The Married Man Read Online Free PDF

seemed cautious about Julien, but then people
never
made the least effort to be fair and objective but always imposed their idiosyncratic reading on a friend’s new lover; they didn’t stop for a moment to wonder if he had qualities that would make the poor friend happy. They only judged the newcomer according to whether he was perceived as a threat or an ally. Although Austin thrived on confusion, he expected reasonableness and calm from other people, at least when they advised him at crucial moments in his life.
    Later in the day Gregg had dropped in unexpectedly for a cup of tea. “Hon,” Gregg said, “that new Julien of yours is a
doll.”
Gregg liked to talk like a waitress in a forties film and he often said things such as, “Time to cool my aching dogs,” or “Your mom”—meaning himself—“is plumb wore out slinging hash,” by which he meant he’d had a tiring day inserting slender disposable wands into clients’ pressure points. But his camp way of talking didn’t mean that he was effeminate or insincere.
    Austin had first met Gregg eight years ago at the gym, when they’d both just arrived in Paris. Back then Gregg had recently left a Midwestern college, where he’d been a dance major, in order to come to Paris. He knew no one. Paris had been a scintillating childhood dream, but the reality was friendless and dull, at least at first. In repose his face was a devastatingly bleak portrait of loneliness, as though he’d been irreversibly disillusioned as a kid. When he was engaged in conversation, however, he lit up, illuminated by curiosity and warmth.
    At least he was friendly and easygoing with Austin, who was older and unthreatening, and he never hesitated to quiz Austin about the most minor acquisitions in his apartment. Gregg noticed even a new book, and every day the mail brought four or five of them, almost all catalogues of antique auctions or furniture shows.
    He was pretty and sensitive but he did everything to hide it, slouching around, skull shaved, fine-boned body bulked up by army fatigues, only the trousers, when he bent to tie the laces of his military shoes, stretching across his rounded butt and bulging thighs to reveal the body he took such pains disguising
—and
building up.
    He was always dropping in with a new story of a sex adventure.
    “Mother, I was in the Parc de Vincennes this morning and I saw this hot kid, a real pervert, you could tell by his hungry, pervy eyes that he had a hungry hole, we went up a deserted path, just the occasional jogger, and the kid starts playing down there and
tout d’un coup
don’t you just know your daughter was
fisting
that sick pig right there in broad daylight!”
    “Dirty?”
    “Leave it to Mom for the practical questions. No, that little Jean-François must douche every morning
just in case….”
    Although he was vulgar and sassy, Gregg had deep inner resources of grief. He once confessed as he was massaging Austin (for he was also an occasional masseur) that he’d never known his father. In the small Ohio town where he’d grown up he’d assumed his dad musthave run off with another woman soon after his birth; that was the version his mother had always given him. But then one day his mother and he were driving to the supermarket when they saw on a park bench a small, graying vagrant asleep, his face puffy, the upper lip bruised a dark purple. “That’s your father,” Gregg’s mother had said.
    As Gregg talked, Austin was lying on his stomach, his face turned away from him. He expected Gregg’s palm or hands to … well, to hesitate. Or stop. But no, the rhythm was exactly the same. And his face lowered into that ruminative murmur men use when they chamois the car or whistle something, the soft murmur of thought joined to a hands-on job.
    Now Gregg was running into the kitchen—“I need some of that Château Chirac,” he said, by which he meant Paris tap water—and then he came back and said, between gulps, “Honey, you