To Paradise (22 page)

On those walks, there would always be a moment in which he realized that he could see, that the night, which had at first seemed a featureless screen of black, toneless and silent, was brighter than it appeared, and although he always promised himself that he would determine the exact moment when it happened, when his eyes adjusted themselves to this different, filtered light, he never could: It happened so gradually, so without his participation, that it was as if his mind existed not to control his body but to marvel at its abilities, its capacity for adaptation.

As they walked, his father would tell him stories from his childhood, would show him places where he had played or had hidden as a boy, and in the night, these stories wouldn’t seem sad the way they did when David’s grandmother had told them, but simply stories: about the other boys in the neighborhood, who threw avocados from one of their trees at his father as he walked home from school;
about the time they had made him climb the mango tree in his own front yard and then had told him he couldn’t come down or they’d beat him, and for hours, until it turned dark, until the last of them finally had to leave his post to go home for dinner, his father had stayed in the tree, crouched in the flat, shallow space made by the limbs meeting the trunk, and when he had finally climbed down—his legs shaking from hunger and exhaustion—he had had to go inside his own house and explain where he’d been to his mother, who had been waiting for him at the dining-room table, silent and livid.

Why didn’t you just tell her then what had happened to you? he had asked his father.

“Oh,” his father had said, and then stopped. “She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear that those boys weren’t really my friends after all. It was embarrassing for her.” He was silent, listening to him. “But that won’t happen to you, Kawika,” his father had continued. “You have friends. I’m proud of you.”

He had been quiet then, his father’s story and its sadness sinking into him, past his heart and down to his intestines, a leaden anvil, and, remembering this, he felt the same sorrow, this time spreading through his body as if it were something that had been injected into his bloodstream. He turned then, and was intending to go to the kitchen on some made-up pretense—to check on the plating of the food; to tell Adams that Percival would need more hot water soon—when he saw Charles descending the stairs.

“What’s wrong?” Charles asked, upon seeing him, his smile vanishing. “Did something happen?” No, no, nothing happened, he said, but Charles held out his arms anyway, and David walked into them, into Charles’s warm solidity, his reassuring bulk. “It’s all right, David, whatever it is,” Charles said, after a pause, and he nodded into Charles’s shoulder. It would be all right, he knew—Charles said so, and David loved him, and he was far from where he’d been, and nothing would happen to him that Charles wouldn’t be able to solve.

By eight, all twelve of the guests had arrived, Peter last of all—it was snowing by then, and Charles and David and John had carried Peter, in his heavy wheelchair, up the front steps: David and John on either side of him, Charles propping up the rear.

He had just seen Peter at Thanksgiving, and he was stunned by how much he had deteriorated in three weeks. The most noticeable evidence of this was the wheelchair—a high-backed one with a headrest—but also his weight loss, the way the skin on his face in particular seemed to have shrunk, so that his lips couldn’t quite close over his teeth. Or maybe it wasn’t that it had shrunk so much as it had been yanked, as if someone had gathered a fistful of scalp at the back of Peter’s skull and pulled, stretching the skin taut and painful and bulging his eyes out of their sockets. Once he was inside, Peter’s friends gathered around him, but David could tell they too were shocked by his appearance; no one seemed to know what to say.

“What, you’ve never seen a dying man before?” Peter asked, coolly, and everyone looked away.

It was a rhetorical question, and a cruel one, but “Of course we have, Peter,” Charles said in his businesslike way. He had retrieved a wool blanket from the study and was now wrapping it about Peter’s shoulders, tucking it around his rib cage. “Now, let’s get you something to eat. Everyone! Dinner’s set out in the dining room; please help yourselves.”

It had been Charles’s original plan to host a sit-down dinner, but Peter had discouraged that. He didn’t know if he would have the strength to sit through a long meal, he said, and besides, the point of this gathering was for him to say goodbye to everyone. He needed to be able to circulate, to talk to people, and then to get away from them when he wanted. Now, as everyone filed slowly, almost reluctantly, toward the dining room, Charles turned to him: “David, would you get Peter a plate? I’m going to settle him on the couch.”

Of course, he said.

In the dining room, there was an atmosphere of excessive merriment, as people served themselves more food than they would ever eat, and made loud pronouncements about how they were putting their diets on hold. They had come for Peter, but no one mentioned
him. It would be the last time they would see him, the last time they would say goodbye, and suddenly the party seemed ghoulish, grotesque, and David hurriedly went from platter to platter, cutting into the line, loading Peter’s plate with meats and pastas and braised vegetables before getting a second plate and arranging it with all of Charles’s favorites, eager to get away.

Back in the living room, Peter was sitting at one end of the sofa, his legs on the ottoman, and Charles was leaning against him, his right arm around Peter’s shoulders, Peter’s face pressed into Charles’s neck, and when David approached them, Charles turned and smiled and David could see he had been crying, and Charles never cried. “Thank you,” he said to David, and, holding the plate out for Peter: “See? No fish. Just like you commanded.”

“Excellent,” said Peter, turning his skull-like face to David. “Thank you, young man.” That was what Peter called him: “young man.” He didn’t like it, but what could he do? After this weekend, he would never have to bear Peter calling him “young man” again. Then he realized he had thought that and felt ashamed, almost as if he’d spoken aloud.

But for all of Peter’s strong opinions about the food, he had no appetite for any of it—even the smell made him gag, he said. And yet, for the rest of the evening, the plate David had brought for him sat on the side table to his right, a cloth napkin bundled around a set of utensils tucked beneath its lip, as if he might at any moment change his mind, pick it up, and consume everything it held. It wasn’t the illness that had eliminated his appetite: It was the new course of chemotherapy he had begun taking a little over a month ago. But the drugs had once again proven useless; the cancer remained, but Peter’s physical strength had not.

He had been bewildered by this when Charles had told him. Why had Peter started a course of chemotherapy when he already knew he was going to kill himself? Beside him, Charles had sighed, and was silent. “It’s hard to give up hope,” he said at last. “Even until the very end.”

It was only after more people had drifted back into the living room with their own plates of food, tentatively arranging
themselves onto chairs and footrests and the second sofa like courtiers assembling around the king’s throne, that David felt he could go get himself something to eat. The dining room was empty, the platters diminished, and as he was filling his plate with what he could, a waiter entered from the kitchen. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry. We’re bringing out more right now.” He saw that David had been reaching for the steak. “I’ll bring out a fresh batch.”

He left, and David looked after him. He was young and handsome and male (everything that he’d strictly forbidden), and when he returned, David stood aside silently and let him remove the empty platter and put the new one down.

That went quick, he said.

“Well, it should. It’s really good. We had a tasting beforehand.” The waiter looked up and smiled, and David smiled back. There was a pause.

I’m David, he said.

“James.”

“Nice to meet you,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed.

“So, is this a birthday party?” James asked.

No—no. It’s for Peter—the guy in the wheelchair. He’s—he’s sick.

James nodded, and there was another silence. “This is a nice house,” he said, and David nodded back. Yeah, it is, he said.

“Who owns it?”

Charles—the big blond guy? The one in the green sweater?
My boyfriend,
he should have said, but he didn’t.

“Oh—oh yeah.” James was still holding the platter, and now he rotated it in his hands and then looked up again and smiled. “And what about you?”

What about me? he asked, flirting back.

“What’s your deal?”

I don’t have a deal.

James gestured with his chin toward the living room. “One of them your boyfriend?”

He didn’t say anything. Eighteen months after their first date, he
still found himself occasionally surprised that he and Charles were a couple. It wasn’t just that Charles was so much older than he was; it was that Charles wasn’t the sort of man he had ever been attracted to—he was too blond, too rich, too white. He knew what they looked like together; he knew what people said. “Well, so what if they think you’re trade?” Eden had asked when he confessed to her. “Trade are people, too.” I know, I know, he said. But it’s different. “Your problem,” Eden said, “is that you can’t accept that people just think of you as some brown-skinned nothing.” And, indeed, it bothered him that people assumed that he was poor and uneducated and using Charles for his money. (Eden: “You
are
poor and uneducated. Besides, what do you care what these old fucks think about you?”)

But what if, instead, he and this James were a couple, both of them young and poor and not-white together? What if he were with someone whom he could look at and see, if only superficially, himself? Was it Charles’s wealth, or his age, or his race that made David feel so often helpless and inferior? Would he be more purposeful, less passive, if things between him and his boyfriend were more equitable? Would he feel like less of a traitor?

And yet he was being a traitor now, by not claiming Charles, by his guilt. Yes, he told James. Charles is. He’s my boyfriend.

“Oh,” said James, and David watched something—pity? disdain?—flicker across his face. “Too bad,” he added, and he grinned and pushed open the double doors to the kitchen, disappearing with his platter, leaving David alone once more.

He grabbed his plate and left, feeling both an intense embarrassment and, less explicably, a kind of rage at Charles, for not being the sort of person he ought to be with, for making him feel ashamed. He knew this was unfair: He wanted Charles’s protection, and he wanted to be free. Sometimes, when he and Charles were sitting in the study on a Saturday night they had chosen to stay in the city, watching a video of one of the black-and-white movies Charles loved from his youth, they would hear the sounds of a group of people on the sidewalk below them, passing beneath the house on their way to a club or bar or party. He would recognize them by their laughter, by the pitch of their voices—not who they were specifically but the kind of
people they were, the tribe of the young and broke and futureless to which he himself had belonged until eighteen months ago. He sometimes felt like one of his ancestors, coaxed onto a ship and sent bobbing around the world, made to stand on plinths at medical colleges in Boston and London and Paris so that doctors and students could examine his elaborately tattooed skin, his necklace of twisted ropes of plaited human hair—Charles was his guide, his chaperone, but he was also his warden, and now that he had been taken from his people, he would never be allowed to return to them. The sensation was most profound on summer nights, when they kept the windows open, and at three a.m. he would be awoken by groups of passersby, singing drunkenly as they rounded the Square, their voices gradually disappearing among the trees. Then he would look at Charles in bed by his side, and feel a mix of pity and love and revulsion and irritation—dismay that he was with someone so different; gratitude that that someone was Charles. “Age is just a number,” one of his more vapid friends had said, trying to be nice, but he was wrong—age was a different continent, and as long as he was with Charles, he would be moored there.

Not that he had anywhere else to be. His future was a vague, vaporous thing. He wasn’t alone in this; so many of his friends and classmates were like him, drifting from home to their jobs and then home again before going out at night to bars or clubs or other people’s apartments. They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive. He had one friend who, after his lover had died, had started gorging himself. Anything he had, he spent on food; David had gone out to dinner with Ezra once and had watched in horrified awe as he had eaten a bowl of wonton soup followed by a plate of wok-fried snow peas and water chestnuts followed by a dish of braised beef tongue followed by a whole Peking duck. He had eaten with a kind of steady, joyless determination, tracing his finger through the last streaks of
sauce, stacking the empty plates atop one another as if they were completed paperwork. It had been repellent, but David had understood it as well: Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food. Over the months, Ezra gained weight, at first slowly and then quickly, and now he was fat. But as long as he was fat, he wasn’t sick, and no one would ever think he was: His cheeks were hot and pink; his lips and fingertips were often slicked with grease—wherever he went, he left evidence of his existence. Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable.