Skinned Alive (26 page)

He begged Ned to take more precautions. Ned said that Luc had swollen glands in his neck and under his arms and night sweats. He also had athlete’s foot and bad skin. They hugged their bear and Ned said, “Peters, I guess it’s curtains for us.” They agreed that if they became ill they’d travel to India and commit suicide beside the Ganges. It was Ned’s idea: “We’ve never been there. It would be an adventure. We should do something absolutely new. Anyway, they know all about death and cremation there—it’s their specialty.”

Whereas the French were calm and rational in their responses to the epidemic, the Germans, like the English, were being driven to hysteria by their press. In France one could forget the disease for whole days at a stretch, but in reactionary Bavaria, for instance, the minister of health had proposed quarantining even healthy carriers. Mark was afraid their test results
wouldn’t be kept confidential, no matter what the hospital had said.

The Berlin sun was shining on the gilt Spirit of Victory on top of the Siegessäule the day Mark and Hajo walked through the Tiergarten on their way to the hospital. Beds of red and pink tulips alternated around the statue of Bismarck, who stood with a sword in one hand and a drapery below the other, as though he were a portly, exhausted torero. They’d each dressed carefully and Hajo had taken the day off from work.

At the last moment Hajo decided he didn’t want to know the results.

“Don’t be silly,” Mark said.

“But what good are they?” Hajo asked. “I’m afraid. If I’m positive I’ll freak.” That was one of his Americanisms: “freak.”

“Look,” Mark said, “we’ve always been careful, but I was such a slut before; I’ll be positive, you’ll be negative, I’m sure of it, but we’ll know we must continue to be extra extra careful. If we’re both negative we’ll be able to fuck each other like bunnies and you’ll never be able to leave me, you’ll be sealed to me for life, you poor sucker.”

Their original doctor had gone off on holiday and had been replaced by a young man who’d just come back from two months in San Francisco, where, he told them in his almost accentless English, he’d learned how to do all the lab work for the blood test. Then he shuffled through their reports, crossed and uncrossed his long legs. He told Hajo he was negative and Mark he was positive. He took another blood sample from Mark just to be sure. The next day he called and confirmed the diagnosis. At the first meeting he said, “We don’t really know what ‘positive’ means, but we’re finding that at least a third of the positives are developing the symptoms and that percentage appears to be growing over time. There are even those who say one hundred percent of the carriers will become symptomatic.”

“You mean die?” Mark asked.

“But there are new methods every day,” the doctor said, embarrassed or maybe vexed, as he stared at Mark’s chart again.

That night they ate dinner at the Paris Bar and Mark joked with the two beefy, handsome guys who owned the place and Hajo quizzed them about Vienna, where they were from. But suddenly, Mark thought that it was all over, his affair with Hajo, his grown-up European love. It occurred to him he’d never been loved by anyone quite so thoughtful and kind and mature. Mark looked at his own fat face in the mirror over the banquette and he feared no one would ever love him again. He felt sorry for himself and he went into the toilet, locked the door and sobbed, pulled himself together and returned to their table. But that night in the big lacquered sleigh bed, under the painting of a scorched field still smoldering, Hajo went right to sleep. He was wearing shorts to bed for the first time. In the past he’d always slept bare-assed. His soft, rapid snores sounded like kindling being trimmed by the smallest Braun saw. Mark started to quake silently from thinking their beautiful love was over. He went down the hall and locked himself behind the toilet door to sob out loud, but then Hajo, skinny in his black T-shirt advertising Kurosawa’s
Ran
and his baggy boxer shorts, was tapping at the door and saying, “Mark, darling, Mark, come to bed, it will be all right, I love you, nothing’s changed,” but Mark knew everything had changed, starting with the shorts.

Vienna was hot and airless and deserted. They walked slowly through the museum of natural history and looked at dinosaur bones. The famous horses weren’t performing their tricks right now, it was off season, and at the opera
Die Fledermaus
was playing only to Japanese group tours; Mark and Hajo left during the first intermission. The Mozart apartment was supposed to
prove how poor the great composer had been, but Mark reckoned it would rent for four thousand bucks a month in Manhattan today.

They lay in the sun in their swimsuits at a public pool on the outskirts of the city. He made Hajo translate what the young people on the towel beside them were talking about. Hajo said that one young man, the one with the hair held back with red rubber bands, was recounting the plot of a story he was writing, or maybe it was a dream. Mark said, “Perhaps he’ll be a famous writer,” but he thought all of this was like a dream: the woods in the distance under a color-leaching sun; this turn-of-the-century brick spa; the virtually naked strangers all around him, each of whom knew the best bus routes, the name of the best neighborhood butcher and the date of the next concert to be given by their favorite local singing star—a whole life Mark would never fathom. Wherever they went, Mark kept murmuring to himself, “It’s over.”

Obviously Hajo couldn’t do or say anything. It was Mark’s responsibility to break up with him. Maybe the heat as they swayed in the tram along the brilliant, nearly deserted Ringstrasse recalled summer days in Charlottesville, yes, that time he’d led an out-of-town cousin through Monticello. He and Willie Lee had stood formally, sweating in seersucker jackets, and watched the lady guide demonstrate “Mr.” Jefferson’s system of pulleys by which double doors could be opened symmetrically. Some little Yankee brats had been cutting up, refusing to stick with the tour, until the mono-bosomed volunteer had said in perfect Tidewater tones,
“Thank you.
This way.
Thank you.”
Those thank-yous had chilled the boys into obedience.

The formality of that place, sweating inside a jacket, could be paired with the shadowless heat of Vienna. They stopped and stared at a Russian war memorial; the inscriptions were
entirely in Russian, not a word of German, and Mark said to himself, “It’s over.”

But it wasn’t. Hajo lay in his arms in the hotel room and said, “You must forgive me. I’m such a coward, and all my German cleanness manias.”

“Hell, no,” Mark said, “it’s a question of dying, not of politeness. Why should you risk your one and only life?” Their intimacy was very deep, maybe because they were both far from home in a hotel with the jaunty name the King of Hungary.

On the television every newscast was about the Austrian wine scandal; vintners were lacing their wine with antifreeze. Mark and Hajo made deep love—physically reserved but emotionally deep. For the first time Mark understood that the precautions they were taking weren’t an insult directed against him; he’d always known that, of course, but he hadn’t accepted it.

Two days after he returned to Paris he learned that Joshua had been hospitalized for the pneumonia. His doctor had been treating it as though it had been just bronchitis, but Joshua had fainted in his apartment with a high fever and the friend he’d stood up at the ballet had made the police break down his door. That same friend had waited to call Mark until Joshua was better. The pneumonia went away as fast as it had come on, but it foreshadowed, of course, a future that made Mark think of the words in that Yankee hymn, “His terrible swift sword.”

He told Ned the news with a smile he couldn’t suppress and Ned wept in his arms. They stared at the truth only a few minutes. Soon Ned was hurrying off to his class at the Sorbonne and Mark was ironing a shirt for the evening, but as the iron slid over the damp fabric and awakened wisps of steam, he thought he had too few attachments to the world. Maybe
that was why he’d become such a porker, to weight himself down. He felt the circle was tightening around him. In a way he was grateful he’d lost the habit of talking to Joshua twice a day and going to the ballet with him twice a week; if their lives had stayed so intertwined Mark would never have been able to give Joshua up.

Joshua had been—
still was!
—Mark’s civilized friend. Mark had forgiven himself his own hell-raising, his own shallowness, because he’d been loved by this serene, subtle man. Joshua’s love had vouched for Mark’s value, but now Mark felt shabbier. Mark didn’t know many French people well, but he doubted if any of them came in Joshua’s variety—this sense of fun linked to the most lightly worn erudition, this kindness redeemed by the least malign bitchery. Anyone who lived in a circle as tight, as overbred, as Joshua’s needed to complain a bit; at least he always said he felt his blood had been oxygenated after a good complaining session. Who else but Joshua could hold in suspension so many different elements—his Venetian elegance, his scholarliness, his camp humor, his ballet fanaticism, his passion for society (he was the most collegial of creatures). His social being was an achievement, a work of art. His laugh—his great, head-thrown-back, all-out, unthrottled laugh—announced his forbearance and hilarity in the face of experience (he pronounced it “high-larity” and certainly his friends all got high off it).

Mark called his mother in Virginia. She was in her eighties but as starchy as ever. They seldom spoke of personal matters. She’d met Joshua several times. When Mark told her about Joshua’s illness and his prospects, she said, “You’re too young to be losing your friends. That’s more for folks in my league, the golden oldies.”

“Yes, ma’am, I guess you’re right there. I hope you’re taking it easy.”

She laughed. “Easy? Why I’m so relaxed I’m downright
trifling.” Her voice darkened. “Now if you get sick, you come home to Virginia and I’ll nurse you, you hear?”

Mark said, “Yes, ma’am,” but he thought he’d rather make a pilgrimage to India. He hadn’t come this far, moved north to live among the Yankees and then come on over here to Paris, France, just so he could end up back home in Charlottesville. He didn’t want to be pitied by his father’s Baptist kin.

As though she were reading his mind, his mother (Miz Ellen, as they called her) said, “I don’t want you killin’ yourself if you take sick. I’d never forgive you. In my family we fight the good fight.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, but he thought he didn’t want to undergo the humiliation of dying among friends, losing his looks and powers, or the loneliness of dying slowly among strangers. He’d kill himself beside the Ganges.

Mark invited Luc and Ned and another friend to a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower for dinner. As they looked down on the river valley and picked out Notre Dame in the distance, Sacré-Coeur on a hill, the pale square of the Place de la Concorde just this side of the dark rectangle of the Tuileries, they watched the early-summer sunlight fade and the blue blaze of streetlamps ignite, laced by swarming yellow headlights. Every moment of beauty had its valedictory side these days for Mark. He took a real pleasure in ordering a good bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet for his guests, and he suffered not the slightest temptation to sip it. He wished he were very thin and lined and dry-looking, an old man with a gray ponytail and bony, Cocteau-like hands, for that look would better correspond to the way he felt.

Luc was still hobbling and he’d lost weight, but his charm was intact if too consciously dispensed in the right doses to the right recipients. They all broke up in a flood of warmth after dinner, but around midnight Ned surprised Mark by coming home in a rage. “Here it is, a nice romantic evening,”
Ned said, “and Luc wanted to go out to a bar. I know he’s terribly worried about his health, he’s got
champignons
in the throat—what’s that in English?”

“Fungus. Thrush.”

“Oh. Anyway, he’s driven. He’s afraid to have sex with other people, but he can’t stop prowling, and I just keep getting hurt. He thinks I should be there to keep him from being lonely, but I feel lonelier when I’m beside him, wanted but not really, you know what I mean? He’s afraid of missing out on the action and he thinks you and I are it.”

In Berlin one night Mark cut his thumb slightly with the vegetable peeler. It was just a nick, but Hajo must have noticed it. In bed, when Mark reached for Hajo’s penis in the dark, Hajo said, “Do you mind, not with your thumb, you cut it.”

Mark said, “OK, that’s it. Let’s just be friends. I can’t live this way.”

Mark realized Hajo was relieved. He’d been too kind to break it off himself, but he was grateful Mark had finally made a move.

Ned flew home to the States to see his parents at the end of August. Mark took the train to Venice.

He’d decided he’d let Joshua set the tone. If Joshua wanted to be frivolous, fine; if he wanted to talk about illness and death, fine. Joshua chose frivolity, which Mark considered gallant.

Once again, if for the last time, they settled into their old habits. They’d be awakened by the spluttering, rumbling, honking, shouting water traffic under their windows. They’d sit in the kitchen, which had been John Singer Sargent’s studio a hundred years ago, and look down into the courtyard and nibble on bread rusks and listen for the furious rumbling of yet another pot of brewed espresso. Then Joshua retreated to the cool immensity of the painted library, where he sat beside a window laced with a morning-glory vine and tapped at his
typewriter. Joshua listened to the classical music station on his transistor and the thin reproduction of a full-bodied piece for strings floated from room to room over the lustrous floors and under the bands of pink and beige plaster layering the cornices.

Daydreaming on his bed with the door open, dozing in the middle of a day too breezy to be hot, Mark heard the radio and the typewriter, these faint life signals Joshua was emitting. Mark thought that this summer everything was just as it had been the twelve preceding summers. The only thing that was different was that this summer would end the series.