Edmund White - Our Young Man

More importantly, he’d trained himself not to be nostalgic, not to recognize pop songs or movies or TV series from other decades, to greet names (even French names) from the sixties or seventies with a look of incomprehension, even bewilderment. For him the threshold of the recognizable was years later, 1980. Whereas other people relaxed into squalid orgies of smiling over their memories, a warm self-indulgence of conjuring up the past not in all its dullness or pain but in a sentimental form, he remained aloof, untouched, strategically uncomprehending. They were all false anyway, these memories, protecting people against the harsh truth. He hated the past. He had suffered as an adolescent from frustration, in his twenties from insecurities (how long could this career of his go on?), and in his thirties from disillusionment (how long must this career of his go on?). Now at nearly forty he could start up all over again. He’d been handed this miracle, eternal youth.

In a world of shiny consumer goods, he was the shiniest one of all. If someone else would have said that to him, it would have enraged him, but he had to admit it was true. He was a product, artfully wrapped, refrigerated like expensive chocolates; he’d been in stock, however, way past his shelf life. They’d have to slash the price in half in order to get the item to move.

Was he being predatory and deceitful to Kevin? Certainly deceitful; he’d said he was twenty-five. Predatory, not really. He hadn’t seduced the boy except by the cool distance he’d maintained and by the natural appeal of his looks and accent and profession. And his barely perceptible friendliness. He wasn’t really a catch — soiled goods, maybe a bit vapid, no longer fresh — but a provincial of nineteen might think he was a rare find, confuse the cleverness he’d picked up from his milieu with a personal acuity.

Kevin rang his bell precisely at seven-thirty and Guy buzzed him up.

“Wow! This place is a palace,” Kevin exclaimed, looking around. He appeared absurdly young, a mere tot, with his freshly pressed shirt and perfect sparkling smile. With his gelled hair and his minty, toothpaste mouth when Guy kissed him, a mere peck, and his cheap straight-boy cologne (was it Mennen’s?), he looked so incorrigibly young that Guy feared going out with him — bad for business, he’d look worn by contrast, faux jeune .

“Yes, isn’t it great?” Guy said. “My aunt left it to me in her will. It’s too fancy for a guy like me and might give people the wrong idea …”

“Was your aunt American? I’m sorry she died,” and Kevin lowered his eyes in routine respect. So Minnesota! Guy thought, though he knew next to nothing about Midwesterners and was only now slowly modeling a wax effigy of the type in his imagination, but he was sure it was a region of pure streams, big skies, and artless boys with good manners and odorless crotches.

“Yes, she was French but married a rich American, enfin , he was a soldier when they met, black—”

“Black? Cool!”

“But he made money later—”

“Doing what?”

“Barbecue,” Guy improvised wildly.

“Cool.”

“And they had no children. First he died—”

“From what?”

“Cholesterol.” Guy wasn’t sure that was fatal, but it sounded like something a black cook might get.

“Poor man. And what did she die from?”

“Malnourishment. Anorexia.” He felt on sure ground with this disease.

“How ironic!”

“Why ironic?”

“Her husband made barbecue.”

A shadowy image of a fat, sweating black man in a starched white chef’s toque crossed his imagination. “She was a vegetarian,” Guy blurted.

“This doesn’t look like an old person’s apartment. I mean, the brass lamps and chocolate-brown walls look so up-to-date.”

“Thanks,” Guy said weakly, “I’ve made a few improvements. Should we go out for dinner?”

They strolled over to Duff’s on Christopher Street and were seated in a booth under a big industrial lamp. They ordered a cheap bottle of white wine and two rare steaks with green beans, hold the potatoes. “A real model’s meal, right?”

“I guess,” Guy said.

“Can I be honest with you?”

Guy’s stomach clenched with fear. “Of course.”

“My brother thinks I’m too boring for a sharp guy like you.”

“You’re not boring — not as boring as I am. At least you’re doing advanced studies.”

“Just college. Everybody does college, and most college kids are dumb.”

“I didn’t go to college.”

“Why not?”

“My parents are aristocrats, a count and countess, and they wanted me to manage the family estates.” Guy resolved that he should write down all his lies in a locked diary and draw a timeline of this life he was inventing for himself.

“It’s never too late to go to school,” Kevin said. Guy smiled frostily.

He took off his own clothes as soon as they got in the door of his apartment. (He thought that would bypass any fumbling or the suggestion of seduction.) He went bare-assed into the kitchen to fetch them two glasses of water. When he came back, Kevin was stepping out of his jeans. He’d already untied his blue Top-Siders and now he was frowning slightly as he unbuttoned his shirt. He stood there in all his boyish beauty. He was wearing traditional Hanes underpants, which his mom had probably bought, six to a pack. Guy took the little erection slanting off to the right as a tribute. Did Kevin, inexperienced as he was, imagine that all gay men shed their clothes the minute they crossed the threshold?

He walked slowly over to Kevin, put their glasses on the coffee table, and folded him into his arms. Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.

Kevin shuddered in his arms. Guy tried to re-create in his mind the delights and repulsions of a virgin’s first time, but he decided to be bold, firm, not a sensitive reed bending in the gusts of the boy’s desire and dismay. If they were both hesitant the whole thing would prove a fiasco.

Kevin’s skin was so cool it was almost clammy, especially the high, rubbery buttocks. They probed each other’s mouths with big, slippery tongues, eels flowing into and out of deep-sea grottoes, shrinking to enter, bloating once inside.

When he knelt to suck Kevin, he glanced up and caught him grimacing. “Are you okay?”

“You mean my wincing? I always do that when I’m jerking off. It’s pleasure — too painful. Is that too weird for you?” His way of submitting his behavior so innocently to Guy’s judgment was so guileless.

Guy thought, Pain as pleasure . He understood that. He licked the boy’s balls, raised high and taut in their hairless sac, and Kevin groaned a bit stagily. Then he shook all over, flinching like a splashed horse. The flinching seemed real, involuntary. Guy thought of a Thoroughbred, how his curried coat drank the light. Guy touched the boy’s fragile pink nipples — no reaction. His body hadn’t been thoroughly eroticized yet, which made Guy think of that Chinese model he’d slept with once, a guy he’d met in São Paulo, someone who wore his body like armor, which had made Guy irrationally conclude the Chinese weren’t sensual, weren’t good sex. They didn’t inhabit their bodies, Guy had decided on the basis of his sample of one.

Kevin fucked him. Guy guided the little hard penis into his body; Guy was lying on his stomach in order to afford Kevin the full plush glamour of his muscular buttocks. The boy didn’t seem to know how to thrust. He just lay couched on Guy’s bigger sleek body, this million-dollar body soaked for decades in costly unguents, and more or less wobbled in there for a very short time until he exploded.