The Folding Star Read Online Free PDF

being obvious about him, so that his mates noticed me staring at him and he turned and made a gesture with his tongue behind his upper teeth. I couldn’t quite tell if it was mocking or provocative, it might have been the sort of insult mentioned bafflingly in Shakespeare. I was absorbed in my own excitement and unaware of the routine spectacle it presented to others: I followed him when he went to the lavatory, but he peed in the lock-up stall and I heard him hawking expressively as he did so. I hung back and looked in the mirror at Edward Manners, the pudging, bespectacled English teacher twice his age.
    Back in the bar and with another beer I had a man of flawless, dead good looks shift up to me and start talking with the banal sing-song that in the outside world would indicate a long and comfortable acquaintance and here was used as a short cut to a short one. There was something fascinating about his blond blandness, skin stretched over wide high cheekbones, long hair starting forward and then swept back in a layered and possibly lacquered wave. It was hard to guess how old he was: his skin was perfect, but when he smiled it crinkled into a hundred lines around his grey eyes. Otherwise he was oddly classless and unmarked by normal wear and tear. His clothing was casual and yet dressy: over the V of a T-shirt a pink chemise with buttons, pockets and epaulettes, and pleated bum-hugging slacks that appeared to shelter, down front, something of remarkable, even tedious length. When he told me he was a model, it all made sense.
    A man who is always smiling prompts a kind of mistrust. I wished Ty (as he absurdly claimed to be called) would allow himself more of the expressionlessness to which his features were suited, of which they were in fact the ideal expression. But he was orthodontically perfect as well, and perhaps he had calculated that that mattered more. Just how fastidious can you get? I asked myself and we danced together for a bit, though I broke off for a drink when a slow number was gloatingly announced by the DJ. I asked him what Ty was short for, and he looked at me as if I was being very silly, and said, ‘Just Ty!’
    We hung about together: though Ty was game for running through our earlier conversation a second time, and I pretended I couldn’t hear him through the noise of the music. He was obsessed by his career and seemed to feel destined for success in London, and that I would somehow be able to bring this about. It was all arranged that I was going to look at his portfolio and let him know what I thought. We seemed to roam back and forth over a boundary between the functional nonsense of pick-up talk and some other elaborate fantasy of his own in which he was obliviously involved, and which turned around extended fashion shoots in tropical countries, rewarded by enormous fees. I took notice, though, when he started talking about the boys in the shadowy table-booth across the floor. I had deliberately kept my back to them but turned with false casualness, ashamed to feel ashamed: I knew it would be the kid I’d fallen for that Ty was pointing out. And there he was, curled up with a skinnier, long-haired friend and eating his face in the laborious public way that adolescents have … leaving me eaten up too with envy and irritation. I swung back and muttered to Ty (I saw him uncertain if I was angry or joking); then kissed him, briefly, and got some consolation from that: he smiled, as if to say that his charm had now been acknowledged and succumbed to. We got another drink, and I was feeling quite drunk and had reached the stage of deciding to go with this guy, the all-too-common pragmatic decision. I was trying to see all that was best in him: the teeth, the skin, probably a good body worked on in gym and sunbed, which was more than I could offer, as was what he showed in his pants, and yet I felt entirely superior to him, with a kind of superiority I was too superior even to have given him a