Inside a Pearl (25 page)

Hubert was shutting down. One day, in a state of curiosity rather than panic, he noticed he couldn't write French words any more. Nor numbers. I rushed him to the hospital and they discovered he'd been attacked by toxoplasmosis, a parasite in the brain. It was reversible, thanks to a drug they'd just discovered (an old drug, though this new application had just been verified). He became thinner and thinner. He could no longer work as an architect; he turned himself into an illustrator. I wrote the text and he did the drawings for a little book called
Our Paris.
We contacted Claude Picasso's mother, Françoise Gilot, who now was married to Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. He put us in touch with a Paris researcher who was replacing the plasma of long-term AIDS patients with transfusions from newly infected patients. The idea was that the long-term patients would be helped by the high T-cell counts of the newly ill. It was a good theory, but it didn't work. We traveled to Marrakesh, which he loved for its warmth. I tried to rent a riyadh, a mansion in the heart of the old city, but when the caretaker saw Hubert's skinny frame he invented an implausible prior claim on the house. Perhaps he was afraid Hubert would die on his property.

We returned to gray, rainy Paris; Hubert longed for the heat of the desert. Our beloved basset hound, Fred, became too big and strong for him. Hubert was afraid of him and gave him to his gay brother, Julien, and the brother's lover, François, who was my age. They lived in Nice in a house with a garden; there was a puppy belonging to the upstairs neighbors for Fred to play with. Hubert's brother and his lover doted on the dog.

John's mother called and said he'd died kissing the Cross; they'd inscribed a public bench in Concord with his name. I hosted a big dinner in his honor at Da Silvano in New York, where everyone toasted him. It seemed appropriate.

Hubert and I went back to Morocco, this time to Agadir, where we hired a car. MC said she thought Hubert was too ill to travel, but I imagined riding around as a passenger in a car would be effortless. It turns out it's exhausting for someone who's weak and suffering. Hubert was vomiting all the time, due to pancreatitis. He couldn't hold down any food. The seams in his blue jeans hurt him. so he switched to long Arab robes. His skin became weirdly dark in the sun. Between his robes, skin color, and thinness, everyone assumed he was an Arab, a poor, beat-up, fleshless one; I caught two gold-toothed Moroccan boys nudging each other behind his back and laughing at him.

He slept all the time. He was too weak to climb into and out of the bath; I had to hold his body in my arms to help him. Naked, he looked like an Auschwitz victim. He wouldn't turn back, but like the dying Kit in
The Sheltering Sky
kept urging me to go deeper and deeper into the desert. Finally we reached Zagora, on the Algerian border. He became incontinent—he pissed all over himself. The desk clerk didn't want to give us a room, though the hotel was empty. I was writing something; Hubert had always listened to my latest pages, but now he was too weak to pay attention. He just smiled at me.

Because I insisted, we started driving back toward civilization, but it was the end of Ramadan and crowds were making merry in the nearly impassible roads. We were about as cheerful as a hearse as we waded through all these laughing, smiling people in their best clothes. When we got to Ouarzazate, Hubert collapsed on the way into the hotel. He kept saying he was finished, and when I insisted he get up he told me he detested me; those were his last words to me. A passerby called an ambulance, which meant Hubert was taken to a filthy Arab hospital where even the food for the patients was brought by family members. I'd been struggling against all odds to keep him alive; now I completely lost it. My act of will had come to nought. Moroccans gathered around his body lying in the grass like characters in a painting by Giotto, eager
to drink in, to
witness
, this calamity; they were allegories of observation. I was extremely frank with the three attending physicians, but I'm not sure they knew what AIDS was. They kept assuring me he was on the mend; they seemed determined to be optimistic.

We'd taken out emergency health insurance. I called the agent and he arranged for an ambulance to drive us through the freezing Atlas Mountains to the dirty Clinique du Sud in Marrakesh. On the way through the cold night he moaned and complained about something stabbing him in the back. The driver stopped and turned him over but couldn't find anything. I assured Hubert there was nothing wrong, which made him hate me all the more (maybe he was feeling pain in the pancreas). The Moroccan nurses at the clinic almost laughed at Hubert's pitiful state. A male intern hurt him in inserting a saline drip in his arm. I was allowed to sleep in the same room. When I woke up in the morning in the gay sunlight, the saline bag was no longer bubbling; he was dead.

The very severe and unsmiling insurance agent showed up and told me I couldn't take Hubert's body back with me. Many papers had to be filled out. Nor did they believe, the Muslims, in embalming. I convinced them to seal him in a lead coffin, though I knew he'd quickly turn to bouillabaisse in the heat.

MC brought her nightgown and toothbrush and spent the night with me when I got back to Paris. I noticed that my hair had turned white, I'd put on fifty pounds, and all my clothes needed dry cleaning. Hubert's brother Julien and his lover flew up to Paris. They went through all the formalities with me and arranged for Hubert's coffin to be repatriated. Only the Père Lachaise cemetery had ovens strong enough to blast through the lead coffin to cremate him. Looking at the smoke coming out of the tall chimney, again I thought of the German death camps.

Julien told me that Hubert had lied to me. Their mother had been a hairdresser and had played the accordion, not the concert piano. His grandmother came from Nantes for the cremation. She was a little, fat peasant woman, always joking. She was no aristocrat but lived in a two-room house with a mud floor; she was a simple, kind woman and
I was sorry that Hubert's lies had kept me from knowing her. Julien told me that Hubert had had sex before meeting me with dozens of men over the years in the woods covering Montburon, behind their house. Even though I'm an atheist, for a long time I lit candles in every church I visited.

In the years that I was living in Paris I paid hundreds of visits to London, sometimes on book tour, but usually just for pleasure. The English could be far more spontaneously social than the French. For one thing, they got drunker more often than the French. The French were constantly tippling wine but were seldom visibly drunk, even if they did have a high percentage of deaths from cirrhosis of the liver. In England, people drank to get drunk, and it was not uncommon to see someone's mother, a duchess or an important editor, fall down in public.

My English friends could give a drinks party with just a day's advance notice, and in spite of the vastness of London were willing to travel on the tube many miles. In New York it took me two weeks and in Paris one week to assemble friends for a full-blown dinner party. In London I could start calling and inviting a day or two before.

The English were witty and irreverently gossipy. My agent, Deborah Rogers, always said, “Let's get together for a good chin wag,” or “Let's put our knees up,” when I was coming to town. The French, being human, enjoyed gossip but officially were opposed to it. If someone served too much “dish” he ran the risk of being told he was no better than a concierge (who are stereotypically regarded as spies and snitches). The French had such active sex lives and inhabited apartments in such close proximity that they lived in mortal fear of being found out. The English seemed to me more moderate in their sexual exploits and lived in greater isolation—very often in detached houses in vast neighborhoods that were scattered across enormous London. Plus, their press, which was scandal driven, had bred in them a taste and a tolerance for outrage.

In France, by contrast, a law called
l'atteinte de la vie privée
meant nothing spicy could be written about public figures. In order to learn about sex scandals among the powerful French players, everyone had to consult the numerous Spanish or English magazines trafficking in loose innuendo and salacious he-said, she-said. In France, even if a reporter came armed with loads of evidence and testimony, the accused could bring an immediate lawsuit against the publishers and a fine could swiftly be imposed—a system that helped guard against poorly substantiated, career-killing hearsay, but that also defused investigative reporting. In many ways the invasion-of-privacy law kept French life unpolluted, but it also tranquilized press vigilance, which meant that there was a weak opposition press in France.

One of my dearest friends in England was Neil Bartlett. While he was still at Oxford, he asked if he could stage parts of my novel,
A Boy's Own Story
, and I was quick to say yes.

When we met to discuss his ideas, I was still a young-looking and presentable forty-three, used to sleeping with, or attempting to seduce, every gay man I met. After all, we'd just emerged from the seventies, the “golden age of promiscuity” (as Brad Gooch later put it in the title of one of his excellent novels). And even though AIDS had since intervened, I imagined that being in Europe constituted an AIDS holiday, a recess from the emergencies of the disease.

I slept with Neil, who was twenty years younger than I and vulpine but strangely courtly, a bit of a dandy with a touch of the thug. He was attracted to drag and he even wore a dress in a book of photos called
Men in Frocks
. And yet he was “the man” when we made love.

Right after Oxford he lived in a council flat that was in the East End and a stone's throw from Lime House. I would stay with him and his adorable roommate, the terribly appealing straight director of the Theatre de Complicité, Simon McBurney, with his childlike face and rubbery, hairless body. In England, more than elsewhere, I met many straight men who were
sympathique
. I had the good luck to observe both men rise in the theater world. The Theatre de Complicité toured outside of England and in England was hosted by the National Theatre
on the South Bank. Simon became a recognized screen actor, and Neil went on to take over the direction of the Lyric Hammersmith. Once he presented Benjamin Britten's
Michelangelo Sonnets
, and for the program notes he asked me to translate Britten's choice of the sonnets into English from the original Italian.

Neil also became one of England's finest writers. He wrote a landmark book,
Who Was That Man?,
about Oscar Wilde and fin de siècle gay London. His novels
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
,
Mr. Clive and Mr. Page,
and
Skin Lane
all had their historical dimensions. He might have dedicated himself just to fiction, but he was also attracted to directing theater pieces of an extravagant, stylized, somewhat campy variety, such as Balzac's
Sarrasine
, Racine's
Bérenice
and Neil's own adaptation of
Camille
.
A Vision of Love Revealed
was based on Simeon Solomon's 1871 prose poem, and Neil himself performed it in the nude in a warehouse. He did adaptations and translations of plays by Molière and Racine and farces by Labiche, as well as the English-language premiere of Genet's posthumous gangster play,
Splendid's
, which I had told him about during my research for Genet.

Neil found a lover, James Gardiner, a collector of vintage postcards who produced a book of letters and photographs called
A Class Apart
that documented an Edwardian affair between an amateur gentleman photographer and his well-hung “butler” who was willing to indulge his employer's taste for uniforms; the butler wrote touching, misspelled love letters to him when he went off to fight in the First World War. Neil and James bought a bijou residence in Brighton where they entertained me more than once.

When Neil got hepatitis, he had a liver transplant, but at first the new liver refused to kick in. Neil never succumbed to convalescence completely, and even when he seemed close to death kept busy and artistically active—until miraculously, at seemingly the last possible minute, the liver began to function. I've often thought of Neil's courage in facing these travails during my own health scares and emergencies.

Once Neil, when he was still in his twenties, came to visit me in Paris. Because his plane was delayed (this was before the Eurostar Chunnel train running under the English Channel), I told him to take
a taxi directly from the airport to MC's. She had also invited to dinner Yannick Guillou, an elegant, uptight (or
guindé
, as the French say in reference to spats) Gallimard editor, who played the harpsichord for half an hour each morning before going to work, and who owned a castle in Normandy.

Neil arrived in a black leather biker jacket and jeans with the whole seat torn out and no underwear. Yannick was astonished by this vestimentary oddity but charmed by Neil's Oxford accent, education, and exquisite manners. Neil's personality was both outrageous and decorous.

Equally odd were the clothes of the gay English writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wore striped military pants and an officer's tunic. Because in France there was no youth culture, these costumes looked particularly strange to Parisians. But Adam also spoke beautiful French, was tall and slim, wonderfully polite and
sortable
(meaning you could take him anywhere). He met some of my ladies, such as Didi d'Anglejan, an American who'd married an aristocrat and gained a title. I'd told my ladies that Adam's father was a judge and a lord—that worked wonders. Nor did it hurt that he'd attended Westminster and Cambridge.

On one of his visits to Paris, I prepared him lunch and said that unfortunately I'd been in a rush and that the only thing I'd had time to prepare was rabbit and mustard sauce. My wonderful butcher on the Île Saint-Louis kept a stone vat by the front door of rabbit parts marinating in Dijon mustard. The trick was to bring this mixture home and sauté it with white wine, then at the last moment stir in crème fraîche. It took ten minutes to do and was served with rice and a vegetable.