Our Young Man

by Edmund White

  With Lucie’s departure, Walt turned down the lights. Pierre-Georges took his leave and winked complicitously at Guy. Guy was dying to run down to the garage and drive his new car around; the parking space the baron had rented was in his, the baron’s, building, which wasn’t convenient to Guy’s place in the Village, but the baron no doubt hoped to lure Guy even more often up to the East Side. Guy wondered if the title of the car was also in the baron’s name.

  Now that there were only four handsome guys left, all gay, he noticed, the music was no longer disco (“Higher and Higher”) but Peggy Lee (“Is That All There Is?”), Édouard’s idea of mood music. Two joints were making the rounds and the champagne was replaced by sweet, deadly stingers. The Ravioli Alley guy, who looked like the young Elvis, was rubbing his crotch through his trousers. He would, Guy thought. It looked half hard and very big. Then Walt, who was sitting next to Elvis, put his hand on his knee and Elvis moved it closer to his dick. Jacky stood and made a show of refilling his drink, but a second later he was sitting on the other side of Elvis and was kissing him passionately. The baron had left the room. Guy was so stoned that he was magnetized to Jacky’s side. As soon as an idea popped into his head he was doing it. There seemed to be a skip between every series of actions as if it had been edited out. Guy looked at Walt; they smiled hopelessly and each said, at the same moment, “Gosh, I’m stoned.” Walt added, “I think that shit was sprayed with PCP.” And Guy nodded meekly, though he had no idea what that meant. Guy’s own erection was so hard it ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door. He felt a little silly, possibly intrusive, sitting next to Jacky as Jacky kissed Elvis, a bit like an importunate extra man who wants to cut in on a woman perfectly happy with her dancing partner. But then Walt had extricated the thug’s big, uncircumcised, ropy cock from his trousers and Elvis was sprawling back on the couch to get sucked. He pulled away from Jacky, who turned without missing a beat to kiss Guy. Jacky’s mouth tasted metallic, which Guy imagined was from the thug’s saliva. Jacky’s eyes were closed. Did he know whom he was kissing? Jacky’s hand unzipped Guy’s fly and pulled out his rigid, leaking penis. As though drawn to it like a sunflower to sun, his mouth descended and engulfed it. Guy trembled from the warm, liquid enclosure, all alive and squirming, the tongue. Oh, God, don’t let me shoot right away! Now Jacky was grappling with Guy’s belt and unbuttoning him—Guy lifted his hips slightly and Jacky tugged his trousers down. With a flicker of anxiety Guy hoped his crotch didn’t smell, hoped his wallet didn’t fall out. But Jacky liked it; Guy thought of the French word pervers and then the English word “manhood.” Jacky had unfolded his manhood and had it on display and isolated as if prepped for surgery. He had pulled back his foreskin and was licking Guy’s balls and now the stretch of skin beside them. His tongue was as rough as a cat’s.

  Guy looked over at Walt’s gray mustache beavering away on the thug’s big penis, which was so adolescent it was pressing up against his soft stomach, fish-belly white, and Walt had to pull it down fastidiously between thumb and forefinger in order to suck it.

  Where was Édouard? The wall beside them was covered with gilt bosses and Louis Seize knots in plaster and Guy thought he could see an eye—liquid, shifting, sensitive as a quivering sea urchin—blinking at the center of one of the ornaments. Was Édouard just a voyeur? Was he back there jacking off? Poor Édouard, deaf even with two hearing aids and his bald head painfully seeded with implants. Could he even get an erection?

  Knowing that they were being watched excited Guy, who moved his arm out of the way as men do in porn to make the focus of excitement more visible to the viewer. Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?

  After it was all over, Édouard rejoined them and chuckled. “I am like the Cardinal de Bernis, who spied on Casanova and a nun.” Guy knew who Casanova was but not the other guy. He was happy to see that Édouard was highly satisfied with his dinner party and orgy. Ever prudent, Guy decided he was too drunk to drive. He and Édouard took the elevator down to the garage to look at the Mercedes. Guy stood with his arm resting on Édouard’s shoulder, then kissed his forehead and took a cab home.

  “Gay men,” Pierre-Georges said over the phone, “pay more for boys who don’t put out. Straight men pay for women who do fuck them. I don’t know why that should be so.”

  “Maybe boys are too plentiful and available, whereas pussy is scarce.” He said the French word, con, and Pierre-Georges laughed even to hear this mild profanity in Guy’s mouth.

  “Scarce? Hardly. Not now. Just troll any of those Second Avenue singles bars in the Fifties. If you’re not too picky, young fat girls are very available.”

  “So do you think I should play hard-to-get for Édouard?”

  “It’s worked so far.”

  A year went by and Guy submitted every month to Jacky’s attentions while Édouard watched through the mosharabia. Once, after a very stoned Christmas dinner, Jacky was kissing Guy deeply and Guy felt a new mouth on his dick. It was Édouard’s, no doubt; he’d removed his dentures and Guy remembered that old guy at the Clermont-Ferrand train station. How old had he been then? Seventeen? Now it was sixteen years later. Guy pulled down Jacky’s trousers, releasing his stubby erection. The baron took turns sucking them off. Guy noticed that Jacky had shaved all his pubic hair—was that some master’s whim or was it aesthetic? Guy had observed the same practice once when he’d made love to an Arab.

  He heard distant rumors of the new backroom bars where some French tourist friends had been turned away by the doorman for wearing cologne, cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders, and Gucci loafers, no socks. Apparently they wanted only “real men.” America had no images for masculinity that weren’t working-class.

  At one bar, the Mine Shaft, there were two floors of horrors, naked men sitting in bathtubs being peed on, a whole wall of glory holes where guys were serviced anonymously, a sling where “bottoms” could get fisted. There was no way Guy could visit that place or the leather bars in the West Twenties. What if someone took his picture? He’d even heard of society people going to the baths on the Upper West Side to hear singers while men in towels stood around. A Polish princess had taken off her rings to fist a go-go boy down on Fourteenth Street.

  Édouard had a glory hole installed in the doorway to his bedroom. It was just a piece of plywood, easily removed, with a large, optimistically large hole cut through at waist-height. They had a light dinner à deux; a butler served them and called Guy monsieur and Édouard Monsieur le Baron. After dinner, which was slightly tedious with its six changes of plates and tableware and its three wines, ending with a delicious Chateau d’Yquem, Édouard sat back in his chair and lit a joint. He talked about the gloomy castle in which he’d grown up where it was always raining. “Then in Brussels we lived above the bank, just a block from the royal palace. My father died when I was nine—gossips said he shot himself because he was gay. My mother was a delicious woman who surrounded herself with artists. There’s a portrait of her.” He pointed to a life-sized painting of a blond woman in a ball gown. The painter had shown more interest in the candy-striped silk dress with its frothy lace bodice than in the subject’s face, which looked fairly generic. “She was a saint—but a powerhouse, too. I’ve tried to follow her example by surrounding myself with beauty and sensitivity.” He winked. His newly installed hair was dyed a Death-in-Venice black. Suddenly he grew silent and left the table. Guy knew what was expected of him and after a few minutes he headed for the glory hole. He “betrayed” Édouard by imagining the toothless mouth on the other side of the door was Jacky’s.

  Édouard relaxed around Guy. They always spoke French; an old man appreciates slipping back into his native tongue. Guy was becoming more and more famous. He was in a widely seen music video lip-synching a song about a sharp-dressed man. He was photographed in black-tie getting out of a limousine with a dowager in a tiara; the photograph was an allusion to Weegee’s photos of New York society people in the f
orties. It was for a men’s cologne in GQ as a full page during the three months leading up to Christmas. American scents smelled like bubble gum and were all vile, Guy thought, except for Perry Ellis’s. A “nose” in Paris had once told him that the best perfume was Ivoire by Balmain but it was priced too low. Guy used it as a room spray.

  Guy was in commercials for A/X, Banana Republic, Barbados rum, and he did runway shows in Paris, Milan, and New York for Sonia Rykiel, Valentino, and YSL. He didn’t have a perfect six-pack or the chest for a Tarzan poster or hooded eyes or pillowed lips—nothing distinctive, no trademark trait except his little jug ears—but he was a perfect size and his very anonymity meant that he could be used in runway shows one after another without drawing attention to his redundant appearances. Even though he didn’t have rugged good looks or a hooked nose or a high-profile girlfriend like Elle Macpherson or Andie MacDowell, he did have his jug ears, small dark eyes, and a hairy chest, and everyone in the business thought he was surprisingly friendly and (America’s highest and weirdest compliment) “down-to-earth,” and Forbes listed him as the world’s fourteenth most successful male model.

  Édouard liked Guy’s combination of celebrity and anonymity and gave him a large emerald ring for Christmas. Guy could look at it for hours, especially in the twilight, when it glowed darkly. He could imagine a wizard fondling it and gazing into its mysterious depths. People always remarked on it, which he liked. It was a lightning rod for their attention; better it than him. Not that he wasn’t insecure if people ignored him, but that seldom happened. A drunk girl at a party told him he was of a different species, that surely someone as beautiful as he had lived an enchanted existence. Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man “handsome” rather than “beautiful”?

  A new illness called “gay cancer” or “gay-related immune deficiency (GRID)” broke out and wiped out a whole house of five on Fire Island. Guy decided not to renew his share for the following summer. He loved the rapturous, lyrical nights there, no care greater than the exact moment to leave the Botel and to migrate over to the Sandpiper or what to prepare for his housemates for dinner, something that they could all afford and that wouldn’t run afoul of all their strange allergies and food dislikes. He never saw those guys off-island but he liked the way they all adored him—and he was amused by their “ass stories” (histoires de cul) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before, and he liked that Édouard stayed on his yacht and never visited the Octagon House where Guy lived.

  But with this new disease it was safer to go to the Hamptons this summer (safer but more expensive and less fun). On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn’t tell the houseboys from the bankers. But in South Hampton servants were in pickup trucks and their bosses in Jaguars and there was no place they mixed except sometimes on the beach. (But the help often weren’t permitted to swim, or they preferred to get together in a coffeehouse on their day off.) Only very evolved employers had their chefs tooling around in shorts and answering to first names. (“What’s for dinner, Jeff?” “Well, Dick, I found the most incredible spare ribs.”)

  One day Pierre-Georges came for a coffee at Guy’s apartment in the Village after he’d had lunch at the Côte Basque with the baron.

  “He wants you to participate in his S&M activities. As a sadist. I said that was completely against your gentle nature, though you did have a violent streak that I’d witnessed twice and that could be cultivated. But only if you felt completely secure as a man …”

  “What on earth! You talk as if I were a child. I’m a grown man of thirty-two.”

  “Professionally you’re twenty-three. But I like your outrage—we can build on that.”

  “Build?”

  “Wait, wait,” Pierre-Georges said, making a calming motion with both hands and looking perfectly calm himself, even smiling. “I told him that your building was up for sale and if you owned it and had two income properties …”

  “What?”

  “If you owned the whole building, you could rent out—”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He asked me to test the waters.”

  “He’d buy me the building and I’d switch his butt?”

  “More than that and more than once.”

  “Berk!” (The sound for revulsion in French comic strips.)

  Pierre-Georges let a long silence accumulate. He who was always voluble didn’t mind showing his tacit impatience or disapproval.

  At last Guy took a new tack: “You’re adept at all things hard”—he used the English word “hard,” the h suppressed, newly imported into French for sadomasochism—“but I know nothing of … all that. Would you tell me how it’s organized?” They both liked the cool, cerebral tone of “organized.” Normally Guy never asked questions. He didn’t like to admit he didn’t already know something. Like all French people he didn’t say, “Je ne sais pas,” but “Je ne sais plus” (“I no longer know”).

  The only thing that slightly irritated Pierre-Georges was the dismissive “all that” (tout ça). He said, “It’s partly my fault you’ve reached your great age and are so naïve. I haven’t wanted you to come across as a slut”—une salope—“especially now that there’s this new saloperie going around”—he meant gay cancer—“but sadism”—and he laughed, surprised at his own thought—“is bizarrely safe. You don’t even have to touch the slave! And if the slave is a very distinguished old man … who’s very particular … and who’s slowed down forcibly with age …”

  Everything Pierre-Georges was saying set off a small detonation in Guy’s mind. Did disease specially spare distinguished old men? Did it affect only riffraff who had problems of … hygiene? Did a single exposure to it suffice (that would be too unfair!), or was it cumulative, was it like Russian roulette, in which only one chamber out of six was loaded but the odds of being eliminated increased with each turn of the barrel?

  “No touching?” Guy said. “But don’t you have to penetrate the victim?”

  “Rarely. It’s all mostly verbal menace and gestures of domination. It’s verbal and mental, in fact.”

  “Convenient if true.”

  “Of course, you wouldn’t be alone. The baron likes scenes, orgies with a narrative. There’d be other young men there, attractive ones, experienced.”

  Guy’s thoughts, usually imperturbable, ricocheted now like a panicked bird inside a closed room. “So,” he said. “What’s the difference between me and a whore?” He swallowed. “Am I a whore?”

  “No more then every married woman. Or heir. They all benefit from wealth they haven’t earned. But whore, if you like. The trick is to be a clever whore”—le truc est d’etre une putain rusée. Pierre-Georges laughed his barking, unfunny laugh. “It would be agreeable to own a house in Greenwich Village, n’est-ce pas, and to be a rentier, especially in a profession like yours with such a short shelf life, no?”

  Guy reasoned with himself that night as he tossed and turned in bed, surely there was something pure about him; he’d never slept with someone as a brutal transaction. Then he turned the emerald ring around in the dark. He laughed at himself. It was true he hadn’t directly negotiated for the jewel, but after he’d received the petit cadeau (“little gift,” to use a whore’s euphemism), he’d thrust himself through the glory hole for the first time. Why did he dream of more and more wealth? He had plenty, didn’t he, which Pierre-Georges had invested for him? Maybe because he’d grown up poor, just spaghetti sometimes three nights in a row, never a franc to buy candy, always hand-me-down clothes, never enough to buy schoolbooks—that had seemed like reality to him. And now that someone wanted to take care of him, he was … grateful? Was that the word?

  He switched on the light and picked up a copy of a novel by Alphonse Daudet that Pierre-Georges had given him, a book he couldn’t get into, for some reason. It was old, he thought accusingly. From some other century. He didn’t like old things. He closed
the book.

  All right, so he’d already acquiesced to the baron for one big gift—why not a bigger one?

  He phoned Pierre-Georges and said, “I can’t sleep. Would he buy me the building outright?” He looked at himself in the large wall mirror over the bed, one he’d positioned there to reflect his “pigginesses” (cochonneries). Of course, his hair was a mess, but he thought he looked pretty good, though his neck, still firm, was threatening to give way, like a dam after ten days of rain. Nothing visible yet, but he could just tell that that would be the first area of devastation. And his elbows were getting leathery.

  He turned his head from left to right. Would he give that guy in the mirror a building?

  He wasn’t his own type.

  “Yes,” Pierre-Georges said, “I’m certain he’d let you sign the deed. It would all be done through lawyers so you wouldn’t have any embarrassment.”

  “What would I wear?” Guy blurted.

  “At the lawyers’? Your dark blue suit, the Armani.”

  “No, I mean, at the orgy.”

  “We could go to a shop on Christopher Street, where they’d fit you for black leather shorts—”

  “Berk!”

  “And a harness.”

  “I’m not a horse. And I thought I would be the master.”

  “That’s what the master wears.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s like asking why English words are spelled the way they are. Because. Just because.”

  The line was silent with just Guy’s audible breathing. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No,” Pierre-Georges said. “I was watching an old movie on television.”

  “Oh? Which one?” Guy and Pierre-Georges often watched movies at the same time, each one at home before his own television. Sometimes thirty minutes would go by without either of them saying anything beyond, “Isn’t that weird? Is that a shovel he has in his hand? What is she doing? Is that a pancake?” Guy’s English was better and he often filled Pierre-Georges in on the plot.