Edmund White - Our Young Man

He took him to the restaurant downstairs from the gym, thinking that a cheeseburger and fries would be less intimidating than goat cheese on focaccia and a beetroot and pear salad, the sort of thing you’d get in most of the neighborhood restaurants.

“Where’s Uncle Guy?” Vicente said, pronouncing the name as in Guys and Dolls . They were seated in a booth and Vicente had already slumped forward across the Formica table, exhausted, and was monotonously rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar dispenser, salt pepper sugar ketchup.

“Oh, he’s trying to make weight.”

“Is he a wrestler?”

“Like that. A model. He’s up for a big jeans commercial and needs to come in at a hundred and forty pounds. How much do you weigh?”

“Fifty-five kilos. I only know kilos. You?”

“I’m not sure,” Kevin said. Suddenly he had an idea. “Maybe you could teach me Spanish.” He thought that might also be a way of improving Vicente’s English. Kevin was always improving himself, more so than his twin. Each time he’d sat on the toilet back in Ely he’d read an entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature . He’d never read novels. Too frivolous. But he was always deep into the history of ancient Rome or a pop science account of the giant molecule. He was determined to make his airhead boyfriend, Guy, teach him French. These days he was reading a secondhand volume of Edmund Burke, which on the spine read On the Sublime French Revolution , and it took him a while to realize that these were two different titles. He read labels for the contents and calorie counts and he comparison-shopped. Because of his family background, he had strong ecological views, and if he’d owned a car, the bumper sticker would have read “Save the Wilderness.”

He admired Ralph Nader. He was appalled by capitalism. In class, he wrote down all the names of the books and authors the professor mentioned in passing and checked them out of Butler Library. His twin was much more of a goof-off and Kevin would have attributed his insouciance to his lack of a “gay gene,” but they had identical genes and their differences must be due to nurture, not nature, although it was hard to pinpoint any differences there. They’d been raised together, dressed identically, and had exactly the same health history. Their grandmother couldn’t tell them apart, though their mother could. It was obvious, she insisted. Chris was meaner and ran in circles.

Even with several attempts, Kevin couldn’t get Vicente to teach him any Spanish. (“What’s ‘table’ in Spanish? Tavola ?” But the boy looked confused and bored).

Upstairs in the gym, Guy was doing lunges and sit-ups fueled by cocaine, gabbling and laughing to himself — until he fainted. He was only out for a second; when he came to, the gym instructor was kneeling over him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“How come you passed out?”

“I guess I forgot to eat this morning.”

The instructor frowned. “Man, you’re too skinny! Better just go home now and rest.”

“Good idea.”

“Take your shower at home. Do you need anyone to go with you? Scoot. Get outta here!” Guy thought he’d take some Ex-lax and shed the pounds that way if he couldn’t exercise any more today. When he got home, he called the nearest Chinese restaurant and ordered four bowls of soup to be delivered. Soup was not very fattening. He’d do another line and another espresso before he tackled the soup. That way he might only drink half a bowl.

Pierre-Georges dropped by and was very pleased. “You’ve never looked more ethereal. Just another five pounds and you’ll be perfect. The go-see is Friday — if you’re named the Cavalier flagship it’s a million-dollar campaign.”

“What’s Cavalier?”

“Oh, come on. Earth calling Planet Guy.”

“I thought it was Guess.”

“Guess was decided a month ago. Frederick Ross got that. Hello-o-o.”

By Friday, Guy could barely cross the room, and if he went for a walk, he had to lean on Kevin, or Vicente, who didn’t like the contact with another man. But Guy did seem to have landed the job and to have beaten out some of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old rivals — that’s what counted to him. As a Buddhist, he didn’t think of himself as competitive, that was all samsara, but he did like to win. He hated the idea that some of these guys, just mere kids, with no experience in the business, could beat him out. They were just skinny beaufres (clods) and didn’t know how to give angles. They brought nothing to the creative process, no input, no sense of style! They didn’t know how to work with photographers. They just drooped around. One night after another horrible dinner in El Faro, a Spanish restaurant where Vicente didn’t talk except to the waiter in Spanish and Guy babbled and played with his food, Kevin was smoldering, and when he was alone in the apartment with Guy, he said, “This has got to stop. Today I was with him all day! He’s your boyfriend’s nephew, not mine. We spent three hours looking at track shoes and he still couldn’t make up his mind which ones to buy. New York is horrible in August. Everything smells like sauerkraut and garbage. And look at you. You’re a bag of bones! Where’d that nice ass go, the one I liked to fuck?”

“I’ll grow you a big fat new one,” Guy said, smiling. “Can I help it if Vicente’s bonded with you and not with me? You’re nicer than me.”

Kevin slapped his hand in playful reproach.

“You never want to have sex now. I can see why monks fast — it keeps them celibate. You whimper in your sleep — must be the body protesting. You spend a lot of time in the bathroom at dinner. Were you throwing up your meal?” Guy hung his head. “Anyway, you’re my boyfriend.”

They decided to keep Vicente just out of kindness and because King Kong said she didn’t want him back in Lackawanna and the boy’s mother in Murcia was now bedridden.

Each time Guy took the bus over to see Andrés, the prisoner was happy to hear Vicente’s news and grateful to Guy. Andrés suggested that Guy send Vicente up to visit him one week in his place.

Guy agreed, but he thought he had to instruct Vicente not to mention Kevin. Vicente seemed astonished to discover his blood uncle, Andrés, from Columbia was a maricón , too. He hadn’t understood that before. A French maricón, normal. An American maricón, why not? To be expected. But a Columbian maricón, his mother’s brother — oh, coño , that wasn’t cool. American prisoner, yes, that was cool, but Latin maricón, no way. The boy seemed utterly lost and slept all the time, though Guy insisted he look for a job. He thought a job was important for the boy’s self-esteem. There was talk of his xeroxing and mailing and manning phones for Pierre-Georges — talk that came to nothing, partly because Pierre-Georges couldn’t be bothered. And Vicente was an eyesore. Guy bought him some new jeans and two cowboy shirts he liked for some reason, some underthings and a peacoat for the cold weather that was just around the corner. Vicente liked Kevin’s brother, Chris, because he was young and not all groomed and was out of shape and had a girl, he was not a maricón but normal, but Chris didn’t like him, he couldn’t be bothered, either. Vicente was vastly amused by the resemblance between the twins, but they thought his delight was boring and predictable, and neither Kevin nor Chris liked to have their interchangeability emphasized, since they were rapidly individuating, or so they hoped.

It was so odd being identical twins entering an urban maturity, which gave them so many opportunities for evolving independently. They each longed to be individuals, and yet they knew they shared a genetic fate, that they would have heart attacks during the same months twenty years from now and die the same year, but more subtly find the same weird jokes funny and unaccountably get depressed at the same time, even if they were separated by a thousand miles. It was odd, because one of them had decided he was straight and one gay, and these different orientations would lead them to have entirely different fates — and yet each would evaluate his experiences with the same lifted eyebrow or the same chuckle or stab of compassion. Chris, for all his much-vaunted heterosexuality, would cruise the same hot guy who’d catch Kevin’s eye, and the same girl would charm both brothers. Both brothers were turned on by Lucie. Perhaps because he was more “normal,” Chris would dress more eccentrically; he even entered a long period of Santa Fe excess, everything weighted down with turquoise, whereas Kevin, despite (or because of) the marginality of his sexuality, hewed close to the norm. It was kind of neat, almost as if they were leading two lives at once, a laboratory case of controlled variance, Manhattan variations on a theme by Ely. All Kevin had to do was observe Chris with his girl, see him holding her hand or protecting her head as he opened her umbrella, to have the same experience himself, to feel it, to feel it in his bones, in his solar plexus, to register it along his nerves. And if Kevin touched Guy’s shoulder and even kissed his neck, then Chris would smile, even pucker sympathetically, though he’d raise a hand instantly to wipe away the abominable sign of affection. Because they saw the point of the other’s actions and attractions, each felt he was playacting in producing and pursuing his own. How authentic could any impulse be if it also contained its opposite? And how resolute could any lifestyle choice be if it was based on neither nature nor nurture, just a whim? If Chris acted the macho too fiercely, they’d both crack up, just as Kevin’s efforts to primp, or act the proper hostess, reduced them both to tears of laughter. True, Chris had been born first, and during the first three months gurgled more and smiled less than his brother and had broken more toys. At two years, Chris had walked a week before Kevin and had hit him angrily over the head with a toy car, though he’d instantly looked bewildered and wailed. Kevin talked first. When they were allowed in grade school to dress differently, Kevin wore brighter colors — did that make him gay? Anyway, that was all family legend invented by parents who out of idle curiosity wanted to find differences between the boys while marveling at the way they mirrored each other. As in many families, the antics of the children were a constant floor show, a distraction from television, as absorbing as a fire in the fireplace, somewhere slim and darting for adult eyes immured in fat to go.