Skinned Alive (25 page)

Because Ned loved Mark, he accepted Hajo. “It could have been worse,” Ned told the bear. “It could have been a gold-digging twenty-year-old Parisian, who would have driven poor aging us out of our home, Mr. Peters.” Later, over dinner, Ned said, “I’m happy for you. And I want you to be faithful to him—it’s better for your health.”

“What about yours?”

“I think it’s odd”—this back to the bear—“that he broke up my affair with Luc and then started up with A-hole or is it Hajo?”

Love had taken Mark by surprise. He spent hours selecting postcards and sent six or seven a day to Berlin. He bought a book on German history and read it until he was thoroughly confused. He hung around the German bookstore next to his gym and even contemplated buying a beginning German course on cassettes for French speakers before he came to his senses. He dieted and exercised, hoping to impress Hajo on his first visit to Berlin three weeks hence.

He’d never been faithful to anyone before. In fact, he’d preached against fidelity, which he’d considered as barbaric as female circumcision. Now he liked it because it meant he was consecrating all his energy and desire to one person, just as he was the sole object of Hajo’s love. He was less fearful than before of competition. He trusted Hajo—so much so that he wondered if he’d ever really trusted anyone before.

When he arrived in Berlin in the new clothes he’d bought for the occasion with the new pigskin bag from Hermès and the big illustrated book on Jean-Michel Frank under his arm (Frank was Hajo’s favorite designer), Hajo kissed him on the lips and hurried him into the waiting car. As they sat side by side Hajo kept interrupting himself or Mark in order to pull back an inch, look at Mark and say, “Good to see you!”

Mark was so in love he kept losing his erection. He suffered two days over these fits of impotence until, scarlet-faced, he blurted out to Hajo, “Look, don’t think I’m always such a dud, it’s just you’re so great and—”

“But, Mark,” Hajo said, “I don’t even notice. Don’t be so complicated, Herr Professor Bear.”

In bed Hajo was slender and hairless to the point of puerility and he slept with his head on Mark’s chest. But in public places, dressed in his double-breasted jacket, outsize raincoat and high-laced boots, Hajo could be unsmilingly severe with headwaiters or ushers or drivers. In bed his face softened and he seemed to be sleepily nuzzling Mark, but out on the
tense, shoddily modern Ku’damm he looked pale and lined and determined.

In the same way he seemed to like Mark’s strength, his physical bulk, as a kid might like his father’s, but over dinner at the Paris Bar Hajo himself would turn paternal and counsel Mark on everything from health insurance to diet. “Don’t eat pork at night!” he said, scandalized. “It’s bad enough at lunch, but never at night. You might as well eat a
sausage!”

Like many people in the theater and movies, Hajo cultivated superstitions about food. He wouldn’t drink anything, not even water, with meals for fear the liquids might dilute his digestive juices. He ate nothing but fruit till noon, nothing but vegetables after six, and he never combined the two, but a month later it was all cheese and potatoes and spinach pasta. For cold sores he had drops of homeopathic potions and something he called “salvia” and he told Mark he’d never in all his forty years had a shot of penicillin.

What most astonished Mark was how little Hajo knew about gay life. For years Hajo had lived with a woman, then with one man for ten years, and in all that time he had been to a gay bar only twice and to a sauna only once. None of Hajo’s friends were gay, although all of his straight friends knew Hajo was “homosexual,” as they said without the slightest shade of condescension or embarrassment.

“Just my luck,” Mark said, “to find the only Berliner who doesn’t drink beer, doesn’t eat sausage, has never been to a cabaret and never worn a garter belt.”

Hajo’s house was his hobby. It was filled with French furniture from the 1920s and ’30s and German paintings from the 1980s. A Turkish woman came twice a week to clean, but everything was already so scrubbed and gleaming she had little to do except iron Hajo’s shirts (he’d sent her for ironing lessons with a friend’s maid, a Spanish woman who had once been in service to the Spanish ambassador to Vienna).

To Mark the house gave off the feeling of silk and barbed wire—the silk was the faded Kilims, the polished pearwood and pale upholstery, and the wire was the brutal paintings, those burned and anguished figures, abandoned Icarus wings and scrawled words. The cold winter light cast a haze over the plants, which were huddled in the conservatory like people waiting for the train. The expensive furnace burned noiselessly.

For all his pride in his house, Hajo liked excitable, bohemian film people given to what Mark thought were strange political resentments against Reagan, nuclear weapons and U.S. intervention in Central America. Mark knew from his mother never to discuss religion or politics, which led Hajo’s Greens to assume Mark was as ecological and leftist as they were.

At two or three in the morning the drunk guests would roar off through the dark, silent suburbs, Hajo would open the French doors to let in the cold night, he and Mark would empty ashtrays and load the dishwasher and suddenly their peace was restored, like the birdsong spring brings back to the garden. “How ya doin’?” Mark would say.

“Fine,” Hajo would reply as their intimacy emerged from hiding. Despite the sudden noise and laughter of these visits from friends, Hajo struck Mark as a solitary, someone who preferred a night alone in which to read the world press for movie news, to repolish his Puiforcat silverware, to watch videos of movies about to be released or to study the paintings reproduced in the art magazine
Wolkenkratzer.

In bed they were passionate but cautious—ardent in their kisses but afraid to exchange those fluids that had once been the gush of life but that now seemed the liquid drained off a fatal infection. In Mark’s dreams Berlin itself—this pocket of glitz and libertinage surrounded by the gray hostility of East Germany—became an emblem of their endangered, quarantined happiness.

On the last night of his visit Mark stretched sleepily and said, “You know I’ve never been faithful to anyone before.”

“No?”

“And I like it!” He smiled into the dark. “There’s even a Spanish kid I met in Venice just before, uh, well, a kid who’s been writing me, but I was proud to write to him and say I was faithful to a guy in Berlin and, well,” he mumbled into the ominous, breathless silence on the pillow beside him, “I’ve never burned a bridge before or turned down even the remotest sexual possibility, it’s all so new….”

Hajo didn’t say a word.

At last Mark asked, “Is there anything wrong?”

Hajo said, “Do you mean you make love with many men now, during
die Pest?”

“No one since I met you.”

“But before? In Paris and Venice?”

Now it was Mark’s turn to say nothing. Hajo went into the kitchen and came back five minutes later with something in his hand that smelled of a summer roadside.

“What are you drinking?”

“Chamomile. Mark, you lied to me. You said you were a gay leader. You said you are health-conscious since a long time. Now I understand you were with a Spanish the night before you met me—that was why your nipples were too sore to touch then but never now.”

It occurred to Mark that “health-consciousness” had become a new word for jealousy.

Hajo took more and more precautions when they made love. When Mark compared their lovemaking with his own heavy sex scenes of the 1970s (losing consciousness in leather harness, the smell of poppers, his legs coated in grease), he had to admit how tame a porno movie of Hajo and him would look. Yet Mark no longer felt like a sex star and he even pretended to be shocked when he heard about things he used to do at
least once a week. With Hajo he felt like a conductor awakening the blare of brass with a raised hand, hushing the massed strings simply by closing his eyes. But the moment it was over, Hajo wouldn’t stew in their juices, not even for a second; he dashed off to wash with a special surgical soap. At dinner he wouldn’t taste anything from Mark’s spoon; from even the merest brush of lips he’d draw back, as though Mark were carved out of burning ice.

Even if Mark conceded Hajo was perfectly within his medical rights, he couldn’t help bridling at the thought he was being faithful to someone afraid to kiss him.

When Mark flew back to Paris, Ned announced Luc had returned from Brazil. Apparently Luc had drunk too much one night in Belém, tried to jump-start a car and had been shot in the leg by the irate and equally drunk owner of the car. Luc was in a Paris hospital. Bits of his hipbone were being transplanted into the damaged femur. Nothing, naturally, was more romantic than nursing a sunburned young lover in pain, and they’d already had sex while a sympathetic male nurse stood guard.

In the delicate cantilevering of Mark and Ned’s love, the precarious downward thrust of forces required a solid underpinning, which they had now—Ned had Luc and Mark had Hajo. But of course no one had anyone for sure, and Mark feared one day he’d lose both Hajo and Ned. Then that calculation shamed him and he sought to imagine himself splendidly alone. He realized he’d picked up the superstition that so long as someone or other was his lover he’d continue to live; to love and to live were near rhymes.

One night Mark said he wanted to read late in the guest bedroom; the next night he wasn’t feeling well; by the third he and Ned had definitely stopped sleeping in the same bed.

Hajo now insisted that Mark take out a good German health insurance policy, one that would cover hospital and doctor
expenses no matter where in the world he fell ill. Mark was grateful to have the policy since he knew many single men had become uninsurable. He was also touched by the attention, the sort he’d usually paid to his younger, dizzier boyfriends. But he also registered the thought that Hajo might be expecting something to go wrong with his health.

That spring Mark and Hajo spent one week out of every month together. Two of Hajo’s Berlin friends became ill, one with the pneumonia, the other with the parasite in the brain. In America more and more of Mark’s friends were dying or dead, and his profits were way off. When he went home to New York for a week he couldn’t stay in his own apartment, since he’d sublet it. He stayed with Joshua and they laughed a lot, but Mark couldn’t help but notice that he, Mark, wasn’t up on the latest fads and feuds, nor was he a constant in his friends’ calculations. Oh, they all liked him and if he came back they’d make room for him soon enough, but as an expatriate he didn’t count as an ally, an introduction or even an ear.

On the street there seemed to be fewer gay men, or perhaps they were just less visible; they’d shaved their mustaches, put on some weight and let the holes pierced through their ears grow back. On the Upper West Side there were ten more gourmet shops and two fewer gay bars. Young heterosexuals—loud, rich and confident—swarmed down Central Park West, gaudy in leg warmers and pink jogging shorts over midwinter tans.

George Balanchine had died and the company was performing his ballets perfectly, but now that Mark knew there would be no new dances he saw each work as part of what the French called the
patrimoine
, a sad and pompous word. All of these swans, even the cygnets, had known Mr. B.; his old hands had stretched a leg still higher or relaxed the rigid circle of lifted arms into a softer ellipse. But soon there would be new
troops of seventeen-year-olds and the old coolness and precision would slacken, blur. Having lived in Paris, Mark no longer believed in progress. When he looked at the Tinkertoy tackiness of the new buildings at Les Halles, he was grateful Paris had been built in earlier, better centuries.

When he went back to Paris, it didn’t feel like home. He could barely understand the muttered conversation of the taxi driver with his Montmartre Titi-Parisian accent. The dollar was losing value every day and anyway Mark had fewer and fewer of them. He and Ned started ironing their own shirts, buying clothes during the sales, eating in, cutting short their calls to America.

They both expected to die. “I just hope I graduate first,” Ned said. “I’d love to finish one thing before buying the farm.” Mark had an attack of shingles. Before his doctor diagnosed it, Mark looked at the spots across his solar plexus and panicked and said out loud to his reflection in the mirror, “Dear God, I’m not ready to die.” The same week, after learning what was wrong with him, he read that shingles in someone under fifty was an accurate “tracer disease,” a sure sign of dangerously lowered immunities. The illness made Mark sleep all the time. He felt as though he were suffocating under wet, heavy eiderdowns. The only thing he could do was watch television, but the foreign language made him anxious. He didn’t like being ill in a foreign country.

He recovered. In May when he saw Hajo in Berlin they went to the hospital for a blood test. Hajo had insisted on it, although Mark had warned him, “You know how it’ll turn out, you’ll be negative and I’ll be positive and then we’ll break up. It’s just that simple.” Hajo was sure they’d both be negative.

At that point the blood samples still had to be shipped to America to be analyzed. They would have to wait a month for the results. Their doctor also gave them physicals and a multi-test, that is, they were each scratched with eight different
infections. The idea was that someone with intact immunities would respond to them all or at least five or six. Mark developed only two red bumps, whereas Hajo grew all eight.

The doctor refused to give out the results over the phone. He insisted that Mark return to Berlin for a face-to-face conference. That wasn’t really inconvenient since he and Hajo had planned anyway to fly together for a week to Vienna, which neither of them had ever visited.

In the interval Mark seldom thought of the disease. He had decided, almost as though it were a question of personal elegance, to be courageous. He wasn’t going to complain or suffer. He was going to be very brave, no matter what happened. That was because he was a gay leader, sort of, and people expected him to set an example. His Virginia ancestors had been courageous. Anyway, even if he sometimes panicked he wasn’t all that attached to life. He thought it was fun, but he wouldn’t mind giving it up. Of course he had no idea how he’d act when worn down by the long, painful reality. He probably wouldn’t have the energy to be courageous.