Soon the other twin emerged from the locker room, showered and dressed, trailing a pine scent, unsmiling, one could almost say shy. He bade his brother farewell in a whispered mumble and was gone. He didn’t look at Guy.
“I don’t even know your name. I’m Guy.”
“Is that spelled as in ‘a guy’?”
“Maybe I should just say that.”
“Never!” the boy exclaimed. “You’re a foreigner?”
“French. Parisian.”
“You don’t meet many of those. Maybe you do in New York. We just moved here a week ago. We just moved here from Ely, Minnesota. I’m Kevin. My brother’s Chris.”
“I’ve never heard of Ely.”
“It’s just a small town in the north of Minnesota, near the Canadian border. It’s where people get outfitted for canoe and camping trips into the Quetico-Superior country, which is on the Canadian side.”
“Sounds cold.”
“It is!” Kevin exclaimed excitedly, as if to encourage what might be a string of lucky guesses. When one of the other men working out looked up and frowned at the offending chitchat, Kevin blushed again, though pink, not red, this time. Social chatter not connected with working out was looked at askance, as in a library.
“Right now it’s thirty-seven degrees in Ely. That’s what my mom said. We’re outfitters, right in the heart of town on Camp Street,” he whispered, looking around nervously.
“Are you foreigners, too? You don’t look American.”
“Oh, we’re Norwegian heritage. We went to Norwegian camp every summer. We can speak Norwegian, sort of. My sister married a real Norwegian ice hockey player and lives in Oslo now.”
“You look Norwegian.”
“You mean dumb?”
“Not at all, blond. Clean. Very clean.”
Kevin got that confused look in his eye again, but he braved it out with a bigger smile, determined to be in on the joke, if that’s what it was, at his own expense. “You mean clean as in boring?”
“Not at all,” Guy protested. “Just because I’m French doesn’t mean I’m nasty. I mean clean-handsome. Here, wanna do another set?”
“Okay.” Kevin stretched out on the board and lifted the barbell and did ten more repetitions, though he slowed down for the last two and out of exhaustion let the bar drift to the left. Guy moved in tighter in case he needed to help him. Kevin looked up Guy’s shorts.
After Guy did his set, Kevin whispered, “We’re the only young guys in here, did you notice?”
So he thinks I’m young, Guy thought, relieved.
They sat in the sauna for five minutes and then took their showers. Kevin had a high, hairless butt of a lunar whiteness; there was no trace of hair, not even in the crack. His penis was small, nested in the merest excuse of a pubic bush. His torso was scarily childish, which prompted Guy to ask, “How old are you guys?”
“In June we’ll be nineteen.”
They decided to grab a cup of coffee together in the restaurant on the ground floor, where an old man was patiently mopping the linoleum, filling the air with the nostril-tickling smell of Lysol. The waitress, hair high and peroxided, asked with a steel-drilling accent, “What can I get you boys?” and Guy liked her for including him as one of the boys and absolving him of being a child molester.
“So what do you do, Guy?”
“I’m a model.”
“Like in a fashion model?”
“Exactly.”
“Cool. Somebody wanted to photograph Chris and me for some fashion shoot, but in the nude, which Chris didn’t want to do. I’m gay but he’s not.”
“How strange. I thought you’d both be straight or both gay.”
“Well, we’ve both experimented with boys and girls, and yes, we have slept together, but only a few times, twice, actually, but Chris has decided he’s really straight and I think I’m really gay.”
American straightforwardness still astounded Guy. A European could take years to get there, but it just popped out of this Minnesota mouth with the lips like Froot Loops and the teeth like Chiclets. It was all so simple, so innocent, but Guy didn’t despise it, he could see Kevin was very pure.
“Don’t you know for sure if you’re gay? Haven’t you tried it with lots of fellows?”
Again the bloodbath blush. “I’m a virgin,” Kevin said, in a small, strangled voice, and Guy thought, irrationally, Of course, that’s why his dick is so small and his ass so rubbery, but that stupid theory evaporated in the first warmth of reflection. “Except fooling around with my brother those two times.”
“I see,” Guy said, stalling for time, wondering what he could say that would be appropriate and maybe consoling, though perhaps consolation wasn’t what was called for. “You were right not to do any nude shots.”
“Why?”
“Real models, professional models, don’t pose in the nude.” And Guy remembered how his own nude photos had ended in Blueboy all those years ago.
“Oh, really? Why not?”
“Swimsuit ads, possibly, maybe underwear, but not total nudity. It just lowers your prestige, I guess, your mystery.”
“Do you think I have some model potential?”
“It’s no fun. It’s not a good career for men. Maybe twelve men in the whole United States make as much as one hundred sixty thousand a year.”
“Do you think I’m handsome enough?”
“It doesn’t really have to do with looks. It’s whether you’re photogenic.”
“Am I photogenic?”
“We won’t know till you put together your portfolio.” Guy had found young guys were more hypnotized by an authority if he wasn’t entirely “supportive”; his reluctance to enthuse paralleled his own self-doubts. “But everyone treats models like you’re beef, like meat, interchangeable. They try to pay you with clothes, not money. It’s the girls who count, because it’s women who buy clothes and beauty products. They’re paid ten times more than us. And most of the population thinks we’re all gay, though most male models are straight.” Guy sighed. “It’s endless.” He cocked his head to one side. “You’re a little short. You have to be at least six feet tall, a size-forty jacket, a fifteen-inch neck. You have to fit into the clothes. Maybe for catalogue work they can pin the clothes here and there to fit, but for runway or fashion or editorial work you have to be a perfect size. The models are hired because the clothes fit them. You can’t be five-foot-eleven.”
“Do you think I have a good face?”
Guy whispered, “Angelic. Your jaw is a little strong, but that could be your trademark. I’d draw a little cleft into your chin to emphasize it.”
“You can do whatever you like to me.”
Guy hadn’t been openly flirting and was taken aback by the kid’s sudden flying of a white flag. “But you’ve really got to want it,” Guy warned. “You’ve got to pound the pavement for six months and accept rejection. It’s hard to be rejected. New York is all about rejection. They’re so fucking rude, photographers, art directors, casting agents. The client is the worst of all. Secretly they resent us for doing nothing and getting rich. That’s what they think. We don’t do anything in their eyes.”
Kevin scanned Guy’s face. “With those cheekbones I could get rich, I’ll bet.”
They made a date to work out together the same time the next day. Kevin’s brother, Chris, could barely look Guy in the eye, and he quickly absented himself to exercise on the other side of the gym.
“Did I say something wrong?” Guy asked.
“Naw, he’s doing legs and squats today.”
“Does he need us to spot him? Squats can be dangerous.”