Edmund White - Our Young Man

“More or less,” Guy said, not wanting to discourage him.

Vicente slept around the clock in a dirty, smelly pile on the immaculate bedspread. Guy insisted they leave him alone. The boy didn’t even take his shoes off; maybe he couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t in turn be stolen.

“Does he look like Andrés?” Kevin asked, genuinely curious.

“Not in the least,” Guy snapped. “Andrés is tall and handsome and a real hidalgo. This boy’s father is Ecuadorian or something and he looks like a statue you might find in the jungle, flat nose, wide forehead, dirty skin, almost Asian eyes, certainly padded cheeks. No expressions, like some cruel Incan god. And he’s short.”

“You certainly have your standards! I’ve noticed that about both you and Pierre-Georges. Are all French people like that?”

“Like what?” Guy asked, not happy about being linked to his bitchy agent.

“So sure of your opinions? Americans are never that sure about what we think.”

“Yes, we have definite standards and we’re very confident about our taste. We learn at an early age what’s good and what’s bad.”

That sounded a little narrow-minded even to Guy’s ears and he hoped Kevin wouldn’t pursue the matter.

This sort of cultural tyranny joined with the fragile convictions nourished by cocaine made Guy argumentative. Kevin had learned to end every dispute with a smile and a kiss. The rhetorical kiss had also begun to irritate Guy.

“Why are you snorting cocaine all the time?” Kevin dared to ask. “Do you like it so much? Enough to jeopardize our happy home?”

Kevin wrapped “our happy home” in ironic quotation marks to indicate he wasn’t all that serious, which only worsened Guy’s mood; he thought irony was cowardly.

“I’m doing it because I’m hungry,” Guy nearly shouted, with a full stop between each word. Then he said in a normal voice and rhythm, “Everyone wants the heroin look now and I hate heroin, but you’ve seen the ads with skinny green-skinned guys with asymmetrical haircuts sitting around and staring in shabby retro living rooms, all acid greens and duck-turd browns, wearing jeans that look sprayed on and gaudy shirts and tiny German sunglasses, looking stunned. In French we say when people are silent, ‘an angel is passing,’ but here the angel must be Satan. And I’m doing it to keep our happy home afloat. You’ve got to understand that fashion means change, even for the worse, and right now healthy, wholesome Americans with their teeth and muscles and tans are out, finished, kaput, whereas sickly Scottish boys with their bed-sit pallor and druggie anorexia are in. I’ve kept ahead of the curve for two decades now. Scruff and hair over my ears and a tattoo — that’s a beginning, but I’m going toward a total Lou Reed look. Maybe I’ll shave my skull. Or get a lip piercing.”

Kevin thought Guy was raving and had no idea what Lou Reed looked like. Anyway, Reed was so seventies! He’d never heard Guy talk so much and attributed it to the coke. It was coke-fueled talk. All because Pierre-Georges had said yesterday over the phone to Guy, “Stylists are looking for a Harley-Davidson these days and you’re a Rolls-Royce, the male counterpart to Catherine Deneuve.”

The comment had kept Guy awake, and at three in the morning Kevin discovered him in the kitchen contemplating a piece of toast.

“What are you doing?”

“I dare not eat it.”

“Come back to bed,” Kevin said, wrapping his arm around Guy’s waist.

When they got up later that morning at ten, Vicente was already slumped in a kitchen table chair but wide awake. He said, “Yo!” and made his funny little salaam gesture. Kevin didn’t know if it was ghetto for “hi” or Spanish for “me.” He was still wearing the same clothes, though he’d added a round woven beige beanie that looked Muslim.

“Poor Vicente,” Guy said. “You must be starving and wondering, ‘Where the hell am I?”’

“Vince!” the boy said. “It’s Vince, man. You got any food in this crib?”

“Toast? Cereal? Banana? Do you drink coffee? We’ll go out to lunch soon.”

“Coffee and banana,” the boy said. He still hadn’t looked them in the eye.

Kevin moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which Vicente inspected with fear in his eyes as though it were something foreign and dangerous, a scorpion. “We don’t have to do anything,” Kevin said. “There’s a little TV in your room. Did you find it in that cabinet at the foot of the bed?”

Vicente said, “No. Thanks,” in a meek little voice and with a nearly amorous smile.

Kevin smiled back. Vicente’s smile was a shocking momentary break of spontaneity and friendliness in an otherwise uniform sullenness, and suggested there was someone sweet and scared and nice living inside there. That was the one way he was like Andrés, Guy thought.

“How did you learn English so well?” Kevin asked.

“The truth? From trying to pick up English and Dutch girls on the beach near Valencia. And in Lackawanna. Mohammed had the TV on all the time and didn’t want us to talk. Man, he’d watch soap operas, commercials, reruns of Kojak , infomercials, all that shit!”

“Would you two shut up?” Guy shouted, fidgeting from his coke hangover; then, to cover his rudeness, “But it’s lovely outside!” he said, throwing his arms wide open and going to the window. “Indian summer. Isn’t that what you call it in English?” Kevin and Vicente exchanged a glance. It was so fruity and big-city to talk about the loveliness of the weather. Kevin provided a banana and made some espresso for them all. Latins drink espresso, right? “Milk? Sugar?”

“Sugar,” Vicente said, “if you got it. You guys don’t work? You’re like Mohammed — he sleeps till noon, though Pilar is usually up early,” Vicente said. It was the longest sentence he’d ventured yet, and Guy, still at the window, was tempted to turn around and smile approvingly, but he was afraid of jinxing the moment. He thought Kevin had established a beachhead and should be encouraged to press on. When the bitter coffee was ready, Guy tossed a boiling cup down his throat but without sitting down. Sitting down was fatal; it might lead him to eat something, a green, seedless grape, say. He needed to jog, to head for the gym and do his crunches and lunges, but he felt light-headed. He needed to do a line.

“I’m a student,” Kevin said. “School starts next week. Guy is a model.”

When Vicente looked blank, Kevin said, “ Fotomodello ,” in what he hoped might be Spanish, but the kid still looked quizzical. Meanwhile, Kevin had finally found the packet of sugar he’d stolen from a diner for just such an emergency.

“Got another one?” Vicente asked. “I like a little coffee with my sugar,” and he smiled at his own witticism.

“I’m going for a run,” Guy announced impulsively, and scurried off to the bedroom for a little “blush-on,” as he called his lines of cocaine. Kevin’s heart sank, thinking the hamster was about to start on the treadmill. I’m living with a hamster and a zombie , Kevin said to himself. Guy will be running all day and well into the night . Somewhere, a fly, caught between window and screen, was shaking its autumn death rattle. Kevin could hear it only because the room was so silent, though the fridge was humming and the house was creaking, as old houses will.

“You found everything? The guest bathroom? The air conditioner? The shower?” Kevin asked with a suspicion of emphasis on “shower.” “By the way, if you ever want to wash your clothes, we’ve got a washer and a dryer.”

“Here? Inside? Inside the house?”

Kevin nodded. “Let’s go out and get some lunch.” He wasn’t sure he liked being saddled with the responsibility of squiring this kid around, and the kid looked fearful at the prospect of a sortie.