Our Young Man (26 page)

“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?”