Skinned Alive by Edmund White

the club pulls a gun on me, and it’s happened three times, I say, ‘I’m sorry but guns are not permitted on the premises,’ and it works, they go away, but mine is a suicidal response.” Paul was someone on whom nothing was wasted; nevertheless he was not always alive to all possibilities, at least not instantly. I told him I was positive, but he didn’t react. Behind theextremely dark sunglasses, there was this presence, breathing and thinking but not reacting.
    Our hotel, the Hesperides, had been built into the sunbaked mud ramparts in the ruins of the pasha’s palace. We stared into an octagonal, palm-shaded pool glistening with black rocks that then slid and clicked—ah, tortoises! There couldn’t have been more than five guests, and the porters, bored and curious, tripped over themselves serving us. We slept in each other’s arms night after night and I stroked his great body as though he were a prize animal,
la belle bête.
My own sense of who I was in this story was highly unstable. I flickered back and forth, wanting to be the blond warrior’s fleshy, pale concubine or then the bearded pasha himself, feeding drugged sherbets to the beautiful Circassian slave I had bought. I thought seriously that I wouldn’t mind buying and owning another human being—if it was Paul.
    The next day we picked up some hitchhikers, who, when we reached their destination, asked us in for mint tea, which we sipped barefoot in a richly carpeted room. A baby and a chicken watched us through the doorway from the sun-white courtyard. Every one of our encounters seemed to end with a carpet, usually one we were supposed to buy. In a village called Wodz, I remember both of us smiling as we observed how long and devious the path to the carpet could become: there was first a tourist excursion through miles of Casbahs, nearly abandoned except for an old veiled woman poking a fire in a now roofless harem; then we took a stroll through an irrigated palm plantation, where a woman leading a donkey took off her turban, a blue bath towel, and filled it with dates, which she gave us with a golden grin; and finally we paid a “surprise visit” to the guide’s “brother,” the carpet merchant who happened to have just returned from the desert with exotic Tuareg rugs. Their prices, to emphasize their exoticism, he pretended to translate from Tuareg dollars into dirham.
    We laughed, bargained, bought, happy anytime our shoulders touched or eyes met. We told everyone we were Danes, since Danish was the one language even the most resourceful carpet merchants didn’t know. (“But wait, I have a cousin in the next village who once lived in Copenhagen.”)
    Later, when I returned to Paris, I would discover that Jean-Loup had left me for Régis, one of the richest men in France. For the first time in his life he was in love, he would say. He would be wearing Régis’s wedding ring, my Jean-Loup who had refused to stay behind at my apartment after the other guests had left lest he appear too
pédé.
People would suspect him of being interested in the limousine, the town house, the château, but Jean-Loup would insist it was all love.
    When he told me, on my return, that he would never sleep with me again—that he had found the man with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life—my response surprised him.
“Ça tombe bien,”
I said (“That suits me fine”).
    Jean-Loup blurted out: “But you’re supposed to be furious.” It wasn’t that he wanted me to fight to get him back, though he might have enjoyed it, but that his vanity demanded that I protest; my own vanity made me concede him with a smile. Feverishly I filled him in on my recent passion for Paul and the strategies I had devised for unloading him, Jean-Loup. It’s true I had thought of fixing him up with a well-heeled handsome young American.
    Jean-Loup’s eyes widened. “I had no idea,” he said, “that things had gone so far.” Perhaps in revenge he told me how he had