Our Young Man (3 page)

He had grown up poor. They had a small, smelly trailer they drove around France for vacations; in the trailer park outside Montoire-sur-le-Loir they’d stayed for five nights. His father set up an awning and a grill and drank even more red wine than usual. That’s where Guy had lost his virginity to a shy, lovely girl from Vichy named Violette. They were both fifteen. His family never ate in restaurants, not even cafés, when they were traveling. Guy had loved clothes but never had had money to buy them. Now, in Paris, he had money but was very practical about saving. Most of his clothes were given to him by designers at a severe discount.

For nearly a decade he was the darling of Paris. He bought an art nouveau apartment designed around 1910 by Guimard, the man who had done the Métro entrances. It was small, but Pierre-Georges declared it “distinguished” and approved that it was in the safe, serene, and nonhappening sixteenth arrondissement. Publicly Guy dated starlets and female models, who mostly were pleased he didn’t expect them to put out. Privately he’d go off at the end of long, bibulous evenings with other good-looking young “straight” men he met at heterosexual pickup bars on the boulevard Montparnasse, guys who like him had been unlucky with lining up a girl for the evening before last call. But he never saw one of these men more than once and never gave out his real name.

Pierre-Georges said to him, “You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re
sympa
, at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space.”

Then Pierre-Georges sent him to New York for a Pepsi commercial, where his Frenchness was of no relevance; in fact, he had to dress in jeans and a sports shirt and flip burgers among young Americans at a picnic shot on a rented estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. It was 1980 and suddenly male models, two years after women, were becoming “supermodels.” Their names were known; the public gossiped about them. Their hourly rates went up. The public laughed at them for being overpaid, but Pierre-Georges pointed out that the career of a model was very short.

Guy worried about everything. The currency in America never made any sense to him since nickels were bigger than dimes, which were worth more. From all those Fred Astaire movies, he thought everyone in New York would be in evening clothes, but actually they were badly dressed and coiffed. Chicly dressed women wore sneakers (he was told they’d put on their heels at the office). Many men looked unwashed. He was shocked how obese some Negro women were and how unselfconsciously, even sloppily, they rolled from side to side down the sidewalk. Portions in restaurants seemed comically large and he was puzzled that several places offered “all you can eat.” The doggy bag was a new idea. New York struck him as dowdy and provincial but strangely electric. Everything was fast and careless, even the hurried way shopgirls wrapped packages. Oddly, waiters were extraordinarily friendly; at one place in the Village the waitress sat down with them and said, “I hope you folks don’t have a complicated order. I’m completely stoned.” Although Guy fancied he knew English well, he had to ask the photographer’s assistant what “folks” and “stoned” meant. From then on Guy used “folks” as often as possible, as in, “They are very funny folks,” thinking that meant they were amusing. Calling someone “amusing” just seemed to irritate New Yorkers.

Even so, he was a huge success in America. There didn’t seem to be room, not even in New York, for several French models, but Guy quickly became the go-to French guy. He met all the top photographers, including Hiro, a very pure, quiet Japanese artist who would arrange a few objects and get ravishing forms and citrusy color combinations, and Richard Avedon, much smaller and younger than Guy had imagined, a very bossy, hardworking genius who told him, “These days I just shoot constantly and my work has all the excitement of confetti.” Avedon was so slim and stylish even in his work clothes that he didn’t seem American or even heterosexual, but he was famous for his celebrated women friends, including the legendary model Dovima, the one he’d photographed with an elephant.

Pierre-Georges told him that New York was very dangerous and when he took a taxi home he should have the driver wait until he was safely in the front door. He could be mugged crossing the five meters between the cab and his lobby. He lived in Greenwich Village (he had trouble pronouncing “Greenwich”) in a floor-through of a brownstone on the corner, illogically, of West Fourth and West Eleventh. Pierre-Georges had found it and even furnished it for him, though Guy was allowed to place family pictures on tiny silver easels Pierre-Georges bought. Guy also draped an extravagant silk scarf across the plain beige couch, but Pierre-Georges teased him about it and he folded it and put it away the next day.

He joined a nearby gym upstairs at Sheridan Square. There was lots of loud joking among the folks working out; some of them were grotesquely muscular and one guy had to be helped up the stairs by his brother. Every day the guy ate an entire rotisserie chicken and drank a pint of bull’s blood. Guy couldn’t understand most of the gibes, but it seemed half the folks were gay and half normal and they were joking about which orientation was more amusing: “Just think of dick as pussy on a stick,” one of the loudmouths guffawed. The population of the gym was at the tipping point between gay and normal.

In the cedar-lined sauna a polite flabby man with a bushy gray mustache and expensive sapphire eyes and the ruins of good looks struck up a conversation. His nipples were the size of erasers. In Paris Guy would have been curt, but here in America folks appeared to be vulgarly friendly. When the man,
un vieux beau
, heard Guy’s accent he switched to a very good French. He said his name was Walt and he was from San Francisco, but he didn’t really work because he had to be free to travel with his older friend, a Belgian baron and banker who was always in transit between Gstaad and Phuket and Venice and Mykonos, you really should meet him, and what do you do, oh, I suspected as much, I know you’re not supposed to ask French people what kind of work they do, but hey, we’re in New York, and Walt laughed at the funny coincidence of that.

By chance they got out of the sauna at the same time and headed down the hall to the showers. Walt cupped one of Guy’s hot buttocks; Guy glared at him but Walt looked unfazed, as though he’d been innocently testing a melon for ripeness or as if someone else had done it. In the shower Walt continued smiling and chatting but he made a bit too much out of laundering his genitals. Although he was too fat, strangely enough Guy could imagine it would be fun to hold him. Walt had a body meant to be held.

When they were dressed and heading out, Walt wrote down Guy’s phone number. Under his taut silk briefs Guy could still feel the shocking familiarity of Walt’s hand, but it confused him. He’d never been attracted to anyone over thirty, at least not to his knowledge, but he was secretly thrilled by the infringement of that brazen touch. Maybe it was because such an obviously civilized man, who spoke French and skied at Gstaad, had done it—as if someone in evening clothes had knelt in the mud to suck his cock. After all, Walt vacationed in Thailand, he studded his conversation with references to yachts and international watering holes—and he’d also reached for Guy’s ass.

Guy realized how lonely he was. How starved for affection. In Paris he’d met an older woman named Elaine in an English class they were both enrolled in. She was an anesthesiologist who lived and worked in Versailles and was sort of perky but fundamentally dull, though she was always free and treated Guy as a kid brother. They never got beyond the formality of calling each other
vous
. In New York he didn’t even have an Elaine to share meals or movies with.

Because almost every man here in the Village stared at him, he’d learned to ignore them all. One had a nice torso but lady legs. Another had worked out his biceps but not his triceps. A third had a good body but ludicrous muttonchops. A fourth carried a man purse because his pale gabardine trousers had no pockets and looked sprayed on: In France only middle-aged bus drivers out on the town still carried them. Guy inventoried all these “faults” because he was just as critical of his own shortcomings—or guarded vigilantly against having any. But he knew that if he could connect with even a very ordinary person he wouldn’t look for that person’s flaws.

If he walked though Washington Square past a lone guy sitting on a bench, eyeing him, Guy would find it harder and harder to breathe as he got nearer, almost as if he were passing through a dangerous force field. His first weekend on Fire Island with Pierre-Georges (who was unexpectedly hairy in a swimsuit), Guy slowly descended the wooden stairs from the dunes to the beach wearing nothing but a tight white swimsuit and sunglasses, and a dozen men looked up from their towels at him and he was afraid he might faint. He thought to himself,
I’ll never be this perfect again
, an idea that made him sad. Something about being beautiful induced melancholy in Guy. He was aware of how brief his perfection would be—and then sneered at himself for being so narcissistic. Beauty was only a way of making money.

He thought he was like an expensive racehorse whom all the people around him kept inspecting and trotting not for his well-being but to protect their investment. Feel his withers … is he off his feed? … the grandstand seems to spook him, he needs blinders … his nose is warm. If he went out without sunglasses, Pierre-Georges came running after him to warn him against squint lines. If he gained an ounce, Pierre-Georges would pinch his waist and murmur, “Miss Piggy.” If he wore tight jeans, Pierre-Georges would hiss, “You look like a whore,” and make him change to something looser. Once, when he wore a filmy, sheer robe, Pierre-Georges whispered that most dismissive of French phrases, “Très original.” If he concentrated while doing a crossword, Pierre-Georges warned him he was getting elevenses—those vertical worry lines above his nose.

He and Pierre-Georges took a public speedboat at midnight from the Grove to the Pines with a bunch of overexcited guys and they all rushed into the Sandpiper. Guy was stoned and taller than most of the other men, and as he stared out over them he experienced a distinctly Buddhist feeling of evanescence. He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realized that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy—and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

Guy met some hunky guys who’d improvised an outdoor gym with weights on the sand in front of their house over on Tuna and they said he could work out with them. One day a small, slender, but perfectly formed blond drew him aside and said, “You should do gymnastics—you’re a model, right? Do you want me to teach you?” The guy, wearing blue baggy shorts, jumped up onto parallel bars and walked down them with just his hands, then turned a somersault and extended his legs and pointed his feet. Guy exercised with him for an hour; apparently the man didn’t expect anything in return—these Americans were amazing!

He’d read an article in a beauty magazine about facial isometrics and every morning in front of the mirror he hooked his fingers in his mouth and stretched out his lips toward his ears, trying to close his mouth at the same time. Or he tilted his head back like a goose and pointed his chin and pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to firm up his chin.

As he came out of the Sandpiper for a breather he ran into Walt, who was very solicitously shepherding about his baron. They were introduced and the baron, ugly as a commissar, held on to Guy’s hand for an uncomfortably long interval. Of course they were speaking French, and rather loudly, and Guy worried the foreign language might irritate some folks, just as he became resentful when several boisterous Germans would speak their language loudly in a Paris café. Guy feared it might be a petit bourgeois trait on his part, but he didn’t want to stand out as a foreigner, though most Americans said they loved his accent, it was so sexy.

The baron, whose name was Édouard, invited him to lunch the next day on his yacht—and he pointed to a massive boat moored and nearly extinct in the slip just beside them. Guy had noticed attractive men and women on the deck of the yacht just that afternoon. He asked, “What time?” Then he asked if he could bring a French-speaking friend.

The little gymnast sidled up to Guy and said, “I see you’ve met Spare Parts.”

“Who, Baron Édouard?”

“We call him Spare Parts because he’s had so much work done on him and still looks like a toad.”

“Toad?” Finally Guy deduced he meant a
crapaud
: That was probably said out of envy and jealousy.

“Be careful of him,” the gymnast added. “He likes violent sex; you don’t want those pretty nipples stretched out. He’s also into fisting. Actually, he’s the slave, I think.”

For once Pierre-Georges, whose instinct was to frown whenever Guy suggested an idea, smiled instead. “A baron? A yacht?” he asked, reassured they weren’t that far from Saint-Tropez after all.

Guy had braced himself for a scary intimate lunch, but the yacht was flourishing with young hangers-on and the baron was only intermittently visible, fully dressed in captain’s whites. Guy thought he must be a clever seducer and was determined to imitate him when he was old—to bait the hook with lots of shiny lures. Walt was very much in evidence, making sure the bong was circulating, that the icy daiquiris were replenished, and the hot blue cheese pastries were being passed around, as well as the crudités with the delicious crab claws.

Walt asked in a whisper, “Which of these boys do you fancy the most?”

Guy shrugged but Walt persevered. “Seriously,” he said.

Guy had spent so much time rejecting even the most handsome Americans that now it was difficult for him to pick someone. He was the one everyone else pursued; he was the commodity, not the consumer. But when Walt asked a third time, Guy murmured in a strangled voice, “That little blond in the neon-blue swimsuit.”