“Would you spend the night with me?” Guy asked.
Again the bucket of blood immersed in the pint of milk: a blush.
“Sure.” Pause. “When do you want me?”
“Tonight? Are you free tonight? We could grab a bite and watch some TV and go to bed.”
“I don’t know if I should eat something before we fuck—wouldn’t it get messy down there?”
Guy laughed and said, “Shit is the best lubricant.”
“Eww-w-w.”
“Anyway, who knows, you might be the pitcher and I the catcher.”
“Huh?”
“You might be the plus and I the minus.”
“You’d permit that?” Kevin asked, wide-eyed.
“You sure like to get down to basics. In France we prefer the unsaid, the
non-dit
. More romantic, we think.”
“I guess you got me typed as a Norwegian oaf.”
“We’ll just play it by ear.”
The idea of improvisation seemed to make Kevin even more anxious. They agreed to meet at seven-thirty. Feeling traitorous, Guy set about hiding all the pictures of Andrés. He just wanted one happy night with this perfect boy. His lies would surface eventually: his age; his commitment to Andrés; even his success as a model and his relative wealth. But he was desperate to make this happen, one rapturous night with Kevin. He could already hear the boy’s tearful accusations. Guy thought this was the moment to pluck the pear, when it was still streaked with green and was woody, before it turned to brown mush, all sweet and runny. Somehow it seemed less reprehensible to be a connoisseur of the
fruit vert
than simply a traitor to his imprisoned lover. Guy saw himself as a horny man who felt that every moment of his improbable youth might be his last.
When he looked back over his life he realized his twenty-sixth birthday had been the hardest because he thought he was no longer young, could no longer pass for a student, not even a grad student. So many of his classmates were getting married, starting businesses, buying houses, fathering children. Then at thirty he’d blown a farewell kiss to his years as a desirable man—but still his extraordinary looks had lingered on.
Not that he’d done anything unusual or disciplined to stay young. Well, maybe a little, but no surgery. He’d cut out bread and desserts, though he couldn’t forgo a daily glass of fattening orange juice. He had a facial every weekday from a very unglamorous Korean woman who worked on Twenty-sixth and Broadway. He used Retin-A on the nights he was alone. He worked out, but only three times a week and only for an hour. He preferred low weights and high reps because he was aiming for definition and didn’t want to bulk up. He’d had electrolysis on his torso. He did facial isometrics after he shaved. He didn’t tan and he applied sunscreen every morning. His hair was expensively styled and feathered and lightened and he held it in place with Tenax. He thinned his eyebrows. If he watched TV alone he made himself do fifty sit-ups every half hour. He’d stopped smoking and only drank two glasses of wine at dinner. People said white wine gave you headaches but he preferred it because it didn’t discolor your teeth. He had his teeth cleaned once a month. Now that he was nearly forty he had to yank out nose and ear hairs and shave his neck since gray hair might grow there. His clothes were always dark and thinning and unnoticeable. No jewelry. No facial hair. If he gained five pounds he’d make a big pot of vegetable soup and eat nothing else for a week. He applied Rogaine regularly to his scalp, though his hair was still thick.
More importantly, he’d trained himself not to be nostalgic, not to recognize pop songs or movies or TV series from other decades, to greet names (even French names) from the sixties or seventies with a look of incomprehension, even bewilderment. For him the threshold of the recognizable was years later, 1980. Whereas other people relaxed into squalid orgies of smiling over their memories, a warm self-indulgence of conjuring up the past not in all its dullness or pain but in a sentimental form, he remained aloof, untouched, strategically uncomprehending. They were all false anyway, these memories, protecting people against the harsh truth. He hated the past. He had suffered as an adolescent from frustration, in his twenties from insecurities (how long could this career of his go on?), and in his thirties from disillusionment (how long must this career of his go on?). Now at nearly forty he could start up all over again. He’d been handed this miracle, eternal youth.
In a world of shiny consumer goods, he was the shiniest one of all. If someone else would have said that to him, it would have enraged him, but he had to admit it was true. He was a product, artfully wrapped, refrigerated like expensive chocolates; he’d been in stock, however, way past his shelf life. They’d have to slash the price in half in order to get the item to move.
Was he being predatory and deceitful to Kevin? Certainly deceitful; he’d said he was twenty-five. Predatory, not really. He hadn’t seduced the boy except by the cool distance he’d maintained and by the natural appeal of his looks and accent and profession. And his barely perceptible friendliness. He wasn’t really a catch—soiled goods, maybe a bit vapid, no longer fresh—but a provincial of nineteen might think he was a rare find, confuse the cleverness he’d picked up from his milieu with a personal acuity.
Kevin rang his bell precisely at seven-thirty and Guy buzzed him up.
“Wow! This place is a palace,” Kevin exclaimed, looking around. He appeared absurdly young, a mere tot, with his freshly pressed shirt and perfect sparkling smile. With his gelled hair and his minty, toothpaste mouth when Guy kissed him, a mere peck, and his cheap straight-boy cologne (was it Mennen’s?), he looked so incorrigibly young that Guy feared going out with him—bad for business, he’d look worn by contrast,
faux jeune
.
“Yes, isn’t it great?” Guy said. “My aunt left it to me in her will. It’s too fancy for a guy like me and might give people the wrong idea …”
“Was your aunt American? I’m sorry she died,” and Kevin lowered his eyes in routine respect.
So Minnesota!
Guy thought, though he knew next to nothing about Midwesterners and was only now slowly modeling a wax effigy of the type in his imagination, but he was sure it was a region of pure streams, big skies, and artless boys with good manners and odorless crotches.
“Yes, she was French but married a rich American,
enfin
, he was a soldier when they met, black—”
“Black? Cool!”
“But he made money later—”
“Doing what?”
“Barbecue,” Guy improvised wildly.
“Cool.”
“And they had no children. First he died—”
“From what?”
“Cholesterol.” Guy wasn’t sure that was fatal, but it sounded like something a black cook might get.
“Poor man. And what did she die from?”
“Malnourishment. Anorexia.” He felt on sure ground with this disease.
“How ironic!”
“Why ironic?”
“Her husband made barbecue.”
A shadowy image of a fat, sweating black man in a starched white chef’s toque crossed his imagination. “She was a vegetarian,” Guy blurted.
“This doesn’t look like an old person’s apartment. I mean, the brass lamps and chocolate-brown walls look so up-to-date.”
“Thanks,” Guy said weakly, “I’ve made a few improvements. Should we go out for dinner?”
They strolled over to Duff’s on Christopher Street and were seated in a booth under a big industrial lamp. They ordered a cheap bottle of white wine and two rare steaks with green beans, hold the potatoes. “A real model’s meal, right?”
“I guess,” Guy said.
“Can I be honest with you?”
Guy’s stomach clenched with fear. “Of course.”
“My brother thinks I’m too boring for a sharp guy like you.”
“You’re not boring—not as boring as I am. At least you’re doing advanced studies.”
“Just college. Everybody does college, and most college kids are dumb.”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“Why not?”
“My parents are aristocrats, a count and countess, and they wanted me to manage the family estates.” Guy resolved that he should write down all his lies in a locked diary and draw a timeline of this life he was inventing for himself.
“It’s never too late to go to school,” Kevin said. Guy smiled frostily.
He took off his own clothes as soon as they got in the door of his apartment. (He thought that would bypass any fumbling or the suggestion of seduction.) He went bare-assed into the kitchen to fetch them two glasses of water. When he came back, Kevin was stepping out of his jeans. He’d already untied his blue Top-Siders and now he was frowning slightly as he unbuttoned his shirt. He stood there in all his boyish beauty. He was wearing traditional Hanes underpants, which his mom had probably bought, six to a pack. Guy took the little erection slanting off to the right as a tribute. Did Kevin, inexperienced as he was, imagine that all gay men shed their clothes the minute they crossed the threshold?
He walked slowly over to Kevin, put their glasses on the coffee table, and folded him into his arms. Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.
Kevin shuddered in his arms. Guy tried to re-create in his mind the delights and repulsions of a virgin’s first time, but he decided to be bold, firm, not a sensitive reed bending in the gusts of the boy’s desire and dismay. If they were both hesitant the whole thing would prove a fiasco.
Kevin’s skin was so cool it was almost clammy, especially the high, rubbery buttocks. They probed each other’s mouths with big, slippery tongues, eels flowing into and out of deep-sea grottoes, shrinking to enter, bloating once inside.
When he knelt to suck Kevin, he glanced up and caught him grimacing. “Are you okay?”
“You mean my wincing? I always do that when I’m jerking off. It’s pleasure—too painful. Is that too weird for you?” His way of submitting his behavior so innocently to Guy’s judgment was so guileless.
Guy thought,
Pain as pleasure
. He understood that. He licked the boy’s balls, raised high and taut in their hairless sac, and Kevin groaned a bit stagily. Then he shook all over, flinching like a splashed horse. The flinching seemed real, involuntary. Guy thought of a Thoroughbred, how his curried coat drank the light. Guy touched the boy’s fragile pink nipples—no reaction. His body hadn’t been thoroughly eroticized yet, which made Guy think of that Chinese model he’d slept with once, a guy he’d met in São Paulo, someone who wore his body like armor, which had made Guy irrationally conclude the Chinese weren’t sensual, weren’t good sex. They didn’t inhabit their bodies, Guy had decided on the basis of his sample of one.
Kevin fucked him. Guy guided the little hard penis into his body; Guy was lying on his stomach in order to afford Kevin the full plush glamour of his muscular buttocks. The boy didn’t seem to know how to thrust. He just lay couched on Guy’s bigger sleek body, this million-dollar body soaked for decades in costly unguents, and more or less wobbled in there for a very short time until he exploded.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “I came in you. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“That’s fine,” Guy said, kissing him and then running toward the shower. “I wanted it. That was great,” he lied. He didn’t know if Kevin might be feeling guilty after his orgasm. (So many men did at first.) That’s why he didn’t linger in bed. But then again, he didn’t want to seem cold, so he called back, “Come take a shower with me,” and the boy almost ran to join him. They rotated in the narrow tub under the showerhead; whoever wasn’t under the water soaped up, stood with legs ajar to wash his own crack, took the blast full in the face, lifted his arms to clean his hairless pits. Kevin was already spotlessly clean except for the lubricant greasing the length of his little cock; he washed it. Then, their bodies warm from the water, they waltzed around so neither of them would get cold. In a few seconds Kevin was hard again and Guy filled his mouth with hot water and knelt to engulf him. The boy let out a groan and tried to lift Guy to his feet. “We should take turns. It’s only fair.”
“Only Princeton boys care about fairness,” Guy said. “That’s why they rub against each other. The Princeton rub.” He whispered, “You’re my stud, my mister,” and filled his mouth again and dipped back to his chore.
“How can I be your stud?” Even the word seemed to embarrass him.
Guy looked up, the water splashing on his face, his wet hair dripping over his eyes. “Bet you can come three times.”
“I came five times once. But it was jerking off. And it was pretty limp and watery at the end.”
Guy looked up admiringly.
After Kevin came, Guy rubbed him dry with a hotel-sized towel and wanted to say, “My little stud,” but censored himself. The “little” might not be appreciated. And post coitum the “stud” might rankle.
Guy put Kevin to bed and gave him the TV remote. Then he went back to the toilet, closed the door, and was oddly proud of how much semen Kevin had squirted into him. Of course, Kevin wasn’t Andrés, with all his barbaric beauty and gypsy passion, as thin and tortured as a Spanish Christ who’d climbed down from the cross, banished the god within, and resurrected the outer man.
Before dawn Guy woke up to an exquisite pain, an inner plundering that his dream tried to make sense of (a hand was reaching for his heart), then he woke up and realized the boy was fucking him again and simultaneously reaching around and jerking Guy off. They both came at the same moment.
Guy’s strategy was to make the boy into the active partner based on the notion that with his small dick and youth he would seldom be cast in that role and that it would build up his confidence. He knew most experienced gays would find such a policy counterintuitive; they all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole. But Pierre-Georges had told him otherwise, that men might style themselves as passive at first because it was easier to take it than give it, but that as a young man became self-assured in a relationship he became more assertive—the return of the repressed. So that both male partners in a couple end up as tops and look for the occasional bottom to fuck.