Our Young Man (2 page)

He decided to play the ingénu (which in fact he was) and said, “Are you kidding? That would be a dream come true.” He knew that a cool, blasé tone was beyond his means; he thought Pierre-Georges would prefer to discover an innocent (Guy was a born actor and could even consciously perform himself).

He took a bus up to Paris a week after the youth rally and Pierre-Georges arranged to have his hair cut and straightened and lightened. He was dressed by Pierre-Georges in loud plaids and a tight-fitting paisley shirt, with long collar points and darts in the back, tight puttees, and English winklepicker shoes, all the ghastly fashions of the early seventies. He learned right away to keep changing his pose. (“You’re giving me repeats,” the wiry little photographer had had to say menacingly only once.) Guy pivoted and smiled or frowned, touched his face or jumped in the air or stared shamelessly at a spot on the wall, all the poses he’d observed in
L’Uomo Vogue
. The photographer and Pierre-Georges discussed him as if he were more or less a desirable side of beef who could not hear them.

“Great bones,” the photographer said.

“But his nose is a little shiny on the left side,” Pierre-Georges pointed out. “And there’s no notch between his nose and his forehead.”

“But that’s very ancient Greek,” the photographer argued. “Very chic just now.”

“He needs to work out,” Pierre-Georges declared. “A little, not much, just some push-ups and curls and bench presses, high reps and low weights, just to fill out his chest and give his biceps some definition.”

“Straight or gay?” the photographer asked.

“He reads straight,” Pierre-Georges said. “That’s all that counts. All the new male models are straight and married.”

“Nice hands,” the photographer added, “but he needs a manicure, no varnish.”

“Guy, you should throw your shoulders back; the hollowed-out chest look is only for women. And stop smoking! Nothing ages your skin more. If you wanted to do some German catalogue work, swimsuits and underwear, bare-chested, I’d have to burn those two moles off your chest.” Guy’s hand instinctively rushed to his chest to protect it.

In Clermont-Ferrand no one seemed to be gay, or at least everyone he encountered was careful not to cruise. Everyone he knew except the priest was married. Like many teenagers, Guy was unfamiliar with himself. He didn’t know what he wanted—except to see the world. He didn’t know what effect he had on others, but everyone tried to please him, even strangers, and even middle-class men and women overcame their reserve to smile or speak to him. He never had to say much to make people open up to him. He liked to say he led a charmed life.

Guy could tell Pierre-Georges liked him but he didn’t know in what way. He seemed to want to perfect Guy’s look and sometimes Guy felt he was nothing more than a plastic doll that came with tiny outfits and a tiny clothes brush. But Pierre-Georges occasionally smiled at Guy in full complicity as if he knew what was going through the young man’s head. Once, when the wiry little photographer was racing about taking shots of Guy jumping in the air as a fan blew his hair, Pierre-Georges winked at the boy. It was absurd! All three of them clustered together in the darkroom improvised in the bathroom: They watched Guy’s features slowly emerge beneath the clear fluid under the red light. The little photographer whispered in awe, “
Magnifique!
A god.” And Pierre-Georges even muttered his highest praise, “Not bad.”

Guy’s mother, wearing her black, most classic dress minus the lace fichu, which Guy had begged her to forego, accompanied him to Paris for his first runway show for Pierre Cardin. She was more nervous than Guy and must have told him ten times not to fall off the stage. He acquitted himself without embarrassment and each time stopped at the right spot for a second’s pause, and the photographers loved him; at least more flashes went off when he took to the runway than for any of the other men. He wasn’t prepared for the frantic changes of clothes backstage; the abrupt, hissed orders as the
maquilleuse
, smelling of cinnamon gum, kept dancing around him on one foot and dusting his face with her powder puff. Pierre-Georges told him he should look angry, even menacing, as if he wanted to punch someone: “That will give you the right look.”

Inexperienced as Guy was, even he could see that Cardin’s loud plaids and vests for men and polyester ties were in bad taste and that orange, the prevailing color, was offensive. The show was held in the immense new Espace Cardin next to the American Embassy. The great man himself was rushing about, muttering orders and folding back collars. Guy noticed that several of the male models had stopped shaving and showed black stubble. He’d never seen that before and thought it must hurt to be kissed by such a man. At the last minute, Cardin himself clapped horn-rimmed glasses on Guy’s face. The lenses, fortunately, were just clear glass, and Guy could see perfectly normally through them. Guy felt a combination of fear and satisfaction on the runway in front of so many strangers. He felt the power of his looks, but it seemed a very limited power and he couldn’t yet calculate its dimensions.

The next day Guy’s face was splashed all over Paris and he was (sort of) a star (nameless). Pierre-Georges brought to his romantic Left Bank hotel with the view of Notre Dame a whole stack of newspapers. Guy wanted to seem casual and indifferent, but he couldn’t help pawing through the papers, especially the regional ones he read regularly. He could see his cheekbones were so high they cast shadows on his thin face, but he thought he was too smiley and risked looking like a simpleton. Pierre-Georges told Guy and his mother that Cardin wanted to sign him up to an exclusive contract but Pierre-Georges thought they should say no. “I can get you a lot more money,” he said, “by shopping you around.”

Just as Guy was saying, “You’re the expert,” his mother was saying, “Is it wise to turn down a definite offer?” And they all three laughed at this spontaneous revelation of character.

Guy was excited about having his picture all over the papers and millions of readers looking at him. Would they speculate about who he was and what he wanted, or was the whole presentation so glossy it was impersonal? Would people long to know him? Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?

Pierre-Georges took Guy and three girls dancing at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, a tuxedo disco. The tall skinny girls were decked out in horrible Cardin “space age” dresses of floating geometrical panels over body stockings. (Cardin, he learned, had lent the girls the new dresses from his latest ready-to-wear collection because he wanted his clothes to be seen in Paris hot spots.) Guy didn’t feel confident about his dancing and he wondered if the black light was doing something facetious to his newly processed hair. But Pierre-Georges assured him he looked handsome in black-tie. From there they went on to the Élysée Matignon. When they all got hungry about midnight they went to the Club Sept, which was a table-hopping restaurant and bar upstairs and a small, mirror-lined gay disco in the basement. The music was a wonderful mix; the Cuban
disquaire
, whom Pierre-Georges called Guy Cuevas, was sitting in a Lucite box and kept playing Marvin Gaye and Dalida.

Guy was secretly thrilled by the blend of gay and straight, black and white, European and American, old and young at the Club Sept and the oddly shaped asymmetrical dishes, spotlit bouquets on each table and the towering wine glasses on green, twisted stems. It seemed very contemporary to him. All of his anguish about whether he liked boys or girls was suddenly resolved and pacified in the dizzying omnisexual pandemonium of the Sept.

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbor boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.
Dear God, please God, don’t let me join that man’s race of the damned
. But now here at the Sept he could see handsome men in coat and tie kissing at the bar, surrounded by their stylish, indifferent women friends.

Guy kept looking at his long, nervous, freshly manicured hand set off by the black sleeve above the heavy white linen cuff pierced by Pierre-Georges’s borrowed silver cuff links. (“Silver in the summer, gold in the winter,” Pierre-Georges had declared.) The girls, Guy noticed, ate large green salads of
mâche
, no bread, and only played with their
noisettes de veau
and drank just one glass of white wine each, though he couldn’t resist taking a bite out of the delicious hard roll positioned directly on the napery, even when all three girls and Pierre-Georges raised an eyebrow at his lack of discipline. They excused themselves one after another and Guy wondered if they were vomiting their dinners. (He’d heard of such things.)

It was an exciting evening. Some young men at the bar stared over at their table and murmured remarks to one another with hard, mobile mouths. Had they recognized him? A bloated, loud American, stumbling drunkenly, shouting English, was swiftly escorted out to the street. For many long minutes he kept pounding on the street door in vain. “Jeem Morrison,” Pierre-Georges whispered. “Sad. He’s lost his looks—
bouffi
.” Bloated.

A month later Morrison was dead and buried in Père Lachaise, the two moles had been burned painlessly off Guy’s chest, and he was successfully weaned from cigarettes after fighting a real struggle (and gaining ten pounds). Pierre-Georges had helped him lose the weight by feeding him amphetamines and had finagled him some very lucrative contracts. Guy had learned that though Pierre-Georges liked to be seen in public with very young models and pretty ephebes, he preferred rough middle-aged brutes in bed whom he dragged home from a bar on the rue Keller. Pierre-Georges encouraged fashion insiders to think Guy was his lover, all the while protesting Guy was “hopelessly straight” and affianced to a silly girl back home in Clermont-Ferrand. Word got out that Guy was as heterosexual as the American guys Bruce Weber was flying over to the Hôtel Meurice and photographing horsing around in the Bois de Boulogne. Zizi Jeanmaire—her spiky hair dyed freshly black—stared at Guy meaningfully over dinner. “He’s not straight,” she said dismissively on her way out, as if no normal man could resist her.

A young American photographer, who lived at the end of a lane on the Left Bank, not far from the offices of
Le Monde
, invited him to pose for a catalogue of ski gear—he even had a simulated, snow-covered slope all set up. The photographer, Hal, was a
joli laid
, not really handsome, with kinky blond hair, big lugubrious eyes of faded blue, big dumpling ears, but he’d done everything to make his look streamlined, modern, effective; his hair was tamed with brilliantine, it seemed, and he lifted weights and was wearing a tight T-shirt to prove it. He had a collection of plates made from broken, colorful shards, which he called
pique assiette
, and the soaring walls of his studio were painted green in such a way as to look smudged and to leave traces of the brushwork.

They had to work quickly before the snow melted and there were lots of clothes to get through. There was no one doing hair and makeup, nor a dresser, but Guy was a good sport and half the time he was in his underwear as he changed.

Hal was unsmiling (did he think that made him more
soigné
, or was he really bored by life?) but he was friendly enough, though he stared too much and took too long to answer questions in his deep voice. It couldn’t be a matter of his comprehension—he’d lived here five years, he said, and his French was good. He didn’t even have much of an accent.

And then, as Guy was getting dressed to leave, Hal said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do some nudes. You’ll be happy someday to have a record of your beauty, your youth.” When he saw a hesitant look on Guy’s face, Hal said, “They’ll be just for us. I’ll give you the prints. And nothing pornographic.”

A large brown envelope arrived in the mail saying
NE PAS PLIER
(Don’t Bend) and reinforced with stiff cardboard. Inside, in glassine envelopes, were several full-color nudes of himself posed against the snowbank. He was naked except for a pair of skis he was holding straight up and a stocking cap. Guy looked at the pictures through a loupe. His uncircumcised penis was large enough. His chest was hairy and he had a clear treasure trail pointing down from his navel to his crotch. He liked the way he appeared, though he worried his forearms looked too small.

Three months later Pierre-Georges steamed into Guy’s studio without knocking and slapped down on the kitchen table Guy’s full-page nude in the American gay magazine
Blueboy
. “Slut, you’ve just sunk your career,” he sputtered. “And it doesn’t even look big.” It took a long dinner and four glasses of Bordeaux for him to go from sputtering to simmering.

“You’ve spoiled all our good work,” he said in a drained, tragic voice. “The whole game with models is never to let the public see everything. Make them dream, make them imagine! Let them see a haunch, not a strange little penis.” He said the harsh slang word
bitte
.

Guy told him the whole story of Hal’s treachery and Pierre-Georges hissed, “Idiot!” Then he relented and said, “Well, it’s an American magazine. No one here will ever see it and he called you Ralph, of all things.” He reflected. “But that is where we want to sell you, America. That’s where the money is.”

Guy had a new thought: “Anyone who buys this magazine shares our vice, and who would admit that?”

“I’m not talking about confession but about gossip.”

Guy longed for a best friend, a confidant. He liked walking everywhere in Paris despite the sudden heat, but he wanted to discuss things with a friend, male or female, and his solitude made him melancholy. He looked at store windows on the Left Bank and across the river on the rue Saint-Honoré and tried to decide whether he liked best Hugo Boss or Kenzo or Lanvin. He coveted a pale gray silk bathrobe from Lanvin but he rebelled at the $1,000 price tag: He laughed when the disdainful clerk at Hermès told him the small pigskin valise with the brass fittings cost $6,000. He wasn’t very sure about money. He didn’t know how long people would want to hire him. He was a popular runway model but he’d have to wait until September for the spring collections to work again. The booking agent at
Vogue
liked him but editorial didn’t pay much, and besides, they didn’t want the same male faces to become too familiar to their readers. He had a big, well-paying yogurt account for print, and then he did a commercial for Brie where he had to dress as a starving young monk who fell on the cheese the second the older, chubbier monks left him alone. That spot ran ten times a day on TV for a month and the residuals kept rolling in.