Edmund White - Our Young Man

Guy was secretly thrilled by the blend of gay and straight, black and white, European and American, old and young at the Club Sept and the oddly shaped asymmetrical dishes, spotlit bouquets on each table and the towering wine glasses on green, twisted stems. It seemed very contemporary to him. All of his anguish about whether he liked boys or girls was suddenly resolved and pacified in the dizzying omnisexual pandemonium of the Sept.

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbor boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth. Dear God, please God, don’t let me join that man’s race of the damned . But now here at the Sept he could see handsome men in coat and tie kissing at the bar, surrounded by their stylish, indifferent women friends.

Guy kept looking at his long, nervous, freshly manicured hand set off by the black sleeve above the heavy white linen cuff pierced by Pierre-Georges’s borrowed silver cuff links. (“Silver in the summer, gold in the winter,” Pierre-Georges had declared.) The girls, Guy noticed, ate large green salads of mâche , no bread, and only played with their noisettes de veau and drank just one glass of white wine each, though he couldn’t resist taking a bite out of the delicious hard roll positioned directly on the napery, even when all three girls and Pierre-Georges raised an eyebrow at his lack of discipline. They excused themselves one after another and Guy wondered if they were vomiting their dinners. (He’d heard of such things.)

It was an exciting evening. Some young men at the bar stared over at their table and murmured remarks to one another with hard, mobile mouths. Had they recognized him? A bloated, loud American, stumbling drunkenly, shouting English, was swiftly escorted out to the street. For many long minutes he kept pounding on the street door in vain. “Jeem Morrison,” Pierre-Georges whispered. “Sad. He’s lost his looks— bouffi .” Bloated.

A month later Morrison was dead and buried in Père Lachaise, the two moles had been burned painlessly off Guy’s chest, and he was successfully weaned from cigarettes after fighting a real struggle (and gaining ten pounds). Pierre-Georges had helped him lose the weight by feeding him amphetamines and had finagled him some very lucrative contracts. Guy had learned that though Pierre-Georges liked to be seen in public with very young models and pretty ephebes, he preferred rough middle-aged brutes in bed whom he dragged home from a bar on the rue Keller. Pierre-Georges encouraged fashion insiders to think Guy was his lover, all the while protesting Guy was “hopelessly straight” and affianced to a silly girl back home in Clermont-Ferrand. Word got out that Guy was as heterosexual as the American guys Bruce Weber was flying over to the Hôtel Meurice and photographing horsing around in the Bois de Boulogne. Zizi Jeanmaire — her spiky hair dyed freshly black — stared at Guy meaningfully over dinner. “He’s not straight,” she said dismissively on her way out, as if no normal man could resist her.

A young American photographer, who lived at the end of a lane on the Left Bank, not far from the offices of Le Monde , invited him to pose for a catalogue of ski gear — he even had a simulated, snow-covered slope all set up. The photographer, Hal, was a joli laid , not really handsome, with kinky blond hair, big lugubrious eyes of faded blue, big dumpling ears, but he’d done everything to make his look streamlined, modern, effective; his hair was tamed with brilliantine, it seemed, and he lifted weights and was wearing a tight T-shirt to prove it. He had a collection of plates made from broken, colorful shards, which he called pique assiette , and the soaring walls of his studio were painted green in such a way as to look smudged and to leave traces of the brushwork.

They had to work quickly before the snow melted and there were lots of clothes to get through. There was no one doing hair and makeup, nor a dresser, but Guy was a good sport and half the time he was in his underwear as he changed.

Hal was unsmiling (did he think that made him more soigné , or was he really bored by life?) but he was friendly enough, though he stared too much and took too long to answer questions in his deep voice. It couldn’t be a matter of his comprehension — he’d lived here five years, he said, and his French was good. He didn’t even have much of an accent.

And then, as Guy was getting dressed to leave, Hal said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do some nudes. You’ll be happy someday to have a record of your beauty, your youth.” When he saw a hesitant look on Guy’s face, Hal said, “They’ll be just for us. I’ll give you the prints. And nothing pornographic.”

A large brown envelope arrived in the mail saying NE PAS PLIER (Don’t Bend) and reinforced with stiff cardboard. Inside, in glassine envelopes, were several full-color nudes of himself posed against the snowbank. He was naked except for a pair of skis he was holding straight up and a stocking cap. Guy looked at the pictures through a loupe. His uncircumcised penis was large enough. His chest was hairy and he had a clear treasure trail pointing down from his navel to his crotch. He liked the way he appeared, though he worried his forearms looked too small.

Three months later Pierre-Georges steamed into Guy’s studio without knocking and slapped down on the kitchen table Guy’s full-page nude in the American gay magazine Blueboy . “Slut, you’ve just sunk your career,” he sputtered. “And it doesn’t even look big.” It took a long dinner and four glasses of Bordeaux for him to go from sputtering to simmering.

“You’ve spoiled all our good work,” he said in a drained, tragic voice. “The whole game with models is never to let the public see everything. Make them dream, make them imagine! Let them see a haunch, not a strange little penis.” He said the harsh slang word bitte .

Guy told him the whole story of Hal’s treachery and Pierre-Georges hissed, “Idiot!” Then he relented and said, “Well, it’s an American magazine. No one here will ever see it and he called you Ralph, of all things.” He reflected. “But that is where we want to sell you, America. That’s where the money is.”

Guy had a new thought: “Anyone who buys this magazine shares our vice, and who would admit that?”

“I’m not talking about confession but about gossip.”

Guy longed for a best friend, a confidant. He liked walking everywhere in Paris despite the sudden heat, but he wanted to discuss things with a friend, male or female, and his solitude made him melancholy. He looked at store windows on the Left Bank and across the river on the rue Saint-Honoré and tried to decide whether he liked best Hugo Boss or Kenzo or Lanvin. He coveted a pale gray silk bathrobe from Lanvin but he rebelled at the $1,000 price tag: He laughed when the disdainful clerk at Hermès told him the small pigskin valise with the brass fittings cost $6,000. He wasn’t very sure about money. He didn’t know how long people would want to hire him. He was a popular runway model but he’d have to wait until September for the spring collections to work again. The booking agent at Vogue liked him but editorial didn’t pay much, and besides, they didn’t want the same male faces to become too familiar to their readers. He had a big, well-paying yogurt account for print, and then he did a commercial for Brie where he had to dress as a starving young monk who fell on the cheese the second the older, chubbier monks left him alone. That spot ran ten times a day on TV for a month and the residuals kept rolling in.