Edmund White - Our Young Man

Important as his new manhood was to him, Kevin acknowledged that Guy held the only key to it. When he went alone to a gay bar — Ty’s on Christopher, for instance — men who were a little sauced chatted him up and automatically reached for his ass. “That’s some caboose you got on you,” while guiding Kevin’s hand to the hardness behind the fly. Even younger, shorter boys ended up gliding a hand down the back of his jeans and fingering his hot hole; he wondered if he was emitting the wrong pheromones, and all this in a gay world where he’d heard 90 percent of the guys were bottoms. How did he attract all these tops? The worst of it was that if he ever were to disregard the health risks and bag a bottom of his own, the guy would probably laugh out loud at his little dick.

He liked being the man but he suspected only Guy could take him seriously in that role. He was wedded to Guy — for his health, through love, and by his determination to be the top. Guy was always available, a heady, expensive flower he could pick and inhale anytime, day or night. One time out of ten Guy would fuck him, but even then Guy wanted to flip at the end and feel Kevin in him. Just as Kevin seemed more and more addicted to Guy, in the same way Guy seemed increasingly besotted with Kevin’s cock, unimpressive though it might be. In the morning Guy would back up against him; Kevin would bop up to piss and then return to his waiting man.

For he never thought of Guy as anything other than masculine, albeit a refined, European, pricey version, and it was Guy’s generosity of spirit that kept his body constantly on tap. There was nothing slutty or depraved about Guy. He was a man without affectations or irony, someone who studied the world with the same simplicity with which he posed for the camera.

To be sure, he knew at all times how he looked, the impression he was giving, how he came off. That was his genius, to know what he looked like to other people. Most guys, even models, waited until strong inner feelings bubbled over, then they flailed about or trembled or hee-hawed with lots of sincerity but no objectivity. Guy was objective; he could triangulate himself through someone else’s gaze (or the camera’s). He didn’t care about what he was feeling. He cared about only what he appeared to be feeling. Just as gifted actors, bland airheads in real life, can appear philosophical, troubled, or tragic on-screen, in the same way Guy could come across as leonine, contemptuous, or seductive to the camera, even if he was only worrying about having clean laundry for tomorrow’s trip to Milan.

Kevin and Guy flew back to Ely for Thanksgiving. It was a nuisance to get there, with two stops (Philadelphia, Minneapolis) and ending up in Hibbing, an hour away from Ely.

They were traveling with Chris. They now looked so different no one stared at the resemblance. Chris was ten pounds heavier and had long shaggy sideburns and had put on a bright yellow jacket, an old one from high school days, so that he looked as if he had never left the Boundary Waters and was escorting his younger city-slicker cousin and his friend to northern Minnesota for the first time.

The brothers scarcely spoke on the plane but it felt good to let their knees touch as they sat in adjoining seats. And it felt good in the Minneapolis airport to order cheeseburgers with ketchup and mustard and cheddar cheese. (Guy ate a salad.) The people who boarded the planes at their two stops were progressively stouter and louder and more guileless.

Ely seemed so quiet and empty after New York — it had just four thousand people and Kevin noticed that they couldn’t hear the loons calling over the lake as they did all summer. The birds had already migrated to the Gulf Coast. Snow was a couple of feet deep, and just a hundred yards from their house was a dark, tall, massive wall of delicious and nostalgic fir trees eating up all the light. Their youth was in that smell, as redolent as rosemary crushed between fingers. Their canoe trips in the summer, their portages across the rocky isthmus, their tents and campfires and instant mashed potatoes, the fish they’d caught and eaten, the musty smell of sleeping bags, the wait for Chris’s heavy breathing so that Kevin could jerk off unnoticed, the scary sound of branches cracking. (Bears? There were so few blueberries that season that the animals were dangerously hungry.)

The air was so cold now it froze the moisture inside Kevin’s nose and laid a marble hand across his forehead. Their roly-poly mother and taciturn father sat as always in the front seat of the Buick and the boys and Guy in the back. The heat was blasting in the car, the radio was tuned to a country and western station, the windshield wipers were clearing a steady accumulation of snow, their mother was full of local gossip. Her sentences were punctuated by her surprisingly high and light giggles, as if the girl she had been were imprisoned below in this oubliette of flesh. She was reeling off her small talk confidently, but every once in a while she turned around to glance at them with questioning eyes, as if she could no longer be sure of how her boys — and this handsome foreigner — were responding.

Guy wondered if he’d made a mistake coming. It all seemed as crude and hopeless as Clermont-Ferrand, though the landscape was more beautiful. Kevin was holding his hand in the darkness of the backseat, but this “coziness” of Kevin’s had become tiresome — almost as tiresome as these Midwestern pleasantries. And then Kevin had a chance of marrying a local heiress — shouldn’t he seize it? It seemed this Gunn girl wanted a sexless marriage — so he should go for it. If he gave her up for Guy and then Guy left him a month later — wouldn’t that be perverse?

He knew that Andrés would finally be getting out of prison one of these days. Andrés had ruined his life for Guy — didn’t he deserve to get Guy? Kevin was young, had a brilliant career ahead of him, whereas Andrés would have no career at all.

And Guy couldn’t get out of his mind the sight of that stiff erection pressing against his orange prison uniform. Guy withdrew his hand from Kevin’s.

Once they were in their old room, Kevin relaxed. Same old Parcheesi board. Same old childhood brass lamp with the glass chimney and a bulb that brightened when a side stem was twisted. The red Hudson Bay blanket with the big label in black letters on white fabric. The old round space heater with its heavily lashed red eye. The cedar closet that was always ten degrees colder than the room. Their old schoolbooks from high school.

Kevin and Chris took turns showering and then, hair washed and waxed and combed and doused in Canoe cologne from an old bottle in the tin medicine cabinet smelling of high school sex and heavy petting in a parked car, they went downstairs to the kitchen, where their mother was making biscuits in the narrow wood-burning oven as, on the modern electric stove, she fried up a ham steak, hash browns, and cooked apple slices. Guy was already downstairs, nodding through their mother’s monologues. It wasn’t even five yet. “Why are we eating so early?” Kevin asked.

“I thought we’d get it out of the way — aren’t you boys hungry? — because Sally Gunn is coming over for some pie and coffee.”

“Gee,” Kevin muttered, “you don’t waste any time, Mom.”

She decided to take it as a compliment. “Yessiree! That’s me: Miss Efficiency! Anyway, Sally really wants to see you boys.” She looked confidingly at Guy: “Sally is an old childhood friend of the boys. Kevin was in love with her.”

Guy wondered what he was supposed to do with this information. Americans were stiff and puritanical — and then they made these shockingly intimate confessions, as if alternating mumbling with an earsplitting blast. They never spoke in the usual quiet, discreet way.