He sat on an orange sectional sofa marooned in the visitors’ lounge. He’d had to pass through three checkpoints and metal detectors. He’d been patted down twice. And yet this room was casual in a studied way—no partitions “protecting” the visitors from the prisoners, two floor lamps to soften the neon glare from the ceiling, three dispensers loaded with soft drinks and sweets, bright acrylic colors swirled on the walls as on an empty lot in Harlem. But he did spot two cameras monitoring the room—
I guess you couldn’t slip someone a knife or diet pills in here
.
At last Andrés was brought in, with one wrist handcuffed. He darted a glance at Guy and muttered something to the guard, who accompanied him to the couch, unlocked their handcuffs, and walked over to another guard, who was sipping a cardboard container of coffee.
Guy smiled sheepishly at Andrés. After all, Andrés was here for years more to come because of a misguided desire to keep up with his rich model lover.
I refuse to feel guilty!
he thought guiltily. “How’s it going?” Guy asked.
“I wish I could make love to you,” Andrés said. “Can you see the outline of my erection?” and Andrés scooted down on the sofa so his uniform stretched tight.
Already?
Guy thought. The petit bourgeois in Guy wanted to stop him, make him sit up straight, not get in trouble, but his own cock stiffened automatically, like a new mother lactating when her baby cries in another room. “I miss you so much,” Andrés said. “I guess you’ve already found someone else.”
“No,” Guy said, “but have you?”
“That’s all bullshit about sex in prison, at least the rape part,” Andrés said angrily. “Maybe the high-security prisoners, the lifers, maybe they team up with some swishy long-haired bitch. Here the guys—But let’s not waste time,” and Andrés fell into a brown study, staring at some point in space so hard that Guy turned to see what it was. “So you’ve already found someone?” Andrés said angrily.
“No, I haven’t,” Guy said simply. “No one could ever replace you in my heart.” He wondered if that sounded sincere.
“Oh, really?” Andrés asked bitterly. “Why is that? Even if there was a nice Parisian town house in the deal or a penthouse overlooking the Champs de Mars?”
“I never schemed to get a house. Anyway, I have enough real estate.”
“But you have a weakness for rich old men.”
“I only have a weakness for a young Colombian who gets an erection the minute he sees me.”
Andrés at first scowled and looked grumpy, as if he were going to object to something, but then in spite of himself he burst into a big grin and lost ten years. He shook his head as if in disbelief and said, “I love you. So much. It hurts.”
“I love you, too, Andrés.”
He asked Guy to put $500 in his account so that he could buy junk food at the canteen.
“What’s your day like?” Guy asked.
“Always the same. I’m awake by five. Which is early, since on the weekends we’re allowed to watch TV well after midnight, and reveille’s at six. Then there’s exercise in the yard. I’ve been doing pull-ups—look.” He made a muscle, and the sudden movement caused both guards’ eyes to swivel in their direction, then drift away.
“We have hours and hours alone. Some guys are studying the law, trying to get a retrial.” Andrés looked at his hands and said in a softer voice, “I’ve been reading the Bible.”
“Why?”
Andrés ruffled his feathers and said, “Why not?” Then he added, “But I can’t understand that fuckin’ old-ass English. Maybe you could bring me a Spanish Bible. What’s wrong with these muthafuckers, why ain’t their English up-to-date?”
Andrés had never sworn before, not in English, though in Spanish it had always been
puta
, and
coño
, as with all young South Americans. He must be learning a new way to speak English from his cellmates.
He looked at Guy and said, “If you don’t love me I’ll kill you.”
Suddenly all Guy’s alarms went off. “But I do love you,” in a little voice he’d never heard before out of his own mouth, shallow and childish. “I’ve never loved anyone so much,” and Guy couldn’t help noticing Andrés’s thick cock flexing again inside his taut orange trousers, an autonomic response to the desire tormenting his features.
“Sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure.”
“I saw you checking out that hairy-chested gorilla over there. Would you like some of that?”
“Andrés, don’t drive us both crazy. I haven’t touched anyone since you went away.”
“But you’d like to. I know you,” Andrés said, and Guy thought guiltily of Kevin, his hairless torso and little pink cock and tiny untried nipples.
“Is the food here edible?”
“It’s okay. On weekends we even have barbecue. Too many starches. I don’t want to get fat. Are there some dynamite new men in your gym? Probably Pierre-Georges is fixing you up with some studs—he must be happy I’m behind bars. No class, no money, no connections—that’s me. Does he say that or just think it? He must be happy to distract you with some young stallion in his stable. Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?”
“Come on, Andrés. Let’s say kind things to each other, loving things—”
“Or what? You won’t come back?” Andrés looked at the tip of his shoe, which he flexed. “You hold all the cards here.”
“Is it boring here? Dangerous? Infuriating?”
“Check, check, and check.” For some reason Andrés suddenly inspected the nails on his right hand. “It’s okay here, once they break your spirit. God, you’re beautiful when you smile like that!”
“Th-thanks.”
“Has everyone always been in love with you? Of course they have, who am I kidding? What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That’s you, you’re that beautiful. A thousand ships. There’s no one even close to you around here. Maybe in Manhattan there are two or three.”
“I’m no longer young,” Guy said.
He thought how boring this visit was. The truth was he and Andrés had nothing in common except their life together. (“Don’t forget to buy the wine! Oh, and some bread.”) Just as they spoke an imperfect English together, which wasn’t the mother tongue of either of them, in the same way sex and the dailiness of daily life were what they had in common, though it wasn’t what either of them was most proficient at. Maybe sex was Andrés’s strong suit. Yes, he was good at that.
Andrés had once accused him of liking him only for sex. At the time, Guy had thought that wasn’t fair; it was Andrés who always nudged him when they were watching a game show in the afternoon and indicated with a toss of his head that they should repair to the bedroom for sex. It was Andrés who wanted to fuck first thing in the morning (he’d show his morning wood, which to be funny he’d call in Spanish his
madera
): Guy had started getting up half an hour early so he’d be clean and his teeth brushed, which made him feel like a woman, not an altogether unpleasant fantasy. Andrés was the one with the constant erection that had to be addressed several times a day; his hard-on was their metronome, sometimes their tyrant. Guy thought he was always accommodating it, but he liked the feeling of being that desired (a womanly feeling, too, he supposed). Now they couldn’t touch, though they could drink each other in with their eyes, and Andrés could slouch in his chair so that his erection was big and visible. Guy would just have to stretch his hand out—but that was no more permissible than Orpheus looking back at Eurydice. Strictly forbidden.
Guy could remember Andrés’s back so clearly—the broad shoulders straining to be broader, the ass-cheeks just unmolded from the curved baking pan, indented at the sides, the crack looking so innocent and boyish—and, most glorious of all, the silky indentation of his spine, slicing his back in two, luminous as a prayer, an infolding of light.
Their time was up! Oh, it was so heartbreaking leaving Andrés there, so unfair, with his unsatisfied
madera
and his aristocratic hands, so pale next to the brutal orange of his uniform, and on his face a lost, devastated look.
Guy made an appointment to take the AIDS test as he’d promised Fred. He went back to St. Vincent’s at the right time, sat with some other glum single men with expensive haircuts and tight jeans. His name was called, he went into the male nurse’s cubicle, and rolled up his sleeve. The nurse smelled of cigarettes and the new cologne by Perry Ellis, the only good American scent. Poor Perry, everyone said he had AIDS, half his face was paralyzed during his last runway show and he nearly swooned. His partner was also about to go, both of them under fifty.
The nurse put a red rubber tourniquet around his bicep and looked at the form he’d filled out. “There’s a mistake here, it says you were born in 1945, but that should be 1965.”
“No,” Guy said, smiling, “’45 is right.”
“What is your secret, girl? Surgery?”
“Good genes, I guess. Moisturizer.”
“I use Indigo Body Butter, but I don’t look like you, darlin’.”
“Try Retin-A,” Guy said.
“Retinal?”
Guy picked up a pencil and scribbled with it in the air. The nurse slipped a prescription pad under his hand and Guy wrote a word.
“Retin-A? I never heard of that. Is that some Swiss monkey gland or sheep bladder? Do you also sleep twelve hours a night in a walk-in refrigerator?”
“Yes. I do,” Guy said, and the nurse hummed an emphatic, “Un-hum.” Suddenly serious, he said gravely, “Make a fist.” He then tapped Guy’s arm and the back of his hand in several places. “It’s good you’re no heroin addict; I can’t find no good veins.” Suddenly he stabbed Guy, who looked away.
The results were available a day later. That night Guy meditated (which he never did, which he didn’t believe in, which he scarcely knew how to do), and he asked his body if it was infected and if it was going to die right away. It said (but this didn’t make any sense),
No. I’m not infected and I’m going to live a long time
. Guy couldn’t tell anyone about this, it was too superstitious and silly, but for some reason he felt reassured, though he didn’t believe in it and he wasn’t even sure what had happened.
Nevertheless, he went to St. Vincent’s with a mixture of confidence and fatalism. He wished he’d never entered into all of this. There was nothing to do anyway if you were ill. He recognized that everyone liked him because he was handsome. Would they all go away if he was dying (and it was a fatal disease)? If he was Auschwitz-thin and covered with black spots? Pierre-Georges would drop him slowly but surely, if he could no longer work. The baron might send him a basket of fruit, Kevin would be horrified. Fred was gone and Andrés locked up. Only Lucie would stay faithful. Women were the loyal ones, he thought wearily.
An intern in a blue uniform and expensive shoes and a Swatch made a fuss about setting Guy down in his cubicle. He glanced at the report and then he looked Guy in the eye and said with a slow smile, “I have good news. You’re negative. I’m not supposed to blurt it out; I’m supposed to talk first about safe sex and condom use, but hey, we’re both grown-ups, right? But for God’s sake, keep up the good work.” And then, looking flirtatiously up through his eyelashes, the intern said, “You must be one of the few tops in the Village.”
“Not always, I’m more versatile,” Guy said. The intern’s smile evaporated.
“Are you new at this?”
“At what?” Guy asked.
“Same-sex practices?”
“Not particularly,” Guy said, a bit shocked at the man’s impertinence, although he admitted to himself he’d find the situation intriguing if the nurse was better-looking.
Guy said, “No, I must be just very lucky.”
The man said, “We recommend you know the name of everyone you sleep with and limit the number of your partners.” That made sense to Guy, kind of.
He was vastly relieved and he remembered his stupid “meditation” when his body had made its own prognostication.
Ridiculous!
he thought, though he had a new respect for the augury.
In the bright, fragile spring day, all blue and crystal, which felt as if it might shatter at any moment in the rising warmth like ice gloving a branch, each evergreen needle inside vivid and distinct, he sauntered forth, walking all the way over to the Hudson. He never took a walk without a destination but now he was powered by his relief at being negative.
He thought,
I must settle down with and be faithful to a virgin boy
, and he thought immediately of Kevin. He thought of Kevin’s pure white body, tinged with pink, like new snow at dawn. He could hear the ice melting above Ely, Minnesota, with its loud gunshot reports as it broke loose and cracked in the sunlight. He thought of that little penis like a cherub on its cloudlet of pubic hair, those lips the color of raspberry sherbet, that white butt, perched high and inviolate.
“Are you single?” Kevin asked in his clear high choirboy voice as soon as he’d finished another set.
“Yes,” Guy said, knowing he’d betrayed Andrés with a monosyllable, poor Andrés languishing in that junior high school of a prison, a silly place denuded of thick sweating walls, tiny barred fragments of light, unoiled dungeon doors. No, it didn’t have the dignity of imprisonment, it was a ludicrous space for warehousing tax evaders and corporate scoundrels.
He wondered if Andrés jerked off seven times a day or ten, thinking about him. Or did he already have a warmer bruder, someone who’d give him a helping hand? Why couldn’t the Colombian government get him extradited? Guy thought he should be bankrolling an appeals process, though the lawyer had said to him, “This isn’t a banana republic. You can’t pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It’s not like France or Spain—those banana republics. You just have to wait your turn like everyone else. It will only work against you if you try to jump the queue.”
Guy repeated this to Pierre-Georges, who said loftily, “We don’t have bananas in France.”
“No, I’m single,” Guy repeated, “which sounds funny to say to an identical twin. You’re never single.”
“Yes, I am,” Kevin protested. “Chris weighs five more pounds than me—guess that’s his straight side. He met a girl on the stoop outside our building and he’s spending nights with her. I guess I should be all jealous and possessive, but I’m not. I’m relieved.”