He kept checking with the hotel reception to see if a letter had arrived for him. He realized that after all these years he didn’t have Pierre-Georges’s number or that of Guy’s mother. He thought, Does this mean I’m alone in the world? Have I lost Guy? Has he just vanished? Surely he wouldn’t do that to me. Has he been in an accident?
Kevin only permitted himself to ask if there was anything for him at the front desk four times a day; he hoped a new shift of clerks would mean the same person wouldn’t witness his abjection. One of them, a guy, seemed Cuban or Puerto Rican, and Kevin tried out his Spanish on him successfully.
At last there was an envelope in Kevin’s box. Guy’s handwriting. He sat on the edge of a salmon-pink tabouret right there in the clamor and confusion of the lobby.
My angel,
I’m not coming. I’m going back to Andrés and we’re returning to Murcia with Vicente, who may stay with us for a while. Vince’s mother passed — but you already knew that.
I realized that I didn’t really want to go to South America. The harsh climate would destroy my already fading complexion, which is wilting rapidly as you may have noticed. And despite the attentions I receive from the same man in Chelsea who keeps Renée Fleming eternally young, a few gray hairs have pushed through, hardy things!
You’d wake up one morning with an entirely gray and faded Guy beside you. The Curse of Quito! To live with a man is already a handicap, as your doctor Blumenstein pointed out to me at the graduation party, but to live with an old man never helped anyone at the dawn of his career.
You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure? I may not look my age, but the age I look is the one you’ve fallen in love with. And real old age is no joke; it demands stoicism and commitment on the part of the caregiver.
Andrés sacrificed seven years of his life to me. Anyone who loves me that much deserves to have me, even though the prize may not be worth much after all. Because of me he never finished his doctorate and he’s sunk an entire social class. Worse — he’s become a criminal, not just poor. His life in many ways is over. You may not understand this. As an American you imagine anything is possible and cannot see that every year another dozen possibilities are closed to us. As two Garlic Belt figures, Andrés and I are realists — about our status as an ex-con and a former beauty queen. We just want a quiet, nearly anonymous life now. Picture us with Vince as three tall sad men who go out walking through Murcia every night after dark.
I’ve always felt the life force throbbing through you — that and your extraordinary intelligence, your ability to analyze and synthesize everything you encounter. I worship you and the more I’ve known you the more I’ve come to revere you. You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile. If you ever feel like it, cut a thatch of your pubic hair and mail it to me in Spain so I can smell it while jerking off. I’ll send you an address.
Pierre-Georges once said I was like a black hole in space. What does that mean? That I shape the outcome of events but don’t really exist? That people project whatever they want onto me, which works since I’m such a nullity?
You may hate me but you shouldn’t. I made a man out of you, or rather found the man in you lurking behind the boy and nurtured him in a world given to stereotypes. I made you my man. I even taught you some French. And I kept you safe from AIDS — and kept you, fed you, sat on your dick. I’m most proud of you of all the things and events and people in my life — I gave you the right setting to survive and prevail.
Please forgive me for disappointing you. It won’t be long before you find some black-haired hidalgo. They go for blonds down there, whom they call rubios.
Your Guy
Kevin wept for an hour and then called his brother. He felt older and wiser — but in what way wiser?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Keith McDermott and Leo Racicot for helping me prepare the manuscript; Michael Carroll for advising me on every word; Brad Gooch for sharing his memories of modeling with me; George Miscamble for giving me an insider’s view of modeling; my editors at Bloomsbury, Michael Fishwick and Anton Mueller, for their unfailing wisdom and enthusiasm; my agent, Amanda Urban, who is a great editor in her own right as well as the best representative a writer could ask for. I am also grateful to my copy editor, Dave Cole, for saving me from a thousand embarrassments. I alone am responsible for the mistakes of fact, chronology and understanding in the book. Didier Malige was kind enough to give me his responses, not always positive.
Rick Whitaker and David McConnell kept me going with their encouragement.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including the classic A Boy’s Own Story and, most recently, Jack Holmes and His Friend, as well as the memoirs My Lives, City Boy, and Inside a Pearl. He is also known as a literary biographer and essayist. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.