Nude Men

letting her in, to my deep regret, because she lets out a loud scream when she sees the mess in my apartment.
    While she climbs up the stairs, I scramble to clean the filthiest things in the room, which almost always turn out to be my cat’s old vomited fur balls, lying in dried-out puddles of stomach fluid, like little orange sausages. There are usually about five of them, which I frantically pick up, sometimes even with my bare hands in the rush of it. I invariably miss one, which my mother invariably finds, and although I’m sure she knows exactly what it is, she goes down on her hands and knees, examines it from very close, and says, “What is that? It looks sad. Or dead. Is it a mouse? Oh, it must be your cat’s poopy. But no, it has no smell.” She then crawls over to the moldy, shriveled-up melon shells and shrunken avocado skins and, groaning, says, “Oh my God, I can't believe it, it stinks, it smells like the Antichrist... Etc.
    Thank God the last visit happened two weeks ago, which means I should have about six weeks of peace before her next one.
    When we talk on the phone, like tonight, she’s usually bearable and sticks mainly to asking me when we’ll see each other, although she does, naturally, lapse into a few criticisms of me and throws in some dull, nagging questions for free, like: “Have they promoted you yet?”
    “How’s it going with the goody-goody?” (her pet name for Charlotte) “Have you cleaned your apartment?” But these are too negligible to dwell on.
     
    T he following day my muscles are hurting like hell. Good. The exercises are finally being felt. The maggot is dying. The Ugly Duckling is turning into a swan. But when I look in the mirror, Jeremy the maggot is still there. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. You may think that there are no changes, but that’s where you’re wrong. There are tremendous changes, changes your untrained eye may not detect but that the expert eye of a painter of nude men cannot fail to notice.
    What’s this bullshit, Jeremy, what’s this bullshit? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. Just do the exercises and don’t think.
    And then I stop. I suddenly stop. I get a revelation. I realize that there is nothing in the world I can do between now and Saturday that will make a difference. And if I exercise too much I will have a very hard time posing, because my body will be in such pain.
    I feel helpless and depressed. That night, I buy potato chips and take my cat to the tiny park near the river, three blocks from my apartment. In the park, I let Minou walk on the ground, on a leash. Then I put her on my lap and just sit there, on a bench. A man, slightly drunk, probably gay, and probably trying to pick me up, says, “Is that a little dog?”
    “Yes,” I say, not wanting to arouse his interest by saying it’s a cat.
    “What brand?” he asks.
    I know perfectly well he means breed and is too drunk to know it.
    “No brand,” I say. “He’s a street dog. A bastard.” '
    “The best kind,” says the man, and walks away.
     
    S aturday afternoon I am taking a shower. It is three o’clock. At six I must be at Lady Henrietta’s apartment. My buzzer rings. “Who is it?” I ask.
    “It’s Tommy.”
    A minute later, he’s up the stairs, walking through my door. I am dripping wet, with a towel around my waist. I haven’t seen Tommy in a month, since before Christmas. He’s half American, half French, and he went to spend the holidays with his extremely rich family in France. He’s eighteen.
    “I had a horrible Christmas” is the first thing he says. “Why?” I ask.
    “My sister is a witch.”
    “Witch as in bitch or as in fairy?”
    “As in bitch.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    Tommy is one of my only friends. And I wouldn’t even call him a real friend, I don’t think. We are not equals. He’s way above me. I am certain the reason he likes me is that he thinks 0f me as his little curiosity.
    We met in a cheese shop, where he started talking to me for no apparent reason. I was uncomfortable with him from the beginning. I felt he considered my choice of cheese dumb. I thought he was laughing, or snickering. In any case, he was smiling. I asked for some Brie. I said I wanted a piece that was very ripe. I pointed to the piece I wanted. It was plump, with the inside bulging out. And apparently Tommy found something funny in that. He started talking to me, saying this was the best cheese shop in the neighborhood, and such