Our Young Man

7

With great regularity Guy intended to visit Andrés in prison and Fred in the hospital and felt perpetually guilty, as if he were responsible for their separate but horrible destinies. The first time he saw Andrés shorn and pale and skinny in his orange jumpsuit, he was thunderstruck. His arms looked so thin and helpless, his bald spot was gleaming, his face seemed to have sprouted five new moles, with the bad food he appeared to have grown a horrible little belly — not really! It was just a fold in his prison clothes. Guy could have slapped himself for the disparaging thought.

That afternoon, after he sat beside Fred and held his hand for fifteen minutes, Guy walked over to the Sheridan Square gym. All the rituals of his life had become so stale — and the perpetual guilt made him angry! He didn’t want to feel like a bad person who brought disaster to everyone around him. He was listless with self-hatred and an irrational anger that could never find a rod to strike but idly played across the surface of his mind. As he trudged upstairs to the second floor and the gym’s open door, he could smell the old sweat, hear the melancholy ring of dropped barbells, and he prepared himself to see those mastodons with their stained gym clothes, pockmarked faces, and neck veins about to pop.

But when he breached the entrance he saw identical blond twins, teenagers, maybe Finns like those models on the fold-out cover of L’Uomo Vogue. After Guy changed, he worked out near them so he could study them. They cheered him up. It was amusing to certify that they were identical down to the tiniest detail — the blond fuzz on their calves; the pointy nose that swerved to one side, thinned out, and turned red near the tip; the long eyetooth that gleamed with saliva; the bulging shoulder blades under identical crisp T-shirts with an unfamiliar logo — shoulder blades like unsprouted wings. They both touched their toes at the same moment and, as their T-shirts rose up, Guy could see identical black moles staining the intricately turned carpentry of their white, white waists. They were just as much mirror images in their behavior, murmuring to each other, exchanging fractional nods of encouragement, one bending to tie the laces of the other, but everything unemphatic. They were like gods posing as shepherds.

Their eyes lingered on Guy for an instant as if the camera, panning across his face and body, got stuck. It was such a slight hesitation as almost to go unremarked, but they both must have noticed Guy had intercepted their glance, because both boys blushed deeply, charmingly. A blush for them was nearly a cardiac arrest. Guy feared they’d faint due to the sudden concentration of blood. What did they see that instant when they looked at him? Compared to their freshness, he was wilted, lined, thick. Only in New York, where everyone was thirty-something, did he appear young. People had agreed he was young, as if by consensus. It was an article of faith. But these twins’ skin was so fine-pored, so rosy; their arms were so firm, nothing was flabby, there was nothing ropy about their necks; they were dramatically thin but not starved-looking. They looked healthy. They hadn’t been on diets. Their heads were too large for their bodies but their features were still small, neat, like entries written in a copperplate hand. The skin fit as neatly as a lady’s glove on their long fingers, not a bit of sag or jiggle or looseness.

The twins must have been so embarrassed by the shared blush that they studiously ignored Guy for the rest of their workout and skipped their shower and hurried off still in their sweaty shorts. Guy thought they might be models, very young models, and he wished he’d seen them naked. They must live nearby.

That night he talked to Pierre-Georges. It was a relief to speak in French — he got all of Guy’s allusions and shorthand and his muted sort of bitchiness. “Do you think Americans are vulgar? Like peasants?”

“Don’t insult our poor peasants,” Pierre-Georges said loftily.

“So you think French peasants are better than typical Americans?”

“You’ve been here too long to be able to say ‘typical.’ There are all kinds of Americans.”

“But they’re crude,” Guy protested. “They talk so loud and sprawl. There’s nothing tidy about them. They’re materialists — nothing spiritual or cultured.”

“Don’t forget you’re from Clermont-Ferrand, not Auteuil. People sprawl in your département. What’s gotten into you?”

“Why are we here in this awful country?” Guy wailed. While Pierre-Georges paused for him to elaborate, Guy collapsed under the weight of everything, his life, this country. Finally Pierre-Georges said in a soft, consoling voice, “Put on your new cashmere blazer and I’ll take you out to the Casa De Pré, you always liked that one.”

“What will we talk about?” Guy asked plaintively.

“Écoute,” Pierre-George said, vexed or pretending to be. “Listen — you’re exaggerating. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes. Don’t keep me waiting.”

“Forty-five?”

They ordered comfort food, a risotto with spring vegetables and a fruity bottle of Vouvray. Pierre-George sent the bread and butter back: too tempting. “Are you very sad about Andrés?”

Guy stared at Pierre-Georges and then just nodded gravely. Finally he said, “My life is such a mess. I thought it was supposed to be glamorous and enviable. That’s what Interview said about me: glamorous, enviable. That’s what After Dark said in its last issue in 1982: ‘Gay, glittery, and glamorous.’”

“Only you remember that,” Pierre-Georges said sourly.

“Yes, I’m sad. Crushed. I hate this country, with its puritanism and heartlessness and filthy diseases.”

“And that’s all Reagan’s fault, I suppose?”

“Whose?” Guy asked, genuinely not recognizing the name.

“Flute!” Pierre-George lisped. It amused him to sound like a flustered French matron and to use out-of-date genteel swear words. “You honestly don’t know who the president of the United States is?”

“Oh. Her!”

“They’re going to revoke your green card.”

“Good! I can’t stand it here another day.”

“Why?” Pierre-Georges asked. “People here think you’re some sort of Norman aristocrat with a chateau. In France no one would be fooled. Just look at how you hold yourself at table.”

Guy stopped slumping and sat upright. “Who cares about all that?” he asked.

“French people do. If you go back you’ll have to deal with all that. Here you can reinvent yourself. And this is where the money is — important now that you’re in your sunset years. How long have you been in the business?”

That night in bed Guy surprised himself because he was happy to be alone. He loved Andrés, he really did. No one had ever been so devoted to him. Guy realized that his way of measuring someone’s devotion was a feminine aspect of his nature; only women wanted men who were devoted. Men wanted men and women who were hard to get. But he’d given himself entirely to Andrés; he’d never been so immersed in another man. But that night when he masturbated he didn’t think of Andrés in his orange jumpsuit and bald spot. No, he imagined he was between the identical twins, that their bodies were as smooth as the alabaster lamps he’d seen once in Volterra. The boys were clambering over him in his fantasy like Sherpas on the slopes, everything coordinated between them. He fell asleep and dreamed they were all swimming together in some sort of low-ceilinged turbulent pool fed by hot springs. The boys were slippery as eels and in his dream one penis exploded in his anus and the identical penis flooded his mouth. Guy smiled in his sleep.

The fall menswear collections were being shown next week in Milan and Guy had a go-see with the new Armani representative in New York. It would be the usual cattle call. Guy could picture it all now, the way the boys, these angular giraffes, would be coiffed backstage with curlers and blow dryers, how makeup artists would swoop around them, highlighting their cheekbones (which already looked ready to explode through their skin), drawing bluish shadows under their heavily kohled eyes, retracing their lips with a vampirish color stick, and then the clothes, the sacred clothes, so much more important than the people wearing them, would be taken out of their sealed and numbered dry-cleaning bags. The boys would be lined up in their preposterous boots and leggings and velvet vests and jewelry, and the designer would fix each boy, spray a curl in place, unbutton a shirt one notch, turn up a collar, like an anxious chef standing at the kitchen door and arranging with greasy fingers the roast chicken to advantage before the grand presentation. They were all just chicken breasts under white sauce and bewigged with parsley.

The thought of trotting down the runway one more time as the buyers plied their paper fans against the stifling heat of the overhead lights and the bad but trendy rock music blared forth and the excited assistants applauded while the giraffes swarmed the runway for the finale and the modest couturier wore a shockingly conventional dark suit from Savile Row as he humbly took his bow, looking like a CEO or politician, a member of a different species from the models, and blew a kiss toward the buyer from Barneys — that prospect repelled Guy. He didn’t want to go. Luckily the Armani representative didn’t choose him; he told Pierre-Georges that Armani wanted more “ethnics” this year for his safari collection. Pierre-Georges was depressed, then frightened. “It’s the beginning of the end. We’re too old.” Guy noticed the diplomatic “we.”

Marty sent him the fully executed deed to the Fire Island house. That day, when Guy visited Fred, he thanked him again and offered him the chance again of leaving it to his sons.

“Why?” Fred asked. “They’ve never been out there and would be scared to go. That’s where we were the happiest. It’s sacred to us.”

Fred’s arms, torso, face, were covered with black spots — KS. Luckily, he couldn’t see; he could nurse his illusions, with Guy’s help, that finally he was an A-list gay. Fred kept drifting off, but then he sat up with a sudden urgency: “There’s a new test at last to see if you’ve got the virus. Guy, I want you to take it, pronto. I know you’re very careful, whatever that means, but you’ve got to take care of yourself. I’d hate to think I’d given it to you. Promise you’ll take the test.”

“Can I do it right here in the hospital?”

“You bet.”

“What’ll I do if I’m positive? Who will take care of me?”

“Andrew?”

Guy reminded him that Andrés was in prison.

“Peter?” Fred said, meaning Pierre-George.

For a while Fred rambled on about Rock Hudson and how he’d “popularized” AIDS. “I wonder if those French doctors can help him. Imagine renting a private jet to take him to Paris — that must have set him back an arm and a leg.” Guy didn’t understand the reference to an arm and a leg — was he just raving? Amputation fantasies?

Suddenly Fred’s attention concentrated and he asked almost slyly, “If you do have AIDS, have you thought who you’d leave the house to? My mother used to say, ‘Never leave your jewelry to someone who doesn’t have someone you know to leave it to — you don’t want some distant cousin of your friend to end up with your stuff.”

Guy said he was leaving everything to his own mother.

Fred smiled. “There’s a good boy. She’d need it if you died.”

Then Fred started talking disjointedly about his mother, long since dead.

When the neurologist came by, a German with an accent, a white beard, and a stomach, he made cheerful comments to his team and to Fred, who didn’t exactly seem to know who he was. He was leading six neurology residents on rounds and he invited one young woman to examine the patient. She hammered Fred’s elbows and knees with a mallet and looked at his eyes and tongue and poked him with her gloved hands. She asked him about his stool. She then said to her professor, “The patient shows signs of increased CMV infection, though reflexes remain stable. The liver is not hypertrophied. Patient’s cognitive functions seem disoriented.” The professor thanked Fred for cooperating — and suddenly they were all gone, leaving behind an audible silence.

“Sounds bad, huh?” Fred asked.

“About the same,” Guy said with placid reassurance. “They were all so earnest.”

“What was that about cognitive functions? Have I become dim-witted?”

“Not at all.” Guy was angry that the resident had discussed Fred in front of him. He felt certain that would never happen in France — another example of American barbarism.

At the gym that evening he didn’t see the twins, but the next day they were there. He was determined to speak to them, if only to ask something like when they’d be finished with the barbell. One of them left early, which seemed odd. The one who remained came right up to Guy and said, “You look familiar.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Guy replied with a smile.

The adolescent had a confused look in his eye but a brave, radiant smile on his lips as if he were determined to be in on the joke, mysterious as it might be. It was the same mixture of confusion and courage Guy had seen on the faces of the deaf.

They decided to spot each other while lifting a heavy barbell during a bench press. “Gee,” Guy said, “you’re much stronger than you look.”

The twin smiled ruefully. “Do I look that out of shape?”

“Not at all.” He looked him in the eye and said in a softer, sexier voice, “Not at all.”

The twin had to adjust something in his jockstrap. He lowered his eyes and blushed a blood-red catastrophe, a total epidermal confession. And Guy felt a surge of power — what did people say, of agency? — once again. He felt triumphant that he could excite this boy. He was enthralled by his unique beauty. (He shouldn’t say unique, since he knew it was twinned.)

Soon the other twin emerged from the locker room, showered and dressed, trailing a pine scent, unsmiling, one could almost say shy. He bade his brother farewell in a whispered mumble and was gone. He didn’t look at Guy.

“I don’t even know your name. I’m Guy.”

“Is that spelled as in ‘a guy’?”

“Maybe I should just say that.”

“Never!” the boy exclaimed. “You’re a foreigner?”

“French. Parisian.”

“You don’t meet many of those. Maybe you do in New York. We just moved here a week ago. We just moved here from Ely, Minnesota. I’m Kevin. My brother’s Chris.”

“I’ve never heard of Ely.”

“It’s just a small town in the north of Minnesota, near the Canadian border. It’s where people get outfitted for canoe and camping trips into the Quetico-Superior country, which is on the Canadian side.”

“Sounds cold.”

“It is!” Kevin exclaimed excitedly, as if to encourage what might be a string of lucky guesses. When one of the other men working out looked up and frowned at the offending chitchat, Kevin blushed again, though pink, not red, this time. Social chatter not connected with working out was looked at askance, as in a library.

“Right now it’s thirty-seven degrees in Ely. That’s what my mom said. We’re outfitters, right in the heart of town on Camp Street,” he whispered, looking around nervously.

“Are you foreigners, too? You don’t look American.”

“Oh, we’re Norwegian heritage. We went to Norwegian camp every summer. We can speak Norwegian, sort of. My sister married a real Norwegian ice hockey player and lives in Oslo now.”

“You look Norwegian.”

“You mean dumb?”

“Not at all, blond. Clean. Very clean.”

Kevin got that confused look in his eye again, but he braved it out with a bigger smile, determined to be in on the joke, if that’s what it was, at his own expense. “You mean clean as in boring?”

“Not at all,” Guy protested. “Just because I’m French doesn’t mean I’m nasty. I mean clean-handsome. Here, wanna do another set?”

“Okay.” Kevin stretched out on the board and lifted the barbell and did ten more repetitions, though he slowed down for the last two and out of exhaustion let the bar drift to the left. Guy moved in tighter in case he needed to help him. Kevin looked up Guy’s shorts.

After Guy did his set, Kevin whispered, “We’re the only young guys in here, did you notice?”

So he thinks I’m young, Guy thought, relieved.

They sat in the sauna for five minutes and then took their showers. Kevin had a high, hairless butt of a lunar whiteness; there was no trace of hair, not even in the crack. His penis was small, nested in the merest excuse of a pubic bush. His torso was scarily childish, which prompted Guy to ask, “How old are you guys?”

“In June we’ll be nineteen.”

They decided to grab a cup of coffee together in the restaurant on the ground floor, where an old man was patiently mopping the linoleum, filling the air with the nostril-tickling smell of Lysol. The waitress, hair high and peroxided, asked with a steel-drilling accent, “What can I get you boys?” and Guy liked her for including him as one of the boys and absolving him of being a child molester.

“So what do you do, Guy?”

“I’m a model.”

“Like in a fashion model?”

“Exactly.”

“Cool. Somebody wanted to photograph Chris and me for some fashion shoot, but in the nude, which Chris didn’t want to do. I’m gay but he’s not.”

“How strange. I thought you’d both be straight or both gay.”

“Well, we’ve both experimented with boys and girls, and yes, we have slept together, but only a few times, twice, actually, but Chris has decided he’s really straight and I think I’m really gay.”

American straightforwardness still astounded Guy. A European could take years to get there, but it just popped out of this Minnesota mouth with the lips like Froot Loops and the teeth like Chiclets. It was all so simple, so innocent, but Guy didn’t despise it, he could see Kevin was very pure.

“Don’t you know for sure if you’re gay? Haven’t you tried it with lots of fellows?”

Again the bloodbath blush. “I’m a virgin,” Kevin said, in a small, strangled voice, and Guy thought, irrationally, Of course, that’s why his dick is so small and his ass so rubbery, but that stupid theory evaporated in the first warmth of reflection. “Except fooling around with my brother those two times.”

“I see,” Guy said, stalling for time, wondering what he could say that would be appropriate and maybe consoling, though perhaps consolation wasn’t what was called for. “You were right not to do any nude shots.”

“Why?”

“Real models, professional models, don’t pose in the nude.” And Guy remembered how his own nude photos had ended in Blueboy all those years ago.

“Oh, really? Why not?”

“Swimsuit ads, possibly, maybe underwear, but not total nudity. It just lowers your prestige, I guess, your mystery.”

“Do you think I have some model potential?”

“It’s no fun. It’s not a good career for men. Maybe twelve men in the whole United States make as much as one hundred sixty thousand a year.”

“Do you think I’m handsome enough?”

“It doesn’t really have to do with looks. It’s whether you’re photogenic.”

“Am I photogenic?”

“We won’t know till you put together your portfolio.” Guy had found young guys were more hypnotized by an authority if he wasn’t entirely “supportive”; his reluctance to enthuse paralleled his own self-doubts. “But everyone treats models like you’re beef, like meat, interchangeable. They try to pay you with clothes, not money. It’s the girls who count, because it’s women who buy clothes and beauty products. They’re paid ten times more than us. And most of the population thinks we’re all gay, though most male models are straight.” Guy sighed. “It’s endless.” He cocked his head to one side. “You’re a little short. You have to be at least six feet tall, a size-forty jacket, a fifteen-inch neck. You have to fit into the clothes. Maybe for catalogue work they can pin the clothes here and there to fit, but for runway or fashion or editorial work you have to be a perfect size. The models are hired because the clothes fit them. You can’t be five-foot-eleven.”

“Do you think I have a good face?”

Guy whispered, “Angelic. Your jaw is a little strong, but that could be your trademark. I’d draw a little cleft into your chin to emphasize it.”

“You can do whatever you like to me.”

Guy hadn’t been openly flirting and was taken aback by the kid’s sudden flying of a white flag. “But you’ve really got to want it,” Guy warned. “You’ve got to pound the pavement for six months and accept rejection. It’s hard to be rejected. New York is all about rejection. They’re so fucking rude, photographers, art directors, casting agents. The client is the worst of all. Secretly they resent us for doing nothing and getting rich. That’s what they think. We don’t do anything in their eyes.”

Kevin scanned Guy’s face. “With those cheekbones I could get rich, I’ll bet.”

They made a date to work out together the same time the next day. Kevin’s brother, Chris, could barely look Guy in the eye, and he quickly absented himself to exercise on the other side of the gym.

“Did I say something wrong?” Guy asked.

“Naw, he’s doing legs and squats today.”

“Does he need us to spot him? Squats can be dangerous.”

“He’s wearing a belt.” After reflecting a moment, Kevin said, “He wants to give us a little space.” After another pause he said, “He might be jealous.” Another set, and Kevin added, “He’s probably worried you might want to have a three-way. You’d be surprised how many men have that fantasy, to be Lucky Pierre between identical twins.”

“Gross,” Guy said, ashamed that he’d had that fantasy himself.

“Guys are freaky. And like I said, Chris thinks he’s more straight.”

Over coffee downstairs, Guy said, “It must be strange to be identical twins. If you have to make a big decision in your life, is he the one you call automatically?”

“He’s my best friend. Our mother used to dress us alike. We had a private language till we were eight and then a school psychologist told our mom that she must stop us from doing that, otherwise we’d never socialize with the other kids.”

“Was the psychologist right?”

“Yep. Now we can’t even remember it — it just evaporated, except ‘weepie’ was our word for ‘basketball.’ That’s all we can remember. And I called him ‘old cock’ and he called me ‘big cock,’ though our cocks of course are identical and small.”

Guy said, “If you slept with your brother, you’re not really a virgin.” Embarrassed by his own coarse remark, he asked, “Do you have shared experiences, nonverbal ones?”

Kevin said, “Oh, yeah! Like once he got socked in the stomach and I was miles away and doubled over with pain. We don’t need more than a word to make the other one crack up over some remembered joke. Or if someone says something asinine, Chris will just poke his cheek with his tongue and we’re both weeping with laughter.”

When they were about to pay at the cash register, Kevin said, “Don’t look now, but that old guy in the corner bugs the shit out of me. He’s always cruising me, and I’m sorry, but I hate old trolls.”

Guy glanced rapidly at the troll and said, “But Kevin, that man’s not old. He couldn’t be more than thirty.”

“He gives me the creeps. I guess I’m weird, but I’ve never even kissed anyone over twenty-five. By the way, Chris thinks you’re older than we are.”

Guy said, “I’m certainly older than you. I’m twenty-five. Too old to kiss?”

“Gee, I’m surprised,” Kevin said. “I told Chris I thought you were more like twenty-two.”

Guy became worried that Kevin might ask around the fashion world and find out he was nearly forty, so he said, “By the way, I haven’t been working much as a model, so I’m looking for a job as a waiter or a sales clerk.” Guy wasn’t sure a vendeur was called a “sales clerk.” He didn’t want Kevin to think of him as a rich forty-year-old model with two houses, but rather as a poor kid like himself just starting out.

“That really surprises me. I’m sure I’ve seen you in ads and commercials.”

“Nope,” Guy said. “Just one peanuts commercial two years ago.”

“Excellent,” Kevin said, using the new vogue word.

Kevin began almost instantly to treat Guy with a suggestion of tenderness and less admiration. For him, perhaps, Guy was no longer a successful grown-up but another beginner struggling to survive. He was easier for Kevin to care about — and Kevin insisted they split the check for coffee and cherry pie right down the middle.

For the first time, as they left the coffee shop Kevin put his arm around Guy’s waist. It occurred to Guy that Kevin might be active in bed. He was startled by the boy’s friendly gesture. He must be lonely, Guy thought.

The next morning when Guy swung by to see Fred, he wasn’t there and his plants and flowers and get-well cards had all been cleared out and the bed was freshly made. The room was in a sort of twilight, lit only by the hall light coming through the door. Had they taken him to the emergency room? Stripped of its colorful ornaments, the room looked smaller, like a cell, and the narrow bed with its crisp sheets and hospital corners looked like one of those restraining cots used for lethal injections.

Blinded by tears and confused, Guy stumbled out into the hallway and saw one of his favorite nurses, the Seventh-Day Adventist with her carefully braided hair. “Oh, honey,” she said, opening her arms. He let her hold him, though she was so much shorter and stouter. “Your poor Mr. Fred passed during the night about three A.M. I was the one who discovered him. He may have had a heart attack. He looked startled and was almost sitting up. He eyes buggin’ out and his mouth open. Those vulture sons were here by eight and put all his belongings in a big black plastic garbage bag. They were gone by eight-thirty after they made sure there were no checked valuables.”

“Valuables?”

“Watch, ring, that sort of thing. They did cry a little. And then they were squabblin’ with each other. You were his real son.”

That thought made Guy cry again, and the nurse, who smelled of vanilla extract dabbed right out of the bottle, held him again in her short arms. “You’re skinny, boy,” she said.

Fred had been such a strong personality, so full of noise and vulgarity and longing, that his abrupt absence left a roaring vacuum behind, the sort you see in a movie when the villain punctures the shell of the airplane and the passengers are all sucked out into the freezing stratosphere. Guy kept thinking he should do something for Fred, that there was some ritual he was neglecting or some form to fill out. But there was nothing to do. No duties.

He went to the Elephant and Castle downstairs, though it was too early to eat and the waiters were just tying on aprons, and the grill, he was told, would take twenty minutes to heat up. There were no other customers. The windows were sparkling clean. The waiter brought him a cup of coffee as an act of mercy.

Suddenly the day seemed so vacant, great empty lots of time laid out before him like fields planted in the same crop. He didn’t know what to do with himself and went to the gym to work out halfheartedly. For some reason he looked at everyone yearningly, including the least likely men, even the owner’s brother, that big straight blowhard who drank a pint of bull’s blood a day and, crippled with gout, had to be handed up the stairs. Grief made Guy masochistic and he could imagine shrinking and living in that brute’s crotch, his only exercise crossing from one small ball to the other. (He’d seen them, and steroids had made them peasized.) He felt so lonely. With Fred gone and Andrés in prison. Nothing was as lonely as the gym, with its averted glances, its surround of reproachful mirrors, its weights cast aside like broken manacles.

He took the Greyhound bus ninety minutes to Otisville, the minimum-security federal prison. It looked like a junior high in the middle of a lot. He was shocked by how small and peaceful it looked — small and without walls. A dozen passengers from New York had gotten off with him; they were all women, mostly black and Hispanic — some the mothers or elderly wives of prisoners, others possibly their adult children or younger wives, two with Muslim headscarves, all with packages in their hands. He wished he’d talked to the forty-something woman sitting next to him, with her mobcap of shiny black hair, straightened and varnished, and her pretty dress and clear lip gloss. He might have received some clues from her as to what to expect. He’d called ahead and his name was on the list, which the fat female guard in her bulging trousers pronounced Guy as in “gigh” to rhyme with “sigh.”

He sat on an orange sectional sofa marooned in the visitors’ lounge. He’d had to pass through three checkpoints and metal detectors. He’d been patted down twice. And yet this room was casual in a studied way — no partitions “protecting” the visitors from the prisoners, two floor lamps to soften the neon glare from the ceiling, three dispensers loaded with soft drinks and sweets, bright acrylic colors swirled on the walls as on an empty lot in Harlem. But he did spot two cameras monitoring the room—I guess you couldn’t slip someone a knife or diet pills in here.

At last Andrés was brought in, with one wrist handcuffed. He darted a glance at Guy and muttered something to the guard, who accompanied him to the couch, unlocked their handcuffs, and walked over to another guard, who was sipping a cardboard container of coffee.

Guy smiled sheepishly at Andrés. After all, Andrés was here for years more to come because of a misguided desire to keep up with his rich model lover. I refuse to feel guilty! he thought guiltily. “How’s it going?” Guy asked.

“I wish I could make love to you,” Andrés said. “Can you see the outline of my erection?” and Andrés scooted down on the sofa so his uniform stretched tight. Already? Guy thought. The petit bourgeois in Guy wanted to stop him, make him sit up straight, not get in trouble, but his own cock stiffened automatically, like a new mother lactating when her baby cries in another room. “I miss you so much,” Andrés said. “I guess you’ve already found someone else.”

“No,” Guy said, “but have you?”

“That’s all bullshit about sex in prison, at least the rape part,” Andrés said angrily. “Maybe the high-security prisoners, the lifers, maybe they team up with some swishy long-haired bitch. Here the guys — But let’s not waste time,” and Andrés fell into a brown study, staring at some point in space so hard that Guy turned to see what it was. “So you’ve already found someone?” Andrés said angrily.

“No, I haven’t,” Guy said simply. “No one could ever replace you in my heart.” He wondered if that sounded sincere.

“Oh, really?” Andrés asked bitterly. “Why is that? Even if there was a nice Parisian town house in the deal or a penthouse overlooking the Champs de Mars?”

“I never schemed to get a house. Anyway, I have enough real estate.”

“But you have a weakness for rich old men.”

“I only have a weakness for a young Colombian who gets an erection the minute he sees me.”

Andrés at first scowled and looked grumpy, as if he were going to object to something, but then in spite of himself he burst into a big grin and lost ten years. He shook his head as if in disbelief and said, “I love you. So much. It hurts.”

“I love you, too, Andrés.”

He asked Guy to put $500 in his account so that he could buy junk food at the canteen.

“What’s your day like?” Guy asked.

“Always the same. I’m awake by five. Which is early, since on the weekends we’re allowed to watch TV well after midnight, and reveille’s at six. Then there’s exercise in the yard. I’ve been doing pull-ups — look.” He made a muscle, and the sudden movement caused both guards’ eyes to swivel in their direction, then drift away.

“We have hours and hours alone. Some guys are studying the law, trying to get a retrial.” Andrés looked at his hands and said in a softer voice, “I’ve been reading the Bible.”

“Why?”

Andrés ruffled his feathers and said, “Why not?” Then he added, “But I can’t understand that fuckin’ old-ass English. Maybe you could bring me a Spanish Bible. What’s wrong with these muthafuckers, why ain’t their English up-to-date?”

Andrés had never sworn before, not in English, though in Spanish it had always been puta, and coño, as with all young South Americans. He must be learning a new way to speak English from his cellmates.

He looked at Guy and said, “If you don’t love me I’ll kill you.”

Suddenly all Guy’s alarms went off. “But I do love you,” in a little voice he’d never heard before out of his own mouth, shallow and childish. “I’ve never loved anyone so much,” and Guy couldn’t help noticing Andrés’s thick cock flexing again inside his taut orange trousers, an autonomic response to the desire tormenting his features.

“Sure?”

“I’m absolutely sure.”

“I saw you checking out that hairy-chested gorilla over there. Would you like some of that?”

“Andrés, don’t drive us both crazy. I haven’t touched anyone since you went away.”

“But you’d like to. I know you,” Andrés said, and Guy thought guiltily of Kevin, his hairless torso and little pink cock and tiny untried nipples.

“Is the food here edible?”

“It’s okay. On weekends we even have barbecue. Too many starches. I don’t want to get fat. Are there some dynamite new men in your gym? Probably Pierre-Georges is fixing you up with some studs — he must be happy I’m behind bars. No class, no money, no connections — that’s me. Does he say that or just think it? He must be happy to distract you with some young stallion in his stable. Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?”

“Come on, Andrés. Let’s say kind things to each other, loving things—”

“Or what? You won’t come back?” Andrés looked at the tip of his shoe, which he flexed. “You hold all the cards here.”

“Is it boring here? Dangerous? Infuriating?”

“Check, check, and check.” For some reason Andrés suddenly inspected the nails on his right hand. “It’s okay here, once they break your spirit. God, you’re beautiful when you smile like that!”

“Th-thanks.”

“Has everyone always been in love with you? Of course they have, who am I kidding? What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That’s you, you’re that beautiful. A thousand ships. There’s no one even close to you around here. Maybe in Manhattan there are two or three.”

“I’m no longer young,” Guy said.

He thought how boring this visit was. The truth was he and Andrés had nothing in common except their life together. (“Don’t forget to buy the wine! Oh, and some bread.”) Just as they spoke an imperfect English together, which wasn’t the mother tongue of either of them, in the same way sex and the dailiness of daily life were what they had in common, though it wasn’t what either of them was most proficient at. Maybe sex was Andrés’s strong suit. Yes, he was good at that.

Andrés had once accused him of liking him only for sex. At the time, Guy had thought that wasn’t fair; it was Andrés who always nudged him when they were watching a game show in the afternoon and indicated with a toss of his head that they should repair to the bedroom for sex. It was Andrés who wanted to fuck first thing in the morning (he’d show his morning wood, which to be funny he’d call in Spanish his madera): Guy had started getting up half an hour early so he’d be clean and his teeth brushed, which made him feel like a woman, not an altogether unpleasant fantasy. Andrés was the one with the constant erection that had to be addressed several times a day; his hard-on was their metronome, sometimes their tyrant. Guy thought he was always accommodating it, but he liked the feeling of being that desired (a womanly feeling, too, he supposed). Now they couldn’t touch, though they could drink each other in with their eyes, and Andrés could slouch in his chair so that his erection was big and visible. Guy would just have to stretch his hand out — but that was no more permissible than Orpheus looking back at Eurydice. Strictly forbidden.

Guy could remember Andrés’s back so clearly — the broad shoulders straining to be broader, the ass-cheeks just unmolded from the curved baking pan, indented at the sides, the crack looking so innocent and boyish — and, most glorious of all, the silky indentation of his spine, slicing his back in two, luminous as a prayer, an infolding of light.

Their time was up! Oh, it was so heartbreaking leaving Andrés there, so unfair, with his unsatisfied madera and his aristocratic hands, so pale next to the brutal orange of his uniform, and on his face a lost, devastated look.

Guy made an appointment to take the AIDS test as he’d promised Fred. He went back to St. Vincent’s at the right time, sat with some other glum single men with expensive haircuts and tight jeans. His name was called, he went into the male nurse’s cubicle, and rolled up his sleeve. The nurse smelled of cigarettes and the new cologne by Perry Ellis, the only good American scent. Poor Perry, everyone said he had AIDS, half his face was paralyzed during his last runway show and he nearly swooned. His partner was also about to go, both of them under fifty.

The nurse put a red rubber tourniquet around his bicep and looked at the form he’d filled out. “There’s a mistake here, it says you were born in 1945, but that should be 1965.”

“No,” Guy said, smiling, “’45 is right.”

“What is your secret, girl? Surgery?”

“Good genes, I guess. Moisturizer.”

“I use Indigo Body Butter, but I don’t look like you, darlin’.”

“Try Retin-A,” Guy said.

“Retinal?”

Guy picked up a pencil and scribbled with it in the air. The nurse slipped a prescription pad under his hand and Guy wrote a word.

“Retin-A? I never heard of that. Is that some Swiss monkey gland or sheep bladder? Do you also sleep twelve hours a night in a walk-in refrigerator?”

“Yes. I do,” Guy said, and the nurse hummed an emphatic, “Un-hum.” Suddenly serious, he said gravely, “Make a fist.” He then tapped Guy’s arm and the back of his hand in several places. “It’s good you’re no heroin addict; I can’t find no good veins.” Suddenly he stabbed Guy, who looked away.

The results were available a day later. That night Guy meditated (which he never did, which he didn’t believe in, which he scarcely knew how to do), and he asked his body if it was infected and if it was going to die right away. It said (but this didn’t make any sense), No. I’m not infected and I’m going to live a long time. Guy couldn’t tell anyone about this, it was too superstitious and silly, but for some reason he felt reassured, though he didn’t believe in it and he wasn’t even sure what had happened.

Nevertheless, he went to St. Vincent’s with a mixture of confidence and fatalism. He wished he’d never entered into all of this. There was nothing to do anyway if you were ill. He recognized that everyone liked him because he was handsome. Would they all go away if he was dying (and it was a fatal disease)? If he was Auschwitz-thin and covered with black spots? Pierre-Georges would drop him slowly but surely, if he could no longer work. The baron might send him a basket of fruit, Kevin would be horrified. Fred was gone and Andrés locked up. Only Lucie would stay faithful. Women were the loyal ones, he thought wearily.

An intern in a blue uniform and expensive shoes and a Swatch made a fuss about setting Guy down in his cubicle. He glanced at the report and then he looked Guy in the eye and said with a slow smile, “I have good news. You’re negative. I’m not supposed to blurt it out; I’m supposed to talk first about safe sex and condom use, but hey, we’re both grown-ups, right? But for God’s sake, keep up the good work.” And then, looking flirtatiously up through his eyelashes, the intern said, “You must be one of the few tops in the Village.”

“Not always, I’m more versatile,” Guy said. The intern’s smile evaporated.

“Are you new at this?”

“At what?” Guy asked.

“Same-sex practices?”

“Not particularly,” Guy said, a bit shocked at the man’s impertinence, although he admitted to himself he’d find the situation intriguing if the nurse was better-looking.

Guy said, “No, I must be just very lucky.”

The man said, “We recommend you know the name of everyone you sleep with and limit the number of your partners.” That made sense to Guy, kind of.

He was vastly relieved and he remembered his stupid “meditation” when his body had made its own prognostication. Ridiculous! he thought, though he had a new respect for the augury.

In the bright, fragile spring day, all blue and crystal, which felt as if it might shatter at any moment in the rising warmth like ice gloving a branch, each evergreen needle inside vivid and distinct, he sauntered forth, walking all the way over to the Hudson. He never took a walk without a destination but now he was powered by his relief at being negative.

He thought, I must settle down with and be faithful to a virgin boy, and he thought immediately of Kevin. He thought of Kevin’s pure white body, tinged with pink, like new snow at dawn. He could hear the ice melting above Ely, Minnesota, with its loud gunshot reports as it broke loose and cracked in the sunlight. He thought of that little penis like a cherub on its cloudlet of pubic hair, those lips the color of raspberry sherbet, that white butt, perched high and inviolate.