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

glances with his French friends—can humankind bear so much candor? he seemed to be asking. Isn’t there something inherently alarming about so much explicitness, even when the subject is safe?
    The worst thing about knowing he was positive was that now he was under an obligation to tell his partners. Not that he informed the man he picked up in the park or the guy he lured over on the phone-chat line. Austin had an American friend in Paris, a well-known gay novelist, who’d come out as positive on TV and in the press, and now he was obliged to be honest with everyone, but Austin was a nobody. At least he’d never made any public statements. His friend the writer was apparently having trouble getting laid these days—so much for honesty.
    No, truly the worst thing was studying one’s body every morning in the shower for auguries. Even in that regard he envied all those hysterical gay guys back in New York or San Francisco who knew to become alarmed about the slightly raised, wine-colored blemish, not the flat, black mole or whatever, who could tell just when a cough became “persistent” enough to be worrying or whether a damp pillowcase and a wet head counted as “night sweats.”
    He both feared and embraced the French silence in the face of thisdisease (and of all other fatal maladies). Something superstitious in him whispered that if you didn’t think about it, the virus would go away. From one month to the next he never heard the dreaded three letters
(VIH
in French rather than HIV, as if the French version of the disease itself were the reverse mirror image of the American, just as the French acronym
SIDA
was an anagram of AIDS). Americans sat up telling each other horror stories, but they were later astonished when their worst fantasies came true, as if they’d hoped to ward off evil by talking it into submission or by taking homeopathic doses of it. The French, however, feared summoning an evil genius by pronouncing its name. Neither system worked. When the lioness awakened and felt the first hunger pains, she would show her claws.
    He knew in his heart that the French approach was especially unsuited to the epidemic. His friend Hervé last year had been so
ashamed
of falling ill that he’d slunk back home to his village in the Dordogne without calling a single friend. Only his ex-lover Gilles had stayed in touch, although Hervé’s grandmother irrationally blamed Gilles for having given him AIDS. Each time Gilles called she’d say that Hervé was sleeping but would call back later. A month later, the next time Gilles phoned, Hervé had already been dead and buried for eleven days.
    It was as if a few young men in the provinces managed to escape to Paris where they lived for a few seasons, where they clipped their heads, lifted some weights, danced on Ecstasy, tattooed one haunch with a butterfly and had sex with hundreds of other underemployed
types
—and then they were driven home to Sarlat by their somber families, all dressed in black as if out for their Easter duties, and they disappeared in a whispered diminuendo, the score marked
ppppp…
.
    What didn’t work out about this system was that no young bright kid coming up to Paris ever saw his predecessor, skinny and crippled, hobbling back down to the provinces. The best prevention, the most convincing proof of the necessity for safe sex, was ocular evidence, actually
seeing
KS blotches on skinny arms or watching rail-thin old men of twenty staggering into a restaurant on two canes, sharpened cheekbones about to rub through the parchment-thin skin, the eyes as bulbous as an insect’s. But in Paris, magical city of elegance andromance, men with AIDS were no more visible than the retarded, the mad or the lame—they’d all been whisked off to some shuttered house in Aquitaine. The French were masters of silence, and as ACT-UP claimed, “Silence = Death.”
    Austin invited Big Julien away for the weekend. In his Michelin guide he’d found a luxury