Free Skinned Alive by Edmund White Page A

prospects,cock size than the size of a raise. In our funny makeshift circle—which I had cobbled together to amuse him and which fell apart when he left me—the girls were witty, uncomplicated and heterosexual, and the boys handsome and homo. We were resolutely silly and made enormous occasions out of each other’s birthdays and saint’s days. Our serious, intimate conversations took place only between two people, usually over the phone.
    I neglected friends my own age. I never spoke English or talked about books except with Hélène. A friend from New York said, after staying with me for a week, that I was living in a fool’s paradise, a gilded playpen filled with enchanting, radiant nymphs and satyrs who offered me “no challenge.” He disapproved of the way I was willing to take just crumbs from Jean-Loup.
    Brioche crumbs, I thought.
    I didn’t know how to explain that now that so many of my old friends in New York had died—my best friend, and also my editor, who was a real friend as well—I preferred my playpen, where I could be twenty-five again but French this time. When reminded of my real age and nationality, I then played at being older and American. Youth and age seemed equally theatrical. Maybe the unreality was the effect of living in another language, of worrying about how many slices of
chèvre
one could take and of buying pretty clothes for a bisexual Bordelais. At about this time a punk interviewed me on television and asked, “You are known as a homosexual, a writer and an American. When did you first realize you were an American?”
    “When I moved to France,” I said.
    That Jean-Loup was elusive could not be held against him. He warned me from the first he was in full flight. What I didn’tgrasp was that he was running toward someone even he couldn’t name yet. Despite his lucid way of making distinctions about other people (“She’s not a liar but a mythomaniac; her lying serves no purpose”) he was indecisive about everything in his own future: Would he marry or become completely gay? Would he stay in business or develop his talent, drawing adult comic strips? Would he remain in Paris or continue shuttling between it and Bordeaux? I teased him, calling him Monsieur Charnière (Mr. Hinge).
    Where he could be decisive was in bed. He had precise and highly colored fantasies, which I deduced from his paces and those he put me through. He never talked about his desires until the last few times we had sex, just before the end of our “story,” as the French call an affair; his new talkativeness I took as a sign that he’d lost interest in me or at least respect for me, and I was right. Earlier he had never talked about his desire, but hurled it against me: he needed me here not there, like this not that. I felt desired for the first time in years.
    My friends, especially Hélène, but even the other children in the playpen, assumed Jean-Loup was genteelly fleecing me with my worldly, cheerful complicity, but I knew I had too little money to warrant such a speculation. He’d even told me that if it was money he was after he could find a man far richer than me. In fact I knew I excited him. That’s why I had to find him a distinguished slut for a wife. I had corrupted him, he told me, by habituating him to sex that was “hard,” which the French pronounce “ard” as in “ardent” and, out of a certain deference, never elide with the preceding word.
    He didn’t mind if I talked during sex, telling him who he was, where we were and why I had to do all this to him. I was used to sex raps from the drug-taking 1970s. Now, of course, there were no drugs and I had to find French words for my obsessions, and when I sometimes made a mistake in gender or verb form Jean-Loup would wince. He wouldn’tmention it later; he didn’t want to talk anything over later. Only once, after he’d done something very strange to me, he asked, laughing as he emerged from the shower, “Are you the crazy one