If Kevin never took a break and hurtled through his days, Vicente ambled through his, only occasionally realizing he was late for school or his office job. He was hoping his mustache would be a pussy-magnet and he couldn’t wait for it to grow in. Vicente was troubled by Guy’s entranced staring at him, when the Frenchman would get tears in his eyes; the maricón wasn’t falling for him, was he?
The tears were due to Guy’s tender concern for Andrés’s nephew and his fear that he wasn’t being strict enough or affectionate enough or stern enough or indulgent enough. And what kind of example was he setting for a provincial Catholic Latin boy? Discussing fripes (clothes) and pipes (blowjobs) with Pierre-Georges and makeup innovations with Lucie, the things she was doing to her female models. (“A carmine smudge at the middle of the mouth and then a fade toward the corners, a very high ponytail wrapped in a sheath, bleached eyebrows, and blue shadows above the upper lids.”) She said she was longing to make Guy’s hair wet, wet, as if he’d just emerged from the shower. Vicente had to listen to all this the way a scholar’s son might have to hear a Greek classic being discussed or a broker’s nephew might listen to the relative merits of stocks and bonds — or as a priest’s nephew might hear of the spiritual nourishment afforded by the Eucharist. And then to see Guy and Kevin embrace and kiss — that couldn’t be a healthy influence on a normal teenage boy.
Vicente always hung around when Lucie came over. He liked black women, though he’d never been with one; apparently they were as passionate as men and their pubes were as rough as steel wool — and the guy at the pool hall had said they had big purple nipples and liked it up the ass. The only thing that irritated Vicente was that Lucie treated him like a lovable kid; she went so far as to ruffle his hair and tickle him. Sometimes he thought she saw him as a miniature collie — loyal, attentive, not very smart, always smiling, ready to go. He wanted her to see him as a big, sexy man with a mustache, but she’d hug him and nuzzle him and talk baby talk to him.
When Guy went to the Bahamas for a swimsuit shoot, Kevin realized he’d become addicted to his lover’s body. He’d jerk off three or four times a day picturing his wonderful face with his look of being a surprised, truant lad, as if his father had just snapped on the basement light when he was about to steal a shot of whiskey. Or he looked like a poacher caught in a cop’s flash, with his little jug ears and violet slash of a mouth and startled face, everything flattened out by the scorching light, his hand aiming the shotgun at the large, furry, unidentifiable ruminant. And Kevin would mold in the air the perfect curve of Guy’s ass, its unexpected warmth and give, the way his own hand looked so tan and masculine against that trim expanse of plush buttock. And he’d nuzzle it and feast on the hole that tasted bitter but smelled calmly rural.
He was young, goddamn it, and it was only normal he’d trick with those hot numbers in the locker room who sprang boners as he toweled off — but he dared not. He had to be faithful, for the sake of Guy’s health and his own. If he cheated he’d have to tell Guy, and there would go his unimpeded access to that glorious dark muscled glove, which had become the lodestone of his days, the sanctum he longed to breach and enter and lodge in. What did they say in art history class that Courbet called his cunt painting—The Origin of the World? Maybe Guy couldn’t give him babies, but Kevin would keep trying. He knew that with his small dick gays would typecast him as a bottom. (The guys in the gym stared at his ass, and one fellow even whistled looking at it when he dropped his towel.) Only Guy turned over for him or lay between his strong, gold-dusted legs and licked his balls. Crazily enough, Kevin was certain his cock had gotten thicker and longer since he’d been topping Guy. Whereas as a fat boy of twelve and thirteen he’d seen his body as womanly, Rubenesque, and in the bathroom he’d posed with his dick squeezed and hidden between his legs, a towel-turban around his head, his mother’s lipstick smearing his mouth, and had considered this zaftig caricature as his only option and found it at once excitingly transgressive and depressing, now he saw himself as a stud with narrow hips, a prominent, muscular chest, a thick neck, and took consolation in what he’d heard a straight guy say in the gym: “It’s not the size of the nail that matters but how you use it.”
Important as his new manhood was to him, Kevin acknowledged that Guy held the only key to it. When he went alone to a gay bar — Ty’s on Christopher, for instance — men who were a little sauced chatted him up and automatically reached for his ass. “That’s some caboose you got on you,” while guiding Kevin’s hand to the hardness behind the fly. Even younger, shorter boys ended up gliding a hand down the back of his jeans and fingering his hot hole; he wondered if he was emitting the wrong pheromones, and all this in a gay world where he’d heard 90 percent of the guys were bottoms. How did he attract all these tops? The worst of it was that if he ever were to disregard the health risks and bag a bottom of his own, the guy would probably laugh out loud at his little dick.
He liked being the man but he suspected only Guy could take him seriously in that role. He was wedded to Guy — for his health, through love, and by his determination to be the top. Guy was always available, a heady, expensive flower he could pick and inhale anytime, day or night. One time out of ten Guy would fuck him, but even then Guy wanted to flip at the end and feel Kevin in him. Just as Kevin seemed more and more addicted to Guy, in the same way Guy seemed increasingly besotted with Kevin’s cock, unimpressive though it might be. In the morning Guy would back up against him; Kevin would bop up to piss and then return to his waiting man.
For he never thought of Guy as anything other than masculine, albeit a refined, European, pricey version, and it was Guy’s generosity of spirit that kept his body constantly on tap. There was nothing slutty or depraved about Guy. He was a man without affectations or irony, someone who studied the world with the same simplicity with which he posed for the camera.
To be sure, he knew at all times how he looked, the impression he was giving, how he came off. That was his genius, to know what he looked like to other people. Most guys, even models, waited until strong inner feelings bubbled over, then they flailed about or trembled or hee-hawed with lots of sincerity but no objectivity. Guy was objective; he could triangulate himself through someone else’s gaze (or the camera’s). He didn’t care about what he was feeling. He cared about only what he appeared to be feeling. Just as gifted actors, bland airheads in real life, can appear philosophical, troubled, or tragic on-screen, in the same way Guy could come across as leonine, contemptuous, or seductive to the camera, even if he was only worrying about having clean laundry for tomorrow’s trip to Milan.
Kevin and Guy flew back to Ely for Thanksgiving. It was a nuisance to get there, with two stops (Philadelphia, Minneapolis) and ending up in Hibbing, an hour away from Ely.
They were traveling with Chris. They now looked so different no one stared at the resemblance. Chris was ten pounds heavier and had long shaggy sideburns and had put on a bright yellow jacket, an old one from high school days, so that he looked as if he had never left the Boundary Waters and was escorting his younger city-slicker cousin and his friend to northern Minnesota for the first time.