Inside a Pearl (11 page)

Caven was often with Rosa von Praunheim, who, in spite of his name, was a man and a very sexy one at that in black leather pants. He'd defiantly assumed the name “Rosa” to recall the pink triangles that homosexuals had been forced to wear in the Nazi death camps. He, too, had made scores of underground films, most notably his 1973 hit
It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse but the Society in Which He Lives
. In 1992 Praunheim made a documentary about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an elderly drag queen who'd survived the Nazi and the Communist regimes, although it later came out that she'd collaborated with the Communists. Mahlsdorf lived in the Gründerzeit Museum in East Berlin, which she'd built to house artifacts of everyday life from around 1900 that she'd found at the dump and flea markets. The owners of the gay bookstore Prinz Eisenherz in West Berlin drove me there so I could meet her. She greeted us in a maid's uniform at the entrance. The “museum” was filled with the conventional middle-class trappings of the period. There was a huge Swiss music box that played yard-wide metal disks. On the landing leading to the basement kitchen and a detailed recreation of an old Berlin gay bar, there was a vitrine filled with Charlotte's sadistic leather accoutrements. Years later, in 2003, after she was dead, I saw the Pulitzer Prize–winning play about her,
I Am My Own Wife
, starring Jefferson Mays and written by a Texan, Doug Wright. From the play I learned that after the Berlin Wall came down and the Stasi files were opened, it was revealed that Charlotte had denounced people she knew in the antiques world. I thought
anyone who survived the Nazis and the Communists as a transvestite must have made some serious compromises.

My This, with his beautiful clothes and kindness,
gemütlich
manners and eternal smile, was a striking contrast to these weird Germans with their perversions, drugs, and conversational directness. Once I asked Thomas, who'd grown up in Switzerland on the German frontier, if he'd ever run across the border to play with German kids, and Thomas shook his head and said, “No, my parents thought they were too dirty.” This often made fun of himself (while, it occurred to me, half bragging) by referring to himself as a simple peasant boy from the mountains, and I gather that in Swiss German he had a comically rustic accent. But in a way he seemed as pure as a mountain stream.

The Germans always seemed to rub the French the wrong way, all the stranger since the French liked to act awestruck by the monuments of German philosophy, art, music, and literature.

A beautiful young woman who was a Berlin journalist and looked like a boy came to dinner in Paris. Ina worked for a left-wing Berlin journal. At the time, I was still researching my Genet biography, and my other friends were all French Genet scholars. Ina also wrote about Proust, Musil, and Jelinek. At a certain point in the evening, Ina said, “Now let me understand. All the men here are gay and all the women are straight, is that right?”

You could almost hear the deflating horns descending,
wah wah wah
. Her question put everyone out of sorts, since French life is built on the possibility of seduction, on the unsaid (
le non-dit
). By spelling everything out, she'd threatened to end the game of flirtation. Of course an American—at least one with enough self-confidence—might have blurted out the same question, too, since we don't like the murk of sexual ambiguity either. I suppose the Americans and the Germans are more alike than the French and the Germans.

Sometime in the mid-eighties, I made a trip to Berlin for
Vogue
with the photographer Dominique Nabokov. She was the widow of the composer Nicolas Nabokov, the great writer's cousin. For years Nicolas had organized the Festival of Europe, which had turned out to be a
CIA scheme for promoting a non-Communist left wing in Western Europe. Because of her husband's old connections, Dominique knew “everyone” in Berlin. We interviewed Aribert Reimann, who'd written the opera
Lear
for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I also spoke to Otto Schily, a founder of the Green Party and a member of the Bundestag. Schily predicted the imminent reunification of East and West Germany, which no one else was talking about. He said that the sense of everyone being German, East and West, was stronger than the Communist/capitalist divide. I was further shocked when he assured me reunification would come soon. All the more so when one of This's friends, Karsten Witte, a film critic, arranged for me to go to East Berlin with two doctor friends of his, husband and wife, who drove me around the city. I was sitting in the backseat and within a few minutes the doctors pointed out that someone official was tailing us. The authorities stopped us and asked me why I was taking notes. I said it was for
Vogue
, just some banalities about the city, and they let us go.

This and I went to a beautiful, newly refurbished neoclassical theater in the East that had been run by Bertolt Brecht when he was alive. We saw
The Threepenny Opera
performed there by the Berliner Ensemble in a very scanty, impoverished production that brought out the plight of the poor, spunky characters. Near the theater was one of the few gay bars the regime permitted to stay open. The people there were shabby, friendly, and alcoholic, and many of the clients were women. No wonder people said the East was more genuine and “real” than the West, though few elected to live there, except the
Mauerspringer
(“wall jumper”), who'd confounded everyone by jumping the wall from the West to the East, then written a book about it.

Years later, after the Wall came down (on November 9, 1989), This and I ate at a trendy restaurant facing the splendors of the French Cathedral, the neoclassical Huguenot church on Berlin's most beautiful square, the Gendarmenmarkt. I went to the nearby flea market where hordes of Eastern Europeans were selling off their most treasured belongings for relative pennies, and the whole thing was terribly sad. Wanting to help one Russian man, I bought an icon from him. It was smoke-blackened from centuries of votive candles. The history of
Europe and, it seemed, of my time in Europe was turning another terrible, irreversible corner.

We were always there in the winter, which was so much more severe than in Paris, where it rarely snows. But for me, Berlin was epitomized by old women in galoshes crowding into one of the many concert halls. The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, who lived there for many years, told me that his Asian wife was repeatedly kicked by these old ladies in the bus. Since she was beautiful and young and Asian, they assumed she was a prostitute.

When I'd spoken to students in English in an old-fashioned wooden amphitheater, they'd all drummed their feet on the hollow-sounding floors instead of applauding. When I read to them from my complex, not entirely successful novel
Caracole
, a pimply male student attacked me for writing in a cultured “Thomas Mann style,” as if that were a terrible sin, and for recording painful events that had happened to me when I was much younger rather than reporting my current angst.

I knew from Nabokov's novel
The Gift
that Berlin could be a summer paradise of interlocking lakes and nude swimming, but maybe Berlin was no longer entirely like that. I'd seen nudism in Munich's English Garden, where there is also a perpetual cataract of cold water along the Eisbach, in which boys surfed in their wetsuits atop an up-gush—sometimes frozen in the hang-ten for minutes, their bodies tense and bulging beneath their Neoprene skins.

This had a social energy that astounded me. Whereas writers must guard against too much socializing in order to work, for This work
was
socializing. He was tirelessly cheerful, never moody, always perfectly turned out, always “on,” though later he treasured his solitude in his mountain ski house in the Engadine; often he'd stay there with just his dog, Lumpi, for weeks on end. I could be social and most people considered me gregarious, but too much chitchat left me exhausted. This liked to sit alone and work his way through hundreds of cinema magazines in an effort to keep up.

Later, in my sixties, I became grotesquely fat. Although everyone in his world was slim, This wasn't embarrassed by my looks, since I was no
longer his lover and didn't reflect badly on him. He turned me into a mildly comical character, “Professor Bear,” bumbling and bewildered and endearing. But at the same time he continued to buy industrial quantities of my books and give them as Christmas presents to his often confused friends, who were uncertain what to think of these “gifts.” Poor This lost both the great love of his life, Thomas, and Elisabeth, the woman he lived with for years (he was living with her when we first met). Waiters in Zurich called her his wife (though maybe
frau
is more ambiguous). She was a glamorous blonde but did so much cocaine that she drove her dress shop into the ground; This lectured her, which only alienated her. She moved out. In Cairo we had a green satin bedspread made for her; This thought she'd look like a Hollywood star lying on it with her long blonde hair. Once I brought her a new, light, flowery perfume from Paris. Since she was “known,” she told me, for wearing Chanel No. 5, she said she'd wear the new perfume to sleep in. Eventually This talked of her less and less often. She had a shiftless lover This didn't approve of. And then one day he told me she had died.

Though he had what seemed a sun-drenched life, his childhood with a tyrannical father and an unloving stepmother had been so grim he seldom spoke of it, and even his adulthood was marked by these unexpected deaths of his intimates. There was something steely inside him that had been forged out of his abusive childhood; I recognized this cold, untouchable core because I had it, too, underneath my amiability. We were both survivors.

After I was diagnosed with HIV, This was afraid of me. We grew apart, as I'd predicted. I wept often over my lost love and felt abandoned. Death was my constant shadow. My mother said to me, “It's normal for someone like me in her eighties to lose a friend every month, but it's strange for someone like you in his forties.” I was attentive but not devoted to my dying friends; I thought, My time will come. I can't suffer through this repeatedly.

Marie-Claude would invite new French novelists or philosophers of the moment to dinner, and these young men from the provinces, who now taught in Paris high schools and lived with women in the twentieth arrondissement, would appear intimidated but also puzzled and surprised by what they were encountering. Who was this aging American fag barely able to speak French? Here was this slender woman in her sixties—with her short pearly gray hair, the floating ecru and beige panels of her layered Japanese clothes, her lacquered red shoes, her ivory cigarette holder, her slightly weary graciousness—offering them some of her famous tapenade on toast (“famous” like all the rituals of this woman's life, at least to the faithful). She was perhaps most famous for her low, smoky voice, though in fact it was someone else's, Jeanne Moreau's. On the phone MC was often mistaken for Jeanne Moreau and immediately put through, an error she relished. One of my naïve girlfriends from the gym thought Marie-Claude couldn't possibly be French: “Is she English, German?” I wondered what sounded foreign—her timbre? Her articulation? Her slow speech? When she was diagnosed with cancer the first time she did consider giving up smoking, but her doctor assured her that stopping would be too much of a shock to her system. (Another friend thought not smoking might destroy her lovely, distinctive speaking voice.)

To me MC seemed completely continental. She even had a very European way of being tired. She would say, “But we're all terribly tired. Everyone is worn out.” It wasn't quite clear if she meant that the troubled politics of recent weeks had exhausted everyone, or whether
in these impoverished latter days everyone we knew had to work like coal miners to stay afloat. I knew that if, in my empirical Anglo-Saxon way, I proffered these possibilities of what she meant by general weariness (since in English we craved examples), Marie-Claude would vaguely reject them, saying,
“Non, c'est pas ça,”
without elaborating on what she meant. “Everyone is terribly, terribly tired.” I found that the French rarely descended to the indignity of an example. They couldn't think with them, and we couldn't think without them.

For years Diane Johnson, the American novelist and author of
Le Divorce
, was my expat pal and coconspirator in noticing and simultaneously scorning and admiring French foibles. Researching her novels, which she increasingly set in Paris, Diane frequently consulted with MC about French manners and morals and expressions. Since the death of Mary McCarthy there had been surprisingly few American novelists living in Paris, where the dollar was becoming weaker and weaker against the franc. Younger American writers were living in Prague or Budapest and would soon enough be moving to the still more affordable capitals of Latvia or Lithuania. This push toward Eastern Europe seemed likely to be less fruitful, since even fewer Americans would ever learn Slavic or Baltic languages or Hungarian, and so would have less of a chance for a real intellectual exchange with the people of these countries. At least in the twenties and thirties a few of all the American artists living in Paris had learned French and were influenced by contemporary French painting and literature.

Now Americans didn't like feeling intimidated by a superior culture but enjoyed dipping randomly into Czech or Hungarian cuisine, folklore, or even politics in a lightly condescending, neocolonial way before running back to their enclaves in bookstores and reading their copies of English-language newspapers and attending concerts by American or British music acts. That's probably why so many young Americans scorned France and believed the French were rude or snooty; they weren't used to dealing with their equals or their more intellectually and artistically refined counterparts in other languages. Whereas the English expats, mostly painters, I'd met on Crete intended to stay there if they could (their lives were better in
Chania than they'd ever been in Liverpool), no American I knew intended to die outside the United States. We all assumed our culture was the best—since our disillusionment with our culture had not yet had time to set in.