Our Young Man

by Edmund White

  A kid would serve the same function as a bad love affair to introduce a note of chaos into our overly organized lives. He’s not going to sit around doing nothing or reading. He’ll need a part-time job. I’m sure he could do mimeographing for Pierre-Georges. “Is he cute?”

  Andrés made a face, as he did when people told a dirty joke. “He’s fifteen. Cute enough, I guess. Keep your mitts off him, okay?”

  “Fifteen is safe with me.” He thought guiltily of Kevin, who was nineteen. “Is he black, too, like your sister King Kong?”

  “King Kong is my cousin, my sister is Concepción.”

  “I forgot. Will I get in trouble with my own green card if I’m caught hosting an illegal?”

  Andrés looked bored, or maybe turned off by Guy’s self-centeredness. “Ask your lawyer. That’s why we have lawyers, though yours didn’t do much good for me.”

  Guy chose to ignore the reproach, and said brightly, like a violinist launching into a gigue after the tedious largo, “Okay. I’ll do it. At least I’ll look into it. Anything for you.”

  Guy felt he was marching out to the end of a diving board and, without a pause, going into a double somersault before making sure there was water in the pool. Would Vicente double his expenses? Quadruple them? What if he was a juvenile delinquent, or worse, a terrorist? What if he and Kevin fought all the time and Kevin said, “It’s either him or me”? What if he was a hostile heterosexual who scorned his gay uncles and imitated them with a limp wrist to his cigarette-smoking buddies from high school?

  He memorized King Kong’s phone number. “What’s her real name? I can’t call her Signora Kong.”

  “Pilar.”

  “What?”

  “Pilar, like the virgin of the pillar.”

  A bell was ringing, indicating an end to the visiting hour. Guy shook Andrés’s hand distractedly but was preoccupied with repeating Pilar’s number until he found a pencil and a scrap of paper, maybe from one of the prison wives.

  Guy waited till Kevin had had two glasses of sake over dinner at the Japanese restaurant on Thirteenth Street before he brought up Vicente. Pierre-Georges had told Guy to go down another ten pounds—thin was in, he said. Maybe the weight loss would wreak havoc on his arms and chest and deflate his ass, but the new clients like Guess all demanded gaunt faces and cheekbones like flying buttresses. Guy ordered nothing but miso soup and sashimi and he left the cubes of tofu in the bowl. And he permitted himself just one cup of sake; otherwise he was living on a diet of espressos and cocaine.

  They were sitting outside behind a metal railing and noisy people kept going by—oh, it was Friday! That’s why people were out. For Guy, every day was the same. Across the street were the dim lights of a holistic medicine shop-cum-ashram, closed for the weekend.

  Initially, Kevin took it well because he assumed Vicente must be a polite, shy boy from some provincial town in Spain, a good Catholic boy who let himself be buggered in stoic silence once a week by Padre Jesús and then assisted at the mass, a bum full of jizz, handing the priest the silver cup of wine. But when Kevin found out Vicente had been living in Lackawanna with King Kong and a terrorist named Mohammed, he shrank back in distaste. “But what if he tries to make a bomb and blows up your brownstone by mistake?” Kevin asked. “I’m serious. What if he’s wearing gold chains around his neck and a backwards baseball cap?”

  They decided to invite Vicente down for a week, all expenses paid, and look him over. Guy called King Kong, but she was too nervous speaking on the phone and apparently couldn’t understand Guy’s French accent, so she handed the receiver to Mohammed, who sounded very ghetto and suspicious. Guy explained he was Andrés’s friend.

  “That loser?” Mohammed asked.

  “Yes, the very one. He said that Vicente was living with you.”

  “You got the wrong number.”

  Guy repeated the boy’s name. Maybe he was saying it the wrong way.

  “Oh, Vince,” Mohammed shouted. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  When he understood that this dude with the weird accent was inviting Vince the Freeloader to New York for a week, he suddenly became more cooperative and friendly. Guy noticed that Vicente himself was never consulted.

  Guy sent a limo from his regular service to Lackawanna to pick up the boy. Explaining train or bus schedules and how to pick up prepaid tickets seemed insurmountable with these poor foreigners and their approximate English. Explaining a car service was problematic enough. When Vicente arrived, sitting up front with the Israeli driver, who was sweating and gabbling and was obviously on speed, Guy looked the boy over and said to himself, Un pauvre type, mauvais genre, which meant he was hopeless.

  Vicente was dressed in a sleazy blue tracksuit and high-tops that might have been stolen. He was short and dark and had a scar on his right cheek. He couldn’t look Guy in the eye and his handshake was boneless. He then pressed his hand to his heart with some sort of salaam he might have picked up from Mohammed. He smelled funny, like warmed-over sweat.

  The boy seemed determined not to be impressed by anything as Guy showed him around. He trudged about in his unlaced shoes; he seemed exhausted, and the smile he’d been wearing as he listened to the excited Israeli had long since faded. “Now, this is your room,” Guy said, opening the door onto the guest room, with a white candlewick bedspread over a single bed, its captain’s chest, its armless chair upholstered in pale chintz, and its wall ornament, a nineteenth century brass compass Kevin had found in an antique store on Bleecker. “That some kind of clock?” Vince said, nodding toward the compass.

  “More or less,” Guy said, not wanting to discourage him.

  Vicente slept around the clock in a dirty, smelly pile on the immaculate bedspread. Guy insisted they leave him alone. The boy didn’t even take his shoes off; maybe he couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t in turn be stolen.

  “Does he look like Andrés?” Kevin asked, genuinely curious.

  “Not in the least,” Guy snapped. “Andrés is tall and handsome and a real hidalgo. This boy’s father is Ecuadorian or something and he looks like a statue you might find in the jungle, flat nose, wide forehead, dirty skin, almost Asian eyes, certainly padded cheeks. No expressions, like some cruel Incan god. And he’s short.”

  “You certainly have your standards! I’ve noticed that about both you and Pierre-Georges. Are all French people like that?”

  “Like what?” Guy asked, not happy about being linked to his bitchy agent.

  “So sure of your opinions? Americans are never that sure about what we think.”

  “Yes, we have definite standards and we’re very confident about our taste. We learn at an early age what’s good and what’s bad.”

  That sounded a little narrow-minded even to Guy’s ears and he hoped Kevin wouldn’t pursue the matter.

  This sort of cultural tyranny joined with the fragile convictions nourished by cocaine made Guy argumentative. Kevin had learned to end every dispute with a smile and a kiss. The rhetorical kiss had also begun to irritate Guy.

  “Why are you snorting cocaine all the time?” Kevin dared to ask. “Do you like it so much? Enough to jeopardize our happy home?”

  Kevin wrapped “our happy home” in ironic quotation marks to indicate he wasn’t all that serious, which only worsened Guy’s mood; he thought irony was cowardly.

  “I’m doing it because I’m hungry,” Guy nearly shouted, with a full stop between each word. Then he said in a normal voice and rhythm, “Everyone wants the heroin look now and I hate heroin, but you’ve seen the ads with skinny green-skinned guys with asymmetrical haircuts sitting around and staring in shabby retro living rooms, all acid greens and duck-turd browns, wearing jeans that look sprayed on and gaudy shirts and tiny German sunglasses, looking stunned. In French we say when people are silent, ‘an angel is passing,’ but here the angel must be Satan. And I’m doing it to keep our happy home afloat. You’ve got to understand that fashion means change, even for the worse, and right now healthy, w
holesome Americans with their teeth and muscles and tans are out, finished, kaput, whereas sickly Scottish boys with their bed-sit pallor and druggie anorexia are in. I’ve kept ahead of the curve for two decades now. Scruff and hair over my ears and a tattoo—that’s a beginning, but I’m going toward a total Lou Reed look. Maybe I’ll shave my skull. Or get a lip piercing.”

  Kevin thought Guy was raving and had no idea what Lou Reed looked like. Anyway, Reed was so seventies! He’d never heard Guy talk so much and attributed it to the coke. It was coke-fueled talk. All because Pierre-Georges had said yesterday over the phone to Guy, “Stylists are looking for a Harley-Davidson these days and you’re a Rolls-Royce, the male counterpart to Catherine Deneuve.”

  The comment had kept Guy awake, and at three in the morning Kevin discovered him in the kitchen contemplating a piece of toast.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I dare not eat it.”

  “Come back to bed,” Kevin said, wrapping his arm around Guy’s waist.

  When they got up later that morning at ten, Vicente was already slumped in a kitchen table chair but wide awake. He said, “Yo!” and made his funny little salaam gesture. Kevin didn’t know if it was ghetto for “hi” or Spanish for “me.” He was still wearing the same clothes, though he’d added a round woven beige beanie that looked Muslim.

  “Poor Vicente,” Guy said. “You must be starving and wondering, ‘Where the hell am I?”’

  “Vince!” the boy said. “It’s Vince, man. You got any food in this crib?”

  “Toast? Cereal? Banana? Do you drink coffee? We’ll go out to lunch soon.”

  “Coffee and banana,” the boy said. He still hadn’t looked them in the eye.

  Kevin moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which Vicente inspected with fear in his eyes as though it were something foreign and dangerous, a scorpion. “We don’t have to do anything,” Kevin said. “There’s a little TV in your room. Did you find it in that cabinet at the foot of the bed?”

  Vicente said, “No. Thanks,” in a meek little voice and with a nearly amorous smile.

  Kevin smiled back. Vicente’s smile was a shocking momentary break of spontaneity and friendliness in an otherwise uniform sullenness, and suggested there was someone sweet and scared and nice living inside there. That was the one way he was like Andrés, Guy thought.

  “How did you learn English so well?” Kevin asked.

  “The truth? From trying to pick up English and Dutch girls on the beach near Valencia. And in Lackawanna. Mohammed had the TV on all the time and didn’t want us to talk. Man, he’d watch soap operas, commercials, reruns of Kojak, infomercials, all that shit!”

  “Would you two shut up?” Guy shouted, fidgeting from his coke hangover; then, to cover his rudeness, “But it’s lovely outside!” he said, throwing his arms wide open and going to the window. “Indian summer. Isn’t that what you call it in English?” Kevin and Vicente exchanged a glance. It was so fruity and big-city to talk about the loveliness of the weather. Kevin provided a banana and made some espresso for them all. Latins drink espresso, right? “Milk? Sugar?”

  “Sugar,” Vicente said, “if you got it. You guys don’t work? You’re like Mohammed—he sleeps till noon, though Pilar is usually up early,” Vicente said. It was the longest sentence he’d ventured yet, and Guy, still at the window, was tempted to turn around and smile approvingly, but he was afraid of jinxing the moment. He thought Kevin had established a beachhead and should be encouraged to press on. When the bitter coffee was ready, Guy tossed a boiling cup down his throat but without sitting down. Sitting down was fatal; it might lead him to eat something, a green, seedless grape, say. He needed to jog, to head for the gym and do his crunches and lunges, but he felt light-headed. He needed to do a line.

  “I’m a student,” Kevin said. “School starts next week. Guy is a model.”

  When Vicente looked blank, Kevin said, “Fotomodello,” in what he hoped might be Spanish, but the kid still looked quizzical. Meanwhile, Kevin had finally found the packet of sugar he’d stolen from a diner for just such an emergency.

  “Got another one?” Vicente asked. “I like a little coffee with my sugar,” and he smiled at his own witticism.

  “I’m going for a run,” Guy announced impulsively, and scurried off to the bedroom for a little “blush-on,” as he called his lines of cocaine. Kevin’s heart sank, thinking the hamster was about to start on the treadmill. I’m living with a hamster and a zombie, Kevin said to himself. Guy will be running all day and well into the night. Somewhere, a fly, caught between window and screen, was shaking its autumn death rattle. Kevin could hear it only because the room was so silent, though the fridge was humming and the house was creaking, as old houses will.

  “You found everything? The guest bathroom? The air conditioner? The shower?” Kevin asked with a suspicion of emphasis on “shower.” “By the way, if you ever want to wash your clothes, we’ve got a washer and a dryer.”

  “Here? Inside? Inside the house?”

  Kevin nodded. “Let’s go out and get some lunch.” He wasn’t sure he liked being saddled with the responsibility of squiring this kid around, and the kid looked fearful at the prospect of a sortie.

  He took him to the restaurant downstairs from the gym, thinking that a cheeseburger and fries would be less intimidating than goat cheese on focaccia and a beetroot and pear salad, the sort of thing you’d get in most of the neighborhood restaurants.

  “Where’s Uncle Guy?” Vicente said, pronouncing the name as in Guys and Dolls. They were seated in a booth and Vicente had already slumped forward across the Formica table, exhausted, and was monotonously rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar dispenser, salt pepper sugar ketchup.

  “Oh, he’s trying to make weight.”

  “Is he a wrestler?”

  “Like that. A model. He’s up for a big jeans commercial and needs to come in at a hundred and forty pounds. How much do you weigh?”

  “Fifty-five kilos. I only know kilos. You?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kevin said. Suddenly he had an idea. “Maybe you could teach me Spanish.” He thought that might also be a way of improving Vicente’s English. Kevin was always improving himself, more so than his twin. Each time he’d sat on the toilet back in Ely he’d read an entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He’d never read novels. Too frivolous. But he was always deep into the history of ancient Rome or a pop science account of the giant molecule. He was determined to make his airhead boyfriend, Guy, teach him French. These days he was reading a secondhand volume of Edmund Burke, which on the spine read On the Sublime French Revolution, and it took him a while to realize that these were two different titles. He read labels for the contents and calorie counts and he comparison-shopped. Because of his family background, he had strong ecological views, and if he’d owned a car, the bumper sticker would have read “Save the Wilderness.”

  He admired Ralph Nader. He was appalled by capitalism. In class, he wrote down all the names of the books and authors the professor mentioned in passing and checked them out of Butler Library. His twin was much more of a goof-off and Kevin would have attributed his insouciance to his lack of a “gay gene,” but they had identical genes and their differences must be due to nurture, not nature, although it was hard to pinpoint any differences there. They’d been raised together, dressed identically, and had exactly the same health history. Their grandmother couldn’t tell them apart, though their mother could. It was obvious, she insisted. Chris was meaner and ran in circles.

  Even with several attempts, Kevin couldn’t get Vicente to teach him any Spanish. (“What’s ‘table’ in Spanish? Tavola?” But the boy looked confused and bored).

  Upstairs in the gym, Guy was doing lunges and sit-ups fueled by cocaine, gabbling and laughing to himself—until he fainted. He was only out for a second; when he came to, the gym instructor was kneeling over him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

/>   “How come you passed out?”

  “I guess I forgot to eat this morning.”

  The instructor frowned. “Man, you’re too skinny! Better just go home now and rest.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Take your shower at home. Do you need anyone to go with you? Scoot. Get outta here!” Guy thought he’d take some Ex-lax and shed the pounds that way if he couldn’t exercise any more today. When he got home, he called the nearest Chinese restaurant and ordered four bowls of soup to be delivered. Soup was not very fattening. He’d do another line and another espresso before he tackled the soup. That way he might only drink half a bowl.

  Pierre-Georges dropped by and was very pleased. “You’ve never looked more ethereal. Just another five pounds and you’ll be perfect. The go-see is Friday—if you’re named the Cavalier flagship it’s a million-dollar campaign.”

  “What’s Cavalier?”

  “Oh, come on. Earth calling Planet Guy.”

  “I thought it was Guess.”

  “Guess was decided a month ago. Frederick Ross got that. Hello-o-o.”

  By Friday, Guy could barely cross the room, and if he went for a walk, he had to lean on Kevin, or Vicente, who didn’t like the contact with another man. But Guy did seem to have landed the job and to have beaten out some of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old rivals—that’s what counted to him. As a Buddhist, he didn’t think of himself as competitive, that was all samsara, but he did like to win. He hated the idea that some of these guys, just mere kids, with no experience in the business, could beat him out. They were just skinny beaufres (clods) and didn’t know how to give angles. They brought nothing to the creative process, no input, no sense of style! They didn’t know how to work with photographers. They just drooped around. One night after another horrible dinner in El Faro, a Spanish restaurant where Vicente didn’t talk except to the waiter in Spanish and Guy babbled and played with his food, Kevin was smoldering, and when he was alone in the apartment with Guy, he said, “This has got to stop. Today I was with him all day! He’s your boyfriend’s nephew, not mine. We spent three hours looking at track shoes and he still couldn’t make up his mind which ones to buy. New York is horrible in August. Everything smells like sauerkraut and garbage. And look at you. You’re a bag of bones! Where’d that nice ass go, the one I liked to fuck?”