Free The Married Man by Edmund White Page A

known?”
    “Two years already. My counts are very good, surprisingly good.” His voice wobbled and he was short of breath. “They don’t seem to be going down. I hope you’re not angry that I didn’t tell you right away, but I could never seem to find the right moment.” Hey, how about the moment just before we had sex? Julien might be thinking, or so Austin imagined. “I’m sure Dr. Aristopoulos wasn’t asking you to have the test because of me.”
    “No, no, of course not,” Julien said, his politeness now striking Austin as ominous. Would Austin ever see him again? All he had was his work number and Julien could instruct the receptionist to say he’d call him right back or that he was out of the office for a few days—no, for an “indefinite leave.” That’s what she would say. They ambled under a promontory surmounted by a Greek temple. On every side there were flowers and flowering bushes, perfectly assorted and groomed, many of them probably transferred for a few weeks only out of the city’s greenhouses until they were replaced by still newer plantings in bloom.
    Julien sprawled on the grass just beside a sign that forbade doing so. An old Vietnamese man walking past shook his finger at him, laughing. Austin stood just on the other side of the foot-high fence of metal hoops, then felt foolish and joined him and felt foolish.
    “Please don’t worry about Dr. Aristopoulos. He’s positive himself; some people say he’s ill, though he looks fine to me. He probably is overly cautious.”
    “I don’t think he’s competent. Why aren’t you seeing a famous specialist?”
    “Several of my friends with HIV see him—”
    “You have
several
friends with AIDS?”
    “They’re all in good health for the moment,” Austin said primly.
    “I’ve never met—or even heard of—someone infected until now,until you. It just seemed to me a media circus, just some new puritanical horror invented by the Americans.” He thought about it for a while.
    “Are you worried about Christine? Have you gone on having sex with her?”
    “Christine?” He smiled a mild, studied, imperturbable smile that Austin read as a signal that he had gone too far with his grubby American questions.
    Austin changed tactics: “You know, don’t worry about … if you want to drop me … I should have been honest from the beginning.” He propped himself up on his elbows and wondered if the grass was staining his seersucker jacket and the seat of his trousers. Julien was wearing his liverish green linen sports coat. “Do you like linen?” Austin asked wildly, then hastened to add, lying, “I do.” He was chattering out of fear and embarrassment.
    “Yes, it’s a noble material.”
    By now Austin had learned that Julien liked cotton, linen and silk, that he revered natural wood and stone, especially marble but even the ubiquitous Parisian sandstone extracted from this very quarry in the last century, that he despised brick and concrete—oh, Austin thought, I’ll miss him.
    Maybe because Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief, if only through contrast, or maybe because he would soon turn fifty and was seropositive, he now had a heightened sense of the swathe his life was cutting. In the past he’d been casual about himself. He’d never wanted to shine. He’d never been known for anything—neither his books, which were ordinary, nor his accomplishments, which amounted to nothing more than a nearly photographic memory of particular pieces of furniture and ceramics and a low-energy charm that allowed him to pass hours with the rich idlers who usually owned those things. Although he’d done well in everything related to the history of furniture itself, he couldn’t talk a good line about Louis XVI as a great patron, about Mme de Pompadour’s “rapacious curiosity” or her “exigent tastes,” which constituted an “enlightened tyranny”—no, he wasn’t a phrasemaker nor was he