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Ethiopia.”
    “Did she have a very posh accent?” Austin asked, because he didn’t want to pose the obvious next question. They had begun to walk along the Quai de la Mégisserie, past the closed pet shops.
    “Bien sûr,”
Julien exclaimed. “I’m certain she was from a very grand family. She’s so gentle—a bit older than I.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’m hopeless about ages, but I think she was, well, anyway, too old to have children. She
had
two children with her, ten and eight.”
    In all his homosexual inexperience Austin rejoiced, calculating that the late forties must be past the age of childbearing for ladies; he exulted in this new proof of Julien’s airy indifference to chronological niggling.
    As they walked along, Austin took Julien’s arm, which felt very thin. Julien was warm and kind, so different from the standoffish Little Julien. Austin acknowledged that he was more attracted to Little Julien, that he thought about him every night and still masturbated remembering him twice a day—the flat chest with a few long hairs straying down the center, the olive hue of his arms, worthy of a Spanish martyr, and his delicate pink ears, which were the color of unhealthy, off-season raspberries. He remembered the hot, bitter taste of his anus, like stale cucumbers, and the heft of his buttocks. He remembered crouching on the floor below Little Julien, who lay athwart the bed on his back, legs falling over the side. Austin would look down the length of Julien’s twisting, foreshortened body, as it worked and worked its sure but devious way through pauses and accelerations toward a release that required every bit of concentration and that couldn’t skip a single one of these intermediary stages. But Austin was determined to push these thoughts aside, and to prove it he tightened his grasp on Big Julien’s arm. Here was a man, a married man, not corrupted by gay life, not standing around a smoky bar with a shaved head, an ear stud or cursory job and a cynical smile already leaching the freshness out of his face. Here was a good man coming to him without intimate tattoos, pierced nipples or other body modifications.
    “Christine and I were wild about each other sexually,” Julien was saying. “We still are now, even when we quarrel all the time; we’re separated, in a month we’ll be divorced, but we’re still so turned on by each other—”
    “—that you still sleep with her?” Austin asked.
    “No, not at all,” Julien said smoothly. “Of course not, my poor little one,
mon pauvre petit
. That’s all over. The bitch.”
    Austin decided he wanted to be a better wife to Julien than Christine had been, more old-fashioned, more patient, since it was precisely Julien’s masculinity—banked and dowsed though it might be—that was the fire at which Austin wanted to warm his hands.

Chapter Five
    J oséphine, the children’s book illustrator, came over for lunch the next day. Austin wanted to know what she, as a woman, thought of Big Julien, though he realized she wasn’t very typically female. Was any woman? Would he have felt right about speaking for all men? Gay men?
    Joséphine was from Tours, reputed to be the home of the best French accent, and she did speak her own language clearly and elegantly, with not too much slang and no elisions. She had the fully awakened, gently satiric response to the absurdities of her friends that was characteristic of someone from a big family, a family of talkers and observers rather than TV watchers. Her beauty was regal: her long neck lengthened still more by blond hair swept up and stabbed haphazardly at the top by a comb or gathered into a ponytail by a red rubber band; a pointy chin and hollow cheeks, crowned by prominent cheekbones; and full breasts that visibly strained at the breastbone like two puppies pulling on their leashes in slightly diverging directions. She had long legs and disproportionately small feet, the big toe aristocratically shorter than the