Our Young Man (10 page)
It was all over in five minutes. He bought the house and wrote out a check for a down payment of $250,000.
Just as Guy was about to leave the Pines (Andrés had decided to go along for the ride to JFK) and was handing Fred the key to the rented house, Fred squeezed his hand shut around the key and said, “Now it’s yours.”
“What is?” Guy asked with a sweet, dazed smile; he was mildly confused, but his smile anticipated an as-yet-unspecified happy surprise.
“The house is yours for next summer. I bought it.”
“You did? You’re not joking?” The uniformed chauffeur had come for Guy’s bags. They’d walk to the harbor, take a waiting boat to the waiting limousine.
“I’ve never been more serious,” Fred said. “I hope we’ll have many a happy summer here together,” he added. “I bought it yesterday.”
Guy grabbed him by the neck and gazed into his eyes for a second.
Fred said in a low voice, “I hope you’ll invite me out once in a while.”
Guy said, “Silly.” He never knew if that word was a good translation for
stupide
, just as he never knew if naughty meant
mauvais
. He’d once made Americans laugh when he had said, “Hitler was naughty.” Andrés was standing off to one side, his head lowered deferentially, as if Guy were receiving a benediction from Signor Fred, their venerable host.
Guy held Fred’s head between his hands and kissed him on the lips, no tongue: The $2.2 million kiss, Fred thought bitterly. A second later, Andrés, slender and elegant and very tanned in a crisp white shirt, open at the neck and the sleeves rolled back, hurried off down the boardwalk behind the uniformed chauffeur and beside Guy, who looked back and blew a kiss.
The next few days Fred was in a state of anguish over Guy. Had Andrés flown off with him to Paris? These grad students seemed so idle, and Andrés was always resting. Once Fred had tried to fill in his résumé in his mind and noticed a blank of a whole year. “What did you do in 1982?” he asked. Andrés replied innocently, “I rested.”
And then Fred obsessed over the risky sex he’d had in the bushes. He kept feeling the glands in his neck and under his arms and looking for telltale brown patches on his legs. There was no test for gay cancer and no treatment. Oh, what a fool he’d been! No wonder Guy was so puritanical; you couldn’t trust anyone, least of all a sleazeball in the bushes.
He couldn’t think of anyone he could discuss his twin obsessions with, Guy and GRID, other than the baron. They had dinner in the baron’s library, where his new lover the antique dealer had installed a tapestry of a bewigged king on horseback pointing gleefully to a distant city on the banks of a river—“in honor of a peace treaty,” Édouard explained vaguely. The room, which Fred remembered as white and sterile but spacious, now seemed crowded with heavy window treatments, potted palms, lots of bric-a-brac, spotlit oil paintings of smiling despots, and even a fire, though it was only late September and still warm out.
“Guess your new lover is responsible for all this?” Fred asked, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Classy.”
“Yes, Will has worked miracles,” Édouard said with a timid smile.
“Guess you have all the luck with the young boys—first Guy and now Will.”
“Boys!” Édouard said, guffawing into his sole amandine. (Even the plates looked old and crazed and stained, Louis somebody.) “Guy’s no boy! Walt snooped around and found some pictures of Guy in French
Vogue
going back to the early seventies. We figured out he must be nearly forty if he’s a day.”
“But he looks so young.”
“He must have a terrible painting in the attic.”
But Fred was too appalled to laugh. He felt someone had socked him in the stomach. He began to sweat and breathe faster, as if he might panic any moment. He’d been fooled, made to look a fool. Panic or maybe vomit. No one pulled the wool over his eyes. He was the cynic, the skeptic, he was fraud-proof. And yet, and yet, he’d been completely hoodwinked. And all that money! He’d spent so much money on Guy, the house—and all for a forty-year-old man who must clip the hair in his nose or yank it out and set off a fit of sneezing.
A middle-aged man who’s probably down to jerking off every other day. A weary man of forty who’s already seen everything come around twice, who let me fuck him that once in a hole where whole armies of men have doubtless passed. What a pretentious queen, pretending to be fresh and naïve, whereas he’s long past his sell-by date. I could have been investing all this time and energy and money in a real kid who might have fallen for me, who wouldn’t have known how to work me so expertly. Kids are emotional and reckless, whereas a man of forty is cold and calculating. I’ve been duped.
“Guy has really upset me,” Fred said, choking up. “I’m afraid I had unsafe sex. Not with Guy—but with a stranger.”
“They say you should know your partner’s name. Do you know the man’s name, the man who you were … indiscreet with?”
“No, it was in the bushes, in the Meat Rack.”
“Oh, dear.” The baron patted his hand. “I’m no one to talk. I specialize in anonymous sex. Though Will is making me mend my ways.”
“Do you think we’re all doomed?”
“Surely not. We eat well, we exercise, we never have a venereal disease for long. We have regular checkups—don’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t trust my gay doctor. He’s a feel-good doctor and a major masochist.”
“Really?” the baron asked, rustling his neck like a mating partridge. “What kind of masochist is he?”
“He had his testicles removed by a surgeon as his master looked on.”
The baron’s eyes glittered. “That’s irreversible,” he said with satisfaction. He blinked and said, “In any event, I believe this gay cancer only hits men who’ve had repeated venereal diseases. Their immune systems are compromised, overloaded. We’re in no danger, especially a straight guy like you, I mean ex-straight.”
“There we were, Guy and me, surrounded by some of the great beauties of the day, and both of us as wise as virgins. We were both afraid of GRID.”
“What?”
“Gay-related immune deficiency.”
Édouard nodded vigorously.
They went quiet after Will came in wearing beige calfskin suede trousers molded to his muscular thighs and butt, the fruits of thousands of squats. He seemed a bit drunk and more expansive than he’d been the only other time Fred had met him. He leaned down and pecked Édouard on the forehead and reached deliberately to pinch Édouard’s tit through the soft blue Egyptian cotton of his monogrammed shirt. The baron winced for a second and then smiled timidly up at his young-master-antique-dealer. “It’s nice to know a cutie like you is my property,” Will said. The baron darted a nervous glance at his guest—and then smiled at his owner. “Yes,” he said awkwardly, “very nice indeed.” He was such a social creature, produced by centuries of breeding, but nothing in his rich experience had prepared him for this moment. (He’d never mixed his evenings on the rack with entertaining his friends.)
Back home, surrounded by staring, life-sized Buddhas, Fred made himself a scotch on the rocks and nervously rubbed his fingers together. Ceil had always hated that tic, the constant whispering sound of his fingers, and had put her hand over his at the movies when he started “pilling.”
In Paris, Guy felt relieved. He could speak the language with all its nuances and not endlessly play the part of the interesting foreigner. At the same time his accent didn’t prompt a discussion. He was just another Frenchman. He had lost his primary accomplishment—the ability to speak English (which he spoke better than he understood)—and the oddity of his identity, of being French in America.
He was just one more handsome man in a whole city of handsome men—handsome if you liked skinny guys with big noses. The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other’s shoes than their sexual availability. It was raining a cold rain but never for long, and you could duck from one awning to the next or from an expensive café to an even more expensive shop. It was hard to believe that just two weeks before, he’d been lying in the warm September sun in a deck chair. Now he’d been repatriated to Paris’s eternal mists.
Andrés had come with him and was staying with him at the Crillon in a room that looked out on the place de la Concorde, a “square” only in the abstract sense that it was a huge space excavated out of the city around it but was curiously open on three sides.
Andrés liked to have sex four or five times a day. Maybe because Guy had resisted him all summer long and had just stared at that big erection in the green Speedo, now that it was released it was relentless. They kissed so much that Guy’s lips were red and swollen and he had to shy away—he had to be camera-ready in the morning.
But it was pure pleasure to lie in bed with this lithe young man who was so in love. He had a patch of long black hair like an emblem on his lean, defined chest. Guy could circle his waist with two hands. He was as elongated as a Christ carved out of wax but as flexible as a whip. He had a vaguely acrid odor, as if his deodorant weren’t strong enough or as if the hot, empty oven were burning spilled food from the day before.
Guy liked to sit opposite him in an outdoor café, where they were kept warm under giant overhead heaters. Andrés was shy, that must be it, though Guy preferred the French word
sauvage
, which sounded more fierce than timid. Andrés had a hard time looking at him and would train his eyes on some distant spot in the sky. He would lean his face on his big open hand as if he were absorbed in new music, though every once in a while he’d shake himself out of his reverie and steal a glance at his companion. Was he tired, jet-lagged, was that why his head seemed too heavy for his neck? When he was looking at that mesmerizing point in the sky his whole face would be drained of color and expression, but when he’d dart a glance at Guy he’d smile a warm, timid smile and his upper lip, bruised from kisses, would pull back to show his wet, tarnished teeth. Andrés avoided sitting in a corner where there was a mirror behind him because he hoped Guy wouldn’t notice his bald spot or at least not dwell upon it. Guy understood the strategy.
They walked across the river and up the boulevard Saint-Germain, stopping to look in all the store windows. Guy took Andrés’s arm, which made the Colombian self-conscious. He kept interrogating the eyes of every passerby, though no one seemed startled, except, perhaps, by Guy’s orange Doc Martens. Andrés was self-conscious but also proud, and he wondered if in people’s eyes he measured up to Guy’s beauty, or at least didn’t look like a member of a different species. They murmured to each other in French, with Andrés inserting an occasional word in English. One word he said in Spanish was
siempre
, though it was
toujours
in French and, of course, “always” in English, but Guy didn’t correct him because he liked his accent.
Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head—his eyes, his smile—and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality—his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. (Andrés had fellated each toe.) He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.
Back in the hotel they did shed them and he lay with his head on Andrés’s belly watching TV, which bored the Colombian because he had trouble following the rapid-fire dialogue; it was a show where they were all discussing the merits and drawbacks of something—could it be incest?—and the young male presenter with his big boyish head, almost purple lips, and huge eyes (was he wearing mascara?) was just on the border between gay and straight, with his small bony hands in the air and a smile or even a smirk on his dark lips and his voice pitched as high as a twelve-year-old’s and his constant quips capping everything the other guests said, the old actress or the fat, unshaved buffoon or the blond boy—and provoking the studio audience into rapid bursts of laughter, a quick chorus of barking, followed each time by a single tinkling laugh of one person slow on the uptake.
And then here was Andrés with a new erection that had to be appeased. The
place
beyond was suddenly immersed in night streaked with the headlights of circulating cars and the brilliant articulated facade of the National Assembly. They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn’t clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated. At the end Andrés’s mouth, forbidden to kiss Guy’s swollen lips, was just an open vowel of ecstasy as they both spilled on his muscly stomach in the dim, shifting colored light of the television and its maddening banter.
Guy had been in America so long that the French struck him as either coiled up and suspicious or absurdly sweet, with an eye out for profit—either paranoid or sycophantic.
He knew what they were up to, he’d been that way, too, with strangers, but in the intervening years he’d become as naïve, as kind, as childish (
bon enfant
) as Americans, which he definitely preferred now. Why waste all that energy being suspicious or syrupy? In America photographers and their assistants and the hair and makeup people thought of him as a good guy, but here, he noticed, friendliness was considered troubling. He enjoyed talking to his old French friends on the phone and with them he could joke and tell stories with no point, but if he tried to make conversation during a fashion shoot the strangers on the set went about their jobs briskly and greeted his American-style garrulousness with a sharp, derisive look, an intake of breath, and an “
Et alors?
”
Making love to Andrés was a full-time job. Whenever they went for a walk or a meal he could feel the impatient desire building up in the boy; at a table he’d rest his heavy head again on his huge cupped hand and look out the window, his mouth open. From time to time he’d surface from his thoughts and the racing images, no doubt, of remembered or projected couplings. Then he’d smile and say something amusing, but it almost felt as if a grieving man were trying to make small talk during a wake; he was definitely downshifting into a different speed. Only when they returned to their hotel room did his thoughts and actions seem to converge. He became more and more passionate and Guy thought of the Greek word
agon
, wasn’t it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony? Wasn’t it the name of that Balanchine ballet he liked so much?