To Paradise (19 page)

He had been relieved that night, but since then, Charles hadn’t repeated his offer, and David hadn’t reminded him, partly because he wasn’t sure whether Charles had meant it, but also because he wasn’t certain he wanted his friends meeting Charles at all. The fact that they hadn’t been introduced by now, so long into their relationship, had gone from being unusual to being suspicious: What was David hiding? What didn’t he want them to see? They already knew how old Charles was, and how rich, and how they had met, so what else was he embarrassed about? So, yes, they would come, but they would come to gather evidence, and after dinner they would all go out together and talk about why David was with Charles to begin with, and what he could possibly see in a man thirty years older than he was.

“I know one thing,” he could hear Eden saying.

Yet David often wondered whether it was only the difference in their ages that made him feel like such a child around Charles, in a way that he had never felt around his own father, who was five years younger than his boyfriend. Look at him now: He was hiding in the stairway that connected the parlor and second floors, crouching on a step that he knew afforded him an excellent view of downstairs while concealing him completely, and from which he could watch the florist, still grumbling, snipping the twine off cords of juniper branches and, just behind her, the two movers, white cotton gloves on their hands, hoisting the eighteenth-century wooden sidewall cupboard from its spot in the dining room and carrying it slowly toward the kitchen, like a coffin, where it would remain for the evening. As a child, he had also hidden on the stairs, listening first to his father and grandmother arguing and later Edward and his grandmother arguing, ready to get up and run back toward his room, back under the sheet, if he needed to.

His role tonight had been demoted to that of a supervisor. “You’re quality control,” Charles had said to him. “I need you there to make sure everything looks as it ought to.” But he knew this was a kindness on Charles’s part—his presence here, as in many things, was
amorphous and ultimately impotent. What he thought, his opinions, would make little difference. Here, in Charles’s house, his suggestions were as meaningless as they were at work.

“Self-pity is an unattractive quality in a man,” he heard his grandmother say.

What about in a woman?

“Also unattractive, but understandable,” his grandmother would say. “A woman has much more to pity herself for.”

His real job tonight (as on every night), he knew, was to be attractive and presentable, and this, at least, he could do, so he stood and climbed the next flight of stairs, to his and Charles’s room. Until five years ago, when Charles had bought a small condominium in a building one block north, Adams had slept directly above, on the fourth story, in what was now another guest suite. David imagined him kneeling on the floor, still in his black suit, his ear pressed to the rug, listening to Charles and Olivier beneath him. He didn’t like this vision, in which Adams’s face was always turned away from him because he could never determine what his expression would be, and yet he kept seeing it.

The party tonight was for another of Charles’s ex-boyfriends, but this one from so long ago—boarding school—that David saw no threat and no need for jealousy. Peter was the first person Charles had ever slept with, when Peter was sixteen and Charles was fourteen, and they had been friends ever since, their relationship sometimes sliding into a sexual one for months or years, though not in the past decade.

But now Peter was dying. This was why the party was on a Friday, not Charles’s preferred Saturday—because the next day Peter had a ticket to Zurich, where he was going to meet an old Swiss classmate of his from college who was now a doctor, and who had agreed to give him an injection of barbiturates that would stop his heart.

It was difficult for David to comprehend how Charles truly felt about this. He was upset, of course—“I’m upset,” Charles said—but what did “upset” mean, really? Charles had never cried, or gotten angry, or gone blank, not as David had when his first friend had died, seven years ago, and as he had with all the rest since; when
he told David about Peter’s decision, he had done so matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, and when David gasped and nearly started crying himself (despite the fact that he didn’t know Peter very well and didn’t much like him besides), it had been Charles who had had to comfort him. Charles had wanted to accompany Peter, but Peter had refused—it would be too difficult for him, he said. He would spend his final evening with Charles, but then, the next morning, he would board the plane with only the nurse he had hired for company.

“At least it’s not the disease,” Charles had said. He said that often. Sometimes he said it directly to David, and sometimes he said it in random moments, almost as an announcement, though the only person to hear it was David. “At least it’s not the disease—at least that’s not how he’s going to die.” Peter was dying of multiple myeloma, with which he’d lived for nine years.

“And now my time is up,” he’d said, with a deliberate, ironic cheerfulness, to a long-unseen acquaintance of his and Charles’s at Charles’s last dinner. “No more extensions for little old me.”

“Is it—”

“Oh, god, no. Boring old cancer, I’m afraid.”

“You always were behind the curve, Peter.”

“I prefer to think of it as traditional. Traditions matter, you know. Someone has to maintain them.”

Now David changed into a suit—all of his good suits had been bought by Charles, but he had stopped wearing them to work when another of the paralegals had commented on them—and chose a tie, before deciding against it: The suit would be enough. He was the only twenty-five-year-old he knew who wore suits outside of work except for Eden, who wore them to be subversive. But as he went to his side of the closet to replace the tie, he passed his bag, and, stuffed down its side, the letter.

He sat on the bed, contemplating it. There would be nothing good in that letter, he knew; it would be about his father, and the news would be bad, and he would have to go home, to his real home, and see him, a person who in certain respects had ceased to become real to him: He was an apparition, someone who appeared only in
David’s dreams, someone who had long ago wandered away from the realm of consciousness into wherever he was, someone lost to him. Over the decade since David had seen him last, he had worked hard to never think about him, because thinking about him was like succumbing to a riptide so powerful that he was afraid he would never emerge from it, that it would carry him so far away from land that he would never be able to return. Every day he woke and practiced not thinking about his father, as an athlete practices his sprints or a musician his scales. And now that diligence was about to be upset. Whatever was inside that envelope would begin a series of conversations with Charles, or at least one very long one, one that he would have to start by telling Charles he needed to go away.
Why?
Charles would ask. And then:
Where? Who? I thought you said he was dead. Wait, slow down—
who
?

He wouldn’t have that conversation tonight, he decided. It was Peter’s party. He had already mourned his father, mourned him for years, and now whatever was in that envelope could wait. And so he buried it deep in his bag, as if by not reading it he was also making not real whatever the letter said—it was suspended, somewhere between New York and Hawai
‘
i: something that had almost happened, but that he, through not recognizing it, had kept at bay.

The party was starting at seven, and Charles had sworn he would be home by six, but at six-fifteen there was still no sign of him, and David stood at the window, looking out onto the street and the shadowy stage of Washington Square beyond, waiting for Charles to arrive.

When he was in college, the school’s drama club had staged a play about a nineteenth-century heiress who hoped to be married to a man her father was convinced was courting her only for her money. The heiress was plain, and the man was handsome, and no one—not her father, not her simpering spinster aunt, not her friends, not the playwright or the audience—believed that she could be of any genuine attraction to her beloved; the heiress was the only one who
believed otherwise. The stubbornness of her belief was meant to be proof of her foolishness, but David saw it as steeliness, the kind born of a great self-possession, the kind he admired in Charles. The opening scene of the second act was of the woman standing in the window of her house, her hair parted in the center and drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck, with two ringlets, like curtains, hanging on each side of her round, sweet face, and her dress, of crisp peach silk, rustling about her. She looked calm and unworried; her hands lay one atop the other at her waist. She was watching for her beloved; she was certain he would come for her.

Now here he was in a similar pose, waiting for
his
beloved. He, unlike the heiress, had fewer reasons to be anxious, and yet he was. But why? Charles loved him, he would always care for him, he had given him a life he could never have afforded on his own, even if it sometimes felt as if he didn’t truly possess it but was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him.

When he had met Charles, a year and a half ago, he had been living in a one-bedroom apartment with Eden on Eighth Street and Avenue B, and although Eden had found their street exciting—the moaning drunks who shouted at you, inexplicably, just to make you jump; the long-haired boys they occasionally found passed out on their stoop in the morning—he had not. He had learned to leave for the law firm at seven a.m. exactly: any earlier and he would find himself encountering partiers and unsuccessful drug dealers stumbling home from the night before; any later and he would have to pass the first panhandlers of the day, mumbling for change as they shuffled west from Tompkins Square Park to St. Marks Place.

“Got a quarter? Got a quarter? Got a quarter?” they would ask.

Sorry, no, I don’t, he had murmured one morning, his head down as if ashamed, trying to sidestep the man.

Normally, this was enough, but this time, the man—white, with a ragged blond beard knotted with filth, a twist tie wrapped around a clump of it—began to follow him, so closely that David could feel the tips of the man’s shoes ticking at the heels of his, could smell his
peppery, porky breath. “You’re lying,” he had hissed. “Why do you lie? I can hear it in your pocket: all that jingle-jangle of coins. Why are you lying? Because you’re one of them, a fucking spic, a fucking spic, aren’t you?”

He had been scared—it was only seven-thirty, and the street was mostly deserted, but there were a few other people out, who stood and gawped at them, as if the two of them were putting on a performance for them to enjoy. (This was something he had quickly grown to hate about this place: how New Yorkers congratulated themselves for ignoring the famous, while watching with unabashed avidity the minor dramas of the plain and average as they played themselves out on the street.) He was almost at Third Avenue by then, and in one of the rare salvations the city sometimes offered, the bus was pulling up to his stop—ten steps, and he would be safe. Ten, nine, eight, seven. And then he was boarding, and he turned and yelled at the man, his voice shrill with fear: I’m not a spic!

“Oh!” said the man, who made no move toward the bus himself. A kind of glee had entered his voice, a delight in getting a response. “Fucking gook! Fucking Chink! Fucking fag! Fucking wop! Fuck you!” As the door had closed, the man had bent, and as the bus pulled away, there had been a thunk on its side, and David had turned and looked out the window and had seen the man, now wearing only one shoe, limping into the street to retrieve its companion.

By the time he reached the office, walking crosstown on Fifty-sixth Street to Broadway, he had managed to compose himself, but then he had seen his reflection in the plate-glass window of the building and realized his pen had leaked, and the entire right-hand side of his shirt was saturated with dark-blue ink. Upstairs, he had gone to the lavatory, only to find it inexplicably locked, and, nearly breathless with panic, had gone instead to the executive washroom, which was empty. There he had begun to dab, fecklessly, at his shirt, the ink dissipating, but not enough. Now his fingers and cheek were stained blue as well. What would he do? It had been a warm day; he hadn’t worn a jacket. He would have to go to a store and buy himself a shirt, and he didn’t have money for that—not money for the shirt itself, not money to lose the pay for the hour it would take to buy it.

It was as he was blotting, cursing, that the door opened, and he looked up and saw Charles. He knew of Charles; he was one of the senior partners, and he was, he supposed, handsome. He had never thought much about it beyond recognizing that he was—Charles was powerful, and old. Spending further time considering his handsomeness was both counterproductive and potentially dangerous. He did know that the secretaries thought Charles was handsome, too. He knew as well that Charles wasn’t married—this was a topic of speculation among them.

“You think he’s a homosexual?” he had overheard one of the secretaries whisper to another.

“Mr. Griffith?” she said. “No! He’s not like one of them.”

Now he began to apologize—for being in the executive washroom, for being covered in ink, for being alive.

Charles ignored his apologies, however. “You do know that shirt’s a goner, right?” he asked, and David looked up from his dabbing to see him smiling. “I’m assuming you don’t have another.”

No, he admitted. Sir.

“Charles,” said Charles, still smiling. “Charles Griffith. I’ll shake your hand later.”

Yes, he said. Right. I’m David Bingham.

He resisted the impulse to apologize again for being in the executive washroom.
No land is owned land,
Edward used to tell him, back when he was still called Edward.
You have the right to be wherever you want.
He wondered if Edward would think that same principle would apply to a senior-management bathroom in a midtown Manhattan law firm. He probably would, though the very concept of a law firm, of a law firm in New York, of David working in a law firm in New York, would disgust him even before he got to the absurdity of there being separate bathrooms in the law firm based upon its employees’ rank.
Shame on you, Kawika. Shame on you. I taught you better than that.