But with this new disease it was safer to go to the Hamptons this summer (safer but more expensive and less fun). On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn’t tell the houseboys from the bankers. But in South Hampton servants were in pickup trucks and their bosses in Jaguars and there was no place they mixed except sometimes on the beach. (But the help often weren’t permitted to swim, or they preferred to get together in a coffeehouse on their day off.) Only very evolved employers had their chefs tooling around in shorts and answering to first names. (“What’s for dinner, Jeff?” “Well, Dick, I found the most incredible spare ribs.”)
One day Pierre-Georges came for a coffee at Guy’s apartment in the Village after he’d had lunch at the Côte Basque with the baron.
“He wants you to participate in his S&M activities. As a sadist. I said that was completely against your gentle nature, though you did have a violent streak that I’d witnessed twice and that could be cultivated. But only if you felt completely secure as a man …”
“What on earth! You talk as if I were a child. I’m a grown man of thirty-two.”
“Professionally you’re twenty-three. But I like your outrage—we can build on that.”
“Build?”
“Wait, wait,” Pierre-Georges said, making a calming motion with both hands and looking perfectly calm himself, even smiling. “I told him that your building was up for sale and if you owned it and had two income properties …”
“What?”
“If you owned the whole building, you could rent out—”
“And what did he say?”
“He asked me to test the waters.”
“He’d buy me the building and I’d switch his butt?”
“More than that and more than once.”
“
Berk!
” (The sound for revulsion in French comic strips.)
Pierre-Georges let a long silence accumulate. He who was always voluble didn’t mind showing his tacit impatience or disapproval.
At last Guy took a new tack: “You’re adept at all things hard”—he used the English word “hard,” the
h
suppressed, newly imported into French for sadomasochism—“but I know nothing of … all that. Would you tell me how it’s organized?” They both liked the cool, cerebral tone of “organized.” Normally Guy never asked questions. He didn’t like to admit he didn’t already know something. Like all French people he didn’t say, “
Je ne sais pas,
” but “
Je ne sais plus
” (“I no longer know”).
The only thing that slightly irritated Pierre-Georges was the dismissive “all that” (
tout ça
). He said, “It’s partly my fault you’ve reached your great age and are so naïve. I haven’t wanted you to come across as a slut”—
une salope
—“especially now that there’s this new
saloperie
going around”—he meant gay cancer—“but sadism”—and he laughed, surprised at his own thought—“is bizarrely safe. You don’t even have to touch the slave! And if the slave is a very distinguished old man … who’s very particular … and who’s slowed down forcibly with age …”
Everything Pierre-Georges was saying set off a small detonation in Guy’s mind. Did disease specially spare distinguished old men? Did it affect only riffraff who had problems of … hygiene? Did a single exposure to it suffice (that would be too unfair!), or was it cumulative, was it like Russian roulette, in which only one chamber out of six was loaded but the odds of being eliminated increased with each turn of the barrel?
“No touching?” Guy said. “But don’t you have to penetrate the victim?”
“Rarely. It’s all mostly verbal menace and gestures of domination. It’s verbal and mental, in fact.”
“Convenient if true.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t be alone. The baron likes scenes, orgies with a narrative. There’d be other young men there, attractive ones, experienced.”
Guy’s thoughts, usually imperturbable, ricocheted now like a panicked bird inside a closed room. “So,” he said. “What’s the difference between me and a whore?” He swallowed. “Am I a whore?”
“No more then every married woman. Or heir. They all benefit from wealth they haven’t earned. But whore, if you like. The trick is to be a clever whore”—
le truc est d’etre une putain rusée
. Pierre-Georges laughed his barking, unfunny laugh. “It would be agreeable to own a house in Greenwich Village,
n’est-ce pas
, and to be a rentier, especially in a profession like yours with such a short shelf life, no?”
Guy reasoned with himself that night as he tossed and turned in bed, surely there was something pure about him; he’d never slept with someone as a brutal transaction. Then he turned the emerald ring around in the dark. He laughed at himself. It was true he hadn’t directly negotiated for the jewel, but after he’d received the
petit cadeau
(“little gift,” to use a whore’s euphemism), he’d thrust himself through the glory hole for the first time. Why did he dream of more and more wealth? He had plenty, didn’t he, which Pierre-Georges had invested for him? Maybe because he’d grown up poor, just spaghetti sometimes three nights in a row, never a franc to buy candy, always hand-me-down clothes, never enough to buy schoolbooks—that had seemed like reality to him. And now that someone wanted to take care of him, he was … grateful? Was that the word?
He switched on the light and picked up a copy of a novel by Alphonse Daudet that Pierre-Georges had given him, a book he couldn’t get into, for some reason. It was old, he thought accusingly. From some other century. He didn’t like old things. He closed the book.
All right, so he’d already acquiesced to the baron for one big gift—why not a bigger one?
He phoned Pierre-Georges and said, “I can’t sleep. Would he buy me the building outright?” He looked at himself in the large wall mirror over the bed, one he’d positioned there to reflect his “pigginesses” (
cochonneries
). Of course, his hair was a mess, but he thought he looked pretty good, though his neck, still firm, was threatening to give way, like a dam after ten days of rain. Nothing visible yet, but he could just tell that that would be the first area of devastation. And his elbows were getting leathery.
He turned his head from left to right. Would he give that guy in the mirror a building?
He wasn’t his own type.
“Yes,” Pierre-Georges said, “I’m certain he’d let you sign the deed. It would all be done through lawyers so you wouldn’t have any embarrassment.”
“What would I wear?” Guy blurted.
“At the lawyers’? Your dark blue suit, the Armani.”
“No, I mean, at the orgy.”
“We could go to a shop on Christopher Street, where they’d fit you for black leather shorts—”
“
Berk!
”
“And a harness.”
“I’m not a horse. And I thought I would be the master.”
“That’s what the master wears.”
“Why?”
“That’s like asking why English words are spelled the way they are. Because. Just because.”
The line was silent with just Guy’s audible breathing. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No,” Pierre-Georges said. “I was watching an old movie on television.”
“Oh? Which one?” Guy and Pierre-Georges often watched movies at the same time, each one at home before his own television. Sometimes thirty minutes would go by without either of them saying anything beyond, “Isn’t that weird? Is that a shovel he has in his hand? What is she doing? Is that a pancake?” Guy’s English was better and he often filled Pierre-Georges in on the plot.
“Well,” Guy said, “I’ve been thinking about my future. I’m thirty-two. Time I had some steady income.”
“You have your Paris apartment rented out.”
“For a pittance. No, tell the baron it’s a yes.”
“He wouldn’t want it to sound like a transaction. He helps his protégé out, and then one night, spontaneously, the protégé explores his dark side in Édouard’s dungeon, just because he wants to.”
“Dungeon?”
“He has a dungeon on West Twenty-sixth Street, two rooms, quite spacious, really, with a Saint Edward’s cross and everything.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Yes. You’ll see—it’s all exciting and effortless.”
“What if I can’t get it up?” Guy wailed.
“That’s of no importance if you’re on the right end of a whip.”
The building was transferred to Guy. He dressed up in his Armani suit and drove in the Mercedes down to the Woolworth Building near Wall Street and visited the very high-end lawyer. There were so many documents to sign, but at the end of it all he was given a copy of the deed. Guy’s own lawyer, a balding bewildered man from the Zoli agency, looked it over and nodded. A nod for which Guy was paying a hundred dollars. But no matter. Pierre-Georges met them there for the signing. He, too, looked very elegant in his boxy Kenzo suit; the lapels were wide and his tie a silk the color of an old bruise. He invited Guy to a Christopher Street restaurant that was calm and empty, next to the Theater de Lys—and, on the other side, to the leather store.
Guy found it very exciting to have Pierre-Georges, the tailor, and a middle-aged clerk watching him as he stripped down in the back of the shop behind a blackout curtain. Guy got an erection from the bright spotlights, the man measuring him, the smell of the leather, the focus and intensity of their stares. He decided not to be embarrassed. The tailor pushed it gently, respectfully, to one side as if it were a familiar though awesome problem. Guy started to say to himself, “Cow-cow, chicken-chicken,” his usual command for going soft, but he stayed hard. Outside on the street, Pierre-Georges, in an unusual gesture of warmth, put an arm around him and said, “You’ll be just fine.”
It wasn’t more than five days later when Édouard phoned him in the afternoon and gave him the address on West Twenty-sixth. He said it wasn’t the main entrance to the building, which was protected by a doorman, but a completely anonymous side door to the right with a buzzer and an intercom. “A woman will answer and you’ll say you’re there for Ed. That’s what they call me: Ed. Tonight at eleven o’clock. I think you’ll find it amusing.”
A fat young woman with a synthetic shiny red nylon-looking pageboy, dressed in black stockings with red garters, a leather miniskirt, a tightly laced bodice from which spilled her large globular breasts, let him in. He did not find her very appetizing. Guy asked if there was a changing room. He had his new leathers in a gym bag. The louvered door in the hallway led to a changing room. “Don’t leave your clothes in there.” Then she said, “Ed’s party is in there,” and pointed to a heavy metal door, the sort Guy imagined was made to contain a fire.
Guy changed rapidly and looked in the mirror to check his hair and outfit. His legs looked skinny and white below the shorts, he feared. But overall he looked frightening—you wouldn’t want to encounter
that
in a dark alley. He was a long way from Clermont-Ferrand.
He decided not to knock on the metal door and say, “Pardon,” the way he’d been taught but to barge in like Genghis Khan, some big terrifying conqueror. Unfortunately he had his street clothes in the gym bag, which mitigated his sadistic allure.
He walked in and saw four tall men in chaps, asses exposed, standing together with their backs to him, almost as if they were at a
urinoir
. He put the bag down and drew closer and they were pissing on the baron, who was crouched on his knees, glorying in the rancid urine. He was wearing a strange leather full-length coat, open to expose his chest, belly, and pitiful little erection. The coat was very Wehrmacht. Guy hoped the liquid wouldn’t cause a short in his hearing aids.
Guy knew not to say hello or greet his host. He pulled up beside the man farthest to the left. They seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of urine and they were painting Édouard’s face and chest and belly with the liquid, which wasn’t so yellow. Guy could see a dozen beer cans lined up on the ledge and he imagined that that was what was being recirculated so abundantly.
He was sure he’d be piss-shy, but he tugged his leather shorts down, and out flopped his tumescent dick. Édouard (he tried to think of him as “it,” the piece-of-shit slave, as Pierre-Georges had taught him) crawled over to Guy; he was dripping and barking like a seal. Guy resorted to the usual French banalizing thought:
But it’s completely normal
, he said to himself, though there was nothing normal about it. Guy was a good enough actor that he felt challenged by this new role. The other folks were muttering the same stupid words, “Yeah, now you’re getting there, yeah, pig, now you’re sucking that big uncut cock, go for it, piggy, yeah, you want that hot young piss, you know you want it …” Guy didn’t dare say anything, with his accent and his ignorance of the right words; he’d be bound to say something like, “Yes, pig, that’s truly excellent,” and they would all laugh, evaporate, like vampires at dawn. He might say something funny. Pierre-Georges had told him humor was the great enemy of sadism. At the sound of the first laugh the whole dungeon would collapse in a puff and vanish.
The baron reached behind him and turned on a faucet that poured water directly onto the raw concrete floor. It flowed into a drain, an industrial-looking drain. No doubt the baron hoped the sound of water would sympathetically induce Guy to pee, but no such luck. He should have gulped three Diet Cokes before coming.
Guy wondered what the scenario was for tonight. Hadn’t Pierre-Georges said the baron liked his orgies to have narratives? It seemed tonight the baron was a bad dog, who kept racing forward to bite his masters on the leg until they whipped him and drove him back into a kennel. The baron actually was uttering, “Gr-r-r,” in an amateurish way that Guy found
attachant
; at least, mercifully, he was no longer begging for Guy’s piss.
The other men were all of a type—tall, balding, skinny, pale, tattooed, almost as if they were vagrants who slept rough, smelling of old cigarettes and beer, their asses wrinkled and flat like deflated balloons but their dicks big and bridled with shiny cock rings. They all had nascent beards and one man, who looked as if he were in his forties, had a broken tooth. He was the only one wearing a motorcycle jacket and no shirt. His ribs were countable, his stomach flat as a drumhead, his chest stringy with sparse, long hairs.