Belle-Île and we’d go to Brittany, to the Morbihan, where my grandmother had an old, primitive house on a river—the house didn’t even have electricity and you could reach it only by water. Our mother did everything so well—she changed the decoration of our house in Nancy every few months. Her cooking was superb. And of course she played … the classical piano. We’d go on car trips together to La Baule or Honfleur or down to the Côte d’Azur—how my mother loved the beach! She and my father would go to a nudist beach at La Baule. I remember one of her friends was walking nude down the beach one day with handcuffs around her wrist and the other half around her husband’s penis and scrotum.”
Austin had to remind himself that Julien’s parents were his age and, like him, pure products of the 1960s. “Did your parents walk around the house nude?”
“Oh, yes, of course!” Julien exclaimed, honestly happy to be recalling something—anything at all—about his happy childhood. “Everything we did was very natural. No false modesty.”
Austin’s own childhood was remote, and both his parents were dead; it was difficult for him to remember that he’d ever been given over to thoughts about them. In fact, at no time had he ever taken himself so seriously as this young man did. It was part of his appeal, this gravity of Julien’s, this certainty that every old score must be settled, every memorial visited, a flower placed before every fond thought. Julien was a legend in his own eyes. If Austin had been French he might have been bored by such self-centeredness, but at least half of what attracted him to Julien was that knowing him represented a total immersion into France. Austin not only had to read Julien’s favorite adult comics, but he also had to learn songs such as
“Paris est une blonde”
and
“Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance.”
Not that Julien ever knew the lyrics after the first line or two, but that didn’t keep him from singing along with made-up nonsense lyrics. He belted every tune out vigorously in his stentorian baritone. Before, Austin had thought of France as female—as perfume, cooking, Renoir mothers in the garden, as silky underthings and fancy fashions, as the soft valley of Paris itself, lying, inviting and seductive, below the stiffmale lingam of the Eiffel Tower. Or he’d thought of
his
women—the Princesse de Lamballe and Marie Antoinette—women who acted through strange alternations of piety and snobbishness, who out of faddishness received the very philosophers whose ideas would soon enough cost them their heads. Women who rejected the stern standard of magnificence from an earlier epoch for the comfort of grace and intimacy. Bluestockings. Taste makers.
In this roseate vision of a France ruled by a feminine sensibility compounded out of caprice and pleasure, men had always struck Austin as playing the duller role. Only since meeting Julien with his very male curatorial concern with women’s clothes, minds and manners had Austin glimpsed the male hands straightening the corsage or clasping the pearls at the base of the swan-like neck or rotating the naked woman on her raised pedestal so that she might present the painter with a better angle. Like landscape architects in a formal French garden, men were shaping and disciplining women, torturing them into unexpected forms.
Julien wasn’t terribly traditional (after all, he’d lived in Ethiopia, he was at least partially homosexual and he’d entirely rejected the Church). But he was French in his tics—his fear of drafts, to the point of changing his seat two or three times in a restaurant if need be, his knowledge of cheeses, wines, mushrooms, his old-fashioned, deliberate way of speaking—all these habits and practices seemed rooted in the soil of
“la douce France,”
a soil he so cherished that he always defended the “peasants” when they marched in Paris in protest against the tumbling protectionist
Austin had to remind himself that Julien’s parents were his age and, like him, pure products of the 1960s. “Did your parents walk around the house nude?”
“Oh, yes, of course!” Julien exclaimed, honestly happy to be recalling something—anything at all—about his happy childhood. “Everything we did was very natural. No false modesty.”
Austin’s own childhood was remote, and both his parents were dead; it was difficult for him to remember that he’d ever been given over to thoughts about them. In fact, at no time had he ever taken himself so seriously as this young man did. It was part of his appeal, this gravity of Julien’s, this certainty that every old score must be settled, every memorial visited, a flower placed before every fond thought. Julien was a legend in his own eyes. If Austin had been French he might have been bored by such self-centeredness, but at least half of what attracted him to Julien was that knowing him represented a total immersion into France. Austin not only had to read Julien’s favorite adult comics, but he also had to learn songs such as
“Paris est une blonde”
and
“Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance.”
Not that Julien ever knew the lyrics after the first line or two, but that didn’t keep him from singing along with made-up nonsense lyrics. He belted every tune out vigorously in his stentorian baritone. Before, Austin had thought of France as female—as perfume, cooking, Renoir mothers in the garden, as silky underthings and fancy fashions, as the soft valley of Paris itself, lying, inviting and seductive, below the stiffmale lingam of the Eiffel Tower. Or he’d thought of
his
women—the Princesse de Lamballe and Marie Antoinette—women who acted through strange alternations of piety and snobbishness, who out of faddishness received the very philosophers whose ideas would soon enough cost them their heads. Women who rejected the stern standard of magnificence from an earlier epoch for the comfort of grace and intimacy. Bluestockings. Taste makers.
In this roseate vision of a France ruled by a feminine sensibility compounded out of caprice and pleasure, men had always struck Austin as playing the duller role. Only since meeting Julien with his very male curatorial concern with women’s clothes, minds and manners had Austin glimpsed the male hands straightening the corsage or clasping the pearls at the base of the swan-like neck or rotating the naked woman on her raised pedestal so that she might present the painter with a better angle. Like landscape architects in a formal French garden, men were shaping and disciplining women, torturing them into unexpected forms.
Julien wasn’t terribly traditional (after all, he’d lived in Ethiopia, he was at least partially homosexual and he’d entirely rejected the Church). But he was French in his tics—his fear of drafts, to the point of changing his seat two or three times in a restaurant if need be, his knowledge of cheeses, wines, mushrooms, his old-fashioned, deliberate way of speaking—all these habits and practices seemed rooted in the soil of
“la douce France,”
a soil he so cherished that he always defended the “peasants” when they marched in Paris in protest against the tumbling protectionist
Similar Books
