Edmund White - Our Young Man

Then, on a new, obviously rehearsed confidential note, Andrés said, with care and solemnity, “I have a great favor to ask of you.”

“Anything,” Guy said, hoping it wasn’t for a metal file in a cake.

“My sister, the one who moved from Bogotá to Murcia, has been diagnosed with cancer. Her husband vanished years ago. She’s been raising her son, Vicente, all on her own. He’s fifteen now. She can’t take care of him anymore, she’s too sick and poor. You remember my sister Concepción?”

“Poor girl. I had no idea. Does she write you in prison?”

“All the time. Anyway, Vicente is staying with a distant cousin in Lackawanna. She, that cousin, we call her King Kong because she’s so black, is married to an Arab, I think he’s a terrorist but he says he’s in air-conditioning repair, anyway he’s fed up with Vicente, not because he’s a bad boy but because he’s poor, Mohammed isn’t earning anything, they’re on welfare, and they can’t get an allowance for Vicente, he’s an illegal, he overstayed his three-month tourist visa.”

“We only have five more minutes. What do you want me to do — send them a check?”

“No, I want you to take Vicente in.”

Guy immediately wondered what Kevin would think. Then he thought about what the boy would mean to his own life. Guy liked crazy, unforeseen twists in fate, maybe because his life had become so predictable, so narrow — regular jaunts to Europe, an hour three times a week at the gym, life’s long diet and only occasional prudent lapses, sex with Kevin, visits to Andrés, every two weeks a phone call to his mother, strategy sessions with Pierre-Georges. (“She said you were rude to her,” Pierre-Georges said of a stylist from Saks. “She also said the suit was wearing you rather than you were wearing the suit.”

“Whatever that means,” Guy muttered. “And she was the rude one, stabbing me with pins, trying to smooth out a cheap shirt that was born wrinkled.”) Life had become confining and routine; even their Saturday night drug vacations dancing at the Roxy were always the same, with MDA, cocaine, and grass, staggering home at dawn with grins on their famous faces. At least Guy’s would be famous if it weren’t so generic — now even his trademark jug ears would soon be invisible under wings of dark hair covering them, carefully arranged in “un brushing.”

A kid would serve the same function as a bad love affair to introduce a note of chaos into our overly organized lives. He’s not going to sit around doing nothing or reading. He’ll need a part-time job. I’m sure he could do mimeographing for Pierre-Georges. “Is he cute?”

Andrés made a face, as he did when people told a dirty joke. “He’s fifteen. Cute enough, I guess. Keep your mitts off him, okay?”

“Fifteen is safe with me.” He thought guiltily of Kevin, who was nineteen. “Is he black, too, like your sister King Kong?”

“King Kong is my cousin, my sister is Concepción.”

“I forgot. Will I get in trouble with my own green card if I’m caught hosting an illegal?”

Andrés looked bored, or maybe turned off by Guy’s self-centeredness. “Ask your lawyer. That’s why we have lawyers, though yours didn’t do much good for me.”

Guy chose to ignore the reproach, and said brightly, like a violinist launching into a gigue after the tedious largo, “Okay. I’ll do it. At least I’ll look into it. Anything for you.”

Guy felt he was marching out to the end of a diving board and, without a pause, going into a double somersault before making sure there was water in the pool. Would Vicente double his expenses? Quadruple them? What if he was a juvenile delinquent, or worse, a terrorist? What if he and Kevin fought all the time and Kevin said, “It’s either him or me”? What if he was a hostile heterosexual who scorned his gay uncles and imitated them with a limp wrist to his cigarette-smoking buddies from high school?

He memorized King Kong’s phone number. “What’s her real name? I can’t call her Signora Kong.”

“Pilar.”

“What?”

“Pilar, like the virgin of the pillar.”

A bell was ringing, indicating an end to the visiting hour. Guy shook Andrés’s hand distractedly but was preoccupied with repeating Pilar’s number until he found a pencil and a scrap of paper, maybe from one of the prison wives.

Guy waited till Kevin had had two glasses of sake over dinner at the Japanese restaurant on Thirteenth Street before he brought up Vicente. Pierre-Georges had told Guy to go down another ten pounds — thin was in, he said. Maybe the weight loss would wreak havoc on his arms and chest and deflate his ass, but the new clients like Guess all demanded gaunt faces and cheekbones like flying buttresses. Guy ordered nothing but miso soup and sashimi and he left the cubes of tofu in the bowl. And he permitted himself just one cup of sake; otherwise he was living on a diet of espressos and cocaine.

They were sitting outside behind a metal railing and noisy people kept going by — oh, it was Friday! That’s why people were out. For Guy, every day was the same. Across the street were the dim lights of a holistic medicine shop-cum-ashram, closed for the weekend.

Initially, Kevin took it well because he assumed Vicente must be a polite, shy boy from some provincial town in Spain, a good Catholic boy who let himself be buggered in stoic silence once a week by Padre Jesús and then assisted at the mass, a bum full of jizz, handing the priest the silver cup of wine. But when Kevin found out Vicente had been living in Lackawanna with King Kong and a terrorist named Mohammed, he shrank back in distaste. “But what if he tries to make a bomb and blows up your brownstone by mistake?” Kevin asked. “I’m serious. What if he’s wearing gold chains around his neck and a backwards baseball cap?”

They decided to invite Vicente down for a week, all expenses paid, and look him over. Guy called King Kong, but she was too nervous speaking on the phone and apparently couldn’t understand Guy’s French accent, so she handed the receiver to Mohammed, who sounded very ghetto and suspicious. Guy explained he was Andrés’s friend.

“That loser?” Mohammed asked.

“Yes, the very one. He said that Vicente was living with you.”

“You got the wrong number.”

Guy repeated the boy’s name. Maybe he was saying it the wrong way.

“Oh, Vince,” Mohammed shouted. “Why didn’t you say so?”

When he understood that this dude with the weird accent was inviting Vince the Freeloader to New York for a week, he suddenly became more cooperative and friendly. Guy noticed that Vicente himself was never consulted.

Guy sent a limo from his regular service to Lackawanna to pick up the boy. Explaining train or bus schedules and how to pick up prepaid tickets seemed insurmountable with these poor foreigners and their approximate English. Explaining a car service was problematic enough. When Vicente arrived, sitting up front with the Israeli driver, who was sweating and gabbling and was obviously on speed, Guy looked the boy over and said to himself, Un pauvre type, mauvais genre , which meant he was hopeless.

Vicente was dressed in a sleazy blue tracksuit and high-tops that might have been stolen. He was short and dark and had a scar on his right cheek. He couldn’t look Guy in the eye and his handshake was boneless. He then pressed his hand to his heart with some sort of salaam he might have picked up from Mohammed. He smelled funny, like warmed-over sweat.

The boy seemed determined not to be impressed by anything as Guy showed him around. He trudged about in his unlaced shoes; he seemed exhausted, and the smile he’d been wearing as he listened to the excited Israeli had long since faded. “Now, this is your room,” Guy said, opening the door onto the guest room, with a white candlewick bedspread over a single bed, its captain’s chest, its armless chair upholstered in pale chintz, and its wall ornament, a nineteenth century brass compass Kevin had found in an antique store on Bleecker. “That some kind of clock?” Vince said, nodding toward the compass.