To Paradise (20 page)

“Wait here,” said Charles, and left, and David, looking up into the mirror and realizing the extent of his dishevelment—there was a clot of ink above his right eye that was sinking into his skin like a
bruise—took his wad of paper towels and went into one of the stalls in case another of the partners came in. But when the bathroom door opened next, it was only Charles, with a flat cardboard box tucked beneath his arm. “Where are you?” he asked.

He peered around the stall door. Here, he said.

Charles looked amused. “What are you doing, hiding in there?” he asked.

I’m not supposed to be here, he said. I’m a paralegal, he added, as clarification.

Charles’s smile became a bit wider. “Well, Paralegal,” he said, lifting the lid of the box to reveal a white shirt, clean and folded, “this is all I have. I think it might be a little big on you, but it’s better than walking around looking like the dark side of the moon, right?”

Or topless, he heard himself say, and he saw Charles’s look turn sharp and appraising. “Yes,” he said, after a short silence. “Or topless. We can’t have that.”

Thank you, he said, taking the box from Charles. He could feel from the cotton that the shirt was expensive, and he pulled out its stays and the cardboard beneath its collar and unbuttoned it with his inky fingers. He was about to hang it on the back of the stall door and begin unbuttoning his own shirt when Charles reached out his hand: “Let me take it,” he said, and he draped his own, clean shirt over his arm, like a caricature of an old-fashioned waiter, while David began undressing. It seemed churlish to close the door at that point and ask for privacy, and, indeed, Charles didn’t move, but stood there, silently, watching him unbutton his shirt, remove it, exchange it for the one he held, and then button up the new one. He was very aware of the sound of their breaths, and of how he hadn’t worn an undershirt, and of how his skin was pimpling even though the bathroom wasn’t especially cold. When he had finished buttoning it and then stuffing it into his pants—turning from Charles as he did to unfasten his belt: How clumsy and graceless it was, this process of dressing and undressing—he thanked Charles again. Thank you for holding my shirt, he said. For everything. I’ll take it back. But Charles grinned. “I think you’d better just throw it away,” he
said. “I don’t think it’s salvageable.” Yes, he agreed, but he didn’t add that he had to try—he only had six shirts, and he couldn’t afford to lose one.

Charles’s shirt sat around him, a balloon of crisp, dry cotton, and as he stepped out of the stall, Charles made a little sound of amusement, saying, “I’d forgotten about that,” and David had looked down at his left side, where, just above his kidney, were Charles’s initials stitched in black: CGG. “Well,” Charles said, “I’d cover that up, if I were you. We can’t have people thinking you stole a shirt from me.” And then he winked at him and left, while David stood there, stupidly. A moment later, the door opened again and Charles’s face appeared. “Incoming,” he said. “Delacroix.” Delacroix was the managing director of the firm. Then he winked again and was gone.

“Hello,” said Delacroix, entering and studying him, clearly not recognizing him, but wondering if he ought to—he didn’t look like someone who’d be using the executive washroom, but these days, anyone under fifty looked like a child to him, so who knew? Maybe this fellow was a partner, too.

Hello, David responded as confidently as he could, and then he scuttled out.

For the rest of the day, he held his arm bent at a right angle over his stomach, concealing the monogram. (That night, it occurred to him that he could have just taped a patch of paper over the spot.) And though no one noticed, he felt marked, branded, and when, leaving the archives room, he saw Charles walking toward him with another partner, he flushed and nearly dropped his books, catching a glimpse of Charles’s back before he rounded the corner. By the end of the day, he was exhausted, and that night his arm floated toward his torso, already disciplined into submission.

The next day was Saturday, and despite his vigorous scrubbing, Charles was proven right—the shirt was hopeless. He had debated whether he could get away with washing and ironing Charles’s shirt himself, but that would have meant adding it to his own bag of laundry and taking it all to the laundromat, and something about putting the shirt in the mesh bag containing his underwear and T-shirts
made him embarrassed. So he’d had to take the shirt to the dry cleaners, spending money he didn’t have.

On Monday, he made sure to arrive at the firm particularly early, and was heading toward Charles’s door when he realized he couldn’t just leave the box outside of his office. He stopped, and was thinking about what to do when, suddenly, there was Charles, in his suit and tie, holding his briefcase, regarding him with the same amused expression he’d given him the previous week.

“Hello, Paralegal David,” he said.

Hi, he said. Um—I brought back your shirt. (Belatedly, he realized he should have brought something for Charles, to thank him, though he couldn’t think of what that might possibly be.) Thank you—thank you so much. You saved me. It’s clean, he added, stupidly.

“I should hope so,” Charles said, still smiling, and he unlocked his office, and took the box, which he set on his desk while David waited in the doorway. “You know,” Charles said, after a pause, turning back to him, “I think you owe me a favor after this.”

Do I?, he finally managed to say.

“I think so,” Charles said, stepping close to him. “I saved you, didn’t I?” He smiled, again. “Why don’t you come have dinner with me sometime?”

Oh, he said. And then again: Oh. Okay. Yes.

“Good,” said Charles. “I’ll call you.”

Oh, he repeated. Right. Yes. Okay.

They were the only ones in the office, and yet they both spoke quietly, almost in whispers, and when David walked away, back to the paralegals’ area, his face was hot.

The dinner was arranged for the following Thursday, and on Charles’s instructions, he had left the office first, at seven-thirty, and had gone alone to the restaurant, which was dark and hushed, where he was seated in a booth and handed a large menu in a leather case. A few minutes past eight, Charles arrived, and David watched as he was greeted by the maître d’, who whispered something in his ear that made Charles smile and roll his eyes. After he sat, a martini
was brought to him, unbidden. “He’ll have one, too,” Charles said to the waiter, nodding at David, and when he had been given his, Charles had raised his glass, ironically, and touched it to his. “To non-exploding pens,” he said.

To non-exploding pens, he’d echoed.

Later, he would look back on that night and realize it had been the first real date he had ever been on. Charles had ordered for both of them (a porterhouse, rare, with sides of spinach and rosemary-roasted potatoes) and had led the conversation. It soon became clear that he had certain ideas about David, which David hadn’t corrected. Besides, most of them weren’t wrong: He
was
poor. He
hadn’t
had a fancy education. He
was
naïve. He
hadn’t
been anywhere. And yet beneath those truths were a set of what Charles, in the courtroom, would have characterized as mitigating factors: He hadn’t always been poor. He had once had a fancy education. He wasn’t completely naïve. He had once lived somewhere neither Charles nor anyone he knew could ever go.

They were halfway through their steak when David realized that he hadn’t asked Charles anything about himself. “Oh, no, what is there to say? I’m afraid I’m very boring,” Charles said, in the careless way that only people who knew they weren’t boring at all could. “We’ll get to me. Tell me about your apartment,” and David, drunk on both gin and the unusual sensation of being treated as if he were a source of great fascination and wisdom, did: He told Charles about the mice and the window casements seamed with grime, and the sad drag queen whose favorite resting place was their stoop and whose favorite two a.m. ballad to bellow was “Waltzing Matilda,” and about his roommate, Eden, who was an artist, a painter, mostly, but whose day job was as a proofreader at a book publishing company. (He didn’t mention that Eden called him every day at the firm at three p.m. and that the two of them talked for an hour, David whispering into the phone and feigning coughing fits to disguise his laughter.)

“Where are you from?” Charles asked, after he had smiled or laughed at all of David’s stories.

Hawai
‘
i, he said, and then, before Charles could ask, O
‘
ahu. Honolulu.

Charles had been there, of course, everyone had, and for a while David spoke around the edges of his life: Yes, he still had family there. No, they weren’t close. No, his father was dead. No, he never knew his mother. No, no siblings, and his father had also been an only child. Yes, one grandparent—his paternal grandmother.

Charles tilted his head and studied him for a moment. “I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” he said, “but what are you? Are you—” He stopped, stymied.

Hawaiian, he said, staunchly, though it wasn’t the whole truth.

“But your last name—”

It’s a missionary name. American missionaries started arriving in the islands in significant numbers in the early nineteenth century; a lot of them intermarried with the Hawaiians.

“Bingham…Bingham,” Charles said ruminatively, and David knew what he would say next. “You know, there’s a dormitory at Yale called Bingham Hall. I lived in it freshman year. Is there any relation?” He grinned, his eyebrow lifted; he already assumed there wasn’t.

Yes—he’s an ancestor.

“Really,” Charles said, and leaned back in his seat, his smile fading. He was quiet, and David understood that, for the first time, he had surprised Charles, surprised and disconcerted him, and that Charles was wondering if his assessments of David had been correct after all. He had spent less than an hour with Charles, but he knew already that Charles did not like to be surprised, did not like having to recalibrate his opinions, the way he had decided to see things. Later, after he had moved in with Charles, he had looked back at that moment and had recognized that he could have redirected the course of their relationship; what if, instead of responding as he had, he had instead said something like:
Oh, yes, I’m from one of the oldest families in Hawai
‘
i. I’m descended from royalty. Everyone there knows who we are. If things had gone differently, I would have been king.
It would have been true.

But what point was the truth? When he had been at his third-rate college, he had once told his boyfriend at the time—a lacrosse player who, outside of his bedroom, either ignored David or
pretended he didn’t exist—the abbreviated story of his family, and the boy had scoffed. “Very funny, man,” he’d said. “And I’m descended from the queen of England. Right.” He had insisted, and finally his boyfriend had rolled over onto his side, away from him, bored by David’s stories. After that, he had learned not to say anything, because it seemed easier and better to lie than it was to be disbelieved. His family was a remote fact, but even so, he didn’t want to hear them mocked; he didn’t want to be reminded how the source of his grandmother’s pride was for most people a subject of ridicule. He didn’t want to think about his poor lost father.

So: We’re from the penniless side of the family, he said instead, and Charles had laughed, relieved.

“It happens to the best of us,” he said.

In the taxi downtown, they had been quiet, and Charles, staring straight ahead, had placed his hand on David’s knee, and David had taken it and moved it atop his groin, and had seen, in shadows, Charles’s profile change as he smiled. They had parted chastely that night—Charles dropping him off on Second Avenue, because he had been too embarrassed for Charles to see the building where he actually lived: Charles’s house was only a mile west from him, but it might as well have been another country altogether—but over the following weeks they met again and again, and six months after their first date, he had moved into Charles’s house on Washington Square.

He felt he had grown simultaneously older and younger over the months he and Charles had been together. Isolated from his own friends, he spent more time with Charles’s, sitting at dinners at which Charles’s polite friends tried to include him in the conversation, and his not-so-polite ones made him the subject of conversation. Eventually, however, both groups would forget about him, their talk turning to more arcane points of the law or the stock market, and he would excuse himself and creep off to bed to wait for Charles. Sometimes they would go to Charles’s friends’ houses for dinner, and there he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read,
movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for—until it was time to go home (early, thankfully).

But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat: all the things he had had to do for his father; all the things he wished his father would have done for him. He knew he should feel infantilized by how obviously unequal their life together was, and yet he didn’t—he liked it, he found it relaxing. It was a relief to be with someone so declarative; it was a relief not to think. Charles’s self-assuredness, which extended to every aspect of their lives, was reassuring. He gave orders to Adams or to the cook with the same brisk, warm authority that he used with David when they were in bed. He sometimes felt as if he were reliving his childhood, this time with Charles as his father, and that made him queasy, because Charles wasn’t his father; he was his lover. Yet the sensation persisted—here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier. Here was someone whose rhythms and patterns were explicable and dependable and, once learned, could be relied upon to be maintained. All along he had known that something had been absent from his life, but it wasn’t until he met Charles that he understood that that quality was logic—fantasy, in Charles’s life, was confined to bed, and even there it made sense in its own way.