He picked up yogurt and fruit at a deli. Lucie was coming over for lunch in an hour. The shopkeeper was friendly in a routine way — today, dailiness seemed obscene, an outrage when he thought of his poor Andrés in prison just for loving him too much.
It felt empty, the day felt bruised, the light looked vacant and assaulted, his street felt at once familiar and strange, as if he were seeing it after a hundred-years’ sleep. It was seldom he thought of himself as a single individual, whirling lonely through space, an unnoticed neural event pulsing somewhere in a minor, dimming universe, but today he felt alone and tiny and powerless.
He called his mother, which he did so seldom that he had to tell her right away that nothing was wrong, that he was just checking up on her, did she like her new Opel. He wanted to tell her about the terrible thing that had just happened to him but of course he couldn’t, she’d never understand, he’d have to explain too many things going back too many years, so he ended up consoling her all over again for her husband’s death. Because the telephone call and the renewed condolences were so unexpected, his mother sounded abashed and overly grateful, which left him feeling all the more empty when he hung up.
At least Lucie was warm and comforting. She held him as he told her about Andrés and they cried together. She was so fragrant and kind and gentle that he felt, guiltily, the shocking stirrings of desire. He never wanted to feel excited ever again, not over anyone. The very thought struck him as disloyal. Lucie sensed his discomfort and made popcorn and began to play with his hair, seriously considering if he’d look good with the wet look. She begged him to let her experiment. He could always just wash it out.
7
With great regularity Guy intended to visit Andrés in prison and Fred in the hospital and felt perpetually guilty, as if he were responsible for their separate but horrible destinies. The first time he saw Andrés shorn and pale and skinny in his orange jumpsuit, he was thunderstruck. His arms looked so thin and helpless, his bald spot was gleaming, his face seemed to have sprouted five new moles, with the bad food he appeared to have grown a horrible little belly — not really! It was just a fold in his prison clothes. Guy could have slapped himself for the disparaging thought.
That afternoon, after he sat beside Fred and held his hand for fifteen minutes, Guy walked over to the Sheridan Square gym. All the rituals of his life had become so stale — and the perpetual guilt made him angry! He didn’t want to feel like a bad person who brought disaster to everyone around him. He was listless with self-hatred and an irrational anger that could never find a rod to strike but idly played across the surface of his mind. As he trudged upstairs to the second floor and the gym’s open door, he could smell the old sweat, hear the melancholy ring of dropped barbells, and he prepared himself to see those mastodons with their stained gym clothes, pockmarked faces, and neck veins about to pop.
But when he breached the entrance he saw identical blond twins, teenagers, maybe Finns like those models on the fold-out cover of L’Uomo Vogue. After Guy changed, he worked out near them so he could study them. They cheered him up. It was amusing to certify that they were identical down to the tiniest detail — the blond fuzz on their calves; the pointy nose that swerved to one side, thinned out, and turned red near the tip; the long eyetooth that gleamed with saliva; the bulging shoulder blades under identical crisp T-shirts with an unfamiliar logo — shoulder blades like unsprouted wings. They both touched their toes at the same moment and, as their T-shirts rose up, Guy could see identical black moles staining the intricately turned carpentry of their white, white waists. They were just as much mirror images in their behavior, murmuring to each other, exchanging fractional nods of encouragement, one bending to tie the laces of the other, but everything unemphatic. They were like gods posing as shepherds.
Their eyes lingered on Guy for an instant as if the camera, panning across his face and body, got stuck. It was such a slight hesitation as almost to go unremarked, but they both must have noticed Guy had intercepted their glance, because both boys blushed deeply, charmingly. A blush for them was nearly a cardiac arrest. Guy feared they’d faint due to the sudden concentration of blood. What did they see that instant when they looked at him? Compared to their freshness, he was wilted, lined, thick. Only in New York, where everyone was thirty-something, did he appear young. People had agreed he was young, as if by consensus. It was an article of faith. But these twins’ skin was so fine-pored, so rosy; their arms were so firm, nothing was flabby, there was nothing ropy about their necks; they were dramatically thin but not starved-looking. They looked healthy. They hadn’t been on diets. Their heads were too large for their bodies but their features were still small, neat, like entries written in a copperplate hand. The skin fit as neatly as a lady’s glove on their long fingers, not a bit of sag or jiggle or looseness.
The twins must have been so embarrassed by the shared blush that they studiously ignored Guy for the rest of their workout and skipped their shower and hurried off still in their sweaty shorts. Guy thought they might be models, very young models, and he wished he’d seen them naked. They must live nearby.
That night he talked to Pierre-Georges. It was a relief to speak in French — he got all of Guy’s allusions and shorthand and his muted sort of bitchiness. “Do you think Americans are vulgar? Like peasants?”
“Don’t insult our poor peasants,” Pierre-Georges said loftily.
“So you think French peasants are better than typical Americans?”
“You’ve been here too long to be able to say ‘typical.’ There are all kinds of Americans.”
“But they’re crude,” Guy protested. “They talk so loud and sprawl. There’s nothing tidy about them. They’re materialists — nothing spiritual or cultured.”
“Don’t forget you’re from Clermont-Ferrand, not Auteuil. People sprawl in your département. What’s gotten into you?”
“Why are we here in this awful country?” Guy wailed. While Pierre-Georges paused for him to elaborate, Guy collapsed under the weight of everything, his life, this country. Finally Pierre-Georges said in a soft, consoling voice, “Put on your new cashmere blazer and I’ll take you out to the Casa De Pré, you always liked that one.”
“What will we talk about?” Guy asked plaintively.
“Écoute,” Pierre-George said, vexed or pretending to be. “Listen — you’re exaggerating. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes. Don’t keep me waiting.”
“Forty-five?”
They ordered comfort food, a risotto with spring vegetables and a fruity bottle of Vouvray. Pierre-George sent the bread and butter back: too tempting. “Are you very sad about Andrés?”
Guy stared at Pierre-Georges and then just nodded gravely. Finally he said, “My life is such a mess. I thought it was supposed to be glamorous and enviable. That’s what Interview said about me: glamorous, enviable. That’s what After Dark said in its last issue in 1982: ‘Gay, glittery, and glamorous.’”
“Only you remember that,” Pierre-Georges said sourly.
“Yes, I’m sad. Crushed. I hate this country, with its puritanism and heartlessness and filthy diseases.”
“And that’s all Reagan’s fault, I suppose?”
“Whose?” Guy asked, genuinely not recognizing the name.
“Flute!” Pierre-George lisped. It amused him to sound like a flustered French matron and to use out-of-date genteel swear words. “You honestly don’t know who the president of the United States is?”