IN THE SUMMER of 1997, the ancient Khmer ruler Jayawarman VII lorded it over Paris in a manner of speaking. Carvings, statues, lingams, lintels, friezes, steles, betyl-stones of all kinds had been imported for an encyclopedic show of Khmer art at the Grand Palais. When his escape from Oliver, Alan, Sohaila and Stan ended in France, Darius attended the Khmer show. He found it difficult to enjoy. Droning AC recycled discreet farts and opinions through the underventilated galleries. The jostling crowd had trouble putting up with itself.
Outdoors, his optic nerve crazed by the relentless and humbling grandeur of the city, Darius couldn’t stop noticing the one person who saw none of it—because his eyes were closed. This was Jayawarman VII. The man’s stone portrait appeared everywhere on banners advertising the Khmer show. Evidently awake, the fact that Jayawarman shut his eyes wherever he went in the beautiful capitol was quite attention-getting. Eyes closed, lips flexing imperceptibly in enlightenment—a peace too awesome to call contentment, much less a smile—the portrait was conventionally Buddhist in type, though clearly a masterpiece.
Darius didn’t think Jayawarman disliked Paris. He wasn’t inclined to argue, “Open your eyes, old man!” Nor was it a matter of eastern and western art contending, though the meditative banner and the rearing golden Pegasi of the Pont Alexandre III made for a nice contrast. Realism, Darius decided, was what it was all about. The key to the eerie realism of the Khmer head, conventional or not, was in the closed eyes. Any sculpture of a figure asleep, say, a Psyche or an Adonis—Darius couldn’t call one to mind—might have the same hypnotic power. Sculptures with open eyes, of which there was a superabundance in Paris, were just sculptures in the end. Some were realistic illusions in stone or bronze, some were less so.
Close the eyes, however, and something strange happened. The viewer no longer has to pretend the statue is thinking or feeling or experiencing any mental activity whatsoever. No more than the actual stone thinks. Suddenly stone isn’t just illusionistic, not just an apt medium to represent an unconscious figure or an aristocratic bonze’s disciplined emptying of his mind. Thoughtlessness and stone are, to all intents and purposes, one thing. The realism of Jayawarman VII’s portrait didn’t grip Darius. A frisson of actuality did. A frisson—he loved mouthing the word on the street in the slight verbal drunkenness he’d felt since arriving.
Like Jayawarman VII, Darius hadn’t come to Paris to see Paris. He hadn’t come to see Jayawarman. The Khmer show was just a foretaste. If someone in Tunis or in Rome had been enthusiastic enough to arrange a retrospective of Colin Vail’s work, he would have gone there. But it was going to be in Paris, so he landed in Paris when he fled college, America, father. The show was due to be mounted that fall in an undistinguished Left Bank gallery.
Darius was letting Sohaila and Stan and a few friends think he was dallying in the way of many young people whose parents finance a year of drift. Had he told anyone he thought his secret purpose in coming was to genuflect at the temple of an obscure American artist, Colin Vail, they might have been charmed or impressed. The pursuit looked wonderfully romantic. In a certain light he could see the romance himself. But he told no one. He feared the reactions of other people would throw an uncomfortable shadow of comedy—or bullshit—on his most solemn beliefs. And make it clear this was all about Oliver.
He had to do some groundwork. Of the Paris connections he scraped together, Cassie Vail passed along the most glamorous name, the dealer and collector who was organizing the Vail show. She knew the man. Before leaving, Darius had labored for days over a light sounding note. Cassie shot back a scrawl on stationery headed Cassandra Vail Fine Art. She gave him the gallerist’s name, plus one or two others. She added, “Darius! Lovely! Lovely to hear! Often so sorry things ended not as smoothly as they might have with your father and me. Always feel the deepest concern and fondness for him. But where on earth is he? Please inform. Can I help? Also, come to see me when you’re back from Paris. Wanted to go desperately myself, but a beau has hip surgery scheduled. Much love!”
His early French lessons with David Caperini had inoculated Darius against corny Parisian daydreams. He expected to hate the museum city, a good place for art of the closed up and put away sort. The city fairly sweated eternity. Darius had never seen anything like it. And in spite of himself he started to love the trickle of life still flowing through endless channels of Lutetian limestone (all subtly golden now that the nineteenth-century gray had been sand-blasted away).
Every day, fascinating generalizations rose like morning mist from the inconceivably detailed foreignness of packages, matchbooks, plugs, switches, everything. It wasn’t a new land, it was a new way of thinking. Here idleness was almost esteemed. It was heaven for a dropout. Loafers in cafés were treated respectfully as if they might be geniuses, ministers-in-exile or terrorists, not mere wastrels like Darius. The deadly infection of American vim and entrepreneurialism had already taken hold. But coming from the United States, Darius didn’t notice it so much.
Darius lived at the Hotel Moderne, a two-star place a block from the Jardins du Luxembourg. A futuristic armoire of black laminated particleboard loomed over the bed on which he reviewed his daily hoard of scribbled phrases and museum postcards. He masturbated constantly, not as considerate as he could have been of the Styrofoam ceiling tiles or chocolate velveteen curtains, easy targets for ejaculations of wild loneliness. At first he thought the narrow-eyed hotel proprietress had no taste. Then the generalization came to him that black plastic furniture and a chocolate color scheme were typically French.
His most welcoming connection was Rolf, the family friend, German but living in Paris and the one who’d told Darius about the Vail show in the first place. He was the first person Darius called. Rolf cut through his pretense of casualness. “Thank God, an American! You wouldn’t believe the French shit I’ve been putting up with. My roommate Roger-Pôl wants his crush to move in. This snooty Mauritanian prince. I hate aristocrats. And I certainly don’t want one living in my home!” He didn’t sound like the ultra-polite houseguest he’d been. He wanted to meet at once.
Darius arrived first at a sprawling café at the Bastille. A thousand iterations of the same gorgeous but drab French boy hunched at the tables, morose, regal. All of them had rested an elbow on the orb of a motorcycle helmet and held the liquid scepter of a panaché in one hand. Rolf, when he came, stood out, to say the least. The good boy gray jacket was gone. He wasn’t at all the houseguest he’d been. Nearly seven feet, he was dressed in an orange shirt and orange and green camouflage pants. A maroon chiffon scarf was wrapped tightly around his great columnar neck. He flipped up the clip-on shades of his clunky glasses and scanned the crowd like an orange lighthouse. Darius raised an arm. Rolf’s smile of perfect confidence was the same as before.
Brisk, kind and, as the son of diplomats, an experienced traveler himself, Rolf knew what a newcomer needed. In moments he was writing names, phone numbers, restaurant addresses on the backs of old notes to himself, which he reread and summarily scored through, all the while debating aloud with himself. “There are many good things still. I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing Paris. Enfin, I was a little blue-eyed when I first came to the Beaux Arts—that was a long time ago—am I, what, seven years older than you?—anyway, in German, we have this expression, blue-eyed. It’s the same in English, no? Sort of—innocent. But I may be coming to the end of my time here. Perhaps.” He took out cigarettes.
“Dommage.” Darius hoped this chirrup had an air of fluency.
“Pourquoi ça?”
“Well,” Darius retreated to English. “Just things ending. I hate that.”
Darius was glad of the thick glasses and the gargantuan fingers continually pushing them back up Rolf’s nose, because they slightly interfered with the almost bruising blue-eyed smile Rolf kept lowering on him. “Don’t say that,” the German murmured paternally. “Look at us!”
After many more smiles, Rolf invited Darius to come shopping with him and to drop by the apartment after. Darius agreed readily, thinking it would seal their acquaintance better than a quick cup of coffee could. Rolf smiled again, his eyes detonating with generous satisfaction. Kindness certainly lay at the bottom of Rolf’s behavior, but what most impressed Darius was the perfection of his manners. The orange was as carefully chosen as the gray had been. These smiles, the sparks in his eyes, were all controlled, deliberate, detached. Not false, surely, but not spontaneous, either. After all, Rolf was still the perfect houseguest.
Rolf was leaving the next day with some friends to drive to his family’s summer home on Lago Maggiore (the Swiss, not the Italian side). After the idiomatic “summer home” came out, Rolf paused. He plucked the cigarette from his wide mouth with a considering pop. He corrected himself. “It’s a little rustico. A beautiful place, but just a shack, a nothing.”
“A cottage?”
“Yes. Not a summer home. A cottage, that’s it.” The well-bred deprecation made Darius smile. Against a background of unremitting strangeness, this fugitive quirk of personality stood out. Something he’d thought American or his own was reproduced exactly in Europe. “Enfin! That’s why I have to shop. We need food to eat in the car. It’s faster if we don’t stop during the drive.”
“A road trip.”
“Yes. A road trip. Exactly.” He stubbed out his cigarette and eyed Darius. “But not long. I mean the trip is long, but I’m not away long. After a week or ten days, I come back. We’ll see each other.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Darius answered.
When they left, the German threaded his way amongst the tables of French boys with the necessary elegance of the enormous or the orange. Outside, he flung his terrifying hand toward Jayawarman VII, whose banner bellied gently on a lamp post. “Have you seen this?” He bent intimately toward Darius. “Fantastic. Fantastique. Sauf la publique. These blockbusters à l’Américain. Disgusting. Your country has a lot to answer for, you know.” He teased so gently it was like a caress.
They went to a Prisunic. Rolf chose a plastic tablet of salami, a plastic-wrapped baguette and even, bashfully, les chips. A messy bin of cheap, picked-through Camemberts made him sigh. “And your mother? She’s well?” he drawled politely. For the first time, he seemed to slow down some, though he kept unscrewing Camembert cartons to prod and sniff them.
“She’s fine.”
“She lives in that house, that large, large house. A mansion, really. I got lost going to the bathroom.”
“Yes. With Stan. Not exactly a rustico.”
“The Romanian. An interesting ménage. I have to say I found it—well—”
“Please. You can’t say anything that would offend me.”
“They didn’t strike me as completely—oriented, those two.”
“They’re foreigners there. Now that I’m here I’m beginning to see what it’s like. The language thing is incredibly tiring. But you’re also right. My family is not well-oriented. I have a feeling you are, though. My parents met your family in India, right?”
“In Mumbai. Not too long after I was born, I think. I was born in Afghanistan. What I remember about Mumbai is the towers of the dead. Very moving, as a matter in fact. The vultures started going extinct, so the bodies in the towers, instead of being eaten—sky burial—they just rotted. My mother became very involved in a foundation to save the vultures. That has nothing to do with your parents, though. How did they meet?”
“I’m asking you. I don’t know. Only that your parents helped mine.”
“The only thing I know is that my father was stationed there somewhat before the revolution in Iran. Was your father—I don’t know this—in the CIA or with the State Department? Maybe you don’t know. Bref, my father introduced yours to this group of Iranian exiles, among them your mother. I think there was some Zoroastrian connection. Not sky burials. Maybe the Zoroastrians wanted to help the Iranian exiles, but then they got angry when they found out the Iranians were just a bunch of Muslims. I don’t know exactly.”
“That sounds like your father introduced my parents to each other.”
“Perhaps.”
“I think my grandfather was CIA—or OSS?—but not my father. At least that’s what my mother told me once. You have to understand, my father lies sometimes. He’ll claim he did what his father actually did. Or even random things. He’s the least oriented of all of us.” A tone of wistfulness eked through.
“But you’re—if I understand it—not to pry...”
“Yes. I’m adopted. Not from anywhere exciting. Just New Jersey.” Fearing he sounded forlorn, Darius began to boast. “My mom was—well, you hate it, but—she was a little like your friend’s crush, Moktar.”
“Ah, yes. Our prince. But he’s Mauritanian, not Iranian. There’s a big difference.”
“You said he was an exile.”
“Yes. He’s living on a tiny government subsidy. But I don’t hate—you have to understand. My own family—oh forget it, forget it!” He put his hands on his hips and laughed into the bin of Camemberts. “I’m enjoying talking. I talk too much. I must be starved for American company.”
“You have an exaggerated opinion of Americans.”
“Darius—” Rolf gave up and took a doubtful Camembert. He led Darius into a narrow aisle of fruit juices in foil bricks. Darius felt a heavy smile coming to rest on him and raised his eyes to it. “I have something to ask, but I don’t want to offend you,” Rolf began.
“Please. You can’t.”
“But I want to be clear—”
“You can’t offend me, I mean. Go ahead.”
“I just want to ask en passant—purely en passant, you understand… No. Let me say this about me instead. Ever since L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, or forever, really, people think I’m gay.”
Darius could see the but coming. “Oh.” He felt an automatic sensation of disappointment. Annoyance, too, because he was sure he hadn’t been thinking along those lines. “That’s not a problem, or—an issue. Really, I hadn’t even thought—”
“Tant mieux. Well. There we are, then. I am. Them thinking it taught me in a way.”
“Wait! You are? I’m confused.”
“I wanted to ask so I wouldn’t be thinking about it for ten days in my rustico.”
“Ask me, you mean?”
“Yes.”
They checked out without saying anything more. On the street, Darius took it up again. “Well, yes. Yes is the answer to what you were asking. But why? Did we ever talk about that before, you and I?”
“No. I only wanted to be clear.”
“But you thought you had to ask me. Not that I care if anybody thinks that about me. Or if I give off—”
“You sound French. They’re so extremely self-conscious. They hate getting cornered into their identity. They always have to be general. Then they all end up exactly the same, like those scooter boys at the café. But, no. You don’t give off le parfum gai, if that’s what you mean. It’s only—you remember when we had dinner with your mother in New Jersey?”
“Of course,” Darius said.
“You talked a lot about another boy.”
“I did?”
“Yes. A mathematician. So I assumed—it just struck me that way very clearly.”
“But that had been over—that hadn’t been going on for a long time at that point.” Darius frowned. They passed an African in a green jumpsuit who shunted soaked rags along a streaming gutter with his green plastic besom.
“Yes, well. Things are slow in life, no? Even me.” He looked down and gestured at himself so the bag of groceries swung like a pendulum. “It’s taken me so long—all my life—to become—” When Darius looked at him and suggested “Orange?” the German howled with laughter. Though even that was controlled. “Précisément! I have become orange. Finally!”
“And do you have a mathematician friend?” The din of voices and traffic seemed to increase in volume. Even the car horns had accents.
“Ah. No.” Rolf smiled.
When his mathematician, Alan Wilkinson, came to Paris for a fall visit and suggested an evening together, Darius was quick to take him up on it, happy to assume the role of helpful local connection for a change. Alan was freelancing for the review pages of the New Republic and half-regretfully laying the groundwork for a chatty career as an intellectual journalist. He lived on a pittance from his family in Virginia and a stipend from his frizzy-haired architect friend.
Timing was the critical issue of the evening. The plan was to meet a famous actress, in town to shoot a celebrity blue jeans commercial. The actress was dining early (jet-lag) with the books editor of Vogue and the Brazilian director hired to shoot her commercial. Meanwhile, Alan, Darius and the director’s gay brother’s close gay friend (but not lover) were having a drink at the Café Beaubourg. In fact, they were waiting for the actress to finish dinner. Then her party would meet up with the director’s gay brother, a runway model. The gay model brother would then call his close gay friend to tell him whether they were moving on to the actress’ suite at L’Hotel or to the Brazilian director’s girlfriend’s Gare du Nord photography studio, in which case Alan, Darius and the close gay friend would pop by and meet the actress. And they could retail a story about her over future drinks as they waited on future celebrities. It wasn’t much, but in the seller’s market for celebrity stories, it was worth cooling their heels for an hour or two. Alan had also dangled a possible meeting with Gore Vidal.
The conversation at the Café Beaubourg was heightened by anticipation, but they didn’t talk about the actress. In truth, they weren’t much interested in her. The close gay friend sat forward in a self-consciously masculine posture, elbows on knees. His hands loosely hoarded a whiskey on the low cocktail table. He was fascinated by Alan, who was acting a touch disdainful as usual. Alan often inspired a kind of contentious fascination.
“I like stupid,” the close friend said, describing his ideal lover. He had a bookish, hatchet face with sinewy temples, and a receding chin that shouted meekness. But he wasn’t at all meek, apparently. He had a boxer’s aggressive jitters, which is to say everywhere but in his eyes. His stubbly red jaw looked swarthy in the streetlight coming through the window. “A stupid boy, mouth hanging open. That’s perfect.” His proud grin looked both menacing and weak. “Tristão and I had a brief thing at first. But even though he’s a model, he wasn’t stupid enough.”
Alan looked like he would rather have been anywhere else. The scheme to meet the actress embarrassed both him and Darius, though they were resigned to its importance. With a sigh, Alan inquired, “You hold that interior experience does or doesn’t exist without the ability to put it into words?”
“Oh, it does,” the close friend answered quickly. He reconsidered. “In a way, it does. It’s more—abstract for them.”
Eyeing his drink lest it spill, Alan slowly shot the cuff of one arm. Darius studied him, making low observations about Alan’s ultra-American style—saggy blazer, button-down, cuffed pants. Clothes got Darius remembering bodies and Alan’s surprisingly muscular back. This erotic thought rumbled like the Métro passing underneath them.
Alan drawled, “You impute interior life to them based on their behavior? Or are you universalizing from your own inner experience?”
The close friend grinned again, clearly enjoying someone he considered up to his level. “There’s not much behavior to observe. They’re always wearing headphones. They’re dreaming of becoming DJ’s. There’s a total intellectual silence. Being with them is like going to a carnal library. Sh!” He eyed Darius briefly as if pointing to a for-example.
Unwillingly, Alan chuckled and drew back his head, a withdrawing mannerism of his whenever he laughed.
Darius whispered, “I always hide being in love. You can hide lots of things.” The close friend paid no attention to Alan’s loyal sidekick. His beady-eyed stare never left Alan.
Outside, under the streetlight, Jayawarman VII looked like he’d closed his eyes in relief at the early-dinner ebbing of tourists. The cobblestones were wet. Since it hadn’t rained, Darius’s gaze ran along the pavement till he saw a green sprinkler truck lumbering toward the Boulevard de Sebastopol trailing a glittering bustle of spray.
The good friend was happy he’d made Alan chuckle. He let drop, “I’m a complete top. I wonder if that doesn’t privilege my own inner experience over the beloved’s? We’re like two paintings, me and this kid from the Ardennes I’m seeing now, or at any rate our inner lives are. I’m representational, highly realistic, and he’s an abstraction, messy—I don’t know—de Kooning?”
Alan shrugged. “But the kid has to be a lot better looking.”
The good friend smiled, pugnaciously immobile. Still staring at Alan, he took the tiny straw from his whiskey and stroked it dry. “Like de Kooning—or like nonsense. Like that ridiculous Colin Vail.”
With a slight motion of his head, Alan looked to Darius for comment.
“I grew up sleeping in his bed,” Darius explained. He laughed at how that sounded. “I mean, not with—”
The good friend’s eyebrows flexed dismissively. “I’m going to the Vail vernissage in a couple of days,” he interrupted. “So we’ll see.” He avoided argument, yielding to Kant’s insight that judgments of taste are necessarily both universal and unjustifiable. Darius, who smiled submissively, understood that principle too. Therefore he and the good friend subtly hated each other.
They actually did meet that famous actress in the end. She was amazingly nice and tiny. Her inviting smile made everyone feel famous along with her. But the earlier part of the evening—with Alan and the good friend—had made more of an impression on Darius. It left him miserable for some reason, and prey to weird fantasies of violence. The fantasies didn’t upset him. In the narrow case of violence, he had no trouble distinguishing the reality of the mind from the reality of the world. What was unexpected was so intense a rebellion against his settled self-image as a receding, masochist bottom. The fantasies felt like products of Oliver’s sick imagination. He half-wondered whether a similar inner rebellion had been what drove Oliver mad.