To Paradise (26 page)

He listened to all of this, still pressed against Charles’s side, Charles’s left arm around him, his right arm around Peter’s shoulders. He had burrowed his face into Charles’s rib cage, like a child, so he could listen to Charles’s slow, steady breaths, so he could feel the heat of his body against his cheek. Charles’s left hand was tucked beneath his left arm, and now David reached up his hand and laced his fingers through Charles’s. The two of them were unnecessary to this part of the evening, but if you were observing them from above, the three of them would have appeared to be a single organism, a twelve-limbed, three-headed creature, one head nodding and listening, the other two silent and immobile, the three of them kept alive by a single, enormous heart, one that steadily, uncomplainingly beat in Charles’s chest, sending bright, clean blood through
the yards of arteries that connected all three of their forms, filling them with life.

It was still early, but people were already preparing to leave. “He’s tired,” they said of Peter to one another, and, to him, “Are you tired?,” to which Peter replied, time after time, “Yes, a little,” until a certain weariness entered his voice, one that could have been from his patience finally depleting or from genuine fatigue. He spent most of his days sleeping, he had told Charles, and in the evenings he would doze until midnight and then wake and “take care of things.”

Like what? he had asked at a lunch about six months ago, shortly after Peter had decided on his Switzerland plan.

“Gathering my papers. Burning letters I don’t want getting into the wrong hands. Finalizing the gift list appended to my will—deciding who gets what. Making a list of people I want to say goodbye to. Making a list of people I don’t want invited to my funeral. I had no idea how much of dying involves list-making: You make lists of people you like and people you hate. You make lists of people you want to say thanks to, and people you want to ask forgiveness from. You make lists of people you want to see and people you don’t. You make lists of songs you want played at your memorial service, and poems you might want read, and who you might want to invite.

“Of course, this is if you’ve been lucky enough to keep your mind. Though lately I’ve been wondering if it’s so lucky at all, being so conscious, being so aware that, from now on, you’ll never progress. You’ll never become
more
educated or learned or interesting than you are right now—everything you do, and experience, from the moment you begin actively dying is useless, a futile attempt to change the end of the story. And yet you keep trying to do it anyway—read what you haven’t read and see what you haven’t seen. But it isn’t
for
anything, you see. You just do it out of practice—because that’s what a human does.”

But does it have to be
for
anything? he had asked, tentatively. He
was always nervous about addressing Peter directly, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself—he had been thinking about his father.

“No, of course not. But we’ve been taught that it must, that experience, that learning, is a pathway to salvation; that it’s the point of life. But it isn’t. The ignorant person dies the same way as the educated one. It makes no difference in the end.”

“Well, but what about pleasure?” Charles had asked. “That’s a reason to do it.”

“Certainly, pleasure. But pleasure doesn’t change anything, really. Not that one should do or not do things because they make no difference in the end.”

Are you scared? he had asked.

Peter had been quiet, and David had worried he had been rude. But then Peter spoke. “I’m not scared because I’m worried it’s going to hurt,” he said, slowly, and when he looked up, his large, light eyes looked even larger and lighter than usual. “I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

There had been a silence after that, and then the conversation had somehow changed. He wondered if Peter still felt that way; he wondered if he was thinking even now that he had wasted his life. He wondered if that was why Peter had tried chemotherapy after all, if he had decided he was going to try once more, if he was hoping he could change his mind, hoping he could feel differently. David hoped he
did
feel differently; he hoped Peter didn’t still feel as he had. It was an impossible thing to ask—
Do you still feel you’ve wasted your life?
—and so he didn’t, though later he would wish he had been able to find a way to do so. He thought, as he always did, of his father, of how he had willed his life away—or was it that he had willed himself away from it? It was his sole act of disobedience, and David hated him for it.

In the living room, the Three Sisters were putting on their coats, winding scarves around their throats, kissing Peter and then Charles goodbye. “You’ll be okay?” he heard Charles ask Percival. “I’ll see
you next week, all right?” And Percival’s response: “Yes, I’m fine. Thanks, Charlie—for everything.” David was always moved by this side of Charles: his motherliness, his care. He had a sudden vision of one of the mothers in the picture books he and his father used to read together, babushkaed and aproned and pleasantly fat and living in a stone house in some unnamed village in some unnamed European country, slipping into her children’s pockets pebbles that she had heated in the oven so their fingers would stay warm on their walk to school.

He knew Charles had asked Adams to instruct the caterers to pack up all the leftover food so any of their guests could take some, though he knew Charles meant for the majority of it to go to John and Timothy. In the kitchen, he found some of the waitstaff placing the last of the cookies and cakes into cardboard containers, and the containers into paper bags, and others hefting large crates of dirty dishes out to their van, which was parked behind the house, in the courtyard that had once separated the main building from the carriage house, which was now a garage. James, he was disappointed and relieved to discover, was nowhere in sight, and for a moment he watched, mesmerized, at the tenderness with which one young woman lowered the remaining quarter of the cheesecake into a plastic tub, settling it as if it were a baby she was tucking into its cradle.

The only thing not put away was the misshapen brick of dark chocolate, scarred and dusty in parts like an oversize car battery. This, like the double-chocolate cake, was a signature of Charles’s parties, and the first time David had seen it, seen how one of the waiters had taken an awl and stuck it in its side, tapping it with a small hammer as another waiter held aloft a plate to catch the splinters that fell from it, he was enraptured. It seemed both improbable and ridiculous that people should order a cube of chocolate so big that they had to actually carve it with a hammer and chisel until its sides appeared to have been gnawed on by mice, and even more unlikely that he should be dating someone who thought this was unexceptional. He had described it later to Eden, who had scoffed and said unhelpful things like “This is why the revolution is coming” and “You better than anyone should know that eating sugar is
an act of hostile colonialism,” but he could tell she was entranced as well by something that seemed like a child’s fantasy brought to life—after this, why shouldn’t one expect to find the house made of gingerbread, the clouds made of cotton candy, the trees in the Square made of peppermint bark? It became a running joke of theirs: The omelet she made was good, he said, but not chocolate-mountain good. The girl she’d had sex with the night before had been fine, she said, but she was no chocolate mountain. “The next party, you have to take a picture and prove to me the depth of Charles’s capitalist depravity,” she told him. She was always asking him when the next gathering would be, when she would finally get to see the evidence.

And so he had been excited to invite Eden to Charles’s next party, his annual pre-Christmas gathering. This had been last year, shortly after he’d moved in, and he had been nervous to ask, but Charles had been enthusiastic. “Of course you should bring her,” he said. “I’m looking forward to meeting this spitfire of yours.” Come, he had told Eden. Come hungry.

She had rolled her eyes. “I’m only coming for the chocolate mountain,” she said, and although she had tried to sound blasé, David had known she was excited as well.

But the night of the party, he had waited and waited, and she had never appeared. This had been a sit-down dinner, and her place had sat empty, her napkin still pleated on her plate. He had been embarrassed and concerned, but Charles had been kind. “Something must have come up,” he had whispered to David as he slid back into his chair after calling her for the third time. “Don’t worry, David. I’m sure she’s okay. I’m sure there’s a good reason.”

They were drinking coffee in the living room when Adams approached him, looking disapproving. “Mister David,” he said to him in a low voice, “there’s a person—a
Miss
Eden—asking for you.”

He was relieved, and then angry: at Adams, for his condescension, and at Eden, for being late, for making him wait and worry. Please bring her in, Adams, he said.

“She won’t come in. She asked for you to come out. She’s waiting in the courtyard.”

He had gotten up, grabbed his coat from the closet, and pushed
past the scrum of waiters and out the back door, where Eden stood on the cobblestones. But just before he exited the building, he had stopped and seen her, looking up at the warm-lit windows that were fogging over with steam, at the handsome waiters in their shirtsleeves and black ties, her breath coming out in puffs. And suddenly he’d understood, as clearly as if she’d said it aloud, that she had been intimidated. He could see her marching west down Washington Square North, stopping in front of the house and checking and rechecking the number, and then, slowly, climbing the stairs. He could see her looking inside, seeing a roomful of middle-aged men, most of them somehow discernibly rich even in their sweaters and jeans; he could see her faltering. He could see that she would have hesitated before lifting her finger to press the buzzer, that she would have reminded herself that she was just as good as they, that she didn’t care about their opinions anyway, that they were just a bunch of old, rich white men, and that she had nothing to apologize for and nothing to be ashamed about.

And then he could see her watching Adams enter the living room to tell them dinner was served, and although she knew already that Charles had a butler, she hadn’t actually expected to
see
him, and as the room cleared, she would have squinted and realized that the painting on the far wall, the one that hung over the sofa, was a Jasper Johns, a real Jasper Johns—not the reproduction she had tacked up in her bedroom—and one which Charles had bought himself as a thirtieth-birthday present, and which David had never told her about. She would have turned then, and stumbled down the stairs, and walked a lap around the Square, telling herself that she could go inside, that she belonged there, that her best friend lived in that house, and that she had every right to be there, too.

But she couldn’t. And so she would have stood outside, just across the street from the house, leaning against the cold iron fence surrounding the Square, watching the waiters present the soup, and then the meat, and then the salad, and wine being poured, and, although she wouldn’t have been able to hear, jokes being told and everyone laughing. And it was only when all the guests had stood that she, by now so chilled she could barely move, her feet numb in
her old combat boots that she’d mended with electrical tape, would see one of the waiters duck onto Fifth Avenue for a smoke and then disappear into the back of the house and realize that there was a service entrance, and she would go there, leaning on the buzzer, announcing David’s name, refusing to enter that golden house.

He knew, looking at her, that part of her would never forgive him, would never forgive the fact that he had—even unintentionally—made her feel so uncomfortable, like such a nothing. He stood on the other side of the door, in the sweater and pants Charles had bought him, the softest clothes he had ever worn, and looked at her in what she called her fancy outfit—a frayed wool herringbone man’s coat, so long it brushed the ground; a brown thrift-store suit worn shiny from use; an old rep tie in stripes of orange and black; a fedora pushed back from her round, plain face; the thin mustache she drew with eyeliner above her upper lip for special occasions—and understood that inviting her here, having her witness his life here, had taken from her the joy of wearing those clothes, of being who she was. She was dear to him, she was his closest friend, she was the only one he had told the real story of what happened to his father. “I’ll cut anyone who messes with you,” she would say to him as they walked through a dangerous part of Alphabet City or the Lower East Side, and he would try not to smile, because she was more than a foot shorter than he was, and so plump and ticklish that just the thought of her barreling toward an assailant, knife in hand, made him grin, but he also knew she meant it: She would protect him, always, against anyone. But by inviting her here, he had failed to protect her. In their world, among their friends, she was Eden, brilliant and witty and singular. In Charles’s world, though, she would be whom everyone else saw: a mannish, overweight, short Chinese American woman, unfeminine and unattractive, charmless and loud, in cheap secondhand clothes and a mustache made of makeup, someone whom people ignored or laughed at, as Charles’s friends surely would have, despite their efforts not to. And now Charles’s world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.

He opened the door and went to her. She looked up, and saw him, and they stared at each other in silence. Eden, he said. Come in. You’re freezing.

But she shook her head. “No way,” she said.

Please. There’s tea, or wine, or coffee, or cider, or—

“I can’t stay,” she said.
Then why have you come?
he wanted to say, but didn’t. “I have places to be,” she continued. “I just came to give you this,” and handed him a lumpy little package wrapped in newsprint. “Open it later,” she instructed, and he slipped it into his coat pocket. “I’d better go,” she said.