To Paradise (21 page)

He had never thought too much about what kind of man he might someday live with, but he had slipped so easily into his role as Charles’s boyfriend, as Charles’s, that it was only in rare moments that he realized with a flop of his stomach that he had in fact come to resemble his father in ways he had never foreseen or imagined—someone who yearned only to be loved and taken care of, to be instructed. And it was in those moments—moments in which he stood in the gloom at the front window, his hand on the shutter, looking out into the darkened square for Charles, waiting like a cat for its owner to come home—that he was able to recognize who he reminded himself of: not just the heiress, in her much too lovely pink dress, but his father. His father, standing at the window of their house, near sundown, exhausted from the anxiety and hopefulness
of waiting all day, still scanning the street for Edward to arrive in his puttery old car, waiting to run down the porch steps and join his friend, waiting to be taken away from his mother and his son, and all the disappointments of his small and inescapable life.

The first doorbell chime sounded as Charles was still getting dressed. “Damnit,” he said. “Who comes exactly when they’re supposed to?”

Americans, he said, which was something he had read in a book, and Charles laughed.

“That’s true,” he said, and kissed him. “Will you go down and talk to whoever it is? I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

Ten?
he asked, in mock outrage. You still need ten more minutes to get ready?

Charles swatted him with his towel. “We can’t all look like you do just out of the shower,” he said. “Some of us need to work at it.”

So he went down, grinning. They had exchanges like that often—complimenting each other’s appearance while diminishing their own—but only in private, because they both knew they were handsome and also both knew that recognizing it aloud was not just unappealing but, these days, potentially cruel as well. They were both vain, and yet vanity was an indulgence, a sign of life, a reminder of good health, a thanksgiving. Sometimes when they were out together, or even in someone’s apartment with a group of other men, they would look at each other quickly and then turn away, because they understood there was something obscene about their cheeks, still plumped with fat, and their arms, still layered with muscle. They were, in certain company, a provocation.

Downstairs, there were no lilies to be seen or smelled, only Adams returning to the kitchen with a now empty silver drinks tray. In the dining room, which David had checked earlier, the catering staff was arranging plates of food around the vases of holly and freesia: Charles had suggested sushi to Peter, but Peter had rejected that suggestion. “Now, on my deathbed, is not when I need to start eating
fish,
” he said. “Not after a lifetime of studiously avoiding it. Just
get me something normal, Charles. Something normal and good.” So Charles had had the party planner hire a caterer who specialized in Mediterranean-inspired food, and now the table was being set with terra-cotta dishes of sliced steak and grilled zucchini and bowls of angel-hair pasta tossed with olives and sundried tomatoes. The waitstaff in their black pants and shirts were women—although he hadn’t been able to oversee the flowers, David
had
found a way to request only female caterers from the company Charles preferred. David knew he’d be irritated when he saw that the usual crew—uniformly young, blond, and male, and who at the last party David had seen eyeing Charles, and Charles enjoying their attention—had been replaced, but knew too that he would be forgiven by the time they went to bed, because Charles liked it when David was jealous, liked being reminded that he still had options.

The dining room, where he and Charles ate dinner every night if they didn’t go out, was old-fashioned and fusty, left mostly intact from when Charles’s parents had lived there. The rest of the house had been renovated a decade ago, when Charles moved in, but this room still had its original long, polished mahogany table, and its matching Federal-period cupboard, and its dark-green wallpaper with its pattern of morning-glory vines, and its dark-green dupioni silk drapes, and its side-by-side portraits of Charles’s ancestors, the first Griffiths to arrive in America from Scotland, their clock with its creamy, whale-ivory face—an heirloom of which Charles was very proud—sitting atop the mantel between them. Charles had no good explanation for why he hadn’t changed the room, and when David was in it, he would always think of his grandmother’s dining room, a place very different in appearance and detail, but similarly unchanged—and more than the room itself, he would think of their family dinners: how his father would get nervous and drop the ladle into the tureen, splashing the tablecloth with soup; how his grandmother would get angry. “For heaven’s sake, son,” she would say. “Can’t you be more careful? Do you see what you’ve done?”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” his father would murmur.

“You see the kind of example you’re setting,” his grandmother would continue, as if his father hadn’t spoken at all. And then, to
David, “You’re going to be more careful than your father, aren’t you, Kawika?”

Yes, he would promise, though he would feel guilty doing so, as if he had betrayed his father, and when his father came into his room that night to tuck him in, he would tell him that he wanted to be just like him. Tears would come to his father’s eyes then, both because he knew David was lying and because he was grateful to him for it. “Don’t be like me, Kawika,” his father would say, kissing him on his cheek. “And you won’t be. You’re going to be better than I am, I know it.” He never knew what to say to this, and so usually he would say nothing, and his father would kiss his fingertips and place them on his forehead. “Go to sleep, now,” he would say. “My Kawika. My son.”

He was suddenly dizzy. What would his father think of him now? What would he say? How would he feel if he knew his son had received a letter that probably contained news, bad news, about him, and had chosen not to read it?
My Kawika. My son.
He was seized by an impulse to run upstairs, tear the letter out of its envelope, and devour it, whatever it might say.

But, no, he couldn’t; if he did, the evening would be lost. Instead, he made himself go into the living room, where three of Peter and Charles’s old friends were sitting: John and Timothy and Percival. These were the nicest friends, the kind who would only look him up and down once, quickly, when he walked in, and for the rest of the evening would keep their eyes on his face. “The Three Sisters,” Peter called them, because they were all single and unglamorous, and because Peter found them insufficiently exciting: “The Spinsters.” Timothy and Percival were both sick; Timothy visibly so, Percival secretly. He had confided in Charles seven months ago, and Charles had told David. “I look fine, don’t I?” Percival asked Charles whenever they saw each other. “I look the same, don’t I?” He was the editor in chief of a small, prestigious publishing house—he was afraid he’d get fired if the company’s owners found out.

“You won’t get fired,” Charles always said. “And if they try, I know exactly the person you should call, and you’ll sue the hell out of them, and I’ll help.”

Percival ignored this. “But I look the same, don’t I?”

“Yes, Percy—you look the same. You look great.”

He looked over at Percival now. The others had glasses of wine, but Percival was holding a teacup in which David knew he was soaking a teabag of medicinal herbs that he got from an acupuncturist in Chinatown who he swore was strengthening his immune system. He studied Percival as he was distracted by his tea:
Did
he look the same? It had been five months since he’d seen him last—was he thinner? Did his complexion seem dustier? It was difficult to say; all of Charles’s friends looked slightly unhealthy to him, whether they were or not. Something, some quality, had disappeared from all of them, no matter how well maintained or robust—light seemed to vanish into their skin, so that even when they were sitting here, in the forgiving candlelight that Charles had grown to favor for these gatherings, they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk. He had once attempted to explain this to Eden, who spent her weekends drawing nudes, and she had rolled her eyes. “It’s because they’re old,” she had said.

He looked next at Timothy, who was now clearly ill, his eyelids as violet as if he’d smudged them with paint, his teeth too long, his hair a fuzz. Timothy had been in boarding school with Peter and Charles, and back then, Charles said, “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful he was. The most beautiful boy in the school.” This was after the first time he’d met Timothy, and the next time, David had examined him, looking for the boy Charles had fallen in love with. He was an actor, an unsuccessful one, and had been married to a beautiful woman, and then for decades had been the lover of a very rich man, but when the man died, his adult children had made Timothy leave their father’s house, and Timothy had moved in with John. No one knew how John, who was jolly and large, made his money—he was from a modest family in the Midwest and had never had a job that lasted longer than a few months and wasn’t handsome enough to be kept—and yet he occupied an entire townhouse in the West Village and ate extravagantly (though, as Charles pointed out, usually only when someone else was paying). “When people like John stop being able to survive through mysterious means in this
city is the day this city is no longer worth living in,” Charles would say, fondly. (For someone who was adamant about people earning their way, he had an unusual number of friends who seemed to do nothing at all: It was something David liked about him.)

As always, the three said hello to him, asked him about what he was doing and how he was, but he had little to say, and eventually, their conversation turned back to themselves, to recounting things they’d done together when they were younger.

“…Well, that’s not as bad as when John dated that homeless guy!”

“First of all, we were hardly
dating,
and second…”

“Tell that story again!”

“Well. This was, oh, about fifteen years ago, when I was working at that framing shop on Twentieth between Fifth and Sixth—”

“Where you got fired for stealing—”

“
Excuse
me. I did
not
get fired for stealing. I got fired for being chronically tardy and incompetent, and for providing poor customer service. I got fired from the
bookstore
for stealing.”

“Oh, well,
excuse
me
.”

“Anyway, can I continue? So I’d get off the F at Twenty-third Street, and I’d always see this guy,
very
cute, kind of a scruffy artist type, plaid shirt and a little beard, carrying a grocery bag, standing on Sixth near the empty lot on the southeast corner. So I cruise her, and she cruises back, and this goes on for a few days. And then, on the fourth day, I go up to her and we talk. She says, ‘Do you live around here?’ And I say, ‘No, I work down the block.’ And she says, ‘Well, we can go into this alley’—it wasn’t really an alley, but there was this little channel between the back wall of the parking lot and this other building they were tearing down—and, you know, we did.”

“Spare us the details.”

“Jealous?”

“Uh, no.”

“Anyway, the next day, I’m walking down the street and there she is again, and back we go into the alley. And then, the day after that, I see her
again,
and I think: Huh. Something’s off here. And then I
realize she’s wearing the
exact same thing
as the previous two times! Right down to the underwear. And also that she’s kind of smelly. Actually, let me correct that: She’s
very
smelly. Poor old girl. She didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“So did you leave?”

“Of course not! We were there, weren’t we?”

They all laughed, and then Timothy began singing: “La da dee la dee da, La da dee la dee da,” and Percival joined in: “She’s just like you and me, but she’s homeless; she’s homeless.” David left them, smiling—he liked watching the three of them together; he liked how no one else seemed to interest them as much as they did themselves. How would his father’s life have been different if Edward had been more like Timothy or Percival or John, if his father had had a friend who would make the stuff of their past into a story to entertain instead of to control? He tried to picture his father in Charles’s house, at this party. What would he think? What would he do? He imagined his father, his shy, slight smile, standing behind the staircase banister, looking at the other men but afraid to join them, assuming they would ignore him as he had been ignored almost all of his life. What would his father’s life have been like had he left the island, had he learned to ignore his mother, had he found someone to cherish him? It might have resulted in a future in which David might not exist. He stood there, conjuring this other life for him: His father, strolling alongside the arch at the north of the Square, a novel tucked under his arm, walking beneath the late-fall trees, their leaves as red as apples, his face lifted to the sky. It would be a Sunday, and he would be on his way to meet a friend for a movie and then dinner. But then the vision faltered: Who was this friend? Was it a man or a woman? Was theirs a romantic relationship? Where was his father living? How was he supporting himself? Where would he go the next day, and the day after? Was he healthy, and if he wasn’t, who was taking care of him? He felt a kind of despair steal over him: for how his father eluded him even in fiction, for how he was unable to construct a happy life for him. He had been unable to save him; he was unable even to summon the courage to learn of his fate. He had abandoned his father in life, and now he was abandoning him
again, in fantasy. Should he not at least be able to dream him into a better existence, a kinder one? What did it say about him, as his son, that he was incapable of even that?

But maybe, he thought, maybe it wasn’t a lack of empathy that was to blame for his inability to project his father into a different life—maybe it was how childlike his father was, how his father had behaved like no other parent, like no other adult, he had known, then or since. There were, for example, their walks, which had begun when David was six or seven. He would be woken late at night by his father, holding out his hand, and David would take it, and together they would walk the streets of their neighborhood in silence, showing each other how familiar things became different in the nighttime: the bush dangling flowers that resembled upside-down cornets, the acacia tree on their neighbor’s property that in the dark appeared enchanted and malevolent and like something from a country far from their own, where they would be two travelers moving through snow that squeaked beneath their boots, and in the distance would be a farmhouse with a single window lit a smoky yellow by a single candle, and inside would be a witch disguised as a kindly widow, and two bowls of soup as thick as porridge, salty with cubes of fatback and sweet with chunks of roasted yam.