Free Skinned Alive by Edmund White Page B

or am I? I think we’re both crazy.” He seemed very pleased.
    For the first year we’d struggled to be “lovers” officially, but he devoted more of his energy to warding me off than embracing me. He had a rule that he could never stay on after a dinner at my place; he would always leave with the other members of the playpen. To stay behind would look too domestic, he thought, too queer, too
pédé.
After a year of such partial intimacy I got fed up. More likely I became frightened that Jean-Loup, who was growing increasingly remote, would suddenly drop me. I broke up with him over dinner in a restaurant. He seemed relieved and said, “I would never have dared to take the first step.” He was shaken for two or three days, then recovered nicely. As he put it, he “supported celibacy” quite effortlessly. It felt natural to him, it was his natural condition.
    I went to New York for a week. By chance he went there after I returned. When we saw each other again in Paris we were as awkward as adolescents. His allergies were acting up; American food had made him put on two kilos; a New York barber had thrown his meaty ears into high relief. “It’s terrible,” Jean-Loup said, “I wanted my independence, but now that I have it…. Undress me.” I did so, triumphant while registering his admission that he was the one after all who had wanted to be free.
    After that we saw each other seldom but when we did it was always passionate. The more people we told that we were no longer lovers, the more violent our desire for each other became. I found his heavy balls, which he liked me to hold in my mouth while I looked up at him. I found the mole on hissmooth haunch. Because of his allergies he couldn’t tolerate colognes or deodorants; I was left with his natural kid-brother smell. We had long since passed through the stage of smoking marijuana together or using sex toys or dressing each other up in bits of finery. Other couples I knew became kinkier and kinkier over the years if they continued having sex or else resigned themselves to the most routine, suburban relief. We were devouring each other with a desire that was ever purer and sharper. Of course such a desire is seldom linked to love. It can be powerful when solicited but quickly forgotten when absent.
    Perhaps the threat of ending things altogether, which we’d just averted, had made us keener. More likely, Jean-Loup, now that he thought he’d become less homosexual by shedding a male lover, me, felt freer to indulge drives that had become more urgent precisely because they were less well defined. Or perhaps I’m exaggerating my importance in his eyes; as he once said, he didn’t like to wank his head over things like that
(“Je ne me branle pas trop la tête”).
    I was in love with him and, during sex, thought of that love, but I tried to conceal it from him.
    I tried to expect nothing, see him when I saw him, pursue other men, as though I were strictly alone in the world. For the first time when he asked me if I had other lovers I said I did and even discussed them with him. He said he was relieved, explaining that my adventures exonerated him from feeling responsible for me and my happiness. He was a lousy lover, he said, famous for being elusive; even his girlfriends complained about his slipperiness. That elusiveness, I would discover, was his protest against his own passivity, his longing to be owned.

    Things changed day by day between us. He said he wasn’t searching for other sexual partners; he preferred to wait until he fell in love, revealing that he didn’t imagine that we’d become lovers again. Nor was he in such a hurry to find a distinguished and sympathetic slut for a wife. When I asked him about his marital plans, he said that he was still looking forward to settling down with a wife and children someday but that now he recognized that when he thought of rough sex, of
la baise harde
, he thought of men. And again he flatteringly blamed me