Our Young Man

by Edmund White

Isolated from his classmates, he spent many an evening with Guy and Vicente, sometimes with Chris or Chris and his spiky sarcastic girl. Guy would get a huge take-out platter of sashimi, though Betty said she wasn’t into slimy raw fish and she cooked up a package of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They all sniffed the microwaved beef broth covetously. “Look at you all, like bloodhounds pursuing a rabbit in heat,” she said, rat-a-tatting her mirthless laugh.

  Guy said, “Studies show ramen noodles can cause heart attacks, especially in women.”

  “Bullshit!” Betty shot back without a pause. “But go ahead, choking on your mercury-rich raw fish. Hey, Guy, studies also show deli-style roast beef is as low in calories as chicken or fish, that the fibers in beans and whole-grain rice cause people to absorb 6 percent fewer calories, and that microwaved potatoes stuffed with cottage cheese shrink fat cells, but far be it from me to suggest edible food to you hunger artists.”

  Wearing his backward New York cap, Vicente smiled and touched his balls like a rapper. “This chick is fly,” he said with stoned approval and an open mouth that wouldn’t close. With the allowance Guy gave him he indulged in family-sized pizzas for himself alone at Famous Ray’s—and never gained an ounce. He was attending a local Catholic high school and working for two dollars an hour running errands for Pierre-Georges. He spent his entire salary on weed, which Betty obtained for him. He was a wake-and-bake guy who seldom let reality abrade him through his haze of cushioning smoke. He didn’t understand fully half of the things people said to him in English, but that was cool. He was content to have a roof over his head, and the weird maricóns didn’t molest him. The only thing he missed was pussy. Back in Murcia and again in Lackawanna he’d had enough pussy, but not here in New York. He figured with all the maricóns in New York there must be a lot of frustrated bitches with cobwebs in their cunts, but chicks here were kinda stuck-up. Maybe because he lived with two maricóns, girls thought he was one. He thought of his baggy jeans, baseball cap, gold necklaces, and unlaced shoes as fashionable, but he didn’t see many other dudes dressed like him. Maybe it made him look too young or poor. Bitches liked dudes with scratch. Best to smoke another blunt. He’d like an Asian bitch—they said their pussies were nice and tight and sideways.

  Kevin felt they were all losers. Friendless. Going nowhere. Guy was a beautiful dumbbell. How many weeks had he been reading that novel, Sapho? And why a novel? You couldn’t learn anything from a novel. He loved Guy, but his life was vapid and empty and was careening toward a certain destiny and bitterness. Nor did he have the initiative to become a photographer or agent himself or to make an exercise video or to start a day spa or to learn hairdressing or to design men’s clothes—he’d never bothered to learn any of the ancillary arts of fashion.

  Chris was just treading water working as a dishwasher until he went back to Ely to take over the family business. Why wasn’t he studying bookkeeping or getting a degree in business? Betty was so jaded, so knowing, so cynical that she couldn’t be a good influence on Chris. She wasn’t even that attractive. Maybe he couldn’t do any better with their small dick. He was glad he’d chosen to be gay, or if not chosen, at least ended up that way. Guy didn’t despise him for not being hung—and he could always take it up the ass. Chris was sitting on their “million-dollar ass” (that’s what Guy called it) and wasting it, just using their two-bit cock.

  And Vicente? He was nice enough but pathetic, always stoned and always horny. (Kevin could hear his bed creaking through the locked door as he jerked off day and night—deep into the night.) He could smell the burning weed. Did Vicente want to go back to Spain, to what was surely drab little Murcia? What would he do there, in the unlikely event he landed a job? Air-conditioning repair? Garage mechanic? But even these careers needed some training, didn’t they?

  How did they get saddled with this loser? That’s what Chris asked, and Kevin didn’t know how to answer him.

  Kevin didn’t want to be held back by this band of layabouts.

  He hated fashion. He hated its insistence on what was new rather than what was attractive. He was enough of a good Midwestern Lutheran to despise worldliness, especially in its most restless, nagging form: vanity. You could never be young enough, thin enough, trendy enough. He thought we should all be focused on serious, ultimate philosophical questions, and on the train he listened sneeringly to a long, loud conversation between two guys his age about the best watches or the most advantageous terms for a credit card. They seemed totally, hopelessly immersed in the here-and-now and all the tedium of late capitalist material culture. Guy was no better, in fact worse, because he brought to bear on his bad values his immense accumulated sophistication and at intelligence (superior wiliness, good memory, quick social navigating skills, the idealism of his passionate appetites). He obsessed over how to update his image, he, whose beauty was eternal and could span decades, and who should be pondering his immortal soul, not his next haircut.

  And yet, Kevin reasoned, I am young and handsome, and I won’t be always. This is the time of my life for sex and beauty, and Guy is the living symbol of that. People see his swimsuit shots with his body sparkling with water (and glycerin), his hair pushed back, the comb lines visible, an angry look widening his eyes and searing his mouth, and they think he’s … deep, powerful as Jupiter, ready to hurl a thunderbolt, vengeful as Wotan—and it’s just silly old Guy, well, no, he has his moods and thoughts, sure, but they’re not as profound as his appearance. He looks so interesting, so full of passion, but he’s—well, not that.

  When Guy tried to foist off on him the silly frippery he’d picked up at photo shoots, Kevin just handed it back wordlessly. In the past Guy had complained about the vacuity of his profession, but now he spoke of it defensively. “It’s an industry worth billions of dollars. It’s like food or tourism. Everyone wears clothes and eats and travels. At least everyone we’re likely to meet. And there aren’t any generic clothes.”

  “Jeans? T-shirts? Sweatshirts?”

  “Designer jeans are a huge market, perhaps the biggest. The same basic design is changed slightly and branded with a famous name and the price is quadrupled. Come on, you’ve read your Roland Barthes.”

  In fact neither of them had read Barthes, though Guy had had an admirer in Paris years ago who frequently quoted the Mythologies at him, and Guy imagined he’d got the gist. Now, apparently, Barthes was démodé, though students in America still referred to him. American profs didn’t keep up to date but clung to the thinkers they’d known since they got tenure: Derrida, Foucault, Barthes … America was the attic of French culture, and Guy was worried that over here he’d fallen behind, surrounded by all this old stuff.

  Their old, lazy ways had changed. Now they awakened at seven in order to get both boys—Vicente and Kevin—fed, caffeinated, and off to school. Kevin suspected that Guy went back to bed, since he subscribed to the superstition that he could preserve his looks by sleeping eleven hours a night—like the Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Well, he’d earned it. But there was something about the way he lay as rigid as a king in his pyramid, cucumber slices on his eyes, dried mud on his face, plugs in his ears, glistening cream on his knees and elbows—oh, he wanted to take a picture of that, Narcissus in his countinghouse! That would startle his fans and his clients. But why? Surely they didn’t think it was all spontaneous and natural, no matter how often photographers showed him on the beach against storm clouds, the fan blowing his straightened and lightened hair, his perfect teeth exposed in his hourly-rate smile, everything out-of-focus except the Rolex on his wrist or whatever product he was hustling. You could say about Guy that he looked great—and looked like himself!—from every angle.

  Betty told them in a casual, amused, almost indifferent way that Vicente wasn’t going to school but hanging out at a pool hall she walked past every morning on Forty-first Street on her way to work. He was usually wearing a goofy, stoned smile at ten in the morning and seemed overdelighted to see her—or maybe anyone he knew.


  “Boy, he’s going to get it!” Guy exclaimed, trying to be very American. (Rage in French sounded feline and perverse; only in English did it sound unaffected and tough.)

  “Why?” Betty asked innocently. “Poor kid. He told me he doesn’t understand anything at Sacred Heart—trig and essays on Native Americans and Shakespeare. At least he has some friends at the pool hall.”

  “You’ve obviously given up on him,” Guy said. “I haven’t! I promised his uncle I’d educate him.”

  “Oh, his uncle? The jailbird?”

  Guy wanted to strike her, but he just bit his lip and left the room. “Did I say something wrong?” Betty asked Kevin.

  “About ten things. But he’ll simmer down.”

  Guy hired a tutor for Vicente, a shaggy, thick Columbia student named Henry, gay but masculine in an unconscious, unstudied way, a young man who seemed mature because black lustrous hair was sprouting over his white T-shirt. He sounded as if he had a permanent cold or allergy in his immense nose, as though it were too large to function properly. He was a nice guy studying architecture who had a very male lack of interest in people, their foibles and interests and background stories. He discussed late Renaissance churches in Venice, for instance, with no curiosity about when or why they’d been built or by whom; he concentrated only on the volumes and the solutions to problems, as if San Giorgio had been built yesterday.

  His indifference to everyday dramas was useful, as it turned out, since he wasted no time on Vicente’s sad tales about his dying mother or his uncle in prison or his black aunt in Lackawanna. He just shrugged with his heavy shoulders and wiped his huge nose with a dirty handkerchief and went back to the math homework. Vicente was usually too stoned to understand what he was saying so patiently. He’d figured out Henry was a maricón too and he even asked him about that, but Henry said, “We could talk about that, but it would lead us rather far afield. Now, let’s look at these numbers.” He was even indifferent when Vicente staged getting out of the shower at the moment Henry arrived one day.

  One Friday, Guy accompanied Vicente up to the Otisville prison in the bus. He knew that only Vicente was slated to visit Andrés today but he hoped to coach the boy on what to say and what to omit. “Andrés doesn’t know anything about Kevin. Certainly not about Chris. Don’t mention them. Just say you and I spend evenings alone looking at your homework. You can say I’ve hired Henry to help you. You can say you’re working for Pierre-Georges a few hours a week—he’ll like that. Don’t mention Betty—that will just trap you into talking about Chris. Don’t mention the pool hall—that will be our little secret. Don’t discuss maricóns with him. That will only irritate him.”

  Things went smoothly, it seemed, but Vicente was by turns evasive and taciturn, and finally he admitted that Andrés accused him of being stoned, with pupils as big as quarters. He’d lectured Vicente about the importance of working hard with a clear head and being grateful to Uncle Guy for all he was doing for him and making sure he didn’t end up like him, Andrés, a loser jailbird. They had talked briefly about Andrés’s sister, Vicente’s mother, and how she was suffering, and Andrés had had to wipe away a tear. Vicente had liked his uncle and had specially liked his way of speaking Spanish in such an educated manner that reminded him of his mother—and then Andrés would break into a real ghetto English for a phrase here and there, and English that sounded like his own, which he’d picked up from Mohammed in Lackawanna. Andrés spoke Spanish like a maricón but English like a man.

  For a few days after the trip to Otisville, Vicente tried to straighten himself out. He didn’t wake-and-bake, he wasn’t late for work with Pierre-Georges, he actually did the homework Henry assigned, but he just couldn’t understand math or write an essay on Native Americans. (He’d never met one, though he’d seen plenty of cool Indians in the movies scalping everyone.) Soon he was softening the blow of failing by smoking again and rattling his bed dreaming of pussy, and bopping around through his day with his lopsided grin. He would try to stay in with the two maricóns in the evening to do his homework, but he never knew where to begin, and besides, he couldn’t concentrate. Studying was so maricón.

  He was amazed by how much money the maricóns wasted—how they’d buy exotic fruits and vegetables. (He’d never even heard of white eggplants before, which Guy liked to leave in groupings on the dining room table as “décor,” or tiny, translucent champagne grapes.) They never cooked meat and potatoes or rice, the only things Vicente liked to eat other than burgers or pizza. They were endlessly serving raspberries without sugar for dessert and unbuttered popcorn for snacks. Vicente was always hungry!

  And yet Guy was fond of the impossible boy. After all, in his veins ran Andrés’s blood; his long, skinny body was a rough draft of the Spanish Christ his uncle had become. When Guy stuck his head in Vicente’s room he was overwhelmed by a stronger version of the family stench.

  Whereas Guy hovered over Vicente like a parent and worried he wasn’t dressing warm enough or taking his vitamins or concentrating when Henry coached him, Kevin appealed to the boy more because he was categorically indifferent. Between the gym and his studies and the long, grueling nights of fucking Guy, Kevin had every second budgeted, and when Vicente would launch into a rambling story about his job delivering paella on a motor scooter back in Murcia, Kevin kept glancing at his watch—oh, sorry, it was his turn to shop and cook tonight and he had a twenty-page paper due on Friday, something about George F. Kennan’s interpretation of the inevitable U.S.–Japan conflict in World War II, and Kevin was out the door, abandoning Vicente in midsentence. The boy was trying to grow a mustache and he studied it for the next half hour in a mirror, then got stoned to see how it looked if he was high. (Pretty cool!)

  If Kevin never took a break and hurtled through his days, Vicente ambled through his, only occasionally realizing he was late for school or his office job. He was hoping his mustache would be a pussy-magnet and he couldn’t wait for it to grow in. Vicente was troubled by Guy’s entranced staring at him, when the Frenchman would get tears in his eyes; the maricón wasn’t falling for him, was he?

  The tears were due to Guy’s tender concern for Andrés’s nephew and his fear that he wasn’t being strict enough or affectionate enough or stern enough or indulgent enough. And what kind of example was he setting for a provincial Catholic Latin boy? Discussing fripes (clothes) and pipes (blowjobs) with Pierre-Georges and makeup innovations with Lucie, the things she was doing to her female models. (“A carmine smudge at the middle of the mouth and then a fade toward the corners, a very high ponytail wrapped in a sheath, bleached eyebrows, and blue shadows above the upper lids.”) She said she was longing to make Guy’s hair wet, wet, as if he’d just emerged from the shower. Vicente had to listen to all this the way a scholar’s son might have to hear a Greek classic being discussed or a broker’s nephew might listen to the relative merits of stocks and bonds—or as a priest’s nephew might hear of the spiritual nourishment afforded by the Eucharist. And then to see Guy and Kevin embrace and kiss—that couldn’t be a healthy influence on a normal teenage boy.

  Vicente always hung around when Lucie came over. He liked black women, though he’d never been with one; apparently they were as passionate as men and their pubes were as rough as steel wool—and the guy at the pool hall had said they had big purple nipples and liked it up the ass. The only thing that irritated Vicente was that Lucie treated him like a lovable kid; she went so far as to ruffle his hair and tickle him. Sometimes he thought she saw him as a miniature collie—loyal, attentive, not very smart, always smiling, ready to go. He wanted her to see him as a big, sexy man with a mustache, but she’d hug him and nuzzle him and talk baby talk to him.

  When Guy went to the Bahamas for a swimsuit shoot, Kevin realized he’d become addicted to his lover’s body. He’d jerk off three or four times a day picturing his wonderful face with his look of being a surprised, truant lad, as if his father had just snapped on the basement light when he was about to
steal a shot of whiskey. Or he looked like a poacher caught in a cop’s flash, with his little jug ears and violet slash of a mouth and startled face, everything flattened out by the scorching light, his hand aiming the shotgun at the large, furry, unidentifiable ruminant. And Kevin would mold in the air the perfect curve of Guy’s ass, its unexpected warmth and give, the way his own hand looked so tan and masculine against that trim expanse of plush buttock. And he’d nuzzle it and feast on the hole that tasted bitter but smelled calmly rural.

  He was young, goddamn it, and it was only normal he’d trick with those hot numbers in the locker room who sprang boners as he toweled off—but he dared not. He had to be faithful, for the sake of Guy’s health and his own. If he cheated he’d have to tell Guy, and there would go his unimpeded access to that glorious dark muscled glove, which had become the lodestone of his days, the sanctum he longed to breach and enter and lodge in. What did they say in art history class that Courbet called his cunt painting—The Origin of the World? Maybe Guy couldn’t give him babies, but Kevin would keep trying. He knew that with his small dick gays would typecast him as a bottom. (The guys in the gym stared at his ass, and one fellow even whistled looking at it when he dropped his towel.) Only Guy turned over for him or lay between his strong, gold-dusted legs and licked his balls. Crazily enough, Kevin was certain his cock had gotten thicker and longer since he’d been topping Guy. Whereas as a fat boy of twelve and thirteen he’d seen his body as womanly, Rubenesque, and in the bathroom he’d posed with his dick squeezed and hidden between his legs, a towel-turban around his head, his mother’s lipstick smearing his mouth, and had considered this zaftig caricature as his only option and found it at once excitingly transgressive and depressing, now he saw himself as a stud with narrow hips, a prominent, muscular chest, a thick neck, and took consolation in what he’d heard a straight guy say in the gym: “It’s not the size of the nail that matters but how you use it.”