Our Young Man Read online

  He realized that he always thought of Robert when he thought of his father. He’d always been jealous of the way they sat out Sunday morning mass while he attended with his mother and Tiphaine—the men and the women. His father had never been proud of his good grades and usually hadn’t even glanced at his report card, though he’d been there at every soccer game Robert played, even some of the practice sessions, despite the fact that Robert had been a very mediocre player. If Robert took a girl out to the movies, his father, even if he always claimed to be broke (fauché), could usually find a blue folded note of fifty francs in his pocket. When his father was so drunk he couldn’t get up the stairs to bed, it was Robert who took off his shoes and propped him up, dragging him along and whispering sweet nothings in his father’s ear, while Guy and his mother, pretending to read, sat rigid and unsmiling under the bright floor lamp, almost embarrassed to be witnessing out of the corner of an eye such a tender, intimate, shameful moment.

  But now his dying father had opened his eyes wide and was trying to say something. Guy bent down so that his ear was next to his father’s lips, which were whispering, “Water.” Guy held up his father’s head with the matted white hair and looked at his long white nose hairs and tilted a glass to his papery lips. Guy was embarrassed by his expensive Creed eau de cologne, but he was sure his father couldn’t identify it. Tiphaine, who’d been napping in her room, came down the stairs, plumper than before, her hair crushed on one side, her cheap dress ill-fitting. She whispered, “Guy,” and kissed him on both cheeks, but for some reason she was smiling at this little drama of filial piety, as if she knew how insincere and out-of-character it was. Guy resented her smile but overcame his surge of hostility toward her.

  Guy’s mother heated up a daube and spooned it out for her children. It wasn’t half bad, Guy said to himself, and then hated himself for even noticing. This was hardly a moment to be handing out stars for cuisine. Robert came home after they’d been served and spent fifteen minutes washing grease from his hands and arms and lingered five minutes looking at his sleeping father. He said he had a kayak and spent a lot of time boating and paddling. He checked out Guy’s wasp waist and muttered his teenage nickname, Sec (“Dry”). Robert’s neck, however, was cross-hatched with tiny squares—the sun, no doubt. Real men don’t moisturize.

  While their mother was in the kitchen fetching the dessert, Robert said, “You seem to be prospering.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “You know, at the garage I have a chance to get a good price on an ’82 Opel. Mom needs a new car.”

  Guy said, “Sure.” He felt guilty because he hadn’t thought about her car; New Yorkers weren’t part of car culture, though he had his Mercedes. “How much is it?”

  “I think I can get it for thirty-two hundred francs.”

  “Thank you for arranging it.”

  “What do you drive?”

  “Mercedes SEL.”

  Robert winced, the way he always had. “I’m sorry I haven’t been contributing my part to help Mom. But at the garage … and with three kids …” (gosses, he said, a word Guy had almost forgotten). “And I make all the repairs around here. You’re never here.”

  Oh, dear, Guy thought. “That’s our deal,” he said smoothly. “You look in on Mother”—he glanced at Tiphaine—“and you do, too. Money is the easy part. I’m so grateful to both of you.” He didn’t want to sound hypocritical; they had never been this polite, this deferential around each other before. He smiled forbearingly at his siblings with a look that pleaded, he hoped, for sympathy and, if he’d somehow offended them, for forgiveness.

  “What’s this, what’s this?” their mother sang out in a forced, cheerful voice as she brought in the chocolate mousse. It was his favorite, at least according to family legend, though he hadn’t eaten a dessert in twenty years. But he’d heard her whipping the cream in the kitchen and he knew he couldn’t refuse it.

  “We’re going to give you a new-old car, an Opel,” Guy said. “Robert’s arranging it.”

  “But that’s too extravagant,” their mother cried. “The old one—”

  “Robert’s getting it at a good price. And he’ll make sure it runs well.”

  Guy worried that Robert would resent this last assertion, that Guy was being a busybody, but Robert was smiling and saying Guy would pay for it out of his New World riches. “And I’ll wash it and vacuum it once a month,” Tiphaine threw in lightheartedly.

  Their mother seemed overwhelmed. She had tears in her eyes and looked at Guy. “You already do so much for me. How did I deserve such a loving son? If I’d economized better—”

  Guy held a finger to his lips and shushed her. “No one else could make so little money go so far. I’m the one at fault, I’ve been thoughtless. I haven’t taken into account that the dollar’s been getting weaker. I will double your allowance and buy the car if Robert will be so kind as to handle the transaction and do the maintenance—that’s the hard part.”

  As was her nature, their mother cleared the dishes before everyone was done. When she came back in she said, “How is that nice … Baron Édouard?” she asked, uncomfortable with his title but fearing, no doubt, that a simple “monsieur” would be rude or sound presumptuous. Tiphaine and Robert exchanged glances and a smirk, as if they were privy to a private joke.

  “Oh, Édouard?” Guy said lazily. “He’s always the same, never changes. I guess rich people don’t change as much as the rest of us; we have to hustle. Except now he’s crazy about antiques and is pawing through everyone’s attic or barn, looking for a treasure. He asks after you … often.” Seeing that his brother and sister were still smirking, he hoped to defuse their satire by asking, “Do you think he’s a real baron? Or a Jew ennobled by the prince of Lichtenstein for making a big loan? Or do businessmen just use titles for prestige? I read that one quarter of all titles in Europe are fake.”

  “Fake? Fake?” their mother shrieked, horrified as if he’d questioned the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. “He seemed to me authentic and a charming, generous man.”

  Guy wondered if she’d think him so charming if she could see him naked and barking.

  Robert at least had stopped sneering. “I guess you must meet a lot of phonies in the fashion industry?”

  Guy wondered how he could respond calmly to this remark. “I suppose all worlds have their fakes. Even garage mechanics. But strictly speaking Édouard isn’t in fashion. He’s a brewer.”

  Robert nodded solemnly. Their mother muttered, “In any event a very charming man, truly elegant.”

  At that moment they heard their father—whose bed had been moved downstairs into the salon—groan, and their mother rushed to his side and the three children followed her slowly, timidly. “We’re here, my darling,” their mother cooed. “We’re right here, chéri, your whole family, your three children and me, you’re not alone,” but Guy thought that was a lie, you’re never so alone as at the moment of your death.

  Their father was gasping and their mother turned up the flow of oxygen and was patting down the sides of his square, transparent tent as if sealing a leak. Now he was sitting up and coughing and his face looked as red a baby’s when it starts to cry.

  I wonder who will be with me at the hour of my death, Guy wondered, then he mentally slapped himself for being morbid and self-pitying. With a trusted servant, he hoped, chuckling at his own frivolity. A servant who would know just how to arrange the pillows, tilt the lampshade, administer the opiate. A servant who would mourn, but only ceremonially, while speculating how generous her legacy would be. Guy knew how to deal with calculated kindness.

  The next morning Tiphaine drove him to the train station after Guy had written down Robert’s bank details for a transfer of funds for the Opel. He kissed his father goodbye, who was sleeping now and blue, not red. His mother was crying silently, seated beside his father; she herself was so frail she scarcely indented the mattress.

  He and Tiphaine stopped by to see their
grandmother, the one who’d worked as a cashier in a Paris café. She’d become almost feral and slept with three big dogs, more for the warmth than out of love for the animals. She who had always been so chic in her way now wore a dirty old bathrobe covered with dog hairs and slippers too big for her feet. She didn’t have her teeth in and her eyebrows had grown in, big heavy caterpillars. Guy had always felt closest to her; after all, she was the Parisian, and she was the one who’d first told him he was handsome. But now she was a grinning savage, and her eyes didn’t reveal if she recognized her grandchildren.

  A day after Guy returned to Paris, his father went into the hospital with pneumonia. Guy volunteered to return home, but his mother said that the doctor had told them that this could go on for months, and besides, his father was seldom conscious now. They’d turned up the morphine and turned down the antibiotics and were hoping he’d just slip away.

  Two days later, the phone rang at two A.M. and his mother was saying tonelessly it was all over. Guy wanted to ask her if she was relieved but he didn’t know if that was what human beings asked. So he asked instead what he thought Robert would say: When was the funeral mass going to be held, and did she need any money?

  He was glad, a moment later, that he hadn’t asked her if she was relieved, because he realized she was already rescripting the past. “We had our differences sometimes,” she said, “but he was a good man who was kind to me and very proud of you kids.” Guy couldn’t believe his ears—their father was a bitter drunk when he wasn’t violent, and the only people he was pleasant with were his bar buddies, the other unemployed drunks of Clermont-Ferrand. Guy remembered distinctly that his mother had said to him maybe ten years ago (he was already in New York) that her husband drove her wild and that she’d kill herself if it wasn’t against her faith. Divorce was even more unthinkable. Guy was cursed with a nearly geological memory in which each time stratum was clearly demarcated from every other and in which memories never blended, and they could always be located with precision. The levels of the past did not bleed into each other in Guy’s mind, nor was the past “color-corrected” to match the present hue. Everything retained its original shade and he could never revise the cruel, barren past to substantiate some sentimental new evaluation. He’d hated and feared his father then and hated him now. His father had seldom talked at home except to mutter something sour and brief, but Guy had heard him at the bar expatiate on his political theories and racist prejudices and anti-German jingoism when he’d gone to collect him late at night at the bar. His father was also obsessed by Arabs. No one was paying much attention to him, but there he was haranguing the void, denouncing the beurs (Arabs born in France) and the Bosches (Huns). (Had he inherited his Germanophobia from his father, who’d fought them in the Great War and had had his eyelids burned off, or did he resent them because their industry was still thriving—or was it just a conventional prejudice, an indication that he was a thinking man and had opinions?) Guy was tall but frail and as he supported his thick, smelly father through the dark, empty streets he longed to slip out from under him so that the hateful man would fall and crack his angry, mumbling skull and die. If they encountered anyone in the streets, especially a brown skinned, big-nosed Arab or a stranger who could be mistaken for an Arab, Guy dreaded the filth that might pour forth from his father’s mouth. When they got home his mother would cluck angrily, “Oh là là, what’s this?” and hold her needles and half-finished knitting and say, “If you think I’m going to share a bed with—that—heave him onto the couch.” But by then his father was already snoring and Robert was coaxing his slumped body up the stairs to the bed in the spare room.

  Now, on the phone as their mother said sad affectionate things, Guy assumed an impenetrable silence. How could people lie to themselves like that? he wondered.

  And then he thought, What should she do? Admit that that man ruined her life? Was that what Guy expected or wanted: that his mother should admit that she’d lived a ruined life?

  And what was so great about his own life? He had to remember the names of three hundred people in the business whom he’d greet with a smile, he could never go outside with baggy jeans and a dirty T-shirt, he had to listen to hours and hours—centuries!—of talk about clothes and photographers. “Yes, he sleeps in the same bed with her every night, but why?” someone might say of a photograph. “Does he ever touch her, or is it just a New York marriage?” He had to listen to everyone’s gossip and schedule, where they’d been and where they were going, how their astrologers warned against this or counseled that. And then the daily facials (hoping the creams and astringents wouldn’t produce pimples), and the absolute trauma of changing a hairstyle. (Was it ahead of the curve or behind it?) He wondered what his real hair color was. And then the hours and hours of chanting—should he have been chanting for his father’s recovery? he wondered guiltily. What should he buy as a gift for Lucie? He’d seen an expensive blue lizard-skin wallet at Céline’s—you wouldn’t find that in New York, would you?

  And what did his life add up to? A portfolio of pictures that was almost instantly démodé, a “beautiful” face with a “masculine” expression and stubble. He was living his life between quotation marks, every inverted comma a proof of inauthenticity—linking his looks to the fleeting moment. When people by accident looked back at his portfolio in fifty years would they say he looked “so eighties,” just as he responded to pictures of Valentino by saying he looked so “twenties,” with his blackened eyebrows, his nostrils black as raisins, his hair shellacked, and his mouth unsmiling. People paid Guy a lot, advertising men projected onto him their own fantasies of “youth,” “innocence,” “sophistication,” or “depth,” but at the end of the day he’d have just a sheaf of glossies and a bitter lined face like a half lemon that had sat in the fridge too many weeks.

  It was nice not to have to talk to Fred every day, who assumed he was with his parents. It was nice to lie in Andrés’s arms; the poor boy had been trained to just brush Guy’s lips with his lips, never to gnaw them. Now Guy had to teach him to wash his hands and not to sniff them at dinner or at a movie, fingers that had been knuckle-deep inside Guy, though it was a sweet failing. Guy felt that if he didn’t watch out, Andrés would devour him. Andrés resented the waiter who delivered their breakfast. He would sigh, even moan, if the man took too long. Guy had to purchase Andrés new underthings and shirts and a hooded green rain slicker, un ciré, because the boy had bought his first-class plane ticket at the last minute. Did he have any money? Was his family rich?

  Andrés never answered Guy’s questions about money but just looked away and smiled mysteriously.

  Guy had never felt so loved. Perhaps because Andrés was so handsome, perhaps because men and women stared at him as often as they stared at Guy, Guy felt Andrés was valuable, enviable, rich with options. Poor Édouard and Fred, they were desperate because time was running out on them. In the apartment of the Buddhas, Guy had seen a photo from the 1950s of Fred in which he was presentable, but he’d never been a beauty, though absurdly he aspired to be one now.

  Andrés was intelligent, too, and could talk about Dalí for hours and hours and the surrealists in general. Apparently Dalí was on his last legs now, with a nose tube feeding him oxygen, all mixed up with his trademark wax mustaches. Dalí was Catalan. (They spoke a kind of Catalan as far south as Valencia, Andrés explained, and as far north as Perpingnan.)

  “I guess it’s like Gaelic in Ireland,” Guy said, just to be pleasant. He liked seeing Andrés getting worked up, his skin flushing red. Usually he was like the dead Christ in his loincloth being lowered from the cross into his mother’s arms, and Guy enjoyed draping a sheet over his loins to underline the resemblance. He could imagine blood-black nail holes in his body.

  Andrés would lie on his stomach practicing Dalí’s signature for hours. His buttocks would always tense when he felt Guy was looking at him.

  “Why Dalí?” Pierre-Georges asked over the phone. “He was a complete fra
ud and would even sign blank sheets of paper for sixty dollars a pop. His greedy wife Gala would put them in front of him; he was completely gaga and she thought she at least would live forever.”

  “How do you know all this?” Guy asked.

  “There was an article in Marie Claire. But he’s a complete fraud. When he was shown some lithographs of Don Quixote he declared them fakes. ‘How can you tell?’ someone asked. ‘They’re fakes because Dalí hasn’t been paid for them.’ Most of his so-called lithographs are just posters of photographic copies, he doesn’t even know how to make lithographs.”

  “Andrés is doing his Ph.D. on Dalí.”

  One day Andrés went out by himself (which was unprecedented). He said something about meeting a friend for lunch, though there had been no exchange of calls. When he came back late in the afternoon he had a bundle of yellowing blank paper under his arm.

  “What’s that for?” Guy asked.

  “It’s paper from the 1950s. I found it at a bouquiniste,” Andrés said. But when Guy pursued the matter Andrés just shrugged. Later he said, “Modern paper contains chemical brighteners that glow under infrared.”

  And then they were back in New York. Guy caught himself speaking to waiters in French; for him French had become the language of servants (though he’d learned Americans with their fussy egalitarianism preferred the word “help”).

  Andrés moved in with him and, when Fred or Pierre-Georges or Lucie came by, sat right next to Guy with his hand on his knee. They must have looked like a queer version of that painting American Gothic. Guy had to admit to himself that it made him uncomfortable to have someone so visibly stake a claim on him, and yet he found the idea reassuring, too. At least he knew that the usual tension in his neck and shoulders was melting away. Belonging to someone felt like being held in someone’s arms, like being shielded from death. His father’s death had caused him to feel more vulnerable, a flimsy transparency held up in the wind, a twist of paper dancing in an air shaft, but Andrés’s embrace stopped him from twisting. Andrés was warm flesh, though he was painfully thin; he was flesh and stubble and his slightly sour odor. He was a thick, veiny penis, uncircumcised like Guy’s, and a loose sack of balls. He was a bald spot and bad teeth. He was so physical despite his slightness pumping Guy full of hot spurts of vitality.