Edmund White - Our Young Man

He had grown up poor. They had a small, smelly trailer they drove around France for vacations; in the trailer park outside Montoire-sur-le-Loir they’d stayed for five nights. His father set up an awning and a grill and drank even more red wine than usual. That’s where Guy had lost his virginity to a shy, lovely girl from Vichy named Violette. They were both fifteen. His family never ate in restaurants, not even cafés, when they were traveling. Guy had loved clothes but never had had money to buy them. Now, in Paris, he had money but was very practical about saving. Most of his clothes were given to him by designers at a severe discount.

For nearly a decade he was the darling of Paris. He bought an art nouveau apartment designed around 1910 by Guimard, the man who had done the Métro entrances. It was small, but Pierre-Georges declared it “distinguished” and approved that it was in the safe, serene, and nonhappening sixteenth arrondissement. Publicly Guy dated starlets and female models, who mostly were pleased he didn’t expect them to put out. Privately he’d go off at the end of long, bibulous evenings with other good-looking young “straight” men he met at heterosexual pickup bars on the boulevard Montparnasse, guys who like him had been unlucky with lining up a girl for the evening before last call. But he never saw one of these men more than once and never gave out his real name.

Pierre-Georges said to him, “You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re sympa , at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space.”

Then Pierre-Georges sent him to New York for a Pepsi commercial, where his Frenchness was of no relevance; in fact, he had to dress in jeans and a sports shirt and flip burgers among young Americans at a picnic shot on a rented estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. It was 1980 and suddenly male models, two years after women, were becoming “supermodels.” Their names were known; the public gossiped about them. Their hourly rates went up. The public laughed at them for being overpaid, but Pierre-Georges pointed out that the career of a model was very short.

Guy worried about everything. The currency in America never made any sense to him since nickels were bigger than dimes, which were worth more. From all those Fred Astaire movies, he thought everyone in New York would be in evening clothes, but actually they were badly dressed and coiffed. Chicly dressed women wore sneakers (he was told they’d put on their heels at the office). Many men looked unwashed. He was shocked how obese some Negro women were and how unselfconsciously, even sloppily, they rolled from side to side down the sidewalk. Portions in restaurants seemed comically large and he was puzzled that several places offered “all you can eat.” The doggy bag was a new idea. New York struck him as dowdy and provincial but strangely electric. Everything was fast and careless, even the hurried way shopgirls wrapped packages. Oddly, waiters were extraordinarily friendly; at one place in the Village the waitress sat down with them and said, “I hope you folks don’t have a complicated order. I’m completely stoned.” Although Guy fancied he knew English well, he had to ask the photographer’s assistant what “folks” and “stoned” meant. From then on Guy used “folks” as often as possible, as in, “They are very funny folks,” thinking that meant they were amusing. Calling someone “amusing” just seemed to irritate New Yorkers.

Even so, he was a huge success in America. There didn’t seem to be room, not even in New York, for several French models, but Guy quickly became the go-to French guy. He met all the top photographers, including Hiro, a very pure, quiet Japanese artist who would arrange a few objects and get ravishing forms and citrusy color combinations, and Richard Avedon, much smaller and younger than Guy had imagined, a very bossy, hardworking genius who told him, “These days I just shoot constantly and my work has all the excitement of confetti.” Avedon was so slim and stylish even in his work clothes that he didn’t seem American or even heterosexual, but he was famous for his celebrated women friends, including the legendary model Dovima, the one he’d photographed with an elephant.

Pierre-Georges told him that New York was very dangerous and when he took a taxi home he should have the driver wait until he was safely in the front door. He could be mugged crossing the five meters between the cab and his lobby. He lived in Greenwich Village (he had trouble pronouncing “Greenwich”) in a floor-through of a brownstone on the corner, illogically, of West Fourth and West Eleventh. Pierre-Georges had found it and even furnished it for him, though Guy was allowed to place family pictures on tiny silver easels Pierre-Georges bought. Guy also draped an extravagant silk scarf across the plain beige couch, but Pierre-Georges teased him about it and he folded it and put it away the next day.

He joined a nearby gym upstairs at Sheridan Square. There was lots of loud joking among the folks working out; some of them were grotesquely muscular and one guy had to be helped up the stairs by his brother. Every day the guy ate an entire rotisserie chicken and drank a pint of bull’s blood. Guy couldn’t understand most of the gibes, but it seemed half the folks were gay and half normal and they were joking about which orientation was more amusing: “Just think of dick as pussy on a stick,” one of the loudmouths guffawed. The population of the gym was at the tipping point between gay and normal.

In the cedar-lined sauna a polite flabby man with a bushy gray mustache and expensive sapphire eyes and the ruins of good looks struck up a conversation. His nipples were the size of erasers. In Paris Guy would have been curt, but here in America folks appeared to be vulgarly friendly. When the man, un vieux beau , heard Guy’s accent he switched to a very good French. He said his name was Walt and he was from San Francisco, but he didn’t really work because he had to be free to travel with his older friend, a Belgian baron and banker who was always in transit between Gstaad and Phuket and Venice and Mykonos, you really should meet him, and what do you do, oh, I suspected as much, I know you’re not supposed to ask French people what kind of work they do, but hey, we’re in New York, and Walt laughed at the funny coincidence of that.

By chance they got out of the sauna at the same time and headed down the hall to the showers. Walt cupped one of Guy’s hot buttocks; Guy glared at him but Walt looked unfazed, as though he’d been innocently testing a melon for ripeness or as if someone else had done it. In the shower Walt continued smiling and chatting but he made a bit too much out of laundering his genitals. Although he was too fat, strangely enough Guy could imagine it would be fun to hold him. Walt had a body meant to be held.

When they were dressed and heading out, Walt wrote down Guy’s phone number. Under his taut silk briefs Guy could still feel the shocking familiarity of Walt’s hand, but it confused him. He’d never been attracted to anyone over thirty, at least not to his knowledge, but he was secretly thrilled by the infringement of that brazen touch. Maybe it was because such an obviously civilized man, who spoke French and skied at Gstaad, had done it — as if someone in evening clothes had knelt in the mud to suck his cock. After all, Walt vacationed in Thailand, he studded his conversation with references to yachts and international watering holes — and he’d also reached for Guy’s ass.