Our Young Man

1

Although Guy was thirty-five he was still working as a model, and certain of his more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, “our young man.” For so many years he’d been actually young; he’d arrived from Paris to New York in the late 1970s when he was in his late twenties but passed as nineteen. He’d been the darling of Fire Island Pines the summers of 1980 and 1981; everyone in the Octagon House was in love with him and he was a good deal more egalitarian and participatory in chores and expenses than he needed to be, splitting the grocery and housecleaning bills down to the last penny, even when he skipped meals or entire weekends.

Everyone adored him, so he could have skimped on his share. He was making $175 an hour as a model for a whole host of beauty products, which was a lot of money in those days; he made more in two hours than his housemate, the young journalist Howard, earned in a week, or Howard’s lover the mustachioed Cuban bartender Martin took in at Uncle Charlie’s in tips on two or three shifts. Even his heavy French accent made him all the more desirable; one of their most besotted housemates, Tom, started taking French lessons but could never master a whole sentence.

Nor was he stinting with his favors. He’d swallow an after-dinner concoction Ted would assemble of acid, tranquilizers, Quaaludes, and the odd yellow jacket. After a strenuous night of dancing at the Sandpiper he’d be found nude at dawn, splayed in the surf with three other amorous beauties or massaging a Croatian fellow model on the deck by the pool as they sipped big shaggy joints of Acapulco gold.

He liked the Pines, since the muscular men there were bankers or lawyers or surgeons and not just gigolos, as comparable studs would have been in Saint-Tropez, lounging around on the decks of moored yachts (or “laying out in the sun,” as these American guys all said, though Guy knew from lycée English class back in France that it should be “lying”; the French, he thought primly, would never have made a similar mistake in their own language).

He was from Clermont-Ferrand, a big, dead, dreary industrial city in the heart of France, lava-black, cold in the winter and suffocatingly hot in the summer, and now he sent home a thousand dollars a month from New York to his pious mother, who arranged the flowers for the altar, and his Communist father, a Michelin factory hand who’d been laid off for twenty years, living on welfare and drinking too much red wine (his first coup de rouge he downed at eleven every morning, an old habit from his working days).

Guy had always known since his grandmother had told him that he was unusually handsome, with his jug ears, full inviting upper lip, and dark intense eyes the color of burnt honey; only the brightest sunlight discovered the amber spokes in them. He’d played soccer in the streets since he was a six-year-old and had the round ass to prove it, itself as firm and slightly giving as an inflated soccer ball. He was six-foot-three and towered over his friends but he was always disastrously skinny and his nickname had been “Sec” (“Dry”) because that’s what the French called those who hadn’t an extra gram of fat on them. When he was seventeen he began to fill in, but just about then he turned moody (boudeur) and started smoking and skipped classes and resigned from being the crozier at church — in fact he slept in on Sundays and missed mass altogether; the omission made his mother cry and his father smile. His parents quarreled once a week and his father, drunk, broke furniture and his mother pronounced bitter reproaches in a soft speaking voice, precise, hateful condemnations which she’d devised to wound and which she muttered expressionlessly.

There were two younger children, a boy and a girl, the nearest, Robert, five years younger, and the girl, Tiphaine, a dozen — both of them presumably the result of Saturday night rapes visited on his outraged mother. The little kids were mousy and unattractive, although Tiphaine seemed to be gifted in math and Robert loved his father and was loved back; their companionship made Guy feel all the more isolated. In the autumn Guy’s father and Robert always left on a weeklong hunting trip to the Sologne to which Guy was never invited.

Guy went with a girl, a friend from lycée, to a session with a professional photographer; she had her heart set on being a top model, though she was overweight and spotty. Everyone in France said “topmodel,” as if it were a bound form. The bored photographer, to whom she was paying five hundred francs for her “portfolio,” ended up taking as many pictures gratis of Guy as of Lazarette. He told Guy that he should pursue modeling. Guy stored that hint away; it might be his passport out of Clermont-Ferrand. Although he was a little rebellious, nevertheless he was a good boy and “projected” goodness — which later would be the downfall of many a person.

One weekend Guy went to Paris with some pilgrims from his church; although he claimed to be an atheist he wanted to see Paris and agreed to participate in the huge youth rally mass that was being held in the Parc des Princes. But on the day of the mass he snuck off and took the Métro to Saint-Germain-de-Prés, which he’d read in a magazine was the artistic center of the capital. He sipped a coffee and studied Le Soir at the highly recommended Café de Flore for two hours, and when he got up to leave a friendly-looking middle-aged man sitting by the window waved him over. “Hello, hello,” he sang out in a loud voice in which Guy could detect just a hint of irony, or was he, Guy, being the provincial paranoid?

Guy had on his tightest black pants and most beautiful baby-blue sweater, though it was really too warm for a sweater. He’d spent an hour before the mirror at the hostel nursing his hair into little sheep curls and had twice gone through all three outfits he’d brought with him. Tiphaine always ribbed him for being more vain than a girl, but their grandmother, overhearing her, had said, “He’s obsessed with his looks and clothes like any normal teenage boy.” Although she’d retired to Clermont-Ferrand she’d been a cashier (“Madame Caisse”) for forty years at a popular Parisian café. She kept her eyebrows plucked and lips painted magenta with a brush even now. From the waist up she was always impeccable, though her skirt was stained and twisted and her shoes worn down; on the job only her top half had been visible to customers and even now that was all she cared about. She chain-smoked Gauloises and drank a shot of cognac every night after dinner. She had a certain Parisian sauciness that the rest of the family lacked and a salty Titi Parisienne way of talking like the actress Arletty.

The man at the Café de Flore invited Guy to join him for a drink. He said, “It’ll just take a second of your time and it could change your whole life.” Guy’s heart was racing but he thought no harm could come to him, could it, in such a public place. Surely he was safe here, wasn’t he?

The man, who was bald but had very shaggy eyebrows to compensate and was wonderfully well dressed in a gray sports jacket the color of a cloud and a flamboyant red and gold silk pocket square, said his name was Pierre-Georges. As soon as Guy had ordered a Suze, which he thought was sufficiently elegant and its yellow color would work to enhance his brown eyes, Pierre-Georges said, “You’re the best-looking man in Paris today. Surely you’re aware of that.” He handed Guy his card, which had the words SCOUTING AGENT printed in embossed letters below his name and above his details. “It’s my business to know these things.”

Guy was surprised, not because he doubted the man’s verdict but because he hadn’t picked up that anyone was studying him. His worldly-wise grandmother had told him only two months earlier that he had the sort of good looks that weren’t dazzling but only slowly dawned on an observer.

“You could be a model!” the man said. “Are you already?” Maybe his grandmother was wrong and had just been quoting some striking Parisian observation she’d overheard.

“No,” he said, deciding to set the bar very low and make himself sound naïve and folkloric. “I’m just a simple boy of the people from Clermont-Ferrand and this is the first time I’ve ever been in Paris.”

Pierre-Georges pressed a smile away with his fingertips and asked, “Age?”

“Seventeen.”

“Lycée?”

“Terminale.”

“So in a few weeks you’ll be free to work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have any objections”—again the fingertips pressing the smile from the lips—“to living in Paris and traveling to New York and Milan?”

He decided to play the ingénu (which in fact he was) and said, “Are you kidding? That would be a dream come true.” He knew that a cool, blasé tone was beyond his means; he thought Pierre-Georges would prefer to discover an innocent (Guy was a born actor and could even consciously perform himself).

He took a bus up to Paris a week after the youth rally and Pierre-Georges arranged to have his hair cut and straightened and lightened. He was dressed by Pierre-Georges in loud plaids and a tight-fitting paisley shirt, with long collar points and darts in the back, tight puttees, and English winklepicker shoes, all the ghastly fashions of the early seventies. He learned right away to keep changing his pose. (“You’re giving me repeats,” the wiry little photographer had had to say menacingly only once.) Guy pivoted and smiled or frowned, touched his face or jumped in the air or stared shamelessly at a spot on the wall, all the poses he’d observed in L’Uomo Vogue. The photographer and Pierre-Georges discussed him as if he were more or less a desirable side of beef who could not hear them.

“Great bones,” the photographer said.

“But his nose is a little shiny on the left side,” Pierre-Georges pointed out. “And there’s no notch between his nose and his forehead.”

“But that’s very ancient Greek,” the photographer argued. “Very chic just now.”

“He needs to work out,” Pierre-Georges declared. “A little, not much, just some push-ups and curls and bench presses, high reps and low weights, just to fill out his chest and give his biceps some definition.”

“Straight or gay?” the photographer asked.

“He reads straight,” Pierre-Georges said. “That’s all that counts. All the new male models are straight and married.”

“Nice hands,” the photographer added, “but he needs a manicure, no varnish.”

“Guy, you should throw your shoulders back; the hollowed-out chest look is only for women. And stop smoking! Nothing ages your skin more. If you wanted to do some German catalogue work, swimsuits and underwear, bare-chested, I’d have to burn those two moles off your chest.” Guy’s hand instinctively rushed to his chest to protect it.

In Clermont-Ferrand no one seemed to be gay, or at least everyone he encountered was careful not to cruise. Everyone he knew except the priest was married. Like many teenagers, Guy was unfamiliar with himself. He didn’t know what he wanted — except to see the world. He didn’t know what effect he had on others, but everyone tried to please him, even strangers, and even middle-class men and women overcame their reserve to smile or speak to him. He never had to say much to make people open up to him. He liked to say he led a charmed life.

Guy could tell Pierre-Georges liked him but he didn’t know in what way. He seemed to want to perfect Guy’s look and sometimes Guy felt he was nothing more than a plastic doll that came with tiny outfits and a tiny clothes brush. But Pierre-Georges occasionally smiled at Guy in full complicity as if he knew what was going through the young man’s head. Once, when the wiry little photographer was racing about taking shots of Guy jumping in the air as a fan blew his hair, Pierre-Georges winked at the boy. It was absurd! All three of them clustered together in the darkroom improvised in the bathroom: They watched Guy’s features slowly emerge beneath the clear fluid under the red light. The little photographer whispered in awe, “Magnifique! A god.” And Pierre-Georges even muttered his highest praise, “Not bad.”

Guy’s mother, wearing her black, most classic dress minus the lace fichu, which Guy had begged her to forego, accompanied him to Paris for his first runway show for Pierre Cardin. She was more nervous than Guy and must have told him ten times not to fall off the stage. He acquitted himself without embarrassment and each time stopped at the right spot for a second’s pause, and the photographers loved him; at least more flashes went off when he took to the runway than for any of the other men. He wasn’t prepared for the frantic changes of clothes backstage; the abrupt, hissed orders as the maquilleuse, smelling of cinnamon gum, kept dancing around him on one foot and dusting his face with her powder puff. Pierre-Georges told him he should look angry, even menacing, as if he wanted to punch someone: “That will give you the right look.”

Inexperienced as Guy was, even he could see that Cardin’s loud plaids and vests for men and polyester ties were in bad taste and that orange, the prevailing color, was offensive. The show was held in the immense new Espace Cardin next to the American Embassy. The great man himself was rushing about, muttering orders and folding back collars. Guy noticed that several of the male models had stopped shaving and showed black stubble. He’d never seen that before and thought it must hurt to be kissed by such a man. At the last minute, Cardin himself clapped horn-rimmed glasses on Guy’s face. The lenses, fortunately, were just clear glass, and Guy could see perfectly normally through them. Guy felt a combination of fear and satisfaction on the runway in front of so many strangers. He felt the power of his looks, but it seemed a very limited power and he couldn’t yet calculate its dimensions.

The next day Guy’s face was splashed all over Paris and he was (sort of) a star (nameless). Pierre-Georges brought to his romantic Left Bank hotel with the view of Notre Dame a whole stack of newspapers. Guy wanted to seem casual and indifferent, but he couldn’t help pawing through the papers, especially the regional ones he read regularly. He could see his cheekbones were so high they cast shadows on his thin face, but he thought he was too smiley and risked looking like a simpleton. Pierre-Georges told Guy and his mother that Cardin wanted to sign him up to an exclusive contract but Pierre-Georges thought they should say no. “I can get you a lot more money,” he said, “by shopping you around.”

Just as Guy was saying, “You’re the expert,” his mother was saying, “Is it wise to turn down a definite offer?” And they all three laughed at this spontaneous revelation of character.

Guy was excited about having his picture all over the papers and millions of readers looking at him. Would they speculate about who he was and what he wanted, or was the whole presentation so glossy it was impersonal? Would people long to know him? Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?

Pierre-Georges took Guy and three girls dancing at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, a tuxedo disco. The tall skinny girls were decked out in horrible Cardin “space age” dresses of floating geometrical panels over body stockings. (Cardin, he learned, had lent the girls the new dresses from his latest ready-to-wear collection because he wanted his clothes to be seen in Paris hot spots.) Guy didn’t feel confident about his dancing and he wondered if the black light was doing something facetious to his newly processed hair. But Pierre-Georges assured him he looked handsome in black-tie. From there they went on to the Élysée Matignon. When they all got hungry about midnight they went to the Club Sept, which was a table-hopping restaurant and bar upstairs and a small, mirror-lined gay disco in the basement. The music was a wonderful mix; the Cuban disquaire, whom Pierre-Georges called Guy Cuevas, was sitting in a Lucite box and kept playing Marvin Gaye and Dalida.

Guy was secretly thrilled by the blend of gay and straight, black and white, European and American, old and young at the Club Sept and the oddly shaped asymmetrical dishes, spotlit bouquets on each table and the towering wine glasses on green, twisted stems. It seemed very contemporary to him. All of his anguish about whether he liked boys or girls was suddenly resolved and pacified in the dizzying omnisexual pandemonium of the Sept.

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbor boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth. Dear God, please God, don’t let me join that man’s race of the damned. But now here at the Sept he could see handsome men in coat and tie kissing at the bar, surrounded by their stylish, indifferent women friends.

Guy kept looking at his long, nervous, freshly manicured hand set off by the black sleeve above the heavy white linen cuff pierced by Pierre-Georges’s borrowed silver cuff links. (“Silver in the summer, gold in the winter,” Pierre-Georges had declared.) The girls, Guy noticed, ate large green salads of mâche, no bread, and only played with their noisettes de veau and drank just one glass of white wine each, though he couldn’t resist taking a bite out of the delicious hard roll positioned directly on the napery, even when all three girls and Pierre-Georges raised an eyebrow at his lack of discipline. They excused themselves one after another and Guy wondered if they were vomiting their dinners. (He’d heard of such things.)

It was an exciting evening. Some young men at the bar stared over at their table and murmured remarks to one another with hard, mobile mouths. Had they recognized him? A bloated, loud American, stumbling drunkenly, shouting English, was swiftly escorted out to the street. For many long minutes he kept pounding on the street door in vain. “Jeem Morrison,” Pierre-Georges whispered. “Sad. He’s lost his looks—bouffi.” Bloated.

A month later Morrison was dead and buried in Père Lachaise, the two moles had been burned painlessly off Guy’s chest, and he was successfully weaned from cigarettes after fighting a real struggle (and gaining ten pounds). Pierre-Georges had helped him lose the weight by feeding him amphetamines and had finagled him some very lucrative contracts. Guy had learned that though Pierre-Georges liked to be seen in public with very young models and pretty ephebes, he preferred rough middle-aged brutes in bed whom he dragged home from a bar on the rue Keller. Pierre-Georges encouraged fashion insiders to think Guy was his lover, all the while protesting Guy was “hopelessly straight” and affianced to a silly girl back home in Clermont-Ferrand. Word got out that Guy was as heterosexual as the American guys Bruce Weber was flying over to the Hôtel Meurice and photographing horsing around in the Bois de Boulogne. Zizi Jeanmaire — her spiky hair dyed freshly black — stared at Guy meaningfully over dinner. “He’s not straight,” she said dismissively on her way out, as if no normal man could resist her.

A young American photographer, who lived at the end of a lane on the Left Bank, not far from the offices of Le Monde, invited him to pose for a catalogue of ski gear — he even had a simulated, snow-covered slope all set up. The photographer, Hal, was a joli laid, not really handsome, with kinky blond hair, big lugubrious eyes of faded blue, big dumpling ears, but he’d done everything to make his look streamlined, modern, effective; his hair was tamed with brilliantine, it seemed, and he lifted weights and was wearing a tight T-shirt to prove it. He had a collection of plates made from broken, colorful shards, which he called pique assiette, and the soaring walls of his studio were painted green in such a way as to look smudged and to leave traces of the brushwork.

They had to work quickly before the snow melted and there were lots of clothes to get through. There was no one doing hair and makeup, nor a dresser, but Guy was a good sport and half the time he was in his underwear as he changed.

Hal was unsmiling (did he think that made him more soigné, or was he really bored by life?) but he was friendly enough, though he stared too much and took too long to answer questions in his deep voice. It couldn’t be a matter of his comprehension — he’d lived here five years, he said, and his French was good. He didn’t even have much of an accent.

And then, as Guy was getting dressed to leave, Hal said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do some nudes. You’ll be happy someday to have a record of your beauty, your youth.” When he saw a hesitant look on Guy’s face, Hal said, “They’ll be just for us. I’ll give you the prints. And nothing pornographic.”

A large brown envelope arrived in the mail saying NE PAS PLIER (Don’t Bend) and reinforced with stiff cardboard. Inside, in glassine envelopes, were several full-color nudes of himself posed against the snowbank. He was naked except for a pair of skis he was holding straight up and a stocking cap. Guy looked at the pictures through a loupe. His uncircumcised penis was large enough. His chest was hairy and he had a clear treasure trail pointing down from his navel to his crotch. He liked the way he appeared, though he worried his forearms looked too small.

Three months later Pierre-Georges steamed into Guy’s studio without knocking and slapped down on the kitchen table Guy’s full-page nude in the American gay magazine Blueboy. “Slut, you’ve just sunk your career,” he sputtered. “And it doesn’t even look big.” It took a long dinner and four glasses of Bordeaux for him to go from sputtering to simmering.

“You’ve spoiled all our good work,” he said in a drained, tragic voice. “The whole game with models is never to let the public see everything. Make them dream, make them imagine! Let them see a haunch, not a strange little penis.” He said the harsh slang word bitte.

Guy told him the whole story of Hal’s treachery and Pierre-Georges hissed, “Idiot!” Then he relented and said, “Well, it’s an American magazine. No one here will ever see it and he called you Ralph, of all things.” He reflected. “But that is where we want to sell you, America. That’s where the money is.”

Guy had a new thought: “Anyone who buys this magazine shares our vice, and who would admit that?”

“I’m not talking about confession but about gossip.”

Guy longed for a best friend, a confidant. He liked walking everywhere in Paris despite the sudden heat, but he wanted to discuss things with a friend, male or female, and his solitude made him melancholy. He looked at store windows on the Left Bank and across the river on the rue Saint-Honoré and tried to decide whether he liked best Hugo Boss or Kenzo or Lanvin. He coveted a pale gray silk bathrobe from Lanvin but he rebelled at the $1,000 price tag: He laughed when the disdainful clerk at Hermès told him the small pigskin valise with the brass fittings cost $6,000. He wasn’t very sure about money. He didn’t know how long people would want to hire him. He was a popular runway model but he’d have to wait until September for the spring collections to work again. The booking agent at Vogue liked him but editorial didn’t pay much, and besides, they didn’t want the same male faces to become too familiar to their readers. He had a big, well-paying yogurt account for print, and then he did a commercial for Brie where he had to dress as a starving young monk who fell on the cheese the second the older, chubbier monks left him alone. That spot ran ten times a day on TV for a month and the residuals kept rolling in.

He had grown up poor. They had a small, smelly trailer they drove around France for vacations; in the trailer park outside Montoire-sur-le-Loir they’d stayed for five nights. His father set up an awning and a grill and drank even more red wine than usual. That’s where Guy had lost his virginity to a shy, lovely girl from Vichy named Violette. They were both fifteen. His family never ate in restaurants, not even cafés, when they were traveling. Guy had loved clothes but never had had money to buy them. Now, in Paris, he had money but was very practical about saving. Most of his clothes were given to him by designers at a severe discount.

For nearly a decade he was the darling of Paris. He bought an art nouveau apartment designed around 1910 by Guimard, the man who had done the Métro entrances. It was small, but Pierre-Georges declared it “distinguished” and approved that it was in the safe, serene, and nonhappening sixteenth arrondissement. Publicly Guy dated starlets and female models, who mostly were pleased he didn’t expect them to put out. Privately he’d go off at the end of long, bibulous evenings with other good-looking young “straight” men he met at heterosexual pickup bars on the boulevard Montparnasse, guys who like him had been unlucky with lining up a girl for the evening before last call. But he never saw one of these men more than once and never gave out his real name.

Pierre-Georges said to him, “You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re sympa, at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space.”

Then Pierre-Georges sent him to New York for a Pepsi commercial, where his Frenchness was of no relevance; in fact, he had to dress in jeans and a sports shirt and flip burgers among young Americans at a picnic shot on a rented estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. It was 1980 and suddenly male models, two years after women, were becoming “supermodels.” Their names were known; the public gossiped about them. Their hourly rates went up. The public laughed at them for being overpaid, but Pierre-Georges pointed out that the career of a model was very short.

Guy worried about everything. The currency in America never made any sense to him since nickels were bigger than dimes, which were worth more. From all those Fred Astaire movies, he thought everyone in New York would be in evening clothes, but actually they were badly dressed and coiffed. Chicly dressed women wore sneakers (he was told they’d put on their heels at the office). Many men looked unwashed. He was shocked how obese some Negro women were and how unselfconsciously, even sloppily, they rolled from side to side down the sidewalk. Portions in restaurants seemed comically large and he was puzzled that several places offered “all you can eat.” The doggy bag was a new idea. New York struck him as dowdy and provincial but strangely electric. Everything was fast and careless, even the hurried way shopgirls wrapped packages. Oddly, waiters were extraordinarily friendly; at one place in the Village the waitress sat down with them and said, “I hope you folks don’t have a complicated order. I’m completely stoned.” Although Guy fancied he knew English well, he had to ask the photographer’s assistant what “folks” and “stoned” meant. From then on Guy used “folks” as often as possible, as in, “They are very funny folks,” thinking that meant they were amusing. Calling someone “amusing” just seemed to irritate New Yorkers.

Even so, he was a huge success in America. There didn’t seem to be room, not even in New York, for several French models, but Guy quickly became the go-to French guy. He met all the top photographers, including Hiro, a very pure, quiet Japanese artist who would arrange a few objects and get ravishing forms and citrusy color combinations, and Richard Avedon, much smaller and younger than Guy had imagined, a very bossy, hardworking genius who told him, “These days I just shoot constantly and my work has all the excitement of confetti.” Avedon was so slim and stylish even in his work clothes that he didn’t seem American or even heterosexual, but he was famous for his celebrated women friends, including the legendary model Dovima, the one he’d photographed with an elephant.

Pierre-Georges told him that New York was very dangerous and when he took a taxi home he should have the driver wait until he was safely in the front door. He could be mugged crossing the five meters between the cab and his lobby. He lived in Greenwich Village (he had trouble pronouncing “Greenwich”) in a floor-through of a brownstone on the corner, illogically, of West Fourth and West Eleventh. Pierre-Georges had found it and even furnished it for him, though Guy was allowed to place family pictures on tiny silver easels Pierre-Georges bought. Guy also draped an extravagant silk scarf across the plain beige couch, but Pierre-Georges teased him about it and he folded it and put it away the next day.

He joined a nearby gym upstairs at Sheridan Square. There was lots of loud joking among the folks working out; some of them were grotesquely muscular and one guy had to be helped up the stairs by his brother. Every day the guy ate an entire rotisserie chicken and drank a pint of bull’s blood. Guy couldn’t understand most of the gibes, but it seemed half the folks were gay and half normal and they were joking about which orientation was more amusing: “Just think of dick as pussy on a stick,” one of the loudmouths guffawed. The population of the gym was at the tipping point between gay and normal.

In the cedar-lined sauna a polite flabby man with a bushy gray mustache and expensive sapphire eyes and the ruins of good looks struck up a conversation. His nipples were the size of erasers. In Paris Guy would have been curt, but here in America folks appeared to be vulgarly friendly. When the man, un vieux beau, heard Guy’s accent he switched to a very good French. He said his name was Walt and he was from San Francisco, but he didn’t really work because he had to be free to travel with his older friend, a Belgian baron and banker who was always in transit between Gstaad and Phuket and Venice and Mykonos, you really should meet him, and what do you do, oh, I suspected as much, I know you’re not supposed to ask French people what kind of work they do, but hey, we’re in New York, and Walt laughed at the funny coincidence of that.

By chance they got out of the sauna at the same time and headed down the hall to the showers. Walt cupped one of Guy’s hot buttocks; Guy glared at him but Walt looked unfazed, as though he’d been innocently testing a melon for ripeness or as if someone else had done it. In the shower Walt continued smiling and chatting but he made a bit too much out of laundering his genitals. Although he was too fat, strangely enough Guy could imagine it would be fun to hold him. Walt had a body meant to be held.

When they were dressed and heading out, Walt wrote down Guy’s phone number. Under his taut silk briefs Guy could still feel the shocking familiarity of Walt’s hand, but it confused him. He’d never been attracted to anyone over thirty, at least not to his knowledge, but he was secretly thrilled by the infringement of that brazen touch. Maybe it was because such an obviously civilized man, who spoke French and skied at Gstaad, had done it — as if someone in evening clothes had knelt in the mud to suck his cock. After all, Walt vacationed in Thailand, he studded his conversation with references to yachts and international watering holes — and he’d also reached for Guy’s ass.

Guy realized how lonely he was. How starved for affection. In Paris he’d met an older woman named Elaine in an English class they were both enrolled in. She was an anesthesiologist who lived and worked in Versailles and was sort of perky but fundamentally dull, though she was always free and treated Guy as a kid brother. They never got beyond the formality of calling each other vous. In New York he didn’t even have an Elaine to share meals or movies with.

Because almost every man here in the Village stared at him, he’d learned to ignore them all. One had a nice torso but lady legs. Another had worked out his biceps but not his triceps. A third had a good body but ludicrous muttonchops. A fourth carried a man purse because his pale gabardine trousers had no pockets and looked sprayed on: In France only middle-aged bus drivers out on the town still carried them. Guy inventoried all these “faults” because he was just as critical of his own shortcomings — or guarded vigilantly against having any. But he knew that if he could connect with even a very ordinary person he wouldn’t look for that person’s flaws.

If he walked though Washington Square past a lone guy sitting on a bench, eyeing him, Guy would find it harder and harder to breathe as he got nearer, almost as if he were passing through a dangerous force field. His first weekend on Fire Island with Pierre-Georges (who was unexpectedly hairy in a swimsuit), Guy slowly descended the wooden stairs from the dunes to the beach wearing nothing but a tight white swimsuit and sunglasses, and a dozen men looked up from their towels at him and he was afraid he might faint. He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad. Something about being beautiful induced melancholy in Guy. He was aware of how brief his perfection would be — and then sneered at himself for being so narcissistic. Beauty was only a way of making money.

He thought he was like an expensive racehorse whom all the people around him kept inspecting and trotting not for his well-being but to protect their investment. Feel his withers … is he off his feed? … the grandstand seems to spook him, he needs blinders … his nose is warm. If he went out without sunglasses, Pierre-Georges came running after him to warn him against squint lines. If he gained an ounce, Pierre-Georges would pinch his waist and murmur, “Miss Piggy.” If he wore tight jeans, Pierre-Georges would hiss, “You look like a whore,” and make him change to something looser. Once, when he wore a filmy, sheer robe, Pierre-Georges whispered that most dismissive of French phrases, “Très original.” If he concentrated while doing a crossword, Pierre-Georges warned him he was getting elevenses — those vertical worry lines above his nose.

He and Pierre-Georges took a public speedboat at midnight from the Grove to the Pines with a bunch of overexcited guys and they all rushed into the Sandpiper. Guy was stoned and taller than most of the other men, and as he stared out over them he experienced a distinctly Buddhist feeling of evanescence. He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realized that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy — and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

Guy met some hunky guys who’d improvised an outdoor gym with weights on the sand in front of their house over on Tuna and they said he could work out with them. One day a small, slender, but perfectly formed blond drew him aside and said, “You should do gymnastics — you’re a model, right? Do you want me to teach you?” The guy, wearing blue baggy shorts, jumped up onto parallel bars and walked down them with just his hands, then turned a somersault and extended his legs and pointed his feet. Guy exercised with him for an hour; apparently the man didn’t expect anything in return — these Americans were amazing!

He’d read an article in a beauty magazine about facial isometrics and every morning in front of the mirror he hooked his fingers in his mouth and stretched out his lips toward his ears, trying to close his mouth at the same time. Or he tilted his head back like a goose and pointed his chin and pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to firm up his chin.

As he came out of the Sandpiper for a breather he ran into Walt, who was very solicitously shepherding about his baron. They were introduced and the baron, ugly as a commissar, held on to Guy’s hand for an uncomfortably long interval. Of course they were speaking French, and rather loudly, and Guy worried the foreign language might irritate some folks, just as he became resentful when several boisterous Germans would speak their language loudly in a Paris café. Guy feared it might be a petit bourgeois trait on his part, but he didn’t want to stand out as a foreigner, though most Americans said they loved his accent, it was so sexy.

The baron, whose name was Édouard, invited him to lunch the next day on his yacht — and he pointed to a massive boat moored and nearly extinct in the slip just beside them. Guy had noticed attractive men and women on the deck of the yacht just that afternoon. He asked, “What time?” Then he asked if he could bring a French-speaking friend.

The little gymnast sidled up to Guy and said, “I see you’ve met Spare Parts.”

“Who, Baron Édouard?”

“We call him Spare Parts because he’s had so much work done on him and still looks like a toad.”

“Toad?” Finally Guy deduced he meant a crapaud: That was probably said out of envy and jealousy.

“Be careful of him,” the gymnast added. “He likes violent sex; you don’t want those pretty nipples stretched out. He’s also into fisting. Actually, he’s the slave, I think.”

For once Pierre-Georges, whose instinct was to frown whenever Guy suggested an idea, smiled instead. “A baron? A yacht?” he asked, reassured they weren’t that far from Saint-Tropez after all.

Guy had braced himself for a scary intimate lunch, but the yacht was flourishing with young hangers-on and the baron was only intermittently visible, fully dressed in captain’s whites. Guy thought he must be a clever seducer and was determined to imitate him when he was old — to bait the hook with lots of shiny lures. Walt was very much in evidence, making sure the bong was circulating, that the icy daiquiris were replenished, and the hot blue cheese pastries were being passed around, as well as the crudités with the delicious crab claws.

Walt asked in a whisper, “Which of these boys do you fancy the most?”

Guy shrugged but Walt persevered. “Seriously,” he said.

Guy had spent so much time rejecting even the most handsome Americans that now it was difficult for him to pick someone. He was the one everyone else pursued; he was the commodity, not the consumer. But when Walt asked a third time, Guy murmured in a strangled voice, “That little blond in the neon-blue swimsuit.”

“Jacky? He’s the biggest slut on the island and a major masochist. He’s always being chained to an abandoned refrigerator in the Meat Rack and we have to send someone at dawn to free him. Not that he’s ever anything but cheerful, whistling all the time. He’s a wannabe deejay.”

So, Guy thought, the baron does like violent sex and surrounds himself with cheerful slaves—and Guy looked to see if Jacky’s nipples were deformed, and they did look sort of large and chewed-on, like cold gristle. But hold on, Guy said to himself. If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he entertain another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.

There were lots of women present — well, three. They were a bit coarse, but the men paid court to them, as if gay men had been cut off from women for so long they reverted right away to their high school sissy-boy gallantry.

After Guy’s second daiquiri the baron emerged from the cabin. Guy had closed his eyes for the moment against the sun, and when he opened them there was Édouard in the captain’s chair next to his deck chair. “You must be careful that perfect skin of yours doesn’t burn,” he said. “I could put some sunscreen on your back if you liked,” and he held up a little tube from Kiehl’s.

“That’s extremely kind of you, but my friend Pierre-Georges has already coated me like a roast chicken in soft butter.”

The baron didn’t laugh, which made Guy feel uncomfortable. He sipped his third drink, which he’d vowed not to touch.

Édouard seemed so somehow honored by Guy’s friendship that he began to give all-male dinners for him — one in a three-story ferryboat that cruised up the Hudson at sunset with a hundred guests served by handsome waiters in short-shorts and orange work boots and black T-shirts silkscreened with the baron’s coat of arms in silver. Édouard was careful to toast Guy, the guest of honor. Otherwise he didn’t pester him. The ship didn’t turn around and return to the Battery until midnight; by then many of the boys had paired off and mounted to the top, darkened deck. Guy stayed below chatting with two of his new friends. In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a “friend”—Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

At another dinner, equally large and lavish, they were served again by the boys in micro-shorts and orange work boots, but this time their midriffs were exposed. Guy’s mother was in town and she was the only woman present among a hundred A-list homosexuals, who were all courtly to her, though Guy got tired of translating their inanities: “Gee, oh, wow, it’s really neat to meet Guy’s mom,” to which his mother said anxiously to her son, “What did he say? What did he say? Oh. Tell him it’s a true honor to meet one of my son’s colleagues.”

“What did she say? Seriously, what did she say?”

At least the baron was unctuous with her and spoke to her his most ancien régime French; Guy’s mother, in her neck-twisting, unsmiling way, was distinctly flirting with Édouard, though that was imperceptible to anyone not in her immediate family. She drank too many foamy grasshoppers and seemed not to register she was the only woman present; at least she didn’t comment on it when Guy led her back to her midtown hotel, the Warwick, which they both pronounced in the American, not the English way.

Édouard told Pierre-Georges over the lunch he’d invited him to at the Côte Basque that he would give anything, pay anything, to sleep with Guy just one night. Of course, he realized Guy might be shocked by the baron’s bodily disarray; Édouard was under no illusion about how unpresentable he’d become. Very few men of his generation could undrape becomingly, and he knew he wasn’t one of them. Since Guy seemed to fancy Jacky, the boy could be introduced into the repast to make it more palatable.

The whole conversation, which excited Pierre-Georges as much as it made him uncomfortable, since he had no polite precedent for such an exchange, was duly reported to Guy. “I suggested you had your heart set on a sky-blue Mercedes convertible but that garage fees made contemplating the purchase of a car unimaginable, given that a parking space in Manhattan was as dear as an apartment in Paris.”

“You just sold my immortal soul for a car and a parking lot without consulting me?” Guy wailed. Everything was rushing by. It seemed to him his life limped along and then went into unexpected spurts.

“I’m consulting you now. Did I do wrong? A Mercedes is fairly expensive.”

Guy sipped his Diet Coke. At last he said sullenly, “No.”

“What?”

“I said no, you did nothing wrong. What did he say?”

“Édouard just blinked and smiled. I suggested you had a saint’s day coming up. Then we spoke of other things. Your career. He offered that Zoli is a personal friend and he could make an introduction.”

“But you’re my agent,” Guy objected. He looked out the window at the gingko tree. It was July, but the summer evenings weren’t as long as they were in Paris.

“He could be your agent and I could be your manager. Zoli’s the top agent for men.”

Guy worried that he’d have to give Zoli his statistics to be printed next to a new head shot — and would he give his real age: thirty? People said he looked twenty — maybe he’d say he was twenty-two, though Zoli was no fool and might call him on it. A little research would turn up all those French ads from ten years ago; of course, Guy could always say that had been a look-alike older brother, now selling sports equipment in a shop in Épinal.

Guy was groomed by Didier Malige, who Pierre-Georges said was the world’s most exclusive hairdresser. New hair and a new facial regime by Mario Badeau and a new photo set by Bruce Weber — that might get him higher fees and stretch his image across the skies during what must surely be his sunset years.

As for the baron, he was kind and respectful and usually interesting and full of fun projects. For his parties he usually annexed Guy’s guest list. He was always seated fully clothed and never exposed people to his terrible old body. He was always surrounded by the cutest young boys who would sit on the floor at his feet while he draped his puffy, jeweled hands over their shoulders — but innocently, innocently, as a grandfather might. The kids were like expensive borzoi snuggled against him. Walt was always around filling glasses, passing joints, putting on new party tapes. Walt always had the latest fashion icon in tow — he brought Christie Brinkley and Gia Carangi by and the makeup wizard Way Bandy. Gia complained there were no girls present — she was bi and preferred girls. But she also talked about her latest boyfriend: “He doesn’t love me, not really. Would you believe he flew me to Milan business class?” Seeing the blank stares, she added, “And not first class.” Walt made everything function smoothly. He hired the caterers, took everyone off to dance at Doubles in a stretch, remembered who was a vegetarian and who was a pescetarian. (Guy had the usual French impatience with picky eaters.)

Although they laughed freely and jostled each other playfully, most of the other male models had nothing in common and were easily bored. Most of them were living with a woman, usually another model. Several were athletes and tennis champs or went in for boxing or motorbiking or were ranked high by the International Ski Federation in the slalom and alpine categories. Several were swimming stars. Even if they were aristocrats who had gone to Le Rosey, the exclusive Swiss boarding school, they knew all the words to Donna Summer’s hit “Once Upon a Time.” Some of the guys were somebodies — Alain Delon’s son (born and brought up in Beverly Hills) or Barry Goldwater’s grandson — but some of them were uncultured thugs, raised in Brooklyn’s “Ravioli Alley” and sporting a tattoo or two, bad teeth, and a thick Brooklyn accent. How much did that Brooklyn guy work? Guy wondered. He’d heard there was an agency called Funny Faces. Maybe they represented him. One guy was the national swimming champion of Spain and had an earring, a shaved chest, and fluffy armpits.

Most of them were interested in the Japanese chanting sort of Buddhism, maybe because it was hopeful and optimistic and was an exotic alternative to Christianity, which was contaminated with overfamiliarity and gloom. Buddhism sounded austere and nonproselytizing and kind of cerebral, but in fact this popular cult kind, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, was one in which you chanted for a Cadillac or a go-see. You didn’t have to meditate, just chant. It was very materialistic but the men who did it claimed it settled their minds, brought inner peace … lots of things. It was really cool how you could kneel in front of your own portable altar and say Nam-myoho-renge-kyo for hours every night instead of snorting coke or drunk-dialing. And it was fun to have a brass gong you struck every time you chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo three times, though the lotus position, granted, was hell on the knees.

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.

“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.

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?”

Guy reasoned with himself that night as he tossed and turned in bed, surely there was something pure about him; he’d never slept with someone as a brutal transaction. Then he turned the emerald ring around in the dark. He laughed at himself. It was true he hadn’t directly negotiated for the jewel, but after he’d received the petit cadeau (“little gift,” to use a whore’s euphemism), he’d thrust himself through the glory hole for the first time. Why did he dream of more and more wealth? He had plenty, didn’t he, which Pierre-Georges had invested for him? Maybe because he’d grown up poor, just spaghetti sometimes three nights in a row, never a franc to buy candy, always hand-me-down clothes, never enough to buy schoolbooks — that had seemed like reality to him. And now that someone wanted to take care of him, he was … grateful? Was that the word?

He switched on the light and picked up a copy of a novel by Alphonse Daudet that Pierre-Georges had given him, a book he couldn’t get into, for some reason. It was old, he thought accusingly. From some other century. He didn’t like old things. He closed the book.

All right, so he’d already acquiesced to the baron for one big gift — why not a bigger one?

He phoned Pierre-Georges and said, “I can’t sleep. Would he buy me the building outright?” He looked at himself in the large wall mirror over the bed, one he’d positioned there to reflect his “pigginesses” (cochonneries). Of course, his hair was a mess, but he thought he looked pretty good, though his neck, still firm, was threatening to give way, like a dam after ten days of rain. Nothing visible yet, but he could just tell that that would be the first area of devastation. And his elbows were getting leathery.

He turned his head from left to right. Would he give that guy in the mirror a building?

He wasn’t his own type.

“Yes,” Pierre-Georges said, “I’m certain he’d let you sign the deed. It would all be done through lawyers so you wouldn’t have any embarrassment.”

“What would I wear?” Guy blurted.

“At the lawyers’? Your dark blue suit, the Armani.”

“No, I mean, at the orgy.”

“We could go to a shop on Christopher Street, where they’d fit you for black leather shorts—”

“Berk!”

“And a harness.”

“I’m not a horse. And I thought I would be the master.”

“That’s what the master wears.”

“Why?”

“That’s like asking why English words are spelled the way they are. Because. Just because.”

The line was silent with just Guy’s audible breathing. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No,” Pierre-Georges said. “I was watching an old movie on television.”

“Oh? Which one?” Guy and Pierre-Georges often watched movies at the same time, each one at home before his own television. Sometimes thirty minutes would go by without either of them saying anything beyond, “Isn’t that weird? Is that a shovel he has in his hand? What is she doing? Is that a pancake?” Guy’s English was better and he often filled Pierre-Georges in on the plot.

“Well,” Guy said, “I’ve been thinking about my future. I’m thirty-two. Time I had some steady income.”

“You have your Paris apartment rented out.”

“For a pittance. No, tell the baron it’s a yes.”

“He wouldn’t want it to sound like a transaction. He helps his protégé out, and then one night, spontaneously, the protégé explores his dark side in Édouard’s dungeon, just because he wants to.”

“Dungeon?”

“He has a dungeon on West Twenty-sixth Street, two rooms, quite spacious, really, with a Saint Edward’s cross and everything.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Yes. You’ll see — it’s all exciting and effortless.”

“What if I can’t get it up?” Guy wailed.

“That’s of no importance if you’re on the right end of a whip.”

The building was transferred to Guy. He dressed up in his Armani suit and drove in the Mercedes down to the Woolworth Building near Wall Street and visited the very high-end lawyer. There were so many documents to sign, but at the end of it all he was given a copy of the deed. Guy’s own lawyer, a balding bewildered man from the Zoli agency, looked it over and nodded. A nod for which Guy was paying a hundred dollars. But no matter. Pierre-Georges met them there for the signing. He, too, looked very elegant in his boxy Kenzo suit; the lapels were wide and his tie a silk the color of an old bruise. He invited Guy to a Christopher Street restaurant that was calm and empty, next to the Theater de Lys — and, on the other side, to the leather store.

Guy found it very exciting to have Pierre-Georges, the tailor, and a middle-aged clerk watching him as he stripped down in the back of the shop behind a blackout curtain. Guy got an erection from the bright spotlights, the man measuring him, the smell of the leather, the focus and intensity of their stares. He decided not to be embarrassed. The tailor pushed it gently, respectfully, to one side as if it were a familiar though awesome problem. Guy started to say to himself, “Cow-cow, chicken-chicken,” his usual command for going soft, but he stayed hard. Outside on the street, Pierre-Georges, in an unusual gesture of warmth, put an arm around him and said, “You’ll be just fine.”

It wasn’t more than five days later when Édouard phoned him in the afternoon and gave him the address on West Twenty-sixth. He said it wasn’t the main entrance to the building, which was protected by a doorman, but a completely anonymous side door to the right with a buzzer and an intercom. “A woman will answer and you’ll say you’re there for Ed. That’s what they call me: Ed. Tonight at eleven o’clock. I think you’ll find it amusing.”

A fat young woman with a synthetic shiny red nylon-looking pageboy, dressed in black stockings with red garters, a leather miniskirt, a tightly laced bodice from which spilled her large globular breasts, let him in. He did not find her very appetizing. Guy asked if there was a changing room. He had his new leathers in a gym bag. The louvered door in the hallway led to a changing room. “Don’t leave your clothes in there.” Then she said, “Ed’s party is in there,” and pointed to a heavy metal door, the sort Guy imagined was made to contain a fire.

Guy changed rapidly and looked in the mirror to check his hair and outfit. His legs looked skinny and white below the shorts, he feared. But overall he looked frightening — you wouldn’t want to encounter that in a dark alley. He was a long way from Clermont-Ferrand.

He decided not to knock on the metal door and say, “Pardon,” the way he’d been taught but to barge in like Genghis Khan, some big terrifying conqueror. Unfortunately he had his street clothes in the gym bag, which mitigated his sadistic allure.

He walked in and saw four tall men in chaps, asses exposed, standing together with their backs to him, almost as if they were at a urinoir. He put the bag down and drew closer and they were pissing on the baron, who was crouched on his knees, glorying in the rancid urine. He was wearing a strange leather full-length coat, open to expose his chest, belly, and pitiful little erection. The coat was very Wehrmacht. Guy hoped the liquid wouldn’t cause a short in his hearing aids.

Guy knew not to say hello or greet his host. He pulled up beside the man farthest to the left. They seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of urine and they were painting Édouard’s face and chest and belly with the liquid, which wasn’t so yellow. Guy could see a dozen beer cans lined up on the ledge and he imagined that that was what was being recirculated so abundantly.

He was sure he’d be piss-shy, but he tugged his leather shorts down, and out flopped his tumescent dick. Édouard (he tried to think of him as “it,” the piece-of-shit slave, as Pierre-Georges had taught him) crawled over to Guy; he was dripping and barking like a seal. Guy resorted to the usual French banalizing thought: But it’s completely normal, he said to himself, though there was nothing normal about it. Guy was a good enough actor that he felt challenged by this new role. The other folks were muttering the same stupid words, “Yeah, now you’re getting there, yeah, pig, now you’re sucking that big uncut cock, go for it, piggy, yeah, you want that hot young piss, you know you want it …” Guy didn’t dare say anything, with his accent and his ignorance of the right words; he’d be bound to say something like, “Yes, pig, that’s truly excellent,” and they would all laugh, evaporate, like vampires at dawn. He might say something funny. Pierre-Georges had told him humor was the great enemy of sadism. At the sound of the first laugh the whole dungeon would collapse in a puff and vanish.

The baron reached behind him and turned on a faucet that poured water directly onto the raw concrete floor. It flowed into a drain, an industrial-looking drain. No doubt the baron hoped the sound of water would sympathetically induce Guy to pee, but no such luck. He should have gulped three Diet Cokes before coming.

Guy wondered what the scenario was for tonight. Hadn’t Pierre-Georges said the baron liked his orgies to have narratives? It seemed tonight the baron was a bad dog, who kept racing forward to bite his masters on the leg until they whipped him and drove him back into a kennel. The baron actually was uttering, “Gr-r-r,” in an amateurish way that Guy found attachant; at least, mercifully, he was no longer begging for Guy’s piss.

The other men were all of a type — tall, balding, skinny, pale, tattooed, almost as if they were vagrants who slept rough, smelling of old cigarettes and beer, their asses wrinkled and flat like deflated balloons but their dicks big and bridled with shiny cock rings. They all had nascent beards and one man, who looked as if he were in his forties, had a broken tooth. He was the only one wearing a motorcycle jacket and no shirt. His ribs were countable, his stomach flat as a drumhead, his chest stringy with sparse, long hairs.

The bad dog made a rush for Guy’s calf and bit into it. It was painful and released enough adrenaline to power an angry outburst from Guy, who lashed the cur back into its kennel; a second later Guy wondered if he’d actually hurt Édouard and broken the skin, but there was no way to ask.

The dog bite hurt; he could see he was bleeding and he tried to remember if he had any runway dates this week where he had to wear shorts. (He didn’t think so.)

Now that the dog had been sufficiently subdued, all the masters drew a tighter and tighter circle around it and forced it to suck them one after another as dogs will. Then the man with the broken tooth made the dog lie paws-out, faceup on the cement floor. He squatted over it and strained and shit in its mouth. Its mouth was a black hole and it was weeping and chewing. Guy knelt down to Édouard and Guy whispered with concern, “Ça va, Monsieur le Baron?”