He looked next at Timothy, who was now clearly ill, his eyelids as violet as if he’d smudged them with paint, his teeth too long, his hair a fuzz. Timothy had been in boarding school with Peter and Charles, and back then, Charles said, “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful he was. The most beautiful boy in the school.” This was after the first time he’d met Timothy, and the next time, David had examined him, looking for the boy Charles had fallen in love with. He was an actor, an unsuccessful one, and had been married to a beautiful woman, and then for decades had been the lover of a very rich man, but when the man died, his adult children had made Timothy leave their father’s house, and Timothy had moved in with John. No one knew how John, who was jolly and large, made his money—he was from a modest family in the Midwest and had never had a job that lasted longer than a few months and wasn’t handsome enough to be kept—and yet he occupied an entire townhouse in the West Village and ate extravagantly （though, as Charles pointed out, usually only when someone else was paying）。 “When people like John stop being able to survive through mysterious means in this city is the day this city is no longer worth living in,” Charles would say, fondly. （For someone who was adamant about people earning their way, he had an unusual number of friends who seemed to do nothing at all: It was something David liked about him.）
As always, the three said hello to him, asked him about what he was doing and how he was, but he had little to say, and eventually, their conversation turned back to themselves, to recounting things they’d done together when they were younger.
“…Well, that’s not as bad as when John dated that homeless guy!”
“First of all, we were hardly dating, and second…”
“Tell that story again!”
“Well. This was, oh, about fifteen years ago, when I was working at that framing shop on Twentieth between Fifth and Sixth—”
“Where you got fired for stealing—”
“Excuse me. I did not get fired for stealing. I got fired for being chronically tardy and incompetent, and for providing poor customer service. I got fired from the bookstore for stealing.”
“Oh, well, excuse me.”
“Anyway, can I continue? So I’d get off the F at Twenty-third Street, and I’d always see this guy, very cute, kind of a scruffy artist type, plaid shirt and a little beard, carrying a grocery bag, standing on Sixth near the empty lot on the southeast corner. So I cruise her, and she cruises back, and this goes on for a few days. And then, on the fourth day, I go up to her and we talk. She says, ‘Do you live around here?’ And I say, ‘No, I work down the block.’ And she says, ‘Well, we can go into this alley’—it wasn’t really an alley, but there was this little channel between the back wall of the parking lot and this other building they were tearing down—and, you know, we did.”
“Spare us the details.”
“Jealous?”
“Uh, no.”
“Anyway, the next day, I’m walking down the street and there she is again, and back we go into the alley. And then, the day after that, I see her again, and I think: Huh. Something’s off here. And then I realize she’s wearing the exact same thing as the previous two times! Right down to the underwear. And also that she’s kind of smelly. Actually, let me correct that: She’s very smelly. Poor old girl. She didn’t have anywhere to go.”
“So did you leave?”
“Of course not! We were there, weren’t we?”
They all laughed, and then Timothy began singing: “La da dee la dee da, La da dee la dee da,” and Percival joined in: “She’s just like you and me, but she’s homeless; she’s homeless.” David left them, smiling—he liked watching the three of them together; he liked how no one else seemed to interest them as much as they did themselves. How would his father’s life have been different if Edward had been more like Timothy or Percival or John, if his father had had a friend who would make the stuff of their past into a story to entertain instead of to control? He tried to picture his father in Charles’s house, at this party. What would he think? What would he do? He imagined his father, his shy, slight smile, standing behind the staircase banister, looking at the other men but afraid to join them, assuming they would ignore him as he had been ignored almost all of his life. What would his father’s life have been like had he left the island, had he learned to ignore his mother, had he found someone to cherish him? It might have resulted in a future in which David might not exist. He stood there, conjuring this other life for him: His father, strolling alongside the arch at the north of the Square, a novel tucked under his arm, walking beneath the late-fall trees, their leaves as red as apples, his face lifted to the sky. It would be a Sunday, and he would be on his way to meet a friend for a movie and then dinner. But then the vision faltered: Who was this friend? Was it a man or a woman? Was theirs a romantic relationship? Where was his father living? How was he supporting himself? Where would he go the next day, and the day after? Was he healthy, and if he wasn’t, who was taking care of him? He felt a kind of despair steal over him: for how his father eluded him even in fiction, for how he was unable to construct a happy life for him. He had been unable to save him; he was unable even to summon the courage to learn of his fate. He had abandoned his father in life, and now he was abandoning him again, in fantasy. Should he not at least be able to dream him into a better existence, a kinder one? What did it say about him, as his son, that he was incapable of even that?
But maybe, he thought, maybe it wasn’t a lack of empathy that was to blame for his inability to project his father into a different life—maybe it was how childlike his father was, how his father had behaved like no other parent, like no other adult, he had known, then or since. There were, for example, their walks, which had begun when David was six or seven. He would be woken late at night by his father, holding out his hand, and David would take it, and together they would walk the streets of their neighborhood in silence, showing each other how familiar things became different in the nighttime: the bush dangling flowers that resembled upside-down cornets, the acacia tree on their neighbor’s property that in the dark appeared enchanted and malevolent and like something from a country far from their own, where they would be two travelers moving through snow that squeaked beneath their boots, and in the distance would be a farmhouse with a single window lit a smoky yellow by a single candle, and inside would be a witch disguised as a kindly widow, and two bowls of soup as thick as porridge, salty with cubes of fatback and sweet with chunks of roasted yam.
On those walks, there would always be a moment in which he realized that he could see, that the night, which had at first seemed a featureless screen of black, toneless and silent, was brighter than it appeared, and although he always promised himself that he would determine the exact moment when it happened, when his eyes adjusted themselves to this different, filtered light, he never could: It happened so gradually, so without his participation, that it was as if his mind existed not to control his body but to marvel at its abilities, its capacity for adaptation.