Edmund White - Our Young Man

When they were about to pay at the cash register, Kevin said, “Don’t look now, but that old guy in the corner bugs the shit out of me. He’s always cruising me, and I’m sorry, but I hate old trolls.”

Guy glanced rapidly at the troll and said, “But Kevin, that man’s not old. He couldn’t be more than thirty.”

“He gives me the creeps. I guess I’m weird, but I’ve never even kissed anyone over twenty-five. By the way, Chris thinks you’re older than we are.”

Guy said, “I’m certainly older than you. I’m twenty-five. Too old to kiss?”

“Gee, I’m surprised,” Kevin said. “I told Chris I thought you were more like twenty-two.”

Guy became worried that Kevin might ask around the fashion world and find out he was nearly forty, so he said, “By the way, I haven’t been working much as a model, so I’m looking for a job as a waiter or a sales clerk.” Guy wasn’t sure a vendeur was called a “sales clerk.” He didn’t want Kevin to think of him as a rich forty-year-old model with two houses, but rather as a poor kid like himself just starting out.

“That really surprises me. I’m sure I’ve seen you in ads and commercials.”

“Nope,” Guy said. “Just one peanuts commercial two years ago.”

“Excellent,” Kevin said, using the new vogue word.

Kevin began almost instantly to treat Guy with a suggestion of tenderness and less admiration. For him, perhaps, Guy was no longer a successful grown-up but another beginner struggling to survive. He was easier for Kevin to care about — and Kevin insisted they split the check for coffee and cherry pie right down the middle.

For the first time, as they left the coffee shop Kevin put his arm around Guy’s waist. It occurred to Guy that Kevin might be active in bed. He was startled by the boy’s friendly gesture. He must be lonely, Guy thought.

The next morning when Guy swung by to see Fred, he wasn’t there and his plants and flowers and get-well cards had all been cleared out and the bed was freshly made. The room was in a sort of twilight, lit only by the hall light coming through the door. Had they taken him to the emergency room? Stripped of its colorful ornaments, the room looked smaller, like a cell, and the narrow bed with its crisp sheets and hospital corners looked like one of those restraining cots used for lethal injections.

Blinded by tears and confused, Guy stumbled out into the hallway and saw one of his favorite nurses, the Seventh-Day Adventist with her carefully braided hair. “Oh, honey,” she said, opening her arms. He let her hold him, though she was so much shorter and stouter. “Your poor Mr. Fred passed during the night about three A.M. I was the one who discovered him. He may have had a heart attack. He looked startled and was almost sitting up. He eyes buggin’ out and his mouth open. Those vulture sons were here by eight and put all his belongings in a big black plastic garbage bag. They were gone by eight-thirty after they made sure there were no checked valuables.”

“Valuables?”

“Watch, ring, that sort of thing. They did cry a little. And then they were squabblin’ with each other. You were his real son.”

That thought made Guy cry again, and the nurse, who smelled of vanilla extract dabbed right out of the bottle, held him again in her short arms. “You’re skinny, boy,” she said.

Fred had been such a strong personality, so full of noise and vulgarity and longing, that his abrupt absence left a roaring vacuum behind, the sort you see in a movie when the villain punctures the shell of the airplane and the passengers are all sucked out into the freezing stratosphere. Guy kept thinking he should do something for Fred, that there was some ritual he was neglecting or some form to fill out. But there was nothing to do. No duties.

He went to the Elephant and Castle downstairs, though it was too early to eat and the waiters were just tying on aprons, and the grill, he was told, would take twenty minutes to heat up. There were no other customers. The windows were sparkling clean. The waiter brought him a cup of coffee as an act of mercy.

Suddenly the day seemed so vacant, great empty lots of time laid out before him like fields planted in the same crop. He didn’t know what to do with himself and went to the gym to work out halfheartedly. For some reason he looked at everyone yearningly, including the least likely men, even the owner’s brother, that big straight blowhard who drank a pint of bull’s blood a day and, crippled with gout, had to be handed up the stairs. Grief made Guy masochistic and he could imagine shrinking and living in that brute’s crotch, his only exercise crossing from one small ball to the other. (He’d seen them, and steroids had made them peasized.) He felt so lonely. With Fred gone and Andrés in prison. Nothing was as lonely as the gym, with its averted glances, its surround of reproachful mirrors, its weights cast aside like broken manacles.

He took the Greyhound bus ninety minutes to Otisville, the minimum-security federal prison. It looked like a junior high in the middle of a lot. He was shocked by how small and peaceful it looked — small and without walls. A dozen passengers from New York had gotten off with him; they were all women, mostly black and Hispanic — some the mothers or elderly wives of prisoners, others possibly their adult children or younger wives, two with Muslim headscarves, all with packages in their hands. He wished he’d talked to the forty-something woman sitting next to him, with her mobcap of shiny black hair, straightened and varnished, and her pretty dress and clear lip gloss. He might have received some clues from her as to what to expect. He’d called ahead and his name was on the list, which the fat female guard in her bulging trousers pronounced Guy as in “gigh” to rhyme with “sigh.”

He sat on an orange sectional sofa marooned in the visitors’ lounge. He’d had to pass through three checkpoints and metal detectors. He’d been patted down twice. And yet this room was casual in a studied way — no partitions “protecting” the visitors from the prisoners, two floor lamps to soften the neon glare from the ceiling, three dispensers loaded with soft drinks and sweets, bright acrylic colors swirled on the walls as on an empty lot in Harlem. But he did spot two cameras monitoring the room— I guess you couldn’t slip someone a knife or diet pills in here .

At last Andrés was brought in, with one wrist handcuffed. He darted a glance at Guy and muttered something to the guard, who accompanied him to the couch, unlocked their handcuffs, and walked over to another guard, who was sipping a cardboard container of coffee.

Guy smiled sheepishly at Andrés. After all, Andrés was here for years more to come because of a misguided desire to keep up with his rich model lover. I refuse to feel guilty! he thought guiltily. “How’s it going?” Guy asked.

“I wish I could make love to you,” Andrés said. “Can you see the outline of my erection?” and Andrés scooted down on the sofa so his uniform stretched tight. Already? Guy thought. The petit bourgeois in Guy wanted to stop him, make him sit up straight, not get in trouble, but his own cock stiffened automatically, like a new mother lactating when her baby cries in another room. “I miss you so much,” Andrés said. “I guess you’ve already found someone else.”

“No,” Guy said, “but have you?”

“That’s all bullshit about sex in prison, at least the rape part,” Andrés said angrily. “Maybe the high-security prisoners, the lifers, maybe they team up with some swishy long-haired bitch. Here the guys — But let’s not waste time,” and Andrés fell into a brown study, staring at some point in space so hard that Guy turned to see what it was. “So you’ve already found someone?” Andrés said angrily.