Edmund White - Our Young Man

The next few days Fred was in a state of anguish over Guy. Had Andrés flown off with him to Paris? These grad students seemed so idle, and Andrés was always resting. Once Fred had tried to fill in his résumé in his mind and noticed a blank of a whole year. “What did you do in 1982?” he asked. Andrés replied innocently, “I rested.”

And then Fred obsessed over the risky sex he’d had in the bushes. He kept feeling the glands in his neck and under his arms and looking for telltale brown patches on his legs. There was no test for gay cancer and no treatment. Oh, what a fool he’d been! No wonder Guy was so puritanical; you couldn’t trust anyone, least of all a sleazeball in the bushes.

He couldn’t think of anyone he could discuss his twin obsessions with, Guy and GRID, other than the baron. They had dinner in the baron’s library, where his new lover the antique dealer had installed a tapestry of a bewigged king on horseback pointing gleefully to a distant city on the banks of a river—“in honor of a peace treaty,” Édouard explained vaguely. The room, which Fred remembered as white and sterile but spacious, now seemed crowded with heavy window treatments, potted palms, lots of bric-a-brac, spotlit oil paintings of smiling despots, and even a fire, though it was only late September and still warm out.

“Guess your new lover is responsible for all this?” Fred asked, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Classy.”

“Yes, Will has worked miracles,” Édouard said with a timid smile.

“Guess you have all the luck with the young boys — first Guy and now Will.”

“Boys!” Édouard said, guffawing into his sole amandine. (Even the plates looked old and crazed and stained, Louis somebody.) “Guy’s no boy! Walt snooped around and found some pictures of Guy in French Vogue going back to the early seventies. We figured out he must be nearly forty if he’s a day.”

“But he looks so young.”

“He must have a terrible painting in the attic.”

But Fred was too appalled to laugh. He felt someone had socked him in the stomach. He began to sweat and breathe faster, as if he might panic any moment. He’d been fooled, made to look a fool. Panic or maybe vomit. No one pulled the wool over his eyes. He was the cynic, the skeptic, he was fraud-proof. And yet, and yet, he’d been completely hoodwinked. And all that money! He’d spent so much money on Guy, the house — and all for a forty-year-old man who must clip the hair in his nose or yank it out and set off a fit of sneezing. A middle-aged man who’s probably down to jerking off every other day. A weary man of forty who’s already seen everything come around twice, who let me fuck him that once in a hole where whole armies of men have doubtless passed. What a pretentious queen, pretending to be fresh and naïve, whereas he’s long past his sell-by date. I could have been investing all this time and energy and money in a real kid who might have fallen for me, who wouldn’t have known how to work me so expertly. Kids are emotional and reckless, whereas a man of forty is cold and calculating. I’ve been duped.

“Guy has really upset me,” Fred said, choking up. “I’m afraid I had unsafe sex. Not with Guy — but with a stranger.”

“They say you should know your partner’s name. Do you know the man’s name, the man who you were … indiscreet with?”

“No, it was in the bushes, in the Meat Rack.”

“Oh, dear.” The baron patted his hand. “I’m no one to talk. I specialize in anonymous sex. Though Will is making me mend my ways.”

“Do you think we’re all doomed?”

“Surely not. We eat well, we exercise, we never have a venereal disease for long. We have regular checkups — don’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t trust my gay doctor. He’s a feel-good doctor and a major masochist.”

“Really?” the baron asked, rustling his neck like a mating partridge. “What kind of masochist is he?”

“He had his testicles removed by a surgeon as his master looked on.”

The baron’s eyes glittered. “That’s irreversible,” he said with satisfaction. He blinked and said, “In any event, I believe this gay cancer only hits men who’ve had repeated venereal diseases. Their immune systems are compromised, overloaded. We’re in no danger, especially a straight guy like you, I mean ex-straight.”

“There we were, Guy and me, surrounded by some of the great beauties of the day, and both of us as wise as virgins. We were both afraid of GRID.”

“What?”

“Gay-related immune deficiency.”

Édouard nodded vigorously.

They went quiet after Will came in wearing beige calfskin suede trousers molded to his muscular thighs and butt, the fruits of thousands of squats. He seemed a bit drunk and more expansive than he’d been the only other time Fred had met him. He leaned down and pecked Édouard on the forehead and reached deliberately to pinch Édouard’s tit through the soft blue Egyptian cotton of his monogrammed shirt. The baron winced for a second and then smiled timidly up at his young-master-antique-dealer. “It’s nice to know a cutie like you is my property,” Will said. The baron darted a nervous glance at his guest — and then smiled at his owner. “Yes,” he said awkwardly, “very nice indeed.” He was such a social creature, produced by centuries of breeding, but nothing in his rich experience had prepared him for this moment. (He’d never mixed his evenings on the rack with entertaining his friends.)

Back home, surrounded by staring, life-sized Buddhas, Fred made himself a scotch on the rocks and nervously rubbed his fingers together. Ceil had always hated that tic, the constant whispering sound of his fingers, and had put her hand over his at the movies when he started “pilling.”

In Paris, Guy felt relieved. He could speak the language with all its nuances and not endlessly play the part of the interesting foreigner. At the same time his accent didn’t prompt a discussion. He was just another Frenchman. He had lost his primary accomplishment — the ability to speak English (which he spoke better than he understood) — and the oddity of his identity, of being French in America.

He was just one more handsome man in a whole city of handsome men — handsome if you liked skinny guys with big noses. The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other’s shoes than their sexual availability. It was raining a cold rain but never for long, and you could duck from one awning to the next or from an expensive café to an even more expensive shop. It was hard to believe that just two weeks before, he’d been lying in the warm September sun in a deck chair. Now he’d been repatriated to Paris’s eternal mists.

Andrés had come with him and was staying with him at the Crillon in a room that looked out on the place de la Concorde, a “square” only in the abstract sense that it was a huge space excavated out of the city around it but was curiously open on three sides.

Andrés liked to have sex four or five times a day. Maybe because Guy had resisted him all summer long and had just stared at that big erection in the green Speedo, now that it was released it was relentless. They kissed so much that Guy’s lips were red and swollen and he had to shy away — he had to be camera-ready in the morning.

But it was pure pleasure to lie in bed with this lithe young man who was so in love. He had a patch of long black hair like an emblem on his lean, defined chest. Guy could circle his waist with two hands. He was as elongated as a Christ carved out of wax but as flexible as a whip. He had a vaguely acrid odor, as if his deodorant weren’t strong enough or as if the hot, empty oven were burning spilled food from the day before.