Authors: Edmund White
“Would you like to go to Morocco with me?” I asked him suddenly. “For a week? A magazine will pay our fares. It’s the south of Morocco. It should be amusing. I don’t know it at all, but I think it’s better to go somewhere brand new—” (“with a lover” were the words I suppressed).
“Sure.”
He said he hadn’t traveled anywhere in Europe or Africa except for two trips to Italy.
Although I knew things can’t be rushed, that intimacy follows its own sequence, I found myself saying, “We should be lovers—you have everything, beauty and intelligence.” Then I added: “And we get on so well.” My reasoning was absurd: his beauty and intelligence were precisely what made him unavailable.
I scarcely wanted him to reply. As long as he didn’t I could nurse my illusions. “That would depend,” he said, “on our being compatible sexually, don’t you think?” Then he asked, with his unblinking gravity, “What’s your sexuality like?” For the first time I could hear a faint Georgia accent in the way the syllables of “sexuality” got stretched out.
“It depends on the person,” I said, stalling. Then, finding my answer lamentable, I pushed all my chips forward on one number: “I like pain.”
“So do I,” he said. “And my penis has never—no man has ever touched it.”
He had had only three lovers and they had all been heterosexuals or fancied they were. In any event they had had his
sort of
pudeur
about uttering endearments to another man. He had a lover now, Thierry, someone he met two years before at the club. The first time they saw each other, Paul had been tanked up on booze, smack and steroids, a murderous cocktail, and they had a fistfight which had dissolved into a night of violent passion.
Every moment must have been haloed in his memory, for he remembered key phrases Thierry had used. For the last two years they had eaten every meal together. Thierry dressed him in the evening before Paul left for work and corrected his French and table manners. These interventions were often nasty, sometimes violent. “What language are you speaking now?” he would demand if Paul made the slightest error. When Paul asked for a little tenderness in bed, Thierry would say, “Oh-ho, like Mama and Papa now, is it?” and then leave the room. Paul fought back—he broke his hand once because he hit Thierry so hard. “Of course he’d say that it was all my fault,” Paul said, “that all he wants is peace, blue skies.” He smiled. “Thierry is a businessman, very dignified. He has never owned a piece of leather in his life. I despise leather. It robs violence of all the”—his smile now radiant, the mainsail creaking as it comes around—“the
sacramental.”
He laughed, shaking, and emitted a strange chortle that I didn’t really understand. It came out of a sensibility I hadn’t glimpsed in him before.
Paul longed for us to reach the desert; he had never seen it before.
We started out at Agadir and took a taxi to the mud-walled town of Taroudant. There we hired a car and drove to Ouarzazate, which had been spoiled by organized tourism: it had become Anywhere Sunny. Then we drove south to Zagora. It was just twenty kilometers beyond Zagora, people said, that
the desert started. I warned Paul the desert could be disappointing: “You’re never alone. There’s always someone spying on you from over the next dune. And it rains. I saw the rain pour over Syria.”
Paul loved maps. Sometimes I could see in him the solitary Georgia genius in love with his best friend’s father, the sheriff, a kid lurking around home in the hot, shuttered afternoons, daydreaming over the globe that his head so resembled, his mind racing on homemade LSD. He knew how to refold maps, but when they were open he would press his palms over their creases as though opening his own eyes wider and wider.
I did all the driving, through adobe cities built along narrow, palm-lined roads. In every town boys wanted to be our guides, sell us trinkets or carpets or their own bodies. They hissed at us at night from the shadows of town walls: lean and finely muscled adolescents hissing to attract our attention, their brown hands massaging a lump beneath the flowing blue acrylic jellabas mass-produced in China. To pass them up with a smile was a new experience for me. I had Paul beside me, this noble pacing lion. I remembered a Paris friend calling me just before we left for Morocco, saying he had written a letter to a friend, “telling him I’d seen you walking down the boulevard Saint-Germain beside the young Hercules with hair the color of copper.” In Morocco there was no one big enough, powerful enough or cruel enough to interest Paul.
Perhaps it was due to the clear, memorable way Paul had defined his sexual nature, but during our cold nights together I lay in his great arms and never once felt excited, just an immense surge of peace and gratitude. Our predicament, we felt, was like a Greek myth. “Two people love each other,” I said, “but the gods have cursed them by giving them the identical passions.” I was being presumptuous sneaking in the phrase “Two people love each other,” because it wasn’t at all clear that he loved me.
One night we went to the movies and saw an Italian adventure film starring American weightlifters and dubbed in French, a story set in a back-lot castle with a perfunctory princess in hot pants. There was an evil prince whose handsome face melted to reveal the devil’s underneath. His victim (“All heroes are masochists,” Paul declared) was an awkward bodybuilder not yet comfortable in his newly acquired bulk, who had challenged the evil prince’s supremacy and now had to be flayed alive. Paul clapped and chortled and, during the tense scenes, physically braced himself. This was the Paul who had explained what Derrida had said of Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s last poems, who claimed that literature could be studied only through rhetoric, grammar and genre and who considered Ronsard a greater poet than Shakespeare (because of Ronsard’s combination of passion and logic, satyr and god, in place of the mere conversational fluency which Paul regarded as the flaw and genius of English): this was the same Paul who booed and cheered as the villain smote the hero before a respectful audience, the air thick with smoke and the flickers of flashlights. It was a movie in which big men were hurting each other.
Jean-Loup would have snorted, his worst prejudices about Americans confirmed, for as we traveled, drawing closer and closer to the desert, we confided more and more in each other. As we drove through the “valley of a thousand Casbahs,” Paul told me about threats to his life. “When someone at the club pulls a gun on me, and it’s happened three times, I say, ‘I’m sorry but guns are not permitted on the premises,’ and it works, they go away, but mine is a suicidal response.” Paul was someone on whom nothing was wasted; nevertheless he was not always alive to all possibilities, at least not instantly. I told him I was positive, but he didn’t react. Behind the
extremely dark sunglasses, there was this presence, breathing and thinking but not reacting.
Our hotel, the Hesperides, had been built into the sunbaked mud ramparts in the ruins of the pasha’s palace. We stared into an octagonal, palm-shaded pool glistening with black rocks that then slid and clicked—ah, tortoises! There couldn’t have been more than five guests, and the porters, bored and curious, tripped over themselves serving us. We slept in each other’s arms night after night and I stroked his great body as though he were a prize animal,
la belle bête.
My own sense of who I was in this story was highly unstable. I flickered back and forth, wanting to be the blond warrior’s fleshy, pale concubine or then the bearded pasha himself, feeding drugged sherbets to the beautiful Circassian slave I had bought. I thought seriously that I wouldn’t mind buying and owning another human being—if it was Paul.
The next day we picked up some hitchhikers, who, when we reached their destination, asked us in for mint tea, which we sipped barefoot in a richly carpeted room. A baby and a chicken watched us through the doorway from the sun-white courtyard. Every one of our encounters seemed to end with a carpet, usually one we were supposed to buy. In a village called Wodz, I remember both of us smiling as we observed how long and devious the path to the carpet could become: there was first a tourist excursion through miles of Casbahs, nearly abandoned except for an old veiled woman poking a fire in a now roofless harem; then we took a stroll through an irrigated palm plantation, where a woman leading a donkey took off her turban, a blue bath towel, and filled it with dates, which she gave us with a golden grin; and finally we paid a “surprise visit” to the guide’s “brother,” the carpet merchant who happened to have just returned from the desert with exotic Tuareg rugs. Their prices, to emphasize their exoticism, he pretended to translate from Tuareg dollars into dirham.
We laughed, bargained, bought, happy anytime our shoulders touched or eyes met. We told everyone we were Danes, since Danish was the one language even the most resourceful carpet merchants didn’t know. (“But wait, I have a cousin in the next village who once lived in Copenhagen.”)
Later, when I returned to Paris, I would discover that Jean-Loup had left me for Régis, one of the richest men in France. For the first time in his life he was in love, he would say. He would be wearing Régis’s wedding ring, my Jean-Loup who had refused to stay behind at my apartment after the other guests had left lest he appear too
pédé.
People would suspect him of being interested in the limousine, the town house, the château, but Jean-Loup would insist it was all love.
When he told me, on my return, that he would never sleep with me again—that he had found the man with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life—my response surprised him.
“Ça tombe bien,”
I said (“That suits me fine”).
Jean-Loup blurted out: “But you’re supposed to be furious.” It wasn’t that he wanted me to fight to get him back, though he might have enjoyed it, but that his vanity demanded that I protest; my own vanity made me concede him with a smile. Feverishly I filled him in on my recent passion for Paul and the strategies I had devised for unloading him, Jean-Loup. It’s true I had thought of fixing him up with a well-heeled handsome young American.
Jean-Loup’s eyes widened. “I had no idea,” he said, “that things had gone so far.” Perhaps in revenge he told me how he had met Régis. It seems that, while I was away, a dear friend of mine had fixed them up.
I was suddenly furious and couldn’t drop the subject. I railed and railed against the dear friend: “When I think he ate my food, drank my drink, all the while plotting to marry you off
to a millionaire in order to advance his own miserable little interests….”
“Let me remind you that Régis’s money means nothing to me. No, what I like is his good humor, his sincerity, his discretion. It was hard for me to be known as your lover—your homosexuality is too evident. Régis is very discreet.”
“What rubbish,” I would say a few days later when Jean-Loup repeated the remark about Régis’s discretion. “He’s famous for surrounding himself with aunties who discuss the price of lace the livelong day.”
“Ah,” Jean-Loup replied, reassured, “you’ve been filled in, I see”
(“Tu t’en renseignes”).
All sparkling and droll, except a terrible sickness, like an infection caused by the prick of a diamond brooch, had set in. When I realized that I would never be able to abandon myself again to Jean-Loup’s perverse needs, when I thought that Régis was enjoying the marriage with him I’d reconciled myself never to know, when I saw the serenity with which Jean-Loup now “assumed” his homosexuality, I felt myself sinking, but genuinely sinking, as though I really were falling, and my face had a permanently hot blush. I described this feeling of falling and heat to Paul. “That’s jealousy,” he said. “You’re jealous.” That must be it, I thought, I who had never been jealous before. If I had behaved so generously with earlier loves lost it was because
I
had never before been consumed by a passion this feverish.
Jealousy, yes, it was jealousy, and never before had I so wanted to hurt someone I loved, and that humiliated me further. A member of the playpen dined at Régis’s
hôtel particulier.
“They hold hands all the time,” she said. “I was agreeably surprised by Régis, a charming man. The house is more a museum than a house. Jean-Loup kept calling the butler for more champagne, and we almost burst out laughing. It was like a dream.”
Every detail fed my rancor—Régis’s charm, wealth, looks (“Not handsome but attractive”).
Everything.
Paul had a photographic memory, and, during the hours spent together in the car in Morocco, he recited page after page of Racine or Ronsard or Sir Philip Sidney. He also continued the story of his life. I wanted to know every detail—the bloody scenes on the steps of the disco, the recourse to dangerous drugs, so despised by the clenched-jaw cocaine set. I wanted to hear that he credited his lover with saving him from being a junkie, a drunk and a thug. “He was the one who got me back into school.”
“A master, I see,” I thought.
“School
master.”
“Now I study Cicéron and prepare my
maîtrise
, but then I was just an animal, a disoriented bull—I’d even gotten into beating up fags down by the Seine at dawn when I was really drunk.”
He gave me a story he had written. It was Hellenistic in tone, precious and edgy, flirting with the diffuse lushness of a Pre-Raphaelite prose, rich but bleached, like a tapestry left out in the sun. I suppose he must have had in mind Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” but Paul’s story was more touching, less cold, more comprehensible. That such a story could never be published in the minimalist, plain-speaking 1980s seemed never to have occurred to him. Could it be that housed in such a massive body he had no need for indirect proofs of power and accomplishment? Or was he so sure of his taste that recognition scarcely interested him at all?
The story is slow to name its characters, but begins with a woman who turns out to be Athena. She discovers a flute and how to get music out of it, but her sisters, seeing her puffing away, laugh at the face she’s making. Athena throws
the flute down and in a rage places a curse on it: “Whoever would make use of it next must die.” Her humiliation would cost a life.