Edmund White - Our Young Man

Guy never opened up to the other models he worked with but he liked to joke with them. They had been discovered by Bruce Weber playing college football or mowing lawns. Guy only pretended to like girls, though he was very close to one girl, a makeup artist most recently from Ohio, or was it Iowa; she was the sweetest girl alive, an orphan who’d lived in one foster home after another. Her name was Lucie and she was close to forty but slender and she always wore black tights and her sort of kinky hair pulled back in a pigtail held in a pink rubber band and she looked really young but tired, as if she’d been awake for two nights. Actually the truth was the opposite: She slept too much and said she loved sleeping more than anything, curled up with her two stuffed lions. She usually wore a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. Her hands were big and clean and mannish. She had very large, full breasts, which were only visible when she stripped down to a gray T-shirt. She wore no bra. She was very sexy in her full-figured way, though she didn’t play the woman card. She wore no makeup except white lip gloss. She was all business and she always carried her fishing-tackle box loaded with eye shadow, eye crayons to cancel dark circles, pressed powders to contour and sculpt the face, a liquid foundation, lip gloss, highlighters, mascara, lipsticks, rouges, cold cream, and an astringent makeup remover to be followed by a soothing moisturizer.

Lucie had been born in Normandy. Her father was a black American soldier and her mother a Vietnamese refugee. Lucie didn’t look Asian. The French orphanage had had an approved list of girls’ names and they went through it systematically; Lucie had been her turn. Maybe the orphanage and foster homes were what had made her so independent, self-sustaining. Although she’d lived in America since she was eighteen (she had an American passport), she had the French way of only complaining about little things (the heat) and passing over the big things (beatings, hunger). She spoke French fluently but with a beguiling American accent (her r was atypical and her u more an oo ). Pierre-Georges thought she was a bore, but he only approved of people who could help him.

Guy met Lucie on a set and she did his makeup in a minute, mainly powdering away that confoundedly shiny nose (only the left side).

She told him she liked his tiny jug ears, his intense eyes, his hollow cheeks and full upper lip, his hairy chest poking up above his T-shirt, and his ineradicable trace of a mustache, no matter how many times a day he shaved. His eyebrows were just two straight dashes and his hairline was low on his forehead. His nose was straight and seemed to be the prolongation of a frown, though he’d disciplined himself never to frown. Pierre-Georges told him not to stand around with his mouth open but his lips were so full they were hard to compress. Pierre-Georges said that full lips like Belmondo’s were sensual when the person was young but grotesque when the person aged; he might consider having them surgically thinned. Lucie said that was crazy and she didn’t know why, but Guy’s strangely assorted features definitely “worked.” (She used the English word.) Lucie seemed like a real friend — observant, loyal, tender.

There was something melancholy, veiled, wounded about Lucie. Guy just knew her childhood had been tragic but he didn’t dare quiz her about it. He felt that once she started to unburden herself they’d never be able to push all her woes back in again. She liked to eat unbuttered popcorn with Guy and watch television in her bare feet; she stayed over twice and hugged him in bed but seemed to expect nothing more. Guy would go to Studio with Lucie. Or he’d take a model he’d just met on a shoot. It was fun to sweep in past that line of clamoring New Jersey kids with their horrible haircuts and tacky Saturday Night Fever clothes. (“I know Steve.”) It was fun to dance under the giant spoon lifting cocaine to a silver nostril. He was now surer of his dancing. The waiters were striking — and often were hired by Zoli or Click as tomorrow’s models. The biggest thrill was when Steve invited one upstairs to the VIP lounge. It was exhilarating to be among the in-crowd along with Lisa, Halston, and Andy. Guy didn’t really like to get high, no more than Andy did; he noticed Andy was always taping people or taking Polaroids of them as a way of avoiding talk or even contact. Maybe it was Guy’s altar-boy childhood or his petit bourgeois fear of ending up broke, but he liked being in control and he feared jeopardizing his looks. Dancing was good exercise but the drugs that fueled it surely took their toll, though people said coke was harmless and not at all addictive.

It wasn’t that he exactly lied about his age, and with real friends like Lucie he’d freely admit how old he was, but in the business he was coy or actively dishonest. No one wanted a middle-aged French fag kissing the girl in a Kellogg’s commercial.

One September day, Guy’s saint’s day, the baron gave him an intimate dinner party in his East Sixtieth Street apartment — and a small beribboned white box containing the keys to a Mercedes 450SEL. Guy gave him a peck on the cheek, which was the most demonstrative he’d ever permitted himself to be with the baron. He wondered when Édouard would try to collect his pound of flesh. He noticed that Jacky was present and was wearing a white shirt nearly opened to the navel with puffy pirate sleeves. Walt was always hovering in the background, organizing the waitstaff.

Saint Guy of Anderlecht was the tenth-century Belgian saint of animals, stables, workhorses, and bachelors, and Édouard had as the centerpiece of his immaculate table a white faience crèche in Saint Guy’s honor, the exquisite figurines placed on a mirror as if they were drowning in a placid pool. Everyone was a model or might as well have been, so there were several salads, three vegetables, a sliver of fish on every plate, and unsweetened raspberries, no bread, though as a Frenchman Guy found it hard to eat without a baguette slice as a scooper. Vintage champagne was served throughout. The models kept leaning over the centerpiece so they could check themselves out in the mirror, Guy noticed. Édouard made several jokes about Saint Guy being the bachelor’s saint. Walt passed a joint.

Guy was ordinarily paranoid in company; was it because he didn’t feel at ease in English and was afraid he’d missed an allusion to Charlie’s Angels or The Brady Bunch ? These Americans thought their TV series and their pop singers were universal and eternal. When they talked about them they got big moist eyes like Bambi. Of course they’d never heard of Dalida or Véronique Sanson. Tonight he thought he should get high, just in case they all ended up in bed. The more he smoked, the more his fantasies were unleashed, as if he were rubbing the magic lantern with every toke. He looked at Jacky with an almost uncontrollable desire. (He was afraid that he, Guy, might at any moment fall to his knees and crawl across the room and bury his head in Jacky’s lap.) Jacky looked so desirable, with his full purple lips and ash-blond crew cut which begged to be brushed with an affectionate hand and turned to wheat or silver. The muscles in his neck stood out. Although there were dark circles under his eyes, he looked unbearably young — how did he do that? Wasn’t Jacky what Americans called the “bottom,” indicated by the keys he wore clipped to the right side of his white painter’s pants? Maybe Jacky was like Pierre-Georges, who wanted his bed partners to be grizzly brutes, not the pretty boys he liked only as arm candy. There was Pierre-Georges, over there on the love seat, speaking French to Lucie and looking bored. She’d put on a pretty party dress for the occasion, cut so low he could see she was, unusually, wearing a bustier laced with pink ribbon; she had on silver-threaded blue bas résille stockings. Now she got up to leave.