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you doing there?”
    “I was teaching architecture in Addis Ababa.”
    “When? Under Haile Selassie?”
    Julien smiled at Austin’s inability to grasp how young he was. “No, just two years ago. The emperor was long gone and even the Communists were already on their way out.”
    “Oh. Of course.” Then, following his own train of thought about age, Austin said, “I imagine Nina Helier must have been very beautiful when she was young.”
    “She’s still a beautiful woman!” At that Julien, indignant, relapsed into a complex silence as though he was physically uncomfortable—nursing a sore shoulder, say. Austin was conscious of this tense, melancholy man beside him as they looked down into a river as restless as Austin’s own mind. He’d known enough older men and women to realize that life and love go on and on, but he also understood that this affair with Julien, if it ever materialized, could be the last one that was thoroughly … reciprocal. Most of the old gay men he knew who had lovers were rich or famous or both and Austin was neither. He felt his time was running out. “How long have you been married?”
    “Oh, a while. Quite a while,” Julien said.
    Austin had already picked up that Julien didn’t like to be held to exact dates or if given a chance would dilate each epoch in his life in order to give every one a mythic weight, though he would have had to be forty to accommodate all the years he assigned to himself. “Was she the first woman—” Austin started to ask, then he suddenly interrupted himself, embarrassed.
    Julien laughed scornfully. “The first woman I slept with?” He turned his full, mocking glance on Austin and called him “my poor little one.”
“Mon pauvre petit
, do you think I’m one of those fags who tried to reform by getting married? By finally getting it up for one sisterly woman?”
    “No, of course not,” Austin answered sheepishly in a small voice.
    “You do! I can see that. When I was just sixteen I told all my classmates I was homosexual, to get that out of the way, and it really wasn’t difficult to say or to live with. But I always liked women. My older brother is homosexual, and I joined him out of solidarity. He’s been with the same man since he was nineteen, perfectly happy, so you can imagine I had no problem accepting the idea of being gay, but it wasn’t black and white for me.”
    Austin felt he was out of his depth, facing an older culture than hisown, one much harder to sum up. His own assumptions struck him as shoddy. He was sorry he’d revealed his West Village smugness; he had belonged to a New York gay world for twenty years and it had left him with too many ready answers. “No,” Austin said, inspired, “I meant was she the first woman you’d ever considered marrying?”
    “Oh. It was very odd, but it was a lightning bolt. We met in Addis at the French Embassy during a reception and the very next day we left in a Jeep together for a weekend in the bush. We were heading for one of the Negus’s palaces, which is now a very shoddy hotel, half-dilapidated. But we hadn’t been driving more than half an hour when we had a flat. There we were, on a dirt path at dusk, surrounded by ostriches, which are very dangerous animals with lethal spurs, taller than a man and much faster runners, but a worry only if they feel cornered. Christine was terribly frightened and I held her in my arms. We spent a whole night near the Jeep until the next morning when at last another car came past.”
    “So that was it?” Austin asked. “Love at first sight.”
    “Yes, we were engaged to be married almost immediately and I would have married her right then and there, only Christine wanted to wait, she knew a little Romanesque chapel in Provence…. She left two months after we met to go back to France. Then I fell in love with a
second
woman, an Englishwoman who was there teaching English in a village. Americans laugh when I say I learned my English in