Our Young Man (31 page)

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?”