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that the water-stained wood floors looked antique and the hump-backed bed seemed worthy of having welcomed George Washington, as the family legend maintained. His father had been too poor and too lazy to hunt but he’d still had good old hunting prints hanging on the tattersall wallpaper in the main hallway, the one that divided the house in symmetrical halves and led to a staircase with steps rising in the smallest possible gradations, wide enough for ball gowns—stretched tight over many crinolines—to descend. Austin’s father had floated down into the family grave ten years ago on a cloud of Old Turkey, leaving behind nothing but debts.
    As it turned out, Lauren Bacall had already left Paris but McVay invited Nina Helier, a perfume heiress who was so old “she no longer had an age,” as the French say unkindly
(elle n’a plus d’âge)
, though she was still in full possession of her beauty—well, if not her
original
beauty then a concocted latter-day version of that loveliness. She presented her immortal face to the viewer impassively as a goddess might—an idol, McVay’s oldest friend, the Count Montpassier, called her. When, just at the moment she was passing over the frontier into old age, she’d confided to Montpassier, “I don’t really like fags,” he’d spat out,
“Dommage
, madame, they are your future.” She wasn’t stupid and she’d instantly taken his point. That was when she’d abandoned her vampishness and become a regular guy, although for men of McVay’s generation she’d always be a Legend—more refined, more fascinating, certainly more mysterious than a mere actress like Bacall.
    Julien was hypnotized by her, although intimidated, which Austin could deduce only from his way of looking at her as though she weren’t sitting there next to him
live
.
    “He’s a
charming
young man,” Henry whispered loudly when the others had gone up to the terrace for coffee and the view. But no matter how much Austin ventured disparaging remarks about Julien to indicate that no comment would be judged out of bounds, McVaywouldn’t take the bait. He stuck with his kindly, formal generalities. He wouldn’t dish. Was it because Henry in fact wasn’t attracted to Julien, who was perhaps too swarthy or Gallic for him, and therefore he hadn’t really focused on him? Or did Henry regard him as Austin’s new husband and thus beyond reproach or even characterization?
“Charming,”
he repeated with emphasis. “A delightful young man. He’s from Nancy, you say?”
    Julien and Austin walked along the Seine at midnight and stood on the wooden, pedestrian bridge, the Pont des Arts, and looked upstream toward the Musée d’Orsay and downstream at the point of the Île de la Cité that split the river in half. It was so late that all the illuminated buildings around them began to sink into darkness except the distant splendors of the Town Hall, which the mayor kept lit an extra half hour every night, just to prove his importance.
    They stood side by side and leaned in to each other. A long, low barge glided under the bridge. Moments later its wake lapped against the massive stone embankments where gay men were cruising one another.
    “What did you think of Nina?” Austin asked, because he was reluctant to mention Henry, too much a force in his life to talk about lightly.
    “She’s exactly the sort of woman I admire,” Julien said. “Silent. Superb. Entirely artificial.”
    “You like artifice?”
    “If there’s one thing I despise it’s a healthy, tanned, big-toothed American girl. No, what I admire is a pale Parisian woman, frail, a hothouse flower, expertly painted.”
    “Is your wife like that?”
    Julien shook his head sadly. “Not now. She’s become grotesquely fat and vulgar. But when I met her in Ethiopia she was delicate, sickly….”
    “Ethiopia?”
    “Yes, she grew up in a diplomatic family. She speaks five of their languages. I’ll show you pictures of her.”
    “What were