by Edmund White
Important as his new manhood was to him, Kevin acknowledged that Guy held the only key to it. When he went alone to a gay bar—Ty’s on Christopher, for instance—men who were a little sauced chatted him up and automatically reached for his ass. “That’s some caboose you got on you,” while guiding Kevin’s hand to the hardness behind the fly. Even younger, shorter boys ended up gliding a hand down the back of his jeans and fingering his hot hole; he wondered if he was emitting the wrong pheromones, and all this in a gay world where he’d heard 90 percent of the guys were bottoms. How did he attract all these tops? The worst of it was that if he ever were to disregard the health risks and bag a bottom of his own, the guy would probably laugh out loud at his little dick.
He liked being the man but he suspected only Guy could take him seriously in that role. He was wedded to Guy—for his health, through love, and by his determination to be the top. Guy was always available, a heady, expensive flower he could pick and inhale anytime, day or night. One time out of ten Guy would fuck him, but even then Guy wanted to flip at the end and feel Kevin in him. Just as Kevin seemed more and more addicted to Guy, in the same way Guy seemed increasingly besotted with Kevin’s cock, unimpressive though it might be. In the morning Guy would back up against him; Kevin would bop up to piss and then return to his waiting man.
For he never thought of Guy as anything other than masculine, albeit a refined, European, pricey version, and it was Guy’s generosity of spirit that kept his body constantly on tap. There was nothing slutty or depraved about Guy. He was a man without affectations or irony, someone who studied the world with the same simplicity with which he posed for the camera.
To be sure, he knew at all times how he looked, the impression he was giving, how he came off. That was his genius, to know what he looked like to other people. Most guys, even models, waited until strong inner feelings bubbled over, then they flailed about or trembled or hee-hawed with lots of sincerity but no objectivity. Guy was objective; he could triangulate himself through someone else’s gaze (or the camera’s). He didn’t care about what he was feeling. He cared about only what he appeared to be feeling. Just as gifted actors, bland airheads in real life, can appear philosophical, troubled, or tragic on-screen, in the same way Guy could come across as leonine, contemptuous, or seductive to the camera, even if he was only worrying about having clean laundry for tomorrow’s trip to Milan.
Kevin and Guy flew back to Ely for Thanksgiving. It was a nuisance to get there, with two stops (Philadelphia, Minneapolis) and ending up in Hibbing, an hour away from Ely.
They were traveling with Chris. They now looked so different no one stared at the resemblance. Chris was ten pounds heavier and had long shaggy sideburns and had put on a bright yellow jacket, an old one from high school days, so that he looked as if he had never left the Boundary Waters and was escorting his younger city-slicker cousin and his friend to northern Minnesota for the first time.
The brothers scarcely spoke on the plane but it felt good to let their knees touch as they sat in adjoining seats. And it felt good in the Minneapolis airport to order cheeseburgers with ketchup and mustard and cheddar cheese. (Guy ate a salad.) The people who boarded the planes at their two stops were progressively stouter and louder and more guileless.
Ely seemed so quiet and empty after New York—it had just four thousand people and Kevin noticed that they couldn’t hear the loons calling over the lake as they did all summer. The birds had already migrated to the Gulf Coast. Snow was a couple of feet deep, and just a hundred yards from their house was a dark, tall, massive wall of delicious and nostalgic fir trees eating up all the light. Their youth was in that smell, as redolent as rosemary crushed between fingers. Their canoe trips in the summer, their portages across the rocky isthmus, their tents and campfires and instant mashed potatoes, the fish they’d caught and eaten, the musty smell of sleeping bags, the wait for Chris’s heavy breathing so that Kevin could jerk off unnoticed, the scary sound of branches cracking. (Bears? There were so few blueberries that season that the animals were dangerously hungry.)
The air was so cold now it froze the moisture inside Kevin’s nose and laid a marble hand across his forehead. Their roly-poly mother and taciturn father sat as always in the front seat of the Buick and the boys and Guy in the back. The heat was blasting in the car, the radio was tuned to a country and western station, the windshield wipers were clearing a steady accumulation of snow, their mother was full of local gossip. Her sentences were punctuated by her surprisingly high and light giggles, as if the girl she had been were imprisoned below in this oubliette of flesh. She was reeling off her small talk confidently, but every once in a while she turned around to glance at them with questioning eyes, as if she could no longer be sure of how her boys—and this handsome foreigner—were responding.
Guy wondered if he’d made a mistake coming. It all seemed as crude and hopeless as Clermont-Ferrand, though the landscape was more beautiful. Kevin was holding his hand in the darkness of the backseat, but this “coziness” of Kevin’s had become tiresome—almost as tiresome as these Midwestern pleasantries. And then Kevin had a chance of marrying a local heiress—shouldn’t he seize it? It seemed this Gunn girl wanted a sexless marriage—so he should go for it. If he gave her up for Guy and then Guy left him a month later—wouldn’t that be perverse?
He knew that Andrés would finally be getting out of prison one of these days. Andrés had ruined his life for Guy—didn’t he deserve to get Guy? Kevin was young, had a brilliant career ahead of him, whereas Andrés would have no career at all.
And Guy couldn’t get out of his mind the sight of that stiff erection pressing against his orange prison uniform. Guy withdrew his hand from Kevin’s.
Once they were in their old room, Kevin relaxed. Same old Parcheesi board. Same old childhood brass lamp with the glass chimney and a bulb that brightened when a side stem was twisted. The red Hudson Bay blanket with the big label in black letters on white fabric. The old round space heater with its heavily lashed red eye. The cedar closet that was always ten degrees colder than the room. Their old schoolbooks from high school.
Kevin and Chris took turns showering and then, hair washed and waxed and combed and doused in Canoe cologne from an old bottle in the tin medicine cabinet smelling of high school sex and heavy petting in a parked car, they went downstairs to the kitchen, where their mother was making biscuits in the narrow wood-burning oven as, on the modern electric stove, she fried up a ham steak, hash browns, and cooked apple slices. Guy was already downstairs, nodding through their mother’s monologues. It wasn’t even five yet. “Why are we eating so early?” Kevin asked.
“I thought we’d get it out of the way—aren’t you boys hungry?—because Sally Gunn is coming over for some pie and coffee.”
“Gee,” Kevin muttered, “you don’t waste any time, Mom.”
She decided to take it as a compliment. “Yessiree! That’s me: Miss Efficiency! Anyway, Sally really wants to see you boys.” She looked confidingly at Guy: “Sally is an old childhood friend of the boys. Kevin was in love with her.”
Guy wondered what he was supposed to do with this information. Americans were stiff and puritanical—and then they made these shockingly intimate confessions, as if alternating mumbling with an earsplitting blast. They never spoke in the usual quiet, discreet way.
Kevin winced and darted a glance at Guy. Guy thought that Kevin’s mother—was she called Marie?—wasn’t any more embarrassing than his own mother, and just as endearing.
During their early supper they sat at the low, almost square white wood table in the kitchen. It was still covered with the old oilcloth of their childhood, red roses printed on a tan trellis, the whole thing curling up along the edges as it had for at least the century long of their young lives. They watched TV throughout the meal, as they had for years. Guy thought the TV a particularly barbaric touch.
Sally arrived on her snowmobile, wearing a knit hat from the Andes with pigtail earflaps and
a synthetic insulated jacket, red to match her cheeks.
She had her Attic beauty intact—her blue eyes, veiled and mysterious, her curved bow of a mouth, her wide face. She made no effort to talk, to act, to engage. She simply displayed her beauty as she’d always done. It was enough. Their mother turned off the TV and they all sat up and smiled and quipped with a new animation. It occurred to Kevin that years of admiring Sally had been good training for admiring Guy; he’d already grown up awestruck by great beauty. She smiled and nodded and turned her face slightly to take the light, as a model is trained not to give repeats, but she seemed to be far away, lost in another language, uncomprehending though benign, somehow “blessing” them with the wonder-working properties of her looks. When she did murmur a few courtesies she struck Kevin as fractionally coarser, as if her decision to skip college and to help out her dad here in Ely had made her not vulgar but more common. After all those evenings drinking at the Log Cabin with other locals slapping the waitress on the fanny, hee-hawing, and soaking their winter beards with beer. And her face had aged, at least there were lines around the eyes and mouth now and creasing her forehead like an egg that’s been boiled too long and has started to get tiny cracks in its perfect surface. Kevin’s father, usually so silent, perked up around Sally until their mother shooed him into the back living room. There they watched the big TV. Chris looked reluctant to leave them but eventually headed upstairs, probably to call Betty.
When he was alone with Sally and Guy, the big TV talking to itself in the other room with its insistent laugh track, Kevin watched her shrug her way slowly and deliberately out of her red coat—and there was the splendor of her big breasts cradled by a plum-colored sweater. Only she would have risked red and plum. Even back in high school she’d always seemed indifferent to what other people thought of her. Maybe because her dad was the town’s richest man, she acted as if no one else mattered. Or maybe because even then she’d reputedly dated older men and she felt superior to her gaggle of high school admirers. Now her indifference risked becoming a trait, a philosophy, something unchangeable. She’d never left Ely, though she said she’d taken an accounting course at the local community college.
Guy barely recognized this Kevin—affable, joking, full of American-style anecdotes, not reluctant to say cretinously obvious things. Guy had heard so much about “beautiful” Ely and “beautiful” Sally, but there was something depressing and a bit squalid about both of them.
She waited for Kevin to ask questions and introduce topics. She’d always been like that, like a thirties movie actress who smiled and laughed and nodded, but always at one remove, always through a scrim of starlight (or through a lens thick with Vaseline), a beauty who glimmered and sparkled. Their nickname for her had been “Ice Out,” the day in May when all the ice finally melted in neighboring lakes and they were at last navigable. It was funny, because it acknowledged that she was frigid but navigable.
“You and Chris don’t look exactly alike anymore,” she said graciously, like a monarch introducing a bland subject of conversation.
“I guess we’re going our separate ways in life,” Kevin said, glancing at Guy. People out here, Guy noticed, mainly chitchatted and joked around, but every once in a while said something serious about life in the same loud innocent way. Guy smiled at Kevin, but he was sick of so much forced smiling; his cheeks ached. And wasn’t it awfully middle-class to be half of a couple?
Looking at Sally, Kevin remembered how he’d once been in love with her. He’d written her a heartfelt love letter and she’d written back a note full of smiley faces in which she’d said she’d always think of him as a friend, if not a boyfriend. He’d been so hurt and had wept for days whenever Chris was not around. He’d played “their” song, something they’d danced to once. And yet, if he was honest with himself, he’d never imagined them in a future together. She was too beautiful, too remote, like a goddess who becomes a constellation, like an old-fashioned screen star who’s photographed in black-and-white, her head tilted, her hair rhythmically curled, highlights planted in her eyes and on certain teeth. He’d never imagined them together, strolling hand in hand and bending over their baby’s carriage, much less sleeping in each other’s arms. He knew her as a deity but not as a girl, though once he’d walked outside past a basement rec room and spied on her and three other girls in a perfect squalor of giggling and innuendo—his one glimpse of her as human, less than ideal.
She did almost nothing, never had. She wasn’t a cheerleader, didn’t play the flute in the school band, didn’t go out for yearbook or a play, didn’t debate free trade or assume an allegorical role in the annual pageant. If she was a deity, she seldom manifested herself. Someone said she was shy, but Kevin didn’t buy that. In democratic Ely anyone who was aloof was deemed shy, the default excuse. But how would a shy woman turn up at his house in her snowmobile on the very night of his arrival? Maybe what his uncle said was right—she wanted a sexless marriage with a childhood friend that would unite Ely’s two biggest outfitters. Maybe she knew Chris wouldn’t accept her terms of abstinence. But why did she assume he, Kevin, would?
They didn’t say much. He’d never been able to draw her out. A woman like her didn’t need to talk. She was a beautiful catatonic—another selling point. In high school she’d thought she was too good for everyone, at least everyone local. She’d had her heart broken by a Swiss anthropologist from the University of Minnesota, who’d spent a summer studying the Ojibwe reservation nearby. He’d studied Sally, too, as if she were part of the indigenous fauna. Apparently she’d admired his strong thighs, always visible in shorts, and his gold granny glasses perched on features as classically regular as her own. What she hadn’t foreseen was that he’d consigned her to one of the vitrines in his memory, along with a few arrowheads and a sketch for a birch bark canoe.
When she and Kevin were adolescents she’d never made the least effort, but now she seemed marginally more cordial. Had her parents put her up to it?
Guy could see she was pretty but top-heavy, with her big breasts and narrow hips. And not that pretty—Kevin had spoken of her as if she were Garbo or Miou-Miou. Nor did she have much charm—but why should she, in this godforsaken place? It would be wasted on the woodchucks. It seemed odd to think that Kevin had once been in love with her. Guy wondered if he should go upstairs and leave them alone.
Kevin invited her to dinner the next evening and her instincts made her hesitate but her interest made her accept and volunteer to bring the wine.
That night in their bedroom, Kevin said to Chris, “I think Ice Out wants to hook up with me. Permanently. I’ll have to say no.” Chris was scratching his ankle. He was naked. He had always slept in the nude, whereas Kevin liked to wear underwear and a T-shirt—did Kevin feel more vulnerable because he was gay? Chris looked up and said, “Why no? She’s beautiful and rich and you used to have such a crush on her. More than that. You really suffered over her. I remember.”
“Yeah, well—why don’t you marry her? I’m gay.”
“Are you sure you’re not just making that shit up? Are you going to let a whim ruin your life?”
“So you think my love for Guy is just a whim, whereas your love for Betty is some big deal?”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad. Anyway, I’m not in love with Betty. That’s just a whim, too.”
“Are we going to end up together?” Kevin asked. He then heard what he was saying and wanted to head off any suspicion of incest. “I mean, as two old grumpy bachelors?”
“God, no, I hope not,” Chris exclaimed, with such vehemence it was obvious he’d thought of it.
“So then why not marry old Ice Out?”
“What makes you think she wants me?”
“Well, she wants me, at least Mom says so.”
“We’re not exactly the same person.”
“More or less,” Kevin said, and wondered if that idea would make Chris uncomfortable. “Anyway, I’m sure as hell not going to marry her. I do
n’t want to live here, but you do.”
Kevin looked at Chris in the soft light of their old bedside lamp, the brass one with the glass chimney Chris had dialed down. He looked at Chris’s button-big dick like a white mushroom in the straw of his pubic hair and at the glabrous chest with its small, confined plantation of hair at the base of his neck. That’s the way I look, given ten pounds difference and no farmer tan. That’s what Guy has to look at, this white slug with the whiter button-cock—and Kevin found this funhouse mirror image disquieting, certainly off-putting. He felt a new surge of gratitude for Guy’s loving him.
Kevin was lonely in his single bed. It was thoughtless of their mother to put Guy in his own room as if she didn’t understand they were a couple. Kevin wished Chris would sleep with him as in the old days, just for company. Kevin didn’t dare to climb into Chris’s bed, now that he was officially “gay” and Chris had decided he was “straight.” Chris had turned off the bedside lamp. They’d always been able to hear their parents’ late-night voices through the heating vents. Now the voices at last subsided, replaced by their father’s snoring.
Without a word Chris joined Kevin in his bed, which calmed him down and made him smile in the dark. He turned on his side with his back to Chris, who wrapped his arm around his waist. Kevin noticed that Chris was no longer nude but had slipped on some briefs. The next night Kevin visited Guy in bed, but he was afraid to have sex with him—what if they got the sheets dirty? What if the creaking bed could be heard through the treacherous heating vents?
For the first two days in Ely, Kevin was able, at least in his own mind, to maintain a sense of himself as a New Yorker, as a brilliant Columbia undergrad, as a bystander to the international world of fashion, as someone soft-spoken, civilized, self-deprecating, and kind. The Minnesota boy he was impersonating was one seen through the eyes of a French model in New York—fresh, innocent, spunky.