Our Young Man

9

Guy flew in early, since the client had paid for a ticket on the Concorde. (You could get a deal for a first-class seat on a jet going over and a Concorde seat coming back.) When he let himself in at nine in the morning, he did so silently and discovered Kevin and Chris asleep. They were together, entwined, those two identical faces, both of them in matching Jockey shorts and nothing else, identical small erections, morning wood, their hands and feet so small, elegant, matching, their blond Norwegian heads pressed together, both of them with open mouths and ruby lips.

Kevin was the first to wake up. “You’re back early. Concorde?”

“Yes. You two look so great together.” Guy felt torn between lust and jealousy.

“We went out last night dancing at the Roxy and didn’t get home till dawn. If I’d known you were flying the Concorde …”

“It was all very last-minute. You know fashion people — hurry up and wait.” If Guy were cheekier he would lie down in the midst of this flowery bower.

Their voices had awakened Chris, who smiled weakly and waved, looked grumpy, adjusted himself, ran into the bathroom, and dressed quickly. A moment later he was gone, his hair all scrunched to one side.

“Why does he have a burr up his ass?”

“He’s just jealous,” Kevin said. Guy wondered why jealous if Chris was so straight, and why was he dancing in a gay club? Chris was barely out the door before Kevin clawed off Guy’s clothes. Afterward, he said to Kevin, while holding him in his arms, what he’d rehearsed so many times, “Baby?”

“Yes, Daddy?” Kevin was holding him and hadn’t yet pulled out.

“What if we each got a discreet tattoo?”

Kevin thought for a moment about this proposal, more jarring than anything he’d anticipated: A model with a tattoo? Weren’t tattoos forever? Did people like them ever get them? Weren’t they something white trash had? “Pardon?” he said.

Guy pulled free, sat up on the towel he’d spread out, and looked Kevin in the eye. Guy worried that he looked strange with his sprayed-on tan just on his face and hands from his last job for sunglasses. (Didn’t they say they wanted an exclusive? How much would that pay? For how many days? Would Élite work all that out with Pierre-Georges? Would the client shoot in New York? Did that young Italian photographer, Giorgio, ever work in New York?) “I’m sorry, I’m still half in Milan, worrying about work.”

“Poor guy,” Kevin said, stroking his face and worrying about Guy’s unrelieved erection now shrinking to half-mast.

“I thought we could get tiny number eights behind our earlobes.”

“Why that number?”

“If it’s on its side, it’s the symbol for infinity and could stand for our eternal love.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” Kevin said, and pecked him on the lips. Quite the commitment, Kevin thought, smiling. “How did you even know that?” he asked, astonished that Guy knew so many things he didn’t; must be his French background.

And indeed Guy explained he’d read about it in a story but he couldn’t remember whose. It probably was a French author’s, a man was in love with a nun and managed to have the infinity symbol projected on the convent lawn just outside her window.

“That’s so romantic,” Kevin said with a frown. “Wouldn’t it be dangerous? I mean, if it got infected?”

Guy made a clucking sound of dismissal and Kevin felt about as daring as a grandmother. “Yeah,” Guy said, “they might have to amputate our heads.”

Kevin said, “That wouldn’t affect me in the least,” though secretly he thought he and Chris were smarter than Guy. They both did well in trig, whereas Guy could barely add. He felt startled, even offended, when Guy knew things he didn’t. Though superior knowledge was only natural in a sophisticated man who’d traveled the world’s capitals for two decades and who liked to read, Guy’s occasional pockets of esoteric knowledge were still disturbing to Kevin, who didn’t want to think of all those years before they’d met or all the conversations Guy might be having now without Kevin, some shared laugh of camaraderie with another runway model backstage as they both wore protective cloth coats over their white alpaca suits, so easy to soil, so likely to shed.

“I guess that would mean we really were married,” Kevin said. “It would be a statement of some sort, that this time it’s for keeps.”

“Of course it’s for keeps,” Guy said. What if Kevin ever met Andrés and saw that he had the same tattoo? Guy could foresee a disaster like that, but the one thing he counted on was that, even if his whole world exploded, he’d always be able to attract new people, maybe of not the same caliber, but good enough. He’d once gotten drunk with a handsome flight attendant who’d said, “The good thing and the bad thing about being a steward is that you never have to make anything work with a guy, because you’re always flying off and meeting new guys.” Being an international model was like that; even in Milan he’d met two other models who’d fancied him. He liked models — they were so clean. Everyone said they were shallow, but he thought it depended. He knew one, that black guy with the Afro he’d met in Chicago, who’d gotten a Ph.D. in something.

“But won’t a facial tattoo be a problem for a model?” Kevin asked.

“Pierre-Georges was right. I need a new look. Anyway, I’m going to grow my hair long to cover my ears — and I have such dumb ears.”

“Aw, they’re cute!”

“And I’m going to stop shaving every day. I’ll have some stubble. I saw a model in Milan with stubble and it was very chic. Everyone was fascinated.” He thought for a moment, picturing his new look. “Ultra-masculine. I’ll start wearing punk, masculine clothes to go-sees. Lots of leather. Safety pins. If that works I’ll push my hair back on one side and show my tattoo. Enough with the Gentleman’s Quarterly look. Models are so square.”

“Who will tattoo us? Does it hurt? It will be so strange to have something … permanent … making me different from Chris. I mean, a mustache, okay, or five pounds, a haircut, but a brand on your flesh?”

“A brand? Let’s not be melodramatic. I think they give you an anesthetic. I’ll find a clean, artistic tattoo artist. It’s becoming far more common.”

“Really? I don’t want to look like a scumbag. We used to say you should never have anything on your body that you couldn’t cover up with long sleeves before a judge.”

“Did you, now? In Ely?” Guy said with just the right combination, he hoped, of ridicule and condescension.

Not wishing to be vexed with Guy, Kevin kissed him and said,“I don’t want to look like a convict.”

Guy had an attack of vertigo at the mention of the word “convict.” He went pale and said, “It must be late for me. Eleven. Let’s go eat something.”

“I’m going to cook something. A mushroom risotto.”

Where on earth did he learn to make that? Guy wondered. Rice sounded fattening, but he thought he’d eat only two spoonfuls. He was disciplined enough to do that, and if he ate three he’d vomit his entire lunch. That was a promise he made himself.

Lucie knew the name of an aesthetic tattoo artist. They made an appointment and went to a dirty little parlor in Chinatown, a third-floor walk-up, smelling of roach spray and Kools. The man, a wizened ex-sailor with sleeves of faded tattoos on both arms, looked like Popeye. All he lacked were a corncob pipe and a can of spinach. It took a hastily drawn sketch to convince him they wanted matching eights behind their left ears, tiny and no colors, visible only behind the lobe.

“I might just as well make them in lemon juice,” the man said mournfully. “But I get it. I’ve had timid gentlemen like you two before. Sure, I can do it. Guess you guys are special pals?” and he set to work on Guy first. His needles looked dirty, and Guy worried he might get the AIDS or hepatitis from them, but he didn’t dare show any qualms, lest Kevin back down.

That night neither of them could sleep from the pain behind their earlobes. The man had said the tattoos would scab over in a day, and the whole thing had taken less than an hour. It was the last burst of warm weather and they strolled over to a café on MacDougal that was open all night. As they were coming home, they ran into Pierre-Georges, who was with one of his older tough guys.

“Thanks for calling to say you were back,” Pierre-Georges said snidely, after the cursory introductions in which he mentioned only Guy’s and Kevin’s names.

“So where are you coming from?” Kevin asked brightly. “Boots & Saddle, or, as we say, Bras & Girdle?”

“Ha-ha,” Pierre-Georges said as words, not a laugh; he was clearly irritated. The overweight trick, pockmarked and reeking of beer, put his arm around Pierre-Georges’s waist as if Pierre-Georges might go off with his friends — or maybe to steady himself. “We were at Ty’s, if you must know.” Then to Guy: “What’s with the stubble? The long hair? The bandage?”

“I just got back today. As you suggested, I’m trying for a new image. Stubble — something hypermasculine. Pietro Whatsit in Milano was all stubble in the Armani défilé and all the photographers went crazy over him.”

“You might have consulted me before you took such a drastic step — and the bandage?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I nicked myself. Je me suis blessé en rasant.”

“You were shaving behind your ear? Both of you?” because he’d registered that Kevin had a bandage in the same place. “You don’t shave at all, I suspect,” he said to Kevin as a reproach.

The trick looked startled by the few words Guy had said in French. New Yorkers were used to Spanish, at least the Puerto Rican kind, which sounded normal if substandard to them, rapid-fire and familiar, especially when English words were constantly dropped in. French, however, startled New Yorkers. It was a serious grown-up language, and New Yorkers suspected Parisians considered themselves their equals if not their superiors. Pierre-Georges didn’t want to lose his trick, who just as easily might have lurched off into the night, heading back to the bar for a second strike, though Ty’s had looked pretty much fished out.

“They’re tattoos,” Guy said. “Tiny ones behind the ear.”

“Chic,” Pierre-Georges whispered with awe instead of exploding. “Come along,” he said to the trick; he obviously didn’t know his name. Pierre-Georges lurched forward for air-kisses on both of Guy’s cheeks.

When they were out of earshot, Kevin said, “He’s weird.”

“You mean rude? Don’t imagine he ever approves of my boyfriends. French, Spanish, American — he’s rude to all of them.”

Kevin found being one of many was troubling, not reassuring as Guy had probably intended. “Does he have any other clients?”

“Two. Both French. But since everyone knows me and likes me, he doesn’t book them often. Poor guys.”

“How does he survive?”

“He’s signed some very lucrative contracts for me, and my commercials keep bringing in big residuals for months. And remember a manager gets a bigger slice of the pie than an agent.”

“So you’re really his cash cow. Is that why he’s so possessive? Or is he in love with you?”

“You saw the kind of brute he goes for. No, let’s just say he’s my Chris, not in love but jealous anyway.”

They were sitting on their stoop, speaking in low voices, watching these huge behemoth American cars lurch by. (There was a stop sign on their corner.) A tall, prissy young man strode by, belting out show tunes to himself at midnight. Oh, he was wearing earphones, Guy noticed, and probably had no idea how loud he was singing. It was an old one, “New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” The man’s voice was operatic, his diction was as fruity as an old diva’s, and his pitch was wobbly. Guy thought, These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.

The next morning Guy and Kevin pulled off their bandages and Guy applied antibiotic cream to their tattoos. Lucie came by for coffee.

“I like your new look,” she said to Guy. “Stubble, jeans, and a wife-beater.”

“Is that what you call a débardeur?”

“Yes, or a Guinea T-shirt.”

“That’s a riot,” Guy said. “A wife-beater.”

“And you, sweetheart?” she said to Kevin. “Is it true you’re going to try modeling?”

“No, Pierre-Georges said I was too short and not virile enough and not a perfect size-forty.”

Lucie said, “I guess compared to the thugs he goes for, big smelly guys with guts. So what are you going to do?”

Guy listened attentively to Kevin’s answer. So often the unspoken etiquette of the couple forbade direct questions and clear answers and an outsider’s chance inquiry was more likely to flush out plans than any discussion (or silence) between lovers.

“I’m going to get my B.A. in poli-sci at Columbia and then a master’s at Georgetown or wherever and take the civil service exam and hopefully become a career diplomat. Chris wants to go back to Ely and take over Dad’s business and become an outfitter, though he’ll have to wait, because Dad’s just forty-five now.”

Five years older than me, Guy thought.

“A diplomat, huh?” Lucie said.

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “I’ve always wanted to travel. And I’ve always liked history and politics. And I’m polite and diplomatic, people say.”

“You’d be a very handsome ambassador.”

“Thanks, but ambassadors are used car salesmen who made big contributions to the party coffers. I want to be a cultural attaché or something — that’s why you two guys have to teach me French! Let’s speak French at least one hour a day. Well, after I’ve had a semester. Right now it’d be useless. You’ll see, I’m good at languages, at least we were stars at Norwegian camp back in Minnesota.” Kevin realized instantly he’d said “we” and hoped that Guy wouldn’t be jealous or even notice.

When they were alone, Kevin said, “That Lucie is so sweet. Finally a friend of yours I can reach out to.”

“You would have liked Fred, too. Very down-to-earth.” Guy was proud of that expression, “down-to-earth.” Americans used it all the time, though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant—terre-à-terre?

“What kind of movies did he make?”

Guy stumbled over the unfamiliar word: “Blaxploitation.”

“Oh, dear.”

“What? I think it was kind of him to make movies for Africans. Well, let’s not argue. So you want to be a diplomat?”

“My adviser at Colombia thinks I’d make a good one.”

“But wouldn’t that take you far away — to Peru?”

“It’ll be years from now,” Kevin said, smiling, “if ever. Maybe you’ll be … tired of modeling and can come with me.”

“Tired or fired or retired.”

“I want to support you, for once. It’ll be my turn. I’ll try to get us a French-speaking country.”

“The Côte d’Ivoire? They have nice beaches. I was there once for a swimsuit commercial.”

“I want to see your reel sometime!”

“We’ll get it from Pierre-Georges. He keeps it up-to-date.”

And so the charms of their lives, their futures, were changed in a casual conversation led by a third person. Would he and Kevin stay together? How many years? Guy felt he should provide for his old age, but he was hooked on the present. With any luck he’d die ten years from now or twenty and leave a beautiful corpse. He had his two houses and his apartment in Paris. Some models were making exercise films or even getting into the business as agents. Others were buying real estate unless all their money was going up their noses. Guy had heard of one Bruce Weber star who’d bought a prewar apartment near Borough Hall and rented it out to visiting models, male and female, four units, cheaper than a midtown hotel, and they could share the kitchen, and no ordinary person was around to complain about the sound of hair dryers blowing all day or the sound of the phone ringing off the hook. Not too convenient for Manhattan clubbing, but usually there was a limo someone had sent for one of the girls.

Guy didn’t like the idea of moving to Peru. That sounded lonely. Bad for the skin. And by then he’d be too old to learn another language. Everyone said Spanish was easy if you knew French. But “fear” was miedo in Spanish and peur in French, a wave was ola not vague—nothing like! And what would they make of two adult men living together in South America, one of them the American cultural attaché?

“All we have is the present,” Guy said, settling into one of his favorite themes, one he’d worked out already back in Clermont-Ferrand. “There is no past and no future, only the present.” He’d argued that position with one of the priests at school, who was torn because he was besotted with Guy but of course wanted him to think of his ultimate reward in heaven.

“That’s interesting.” Kevin said, bored.

Guy was sorry that Kevin didn’t argue with him. Most people did, at least other models did. “No future? You’ve got to be kidding! What about my next job in Saint-Tropez?” they’d say indignantly, and then he’d take them to a higher if paradoxical level. But Kevin didn’t like to philosophize. All he wanted to do when they were together was chitchat or have sex. He wasn’t very intellectual. Or maybe it was just American practicality, whereas the French like to soar on the wings of speculation.

Guy loved the feeling he got when he was tiptoeing into the cobwebs of the stratosphere. He’d smile benignly at his own familiarity with these difficult subjects, his calm, mature mastery of these paradoxes. He didn’t want to be down-to-earth all the time. Being earthbound didn’t do much for him.

Kevin turned off the minute Guy got that contented smile on his face and launched into one of his idiotic rants, what he considered philosophizing. Kevin had studied real philosophy at Columbia and had received an A on his term paper about the difference between ideology and ideas. (Ideology was a false view promoted by the ruling class in order to hoodwink the proletariat.) He was sickened by Guy’s rambling on about time, and wondered how much longer he’d be able to stomach it.

Three days later Guy took the bus to see Andrés. This time he told Kevin where he was going and Kevin said, “I admire you for that. You’re a very loyal person.”

Guy agreed. He was very loyal. He still sent his mother a thousand dollars a month, which wasn’t so much, given the downgrading of the dollar, but it was something. It allowed her to live correctly, now that she had a car in good running order and all paid for. She owned her home. And she got a welfare check from the government. She’d had to hide the allowance she got from Guy in order to qualify for the government stipend. He mailed a money order to his brother, who handed her the cash. So far they hadn’t been caught. From time to time Lucie helped Guy fill a big box of shawls, sweaters, dresses — everything she could pick up in his mother’s size after a collection was shown. His mother complained that the clothes were too stylish or flashy or daring for their neighborhood, and he was certain she was still shopping in her old raincoat and paisley scarf she’d bought from the Arabs in the market in the shadow of the cathedral.

Guy had been loyal to Fred, more than anyone else had, and he would have stayed on good terms with the baron if he hadn’t been exiled. He was fidel to Andrés and took the long, boring bus ride out there every week. He’d even become friendly with one of the other “wives,” a delicate young black woman who bathed herself in a sweet candied perfume she said was invented by Elizabeth Taylor. She really smelled like cotton candy. Yes, he was a loyal friend — he’d stuck with Pierre-Georges even though bigger agents had tried to lure him away. Of course, he knew Pierre-Georges was watching out for him 24/7, and he doubted another agent could wrangle him bigger contracts. Guy had been around too long; everyone knew what he was worth.

“What if Andrés notices the tattoo? Won’t you have some explaining to do?” Kevin asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“Oh, he won’t. He’s pretty — how do you say? Narcisse?”

“Narcissistic. That’s a tough one.” Kevin thought it advisable to comment on the word rather than the character flaw.

“He never notices anything,” Guy said.

Of course, he did, and to make sure he did, as soon as they were seated opposite each other in the visiting room, Guy pushed his hair back and flipped his earlobe forward. “See what I did for you? Just as I promised.”

Andrés, rather than being delighted, looked around nervously at the guard, the same handsome thick one as before, who was studying them carefully. He strode over to them and pulled back his ear; the tattoo of the number eight was bigger than Guy’s and harder to distinguish on black skin. And then he grabbed Andrés, wrenched his head around, and revealed his tattoo, the same number eight. At that point he grunted and walked away, back to the other guard he’d been chatting with.

“That wasn’t cool,” Andrés said to Guy.

“You got the tattoo to please your new love or master or whatever he is, and to cover yourself around me you convinced me to do it, too — for you. You pretended—” And Guy couldn’t help but laugh when he realized he’d played the same trick on Kevin. Guy thought that he and Andrés were both wily, always plotting, and Kevin and the black man were typical Yankee dopes. “What’s your lover’s name, anyway?”

“Lester,” Andrés said in a surly tone. “He’s not my lover.” He lowered his eyes and said in a small voice, “He’s my protector. You’re my lover.”

“Did you choose him to be your protector? Or did he choose you as his protégé?”

Andrés exploded, “You don’t know what it’s like to live in here all day, every day. I need someone to protect me.”

Guy could see that Andrés had been working out hard. His arms and shoulders looked twice as big as before. How dangerous really was this junior high of a prison? Knowing that he’d duped Kevin in the same way Andrés had duped him made Guy forgive him, though with an edge of exasperation. He hoped Lester wouldn’t punish Andrés — beat him or put him in solitary. Lester might have hit Andrés now if it weren’t for the surveillance cameras and so many witnesses from the outside world. “I’m sorry — I had no idea.”

So unexpected was Guy’s apology that Andrés broke into a sweet boyish smile: That sweetness had almost been extinguished in this new tough, hardened Andrés here in prison where anger seemed to be the default mode, but Guy’s kindness called to the boy hidden within, who slowly emerged from the darkest cave of Andrés’s heart, where the child had been declared dead. He wasn’t dead, just weakened and frightened. “I should be the one begging your forgiveness,” Andrés said softly.

“Let’s forget the whole thing.”

They smiled long and hard at each other, shook hands warmly, and Andrés even got tears in his eyes. Guy wondered what Andrés would do with this sweet-feeling child at the entrance of the cave now that the tide was rushing in around his knees.

What Andrés had done, apparently, was start a major fight between the Puerto Rican gang to which he belonged and the black gang — with the result he was put in lockdown and his sentence was increased by two years. The next time Guy saw him, he still had a bump on his head and a black eye and his lip was torn. He was still indignant, and plagued Guy with a long “he said, I said” narrative Guy couldn’t follow. Then he simmered down and looked morose, probably at the prospect of the addition to his sentence. He talked about his new interest in the Catholic Church and his pious reading of the lives of the saints: “Those were some far-out cats,” Andrés exclaimed with his torn-lipped smile.

Then, on a new, obviously rehearsed confidential note, Andrés said, with care and solemnity, “I have a great favor to ask of you.”

“Anything,” Guy said, hoping it wasn’t for a metal file in a cake.

“My sister, the one who moved from Bogotá to Murcia, has been diagnosed with cancer. Her husband vanished years ago. She’s been raising her son, Vicente, all on her own. He’s fifteen now. She can’t take care of him anymore, she’s too sick and poor. You remember my sister Concepción?”

“Poor girl. I had no idea. Does she write you in prison?”

“All the time. Anyway, Vicente is staying with a distant cousin in Lackawanna. She, that cousin, we call her King Kong because she’s so black, is married to an Arab, I think he’s a terrorist but he says he’s in air-conditioning repair, anyway he’s fed up with Vicente, not because he’s a bad boy but because he’s poor, Mohammed isn’t earning anything, they’re on welfare, and they can’t get an allowance for Vicente, he’s an illegal, he overstayed his three-month tourist visa.”

“We only have five more minutes. What do you want me to do — send them a check?”

“No, I want you to take Vicente in.”

Guy immediately wondered what Kevin would think. Then he thought about what the boy would mean to his own life. Guy liked crazy, unforeseen twists in fate, maybe because his life had become so predictable, so narrow — regular jaunts to Europe, an hour three times a week at the gym, life’s long diet and only occasional prudent lapses, sex with Kevin, visits to Andrés, every two weeks a phone call to his mother, strategy sessions with Pierre-Georges. (“She said you were rude to her,” Pierre-Georges said of a stylist from Saks. “She also said the suit was wearing you rather than you were wearing the suit.”

“Whatever that means,” Guy muttered. “And she was the rude one, stabbing me with pins, trying to smooth out a cheap shirt that was born wrinkled.”) Life had become confining and routine; even their Saturday night drug vacations dancing at the Roxy were always the same, with MDA, cocaine, and grass, staggering home at dawn with grins on their famous faces. At least Guy’s would be famous if it weren’t so generic — now even his trademark jug ears would soon be invisible under wings of dark hair covering them, carefully arranged in “un brushing.”

A kid would serve the same function as a bad love affair to introduce a note of chaos into our overly organized lives. He’s not going to sit around doing nothing or reading. He’ll need a part-time job. I’m sure he could do mimeographing for Pierre-Georges. “Is he cute?”

Andrés made a face, as he did when people told a dirty joke. “He’s fifteen. Cute enough, I guess. Keep your mitts off him, okay?”

“Fifteen is safe with me.” He thought guiltily of Kevin, who was nineteen. “Is he black, too, like your sister King Kong?”

“King Kong is my cousin, my sister is Concepción.”

“I forgot. Will I get in trouble with my own green card if I’m caught hosting an illegal?”

Andrés looked bored, or maybe turned off by Guy’s self-centeredness. “Ask your lawyer. That’s why we have lawyers, though yours didn’t do much good for me.”

Guy chose to ignore the reproach, and said brightly, like a violinist launching into a gigue after the tedious largo, “Okay. I’ll do it. At least I’ll look into it. Anything for you.”

Guy felt he was marching out to the end of a diving board and, without a pause, going into a double somersault before making sure there was water in the pool. Would Vicente double his expenses? Quadruple them? What if he was a juvenile delinquent, or worse, a terrorist? What if he and Kevin fought all the time and Kevin said, “It’s either him or me”? What if he was a hostile heterosexual who scorned his gay uncles and imitated them with a limp wrist to his cigarette-smoking buddies from high school?

He memorized King Kong’s phone number. “What’s her real name? I can’t call her Signora Kong.”

“Pilar.”

“What?”

“Pilar, like the virgin of the pillar.”

A bell was ringing, indicating an end to the visiting hour. Guy shook Andrés’s hand distractedly but was preoccupied with repeating Pilar’s number until he found a pencil and a scrap of paper, maybe from one of the prison wives.

Guy waited till Kevin had had two glasses of sake over dinner at the Japanese restaurant on Thirteenth Street before he brought up Vicente. Pierre-Georges had told Guy to go down another ten pounds — thin was in, he said. Maybe the weight loss would wreak havoc on his arms and chest and deflate his ass, but the new clients like Guess all demanded gaunt faces and cheekbones like flying buttresses. Guy ordered nothing but miso soup and sashimi and he left the cubes of tofu in the bowl. And he permitted himself just one cup of sake; otherwise he was living on a diet of espressos and cocaine.

They were sitting outside behind a metal railing and noisy people kept going by — oh, it was Friday! That’s why people were out. For Guy, every day was the same. Across the street were the dim lights of a holistic medicine shop-cum-ashram, closed for the weekend.

Initially, Kevin took it well because he assumed Vicente must be a polite, shy boy from some provincial town in Spain, a good Catholic boy who let himself be buggered in stoic silence once a week by Padre Jesús and then assisted at the mass, a bum full of jizz, handing the priest the silver cup of wine. But when Kevin found out Vicente had been living in Lackawanna with King Kong and a terrorist named Mohammed, he shrank back in distaste. “But what if he tries to make a bomb and blows up your brownstone by mistake?” Kevin asked. “I’m serious. What if he’s wearing gold chains around his neck and a backwards baseball cap?”

They decided to invite Vicente down for a week, all expenses paid, and look him over. Guy called King Kong, but she was too nervous speaking on the phone and apparently couldn’t understand Guy’s French accent, so she handed the receiver to Mohammed, who sounded very ghetto and suspicious. Guy explained he was Andrés’s friend.

“That loser?” Mohammed asked.

“Yes, the very one. He said that Vicente was living with you.”

“You got the wrong number.”

Guy repeated the boy’s name. Maybe he was saying it the wrong way.

“Oh, Vince,” Mohammed shouted. “Why didn’t you say so?”

When he understood that this dude with the weird accent was inviting Vince the Freeloader to New York for a week, he suddenly became more cooperative and friendly. Guy noticed that Vicente himself was never consulted.

Guy sent a limo from his regular service to Lackawanna to pick up the boy. Explaining train or bus schedules and how to pick up prepaid tickets seemed insurmountable with these poor foreigners and their approximate English. Explaining a car service was problematic enough. When Vicente arrived, sitting up front with the Israeli driver, who was sweating and gabbling and was obviously on speed, Guy looked the boy over and said to himself, Un pauvre type, mauvais genre, which meant he was hopeless.

Vicente was dressed in a sleazy blue tracksuit and high-tops that might have been stolen. He was short and dark and had a scar on his right cheek. He couldn’t look Guy in the eye and his handshake was boneless. He then pressed his hand to his heart with some sort of salaam he might have picked up from Mohammed. He smelled funny, like warmed-over sweat.

The boy seemed determined not to be impressed by anything as Guy showed him around. He trudged about in his unlaced shoes; he seemed exhausted, and the smile he’d been wearing as he listened to the excited Israeli had long since faded. “Now, this is your room,” Guy said, opening the door onto the guest room, with a white candlewick bedspread over a single bed, its captain’s chest, its armless chair upholstered in pale chintz, and its wall ornament, a nineteenth century brass compass Kevin had found in an antique store on Bleecker. “That some kind of clock?” Vince said, nodding toward the compass.

“More or less,” Guy said, not wanting to discourage him.

Vicente slept around the clock in a dirty, smelly pile on the immaculate bedspread. Guy insisted they leave him alone. The boy didn’t even take his shoes off; maybe he couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t in turn be stolen.

“Does he look like Andrés?” Kevin asked, genuinely curious.

“Not in the least,” Guy snapped. “Andrés is tall and handsome and a real hidalgo. This boy’s father is Ecuadorian or something and he looks like a statue you might find in the jungle, flat nose, wide forehead, dirty skin, almost Asian eyes, certainly padded cheeks. No expressions, like some cruel Incan god. And he’s short.”

“You certainly have your standards! I’ve noticed that about both you and Pierre-Georges. Are all French people like that?”

“Like what?” Guy asked, not happy about being linked to his bitchy agent.

“So sure of your opinions? Americans are never that sure about what we think.”

“Yes, we have definite standards and we’re very confident about our taste. We learn at an early age what’s good and what’s bad.”

That sounded a little narrow-minded even to Guy’s ears and he hoped Kevin wouldn’t pursue the matter.

This sort of cultural tyranny joined with the fragile convictions nourished by cocaine made Guy argumentative. Kevin had learned to end every dispute with a smile and a kiss. The rhetorical kiss had also begun to irritate Guy.

“Why are you snorting cocaine all the time?” Kevin dared to ask. “Do you like it so much? Enough to jeopardize our happy home?”

Kevin wrapped “our happy home” in ironic quotation marks to indicate he wasn’t all that serious, which only worsened Guy’s mood; he thought irony was cowardly.

“I’m doing it because I’m hungry,” Guy nearly shouted, with a full stop between each word. Then he said in a normal voice and rhythm, “Everyone wants the heroin look now and I hate heroin, but you’ve seen the ads with skinny green-skinned guys with asymmetrical haircuts sitting around and staring in shabby retro living rooms, all acid greens and duck-turd browns, wearing jeans that look sprayed on and gaudy shirts and tiny German sunglasses, looking stunned. In French we say when people are silent, ‘an angel is passing,’ but here the angel must be Satan. And I’m doing it to keep our happy home afloat. You’ve got to understand that fashion means change, even for the worse, and right now healthy, wholesome Americans with their teeth and muscles and tans are out, finished, kaput, whereas sickly Scottish boys with their bed-sit pallor and druggie anorexia are in. I’ve kept ahead of the curve for two decades now. Scruff and hair over my ears and a tattoo — that’s a beginning, but I’m going toward a total Lou Reed look. Maybe I’ll shave my skull. Or get a lip piercing.”

Kevin thought Guy was raving and had no idea what Lou Reed looked like. Anyway, Reed was so seventies! He’d never heard Guy talk so much and attributed it to the coke. It was coke-fueled talk. All because Pierre-Georges had said yesterday over the phone to Guy, “Stylists are looking for a Harley-Davidson these days and you’re a Rolls-Royce, the male counterpart to Catherine Deneuve.”

The comment had kept Guy awake, and at three in the morning Kevin discovered him in the kitchen contemplating a piece of toast.

“What are you doing?”

“I dare not eat it.”

“Come back to bed,” Kevin said, wrapping his arm around Guy’s waist.

When they got up later that morning at ten, Vicente was already slumped in a kitchen table chair but wide awake. He said, “Yo!” and made his funny little salaam gesture. Kevin didn’t know if it was ghetto for “hi” or Spanish for “me.” He was still wearing the same clothes, though he’d added a round woven beige beanie that looked Muslim.

“Poor Vicente,” Guy said. “You must be starving and wondering, ‘Where the hell am I?”’

“Vince!” the boy said. “It’s Vince, man. You got any food in this crib?”

“Toast? Cereal? Banana? Do you drink coffee? We’ll go out to lunch soon.”

“Coffee and banana,” the boy said. He still hadn’t looked them in the eye.

Kevin moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which Vicente inspected with fear in his eyes as though it were something foreign and dangerous, a scorpion. “We don’t have to do anything,” Kevin said. “There’s a little TV in your room. Did you find it in that cabinet at the foot of the bed?”

Vicente said, “No. Thanks,” in a meek little voice and with a nearly amorous smile.

Kevin smiled back. Vicente’s smile was a shocking momentary break of spontaneity and friendliness in an otherwise uniform sullenness, and suggested there was someone sweet and scared and nice living inside there. That was the one way he was like Andrés, Guy thought.

“How did you learn English so well?” Kevin asked.

“The truth? From trying to pick up English and Dutch girls on the beach near Valencia. And in Lackawanna. Mohammed had the TV on all the time and didn’t want us to talk. Man, he’d watch soap operas, commercials, reruns of Kojak, infomercials, all that shit!”

“Would you two shut up?” Guy shouted, fidgeting from his coke hangover; then, to cover his rudeness, “But it’s lovely outside!” he said, throwing his arms wide open and going to the window. “Indian summer. Isn’t that what you call it in English?” Kevin and Vicente exchanged a glance. It was so fruity and big-city to talk about the loveliness of the weather. Kevin provided a banana and made some espresso for them all. Latins drink espresso, right? “Milk? Sugar?”

“Sugar,” Vicente said, “if you got it. You guys don’t work? You’re like Mohammed — he sleeps till noon, though Pilar is usually up early,” Vicente said. It was the longest sentence he’d ventured yet, and Guy, still at the window, was tempted to turn around and smile approvingly, but he was afraid of jinxing the moment. He thought Kevin had established a beachhead and should be encouraged to press on. When the bitter coffee was ready, Guy tossed a boiling cup down his throat but without sitting down. Sitting down was fatal; it might lead him to eat something, a green, seedless grape, say. He needed to jog, to head for the gym and do his crunches and lunges, but he felt light-headed. He needed to do a line.

“I’m a student,” Kevin said. “School starts next week. Guy is a model.”

When Vicente looked blank, Kevin said, “Fotomodello,” in what he hoped might be Spanish, but the kid still looked quizzical. Meanwhile, Kevin had finally found the packet of sugar he’d stolen from a diner for just such an emergency.

“Got another one?” Vicente asked. “I like a little coffee with my sugar,” and he smiled at his own witticism.

“I’m going for a run,” Guy announced impulsively, and scurried off to the bedroom for a little “blush-on,” as he called his lines of cocaine. Kevin’s heart sank, thinking the hamster was about to start on the treadmill. I’m living with a hamster and a zombie, Kevin said to himself. Guy will be running all day and well into the night. Somewhere, a fly, caught between window and screen, was shaking its autumn death rattle. Kevin could hear it only because the room was so silent, though the fridge was humming and the house was creaking, as old houses will.

“You found everything? The guest bathroom? The air conditioner? The shower?” Kevin asked with a suspicion of emphasis on “shower.” “By the way, if you ever want to wash your clothes, we’ve got a washer and a dryer.”

“Here? Inside? Inside the house?”

Kevin nodded. “Let’s go out and get some lunch.” He wasn’t sure he liked being saddled with the responsibility of squiring this kid around, and the kid looked fearful at the prospect of a sortie.

He took him to the restaurant downstairs from the gym, thinking that a cheeseburger and fries would be less intimidating than goat cheese on focaccia and a beetroot and pear salad, the sort of thing you’d get in most of the neighborhood restaurants.

“Where’s Uncle Guy?” Vicente said, pronouncing the name as in Guys and Dolls. They were seated in a booth and Vicente had already slumped forward across the Formica table, exhausted, and was monotonously rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar dispenser, salt pepper sugar ketchup.

“Oh, he’s trying to make weight.”

“Is he a wrestler?”

“Like that. A model. He’s up for a big jeans commercial and needs to come in at a hundred and forty pounds. How much do you weigh?”

“Fifty-five kilos. I only know kilos. You?”

“I’m not sure,” Kevin said. Suddenly he had an idea. “Maybe you could teach me Spanish.” He thought that might also be a way of improving Vicente’s English. Kevin was always improving himself, more so than his twin. Each time he’d sat on the toilet back in Ely he’d read an entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He’d never read novels. Too frivolous. But he was always deep into the history of ancient Rome or a pop science account of the giant molecule. He was determined to make his airhead boyfriend, Guy, teach him French. These days he was reading a secondhand volume of Edmund Burke, which on the spine read On the Sublime French Revolution, and it took him a while to realize that these were two different titles. He read labels for the contents and calorie counts and he comparison-shopped. Because of his family background, he had strong ecological views, and if he’d owned a car, the bumper sticker would have read “Save the Wilderness.”

He admired Ralph Nader. He was appalled by capitalism. In class, he wrote down all the names of the books and authors the professor mentioned in passing and checked them out of Butler Library. His twin was much more of a goof-off and Kevin would have attributed his insouciance to his lack of a “gay gene,” but they had identical genes and their differences must be due to nurture, not nature, although it was hard to pinpoint any differences there. They’d been raised together, dressed identically, and had exactly the same health history. Their grandmother couldn’t tell them apart, though their mother could. It was obvious, she insisted. Chris was meaner and ran in circles.

Even with several attempts, Kevin couldn’t get Vicente to teach him any Spanish. (“What’s ‘table’ in Spanish? Tavola?” But the boy looked confused and bored).

Upstairs in the gym, Guy was doing lunges and sit-ups fueled by cocaine, gabbling and laughing to himself — until he fainted. He was only out for a second; when he came to, the gym instructor was kneeling over him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“How come you passed out?”

“I guess I forgot to eat this morning.”

The instructor frowned. “Man, you’re too skinny! Better just go home now and rest.”

“Good idea.”

“Take your shower at home. Do you need anyone to go with you? Scoot. Get outta here!” Guy thought he’d take some Ex-lax and shed the pounds that way if he couldn’t exercise any more today. When he got home, he called the nearest Chinese restaurant and ordered four bowls of soup to be delivered. Soup was not very fattening. He’d do another line and another espresso before he tackled the soup. That way he might only drink half a bowl.

Pierre-Georges dropped by and was very pleased. “You’ve never looked more ethereal. Just another five pounds and you’ll be perfect. The go-see is Friday — if you’re named the Cavalier flagship it’s a million-dollar campaign.”

“What’s Cavalier?”

“Oh, come on. Earth calling Planet Guy.”

“I thought it was Guess.”

“Guess was decided a month ago. Frederick Ross got that. Hello-o-o.”

By Friday, Guy could barely cross the room, and if he went for a walk, he had to lean on Kevin, or Vicente, who didn’t like the contact with another man. But Guy did seem to have landed the job and to have beaten out some of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old rivals — that’s what counted to him. As a Buddhist, he didn’t think of himself as competitive, that was all samsara, but he did like to win. He hated the idea that some of these guys, just mere kids, with no experience in the business, could beat him out. They were just skinny beaufres (clods) and didn’t know how to give angles. They brought nothing to the creative process, no input, no sense of style! They didn’t know how to work with photographers. They just drooped around. One night after another horrible dinner in El Faro, a Spanish restaurant where Vicente didn’t talk except to the waiter in Spanish and Guy babbled and played with his food, Kevin was smoldering, and when he was alone in the apartment with Guy, he said, “This has got to stop. Today I was with him all day! He’s your boyfriend’s nephew, not mine. We spent three hours looking at track shoes and he still couldn’t make up his mind which ones to buy. New York is horrible in August. Everything smells like sauerkraut and garbage. And look at you. You’re a bag of bones! Where’d that nice ass go, the one I liked to fuck?”

“I’ll grow you a big fat new one,” Guy said, smiling. “Can I help it if Vicente’s bonded with you and not with me? You’re nicer than me.”

Kevin slapped his hand in playful reproach.

“You never want to have sex now. I can see why monks fast — it keeps them celibate. You whimper in your sleep — must be the body protesting. You spend a lot of time in the bathroom at dinner. Were you throwing up your meal?” Guy hung his head. “Anyway, you’re my boyfriend.”

They decided to keep Vicente just out of kindness and because King Kong said she didn’t want him back in Lackawanna and the boy’s mother in Murcia was now bedridden.

Each time Guy took the bus over to see Andrés, the prisoner was happy to hear Vicente’s news and grateful to Guy. Andrés suggested that Guy send Vicente up to visit him one week in his place.

Guy agreed, but he thought he had to instruct Vicente not to mention Kevin. Vicente seemed astonished to discover his blood uncle, Andrés, from Columbia was a maricón, too. He hadn’t understood that before. A French maricón, normal. An American maricón, why not? To be expected. But a Columbian maricón, his mother’s brother — oh, coño, that wasn’t cool. American prisoner, yes, that was cool, but Latin maricón, no way. The boy seemed utterly lost and slept all the time, though Guy insisted he look for a job. He thought a job was important for the boy’s self-esteem. There was talk of his xeroxing and mailing and manning phones for Pierre-Georges — talk that came to nothing, partly because Pierre-Georges couldn’t be bothered. And Vicente was an eyesore. Guy bought him some new jeans and two cowboy shirts he liked for some reason, some underthings and a peacoat for the cold weather that was just around the corner. Vicente liked Kevin’s brother, Chris, because he was young and not all groomed and was out of shape and had a girl, he was not a maricón but normal, but Chris didn’t like him, he couldn’t be bothered, either. Vicente was vastly amused by the resemblance between the twins, but they thought his delight was boring and predictable, and neither Kevin nor Chris liked to have their interchangeability emphasized, since they were rapidly individuating, or so they hoped.

It was so odd being identical twins entering an urban maturity, which gave them so many opportunities for evolving independently. They each longed to be individuals, and yet they knew they shared a genetic fate, that they would have heart attacks during the same months twenty years from now and die the same year, but more subtly find the same weird jokes funny and unaccountably get depressed at the same time, even if they were separated by a thousand miles. It was odd, because one of them had decided he was straight and one gay, and these different orientations would lead them to have entirely different fates — and yet each would evaluate his experiences with the same lifted eyebrow or the same chuckle or stab of compassion. Chris, for all his much-vaunted heterosexuality, would cruise the same hot guy who’d catch Kevin’s eye, and the same girl would charm both brothers. Both brothers were turned on by Lucie. Perhaps because he was more “normal,” Chris would dress more eccentrically; he even entered a long period of Santa Fe excess, everything weighted down with turquoise, whereas Kevin, despite (or because of) the marginality of his sexuality, hewed close to the norm. It was kind of neat, almost as if they were leading two lives at once, a laboratory case of controlled variance, Manhattan variations on a theme by Ely. All Kevin had to do was observe Chris with his girl, see him holding her hand or protecting her head as he opened her umbrella, to have the same experience himself, to feel it, to feel it in his bones, in his solar plexus, to register it along his nerves. And if Kevin touched Guy’s shoulder and even kissed his neck, then Chris would smile, even pucker sympathetically, though he’d raise a hand instantly to wipe away the abominable sign of affection. Because they saw the point of the other’s actions and attractions, each felt he was playacting in producing and pursuing his own. How authentic could any impulse be if it also contained its opposite? And how resolute could any lifestyle choice be if it was based on neither nature nor nurture, just a whim? If Chris acted the macho too fiercely, they’d both crack up, just as Kevin’s efforts to primp, or act the proper hostess, reduced them both to tears of laughter. True, Chris had been born first, and during the first three months gurgled more and smiled less than his brother and had broken more toys. At two years, Chris had walked a week before Kevin and had hit him angrily over the head with a toy car, though he’d instantly looked bewildered and wailed. Kevin talked first. When they were allowed in grade school to dress differently, Kevin wore brighter colors — did that make him gay? Anyway, that was all family legend invented by parents who out of idle curiosity wanted to find differences between the boys while marveling at the way they mirrored each other. As in many families, the antics of the children were a constant floor show, a distraction from television, as absorbing as a fire in the fireplace, somewhere slim and darting for adult eyes immured in fat to go.

Exactly at the moment Kevin started losing patience with Guy, Chris was tiring of his girlfriend, and both accepted the coincidence as natural. Were they both following the same trajectory, or did the ambivalent feelings of one permit the other to voice his own doubts? Or were they being drawn irresistibly back to each other? Were they fated to end up together? These parallel developments, no matter how mysteriously related, had never surprised them, just as when one of them had a sore throat he automatically handed a lozenge to the other.

“Guy is so predictable,” Kevin complained.

“Dumb, just go ahead and say it. Most people are dumber than we are but — treats you nice — gives you money.”

“That kid — Vince — annoying.”

“Back off,” Chris said. “Not your responsibility.”

“Guy — whatta flake.”

Soon their out-loud shorthand comments were exhausted and the dialogue went underground as they each arrived at subterranean insights together. They were sitting next to each other on a stoop and their silent conversation erupted in half smiles, a shared widening of the eyes, a shoulder bump, a gasp of understanding.

“Really?” one of them said after five minutes of apparent silence. The other nodded.

Their father’s brother, a dapper man they scarcely knew because he lived in far-off Minneapolis, where he was a florist, came to New York for the first time in his life. He stayed in a drab, expensive hotel for businessmen across from Penn Station. He was traveling alone (he’d never married, for some reason), but he had a long list of Broadway shows he intended to see. He seemed disappointed that his attractive nephews knew nothing about the stars, the directors, or even the names of all these musicals, some of which had already been playing for two or three years. Back in Minnesota, he’d pictured them as taking in a show nightly and then dining at Sardi’s or sipping a cocktail at the Rainbow Room, but they drew a blank at the mention of these eateries, just as they’d never heard of Mama Leone’s or the Carnegie Deli. Chris explained he got a nosebleed if he went north of Fourteenth Street, and Kevin, who seemed marginally more sophisticated, said he thought most Broadway shows were tacky and overmiked, or so he’d heard.

Uncle Phil had obviously come to town with thousands of dollars and wanted to live it up every night — steakhouses but also charming, out-of-the-way Greenwich Village bistros that only insiders knew about. The twins only dimly remembered him from family reunions and a cousin’s wedding, where Uncle Phil had done the flowers, all glads, baby’s breath, and birds-of-paradise, with lots of eucalyptus leaves, which made their mother sneeze. He wore an unusual amount of cologne for a Midwestern man of his generation and his breath was always sweetened with Sen-Sen. He was talkative and upbeat, which the boys found preferable to their parents’ dourness, though tiring.

One night Kevin had gone with Phil to see Cats, which was impressive for its special effects if not for its imperceptible plot and generic music; afterward, Phil, exhilarated by the show, wanted to go to what he’d read was a trendy show-business restaurant, Joe Allen’s, where the walls were lined with posters of shows that had flopped.

“I really, really like your friend Guy. So handsome!” Uncle Phil said. “I saw him years ago in a Pepsi commercial. It was a yard party, looked so typically American, I had no idea he was French. He looked like just one more cute college kid — gee, that must have been twenty years ago. I’d just moved to the Twin Cities — yeah, twenty years ago.”

“It’s remarkable how young he still looks, isn’t it?” Kevin said. He found talk about Guy’s eternal youth as boring as talk about how closely he resembled Chris; those were the two great “tropes” of their lives, as he’d learned to say at Columbia.

“Yeah, but your parents don’t like the idea that you’re living with a rich, older man and he’s paying all the bills. That’s not my view. I’m a little more sophisticated, but they’re worried about exploitation.”

“Who’s exploiting whom? Am I because I’m the gold digger, or is he because I’m half his age and he’s made me his sex slave?”

“Why, he is, of course. Your parents wish you’d find a nice guy your own age, white, possibly, a college student, someone who pays his own way, an American, I mean. Guy is a perfectly nice guy, if a bit irritable—”

“That’s the cocaine talking,“ Kevin said, tucking into his pecan pie. Around Guy he didn’t order dessert; it was as though he were gobbling in front of Muslims during Ramadan.

“Cocaine? Oh, dear — it’s worse than I thought.”

“Cocaine’s not dangerous!” Kevin said too loud, eliciting smiles of agreement from neighboring tables. He added in a softer but more pedantic voice, “All the studies show it’s not addictive. It just sharpens your mind and makes you want to work more — that’s why it’s called the yuppie’s drug of choice. It’s not really a drug, it’s related to Novocain. It numbs you.” He thought he’d add a shocking gay note for his uncle’s benefit: “That’s why guys who have trouble getting fucked sprinkle it on their assholes. It numbs the pain.”

Uncle Phil looked both amused and troubled by this confidence and said with a little smile, “That may well be. I guess I’m just being too Lutheran about it.”

“My parents would be even happier if I moved back to Ely and married a girl.”

“As a matter of fact, your mom says you used to be sweet on a girl in your class back home — Sally Gunn. The school beauty. Blue eyes, the straight nose of a Greek goddess, big tits, skinny hips like a boy. As you know, her dad is the other big outfitter in Ely—”

“And if we got married it would be a dynastic consolidation,” Kevin added grimly.

“Well …”

“There’s only one little problem. I’m gay. I like men.”

“You know, your mother has kept up with Sally and they get together for drinks at the Log Cabin.”

“That smelly old bar? Smells like kerosene and old beer. I didn’t think women went in there.”

“Anyway, it turns out they’ve discussed your being gay.”

“Wait — my mother and my old girlfriend have discussed my sexuality?”

“I didn’t know it was a secret.”

Kevin sipped his decaf. “Well, it’s not,” he mumbled. “But still!”

“So Sally said she’d always known you were gay and that didn’t bother her, in fact she preferred it because she hates sex and she always thought you were a perfect gentleman because you didn’t want to feel up her tits all the time like the other guys and you were a good dancer, as good as her, and you let her drive you both around in her little MG.”

“So we’re to have an arranged, sexless marriage, consolidating our family businesses? Nifty.”

Phil smiled brightly. “Do you really think so?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m in love with Guy.”

“No wonder,” Phil was quick to chime in. “He’s a historic beauty.”

“What’s your type?” Kevin asked bluntly, tired of pretending Phil was safely in the closet and not liking the sound of “historic.”

Uncle Phil blushed their famous Norwegian blush and said, “All kinds.”

“Very ecumenical, “ Kevin said, dubious. “Younger?”

“Yes.”

“Much younger?”

“Yes, strangely enough.”

“It’s not that strange. Blond?”

“Yes.”

“Butch? Aggressive?”

Phil whispered, “Yes.”

Kevin thought he should stop his interrogation before Phil made an awkward declaration of love.

After a moment’s silence, Phil said, “So what should I tell your parents?”

“That Guy is an upstanding, mature, responsible man who fucks me good.”

Phil exclaimed, “I can’t say that!”

“No, you can’t. Just tell them you liked Guy and that we’re both negative and faithful. That’s what parents worry about. Really worry about. AIDS. And I understand it.”

Kevin turned out to be a brilliant student — imaginative, punctual with his assignments, analytical and skeptical, a nonstop reader, endlessly curious and diplomatic with his fellow students — and especially with his professors. He picked up right away that he might have the right looks (Nordic) to be a career diplomat; a standard Midwestern accent that needed to be placed farther back in the throat and made softer and less nasal; an unexceptionable pedigree (no Nazis or criminals or rabble-rousers hanging from the family tree and no controversial tycoons or scientists, either); ambitious but not pushy, earnest at the right serious moments but otherwise a mild American joker, always laughing. His was an obliging politeness that never shaded off into obsequiousness, a mental precision that never turned pedantic. He had all the virtues and, because of his generic, small-town family background, no entangling alliances with politicians, lobbyists, plutocrats, or radicals. On the other hand, he was a bit too far out of the closet, untraveled, a monoglot, naïvely trusting, as friendly as a family pet. And he had the usual defect of a twin: excessive unguarded loyalty and transparence to his brother. Would he be able to keep a secret from Chris?

His adviser, Dr. Blumenstein, warned him that these were some of the questions the Foreign Service and the FBI would be eventually asking about him and his suitability to serve. Blumenstein hoped Kevin would eventually apply to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs if he did well in his courses and Graduate Record Exams. He hoped Kevin as an undergrad would take a broad range of courses from political geography to Arabic to Asian studies in the next few years. Any interest in learning to speak Hmong? Urdu? Pity. Of the usual languages, Spanish was crucial. Kevin realized, didn’t he, that the Foreign Service could be extremely dangerous and that his first postings would be in Third World countries deprived of creature comforts? He really should consider Urdu, if for no other reason than to be able to read Hafez in the original.

Would Kevin be looking for a wife with social graces, endless patience, and few prejudices, preferably a private income? That was the sort of wife/hostess an ambassador needed.

Kevin smiled and took his courage in his hands. He said, “There aren’t any young ladies in my future.”

“Are you a Minorite? An Athenian? A Uranian?”

Kevin had never heard these euphemisms before, but he could guess at their meaning from the leer in Blumenstein’s eye and his unusually wet, prolonged smile. The boy said, “Yes.” He figured his adviser wouldn’t know these strange words unless he himself was an initiate.

“You’ll find,” Blumenstein said, lighting his pipe, “that the Foreign Service is full of Friends of Dorothy, though most of them are, as the Italians say, insospettabile.”

Kevin, despite his sunny nature, made few friends at school. He didn’t want any classmates dropping in unexpectedly. Guy wouldn’t like that. Guy didn’t really approve of casual American ways. One time Chris had gone uninvited into the kitchen and stared into the fridge. “I’m hungry! Looks like you guys never snack.” Eventually he found an unopened package of prosciutto, which he gobbled down, cursing that he had to peel off the individual pieces of paper. Guy was outraged and said, “What if that had been an essential ingredient of our dinner? How dare he ransack our refrigerator like that?”

“Come on, Guy, he’s my brother. Whatever is mine is his.”

“We don’t think that way in France. No French person would behave like that. He’s not well educated.” (Guy always made that mistake in English, “educated” for “brought up.”)

The other students at Columbia, after an initial show of friendliness, didn’t warm up to Kevin. When a shaggy guy with a Brooklyn accent asked him to join him and some other guys for a beer, Kevin said he had to hurry home. “Where’s home?”

“The Village.”

“Lucky guy. Where?”

“West Eleventh and West Fourth.”

“Wow, best address in New York. Your folks live there? Rent control?”

“No. A friend lives there. He owns the house.” Kevin started to pull away, not wanting to be interrogated further. He was proud to be living on that prime, leafy street with a man-in-a-million but it made him uncomfortable to be envied. He’d never gloried in his fate to a stranger and, unperceived, it was only the shadow of a reality. It scarcely existed. But if examined in depth he could easily be taken for a leech, a kept boy, a pariah with a secret. That could end up on his FBI record. Living a double life was possible in New York. Columbia was far from the Village, and other students rarely strayed south of Ninety-sixth Street. He never ran into anyone he knew from school. Manhattan was perfect for anonymity.

Isolated from his classmates, he spent many an evening with Guy and Vicente, sometimes with Chris or Chris and his spiky sarcastic girl. Guy would get a huge take-out platter of sashimi, though Betty said she wasn’t into slimy raw fish and she cooked up a package of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They all sniffed the microwaved beef broth covetously. “Look at you all, like bloodhounds pursuing a rabbit in heat,” she said, rat-a-tatting her mirthless laugh.

Guy said, “Studies show ramen noodles can cause heart attacks, especially in women.”

“Bullshit!” Betty shot back without a pause. “But go ahead, choking on your mercury-rich raw fish. Hey, Guy, studies also show deli-style roast beef is as low in calories as chicken or fish, that the fibers in beans and whole-grain rice cause people to absorb 6 percent fewer calories, and that microwaved potatoes stuffed with cottage cheese shrink fat cells, but far be it from me to suggest edible food to you hunger artists.”

Wearing his backward New York cap, Vicente smiled and touched his balls like a rapper. “This chick is fly,” he said with stoned approval and an open mouth that wouldn’t close. With the allowance Guy gave him he indulged in family-sized pizzas for himself alone at Famous Ray’s — and never gained an ounce. He was attending a local Catholic high school and working for two dollars an hour running errands for Pierre-Georges. He spent his entire salary on weed, which Betty obtained for him. He was a wake-and-bake guy who seldom let reality abrade him through his haze of cushioning smoke. He didn’t understand fully half of the things people said to him in English, but that was cool. He was content to have a roof over his head, and the weird maricóns didn’t molest him. The only thing he missed was pussy. Back in Murcia and again in Lackawanna he’d had enough pussy, but not here in New York. He figured with all the maricóns in New York there must be a lot of frustrated bitches with cobwebs in their cunts, but chicks here were kinda stuck-up. Maybe because he lived with two maricóns, girls thought he was one. He thought of his baggy jeans, baseball cap, gold necklaces, and unlaced shoes as fashionable, but he didn’t see many other dudes dressed like him. Maybe it made him look too young or poor. Bitches liked dudes with scratch. Best to smoke another blunt. He’d like an Asian bitch — they said their pussies were nice and tight and sideways.

Kevin felt they were all losers. Friendless. Going nowhere. Guy was a beautiful dumbbell. How many weeks had he been reading that novel, Sapho? And why a novel? You couldn’t learn anything from a novel. He loved Guy, but his life was vapid and empty and was careening toward a certain destiny and bitterness. Nor did he have the initiative to become a photographer or agent himself or to make an exercise video or to start a day spa or to learn hairdressing or to design men’s clothes — he’d never bothered to learn any of the ancillary arts of fashion.

Chris was just treading water working as a dishwasher until he went back to Ely to take over the family business. Why wasn’t he studying bookkeeping or getting a degree in business? Betty was so jaded, so knowing, so cynical that she couldn’t be a good influence on Chris. She wasn’t even that attractive. Maybe he couldn’t do any better with their small dick. He was glad he’d chosen to be gay, or if not chosen, at least ended up that way. Guy didn’t despise him for not being hung — and he could always take it up the ass. Chris was sitting on their “million-dollar ass” (that’s what Guy called it) and wasting it, just using their two-bit cock.

And Vicente? He was nice enough but pathetic, always stoned and always horny. (Kevin could hear his bed creaking through the locked door as he jerked off day and night — deep into the night.) He could smell the burning weed. Did Vicente want to go back to Spain, to what was surely drab little Murcia? What would he do there, in the unlikely event he landed a job? Air-conditioning repair? Garage mechanic? But even these careers needed some training, didn’t they?

How did they get saddled with this loser? That’s what Chris asked, and Kevin didn’t know how to answer him.

Kevin didn’t want to be held back by this band of layabouts.

He hated fashion. He hated its insistence on what was new rather than what was attractive. He was enough of a good Midwestern Lutheran to despise worldliness, especially in its most restless, nagging form: vanity. You could never be young enough, thin enough, trendy enough. He thought we should all be focused on serious, ultimate philosophical questions, and on the train he listened sneeringly to a long, loud conversation between two guys his age about the best watches or the most advantageous terms for a credit card. They seemed totally, hopelessly immersed in the here-and-now and all the tedium of late capitalist material culture. Guy was no better, in fact worse, because he brought to bear on his bad values his immense accumulated sophistication and at intelligence (superior wiliness, good memory, quick social navigating skills, the idealism of his passionate appetites). He obsessed over how to update his image, he, whose beauty was eternal and could span decades, and who should be pondering his immortal soul, not his next haircut.

And yet, Kevin reasoned, I am young and handsome, and I won’t be always. This is the time of my life for sex and beauty, and Guy is the living symbol of that. People see his swimsuit shots with his body sparkling with water (and glycerin), his hair pushed back, the comb lines visible, an angry look widening his eyes and searing his mouth, and they think he’s … deep, powerful as Jupiter, ready to hurl a thunderbolt, vengeful as Wotan — and it’s just silly old Guy, well, no, he has his moods and thoughts, sure, but they’re not as profound as his appearance. He looks so interesting, so full of passion, but he’s — well, not that.

When Guy tried to foist off on him the silly frippery he’d picked up at photo shoots, Kevin just handed it back wordlessly. In the past Guy had complained about the vacuity of his profession, but now he spoke of it defensively. “It’s an industry worth billions of dollars. It’s like food or tourism. Everyone wears clothes and eats and travels. At least everyone we’re likely to meet. And there aren’t any generic clothes.”

“Jeans? T-shirts? Sweatshirts?”

“Designer jeans are a huge market, perhaps the biggest. The same basic design is changed slightly and branded with a famous name and the price is quadrupled. Come on, you’ve read your Roland Barthes.”

In fact neither of them had read Barthes, though Guy had had an admirer in Paris years ago who frequently quoted the Mythologies at him, and Guy imagined he’d got the gist. Now, apparently, Barthes was démodé, though students in America still referred to him. American profs didn’t keep up to date but clung to the thinkers they’d known since they got tenure: Derrida, Foucault, Barthes … America was the attic of French culture, and Guy was worried that over here he’d fallen behind, surrounded by all this old stuff.

Their old, lazy ways had changed. Now they awakened at seven in order to get both boys — Vicente and Kevin — fed, caffeinated, and off to school. Kevin suspected that Guy went back to bed, since he subscribed to the superstition that he could preserve his looks by sleeping eleven hours a night — like the Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Well, he’d earned it. But there was something about the way he lay as rigid as a king in his pyramid, cucumber slices on his eyes, dried mud on his face, plugs in his ears, glistening cream on his knees and elbows — oh, he wanted to take a picture of that, Narcissus in his countinghouse! That would startle his fans and his clients. But why? Surely they didn’t think it was all spontaneous and natural, no matter how often photographers showed him on the beach against storm clouds, the fan blowing his straightened and lightened hair, his perfect teeth exposed in his hourly-rate smile, everything out-of-focus except the Rolex on his wrist or whatever product he was hustling. You could say about Guy that he looked great — and looked like himself! — from every angle.

Betty told them in a casual, amused, almost indifferent way that Vicente wasn’t going to school but hanging out at a pool hall she walked past every morning on Forty-first Street on her way to work. He was usually wearing a goofy, stoned smile at ten in the morning and seemed overdelighted to see her — or maybe anyone he knew.

“Boy, he’s going to get it!” Guy exclaimed, trying to be very American. (Rage in French sounded feline and perverse; only in English did it sound unaffected and tough.)

“Why?” Betty asked innocently. “Poor kid. He told me he doesn’t understand anything at Sacred Heart — trig and essays on Native Americans and Shakespeare. At least he has some friends at the pool hall.”

“You’ve obviously given up on him,” Guy said. “I haven’t! I promised his uncle I’d educate him.”

“Oh, his uncle? The jailbird?”

Guy wanted to strike her, but he just bit his lip and left the room. “Did I say something wrong?” Betty asked Kevin.

“About ten things. But he’ll simmer down.”

Guy hired a tutor for Vicente, a shaggy, thick Columbia student named Henry, gay but masculine in an unconscious, unstudied way, a young man who seemed mature because black lustrous hair was sprouting over his white T-shirt. He sounded as if he had a permanent cold or allergy in his immense nose, as though it were too large to function properly. He was a nice guy studying architecture who had a very male lack of interest in people, their foibles and interests and background stories. He discussed late Renaissance churches in Venice, for instance, with no curiosity about when or why they’d been built or by whom; he concentrated only on the volumes and the solutions to problems, as if San Giorgio had been built yesterday.

His indifference to everyday dramas was useful, as it turned out, since he wasted no time on Vicente’s sad tales about his dying mother or his uncle in prison or his black aunt in Lackawanna. He just shrugged with his heavy shoulders and wiped his huge nose with a dirty handkerchief and went back to the math homework. Vicente was usually too stoned to understand what he was saying so patiently. He’d figured out Henry was a maricón too and he even asked him about that, but Henry said, “We could talk about that, but it would lead us rather far afield. Now, let’s look at these numbers.” He was even indifferent when Vicente staged getting out of the shower at the moment Henry arrived one day.

One Friday, Guy accompanied Vicente up to the Otisville prison in the bus. He knew that only Vicente was slated to visit Andrés today but he hoped to coach the boy on what to say and what to omit. “Andrés doesn’t know anything about Kevin. Certainly not about Chris. Don’t mention them. Just say you and I spend evenings alone looking at your homework. You can say I’ve hired Henry to help you. You can say you’re working for Pierre-Georges a few hours a week — he’ll like that. Don’t mention Betty — that will just trap you into talking about Chris. Don’t mention the pool hall — that will be our little secret. Don’t discuss maricóns with him. That will only irritate him.”

Things went smoothly, it seemed, but Vicente was by turns evasive and taciturn, and finally he admitted that Andrés accused him of being stoned, with pupils as big as quarters. He’d lectured Vicente about the importance of working hard with a clear head and being grateful to Uncle Guy for all he was doing for him and making sure he didn’t end up like him, Andrés, a loser jailbird. They had talked briefly about Andrés’s sister, Vicente’s mother, and how she was suffering, and Andrés had had to wipe away a tear. Vicente had liked his uncle and had specially liked his way of speaking Spanish in such an educated manner that reminded him of his mother — and then Andrés would break into a real ghetto English for a phrase here and there, and English that sounded like his own, which he’d picked up from Mohammed in Lackawanna. Andrés spoke Spanish like a maricón but English like a man.

For a few days after the trip to Otisville, Vicente tried to straighten himself out. He didn’t wake-and-bake, he wasn’t late for work with Pierre-Georges, he actually did the homework Henry assigned, but he just couldn’t understand math or write an essay on Native Americans. (He’d never met one, though he’d seen plenty of cool Indians in the movies scalping everyone.) Soon he was softening the blow of failing by smoking again and rattling his bed dreaming of pussy, and bopping around through his day with his lopsided grin. He would try to stay in with the two maricóns in the evening to do his homework, but he never knew where to begin, and besides, he couldn’t concentrate. Studying was so maricón.

He was amazed by how much money the maricóns wasted — how they’d buy exotic fruits and vegetables. (He’d never even heard of white eggplants before, which Guy liked to leave in groupings on the dining room table as “décor,” or tiny, translucent champagne grapes.) They never cooked meat and potatoes or rice, the only things Vicente liked to eat other than burgers or pizza. They were endlessly serving raspberries without sugar for dessert and unbuttered popcorn for snacks. Vicente was always hungry!

And yet Guy was fond of the impossible boy. After all, in his veins ran Andrés’s blood; his long, skinny body was a rough draft of the Spanish Christ his uncle had become. When Guy stuck his head in Vicente’s room he was overwhelmed by a stronger version of the family stench.

Whereas Guy hovered over Vicente like a parent and worried he wasn’t dressing warm enough or taking his vitamins or concentrating when Henry coached him, Kevin appealed to the boy more because he was categorically indifferent. Between the gym and his studies and the long, grueling nights of fucking Guy, Kevin had every second budgeted, and when Vicente would launch into a rambling story about his job delivering paella on a motor scooter back in Murcia, Kevin kept glancing at his watch — oh, sorry, it was his turn to shop and cook tonight and he had a twenty-page paper due on Friday, something about George F. Kennan’s interpretation of the inevitable U.S. — Japan conflict in World War II, and Kevin was out the door, abandoning Vicente in midsentence. The boy was trying to grow a mustache and he studied it for the next half hour in a mirror, then got stoned to see how it looked if he was high. (Pretty cool!)

If Kevin never took a break and hurtled through his days, Vicente ambled through his, only occasionally realizing he was late for school or his office job. He was hoping his mustache would be a pussy-magnet and he couldn’t wait for it to grow in. Vicente was troubled by Guy’s entranced staring at him, when the Frenchman would get tears in his eyes; the maricón wasn’t falling for him, was he?

The tears were due to Guy’s tender concern for Andrés’s nephew and his fear that he wasn’t being strict enough or affectionate enough or stern enough or indulgent enough. And what kind of example was he setting for a provincial Catholic Latin boy? Discussing fripes (clothes) and pipes (blowjobs) with Pierre-Georges and makeup innovations with Lucie, the things she was doing to her female models. (“A carmine smudge at the middle of the mouth and then a fade toward the corners, a very high ponytail wrapped in a sheath, bleached eyebrows, and blue shadows above the upper lids.”) She said she was longing to make Guy’s hair wet, wet, as if he’d just emerged from the shower. Vicente had to listen to all this the way a scholar’s son might have to hear a Greek classic being discussed or a broker’s nephew might listen to the relative merits of stocks and bonds — or as a priest’s nephew might hear of the spiritual nourishment afforded by the Eucharist. And then to see Guy and Kevin embrace and kiss — that couldn’t be a healthy influence on a normal teenage boy.

Vicente always hung around when Lucie came over. He liked black women, though he’d never been with one; apparently they were as passionate as men and their pubes were as rough as steel wool — and the guy at the pool hall had said they had big purple nipples and liked it up the ass. The only thing that irritated Vicente was that Lucie treated him like a lovable kid; she went so far as to ruffle his hair and tickle him. Sometimes he thought she saw him as a miniature collie — loyal, attentive, not very smart, always smiling, ready to go. He wanted her to see him as a big, sexy man with a mustache, but she’d hug him and nuzzle him and talk baby talk to him.

When Guy went to the Bahamas for a swimsuit shoot, Kevin realized he’d become addicted to his lover’s body. He’d jerk off three or four times a day picturing his wonderful face with his look of being a surprised, truant lad, as if his father had just snapped on the basement light when he was about to steal a shot of whiskey. Or he looked like a poacher caught in a cop’s flash, with his little jug ears and violet slash of a mouth and startled face, everything flattened out by the scorching light, his hand aiming the shotgun at the large, furry, unidentifiable ruminant. And Kevin would mold in the air the perfect curve of Guy’s ass, its unexpected warmth and give, the way his own hand looked so tan and masculine against that trim expanse of plush buttock. And he’d nuzzle it and feast on the hole that tasted bitter but smelled calmly rural.

He was young, goddamn it, and it was only normal he’d trick with those hot numbers in the locker room who sprang boners as he toweled off — but he dared not. He had to be faithful, for the sake of Guy’s health and his own. If he cheated he’d have to tell Guy, and there would go his unimpeded access to that glorious dark muscled glove, which had become the lodestone of his days, the sanctum he longed to breach and enter and lodge in. What did they say in art history class that Courbet called his cunt painting—The Origin of the World? Maybe Guy couldn’t give him babies, but Kevin would keep trying. He knew that with his small dick gays would typecast him as a bottom. (The guys in the gym stared at his ass, and one fellow even whistled looking at it when he dropped his towel.) Only Guy turned over for him or lay between his strong, gold-dusted legs and licked his balls. Crazily enough, Kevin was certain his cock had gotten thicker and longer since he’d been topping Guy. Whereas as a fat boy of twelve and thirteen he’d seen his body as womanly, Rubenesque, and in the bathroom he’d posed with his dick squeezed and hidden between his legs, a towel-turban around his head, his mother’s lipstick smearing his mouth, and had considered this zaftig caricature as his only option and found it at once excitingly transgressive and depressing, now he saw himself as a stud with narrow hips, a prominent, muscular chest, a thick neck, and took consolation in what he’d heard a straight guy say in the gym: “It’s not the size of the nail that matters but how you use it.”

Important as his new manhood was to him, Kevin acknowledged that Guy held the only key to it. When he went alone to a gay bar — Ty’s on Christopher, for instance — men who were a little sauced chatted him up and automatically reached for his ass. “That’s some caboose you got on you,” while guiding Kevin’s hand to the hardness behind the fly. Even younger, shorter boys ended up gliding a hand down the back of his jeans and fingering his hot hole; he wondered if he was emitting the wrong pheromones, and all this in a gay world where he’d heard 90 percent of the guys were bottoms. How did he attract all these tops? The worst of it was that if he ever were to disregard the health risks and bag a bottom of his own, the guy would probably laugh out loud at his little dick.

He liked being the man but he suspected only Guy could take him seriously in that role. He was wedded to Guy — for his health, through love, and by his determination to be the top. Guy was always available, a heady, expensive flower he could pick and inhale anytime, day or night. One time out of ten Guy would fuck him, but even then Guy wanted to flip at the end and feel Kevin in him. Just as Kevin seemed more and more addicted to Guy, in the same way Guy seemed increasingly besotted with Kevin’s cock, unimpressive though it might be. In the morning Guy would back up against him; Kevin would bop up to piss and then return to his waiting man.

For he never thought of Guy as anything other than masculine, albeit a refined, European, pricey version, and it was Guy’s generosity of spirit that kept his body constantly on tap. There was nothing slutty or depraved about Guy. He was a man without affectations or irony, someone who studied the world with the same simplicity with which he posed for the camera.

To be sure, he knew at all times how he looked, the impression he was giving, how he came off. That was his genius, to know what he looked like to other people. Most guys, even models, waited until strong inner feelings bubbled over, then they flailed about or trembled or hee-hawed with lots of sincerity but no objectivity. Guy was objective; he could triangulate himself through someone else’s gaze (or the camera’s). He didn’t care about what he was feeling. He cared about only what he appeared to be feeling. Just as gifted actors, bland airheads in real life, can appear philosophical, troubled, or tragic on-screen, in the same way Guy could come across as leonine, contemptuous, or seductive to the camera, even if he was only worrying about having clean laundry for tomorrow’s trip to Milan.

Kevin and Guy flew back to Ely for Thanksgiving. It was a nuisance to get there, with two stops (Philadelphia, Minneapolis) and ending up in Hibbing, an hour away from Ely.

They were traveling with Chris. They now looked so different no one stared at the resemblance. Chris was ten pounds heavier and had long shaggy sideburns and had put on a bright yellow jacket, an old one from high school days, so that he looked as if he had never left the Boundary Waters and was escorting his younger city-slicker cousin and his friend to northern Minnesota for the first time.

The brothers scarcely spoke on the plane but it felt good to let their knees touch as they sat in adjoining seats. And it felt good in the Minneapolis airport to order cheeseburgers with ketchup and mustard and cheddar cheese. (Guy ate a salad.) The people who boarded the planes at their two stops were progressively stouter and louder and more guileless.

Ely seemed so quiet and empty after New York — it had just four thousand people and Kevin noticed that they couldn’t hear the loons calling over the lake as they did all summer. The birds had already migrated to the Gulf Coast. Snow was a couple of feet deep, and just a hundred yards from their house was a dark, tall, massive wall of delicious and nostalgic fir trees eating up all the light. Their youth was in that smell, as redolent as rosemary crushed between fingers. Their canoe trips in the summer, their portages across the rocky isthmus, their tents and campfires and instant mashed potatoes, the fish they’d caught and eaten, the musty smell of sleeping bags, the wait for Chris’s heavy breathing so that Kevin could jerk off unnoticed, the scary sound of branches cracking. (Bears? There were so few blueberries that season that the animals were dangerously hungry.)

The air was so cold now it froze the moisture inside Kevin’s nose and laid a marble hand across his forehead. Their roly-poly mother and taciturn father sat as always in the front seat of the Buick and the boys and Guy in the back. The heat was blasting in the car, the radio was tuned to a country and western station, the windshield wipers were clearing a steady accumulation of snow, their mother was full of local gossip. Her sentences were punctuated by her surprisingly high and light giggles, as if the girl she had been were imprisoned below in this oubliette of flesh. She was reeling off her small talk confidently, but every once in a while she turned around to glance at them with questioning eyes, as if she could no longer be sure of how her boys — and this handsome foreigner — were responding.

Guy wondered if he’d made a mistake coming. It all seemed as crude and hopeless as Clermont-Ferrand, though the landscape was more beautiful. Kevin was holding his hand in the darkness of the backseat, but this “coziness” of Kevin’s had become tiresome — almost as tiresome as these Midwestern pleasantries. And then Kevin had a chance of marrying a local heiress — shouldn’t he seize it? It seemed this Gunn girl wanted a sexless marriage — so he should go for it. If he gave her up for Guy and then Guy left him a month later — wouldn’t that be perverse?

He knew that Andrés would finally be getting out of prison one of these days. Andrés had ruined his life for Guy — didn’t he deserve to get Guy? Kevin was young, had a brilliant career ahead of him, whereas Andrés would have no career at all.

And Guy couldn’t get out of his mind the sight of that stiff erection pressing against his orange prison uniform. Guy withdrew his hand from Kevin’s.

Once they were in their old room, Kevin relaxed. Same old Parcheesi board. Same old childhood brass lamp with the glass chimney and a bulb that brightened when a side stem was twisted. The red Hudson Bay blanket with the big label in black letters on white fabric. The old round space heater with its heavily lashed red eye. The cedar closet that was always ten degrees colder than the room. Their old schoolbooks from high school.

Kevin and Chris took turns showering and then, hair washed and waxed and combed and doused in Canoe cologne from an old bottle in the tin medicine cabinet smelling of high school sex and heavy petting in a parked car, they went downstairs to the kitchen, where their mother was making biscuits in the narrow wood-burning oven as, on the modern electric stove, she fried up a ham steak, hash browns, and cooked apple slices. Guy was already downstairs, nodding through their mother’s monologues. It wasn’t even five yet. “Why are we eating so early?” Kevin asked.

“I thought we’d get it out of the way — aren’t you boys hungry? — because Sally Gunn is coming over for some pie and coffee.”

“Gee,” Kevin muttered, “you don’t waste any time, Mom.”

She decided to take it as a compliment. “Yessiree! That’s me: Miss Efficiency! Anyway, Sally really wants to see you boys.” She looked confidingly at Guy: “Sally is an old childhood friend of the boys. Kevin was in love with her.”

Guy wondered what he was supposed to do with this information. Americans were stiff and puritanical — and then they made these shockingly intimate confessions, as if alternating mumbling with an earsplitting blast. They never spoke in the usual quiet, discreet way.

Kevin winced and darted a glance at Guy. Guy thought that Kevin’s mother — was she called Marie? — wasn’t any more embarrassing than his own mother, and just as endearing.

During their early supper they sat at the low, almost square white wood table in the kitchen. It was still covered with the old oilcloth of their childhood, red roses printed on a tan trellis, the whole thing curling up along the edges as it had for at least the century long of their young lives. They watched TV throughout the meal, as they had for years. Guy thought the TV a particularly barbaric touch.

Sally arrived on her snowmobile, wearing a knit hat from the Andes with pigtail earflaps and a synthetic insulated jacket, red to match her cheeks.

She had her Attic beauty intact — her blue eyes, veiled and mysterious, her curved bow of a mouth, her wide face. She made no effort to talk, to act, to engage. She simply displayed her beauty as she’d always done. It was enough. Their mother turned off the TV and they all sat up and smiled and quipped with a new animation. It occurred to Kevin that years of admiring Sally had been good training for admiring Guy; he’d already grown up awestruck by great beauty. She smiled and nodded and turned her face slightly to take the light, as a model is trained not to give repeats, but she seemed to be far away, lost in another language, uncomprehending though benign, somehow “blessing” them with the wonder-working properties of her looks. When she did murmur a few courtesies she struck Kevin as fractionally coarser, as if her decision to skip college and to help out her dad here in Ely had made her not vulgar but more common. After all those evenings drinking at the Log Cabin with other locals slapping the waitress on the fanny, hee-hawing, and soaking their winter beards with beer. And her face had aged, at least there were lines around the eyes and mouth now and creasing her forehead like an egg that’s been boiled too long and has started to get tiny cracks in its perfect surface. Kevin’s father, usually so silent, perked up around Sally until their mother shooed him into the back living room. There they watched the big TV. Chris looked reluctant to leave them but eventually headed upstairs, probably to call Betty.

When he was alone with Sally and Guy, the big TV talking to itself in the other room with its insistent laugh track, Kevin watched her shrug her way slowly and deliberately out of her red coat — and there was the splendor of her big breasts cradled by a plum-colored sweater. Only she would have risked red and plum. Even back in high school she’d always seemed indifferent to what other people thought of her. Maybe because her dad was the town’s richest man, she acted as if no one else mattered. Or maybe because even then she’d reputedly dated older men and she felt superior to her gaggle of high school admirers. Now her indifference risked becoming a trait, a philosophy, something unchangeable. She’d never left Ely, though she said she’d taken an accounting course at the local community college.

Guy barely recognized this Kevin — affable, joking, full of American-style anecdotes, not reluctant to say cretinously obvious things. Guy had heard so much about “beautiful” Ely and “beautiful” Sally, but there was something depressing and a bit squalid about both of them.

She waited for Kevin to ask questions and introduce topics. She’d always been like that, like a thirties movie actress who smiled and laughed and nodded, but always at one remove, always through a scrim of starlight (or through a lens thick with Vaseline), a beauty who glimmered and sparkled. Their nickname for her had been “Ice Out,” the day in May when all the ice finally melted in neighboring lakes and they were at last navigable. It was funny, because it acknowledged that she was frigid but navigable.

“You and Chris don’t look exactly alike anymore,” she said graciously, like a monarch introducing a bland subject of conversation.

“I guess we’re going our separate ways in life,” Kevin said, glancing at Guy. People out here, Guy noticed, mainly chitchatted and joked around, but every once in a while said something serious about life in the same loud innocent way. Guy smiled at Kevin, but he was sick of so much forced smiling; his cheeks ached. And wasn’t it awfully middle-class to be half of a couple?

Looking at Sally, Kevin remembered how he’d once been in love with her. He’d written her a heartfelt love letter and she’d written back a note full of smiley faces in which she’d said she’d always think of him as a friend, if not a boyfriend. He’d been so hurt and had wept for days whenever Chris was not around. He’d played “their” song, something they’d danced to once. And yet, if he was honest with himself, he’d never imagined them in a future together. She was too beautiful, too remote, like a goddess who becomes a constellation, like an old-fashioned screen star who’s photographed in black-and-white, her head tilted, her hair rhythmically curled, highlights planted in her eyes and on certain teeth. He’d never imagined them together, strolling hand in hand and bending over their baby’s carriage, much less sleeping in each other’s arms. He knew her as a deity but not as a girl, though once he’d walked outside past a basement rec room and spied on her and three other girls in a perfect squalor of giggling and innuendo — his one glimpse of her as human, less than ideal.

She did almost nothing, never had. She wasn’t a cheerleader, didn’t play the flute in the school band, didn’t go out for yearbook or a play, didn’t debate free trade or assume an allegorical role in the annual pageant. If she was a deity, she seldom manifested herself. Someone said she was shy, but Kevin didn’t buy that. In democratic Ely anyone who was aloof was deemed shy, the default excuse. But how would a shy woman turn up at his house in her snowmobile on the very night of his arrival? Maybe what his uncle said was right — she wanted a sexless marriage with a childhood friend that would unite Ely’s two biggest outfitters. Maybe she knew Chris wouldn’t accept her terms of abstinence. But why did she assume he, Kevin, would?

They didn’t say much. He’d never been able to draw her out. A woman like her didn’t need to talk. She was a beautiful catatonic — another selling point. In high school she’d thought she was too good for everyone, at least everyone local. She’d had her heart broken by a Swiss anthropologist from the University of Minnesota, who’d spent a summer studying the Ojibwe reservation nearby. He’d studied Sally, too, as if she were part of the indigenous fauna. Apparently she’d admired his strong thighs, always visible in shorts, and his gold granny glasses perched on features as classically regular as her own. What she hadn’t foreseen was that he’d consigned her to one of the vitrines in his memory, along with a few arrowheads and a sketch for a birch bark canoe.

When she and Kevin were adolescents she’d never made the least effort, but now she seemed marginally more cordial. Had her parents put her up to it?

Guy could see she was pretty but top-heavy, with her big breasts and narrow hips. And not that pretty — Kevin had spoken of her as if she were Garbo or Miou-Miou. Nor did she have much charm — but why should she, in this godforsaken place? It would be wasted on the woodchucks. It seemed odd to think that Kevin had once been in love with her. Guy wondered if he should go upstairs and leave them alone.

Kevin invited her to dinner the next evening and her instincts made her hesitate but her interest made her accept and volunteer to bring the wine.

That night in their bedroom, Kevin said to Chris, “I think Ice Out wants to hook up with me. Permanently. I’ll have to say no.” Chris was scratching his ankle. He was naked. He had always slept in the nude, whereas Kevin liked to wear underwear and a T-shirt — did Kevin feel more vulnerable because he was gay? Chris looked up and said, “Why no? She’s beautiful and rich and you used to have such a crush on her. More than that. You really suffered over her. I remember.”

“Yeah, well — why don’t you marry her? I’m gay.”

“Are you sure you’re not just making that shit up? Are you going to let a whim ruin your life?”

“So you think my love for Guy is just a whim, whereas your love for Betty is some big deal?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. Anyway, I’m not in love with Betty. That’s just a whim, too.”

“Are we going to end up together?” Kevin asked. He then heard what he was saying and wanted to head off any suspicion of incest. “I mean, as two old grumpy bachelors?”

“God, no, I hope not,” Chris exclaimed, with such vehemence it was obvious he’d thought of it.

“So then why not marry old Ice Out?”

“What makes you think she wants me?”

“Well, she wants me, at least Mom says so.”

“We’re not exactly the same person.”

“More or less,” Kevin said, and wondered if that idea would make Chris uncomfortable. “Anyway, I’m sure as hell not going to marry her. I don’t want to live here, but you do.”

Kevin looked at Chris in the soft light of their old bedside lamp, the brass one with the glass chimney Chris had dialed down. He looked at Chris’s button-big dick like a white mushroom in the straw of his pubic hair and at the glabrous chest with its small, confined plantation of hair at the base of his neck. That’s the way I look, given ten pounds difference and no farmer tan. That’s what Guy has to look at, this white slug with the whiter button-cock—and Kevin found this funhouse mirror image disquieting, certainly off-putting. He felt a new surge of gratitude for Guy’s loving him.

Kevin was lonely in his single bed. It was thoughtless of their mother to put Guy in his own room as if she didn’t understand they were a couple. Kevin wished Chris would sleep with him as in the old days, just for company. Kevin didn’t dare to climb into Chris’s bed, now that he was officially “gay” and Chris had decided he was “straight.” Chris had turned off the bedside lamp. They’d always been able to hear their parents’ late-night voices through the heating vents. Now the voices at last subsided, replaced by their father’s snoring.

Without a word Chris joined Kevin in his bed, which calmed him down and made him smile in the dark. He turned on his side with his back to Chris, who wrapped his arm around his waist. Kevin noticed that Chris was no longer nude but had slipped on some briefs. The next night Kevin visited Guy in bed, but he was afraid to have sex with him — what if they got the sheets dirty? What if the creaking bed could be heard through the treacherous heating vents?

For the first two days in Ely, Kevin was able, at least in his own mind, to maintain a sense of himself as a New Yorker, as a brilliant Columbia undergrad, as a bystander to the international world of fashion, as someone soft-spoken, civilized, self-deprecating, and kind. The Minnesota boy he was impersonating was one seen through the eyes of a French model in New York — fresh, innocent, spunky.

But by the third day at home he’d regressed to his old self — sleepy, idly cruel, loud, vain. He hated this transformation, but it was stronger than he was. Just as his homosexuality seemed tenuous when his twin was straight, in the same way his New York self seemed very fragile, if he could revert to his Ely boorishness so quickly. He liked to take walks with Guy every day at least once, hoping fresh injections of civilization would awaken his slumbering new identity. Guy didn’t pick up on any change in him, but after talking to him Kevin felt more alert, more refined, more alive intellectually, as he did after reading Nietzsche, as if he weren’t just a rube but a thoughtful, gentle man, sensitive to paradoxes and denser, finer distinctions. Even if Guy wasn’t that smart, at least he was sophisticated.

He tried not to be a snob who missed the point of Ely — its towering pines, its frank bonhomie, its easygoing acceptance of all kinds of people. His parents, Sally, his other high school friends, were slow to criticize anyone. Were they really that tolerant, or did they just think it was rude to point out jarring differences? Were they moral or were they polite?

Guy wanted to see the nearby Indian reservation, but when they drove there he was disappointed. As a child he’d played cowboys and Indians, but on the reservation there were no feathers or horses or peace pipes, just humble little houses and nearly empty streets and a few old, rusted-out parked cars. Guy looked at Kevin and fluttered his hand in front of his mouth and gave a feeble war whoop with raised, questioning eyebrows. Kevin shook his head.

When Kevin criticized his parents for being hicks, Guy pretended not to understand. “They’re lovely people,” he’d say, getting a faraway look in his eyes. In truth Guy was bored and wished Pierre-Georges would phone recalling him to New York and a “fabulous” new assignment.

Guy worried that his career was slowly coming to an end. He’d been up for a McDonald’s commercial in which he’d been paired with a new, hot girl, a Slovenian eighteen-year-old. She had a porcelain complexion, lustrous hair, tiny hands — and in the test shots Guy looked much older. Not his age, but older. The cameraman remembered him from years ago, his first U.S. commercial for Pepsi. The female stylist said, “They don’t really … go together.” He hadn’t gotten the job. Pierre-Georges muttered that the Slovenian was a “cow.”

Kevin rode behind Sally on her snowmobile down the obliterated roads, visible only because of the clearings through the trees. He clung with his gloved hands to her strong body in its red coat and he enjoyed the mindless sensation of speeding through the glittering cold and banking for a turn in the path. He felt nothing erotic, as he might have if the driver had been a man (as he’d once felt in high school holding on to a handsome motorcyclist he barely knew), but he liked that Sally was in control and was steering them through this white paradise, half of which her family owned.

When they came back to his house for lunch they were quick to shed their gloves, boots, and outerwear, and Kevin’s mom handed them each a stein full of mulled cider — sweet, hot, and fragrant, with an immersed cinnamon stick. As they sat around the square table with its oilcloth covering, Kevin could see Chris was looking at Sally with a new acuity, as if she were no longer a habit but a possibility. She was even polite to Guy — or polite in a Midwestern way of asking him lots of personal questions, which usually made the French bristle. Was she extending herself toward Guy because she thought he was going to be a permanent part of their lives? “What’s it like to be a model?” she asked. “To hang out with some of the world’s most beautiful women?”