Edmund White - Our Young Man

Édouard relaxed around Guy. They always spoke French; an old man appreciates slipping back into his native tongue. Guy was becoming more and more famous. He was in a widely seen music video lip-synching a song about a sharp-dressed man. He was photographed in black-tie getting out of a limousine with a dowager in a tiara; the photograph was an allusion to Weegee’s photos of New York society people in the forties. It was for a men’s cologne in GQ as a full page during the three months leading up to Christmas. American scents smelled like bubble gum and were all vile, Guy thought, except for Perry Ellis’s. A “nose” in Paris had once told him that the best perfume was Ivoire by Balmain but it was priced too low. Guy used it as a room spray.

Guy was in commercials for A/X, Banana Republic, Barbados rum, and he did runway shows in Paris, Milan, and New York for Sonia Rykiel, Valentino, and YSL. He didn’t have a perfect six-pack or the chest for a Tarzan poster or hooded eyes or pillowed lips — nothing distinctive, no trademark trait except his little jug ears — but he was a perfect size and his very anonymity meant that he could be used in runway shows one after another without drawing attention to his redundant appearances. Even though he didn’t have rugged good looks or a hooked nose or a high-profile girlfriend like Elle Macpherson or Andie MacDowell, he did have his jug ears, small dark eyes, and a hairy chest, and everyone in the business thought he was surprisingly friendly and (America’s highest and weirdest compliment) “down-to-earth,” and Forbes listed him as the world’s fourteenth most successful male model.

Édouard liked Guy’s combination of celebrity and anonymity and gave him a large emerald ring for Christmas. Guy could look at it for hours, especially in the twilight, when it glowed darkly. He could imagine a wizard fondling it and gazing into its mysterious depths. People always remarked on it, which he liked. It was a lightning rod for their attention; better it than him. Not that he wasn’t insecure if people ignored him, but that seldom happened. A drunk girl at a party told him he was of a different species, that surely someone as beautiful as he had lived an enchanted existence. Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man “handsome” rather than “beautiful”?

A new illness called “gay cancer” or “gay-related immune deficiency (GRID)” broke out and wiped out a whole house of five on Fire Island. Guy decided not to renew his share for the following summer. He loved the rapturous, lyrical nights there, no care greater than the exact moment to leave the Botel and to migrate over to the Sandpiper or what to prepare for his housemates for dinner, something that they could all afford and that wouldn’t run afoul of all their strange allergies and food dislikes. He never saw those guys off-island but he liked the way they all adored him — and he was amused by their “ass stories” ( histoires de cul ) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before, and he liked that Édouard stayed on his yacht and never visited the Octagon House where Guy lived.

But with this new disease it was safer to go to the Hamptons this summer (safer but more expensive and less fun). On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn’t tell the houseboys from the bankers. But in South Hampton servants were in pickup trucks and their bosses in Jaguars and there was no place they mixed except sometimes on the beach. (But the help often weren’t permitted to swim, or they preferred to get together in a coffeehouse on their day off.) Only very evolved employers had their chefs tooling around in shorts and answering to first names. (“What’s for dinner, Jeff?” “Well, Dick, I found the most incredible spare ribs.”)

One day Pierre-Georges came for a coffee at Guy’s apartment in the Village after he’d had lunch at the Côte Basque with the baron.

“He wants you to participate in his S&M activities. As a sadist. I said that was completely against your gentle nature, though you did have a violent streak that I’d witnessed twice and that could be cultivated. But only if you felt completely secure as a man …”

“What on earth! You talk as if I were a child. I’m a grown man of thirty-two.”

“Professionally you’re twenty-three. But I like your outrage — we can build on that.”

“Build?”

“Wait, wait,” Pierre-Georges said, making a calming motion with both hands and looking perfectly calm himself, even smiling. “I told him that your building was up for sale and if you owned it and had two income properties …”

“What?”

“If you owned the whole building, you could rent out—”

“And what did he say?”

“He asked me to test the waters.”

“He’d buy me the building and I’d switch his butt?”

“More than that and more than once.”

“ Berk! ” (The sound for revulsion in French comic strips.)

Pierre-Georges let a long silence accumulate. He who was always voluble didn’t mind showing his tacit impatience or disapproval.

At last Guy took a new tack: “You’re adept at all things hard”—he used the English word “hard,” the h suppressed, newly imported into French for sadomasochism—“but I know nothing of … all that. Would you tell me how it’s organized?” They both liked the cool, cerebral tone of “organized.” Normally Guy never asked questions. He didn’t like to admit he didn’t already know something. Like all French people he didn’t say, “ Je ne sais pas, ” but “ Je ne sais plus ” (“I no longer know”).

The only thing that slightly irritated Pierre-Georges was the dismissive “all that” ( tout ça ). He said, “It’s partly my fault you’ve reached your great age and are so naïve. I haven’t wanted you to come across as a slut”— une salope —“especially now that there’s this new saloperie going around”—he meant gay cancer—“but sadism”—and he laughed, surprised at his own thought—“is bizarrely safe. You don’t even have to touch the slave! And if the slave is a very distinguished old man … who’s very particular … and who’s slowed down forcibly with age …”

Everything Pierre-Georges was saying set off a small detonation in Guy’s mind. Did disease specially spare distinguished old men? Did it affect only riffraff who had problems of … hygiene? Did a single exposure to it suffice (that would be too unfair!), or was it cumulative, was it like Russian roulette, in which only one chamber out of six was loaded but the odds of being eliminated increased with each turn of the barrel?

“No touching?” Guy said. “But don’t you have to penetrate the victim?”

“Rarely. It’s all mostly verbal menace and gestures of domination. It’s verbal and mental, in fact.”

“Convenient if true.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t be alone. The baron likes scenes, orgies with a narrative. There’d be other young men there, attractive ones, experienced.”

Guy’s thoughts, usually imperturbable, ricocheted now like a panicked bird inside a closed room. “So,” he said. “What’s the difference between me and a whore?” He swallowed. “Am I a whore?”

“No more then every married woman. Or heir. They all benefit from wealth they haven’t earned. But whore, if you like. The trick is to be a clever whore”— le truc est d’etre une putain rusée . Pierre-Georges laughed his barking, unfunny laugh. “It would be agreeable to own a house in Greenwich Village, n’est-ce pas , and to be a rentier, especially in a profession like yours with such a short shelf life, no?”