The next day Fred felt lonely, humiliated, and deeply repentant. Although Guy didn’t know anything about his visit to the Meat Rack, Fred was as guilt-ridden as if his foolish submission had been thoroughly documented on film. Without thinking it out, he made an appointment with the real estate agent. As he walked to his office at the harbor on a late August day that was sultry and windless, past houses that for the moment were for the most part deserted (it was Wednesday and the garbage was smelling foul in the heat — it wouldn’t be collected till Friday), he wondered if this was a terrible idea. He couldn’t really afford it and his flushed face burned with shame and anxiety.
It was all over in five minutes. He bought the house and wrote out a check for a down payment of $250,000.
Just as Guy was about to leave the Pines (Andrés had decided to go along for the ride to JFK) and was handing Fred the key to the rented house, Fred squeezed his hand shut around the key and said, “Now it’s yours.”
“What is?” Guy asked with a sweet, dazed smile; he was mildly confused, but his smile anticipated an as-yet-unspecified happy surprise.
“The house is yours for next summer. I bought it.”
“You did? You’re not joking?” The uniformed chauffeur had come for Guy’s bags. They’d walk to the harbor, take a waiting boat to the waiting limousine.
“I’ve never been more serious,” Fred said. “I hope we’ll have many a happy summer here together,” he added. “I bought it yesterday.”
Guy grabbed him by the neck and gazed into his eyes for a second.
Fred said in a low voice, “I hope you’ll invite me out once in a while.”
Guy said, “Silly.” He never knew if that word was a good translation for stupide, just as he never knew if naughty meant mauvais. He’d once made Americans laugh when he had said, “Hitler was naughty.” Andrés was standing off to one side, his head lowered deferentially, as if Guy were receiving a benediction from Signor Fred, their venerable host.
Guy held Fred’s head between his hands and kissed him on the lips, no tongue: The $2.2 million kiss, Fred thought bitterly. A second later, Andrés, slender and elegant and very tanned in a crisp white shirt, open at the neck and the sleeves rolled back, hurried off down the boardwalk behind the uniformed chauffeur and beside Guy, who looked back and blew a kiss.
The next few days Fred was in a state of anguish over Guy. Had Andrés flown off with him to Paris? These grad students seemed so idle, and Andrés was always resting. Once Fred had tried to fill in his résumé in his mind and noticed a blank of a whole year. “What did you do in 1982?” he asked. Andrés replied innocently, “I rested.”
And then Fred obsessed over the risky sex he’d had in the bushes. He kept feeling the glands in his neck and under his arms and looking for telltale brown patches on his legs. There was no test for gay cancer and no treatment. Oh, what a fool he’d been! No wonder Guy was so puritanical; you couldn’t trust anyone, least of all a sleazeball in the bushes.
He couldn’t think of anyone he could discuss his twin obsessions with, Guy and GRID, other than the baron. They had dinner in the baron’s library, where his new lover the antique dealer had installed a tapestry of a bewigged king on horseback pointing gleefully to a distant city on the banks of a river—“in honor of a peace treaty,” Édouard explained vaguely. The room, which Fred remembered as white and sterile but spacious, now seemed crowded with heavy window treatments, potted palms, lots of bric-a-brac, spotlit oil paintings of smiling despots, and even a fire, though it was only late September and still warm out.
“Guess your new lover is responsible for all this?” Fred asked, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Classy.”
“Yes, Will has worked miracles,” Édouard said with a timid smile.
“Guess you have all the luck with the young boys — first Guy and now Will.”
“Boys!” Édouard said, guffawing into his sole amandine. (Even the plates looked old and crazed and stained, Louis somebody.) “Guy’s no boy! Walt snooped around and found some pictures of Guy in French Vogue going back to the early seventies. We figured out he must be nearly forty if he’s a day.”
“But he looks so young.”
“He must have a terrible painting in the attic.”
But Fred was too appalled to laugh. He felt someone had socked him in the stomach. He began to sweat and breathe faster, as if he might panic any moment. He’d been fooled, made to look a fool. Panic or maybe vomit. No one pulled the wool over his eyes. He was the cynic, the skeptic, he was fraud-proof. And yet, and yet, he’d been completely hoodwinked. And all that money! He’d spent so much money on Guy, the house — and all for a forty-year-old man who must clip the hair in his nose or yank it out and set off a fit of sneezing. A middle-aged man who’s probably down to jerking off every other day. A weary man of forty who’s already seen everything come around twice, who let me fuck him that once in a hole where whole armies of men have doubtless passed. What a pretentious queen, pretending to be fresh and naïve, whereas he’s long past his sell-by date. I could have been investing all this time and energy and money in a real kid who might have fallen for me, who wouldn’t have known how to work me so expertly. Kids are emotional and reckless, whereas a man of forty is cold and calculating. I’ve been duped.
“Guy has really upset me,” Fred said, choking up. “I’m afraid I had unsafe sex. Not with Guy — but with a stranger.”
“They say you should know your partner’s name. Do you know the man’s name, the man who you were … indiscreet with?”
“No, it was in the bushes, in the Meat Rack.”
“Oh, dear.” The baron patted his hand. “I’m no one to talk. I specialize in anonymous sex. Though Will is making me mend my ways.”
“Do you think we’re all doomed?”
“Surely not. We eat well, we exercise, we never have a venereal disease for long. We have regular checkups — don’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t trust my gay doctor. He’s a feel-good doctor and a major masochist.”
“Really?” the baron asked, rustling his neck like a mating partridge. “What kind of masochist is he?”
“He had his testicles removed by a surgeon as his master looked on.”
The baron’s eyes glittered. “That’s irreversible,” he said with satisfaction. He blinked and said, “In any event, I believe this gay cancer only hits men who’ve had repeated venereal diseases. Their immune systems are compromised, overloaded. We’re in no danger, especially a straight guy like you, I mean ex-straight.”
“There we were, Guy and me, surrounded by some of the great beauties of the day, and both of us as wise as virgins. We were both afraid of GRID.”
“What?”
“Gay-related immune deficiency.”
Édouard nodded vigorously.
They went quiet after Will came in wearing beige calfskin suede trousers molded to his muscular thighs and butt, the fruits of thousands of squats. He seemed a bit drunk and more expansive than he’d been the only other time Fred had met him. He leaned down and pecked Édouard on the forehead and reached deliberately to pinch Édouard’s tit through the soft blue Egyptian cotton of his monogrammed shirt. The baron winced for a second and then smiled timidly up at his young-master-antique-dealer. “It’s nice to know a cutie like you is my property,” Will said. The baron darted a nervous glance at his guest — and then smiled at his owner. “Yes,” he said awkwardly, “very nice indeed.” He was such a social creature, produced by centuries of breeding, but nothing in his rich experience had prepared him for this moment. (He’d never mixed his evenings on the rack with entertaining his friends.)