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baron’s coat of arms in silver. Édouard was careful to toast Guy, the guest of honor. Otherwise he didn’t pester him. The ship didn’t turn around and return to the Battery until midnight; by then many of the boys had paired off and mounted to the top, darkened deck. Guy stayed below chatting with two of his new friends. In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a “friend”—Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.
    At another dinner, equally large and lavish, they were served again by the boys in micro-shorts and orange work boots, but this time their midriffs were exposed. Guy’s mother was in town and she was the only woman present among a hundred A-list homosexuals, who were all courtly to her, though Guy got tired of translating their inanities: “Gee, oh, wow, it’s really neat to meet Guy’s mom,” to which his mother said anxiously to her son, “What did he say? What did he say? Oh. Tell him it’s a true honor to meet one of my son’s colleagues.”
    “What did she say? Seriously, what did she say?”
    At least the baron was unctuous with her and spoke to her his most ancien régime French; Guy’s mother, in her neck-twisting, unsmiling way, was distinctly flirting with Édouard, though that was imperceptible to anyone not in her immediate family. She drank too many foamy grasshoppers and seemed not to register she was the only woman present; at least she didn’t comment on it when Guy led her back to her midtown hotel, the Warwick, which they both pronounced in the American, not the English way.
    Édouard told Pierre-Georges over the lunch he’d invited him to at the Côte Basque that he would give anything, pay anything, to sleep with Guy just one night. Of course, he realized Guy might be shocked by the baron’s bodily disarray; Édouard was under no illusion about how unpresentable he’d become. Very few men of his generation could undrape becomingly, and he knew he wasn’t one of them. Since Guy seemed to fancy Jacky, the boy could be introduced into the repast to make it more palatable.
    The whole conversation, which excited Pierre-Georges as much as it made him uncomfortable, since he had no polite precedent for such an exchange, was duly reported to Guy. “I suggested you had your heart set on a sky-blue Mercedes convertible but that garage fees made contemplating the purchase of a car unimaginable, given that a parking space in Manhattan was as dear as an apartment in Paris.”
    “You just sold my immortal soul for a car and a parking lot without consulting me?” Guy wailed. Everything was rushing by. It seemed to him his life limped along and then went into unexpected spurts.
    “I’m consulting you now. Did I do wrong? A Mercedes is fairly expensive.”
    Guy sipped his Diet Coke. At last he said sullenly, “No.”
    “What?”
    “I said no, you did nothing wrong. What did he say?”
    “Édouard just blinked and smiled. I suggested you had a saint’s day coming up. Then we spoke of other things. Your career. He offered that Zoli is a personal friend and he could make an introduction.”
    “But you’re my agent,” Guy objected. He looked out the window at the gingko tree. It was July, but the summer evenings weren’t as long as they were in Paris.
    “He could be your agent and I could be your manager. Zoli’s the top agent for men.”
    Guy worried that he’d have to give Zoli his statistics to be printed next to a new head shot—and would he give his real age: thirty? People said he looked twenty—maybe he’d say he was twenty-two, though Zoli was no fool and might call him on it. A little research would turn up all those French ads from ten years ago; of course, Guy could always say that had been a look-alike older brother, now selling sports equipment in a shop in Épinal.
    Guy was groomed by Didier Malige, who Pierre-Georges said was the world’s most exclusive hairdresser. New hair and a new facial regime by