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?