Inside a Pearl Read online

  He showed me photos of himself in Nantes, where he went to architecture school—in them he was even thinner and his hair (which had a will and a density of its own) was even longer. He wore white cambric pirate shirts loosely laced at the neck, with mutton-sleeves, the whole stuffed into wide-wale corduroy trousers, the sort Rodolfo might wear in Act I of La Bohème—bohemian and elegant, an amusing variation on a worker’s costume. He also had black-and-white snapshots of a reedy naked young woman toiling in a fisherman’s net on the parquet. In some of the same pictures he was striding through nearly empty rooms in highly polished hip-high black boots. His shabby student apartment had been the piano nobile of an eighteenth-century town house, he explained, on the Île Feydeau in Nantes, complete with the stone masks of slaves under the windows who’d been transported and temporarily housed on the island until the French Revolution ended the slave trade. Nor is the island an island anymore; the rivers around it were filled in after World War II. But Hubert had loved the aristocratic history of the town house, even though he lived there without heat or even electricity.

  All that was before I met him, as were his years in Addis Ababa. He went there in a sort of Peace Corps alternative to military service; he was teaching architecture to Ethiopians in French.

  “Do they know French?”

  “No, but they think they do. Knowing French is part of their cultural heritage.”

  “Did they learn anything?”

  “No, I just threw their finals out the window without reading them.” He laughed his deep, unconvincing laugh.

  “Could you speak any of their languages?”

  “That’s how you could tell the spies: they spoke Amharic. The rest of us spoke English or French or both. My wife speaks five Ethiopian languages—she’s not a spy, she grew up there.” He explained that her father was an expert on deserts, and they’d lived many places where deserts were encroaching on the land.

  He had peculiar relics of those days, which now belong to me: a tiny gold lion, the emperor’s symbol; a painting of Communist soldiers holding red flags, all looking the same way; a giant ostrich foot with a lethal spur; a postcard of the famous underground churches carved into the living rock. No guest ever guesses the painting of the soldiers is Ethiopian. Most people think it’s Haitian. It was done by Haile Selassie’s court painter, who went Communist when the emperor (whom Hubert called “the Negus”) was deposed. Hubert used to have a double-exposed snapshot of the painter, as skinny in his robes as an ebony stick mummified in cloth. The double image made him look somewhat ghostly. In his opinion the Ethiopian women were beautiful, whereas the men were balding and either pudgy or starving.

  He claimed he was from the petite noblesse (I suppose he thought the lie was more plausible if it was modest). He said that his mother had been a promising concert pianist but his evil father had forced her to give up her career. He said that his ancestors had built the medieval church in Nantes; when the tower had tilted the architect had committed suicide. He said that his father’s infidelities had driven his mother to suicide. He said that he attended a reunion of the Knights of Malta in the Opéra-Comique and that six of your eight great-grandparents had to be aristocrats in order to belong. He spoke fondly of some impoverished blue-blooded friends in the sixteenth arrondissement who lived without hot water in a vast noble apartment with an open water basin flowing in the kitchen.

  I asked Hubert why he never sought out these friends and he said he preferred to visit them in his thoughts. He was a very poetic young man, a sort of Hamlet-Byron-Tristan. He would never tolerate a mean word said of my few titled friends. He always insisted in a seemingly innocent but actually tendentious way on Marie-Claude’s Jewishness; once he asked, “Elle est juive d’ou?” (She’s a Jew from where?). I became angry and said, “She’s French, just like you!” He was very proud of the fact that of the fifty or so architects who worked for his boîte, he was the only one who had all four grandparents born in France. And yet he suspected his own father was a Jew. He was circumcised and his grandfather’s name was Isaiah; had the family converted for safety reasons?

  He loved to talk negatively about his wife, and when a real fatso would waddle past, he’d say, “There goes Fabienne in five years.” And yet he insisted we meet her for lunch. She had unruly dyed red hair and wore black leather; the combination seemed to me more German than French. She’d been the girlfriend of an English punk rocker, apparently a famous one. She made a living screening African political refugees. She regaled us with imitations of their bad French and tall horror stories contrived to win sympathy, usually implausible and absurd; it reminded me of my Texas grandfather’s “nigger jokes,” full of dialect and instances of “the cute things they say.” She didn’t seem nearly beautiful or refined enough to be Hubert’s wife, but since I was neither beautiful nor refined I thought he merely had odd taste. He divorced her within months of our meeting. They were already separated and had been for about a month. They lived apart.

  He loved me, and since my ego had taken a bruising from Brice and I already thought I was impossibly old for gay life, I felt grateful and happy. Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion. We had very hot sex, but I figured out he wanted to be dominated (only in bed), which wasn’t my natural role, though I hoped to bind him to me by playing it. For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I’m writing—an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts. I have such a geisha temperament that I long to please men; I always assume that in a marital squabble my friend, whether male or female, is at fault in failing to please The Man. I’m not talking about sex roles, much less dominance in real life. I’m talking about the submission I feel and project onto my friends.

  Hubert was so mysterious. If I’d ask him a direct question about his sexual experiences in the past with other men or women, he’d just grow silent. He wouldn’t say anything. I felt I was being a nosy American. He was always tired and losing weight, though he was already skeletal. Then he developed a chancre on his penis that wouldn’t go away. I made him go to my gay doctor, who told him he must have the test for HIV. Hubert was indignant. How impertinent!

  Maybe we wouldn’t have stayed together if he’d been negative. He loved me, but we weren’t really compatible. I was liberal, he was a royalist. I had a nearly automatic American respect for minorities; he was scornful of difference. I was compulsively social; he was a one-man dog who hated to share me. But then I believed maybe he really was an inexperienced straight man whom I’d infected, though we used condoms and practiced “safe sex,” whatever that was.

  No one I knew could give a straight answer to the question of what was safe. Was oral sex safe? Was kissing? Was pre-come dangerous? Were we both going to die? The doctor said his T-cell count was so low, below a hundred, that he’d obviously been positive for many years, longer than me. And yet, since I knew nothing of his past, there was always the possibility I’d slipped up and handed him a death sentence. It may have served his purposes to keep me in his thrall through ignorance about his past and guilt. He was a strategist in love, whereas I, like most Americans of my generation, was always eager to blab the truth in the name of honesty.

  I got a job as a full (if underpaid) professor of creative writing at Brown. Hubert wanted to accompany me and live in America. We’d been together only a year. I was touched that he was willing to leave his job, his language, his family—all for me. He had already divorced his wife. Of course he and I both thought we had only two or three years to live.

  Hubert wanted to work as an architect in America. Little did we know that the American Northeast was going through a severe recession that had hit particularly hard the building industry. In order to get him a professional visa to work, we had to find an architect in Boston to say he was indispensable. I convinced two Boston-based South American architects I had profiled for House & Garden to say they needed his expertise in order to enter big international architectural competitions. Then they backed down, saying they were a
fraid their own visas might come under scrutiny. After a brief panic I located an American architect friend of James Lord’s, a handsome, kind millionaire who didn’t actually practice architecture but signed the voucher out of amiability.

  My stupid American lawyer in Paris didn’t know that an alien couldn’t enter America on a tourist visa if he was waiting for a work visa. Hubert was turned back at the Boston airport and held under armed guard for eight hours until he was sent back to Paris at his own expense. After anxious hours spent in vain in the airport, I remember the lonely taxi ride to Providence through the winter snows with a Sikh taxi driver. To ask directions we pulled up to an aluminum-sheathed snack trailer, the only thing open in downtown Providence. Steam was rolling off the trailer’s windows and it was surrounded by drunks, who began to pound on the top of the car and shout, “Go home, towelhead.” I cried and cried. I’d rented the big, dowdy house of another writer professor on sabbatical. I’d also bought his VW Sirocco. I had to drive through the sleet to the supermarket to buy provisions. There the canned music was scratchy and the aisles were fluorescent lit and empty. The gum-chewing checkout clerk looked in her teens but was coiffed with an enormous helmet of teased hair; her fingernails were painted with swirly colors and had zircons somehow implanted in them, one jewel per nail. I wept as I ate a whole carton of cottage cheese, which you can’t find in France. I’d also bought a Sara Lee carrot cake, which didn’t exist in Paris either.

  I called Si Newhouse, who owned all the various periodicals I wrote for, and asked him if anything could be done for Hubert. “That will backfire in the States,” he said. “This isn’t a banana republic like France where you can use pull or bribe officials. Just wait for the normal procedures to work.” I was astonished that Si, one of the richest Americans, couldn’t influence someone; everybody in the countries I knew, France, Italy, or Spain (the “Garlic Belt”), could be bought. If I wore my French honor (Officer of Arts and Letters) I could get a seat on a full Air France flight; Paris was the capital of the Garlic Belt. Egalité and fraternité were fictions.

  Hubert could get into Canada, and to be with him I flew to Montréal for a weekend. It was January. January in Canada (at least before global warming) was a trial. I’d found him a B and B in the gay part of town, which he detested. He was snooty about Canadian French (un ami became un chum in Canada, une voiture became un char because it sounds like “a car,” although in French the word means “chariot” or “tank”). He seemed to hate queens of any sort, the peroxided workers in the B and B who talked about cock size and getting drunk and who smoked Kools and filed their nails all day long. To break the monotony on my second visit I rented a car and drove him through a blizzard to Québec City, the only walled town in the Americas. The snow was so blinding that I couldn’t see the edge of the road. He had to walk ahead, feeling for the edge with his boot, and I had to follow him at a snail’s pace. It must have been the beginning of February, because our arrival coincided with the Winter Carnival; everyone was blowing toy trumpets and drinking potent Caribous and visiting the huge ice sculptures from various Nordic countries and even China. Finally we found a room in a modern tower on the outskirts of town.

  Hubert was happy. The city was old, the eighty or so ice sculptures were unique, everyone was merry and slipping and sliding up the cobblestone streets, and the trumpets were echoing off the stone walls. We had great sex as always. I felt guilty that my lawyer had misadvised us.

  Finally his work visa came through. Though he got into the States at last, he was angry at the whole country and bitter. “No one wants to come here anymore, at least not from the first or second world. France is superior to America.”

  My nephew’s heart had been broken by his wife in Tokyo. He flew to Providence and joined us. Hubert couldn’t bear him. Keith would get drunk and scream at his wife, Tomoko, in Japan over the phone round about two in the morning. The worst was that they communicated in pidgin English: “Me no wanty come back Japan!” he would shout. Neither he nor Hubert had any respect for our landlord’s house or furniture. “It’s all store-bought furniture, new, it’s worth nothing,” Hubert declared.

  “Americans spend a lot of money on store-bought furniture,” I said. “They’re very proud of it.” In one of the bedrooms there was a spooky, life-size doll of a grandmother, reminiscent of Mrs. Bates in Psycho. My nephew hauled it down to the basement, where it became filthy. I could see an invisible adding machine touting up vast sums I would owe the landlord for the damages. Eventually the sum came to ten thousand dollars. The parquet floor was thin and easily scarred. Hubert didn’t like the placement of the dining room table and shoved it to a new place, leaving behind deep grooves in the floor. We bought a basset puppy who gnawed holes in the upholstery. The balloon ceiling in the entrance hall filled with overflow water from the bathtub above, although our landlord had warned us of that possibility.

  Finally Hubert threw my nephew out of the house after he said patronizing things about the Italians, as if they were all stupid day laborers. My nephew had never traveled to Italy, but his self-esteem was so low he needed to feel superior to someone. Was it Stendhal who said the French were Italians in a bad mood? Certainly the bond between the Italians and the French is a very tight one, ever since Catherine de Médici arrived in Paris with her pastry chefs, or perhaps since Petrarch fell in love with his Laura (who may have been an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade), or even since Caesar conquered Gaul.

  But Hubert was sort of compassionate. He introduced my nephew to a Finnish weaver twenty-five years older than Keith, a woman who he realized would take care of Keith, as she did for the next twenty years. They became lovers.

  I’d met a woman in Paris named Christine, a teacher in a maternelle (kindergarten), and invited her to accompany me to Providence, all expenses paid, so she could develop her talent as an illustrator while I started my teaching job at Brown. I thought she’d be good company for Hubert, who until recently had had a wife. And after all, both Hubert and Christine wanted to be illustrators. As a woman, she’d take the curse off an all-male household. It was an experiment that resulted in Christine becoming an important, in-demand children’s book artist (she ended up doing children’s books with Julie Andrews and her daughter), but was otherwise something of a disaster.

  In fact, Hubert didn’t like her—either this or he wanted me all to himself.

  Christine was constantly irritating Hubert, though she did her best to soothe him. She was always desperately in love, and there was no reasoning with her if she was in hot pursuit of a man. She’d met an Israeli, a grad student at Brown, and, in spite of Hubert’s specific prohibition against inviting anyone to the small house we’d rented in Key West for the month of January, she secretly asked him down for a weekend. When it turned out she’d ignored Hubert’s will, he became furious and disappeared, riding his bike across the island for twenty-four hours. I was terribly anxious and sensed that somehow he thought this was all my fault.

  In turn, Christine was hurt that what Hubert called her nymphomania so vexed him. As a man used to flirting with women and sleeping with them, he wasn’t afraid of them or on distant, polite terms with them as I was. He talked openly and crudely with women about their pussies and their “insatiable” needs. Which never struck me as funny, though he laughed a lot with a big, hollow laugh.

  Because Christine was so nakedly needy, she seemed to me like another gay man—like me whenever I was infatuated. Both she and Hubert, so young and so good looking, were frustrated because no one in Providence cruised them. I explained that in America it was considered rude (or gay) to look fixedly at someone. It seemed symptomatic of the national differences to me that the word “cruise” in English applied only to gays, whereas the French equivalent, draguer, applied to heterosexuals as well.

  “But have we lost our looks?” Christine asked.

  In some ways very sophisticated, she could also be naïve and credulous. When she’d first moved to Paris, a chubby, mid
dle-aged Turk offering to “audition” her had made her parade around for him in a sheer dress, then a bikini, then nude–-explaining that he wanted to make her a “top model” (the two English words are always said together by French speakers, as if they constitute a necessarily bound form). When it got late and Christine could see he was agitating something in his lap, she started to cry, wailing, “I don’t want to be a topmodel!”

  She’d gathered up her clothes and fled. The man lived in the place des Victoires, which was deserted at midnight, and she looked back over her shoulder to see if he was pursuing her.

  The least French-seeming thing about Christine was her love of telling tales that exposed her own naïveté, which she mocked and gloried in. Hubert and I teased her about the Israeli grad student, who was portly, trying to hide from her behind a tree.

  “The pregnant tree,” Hubert said, and in the air he drew a tree with a stomach.

  Christine’s drawings were of childhood innocence and would often show children with their grandmothers or would illustrate idyllic memories of her grandfather’s estate beside the Loire and long summers playing there with her girl cousins.

  Hubert’s drawings were satirical of grown-ups saying pretentious or fatuous things. It was as if, since he was obliged to say farewell to this world, he must first denigrate it. As a favor to me, Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje printed some of Hubert’s drawings in their magazine Brick, but several readers found them so offensive they canceled their subscriptions. I thought it was heroic that Hubert still cared enough about the world to satirize it.