The Married Man by Edmund White Read Free Book Online

others. She wasn’t fussy at all or coy or full of feminine wiles.
    He’d read somewhere that women imagined men want to feeluseful to women and that they delight in performing acts of gallantry; Joséphine was not laboring under any such misapprehension. She knew exactly how ungallant men could be. She was so beautiful and confident that all she needed to do was tug at her thick lustrous hair with a brush, wriggle into jeans or black pantyhose and a short skirt and pull on a tight T-shirt and she was ready to go out. Tired with bluish circles under her eyes, she was beautiful, just as flushed and glowing at the gym she was beautiful; she had nothing but varieties of beauty to offer. He’d seen her in a black silk dress at the Opera, borrowed pearls around her neck, and she’d been so cold and exquisite that, on a whim, he’d introduced her with gratifying, hand-kissing results, to a snobbish fag as “the Princess Radziwill.” But she was just as extraordinary at the end of a long, tiring trip (they often traveled together); she’d be beautiful even during childbirth, he decided.
    She was as naive as a Kansan in Paris. Irony sailed right over her head. She never got a joke and the least bit of teasing reduced her to tears rather than the usual sulky, annoyed amusement. No matter how much Austin exaggerated or, in a New York reflex, said the opposite of what he meant in exasperated italics, Joséphine, wide-eyed, would say,
“Vraiment?
Really?”
    She and Gregg had been lovers for six troubled, hilarious months full of laughter and tears. Now it was one of their successful party pieces, their tumbled, contradictory accounts of all their feelings.
    The routine, of course, hid the sharp pain Joséphine had suffered as well as Gregg’s sadness at bidding so many scalding tears to such lovely ice-blue eyes, the eyes of one of his only friends, after all.
    Now Austin talked across the restaurant table about Big Julien. “He’s very
vieille France
, don’t you think?”
    “Vieille …?”
    “God, Joséphine, sometimes I have the feeling
I’m
the Frenchman and
you’re
the American. You know, Old France, proper, stuffy,
comme il faut.”
    She blinked, confused, in the lamplight that shed its warmth over their table on this gray, rainy late April day. “He has nice manners,” she said hopefully, afraid to venture more.
    “Do you think he’s gay?”
    “What?
Isn’t
he gay?” she asked, alarmed again. Until she’d moved to Paris, apparently she’d never met a single homosexual or even thought about the whole vexing subject of sexual variety. She’d dealt with impotence, premature ejaculation, violence, balding, infidelity, logorrhea, prostate problems, and all the other things men might contrive to irritate a woman, but she’d worked from the simple axiom that all these men more or less desired her.
    “Well, he
says
he’s bisexual,” Austin insinuated with a pretended skepticism and a vocal raised eyebrow, although in truth he had no doubts at all about either side of Julien’s sexuality; he simply wanted to provoke a spate of girl talk.
    “You
have
been to bed with him, haven’t you?” she asked, going with chat-deflecting directness to the sore heart of the matter.
    “Not really.”
    “Now Austin …” she admonished, raising one translucent forefinger with its clear, small, unpolished nail. She was calling for a truth that was just as unvarnished. She pronounced his name as though it were Ostend, the Belgian port. Her habit of catching him out was something she’d picked up from Gregg, a tic that she’d learned was considered generally amusing.
    “Well,” he spluttered, “I think even he is puzzled, but I don’t dare seduce him before I’ve explained to him about being seropositive. Or what would you say?” He was half-hoping for some superior French worldliness that would get him off the moral hook.
    Joséphine acknowledged Austin’s health status only during those rare times when he