Edmund White - Our Young Man

Kevin winced and darted a glance at Guy. Guy thought that Kevin’s mother — was she called Marie? — wasn’t any more embarrassing than his own mother, and just as endearing.

During their early supper they sat at the low, almost square white wood table in the kitchen. It was still covered with the old oilcloth of their childhood, red roses printed on a tan trellis, the whole thing curling up along the edges as it had for at least the century long of their young lives. They watched TV throughout the meal, as they had for years. Guy thought the TV a particularly barbaric touch.

Sally arrived on her snowmobile, wearing a knit hat from the Andes with pigtail earflaps and a synthetic insulated jacket, red to match her cheeks.

She had her Attic beauty intact — her blue eyes, veiled and mysterious, her curved bow of a mouth, her wide face. She made no effort to talk, to act, to engage. She simply displayed her beauty as she’d always done. It was enough. Their mother turned off the TV and they all sat up and smiled and quipped with a new animation. It occurred to Kevin that years of admiring Sally had been good training for admiring Guy; he’d already grown up awestruck by great beauty. She smiled and nodded and turned her face slightly to take the light, as a model is trained not to give repeats, but she seemed to be far away, lost in another language, uncomprehending though benign, somehow “blessing” them with the wonder-working properties of her looks. When she did murmur a few courtesies she struck Kevin as fractionally coarser, as if her decision to skip college and to help out her dad here in Ely had made her not vulgar but more common. After all those evenings drinking at the Log Cabin with other locals slapping the waitress on the fanny, hee-hawing, and soaking their winter beards with beer. And her face had aged, at least there were lines around the eyes and mouth now and creasing her forehead like an egg that’s been boiled too long and has started to get tiny cracks in its perfect surface. Kevin’s father, usually so silent, perked up around Sally until their mother shooed him into the back living room. There they watched the big TV. Chris looked reluctant to leave them but eventually headed upstairs, probably to call Betty.

When he was alone with Sally and Guy, the big TV talking to itself in the other room with its insistent laugh track, Kevin watched her shrug her way slowly and deliberately out of her red coat — and there was the splendor of her big breasts cradled by a plum-colored sweater. Only she would have risked red and plum. Even back in high school she’d always seemed indifferent to what other people thought of her. Maybe because her dad was the town’s richest man, she acted as if no one else mattered. Or maybe because even then she’d reputedly dated older men and she felt superior to her gaggle of high school admirers. Now her indifference risked becoming a trait, a philosophy, something unchangeable. She’d never left Ely, though she said she’d taken an accounting course at the local community college.

Guy barely recognized this Kevin — affable, joking, full of American-style anecdotes, not reluctant to say cretinously obvious things. Guy had heard so much about “beautiful” Ely and “beautiful” Sally, but there was something depressing and a bit squalid about both of them.

She waited for Kevin to ask questions and introduce topics. She’d always been like that, like a thirties movie actress who smiled and laughed and nodded, but always at one remove, always through a scrim of starlight (or through a lens thick with Vaseline), a beauty who glimmered and sparkled. Their nickname for her had been “Ice Out,” the day in May when all the ice finally melted in neighboring lakes and they were at last navigable. It was funny, because it acknowledged that she was frigid but navigable.

“You and Chris don’t look exactly alike anymore,” she said graciously, like a monarch introducing a bland subject of conversation.

“I guess we’re going our separate ways in life,” Kevin said, glancing at Guy. People out here, Guy noticed, mainly chitchatted and joked around, but every once in a while said something serious about life in the same loud innocent way. Guy smiled at Kevin, but he was sick of so much forced smiling; his cheeks ached. And wasn’t it awfully middle-class to be half of a couple?

Looking at Sally, Kevin remembered how he’d once been in love with her. He’d written her a heartfelt love letter and she’d written back a note full of smiley faces in which she’d said she’d always think of him as a friend, if not a boyfriend. He’d been so hurt and had wept for days whenever Chris was not around. He’d played “their” song, something they’d danced to once. And yet, if he was honest with himself, he’d never imagined them in a future together. She was too beautiful, too remote, like a goddess who becomes a constellation, like an old-fashioned screen star who’s photographed in black-and-white, her head tilted, her hair rhythmically curled, highlights planted in her eyes and on certain teeth. He’d never imagined them together, strolling hand in hand and bending over their baby’s carriage, much less sleeping in each other’s arms. He knew her as a deity but not as a girl, though once he’d walked outside past a basement rec room and spied on her and three other girls in a perfect squalor of giggling and innuendo — his one glimpse of her as human, less than ideal.

She did almost nothing, never had. She wasn’t a cheerleader, didn’t play the flute in the school band, didn’t go out for yearbook or a play, didn’t debate free trade or assume an allegorical role in the annual pageant. If she was a deity, she seldom manifested herself. Someone said she was shy, but Kevin didn’t buy that. In democratic Ely anyone who was aloof was deemed shy, the default excuse. But how would a shy woman turn up at his house in her snowmobile on the very night of his arrival? Maybe what his uncle said was right — she wanted a sexless marriage with a childhood friend that would unite Ely’s two biggest outfitters. Maybe she knew Chris wouldn’t accept her terms of abstinence. But why did she assume he, Kevin, would?

They didn’t say much. He’d never been able to draw her out. A woman like her didn’t need to talk. She was a beautiful catatonic — another selling point. In high school she’d thought she was too good for everyone, at least everyone local. She’d had her heart broken by a Swiss anthropologist from the University of Minnesota, who’d spent a summer studying the Ojibwe reservation nearby. He’d studied Sally, too, as if she were part of the indigenous fauna. Apparently she’d admired his strong thighs, always visible in shorts, and his gold granny glasses perched on features as classically regular as her own. What she hadn’t foreseen was that he’d consigned her to one of the vitrines in his memory, along with a few arrowheads and a sketch for a birch bark canoe.

When she and Kevin were adolescents she’d never made the least effort, but now she seemed marginally more cordial. Had her parents put her up to it?

Guy could see she was pretty but top-heavy, with her big breasts and narrow hips. And not that pretty — Kevin had spoken of her as if she were Garbo or Miou-Miou. Nor did she have much charm — but why should she, in this godforsaken place? It would be wasted on the woodchucks. It seemed odd to think that Kevin had once been in love with her. Guy wondered if he should go upstairs and leave them alone.

Kevin invited her to dinner the next evening and her instincts made her hesitate but her interest made her accept and volunteer to bring the wine.

That night in their bedroom, Kevin said to Chris, “I think Ice Out wants to hook up with me. Permanently. I’ll have to say no.” Chris was scratching his ankle. He was naked. He had always slept in the nude, whereas Kevin liked to wear underwear and a T-shirt — did Kevin feel more vulnerable because he was gay? Chris looked up and said, “Why no? She’s beautiful and rich and you used to have such a crush on her. More than that. You really suffered over her. I remember.”