Our Young Man Read online

  Guy’s mother hadn’t expected him to come back for the funeral. Pierre-Georges had arranged for a florist to deliver a big, standing wreath of red and white carnations and a blue silk ribbon stretched across its empty thorax reading, “Didier remembered always in the loving hearts of his family.” Guy was shocked that Pierre-Georges had filed away his father’s first name, Didier. Pierre-Georges was impeccable!

  Guy spoke to his mother every day. She sounded subdued and a bit worried. She’d never written a check in her life. Tiphaine was teaching her how to keep a checkbook and work out a budget. Guy resented this intimate brush with poverty and mortality. He knew that someday soon he’d be old and infirm—but he repeated the words “old and infirm” precisely because they were a formula and held the reality at bay. They were prophylactic words, a sting of the same venom, an antidote like homeopathic medicine. His kind of Buddhism instructed you to live in the moment, he vaguely remembered, and that suited him fine. If you chanted twice a day and made love three times and always wore beautiful clothes and stayed away from dreary people, you could just hover in the present, couldn’t you? Or had he gotten that completely wrong?

  5.

  Fred announced that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, but it wasn’t always linked to AIDS, it was something older Jews and Italians got just naturally, older Mediterranean men, but it used to be very rare and it had been seen just in Jersey nursing homes or in Florida retirement villages. “We’re going to beat this thing,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ve got the best goddamn team of doctors on the globe, the real McCoy.” Then he thought about it for a day and he phoned: “But what if I infected you that one time I fucked you?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Guy said. “I haven’t had any other STDs, so my immune system hasn’t been compromised. And besides, you came on my stomach, not in my ass. I don’t think it’s in precum. Anyway, we only did it once—and you need multiple exposures, don’t you?”

  “Hey, maybe you gave it to me,” Fred said. “That’s a possibility, isn’t it? Should I sue you? Can the top get it?”

  “Not usually,” Guy said. “Anyway, don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’re as strong as an ox.”

  “Do you know if you’re clean?”

  “Clean?”

  “I guess I’m not clean now.”

  “Don’t worry. Do you have any other symptoms?”

  “A tubercular cough. Night sweats. Swollen lymph glands. Weight loss. I’m a goner, right?”

  “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

  “C’mon!” Fred shouted into the receiver. “You’re supposed to reassure me,” he said, disgusted.

  “What do the doctors say, the real McCoys?”

  “They don’t know shit. They don’t even know for sure what causes it, do they? Poppers? Mustaches? Pork?”

  “How about sex?”

  “Isn’t it ironic that I came out now? It’s like moving to London during the Great Plague.”

  Guy wondered, could he have given GRID to Fred? Could Fred have given it to him?

  Guy promised to shop for and microwave him dinner that very evening, something nourishing, chicken Parmigianino and broccoli, say.

  Fred said, “The house is a mess. There is an inch of dust on the fuckin’ Buddhas.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It’ll be great to see you. Don’t be offended if I don’t eat much. And if I look like hell. Is Andrew coming?” That was what he called Andrés.

  “No, no, I’ll come alone. You probably just have a bad case of flu. It’s the season.”

  But Fred really did look frail and diminished when he opened the door, a little defeated old man. He was in a ratty old bathrobe over baggy boxer shorts and a torn T-shirt marked “Colorado State,” where he’d studied and wrestled a century ago. “Don’t touch me!” Fred warned. “Don’t kiss me. I may be contagious. Disinfect your hands when you leave here. You really should be wearing a mask.”

  “I’ll do no such thing, let me hug you.”

  “Guy, I’m not fooling around, stay away.”

  But Guy did hug him and felt how skinny he was under the robe, his ribs as articulated as a washboard or a xylophone. He smelled bad, like dirt and old sweat.

  Guy worked hard at being cheerful; it was December, and Fred was trembling slightly like an expensive dog, though the apartment was toasty and smelled like sandalwood for some reason, maybe joss sticks burned before the idol.

  Once the food was twirled and warmed in the microwave, Guy watched Fred eat, or rather dabble his fork in the sticky contents of his plate.

  “Don’t use so much salt,” Guy said.

  “Fuck it! I’ll be dead long before a salt buildup in my arteries. Nothing has any taste.”

  Guy was staring at the quarter-sized brown spot on Fred’s thigh where his robe had fallen open. Fred intercepted his glance and said, “Pretty bad, huh?”

  Guy knew from his mother that you couldn’t discuss mortality simply, nobly, honestly with the dying or the mourners, that the visitor was obliged to be cheerful. He also knew that Fred worshipped him so much he’d believe anything Guy would say. “You’ll outlive us all,” Guy promised. “You’re an ox.”

  “I feel more like a calf being led to slaughter.”

  Guy could see the doomed look on Fred’s face, like the pallid, resigned look of a drowning friend only a few meters out to sea but caught in an inescapable undertow. Fred had already given up. “What are my kids going to say? ‘Daddy, we told you so.’ What did I have the face-lift and the tummy tuck for? The mortician?”

  “Stop, Fred, you’ll feel fine in a week.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Trust me. A week.”

  “Carbolic acid,” Fred said. “Wash all the exposed surfaces of your skin with carbolic acid.”

  “Shut up,” Guy said playfully, and then he courageously embraced the sick man again. “I’ll be back again tomorrow.”

  “You will? When?”

  “We’ll see.” Then he added spitefully, “You have a heavy schedule tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got nothing planned but worry. I don’t even feel up to putting together this new movie deal.” He thought about it and said, “I should do the first AIDS movie—something very romantic, with two hot young macho studs dying.”

  “How hot would they be,” Guy asked, “if they both had AIDS?”

  “The lead would have to lose thirty pounds for the last three minutes. We’d cast a famous straight father of nine. Makeup would cover him with black spots—an Oscar, he’d get an Oscar for kissing a man. Boffo box office!”

  Fred seemed cheered up by his new product. It was a way of mastering the disease. It was a way of turning tragedy to farce for profit.

  It was a depressing winter and spring. Fred kept succumbing to one disease or another. One day he couldn’t write and he sat bemused in front of a few doodles. That turned out to be a parasite in the brain, toxoplasmosis, but they’d just discovered a way of routing it. Then he succumbed to PCP, the gay pneumonia, and he was put on a ventilator and an antibiotic drip. He lost sensation in his feet except for occasional stabbing pains: neuropathy. Guy was learning a new vocabulary. Fred would get better and would go on long walks with Guy, though he was a skeleton in baggy clothes. Everything his eyes landed on he wanted to buy. Soon the spare bedroom was full of ostrich eggs nesting on branching coral supports, storage ottomans, a signed first edition of Huckleberry Finn, a huge poster for the Italian version of Gone with the Wind, lots of bad paintings in gold frames. Everything went on his American Express card and Guy got a call from a hysterical Ceil; the kids had told her after a visit with Fred that Daddy was laying up treasures like a pharaoh furnishing his tomb. Guy, who wondered how she’d found his number, mumbled that he couldn’t intervene. He didn’t even know Fred that well. She started sobbing; “I don’t care if he’s gay. Gay, schmay. It’s the children’s inheritance I’m worried about.”

  “Aren’t they alread
y grown up and married, with children of their own?”

  “You bastard, trying to rob my children, you filthy French harlot and … husband-stealer.”

  Guy just hung up and shrugged. He didn’t pick up the ringing phone. It was sure to be the seal, the phoque. Two days later he received a letter in the mail poorly spelled and hastily written, calling him a Jezebel switching his little homo butt before the dazed eyes of a pathetic, dying old man. She knew all about the house on Fire Island and their drug-fueled orgies where gullible Fred had been deliberately infected with a fatal disease. She knew all about vicious fag home-breakers and gold diggers.

  Guy just slapped the letter in front of Fred, who read it silently, intently, then looked up at Guy with a saturnine scowl. “The bitch will stop at nothing. We’ve got to transfer the ownership of the Pines house to you. I’ve heard stories of the family seconds after a death clearing out an apartment and changing the locks. The vultures! You can bet your bottom dollar Ceil will contest the will. We’ve got to put it in your name now and make it foolproof. I’ve heard of wills where if someone who’s getting a bequest contests the will, he gets nothing. That’s what I want.”

  “In France you can’t disinherit your own children. Napoleonic law.”

  “Well, lah-di-fuckin’-dah, it’s my money and I’ll leave it like I want to, to the great love of my life.”

  As Guy walked home through the snow he felt bad he’d only put out that one time for Fred. If he’d only known Fred was going to die so soon, he’d have been less tight-assed about it. Coached by Pierre-Georges, Guy had been playing a deep game for long-term stakes, but there was going to be only the short term, as it turned out. Oh, well, he thought, maybe the great loves are always unreciprocated; did Beatrice put out for Dante, Eloisa for Abelard? Didn’t Abelard castrate himself or something extreme? If love worked out, it was just dull and normal—Guy had done Fred a favor by rejecting him, and Guy had avoided the disease.

  Andrés was commuting out to Rutgers on a bus three days a week; he was in the last year of coursework for his Ph.D. The bus was cheaper than the train. He’d rented a studio nearby on Weehawken Street where he spent two or three days a week, just a room next door to a taxidermist storeroom: Everything smelled of naphthalene. He was away from home almost too much, though at first Guy had welcomed the time alone. What was he doing in his studio? Taking tricks there? Why did he need a studio?

  And then Guy paid a surprise visit to him one day on the pretense that he was in the neighborhood and wanted to take him to lunch at a new restaurant on Greenwich Street. The room was very bleak, just a chair and a desk and a floor lamp. And everywhere prints by Dalí, or at least very faithful copies—horrible robot women and crucified Christs seen from a strange axonometric perspective, and vaporous, mounted Don Quixotes, melting watches and forks. All with pretentious, far-fetched surrealist names and big Dalí signatures.

  “These must be worth a fortune,” Guy said. “Are they real?”

  “They’re part of my research for my Ph.D.,” Andrés said, not looking Guy in the eye.

  “Not every art history student can afford originals by his topic,” Guy said.

  Andrés looked uncomfortable. “Let’s get out of here. These fumes are disgusting.”

  “They smell like mothballs.”

  “That’s what they are. Let’s go to that restaurant of yours—my treat. I’ve got an appointment at two-thirty.”

  “Who with?”

  “Uh, my professor.”

  “I thought you said he was on leave in France.”

  “Well, a dealer, if you must know. My treat today.”

  Although Andrés had been poor or stingy when they first met, now he’d become a big spender—he covered Guy with expensive presents (seashells dipped in silver, a gold seal ring with an absurd coat of arms he’d invented, three parakeets on an apple, a white fox fur throw for the bed, first-class plane tickets for a weekend in San Juan, where he’d lodged them in El Convento, built around a courtyard, noisy all night with riotous birthday parties or business conventions). And he bought himself designer clothes which looked silly on him—skinny light blue Dolce & Gabbana trousers and an Hermès jacket of a beige canvas with big red darts, dozens of monogrammed shirts, old-fashioned lace-up shoes from Brooks and fur-lined black suede space boots, three good suits, and a Kenzo gray overcoat. Where was all the money coming from? His father had been laid off from his air-conditioning repair job, Andrés told him when Guy read an article about unemployment in Colombia. All this senseless spending made Guy uneasy, and whenever Andrés was about to purchase some new silly extravagance, Guy would say, “Do you really need it? Will you ever wear it? Why not save up and buy one really perfect blazer?” It was as if Andrés were buying as compulsively as Fred, as if he were embarrassed by all the cash stuffing his wallet. Mysterious people (a lady, a man) called and asked for Andrés; Guy overheard Andrés’s end of the conversation, which was all about delivery dates. “I can’t do it that fast,” Andrés said curtly. His hands were often stained with coffee; there’d been two hair dryers on his workshop desk—two? What for? Andrés never blow-dried his hair. Then he saw a scrap of paper on which Andrés had written the address of an art gallery in St. Louis—Drew Fine Arts. What was going on?

  He knew what was going on but chose to ignore it. Andrés offered to pay Guy’s rent.

  “Are you mad?” Guy said. “Maybe when I owe some real estate tax in March we can split it. It’s only a few hundred dollars. But you’re my husband.” And the word “husband,” which Guy pronounced with an ambiguous smile, so thrilled Andrés that he had to unbend his sudden erection that was folded uncomfortably in his pale-blue shorts under his jeans. He bullied Guy into the bedroom and then gently smoothed him out on the bed like a paper dolly. He tugged their trousers off without unbuttoning them—they were both that skinny. In his haste he spilled some of Guy’s pocket change on the floor. He didn’t even bother to unbutton their shirts, and reached up to pinch his nipple. Nothing excited Guy more—he joked that his tits were his primary sexual organ—but he’d forbidden Andrés to inflict that sweet torture on him for fear his nipples would become grotesquely enlarged and he’d no longer be fit for bathing suit modeling. No tit-pinching, no long, bruising kisses—the merchandise had to be respected.

  Never had Andrés been more ardent. Something about the word “husband” had roused him to new heights of ecstasy. Guy felt for the first time that he was understanding the meaning of each kiss, each hug, each thrust; it was as if in a dream he’d suddenly mastered sign language and could read it effortlessly, fluently. After they both climaxed, first Guy, then Andrés, they lay side by side, panting. Andrés got up and staggered a second and went into the bathroom. His ass looked boyish and white and unimportant under his dark shirt. He wiped them down with a wet washcloth. He almost swooned beside Guy. They turned on their sides facing each other. Guy just hoped Andrés wouldn’t be caught by the police—it was a serious offense, wasn’t it. Jail time?

  “I like it that we both look alike, thin and hairy and tall, except you have these cute little ears”—he touched them—“and that perfect skin.”

  Guy laughed. “And I’m ten years older.”

  Startled, Andrés propped himself up on an elbow and said, “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m thirty-eight. Look. I’ll show you my passport.”

  “I always assumed you were six years younger than me.”

  “As Pierre-Georges would say, professionally I’m twenty-three. But chronologically I’m thirty-eight.”

  “I’ve always seen you as a little brother, someone I had to protect.”

  “Let’s go on pretending. I like that role.”

  “It’s crazy, how do you do it?”

  “Genes, I guess. My brother Robert is another Dorian Gray, though my mother looks her age. Maybe I’ll be struck by a coup de vieux.” He sang the Beatles’ line, “‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?
’ and when I look it?”

  “I’ll always love you,” Andrés blurted out. And Guy looked at him with a sad smile, as if doubting and believing at the same time this eternal pledge.

  “Anyway, it’s all an illusion,” Guy said. “Here you can see crow’s feet.” He pointed to his eyes. “And here my chin line is giving way no matter how many isometrics I do or how many sticks of gum I chew in private. And my nose is getting bigger every year, though luckily I was born with little jug ears. But the secret of looking young is always darting about, never staring at a fixed point, being the first to leap up and fetch the milk.” He was very proud of the word “fetch,” which had no equivalent in French. Lately they’d begun to speak mostly English to each other. Guy had no Spanish and Andrés’s French was rusty. Besides, Americans resented foreign languages being spoken around them. Americans thought foreigners were like impertinent kids speaking pig latin to mock their elders.

  “No,” Andrés said, “it’s your face! Nothing to do with being constantly in motion, though you do that, too, my little hummingbird. Your face is just so perfect and unlined and beautiful.”

  “Autant que ça dure. As long as it lasts.”

  “You’re just gloomy because your father died.”

  “When a father dies, the son sees himself approaching the edge of the cliff: Next!”

  “You always make everything into a general principle,” Andrés said, teasing him, looking at how the black hairs on Guy’s legs grew darker and denser as they approached his crotch and started to swirl as if being drawn into a vortex. They were such strong legs, strong like a bow strung with powerful muscles. Andrés could feel himself growing hard again and was afraid of annoying Guy with the persistence of desire—maybe Guy was too old to go at it multiple times! Andrés lay on his stomach to hide his erection but propped himself on his elbows so his bald spot wouldn’t be right under Guy’s nose.