Edmund White - Our Young Man

The fall menswear collections were being shown next week in Milan and Guy had a go-see with the new Armani representative in New York. It would be the usual cattle call. Guy could picture it all now, the way the boys, these angular giraffes, would be coiffed backstage with curlers and blow dryers, how makeup artists would swoop around them, highlighting their cheekbones (which already looked ready to explode through their skin), drawing bluish shadows under their heavily kohled eyes, retracing their lips with a vampirish color stick, and then the clothes, the sacred clothes, so much more important than the people wearing them, would be taken out of their sealed and numbered dry-cleaning bags. The boys would be lined up in their preposterous boots and leggings and velvet vests and jewelry, and the designer would fix each boy, spray a curl in place, unbutton a shirt one notch, turn up a collar, like an anxious chef standing at the kitchen door and arranging with greasy fingers the roast chicken to advantage before the grand presentation. They were all just chicken breasts under white sauce and bewigged with parsley.

The thought of trotting down the runway one more time as the buyers plied their paper fans against the stifling heat of the overhead lights and the bad but trendy rock music blared forth and the excited assistants applauded while the giraffes swarmed the runway for the finale and the modest couturier wore a shockingly conventional dark suit from Savile Row as he humbly took his bow, looking like a CEO or politician, a member of a different species from the models, and blew a kiss toward the buyer from Barneys — that prospect repelled Guy. He didn’t want to go. Luckily the Armani representative didn’t choose him; he told Pierre-Georges that Armani wanted more “ethnics” this year for his safari collection. Pierre-Georges was depressed, then frightened. “It’s the beginning of the end. We’re too old.” Guy noticed the diplomatic “we.”

Marty sent him the fully executed deed to the Fire Island house. That day, when Guy visited Fred, he thanked him again and offered him the chance again of leaving it to his sons.

“Why?” Fred asked. “They’ve never been out there and would be scared to go. That’s where we were the happiest. It’s sacred to us.”

Fred’s arms, torso, face, were covered with black spots — KS. Luckily, he couldn’t see; he could nurse his illusions, with Guy’s help, that finally he was an A-list gay. Fred kept drifting off, but then he sat up with a sudden urgency: “There’s a new test at last to see if you’ve got the virus. Guy, I want you to take it, pronto. I know you’re very careful, whatever that means, but you’ve got to take care of yourself. I’d hate to think I’d given it to you. Promise you’ll take the test.”

“Can I do it right here in the hospital?”

“You bet.”

“What’ll I do if I’m positive? Who will take care of me?”

“Andrew?”

Guy reminded him that Andrés was in prison.

“Peter?” Fred said, meaning Pierre-George.

For a while Fred rambled on about Rock Hudson and how he’d “popularized” AIDS. “I wonder if those French doctors can help him. Imagine renting a private jet to take him to Paris — that must have set him back an arm and a leg.” Guy didn’t understand the reference to an arm and a leg — was he just raving? Amputation fantasies?

Suddenly Fred’s attention concentrated and he asked almost slyly, “If you do have AIDS, have you thought who you’d leave the house to? My mother used to say, ‘Never leave your jewelry to someone who doesn’t have someone you know to leave it to — you don’t want some distant cousin of your friend to end up with your stuff.”

Guy said he was leaving everything to his own mother.

Fred smiled. “There’s a good boy. She’d need it if you died.”

Then Fred started talking disjointedly about his mother, long since dead.

When the neurologist came by, a German with an accent, a white beard, and a stomach, he made cheerful comments to his team and to Fred, who didn’t exactly seem to know who he was. He was leading six neurology residents on rounds and he invited one young woman to examine the patient. She hammered Fred’s elbows and knees with a mallet and looked at his eyes and tongue and poked him with her gloved hands. She asked him about his stool. She then said to her professor, “The patient shows signs of increased CMV infection, though reflexes remain stable. The liver is not hypertrophied. Patient’s cognitive functions seem disoriented.” The professor thanked Fred for cooperating — and suddenly they were all gone, leaving behind an audible silence.

“Sounds bad, huh?” Fred asked.

“About the same,” Guy said with placid reassurance. “They were all so earnest.”

“What was that about cognitive functions? Have I become dim-witted?”

“Not at all.” Guy was angry that the resident had discussed Fred in front of him. He felt certain that would never happen in France — another example of American barbarism.

At the gym that evening he didn’t see the twins, but the next day they were there. He was determined to speak to them, if only to ask something like when they’d be finished with the barbell. One of them left early, which seemed odd. The one who remained came right up to Guy and said, “You look familiar.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Guy replied with a smile.

The adolescent had a confused look in his eye but a brave, radiant smile on his lips as if he were determined to be in on the joke, mysterious as it might be. It was the same mixture of confusion and courage Guy had seen on the faces of the deaf.

They decided to spot each other while lifting a heavy barbell during a bench press. “Gee,” Guy said, “you’re much stronger than you look.”

The twin smiled ruefully. “Do I look that out of shape?”

“Not at all.” He looked him in the eye and said in a softer, sexier voice, “Not at all.”

The twin had to adjust something in his jockstrap. He lowered his eyes and blushed a blood-red catastrophe, a total epidermal confession. And Guy felt a surge of power — what did people say, of agency? — once again. He felt triumphant that he could excite this boy. He was enthralled by his unique beauty. (He shouldn’t say unique, since he knew it was twinned.)

Soon the other twin emerged from the locker room, showered and dressed, trailing a pine scent, unsmiling, one could almost say shy. He bade his brother farewell in a whispered mumble and was gone. He didn’t look at Guy.

“I don’t even know your name. I’m Guy.”

“Is that spelled as in ‘a guy’?”

“Maybe I should just say that.”

“Never!” the boy exclaimed. “You’re a foreigner?”

“French. Parisian.”

“You don’t meet many of those. Maybe you do in New York. We just moved here a week ago. We just moved here from Ely, Minnesota. I’m Kevin. My brother’s Chris.”

“I’ve never heard of Ely.”

“It’s just a small town in the north of Minnesota, near the Canadian border. It’s where people get outfitted for canoe and camping trips into the Quetico-Superior country, which is on the Canadian side.”

“Sounds cold.”

“It is!” Kevin exclaimed excitedly, as if to encourage what might be a string of lucky guesses. When one of the other men working out looked up and frowned at the offending chitchat, Kevin blushed again, though pink, not red, this time. Social chatter not connected with working out was looked at askance, as in a library.

“Right now it’s thirty-seven degrees in Ely. That’s what my mom said. We’re outfitters, right in the heart of town on Camp Street,” he whispered, looking around nervously.

“Are you foreigners, too? You don’t look American.”