Our Young Man

by Edmund White

  But these guys? He knew them. He loved them. He owed them something. He’d nurtured their love for him. In Andrés’s case, he’d ruined his life, if inadvertently. Andrés had committed crimes for him and served years in prison, which had brutalized him; he’d gone from a sweet, willowy art historian to a tank with a buzz cut and a foul mouth. He’d learned English in prison but the worst kind. He’d sunk a dozen social classes—what would his poor parents think? They sent off a gentleman scholar to America and got back a gangster brute.

  Sexy, though, he thought. Very sexy.

  And Kevin? For once Guy had had a good influence on someone. He’d pushed him all the way through university. He was more confident, more polished, but still Minnesota-pure, if no longer Minnesota-naïf. And yet, the young man was fearfully in love with him. That’s why he’d cried. His love (which he believed Guy betrayed) was hurting him.

  Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his “eternal” beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was—empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? “Riddled with vices?”), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he’d outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it?

  Finally Kevin went out to meet a school friend for dinner. Andrés, with his face branded with Guy’s name, took his faithless lover in his arms (he smelled of ammonia from the prison). Guy’s body remembered, awakened, though they did new things; Andrés had changed, not the urgency to get the very last millimeter inside him but their practices, those were all new and for a second Guy was jealous of that black guard. Andrés came a lot and quickly, but he kept searching Guy’s face and for a second even mimed strangling him, then reached up and closed Guy’s eyelids and placed his hand over his eyes.

  Andrés couldn’t stay in America; he was a criminal alien without papers. Nor could he leave Vicente in this idle, decadent state. Guy bought them both a ticket to Barcelona, with a transfer to Valencia and then a bus ride to Murcia. Andrés was convinced that his nephew would find a job in Murcia. The idea of returning to Spain and working (didn’t they have a twenty percent unemployment rate?) didn’t appeal to Vicente, though he was mildly curious about what Spain held in store for him. He could remember the glassy, smooth marble pavement around the historic center in Valencia, so polished you could see your reflection in it.

  When Kevin understood that in less than a week Andrés and Vicente would be leaving New York, he surprised himself by how gracious he became, couch-surfing at the apartment of a grad student friend way uptown and leaving Guy, with his legibly guilty conscience, to lavish Andrés with love. Yes, Kevin was jealous, but he knew Guy belonged to him. And besides, jealousy wasn’t a manly feeling. Men were better than that. They thought of their lovers as their best friends and wanted them to be happy, whatever it took.

  They agreed to meet in Miami. For a long time Kevin had wanted to stay on South Beach. He’d seen so many TV specials about it, and it had always looked so glamorous, with its palm trees, art deco hotels, wide beaches, and European bathing beauties. Two nights there were Guy’s graduation present for Kevin. The room was decorated in serigraphs by Georgia O’Keeffe–like vulvas or cacti.

  But Guy didn’t come. That was so unlike him. He lived by the clock and was always perfectly on time. Kevin’s mind raced. He talked to his brother three times in a day expressing his fears. He went for long walks where the hotels bordered the beach. Evening was just washing in and the vacationers’ cars were already lined up along the little road in front of the hotels. People were spilling out of convertibles and parading past the pedestrians with their slicked-back black hair, flashing white teeth, tans so old they looked like rammed earth dried and watered a dozen times, everyone thick and dressed in neon-blue Lycra, everyone vulgar and chattering and oiled. He thought this was the ideal, Miami Beach, for all the Latins. This was their paradise, these salsa-emitting vehicles and these oil-stained bikinis. That everything was at night made it all the more grotesque, the quality of a bruise, a tanned bruise.

  He kept checking with the hotel reception to see if a letter had arrived for him. He realized that after all these years he didn’t have Pierre-Georges’s number or that of Guy’s mother. He thought, Does this mean I’m alone in the world? Have I lost Guy? Has he just vanished? Surely he wouldn’t do that to me. Has he been in an accident?

  Kevin only permitted himself to ask if there was anything for him at the front desk four times a day; he hoped a new shift of clerks would mean the same person wouldn’t witness his abjection. One of them, a guy, seemed Cuban or Puerto Rican, and Kevin tried out his Spanish on him successfully.

  At last there was an envelope in Kevin’s box. Guy’s handwriting. He sat on the edge of a salmon-pink tabouret right there in the clamor and confusion of the lobby.

  My angel,

  I’m not coming. I’m going back to Andrés and we’re returning to Murcia with Vicente, who may stay with us for a while. Vince’s mother passed—but you already knew that.

  I realized that I didn’t really want to go to South America. The harsh climate would destroy my already fading complexion, which is wilting rapidly as you may have noticed. And despite the attentions I receive from the same man in Chelsea who keeps Renée Fleming eternally young, a few gray hairs have pushed through, hardy things!

  You’d wake up one morning with an entirely gray and faded Guy beside you. The Curse of Quito! To live with a man is already a handicap, as your doctor Blumenstein pointed out to me at the graduation party, but to live with an old man never helped anyone at the dawn of his career.

  You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure? I may not look my age, but the age I look is the one you’ve fallen in love with. And real old age is no joke; it demands stoicism and commitment on the part of the caregiver.

  Andrés sacrificed seven years of his life to me. Anyone who loves me that much deserves to have me, even though the prize may not be worth much after all. Because of me he never finished his doctorate and he’s sunk an entire social class. Worse—he’s become a criminal, not just poor. His life in many ways is over. You may not understand this. As an American you imagine anything is possible and cannot see that every year another dozen possibilities are closed to us. As two Garlic Belt figures, Andrés and I are realists—about our status as an ex-con and a former beauty queen. We just want a quiet, nearly anonymous life now. Picture us with Vince as three tall sad men who go out walking through Murcia every night after dark.

  I’ve always felt the life force throbbing through you—that and your extraordinary intelligence, your ability to analyze and synthesize everything you encounter. I worship you and the more I’ve known you the more I’ve come to revere you. You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile. If you ever feel like it, cut a thatch of your pubic hair and mail it to me in Spain so I can smell it while jerking off. I’ll send you an address.

  Pierre-Georges once said I was like a black hole in space. What does that mean? That I shape the outcome of events but don’t really exist? That people project whatever they want onto me, which works since I’m such a nullity?

  You may hate me but you shouldn’t. I made a man out of you, or rather found the man in you lurking behind the boy and nurtured him in a world given to stereotypes. I made you my man. I even taught you some French. And I kept you safe from AIDS—and kept you, fed you, sat on your dick. I’m most proud of you of all the things and events and people in my life—I gave you the right setting to survive and prevail.

  Please forgive me for disappointing you. It won’t be long before you find some black-haired hidalgo. They go for blonds down there, whom they call rubios.

  Your Guy

&nbs
p; Kevin wept for an hour and then called his brother. He felt older and wiser—but in what way wiser?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Keith McDermott and Leo Racicot for helping me prepare the manuscript; Michael Carroll for advising me on every word; Brad Gooch for sharing his memories of modeling with me; George Miscamble for giving me an insider’s view of modeling; my editors at Bloomsbury, Michael Fishwick and Anton Mueller, for their unfailing wisdom and enthusiasm; my agent, Amanda Urban, who is a great editor in her own right as well as the best representative a writer could ask for. I am also grateful to my copy editor, Dave Cole, for saving me from a thousand embarrassments. I alone am responsible for the mistakes of fact, chronology and understanding in the book. Didier Malige was kind enough to give me his responses, not always positive.

  Rick Whitaker and David McConnell kept me going with their encouragement.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Edmund White is the author of many novels, including the classic A Boy’s Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes and His Friend, as well as the memoirs My Lives, City Boy, and Inside a Pearl. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  Nocturnes for the King of Naples: A Novel

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

  A Boy’s Own Story: A Novel

  The Beautiful Room Is Empty: A Novel

  Caracole: A Novel

  The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis

  Genet: A Biography

  The Burning Library: Essays

  Our Paris: Sketches from Memory

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  The Farewell Symphony: A Novel

  Marcel Proust: A Life

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  The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris

  Fanny: A Fiction

  Arts and Letters: Essays

  My Lives: A Memoir

  Chaos: A Novella and Stories

  Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel

  Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

  City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s

  Sacred Monsters: New Essays on Literature and Art

  Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel

  Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

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  First published 2016

  © Edmund White, 2016

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-62040-996-1

  ePub: 978-1-63286-002-6

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