Edmund White - Our Young Man

Guy realized how lonely he was. How starved for affection. In Paris he’d met an older woman named Elaine in an English class they were both enrolled in. She was an anesthesiologist who lived and worked in Versailles and was sort of perky but fundamentally dull, though she was always free and treated Guy as a kid brother. They never got beyond the formality of calling each other vous . In New York he didn’t even have an Elaine to share meals or movies with.

Because almost every man here in the Village stared at him, he’d learned to ignore them all. One had a nice torso but lady legs. Another had worked out his biceps but not his triceps. A third had a good body but ludicrous muttonchops. A fourth carried a man purse because his pale gabardine trousers had no pockets and looked sprayed on: In France only middle-aged bus drivers out on the town still carried them. Guy inventoried all these “faults” because he was just as critical of his own shortcomings — or guarded vigilantly against having any. But he knew that if he could connect with even a very ordinary person he wouldn’t look for that person’s flaws.

If he walked though Washington Square past a lone guy sitting on a bench, eyeing him, Guy would find it harder and harder to breathe as he got nearer, almost as if he were passing through a dangerous force field. His first weekend on Fire Island with Pierre-Georges (who was unexpectedly hairy in a swimsuit), Guy slowly descended the wooden stairs from the dunes to the beach wearing nothing but a tight white swimsuit and sunglasses, and a dozen men looked up from their towels at him and he was afraid he might faint. He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again , an idea that made him sad. Something about being beautiful induced melancholy in Guy. He was aware of how brief his perfection would be — and then sneered at himself for being so narcissistic. Beauty was only a way of making money.

He thought he was like an expensive racehorse whom all the people around him kept inspecting and trotting not for his well-being but to protect their investment. Feel his withers … is he off his feed? … the grandstand seems to spook him, he needs blinders … his nose is warm. If he went out without sunglasses, Pierre-Georges came running after him to warn him against squint lines. If he gained an ounce, Pierre-Georges would pinch his waist and murmur, “Miss Piggy.” If he wore tight jeans, Pierre-Georges would hiss, “You look like a whore,” and make him change to something looser. Once, when he wore a filmy, sheer robe, Pierre-Georges whispered that most dismissive of French phrases, “Très original.” If he concentrated while doing a crossword, Pierre-Georges warned him he was getting elevenses — those vertical worry lines above his nose.

He and Pierre-Georges took a public speedboat at midnight from the Grove to the Pines with a bunch of overexcited guys and they all rushed into the Sandpiper. Guy was stoned and taller than most of the other men, and as he stared out over them he experienced a distinctly Buddhist feeling of evanescence. He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realized that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy — and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

Guy met some hunky guys who’d improvised an outdoor gym with weights on the sand in front of their house over on Tuna and they said he could work out with them. One day a small, slender, but perfectly formed blond drew him aside and said, “You should do gymnastics — you’re a model, right? Do you want me to teach you?” The guy, wearing blue baggy shorts, jumped up onto parallel bars and walked down them with just his hands, then turned a somersault and extended his legs and pointed his feet. Guy exercised with him for an hour; apparently the man didn’t expect anything in return — these Americans were amazing!

He’d read an article in a beauty magazine about facial isometrics and every morning in front of the mirror he hooked his fingers in his mouth and stretched out his lips toward his ears, trying to close his mouth at the same time. Or he tilted his head back like a goose and pointed his chin and pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to firm up his chin.

As he came out of the Sandpiper for a breather he ran into Walt, who was very solicitously shepherding about his baron. They were introduced and the baron, ugly as a commissar, held on to Guy’s hand for an uncomfortably long interval. Of course they were speaking French, and rather loudly, and Guy worried the foreign language might irritate some folks, just as he became resentful when several boisterous Germans would speak their language loudly in a Paris café. Guy feared it might be a petit bourgeois trait on his part, but he didn’t want to stand out as a foreigner, though most Americans said they loved his accent, it was so sexy.

The baron, whose name was Édouard, invited him to lunch the next day on his yacht — and he pointed to a massive boat moored and nearly extinct in the slip just beside them. Guy had noticed attractive men and women on the deck of the yacht just that afternoon. He asked, “What time?” Then he asked if he could bring a French-speaking friend.

The little gymnast sidled up to Guy and said, “I see you’ve met Spare Parts.”

“Who, Baron Édouard?”

“We call him Spare Parts because he’s had so much work done on him and still looks like a toad.”

“Toad?” Finally Guy deduced he meant a crapaud : That was probably said out of envy and jealousy.

“Be careful of him,” the gymnast added. “He likes violent sex; you don’t want those pretty nipples stretched out. He’s also into fisting. Actually, he’s the slave, I think.”

For once Pierre-Georges, whose instinct was to frown whenever Guy suggested an idea, smiled instead. “A baron? A yacht?” he asked, reassured they weren’t that far from Saint-Tropez after all.

Guy had braced himself for a scary intimate lunch, but the yacht was flourishing with young hangers-on and the baron was only intermittently visible, fully dressed in captain’s whites. Guy thought he must be a clever seducer and was determined to imitate him when he was old — to bait the hook with lots of shiny lures. Walt was very much in evidence, making sure the bong was circulating, that the icy daiquiris were replenished, and the hot blue cheese pastries were being passed around, as well as the crudités with the delicious crab claws.

Walt asked in a whisper, “Which of these boys do you fancy the most?”

Guy shrugged but Walt persevered. “Seriously,” he said.

Guy had spent so much time rejecting even the most handsome Americans that now it was difficult for him to pick someone. He was the one everyone else pursued; he was the commodity, not the consumer. But when Walt asked a third time, Guy murmured in a strangled voice, “That little blond in the neon-blue swimsuit.”

“Jacky? He’s the biggest slut on the island and a major masochist. He’s always being chained to an abandoned refrigerator in the Meat Rack and we have to send someone at dawn to free him. Not that he’s ever anything but cheerful, whistling all the time. He’s a wannabe deejay.”

So , Guy thought, the baron does like violent sex and surrounds himself with cheerful slaves —and Guy looked to see if Jacky’s nipples were deformed, and they did look sort of large and chewed-on, like cold gristle. But hold on , Guy said to himself. If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he entertain another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.

There were lots of women present — well, three. They were a bit coarse, but the men paid court to them, as if gay men had been cut off from women for so long they reverted right away to their high school sissy-boy gallantry.