Our Young Man

by Edmund White

  “Yes, she was French but married a rich American, enfin, he was a soldier when they met, black—”

  “Black? Cool!”

  “But he made money later—”

  “Doing what?”

  “Barbecue,” Guy improvised wildly.

  “Cool.”

  “And they had no children. First he died—”

  “From what?”

  “Cholesterol.” Guy wasn’t sure that was fatal, but it sounded like something a black cook might get.

  “Poor man. And what did she die from?”

  “Malnourishment. Anorexia.” He felt on sure ground with this disease.

  “How ironic!”

  “Why ironic?”

  “Her husband made barbecue.”

  A shadowy image of a fat, sweating black man in a starched white chef’s toque crossed his imagination. “She was a vegetarian,” Guy blurted.

  “This doesn’t look like an old person’s apartment. I mean, the brass lamps and chocolate-brown walls look so up-to-date.”

  “Thanks,” Guy said weakly, “I’ve made a few improvements. Should we go out for dinner?”

  They strolled over to Duff’s on Christopher Street and were seated in a booth under a big industrial lamp. They ordered a cheap bottle of white wine and two rare steaks with green beans, hold the potatoes. “A real model’s meal, right?”

  “I guess,” Guy said.

  “Can I be honest with you?”

  Guy’s stomach clenched with fear. “Of course.”

  “My brother thinks I’m too boring for a sharp guy like you.”

  “You’re not boring—not as boring as I am. At least you’re doing advanced studies.”

  “Just college. Everybody does college, and most college kids are dumb.”

  “I didn’t go to college.”

  “Why not?”

  “My parents are aristocrats, a count and countess, and they wanted me to manage the family estates.” Guy resolved that he should write down all his lies in a locked diary and draw a timeline of this life he was inventing for himself.

  “It’s never too late to go to school,” Kevin said. Guy smiled frostily.

  He took off his own clothes as soon as they got in the door of his apartment. (He thought that would bypass any fumbling or the suggestion of seduction.) He went bare-assed into the kitchen to fetch them two glasses of water. When he came back, Kevin was stepping out of his jeans. He’d already untied his blue Top-Siders and now he was frowning slightly as he unbuttoned his shirt. He stood there in all his boyish beauty. He was wearing traditional Hanes underpants, which his mom had probably bought, six to a pack. Guy took the little erection slanting off to the right as a tribute. Did Kevin, inexperienced as he was, imagine that all gay men shed their clothes the minute they crossed the threshold?

  He walked slowly over to Kevin, put their glasses on the coffee table, and folded him into his arms. Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.

  Kevin shuddered in his arms. Guy tried to re-create in his mind the delights and repulsions of a virgin’s first time, but he decided to be bold, firm, not a sensitive reed bending in the gusts of the boy’s desire and dismay. If they were both hesitant the whole thing would prove a fiasco.

  Kevin’s skin was so cool it was almost clammy, especially the high, rubbery buttocks. They probed each other’s mouths with big, slippery tongues, eels flowing into and out of deep-sea grottoes, shrinking to enter, bloating once inside.

  When he knelt to suck Kevin, he glanced up and caught him grimacing. “Are you okay?”

  “You mean my wincing? I always do that when I’m jerking off. It’s pleasure—too painful. Is that too weird for you?” His way of submitting his behavior so innocently to Guy’s judgment was so guileless.

  Guy thought, Pain as pleasure. He understood that. He licked the boy’s balls, raised high and taut in their hairless sac, and Kevin groaned a bit stagily. Then he shook all over, flinching like a splashed horse. The flinching seemed real, involuntary. Guy thought of a Thoroughbred, how his curried coat drank the light. Guy touched the boy’s fragile pink nipples—no reaction. His body hadn’t been thoroughly eroticized yet, which made Guy think of that Chinese model he’d slept with once, a guy he’d met in São Paulo, someone who wore his body like armor, which had made Guy irrationally conclude the Chinese weren’t sensual, weren’t good sex. They didn’t inhabit their bodies, Guy had decided on the basis of his sample of one.

  Kevin fucked him. Guy guided the little hard penis into his body; Guy was lying on his stomach in order to afford Kevin the full plush glamour of his muscular buttocks. The boy didn’t seem to know how to thrust. He just lay couched on Guy’s bigger sleek body, this million-dollar body soaked for decades in costly unguents, and more or less wobbled in there for a very short time until he exploded.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “I came in you. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “That’s fine,” Guy said, kissing him and then running toward the shower. “I wanted it. That was great,” he lied. He didn’t know if Kevin might be feeling guilty after his orgasm. (So many men did at first.) That’s why he didn’t linger in bed. But then again, he didn’t want to seem cold, so he called back, “Come take a shower with me,” and the boy almost ran to join him. They rotated in the narrow tub under the showerhead; whoever wasn’t under the water soaped up, stood with legs ajar to wash his own crack, took the blast full in the face, lifted his arms to clean his hairless pits. Kevin was already spotlessly clean except for the lubricant greasing the length of his little cock; he washed it. Then, their bodies warm from the water, they waltzed around so neither of them would get cold. In a few seconds Kevin was hard again and Guy filled his mouth with hot water and knelt to engulf him. The boy let out a groan and tried to lift Guy to his feet. “We should take turns. It’s only fair.”

  “Only Princeton boys care about fairness,” Guy said. “That’s why they rub against each other. The Princeton rub.” He whispered, “You’re my stud, my mister,” and filled his mouth again and dipped back to his chore.

  “How can I be your stud?” Even the word seemed to embarrass him.

  Guy looked up, the water splashing on his face, his wet hair dripping over his eyes. “Bet you can come three times.”

  “I came five times once. But it was jerking off. And it was pretty limp and watery at the end.”

  Guy looked up admiringly.

  After Kevin came, Guy rubbed him dry with a hotel-sized towel and wanted to say, “My little stud,” but censored himself. The “little” might not be appreciated. And post coitum the “stud” might rankle.

  Guy put Kevin to bed and gave him the TV remote. Then he went back to the toilet, closed the door, and was oddly proud of how much semen Kevin had squirted into him. Of course, Kevin wasn’t Andrés, with all his barbaric beauty and gypsy passion, as thin and tortured as a Spanish Christ who’d climbed down from the cross, banished the god within, and resurrected the outer man.

  Before dawn Guy woke up to an exquisite pain, an inner plundering that his dream tried to make sense of (a hand was reaching for his heart), then he woke up and realized the boy was fucking him again and simultaneously reaching around and jerking Guy off. They both came at the same moment.

  Guy’s strategy was to make the boy into the active partner based on the notion that with his small dick and youth he would seldom be cast in that role and that it would build up his confidence. He knew most experienced gays would find such a policy counterintuitive; they all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole. But Pierre-Georges had told him otherwise, that men might style themselves as passive at first because it was easier to take it than give it, but that as a young man became self-assured in a relationship he became more assertive—the return of the repressed. So that both male partners in a couple end up as tops and look for the occasional bottom to fuck.

  Perhaps it
wasn’t that systematic, but Guy trusted his instincts, and after a week together Kevin was walking with a new swagger and even swatting Guy on the butt the minute they turned a corner. Because Kevin thought of Guy as more sophisticated and five or six years older, more the New Yorker, he let Guy decide when they’d go to the gym or what movie they’d see. They usually ate at a diner because it was quick and cheap and Kevin, if left to his own devices, could live on cheeseburgers and fries. He wanted, however, to have cheekbones like Guy, those knuckles about to burst through the taut sheet, and so he docilely ordered the salad and Diet Coke but then rewarded himself with a slice of cherry cheesecake, a taste for which was a New York acquisition, just as he could order now a poppy-seed bagel with lox and a “schmear” (salmon and cream cheese)—and he never gained an ounce.

  His legs were meaty enough to remind Guy he was a man, but each segment of his six-pack when he sat up was the width of a beer can and he was so thin his stomach almost touched his backbone, and he had three muscles on his side under his armpit, “obliques” (the gym teacher had called them) that looked like finger-paint daubs or streaked commas or fingers holding his core as if it were a glass of milk. When he turned on his stomach, his spine and ribs looked like a trilobite fossil.

  Kevin had bought a Walkman and was obsessed with Madonna and U2 and New Order. He spoke often about his “music” and defended it as if Guy were challenging it. His music was his one article of faith, the sole fatherland he pledged allegiance to. He’d sit there with his black earphones on and nod his head rhythmically, mouthing the words. He knew all the words and for him they were canonical. He would often cite them to Guy as if they expressed superior wisdom. Guy never doubted their gravity or timelessness and that seemed to pacify Kevin, who would tense up in advance, spoiling for a fight. Otherwise he was docility itself, always good-humored and smiling, almost too affectionate. Guy found his affection oppressive, as if he were a joyful lapdog circling around his feet and yipping and biting excitedly, impeding his progress. Indifference and mystery were more appealing. A little distance let your partner’s imagination and tenderness expand to fill the space between you and him, give your mind and emotions permission to work, to yearn. Hankering might constitute an attachment in Buddhism, but in love it was a virtue, one that was constructive, that allowed you to build and articulate the very object of your affection. Whether the Buddhists were right or wrong—that love itself was always disappointing—was a matter of indifference to Guy. Love was his vocation, though he’d inspired more love than he’d experienced. He was like one of those legendary Hollywood actresses who drove men mad with desire and yet felt nothing themselves, who became old, fat, gap-toothed, and right-wing after years of being synonymous with the bikini and Saint-Tropez, say. Guy knew that the baron and Fred and Andrés had all loved him and that even now Andrés might be beating off in his lonely cell and whispering, “Guy,” as he came, afraid that he’d rock the bunk bed and wake the brute below.

  Thoughts of Andrés made him sick with guilt but also glowed beckoningly like the idea of a Liberty Bond that was accruing interest and that someday he’d be able to cash in.

  When he went out walking in the evening with Kevin, the boy wrapped his arm around Guy’s waist, the way Latin men did with their women. They’d stroll very slowly. Guy wondered what people were thinking as they passed. That Guy was a child molester who’d hypnotized his victim? That Kevin was mentally ill and the only person he trusted was his uncle, and that the patient was lavishing on Guy all the affection he should be distributing over several people? Guy had once seen an overgrown, amorous, curly-haired bar mitzvah boy kissing his little balding father in the same way, as if all the youngster’s budding sexual energy and affection were centered on this one unlikely person whom he cherished like a lover. Kevin was like that—a bar mitzvah boy utterly enraptured with his father.

  One day, whether by design or accident, they ran into Kevin’s twin, Chris, who was with the gum-snapping girl he was dating. Kevin seemed all the leaner beside his twin. And prouder—his date was more beautiful than his brother’s. They all filed into the corner bar, which was strangely dark. The girl, Betty, was surprisingly quick and clever. She was a native New Yorker, she said, “conceived in the Village and born in Queens,” and she had the disabused savviness to prove it. She paused for a second and let her eyes roam before launching into an “original” observation, like an opera singer who composes herself before starting the famous coloratura aria. She seemed acutely conscious that Guy and Kevin were a couple, and she was at pains to show she was so familiar with homos as to be bored by them, even while she was faintly satirical at their expense. “What are you boys up to?” she said, giving an audible wink. “Out for a cruise?”

  Guy, with all the generosity of the beautiful, found Betty amusing and turned his killer smile on her. Impertinently she asked, “Do you dye your eyelashes black, or have you tattooed them black? It’s rare to see eyelashes that black —but I must say it does wonders for your eyes.”

  “Nothing like that,” Guy said, unoffended. “They’re just that way. Girls tattoo their eyebrows but not their eyelashes—that would be too dangerous.” Betty winked at Chris, as if this were a little lie they’d dissect and relish later.

  Two minutes after they’d finished their beers, Kevin hustled Guy out of there. Chris seemed surprised by the decisiveness on his brother’s part.

  On the street Kevin said, “I’m sick of staying home every night. Let’s go to the Roxy and dance.”

  “Great idea,” Guy said, pleased by Kevin’s assertiveness but vexed by the prospect of disco dancing. They couldn’t arrive there before two in the morning. They’d have to snort a little blow to get their energy up, though Kevin was too budget-conscious to do it all night, thank God.

  “I want to show you off,” Kevin said.

  Two days later Guy took the bus again to Andrés’s prison. He lied to Kevin that he was posing at LaGuardia for a German skiwear catalogue all day.

  Andrés was in a dark mood and it took Guy a minute to realize he was consumed with jealousy. Suddenly he said, “I have an idea.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think we should get identical tattoos.”

  “Really?”

  “Facial tattoos.”

  “But I have to work,” Guy said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil your precious asset.” Guy thought Andrés’s English was much more idiomatic than in his pre-prison past; he must be sitting around gabbing all day with his American cellmate. Even his accent was more ghetto.

  “How could a facial tattoo go unnoticed?” Guy asked.

  “Behind your earlobe. Just a small number eight.”

  Guy thought immediately of Kevin, who’d be sure to notice and descend into a paroxysm of rage. Maybe that was Andrés’s idea—to mark his property with his brand. “What does the eight stand for?”

  Andrés touched his fly, for all the world like a rapper. “Don’t you remember? It’s when we met—February eighth? But it’s also the symbol for infinity if it’s turned on its side. That’s how long our love will last—infinitely. At least mine for you.”

  Guy smiled and said, “Okay, okay.”

  Andrés suddenly seemed more alert. “You’ll do it?”

  “Sure,” Guy said, thinking he could always think up an excuse later. “But how will you get a tattoo in prison?”

  “Not a problem, my man,” he muttered. “It’s cool.” Andrés sounded more and more like a very low-class thug, and that alarmed and excited Guy. He’d always been passionate—would he be more so now? Would his dick be even bigger and blacker? Would he smell even more like saffron and olive oil in which chopped shallots were sizzling? “Oh, baby,” Andrés said, “would you do that for me?” And Guy thought he had that mellow, late-night romantic voice of a black disc jockey talking about his “African queen.” “Would you really do that for me, baby?”

  Guy realized Andrés had never called him
“baby” before, nor had he ever spoken in this crooning baritone. Suddenly Guy was jealous thinking about his Afro-American rival, and he said, “You never talk about your cellmate. Is he here now? Can you point him out? Subtly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you sound different. Is he your lover?”

  Andrés shut down. His anger (or was it his embarrassment?) became such a heavy charge that it shorted him out, with only a few bright noisy sparks to express his total outage. “You’re the one with the lover!” Andrés shouted, getting up out of his chair and causing the guards to come striding quickly toward them.

  “Is everything cool, here?” a thick-chested black guard asked. “Are you boys playing nicely? Staying cool, Andy?”

  Guy thought the intonation sounded familiar. “We’re cool,” Andrés said sullenly, and sat back down. His chin dropped to his chest.

  Of course, Guy thought. The black guard got the Colombian beauty. He won’t let anyone else near that prime beef. That’s the voice Andrés is imitating.

  But then Andrés was telling him he had joined a Puerto Rican gang in prison. “It’s so good to be speaking Spanish again, even if it’s their funny kind of Spanish. Here you have to choose the black gang or the P.R. gang. I feel sorry for these Wall Street cats. They don’t have no gang.”

  “Are you sure the eight isn’t just the name of your Spanish gang? Ocho? And you want to make it sound like our symbol so I won’t get jealous?”

  “Baby …” Andrés said with such a hurt, reproachful look that Guy immediately backed off. He leaned in to kiss Andrés on the cheek, but Andrés shrank away and looked around nervously. “I told them you be my cousin.”

  “I’ve seen other people in here kissing.”

  “Not guys.”

  “Not even cousins?”

  Andrés smiled and said, “Get outta here.”

  Guy noticed the stretched orange fabric crotch: no hard-on this time. Maybe only a crooning black voice excited him now.

  Kevin insisted they go up to the hot-tarred roof of their brownstone to “lay out,” as he put it. While there, they fraternized with a friendly young couple of chubs, Mr. and Mrs. Something Polish to whom Guy had rented out the top floor. They were newlyweds and so much in love they couldn’t keep their paws off each other. He was in pest control, he said, and she was a baker, which meant she had to get up at four in the morning. She worked for the French baker down the street and brought home very American carrot cupcakes onto which she had piped orange and green frosting.