To Paradise

PART I

The letter arrived at the office on the day of the party. He rarely got mail, and when he did, it wasn’t actually for him—just subscription offers for magazines and law journals that were addressed to “Paralegal” and dropped in a bundle on one of their desks by the mailroom clerk—so it wasn’t until he was drinking his afternoon cup of coffee that he bothered to scrape the rubber band off the stack of envelopes and flick through them, only to suddenly see his name. When he saw the return address, he experienced a loss of breath, one so profound that for a moment all sound disappeared except for that of a hot, dry wind.

He took the envelope and stuffed it into his pants pocket and hurried to the archive room, which was the most private place on the floor, where he held it against his chest for a moment before opening it, tearing the letter itself in his haste. But then, midway through removing the sheet of paper inside, he instead replaced it in its envelope, folded it in half, and jammed it into his shirt pocket. And then he had to sit on a stack of old law books, puffing air onto his clasped hands, which was something he did when he was anxious, until he was ready to leave.

By the time he returned to his desk, it was a quarter of four. He had already requested permission to leave at four today, but he went to ask his manager if he might go a few minutes earlier. Of course, she said—it was a slow day; she’d see him on Monday. He thanked her, and shoved the letter into his bag.

“Have a good weekend,” she said as he left.

You too, he said.

He had to pass Charles’s office on the way to the elevator, but he didn’t look in to say goodbye to him, because they had agreed that it was safest if they pretended not to be any more familiar with each other than a senior partner would be with a junior paralegal. When they had first begun seeing each other, he would find himself walking by Charles’s office a dozen times a day, hoping to catch a glimpse of him doing something mundane, the more mundane the better: smoothing back his hair as he read a brief; dictating a memo into his recorder; flipping through the pages of a law book; talking on the phone while looking out the window to the Hudson River, his back to the door. Charles never acknowledged him, but David was certain he was aware of his passings.

That had been the source of one of their early disagreements: Charles’s lack of acknowledgment. “Well, what can I do, David?” Charles had asked him, not defensively, as they lay in bed one night. “It’s not like I can stop by the paralegals’ area whenever I want. Or even call you: Laura can see on her phone who I’m calling, and she’d eventually put two and two together.”

He didn’t say anything, just pressed his face into the pillow, and Charles sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” he said, gently. “It’s just complicated. You know how it is.”

Finally, they had worked out a code: Whenever he passed Charles’s office, and Charles wasn’t busy, he would clear his throat and twirl a pencil between his fingers; that would be his signal that he’d seen David. It was silly—David wouldn’t dare tell his friends that this was how he and Charles interacted in the office; they already didn’t trust Charles—but it was also satisfying. “Larsson, Wesley owns me by day, but you own me by night,” Charles always said, and that was satisfying, too.

But they still get more billable hours from you than I do, he’d said to Charles, once.

“Not true,” said Charles. “You get weekends, and holidays, and nights as well.” He reached over then and grabbed his calculator—Charles was the only person he had ever slept with, or dated, who kept a calculator on his bedside table, much less consulted it regularly during their arguments and discussions—and began punching the buttons. “Twenty-four hours in a day, seven days a week,” he said. “Larsson, Wesley gets—what? Twelve hours over five days, plus, okay, another seven combined on the weekend. That’s sixty-seven total. One hundred sixty-eight hours in a week, take away sixty-seven—that means that for a hundred and one hours every week, minimum, I am at your complete and utter disposal. And that doesn’t count the hours at Larsson that I spend thinking about you, or thinking about you and trying not to think about you.”

How many are those? he asked. They were both smiling by then.

“Loads,” said Charles. “Countless. Tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours. More than any other client I have.”

Now he walked by Charles’s office, and Charles cleared his throat and spun a pencil between his fingers, and David smiled: He’d been seen. Now he could go.

At home, everything was under control. That’s what Adams told him when he came in: “Everything is under control, Mister David.” As always, he seemed faintly puzzled—by the fact of David, by his presence in the house, by having to serve David, and now by David’s belief that he could contribute anything to a dinner party, the kind Adams had been arranging for years, more years than David had been alive.

When he moved into the house a year ago, he had asked Adams again and again to call him David, not Mister David, but Adams never would, or at least never did. Adams would never be used to him, and he would never be used to Adams. After one of the first nights he had spent with Charles, they had been in bed making out, near sex, when he heard someone speak Charles’s name gravely, and he had yelped and jolted and looked up to see Adams standing in the doorway of Charles’s room.

“I can bring breakfast now, Mister Charles, unless you’d rather wait.”

“I’ll wait, Adams, thank you.”

After Adams left, Charles had pulled him close again, but David pushed away, and Charles laughed. “What was that sound you made?” he teased, and gave a few short, high barks. “Like a porpoise,” he said. “Adorable.”

Does he always do that? he asked.

“Adams? Yes. He knows I like my routine.”

It’s a little creepy, Charles.

“Oh, Adams is harmless,” Charles said. “He’s just a little old-fashioned. And he’s an excellent butler.”

Over the months, he had tried to talk to Charles about Adams, but he was never successful, in part because he could never quite articulate his objections. Adams never treated him with anything but a somber, distant respect, and yet David knew somehow that Adams disapproved of him. When he told his best friend and former roommate, Eden, about Adams, she had rolled her eyes. “A butler?” she had said. “Give me a break, David. Anyway, he probably hates all of Chuck’s tricks.” (That was what Eden called Charles: Chuck. Now all their friends called him Chuck as well.)

I’m not a trick, he’d corrected Eden.

“Oh, right, I’m sorry,” Eden had said. “You’re his boyfriend.” And she had pursed her lips and fluttered her eyelashes—she didn’t approve of monogamy, and neither did she approve of men: “Except for you, David,” she’d say. “And you barely count.”

Gee, thanks, he’d say, and she’d laugh.

But he knew it wasn’t true that Adams disapproved of all of Charles’s boyfriends, because he’d once overheard a conversation that Adams and Charles had had about Charles’s former boyfriend Olivier, whom Charles had dated before he met David. “And Mister Olivier called,” Adams had said, giving Charles his messages, and David, standing just outside the doorway to the study, could hear something different in Adams’s voice.

“How did he sound?” Charles asked. He and Olivier were still friendly but only saw each other once or twice a year at most.

“Very well,” said Adams. “Please give him my regards.”

“I absolutely will,” Charles said.

Anyway, trying to complain about Adams was useless, because Charles would never abandon him: He had been Charles’s parents’ butler when he was a teenager, and when they both died, Charles, who was their only child, inherited not only their house but Adams as well. He could never tell his friends that; they would see Charles’s employment of a seventy-five-year-old man in a physically demanding position as a form of geriatric exploitation, despite the fact that David knew that Adams enjoyed having his job as much as Charles enjoyed providing it to him. His friends never understood that—how, for some people, work was the only thing that made them feel real to the world.

“I know it seems anachronistic to have a butler,” Charles had said—few of his own friends did, even the ones who were richer or from older money than he was—“but when you’re raised with one, it’s a hard habit to give up.” He sighed. “I don’t expect you, or anyone, to understand.” David said nothing. “This is as much Adams’s house as it is mine,” Charles often said, and David knew he meant it in a way, even if it wasn’t true. Habitation is not equivalent to ownership, he’d reminded Charles, quoting his first-year law-school professor, and Charles had grabbed him (they’d been in bed then, too). “Are you actually explaining legal principles to me?” he’d asked, teasing. “To me? You really are adorable.” You wouldn’t understand, Charles said to him, about this and so many other matters, and when he did, David’s grandmother’s face would suddenly flash through his mind. Would his grandmother have ever said that their house was as much Matthew’s and Jane’s as it was theirs? He didn’t think so. Their house belonged only to the Binghams, and the only way to become a Bingham was to be born one or to marry one.

It certainly would never have occurred to Matthew or Jane to consider the Bingham house theirs either, and David suspected that Adams felt the same way: This was Charles’s house, and always would be, and although he might be a part of it, it was only as a chair or a sidewall cabinet was part of it—a fixture, but nothing with its own desires or motivations or sense of autonomy. Adams could behave as if it were his—look at him now, ignoring the presence of the party planner to order the caterers into the kitchen and the furniture movers into the dining room—but though his authority was in part innate, much of it was due to his association with Charles, whose name he invoked only when necessary, though still not infrequently. “You know Mr. Griffith doesn’t like them,” he was now chiding the florist, who stood before him, protesting, trying to persuade, clutching a green plastic bucket of partially opened Easter lilies against her chest. “We discussed this. He thinks their scent is funereal.”

“But I ordered all of these!” (The florist, in a near-wail.)

“Then I suggest you contact Mr. Griffith and try to convince him,” Adams said, knowing she never would, and, indeed, the florist turned and walked away, calling to her crew as she did, “We have to eighty-six the lilies!” and, lower, “Asshole.”

David watched her go, feeling triumphant as she did. He was to have coordinated the flowers. After the last big party—this was shortly after David had moved in—he had suggested to Charles that the flowers were a little listless, and far too fragrant: overly perfumed flowers distracted from the food. “You’re right,” Charles had said. “Next time, you’ll be in charge of them.”

Will I really?

“Of course. What do I know about flowers? You’re the expert,” Charles had said, and had kissed him.

At the time, this had felt like a privilege, a gift, but since then he had come to learn that when Charles declared his ignorance it was only because he thought the subject inconsequential. He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time—he had other, more important things to learn about and remember. And anyway, it hadn’t happened: Charles had remembered to tell the party planner not to hire the same florist, but had forgotten to tell her that David would be in charge. David had spent the past month planning his arrangements, calling different shops in the Flower District to ask if they could special-order stephanotis and protea, and it had only been two weeks ago, when he and Charles were having a drink in the living room and Charles had asked Adams for an update about the party planner—“Yes, she’s hired a different florist”—that David had realized that he wasn’t to be responsible for the flowers after all.

He had waited until Adams left to ask Charles about it, both because they tried not to argue in front of Adams and because he wanted to rehearse the words to himself, to make sure he didn’t sound like he was whining. But he had anyway. I thought I was overseeing the flowers, he’d said, once Adams exited the room.

“What?”

Remember? You said I could?

“Oh, god. Did I?”

Yes.

“I don’t remember. But if you say I did, then I did. Oh, David, I’m sorry.” And then, when he didn’t answer, “You’re not mad, are you? It’s just a bunch of silly flowers. David. Are you upset?”

No, he lied.

“But you are. I’m sorry, David. You can do the next one, I promise.”

He had nodded, and then Adams had reappeared to announce that dinner was served, and the two of them had gone to the dining room. As they ate, he tried to be cheerful, because that was what Charles liked, but later, in bed, Charles had turned to him in the dark and asked, “You’re still annoyed, aren’t you?”

It was difficult to explain why he was—he knew he would sound petty. I just want to help you, he’d begun. I just want to feel like I’m doing something here.

“But you are helping me,” Charles had said. “Every night you’re here with me, you’re helping me.”

Well—thank you. But—I want to feel like we’re doing something together, like I’m contributing something to your life. I feel like—like I’m just taking up room in this house, but I’m not actually doing anything, do you know what I mean?

Charles had been quiet. “I understand,” he said, finally. “Next time, David, I promise. And—I’ve been thinking—why don’t we have some of your friends over for a dinner? Just your friends. You know all of mine, but I feel I’ve hardly met yours.”

Really?

“Yes. This is your house, too; I want them to feel welcome here.”

He had been relieved that night, but since then, Charles hadn’t repeated his offer, and David hadn’t reminded him, partly because he wasn’t sure whether Charles had meant it, but also because he wasn’t certain he wanted his friends meeting Charles at all. The fact that they hadn’t been introduced by now, so long into their relationship, had gone from being unusual to being suspicious: What was David hiding? What didn’t he want them to see? They already knew how old Charles was, and how rich, and how they had met, so what else was he embarrassed about? So, yes, they would come, but they would come to gather evidence, and after dinner they would all go out together and talk about why David was with Charles to begin with, and what he could possibly see in a man thirty years older than he was.

“I know one thing,” he could hear Eden saying.

Yet David often wondered whether it was only the difference in their ages that made him feel like such a child around Charles, in a way that he had never felt around his own father, who was five years younger than his boyfriend. Look at him now: He was hiding in the stairway that connected the parlor and second floors, crouching on a step that he knew afforded him an excellent view of downstairs while concealing him completely, and from which he could watch the florist, still grumbling, snipping the twine off cords of juniper branches and, just behind her, the two movers, white cotton gloves on their hands, hoisting the eighteenth-century wooden sidewall cupboard from its spot in the dining room and carrying it slowly toward the kitchen, like a coffin, where it would remain for the evening. As a child, he had also hidden on the stairs, listening first to his father and grandmother arguing and later Edward and his grandmother arguing, ready to get up and run back toward his room, back under the sheet, if he needed to.

His role tonight had been demoted to that of a supervisor. “You’re quality control,” Charles had said to him. “I need you there to make sure everything looks as it ought to.” But he knew this was a kindness on Charles’s part—his presence here, as in many things, was amorphous and ultimately impotent. What he thought, his opinions, would make little difference. Here, in Charles’s house, his suggestions were as meaningless as they were at work.

“Self-pity is an unattractive quality in a man,” he heard his grandmother say.

What about in a woman?

“Also unattractive, but understandable,” his grandmother would say. “A woman has much more to pity herself for.”

His real job tonight (as on every night), he knew, was to be attractive and presentable, and this, at least, he could do, so he stood and climbed the next flight of stairs, to his and Charles’s room. Until five years ago, when Charles had bought a small condominium in a building one block north, Adams had slept directly above, on the fourth story, in what was now another guest suite. David imagined him kneeling on the floor, still in his black suit, his ear pressed to the rug, listening to Charles and Olivier beneath him. He didn’t like this vision, in which Adams’s face was always turned away from him because he could never determine what his expression would be, and yet he kept seeing it.

The party tonight was for another of Charles’s ex-boyfriends, but this one from so long ago—boarding school—that David saw no threat and no need for jealousy. Peter was the first person Charles had ever slept with, when Peter was sixteen and Charles was fourteen, and they had been friends ever since, their relationship sometimes sliding into a sexual one for months or years, though not in the past decade.

But now Peter was dying. This was why the party was on a Friday, not Charles’s preferred Saturday—because the next day Peter had a ticket to Zurich, where he was going to meet an old Swiss classmate of his from college who was now a doctor, and who had agreed to give him an injection of barbiturates that would stop his heart.

It was difficult for David to comprehend how Charles truly felt about this. He was upset, of course—“I’m upset,” Charles said—but what did “upset” mean, really? Charles had never cried, or gotten angry, or gone blank, not as David had when his first friend had died, seven years ago, and as he had with all the rest since; when he told David about Peter’s decision, he had done so matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, and when David gasped and nearly started crying himself (despite the fact that he didn’t know Peter very well and didn’t much like him besides), it had been Charles who had had to comfort him. Charles had wanted to accompany Peter, but Peter had refused—it would be too difficult for him, he said. He would spend his final evening with Charles, but then, the next morning, he would board the plane with only the nurse he had hired for company.

“At least it’s not the disease,” Charles had said. He said that often. Sometimes he said it directly to David, and sometimes he said it in random moments, almost as an announcement, though the only person to hear it was David. “At least it’s not the disease—at least that’s not how he’s going to die.” Peter was dying of multiple myeloma, with which he’d lived for nine years.

“And now my time is up,” he’d said, with a deliberate, ironic cheerfulness, to a long-unseen acquaintance of his and Charles’s at Charles’s last dinner. “No more extensions for little old me.”

“Is it—”

“Oh, god, no. Boring old cancer, I’m afraid.”

“You always were behind the curve, Peter.”

“I prefer to think of it as traditional. Traditions matter, you know. Someone has to maintain them.”

Now David changed into a suit—all of his good suits had been bought by Charles, but he had stopped wearing them to work when another of the paralegals had commented on them—and chose a tie, before deciding against it: The suit would be enough. He was the only twenty-five-year-old he knew who wore suits outside of work except for Eden, who wore them to be subversive. But as he went to his side of the closet to replace the tie, he passed his bag, and, stuffed down its side, the letter.

He sat on the bed, contemplating it. There would be nothing good in that letter, he knew; it would be about his father, and the news would be bad, and he would have to go home, to his real home, and see him, a person who in certain respects had ceased to become real to him: He was an apparition, someone who appeared only in David’s dreams, someone who had long ago wandered away from the realm of consciousness into wherever he was, someone lost to him. Over the decade since David had seen him last, he had worked hard to never think about him, because thinking about him was like succumbing to a riptide so powerful that he was afraid he would never emerge from it, that it would carry him so far away from land that he would never be able to return. Every day he woke and practiced not thinking about his father, as an athlete practices his sprints or a musician his scales. And now that diligence was about to be upset. Whatever was inside that envelope would begin a series of conversations with Charles, or at least one very long one, one that he would have to start by telling Charles he needed to go away. Why? Charles would ask. And then: Where? Who? I thought you said he was dead. Wait, slow down—who?

He wouldn’t have that conversation tonight, he decided. It was Peter’s party. He had already mourned his father, mourned him for years, and now whatever was in that envelope could wait. And so he buried it deep in his bag, as if by not reading it he was also making not real whatever the letter said—it was suspended, somewhere between New York and Hawai‘i: something that had almost happened, but that he, through not recognizing it, had kept at bay.

The party was starting at seven, and Charles had sworn he would be home by six, but at six-fifteen there was still no sign of him, and David stood at the window, looking out onto the street and the shadowy stage of Washington Square beyond, waiting for Charles to arrive.

When he was in college, the school’s drama club had staged a play about a nineteenth-century heiress who hoped to be married to a man her father was convinced was courting her only for her money. The heiress was plain, and the man was handsome, and no one—not her father, not her simpering spinster aunt, not her friends, not the playwright or the audience—believed that she could be of any genuine attraction to her beloved; the heiress was the only one who believed otherwise. The stubbornness of her belief was meant to be proof of her foolishness, but David saw it as steeliness, the kind born of a great self-possession, the kind he admired in Charles. The opening scene of the second act was of the woman standing in the window of her house, her hair parted in the center and drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck, with two ringlets, like curtains, hanging on each side of her round, sweet face, and her dress, of crisp peach silk, rustling about her. She looked calm and unworried; her hands lay one atop the other at her waist. She was watching for her beloved; she was certain he would come for her.

Now here he was in a similar pose, waiting for his beloved. He, unlike the heiress, had fewer reasons to be anxious, and yet he was. But why? Charles loved him, he would always care for him, he had given him a life he could never have afforded on his own, even if it sometimes felt as if he didn’t truly possess it but was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him.

When he had met Charles, a year and a half ago, he had been living in a one-bedroom apartment with Eden on Eighth Street and Avenue B, and although Eden had found their street exciting—the moaning drunks who shouted at you, inexplicably, just to make you jump; the long-haired boys they occasionally found passed out on their stoop in the morning—he had not. He had learned to leave for the law firm at seven a.m. exactly: any earlier and he would find himself encountering partiers and unsuccessful drug dealers stumbling home from the night before; any later and he would have to pass the first panhandlers of the day, mumbling for change as they shuffled west from Tompkins Square Park to St. Marks Place.

“Got a quarter? Got a quarter? Got a quarter?” they would ask.

Sorry, no, I don’t, he had murmured one morning, his head down as if ashamed, trying to sidestep the man.

Normally, this was enough, but this time, the man—white, with a ragged blond beard knotted with filth, a twist tie wrapped around a clump of it—began to follow him, so closely that David could feel the tips of the man’s shoes ticking at the heels of his, could smell his peppery, porky breath. “You’re lying,” he had hissed. “Why do you lie? I can hear it in your pocket: all that jingle-jangle of coins. Why are you lying? Because you’re one of them, a fucking spic, a fucking spic, aren’t you?”

He had been scared—it was only seven-thirty, and the street was mostly deserted, but there were a few other people out, who stood and gawped at them, as if the two of them were putting on a performance for them to enjoy. (This was something he had quickly grown to hate about this place: how New Yorkers congratulated themselves for ignoring the famous, while watching with unabashed avidity the minor dramas of the plain and average as they played themselves out on the street.) He was almost at Third Avenue by then, and in one of the rare salvations the city sometimes offered, the bus was pulling up to his stop—ten steps, and he would be safe. Ten, nine, eight, seven. And then he was boarding, and he turned and yelled at the man, his voice shrill with fear: I’m not a spic!

“Oh!” said the man, who made no move toward the bus himself. A kind of glee had entered his voice, a delight in getting a response. “Fucking gook! Fucking Chink! Fucking fag! Fucking wop! Fuck you!” As the door had closed, the man had bent, and as the bus pulled away, there had been a thunk on its side, and David had turned and looked out the window and had seen the man, now wearing only one shoe, limping into the street to retrieve its companion.

By the time he reached the office, walking crosstown on Fifty-sixth Street to Broadway, he had managed to compose himself, but then he had seen his reflection in the plate-glass window of the building and realized his pen had leaked, and the entire right-hand side of his shirt was saturated with dark-blue ink. Upstairs, he had gone to the lavatory, only to find it inexplicably locked, and, nearly breathless with panic, had gone instead to the executive washroom, which was empty. There he had begun to dab, fecklessly, at his shirt, the ink dissipating, but not enough. Now his fingers and cheek were stained blue as well. What would he do? It had been a warm day; he hadn’t worn a jacket. He would have to go to a store and buy himself a shirt, and he didn’t have money for that—not money for the shirt itself, not money to lose the pay for the hour it would take to buy it.

It was as he was blotting, cursing, that the door opened, and he looked up and saw Charles. He knew of Charles; he was one of the senior partners, and he was, he supposed, handsome. He had never thought much about it beyond recognizing that he was—Charles was powerful, and old. Spending further time considering his handsomeness was both counterproductive and potentially dangerous. He did know that the secretaries thought Charles was handsome, too. He knew as well that Charles wasn’t married—this was a topic of speculation among them.

“You think he’s a homosexual?” he had overheard one of the secretaries whisper to another.

“Mr. Griffith?” she said. “No! He’s not like one of them.”

Now he began to apologize—for being in the executive washroom, for being covered in ink, for being alive.

Charles ignored his apologies, however. “You do know that shirt’s a goner, right?” he asked, and David looked up from his dabbing to see him smiling. “I’m assuming you don’t have another.”

No, he admitted. Sir.

“Charles,” said Charles, still smiling. “Charles Griffith. I’ll shake your hand later.”

Yes, he said. Right. I’m David Bingham.

He resisted the impulse to apologize again for being in the executive washroom. No land is owned land, Edward used to tell him, back when he was still called Edward. You have the right to be wherever you want. He wondered if Edward would think that same principle would apply to a senior-management bathroom in a midtown Manhattan law firm. He probably would, though the very concept of a law firm, of a law firm in New York, of David working in a law firm in New York, would disgust him even before he got to the absurdity of there being separate bathrooms in the law firm based upon its employees’ rank. Shame on you, Kawika. Shame on you. I taught you better than that.

“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.

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.

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.

But David’s distance from his own life made less sense to him. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t poor, and as long as he was with Charles, he never would be. And yet he was unable to imagine what he might be alive for. He had completed one year of law school before his finances had forced him to drop out and take the job as a paralegal at Larsson, Wesley three years ago, and Charles was always telling him he should reenroll. “Anywhere you want, the best place you can get in,” he’d say. (David had been attending a state school beforehand; he knew Charles would expect better from him.) “I’ll pay for all of it.” When David demurred, Charles would be puzzled. “Why?” he’d ask. “You did a year—you clearly wanted to do it before. And you have a good mind for it. So why not continue?” He couldn’t tell Charles that he hadn’t actually had a particular passion for the law, that he didn’t understand why he had applied for law school in the first place—except that it had seemed like something his father might have wanted for him, something that might have made his father proud. Going to law school fell into the vast category of being able to take care of himself, a virtue his father had always impressed upon him—a skill his father was never able to possess.

Do we have to talk about it? he’d ask Charles.

“No, we don’t,” Charles would say. “But I just don’t like seeing someone as bright as you waste his time being a paralegal.”

I like being a paralegal, he’d say. I’m not as ambitious as you want me to be, Charles.

Charles would sigh. “I don’t want you to be anything but happy, David,” Charles would say. “I just want to know what you want in life. When I was your age, I wanted everything. I wanted influence, and I wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and I wanted to be respected. What do you want?”

I want to be here, he’d always say, with you, and Charles would sigh again but also smile, frustrated but also pleased. “David,” he’d groan, and the argument, if that’s what it was, would end.

And yet sometimes, on those summer nights, he thought he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be somewhere between where he was, in a bed dressed in expensive cotton sheets next to the man he had grown to love, and on the street, skirting the edge of the park, squealing and clinging to his friends when a rat darted from the shadows inches from his feet, drunk and wild and hopeless, his life burning away, with no one to have dreams for him, not even himself.

In the living room, two of the waitstaff were circulating, refilling water glasses, removing empty plates; Adams was delivering drinks. There was a bartender among the catering crew, but David knew that she was being held hostage in the kitchen, her attempts to help rebuffed by Adams, who liked to make the drinks himself and would allow no one to disrupt his methods. And so, for every party, Charles would remind the party planner to instruct the caterer not to bring a bartender, and every time, the caterer would bring someone along “just in case,” and every time, he would be consigned to the kitchen and not allowed to do his job.

From his position beside the staircase, he watched as James entered the room, watched the other guests watch him, watched them register his ass, his eyes, his smile. Now that David wasn’t in the room, he was the only nonwhite person there. James bent over the Three Sisters and said something that David couldn’t hear but that made them all laugh, before straightening and leaving with a stack of plates. A few minutes later, he returned with clean plates and the platter of pasta, which he offered around the room, balancing the dish atop the palm of his right hand while holding his left hand in a fist behind his back.

What if he were to say James’s name as James exited the room? James would look about, surprised, and then see him and smile and come to him, and David would take his hand and lead him to the slant-ceilinged closet beneath the staircase, where Adams stored the house’s supply of mothballs and candles and the burlap bags of cedar chips that he tucked between Charles’s sweaters when he was packing them up for the summer, and which Charles liked to toss into the fireplace to make the smoke more fragrant. The space was just high enough to stand in, and just deep enough for one person to kneel in; he could already feel James’s skin beneath his fingers, already hear the sounds they’d both make. And then James would leave, returning to his duties, and David would wait, counting to two hundred, before he too left, running upstairs to his and Charles’s bathroom to rinse out his mouth before returning to the living room, where James would already be offering people another helping of steak or chicken, and sitting down next to Charles. For the rest of the evening, they would try not to look at each other too much, but with every rotation through the room, James would glance at him, and he would glance back, and when the catering crew was cleaning up, he would tell Charles that he thought he’d forgotten his book and would slip downstairs before Charles could respond, where he would find James just as he was putting on his coat, press into his palm a piece of paper with his telephone number at work, tell him to call. For weeks, maybe months, thereafter they would meet, always at James’s, and then, one day, James would start dating someone or move away or simply grow bored, and David would never hear from him again. He could see and feel and taste it so vividly that it was as if it had already happened and he was reliving a memory, but when James finally did come into view, walking back to the kitchen, he made himself hide, turning his face to the wall to keep from the temptation of speaking.

This constant desire! Was it the fact that it was dangerous to have sex the way he used to, or that he and Charles were monogamous, or was he just restless? “You’re young,” Charles had said, laughing, unoffended, when he had told him. “It’s normal. You’ll grow out of it in the next sixty years or so.” But he wasn’t sure it was that, or perhaps not only that. He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it—and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.

He thought, inevitably, of his father, of what his father had craved. Love, he supposed, affection. But nothing else. Food did not interest him, or sex, or travel, or cars or clothes or houses. One Christmas—the year before they left for Lipo-wao-nahele, which means he would have been nine—they had been assigned at school to find out what their parents wanted for the holiday, and then they would make that thing in art class. Of course, what their parents really wanted they couldn’t make, but other children’s mothers and fathers seemed to understand that, and had answered with something plausible. “I’ve always wanted a nice drawing of you,” someone’s mother said, or “I’d love a new picture frame.” But David’s father had only taken his hand. “I have you,” his father said. “I don’t need anything else.” But you must want something, he had insisted, frustrated, and his father had shaken his head. “No,” he repeated. “You’re my greatest treasure. If I have you, I don’t need anything else.” Finally, David had had to explain his dilemma to his grandmother, who had stood and marched over to where his father lay on the porch, reading the paper and waiting for Edward, and snapped at him, “Wika! Your son is going to fail his school assignment unless you tell him something he can make for you!”

In the end, he had made his father a clay ornament, which was fired in the school’s kiln. It was a lumpy thing, only half glazed, in the shape of what was meant to be a star, with his father’s name—their name—scratched into its surface, but his father had loved it and had hung it above his bed (they hadn’t bought a tree that year), hammering the nail in himself. He remembered how his father had almost cried, and how he had been embarrassed for him, for his happiness over something so stupid and ugly and inexpert, something he had made hastily, in just a few minutes, eager to go outside to play with his friends.

Or, perhaps, this constant yearning for sex was Charles’s fault. He had not been attracted to Charles when they met—his flirting had been automatic, rather than from any genuine feeling—and when he had accepted his invitation for dinner, it was out of curiosity, not desire. But midway through the meal, something had shifted, and the second time they met, at Charles’s house the following day, their encounter had been feverish and almost wordless.

Yet, despite their mutual attraction, they delayed actually having sex for weeks, because they both wanted to avoid the conversation they would first need to have, the conversation that was written on the faces of so many people they knew.

Finally, he had brought it up himself. Listen, he’d said, I don’t have it, and he had watched Charles’s face sag.

“Thank god,” he had said. He had waited for Charles to say that he didn’t have it, either, but he didn’t. “Nobody knows,” he said. “But you should. But aside from Olivier—my ex—no one else does: Just my doctor, him, me, and now you. Oh, and Adams, of course. But no one at work. They can’t.”

He had been momentarily speechless, but Charles had spoken into his silence. “I’m very healthy,” he said. “I have the drugs, I tolerate them well.” He paused. “No one has to know.”

He had been surprised, and then surprised at his surprise. He had made out with and even dated men with the illness, but Charles seemed the antithesis of the disease, a person in whom it would dare not reside. He knew that was silly, but it was also how he felt. After they became a couple, Charles’s friends would ask him—half teasing, half serious—what on earth he had seen in their old, old friend (“Fuck you,” Charles would say, grinning), and David would say that it was Charles’s confidence (“Note that he didn’t say your looks, Charlie,” Peter would say). And while that was true, it wasn’t only what attracted him, or rather not just; it was Charles’s ability to project a certain indestructibility, his radical conviction that anything was solvable, that anything could be fixed as long as you had the right money and connections and mind. No less than death would have to yield to Charles, or so it seemed. It was a quality he would have for the rest of his life, and the thing David would miss the most about him when he was gone.

And it was that same quality that allowed David to forget—not always, but for periods of time—that Charles was infected at all. He saw him take his medication, he knew that he saw his doctor at lunchtime on the first Monday of every month, but for hours, days, weeks, he was able to pretend that Charles’s life, and his life with him, would go on and on, a roll of parchment unscrolling down a long grassy path. He was able to tease Charles about how much time he spent in front of the mirror, the way he patted creams on his face before they went to bed, flexing his mouth into different grimaces, the way he would examine his reflection after getting out of the shower, holding his towel in place around his waist with one hand as he twisted his neck to examine his back, the way he would bare his teeth, tapping at his gums with his fingernail. Charles’s self-scrutiny was the result of middle-aged vanity and insecurity, yes, the kind that was exacerbated by David’s presence, by his youth, but it was also, David knew—knew, but tried to ignore—an expression of Charles’s fear: Was he losing weight? Were his fingernails discoloring? Were his cheeks hollowing? Had he sprouted a lesion? When would the illness write itself on his body? When would the drugs that had so far kept the illness away do the same? When would he become a citizen in the land of the sick? Pretending was foolish, and yet they both did it, except when it was perilous to do so; Charles pretended and David let him. Or was it that David pretended and Charles let him? Either way, the outcome was the same: They rarely discussed the disease; they never even said its name.

But though Charles refused to claim the disease for himself, he never denied it in his friends. Percival, Timothy, Teddy, Norris: Charles gave them money, he arranged appointments with his doctor, he hired cooks and housekeepers and nurses who would dare, would deign, to help them. He had even moved Teddy, who had died shortly before David had begun seeing Charles, into the study next to his bedroom, and it was there, surrounded by Charles’s collection of botanical prints, that Teddy had spent his final months. When Teddy had died, it had been Charles, along with Teddy’s other friends, who had found a sympathetic priest, who had arranged the wake, who had divided Teddy’s ashes among them. The next day, he had gone to work. Work was one realm, and outside of work was another, and he seemed to accept that the two would never overlap, that his friend’s death would never be an adequate excuse for coming in late or for not coming in at all. His grief, like his love, was something he would never expect anyone at Larsson, Wesley to understand or share. He was exhausted, David would later understand, but he never complained about it, because exhaustion was a privilege of the living.

And here, too, David felt ashamed, ashamed because he was frightened, because he was repulsed. He didn’t want to look at Timothy’s shrunken face; he didn’t want to confront Peter’s wrists, grown so bony that he had exchanged his metal watch for a child’s plastic one, which even so slid down his arm like a bangle. He had had friends who had gotten sick, but he had shrunk from them, blowing them kisses goodbye instead of kissing them on the cheek, crossing the street to avoid talking to them, dawdling outside buildings he used to dash into, standing in corners when Eden went to hug them, skirting out of rooms that were desperate for visitors. Wasn’t it enough that he was twenty-five and had to live like this? Wasn’t that courage enough? How could he be expected to do more, to be more?

His behavior, his cowardice—they had been the source of his and Eden’s first big fight. “You’re such an asshole,” Eden had hissed at him when she found him downstairs, sitting on one of their friends’ stoops, waiting for her in the cold for thirty minutes. He hadn’t been able to take it—the smells of the room, its closeness, the fear and resignation. “How would you feel, David?” she’d yelled at him, and, when he admitted he was scared, she’d snorted. “You’re scared,” she said. “You’re scared? God, David, I hope you grow a fucking pair by the time I die.” And he had: By the time Eden herself was dying, twenty-two years later, it was he who sat by her side, night after night, for months; it was he who picked her up from her chemotherapy appointments; it was he who held her that final day, he who stroked her back as the skin turned cold and smooth. In the way that people decided they would become healthier, he had decided to become better, braver, and when Eden finally died, he had sobbed, both because she had left him but also because no one had been prouder of him, no one had seen how hard he had worked at not running away. She had been the final witness of the person he had been, and now she was gone, and her memory of his transformation was gone with her.

Decades later, when Charles was long dead and David was an old man himself, his husband, who was much younger than he was—history repeating itself, but inverted—would have a curious nostalgia for these years, and a curious wonder for the disease, which he insisted on calling “the plague.” “Didn’t you just feel that everything was falling to pieces around you?” he’d ask, ready to be outraged on David’s and his friends’ behalf, ready to offer him sympathy and solace, and David, who had by then lived with the disease for almost as long as his husband had been alive, would say he hadn’t. Maybe Charles did, he said, but I didn’t. The year I started having sex was the year the disease was given a name—I never knew sex, or adulthood, without it. “But how could you even function when it killed so many? Didn’t it feel impossible?” his husband would ask, and David would struggle to articulate what he wanted Aubrey to understand. Yes, he’d say slowly, it sometimes did. But we all functioned; we all had to. We went to funerals and to hospitals, but we also went to work and to parties and to gallery shows and ran errands and had sex and dated and were young and stupid. We helped each other, it’s true, we loved each other, but we also gossiped about people and made fun of them and got into fights and were shitty friends and boyfriends, sometimes. We did both—we did it all. He didn’t say that it was only years later that he came to an understanding of how extraordinary that period had been, of how numerous its terrors, of how strange that some of what he remembered most clearly were the mundanities, stray details, little things significant to no one but himself: not the hospital rooms or faces but the evening he and Eden decided they were going to stay up until dawn, drinking cup after cup of coffee until they were so punchy they lost the ability to speak, or the gray-and-white cat that lived in the little flower shop he used to visit on Horatio and Eighth Avenue, or the kind of bagels that Nathaniel, the man he had lived with and loved after Charles, liked to eat: poppy seed, with a smoked-salmon-and-chive spread. (He had named his and Aubrey’s son after Nathaniel—the first firstborn male Bingham in generations not to be called David.) It was also not until years later that he came to realize how much he had simply accepted as fact, when, really, he should never have accepted it at all—that he should have spent his twenties going to memorial services instead of plotting his own future; that his fantasies never extended beyond the year. He had, he was able to see, drifted through that decade, moving through it with the cool detachment of a sleepwalker—to have awakened would have been to be overwhelmed with all he had seen and withstood. Others had been able to do this, but he had not; he had sought to cosset himself, to invent a place of safety, one in which the outside world was unable to fully intrude. Theirs had been a generational suspension—some had found solace in anger, and others in silence. His friends marched and protested and shouted against the government and the pharmaceutical companies; they volunteered, they submerged themselves into the horror that surrounded them. But he did nothing, as if doing nothing meant that nothing would be done to him; it was a noisy time, but he had chosen quiet instead, and although he had been ashamed of his passivity, of his fear, not even shame had been enough to motivate him to seek a greater engagement with the world around him. He wanted protection. He wanted to be removed. He sought, he knew, what his father might also have sought in Lipo-wao-nahele. And like his father, he had chosen incorrectly—he had attempted not to reckon with his own anger but to hide from it. But hiding hadn’t stopped things from happening. The only thing it prevented was eventually being found.

Now it was nine p.m., and the dishes on the dining-room table had been removed and replaced with desserts, and once again, everyone roused themselves to cut slices of pine-nut tart and polenta cake, its surface glazed with candied rounds of orange, and a double-chocolate cake made from a recipe invented by Charles’s grandmother’s cook, and which he served at every dinner he hosted. Once again, David followed the guests into the dining room to fix plates for Peter and Charles.

When he returned, James was setting a platter of dried apricots and figs and salted almonds and shards of dark chocolate on the coffee table near the sofa where Charles and Peter still sat, and David watched the two men watch James, their faces alert but unreadable. “Thank you, young man,” Peter said, as James straightened.

He avoided looking at James as they passed each other in the entryway, James’s left arm brushing against his right one, and set Peter’s plate at his side, and handed Charles his, Charles grabbing his hand as he did. Next to them, Peter watched, his expression still unreadable.

He had met all of Charles’s other close friends before Peter, and the combination of Charles’s apparent reluctance to introduce them and his frequent invocation of Peter’s name and opinions—“Peter saw that new production at the Signature already and says it’s garbage”; “I want to stop by Three Lives and buy this biography that Peter recommended”; “Peter said we must go to the Adrian Piper show at Paula Cooper as soon as it opens”—made him nervous. By the time they met, three months into his and Charles’s relationship, his nervousness had hardened into anxiety, which was compounded by Charles’s own. “I hope the food’s okay,” Charles fretted, as David hunted for one of his socks, only to realize it was on the bed, where he’d left it five minutes earlier. “Peter’s a very picky eater. And he has excellent taste, so if it’s not good enough, he’ll say something.” (“Peter sounds like an asshole,” Eden had said when David had told her about him, or at least the secondhand Peter he knew, and David had to now stop himself from echoing her aloud.)

He was both fascinated and alarmed by this version of Charles, so flustered and discombobulated. It was something of a relief to see that even Charles could feel inadequate; on the other hand, they couldn’t both begin the evening feeling this insecure—he was counting on Charles to be his defender. Why are you so nervous? he asked Charles. This is your oldest friend.

“It’s because he’s my oldest friend that I’m nervous,” said Charles, stroking his razor beneath his chin. “Don’t you have a friend whose opinion matters more to you than anyone’s?”

No, he said, though he thought of Eden as he did.

“Well, you will someday,” said Charles. “Damnit.” He had nicked himself, and he grabbed a square of toilet paper and held it against his skin. “If you’re lucky, that is. You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.”

Why?

“Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

But was that really true? He thought of his father, who definitely had been afraid of Edward. He had wanted Edward’s approval, that was true; and Edward had challenged him, that was also true. But Edward hadn’t wanted his father to become better—not smarter or more educated or more independent-minded. He had simply wanted his father to—what? Agree with him; obey him; keep him company. He had pretended that such obedience was in the service of a greater mission, but it hadn’t been—it had been about finding someone who might finally look up to him, which is all anyone seemed to want. The kind of friend Charles was describing was someone who wanted you to become more yourself. But Edward had wanted the opposite for David’s father. He had wanted to reduce him into something that didn’t think at all.

Well, he said, but isn’t your friend supposed to be nice to you?

“That’s what I have you for,” Charles said, smiling at him in the mirror.

When he finally did meet Peter, he was surprised by how mesmerizingly ugly he was. It wasn’t that any one feature was so disagreeable—he had large, light-colored eyes, like a dog’s, and a bony, confident nose, and long dark eyebrows that seemed to have grown as a single unit rather than as a collection of individual hairs—but the combination was unharmonious, if compellingly so. It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.

“Peter,” Charles said, hugging him.

“Charlie,” Peter replied.

For the first part of dinner, Peter talked. He was someone, it seemed, who had a strong and informed opinion on virtually any topic, and his soliloquy, fueled by small comments and questions from Charles, went from the repointing work on Peter’s building to the revival of certain nearly extinct squash varietals to the flaws of a highly acclaimed recent novel to the charms of an obscure, newly republished collection of brief essays by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk to the connections between anti-modernists and anti-Semites to why he would no longer holiday in Hydra but, rather, in Rhodes. David was ignorant about all of these subjects, yet through his mounting unease, he found himself intrigued by Peter. Not so much by what he said—he was unable to follow most of it—but by how he said it: He had a lovely, deep voice, and he spoke as if he enjoyed the feel of the words coming off his tongue, as if he were saying them only because he liked the sensation of doing so.

“So, David,” said Peter, turning to him as David knew he must. “Charles has already told me how you met. But tell me about yourself.”

There’s really not much to tell, he began, looking briefly at Charles, who gave him an encouraging smile. He recited the facts that Charles already knew, as Peter stared at him with his pale, wolfish eyes. He had expected Peter to be interrogatory, to start asking him the questions everyone always did—So your father never worked, ever? Never? You didn’t know your mother? Not even a little?—but he had only nodded, and then said nothing.

I’m boring, he’d concluded, apologetically, and Peter had nodded, slowly and gravely, as if David had said something profound. “Yes,” he said. “You are. But you’re young. You’re supposed to be boring.” He had been uncertain how to interpret this, but Charles had only smiled. “Does that mean you were boring when you were twenty-five, Peter?” he asked, teasingly, and Peter had nodded again. “Of course I was, and you too, Charles.”

“So when did we start becoming interesting?”

“That’s a big assumption to make, isn’t it? But I’d say in the last ten years.”

“That recently?”

“I’m just talking about myself now,” Peter said, and Charles laughed. “Bitch,” he said, fondly.

“I think that went well,” Charles had said that night in bed, and David had agreed, though he actually didn’t. Since that night, he had had to see Peter on only a few more occasions, and each time, there would be a pause in the conversation in which Peter would turn his large head in David’s direction and ask, “So what’s happened to you since I saw you last, young man?,” as if life was something that David wasn’t experiencing but was, rather, having bestowed upon him. And then Peter had gotten sicker, and David had seen him even less, and after tonight, he would never see him again. Charles had said that Peter was dying a disappointed man: He was a renowned poet, but for the past three decades he had been writing a novel, yet it had never found a publisher. “He had assumed it would be his legacy,” Charles said.

He couldn’t completely understand Charles’s and his friends’ interest in their legacy. Sometimes at these parties, talk would turn to how they might be remembered when they died, to the things they would leave behind. Sometimes their tone would be content, or defiant, or, more often, plaintive; it wasn’t only that some of them didn’t feel they were leaving enough but that what they were leaving was too complicated, too compromised. Who would remember them, and what would they remember? Would their children think of how they had had tea parties with them, or read to them, or taught them how to catch a ball? Or would they instead recall how they had left their mothers, how they had moved out of their houses in Connecticut and into apartments in the city that were never comfortable enough for children, no matter how hard they tried? Would their lovers think of them when they were so bright with health that they could walk down the street and men would literally turn around to look at them, or would they think of them as they were today, as old men who weren’t even old, from whose faces and bodies people shied? The knowledge and recognition of who they were in life had been hard-won, but they wouldn’t be able to control who they became in death.

And yet who cared? The dead knew nothing, felt nothing, were nothing. When he told Eden of Charles’s and his friends’ concerns, she had said that it was a very white male fixation to be concerned with legacy. How do you mean? he’d asked. “Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,” she said. “The rest of us are too busy trying to get through the day.” At the time, he’d laughed and called her melodramatic, and a reactionary man-hater, but that night, as he lay in bed, he had thought about what she said and wondered if she was correct. “If I had had a child,” Charles occasionally said, “I’d feel like I was leaving something behind—like I had left my mark on the world.” He knew what Charles meant by this, but he was also puzzled by his inability to see the assumptions inherent in that statement: How did having a child guarantee anything? What if your child didn’t like you? What if your child didn’t care about you? What if your child became a terrible adult, an association you were ashamed of? Then what? A person was the worst legacy, because a person was by definition unpredictable.

His grandmother had known this. When he was very young, he had asked his grandmother why he was called Kawika if his real name was David. All of the firstborn males in their family were named David, and yet all of them were known as Kawika, the Hawaiianization of David. If we’re all called Kawika, why is our name David? he had wondered aloud to her, and his father—they had been at the dinner table—had made that little chirping noise he did when he was fearful or worried.

But there had been nothing to be frightened of, for his grandmother had not only not been angry, she had even smiled a bit. “Because,” she said, “the king was named David.” The king, their ancestor: He knew that much.

That night, his father had come to see him before he went to sleep. “Don’t ask your grandmother questions like that,” he’d said. Why? he had asked: She hadn’t been mad. “Not with you,” his father said. “But later, with me—she asked me why I wasn’t teaching you these things better.” His father had looked so upset that he had promised, and apologized, and his father had exhaled in relief and leaned over and kissed him on his forehead. “Thank you,” he said. “Good night, Kawika.”

He hadn’t the words for it, he was too young, but he knew even then that his grandmother was ashamed of his father. In May, when they went to her society’s annual party, it would be David who would walk into the palace with his grandmother, David whom his grandmother would introduce to her friends, beaming as they kissed him on the cheek and told him how handsome he looked. Somewhere behind them, he knew, would be his father, smiling at the ground, not expecting recognition and not receiving any, either. After the guests had moved outdoors for dinner on the palace grounds, David would sneak back into the building and find his father still in the throne room, sitting half shrouded by silk curtains in one of the window bays, looking out at the torchlit lawn.

Da, he’d say. Come join the party.

“No, Kawika,” his father would say. “You go, have fun. I’m not wanted there.”

But he would insist, and finally his father would say, “I’ll only go if you come with me.” Of course, he’d say, and hold out his hand, which his father would take, and they’d walk outside together toward the party, which had continued without them.

His father had been his grandmother’s first disappointed legacy; David knew he was her second. When he had left Hawai‘i for what he knew would be forever, he had gone to tell her—not because he wanted her approval (he had told himself at the time that he didn’t care either way), and not because he expected her to argue with him, but because he wanted to ask her to take care of his father, to protect him. He knew that, by leaving, he would be forsaking his birthright as well—the land, the money, his trust. But it seemed a small sacrifice, small and theoretical, because none of it had ever been his to begin with. It had belonged not to him specifically but to the person who happened to possess his name, and he would renounce that as well.

By then he had been living for two years on the Big Island. Back he had gone to the house on O‘ahu Avenue, where he had found his grandmother in the sunroom, sitting in her cane-backed chair, gripping the ends of its arms with her long, strong fingers. He had spoken, and she was silent, and at the end, she had finally looked at him, once, before turning away again. “You’re a disappointment,” she said. “You and your father, both. After all I did for you, Kawika. After all that I did.”

My name’s not Kawika anymore, he said. It’s David. And then he had turned and fled before his grandmother could say anything else: You don’t deserve to be called Kawika. You don’t deserve that name.

Months later, he would think of this conversation and cry, because there had been a time—years—when he was his grandmother’s pride, when she would have him sit next to her on the love seat, pressed against her side. “I’m not afraid of death,” she’d say, “and do you know why, Kawika?”

No, he’d say.

“Because I know I’ll live on in you. My purpose—my life—will live on in you, my pride and joy. My story, and our history, lives in you.”

But it hadn’t, or at least not in the way she’d intended. He had failed her in so many ways. He had left her, he had rejected his home, his faith, his name. He was living in New York with a man, with a white man. He never spoke of his family, or his ancestors. He never chanted the songs he had been taught to chant, he never danced the stories he had been taught to dance, he never recited the history he had been taught to revere. She had assumed that she would be preserved in him—and not just her but his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. He had always told himself that he had chosen to betray her because she hadn’t loved his father well enough, but lately, he had been wondering whether his betrayal was deliberate or whether it was attributable to something deficient within him, some fundamental coldness. He knew how happy Charles would be if, after one of their conversations, David would promise Charles that he would be Charles’s legacy, that Charles would always live on in him. He knew how moved Charles would be if he did. And yet he never could. Not because it wasn’t true—he would love Charles, he would tell all his future lovers, his future husband, his future son, his future colleagues and friends, about Charles for decades after his death: the lessons he had learned from him, the places they had visited together, the way he smelled, how brave and generous he had been, the way he had taught him to eat marrow, escargot, and artichokes, how sexy he had been, how they had met, how they had parted—but because he had had enough of being someone’s legacy; he knew the fear of feeling inadequate, the burden of disappointing. He would never do it again; he would be free. What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

Now, standing beside Charles, he took a breath. He would have to speak to Peter at some point; he would have to tell him goodbye. He had thought for weeks about what he might say, but anything he deemed meaningful he knew Peter would find trite, and anything pleasant and uncontroversial seemed like a waste of time. He had something that Peter did not—life, the promise and expectation of years—and yet he remained intimidated by him. Do it now, he told himself. Talk to him now, while the room’s still empty and no one will be listening to you.

But when he finally sat down on Charles’s left, Charles and Peter didn’t pause in their low, murmured conversation, and so he instead leaned against Charles, who took his hand again and squeezed it, before turning to him and smiling. “I feel like I haven’t seen you all night,” he said.

The night is young; and so am I, he said, an old joke of theirs, and Charles put his hand on the back of David’s head and brought his face close. “Will you help me?” he asked.

He had been warned beforehand that Charles would need his assistance with Peter, and so he stood and helped Peter into his chair before pushing him out of the room and down the hallway to the left, past the slant-ceilinged closet, to the little bathroom wedged beneath the stairs. This bathroom, Charles had told him, was legendary: At earlier parties, in earlier years, when Charles was younger and wilder, it was to here that people would sneak away, in twos and threes in the midst of dinners and late-night gatherings, with everyone else sitting in the dining room or living room and making jokes about the disappeared, greeting them upon their return with hoots and laughter. Did you ever go in there with anyone? he had asked, and Charles had grinned. “Of course I did,” he said. “What do you think? I’m a red-blooded American male.” Adams called this bathroom the powder room, which he intended to be decorous, but which Charles’s friends had found hilarious.

Now, though, the powder room was only what it was—a bathroom—and these days, there were two people inside of it only because one was helping the other use the toilet. David helped Charles help Peter stand (for, as thin as he was, he was, curiously, heavier than he appeared, his legs almost useless beneath him), and once Charles had his arms wrapped around Peter’s chest, he nodded at them and closed the door and stood outside, trying not to listen to the sounds Peter was making. He was always perplexed and impressed by how much waste the body was able to create until the very end, even when it was given little to digest. On and on it went, the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry.

There was the noise of the tap turning on, and hands being washed, and then Charles calling his name. He opened the door and maneuvered the chair into position and then helped lower Peter into it, replacing the pillow behind his back. David had been avoiding Peter’s eyes, certain that Peter resented his presence, but as he straightened, Peter looked up, and the two of them looked at each other. It was a brief exchange, so brief that Charles, arranging Peter’s sweater around him, didn’t even notice, but after they returned Peter to the living room—now filled once more with their guests, the air scented with sugar and chocolate and the coffee Adams was pouring into cups—David again pressed himself against Charles’s side, feeling childish but also in need of protection from the anger, the fury, the terrible want he had seen in Peter’s face. It was not, David knew, directed at him specifically but, rather, at what he represented: He was alive, and when this night was over, he would climb two flights upstairs and maybe he and Charles would have sex and maybe they wouldn’t, and the next day he would wake and choose what he wanted for breakfast, and what he wanted to do that day—he would go to the bookstore, or to the movies, or to lunch, or to a museum, or simply take a walk. And in that day he would make hundreds of choices, so many he would lose count, so many he would forget to notice he was doing it, and with every choice he would be asserting his presence, his place in the world. And with every choice he made, Peter would be receding further from life, further from his memory, would be becoming a matter of history with each minute, each hour, one day to be forgotten altogether: a legacy of nothing; a memory of no one.

For most of the night, Peter’s guests had been circling about him rather than engaging him directly. Sometimes someone near him would turn to him in the course of conversation with someone else—“Do you remember that night, Peter?”; “That guy, Peter, what was his name? You know, the one we met in Palm Springs”; “Peter, we’re talking about that trip we went on in seventy-eight”—but mostly, they talked only with one another, leaving Peter to sit there on the far end of the sofa, Charles at his side. They were all scared of Peter, David had long since realized, and now they were especially scared of him, because this was the last time they would see him and the pressure to say goodbye to him was so great that they were ignoring him instead. Peter, however, seemed content with his position. There was something majestic about his calm, the way he moved his gaze over his friends, all gathered there for him, occasionally nodding at something Charles said to him, like a massive old dog that sits by his master’s side and surveys the room, knowing that there would be no threats to his owner’s safety that night.

But now, suddenly, as if commanded by a call only they could hear, people began approaching Peter, one by one, bending and talking into his ear. John was among the first, and David nudged Charles, who made to stand, to leave and give Peter some privacy, but Peter placed his hand on Charles’s leg and Charles sat back down. And so, instead, he and David stayed, watching as John returned to his place in the chair on the other side of the room, and was replaced by Percival, and then Timothy, and then Norris and Julien and Christopher, who all in turn took Peter’s hands in their own and bent or knelt or sat beside him and spoke softly to him, having their final conversations. David was unable to hear most, or even all, of what they said, but he and Charles remained still, as if Peter were the emperor and these his ministers, come to deliver bits of news from across the realm, and they were servants, never meant to hear any of it and yet unable to flee back to the kitchen where they belonged.

Of course, what Peter’s friends had to say wasn’t confidential at all but banalities delivered with the intimacy of a secret. They spoke as if Peter were ancient, and his memory long gone. “I do remember, you know,” Peter would normally say, as he always did when someone prefaced a story with “Do you remember?” “I’m not that far gone.” But in this moment he seemed to have acquired a new kind of grace, one that manifested itself as patience, and he allowed each person to hold him against them, talking at him without seeming to need a response. He had not thought Peter would be interested in, much less capable of, being good at dying, but there he sat, generous and stately, listening to his friends, smiling at various moments, nodding his head and letting his hand be held:

“Do you remember that summer ten years ago when we took that tumbledown house in the Pines, Peter, and how one morning you went downstairs and there was that deer standing in the middle of the living room, eating the nectarines that Christopher had left on the counter?”

“I’ve always felt bad about that time we fought—you know what I’m talking about. I’ve always regretted it; I always wanted to take it back. I’m so sorry, Peter. Please tell me you forgive me.”

“Peter, I don’t know how I’m going to do this—all this—without you. I know it wasn’t always easy between us, but I’m going to miss you. You taught me so much—I just want to thank you.”

He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say. Dying meant repeating the same things again and again, much as Peter was doing now: Yes, I remember. No, I’ll be fine. No, you’ll be fine. Yes, of course I forgive you. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty. No, I’m not in any pain. No, I know what you’re trying to say. Yes, I love you, too, I love you, too, I love you, too.

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.

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.

He went to the sofa and sat where Charles had sat, the cushions still warm beneath him. Charles had been holding Peter’s hands, but he did not. And still—still: Even as Peter gazed at him, he could think of nothing to say, nothing that was not impossible. It would have to be Peter who spoke first, and, finally, he did, David leaning toward him to hear what he would say.

“David.”

Yes.

“Take care of my Charles. Will you do that for me?”

Yes, he promised, relieved that more hadn’t been asked from him, and that Peter hadn’t taken the opportunity to deliver some devastating observation he’d made, some truth about himself that David would never be able to forget. Of course I will.

Peter made a soft dismissive noise. “ ‘Of course,’ ” he murmured.

I will, he told Peter, fiercely. I will. It was important that Peter believed him. But as David was promising him, Peter was already looking away, toward the sound of Charles’s reentry, reaching his arms toward his friend in a gesture so childlike, so loving, that forever after, David was unable to imagine him in any other way: Peter, his arms open and empty, bundled like a toddler about to go out and play in the snow, and walking toward them, to fill them with his presence, Charles, his face crumpling, looking only at Peter, as if nobody else existed in the world.

They lay in bed that night, he and Charles, not touching, not speaking, their preoccupation so complete that, had anyone seen them, he would have mistaken them for strangers.

Peter was gone, lifted downstairs by his nurse and the assistant and accompanied by David and Charles, fed into a car that Charles had called for him. And then the car had driven away, back to Peter’s warm, cluttered second-floor apartment in an old house on Bethune Street near the river, with its crumbling staircase and painted brick facade, and David and Charles had remained on the sidewalk in the cold. He had always known that the end of the evening would be the end of Peter in their lives—in Charles’s life—and now that it had actually happened, it seemed too abrupt, too abbreviated, like something out of a fairy tale: a clock striking midnight and the world being misted with gray, potential lives together dissolving into nothingness.

They had stood there, together, long after the car had vanished from sight. It wasn’t so late, but the cold had kept almost everyone indoors, and only a few stray people, wrapped in black, passed before them. Across the street, the park glittered with snow. Finally, he had taken Charles’s arm. It’s chilly, he said. Let’s go back inside. “Yes,” Charles agreed, his voice faint.

Back inside, they shut off the living-room lights, Charles did a check of the back-door locks as he always did, and then they climbed the stairs to their room, undressed and dressed, and brushed their teeth in silence.

Around them, the night thickened and settled. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, he heard Charles’s breathing change, grow slow and deep, and when he did, he got out of bed and went quietly to the closet, retrieved the letter from his bag, and crept downstairs.

For a while he sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, holding the envelope in both hands. This was his last moment of ignorance, of pretending, and he didn’t want it to end. But finally, he turned on the lamp, and removed the sheet of paper, and read what it said.

He woke to the sound of his name and Charles’s palm on his cheek, and when he opened his eyes, he knew from the clarity of light that filled the room that it was snowing again. Before him, on the ottoman, sat Charles, wearing his robe and what they called his old-man pajamas, striped blue cotton with his initials stitched in black on the breast pocket. Charles never came downstairs until he had combed his hair, but now it stood about his head in clumps, so that David could see the white of his scalp where the hair had become thin at the crown.

“He’s gone,” Charles said.

Oh, Charles, he said. When?

“About an hour ago. His nurse called me. I woke up, and looked over, and you weren’t next to me”—he began to apologize, but Charles put his hand on his arm, stopping him—“and I was disoriented. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. But then I remembered: I was in my house, and it was the day after the party, and I had been waiting for this call—I knew what it would be. I had just thought it would be tomorrow, not today. But it wasn’t—he never even made it to the airport.

“So I didn’t answer it. You didn’t hear it ring? I just lay there and listened to the phone ringing and ringing and ringing: six, ten, twenty times—I’d turned the answering machine off last night. It was so loud. Such an insistent, rude noise: I never realized. Finally, it stopped, and I sat up, on the edge of the bed, and listened.

“I found myself in that moment thinking of my brother. Oh, right—you don’t know. Well, when I was five, my mother gave birth to another son. My brother, Morgan. She and my father had been trying to have a child for years, I later learned. Ten weeks before her due date, she went into labor.

“Back then—this would have been 1943—there was nothing you could do for such a premature baby: There was no such thing as neonatal care; the incubators were primitive compared to what we have now. It was extraordinary he was alive at all. The doctor told my parents he would die within forty-eight hours.

“No one told me this, of course. These days, I’m always shocked by how much information parents give their children, information those children aren’t yet equipped to understand. When I was a child, I knew nothing, and the people who looked after me were charged with keeping me ignorant. What I learned I gathered from whispers and eavesdropping. And yet I don’t remember feeling frustrated; I would never have considered my parents’ lives part of mine. My world was the fourth floor, with my toys and books. My parents were visitors; the only adults who belonged were my nanny and my tutor.

“But even I knew that something was wrong—I knew from the way the adults whispered in the hallway, falling silent when they spotted me; the way even my nanny, who loved me, seemed distracted, looking toward the door when the maid came in with my lunch, raising her eyebrows inquiringly at her, tightening her mouth when she shook her head in response. Downstairs, everything was silent. The servants—this was long before Adams’s time—spoke in low voices, and for three days, I went to bed without being taken downstairs to be presented to my parents first.

“On the fourth day of this, I decided I was going to sneak downstairs and figure out what was happening. And so I pretended to be asleep when Nanny came to check on me that night, and then I waited and waited, until I heard the last maid walking upstairs toward her bedroom. And then I got out of bed and tiptoed down to my parents’. As I did, I noticed a faint light, candlelight, coming from the parlor next door to their room, and as I noticed that light, I also heard a small, strange sound that I couldn’t identify. I crept closer to the parlor. I was so careful, so quiet. Finally, I was at the door, which was ajar, and I looked inside.

“I saw my mother, sitting on a chair. There was a candle on the table by her side, and in her arms, she held my brother. The thing I remember thinking later was how beautiful she looked. She had long, reddish hair that she always wore pinned up, but now it hung about her like a veil, and she was wearing a lilac-colored silk robe and a white nightgown beneath it; her feet were bare. I had never seen my mother look like this—I had never seen my parents in any way other than how they wanted me to see them: fully dressed, capable, competent.

“In her left arm, she was cradling the baby. But in her right hand she was holding an odd instrument, a clear glass dome, and she would fit the dome over the baby’s mouth and nose and then squeeze the rubber bulb attached to it. That was the sound I’d heard, the rubber bulb wheezing as it filled and emptied with air, air she was giving to Morgan. She kept up a steady rhythm, and she didn’t rush: not too fast, not too much. Every ten squeezes or so she would stop for a second, and I could hear, barely, the baby’s breath, so quiet.

“I don’t know how long I stood there, watching her. She never looked up. The expression on her face—I can’t describe it. It wasn’t despairing, or sorrowful, or desperate. It was just—nothing. But not blank. Attentive, I suppose. As if there were nothing else in her life—no past, no present, no husband or son or house—as if she existed only to try to pump air into her baby’s lungs.

“It didn’t work, of course. Morgan died the next day. Nanny told me about it at last: that I’d had a brother, and that his lungs had been faulty, and that he had died, and that I wasn’t to be sad because he was now with God. Later, when my mother was dying, I learned that my parents had fought; that my father had disagreed with her trying, that he had forbade her from using that instrument. I don’t know where she got it from. I don’t know that she ever forgave him: for not believing, for dissuading her from trying. My father, I learned, hadn’t even wanted to bring him home from the hospital, and when my mother fought to do so—they donated so much to the place that they wouldn’t deny her—he had disapproved of that as well.

“My mother wasn’t a sentimental woman. She never spoke of Morgan, and after he died, she eventually recovered herself. Over the decades, she ran charities, she hosted dinners, she rode horses and painted, she read and collected rare books, she volunteered at a home for unwed young mothers; she made a life in this house for me and my father.

“I never considered myself much like her, and neither did she. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d sometimes say to me, and she always sounded a little rueful. And she was right—I was never one of those gay men who found an affinity with their mothers. Except for the fact that we never discussed who I loved, I did have a kinship with my father. For a long time, I was able to pretend that we never talked about who I was, or part of who I was, because we had so many other things to talk about. The law, for example. Or business. Or biographies, which we both liked to read. By the time I stopped pretending, he was already dead.

“But lately, I’ve been thinking about that night more and more. I wonder if I’m actually more like her than I knew. I wonder who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.

“I was sitting there, thinking all of this, when the phone rang again. This time I got up and answered it. It was Peter’s new day-shift nurse—a nice guy. I’d met him a few times. He told me Peter had died, and that it had been peaceful, and that he was very sorry for my loss. And then I hung up and I went looking for you.”

He was quiet, and David realized that it was the end of his story. As Charles had talked, he had looked out the window, which had become a screen of white, and now he turned to David again, and David pressed his back into the sofa’s cushions and beckoned to Charles, who lay down next to him.

They were silent for a long time, and although David was thinking many things, he mostly thought about how good this moment was, lying next to Charles in a warm room, with snow outside. He thought that he should tell Charles that he would hold the air pump for him, but he couldn’t. He wanted so much to give Charles something, some measure of the consolation that Charles had given him, but he couldn’t. Much later, he would wish, again and again, that he had said something, anything, no matter how clumsy. In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.

“I came down here,” Charles finally said, “I came down here and found you. And”—he took a breath—“and you were asleep, with a letter on your chest, beneath your hand. And—I took it from you, and I read it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry, David.” He was quiet. “And I’m sorry for what’s in it. How come you never told me?”

I don’t know, he said, at last. But he wasn’t angry that Charles had read his letter. He was relieved—that Charles knew, that, once again, Charles’s decisiveness had made a difficult task easier.

“So—your father. He’s still alive.”

Barely, he said. For now.

“Yes. And your grandmother wants you to come see him.”

Yes.

“And that place he lived in—”

It wasn’t what you were thinking, he interrupted Charles. I mean, it was. But it wasn’t. How could he tell Charles? How could he make him understand? How could he make Lipo-wao-nahele sound like something different, something better, something saner than what it was? Not a folly, not make-believe, not an impossibility, but something his father—and even he—had once believed in with all the hopefulness they had, a place where history was meaningless, a place that would finally feel like home, a place where his father had gone in anticipation as much as in fear. He couldn’t. His grandmother had never understood it; Charles certainly wouldn’t, either.

I can’t explain it, he said at last. You wouldn’t understand.

“Try me,” said Charles.

Well, maybe, he said, but he knew he would. Charles knew how to help everyone—what if he knew how to help David, too? What was the point of loving him, of being loved back, if he wasn’t going to try?

But first, he had to eat something; he was hungry. He wriggled himself off the sofa, and held out his hand for Charles, and as they went to the kitchen, he thought of his father again. Not as he was in the care home he lived in now; not as he had been in the last days of his stay at Lipo-wao-nahele, his eyes vacant, his face streaked with dirt; but as he had been when they lived together in their house, when he was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, when they were a father and a son, and he had never had to consider anything other than the fact that his father would always take care of him, or at least would always try, because he had promised he always would, and because he knew his father loved him, and because that was the way of things. Loss, loss—he had lost so much. How would he ever feel complete again? How could he make up for all those years? How could he forgive? How could he be forgiven?

“Let’s see,” said Charles, as they stood in the kitchen together, surveying their options. On the counter, there was a loaf of sourdough bread wrapped in brown paper that Adams had set aside for them, and Charles sawed off slices for both of them before holding his aloft. “To your father,” he said.

To Peter, he responded.

“An early New Year’s toast,” Charles announced: “Six more years until the twenty-first century.”

They touched their pieces of bread against each other, solemnly, and ate. Behind them, the windows rattled from the wind, but they couldn’t feel it themselves—the house was too well made. “Let’s see what Adams saved for us,” Charles said after they had finished, and opened the refrigerator, removing a jar of mayonnaise, a container of cold steak, a jar of mustard, a wedge of cheese. “Jarlsberg,” he said, and then, almost to himself, “Peter’s favorite.”

He put his arms around Charles, and Charles leaned against him, and for a moment they were quiet. It was then that he had a sudden vision of the two of them many years later, in some undated time far into the future. Outside, the world had changed: The streets had been overgrown with weeds, and the cobblestones in the courtyard were shaggy with pampas grass, and the sky was a viscous green, and a creature with rubbery, webbed wings glided past them. A car puffed south down Fifth Avenue, hovering a few inches above the ground, hissing air as it went. The garage was a ruin, half decayed, its bricks soft and cakey, and in the middle of it, thrusting its way through the crumbling roof, grew a mango tree, just like the one that had grown in the front yard of the house where he had once lived with his father, its branches bulbous with fruit. If it wasn’t quite the end of things, then it was close—the fruit was too poisoned to eat; the car was windowless; the air shimmered with oily smoke; the creature had settled atop the building across the street, its talons gripping the parapet, its black eyes searching for something to swoop down upon and devour.

But inside, he and Charles were somehow the same as they were: still healthy, still there, still magically themselves. They were two people in love, and they were making themselves something to eat, and there was plenty of food, and as long as they stayed indoors, together, no harm would come to them. And to their right, at the far end of the kitchen, was a door, and if they opened that door and walked through it, they would find themselves in a replica of this house, except in that house would be Peter, alive and sarcastic and intimidating, and in the house to the right of his would be John and Timothy and Percy, and in the house to the right of theirs, Eden and Teddy, and on and on and on, an unbroken chain of houses, the people they loved resurrected and restored, an eternity of meals and conversations and arguments and forgivenesses. Together they’d walk through these houses, opening doors, greeting friends, closing doors behind them, until, at last, they’d come to what they somehow knew was the final door. And here they’d pause a moment, squeezing each other’s hands, before turning the knob and entering a kitchen just like their own, the same jade-green walls, the same gilt-edged china in the cupboards, the same framed etchings on the walls, the same soft linen dish towels hung on the same ash-carved pegs, but in which a mango tree was growing, its leaves brushing the ceiling.

And here, sitting on a chair and patiently waiting, would be his father, and when he saw David, he would spring to his feet, his face alight, crying with joy. “My Kawika,” he’d say, “you’ve come for me! You’ve finally come for me!” He wouldn’t hesitate, but would run toward him, while behind him, Charles stood and beamed, watching this final reunion, a father and son finding each other at last.