“Jeans? T-shirts? Sweatshirts?”
“Designer jeans are a huge market, perhaps the biggest. The same basic design is changed slightly and branded with a famous name and the price is quadrupled. Come on, you’ve read your Roland Barthes.”
In fact neither of them had read Barthes, though Guy had had an admirer in Paris years ago who frequently quoted the Mythologies at him, and Guy imagined he’d got the gist. Now, apparently, Barthes was démodé, though students in America still referred to him. American profs didn’t keep up to date but clung to the thinkers they’d known since they got tenure: Derrida, Foucault, Barthes … America was the attic of French culture, and Guy was worried that over here he’d fallen behind, surrounded by all this old stuff.
Their old, lazy ways had changed. Now they awakened at seven in order to get both boys — Vicente and Kevin — fed, caffeinated, and off to school. Kevin suspected that Guy went back to bed, since he subscribed to the superstition that he could preserve his looks by sleeping eleven hours a night — like the Mexican movie star Dolores del Río. Well, he’d earned it. But there was something about the way he lay as rigid as a king in his pyramid, cucumber slices on his eyes, dried mud on his face, plugs in his ears, glistening cream on his knees and elbows — oh, he wanted to take a picture of that, Narcissus in his countinghouse! That would startle his fans and his clients. But why? Surely they didn’t think it was all spontaneous and natural, no matter how often photographers showed him on the beach against storm clouds, the fan blowing his straightened and lightened hair, his perfect teeth exposed in his hourly-rate smile, everything out-of-focus except the Rolex on his wrist or whatever product he was hustling. You could say about Guy that he looked great — and looked like himself! — from every angle.
Betty told them in a casual, amused, almost indifferent way that Vicente wasn’t going to school but hanging out at a pool hall she walked past every morning on Forty-first Street on her way to work. He was usually wearing a goofy, stoned smile at ten in the morning and seemed overdelighted to see her — or maybe anyone he knew.
“Boy, he’s going to get it!” Guy exclaimed, trying to be very American. (Rage in French sounded feline and perverse; only in English did it sound unaffected and tough.)
“Why?” Betty asked innocently. “Poor kid. He told me he doesn’t understand anything at Sacred Heart — trig and essays on Native Americans and Shakespeare. At least he has some friends at the pool hall.”
“You’ve obviously given up on him,” Guy said. “I haven’t! I promised his uncle I’d educate him.”
“Oh, his uncle? The jailbird?”
Guy wanted to strike her, but he just bit his lip and left the room. “Did I say something wrong?” Betty asked Kevin.
“About ten things. But he’ll simmer down.”
Guy hired a tutor for Vicente, a shaggy, thick Columbia student named Henry, gay but masculine in an unconscious, unstudied way, a young man who seemed mature because black lustrous hair was sprouting over his white T-shirt. He sounded as if he had a permanent cold or allergy in his immense nose, as though it were too large to function properly. He was a nice guy studying architecture who had a very male lack of interest in people, their foibles and interests and background stories. He discussed late Renaissance churches in Venice, for instance, with no curiosity about when or why they’d been built or by whom; he concentrated only on the volumes and the solutions to problems, as if San Giorgio had been built yesterday.
His indifference to everyday dramas was useful, as it turned out, since he wasted no time on Vicente’s sad tales about his dying mother or his uncle in prison or his black aunt in Lackawanna. He just shrugged with his heavy shoulders and wiped his huge nose with a dirty handkerchief and went back to the math homework. Vicente was usually too stoned to understand what he was saying so patiently. He’d figured out Henry was a maricón too and he even asked him about that, but Henry said, “We could talk about that, but it would lead us rather far afield. Now, let’s look at these numbers.” He was even indifferent when Vicente staged getting out of the shower at the moment Henry arrived one day.
One Friday, Guy accompanied Vicente up to the Otisville prison in the bus. He knew that only Vicente was slated to visit Andrés today but he hoped to coach the boy on what to say and what to omit. “Andrés doesn’t know anything about Kevin. Certainly not about Chris. Don’t mention them. Just say you and I spend evenings alone looking at your homework. You can say I’ve hired Henry to help you. You can say you’re working for Pierre-Georges a few hours a week — he’ll like that. Don’t mention Betty — that will just trap you into talking about Chris. Don’t mention the pool hall — that will be our little secret. Don’t discuss maricóns with him. That will only irritate him.”
Things went smoothly, it seemed, but Vicente was by turns evasive and taciturn, and finally he admitted that Andrés accused him of being stoned, with pupils as big as quarters. He’d lectured Vicente about the importance of working hard with a clear head and being grateful to Uncle Guy for all he was doing for him and making sure he didn’t end up like him, Andrés, a loser jailbird. They had talked briefly about Andrés’s sister, Vicente’s mother, and how she was suffering, and Andrés had had to wipe away a tear. Vicente had liked his uncle and had specially liked his way of speaking Spanish in such an educated manner that reminded him of his mother — and then Andrés would break into a real ghetto English for a phrase here and there, and English that sounded like his own, which he’d picked up from Mohammed in Lackawanna. Andrés spoke Spanish like a maricón but English like a man.
For a few days after the trip to Otisville, Vicente tried to straighten himself out. He didn’t wake-and-bake, he wasn’t late for work with Pierre-Georges, he actually did the homework Henry assigned, but he just couldn’t understand math or write an essay on Native Americans. (He’d never met one, though he’d seen plenty of cool Indians in the movies scalping everyone.) Soon he was softening the blow of failing by smoking again and rattling his bed dreaming of pussy, and bopping around through his day with his lopsided grin. He would try to stay in with the two maricóns in the evening to do his homework, but he never knew where to begin, and besides, he couldn’t concentrate. Studying was so maricón.
He was amazed by how much money the maricóns wasted — how they’d buy exotic fruits and vegetables. (He’d never even heard of white eggplants before, which Guy liked to leave in groupings on the dining room table as “décor,” or tiny, translucent champagne grapes.) They never cooked meat and potatoes or rice, the only things Vicente liked to eat other than burgers or pizza. They were endlessly serving raspberries without sugar for dessert and unbuttered popcorn for snacks. Vicente was always hungry!
And yet Guy was fond of the impossible boy. After all, in his veins ran Andrés’s blood; his long, skinny body was a rough draft of the Spanish Christ his uncle had become. When Guy stuck his head in Vicente’s room he was overwhelmed by a stronger version of the family stench.
Whereas Guy hovered over Vicente like a parent and worried he wasn’t dressing warm enough or taking his vitamins or concentrating when Henry coached him, Kevin appealed to the boy more because he was categorically indifferent. Between the gym and his studies and the long, grueling nights of fucking Guy, Kevin had every second budgeted, and when Vicente would launch into a rambling story about his job delivering paella on a motor scooter back in Murcia, Kevin kept glancing at his watch — oh, sorry, it was his turn to shop and cook tonight and he had a twenty-page paper due on Friday, something about George F. Kennan’s interpretation of the inevitable U.S. — Japan conflict in World War II, and Kevin was out the door, abandoning Vicente in midsentence. The boy was trying to grow a mustache and he studied it for the next half hour in a mirror, then got stoned to see how it looked if he was high. (Pretty cool!)