Our Young Man by Edmund White

stranger.”
    “They say you should know your partner’s name. Do you know the man’s name, the man who you were … indiscreet with?”
    “No, it was in the bushes, in the Meat Rack.”
    “Oh, dear.” The baron patted his hand. “I’m no one to talk. I specialize in anonymous sex. Though Will is making me mend my ways.”
    “Do you think we’re all doomed?”
    “Surely not. We eat well, we exercise, we never have a venereal disease for long. We have regular checkups—don’t you?”
    “Yes, but I don’t trust my gay doctor. He’s a feel-good doctor and a major masochist.”
    “Really?” the baron asked, rustling his neck like a mating partridge. “What kind of masochist is he?”
    “He had his testicles removed by a surgeon as his master looked on.”
    The baron’s eyes glittered. “That’s irreversible,” he said with satisfaction. He blinked and said, “In any event, I believe this gay cancer only hits men who’ve had repeated venereal diseases. Their immune systems are compromised, overloaded. We’re in no danger, especially a straight guy like you, I mean ex-straight.”
    “There we were, Guy and me, surrounded by some of the great beauties of the day, and both of us as wise as virgins. We were both afraid of GRID.”
    “What?”
    “Gay-related immune deficiency.”
    Édouard nodded vigorously.
    They went quiet after Will came in wearing beige calfskin suede trousers molded to his muscular thighs and butt, the fruits of thousands of squats. He seemed a bit drunk and more expansive than he’d been the only other time Fred had met him. He leaned down and pecked Édouard on the forehead and reached deliberately to pinch Édouard’s tit through the soft blue Egyptian cotton of his monogrammed shirt. The baron winced for a second and then smiled timidly up at his young-master-antique-dealer. “It’s nice to know a cutie like you is my property,” Will said. The baron darted a nervous glance at his guest—and then smiled at his owner. “Yes,” he said awkwardly, “very nice indeed.” He was such a social creature, produced by centuries of breeding, but nothing in his rich experience had prepared him for this moment. (He’d never mixed his evenings on the rack with entertaining his friends.)
    Back home, surrounded by staring, life-sized Buddhas, Fred made himself a scotch on the rocks and nervously rubbed his fingers together. Ceil had always hated that tic, the constant whispering sound of his fingers, and had put her hand over his at the movies when he started “pilling.”

4.
    In Paris, Guy felt relieved. He could speak the language with all its nuances and not endlessly play the part of the interesting foreigner. At the same time his accent didn’t prompt a discussion. He was just another Frenchman. He had lost his primary accomplishment—the ability to speak English (which he spoke better than he understood)—and the oddity of his identity, of being French in America.
    He was just one more handsome man in a whole city of handsome men—handsome if you liked skinny guys with big noses. The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other’s shoes than their sexual availability. It was raining a cold rain but never for long, and you could duck from one awning to the next or from an expensive café to an even more expensive shop. It was hard to believe that just two weeks before, he’d been lying in the warm September sun in a deck chair. Now he’d been repatriated to Paris’s eternal mists.
    Andrés had come with him and was staying with him at the Crillon in a room that looked out on the place de la Concorde, a “square” only in the abstract sense that it was a huge space excavated out of the city around it but was curiously open on three sides.
    Andrés liked to have sex four or five times a day. Maybe because Guy had resisted him all summer long and had just stared at that big erection in the green Speedo, now that it was released it was