Our Young Man

by Edmund White

  “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.”

  4.

  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?

  When he called his mother she sobbed into the phone and said, “Thank God you’re back in France. Your father is going quickly. Come home right away. Tonight.”

  Guy said yes, of course, but after hanging up he sank into the bleakest resentment. He felt as if the last twenty years had just been a rosy chimera. He felt as if his parents were dragging him away from his glamorous, cosseted life in which so many men loved him. He knew his father had been fighting emphysema for years, though he wouldn’t give up his pack of Gauloises a day and would even turn off the oxygen in his tent so that he could smoke another clope. He was now so bad he couldn’t talk on the phone without gasping, and his mother said he couldn’t walk fifty meters without sitting down to catch his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Andrés asked, a crease across his lovely smooth forehead.

  “I’ve got to take the train down to Clermont-Ferrand. My father’s very sick. I think he’s dying.”

  “Oh, mon petit,” Andrés said folding him into his arms. “Tonight?”

  “Yes, I guess.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work. They don’t want a guest at this time. And there are no hotels nearby. You can’t believe how … poor it is! How poor they are. And how would I explain you to them?”

  Andrés was Latin enough to understand the sacred rights of the family and the inconvenience of a same-sex lover. He looked pained, as if someone had turned off his oxygen, too; Guy remembered that in a crisis Latins don’t know how to be stoic. They wear their emotions on their sleeve, and their lips, far from being stiff, are quavering with self-pity.

  They had only two more hours before the train but Andrés managed to squeeze in another orgasm. Guy couldn’t concentrate on sex. The concierge was arranging his train ticket, but he had to cancel tomorrow’s shoot and tell his mother when he was arriving and he had to pack a few things. And call Pierre-Georges. Then, on top of everything else, he had Fred’s daily phone call to deal with. He always called at four Paris time and ten P.M. New York time. Fred was always mournful because Guy had admitted that Andrés had flown over with him to Paris, but this evening, even while Andrés’s sperm was still drying on his stomach, Guy was able to jolt Fred by announcing he was going to his father’s deathbed.

  “Oh, baby, what terrible news! Well, we saw it coming. He just wouldn’t stop smoking—” And then Fred cut himself off, knowing that it was not in the best of taste to blame the dying. “I wish I could be there with you. I always assumed your father must be in his fifties, since I thought you were in your twenties. But now I know your true age, I guess your dad must be—”

  “He’s seventy-three,” Guy said coldly, then he let a long silence install itself over the crackling wire. Guy had learned how eloquently uncomfortable a silence could be.

  “Well, that’s young,” Fred babbled, completely disconcerted and aware that Andrés could probably divine Fred’s faux pas from Guy’s end of the conversation. Or if not, Guy would repeat it all to him soon enough. Best to change the subject. “So, how’s the work?” Fred asked brightly.

  “I’ve called it all off.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Would you have me prancing on a runway while my father was dying?”

  They hung up a moment later and Guy, who could see another of Andrés’s erections developing, raced about packing a few things, checking the train schedule with the concierge, and then phoning his mother to confirm when he’d arrive. At least the seriousness and urgency of the moment made Andrés go soft, though he prolonged their “final” embrace and became erect again. Guy was just a bit disgusted and he did a quick inventory of what he’d packed while feigning rapture in Andrés’s arms.

  His first-class seat on the train was comfortable and Guy liked the smell of the carpet, which must have been steam-cleaned recently. He had remembered to stamp his ticket in the machine before he boarded and now the conductor was nowhere in sight. There was only one other man at the far end of the car, reading under a spotlight.

  Guy was full of resentment against his parents for some reason, as if they were interrupting his new life (not so new now)—his New York pampered life of wealth and no responsibilities and lots of sex and eternal youth. They were dragging him back to the dirty lace curtains masking the windows giving directly onto the bleak, usually empty street, the view of the dirty white and gray uninterrupted facades of the houses across the way almost never lit from within, ghost houses in a ghost town. They were pulling him back to the space heater glowing red and then dimming, the freezing bedroom with the torn toile de jouy wallpaper and the matching slipcover on the one armchair, the dingy bathroom with the leprous mirror above the old-fashioned sink, and the mildewed shower curtain shrouding a shower no bigger than a sentry box. He couldn’t bear the ugliness and the poverty, the mouse-shit-in-the-corner horror of it all, the reminder that ordinary people get old and die, that they get thicker and stiffer with age, that they gasp for air.

  He went into the large bathroom on the train and locked the door and masturbated. Logically more sex was the last thing he should want, but he felt compelled to spurt, gicler, as perhaps a way of reclaiming himself from his importunate lover and from the cold neutering embrace of his parents. His mind raced between remembered images and those he made up as he sought to keep the divining rod bobbing and dipping above the buried stream of hot liquid. When it finally surfaced he was only half hard; jerking off had been more therapeutic than erotic.

  His mother was wearing a cheap scarf and her old tan raincoat and snow-stained flats as she stood out of the rain outside at the train station beneath the metal awning. Everything in France was so organized. He’d told her which train car he’d be on, and here she was in the exact place and at the exact time. She looked pale and as untweezered as a nun. She ignored his flowing, fashionable coat and his dark silk suit from Browns in London and his new Vuitton luggage; she clung to him fiercely in one quick embrace and he felt a reproach in it, as if he’d handed a copy of Vogue to Medea.

  His mother drove them swiftly and surely to the house as if she daren’t spend an extra minute away from her dying husband. “I’m so glad you made it in time.”

  Guy said, “Is he that bad?”

  His mother glanced away from the wet road unspooling before their headlights, illuminating corners of familiar old barns and houses as they swerved around corners. “Yes,” she said with
simple finality.

  “Is Robert here? Tiphaine?”

  “Yes, Robert drove up from Vienne, where he’s working in a garage, and Tiphaine took the train down from Lyon, where she’s a court stenographer.”

  Guy thought of things to ask about his siblings but he didn’t feel that sort of chitchat would be appropriate; he also didn’t want to draw attention to how out of touch he’d become with the basic facts about his family. So he just looked out the window at the rain, the passing lava-black buildings, and the glassy eyes of an attentive dog standing in the drizzle. There was the Dumoulins’ dingy house and their old trailer parked on the front lawn. “Do you have a full-time nurse?” Guy asked, thinking that was the kind of no-nonsense question a real person might ask—his brother, for instance.

  His father was so pale he looked as if he’d been copied in limestone. He was inside his oxygen tent dozing and his face was blurred behind the clear plastic. Guy didn’t know if it was better to let him sleep or to tell him he’d come home to see him. His mother solved the problem by saying, “Chéri, notre Guy est là,” which caused his father’s eyes to flutter open and his lips to produce a sketch of a smile. He’d gotten so much thinner and his features were stronger, more marked, so that he appeared younger in spite of his pallor. Guy could see that he’d once been handsome, the way he looked in that old picture from the fifties.

  Guy realized he’d always been afraid of his father and now he tensed up, which was absurd faced with this pallid, skinny copy of his heavy-drinking parent, this shrunken facsimile smiling his sketchy little smile. “Bonjour, Papa,” Guy said in a low voice the way he imagined Robert must sound. (His voice had always been much lower than Guy’s; when they were teenagers Guy could hear him in the next room talking to himself, forcing his voice down a few notes.) His father reached with his nearly transparent hand for Guy’s—something he’d never done before.