Free Skinned Alive by Edmund White

please Jean-Loup. And if I bought him his clothes every Saturday morning, that afternoon he would let me take them off again, piece by piece, to expose his boyish body, a lean-hipped and priapic body. On one hip, the color of wedding-gown satin, he had a mole, which the French more accurately call a
grain de beauté.
    Since Jean-Loup came from a solid middle-class family but had climbed a social rung, he had the most rigid code of etiquette, and I owe him the slight improvements I’ve made in my impressionistic American table manners, learned thirty years ago among boarding-school savages. Whereas Americans are taught to keep their unused hand in their lap at the table, the French are so filthy minded they assume hidden hands are the devil’s workshop. Whereas Americans clear each plate as soon as it’s finished, the French wait for everyone to complete the course. That’s the sort of thing he taught me. To light a match after one has smelled up a toilet. To greet the most bizarre story with the comment, “But that’s perfectly normal.” To be careful to serve oneself from the cheese tray no more than once (“Cheese is the only course a guest has the right to refuse,” he told me, “and the only dish that should never be passed twice”).
    Also not to ask so many questions or volunteer so many answers. After a two-hour train ride he’d ask me if I had had enough time to confide to the stranger at my side all the details of my unhappy American childhood. Like most Frenchmen who have affairs with Americans, he was attracted by my “niceness” and “simplicity” (ambiguous compliments at best), but had set out to reform those very qualities, which became weaknesses once I was granted the high status of honorary Frenchman. “Not Frenchman,” he would say. “You’ll never be French. But you are a Parisian. No one can deny that.” Then to flatter me he would add,
“Plus parisien tu meurs,”
though just then I felt I’d die if I were less, not more, Parisian.
    But if Jean-Loup was always “correct” in the salon, he was “vicious” and “perverse” (high compliments in France) in the
chambre.
The problem was that he didn’t like to see me very often. He loved me but wasn’t in love with me, that depressing (and all too translatable) distinction
(“Je t’aime mais je ne suis pas amoureux d’amour”).
He was always on the train to Bordeaux, where his parents lived and where he’d been admitted to several châteaux, including some familiar even to me because they were on wine labels. He’d come back with stories of weekend country parties at which the boys got drunk and tore off the girls’ designer dresses and then everyone went riding bareback at dawn. He had a set of phrases for describing these routs
(“On s’éclatait”; “On se marrait”; “On était fou, mais vraiment fou et on a bien rigolé”)
, which all meant they had behaved disreputably with the right people within decorous limits. After all they were in their own “milieu.” He slept with a few of the girls and was looking to marry one who would be intelligent, not ugly, distinguished, a good sport and a slut in bed. He even asked me to help him. “You go everywhere, you meet everyone,” he said, “you’ve fixed up so many of your friends, find me someone like Brigitte but better groomed, a good slut who likes men. Of course, even if I married that would never affect our relationship.” Recently he’d decided that he would inform his bride-to-be that he was homosexual; he just knew she’d be worldly about it.
    With friends Jean-Loup was jolly and impertinent, quick to trot out his “horrors,” as he called them, things that would make the girls scream and the boys blush. Twice he showed his penis at mixed dinner parties. Even so, his horrors were, while shocking, kindhearted and astute. He never asked about money or class, questions that might really embarrass a Frenchman. He would sooner ask about blowjobs than job