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.