I was so embarrassed by the whole subject that I said, “No. No one's ever heard of me.”

Cheekier writers I know answer that question by saying, “Only if you're cultured.”

If someone knew my name he was usually a middle-aged gay. I got used to supposedly educated men saying brightly, “I don't read. But my wife does.” And she was brought up to meet the writer, but she would turn out to be clueless, a reader of foil-covered airport paperbacks.

In America I had to confront the writer's loss of prestige and the public's neglect. In France and England I'd been on endless radio and TV chat shows. In London, Jeremy Isaacs had interviewed me for an hour on
Face to Face
when everyone assumed I'd soon be dead from AIDS. In America literary writers didn't have the same access to the media. We had reality show stars for that.

My old friends in New York had been decimated by AIDS. I passed so many apartment buildings in the Village or Chelsea where a lover or trick or friend had once lived. There's where I once went to dinner with that cute airline steward. I'd shown up with three bottles of wine for two people—that's when I admitted to myself I was an alcoholic. Also it was the third time in a month I'd lost my contact lenses. Where
was that guy now? I'd sat by several deathbeds at St. Vincent's, but not all the people who'd disappeared were accounted for. Gay life was organized in such a way that one day you realized you hadn't seen an acquaintance for months, years.