Invisible Love Read Free

windows, were addressing them.
    â€œI now pronounce you man and wife,” the priest said, and as the official bride and groom kissed each other on the lips, with the figure of Christ looking down on them benevolently, the unofficial spouses did the same in their corner. Just as Eddy and Geneviève exchanged rings to the sound of a hymn played by the organ, the brown-haired man took a case from his pocket, extracted two rings, and discreetly slipped them on his and the other man’s fingers.
    Nobody had noticed them.
    And nobody paid any attention to them when, once the service was over, they remained on their knees, praying, while the wedding party dispersed down the central nave.
    During the ritual congratulations in front of the cathedral, the two men continued to meditate in the charitable half-light. When the cheering and the car horns had subsided outside and they at last made up their minds to move, they came out onto the top of the empty steps, with no photographer to record the moment, with no family members to celebrate their happiness by throwing rice and applauding, and with no witness other than the Gothic tower of the town hall, at the top of which the archangel Michael was slaying a dragon in the dazzling sunlight.
    They rushed to the brown-haired man’s apartment at 22 Avenue Lepoutre and closed the shutters. They were freer than Geneviève and Eddy: they didn’t need to wait until nightfall to express their love for each other beneath the sheets.
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    *
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    Much to his own astonishment, Jean had fallen in love with Laurent.
    Since he had reached adulthood, Jean had amassed a great many fleeting encounters, and had had many lovers for whom he had felt nothing. His sensual appetites had turned him into a hunter, and he had spent hours cruising bars and saunas and parks and smoky nightclubs—he hated cigarette smoke—his head battered by music he also hated, in search of prey to take home with him.
    He had thought he liked this carefree, dissolute existence until he met Laurent, but from their first kisses, he realized that it was neither as wonderful nor as audacious as he had thought. It might have provided him with pleasures, orgasms, narcissistic ecstasies, but it had also bred a kind of cynicism in him. His lack of commitment had turned him into a Don Juan, doomed to endlessly start over again. He had reduced other men to the satisfaction their bodies gave him. The more he had assuaged his sexual urges, the less he had appreciated the company of men. He had fucked so many of them that he had stopped respecting them.
    Laurent had restored his taste, his esteem for life. This fair-haired young man, an electrician at the Théâtre Royal du Parc, put as much enthusiasm into talking or shopping or cooking as into making love. Everything excited him. His arrival had started a revolution in Jean, helping him to discover love where previously he had known only physical pleasure. Being of a vigorous temperament, Jean reacted to this upheaval by going to extremes: he praised Laurent to the skies, showered him with gifts, smothered him with kisses, and threw himself on him with a desire that was insatiable.
    That was why Jean had been so determined to consecrate their relationship. Since society did not allow the legal union of two men, he had come up with a subterfuge. It was not that Jean and Laurent found being in a sexual minority any kind of burden. They were both too glad just to be alive for that. They even derived a kind of pride from their situation as outsiders, the pride of those who, knowing they are rare, feel the thrill of the initiated: they were part of both the visible world and an invisible world, ordinary society and a clandestine society. Day by day, they hardly cared that what was granted to the masses was denied them! But if they really wanted it, they would have to get it by trickery . . .
    And so it was that they married simultaneously with Eddy and