Edmund White - Our Young Man

“Oh, baby, what terrible news! Well, we saw it coming. He just wouldn’t stop smoking—” And then Fred cut himself off, knowing that it was not in the best of taste to blame the dying. “I wish I could be there with you. I always assumed your father must be in his fifties, since I thought you were in your twenties. But now I know your true age, I guess your dad must be—”

“He’s seventy-three,” Guy said coldly, then he let a long silence install itself over the crackling wire. Guy had learned how eloquently uncomfortable a silence could be.

“Well, that’s young,” Fred babbled, completely disconcerted and aware that Andrés could probably divine Fred’s faux pas from Guy’s end of the conversation. Or if not, Guy would repeat it all to him soon enough. Best to change the subject. “So, how’s the work?” Fred asked brightly.

“I’ve called it all off.”

“Oh, no.”

“Would you have me prancing on a runway while my father was dying?”

They hung up a moment later and Guy, who could see another of Andrés’s erections developing, raced about packing a few things, checking the train schedule with the concierge, and then phoning his mother to confirm when he’d arrive. At least the seriousness and urgency of the moment made Andrés go soft, though he prolonged their “final” embrace and became erect again. Guy was just a bit disgusted and he did a quick inventory of what he’d packed while feigning rapture in Andrés’s arms.

His first-class seat on the train was comfortable and Guy liked the smell of the carpet, which must have been steam-cleaned recently. He had remembered to stamp his ticket in the machine before he boarded and now the conductor was nowhere in sight. There was only one other man at the far end of the car, reading under a spotlight.

Guy was full of resentment against his parents for some reason, as if they were interrupting his new life (not so new now) — his New York pampered life of wealth and no responsibilities and lots of sex and eternal youth. They were dragging him back to the dirty lace curtains masking the windows giving directly onto the bleak, usually empty street, the view of the dirty white and gray uninterrupted facades of the houses across the way almost never lit from within, ghost houses in a ghost town. They were pulling him back to the space heater glowing red and then dimming, the freezing bedroom with the torn toile de jouy wallpaper and the matching slipcover on the one armchair, the dingy bathroom with the leprous mirror above the old-fashioned sink, and the mildewed shower curtain shrouding a shower no bigger than a sentry box. He couldn’t bear the ugliness and the poverty, the mouse-shit-in-the-corner horror of it all, the reminder that ordinary people get old and die, that they get thicker and stiffer with age, that they gasp for air.

He went into the large bathroom on the train and locked the door and masturbated. Logically more sex was the last thing he should want, but he felt compelled to spurt, gicler , as perhaps a way of reclaiming himself from his importunate lover and from the cold neutering embrace of his parents. His mind raced between remembered images and those he made up as he sought to keep the divining rod bobbing and dipping above the buried stream of hot liquid. When it finally surfaced he was only half hard; jerking off had been more therapeutic than erotic.

His mother was wearing a cheap scarf and her old tan raincoat and snow-stained flats as she stood out of the rain outside at the train station beneath the metal awning. Everything in France was so organized. He’d told her which train car he’d be on, and here she was in the exact place and at the exact time. She looked pale and as untweezered as a nun. She ignored his flowing, fashionable coat and his dark silk suit from Browns in London and his new Vuitton luggage; she clung to him fiercely in one quick embrace and he felt a reproach in it, as if he’d handed a copy of Vogue to Medea.

His mother drove them swiftly and surely to the house as if she daren’t spend an extra minute away from her dying husband. “I’m so glad you made it in time.”

Guy said, “Is he that bad?”

His mother glanced away from the wet road unspooling before their headlights, illuminating corners of familiar old barns and houses as they swerved around corners. “Yes,” she said with simple finality.

“Is Robert here? Tiphaine?”

“Yes, Robert drove up from Vienne, where he’s working in a garage, and Tiphaine took the train down from Lyon, where she’s a court stenographer.”

Guy thought of things to ask about his siblings but he didn’t feel that sort of chitchat would be appropriate; he also didn’t want to draw attention to how out of touch he’d become with the basic facts about his family. So he just looked out the window at the rain, the passing lava-black buildings, and the glassy eyes of an attentive dog standing in the drizzle. There was the Dumoulins’ dingy house and their old trailer parked on the front lawn. “Do you have a full-time nurse?” Guy asked, thinking that was the kind of no-nonsense question a real person might ask — his brother, for instance.

His father was so pale he looked as if he’d been copied in limestone. He was inside his oxygen tent dozing and his face was blurred behind the clear plastic. Guy didn’t know if it was better to let him sleep or to tell him he’d come home to see him. His mother solved the problem by saying, “ Chéri, notre Guy est là, ” which caused his father’s eyes to flutter open and his lips to produce a sketch of a smile. He’d gotten so much thinner and his features were stronger, more marked, so that he appeared younger in spite of his pallor. Guy could see that he’d once been handsome, the way he looked in that old picture from the fifties.

Guy realized he’d always been afraid of his father and now he tensed up, which was absurd faced with this pallid, skinny copy of his heavy-drinking parent, this shrunken facsimile smiling his sketchy little smile. “ Bonjour, Papa, ” Guy said in a low voice the way he imagined Robert must sound. (His voice had always been much lower than Guy’s; when they were teenagers Guy could hear him in the next room talking to himself, forcing his voice down a few notes.) His father reached with his nearly transparent hand for Guy’s — something he’d never done before.

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.