Little League. Oh, dear, Guy thought, isn’t that children?
“Going down to the beach and staring at the surfers. Say, we’ve got to get you out to L.A. for some screen tests.”
“Aren’t I the wrong color for your films?”
Fred laughed. “Put a little slap on you. Seriously, I’m coproducing a wonderful art-house movie about a schizophrenic who falls for an anorexic.”
“Schizophrenic? So you thought of me?”
“I can’t stop thinking of you,” Fred said in a lower, sexy voice. “No, the schizophrenic’s confidant, a pastry chef.”
“And this pastry chef is French?”
“Why not? We need some textures.”
“Do you have a director?”
Fred sat up in his chair. “We haven’t signed anyone yet, but this is such a high-end property we’re talking to some of the European and experimental guys in the business.”
“I’m not sure I’m much of an actor.” Guy flashed on his recent debacle in the dungeon.
After dinner Fred invited Guy up to his place in a new building overlooking Washington Square.
“I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”
“I’m bicoastal,” Fred said suggestively. “Nah, I was born in Brooklyn. I need New York the way a fish needs air.”
Guy tried to work that one out.
The apartment, which was a dusty neglected penthouse with dead plants and a view of the graffiti-covered Washington Square arch and the seething, dangerous park beyond it, was glitzy-Oriental, with three gilt life-sized statues of the meditating Buddha at the entrance, low black-lacquered tables with pagoda trim, blood-red silk couches with heavy tassel pulls, a spotlit abstraction that some decorator had obviously chosen for the color, a terrazzo floor with glitter buried into it delineating — oh, a dragon lounging on the Great Wall of China. “I’m a sort of Buddhist myself,” Guy said, to be agreeable in case the décor was an expression of Fred’s beliefs rather then his tastes.
“This is something Ceil concocted with that pansy decorator of hers — I’m going to clear it all out and put in something simple and modern and classic, maybe with a Pompeian motif or a Moorish.”
“Don’t be too hasty,” Guy advised.
“Maybe I’ll go all antique. Édouard has that handsome young antique dealer he’s so crazy about. What a body that kid has! Gr-r-r …” and he made the sound of an angry dog, which reminded Guy uncomfortably of Édouard’s excesses.
“I haven’t met him,” Guy said coolly.
“Really? Édouard’s besotted with him. He’s clearing out all that boring-ass white furniture of his and going all Chippendale or something, but I’ll bet you it’s just so he can be with young Will, who’s going to supply him with lots of priceless lumber with a fifty percent markup, you can bet.”
That was quick, Guy thought, panicking to think he’d been replaced.
Fred turned a dial and lowered the lights. “It’s nice to see the city from here, if you can glimpse it between all those goddamn Buddhas. Sorry,” he said.
“I’m just the chanting kind of Buddhist,” Guy hastened to say, “not the begging-bowl kind.” Fred had refreshed their drinks and now was sitting next to Guy. He said, “Isn’t that the kind where you chant all day for things you want? I had a friend who chanted who was bi and kept by rich men and women one at a time. He chanted for a Rolls and got it. He said the only disadvantage of being a live-in gigolo is that you have to be willing to play canasta at three A.M. with some ancient insomniac lady.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Guy was quick to say.
“But what are you chanting for?”
“A beach house in Fire Island Pines.”
Fred, who’d been leaning forward, now sat back. “Whoa! I’m not that rich. I’m a millionaire, but a very minor millionaire,” and he held his finger and thumb apart to indicate two inches.
Guy laughed. “But I wasn’t asking you for anything. That’s what I chant for. I pray to Amida, not to you.” But after Guy went to the toilet he said he was tired, he had an early call, and he thanked Fred, who looked devastated.
“You can’t just walk out of my life like that.”
They exchanged phone numbers, but when Fred tried to line him up for lunch or dinner or a movie, Guy said, “I don’t have my schedule yet for this week. It would be unfair to you to make a date and then have to break it.”
“Don’t French people kiss each other goodbye on two cheeks?”
“Fathers and sons. When you get the Légion d’honneur. Silly Parisian queens and society people.”
While Fred was pondering this, Guy shook hands, thanked him, and left.
Guy needed some time alone to absorb how the baron had turned on him. All that talk about how they were soul mates, about how Guy had a rare gift for transcending nationality, class, age. Had he said class? Did that mean he thought Guy was beneath him, low-class? Pierre-Georges had insinuated he, Guy, was a bore, with just his looks to offer. Was he a bore?
On his way home he cruised a hot kid who turned out to be a nineteen-year-old dancer named Vladimir. Guy took him home, gave him a drink, and fucked him. Enough old men! Guy told himself. But after the adoring, rapturous Vladimir had left (“Sorry, I can’t sleep with another person in bed,” Guy had said drily), he still felt bruised and insulted.
He wondered the next morning if Édouard would phone him, but Vlad and Fred did. He agreed to have a quick lunch with Fred, who was in some sort of golfing clothes minus the cleats.
“I couldn’t sleep all night,” Fred said. “I worried that I’d said something wrong, that I’d turned you off somehow.”
“Not at all,” Guy said, turning on a thousand-watt smile. He smiled like that when he wanted to appear inaccessible. “I had a delightful evening.”
“Really? You’re not bullshitting me? Because, honestly, I’m completely dazzled by you.” He sighed heavily and ran a hand across his baldpate. “Coming out in your sixties is no joke. I mean, you’re so vulnerable. It’s like being a pimply fifteen-year-old all over again. I’m a whizz at picking up birds.” (Oh, he means women.) “Birds are easy, at least in L.A., if you have a nice car and you say you’re a producer. They’re all like Lana Turner waiting to be discovered at that drugstore.” (Guy didn’t get the reference, but he thought he’d heard of that old actress).
“I guess you must be quite the stud,” Guy said, and wondered if Fred would detect the irony. From his decade in Paris, Guy had learned how to insult people sweetly.
But Fred didn’t pick up on the irony. “I’m not saying that. It’s just that wealth and influence count more with women than they do with men. You see, men want to be the top dog, not attract him.”
Dogs again, Guy thought. “It must have been a relief to come out finally.”
“Yes and no. I was in terrible shape. I had to go on a diet and lose fifty pounds. Now I go to the gym three hours every day and my personal trainer is a real demon. Then”—here he dropped his voice—“I’m only telling you this ’cause I trust you — I had a face-lift.” He showed him the scars behind his ears. There were whiskers growing there — some of the beard skin had been tucked back there. “That’s why I look so young.”
“Oh, that’s why,” Guy said.
“And I had liposuction — they boiled down ten pounds of gut fat. I had to wear a corset for a month. I’m having hair implants, but boy, are those painful. I had my eyebrows and my ears lasered clean of hair. I had the age spots burned off my hands with an acetylene torch. When the scabs fall off, your hands are white.”
“In French,” Guy said, “we call those spots cemetery flowers.”