Jennifer Haigh (19 page)

"Billy, he wants to see you. And he's lonely. He hasn't been himself since Deena left."

"I can't believe you said I was coming."

"Why are you being so stubborn?" said Gwen, the most stubborn creature on earth.

"I'm not stubborn."

"Billy." Her voice was very small; she had gone into wheedling mode. "Please?"

"Seriously, I can't. I'm on call Wednesday."

Sri looked up from his puzzle, his lips twisted in amusement.

"Oh," said Gwen."Well, why didn't you say so?"

"I forgot."

Sri rolled his eyes.

Gwen sighed."Then I guess I'll see you at Mom's. Can you come early, at least? Don't leave me alone with her." Gwen paused."And tell Srikanth I said hello."

"Will do," said Billy, and hung up the phone.

"You are the worst liar in the world." Sri scratched idly at the crossword with a ballpoint pen. In ten minutes the boxes would be filled.

"Me? You have no idea what you're writing there. They're just random letters. You're lucky I can't read your Hindi handwriting."

"I'm just trying to impress you," said Sri.

"I'm already impressed."

Sri smiled. He was stunningly handsome when he smiled; knowing this, he deployed the smile sparingly. It was as if he'd spent his life surrounded by mirrors, so accurately did he gauge the effects of his good looks.

"What's happening Wednesday?" he asked.

"Gwen's going to Boston. To see my dad."

"Ah." Sri waited for Billy to continue. Then, when he didn't: "You don't want to go."

"Jesus, why would I? One day at my mother's is punishment enough," said Billy."You know all this."

"I do?"
I'm listening
, his tone said—but it was an invitation, not a demand. Billy loved this about Sri: his coolness, his subtlety. There were no scenes with him, none of the high opera Tom and Richard sometimes engaged in, or the confusing emotional tango Billy had stumbled through, years ago, with Lauren McGregor.

"I saw him a few years ago," Billy said. "I didn't particularly enjoy it."

This was a gross understatement. That dinner in Concord—the first time in a decade his parents had suffered each other's company—had been excruciating for all concerned. All but Billy's brother, Scott, whose return to New England had occasioned the debacle. When Scott arrived with his noisy tribe, he was already bleary-eyed; he disappeared periodically into the guest room to fire up a joint. While the rest of the family bled, Scott had wandered through the day in a fog.

(Typical! Years ago Billy had given his brother a nickname:
Scott Free.
)

Their father, for some unknowable reason—sadism? childish spite?—had brought his then-girlfriend Deena. Paulette, unprepared for this bombshell, was icily polite; Deena made the best of a bad situation by drinking an entire bottle of Sancerre before dinner. She'd spent the evening sleeping it off in the guest room while Frank and Paulette glared at each other across the table.

"You never mentioned it," said Sri.

"It was before I met you," Billy lied.

"That's a long time."

"I guess so. I haven't noticed. I have nothing to say to him."

"Maybe he has something to say to you."

Undoubtedly this was true. Given half a chance, Frank would talk Billy into a coma, a hazard of thirty years in the classroom: a compulsion to lecture, an unnatural ease in one-sided conversations. Utter obliviousness to the listener's boredom, irritation, or outright rage.

"He only talks about his research," said Billy.

"Which is."

"Oncodevelopmental biology."

Sri raised his eyebrows. "This is a remarkable fact to keep quiet for so long."

Billy shrugged, rose to refill their mugs.

"It's fascinating, how gene-expression patterns that are normal in the embryo drive malignancy in the adult. Similar, really, to the dysregulated genes in heart disease. Too much Mef-two and whammo!"

Sri broke off. "Why didn't you tell me? I'd love to know more about his research. We would have a great deal to talk about."

That's why, Billy thought.

He'd met Sri at a conference in Toronto—nearly four years ago, before Billy joined his group practice, when life was simpler and they both had time to attend such things. Billy had registered at the last minute; he'd planned to spend that Monday running the Boston Marathon, but had been sidelined by an injury, a painful groin pull. He and Sri would laugh about this later, how they owed their meeting to Billy's groin.

Sri was an MD fellow at Columbia, giving a talk on myocardial transcription factors, a hot topic in the early nineties. Listening to him speak—the crisp British inflection, the public school accent—Billy had felt something move inside him. Sri's beauty would have been striking anywhere; but in a conference room full of decrepit old men, it seemed, truly, obscene.

Is he?
Billy wondered.

At the time—and even still—he had little instinct for such things.

The paper was received with enthusiasm; the team leader, a venerable professor at Columbia, was mobbed with questions. Sri stood off to the side, alone; Billy had a clear shot.
How do I do this?
he wondered. He had never approached a man before. The others—what few there'd been—had always come to him.

Sri's eyes, up close, were the color of coffee. His mouth looked firm and juicy, like a ripe plum. Billy's question, involving MyoD—the mother of all muscle-gene regulators—could have been answered in two minutes; but Billy surprised himself by suggesting a drink at the hotel bar.

They took a corner table, slightly secluded, two handsome young men in very good suits: Billy in Armani, Sri in a sand-colored linen Billy was dying to touch. He glanced around, feeling conspicuous. To his relief the bar was full of men sitting together, colleagues and coinvestigators winding down from the day.

Later, when they stepped into the elevator, Billy pressed the button for the fourth floor. "You're mistaken," Sri said softly. "I'm on five."

And just that easily, it was settled between them. Billy had never had to ask. Back in New York, they saw each other occasionally, then weekly, then every day. Their monogamy was spontaneous, accidental.

Neither had expected it, or insisted upon it. At the outset Sri had another lover, and Billy saw an old Pearse classmate he'd slept with sporadically since college. Matthew worked for the State Department in Barcelona; once a year Billy vacationed there, and spent the better part of a week in Matthew's bed. Since meeting Sri he'd visited Barcelona only once. Sri hadn't pressed for details about this friend, this Matthew, but his sly smile suggested that he knew all. Once, at a dinner party, Tom and Richard had raved about their own vacation to Barcelona.

Oh, Billy has intimate knowledge of Barcelona
, Sri had remarked.
He's crazy about Barcelona. He can't seem to get enough.

But that was years ago. Now Billy couldn't remember any skin but Srikanth's, any mouth, any smell.
I don't want anyone else
, he'd once told Sri.

Of course you don't
, Sri replied.
People irritate you. And you're terrified of change.

Even now, if Billy were to fall into bed with someone—a stranger from a bar or bookstore, the cute blond barista who flirted with him at Starbucks—it somehow wouldn't matter. Sri would know instantly, and tease him mercilessly; but nothing would change between them.

Billy knew this as surely as he knew his own name, and the knowledge comforted him deeply. He couldn't imagine his life any other way.

Different on the surface, they were alike in the ways that mattered. Both eldest sons of successful fathers (Sri's had been a close adviser to Sanjay Gandhi); both sent away to demanding schools (Billy to Pearse, Sri to Doon). With Sri, Billy was not merely happy. He was
understood.
When he thought of their lives together, he felt a deep relief. Sri was his solution to a particularly nettlesome problem: how a man like him was to live.

For years this was the phrase he used. As a teenager he viewed his sexuality as a medical condition, invisible to the naked eye, but requiring management. Watching other boys in class, on the playing field, he wondered:
Is he like me?
Some were, had to be. The most obvious case was a boy named Willie Neeland, who'd arrived at Pearse halfway through Billy's second year. From his first day on campus, Willie attracted attention; with his looks, he didn't have a choice. He was tiny, with a mop of blond curls and a comical gait. He didn't walk across a room, he
bounced.
And when Willie bounced into Pearse, Billy held his breath, expecting the worst. Willie was a sight gag: his loud shirts, his tiny hands and feet, his high-pitched voice so patently ridiculous that teasing him was nearly redundant. Willie was dead meat.

But for reasons Billy didn't understand, Willie Neeland was spared.

More than that: he was so outrageous that he became something of a celebrity. He was talented, smart in all the ways Billy wasn't. He could draw anything, anyone, with astonishing accuracy. Most famously, he was an uncanny mimic. His face and body seemed made of plastic; he could become Mick Jagger or Richard Nixon or Muhammad Ali with a tilt of the head, a trick of voice. Soon his repertoire included every teacher at Pearse. The other boys applauded wildly, and left Willie in peace.

At first Billy was relieved. Then, strangely, annoyed. Willie's impersonations began to irk him. Even the name,
Willie
, was irritating: the girlish spelling, the phallic connotations. Most distressingly, it was far too close to
Billy
. They were both Williams, after all; but there the similarity ended. They were nothing alike. Billy had no interest in the Willie Neelands of the world. It was the athletes who inflamed him, his teammates in soccer and lacrosse, the bigger, tougher guys who played rugby and football. Guys who, if they suspected, would beat the shit out of him. Knowing this, he watched them furtively, shamefully, his desire inflamed by fear. (Years later he would grasp the perversity of this. But at the time, no. At the time he was inflamed.)

He would have forgotten Willie Neeland altogether if not for a conversation that happened at the end of his third year. Like every other May, Frank McKotch drove up to Pearse to empty out Billy's dorm room, to transport him and his junk back to Concord for the summer. They were packing boxes into the Volvo when Willie Neeland bounced past in one of his famous shirts, red gingham like a tablecloth, a sketch pad under his arm. Billy and Willie wished each other a good summer. In the Pearse way, they shook hands and shoved each other's shoulder. When Billy got into the car, his father spoke.

Interesting little fellow. Kind of flaky, isn't he?

Nah
, Billy said, blushing mightily.
Willie's cool.

(Did he imagine it, or did his father shoot him a sidelong glance?

A warning look, heavy with meaning. Billy had replayed it so many times that the memory was tattered, distorted probably. It was impossible to say.)

Then Frank launched into a story that was meant to be comic, about a time he'd driven to the beach with his buddy Neil Windsor and a couple of Radcliffe girls. Frank had taken his date into the sea grass—
for a little privacy
, he told Billy, with an arched eyebrow. Billy felt his cheeks heat; he was sixteen and alarmed by such confidences, which his father offered with troubling frequency.
Neil didn't lay a hand on his girl
, Frank said, laughing.
I couldn't believe it. I thought for sure he was queer.

The whole conversation lasted maybe five minutes, but Billy would remember it always. At the time—and still—he couldn't shake the feeling that his father had been signaling him:
I know what you are, and you'd better not be. Not you. Not my son.

He couldn't, for a long time, think of himself as
gay
, a term he associated with the Provincetown queens who paraded down Commercial Street every Fourth of July, that titillating and frightening and haunting spectacle of his youth. He had been a sober, sensitive boy, and this remained his basic nature. Yet his condition was associated with costumes and dancing, Mardi Gras and drag shows, the kind of contrived merriment that had always grated on him. It was a troubling discovery. Even as a child, he'd hated Halloween.

He needed a man; he'd come to accept that. Yet he was often repulsed by men who were gay. Self-hatred, Matthew had called it, when Billy confessed it in a late-night phone call to Barcelona. Billy disputed the charge. It was in his temperament to be specific, and he knew precisely what he wanted. A serious man, a masculine man.

Someone more or less like himself.

Reaching this conclusion—his basic nature, immutable, eternal—had taken years. Before that, halfheartedly, he had tried. In college he'd fallen in love—a kind of love—with Lauren McGregor, and it was Lauren who'd made everything clear.

He'd known her since Pearse, where she'd been his lab partner in first-year biology, the luck of alphabetical order. She was a plain, quiet girl with shaggy bangs she peered through cautiously, as though she feared what lay beyond. Tall, Billy's height, and so thin her skirts seemed empty—no curve of hip or ass, nothing at all. Lauren was the shyest girl in the class, and the smartest; she adored Billy with an intensity so obvious that he was constantly teased about it.