To Paradise (27 page)

Wait, he said, and hurried back inside, where the staff was wrapping up the last of the leftovers, shrouding the chocolate mountain in tinfoil. He grabbed it—Adams raising his eyebrows but saying nothing—and staggered back downstairs, both of his arms wrapped around it.

Here, he said to Eden, handing it over to her. It’s the chocolate mountain.

She was surprised, he could tell, and adjusted it in her arms, listing a little beneath its weight. “What the fuck, David?” she said. “What’m I going to do with this?”

He had shrugged. I don’t know, he said. But it’s yours.

“How’m I going to get it home?”

A cab?

“I don’t have money for a cab. And I
don’t,
” she said, as David reached into his pocket, “I don’t want your
money,
David.”

I don’t know what you want me to say, Eden, he said, and then, when she said nothing, I love him. I’m sorry, but I do. I love him.

For a while they had stood there, quiet, in the cold night. From inside, he could hear the thump-thump-thump of house music begin to play. “Then fuck you, David,” said Eden, quietly, and she had turned and left, still lugging the chocolate mountain, the hem of her coat dusting the ground behind her in a way that made her appear, for a moment, grand. He had watched her round the corner. Then he went back into the house and returned to Charles’s side.

“Everything okay?” Charles asked, and David nodded.

They did the best they could, afterward. The next day he called
Eden at home, and spoke into the answering machine—the message still in his voice—but she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t call him back. For a whole month, they didn’t speak, and every afternoon David would stare at his phone at Larsson, Wesley, willing that it would ring and he would hear Eden’s dry, throaty croak on the other end. And then, finally, she did call, one afternoon in late January.

“I’m not apologizing,” Eden said.

I’m not expecting you to, he said.

“You won’t believe what happened to me on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “Remember that girl I was fucking? Theodora?”

You wouldn’t believe what happened to me, either, he could have said, because by that point he had been taken by Charles on a surprise trip to Gstaad, his first time out of the country, where he had learned how to ski and had eaten pizza that had been covered with a drift of shaved truffles and a velvety soup made of pureed white asparagus and cream, and where he and Charles had had a three-way—David’s first—with one of the ski instructors, and for a few days, he had forgotten who he was entirely. But he never said that to her; he wanted her to think that nothing at all had changed, and she, for her part, let him pretend that she believed that, too.

What he also never said was thank you. That night, after she left and then the guests did as well, he and Charles had gone up to their room. “Is your friend all right?” Charles asked, as they climbed into bed.

Yes, he lied. She got the date wrong. She’s really sorry and sends her apologies. Eden and Charles would never meet, he now knew, but manners mattered to Charles and he wanted him to like her, or at least the idea of her.

Charles fell asleep, but David lay awake, thinking of Eden. And then he remembered that she had given him something, and he got out of bed and went downstairs to grope in the closet for his coat, and then for the hard little package. It had been bundled in the page from
The Village Voice
advertising escorts, their standard wrapping paper, and then tied with twine, and he had had to knife through its bindings.

Inside had been a small clay sculpture of two forms, two men,
standing pressed against each other, holding hands. Eden had begun working with clay only a few months before David moved out, and although the forms were imperfect, he could see that she’d improved—the lines were more fluid, the forms more confident, the proportions more refined. But the piece still looked primitive, somehow, lively rather than lifelike, and that too was intentional: Eden was trying to repopulate the world with statuary of the sort that had been destroyed over the centuries by Western marauders. He examined the work more closely and realized that the two men were meant to be him and Charles—Eden had rendered Charles’s mustache as a series of short vertical strokes, had captured the sharp side part of his hair. On the bottom she had etched their initials and the date, and beneath those, her own initials.

She didn’t like Charles—on principle, and because he’d taken her closest friend from her. But in this sculpture, she had united the three of them: She had carved herself into David’s and Charles’s lives.

He climbed the stairs, back up to his and Charles’s room; he had gone to his and Charles’s closet, had worked the sculpture into a gym sock, and had shoved it into the back of his and Charles’s underwear drawer. He never showed it to Charles, and Eden never asked him about it. But years later, when he was moving out of Charles’s house, he found it, and in his new apartment, he set it on the mantel, and every now and again, he would pick it up and hold it in his palm. He had spent so much of his childhood feeling alone that when he began seeing Charles, he felt like he would never be alone, or lonely, ever again.

He was wrong, of course. He was still lonely with Charles; he was lonelier after Charles. That was a feeling that never went away. But the sculpture was a reminder of something else. He hadn’t been alone before he met Charles after all—he had been Eden’s. He just hadn’t known it.

But she had.

The guests had left, the caterers had left, and the house had taken on that particular desolate mood that it always did in the aftermath of a party: It had been called on to perform, brilliantly, for a few hours, and now it was being returned to its normal, dull existence. The Three Sisters, who had lingered the longest, had finally departed with half a dozen paper bags stacked with containers of food, John purring with delight as he received them. Even Adams had been dismissed, though before he had left, he had bowed, formally, before Peter, and Peter had bent his head in return. “Godspeed, Mister Peter,” Adams had said, solemnly. “I hope your journey is safe.”

“Thank you, Adams,” said Peter, who had used to call Adams “Miss Adams” behind his back. “For everything. You’ve been so good to me over the years—to all of us.” They shook hands.

“Good night, Adams,” said Charles, who was standing behind Peter. “Thank you for tonight—everything was perfect, as usual,” and Adams nodded again and walked out of the living room, toward the kitchen. When Charles’s parents were alive, and there had been a full-time cook and a full-time housekeeper and a maid and a chauffeur as well as Adams, all of the staff were expected to use the back door for their comings and goings. And although Charles had long since revised that rule, Adams still only arrived or departed through the kitchen entrance—initially because, Charles thought, he was uncomfortable disrupting such a long-standing tradition, but recently because he was old, and the back staircase was shallower, its steps wider.

As David watched him go, he wondered, as he sometimes did, what Adams’s life was outside of the house. What did Adams wear, to whom and how did he speak, when he wasn’t in Charles’s house, when he wasn’t in his suit, when he wasn’t serving? What did he do in his apartment? What were his hobbies? He had every Sunday off, as well as the third Monday of every month, and five weeks of vacation, two of which he took in early January, when Charles was skiing. When David asked, Charles had said that he thought that Adams had a rental cabin down in Key West, and that he went fishing there, but he hadn’t been sure. He knew so little about Adams’s life. Had Adams been married? Did he have a boyfriend, a
girlfriend? Had he ever? Did he have siblings, nieces or nephews? Did he have friends? In the early days of their relationship, when he was still getting accustomed to Adams’s presence, he had asked Charles all of these questions, and Charles had laughed, embarrassed. “This is terrible,” he said, “but I don’t know how to answer any of these.” How could you not? he’d asked, before he was aware of what he was saying, but Charles hadn’t been offended. “It’s difficult to explain,” he said, “but there are some people in your life where it’s just—it’s just easier not to know too much about them.”

He wondered now if he was another one of those people in Charles’s life, someone whose appeal would not only be ruined by the complications of his history but who had indeed been chosen because he seemed to have no history at all. He knew Charles was unafraid of difficult lives, but perhaps David had been attractive because he had appeared so simple, someone not yet marked by age or experience. A dead mother, a dead father, a year in law school, a childhood spent far away in a middle-class family, handsome but not intimidatingly so, smart but not memorably so, someone who had preferences and desires, but not so strongly held that he would be unwilling to accommodate Charles’s. He could see how, to Charles, he was defined by his absences—no secrets, no troublesome ex-boyfriends, no illnesses, no past.

Then there was Peter: someone whom Charles knew intimately, and who in turn, David was belatedly realizing, knew more about Charles than he ever would. No matter how long he stayed with Charles, no matter how much he might learn about him, Peter would always possess more of him—not just years but epochs. He had known Charles as a child, and as a young man, and as a middle-aged one. He had given Charles his first kiss, his first blow job, his first cigarette, his first beer, his first breakup. Together, they had learned what they liked in the world: what food, what books, what plays, what art, what ideas, what people. He had known Charles before he became Charles, when he was just a sturdy, athletic boy to whom Peter had found himself attracted. David could see, too late, after months of struggling to find a way to talk to Peter, how he could have and should have simply asked Peter about the person they shared: about who he’d been, about
the life he’d had before David had entered it. Charles may have been incurious about David, but David was guilty of the same incuriousness; each of them wanted the other to exist only as he was currently experiencing him—as if they were both too unimaginative to contemplate each other in a different context.

But suppose they were forced to? Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely? What if Manhattan was a flooded island of rivers and canals, and people traveled in wooden longboats, and you yanked nets of oysters from the cloudy waters beneath your house, which was held aloft on stilts? Or what if they lived in a glittering, treeless metropolis rendered entirely in frost, in buildings made from stacked blocks of ice, and rode polar bears and kept seals as pets, against whose jiggling sides you’d press at night for warmth? Would they still recognize each other, passing each other in different boats, or crunching through the snow, hurrying home to their fires?

Or what if New York looked just as it did, but no one he knew was dying, no one was dead, and tonight’s party had been just another gathering of friends, and there was no pressure to say anything wise, anything conclusive, because they would have hundreds more dinners, thousands more nights, dozens more years, to figure out what they wanted to tell one another? Would they still be together in that world, where there was no need to cling together from fear, where their knowledge of pneumonia, of cancers, of fungal infections, of blindness, would be obscure, useless, ridiculous?

Or what if, in this planetary shift, they were knocked sideways, west and south, and returned to consciousness somewhere else entirely, in Hawai
‘
i, and in that Hawai
‘
i, that other Hawai
‘
i, there was no reason for Lipo-wao-nahele, that place to which his father had removed him so long ago, because what it had tried to conjure was in fact real? What if, in this Hawai
‘
i, the islands were still a kingdom, not part of America at all, and his father was the king, and he, David, was the crown prince? Would they still know each other? Would they still have fallen in love? Would David still have need for Charles? There, he would be the more powerful of the
two—he would no longer be in need of another’s largesse, another’s protection, another’s education. Who would Charles be to him there? Would David still find something to love in him? And what of his father—who would he be? Would he be more confident, more self-assured, less scared, less lost? Would he still have had use for Edward? Or would Edward be a speck, a servant, a nameless functionary his father passed, unseeing, on his way to his study to sign documents and treaties, his handsome face aglow as he walked barefoot across the gleaming floors, the wood polished every morning with macadamia oil?

He would never know. For in the world in which they lived, he and his father, they were only who they were: two men, both of whom had sought succor from another man, one each hoped might save him from the smallness of his life. His father had chosen poorly. David had not. But in the end, they were both dependents, disappointed by their past and frightened by their present.

He turned to watch Charles wrap a scarf around Peter’s throat. They were silent, and David had the feeling, as he often had when watching them, but which he had most acutely that evening, that he was a trespasser, that their intimacy was never his to witness. He didn’t move, but he didn’t need to—they had forgotten he was even there. Peter had originally thought he might spend the night in the house with Charles, but the day before had decided against it. His nurse had been called, and was coming with an assistant to pick him up and escort him home.

It was time to say goodbye. “Just give me a second,” Charles announced to them both in a strangled voice, and left the room, and they could both hear him running up the stairs.

And then David was alone with Peter. Peter was in his wheelchair, swaddled in his coat and hat; the top and bottom of his face were obscured by layers of wool, as if he wasn’t dying but mutating, as if the wool were creeping over him like a skin, turning him into something cozy and soft—a couch, a cushion, a bundle of yarn. Charles had been sitting on the sofa to talk to him, and Peter’s chair was still angled toward what was now an empty seat in an empty room.