Skinned Alive (24 page)

So now social life was something Mark surrendered as well, along with booze and cigarettes and drugs. Soon he’d have to give up sex, no doubt, but not yet, not yet. Like the French boys he knew he said he was being “prudent” and “cautious,” but the prudence amounted to nothing more than approaching only those boys who appealed to him, the caution to vowing not to go this far tomorrow night.

Even so, Mark had much less sex, since in Paris no one knew who he was and he didn’t get any free rides. In New York people admired money more than here, or rather they confused wealth with sexiness.

Ned had no such restraints imposed on him. He had that foolish grin, crazy American accent and never worked, so he was as attractive as he was available. He met someone named Luc.

“Is he cute, Petes?”

“Peters, he’s just a flirt.”

“Petey, I know you’re going to leave me.” Mark whispered to their stuffed bear, “Mr. Peters, he’s going to dump fat old us for this garlic-smelling, lap-swimming, four-foot-tall, fireball do-nothing.”

“Luc hates garlic and he has more energy than both of us. He’s some sort of weird French nurse running around to old ladies at six in the morning giving them shots.”

The more Mark heard about Luc the more he worried. Ned found every banal remark Luc made
génial
or
géant.
He was so enamored he was even slipping into scrappy French around Mark, who had to lay down a new rule: “Look, Petes, no Frog in the house. I’m serious.” Ned tried to downplay his ardor, but since Mark was his only real friend in Paris and certainly his best buddy in the whole world, he couldn’t resist talking
to him about his obsession. He attempted to disguise it as a series of complaints: “Luc is such an egomaniac he invites three of his friends over to watch him take a bath”; “I know you never thought I’d like opera but I’m humming it because Luc plays that damn caterwauling all day”; “He’s so absurdly macho he always insists on running the show sexually, not that I exactly mind.”

Mark realized then how fragile their love was. Since he and Ned didn’t have sex, they were dependent on outsiders. The least threatening kind of adventure was one-time-only tricks, and in the old days New York would have turned up an inexhaustible supply of them. But the statistics were closing in on them and they’d die if they kept up this pace. Luc was right for Ned, but what if Ned moved out? Mark would have preferred a less possessive lover for Ned.

He thought they might already be harboring this lazy seed, this death plant. Ned and Mark both believed that if they slept enough their immunities would resist the virus; they were always sinking into deep, swooning naps to the sound of the rain in the courtyard, which was like the sound of newspaper burning.

Out of deference to Mark, Ned saw less of Luc, but this very gift caused Ned to resent Mark and made the already troubled Luc crack. He sold his nursing practice, sublet his apartment and headed off to Brazil to be a Club Med GO
(Gentil Organisateur).

To compensate for this loss Ned enrolled in a History of French Art course at the Louvre, but in June, after a year in Paris, they both realized they were as rootless as when they’d arrived. Ned was on a nodding, beer-buying basis with dozens of men in the bars, on a lovemaking basis with a few, but with none could he go to a movie or share a secret. Mark knew only a few guys from his gym.

They made plans to spend the end of the summer with
Joshua in Venice. They joined Joshua in the rambling apartment he rented in a palace on the Grand Canal. Despite the flame-shaped windows, the colored marble façades and the turbaned heads that served as door knockers, Venice still felt very familiarly luxurious.

Joshua looked as burnished as the city. He was tan and slim from his daily bastings at the Cipriani pool, where the rich clients were so old Gore Vidal had dubbed the place Lourdes. Joshua worked every afternoon at his desk under the painted allegory of the ceiling. He listened to the soft lapping of the little
rio
under his windows. In the evening they’d wear white shirts and linen suits over that day’s burn and saunter forth into Campo Santo Stefano, which Joshua liked because it was dominated by the statue of a nineteenth-century Dante scholar. Their conversation, however, was anything but scholarly; it was all laughter, boys and gossip. Mark thought he was making such a mistake living in Paris and depriving himself of Joshua’s good humor, always subtle no matter how exhilarating it became. This friendship was the brightest jewel in Mark’s diadem.

And then Ned flew home to Boston for a visit with his parents. Just before he left he said to Mark, “I hope I’m not making a mistake. I’ve never left you alone before. Peters, you’re going to leave me, I know you are, you’re bored with me.” That very night Mark was cruising in jeans along that dark patch between the Piazzetta and Harry’s that looks out across the lagoon toward the illuminated façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. He saw a man with a dazzling smile leaning against the railing. Mark said, “Hello,” and the man said, “You must be American.”

“How did you know?”

“It’s completely obvious—in a nice way.”

Mark, wary of a put-down, said, “Actually I’m an American who lives in Paris. And right now I’m staying with some friends
in an extraordinary palace where Henry James lived and John Singer Sargent painted—it’s a real American hangout. Wanna see it?”

“Sure.”

On the way through the echoing streets they went past the ugliest church in town, San Moise. “Exactly who was Saint Moses?” Mark asked.

His new friend introduced himself as Hajo and said he was German. He mentioned he had become very careful given the health crisis, and Mark, who identified himself as a sort of gay leader, lied and said he, too, had long been circumspect. Mark felt very self-conscious about his weight and told himself there was no reason this blond, slender Hajo in the cashmere blazer would want someone like him. Of course, Mark had to admit to himself, he
had
picked up a cute Spanish kid the night before at the very same cruising spot.

They lit the courtyard, walked past the abandoned
felze
(the shuttered cover for the gondola on rainy days) and mounted the outdoor stone stairs to the
piano nobile
, went on up the inner stairs to Joshua’s floor, closed the painted wood doors to the library and made drinks for themselves. The transistor played some old string concerto and the wake of the passing
vaporetti
slapped the steps of the water gate below.

But no sooner did Mark toast Hajo under that artificial paradise of scholarly muses bearing tomes of Petrarch and Aretino than Hajo put his drink down on the stone floor and kissed Mark, and Mark wondered if you could get high off the liquor in someone else’s mouth, then he wondered how many more times in his life a handsome stranger would kiss him like this with real desire, then he wondered how much longer he’d be alive, then he wondered what this guy’s angle was, why me? It even occurred to him Hajo was a gigolo whom Joshua had hired to cheer him up.

They went to bed and tried to eat each other alive, so hungry
were they both for affection. Up close Mark could see Hajo must be more or less forty himself, and that made him feel good. Everyone assumed Mark went for nothing but kids. But it just happened that way. Twinkies were available, adaptable, ready to pack a bag and take off. Another grown-up came with a complete set of friends, habits, hesitations.

Hajo seemed to like Mark’s body. Over the next few days Mark started giving Hajo a tour of his favorite paintings in Venice. Although Mark got the names and centuries all turned around, Hajo began to call him Professor Bear.

Wounded, Mark said, “Like Jerry Lewis, the Nutty Professor?”

“No, Mark, but because you know so much and you look like a lovable bear, so Professor Bear, but maybe ‘professor’ is a better word in German I think?”

“Maybe. Nobody wants to be a professor in America.”

Whereas Ned had given Mark back his childhood, the silliness and sweetness of lazy days in Charlottesville so long ago, Hajo represented middle age, but not the dimness that term suggested in English, rather the ripeness implied by the French phrase,
la fleur de l’âge.

Hajo was staying at the Gritti Palace in a corner room people called the Elizabeth Taylor suite, because she’d slept there once years ago with Richard Burton. Like most Germans’ his English was fluent, but more unusually he was equally at ease in French and Italian. His clothes were beautiful, not the dark undertaker’s suits Frenchmen affected on the theory that sobriety is discreet and discretion is elegant, but, rather, bright Armani jackets over jeans, antique silk ties with handmade check shirts, high boots so intricately laced they suggested perversion. For someone so dandified Hajo was winningly reluctant to talk about clothes; he even blushed when Mark snooped into his closet and said, “Wow.”

For years Mark had been the one to plan the evening, order
the food, pay the bill, light cigarettes, ask questions, but now he felt himself the focus of attentions more refined than those he’d ever paid anyone. Hajo was especially gallant to Joshua, who was instantly seduced.

Hajo was a film producer and he’d come to Venice for the festival. Unlike everyone else, who stayed at the Excelsior on the Lido to be near the screenings and hoopla, Hajo preferred to live in town at one remove.

As Mark grew to know him, he discovered so many complexities in Hajo that he despaired of ever explaining his new friend to the folks back home. Not that Hajo was full of inner conflicts. No, he was all of a piece, but that piece had strange new contours. Hajo was both a socialist and a socialite—his politics the residue of 1968, a year Americans could scarcely single out but that had marked every European who’d been young at the time, whereas his taste for
mondanités
was something he’d come to more recently and hoped to contain, like a dangerous but exciting drug habit. His picture was frequently in the paper for having escorted a starlet or skied with a prince, and yet he insisted that at Gstaad he preferred to go to bed early with a book and be flown by helicopter to the top of virgin trails (“That way you see all the wild animals on the way down instead of the usual Muffies and Babs”).

He was really a bit like the European movie business itself, Mark came to realize. There was the Berlin Film Festival in freezing February with all those dirty, long-haired hippies in their fifties scuttling through the snow to look at movies from a leftist or lesbian perspective; and then in May there was the Cannes Festival with stars in ermine and chauffeured Mercedes and bathing beauties granting bikini sessions to photographers on the beach. Hajo embodied the contradictions but did so by finding unsuspected kindness and softness in steely international hostesses as well as a queer glamour in dour ex-Maoists who’d traded in revolutionary politics for beer and
bitterness. He seemed to like everyone. As soon as Mark mentioned a name Hajo smiled his huge smile and said, “She’s great! A fabulous woman!” or “Isn’t he sympathetic? Please give him my very best.”

Among his Parisian acquaintances Mark had grown accustomed to a low level of constant grumbling, but with Hajo everything was upbeat. He liked most movies, he was curious about most new political or artistic developments and he thought nothing of hopping on a plane to see a new ballet in Marseille or a fashion show in Milan. For several summers he’d rented a house in East Hampton, and he prided himself on his knowledge of America. His only hypocrisy consisted of pretending he’d been trying to reach someone for hours by phone. When that person answered even on the first try Hajo invariably sang out “Finally!”

The America of old movies he also liked—westerns, Minnelli musicals, the films noirs of the 1950s, Hitchcock—but he felt the more recent super-budget sci-fi kiddy crap was endangering the entire industry. A photo of a cowboy would make him grow misty-eyed but he could also say quite casually, “You’re lucky you live in Europe, Mark. The quality of life in America is so low. The clothes, the crime, especially the food.”

Unlike Mark’s Parisian acquaintances, who all seemed to despise their jobs, Hajo loved his work. Like an American, Hajo bragged about how much he worked, even exaggerated how long and arduous were his hours, and he quite gratuitously attributed grueling efforts to indolent Mark. (“Poor Mark, you spend every moment studying the tourism allure—do you say that?
allure?
—of Venice.”) As far as Mark could see, Hajo’s work was much like his own, mainly a matter of kissing babies and cutting ribbons, of “circulating.”

Unlike an American businessman, Hajo revered art. In Berlin he shuffled into the ugly modern opera house with all the
fat ladies in galoshes to listen to the upsetting stridencies of
Lulu.
His big house in Grünewald was filled with the newest German expressionist paintings and Hajo had once even been asked by the reigning genius of the moment to find him wild hare’s blood to be sprinkled over a legless, hacked-to-pieces Steinway; Hajo had guiltily confessed to Mark in bed one night that he’d been so busy that week he’d settled for plain rabbit’s blood from the butcher (“I pray this lie is never revealed—even the title is
Hasenblut!”).
Mark learned that Hajo had been faithful to his previous lover for ten years until last June when the lover had left him for a “phony” Austrian baron (“It’s even against the law in Austria to use titles; you can be fined for putting ‘baron’ on your
carte de visite”).

When Mark returned to Paris, Ned was already there; he’d enrolled at the Sorbonne. Mark couldn’t help talking about Hajo all the time. Besides, Hajo phoned twice a day and sent by express mail unbearable tapes he’d concocted out of all the most recent dissonant music, a quartet by Henze, water dripping and gurgling by Cage. Ned would come home from school and catch Mark doing sit-ups to Stockhausen blips and bleeps. Now it was Ned’s turn to apostrophize their stuffed bear: “Mr. Peters, he’s going to leave boring old us for this arty-farty Kraut who’s as old as he is, why it’s obscene, sex between two people of the same age!”