Edmund White - Our Young Man

“That Guy is an upstanding, mature, responsible man who fucks me good.”

Phil exclaimed, “I can’t say that!”

“No, you can’t. Just tell them you liked Guy and that we’re both negative and faithful. That’s what parents worry about. Really worry about. AIDS. And I understand it.”

Kevin turned out to be a brilliant student — imaginative, punctual with his assignments, analytical and skeptical, a nonstop reader, endlessly curious and diplomatic with his fellow students — and especially with his professors. He picked up right away that he might have the right looks (Nordic) to be a career diplomat; a standard Midwestern accent that needed to be placed farther back in the throat and made softer and less nasal; an unexceptionable pedigree (no Nazis or criminals or rabble-rousers hanging from the family tree and no controversial tycoons or scientists, either); ambitious but not pushy, earnest at the right serious moments but otherwise a mild American joker, always laughing. His was an obliging politeness that never shaded off into obsequiousness, a mental precision that never turned pedantic. He had all the virtues and, because of his generic, small-town family background, no entangling alliances with politicians, lobbyists, plutocrats, or radicals. On the other hand, he was a bit too far out of the closet, untraveled, a monoglot, naïvely trusting, as friendly as a family pet. And he had the usual defect of a twin: excessive unguarded loyalty and transparence to his brother. Would he be able to keep a secret from Chris?

His adviser, Dr. Blumenstein, warned him that these were some of the questions the Foreign Service and the FBI would be eventually asking about him and his suitability to serve. Blumenstein hoped Kevin would eventually apply to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs if he did well in his courses and Graduate Record Exams. He hoped Kevin as an undergrad would take a broad range of courses from political geography to Arabic to Asian studies in the next few years. Any interest in learning to speak Hmong? Urdu? Pity. Of the usual languages, Spanish was crucial. Kevin realized, didn’t he, that the Foreign Service could be extremely dangerous and that his first postings would be in Third World countries deprived of creature comforts? He really should consider Urdu, if for no other reason than to be able to read Hafez in the original.

Would Kevin be looking for a wife with social graces, endless patience, and few prejudices, preferably a private income? That was the sort of wife/hostess an ambassador needed.

Kevin smiled and took his courage in his hands. He said, “There aren’t any young ladies in my future.”

“Are you a Minorite? An Athenian? A Uranian?”

Kevin had never heard these euphemisms before, but he could guess at their meaning from the leer in Blumenstein’s eye and his unusually wet, prolonged smile. The boy said, “Yes.” He figured his adviser wouldn’t know these strange words unless he himself was an initiate.

“You’ll find,” Blumenstein said, lighting his pipe, “that the Foreign Service is full of Friends of Dorothy, though most of them are, as the Italians say, insospettabile .”

Kevin, despite his sunny nature, made few friends at school. He didn’t want any classmates dropping in unexpectedly. Guy wouldn’t like that. Guy didn’t really approve of casual American ways. One time Chris had gone uninvited into the kitchen and stared into the fridge. “I’m hungry! Looks like you guys never snack.” Eventually he found an unopened package of prosciutto, which he gobbled down, cursing that he had to peel off the individual pieces of paper. Guy was outraged and said, “What if that had been an essential ingredient of our dinner? How dare he ransack our refrigerator like that?”

“Come on, Guy, he’s my brother. Whatever is mine is his.”

“We don’t think that way in France. No French person would behave like that. He’s not well educated.” (Guy always made that mistake in English, “educated” for “brought up.”)

The other students at Columbia, after an initial show of friendliness, didn’t warm up to Kevin. When a shaggy guy with a Brooklyn accent asked him to join him and some other guys for a beer, Kevin said he had to hurry home. “Where’s home?”

“The Village.”

“Lucky guy. Where?”

“West Eleventh and West Fourth.”

“Wow, best address in New York. Your folks live there? Rent control?”

“No. A friend lives there. He owns the house.” Kevin started to pull away, not wanting to be interrogated further. He was proud to be living on that prime, leafy street with a man-in-a-million but it made him uncomfortable to be envied. He’d never gloried in his fate to a stranger and, unperceived, it was only the shadow of a reality. It scarcely existed. But if examined in depth he could easily be taken for a leech, a kept boy, a pariah with a secret. That could end up on his FBI record. Living a double life was possible in New York. Columbia was far from the Village, and other students rarely strayed south of Ninety-sixth Street. He never ran into anyone he knew from school. Manhattan was perfect for anonymity.

Isolated from his classmates, he spent many an evening with Guy and Vicente, sometimes with Chris or Chris and his spiky sarcastic girl. Guy would get a huge take-out platter of sashimi, though Betty said she wasn’t into slimy raw fish and she cooked up a package of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They all sniffed the microwaved beef broth covetously. “Look at you all, like bloodhounds pursuing a rabbit in heat,” she said, rat-a-tatting her mirthless laugh.

Guy said, “Studies show ramen noodles can cause heart attacks, especially in women.”

“Bullshit!” Betty shot back without a pause. “But go ahead, choking on your mercury-rich raw fish. Hey, Guy, studies also show deli-style roast beef is as low in calories as chicken or fish, that the fibers in beans and whole-grain rice cause people to absorb 6 percent fewer calories, and that microwaved potatoes stuffed with cottage cheese shrink fat cells, but far be it from me to suggest edible food to you hunger artists.”

Wearing his backward New York cap, Vicente smiled and touched his balls like a rapper. “This chick is fly ,” he said with stoned approval and an open mouth that wouldn’t close. With the allowance Guy gave him he indulged in family-sized pizzas for himself alone at Famous Ray’s — and never gained an ounce. He was attending a local Catholic high school and working for two dollars an hour running errands for Pierre-Georges. He spent his entire salary on weed, which Betty obtained for him. He was a wake-and-bake guy who seldom let reality abrade him through his haze of cushioning smoke. He didn’t understand fully half of the things people said to him in English, but that was cool. He was content to have a roof over his head, and the weird maricóns didn’t molest him. The only thing he missed was pussy. Back in Murcia and again in Lackawanna he’d had enough pussy, but not here in New York. He figured with all the maricóns in New York there must be a lot of frustrated bitches with cobwebs in their cunts, but chicks here were kinda stuck-up. Maybe because he lived with two maricóns, girls thought he was one. He thought of his baggy jeans, baseball cap, gold necklaces, and unlaced shoes as fashionable, but he didn’t see many other dudes dressed like him. Maybe it made him look too young or poor. Bitches liked dudes with scratch. Best to smoke another blunt. He’d like an Asian bitch — they said their pussies were nice and tight and sideways.

Kevin felt they were all losers. Friendless. Going nowhere. Guy was a beautiful dumbbell. How many weeks had he been reading that novel, Sapho ? And why a novel? You couldn’t learn anything from a novel. He loved Guy, but his life was vapid and empty and was careening toward a certain destiny and bitterness. Nor did he have the initiative to become a photographer or agent himself or to make an exercise video or to start a day spa or to learn hairdressing or to design men’s clothes — he’d never bothered to learn any of the ancillary arts of fashion.