Edmund White - Our Young Man

“I have a six A.M. call tomorrow,” she said. “Top of the newly finished Citicorp Building for Italian Bazaar . I’m working for Von Wangenheim.”

He stood and kissed her on both cheeks. He knew she was really leaving out of discretion; she was the only woman still present. “Thanks for the gift,” he said. She’d brought him a used hardcover of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , which he’d always meant to read. She’d told him that she chanted and it had brought her the job for Vogue Patterns , which had the world’s most daring editorial pages. Lucie had painted a Japanese model’s face pale green and dressed her in a skin-colored, sleazy vintage ball gown she and Guy had found in a secondhand store on Greenwich Avenue. It had started a revolution, the sick look.

With Lucie’s departure, Walt turned down the lights. Pierre-Georges took his leave and winked complicitously at Guy. Guy was dying to run down to the garage and drive his new car around; the parking space the baron had rented was in his, the baron’s, building, which wasn’t convenient to Guy’s place in the Village, but the baron no doubt hoped to lure Guy even more often up to the East Side. Guy wondered if the title of the car was also in the baron’s name.

Now that there were only four handsome guys left, all gay, he noticed, the music was no longer disco (“Higher and Higher”) but Peggy Lee (“Is That All There Is?”), Édouard’s idea of mood music. Two joints were making the rounds and the champagne was replaced by sweet, deadly stingers. The Ravioli Alley guy, who looked like the young Elvis, was rubbing his crotch through his trousers. He would, Guy thought. It looked half hard and very big. Then Walt, who was sitting next to Elvis, put his hand on his knee and Elvis moved it closer to his dick. Jacky stood and made a show of refilling his drink, but a second later he was sitting on the other side of Elvis and was kissing him passionately. The baron had left the room. Guy was so stoned that he was magnetized to Jacky’s side. As soon as an idea popped into his head he was doing it. There seemed to be a skip between every series of actions as if it had been edited out. Guy looked at Walt; they smiled hopelessly and each said, at the same moment, “Gosh, I’m stoned.” Walt added, “I think that shit was sprayed with PCP.” And Guy nodded meekly, though he had no idea what that meant. Guy’s own erection was so hard it ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door. He felt a little silly, possibly intrusive, sitting next to Jacky as Jacky kissed Elvis, a bit like an importunate extra man who wants to cut in on a woman perfectly happy with her dancing partner. But then Walt had extricated the thug’s big, uncircumcised, ropy cock from his trousers and Elvis was sprawling back on the couch to get sucked. He pulled away from Jacky, who turned without missing a beat to kiss Guy. Jacky’s mouth tasted metallic, which Guy imagined was from the thug’s saliva. Jacky’s eyes were closed. Did he know whom he was kissing? Jacky’s hand unzipped Guy’s fly and pulled out his rigid, leaking penis. As though drawn to it like a sunflower to sun, his mouth descended and engulfed it. Guy trembled from the warm, liquid enclosure, all alive and squirming, the tongue. Oh, God, don’t let me shoot right away! Now Jacky was grappling with Guy’s belt and unbuttoning him — Guy lifted his hips slightly and Jacky tugged his trousers down. With a flicker of anxiety Guy hoped his crotch didn’t smell, hoped his wallet didn’t fall out. But Jacky liked it; Guy thought of the French word pervers and then the English word “manhood.” Jacky had unfolded his manhood and had it on display and isolated as if prepped for surgery. He had pulled back his foreskin and was licking Guy’s balls and now the stretch of skin beside them. His tongue was as rough as a cat’s.

Guy looked over at Walt’s gray mustache beavering away on the thug’s big penis, which was so adolescent it was pressing up against his soft stomach, fish-belly white, and Walt had to pull it down fastidiously between thumb and forefinger in order to suck it.

Where was Édouard? The wall beside them was covered with gilt bosses and Louis Seize knots in plaster and Guy thought he could see an eye — liquid, shifting, sensitive as a quivering sea urchin — blinking at the center of one of the ornaments. Was Édouard just a voyeur? Was he back there jacking off? Poor Édouard, deaf even with two hearing aids and his bald head painfully seeded with implants. Could he even get an erection?

Knowing that they were being watched excited Guy, who moved his arm out of the way as men do in porn to make the focus of excitement more visible to the viewer. Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?

After it was all over, Édouard rejoined them and chuckled. “I am like the Cardinal de Bernis, who spied on Casanova and a nun.” Guy knew who Casanova was but not the other guy. He was happy to see that Édouard was highly satisfied with his dinner party and orgy. Ever prudent, Guy decided he was too drunk to drive. He and Édouard took the elevator down to the garage to look at the Mercedes. Guy stood with his arm resting on Édouard’s shoulder, then kissed his forehead and took a cab home.

“Gay men,” Pierre-Georges said over the phone, “pay more for boys who don’t put out. Straight men pay for women who do fuck them. I don’t know why that should be so.”

“Maybe boys are too plentiful and available, whereas pussy is scarce.” He said the French word, con , and Pierre-Georges laughed even to hear this mild profanity in Guy’s mouth.

“Scarce? Hardly. Not now. Just troll any of those Second Avenue singles bars in the Fifties. If you’re not too picky, young fat girls are very available.”

“So do you think I should play hard-to-get for Édouard?”

“It’s worked so far.”

A year went by and Guy submitted every month to Jacky’s attentions while Édouard watched through the mosharabia. Once, after a very stoned Christmas dinner, Jacky was kissing Guy deeply and Guy felt a new mouth on his dick. It was Édouard’s, no doubt; he’d removed his dentures and Guy remembered that old guy at the Clermont-Ferrand train station. How old had he been then? Seventeen? Now it was sixteen years later. Guy pulled down Jacky’s trousers, releasing his stubby erection. The baron took turns sucking them off. Guy noticed that Jacky had shaved all his pubic hair — was that some master’s whim or was it aesthetic? Guy had observed the same practice once when he’d made love to an Arab.

He heard distant rumors of the new backroom bars where some French tourist friends had been turned away by the doorman for wearing cologne, cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders, and Gucci loafers, no socks. Apparently they wanted only “real men.” America had no images for masculinity that weren’t working-class.

At one bar, the Mine Shaft, there were two floors of horrors, naked men sitting in bathtubs being peed on, a whole wall of glory holes where guys were serviced anonymously, a sling where “bottoms” could get fisted. There was no way Guy could visit that place or the leather bars in the West Twenties. What if someone took his picture? He’d even heard of society people going to the baths on the Upper West Side to hear singers while men in towels stood around. A Polish princess had taken off her rings to fist a go-go boy down on Fourteenth Street.

Édouard had a glory hole installed in the doorway to his bedroom. It was just a piece of plywood, easily removed, with a large, optimistically large hole cut through at waist-height. They had a light dinner à deux ; a butler served them and called Guy monsieur and Édouard Monsieur le Baron . After dinner, which was slightly tedious with its six changes of plates and tableware and its three wines, ending with a delicious Chateau d’Yquem, Édouard sat back in his chair and lit a joint. He talked about the gloomy castle in which he’d grown up where it was always raining. “Then in Brussels we lived above the bank, just a block from the royal palace. My father died when I was nine — gossips said he shot himself because he was gay. My mother was a delicious woman who surrounded herself with artists. There’s a portrait of her.” He pointed to a life-sized painting of a blond woman in a ball gown. The painter had shown more interest in the candy-striped silk dress with its frothy lace bodice than in the subject’s face, which looked fairly generic. “She was a saint — but a powerhouse, too. I’ve tried to follow her example by surrounding myself with beauty and sensitivity.” He winked. His newly installed hair was dyed a Death-in-Venice black. Suddenly he grew silent and left the table. Guy knew what was expected of him and after a few minutes he headed for the glory hole. He “betrayed” Édouard by imagining the toothless mouth on the other side of the door was Jacky’s.