Edmund White - Our Young Man

“Yeah, well — why don’t you marry her? I’m gay.”

“Are you sure you’re not just making that shit up? Are you going to let a whim ruin your life?”

“So you think my love for Guy is just a whim, whereas your love for Betty is some big deal?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. Anyway, I’m not in love with Betty. That’s just a whim, too.”

“Are we going to end up together?” Kevin asked. He then heard what he was saying and wanted to head off any suspicion of incest. “I mean, as two old grumpy bachelors?”

“God, no, I hope not,” Chris exclaimed, with such vehemence it was obvious he’d thought of it.

“So then why not marry old Ice Out?”

“What makes you think she wants me?”

“Well, she wants me, at least Mom says so.”

“We’re not exactly the same person.”

“More or less,” Kevin said, and wondered if that idea would make Chris uncomfortable. “Anyway, I’m sure as hell not going to marry her. I don’t want to live here, but you do.”

Kevin looked at Chris in the soft light of their old bedside lamp, the brass one with the glass chimney Chris had dialed down. He looked at Chris’s button-big dick like a white mushroom in the straw of his pubic hair and at the glabrous chest with its small, confined plantation of hair at the base of his neck. That’s the way I look, given ten pounds difference and no farmer tan. That’s what Guy has to look at, this white slug with the whiter button-cock —and Kevin found this funhouse mirror image disquieting, certainly off-putting. He felt a new surge of gratitude for Guy’s loving him.

Kevin was lonely in his single bed. It was thoughtless of their mother to put Guy in his own room as if she didn’t understand they were a couple. Kevin wished Chris would sleep with him as in the old days, just for company. Kevin didn’t dare to climb into Chris’s bed, now that he was officially “gay” and Chris had decided he was “straight.” Chris had turned off the bedside lamp. They’d always been able to hear their parents’ late-night voices through the heating vents. Now the voices at last subsided, replaced by their father’s snoring.

Without a word Chris joined Kevin in his bed, which calmed him down and made him smile in the dark. He turned on his side with his back to Chris, who wrapped his arm around his waist. Kevin noticed that Chris was no longer nude but had slipped on some briefs. The next night Kevin visited Guy in bed, but he was afraid to have sex with him — what if they got the sheets dirty? What if the creaking bed could be heard through the treacherous heating vents?

For the first two days in Ely, Kevin was able, at least in his own mind, to maintain a sense of himself as a New Yorker, as a brilliant Columbia undergrad, as a bystander to the international world of fashion, as someone soft-spoken, civilized, self-deprecating, and kind. The Minnesota boy he was impersonating was one seen through the eyes of a French model in New York — fresh, innocent, spunky.

But by the third day at home he’d regressed to his old self — sleepy, idly cruel, loud, vain. He hated this transformation, but it was stronger than he was. Just as his homosexuality seemed tenuous when his twin was straight, in the same way his New York self seemed very fragile, if he could revert to his Ely boorishness so quickly. He liked to take walks with Guy every day at least once, hoping fresh injections of civilization would awaken his slumbering new identity. Guy didn’t pick up on any change in him, but after talking to him Kevin felt more alert, more refined, more alive intellectually, as he did after reading Nietzsche, as if he weren’t just a rube but a thoughtful, gentle man, sensitive to paradoxes and denser, finer distinctions. Even if Guy wasn’t that smart, at least he was sophisticated.

He tried not to be a snob who missed the point of Ely — its towering pines, its frank bonhomie, its easygoing acceptance of all kinds of people. His parents, Sally, his other high school friends, were slow to criticize anyone. Were they really that tolerant, or did they just think it was rude to point out jarring differences? Were they moral or were they polite?

Guy wanted to see the nearby Indian reservation, but when they drove there he was disappointed. As a child he’d played cowboys and Indians, but on the reservation there were no feathers or horses or peace pipes, just humble little houses and nearly empty streets and a few old, rusted-out parked cars. Guy looked at Kevin and fluttered his hand in front of his mouth and gave a feeble war whoop with raised, questioning eyebrows. Kevin shook his head.

When Kevin criticized his parents for being hicks, Guy pretended not to understand. “They’re lovely people,” he’d say, getting a faraway look in his eyes. In truth Guy was bored and wished Pierre-Georges would phone recalling him to New York and a “fabulous” new assignment.

Guy worried that his career was slowly coming to an end. He’d been up for a McDonald’s commercial in which he’d been paired with a new, hot girl, a Slovenian eighteen-year-old. She had a porcelain complexion, lustrous hair, tiny hands — and in the test shots Guy looked much older. Not his age, but older. The cameraman remembered him from years ago, his first U.S. commercial for Pepsi. The female stylist said, “They don’t really … go together.” He hadn’t gotten the job. Pierre-Georges muttered that the Slovenian was a “cow.”

Kevin rode behind Sally on her snowmobile down the obliterated roads, visible only because of the clearings through the trees. He clung with his gloved hands to her strong body in its red coat and he enjoyed the mindless sensation of speeding through the glittering cold and banking for a turn in the path. He felt nothing erotic, as he might have if the driver had been a man (as he’d once felt in high school holding on to a handsome motorcyclist he barely knew), but he liked that Sally was in control and was steering them through this white paradise, half of which her family owned.

When they came back to his house for lunch they were quick to shed their gloves, boots, and outerwear, and Kevin’s mom handed them each a stein full of mulled cider — sweet, hot, and fragrant, with an immersed cinnamon stick. As they sat around the square table with its oilcloth covering, Kevin could see Chris was looking at Sally with a new acuity, as if she were no longer a habit but a possibility. She was even polite to Guy — or polite in a Midwestern way of asking him lots of personal questions, which usually made the French bristle. Was she extending herself toward Guy because she thought he was going to be a permanent part of their lives? “What’s it like to be a model?” she asked. “To hang out with some of the world’s most beautiful women?”

The years went by. Chris moved back to Ely, married Sally, managed the conjoined family businesses, but they kept separate bedrooms and had no children. This seemed to be according to the terms they’d worked out. Kevin and Chris called each other every day at least once, sometimes just to say, “How are you keeping? Nothing to report on this end,” and hang up. Every two months, at least during the winter months when they weren’t that busy, Chris flew to New York and stayed with Betty. Kevin assumed his brother was supporting her, now that he was rich. At least he couldn’t see how she was surviving otherwise. Now that she had her degree in film from NYU, all she seemed to be doing was to write one or two short movie reviews for Interview . How much could that pay? A hundred bucks? She was also giving a literary tour of the Village once a week, visiting Edna St. Vincent Millay’s skinny wooden house, and pointing out E. E. Cummings’s and Djuna Barnes’s entranceways on Patchin Place. But her tours seldom had more than ten paying clients.