* * *
The first doorbell chime sounded as Charles was still getting dressed. “Damnit,” he said. “Who comes exactly when they’re supposed to?”
Americans, he said, which was something he had read in a book, and Charles laughed.
“That’s true,” he said, and kissed him. “Will you go down and talk to whoever it is? I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
Ten? he asked, in mock outrage. You still need ten more minutes to get ready?
Charles swatted him with his towel. “We can’t all look like you do just out of the shower,” he said. “Some of us need to work at it.”
So he went down, grinning. They had exchanges like that often—complimenting each other’s appearance while diminishing their own—but only in private, because they both knew they were handsome and also both knew that recognizing it aloud was not just unappealing but, these days, potentially cruel as well. They were both vain, and yet vanity was an indulgence, a sign of life, a reminder of good health, a thanksgiving. Sometimes when they were out together, or even in someone’s apartment with a group of other men, they would look at each other quickly and then turn away, because they understood there was something obscene about their cheeks, still plumped with fat, and their arms, still layered with muscle. They were, in certain company, a provocation.
Downstairs, there were no lilies to be seen or smelled, only Adams returning to the kitchen with a now empty silver drinks tray. In the dining room, which David had checked earlier, the catering staff was arranging plates of food around the vases of holly and freesia: Charles had suggested sushi to Peter, but Peter had rejected that suggestion. “Now, on my deathbed, is not when I need to start eating fish,” he said. “Not after a lifetime of studiously avoiding it. Just get me something normal, Charles. Something normal and good.” So Charles had had the party planner hire a caterer who specialized in Mediterranean-inspired food, and now the table was being set with terra-cotta dishes of sliced steak and grilled zucchini and bowls of angel-hair pasta tossed with olives and sundried tomatoes. The waitstaff in their black pants and shirts were women—although he hadn’t been able to oversee the flowers, David had found a way to request only female caterers from the company Charles preferred. David knew he’d be irritated when he saw that the usual crew—uniformly young, blond, and male, and who at the last party David had seen eyeing Charles, and Charles enjoying their attention—had been replaced, but knew too that he would be forgiven by the time they went to bed, because Charles liked it when David was jealous, liked being reminded that he still had options.
The dining room, where he and Charles ate dinner every night if they didn’t go out, was old-fashioned and fusty, left mostly intact from when Charles’s parents had lived there. The rest of the house had been renovated a decade ago, when Charles moved in, but this room still had its original long, polished mahogany table, and its matching Federal-period cupboard, and its dark-green wallpaper with its pattern of morning-glory vines, and its dark-green dupioni silk drapes, and its side-by-side portraits of Charles’s ancestors, the first Griffiths to arrive in America from Scotland, their clock with its creamy, whale-ivory face—an heirloom of which Charles was very proud—sitting atop the mantel between them. Charles had no good explanation for why he hadn’t changed the room, and when David was in it, he would always think of his grandmother’s dining room, a place very different in appearance and detail, but similarly unchanged—and more than the room itself, he would think of their family dinners: how his father would get nervous and drop the ladle into the tureen, splashing the tablecloth with soup; how his grandmother would get angry. “For heaven’s sake, son,” she would say. “Can’t you be more careful? Do you see what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” his father would murmur.
“You see the kind of example you’re setting,” his grandmother would continue, as if his father hadn’t spoken at all. And then, to David, “You’re going to be more careful than your father, aren’t you, Kawika?”
Yes, he would promise, though he would feel guilty doing so, as if he had betrayed his father, and when his father came into his room that night to tuck him in, he would tell him that he wanted to be just like him. Tears would come to his father’s eyes then, both because he knew David was lying and because he was grateful to him for it. “Don’t be like me, Kawika,” his father would say, kissing him on his cheek. “And you won’t be. You’re going to be better than I am, I know it.” He never knew what to say to this, and so usually he would say nothing, and his father would kiss his fingertips and place them on his forehead. “Go to sleep, now,” he would say. “My Kawika. My son.”
He was suddenly dizzy. What would his father think of him now? What would he say? How would he feel if he knew his son had received a letter that probably contained news, bad news, about him, and had chosen not to read it? My Kawika. My son. He was seized by an impulse to run upstairs, tear the letter out of its envelope, and devour it, whatever it might say.
But, no, he couldn’t; if he did, the evening would be lost. Instead, he made himself go into the living room, where three of Peter and Charles’s old friends were sitting: John and Timothy and Percival. These were the nicest friends, the kind who would only look him up and down once, quickly, when he walked in, and for the rest of the evening would keep their eyes on his face. “The Three Sisters,” Peter called them, because they were all single and unglamorous, and because Peter found them insufficiently exciting: “The Spinsters.” Timothy and Percival were both sick; Timothy visibly so, Percival secretly. He had confided in Charles seven months ago, and Charles had told David. “I look fine, don’t I?” Percival asked Charles whenever they saw each other. “I look the same, don’t I?” He was the editor in chief of a small, prestigious publishing house—he was afraid he’d get fired if the company’s owners found out.
“You won’t get fired,” Charles always said. “And if they try, I know exactly the person you should call, and you’ll sue the hell out of them, and I’ll help.”
Percival ignored this. “But I look the same, don’t I?”
“Yes, Percy—you look the same. You look great.”
He looked over at Percival now. The others had glasses of wine, but Percival was holding a teacup in which David knew he was soaking a teabag of medicinal herbs that he got from an acupuncturist in Chinatown who he swore was strengthening his immune system. He studied Percival as he was distracted by his tea: Did he look the same? It had been five months since he’d seen him last—was he thinner? Did his complexion seem dustier? It was difficult to say; all of Charles’s friends looked slightly unhealthy to him, whether they were or not. Something, some quality, had disappeared from all of them, no matter how well maintained or robust—light seemed to vanish into their skin, so that even when they were sitting here, in the forgiving candlelight that Charles had grown to favor for these gatherings, they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk. He had once attempted to explain this to Eden, who spent her weekends drawing nudes, and she had rolled her eyes. “It’s because they’re old,” she had said.