Our Young Man (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I guess.”

“I’ll come with you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve called it all off.”

“Oh, no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guy said, “Is he that bad?”

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

“Is Robert here? Tiphaine?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t complain.”

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

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

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

“Thank you for arranging it.”

“What do you drive?”

“Mercedes SEL.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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