Our Young Man

10

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

Chris seemed happy enough. His fingernails were always dirty and ragged and his palms callused. He said he was busy all winter long repairing things — the canoe shed, the outboard motors, the dock, their house and their parents’, the cabins they rented out in the summer. He had a lean, energetic old Indian fellow to help him, especially with the canoes. Chris liked him because he didn’t talk much and stayed busy all day long and knew outboard motors. Sally kept the books and did all the ordering of the staples and tents they sold or rented out to canoe parties entering the Quetico-Superior country. Their Indian helper would drive the hundred miles into Duluth to load the trunk up and bring it back.

Sally, Chris said, was affectionate and would let him stretch out on the couch, his head on her lap. Once she’d said, “I love the way the firelight plays on your golden hair. It lights it up in front and back here on the crown. I can see where people got the idea of haloes.”

As far as Chris knew she was still a virgin, and on their anniversary each year she wore her white wedding gown, but only for him. Their business was flourishing. Fewer and fewer people actually wanted to paddle these days; more and more relied on outboards. The weather was getting warmer year by year, which was good: It made their rental season longer. More and more first-timers were renting; it was hard to convince them to clean up after themselves after they broke camp, and the Indian traveled once a week in his power boat filling up three or four plastic garbage bags. Some folks from New York had actually shot a loon and tried to eat it; they’d even complained it was all oil and bones. Sally told them killing a loon was illegal.

With Chris out of his life (except for the daily calls), Kevin felt lonely. Yes, he had Guy, but Guy was — what was that French word he’d learned—insaisissable? Elusory?

Kevin graduated from Columbia and Georgetown at the top of his class. It had always been assumed that Guy would accompany Kevin on his first diplomatic assignment.

One day, a week before Andrés was meant to be released, at eleven fifteen in the morning, he walked through the door to the Greenwich Village apartment. He found Guy asleep in bed beside a beautiful blond guy who had his head on Guy’s chest. Andrés looked at them for a full minute, without making a sound — he’d learned to be stealthy. Tears poured down his impassive face, scorching lines over the tattooed letters on each cheek, the G and the Y on his face, the U on his forehead, Guy’s name. He felt so stupid having expected a joyous surprise and welcome at his homecoming. He’d not been smart enough to realize that a star (an ageing star) like Guy would need some trophy boy in his arms. Sure, he himself had not been that faithful in prison, but coño, he’d had no other pleasures except working out and jerking off over and over till he went limp. And talking for hours to his idiotic cellmate about the guy’s wife and making dumb things in shop.

He’d cheated because he had nothing else to do or have. But he’d always thought that Guy was fiel since, damn!, he owed him something, Guy had his freedom and this big bed, sheets white as foam, the right to walk around the world as he wished, to see movies and eat Italian, Chinese, Cuban, whatever he wanted, and to stand under the hot shower for hours and to use all the products he wanted or might just slightly want. The least Guy could have done was to stay faithful, shit!, this little punk had probably been around for years and years. He wanted to wake them and shoot them both between the eyes or in the balls, there was no decency in the world!

He left the room and wandered down the hall to the guest room where he hoped he’d find his nephew studying but no, the kid was asleep too, asleep at eleven in the morning! Guy had promised he’d look after Vicente, make him work, stabilize him, discipline him — but here he was with two roaches in the ashtray by the bed, a skinny naked body, not a book in sight. He’d heard so much from Guy about the boy’s workout routine, his weight-gaining diet, his sober habits, his regimented day. Fuck!

Andrés dragged the boy out of bed onto the floor, not caring if he broke his back or injured his flopping neck.

“Hey! Ay!” Vicente yelled, startled into English and Spanish, his red eyes traveling up Andrés’s jeans leg in a bewildered rage — and then he melted into a smile upon recognizing his enraged uncle.

“Don’t fuckin’ smile at me, you little shit!” Andrés shouted. He kicked the boy, who looked confused then terrified and rolled away.

“What the hell you doin’ here? I thought you weren’t being sprung till next week.”

“Guess I surprised you and the little lovebirds next door. Thought you’d pull a fast one on ol’ Andy.” It took a minute for Vicente to realize his uncle was referring to himself.

“Don’t kick him,” Guy said quietly, confidentially; he was suddenly standing in the doorway and reaching out to touch Andrés’s shoulder.

Andrés shook off his hand, tightened his fists and turned to look at Guy. Somewhere in the sun-drenched background was the other guy’s naked body, slightly bent over — in shame? Fear? Modesty?

“Sorry if I woke you guys up at eleven in the morning.”

“How did you get out early? Who drove you into town?” Guy asked.

“Sorry to fake you out before you hid the evidence and had Vicente all washed up and combed and your trick in the closet.”

Guy smiled wearily as if in response to a bad joke or corny pun. His heart was beating with alarm but all he wanted to do was to fold Andrés in his arms. If only Kevin weren’t here or would put on some clothes. Guy looked around. Kevin had disappeared and Guy could hear water running. Maybe that was what he was doing, preparing to leave.

Vicente had pulled on some week-old boxer shorts and a dirty T-shirt, which clung so tightly to his body he looked even skinnier. “Let’s all chill,” Vicente mumbled. He couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. His nails looked badly bitten, which Guy realized he’d never noticed before. Those dirty little nails, bitten down to the cuticle, made him feel guilty.

Had Andrés seen him in bed with Kevin? What a disaster, he told himself, as his mind scurried around searching for alibis.

Andrés folded his arms, widened his stance and rocked back on his heels.

Guy shrugged and almost whispered, “I’ll make some coffee.”

Andrés said, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to walk around for ten minutes and when I come back I want to see you bums dressed and the trick gone.”

“What’s a trick?” Vicente asked.

“It’s whores’ slang,” Guy said wearily, “for a one-time client.”

“But Kevin isn’t—” And Guy kicked him.

Andrés stormed out. Guy said, “We’re up shit creek,” a saying he was proud of, since it was both American and manly. “Jump in the shower and get dressed.”

“But I’m still tired …”

“Now!” Guy barked, which was so unusual for him that Vicente headed immediately into his bathroom to get ready.

Guy hurried off to his own bathroom, which Kevin had filled with steam. Kevin was as pink as a boiled shrimp. “Did you get rid of him?” Kevin asked over the roar of the water.

Guy turned the shower off, which seemed to vex Kevin since he still had soap all over. “He’s gone out for ten minutes but he’ll be right back.” Even after all these years — and especially in an emergency like this, Guy felt as if he were in a dream when he spoke English and he was mildly astonished that he was making sense. He was almost offended that Kevin could talk about getting rid of “him.”

Guy said, “Would you mind leaving us alone for half an hour till all this blows over?” He was speaking in his most intimate indoor voice, soft and kind.

Kevin said, “It’s not going to blow over. We got to have this out. You’re either mine or his — which is it?”

“Let me get showered and dressed,” Guy said tonelessly.

A fleeting look of fear crept into Kevin’s eye. He rushed off to dress without saying a word. Guy hadn’t reassured him.

By the time all three of them were fidgeting and formal in the living room, pretending to be at ease as in a posed, “casual” photo, Andrés had returned. Guy noticed his hand was shaking slightly — from anger? Tension? “Looks like a committee,” he said. Then he turned to Kevin and said accusingly, “Who are you?”

“I’m Guy’s lover, Kevin. I’ve been living here for years. I’m surprised you never heard of me.”

“How could I? I wasn’t exactly free to investigate. And God knows Guy would never have told me anything. He’d sooner die.” Andrés looked at Guy menacingly. “All along I thought you were waiting for me. I shoulda knowed you had your pretty blond butt boy in your bed every night. You’re not decent, nobody’s decent. You didn’t mind if I suffered as long as you could fuck a boy every night and get a two-hour rub-down and travel to Europe whenever and wherever you wanted. It ain’t decent.”

Guy inventoried Andrés’s envies — sex, massage, travel. He wanted to buy off Andrés’s rage and wounded feelings with all these things.

He wondered how all this would end. He hoped it wouldn’t be up to him — that he wouldn’t have to choose between them.

And then the focus shifted to Vicente, who was living in the States illegally, since he’d outstayed his original three-month visa by years. Guy had hired a lawyer to sort it all out, but it seemed hopeless, unless Vicente went back to Spain, found an American woman to marry, could prove it was a legitimate marriage, applied for a green card, waited six months … Or he could stay here, never break the law, never try to work, stay off the government’s radar. That was the problem, Guy explained: Andrés wanted him to work, but he couldn’t unless it was off the books. Or Andrés wanted him to go to a university, but he didn’t have a student visa. Nor the grades. So he just ended up sleeping till noon, biting his nails, playing pool, trying unsuccessfully to pick up girls, getting high.

Guy tried to explain all that to Andrés, but even though, as a foreigner himself, Andrés understood visa problems, he shook his head and said, “This has got to change. I owe it to his mother, my poor dead sister,” and Andrés made the sign of the cross and kissed his thumb, which Guy had never seen him do before.

“But, Andy,” Vicente said, using the new prison name, “I help out around the house …”

“Not!” Kevin chimed in, which only drew the unwelcome attention back to him.

“Who are you, kid? Guy fuckin’ you regular?”

“Actually, I’m the one who does the fucking,” Kevin said.

“Oh, yeah? A little punk like you’s Guy’s man? Guy’s your bitch?”

Vicente piped up. “I’m hungry. Anyone else? C’mon, Andy, you must be ready to chow down.”

“We don’t think about sex like that,” Kevin said primly.

“Why don’t you chow down, Vicente?” Andrés asked angrily.

“Vince.”

“Your fuckin’ name is Vicente. Te llamas Vicente,” and he said his name with a Castilian lisp.

“Get out of here!” Andrés shouted. “Let the grown-ups, the men, talk.”

Looking down, side-swiping them with uneasy glances, Vicente shuffled out but hesitated at the door in case it was all a joke.

“Salir de acqui!” Andrés shouted and the boy flew out of the door.

“Great work you’re doing with him,” Andrés said bitterly.

“That’s not fair,” Guy said. “I’ve done my best. He’s a bad seed, won’t work, always gets high.”

“Bad seed? Bad seed, huh? Like his uncle?”

“That’s not what I meant, it’s just—”

“That’s what you said.”

A grim silence set in.

“You’ve gotten so big. So strong and muscular,” Guy said in a matter-of-fact and, he hoped, not-too-oily way.

“Scare you, huh? I could fuck you both so you couldn’t walk for a week.”

Then some evil thought dawned in Andrés’s mind — you could tell from his sardonic smile. He looked at Kevin and said, “Don’t count on Monsieur Guy stickin’ with you through sickness and health, good times and bad. He ain’t got a very good record.”

“He loves me,” Kevin said.

“Oh, yeah? How can you be sure?”

Kevin stood beside Guy and bent his earlobe forward to reveal the infinity tattoo.

Then he revealed his own. And then Andrés revealed his. Kevin looked with confusion at Guy. And then his eyes gleamed with tears and he began to shake his head in denial.

“Trust me, buddy,” Andrés said, “he’s no good. He’s a fuckin’ som-bitch.”

Oh, merde, Guy thought. Putain! And for a second he thought he might end up alone — he’d always been alone, that was his natural habitat, loneliness, he could deal with it better than disappointing everyone. He’d lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean. Guy felt it was unfair that his fate was being decided in a language not his own.

They talked and talked all afternoon and both Kevin and Andrés cried, though Guy remained dry-eyed (I’m a monster, he thought). Guy ordered in two pizzas, one with black olives and anchovies (Andrés’s favorite) and one of quattro formaggi (Kevin’s), and Guy sampled each one impartially.

At a certain point Andrés slammed the side table so hard that it caved in and fell apart. When Guy brought him another cup of coffee, he wrapped his hand around Guy’s leg. Kevin stared accusingly. Guy just stood there though the hot cup was burning his hand. He felt so awkward. He was used to being admired by more than one man at a time; on Fire Island different drunk men would grab at him on the dance floor and he would just laugh and walk away and join his friends on the deck.

But these guys? He knew them. He loved them. He owed them something. He’d nurtured their love for him. In Andrés’s case, he’d ruined his life, if inadvertently. Andrés had committed crimes for him and served years in prison, which had brutalized him; he’d gone from a sweet, willowy art historian to a tank with a buzz cut and a foul mouth. He’d learned English in prison but the worst kind. He’d sunk a dozen social classes — what would his poor parents think? They sent off a gentleman scholar to America and got back a gangster brute.

Sexy, though, he thought. Very sexy.

And Kevin? For once Guy had had a good influence on someone. He’d pushed him all the way through university. He was more confident, more polished, but still Minnesota-pure, if no longer Minnesota-naïf. And yet, the young man was fearfully in love with him. That’s why he’d cried. His love (which he believed Guy betrayed) was hurting him.

Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his “eternal” beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was — empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? “Riddled with vices?”), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he’d outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it?

Finally Kevin went out to meet a school friend for dinner. Andrés, with his face branded with Guy’s name, took his faithless lover in his arms (he smelled of ammonia from the prison). Guy’s body remembered, awakened, though they did new things; Andrés had changed, not the urgency to get the very last millimeter inside him but their practices, those were all new and for a second Guy was jealous of that black guard. Andrés came a lot and quickly, but he kept searching Guy’s face and for a second even mimed strangling him, then reached up and closed Guy’s eyelids and placed his hand over his eyes.

Andrés couldn’t stay in America; he was a criminal alien without papers. Nor could he leave Vicente in this idle, decadent state. Guy bought them both a ticket to Barcelona, with a transfer to Valencia and then a bus ride to Murcia. Andrés was convinced that his nephew would find a job in Murcia. The idea of returning to Spain and working (didn’t they have a twenty percent unemployment rate?) didn’t appeal to Vicente, though he was mildly curious about what Spain held in store for him. He could remember the glassy, smooth marble pavement around the historic center in Valencia, so polished you could see your reflection in it.

When Kevin understood that in less than a week Andrés and Vicente would be leaving New York, he surprised himself by how gracious he became, couch-surfing at the apartment of a grad student friend way uptown and leaving Guy, with his legibly guilty conscience, to lavish Andrés with love. Yes, Kevin was jealous, but he knew Guy belonged to him. And besides, jealousy wasn’t a manly feeling. Men were better than that. They thought of their lovers as their best friends and wanted them to be happy, whatever it took.

They agreed to meet in Miami. For a long time Kevin had wanted to stay on South Beach. He’d seen so many TV specials about it, and it had always looked so glamorous, with its palm trees, art deco hotels, wide beaches, and European bathing beauties. Two nights there were Guy’s graduation present for Kevin. The room was decorated in serigraphs by Georgia O’Keeffe — like vulvas or cacti.

But Guy didn’t come. That was so unlike him. He lived by the clock and was always perfectly on time. Kevin’s mind raced. He talked to his brother three times in a day expressing his fears. He went for long walks where the hotels bordered the beach. Evening was just washing in and the vacationers’ cars were already lined up along the little road in front of the hotels. People were spilling out of convertibles and parading past the pedestrians with their slicked-back black hair, flashing white teeth, tans so old they looked like rammed earth dried and watered a dozen times, everyone thick and dressed in neon-blue Lycra, everyone vulgar and chattering and oiled. He thought this was the ideal, Miami Beach, for all the Latins. This was their paradise, these salsa-emitting vehicles and these oil-stained bikinis. That everything was at night made it all the more grotesque, the quality of a bruise, a tanned bruise.

He kept checking with the hotel reception to see if a letter had arrived for him. He realized that after all these years he didn’t have Pierre-Georges’s number or that of Guy’s mother. He thought, Does this mean I’m alone in the world? Have I lost Guy? Has he just vanished? Surely he wouldn’t do that to me. Has he been in an accident?

Kevin only permitted himself to ask if there was anything for him at the front desk four times a day; he hoped a new shift of clerks would mean the same person wouldn’t witness his abjection. One of them, a guy, seemed Cuban or Puerto Rican, and Kevin tried out his Spanish on him successfully.

At last there was an envelope in Kevin’s box. Guy’s handwriting. He sat on the edge of a salmon-pink tabouret right there in the clamor and confusion of the lobby.

My angel,

I’m not coming. I’m going back to Andrés and we’re returning to Murcia with Vicente, who may stay with us for a while. Vince’s mother passed — but you already knew that.

I realized that I didn’t really want to go to South America. The harsh climate would destroy my already fading complexion, which is wilting rapidly as you may have noticed. And despite the attentions I receive from the same man in Chelsea who keeps Renée Fleming eternally young, a few gray hairs have pushed through, hardy things!

You’d wake up one morning with an entirely gray and faded Guy beside you. The Curse of Quito! To live with a man is already a handicap, as your doctor Blumenstein pointed out to me at the graduation party, but to live with an old man never helped anyone at the dawn of his career.

You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure? I may not look my age, but the age I look is the one you’ve fallen in love with. And real old age is no joke; it demands stoicism and commitment on the part of the caregiver.

Andrés sacrificed seven years of his life to me. Anyone who loves me that much deserves to have me, even though the prize may not be worth much after all. Because of me he never finished his doctorate and he’s sunk an entire social class. Worse — he’s become a criminal, not just poor. His life in many ways is over. You may not understand this. As an American you imagine anything is possible and cannot see that every year another dozen possibilities are closed to us. As two Garlic Belt figures, Andrés and I are realists — about our status as an ex-con and a former beauty queen. We just want a quiet, nearly anonymous life now. Picture us with Vince as three tall sad men who go out walking through Murcia every night after dark.

I’ve always felt the life force throbbing through you — that and your extraordinary intelligence, your ability to analyze and synthesize everything you encounter. I worship you and the more I’ve known you the more I’ve come to revere you. You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile. If you ever feel like it, cut a thatch of your pubic hair and mail it to me in Spain so I can smell it while jerking off. I’ll send you an address.

Pierre-Georges once said I was like a black hole in space. What does that mean? That I shape the outcome of events but don’t really exist? That people project whatever they want onto me, which works since I’m such a nullity?

You may hate me but you shouldn’t. I made a man out of you, or rather found the man in you lurking behind the boy and nurtured him in a world given to stereotypes. I made you my man. I even taught you some French. And I kept you safe from AIDS — and kept you, fed you, sat on your dick. I’m most proud of you of all the things and events and people in my life — I gave you the right setting to survive and prevail.

Please forgive me for disappointing you. It won’t be long before you find some black-haired hidalgo. They go for blonds down there, whom they call rubios.

Your Guy

Kevin wept for an hour and then called his brother. He felt older and wiser — but in what way wiser?