Our Young Man Read online

  “Perfectly,” Guy said, though he didn’t quite understand.

  “A young, handsome guy—a masculine, muscular one. Masc-musc, as we say in L.A.”

  Guy wondered if he qualified, though he wasn’t at all attracted to Fred. The minute someone announces a casting call, Guy thought ruefully, I always wonder if I’ll get the part.

  Fred was on his third martini. “All my life I’ve been staring at those guys, wanting them, never daring to talk to them, volunteering to coach Little League—”

  Little League. Oh, dear, Guy thought, isn’t that children?

  “Going down to the beach and staring at the surfers. Say, we’ve got to get you out to L.A. for some screen tests.”

  “Aren’t I the wrong color for your films?”

  Fred laughed. “Put a little slap on you. Seriously, I’m coproducing a wonderful art-house movie about a schizophrenic who falls for an anorexic.”

  “Schizophrenic? So you thought of me?”

  “I can’t stop thinking of you,” Fred said in a lower, sexy voice. “No, the schizophrenic’s confidant, a pastry chef.”

  “And this pastry chef is French?”

  “Why not? We need some textures.”

  “Do you have a director?”

  Fred sat up in his chair. “We haven’t signed anyone yet, but this is such a high-end property we’re talking to some of the European and experimental guys in the business.”

  “I’m not sure I’m much of an actor.” Guy flashed on his recent debacle in the dungeon.

  After dinner Fred invited Guy up to his place in a new building overlooking Washington Square.

  “I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”

  “I’m bicoastal,” Fred said suggestively. “Nah, I was born in Brooklyn. I need New York the way a fish needs air.”

  Guy tried to work that one out.

  The apartment, which was a dusty neglected penthouse with dead plants and a view of the graffiti-covered Washington Square arch and the seething, dangerous park beyond it, was glitzy-Oriental, with three gilt life-sized statues of the meditating Buddha at the entrance, low black-lacquered tables with pagoda trim, blood-red silk couches with heavy tassel pulls, a spotlit abstraction that some decorator had obviously chosen for the color, a terrazzo floor with glitter buried into it delineating—oh, a dragon lounging on the Great Wall of China. “I’m a sort of Buddhist myself,” Guy said, to be agreeable in case the décor was an expression of Fred’s beliefs rather then his tastes.

  “This is something Ceil concocted with that pansy decorator of hers—I’m going to clear it all out and put in something simple and modern and classic, maybe with a Pompeian motif or a Moorish.”

  “Don’t be too hasty,” Guy advised.

  “Maybe I’ll go all antique. Édouard has that handsome young antique dealer he’s so crazy about. What a body that kid has! Gr-r-r …” and he made the sound of an angry dog, which reminded Guy uncomfortably of Édouard’s excesses.

  “I haven’t met him,” Guy said coolly.

  “Really? Édouard’s besotted with him. He’s clearing out all that boring-ass white furniture of his and going all Chippendale or something, but I’ll bet you it’s just so he can be with young Will, who’s going to supply him with lots of priceless lumber with a fifty percent markup, you can bet.”

  That was quick, Guy thought, panicking to think he’d been replaced.

  Fred turned a dial and lowered the lights. “It’s nice to see the city from here, if you can glimpse it between all those goddamn Buddhas. Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m just the chanting kind of Buddhist,” Guy hastened to say, “not the begging-bowl kind.” Fred had refreshed their drinks and now was sitting next to Guy. He said, “Isn’t that the kind where you chant all day for things you want? I had a friend who chanted who was bi and kept by rich men and women one at a time. He chanted for a Rolls and got it. He said the only disadvantage of being a live-in gigolo is that you have to be willing to play canasta at three A.M. with some ancient insomniac lady.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Guy was quick to say.

  “But what are you chanting for?”

  “A beach house in Fire Island Pines.”

  Fred, who’d been leaning forward, now sat back. “Whoa! I’m not that rich. I’m a millionaire, but a very minor millionaire,” and he held his finger and thumb apart to indicate two inches.

  Guy laughed. “But I wasn’t asking you for anything. That’s what I chant for. I pray to Amida, not to you.” But after Guy went to the toilet he said he was tired, he had an early call, and he thanked Fred, who looked devastated.

  “You can’t just walk out of my life like that.”

  They exchanged phone numbers, but when Fred tried to line him up for lunch or dinner or a movie, Guy said, “I don’t have my schedule yet for this week. It would be unfair to you to make a date and then have to break it.”

  “Don’t French people kiss each other goodbye on two cheeks?”

  “Fathers and sons. When you get the Légion d’honneur. Silly Parisian queens and society people.”

  While Fred was pondering this, Guy shook hands, thanked him, and left.

  Guy needed some time alone to absorb how the baron had turned on him. All that talk about how they were soul mates, about how Guy had a rare gift for transcending nationality, class, age. Had he said class? Did that mean he thought Guy was beneath him, low-class? Pierre-Georges had insinuated he, Guy, was a bore, with just his looks to offer. Was he a bore?

  On his way home he cruised a hot kid who turned out to be a nineteen-year-old dancer named Vladimir. Guy took him home, gave him a drink, and fucked him. Enough old men! Guy told himself. But after the adoring, rapturous Vladimir had left (“Sorry, I can’t sleep with another person in bed,” Guy had said drily), he still felt bruised and insulted.

  He wondered the next morning if Édouard would phone him, but Vlad and Fred did. He agreed to have a quick lunch with Fred, who was in some sort of golfing clothes minus the cleats.

  “I couldn’t sleep all night,” Fred said. “I worried that I’d said something wrong, that I’d turned you off somehow.”

  “Not at all,” Guy said, turning on a thousand-watt smile. He smiled like that when he wanted to appear inaccessible. “I had a delightful evening.”

  “Really? You’re not bullshitting me? Because, honestly, I’m completely dazzled by you.” He sighed heavily and ran a hand across his baldpate. “Coming out in your sixties is no joke. I mean, you’re so vulnerable. It’s like being a pimply fifteen-year-old all over again. I’m a whizz at picking up birds.” (Oh, he means women.) “Birds are easy, at least in L.A., if you have a nice car and you say you’re a producer. They’re all like Lana Turner waiting to be discovered at that drugstore.” (Guy didn’t get the reference, but he thought he’d heard of that old actress).

  “I guess you must be quite the stud,” Guy said, and wondered if Fred would detect the irony. From his decade in Paris, Guy had learned how to insult people sweetly.

  But Fred didn’t pick up on the irony. “I’m not saying that. It’s just that wealth and influence count more with women than they do with men. You see, men want to be the top dog, not attract him.”

  Dogs again, Guy thought. “It must have been a relief to come out finally.”

  “Yes and no. I was in terrible shape. I had to go on a diet and lose fifty pounds. Now I go to the gym three hours every day and my personal trainer is a real demon. Then”—here he dropped his voice—“I’m only telling you this ’cause I trust you—I had a face-lift.” He showed him the scars behind his ears. There were whiskers growing there—some of the beard skin had been tucked back there. “That’s why I look so young.”

  “Oh, that’s why,” Guy said.

  “And I had liposuction—they boiled down ten pounds of gut fat. I had to wear a corset for a month. I’m having hair implants, but boy, are those painful. I had my eyebrows and my ears lasered clean of hair. I had the age spots burned of
f my hands with an acetylene torch. When the scabs fall off, your hands are white.”

  “In French,” Guy said, “we call those spots cemetery flowers.”

  “Gross. I had my elbows sanded. My teeth are all new.” He smiled to show his new teeth.

  “Is it worth it?” Guy asked.

  “I want to be an A-list gay. I want people to say, ‘Who’s that young stud?’”

  Guy didn’t know what to say, so he just smiled. The campy waiter stopped by to chat for a few minutes; they were the last lunch customers. Talking as two masculine men with one who was so flamboyant formed a kind of bond, and after the waiter tripped off, Fred said, “I feel really good with you. You know how to make a guy feel good. I don’t know why I trust you.”

  Guy looked at his own beautiful Beaume & Mercier watch, which he’d bought at duty-free at Charles de Gaulle, and exclaimed, “I’ve got to be running.” He was trying to head Fred off from making an embarrassing avowal.

  “Run, run,” Fred said in a friendly way, though the color drained from his face and his eyes went extinct.

  When Guy called Pierre-Georges to relate all his recent news, Pierre-Georges said to him, “You see, Americans aren’t realistic like us, even the old: They want to be loved for themselves. They want to be young. They don’t recognize they have to have something to offer—money or power or a title.”

  “Would you check this guy out—Fred Hampton—and see if he’s legitimate?”

  The next night Fred invited Guy out to a musical (Guy despised musicals, but didn’t say anything) and to dinner in a Russian restaurant complete with blinis and caviar, lamb shashlik on skewers, and a caterwauling baritone who accompanied himself approximately on the piano. (“Memories light the corners of my mind …”) Fred drank quite a bit of one of the twenty-three kinds of vodkas on offer. (He chose bison grass, whatever that was.) “So tell me—gosh, you’re handsome! What’s the secret of being a successful male model, other than being fabulously good-looking?”

  Guy decided to ignore the compliment and to answer the question seriously. “It’s like acting—knowing how you look to other people.” He’d thought about this and talked about it with Lucie. “Most people can’t see themselves from the camera’s—or the audience’s—point of view. They just do what feels natural. They don’t know how they look, how they’re coming across.”

  “For example?” Anglo-Saxons, Guy thought, always want examples. So lowering. They’re incapable of thinking abstractly.

  “Bad actors, if they want to look anxious, wave their arms a lot, which feels right but looks absurd.”

  “And models?”

  “You might hold up your hand to suggest protest or resistance, but an open hand thrust forward is the size of a head—it feels right but it looks wrong. A hand should never be seen except in profile.”

  “How interesting,” Fred said, looking uninterested. He wants to talk only about his love for me. “Go on.”

  “A model selling a new typewriter might look directly at the camera, especially if he’s been told he has beautiful eyes.”

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Fred said sadly, possibly anticipating Guy’s indifference.

  “But a model, if he’s selling a product, should look at it, never the camera.” Suddenly Guy felt shocked by the childish insistence in his voice and disheartened by how trivial the knowledge of his “craft” sounded. For different reasons both men were sad, and they lapsed into silence.

  Suddenly Fred brightened and said, “You know, that house on Fire Island you keep mentioning?”

  “That I’m chanting for,” Guy corrected, smiling.

  “I think we should go out there this Sunday now that it’s getting warmer. I’ve lined up a real estate agent who could show us some houses.” Fred smiled. “I wouldn’t want you to chant in vain. We can stay over Sunday night.”

  When Guy told Pierre-Georges that night his news over the phone, Pierre-Georges exclaimed, “You see! I’ve always claimed you get more if you’re a man by not putting out. Women succeed by sleeping with men, but men do better by not sleeping with them.”

  “Have you always said that?” Guy said, teasing him. “I’ve never done anything through calculation. I just chant.”

  “She just chants—Little Miss Innocent.”

  “It would be nice to have a house right on the beach. Wake up at noon, pull back the blackout curtains, open the glass doors, cross the dunes … just wear a smile and a Jantzen.”

  “That dates you!”

  “You’re right. I wish we could just wash our brains clean of everything from the past. What are you eating?”

  “White beans and sardines and chervil.”

  “I love that! But it’s better with red peppercorns.”

  Lucie came by to show off her new burnt-orange sweater, which stretched attractively across her tits and looked like a radiant mango against her light brown skin. She twirled around to show it off but she was so little an exhibitionist that she ran out of steam after a half turn and deflated self-consciously onto the couch.

  “Look, I’ve only got ten minutes,” Guy said, “before I go off for a Banana Republic go-see way uptown, but I want to talk about something with you. Then I have a Bacardi rum shoot midtown.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Tell me.” He was never this serious and she felt flattered and hoped to be worthy of his confidence.

  “This chanting thing is sort of creepy.”

  “How so?” She chanted, too, and always defended Buddhism.

  “Just for fun, I was chanting for a beach house in the Pines, and now this old guy seems to want to offer me one.”

  “Bravo!”

  “Do you think I’m just a big whore?”

  “None of us is getting any younger.” She reoriented herself and said, “Americans are always so cheap. They always want to split the bill. Of course, the younger girl models never pay for anything, but they have to go out with horrible Russian gangsters. You’re the only one who gets an apartment”—she looked around—“or a house out of the deal. How do you do it?”

  “Chanting.”

  “I’ve been chanting for a Cadillac convertible and I’m still taking the IRT.”

  They laughed. Guy took her hand between both of his. She was surprised by the gesture. “Do you think I’ve become a gold digger? I’ve already got plenty of money saved up. But I can’t stop myself.”

  “Look, it’s nothing you’re doing. You’re gorgeous—that’s your only fault.”

  Guy decided to believe her. It was simpler.

  But what was he going to do Sunday night when Fred would want to share his bed? He could always say he had a big job Monday early, that he was doing a whole shoot for Perry Ellis.

  It was a cool March day in the Pines as they crossed the bay in a powerboat Fred had hired in advance. (The ferry wasn’t running yet.) Big gray clouds chased one another like fat, playful puppies in a pet store window, except the enclosure was immense, all of outdoors. It was fairly cool and there was a stinging hint of rain in the air, what the French call “spit” (crachin). Fred squinted at the wind and rain reproachfully, as if it were conspiring to ruin their day, but Guy said, “I love it. It reminds me of Brittany.”

  They were shown a gray-shingled house from the 1950s a block from the beach with a rotting wood staircase. Inside, the house smelled of kerosene and septic tank. “Did some old couple just live here and die?” Guy asked.

  “How much does this cost?” Fred asked, raising and lowering his jacket zipper nervously.

  The agent—a prematurely tanned middle-aged man—smiled and held out his hands jokily, miming as if he were trying to juggle several balls or answer both questions at once. “Yes! An old couple lived here. They haven’t died but they need the cash. Their winter house is in Sayville. This is a fixer-upper; that’s why it’s only a million and a half.”

  “Only!” Fred shouted. “It’s run-down, it’s off the beach; even fixed up, the rooms are too small. And you can�
��t get flood or hurricane insurance out here, you told me that yourself.” The agent shrugged and Fred zipped his blue windbreaker shut so it held his stomach as in a sling. He walked out on the stairs and flicked open his chrome lighter, cupped the flame, and lit a Camel, squinting into the blowback. His jaw muscles were working; maybe he hadn’t expected such high prices.

  Next they saw an architect’s house right on the dunes with glass doors and turrets and a great room two stories high, but a screen door was banging in the wind, the rubber insulation around the kitchen windows was rotting, and the parquet floor was buckling. “How much is this one?” Fred asked.

  “Just three million. You’d pay that much for an empty lot in this location.”

  “We’ll take it,” Guy called out, then looked at Fred and said, “Right, Daddy?” Then he bent over laughing at his little joke.

  Fred smiled a sour little smile.

  As they walked along Atlantic, they battled a cold wind, which raised goose bumps on their legs. They were both in shorts. “I know some of these kids get into calling their older boyfriends ‘Daddy,’ but I think that’s sick.” Fred was holding on to Guy as if to keep him warm and grounded in the wind. He had a strong arm across Guy’s back and was whispering into his ear, “I don’t want to be anyone’s daddy. I already have three kids and two grandchildren—you’d never guess it, would you?”

  “No, you don’t seem the type.” But then Guy realized Fred was referring to his youthfulness, not his paternal image. “You look too young.”

  Fred brightened. “I do? Honest?”

  “Honest,” Guy echoed, feeling depressed.

  Because he’d inadvertently cooperated with Fred’s sense that he was an A-list gay, Guy went to bed with him that night in the suite he’d rented in some Potemkin-village “palace” an old queen had pieced together according to her fantasies of luxury and history. It was all falling apart, but at first glance it did seem baronial-Liberace, especially compared to the humble dwellings that surrounded it, with names like “Lickety Split” and “Atta Gurl.” It was all gray and white like some comic-book version of a stately home, except inside it smelled of Kools and roach spray and the potted ferns were turning brown. The “velvet” bedspread was some flimsy synthetic that clung to their bodies and didn’t breathe.