The Married Man by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page A

mentioned it. Then she’d frown and narrow her eyes as though she were staring into a sunset that had given her a very bad headache. “Yes, you must,” she said in hushed tones, but he wasn’t sure she wasn’t copying other people’s conventions of concern.
    “Should we have sex first a few times and
then
should I mention it? Won’t he drop me right away if I tell him first?” Austin knew that if a gay American was overhearing him he’d be horrified at Austin’s ethical wobbling.
    “Yes,” Joséphine said, as she disappointed Austin by waving off the dessert menu and ordering an espresso for both of them, a mother’s disabused glance over imaginary glasses to show she’d brookno whining objections to her spartan good sense from her greedy friend. “Maybe it would be best if you got him hooked
(accroché)
before you sprang on him any unpleasant news.”
    Austin was surprised to hear his possibly imminent death demoted to the status of the “unpleasant”
(désagréable)
. In truth, he had no symptoms and even looked embarrassingly robust.
    Austin and Peter, his American ex-lover, had been tested together in Paris in 1986, three years earlier, because their French doctor with the Greek name had insisted. People said that the doctor himself was infected with the virus. Peter, a genuine escapist, had objected to the whole process, arguing Austin would be thrown out of France if positive and sent home to the States in leg irons (Peter had already decided to move back). “And you won’t be able to travel and practice your profession,” Peter said with such energy and fussy precision that Austin suspected he must be repeating something he’d read in the paranoid gay press. “In Sweden, they’re sending seropositives to a prison island.” Neither Austin nor Peter was certain you said “seropositives” in English, which Peter in particular found annoying and disorienting in his capacity as a super patriot who’d never condescended to learn any French beyond the most approximate bar-room gabbling. “In Munich they test you at the border and to stay in India more than a month you must undergo a blood test.”
    “So those places would be eliminated in any event,” Austin pointed out.
    “Anyway, who wants to go to Munich, European capital of vulgarity and fascism, all those middle-aged men linking arms and wearing lederhosen? And India is too creepy-crawly for those-who-are-positive,” he said, hoping he’d found a formula for their condition that was both graceful and good English.
    Cut off from America, from the massive protests and the underground treatment newsletters, from the hours and hours of frightened midnight conversations with friends by phone and the organized safesex and massage sessions, far from the hysteria and the solace, Austin did not know what to think of this disease that had taken them by chance, as though he had awakened to find himself in a cave under the heavy paw of a lioness, who was licking him for the momentand breathing all over him with her gamy, carrion smell but who was capable of showing her claws and devouring him today … or tomorrow.
    Even after Peter moved back to the States, he had a lingering resentment against Austin for having insisted they be tested.
    And Austin, too, felt that he’d gained nothing by knowing, since the only available treatments didn’t seem to work. He’d had a cheerfully defiant conviction that learning the truth is always liberating, but since moving to Europe he’d come to doubt his democratic frankness, his “transparence,” as the French called it, as though it were no more interesting than a clear pane of glass. He’d learned not to blurt out whatever happened to be passing through his mind and, out of the same curbing of instinct, he’d started to shy away from bald declarations of facts, even when other people made them. If another American called out anything in a loud, unironic voice, he’d exchange amused but slightly alarmed