Edmund White - Our Young Man

“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.

Guy’s mother hadn’t expected him to come back for the funeral. Pierre-Georges had arranged for a florist to deliver a big, standing wreath of red and white carnations and a blue silk ribbon stretched across its empty thorax reading, “Didier remembered always in the loving hearts of his family.” Guy was shocked that Pierre-Georges had filed away his father’s first name, Didier. Pierre-Georges was impeccable!

Guy spoke to his mother every day. She sounded subdued and a bit worried. She’d never written a check in her life. Tiphaine was teaching her how to keep a checkbook and work out a budget. Guy resented this intimate brush with poverty and mortality. He knew that someday soon he’d be old and infirm — but he repeated the words “old and infirm” precisely because they were a formula and held the reality at bay. They were prophylactic words, a sting of the same venom, an antidote like homeopathic medicine. His kind of Buddhism instructed you to live in the moment, he vaguely remembered, and that suited him fine. If you chanted twice a day and made love three times and always wore beautiful clothes and stayed away from dreary people, you could just hover in the present, couldn’t you? Or had he gotten that completely wrong?

Fred announced that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, but it wasn’t always linked to AIDS, it was something older Jews and Italians got just naturally, older Mediterranean men, but it used to be very rare and it had been seen just in Jersey nursing homes or in Florida retirement villages. “We’re going to beat this thing,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ve got the best goddamn team of doctors on the globe, the real McCoy.” Then he thought about it for a day and he phoned: “But what if I infected you that one time I fucked you?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Guy said. “I haven’t had any other STDs, so my immune system hasn’t been compromised. And besides, you came on my stomach, not in my ass. I don’t think it’s in precum. Anyway, we only did it once — and you need multiple exposures, don’t you?”

“Hey, maybe you gave it to me,” Fred said. “That’s a possibility, isn’t it? Should I sue you? Can the top get it?”

“Not usually,” Guy said. “Anyway, don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’re as strong as an ox.”

“Do you know if you’re clean?”

“Clean?”

“I guess I’m not clean now.”

“Don’t worry. Do you have any other symptoms?”

“A tubercular cough. Night sweats. Swollen lymph glands. Weight loss. I’m a goner, right?”

“I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“C’mon!” Fred shouted into the receiver. “You’re supposed to reassure me,” he said, disgusted.

“What do the doctors say, the real McCoys?”

“They don’t know shit. They don’t even know for sure what causes it, do they? Poppers? Mustaches? Pork?”

“How about sex?”

“Isn’t it ironic that I came out now? It’s like moving to London during the Great Plague.”

Guy wondered, could he have given GRID to Fred? Could Fred have given it to him?

Guy promised to shop for and microwave him dinner that very evening, something nourishing, chicken Parmigianino and broccoli, say.

Fred said, “The house is a mess. There is an inch of dust on the fuckin’ Buddhas.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It’ll be great to see you. Don’t be offended if I don’t eat much. And if I look like hell. Is Andrew coming?” That was what he called Andrés.

“No, no, I’ll come alone. You probably just have a bad case of flu. It’s the season.”

But Fred really did look frail and diminished when he opened the door, a little defeated old man. He was in a ratty old bathrobe over baggy boxer shorts and a torn T-shirt marked “Colorado State,” where he’d studied and wrestled a century ago. “Don’t touch me!” Fred warned. “Don’t kiss me. I may be contagious. Disinfect your hands when you leave here. You really should be wearing a mask.”

“I’ll do no such thing, let me hug you.”

“Guy, I’m not fooling around, stay away.”

But Guy did hug him and felt how skinny he was under the robe, his ribs as articulated as a washboard or a xylophone. He smelled bad, like dirt and old sweat.

Guy worked hard at being cheerful; it was December, and Fred was trembling slightly like an expensive dog, though the apartment was toasty and smelled like sandalwood for some reason, maybe joss sticks burned before the idol.

Once the food was twirled and warmed in the microwave, Guy watched Fred eat, or rather dabble his fork in the sticky contents of his plate.

“Don’t use so much salt,” Guy said.

“Fuck it! I’ll be dead long before a salt buildup in my arteries. Nothing has any taste.”

Guy was staring at the quarter-sized brown spot on Fred’s thigh where his robe had fallen open. Fred intercepted his glance and said, “Pretty bad, huh?”

Guy knew from his mother that you couldn’t discuss mortality simply, nobly, honestly with the dying or the mourners, that the visitor was obliged to be cheerful. He also knew that Fred worshipped him so much he’d believe anything Guy would say. “You’ll outlive us all,” Guy promised. “You’re an ox.”

“I feel more like a calf being led to slaughter.”

Guy could see the doomed look on Fred’s face, like the pallid, resigned look of a drowning friend only a few meters out to sea but caught in an inescapable undertow. Fred had already given up. “What are my kids going to say? ‘Daddy, we told you so.’ What did I have the face-lift and the tummy tuck for? The mortician?”

“Stop, Fred, you’ll feel fine in a week.”

“Really?”

“Really. Trust me. A week.”

“Carbolic acid,” Fred said. “Wash all the exposed surfaces of your skin with carbolic acid.”

“Shut up,” Guy said playfully, and then he courageously embraced the sick man again. “I’ll be back again tomorrow.”