Out his bedroom window a blue helmet of sky is fixed above the pines. He shuts his eyes. Years pass in a blink now, Rex wrote. How much more is written in the spaces between the lines? Go now or forever hold your tongue.
“It’s eight days in all.” Zeno buckles his suitcase. “I’ve loaded the cupboards. Got extra cigarettes too. Trish has promised to look in on you every day.”
* * *
He burns so much adrenaline during the flights that by the time he gets off in Heathrow, he is practically hallucinating. Outside passport control he looks for an Englishwoman; instead a six-foot-six man with prematurely silver hair and apricot-colored pants that flare at the calf seizes his forearm.
“Oh, you are a little box of cocoa,” says the giant, and air-kisses both of Zeno’s cheeks. “I’m Hillary.”
Zeno clutches his suitcase, trying to comprehend. “How did you know I was me?”
Hillary shows his canines. “Lucky guess.”
He plucks Zeno’s suitcase from his grasp and marshals him through the crowds. Beneath a blue vest, Hillary wears what looks like a peasant’s blouse with sequins randomly applied to the sleeves. Are his fingernails painted green? Is a man allowed to dress like this here? Yet, as Hillary’s boots clip-clop across the terminal, as they weave into a crush of buses and taxis, no one pays much mind. They clamber into a pocket-sized wine-colored two-door, something called an Austin 1100, Hillary insisting on holding the door for Zeno, then walking around the rear of the little car and folding his long body behind the right-hand drive, knees practically in his teeth as he works the pedals, his hair brushing the roof, and Zeno tries not to hyperventilate.
London is smoke-gray and endless. Hillary chatters: “Brentford on your right, old dunghead boyfriend lived right over there, big, disobedient nipper. Rex finishes school in one hour, so we’ll surprise him at home. That’s Gunnersbury Park there, see?”
Parking meters, creeping traffic, soot-stained facades. Wrigley’s Spearmint Gold Leaf One of the Great Cigarettes Ales Spirits and Wines. They park outside a sun-deprived brick house in Camden. No gardens, no hedges, no warbling greenfinches, no matronly wife with teacups. A leaflet glued by rain to the sidewalk reads, The easy way to pay. “We go up,” Hillary says and bends through the doorway like a mobile tree. He carries Zeno’s suitcase up four flights, his long strides skipping every other stair.
Inside, the flat appears bisected in two. On one side run tidy bookshelves while on the other tapestries, bicycle frames, candles, ashtrays, brass elephants, thickly frosted abstract paintings, and dead houseplants all seem to have been thrown into piles by a cyclone. “Make yourself at home, I’ll just wet some leaves,” Hillary says. He lights a cigarette from a stove burner and emits a titanic sigh. His forehead is unlined, his cheeks smooth-shaven; when Zeno and Rex were in Korea, Hillary could not have been more than five years old.
From the turntable exuberant voices sing, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” and the realization hits: Rex and Hillary live together. In a one-bedroom apartment.
“Sit, sit.”
Zeno sits at the table while the record plays, gusts of confusion and exhaustion blasting over him. Hillary ducks light fixtures as he flips the record, then taps ashes into a houseplant.
“It’s such fun to have one of Rex’s friends visit. Rex never has friends visit. Sometimes I think he had none before I met him.”
Keys jingle at the door, and Hillary raises his eyebrows at Zeno, and a man comes into the apartment in a raincoat and galoshes and his face is the color of cheese curd and he has a little paunch sticking out over his belt and a concave chest and his eyeglasses are fogged and his freckles are faded but still exuberant in their quantity and it is Rex.
Zeno puts out a hand, but Rex embraces him.
Emotion rises unbidden to Zeno’s eyes. “Jet lag,” he says, and wipes his cheeks.
“Of course.”
A mile above them Hillary brings a cracked green fingernail to his own eye and scoops away a tear. He fills two cups with black tea, sets out a plate of biscuits, switches off the record player, wraps himself in a big purple raincoat, and says, “Right, I’ll leave you two old muckers to it then.” Zeno listens to him scuttle down the stairs like a giant multicolored spider.
Rex takes off his coat and shoes. “So, plowing snow?” The apartment seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff. “And me, I’m still reading Iron Age poems to boys who don’t want to hear them.”