To Paradise (25 page)

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.