Edmund White - Our Young Man

Chris was just treading water working as a dishwasher until he went back to Ely to take over the family business. Why wasn’t he studying bookkeeping or getting a degree in business? Betty was so jaded, so knowing, so cynical that she couldn’t be a good influence on Chris. She wasn’t even that attractive. Maybe he couldn’t do any better with their small dick. He was glad he’d chosen to be gay, or if not chosen, at least ended up that way. Guy didn’t despise him for not being hung — and he could always take it up the ass. Chris was sitting on their “million-dollar ass” (that’s what Guy called it) and wasting it, just using their two-bit cock.

And Vicente? He was nice enough but pathetic, always stoned and always horny. (Kevin could hear his bed creaking through the locked door as he jerked off day and night — deep into the night.) He could smell the burning weed. Did Vicente want to go back to Spain, to what was surely drab little Murcia? What would he do there, in the unlikely event he landed a job? Air-conditioning repair? Garage mechanic? But even these careers needed some training, didn’t they?

How did they get saddled with this loser? That’s what Chris asked, and Kevin didn’t know how to answer him.

Kevin didn’t want to be held back by this band of layabouts.

He hated fashion. He hated its insistence on what was new rather than what was attractive. He was enough of a good Midwestern Lutheran to despise worldliness, especially in its most restless, nagging form: vanity. You could never be young enough, thin enough, trendy enough. He thought we should all be focused on serious, ultimate philosophical questions, and on the train he listened sneeringly to a long, loud conversation between two guys his age about the best watches or the most advantageous terms for a credit card. They seemed totally, hopelessly immersed in the here-and-now and all the tedium of late capitalist material culture. Guy was no better, in fact worse, because he brought to bear on his bad values his immense accumulated sophistication and at intelligence (superior wiliness, good memory, quick social navigating skills, the idealism of his passionate appetites). He obsessed over how to update his image, he, whose beauty was eternal and could span decades, and who should be pondering his immortal soul, not his next haircut.

And yet , Kevin reasoned, I am young and handsome, and I won’t be always. This is the time of my life for sex and beauty, and Guy is the living symbol of that. People see his swimsuit shots with his body sparkling with water (and glycerin), his hair pushed back, the comb lines visible, an angry look widening his eyes and searing his mouth, and they think he’s … deep, powerful as Jupiter, ready to hurl a thunderbolt, vengeful as Wotan — and it’s just silly old Guy, well, no, he has his moods and thoughts, sure, but they’re not as profound as his appearance. He looks so interesting, so full of passion, but he’s — well, not that.

When Guy tried to foist off on him the silly frippery he’d picked up at photo shoots, Kevin just handed it back wordlessly. In the past Guy had complained about the vacuity of his profession, but now he spoke of it defensively. “It’s an industry worth billions of dollars. It’s like food or tourism. Everyone wears clothes and eats and travels. At least everyone we’re likely to meet. And there aren’t any generic clothes.”

“Jeans? T-shirts? Sweatshirts?”

“Designer jeans are a huge market, perhaps the biggest. The same basic design is changed slightly and branded with a famous name and the price is quadrupled. Come on, you’ve read your Roland Barthes.”

In fact neither of them had read Barthes, though Guy had had an admirer in Paris years ago who frequently quoted the Mythologies at him, and Guy imagined he’d got the gist. Now, apparently, Barthes was démodé, though students in America still referred to him. American profs didn’t keep up to date but clung to the thinkers they’d known since they got tenure: Derrida, Foucault, Barthes … America was the attic of French culture, and Guy was worried that over here he’d fallen behind, surrounded by all this old stuff.

Their old, lazy ways had changed. Now they awakened at seven in order to get both boys — Vicente and Kevin — fed, caffeinated, and off to school. Kevin suspected that Guy went back to bed, since he subscribed to the superstition that he could preserve his looks by sleeping eleven hours a night — like the Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Well, he’d earned it. But there was something about the way he lay as rigid as a king in his pyramid, cucumber slices on his eyes, dried mud on his face, plugs in his ears, glistening cream on his knees and elbows — oh, he wanted to take a picture of that, Narcissus in his countinghouse! That would startle his fans and his clients. But why? Surely they didn’t think it was all spontaneous and natural, no matter how often photographers showed him on the beach against storm clouds, the fan blowing his straightened and lightened hair, his perfect teeth exposed in his hourly-rate smile, everything out-of-focus except the Rolex on his wrist or whatever product he was hustling. You could say about Guy that he looked great — and looked like himself! — from every angle.

Betty told them in a casual, amused, almost indifferent way that Vicente wasn’t going to school but hanging out at a pool hall she walked past every morning on Forty-first Street on her way to work. He was usually wearing a goofy, stoned smile at ten in the morning and seemed overdelighted to see her — or maybe anyone he knew.

“Boy, he’s going to get it!” Guy exclaimed, trying to be very American. (Rage in French sounded feline and perverse; only in English did it sound unaffected and tough.)

“Why?” Betty asked innocently. “Poor kid. He told me he doesn’t understand anything at Sacred Heart — trig and essays on Native Americans and Shakespeare. At least he has some friends at the pool hall.”

“You’ve obviously given up on him,” Guy said. “I haven’t! I promised his uncle I’d educate him.”

“Oh, his uncle? The jailbird?”

Guy wanted to strike her, but he just bit his lip and left the room. “Did I say something wrong?” Betty asked Kevin.

“About ten things. But he’ll simmer down.”

Guy hired a tutor for Vicente, a shaggy, thick Columbia student named Henry, gay but masculine in an unconscious, unstudied way, a young man who seemed mature because black lustrous hair was sprouting over his white T-shirt. He sounded as if he had a permanent cold or allergy in his immense nose, as though it were too large to function properly. He was a nice guy studying architecture who had a very male lack of interest in people, their foibles and interests and background stories. He discussed late Renaissance churches in Venice, for instance, with no curiosity about when or why they’d been built or by whom; he concentrated only on the volumes and the solutions to problems, as if San Giorgio had been built yesterday.

His indifference to everyday dramas was useful, as it turned out, since he wasted no time on Vicente’s sad tales about his dying mother or his uncle in prison or his black aunt in Lackawanna. He just shrugged with his heavy shoulders and wiped his huge nose with a dirty handkerchief and went back to the math homework. Vicente was usually too stoned to understand what he was saying so patiently. He’d figured out Henry was a maricón too and he even asked him about that, but Henry said, “We could talk about that, but it would lead us rather far afield. Now, let’s look at these numbers.” He was even indifferent when Vicente staged getting out of the shower at the moment Henry arrived one day.

One Friday, Guy accompanied Vicente up to the Otisville prison in the bus. He knew that only Vicente was slated to visit Andrés today but he hoped to coach the boy on what to say and what to omit. “Andrés doesn’t know anything about Kevin. Certainly not about Chris. Don’t mention them. Just say you and I spend evenings alone looking at your homework. You can say I’ve hired Henry to help you. You can say you’re working for Pierre-Georges a few hours a week — he’ll like that. Don’t mention Betty — that will just trap you into talking about Chris. Don’t mention the pool hall — that will be our little secret. Don’t discuss maricóns with him. That will only irritate him.”