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foreigner, though most Americans said they loved his accent, it was so sexy.
    The baron, whose name was Édouard, invited him to lunch the next day on his yacht—and he pointed to a massive boat moored and nearly extinct in the slip just beside them. Guy had noticed attractive men and women on the deck of the yacht just that afternoon. He asked, “What time?” Then he asked if he could bring a French-speaking friend.
    The little gymnast sidled up to Guy and said, “I see you’ve met Spare Parts.”
    “Who, Baron Édouard?”
    “We call him Spare Parts because he’s had so much work done on him and still looks like a toad.”
    “Toad?” Finally Guy deduced he meant a crapaud : That was probably said out of envy and jealousy.
    “Be careful of him,” the gymnast added. “He likes violent sex; you don’t want those pretty nipples stretched out. He’s also into fisting. Actually, he’s the slave, I think.”
    For once Pierre-Georges, whose instinct was to frown whenever Guy suggested an idea, smiled instead. “A baron? A yacht?” he asked, reassured they weren’t that far from Saint-Tropez after all.
    Guy had braced himself for a scary intimate lunch, but the yacht was flourishing with young hangers-on and the baron was only intermittently visible, fully dressed in captain’s whites. Guy thought he must be a clever seducer and was determined to imitate him when he was old—to bait the hook with lots of shiny lures. Walt was very much in evidence, making sure the bong was circulating, that the icy daiquiris were replenished, and the hot blue cheese pastries were being passed around, as well as the crudités with the delicious crab claws.
    Walt asked in a whisper, “Which of these boys do you fancy the most?”
    Guy shrugged but Walt persevered. “Seriously,” he said.
    Guy had spent so much time rejecting even the most handsome Americans that now it was difficult for him to pick someone. He was the one everyone else pursued; he was the commodity, not the consumer. But when Walt asked a third time, Guy murmured in a strangled voice, “That little blond in the neon-blue swimsuit.”
    “Jacky? He’s the biggest slut on the island and a major masochist. He’s always being chained to an abandoned refrigerator in the Meat Rack and we have to send someone at dawn to free him. Not that he’s ever anything but cheerful, whistling all the time. He’s a wannabe deejay.”
    So , Guy thought, the baron does like violent sex and surrounds himself with cheerful slaves —and Guy looked to see if Jacky’s nipples were deformed, and they did look sort of large and chewed-on, like cold gristle. But hold on , Guy said to himself. If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he entertain another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.
    There were lots of women present—well, three. They were a bit coarse, but the men paid court to them, as if gay men had been cut off from women for so long they reverted right away to their high school sissy-boy gallantry.
    After Guy’s second daiquiri the baron emerged from the cabin. Guy had closed his eyes for the moment against the sun, and when he opened them there was Édouard in the captain’s chair next to his deck chair. “You must be careful that perfect skin of yours doesn’t burn,” he said. “I could put some sunscreen on your back if you liked,” and he held up a little tube from Kiehl’s.
    “That’s extremely kind of you, but my friend Pierre-Georges has already coated me like a roast chicken in soft butter.”
    The baron didn’t laugh, which made Guy feel uncomfortable. He sipped his third drink, which he’d vowed not to touch.
    Édouard seemed so somehow honored by Guy’s friendship that he began to give all-male dinners for him—one in a three-story ferryboat that cruised up the Hudson at sunset with a hundred guests served by handsome waiters in short-shorts and orange work boots and black T-shirts silkscreened with the