Edmund White - Our Young Man

“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 off 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 .