They were halfway through their steak when David realized that he hadn’t asked Charles anything about himself. “Oh, no, what is there to say? I’m afraid I’m very boring,” Charles said, in the careless way that only people who knew they weren’t boring at all could. “We’ll get to me. Tell me about your apartment,” and David, drunk on both gin and the unusual sensation of being treated as if he were a source of great fascination and wisdom, did: He told Charles about the mice and the window casements seamed with grime, and the sad drag queen whose favorite resting place was their stoop and whose favorite two a.m. ballad to bellow was “Waltzing Matilda,” and about his roommate, Eden, who was an artist, a painter, mostly, but whose day job was as a proofreader at a book publishing company. （He didn’t mention that Eden called him every day at the firm at three p.m. and that the two of them talked for an hour, David whispering into the phone and feigning coughing fits to disguise his laughter.）
“Where are you from?” Charles asked, after he had smiled or laughed at all of David’s stories.
Hawai‘i, he said, and then, before Charles could ask, O‘ahu. Honolulu.
Charles had been there, of course, everyone had, and for a while David spoke around the edges of his life: Yes, he still had family there. No, they weren’t close. No, his father was dead. No, he never knew his mother. No, no siblings, and his father had also been an only child. Yes, one grandparent—his paternal grandmother.
Charles tilted his head and studied him for a moment. “I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” he said, “but what are you? Are you—” He stopped, stymied.
Hawaiian, he said, staunchly, though it wasn’t the whole truth.
“But your last name—”
It’s a missionary name. American missionaries started arriving in the islands in significant numbers in the early nineteenth century; a lot of them intermarried with the Hawaiians.
“Bingham…Bingham,” Charles said ruminatively, and David knew what he would say next. “You know, there’s a dormitory at Yale called Bingham Hall. I lived in it freshman year. Is there any relation?” He grinned, his eyebrow lifted; he already assumed there wasn’t.
Yes—he’s an ancestor.
“Really,” Charles said, and leaned back in his seat, his smile fading. He was quiet, and David understood that, for the first time, he had surprised Charles, surprised and disconcerted him, and that Charles was wondering if his assessments of David had been correct after all. He had spent less than an hour with Charles, but he knew already that Charles did not like to be surprised, did not like having to recalibrate his opinions, the way he had decided to see things. Later, after he had moved in with Charles, he had looked back at that moment and had recognized that he could have redirected the course of their relationship; what if, instead of responding as he had, he had instead said something like: Oh, yes, I’m from one of the oldest families in Hawai‘i. I’m descended from royalty. Everyone there knows who we are. If things had gone differently, I would have been king. It would have been true.
But what point was the truth? When he had been at his third-rate college, he had once told his boyfriend at the time—a lacrosse player who, outside of his bedroom, either ignored David or pretended he didn’t exist—the abbreviated story of his family, and the boy had scoffed. “Very funny, man,” he’d said. “And I’m descended from the queen of England. Right.” He had insisted, and finally his boyfriend had rolled over onto his side, away from him, bored by David’s stories. After that, he had learned not to say anything, because it seemed easier and better to lie than it was to be disbelieved. His family was a remote fact, but even so, he didn’t want to hear them mocked; he didn’t want to be reminded how the source of his grandmother’s pride was for most people a subject of ridicule. He didn’t want to think about his poor lost father.
So: We’re from the penniless side of the family, he said instead, and Charles had laughed, relieved.
“It happens to the best of us,” he said.
In the taxi downtown, they had been quiet, and Charles, staring straight ahead, had placed his hand on David’s knee, and David had taken it and moved it atop his groin, and had seen, in shadows, Charles’s profile change as he smiled. They had parted chastely that night—Charles dropping him off on Second Avenue, because he had been too embarrassed for Charles to see the building where he actually lived: Charles’s house was only a mile west from him, but it might as well have been another country altogether—but over the following weeks they met again and again, and six months after their first date, he had moved into Charles’s house on Washington Square.
He felt he had grown simultaneously older and younger over the months he and Charles had been together. Isolated from his own friends, he spent more time with Charles’s, sitting at dinners at which Charles’s polite friends tried to include him in the conversation, and his not-so-polite ones made him the subject of conversation. Eventually, however, both groups would forget about him, their talk turning to more arcane points of the law or the stock market, and he would excuse himself and creep off to bed to wait for Charles. Sometimes they would go to Charles’s friends’ houses for dinner, and there he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for—until it was time to go home （early, thankfully）。
But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat: all the things he had had to do for his father; all the things he wished his father would have done for him. He knew he should feel infantilized by how obviously unequal their life together was, and yet he didn’t—he liked it, he found it relaxing. It was a relief to be with someone so declarative; it was a relief not to think. Charles’s self-assuredness, which extended to every aspect of their lives, was reassuring. He gave orders to Adams or to the cook with the same brisk, warm authority that he used with David when they were in bed. He sometimes felt as if he were reliving his childhood, this time with Charles as his father, and that made him queasy, because Charles wasn’t his father; he was his lover. Yet the sensation persisted—here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier. Here was someone whose rhythms and patterns were explicable and dependable and, once learned, could be relied upon to be maintained. All along he had known that something had been absent from his life, but it wasn’t until he met Charles that he understood that that quality was logic—fantasy, in Charles’s life, was confined to bed, and even there it made sense in its own way.
He had never thought too much about what kind of man he might someday live with, but he had slipped so easily into his role as Charles’s boyfriend, as Charles’s, that it was only in rare moments that he realized with a flop of his stomach that he had in fact come to resemble his father in ways he had never foreseen or imagined—someone who yearned only to be loved and taken care of, to be instructed. And it was in those moments—moments in which he stood in the gloom at the front window, his hand on the shutter, looking out into the darkened square for Charles, waiting like a cat for its owner to come home—that he was able to recognize who he reminded himself of: not just the heiress, in her much too lovely pink dress, but his father. His father, standing at the window of their house, near sundown, exhausted from the anxiety and hopefulness of waiting all day, still scanning the street for Edward to arrive in his puttery old car, waiting to run down the porch steps and join his friend, waiting to be taken away from his mother and his son, and all the disappointments of his small and inescapable life.