“Excuse me, what’s a nose?” Kevin repeated with a big smile. Guy winced. He’d never seen Pierre-Georges so revved up, virtually hysterical. Maybe it was the excitement of Paris or the Concorde, but it seemed like cocaine.
“A nose!” Pierre-Georges shouted. “Un Nez. The man who creates new perfumes.”
“Oh, I get it, like he’s a nose because he smells—”
“Are you retarded?” Pierre-Georges said, staring the boy down. “He’s a little retarded, no?” he said, addressing Guy.
“I guess when it comes to fashion,” Kevin said, smiling again, imagining he could conquer this Parisian viper with homegrown charm, “I am sort of retarded.”
“Obviously,” Pierre-Georges snarled without a moment’s hesitation, giving a sweeping glance at Kevin’s jeans and checked shirt and sneakers. “Who made your clothes — FAO Schwarz?” naming the children’s toy store.
Kevin laughed at that one, interpreting it incorrectly as a friendly if deadpan jibe. “That’s a good one, Pierre,” he said, imagining that was his given name and that Georges must be his last name. “You’ve been in the business for years and years.” Pierre-Georges cast his eyes to heaven. “Would you say I have any potential as a model?” Kevin had boldly put himself in the line of fire, something American parents taught their children to do.
“My dear, you have a certain naïf fraicheur, most appealing in bed, I’m sure, especially in the satanic embrace of an old master like this one”—and he jerked his head toward Guy—“but you’re too short for the runway, and for print you don’t have that je ne sais what that makes us dream, fantasize, that evokes the opera or silent movie stars or impossibly decadent aristocrats, enfin, you look like an American farmer, an uncultured pig farmer”—Pierre-Georges actually shuddered—“but lacking, how do I say? The necessary virility. Guy has told me you and your twin have very small verges, penises, which seems tragic for nature to have made the same mistake twice, I mention that only—”
“I never said that!” Guy sputtered. “I would never say that.”
“Enfin, you said his sex is touching, which means small, no?”
“It means large,” Guy said.
Now Pierre-Georges looked directly at Kevin. “You and your brother are identical? Maybe I could find something, Italians love blonds, they love wholesome, maybe because they themselves are so devious, so oily.”
Looking shattered by the discussion of his penis size but still resolutely smiling, unshaken in his belief in affability, Kevin said, “My brother isn’t really gay and he doesn’t want to be a model.”
“That’s all that was missing. But I’m not really concerned with these taxonomic distinctions,” Pierre-Georges said loftily. “I just thought L’Uomo Vogue might be amused by blond twins, but if you’re not interested …”
“Oh, I’m very interested, but Chris doesn’t even look that much like me now. He’s put on weight—”
Pierre-Georges shrank back in horror. “Another retarded,” he said, “destroying his youth.” And with that, he was out the door without so much as a peck on Guy’s cheek.
“Now, that’s what you call a vicious French queen. I never discussed your penis size—”
“Bet you did,” Kevin said, “at the beginning. I’ve heard the way gay guys talk at the gym. Nothing’s sacred. Not even my poor little penis.”
“Your penis is fine, I worship it.” And Guy fell to his knees and started nuzzling his crotch until Kevin pulled him to his feet.
“Chris told me I shouldn’t trust you, and he was right, but I love you anyway.”
Kevin brooded about his modeling prospects and all Guy’s lies, and more than once Guy overheard him talking on the phone with Chris in their strange shorthand punctuated with giggles. Guy gathered from Kevin’s end of the conversation that it must not be too flattering, since he lowered his voice whenever Guy entered the room. Yet Kevin, whenever he walked past Guy, couldn’t resist kissing him on the neck. It excited Guy that Kevin, when he wanted to make love, would perch beside him, say sweet things, and begin to touch him amorously; Guy figured that must be what girls expected, to be “warmed up,” and that Kevin’s experience must be entirely with girls.
They went out to Fire Island for a long weekend, as the lawyer had suggested. Kevin had never been there before and was impressed by everything — the ferryboat traversing the bay, all these suntanned, muscled men in baseball caps, pastel shorts, and silver necklaces carrying boxloads of red geraniums, the distant sound of the surf pounding on the Atlantic beach invisible just over the dunes, all these grown-ups pulling little red wagons over the raised wooden walkways, the tranquil regard of an unfrightened deer and her fawn in the sandy brush just a hand’s breadth away from the main path, the fantastical torqued shapes of the stylish houses mounted on unpainted stilts (“There’s Calvin Klein’s house, there’s Tommy Tune’s”), the absence of cars, and the sudden burst of cackling from unseen men already hard at drinks around a pool just behind that weathered wood fence, the extraordinary friendliness of everyone saying hello. At first Kevin suspected Guy must have slept with half these guys, but then he figured out everyone must be stoned or mellow — and that the walkways here were far more friendly than the streets of Manhattan.
At last they reached Guy’s house. He felt a bit like an intruder putting the key in the gate to the outer wall. Inside, the pool, filled and glittering, awaited them. Someone must be maintaining it, it looked clean, and water was bubbling at one end. It smelled of chlorine.
Inside, the house reeked of mildew and garbage. Flimsy aluminum beach chairs were stacked in the living room. Guy flung open the sliding glass doors after first lifting the obstructing one-by-twos in the metal floor doorframes.
Kevin was flabbergasted by how big and sunny and baronial the house was. Guy was checking that the lights worked and that the water could be turned on in the bathroom. Everything was functioning, and Guy wondered how the house had weathered the harsh winter without the pipes bursting. Was there a caretaker? Who was paying for the utilities? Could it be an automatic monthly deduction?
Guy took their bag into the bedroom and opened those sliding glass doors, too, and verified that there were sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom. Everything felt slightly damp. He could hear Kevin in the living room, carrying the folding chairs out to the pool and setting them up. A cool breath was sluicing now all through the house and the smell of brine had replaced the odor of rot.