To Paradise (23 page)

But David’s distance from his own life made less sense to him. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t poor, and as long as he was with Charles, he never would be. And yet he was unable to imagine what he might be alive for. He had completed one year of law school before his finances had forced him to drop out and take the job as a paralegal at Larsson, Wesley three years ago, and Charles was always telling him he should reenroll. “Anywhere you want, the best place you can get in,” he’d say. (David had been attending a state school beforehand; he knew Charles would expect better from him.) “I’ll pay for all of it.” When David demurred, Charles would be puzzled. “Why?” he’d ask. “You did a year—you clearly wanted to do it before. And you have a good mind for it. So why not continue?” He couldn’t tell Charles that he hadn’t actually had a particular passion for the law, that he didn’t understand why he had applied for law school in the first place—except that it had seemed like something his father might have wanted for him, something that might have made his father proud. Going to law school fell into the vast category of being able to take care of himself, a virtue his father had always impressed upon him—a skill his father was never able to possess.

Do we have to talk about it? he’d ask Charles.

“No, we don’t,” Charles would say. “But I just don’t like seeing someone as bright as you waste his time being a paralegal.”

I like being a paralegal, he’d say. I’m not as ambitious as you want me to be, Charles.

Charles would sigh. “I don’t want you to be anything but happy, David,” Charles would say. “I just want to know what you want in life. When I was your age, I wanted everything. I wanted influence, and I wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and I wanted to be respected. What do
you
want?”

I want to be here, he’d always say, with you, and Charles would sigh again but also smile, frustrated but also pleased. “David,” he’d groan, and the argument, if that’s what it was, would end.

And yet sometimes, on those summer nights, he thought he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be somewhere between where he was, in a bed dressed in expensive cotton sheets next to the man he had grown to love, and on the street, skirting the edge of the park, squealing and clinging to his friends when a rat darted from the shadows inches from his feet, drunk and wild and hopeless, his life burning away, with no one to have dreams for him, not even himself.

In the living room, two of the waitstaff were circulating, refilling water glasses, removing empty plates; Adams was delivering drinks. There was a bartender among the catering crew, but David knew that she was being held hostage in the kitchen, her attempts to help rebuffed by Adams, who liked to make the drinks himself and would allow no one to disrupt his methods. And so, for every party, Charles would remind the party planner to instruct the caterer not to bring a bartender, and every time, the caterer would bring someone along “just in case,” and every time, he would be consigned to the kitchen and not allowed to do his job.

From his position beside the staircase, he watched as James entered the room, watched the other guests watch him, watched them register his ass, his eyes, his smile. Now that David wasn’t in the room, he was the only nonwhite person there. James bent over the Three Sisters and said something that David couldn’t hear but
that made them all laugh, before straightening and leaving with a stack of plates. A few minutes later, he returned with clean plates and the platter of pasta, which he offered around the room, balancing the dish atop the palm of his right hand while holding his left hand in a fist behind his back.

What if he were to say James’s name as James exited the room? James would look about, surprised, and then see him and smile and come to him, and David would take his hand and lead him to the slant-ceilinged closet beneath the staircase, where Adams stored the house’s supply of mothballs and candles and the burlap bags of cedar chips that he tucked between Charles’s sweaters when he was packing them up for the summer, and which Charles liked to toss into the fireplace to make the smoke more fragrant. The space was just high enough to stand in, and just deep enough for one person to kneel in; he could already feel James’s skin beneath his fingers, already hear the sounds they’d both make. And then James would leave, returning to his duties, and David would wait, counting to two hundred, before he too left, running upstairs to his and Charles’s bathroom to rinse out his mouth before returning to the living room, where James would already be offering people another helping of steak or chicken, and sitting down next to Charles. For the rest of the evening, they would try not to look at each other too much, but with every rotation through the room, James would glance at him, and he would glance back, and when the catering crew was cleaning up, he would tell Charles that he thought he’d forgotten his book and would slip downstairs before Charles could respond, where he would find James just as he was putting on his coat, press into his palm a piece of paper with his telephone number at work, tell him to call. For weeks, maybe months, thereafter they would meet, always at James’s, and then, one day, James would start dating someone or move away or simply grow bored, and David would never hear from him again. He could see and feel and taste it so vividly that it was as if it had already happened and he was reliving a memory, but when James finally did come into view, walking back to the kitchen, he made himself hide, turning his face to the wall to keep from the temptation of speaking.

This constant desire! Was it the fact that it was dangerous to have sex the way he used to, or that he and Charles were monogamous, or was he just restless? “You’re young,” Charles had said, laughing, unoffended, when he had told him. “It’s normal. You’ll grow out of it in the next sixty years or so.” But he wasn’t sure it was that, or perhaps not only that. He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it—and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.

He thought, inevitably, of his father, of what his father had craved. Love, he supposed, affection. But nothing else. Food did not interest him, or sex, or travel, or cars or clothes or houses. One Christmas—the year before they left for Lipo-wao-nahele, which means he would have been nine—they had been assigned at school to find out what their parents wanted for the holiday, and then they would make that thing in art class. Of course, what their parents really wanted they couldn’t make, but other children’s mothers and fathers seemed to understand that, and had answered with something plausible. “I’ve always wanted a nice drawing of you,” someone’s mother said, or “I’d love a new picture frame.” But David’s father had only taken his hand. “I have you,” his father said. “I don’t need anything else.” But you must want
something,
he had insisted, frustrated, and his father had shaken his head. “No,” he repeated. “You’re my greatest treasure. If I have you, I don’t need anything else.” Finally, David had had to explain his dilemma to his grandmother, who had stood and marched over to where his father lay on the porch, reading the paper and waiting for Edward, and snapped at him, “Wika! Your son is going to fail his school assignment unless you tell him something he can make for you!”

In the end, he had made his father a clay ornament, which was fired in the school’s kiln. It was a lumpy thing, only half glazed, in the shape of what was meant to be a star, with his father’s name—their name—scratched into its surface, but his father had loved it and had hung it above his bed (they hadn’t bought a tree that year), hammering the nail in himself. He remembered how his father had almost cried, and how he had been embarrassed for him, for his
happiness over something so stupid and ugly and inexpert, something he had made hastily, in just a few minutes, eager to go outside to play with his friends.

Or, perhaps, this constant yearning for sex was Charles’s fault. He had not been attracted to Charles when they met—his flirting had been automatic, rather than from any genuine feeling—and when he had accepted his invitation for dinner, it was out of curiosity, not desire. But midway through the meal, something had shifted, and the second time they met, at Charles’s house the following day, their encounter had been feverish and almost wordless.

Yet, despite their mutual attraction, they delayed actually having sex for weeks, because they both wanted to avoid the conversation they would first need to have, the conversation that was written on the faces of so many people they knew.

Finally, he had brought it up himself. Listen, he’d said, I don’t have it, and he had watched Charles’s face sag.

“Thank god,” he had said. He had waited for Charles to say that he didn’t have it, either, but he didn’t. “Nobody knows,” he said. “But you should. But aside from Olivier—my ex—no one else does: Just my doctor, him, me, and now you. Oh, and Adams, of course. But no one at work. They can’t.”

He had been momentarily speechless, but Charles had spoken into his silence. “I’m very healthy,” he said. “I have the drugs, I tolerate them well.” He paused. “No one has to know.”

He had been surprised, and then surprised at his surprise. He had made out with and even dated men with the illness, but Charles seemed the antithesis of the disease, a person in whom it would dare not reside. He knew that was silly, but it was also how he felt. After they became a couple, Charles’s friends would ask him—half teasing, half serious—what on earth he had seen in their old,
old
friend (“Fuck you,” Charles would say, grinning), and David would say that it was Charles’s confidence (“Note that he didn’t say your looks, Charlie,” Peter would say). And while that was true, it wasn’t only what attracted him, or rather not just; it was Charles’s ability to project a certain indestructibility, his radical conviction that anything was solvable, that anything could be fixed as long as you had the
right money and connections and mind. No less than death would have to yield to Charles, or so it seemed. It was a quality he would have for the rest of his life, and the thing David would miss the most about him when he was gone.

And it was that same quality that allowed David to forget—not always, but for periods of time—that Charles was infected at all. He saw him take his medication, he knew that he saw his doctor at lunchtime on the first Monday of every month, but for hours, days, weeks, he was able to pretend that Charles’s life, and his life with him, would go on and on, a roll of parchment unscrolling down a long grassy path. He was able to tease Charles about how much time he spent in front of the mirror, the way he patted creams on his face before they went to bed, flexing his mouth into different grimaces, the way he would examine his reflection after getting out of the shower, holding his towel in place around his waist with one hand as he twisted his neck to examine his back, the way he would bare his teeth, tapping at his gums with his fingernail. Charles’s self-scrutiny was the result of middle-aged vanity and insecurity, yes, the kind that was exacerbated by David’s presence, by his youth, but it was also, David knew—knew, but tried to ignore—an expression of Charles’s fear: Was he losing weight? Were his fingernails discoloring? Were his cheeks hollowing? Had he sprouted a lesion? When would the illness write itself on his body? When would the drugs that had so far kept the illness away do the same? When would he become a citizen in the land of the sick? Pretending was foolish, and yet they both did it, except when it was perilous to do so; Charles pretended and David let him. Or was it that David pretended and Charles let him? Either way, the outcome was the same: They rarely discussed the disease; they never even said its name.

But though Charles refused to claim the disease for himself, he never denied it in his friends. Percival, Timothy, Teddy, Norris: Charles gave them money, he arranged appointments with his doctor, he hired cooks and housekeepers and nurses who would dare, would deign, to help them. He had even moved Teddy, who had died shortly before David had begun seeing Charles, into the study next to his bedroom, and it was there, surrounded by Charles’s
collection of botanical prints, that Teddy had spent his final months. When Teddy had died, it had been Charles, along with Teddy’s other friends, who had found a sympathetic priest, who had arranged the wake, who had divided Teddy’s ashes among them. The next day, he had gone to work. Work was one realm, and outside of work was another, and he seemed to accept that the two would never overlap, that his friend’s death would never be an adequate excuse for coming in late or for not coming in at all. His grief, like his love, was something he would never expect anyone at Larsson, Wesley to understand or share. He was exhausted, David would later understand, but he never complained about it, because exhaustion was a privilege of the living.

And here, too, David felt ashamed, ashamed because he was frightened, because he was repulsed. He didn’t want to look at Timothy’s shrunken face; he didn’t want to confront Peter’s wrists, grown so bony that he had exchanged his metal watch for a child’s plastic one, which even so slid down his arm like a bangle. He had had friends who had gotten sick, but he had shrunk from them, blowing them kisses goodbye instead of kissing them on the cheek, crossing the street to avoid talking to them, dawdling outside buildings he used to dash into, standing in corners when Eden went to hug them, skirting out of rooms that were desperate for visitors. Wasn’t it enough that he was twenty-five and had to live like this? Wasn’t that courage enough? How could he be expected to do more, to be more?

His behavior, his cowardice—they had been the source of his and Eden’s first big fight. “You’re such an asshole,” Eden had hissed at him when she found him downstairs, sitting on one of their friends’ stoops, waiting for her in the cold for thirty minutes. He hadn’t been able to take it—the smells of the room, its closeness, the fear and resignation. “How would you feel, David?” she’d yelled at him, and, when he admitted he was scared, she’d snorted. “You’re
scared,
” she said. “
You’re
scared? God, David, I hope you grow a fucking pair by the time I die.” And he had: By the time Eden herself was dying, twenty-two years later, it was he who sat by her side, night after night, for months; it was he who picked her up from her
chemotherapy appointments; it was he who held her that final day, he who stroked her back as the skin turned cold and smooth. In the way that people decided they would become healthier, he had decided to become better, braver, and when Eden finally died, he had sobbed, both because she had left him but also because no one had been prouder of him, no one had seen how hard he had worked at not running away. She had been the final witness of the person he had been, and now she was gone, and her memory of his transformation was gone with her.