To Paradise (24 page)

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.