Andrés never answered Guy’s questions about money but just looked away and smiled mysteriously.
Guy had never felt so loved. Perhaps because Andrés was so handsome, perhaps because men and women stared at him as often as they stared at Guy, Guy felt Andrés was valuable, enviable, rich with options. Poor Édouard and Fred, they were desperate because time was running out on them. In the apartment of the Buddhas, Guy had seen a photo from the 1950s of Fred in which he was presentable, but he’d never been a beauty, though absurdly he aspired to be one now.
Andrés was intelligent, too, and could talk about Dalí for hours and hours and the surrealists in general. Apparently Dalí was on his last legs now, with a nose tube feeding him oxygen, all mixed up with his trademark wax mustaches. Dalí was Catalan. (They spoke a kind of Catalan as far south as Valencia, Andrés explained, and as far north as Perpingnan.)
“I guess it’s like Gaelic in Ireland,” Guy said, just to be pleasant. He liked seeing Andrés getting worked up, his skin flushing red. Usually he was like the dead Christ in his loincloth being lowered from the cross into his mother’s arms, and Guy enjoyed draping a sheet over his loins to underline the resemblance. He could imagine blood-black nail holes in his body.
Andrés would lie on his stomach practicing Dalí’s signature for hours. His buttocks would always tense when he felt Guy was looking at him.
“Why Dalí?” Pierre-Georges asked over the phone. “He was a complete fraud and would even sign blank sheets of paper for sixty dollars a pop. His greedy wife Gala would put them in front of him; he was completely gaga and she thought she at least would live forever.”
“How do you know all this?” Guy asked.
“There was an article in Marie Claire. But he’s a complete fraud. When he was shown some lithographs of Don Quixote he declared them fakes. ‘How can you tell?’ someone asked. ‘They’re fakes because Dalí hasn’t been paid for them.’ Most of his so-called lithographs are just posters of photographic copies, he doesn’t even know how to make lithographs.”
“Andrés is doing his Ph.D. on Dalí.”
One day Andrés went out by himself (which was unprecedented). He said something about meeting a friend for lunch, though there had been no exchange of calls. When he came back late in the afternoon he had a bundle of yellowing blank paper under his arm.
“What’s that for?” Guy asked.
“It’s paper from the 1950s. I found it at a bouquiniste,” Andrés said. But when Guy pursued the matter Andrés just shrugged. Later he said, “Modern paper contains chemical brighteners that glow under infrared.”
And then they were back in New York. Guy caught himself speaking to waiters in French; for him French had become the language of servants (though he’d learned Americans with their fussy egalitarianism preferred the word “help”).
Andrés moved in with him and, when Fred or Pierre-Georges or Lucie came by, sat right next to Guy with his hand on his knee. They must have looked like a queer version of that painting American Gothic. Guy had to admit to himself that it made him uncomfortable to have someone so visibly stake a claim on him, and yet he found the idea reassuring, too. At least he knew that the usual tension in his neck and shoulders was melting away. Belonging to someone felt like being held in someone’s arms, like being shielded from death. His father’s death had caused him to feel more vulnerable, a flimsy transparency held up in the wind, a twist of paper dancing in an air shaft, but Andrés’s embrace stopped him from twisting. Andrés was warm flesh, though he was painfully thin; he was flesh and stubble and his slightly sour odor. He was a thick, veiny penis, uncircumcised like Guy’s, and a loose sack of balls. He was a bald spot and bad teeth. He was so physical despite his slightness pumping Guy full of hot spurts of vitality.
Guy’s mother hadn’t expected him to come back for the funeral. Pierre-Georges had arranged for a florist to deliver a big, standing wreath of red and white carnations and a blue silk ribbon stretched across its empty thorax reading, “Didier remembered always in the loving hearts of his family.” Guy was shocked that Pierre-Georges had filed away his father’s first name, Didier. Pierre-Georges was impeccable!
Guy spoke to his mother every day. She sounded subdued and a bit worried. She’d never written a check in her life. Tiphaine was teaching her how to keep a checkbook and work out a budget. Guy resented this intimate brush with poverty and mortality. He knew that someday soon he’d be old and infirm — but he repeated the words “old and infirm” precisely because they were a formula and held the reality at bay. They were prophylactic words, a sting of the same venom, an antidote like homeopathic medicine. His kind of Buddhism instructed you to live in the moment, he vaguely remembered, and that suited him fine. If you chanted twice a day and made love three times and always wore beautiful clothes and stayed away from dreary people, you could just hover in the present, couldn’t you? Or had he gotten that completely wrong?
5
Fred announced that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, but it wasn’t always linked to AIDS, it was something older Jews and Italians got just naturally, older Mediterranean men, but it used to be very rare and it had been seen just in Jersey nursing homes or in Florida retirement villages. “We’re going to beat this thing,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ve got the best goddamn team of doctors on the globe, the real McCoy.” Then he thought about it for a day and he phoned: “But what if I infected you that one time I fucked you?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Guy said. “I haven’t had any other STDs, so my immune system hasn’t been compromised. And besides, you came on my stomach, not in my ass. I don’t think it’s in precum. Anyway, we only did it once — and you need multiple exposures, don’t you?”
“Hey, maybe you gave it to me,” Fred said. “That’s a possibility, isn’t it? Should I sue you? Can the top get it?”
“Not usually,” Guy said. “Anyway, don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’re as strong as an ox.”
“Do you know if you’re clean?”
“Clean?”
“I guess I’m not clean now.”
“Don’t worry. Do you have any other symptoms?”
“A tubercular cough. Night sweats. Swollen lymph glands. Weight loss. I’m a goner, right?”
“I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“C’mon!” Fred shouted into the receiver. “You’re supposed to reassure me,” he said, disgusted.
“What do the doctors say, the real McCoys?”
“They don’t know shit. They don’t even know for sure what causes it, do they? Poppers? Mustaches? Pork?”
“How about sex?”
“Isn’t it ironic that I came out now? It’s like moving to London during the Great Plague.”
Guy wondered, could he have given GRID to Fred? Could Fred have given it to him?
Guy promised to shop for and microwave him dinner that very evening, something nourishing, chicken Parmigianino and broccoli, say.
Fred said, “The house is a mess. There is an inch of dust on the fuckin’ Buddhas.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It’ll be great to see you. Don’t be offended if I don’t eat much. And if I look like hell. Is Andrew coming?” That was what he called Andrés.