Our Young Man

4

In Paris, Guy felt relieved. He could speak the language with all its nuances and not endlessly play the part of the interesting foreigner. At the same time his accent didn’t prompt a discussion. He was just another Frenchman. He had lost his primary accomplishment — the ability to speak English (which he spoke better than he understood) — and the oddity of his identity, of being French in America.

He was just one more handsome man in a whole city of handsome men — handsome if you liked skinny guys with big noses. The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other’s shoes than their sexual availability. It was raining a cold rain but never for long, and you could duck from one awning to the next or from an expensive café to an even more expensive shop. It was hard to believe that just two weeks before, he’d been lying in the warm September sun in a deck chair. Now he’d been repatriated to Paris’s eternal mists.

Andrés had come with him and was staying with him at the Crillon in a room that looked out on the place de la Concorde, a “square” only in the abstract sense that it was a huge space excavated out of the city around it but was curiously open on three sides.

Andrés liked to have sex four or five times a day. Maybe because Guy had resisted him all summer long and had just stared at that big erection in the green Speedo, now that it was released it was relentless. They kissed so much that Guy’s lips were red and swollen and he had to shy away — he had to be camera-ready in the morning.

But it was pure pleasure to lie in bed with this lithe young man who was so in love. He had a patch of long black hair like an emblem on his lean, defined chest. Guy could circle his waist with two hands. He was as elongated as a Christ carved out of wax but as flexible as a whip. He had a vaguely acrid odor, as if his deodorant weren’t strong enough or as if the hot, empty oven were burning spilled food from the day before.

Guy liked to sit opposite him in an outdoor café, where they were kept warm under giant overhead heaters. Andrés was shy, that must be it, though Guy preferred the French word sauvage, which sounded more fierce than timid. Andrés had a hard time looking at him and would train his eyes on some distant spot in the sky. He would lean his face on his big open hand as if he were absorbed in new music, though every once in a while he’d shake himself out of his reverie and steal a glance at his companion. Was he tired, jet-lagged, was that why his head seemed too heavy for his neck? When he was looking at that mesmerizing point in the sky his whole face would be drained of color and expression, but when he’d dart a glance at Guy he’d smile a warm, timid smile and his upper lip, bruised from kisses, would pull back to show his wet, tarnished teeth. Andrés avoided sitting in a corner where there was a mirror behind him because he hoped Guy wouldn’t notice his bald spot or at least not dwell upon it. Guy understood the strategy.

They walked across the river and up the boulevard Saint-Germain, stopping to look in all the store windows. Guy took Andrés’s arm, which made the Colombian self-conscious. He kept interrogating the eyes of every passerby, though no one seemed startled, except, perhaps, by Guy’s orange Doc Martens. Andrés was self-conscious but also proud, and he wondered if in people’s eyes he measured up to Guy’s beauty, or at least didn’t look like a member of a different species. They murmured to each other in French, with Andrés inserting an occasional word in English. One word he said in Spanish was siempre, though it was toujours in French and, of course, “always” in English, but Guy didn’t correct him because he liked his accent.

Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head — his eyes, his smile — and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality — his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. (Andrés had fellated each toe.) He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.

Back in the hotel they did shed them and he lay with his head on Andrés’s belly watching TV, which bored the Colombian because he had trouble following the rapid-fire dialogue; it was a show where they were all discussing the merits and drawbacks of something — could it be incest? — and the young male presenter with his big boyish head, almost purple lips, and huge eyes (was he wearing mascara?) was just on the border between gay and straight, with his small bony hands in the air and a smile or even a smirk on his dark lips and his voice pitched as high as a twelve-year-old’s and his constant quips capping everything the other guests said, the old actress or the fat, unshaved buffoon or the blond boy — and provoking the studio audience into rapid bursts of laughter, a quick chorus of barking, followed each time by a single tinkling laugh of one person slow on the uptake.

And then here was Andrés with a new erection that had to be appeased. The place beyond was suddenly immersed in night streaked with the headlights of circulating cars and the brilliant articulated facade of the National Assembly. They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn’t clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated. At the end Andrés’s mouth, forbidden to kiss Guy’s swollen lips, was just an open vowel of ecstasy as they both spilled on his muscly stomach in the dim, shifting colored light of the television and its maddening banter.

Guy had been in America so long that the French struck him as either coiled up and suspicious or absurdly sweet, with an eye out for profit — either paranoid or sycophantic.

He knew what they were up to, he’d been that way, too, with strangers, but in the intervening years he’d become as naïve, as kind, as childish (bon enfant) as Americans, which he definitely preferred now. Why waste all that energy being suspicious or syrupy? In America photographers and their assistants and the hair and makeup people thought of him as a good guy, but here, he noticed, friendliness was considered troubling. He enjoyed talking to his old French friends on the phone and with them he could joke and tell stories with no point, but if he tried to make conversation during a fashion shoot the strangers on the set went about their jobs briskly and greeted his American-style garrulousness with a sharp, derisive look, an intake of breath, and an “Et alors?”

Making love to Andrés was a full-time job. Whenever they went for a walk or a meal he could feel the impatient desire building up in the boy; at a table he’d rest his heavy head again on his huge cupped hand and look out the window, his mouth open. From time to time he’d surface from his thoughts and the racing images, no doubt, of remembered or projected couplings. Then he’d smile and say something amusing, but it almost felt as if a grieving man were trying to make small talk during a wake; he was definitely downshifting into a different speed. Only when they returned to their hotel room did his thoughts and actions seem to converge. He became more and more passionate and Guy thought of the Greek word agon, wasn’t it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony? Wasn’t it the name of that Balanchine ballet he liked so much?

When he called his mother she sobbed into the phone and said, “Thank God you’re back in France. Your father is going quickly. Come home right away. Tonight.”

Guy said yes, of course, but after hanging up he sank into the bleakest resentment. He felt as if the last twenty years had just been a rosy chimera. He felt as if his parents were dragging him away from his glamorous, cosseted life in which so many men loved him. He knew his father had been fighting emphysema for years, though he wouldn’t give up his pack of Gauloises a day and would even turn off the oxygen in his tent so that he could smoke another clope. He was now so bad he couldn’t talk on the phone without gasping, and his mother said he couldn’t walk fifty meters without sitting down to catch his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Andrés asked, a crease across his lovely smooth forehead.

“I’ve got to take the train down to Clermont-Ferrand. My father’s very sick. I think he’s dying.”

“Oh, mon petit,” Andrés said folding him into his arms. “Tonight?”

“Yes, I guess.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, that wouldn’t work. They don’t want a guest at this time. And there are no hotels nearby. You can’t believe how … poor it is! How poor they are. And how would I explain you to them?”

Andrés was Latin enough to understand the sacred rights of the family and the inconvenience of a same-sex lover. He looked pained, as if someone had turned off his oxygen, too; Guy remembered that in a crisis Latins don’t know how to be stoic. They wear their emotions on their sleeve, and their lips, far from being stiff, are quavering with self-pity.

They had only two more hours before the train but Andrés managed to squeeze in another orgasm. Guy couldn’t concentrate on sex. The concierge was arranging his train ticket, but he had to cancel tomorrow’s shoot and tell his mother when he was arriving and he had to pack a few things. And call Pierre-Georges. Then, on top of everything else, he had Fred’s daily phone call to deal with. He always called at four Paris time and ten P.M. New York time. Fred was always mournful because Guy had admitted that Andrés had flown over with him to Paris, but this evening, even while Andrés’s sperm was still drying on his stomach, Guy was able to jolt Fred by announcing he was going to his father’s deathbed.

“Oh, baby, what terrible news! Well, we saw it coming. He just wouldn’t stop smoking—” And then Fred cut himself off, knowing that it was not in the best of taste to blame the dying. “I wish I could be there with you. I always assumed your father must be in his fifties, since I thought you were in your twenties. But now I know your true age, I guess your dad must be—”

“He’s seventy-three,” Guy said coldly, then he let a long silence install itself over the crackling wire. Guy had learned how eloquently uncomfortable a silence could be.

“Well, that’s young,” Fred babbled, completely disconcerted and aware that Andrés could probably divine Fred’s faux pas from Guy’s end of the conversation. Or if not, Guy would repeat it all to him soon enough. Best to change the subject. “So, how’s the work?” Fred asked brightly.

“I’ve called it all off.”

“Oh, no.”

“Would you have me prancing on a runway while my father was dying?”

They hung up a moment later and Guy, who could see another of Andrés’s erections developing, raced about packing a few things, checking the train schedule with the concierge, and then phoning his mother to confirm when he’d arrive. At least the seriousness and urgency of the moment made Andrés go soft, though he prolonged their “final” embrace and became erect again. Guy was just a bit disgusted and he did a quick inventory of what he’d packed while feigning rapture in Andrés’s arms.

His first-class seat on the train was comfortable and Guy liked the smell of the carpet, which must have been steam-cleaned recently. He had remembered to stamp his ticket in the machine before he boarded and now the conductor was nowhere in sight. There was only one other man at the far end of the car, reading under a spotlight.

Guy was full of resentment against his parents for some reason, as if they were interrupting his new life (not so new now) — his New York pampered life of wealth and no responsibilities and lots of sex and eternal youth. They were dragging him back to the dirty lace curtains masking the windows giving directly onto the bleak, usually empty street, the view of the dirty white and gray uninterrupted facades of the houses across the way almost never lit from within, ghost houses in a ghost town. They were pulling him back to the space heater glowing red and then dimming, the freezing bedroom with the torn toile de jouy wallpaper and the matching slipcover on the one armchair, the dingy bathroom with the leprous mirror above the old-fashioned sink, and the mildewed shower curtain shrouding a shower no bigger than a sentry box. He couldn’t bear the ugliness and the poverty, the mouse-shit-in-the-corner horror of it all, the reminder that ordinary people get old and die, that they get thicker and stiffer with age, that they gasp for air.

He went into the large bathroom on the train and locked the door and masturbated. Logically more sex was the last thing he should want, but he felt compelled to spurt, gicler, as perhaps a way of reclaiming himself from his importunate lover and from the cold neutering embrace of his parents. His mind raced between remembered images and those he made up as he sought to keep the divining rod bobbing and dipping above the buried stream of hot liquid. When it finally surfaced he was only half hard; jerking off had been more therapeutic than erotic.

His mother was wearing a cheap scarf and her old tan raincoat and snow-stained flats as she stood out of the rain outside at the train station beneath the metal awning. Everything in France was so organized. He’d told her which train car he’d be on, and here she was in the exact place and at the exact time. She looked pale and as untweezered as a nun. She ignored his flowing, fashionable coat and his dark silk suit from Browns in London and his new Vuitton luggage; she clung to him fiercely in one quick embrace and he felt a reproach in it, as if he’d handed a copy of Vogue to Medea.

His mother drove them swiftly and surely to the house as if she daren’t spend an extra minute away from her dying husband. “I’m so glad you made it in time.”

Guy said, “Is he that bad?”

His mother glanced away from the wet road unspooling before their headlights, illuminating corners of familiar old barns and houses as they swerved around corners. “Yes,” she said with simple finality.

“Is Robert here? Tiphaine?”

“Yes, Robert drove up from Vienne, where he’s working in a garage, and Tiphaine took the train down from Lyon, where she’s a court stenographer.”

Guy thought of things to ask about his siblings but he didn’t feel that sort of chitchat would be appropriate; he also didn’t want to draw attention to how out of touch he’d become with the basic facts about his family. So he just looked out the window at the rain, the passing lava-black buildings, and the glassy eyes of an attentive dog standing in the drizzle. There was the Dumoulins’ dingy house and their old trailer parked on the front lawn. “Do you have a full-time nurse?” Guy asked, thinking that was the kind of no-nonsense question a real person might ask — his brother, for instance.

His father was so pale he looked as if he’d been copied in limestone. He was inside his oxygen tent dozing and his face was blurred behind the clear plastic. Guy didn’t know if it was better to let him sleep or to tell him he’d come home to see him. His mother solved the problem by saying, “Chéri, notre Guy est là,” which caused his father’s eyes to flutter open and his lips to produce a sketch of a smile. He’d gotten so much thinner and his features were stronger, more marked, so that he appeared younger in spite of his pallor. Guy could see that he’d once been handsome, the way he looked in that old picture from the fifties.

Guy realized he’d always been afraid of his father and now he tensed up, which was absurd faced with this pallid, skinny copy of his heavy-drinking parent, this shrunken facsimile smiling his sketchy little smile. “Bonjour, Papa,” Guy said in a low voice the way he imagined Robert must sound. (His voice had always been much lower than Guy’s; when they were teenagers Guy could hear him in the next room talking to himself, forcing his voice down a few notes.) His father reached with his nearly transparent hand for Guy’s — something he’d never done before.

He realized that he always thought of Robert when he thought of his father. He’d always been jealous of the way they sat out Sunday morning mass while he attended with his mother and Tiphaine — the men and the women. His father had never been proud of his good grades and usually hadn’t even glanced at his report card, though he’d been there at every soccer game Robert played, even some of the practice sessions, despite the fact that Robert had been a very mediocre player. If Robert took a girl out to the movies, his father, even if he always claimed to be broke (fauché), could usually find a blue folded note of fifty francs in his pocket. When his father was so drunk he couldn’t get up the stairs to bed, it was Robert who took off his shoes and propped him up, dragging him along and whispering sweet nothings in his father’s ear, while Guy and his mother, pretending to read, sat rigid and unsmiling under the bright floor lamp, almost embarrassed to be witnessing out of the corner of an eye such a tender, intimate, shameful moment.

But now his dying father had opened his eyes wide and was trying to say something. Guy bent down so that his ear was next to his father’s lips, which were whispering, “Water.” Guy held up his father’s head with the matted white hair and looked at his long white nose hairs and tilted a glass to his papery lips. Guy was embarrassed by his expensive Creed eau de cologne, but he was sure his father couldn’t identify it. Tiphaine, who’d been napping in her room, came down the stairs, plumper than before, her hair crushed on one side, her cheap dress ill-fitting. She whispered, “Guy,” and kissed him on both cheeks, but for some reason she was smiling at this little drama of filial piety, as if she knew how insincere and out-of-character it was. Guy resented her smile but overcame his surge of hostility toward her.

Guy’s mother heated up a daube and spooned it out for her children. It wasn’t half bad, Guy said to himself, and then hated himself for even noticing. This was hardly a moment to be handing out stars for cuisine. Robert came home after they’d been served and spent fifteen minutes washing grease from his hands and arms and lingered five minutes looking at his sleeping father. He said he had a kayak and spent a lot of time boating and paddling. He checked out Guy’s wasp waist and muttered his teenage nickname, Sec (“Dry”). Robert’s neck, however, was cross-hatched with tiny squares — the sun, no doubt. Real men don’t moisturize.

While their mother was in the kitchen fetching the dessert, Robert said, “You seem to be prospering.”

“Can’t complain.”

“You know, at the garage I have a chance to get a good price on an ’82 Opel. Mom needs a new car.”

Guy said, “Sure.” He felt guilty because he hadn’t thought about her car; New Yorkers weren’t part of car culture, though he had his Mercedes. “How much is it?”

“I think I can get it for thirty-two hundred francs.”

“Thank you for arranging it.”

“What do you drive?”

“Mercedes SEL.”

Robert winced, the way he always had. “I’m sorry I haven’t been contributing my part to help Mom. But at the garage … and with three kids …” (gosses, he said, a word Guy had almost forgotten). “And I make all the repairs around here. You’re never here.”

Oh, dear, Guy thought. “That’s our deal,” he said smoothly. “You look in on Mother”—he glanced at Tiphaine—“and you do, too. Money is the easy part. I’m so grateful to both of you.” He didn’t want to sound hypocritical; they had never been this polite, this deferential around each other before. He smiled forbearingly at his siblings with a look that pleaded, he hoped, for sympathy and, if he’d somehow offended them, for forgiveness.

“What’s this, what’s this?” their mother sang out in a forced, cheerful voice as she brought in the chocolate mousse. It was his favorite, at least according to family legend, though he hadn’t eaten a dessert in twenty years. But he’d heard her whipping the cream in the kitchen and he knew he couldn’t refuse it.

“We’re going to give you a new-old car, an Opel,” Guy said. “Robert’s arranging it.”

“But that’s too extravagant,” their mother cried. “The old one—”

“Robert’s getting it at a good price. And he’ll make sure it runs well.”

Guy worried that Robert would resent this last assertion, that Guy was being a busybody, but Robert was smiling and saying Guy would pay for it out of his New World riches. “And I’ll wash it and vacuum it once a month,” Tiphaine threw in lightheartedly.

Their mother seemed overwhelmed. She had tears in her eyes and looked at Guy. “You already do so much for me. How did I deserve such a loving son? If I’d economized better—”

Guy held a finger to his lips and shushed her. “No one else could make so little money go so far. I’m the one at fault, I’ve been thoughtless. I haven’t taken into account that the dollar’s been getting weaker. I will double your allowance and buy the car if Robert will be so kind as to handle the transaction and do the maintenance — that’s the hard part.”

As was her nature, their mother cleared the dishes before everyone was done. When she came back in she said, “How is that nice … Baron Édouard?” she asked, uncomfortable with his title but fearing, no doubt, that a simple “monsieur” would be rude or sound presumptuous. Tiphaine and Robert exchanged glances and a smirk, as if they were privy to a private joke.

“Oh, Édouard?” Guy said lazily. “He’s always the same, never changes. I guess rich people don’t change as much as the rest of us; we have to hustle. Except now he’s crazy about antiques and is pawing through everyone’s attic or barn, looking for a treasure. He asks after you … often.” Seeing that his brother and sister were still smirking, he hoped to defuse their satire by asking, “Do you think he’s a real baron? Or a Jew ennobled by the prince of Lichtenstein for making a big loan? Or do businessmen just use titles for prestige? I read that one quarter of all titles in Europe are fake.”

“Fake? Fake?” their mother shrieked, horrified as if he’d questioned the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. “He seemed to me authentic and a charming, generous man.”

Guy wondered if she’d think him so charming if she could see him naked and barking.

Robert at least had stopped sneering. “I guess you must meet a lot of phonies in the fashion industry?”

Guy wondered how he could respond calmly to this remark. “I suppose all worlds have their fakes. Even garage mechanics. But strictly speaking Édouard isn’t in fashion. He’s a brewer.”

Robert nodded solemnly. Their mother muttered, “In any event a very charming man, truly elegant.”

At that moment they heard their father — whose bed had been moved downstairs into the salon — groan, and their mother rushed to his side and the three children followed her slowly, timidly. “We’re here, my darling,” their mother cooed. “We’re right here, chéri, your whole family, your three children and me, you’re not alone,” but Guy thought that was a lie, you’re never so alone as at the moment of your death.

Their father was gasping and their mother turned up the flow of oxygen and was patting down the sides of his square, transparent tent as if sealing a leak. Now he was sitting up and coughing and his face looked as red a baby’s when it starts to cry.

I wonder who will be with me at the hour of my death, Guy wondered, then he mentally slapped himself for being morbid and self-pitying. With a trusted servant, he hoped, chuckling at his own frivolity. A servant who would know just how to arrange the pillows, tilt the lampshade, administer the opiate. A servant who would mourn, but only ceremonially, while speculating how generous her legacy would be. Guy knew how to deal with calculated kindness.

The next morning Tiphaine drove him to the train station after Guy had written down Robert’s bank details for a transfer of funds for the Opel. He kissed his father goodbye, who was sleeping now and blue, not red. His mother was crying silently, seated beside his father; she herself was so frail she scarcely indented the mattress.

He and Tiphaine stopped by to see their grandmother, the one who’d worked as a cashier in a Paris café. She’d become almost feral and slept with three big dogs, more for the warmth than out of love for the animals. She who had always been so chic in her way now wore a dirty old bathrobe covered with dog hairs and slippers too big for her feet. She didn’t have her teeth in and her eyebrows had grown in, big heavy caterpillars. Guy had always felt closest to her; after all, she was the Parisian, and she was the one who’d first told him he was handsome. But now she was a grinning savage, and her eyes didn’t reveal if she recognized her grandchildren.

A day after Guy returned to Paris, his father went into the hospital with pneumonia. Guy volunteered to return home, but his mother said that the doctor had told them that this could go on for months, and besides, his father was seldom conscious now. They’d turned up the morphine and turned down the antibiotics and were hoping he’d just slip away.

Two days later, the phone rang at two A.M. and his mother was saying tonelessly it was all over. Guy wanted to ask her if she was relieved but he didn’t know if that was what human beings asked. So he asked instead what he thought Robert would say: When was the funeral mass going to be held, and did she need any money?

He was glad, a moment later, that he hadn’t asked her if she was relieved, because he realized she was already rescripting the past. “We had our differences sometimes,” she said, “but he was a good man who was kind to me and very proud of you kids.” Guy couldn’t believe his ears — their father was a bitter drunk when he wasn’t violent, and the only people he was pleasant with were his bar buddies, the other unemployed drunks of Clermont-Ferrand. Guy remembered distinctly that his mother had said to him maybe ten years ago (he was already in New York) that her husband drove her wild and that she’d kill herself if it wasn’t against her faith. Divorce was even more unthinkable. Guy was cursed with a nearly geological memory in which each time stratum was clearly demarcated from every other and in which memories never blended, and they could always be located with precision. The levels of the past did not bleed into each other in Guy’s mind, nor was the past “color-corrected” to match the present hue. Everything retained its original shade and he could never revise the cruel, barren past to substantiate some sentimental new evaluation. He’d hated and feared his father then and hated him now. His father had seldom talked at home except to mutter something sour and brief, but Guy had heard him at the bar expatiate on his political theories and racist prejudices and anti-German jingoism when he’d gone to collect him late at night at the bar. His father was also obsessed by Arabs. No one was paying much attention to him, but there he was haranguing the void, denouncing the beurs (Arabs born in France) and the Bosches (Huns). (Had he inherited his Germanophobia from his father, who’d fought them in the Great War and had had his eyelids burned off, or did he resent them because their industry was still thriving — or was it just a conventional prejudice, an indication that he was a thinking man and had opinions?) Guy was tall but frail and as he supported his thick, smelly father through the dark, empty streets he longed to slip out from under him so that the hateful man would fall and crack his angry, mumbling skull and die. If they encountered anyone in the streets, especially a brown skinned, big-nosed Arab or a stranger who could be mistaken for an Arab, Guy dreaded the filth that might pour forth from his father’s mouth. When they got home his mother would cluck angrily, “Oh là là, what’s this?” and hold her needles and half-finished knitting and say, “If you think I’m going to share a bed with — that — heave him onto the couch.” But by then his father was already snoring and Robert was coaxing his slumped body up the stairs to the bed in the spare room.

Now, on the phone as their mother said sad affectionate things, Guy assumed an impenetrable silence. How could people lie to themselves like that? he wondered.

And then he thought, What should she do? Admit that that man ruined her life? Was that what Guy expected or wanted: that his mother should admit that she’d lived a ruined life?

And what was so great about his own life? He had to remember the names of three hundred people in the business whom he’d greet with a smile, he could never go outside with baggy jeans and a dirty T-shirt, he had to listen to hours and hours — centuries! — of talk about clothes and photographers. “Yes, he sleeps in the same bed with her every night, but why?” someone might say of a photograph. “Does he ever touch her, or is it just a New York marriage?” He had to listen to everyone’s gossip and schedule, where they’d been and where they were going, how their astrologers warned against this or counseled that. And then the daily facials (hoping the creams and astringents wouldn’t produce pimples), and the absolute trauma of changing a hairstyle. (Was it ahead of the curve or behind it?) He wondered what his real hair color was. And then the hours and hours of chanting — should he have been chanting for his father’s recovery? he wondered guiltily. What should he buy as a gift for Lucie? He’d seen an expensive blue lizard-skin wallet at Céline’s — you wouldn’t find that in New York, would you?

And what did his life add up to? A portfolio of pictures that was almost instantly démodé, a “beautiful” face with a “masculine” expression and stubble. He was living his life between quotation marks, every inverted comma a proof of inauthenticity — linking his looks to the fleeting moment. When people by accident looked back at his portfolio in fifty years would they say he looked “so eighties,” just as he responded to pictures of Valentino by saying he looked so “twenties,” with his blackened eyebrows, his nostrils black as raisins, his hair shellacked, and his mouth unsmiling. People paid Guy a lot, advertising men projected onto him their own fantasies of “youth,” “innocence,” “sophistication,” or “depth,” but at the end of the day he’d have just a sheaf of glossies and a bitter lined face like a half lemon that had sat in the fridge too many weeks.

It was nice not to have to talk to Fred every day, who assumed he was with his parents. It was nice to lie in Andrés’s arms; the poor boy had been trained to just brush Guy’s lips with his lips, never to gnaw them. Now Guy had to teach him to wash his hands and not to sniff them at dinner or at a movie, fingers that had been knuckle-deep inside Guy, though it was a sweet failing. Guy felt that if he didn’t watch out, Andrés would devour him. Andrés resented the waiter who delivered their breakfast. He would sigh, even moan, if the man took too long. Guy had to purchase Andrés new underthings and shirts and a hooded green rain slicker, un ciré, because the boy had bought his first-class plane ticket at the last minute. Did he have any money? Was his family rich?

Andrés never answered Guy’s questions about money but just looked away and smiled mysteriously.

Guy had never felt so loved. Perhaps because Andrés was so handsome, perhaps because men and women stared at him as often as they stared at Guy, Guy felt Andrés was valuable, enviable, rich with options. Poor Édouard and Fred, they were desperate because time was running out on them. In the apartment of the Buddhas, Guy had seen a photo from the 1950s of Fred in which he was presentable, but he’d never been a beauty, though absurdly he aspired to be one now.

Andrés was intelligent, too, and could talk about Dalí for hours and hours and the surrealists in general. Apparently Dalí was on his last legs now, with a nose tube feeding him oxygen, all mixed up with his trademark wax mustaches. Dalí was Catalan. (They spoke a kind of Catalan as far south as Valencia, Andrés explained, and as far north as Perpingnan.)

“I guess it’s like Gaelic in Ireland,” Guy said, just to be pleasant. He liked seeing Andrés getting worked up, his skin flushing red. Usually he was like the dead Christ in his loincloth being lowered from the cross into his mother’s arms, and Guy enjoyed draping a sheet over his loins to underline the resemblance. He could imagine blood-black nail holes in his body.

Andrés would lie on his stomach practicing Dalí’s signature for hours. His buttocks would always tense when he felt Guy was looking at him.

“Why Dalí?” Pierre-Georges asked over the phone. “He was a complete fraud and would even sign blank sheets of paper for sixty dollars a pop. His greedy wife Gala would put them in front of him; he was completely gaga and she thought she at least would live forever.”

“How do you know all this?” Guy asked.

“There was an article in Marie Claire. But he’s a complete fraud. When he was shown some lithographs of Don Quixote he declared them fakes. ‘How can you tell?’ someone asked. ‘They’re fakes because Dalí hasn’t been paid for them.’ Most of his so-called lithographs are just posters of photographic copies, he doesn’t even know how to make lithographs.”

“Andrés is doing his Ph.D. on Dalí.”

One day Andrés went out by himself (which was unprecedented). He said something about meeting a friend for lunch, though there had been no exchange of calls. When he came back late in the afternoon he had a bundle of yellowing blank paper under his arm.

“What’s that for?” Guy asked.

“It’s paper from the 1950s. I found it at a bouquiniste,” Andrés said. But when Guy pursued the matter Andrés just shrugged. Later he said, “Modern paper contains chemical brighteners that glow under infrared.”

And then they were back in New York. Guy caught himself speaking to waiters in French; for him French had become the language of servants (though he’d learned Americans with their fussy egalitarianism preferred the word “help”).

Andrés moved in with him and, when Fred or Pierre-Georges or Lucie came by, sat right next to Guy with his hand on his knee. They must have looked like a queer version of that painting American Gothic. Guy had to admit to himself that it made him uncomfortable to have someone so visibly stake a claim on him, and yet he found the idea reassuring, too. At least he knew that the usual tension in his neck and shoulders was melting away. Belonging to someone felt like being held in someone’s arms, like being shielded from death. His father’s death had caused him to feel more vulnerable, a flimsy transparency held up in the wind, a twist of paper dancing in an air shaft, but Andrés’s embrace stopped him from twisting. Andrés was warm flesh, though he was painfully thin; he was flesh and stubble and his slightly sour odor. He was a thick, veiny penis, uncircumcised like Guy’s, and a loose sack of balls. He was a bald spot and bad teeth. He was so physical despite his slightness pumping Guy full of hot spurts of vitality.

Guy’s mother hadn’t expected him to come back for the funeral. Pierre-Georges had arranged for a florist to deliver a big, standing wreath of red and white carnations and a blue silk ribbon stretched across its empty thorax reading, “Didier remembered always in the loving hearts of his family.” Guy was shocked that Pierre-Georges had filed away his father’s first name, Didier. Pierre-Georges was impeccable!

Guy spoke to his mother every day. She sounded subdued and a bit worried. She’d never written a check in her life. Tiphaine was teaching her how to keep a checkbook and work out a budget. Guy resented this intimate brush with poverty and mortality. He knew that someday soon he’d be old and infirm — but he repeated the words “old and infirm” precisely because they were a formula and held the reality at bay. They were prophylactic words, a sting of the same venom, an antidote like homeopathic medicine. His kind of Buddhism instructed you to live in the moment, he vaguely remembered, and that suited him fine. If you chanted twice a day and made love three times and always wore beautiful clothes and stayed away from dreary people, you could just hover in the present, couldn’t you? Or had he gotten that completely wrong?