Our Young Man

6

In the courtroom the lawyer for the prosecution had a beautiful face, cruel blue eyes, and such a strong Scottish brogue that neither Andrés nor Guy could understand anything he said. Everything in the courtroom was dun-colored and outmoded, starting with the short balding judge in his creased black robe and with his grating Brooklyn accent, even his way of sucking up his nasal phlegm after every halfhearted remark — Guy agreed with Chanel that everything was fashion — the weather, the room, the people.

Guy was so fearful of what was to become of Andrés, but it was hard to think these common people would be deciding his fate. Perhaps it was because of his privileged (even fairy-tale) adulthood and his banal childhood and adolescence, but in France, where everyone could be bought, Guy kept thinking if he fucked or paid or befriended someone, he could make all this go away. The idea that his beautiful lover’s fate was in the badly manicured hands of these slobs (okay, okay, the Scot wasn’t a slob) infuriated him. He knew he was just a poor kid from Clermont-Ferrand, but suddenly he felt like a marquis by contrast and this trial seemed to be the revenge of the vulgar on the extraordinary. He was right to take Fred’s house; never again must he be poor or vulnerable. He must be armored against the assaults of the average with wealth and beauty and connections.

Lazlo was persuasive and showed reproductions of the blank paper Dalí had pre-signed, and he handed to the judge copies of papers on Dalí that Andrés had written for Rutgers. He argued that Andrés repented his misdemeanors now but that committing them had been so tempting because he was a desperately poor grad student who received nothing but free tuition and a $10,000 stipend in return for teaching three undergraduate sections of an art history lecture course.

The Scot took up each of Lazlo’s arguments; Lazlo had to translate, in a whisper, his brogue into ordinary English. The Scot said that Andrés had lived perfectly well on his stipend for two years and hadn’t even taken out a student loan. That he was a good student only made his forgery all the more reprehensible; he had diabolically used his Dalí expertise to facilitate his crimes. It was Dalí’s choice to exploit his own name. If he wanted to sell his signature, that was his right and far from an argument in favor of legalizing the forgeries of a greedy, cynical interloper.

The judge found Andrés guilty and handed down a sentence of three years in prison without parole. He said that Andrés’s crime was worse than that of his dealers (who’d been sent to prison for two years) precisely because of his skill and intelligence — and the training he’d received from a state-supported university. He’d learned how to forge works of art at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Guy noticed that the little judge seemed very jingoistic and Guy wished he hadn’t engaged a lawyer with a foreign accent and name, and he wished he hadn’t spoken to Lazlo in French. Americans could be very paranoid. They’d chosen a trial by judge over a trial by jury because Lazlo had thought the technicalities of the case would baffle ordinary citizens, but then again, maybe a jury would have pitied Andrés’s obvious youth and inexperience.

Andrés turned white when his sentence was read out, and he was immediately handcuffed and taken off by two policemen. Guy had foreseen a moment when they’d embrace, but that didn’t happen. Andrés was just led away. Guy turned to Lazlo and said, “That’s it? No more bail? He’s gone for good?”

Lazlo smiled a sad little apologetic smile. “Of course we’ll appeal.”

“On what grounds?”

“That the sentence is unreasonably harsh.”

“Do you think the judge hated us because we’re foreigners?”

Lazlo looked up through his bushy eyebrows and said, “No. Because you’re homosexuals. Handsome homosexuals. These Jewish family men are like that sometimes.”

Guy thought of Fred’s vicious sons, but then he remembered Lazlo himself was Jewish, and he seemed friendly enough.

Lazlo told him not to worry and hailed a taxi. Guy was suddenly alone at eleven in the morning in an unfamiliar part of town.

He took a cab home. This was the first warm day of April after a long and difficult winter. The pear trees on his block were budding, though they were the kind that never bore fruit. Sterile trees. New York trees.

He picked up yogurt and fruit at a deli. Lucie was coming over for lunch in an hour. The shopkeeper was friendly in a routine way — today, dailiness seemed obscene, an outrage when he thought of his poor Andrés in prison just for loving him too much.

It felt empty, the day felt bruised, the light looked vacant and assaulted, his street felt at once familiar and strange, as if he were seeing it after a hundred-years’ sleep. It was seldom he thought of himself as a single individual, whirling lonely through space, an unnoticed neural event pulsing somewhere in a minor, dimming universe, but today he felt alone and tiny and powerless.

He called his mother, which he did so seldom that he had to tell her right away that nothing was wrong, that he was just checking up on her, did she like her new Opel. He wanted to tell her about the terrible thing that had just happened to him but of course he couldn’t, she’d never understand, he’d have to explain too many things going back too many years, so he ended up consoling her all over again for her husband’s death. Because the telephone call and the renewed condolences were so unexpected, his mother sounded abashed and overly grateful, which left him feeling all the more empty when he hung up.

At least Lucie was warm and comforting. She held him as he told her about Andrés and they cried together. She was so fragrant and kind and gentle that he felt, guiltily, the shocking stirrings of desire. He never wanted to feel excited ever again, not over anyone. The very thought struck him as disloyal. Lucie sensed his discomfort and made popcorn and began to play with his hair, seriously considering if he’d look good with the wet look. She begged him to let her experiment. He could always just wash it out.