Edmund White - Our Young Man

When he told Pierre-Georges about it that afternoon during their daily phone call, Pierre-Georges said he found that “disgusting.”

After Labor Day, Guy was due to go to Paris and Milan for work. Fred was sad, especially since he’d not been able to secure a trip with him or plans of any sort to be together. Guy was also beginning to see a young man, Andrés, who was a Ph.D. student of thirty at Rutgers, a Colombian he’d met on the beach. Andrés was hanging around the pool for hours and often stayed for lunch or dinner. Fred had hired a full-time Sri Lankan cook named Nili, who lived in the maid’s room with his wife and four small children. The family stayed out of the way, though they probably had the run of the house when no one was around. They were all a bit too servile for Fire Island, but at least they no longer bowed or performed that namaste thing.

Guy and Andrés spent hours by the pool or on the couch looking through expensive art books Guy had bought for Andrés. He was getting a doctorate in art history, something to do with that fraud Dalí. Andrés had a soft breathy way of talking. They seemed smitten with each other, and more than once Fred had seen a big erection in Andrés’s green Speedo as he stared at Guy. Fred had never suggested Guy take a vow of chastity or fidelity; he didn’t need to. He knew Guy was scared shitless of this gay cancer thing as long as it lasted, maybe another year. Fred knew that if Guy hadn’t been so bored by the Hamptons he would have never dared to come back to Fire Island.

What could Fred do to secure his future with Guy? If he bought the house, they would at least have that in common, and Guy wouldn’t be able to exclude him, Fred, from a place he’d paid for. But he couldn’t really afford it, not if he was going to produce that new hip-hop film in the coming year. And then Ceil was taking him to the cleaners. He didn’t want to be forced to declare bankruptcy again. Fred could sell the New York apartment and rent a studio, but that didn’t make sense. Guy might despise him if he saw how abject or poor he’d become. Why buy a showplace on the beach for a kid you’ve only fucked once?

He watched Guy and Andrés flirting with each other from deck chairs around the pool, Andrés’s green Speedo always filled with an erection no matter how lofty the talk about surrealism might get to be. They were both dark and hairy, though Guy had those small intense eyes like bullet holes drilled through a sheet and Andrés had large green eyes and a smile that was beguiling but slightly tarnished and a dime-sized bald spot. Andrés, though Colombian, could speak some French (his parents were both profs in Medillín and his mother taught French and Italian), and when they were murmuring together they leaned in to each other until their bodies almost touched.

The Elvis Presley look-alike thug stopped by for a free drink. His body was white and hairless and out of shape, but he had an unusual degree of confidence and he zeroed right in on Fred. His name was Gerritt, for some unlikely reason, and he sat next to Fred on the deck and began to feel himself up in his canary-yellow bikini. Fred’s eyes kept darting back and forth from Guy and Andrés on the other side of the pool, laughing together with obscene complacency, and the rapidly growing anaconda in Gerritt’s bikini. Gerritt said, “Neat tattoo,” but then he realized he was staring at burst blue veins on Fred’s arm and looked away. Gerritt sipped a doobie that some hanger-on had assembled and leaned in and whispered with his gin-soaked breath, “I’d fuck you for two hundred bucks.” Fred didn’t say anything, but he just wipered his hand in a signal suggesting erasure or “not for me.” He was offended that Gerritt assumed he had to pay for it. Gerritt got up out of the deck chair with some difficulty and stumbled off drunkenly with not so much as a “so long,” headed for the Meat Rack, no doubt, and an afternoon freebie with a young size queen. (What was the saying, there were two kinds of gays — size queens and liars?) Fred couldn’t help reflecting that he could get laid cheap with any of these fellows around the pool — cheap or gratis, since several of them wanted to be in the movies.

That night Fred got sloppy drunk on vodka and tonic and headed for the Meat Rack. He loved (as one loves slow, sad music) the sound of the surf pounding on the sand, the feel of the salty wind blowing through his clothes, and the look of men darting through the low bushes and pausing to glance back. Fred guessed he must look good in his tight jeans and plain white T-shirt, which turned his new pectorals into bluish, glowing dry-ice mounds. He was in such despair as he mentally pictured Guy and Andrés nodding and laughing together, Andrés shamelessly displaying the bend sinister of his hard-on. And then that Gerritt insinuating that Fred was so obviously a john!

Fred was drunk and stumbling through the sand down unmarked little paths. Next thing he knew, he was in the big warm embrace of a giant in a scratchy wool shirt who put a yard of tongue down Fred’s throat, and then they were groping each other. Fred needed his hands and kisses but worried they might belong to a B-list man past his prime, but then the man turned him around and inserted a wet finger followed by a slick prick into his ass. A few thrusts later and the man had squirted, heaved a sigh, pulled out, and disappeared into the brush.

Fred sobered and had the panicky thought: I’ve just signed up for a death sentence in exchange for five dirty minutes in the dark with a stranger who wasn’t even hung .

The next day Fred felt lonely, humiliated, and deeply repentant. Although Guy didn’t know anything about his visit to the Meat Rack, Fred was as guilt-ridden as if his foolish submission had been thoroughly documented on film. Without thinking it out, he made an appointment with the real estate agent. As he walked to his office at the harbor on a late August day that was sultry and windless, past houses that for the moment were for the most part deserted (it was Wednesday and the garbage was smelling foul in the heat — it wouldn’t be collected till Friday), he wondered if this was a terrible idea. He couldn’t really afford it and his flushed face burned with shame and anxiety.

It was all over in five minutes. He bought the house and wrote out a check for a down payment of $250,000.

Just as Guy was about to leave the Pines (Andrés had decided to go along for the ride to JFK) and was handing Fred the key to the rented house, Fred squeezed his hand shut around the key and said, “Now it’s yours.”

“What is?” Guy asked with a sweet, dazed smile; he was mildly confused, but his smile anticipated an as-yet-unspecified happy surprise.

“The house is yours for next summer. I bought it.”

“You did? You’re not joking?” The uniformed chauffeur had come for Guy’s bags. They’d walk to the harbor, take a waiting boat to the waiting limousine.

“I’ve never been more serious,” Fred said. “I hope we’ll have many a happy summer here together,” he added. “I bought it yesterday.”

Guy grabbed him by the neck and gazed into his eyes for a second.

Fred said in a low voice, “I hope you’ll invite me out once in a while.”

Guy said, “Silly.” He never knew if that word was a good translation for stupide , just as he never knew if naughty meant mauvais . He’d once made Americans laugh when he had said, “Hitler was naughty.” Andrés was standing off to one side, his head lowered deferentially, as if Guy were receiving a benediction from Signor Fred, their venerable host.

Guy held Fred’s head between his hands and kissed him on the lips, no tongue: The $2.2 million kiss, Fred thought bitterly. A second later, Andrés, slender and elegant and very tanned in a crisp white shirt, open at the neck and the sleeves rolled back, hurried off down the boardwalk behind the uniformed chauffeur and beside Guy, who looked back and blew a kiss.