Edmund White - Our Young Man

Guy didn’t like the idea of moving to Peru. That sounded lonely. Bad for the skin. And by then he’d be too old to learn another language. Everyone said Spanish was easy if you knew French. But “fear” was miedo in Spanish and peur in French, a wave was ola not vague —nothing like! And what would they make of two adult men living together in South America, one of them the American cultural attaché?

“All we have is the present,” Guy said, settling into one of his favorite themes, one he’d worked out already back in Clermont-Ferrand. “There is no past and no future, only the present.” He’d argued that position with one of the priests at school, who was torn because he was besotted with Guy but of course wanted him to think of his ultimate reward in heaven.

“That’s interesting.” Kevin said, bored.

Guy was sorry that Kevin didn’t argue with him. Most people did, at least other models did. “No future? You’ve got to be kidding! What about my next job in Saint-Tropez?” they’d say indignantly, and then he’d take them to a higher if paradoxical level. But Kevin didn’t like to philosophize. All he wanted to do when they were together was chitchat or have sex. He wasn’t very intellectual. Or maybe it was just American practicality, whereas the French like to soar on the wings of speculation.

Guy loved the feeling he got when he was tiptoeing into the cobwebs of the stratosphere. He’d smile benignly at his own familiarity with these difficult subjects, his calm, mature mastery of these paradoxes. He didn’t want to be down-to-earth all the time. Being earthbound didn’t do much for him.

Kevin turned off the minute Guy got that contented smile on his face and launched into one of his idiotic rants, what he considered philosophizing. Kevin had studied real philosophy at Columbia and had received an A on his term paper about the difference between ideology and ideas. (Ideology was a false view promoted by the ruling class in order to hoodwink the proletariat.) He was sickened by Guy’s rambling on about time, and wondered how much longer he’d be able to stomach it.

Three days later Guy took the bus to see Andrés. This time he told Kevin where he was going and Kevin said, “I admire you for that. You’re a very loyal person.”

Guy agreed. He was very loyal. He still sent his mother a thousand dollars a month, which wasn’t so much, given the downgrading of the dollar, but it was something. It allowed her to live correctly, now that she had a car in good running order and all paid for. She owned her home. And she got a welfare check from the government. She’d had to hide the allowance she got from Guy in order to qualify for the government stipend. He mailed a money order to his brother, who handed her the cash. So far they hadn’t been caught. From time to time Lucie helped Guy fill a big box of shawls, sweaters, dresses — everything she could pick up in his mother’s size after a collection was shown. His mother complained that the clothes were too stylish or flashy or daring for their neighborhood, and he was certain she was still shopping in her old raincoat and paisley scarf she’d bought from the Arabs in the market in the shadow of the cathedral.

Guy had been loyal to Fred, more than anyone else had, and he would have stayed on good terms with the baron if he hadn’t been exiled. He was fidel to Andrés and took the long, boring bus ride out there every week. He’d even become friendly with one of the other “wives,” a delicate young black woman who bathed herself in a sweet candied perfume she said was invented by Elizabeth Taylor. She really smelled like cotton candy. Yes, he was a loyal friend — he’d stuck with Pierre-Georges even though bigger agents had tried to lure him away. Of course, he knew Pierre-Georges was watching out for him 24/7, and he doubted another agent could wrangle him bigger contracts. Guy had been around too long; everyone knew what he was worth.

“What if Andrés notices the tattoo? Won’t you have some explaining to do?” Kevin asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“Oh, he won’t. He’s pretty — how do you say? Narcisse?”

“Narcissistic. That’s a tough one.” Kevin thought it advisable to comment on the word rather than the character flaw.

“He never notices anything,” Guy said.

Of course, he did, and to make sure he did, as soon as they were seated opposite each other in the visiting room, Guy pushed his hair back and flipped his earlobe forward. “See what I did for you? Just as I promised.”

Andrés, rather than being delighted, looked around nervously at the guard, the same handsome thick one as before, who was studying them carefully. He strode over to them and pulled back his ear; the tattoo of the number eight was bigger than Guy’s and harder to distinguish on black skin. And then he grabbed Andrés, wrenched his head around, and revealed his tattoo, the same number eight. At that point he grunted and walked away, back to the other guard he’d been chatting with.

“That wasn’t cool,” Andrés said to Guy.

“You got the tattoo to please your new love or master or whatever he is, and to cover yourself around me you convinced me to do it, too — for you. You pretended—” And Guy couldn’t help but laugh when he realized he’d played the same trick on Kevin. Guy thought that he and Andrés were both wily, always plotting, and Kevin and the black man were typical Yankee dopes. “What’s your lover’s name, anyway?”

“Lester,” Andrés said in a surly tone. “He’s not my lover.” He lowered his eyes and said in a small voice, “He’s my protector. You’re my lover.”

“Did you choose him to be your protector? Or did he choose you as his protégé?”

Andrés exploded, “You don’t know what it’s like to live in here all day, every day. I need someone to protect me.”

Guy could see that Andrés had been working out hard. His arms and shoulders looked twice as big as before. How dangerous really was this junior high of a prison? Knowing that he’d duped Kevin in the same way Andrés had duped him made Guy forgive him, though with an edge of exasperation. He hoped Lester wouldn’t punish Andrés — beat him or put him in solitary. Lester might have hit Andrés now if it weren’t for the surveillance cameras and so many witnesses from the outside world. “I’m sorry — I had no idea.”

So unexpected was Guy’s apology that Andrés broke into a sweet boyish smile: That sweetness had almost been extinguished in this new tough, hardened Andrés here in prison where anger seemed to be the default mode, but Guy’s kindness called to the boy hidden within, who slowly emerged from the darkest cave of Andrés’s heart, where the child had been declared dead. He wasn’t dead, just weakened and frightened. “I should be the one begging your forgiveness,” Andrés said softly.

“Let’s forget the whole thing.”

They smiled long and hard at each other, shook hands warmly, and Andrés even got tears in his eyes. Guy wondered what Andrés would do with this sweet-feeling child at the entrance of the cave now that the tide was rushing in around his knees.

What Andrés had done, apparently, was start a major fight between the Puerto Rican gang to which he belonged and the black gang — with the result he was put in lockdown and his sentence was increased by two years. The next time Guy saw him, he still had a bump on his head and a black eye and his lip was torn. He was still indignant, and plagued Guy with a long “he said, I said” narrative Guy couldn’t follow. Then he simmered down and looked morose, probably at the prospect of the addition to his sentence. He talked about his new interest in the Catholic Church and his pious reading of the lives of the saints: “Those were some far-out cats,” Andrés exclaimed with his torn-lipped smile.