Inside a Pearl (8 page)

“The Provençal accent is easy enough, like when they say ‘vang' for
vin
or ‘pang' for
pain
.”

“But no one says ‘pang'!”

I can remember when Hector Bianciotti, an Argentine novelist living in Paris, interviewed me for a two-page piece in the
Nouvel Observateur
, a weekly left-of-center glossy that's roughly equivalent to the weekend magazine of the English
Guardian
. He and I met in the downstairs bar at the Montalembert, a few doors from the offices of Gallimard, the premier publisher. With its brown velvet walls and heavy leather club chairs, the room had been a meeting place for writers since the time of Sartre and Beauvoir, who'd more famously also liked the Café Flore three blocks away. I had seen photos of Sartre taken here with his followers, including his handsome secretary Jean Cau. In another photo Jean Genet was being introduced to the author of
La Bâtarde,
Violette Leduc. She was upset that day because Genet said, “I've been enjoying your
Asphyxie
,” though the book was named
L'Asphyxie
and Genet's way of saying the title suggested he was enjoying the feeling of moral and mental disarray in the work—or so she
imagined in her hysterical, paranoid way. Like Genet, she was a fatherless child, as was their wealthy patron, Jacques Guérin—another “bastard.” (Ironically, later the three bastards would collaborate on a short black-and-white film, now lost, about a baptism in which Genet played the baby.)

Hector asked me a few random questions about my
enfance dans le Ohio
, but rather than tossing off a witty remark or two, I started giving a complete report: “…then, at age seven, I moved from Cincinnati to Evanston, Illinois.” At last I noticed the look of panic and even disdain crossing Hector's face. “I don't need to know all that. It's just an article, not a hagiography!”

When the article appeared in print, it had several mistakes in it and my friend Gilles said,

“It's of no importance. No one will remember. No one will even finish reading it.”

I mentioned that in America we had fact checkers and that we had to put red pencil dots over every statement after we'd verified it from three sources. Gilles merely waved a hand as if driving away an annoying insect. When I went on pointing out the mistakes, Gilles said, “My poor Ad.” He pronounced my name in what he believed was the usual American way,
Ad
. “I think you have no idea how important Hector is. He will probably win the Goncourt this year and soon he'll be a member of the French Academy. He's done you a tremendous honor.”

Hector had begun to write in French, not Spanish, only a few years previously. People said he was helped by his lover Angelo Rinaldi, a Corsican novelist and the extremely acerbic critic for
L'Express.
(Hector wrote one terrific book about his coming out in the Pampas,
Le Pas si lent de l'amour.
) In the years to come, Angelo would like every other book I wrote and hate the alternate ones. His vitriol in general won him lots of attention, since most French critics were routinely positive. An older writer explained to me that during the Vichy years of the Nazi occupation, right-wing critics had been so brutally nasty that ever since, the left-wing style had been pleasantly anodyne; the slightest reservation was read as a violent dismissal. Gilles had been right about Hector, who was invited to join the Academy, and a few years later so was
Angelo. I would often see Angelo, always grimacing, each time his hair a color never encountered in nature, headed to his
chambre d'assignation
on the Île Saint-Louis, usually in the company of a teenager he'd met at a gym during wrestling practice.

I can't remember how, but in some way Milan Kundera became aware of me. He wanted someone to translate two of his political essays from French (which he'd recently begun writing in, too) into English. I told him I could not even translate a French menu in restaurants—was
confit de canard
“duck preserved in its own fat”? And did a
financier
have something to do with cake or a pastry? Kundera said he didn't want anyone too sophisticated.
Sophistiqué
had kept in French some of its original sense of sophistry, of an ingenious playing with words, and I took it that what Kundera hated was what Fowler in his
Modern English Usage
calls “elegant variation”—the pointless and confusing interchanging of near synonyms so that the reader thinks something new is being discussed.

At the time Kundera was very paranoid that the Czech equivalent of the KGB was trying to bump him off, so I had to buzz him precisely at noon, neither a minute before nor a minute later, and I'd be accompanied by his wife Vera up to the first landing of his rue Littré apartment. Then he would walk with me up the last flight of stairs. If he was famous as a wrestler, he must have been a featherweight, because he was very frail, though his pictures made him look big and powerful. He didn't know English very well. He knew that
about
meant “more or less” but he didn't know it was also a preposition, as in “about love.” We wrangled over many words in that way. His essays, as I recall, were about the spurious idea that Prague was closer culturally to Paris than to St. Petersburg. His own father had been a musician for Janá
č
ek in Brno, and I wanted to point out that Janá
č
ek had adopted a Russian play (Ostrovsky's
The Storm
) in
Kát'a Kabanová
not a French one, but I didn't dare. Yet he was very sweet and played a record for me of one of Janá
č
ek's chamber works and gave me a running commentary on its secret plot: “Here he sees her again about to board the train.” His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the
movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when MC and I sat down behind them.

My early, brief moment of Parisian celebrity came and went. Afterward few people in France could place me but some gave troubled little smiles of recognition when my name was mentioned.
“Mais bien sûr,”
they whispered politely. This French system of making a fuss over whatever was new and then promptly forgetting it meant that many young innovators had their moment in the sun right away, without having to wait years as they would have to in America. But it also meant that new ideas—feminism, say, or gay liberation—weren't revolutionary or very interesting, since they were treated as this year's fad, no more, and quickly were cycled out of sight. In America an idea was accepted only after it was judged to be of real, lasting significance. Then it stuck around forever, especially if it became a department in American universities—gender studies or queer studies. If I'd introduce an American intellectual to French friends in the mid-1980s, and say, “She's a leading feminist who's queering the Renaissance,” they'd make a face and say, “Feminism. You mean that's still being discussed in America? We had that here in the early seventies, but it's hopelessly
vétuste
,
démodé
. No one ever mentions it. No more than any woman now would wear Berber jewelry or a tuxedo or a hoop skirt.”

My great love during those years was from Zurich, the manager of a small chain of Swiss cinemas, whom I met in Venice. I'd been spending several weeks every year in Venice with my best friend, David Kalstone, who lived in New York, taught English at Rutgers, and in the summers lived in Venice. David spoke Italian and loved Venice, a great pedestrian city if you were a good walker, and he was. He was nearly blind, but Venice's walkways were well lit and the steps over bridges were clearly outlined in white pebbles. It was a city without cars and, though it was awesomely labyrinthine, David knew all its byways. He was a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim and we spent many evenings in her historic, if tedious, company, always accompanied by her little dogs. In her garden (a garden was a rare feature for a Venetian palazzo), Peggy had a white marble Byzantine throne and around it her various shih tzus were buried. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she'd assure them she wasn't.

Every artistic or political or entertainment personality who came through Venice felt obliged to contact Peggy, and if the dignitary was sufficiently important she'd give him or her a cocktail party. That's how I first met Gore Vidal, who in those years lived full time in Italy. He blurbed my second novel,
Nocturnes for the King of Naples,
but later, toward the end of his life, he turned against me because I wrote a play about him and Timothy McVeigh.

I met my Swiss cinema magnate one night on what we called the
molo nero
, a “dark dock” for cruising, a pathway between the Piazzetta
San Marco and Harry's Bar—by day a major thoroughfare for tourists heading to the vaporetto stop but at night a byway where gays could be found milling around, to the extent that they congregated anywhere in this least gay of all cities. (In those days, they also went to a gay beach out on the Lido, to Haig's Bar across from the Gritti Palace hotel, and to the public toilets on one side of the Rialto Bridge.) There, on the
molo nero
, around midnight when the crowds had dissipated (most tourists were day trippers, since hotels in Venice were so expensive), a few gays would linger, though they could be scared off by the glare of approaching boats. One evening, sitting on a fence all dressed in white was a tan, smiling man not in his first youth, closer to my age—a decade younger, as it turned out.

As I approached he said in accented English, “You must be American.”

“I am. How could you tell?”

“The way you smiled at me even though I'm a stranger.”

Later, I thought it must have been my sloppy appearance that gave me away, the fact that my shirt wasn't tucked in.

I couldn't imagine why this handsome man would be interested in me, so I said, “You should come back to the palace where I'm staying. It's pretty spectacular. The kitchen was John Singer Sargent's studio, and Henry James slept in the library in a sort of medical metal bed.”

I'm not sure he knew who James or Sargent was; the past interested him not at all.

When we were standing in the middle of the immense marble floor of the library, he took my glass from my hand and put it on the floor, then he kissed me passionately.

It turned out that he had my novel
A Boy's Own Story
in his bag. His longtime lover, the art dealer Thomas Ammann, who had just broken up with him, had brought back from New York the new gay book everyone was talking about, so I think it pleased This—short for, Matthias and pronounced “Tees”—to have the author of the new vogue book in bed. Thomas had left him for George, a beautiful young Greek man who was a model and who'd just had an affair with Rock Hudson (Hudson's AIDS had not yet been made public). This was disease-phobic, and used not one but two condoms. (“I'm Swiss,” he
explained.) Within a few years both George and Thomas would die of AIDS.

This asked me if I'd been “careful” and of course I said yes, though just the night before I'd slept with a young Spaniard who'd worked my nipples so hard they were still aflame and I winced whenever they were touched. But at that time, in the early eighties, there was no test for AIDS and no one knew exactly what caused it. We suspected it was caused by sex, but how? It seemed too unfair to us that a single exposure could infect someone; in our guilt-ridden way we wanted the disease to be the punishment for a long life of vice.

But even by those standards I'd been what the French called
vicieux
(a compliment in the world of gay French small advertisements). I'd slept with some three thousand men, I figured, and big-city gay men of my generation asked, “Why so few?” My figures were based on the rate of three a week for twenty years, between the ages of twenty-two and forty-two in New York, but many of my coevals “turned” two or three “tricks” a night, using the whore's slang of the period (a “trick” was a once-only encounter, a word I had to explain recently to gay grad students). Truth be told, I would often go to the sauna, where I'd meet a dozen men a night. But to This I pretended to be far more innocent. He was reassured and thought of me as a sort of responsible gay leader thanks to my work with Gay Men's Health Crisis.

I wasn't ready to change my ways. I was so used to undressing mentally almost every man I met (and often went on to do so literally) that promiscuity was my first response to the least sign of reciprocity. I loved sex, but I never experienced it in its “pure” state; to me, it was always blended with at least some shred of romantic fantasy.

Soon I began to visit This in Zurich every other week and he came to Paris occasionally. When he traveled to my city we stayed on the rue du Cherche-Midi in the beautiful apartment belonging to Andy Warhol and his business associate, Fred Hughes. It was reached by crossing a formal French garden, mainly of gravel, that was dominated by a sphinx with the head of an eighteenth-century female courtier. Inside, in the salon, there were a newly upholstered Second Empire couch and a huge circus painting by José María Sert resting on the floor. The
kitchen was the latest in stylishness and efficiency, designed by Andrée Putman, a French woman who looked like a man in drag (“More man than
pute
,” people said). In her store in the Marais, Putman was recycling designs from the past by Charlotte Perriand and Jean-Michel Frank. Warhol's apartment looked as if someone with money and taste hadn't quite moved in.

I wasn't used to going out with mature men who already had strong opinions and spoke confidently of their defining life experiences. The boys I usually dated tried to fit into my crowded world because they had only the smallest, thinnest world of their own. Their feelings were often hard to sound because they themselves didn't know what they felt. This knew how people should live and in what surroundings. He had opinions on everything that interested him, and what didn't interest him he shrugged off. Maybe because he was involved with two visual arts—he exhibited and sometimes produced films and he collected contemporary art—he was very concerned about how everything looked. We spent a whole day at Puiforcat in Paris choosing silverware for his table. He cared how I cut my nails. He didn't like me to be thirty pounds overweight, so we went to a Swiss spa and ate nothing for ten days. Clothes were important to This. His ex, Thomas, was regularly listed among the ten best-dressed men in the world. Thomas would fly the king of Spain's tailor from Madrid to Zurich for fittings. They both pioneered the beautifully cut blazer-with-jeans look. Thomas's cook/maid, who had worked for a Spanish ambassador and knew how to iron shirts expertly, gave ironing lessons to This's maid. Once when I suggested we go to the Canary Islands for a vacation, This said the only snobbish words I ever heard from his lips: “Oh, that's where we send our maids for their holidays—Putzfrau Insel, we call it.”