Our Young Man (14 page)

“I’ll always love you,” Andrés blurted out. And Guy looked at him with a sad smile, as if doubting and believing at the same time this eternal pledge.

“Anyway, it’s all an illusion,” Guy said. “Here you can see crow’s feet.” He pointed to his eyes. “And here my chin line is giving way no matter how many isometrics I do or how many sticks of gum I chew in private. And my nose is getting bigger every year, though luckily I was born with little jug ears. But the secret of looking young is always darting about, never staring at a fixed point, being the first to leap up and fetch the milk.” He was very proud of the word “fetch,” which had no equivalent in French. Lately they’d begun to speak mostly English to each other. Guy had no Spanish and Andrés’s French was rusty. Besides, Americans resented foreign languages being spoken around them. Americans thought foreigners were like impertinent kids speaking pig latin to mock their elders.

“No,” Andrés said, “it’s your face! Nothing to do with being constantly in motion, though you do that, too, my little hummingbird. Your face is just so perfect and unlined and beautiful.”

“
Autant que ça dure
. As long as it lasts.”

“You’re just gloomy because your father died.”

“When a father dies, the son sees himself approaching the edge of the cliff: Next!”

“You always make everything into a general principle,” Andrés said, teasing him, looking at how the black hairs on Guy’s legs grew darker and denser as they approached his crotch and started to swirl as if being drawn into a vortex. They were such strong legs, strong like a bow strung with powerful muscles. Andrés could feel himself growing hard again and was afraid of annoying Guy with the persistence of desire—maybe Guy was too old to go at it multiple times! Andrés lay on his stomach to hide his erection but propped himself on his elbows so his bald spot wouldn’t be right under Guy’s nose.

“We Frenchies are just like that,” Guy said, smiling. Guy buried his face in his hands, then lowered them slowly, as if peeking at Andrés: “Are you shocked that I’m so old?”

Andrés just rolled over on his side, revealing his erection.

“Very eloquent,” Guy said. They made love again. The phone rang and rang. “Why doesn’t the service pick up?” They took turns fucking each other. To Guy they enjoyed an almost oneiric freedom with each other, something he’d never known, which had nothing to do with role-playing and everything to do with abandon.

When Guy phoned his service the operator said a Mr. Fred had called and was back in St. Vincent’s. Guy showered and dressed rapidly and walked over to the hospital. Guy faintly resented these constant emergencies, as if Fred had designed them to trap Guy into seeing him more frequently. He stopped by the front desk to ask which was Fred’s room and zigzagged down the polished marble corridors to the elevator in the far southeast corner. His irritation melted away and he realized that all along it had been anxiety about what he’d find in Fred’s room.

St. Vincent’s had more cases of AIDS than any hospital in America, Guy had heard. Now he was walking past so many rooms housing cadaverous men on drips, it was as if Auschwitz victims were being resuscitated. Some seemed unsalvageable. They were like those concentration camp prisoners whom other inmates called “Muselmanns” because they just rocked back and forth, their eyes vacant, waiting for the end.

Fred wasn’t one of those. He must have been given some sort of upper because he chattered incessantly and licked his dry lips. He winced under Guy’s light touch when Guy bent down toward the bed. He was squinting—could he see Guy? Surely he must recognize his distinctive cologne. There were two other visitors when Guy arrived, cronies, childhood friends from Brooklyn, two old, portly men with liver spots on their hands and wattles under their chins. Fred would probably look like them if he hadn’t had the spots blowtorched off his hands and a surgical lift of his chin. But how much more natural and comfortable these men seemed, with their hands folded over their bellies and their lived-in faces. Jews, Guy thought, and wondered why he’d never met any of Fred’s childhood friends before, out on Fire Island. He’d heard that Jews were good family men who didn’t drink or gamble or play with boys. Was Fred a tragic exception?

Fred made the introductions and the visitors gave him a limp handshake and tilted their faces in attitudes of suspicious inspection, as if Guy with his youth and startling good looks were the very embodiment of the Christian Gay Plague.

Guy said, “What’s wrong with you now? You don’t look sick.”

“I’m blind. CMV in the eyes.”

“How horrible. Are they curing it?”

“That’s why I have the drip,” Fred said wearily. “They’re going to implant a pellet directly into my eyes with Something-Acyclovir in it. But it’s irreversible.” He looked tired. Guy wondered how long his friends had been here.

“Is it permanent?”

“Yes, I’m blind,” Fred said bitterly. “Great for a film producer.”

One of the guests had brought Fred a murder mystery, not even a new copy, which he suggested might be a good property for Fred to develop. “You could get your friend to read it to you.”

“Just because you finally got around to reading a book, Marty, is no reason to turn it into a fuckin’ movie.”

“It’s a sort of a Cagney film,” Marty said defensively.

“Great. How long has he been dead? Nah, I probably won’t be making any more films. I certainly won’t spend my last days listening to Mickey Spillane. Keats, maybe, or Tolstoy. Or James Michener. Something classy.”

Guy was reeling from news of the diagnosis. “You’re really blind? You can’t see me?”

“I’m blind!” Fred shouted, then he paused and smiled. “But I can remember every detail of your face. Sit here,” he said, patting the bed, “so I can read your face like Braille.”

Guy was embarrassed in front of the other men; he was a
fegala
, wasn’t that what they were thinking, a gentile
and
a faggot and the angel of death. But he couldn’t deny poor Fred anything, so he perched on the edge of the bed and lifted Fred’s hands to his face, and Fred’s hands roamed ravenously over his perfect features and even thundered over his ears. It was too much of a display of affection for the visitors; they stood and bade farewell. “Thank God these nudniks are gone, real schnorrers, always wanting something. That Marty always was a putz.”

“Speak English,” Guy said, laughing.

Fred’s fingers, tasting of rubbing alcohol, traced his teeth and his lips, even caged his fluttering eyelids for a second. Guy thought of fireflies.

“My darling boy,” Fred said. “My beauty.”

“Since you’ve gotten sick,” Guy said to be nice, “you look thinner and twenty years younger.”

“I do?” Fred asked eagerly.

“Yes,” Guy said, wondering how far he could go, “you look like that A-list gay you’ve always wanted to be.” Tears sprang to Guy’s eyes; luckily Fred couldn’t see them.

“Perfect, and I can’t even look in the mirror.” He paused. “I don’t want you to think you gave it to me. I went out to the Meat Rack last summer and got fucked.”

“Without a rubber?”

“Yes, goddamn it, without a rubber.”

“Just one time?”

“You’re meshuga,” Fred said, “with your multiple exposures, just one time you can get infected. I’m the living proof; that’s the only time I ever bottomed.”

Guy suddenly wondered if Andrés was clean. Was he faithful? That’s why Guy thought he must always be available sexually for him—and passionate—or else he’d look elsewhere for that necessary fifth orgasm a day. Was he using his studio to trick?

Fred, as if reading Guy’s mind, asked, “How’s Andrew?”

Guy said, “He’s fine. Do you want to sleep? Should I leave, or should I sit over here and read a book while you nap? Tell me. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Stay. Stay. Do you have a book?”

“I’ll step out and buy the paper and get a coffee and come back in half an hour. Do you want something from the outside world?”

“Nothing, some wintergreen gum. Promise you’ll come back?”

“I promise.”

“That Marty! You could read the fuckin’ Mickey Spillane.”

Guy felt exhausted when he left Fred and walked past all those somber, silent men in their identical rooms—young, he supposed, but looking ancient, with their gaunt faces and their open mouths. He wanted to flee—he wished he could shoot a commercial in Tahiti, someplace sunny and distant from all this.

The rooms were identical but filled with grief and disease, flowers and stuffed animals and ranks of get-well cards.

People kept saying, “AIDS is not a death sentence,” and they spoke of fighting it, but that was all nonsense; American puritans acted as if everything were just a matter of willpower. It did kill its victims, one after another, relentlessly. If Fred’s indiscretion was in the Meat Rack, then that must mean he was infected
after
he fucked Guy last spring; that was a relief—although all this effort to pin down the exact occasion was futile and silly. No one knew precisely how it was transmitted and it seemed everyone, men and women, straight and gay, was vulnerable.

Guy got a phone call from Andrés one morning in February at nine
A.M.
His studio had been raided by the cops and the FBI and he was being retained at a federal prison, and they’d confiscated all his forgeries and were holding them as evidence. Two of his dealers in New York had also been rounded up in the same sweep. Guy wondered if he himself was a person of interest. He called Pierre-Georges.

“I wonder why Andrés was taking such risks?” Guy asked.

“He thought he needed more money to keep up with you. He told me so. What a careless guy, getting caught like that. And he’s a risk queen—he used to have a motorcycle. These young men always get killed. The best source for organ transplants. Don’t they call them ‘donor cycles’?”

“Why didn’t you tell me he was worried about money?” Guy asked, annoyed with the callous chatter.

“As your manager I didn’t want to see you lavishing a fortune on that Andrés. I know you don’t care about money, but someday—someday soon—you’ll be grateful to me. And by the way, make sure your friend Fred transfers to you the title of ‘Petticoat Junction.’” (That was Pierre-Georges’s nickname for their Fire Island house.)

“Please don’t bring that up. I’ve got to help Andrés. That’s the thing.”

“He was caught red-handed,” Pierre-Georges said, interrupting. “He’ll be in prison and released in six or seven years and deported for good. In prison he’ll be raped, a pretty boy like him, and he’ll catch AIDS. And die. Be a realist.”

Guy said, “You’re insufferable,” and hung up on Pierre-Georges, who immediately called back and said, “I’ll find you the best lawyer.”

At last Guy muttered, “Thank you.”

True to his word, Pierre-Georges found a lawyer later in the day whom Guy rushed to Midtown to see, wearing a new blue silk suit. (Guy preferred the French word,
costume
, since it was explicit about clothes as playacting.)

The lawyer, an old Hungarian whose fingers were yellow from nicotine and who had four original Magrittes on the wall, explained that Dalí’s case was complicated, that nearly half the prints attributed to him were fake. “There are new prints that Dalí never made, then there are reprints that are adaptations of real Dalí paintings, then there are new fake prints added to authentic editions, then there facsimiles with forged signatures, and finally there are fake copies of real prints.” The man smiled and made Guy an espresso on a machine he had next to his desk. He was a chain smoker. His office was on Fifth Avenue and had big windows that looked out across the street to the Forty-second Street library. “It’s all a mess, especially because the master himself signed a hundred thousand blank sheets of paper. He was already gaga, but his greedy wife …” It was snowing, and Guy imagined the bronze library lions were shivering.

“Can we post bail for poor Andrés?”

“It might be very high because he’s a foreigner who could flee.”

“That’s okay.”

“Why would he do these forgeries?”

Guy thought the man was a sophisticated European and could deal with the truth. “Money. He’s my … boyfriend and felt he had to keep up. I earn a lot. I’m a model.” The man nodded his head in mock obeisance, which irritated Guy, who was quick to add, “It’s a very brief career.”

“Like a butterfly’s,” the man said politely. “All beauties have brief lives. Professional lives.”

Guy wasn’t sure if the man was flirting or just civilized. Guy had been in America too long, where real men were always gruff, might lunch but never dine with another man, and, seated even next to each other, conversed in loud voices as if they were miles apart. They didn’t want to be seen conversing softly, confidingly. Nor would real men sit in adjoining chairs at a table for four, but were always seen facing each other. But in Europe even heterosexuals were refined, at least the educated ones. He’d had a very refined friend, a curator at the Louvre called Titus, and he’d asked him point-blank if he was gay. “
Non, je m’excuse, j’aime les filles
,” he said after their twelfth intimate supper.

The lawyer, Lazlo, took down all Andrés’s details and promised he’d get him out on bail in a day or two. “Does he speak English?”

“Perfectly,” said Guy.

“I’ll have to meet with him to put together our defense. I know a lot about the surrealists—Magritte was my friend, as was the photographer Kertész, another Hungarian in New York like me.”

Guy nodded to show he recognized the names. He thanked Lazlo for taking on the case and the lawyer very politely accompanied him to the elevator. Guy handed him his card. “I’m just the right person for this job,” Lazlo said. “A foreigner, an art expert, somewhat experienced as a lawyer.” He smiled at his own modesty and patted Guy on the back. He was considerably shorter than Guy and his glasses, as Guy could see in the neon glare, were smudged. He was puffing away on his cigarette.

“What will happen to him?” Guy asked.

“He’ll probably spend a few years in prison.”

“Years?”

“Yes, it’s a serious crime, you know. He must love you a lot. We might get him out on parole with two hundred hours of community service.”