Skinned Alive (23 page)

Without doing much Mark attracted a whole solar system of playmates around him every evening. Like a stage Irishman in London, he’d always played the Rebel Gentleman among the Yankees, for whom southernness meant gallantry, borderline intelligence and a bibulous conviviality. He feared that he’d misled all those guys who, imitating him, had worn madras, sniffed ethyl and voted Republican—and had had sex with hundreds and hundreds of partners. All those hot athletic men came now to haunt him with their skin hung like a wet shirt on a hanger.

Mark began to change. His doctor, no longer so cheerful, ordered Mark to stop smoking: “You have chronic bronchitis and it can only get worse. Go to Smokenders; they have a foolproof program.” Mark had a charming way of hanging his head like a kid, pawing the floor and saying loudly with that winning southern accent, “Aw, Doc, give a fella a break,” but the doctor, pudgy and owly after his own recent double withdrawal from nicotine and cocaine, stood firm.

Mark went to the Smokender sessions dutifully, switched to a vile mentholated brand, wrapped each pack in a paper sleeve, sat through gruesome movies of lungs, saved all his butts in one big Mason jar and compiled lists of minor, personal, nongruesome reasons for quitting.

It worked. He stopped smoking, gained twenty pounds and went almost overnight from a young guy in his early thirties to a middle-aged man deep into his forties. He watched his father’s jowly face overwhelm his own sharp features. He had no desire to touch a cigarette. But he felt that stopping smoking had turned him from a hot number into a slow-burning cipher.

Without the nicotine to counteract the effects of alcohol, he became drunk more easily. One night he was so high he couldn’t get his newly fat body up the ladder to his loft bed. He slept on his couch and woke with such a feeling of drenched, panicked shame that he never again took another drink. He warned himself that if he started again he’d have to join Alcoholics Anonymous, and that dire prospect kept him sober. Of course his AA friends screeched at him he was just on a “dry drunk,” but that suited him fine as long as he stayed sober. Sometimes he did envy them. The party was still going on for them, if dry this time, whereas he was slowly withdrawing.

After he sobered up a previously unsuspected sweet tooth grew in and he became still stouter. He gnashed at Godiva chocolates and Lanciani brownies with fury, wolfing his curse.

Ned was his only consolation. Ned was sweet and adaptable without being a pushover. If people ignored him at a dinner party or failed to remember his name after he’d been introduced several times, he complained loudly. He was handsome without the loss of individuality that good looks usually imply. He had teeth that weren’t perfect and a queer way of cocking his head to one side which, when coupled with a confused smile, gave him a goofy, dazzled air. On bad days he was certain that people were making fun of him, and then Mark would call him Paranoid Petey. His sweetness touched Mark—every feeling that was struck inside Ned vibrated somewhere inside Mark.

They’d been introduced formally (well, not so formally as
all that) by a mutual friend who’d said to Mark, rubbing his hands like a matchmaker, “Have I got a boy for you.” That had been in late ’81 when the official line had been “Limit the number of your partners. Know their names.” Ned was a very cute name to know, and if less was better, then just one would surely be best.

There was an old-fashioned sweetness about their love from the very beginning. At their first encounter over drinks Ned had been cooking a roast lamb and had asked Mark how to test it for the right degree of pinkness. Mark didn’t have the foggiest and they both laughed at their shared ineptitude. Two nights later Mark had been entertaining three friends from Venice and had invited Ned to help out, since Ned had studied a year in Florence and sort of spoke Italian, as did Mark. Ned dressed perfectly, smiled often and kept Mark company while he washed up.

As a southerner, Mark took social life very seriously. He couldn’t endure New York insolence—the spiteful attacks called “teasing,” the shameless social climbing (heads poking up like periscopes over the sea of faces), the charged pairings of conspirators who ignored the melee around them. Mark believed in keeping one conversation (frivolous, decorous) going among the eight dinner guests. He believed in dressing carefully for every occasion, even schlepping to the deli. He was for stoicism rather than bellyaching, for quips rather than teasing, for light opinions rather than heavy information, dull kindness rather than rapier wit—all the values, in short, his Episcopalian mother (poor, imperious) had imparted to his (rich and humble) Baptist father.

Although Ned wasn’t a southerner he was a little Boston aristocrat who shared Mark’s patriarchal values. Ned automatically called older men “sir,” opened doors for ladies, instantly identified himself on the phone by name and said “Good evening” when he got into a taxi. He also had fresh, clear
emotions. If someone told him a sad story (and more and more of the stories these days were sad), Ned cried quickly and copiously. He never worried about being consistent. He wasn’t the kind of stuffed shirt who decides you’re only hurting beggars by giving them handouts; if the beggar looked pitiful, Ned would brush away tears and empty his pockets. He was a volunteer for lots of charities.

Ned especially liked Joshua, Mark’s best friend, who was well into his fifties, an English professor and a well-known critic of contemporary poetry. When Joshua was recovering from cataract surgery Ned worked for him, reading him his mail, taking dictation, preparing meals, telling him what the characters were doing on TV.

In fact, for a while Ned saw a lot more of Joshua than Mark did. Mark had to settle for daily phone calls.

Joshua was a master of the art of the telephone call. Like Madame de Sévigné, who could plunge headlong into a story in the first line of a letter, Joshua would sometimes start off by singing the latest pop song or quoting the latest advertising jingle. Sometimes he’d pretend to be someone else. Mark would have an ancient sex pervert on the line wanting to join the Bunyonette Orgy Club, or a little kid saying, “I’m twelve years old and I read your profile in
Christopher Street
, the gay magazine….”

Or Joshua would start by quoting a really juicy academic absurdity he’d gone truffling after in a learned journal. Or he’d quote from Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn” or discuss brim width at his hatmaker’s, Gélot, in Paris. For such an unworldly man he was terribly
mondain.

If he was munching something he’d give the recipe. An eavesdropper might have been startled by his instructions for grated zucchini: “First you peel and rape six courgettes….”

In their drinking days Joshua and Mark would eat a T-bone and green beans at Duff’s on Christopher Street, down a bottle
of wine and then head over to the Riv on Sheridan Square, where they’d sip sweet, dangerous stingers. In the warm weather the glass walls would open up and they’d be seated almost in the midst of all the grit and clowning, the sudden updraft through the subway grate, the mammoth black men in shorts on skates, their wrists circled by glowing fluorescent bracelets, the susurrus and scent of queens from the provinces mixed in with the sweat and grunts of the local machos. When they were quite drunk Mark and Joshua would speak to each other in their version of Italian, because they’d spent many summers together in Venice and liked to imagine they were Italians, even Italian housewives who addressed one another with feigned affection as
carissima.
Then Mark and Joshua would pour themselves into separate taxis, wave and head in opposite directions home. There they’d call each other once more, just to say good night. No one could ever have fitted into such a closed corporation of a friendship, but Ned did.

Mark and Joshua had met fifteen years ago at the ballet. At first they had had nothing else in common (later their friendship itself was what they shared). For Mark the ballet was prowess, gymnastics as a foreglimpse of paradise, a way of seeing perfect men powering long-legged, long-necked women through the crosslit air. For Joshua it was Utopia. As he said, “All these physically deformed, argumentative New York intellectuals in the audience couldn’t accept any vision of society except something nonverbal and sublimely athletic.” They went at least twice a week to the State Theater and called all the performers by their first names, although they didn’t know them. Mark thought of Balanchine as by definition a European—a Russian who had lived in Paris—and he ascribed Balanchine’s clarity and hardness to his cosmopolitan background.

As things became grimmer, Mark was summoned more and more frequently to bedsides and graves. Ned kept him happy,
not through any services he performed, since they were equally sloppy and incompetent in the kitchen and Ned never hid his depressions except from what they both called “company.” No, what Ned offered was sweetness. They’d hug each other in the loft bed and say, “I love you, Petes.”

“Aren’t we cozy here, Peters?” That was their word for happy: “cozy.”

And then they moved to Paris, not for any special reason but because Mark knew that if he didn’t make an effort he’d end up in St. Thomas, get totally lazy, still fatter, and start drinking again. Mark had heard about this really neat cooking school in Paris where the chefs worked under mirrors all morning while everyone looked up and took notes, then the class ate the results. American apprentices did all the chopping and translated the instructions into English. The Paris trip sounded appealing to Ned, who’d once studied Italian and art history at an American brat school in Florence and had never stopped daydreaming about “Europe,” a unity that existed more in the American imagination than in any actual Frenchman’s or Englishman’s mind.

What they didn’t say, Mark and Ned, was that they hoped the party would go on in Europe as it had before in the States. It amused Mark to call Europe the “New World,” since it was all new to him. And just as Europeans had once gone to America in search of sex, in the same spirit he’d come to the New World.

They found a pretty house on the rue de Verneuil, just a few blocks from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The street was lined with the gray, unbroken façades of severe eighteenth-century town houses, but if you punched out the right code and pushed through the teal-blue lacquered doors you crossed a courtyard filled with planters and reached their white wood house with the green shutters and the small rooms that an inspired maniac had painted floor to ceiling with
faux marbre
, faux malachite
and putti swirling in gray and pink clouds. Despite this hectic decor, the house was charming and quieter than a cottage down a village lane, where invariably there are animals, birds, people and cars. Here there was only silence filtered through the crepitation of rain in the courtyard. Mark amused his French friends when he referred unwittingly to the stately
hôtels particuliers
in his neighborhood as
palais;
he was used to Italy, where even the meanest apartment block counted as a
palazzo.

He and Ned made big fires in the fireplaces, thoroughly enjoyed the comedy of half learning French and took trains nearly everywhere, to Stockholm and Barcelona, Rome and Amsterdam. Mark told himself he was scouting picturesque locales for the Bunyonettes, and from time to time he took notes on prices, quality of service, sights to see and nearest gay bars.

He even enrolled in the cooking school and bought all the
batterie de cuisine
that the school had for sale. But though he took down the instructions for lobster bisque, rabbit in its own blood and lemon crêpes, he never even unpacked the crêpe pan.

They both cruised. Without discussing it they had an agreement not to bring anyone home. They’d also tacitly consented to continue sleeping in the same bed. Every night they headed out to the back-room bars where indeed the party was still in full swing. People were shorter and more perfumed and kissed more than in the old days in New York, but what the French called
touche-pipi
went on without restraint. One couldn’t say the gay community in Paris was irresponsible, since no such community existed, at least not as far as Mark could figure out. They’d stumble home at two or three in the morning, shower and crawl innocently into their big bed with the old, eyeletted linen. Back home people had warned them to say they were from Canada or England, but the French weren’t scared of the disease and besides appeared to like Americans.
The French thought Americans were at once uncultured and wildly up-to-date and kind, although the kindness was sometimes taken as proof of stupidity. Some kid assured Mark,
“Ned est toujours gentil—et pas du tout bête!”
as though good humor were usually cretinous.

Here Mark was, dashing about from the Alliance Française to the cooking school, checking out the discos and saunas, renting cars for jaunts to châteaux and running up thousand-dollar phone bills calling all his friends in New York to praise Paris and to assure them the French were “real shy and sweet” under that stylish Gallic disdain. He felt rejuvenated and even lost three kilos, though he had ten more to go. Joshua filled him in on the latest doings of Mr. B. and Jerry, that is, the choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.

Although Ned was twenty-eight he looked twenty and picked up Parisian styles so quickly that soon he’d become the choicest Kiki in town, hair military short on the sides and gelled high on top, jeans rolled and military boots huge. He and Mark would wander separately about in the rain for hours memorizing street names. Often they’d help lost compatriots for a moment, then vanish into the attractive mystery of being half-Gallicized Americans. Mark overheard Ned pretending to confuse “assist” for “attend” and “actual” for “present,” and kept teasing him (“You big phony”) with a happy smile on his face. The happiness was that of children who laugh to see themselves in a distorting mirror.

But they couldn’t get a real social life off the ground. In New York Mark had had his regulars stopping in unannounced for cocktails. There’d always been pretty men hanging out for the coke or the good times or to meet one another. In Paris people seemed to think it was sufficient to check in once a month to keep a friendship alive. And if they liked Mark and Ned and submitted with a laugh and a blush to their nosy questions in English, in French they were disdainful toward
the other French guys. Everyone, moreover, thought it strange Mark and Ned knew only gays; French people kept referring contemptuously to the “ghetto.”