Our Young Man (15 page)

Guy shook his head and stared at his own lustrous lace-up shoes below the knife-sharp crease of his trousers. “Yes,” he said, “in love. Foolish boy.”

That evening as Guy was eating unbuttered popcorn with Lucie and filling her in on the whole horror story, Lazlo phoned. “He’ll be out tomorrow,” he said.

“Thank you, thank you,” Guy cried out. He never let himself show excitement (except in bed), but this time his gratitude burst forth. Lucie, puzzled by the astonishing enthusiasm, cocked her head and smiled quizzically, like a hard-of-hearing person listening to an explosion.

“And the …
caution
, the bail, was it very dear?”

“Not so bad, we’ll talk about all that in the morning.”

After Guy hung up he hugged Lucie and danced around the room with her in a sort of ecstasy-polka. Then he called Pierre-Georges with the good news.

Pierre-Georges said sourly, “That still doesn’t mean he won’t serve time.”

Guy didn’t want to think about that and said, “What are you watching? I can hear the TV.”

“An old movie—horrible color.”

“What movie?”

“
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
.”

“Oh, I like that one.”

“It’s idiotic.” Then, after a pause, Pierre-Georges asked, “Do you think Andrés knew what kind of risk he was running?”

“Yes, I’m sure he did.”

“He must love you very much.” He was the second person to say that today.

Guy’s instinct was to pass that off as a gibe or a joke, but he caught himself and said softly, “Yes. He must. It’s crazy love, but it is love.”

When Andrés was released the next morning at nine, Guy was there to greet him. It was from the federal prison down on Park Row and office workers were swarming around him. Guy had put on a black cashmere turtleneck and black slacks and was wearing his black cashmere peacoat. He thought all the black would highlight his pale face, and the touch of cashmere would be comforting. And it might suggest, as bright colors would not, how grave the situation was and that he was … in mourning (
en deuil
).

Andrés walked into his arms, though normally he was self-conscious in public. All that was behind them; they had so little time together left, Guy felt he was in an opera, the last tragic act. Andrés held Guy’s head between his long hands and covered him with kisses. They were both crying.

“Wanna see my head shots?” Andrés asked with a grin, and showed him two mug shots the police had taken, one straight on and the other in profile. He was wearing a uniform in the pictures, though now he was back in yesterday’s clothes. “My first modeling job,” he said ruefully.

Guy said, “Good cheekbones, bad lighting.”

Andrés said, “They actually call it a booking photo. Isn’t that funny?”

Andrés smelled. They rushed home and went to bed. They made love twice in a row, and for once Guy didn’t keep Andrés from kissing his nipples or his mouth. Guy licked Andrés’s fluffy armpit, which smelled. Guy wanted to memorize his body, soon to be lost to him for years. Andrés had a few dark hairs between his nipples, but in the daylight Guy could see faint swirls of short, almost blond hair across his torso, the fuzz that would turn long and dark by the time he got out of prison. His uncircumcised penis tasted rank. Guy propped himself up and studied it. It was big and ugly, with such a long trunk and such a loose sack—it looked prehistoric but friendly, like some pet lizard relative known to the family alone. As Andrés bit into his nipple he looked up searchingly into Guy’s face. “I guess you’ll be doing this with other men now.”

Guy said, “Hush.” And then he added, “It depends on how many years … we’re apart.”

Andrés burst into tears and sobbed and sobbed on Guy’s chest. Guy kept stroking his hair and wished he’d been more reassuring. The phone rang but Guy let the service pick up. Then it rang again. But Guy was trapped under a sobbing young man. What if it was poor blind Fred? Or a booking agent? He didn’t want to crush this moment under the rolling juggernaut of his career, not now, when Andrés’s life was going up in flames.

“I haven’t even told my parents yet,” Andrés said in a spookily quiet, solemn voice. It sounded like a whisper in a cavern. “It will break their hearts. They were living through me.”

“Have you told Rutgers yet? Your adviser?” Guy asked.

“Of course not!” Andrés snapped. “When would I have told them?”

“I’m sorry. I forgot.”

“And now with Interpol, this will follow me around the rest of my life. And I’ll never get my degree. Who would hire a criminal anyway? In the past even a criminal could become a grade-school teacher in the Andes or Angola, but now everyplace is interconnected. Should I just kill myself?”

Guy was suddenly energized. “No, you should call this brilliant lawyer who’s an expert in art and immigration. He says maybe he’ll get you out on parole.”

“No, my contact at Drew Fine Arts got two years, and he’s an American citizen—two years and a fine of three thousand dollars, and he wasn’t forging fakes, just selling them.”

“But Lazlo told me the whole Dalí estate is a mess because the master—”

“Yes, but Dalí’s paper was watermarked with an infinity symbol and was from a particular factory that went belly-up in 1980. There are tons of Dalí products out there—shirts, cognac bottles, gilt oyster knives, ashtrays for Air India—but they’re all authorized.”

“How disgusting,” Guy murmured.

Andrés took offense: “He’s a great Catalan artist and I only worked on lithos of his best work.
The Great Masturbator
, the
Bullfight
series,
Cosmic Warrior
,
Caesar in Dalivision
…”

“Yes, of course,” Guy said, trying to soothe him.

They went together to Lazlo’s office the next morning at ten. And the lawyer seemed charmed by them both, two young men so handsome and appealingly happy, at least on a better day. Lazlo asked them lots of questions and both he and Andrés took copious notes. Guy looked out the window at the crowds surging down Fifth Avenue, and it seemed unreal to him that they were all free and soon Andrés would be behind bars. It seemed an utterly arbitrary thing, that society would care so much about its precious property that it would punish a young man in the flower of his youth for stealing some of it. “Stealing” was a big word, since he was only copying an inferior hack who endlessly plagiarized himself and invited everyone else to join in. Even the experts would trip all over themselves trying to pinpoint the exact crime Andrés had committed. Dalí himself was dead or dying, as waxy as his absurd mustaches, and there were no pockets in the shroud, but if the heirs and lawyers were all that greedy, then Guy could pay them off. Surely no one cared about the integrity of this artist who had made a career of selling himself out. Dalí would probably have even been flattered that such a clever, handsome guy had bothered to copy his images so industriously. A copy of a fake by a fraud was surely a negligible sort of offense.

Lazlo made them cups of espresso. The cups looked none too clean. He said something that suggested he, too, regarded Dalí as a charlatan, and Guy’s passionate young Colombian took offense, predictably. And of course it was immaterial the absolute quality of the work he’d plagiarized. “Victimless crime” were the words stuck in Guy’s head. The room smelled of coffee and Gitanes and Guy suspected the large panes of glass were slick with all these continental fumes.

They hurried home with a new urgency and fell on each other, famished and frightened. Guy could taste the coffee in Andrés’s mouth. He admired his lean, muscled white ass as if he’d never seen it before, the play of muscles across it like summer lightning, except it was something humble and familiar, not cosmic but a companion, a friend, at once familiar and exciting. They were desperate and it occurred to Guy that the police could never come to arrest Andrés if Guy refused to answer the door, if they nailed it shut and fed only on each other, as white as lab mice. They were two solid men, each 150 or 160 pounds, over six feet tall, big beasts; they could afford to fast for days, weeks. Guy wanted to buy them just a month or two; when the police broke down the door they’d find them locked in each other’s arms, forming a rotting crab on the beach of a bed rich in waves of linen. They might be dead.

“What if we just ran away?” Guy said. “There must be some drought-ridden farm near Cartagena where they’d never find us or some village in the Congo where the police would die of malaria. I don’t want to live long—just a while longer with you. And then when the police closed in on our African shack we could set it on fire and go up in flames.”

Andrés started to speak and then sobs overtook him and he cried for half an hour on Guy’s chest. Something about his disarray, his vulnerability, excited Guy. The idea that this lithe, sinewy man was so wracked by sobs turned Guy on as Andrés thrashed from side to side. They wouldn’t even have conjugal rights in prison.

Andrés couldn’t bear not to be lodged inside Guy, sheathed inside Guy’s body; it had nothing to do with being macho, it was just the need to hide, to merge, to infest.

Guy didn’t dare refuse him. He didn’t want to refuse him, but it was hard to get on with their ordinary lives with Andrés’s finger hovering constantly over the pause button. They had to pretend at least they were living a normal life, didn’t they, the unworried, unhurried rhythm of their average days, or else nothing was enjoyable. It was the dailiness of their existence that delighted them, especially when it was slashed through with passion, like burlap erupting into red velvet welts. They had to set the table, scramble the eggs, wash the dishes—they couldn’t just devour each other, could they?

Guy had to visit poor blind Fred in St. Vincent’s, the City of the Dead on the seventh floor of Spellman, small and dirty, all the single rooms converted into doubles. Surprisingly, it was a carnival atmosphere that afternoon—two drags were accompanying Rollerena, and she whizzed by, homely in her black glasses and dusty organdy, a fixed smile on her face, a wand in her hand. She looked like a nerdy high school girl with glasses and acne. Sister Patricia was silently patrolling the halls, her scrubbed face accented with her furry eyebrows, her white hands tucked into her full black sleeves. Fred was asleep. When Guy woke him, he smiled and said, “I wish you’d buy me a Walkman. It’s so fuckin’ boring being blind.”

“A what?”

“You can listen to music with it,” and he mimed earphones.

“
Ah! Un Baladeur!
”

“Do you people have your own names for everything? What’s a computer?”

“
Ordinateur
.”

“See—and a hamburger?”

“
Merde
.”

Fred laughed and sobered up enough to say, “Come tomorrow at one. My lawyer will be able to transfer the deed.”

“One? Is that within visiting hours? Most hospitals—”

“There are no hours up here. Sister Patricia accepts everything—hell, some of these guys even spend the night with their lovers. I’ve even heard they decorate their rooms with photos and blankets and balloons from home, not that that would do a blind man any good. No dogs so far, but that’ll come.”

Guy kissed Fred goodbye on his thin, sour-tasting lips. He worried that if he accepted the Fire Island house he’d get into a legal squabble with Fred’s family. But,
merde
, if the Anglo Saxons had these crazy laws that allowed you to disinherit your own children, then he, Guy, would have to profit from their cruel, unreasonable rules. Anyway, the “children” were two middle-aged men well launched in their own careers, or so Fred said. Wasn’t one of them a podiatrist? Sore feet surely must be lucrative. Anyway, they neglected Fred and had taken their mother’s side in the divorce.

It was tempting to take the house—that way Guy would never have to worry again about money. He could rent it out every summer. And who knew how much Andrés’s defense would set him back?

At twelve-thirty the next day when Guy was brushing his teeth and spraying his hair, Andrés seemed moody and childish about the prospect of even a half an hour’s separation.

“The poor man’s dying,” Guy said. “He’s already blind. You might as well be jealous of the parakeet.”

Andrés said sullenly, “We don’t have a parakeet.” Then he laughed charmingly in spite of himself, the laugh cracking the marble of his face, and said, “And if you did, I’d be jealous of it.”

Guy ruffled his hair and hurried out before Andrés could become desperate again. When Guy arrived on the seventh floor he could see Fred was propped up in bed. He looked shaved and washed for the occasion, his hair combed. That man Marty was sitting in the only chair, his little soft hands folded over his belly.

As he entered the room, Guy said hi. He didn’t want to startle Fred by surprising him with a touch—Guy was good at imagining things from another person’s point of view. Marty gave his hand to be shaken—he seemed to be unfamiliar with the custom of shaking hands. Guy felt Marty was disapproving—maybe he was friends with the seal. Or maybe it was Jewish tribal thing—why enrich the pretty goy? Or maybe Guy was just being paranoid.

“I brought you a Discman—and a dozen CDs. I’ll bring you some more tomorrow—just tell me what you want.”

“Bernard Herrmann. Dimitri Tiomkin. Classy music composers.”

“What about Michel Legrand?”

“Who?”

“He did ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.’”

“French, right? Forget it. Well, let’s get started.”

Marty had drawn up the papers and now he sat beside Fred on the edge of the bed. “Do you want me to read it to you?”

“Just summarize it in ordinary language.”

“Well, it leaves the Bel Air house to Ceil and twenty thousand to each of the boys and the Fire Island house to Guy. If anyone contests the will their bequest will be canceled. It’s called the ‘in terrorem’ clause.”

“Do you think that will stick?”

“I guess they could claim you were demented.”

“I probably will be if the CMV goes into my head. That’s why I want to get this over now.”

“Only twenty thousand for each of the boys?” Guy asked, trying to sound fair.