“Come on, Guy, he’s my brother. Whatever is mine is his.”
“We don’t think that way in France. No French person would behave like that. He’s not well educated.” (Guy always made that mistake in English, “educated” for “brought up.”)
The other students at Columbia, after an initial show of friendliness, didn’t warm up to Kevin. When a shaggy guy with a Brooklyn accent asked him to join him and some other guys for a beer, Kevin said he had to hurry home. “Where’s home?”
“The Village.”
“Lucky guy. Where?”
“West Eleventh and West Fourth.”
“Wow, best address in New York. Your folks live there? Rent control?”
“No. A friend lives there. He owns the house.” Kevin started to pull away, not wanting to be interrogated further. He was proud to be living on that prime, leafy street with a man-in-a-million but it made him uncomfortable to be envied. He’d never gloried in his fate to a stranger and, unperceived, it was only the shadow of a reality. It scarcely existed. But if examined in depth he could easily be taken for a leech, a kept boy, a pariah with a secret. That could end up on his FBI record. Living a double life was possible in New York. Columbia was far from the Village, and other students rarely strayed south of Ninety-sixth Street. He never ran into anyone he knew from school. Manhattan was perfect for anonymity.
Isolated from his classmates, he spent many an evening with Guy and Vicente, sometimes with Chris or Chris and his spiky sarcastic girl. Guy would get a huge take-out platter of sashimi, though Betty said she wasn’t into slimy raw fish and she cooked up a package of ramen noodles in the kitchen. They all sniffed the microwaved beef broth covetously. “Look at you all, like bloodhounds pursuing a rabbit in heat,” she said, rat-a-tatting her mirthless laugh.
Guy said, “Studies show ramen noodles can cause heart attacks, especially in women.”
“Bullshit!” Betty shot back without a pause. “But go ahead, choking on your mercury-rich raw fish. Hey, Guy, studies also show deli-style roast beef is as low in calories as chicken or fish, that the fibers in beans and whole-grain rice cause people to absorb 6 percent fewer calories, and that microwaved potatoes stuffed with cottage cheese shrink fat cells, but far be it from me to suggest edible food to you hunger artists.”
Wearing his backward New York cap, Vicente smiled and touched his balls like a rapper. “This chick is fly,” he said with stoned approval and an open mouth that wouldn’t close. With the allowance Guy gave him he indulged in family-sized pizzas for himself alone at Famous Ray’s — and never gained an ounce. He was attending a local Catholic high school and working for two dollars an hour running errands for Pierre-Georges. He spent his entire salary on weed, which Betty obtained for him. He was a wake-and-bake guy who seldom let reality abrade him through his haze of cushioning smoke. He didn’t understand fully half of the things people said to him in English, but that was cool. He was content to have a roof over his head, and the weird maricóns didn’t molest him. The only thing he missed was pussy. Back in Murcia and again in Lackawanna he’d had enough pussy, but not here in New York. He figured with all the maricóns in New York there must be a lot of frustrated bitches with cobwebs in their cunts, but chicks here were kinda stuck-up. Maybe because he lived with two maricóns, girls thought he was one. He thought of his baggy jeans, baseball cap, gold necklaces, and unlaced shoes as fashionable, but he didn’t see many other dudes dressed like him. Maybe it made him look too young or poor. Bitches liked dudes with scratch. Best to smoke another blunt. He’d like an Asian bitch — they said their pussies were nice and tight and sideways.
Kevin felt they were all losers. Friendless. Going nowhere. Guy was a beautiful dumbbell. How many weeks had he been reading that novel, Sapho? And why a novel? You couldn’t learn anything from a novel. He loved Guy, but his life was vapid and empty and was careening toward a certain destiny and bitterness. Nor did he have the initiative to become a photographer or agent himself or to make an exercise video or to start a day spa or to learn hairdressing or to design men’s clothes — he’d never bothered to learn any of the ancillary arts of fashion.
Chris was just treading water working as a dishwasher until he went back to Ely to take over the family business. Why wasn’t he studying bookkeeping or getting a degree in business? Betty was so jaded, so knowing, so cynical that she couldn’t be a good influence on Chris. She wasn’t even that attractive. Maybe he couldn’t do any better with their small dick. He was glad he’d chosen to be gay, or if not chosen, at least ended up that way. Guy didn’t despise him for not being hung — and he could always take it up the ass. Chris was sitting on their “million-dollar ass” (that’s what Guy called it) and wasting it, just using their two-bit cock.
And Vicente? He was nice enough but pathetic, always stoned and always horny. (Kevin could hear his bed creaking through the locked door as he jerked off day and night — deep into the night.) He could smell the burning weed. Did Vicente want to go back to Spain, to what was surely drab little Murcia? What would he do there, in the unlikely event he landed a job? Air-conditioning repair? Garage mechanic? But even these careers needed some training, didn’t they?
How did they get saddled with this loser? That’s what Chris asked, and Kevin didn’t know how to answer him.
Kevin didn’t want to be held back by this band of layabouts.
He hated fashion. He hated its insistence on what was new rather than what was attractive. He was enough of a good Midwestern Lutheran to despise worldliness, especially in its most restless, nagging form: vanity. You could never be young enough, thin enough, trendy enough. He thought we should all be focused on serious, ultimate philosophical questions, and on the train he listened sneeringly to a long, loud conversation between two guys his age about the best watches or the most advantageous terms for a credit card. They seemed totally, hopelessly immersed in the here-and-now and all the tedium of late capitalist material culture. Guy was no better, in fact worse, because he brought to bear on his bad values his immense accumulated sophistication and at intelligence (superior wiliness, good memory, quick social navigating skills, the idealism of his passionate appetites). He obsessed over how to update his image, he, whose beauty was eternal and could span decades, and who should be pondering his immortal soul, not his next haircut.
And yet, Kevin reasoned, I am young and handsome, and I won’t be always. This is the time of my life for sex and beauty, and Guy is the living symbol of that. People see his swimsuit shots with his body sparkling with water (and glycerin), his hair pushed back, the comb lines visible, an angry look widening his eyes and searing his mouth, and they think he’s … deep, powerful as Jupiter, ready to hurl a thunderbolt, vengeful as Wotan — and it’s just silly old Guy, well, no, he has his moods and thoughts, sure, but they’re not as profound as his appearance. He looks so interesting, so full of passion, but he’s — well, not that.
When Guy tried to foist off on him the silly frippery he’d picked up at photo shoots, Kevin just handed it back wordlessly. In the past Guy had complained about the vacuity of his profession, but now he spoke of it defensively. “It’s an industry worth billions of dollars. It’s like food or tourism. Everyone wears clothes and eats and travels. At least everyone we’re likely to meet. And there aren’t any generic clothes.”