Skinned Alive (8 page)

Also not to ask so many questions or volunteer so many answers. After a two-hour train ride he’d ask me if I had had enough time to confide to the stranger at my side all the details of my unhappy American childhood. Like most Frenchmen who have affairs with Americans, he was attracted by my “niceness” and “simplicity” (ambiguous compliments at best), but had set out to reform those very qualities, which became weaknesses once I was granted the high status of honorary Frenchman. “Not Frenchman,” he would say. “You’ll never be French. But you are a Parisian. No one can deny that.” Then to flatter me he would add,
“Plus parisien tu meurs,”
though just then I felt I’d die if I were less, not more, Parisian.

But if Jean-Loup was always “correct” in the salon, he was “vicious” and “perverse” (high compliments in France) in the
chambre.
The problem was that he didn’t like to see me very often. He loved me but wasn’t in love with me, that depressing (and all too translatable) distinction
(“Je t’aime mais je ne suis pas amoureux d’amour”).
He was always on the train to Bordeaux, where his parents lived and where he’d been admitted to several châteaux, including some familiar even to me because they were on wine labels. He’d come back with stories of weekend country parties at which the boys got drunk and tore off the girls’ designer dresses and then everyone went riding bareback at dawn. He had a set of phrases for describing these routs
(“On s’éclatait”; “On se marrait”; “On était fou, mais vraiment fou et on a bien rigolé”)
, which all meant they had behaved disreputably with the right people within decorous limits. After all they were in their own “milieu.” He slept with a few of the girls and was looking to marry one who would be intelligent, not ugly, distinguished, a good sport and a slut in bed. He even asked me to help him. “You go everywhere, you meet everyone,” he said, “you’ve fixed up so many of your friends, find me someone like Brigitte but better groomed, a good slut who likes men. Of course, even if I married that would never affect our relationship.” Recently he’d decided that he would inform his bride-to-be that he was homosexual; he just knew she’d be worldly about it.

With friends Jean-Loup was jolly and impertinent, quick to trot out his “horrors,” as he called them, things that would make the girls scream and the boys blush. Twice he showed his penis at mixed dinner parties. Even so, his horrors were, while shocking, kindhearted and astute. He never asked about money or class, questions that might really embarrass a Frenchman. He would sooner ask about blowjobs than job prospects,
cock size than the size of a raise. In our funny makeshift circle—which I had cobbled together to amuse him and which fell apart when he left me—the girls were witty, uncomplicated and heterosexual, and the boys handsome and homo. We were resolutely silly and made enormous occasions out of each other’s birthdays and saint’s days. Our serious, intimate conversations took place only between two people, usually over the phone.

I neglected friends my own age. I never spoke English or talked about books except with Hélène. A friend from New York said, after staying with me for a week, that I was living in a fool’s paradise, a gilded playpen filled with enchanting, radiant nymphs and satyrs who offered me “no challenge.” He disapproved of the way I was willing to take just crumbs from Jean-Loup.

Brioche crumbs, I thought.

I didn’t know how to explain that now that so many of my old friends in New York had died—my best friend, and also my editor, who was a real friend as well—I preferred my playpen, where I could be twenty-five again but French this time. When reminded of my real age and nationality, I then played at being older and American. Youth and age seemed equally theatrical. Maybe the unreality was the effect of living in another language, of worrying about how many slices of
chèvre
one could take and of buying pretty clothes for a bisexual Bordelais. At about this time a punk interviewed me on television and asked, “You are known as a homosexual, a writer and an American. When did you first realize you were an American?”

“When I moved to France,” I said.

That Jean-Loup was elusive could not be held against him. He warned me from the first he was in full flight. What I didn’t
grasp was that he was running toward someone even he couldn’t name yet. Despite his lucid way of making distinctions about other people (“She’s not a liar but a mythomaniac; her lying serves no purpose”) he was indecisive about everything in his own future: Would he marry or become completely gay? Would he stay in business or develop his talent, drawing adult comic strips? Would he remain in Paris or continue shuttling between it and Bordeaux? I teased him, calling him Monsieur Charnière (Mr. Hinge).

Where he could be decisive was in bed. He had precise and highly colored fantasies, which I deduced from his paces and those he put me through. He never talked about his desires until the last few times we had sex, just before the end of our “story,” as the French call an affair; his new talkativeness I took as a sign that he’d lost interest in me or at least respect for me, and I was right. Earlier he had never talked about his desire, but hurled it against me: he needed me here not there, like this not that. I felt desired for the first time in years.

My friends, especially Hélène, but even the other children in the playpen, assumed Jean-Loup was genteelly fleecing me with my worldly, cheerful complicity, but I knew I had too little money to warrant such a speculation. He’d even told me that if it was money he was after he could find a man far richer than me. In fact I knew I excited him. That’s why I had to find him a distinguished slut for a wife. I had corrupted him, he told me, by habituating him to sex that was “hard,” which the French pronounce “ard” as in “ardent” and, out of a certain deference, never elide with the preceding word.

He didn’t mind if I talked during sex, telling him who he was, where we were and why I had to do all this to him. I was used to sex raps from the drug-taking 1970s. Now, of course, there were no drugs and I had to find French words for my obsessions, and when I sometimes made a mistake in gender or verb form Jean-Loup would wince. He wouldn’t
mention it later; he didn’t want to talk anything over later. Only once, after he’d done something very strange to me, he asked, laughing as he emerged from the shower, “Are you the crazy one or am I? I think we’re both crazy.” He seemed very pleased.

For the first year we’d struggled to be “lovers” officially, but he devoted more of his energy to warding me off than embracing me. He had a rule that he could never stay on after a dinner at my place; he would always leave with the other members of the playpen. To stay behind would look too domestic, he thought, too queer, too
pédé.
After a year of such partial intimacy I got fed up. More likely I became frightened that Jean-Loup, who was growing increasingly remote, would suddenly drop me. I broke up with him over dinner in a restaurant. He seemed relieved and said, “I would never have dared to take the first step.” He was shaken for two or three days, then recovered nicely. As he put it, he “supported celibacy” quite effortlessly. It felt natural to him, it was his natural condition.

I went to New York for a week. By chance he went there after I returned. When we saw each other again in Paris we were as awkward as adolescents. His allergies were acting up; American food had made him put on two kilos; a New York barber had thrown his meaty ears into high relief. “It’s terrible,” Jean-Loup said, “I wanted my independence, but now that I have it…. Undress me.” I did so, triumphant while registering his admission that he was the one after all who had wanted to be free.

After that we saw each other seldom but when we did it was always passionate. The more people we told that we were no longer lovers, the more violent our desire for each other became. I found his heavy balls, which he liked me to hold in my mouth while I looked up at him. I found the mole on his
smooth haunch. Because of his allergies he couldn’t tolerate colognes or deodorants; I was left with his natural kid-brother smell. We had long since passed through the stage of smoking marijuana together or using sex toys or dressing each other up in bits of finery. Other couples I knew became kinkier and kinkier over the years if they continued having sex or else resigned themselves to the most routine, suburban relief. We were devouring each other with a desire that was ever purer and sharper. Of course such a desire is seldom linked to love. It can be powerful when solicited but quickly forgotten when absent.

Perhaps the threat of ending things altogether, which we’d just averted, had made us keener. More likely, Jean-Loup, now that he thought he’d become less homosexual by shedding a male lover, me, felt freer to indulge drives that had become more urgent precisely because they were less well defined. Or perhaps I’m exaggerating my importance in his eyes; as he once said, he didn’t like to wank his head over things like that
(“Je ne me branle pas trop la tête”).

I was in love with him and, during sex, thought of that love, but I tried to conceal it from him.

I tried to expect nothing, see him when I saw him, pursue other men, as though I were strictly alone in the world. For the first time when he asked me if I had other lovers I said I did and even discussed them with him. He said he was relieved, explaining that my adventures exonerated him from feeling responsible for me and my happiness. He was a lousy lover, he said, famous for being elusive; even his girlfriends complained about his slipperiness. That elusiveness, I would discover, was his protest against his own passivity, his longing to be owned.

Things changed day by day between us. He said he wasn’t searching for other sexual partners; he preferred to wait until he fell in love, revealing that he didn’t imagine that we’d become lovers again. Nor was he in such a hurry to find a distinguished and sympathetic slut for a wife. When I asked him about his marital plans, he said that he was still looking forward to settling down with a wife and children someday but that now he recognized that when he thought of rough sex, of
la baise harde
, he thought of men. And again he flatteringly blamed me for having corrupted him even while he admitted he was looking for someone else, another man, to love.

Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his “husband,” despite his revulsion against camp. I think he was trying to come up with a way that would let our friendship continue while giving each of us permission to pursue other people. Once he somberly spoke of me as his
mécène
(or “patron”) but I winced and he quickly withdrew the description. I wouldn’t have minded playing his father, but that never occurred to him.

I’m afraid I’m making him sound too cold. He had that sweet kid-brother charm, especially around women. All those former debutantes from Bordeaux living in Paris felt free to ask him to run an errand or install a bookcase, which he did with unreflecting devotion. He was careful (far more careful than any American would have been) to distinguish between a pal and a friend, but the true friends exercised an almost limitless power over him. Jean-Loup was quite proud of his capacity for friendship. When he would say that he was a rotten lover—elusive, unsure of his direction—he’d also assure me that he’d always remain my faithful friend, and I believed him. I knew that he was, in fact, waiting for our passion to wear itself out so that a more decent friendship could declare itself.

He wasn’t a friend during sex or just afterward; he’d always
shower, dress and leave as quickly as possible. Once, when he glanced back at the rubble we had made of the bedroom, he said all that evidence of our bestiality disgusted him. Nor was he especially kind to me around our playmates. To them, paradoxically, he enjoyed demonstrating how thoroughly lie was at home in my apartment. He was the little lord of the manor. Yet he’d compliment me on how well I “received” people and assure me I could always open a restaurant in New York someday if my career as a writer petered out. He didn’t take my writing too seriously. It had shocked him the few times he’d dipped into it. He preferred the lucidity and humanism of Milan Kundera, his favorite writer. In fact none of our playmates read me, and their indifference pleased me. It left me alone with my wet sand.

He took a reserved interest in my health. He was relieved that my blood tests every six months suggested the virus was still dormant. He was pleased
I
no longer smoked or drank (though like most French people he didn’t consider champagne alcoholic). During one of our sex games he poured half a bottle of red Sancerre down my throat; the etiquette of the situation forbade my refusal, but it was the only time I had tasted alcohol in nearly ten years. We were convinced that the sort of sex we practiced might be demented but was surely safe; in fact we had made it demented since it had to stay safe.

He was negative. While he waited for his results, he said that if they turned out positive his greatest regret would be that he wouldn’t be able to father children. A future without a family seemed unbearable. As long as his boy’s body with its beautifully shaped man’s penis remained unmarked, without a sign of its past or a curse over its future, he was happy to lend himself to our games.