But by the third day at home he’d regressed to his old self — sleepy, idly cruel, loud, vain. He hated this transformation, but it was stronger than he was. Just as his homosexuality seemed tenuous when his twin was straight, in the same way his New York self seemed very fragile, if he could revert to his Ely boorishness so quickly. He liked to take walks with Guy every day at least once, hoping fresh injections of civilization would awaken his slumbering new identity. Guy didn’t pick up on any change in him, but after talking to him Kevin felt more alert, more refined, more alive intellectually, as he did after reading Nietzsche, as if he weren’t just a rube but a thoughtful, gentle man, sensitive to paradoxes and denser, finer distinctions. Even if Guy wasn’t that smart, at least he was sophisticated.
He tried not to be a snob who missed the point of Ely — its towering pines, its frank bonhomie, its easygoing acceptance of all kinds of people. His parents, Sally, his other high school friends, were slow to criticize anyone. Were they really that tolerant, or did they just think it was rude to point out jarring differences? Were they moral or were they polite?
Guy wanted to see the nearby Indian reservation, but when they drove there he was disappointed. As a child he’d played cowboys and Indians, but on the reservation there were no feathers or horses or peace pipes, just humble little houses and nearly empty streets and a few old, rusted-out parked cars. Guy looked at Kevin and fluttered his hand in front of his mouth and gave a feeble war whoop with raised, questioning eyebrows. Kevin shook his head.
When Kevin criticized his parents for being hicks, Guy pretended not to understand. “They’re lovely people,” he’d say, getting a faraway look in his eyes. In truth Guy was bored and wished Pierre-Georges would phone recalling him to New York and a “fabulous” new assignment.
Guy worried that his career was slowly coming to an end. He’d been up for a McDonald’s commercial in which he’d been paired with a new, hot girl, a Slovenian eighteen-year-old. She had a porcelain complexion, lustrous hair, tiny hands — and in the test shots Guy looked much older. Not his age, but older. The cameraman remembered him from years ago, his first U.S. commercial for Pepsi. The female stylist said, “They don’t really … go together.” He hadn’t gotten the job. Pierre-Georges muttered that the Slovenian was a “cow.”
Kevin rode behind Sally on her snowmobile down the obliterated roads, visible only because of the clearings through the trees. He clung with his gloved hands to her strong body in its red coat and he enjoyed the mindless sensation of speeding through the glittering cold and banking for a turn in the path. He felt nothing erotic, as he might have if the driver had been a man (as he’d once felt in high school holding on to a handsome motorcyclist he barely knew), but he liked that Sally was in control and was steering them through this white paradise, half of which her family owned.
When they came back to his house for lunch they were quick to shed their gloves, boots, and outerwear, and Kevin’s mom handed them each a stein full of mulled cider — sweet, hot, and fragrant, with an immersed cinnamon stick. As they sat around the square table with its oilcloth covering, Kevin could see Chris was looking at Sally with a new acuity, as if she were no longer a habit but a possibility. She was even polite to Guy — or polite in a Midwestern way of asking him lots of personal questions, which usually made the French bristle. Was she extending herself toward Guy because she thought he was going to be a permanent part of their lives? “What’s it like to be a model?” she asked. “To hang out with some of the world’s most beautiful women?”
10
The years went by. Chris moved back to Ely, married Sally, managed the conjoined family businesses, but they kept separate bedrooms and had no children. This seemed to be according to the terms they’d worked out. Kevin and Chris called each other every day at least once, sometimes just to say, “How are you keeping? Nothing to report on this end,” and hang up. Every two months, at least during the winter months when they weren’t that busy, Chris flew to New York and stayed with Betty. Kevin assumed his brother was supporting her, now that he was rich. At least he couldn’t see how she was surviving otherwise. Now that she had her degree in film from NYU, all she seemed to be doing was to write one or two short movie reviews for Interview. How much could that pay? A hundred bucks? She was also giving a literary tour of the Village once a week, visiting Edna St. Vincent Millay’s skinny wooden house, and pointing out E. E. Cummings’s and Djuna Barnes’s entranceways on Patchin Place. But her tours seldom had more than ten paying clients.
Chris seemed happy enough. His fingernails were always dirty and ragged and his palms callused. He said he was busy all winter long repairing things — the canoe shed, the outboard motors, the dock, their house and their parents’, the cabins they rented out in the summer. He had a lean, energetic old Indian fellow to help him, especially with the canoes. Chris liked him because he didn’t talk much and stayed busy all day long and knew outboard motors. Sally kept the books and did all the ordering of the staples and tents they sold or rented out to canoe parties entering the Quetico-Superior country. Their Indian helper would drive the hundred miles into Duluth to load the trunk up and bring it back.
Sally, Chris said, was affectionate and would let him stretch out on the couch, his head on her lap. Once she’d said, “I love the way the firelight plays on your golden hair. It lights it up in front and back here on the crown. I can see where people got the idea of haloes.”
As far as Chris knew she was still a virgin, and on their anniversary each year she wore her white wedding gown, but only for him. Their business was flourishing. Fewer and fewer people actually wanted to paddle these days; more and more relied on outboards. The weather was getting warmer year by year, which was good: It made their rental season longer. More and more first-timers were renting; it was hard to convince them to clean up after themselves after they broke camp, and the Indian traveled once a week in his power boat filling up three or four plastic garbage bags. Some folks from New York had actually shot a loon and tried to eat it; they’d even complained it was all oil and bones. Sally told them killing a loon was illegal.
With Chris out of his life (except for the daily calls), Kevin felt lonely. Yes, he had Guy, but Guy was — what was that French word he’d learned—insaisissable? Elusory?
Kevin graduated from Columbia and Georgetown at the top of his class. It had always been assumed that Guy would accompany Kevin on his first diplomatic assignment.
One day, a week before Andrés was meant to be released, at eleven fifteen in the morning, he walked through the door to the Greenwich Village apartment. He found Guy asleep in bed beside a beautiful blond guy who had his head on Guy’s chest. Andrés looked at them for a full minute, without making a sound — he’d learned to be stealthy. Tears poured down his impassive face, scorching lines over the tattooed letters on each cheek, the G and the Y on his face, the U on his forehead, Guy’s name. He felt so stupid having expected a joyous surprise and welcome at his homecoming. He’d not been smart enough to realize that a star (an ageing star) like Guy would need some trophy boy in his arms. Sure, he himself had not been that faithful in prison, but coño, he’d had no other pleasures except working out and jerking off over and over till he went limp. And talking for hours to his idiotic cellmate about the guy’s wife and making dumb things in shop.