As they walked, his father would tell him stories from his childhood, would show him places where he had played or had hidden as a boy, and in the night, these stories wouldn’t seem sad the way they did when David’s grandmother had told them, but simply stories: about the other boys in the neighborhood, who threw avocados from one of their trees at his father as he walked home from school; about the time they had made him climb the mango tree in his own front yard and then had told him he couldn’t come down or they’d beat him, and for hours, until it turned dark, until the last of them finally had to leave his post to go home for dinner, his father had stayed in the tree, crouched in the flat, shallow space made by the limbs meeting the trunk, and when he had finally climbed down—his legs shaking from hunger and exhaustion—he had had to go inside his own house and explain where he’d been to his mother, who had been waiting for him at the dining-room table, silent and livid.
Why didn’t you just tell her then what had happened to you? he had asked his father.
“Oh,” his father had said, and then stopped. “She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear that those boys weren’t really my friends after all. It was embarrassing for her.” He was silent, listening to him. “But that won’t happen to you, Kawika,” his father had continued. “You have friends. I’m proud of you.”
He had been quiet then, his father’s story and its sadness sinking into him, past his heart and down to his intestines, a leaden anvil, and, remembering this, he felt the same sorrow, this time spreading through his body as if it were something that had been injected into his bloodstream. He turned then, and was intending to go to the kitchen on some made-up pretense—to check on the plating of the food; to tell Adams that Percival would need more hot water soon—when he saw Charles descending the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” Charles asked, upon seeing him, his smile vanishing. “Did something happen?” No, no, nothing happened, he said, but Charles held out his arms anyway, and David walked into them, into Charles’s warm solidity, his reassuring bulk. “It’s all right, David, whatever it is,” Charles said, after a pause, and he nodded into Charles’s shoulder. It would be all right, he knew—Charles said so, and David loved him, and he was far from where he’d been, and nothing would happen to him that Charles wouldn’t be able to solve.
* * *
By eight, all twelve of the guests had arrived, Peter last of all—it was snowing by then, and Charles and David and John had carried Peter, in his heavy wheelchair, up the front steps: David and John on either side of him, Charles propping up the rear.
He had just seen Peter at Thanksgiving, and he was stunned by how much he had deteriorated in three weeks. The most noticeable evidence of this was the wheelchair—a high-backed one with a headrest—but also his weight loss, the way the skin on his face in particular seemed to have shrunk, so that his lips couldn’t quite close over his teeth. Or maybe it wasn’t that it had shrunk so much as it had been yanked, as if someone had gathered a fistful of scalp at the back of Peter’s skull and pulled, stretching the skin taut and painful and bulging his eyes out of their sockets. Once he was inside, Peter’s friends gathered around him, but David could tell they too were shocked by his appearance; no one seemed to know what to say.
“What, you’ve never seen a dying man before?” Peter asked, coolly, and everyone looked away.
It was a rhetorical question, and a cruel one, but “Of course we have, Peter,” Charles said in his businesslike way. He had retrieved a wool blanket from the study and was now wrapping it about Peter’s shoulders, tucking it around his rib cage. “Now, let’s get you something to eat. Everyone! Dinner’s set out in the dining room; please help yourselves.”
It had been Charles’s original plan to host a sit-down dinner, but Peter had discouraged that. He didn’t know if he would have the strength to sit through a long meal, he said, and besides, the point of this gathering was for him to say goodbye to everyone. He needed to be able to circulate, to talk to people, and then to get away from them when he wanted. Now, as everyone filed slowly, almost reluctantly, toward the dining room, Charles turned to him: “David, would you get Peter a plate? I’m going to settle him on the couch.”
Of course, he said.
In the dining room, there was an atmosphere of excessive merriment, as people served themselves more food than they would ever eat, and made loud pronouncements about how they were putting their diets on hold. They had come for Peter, but no one mentioned him. It would be the last time they would see him, the last time they would say goodbye, and suddenly the party seemed ghoulish, grotesque, and David hurriedly went from platter to platter, cutting into the line, loading Peter’s plate with meats and pastas and braised vegetables before getting a second plate and arranging it with all of Charles’s favorites, eager to get away.
Back in the living room, Peter was sitting at one end of the sofa, his legs on the ottoman, and Charles was leaning against him, his right arm around Peter’s shoulders, Peter’s face pressed into Charles’s neck, and when David approached them, Charles turned and smiled and David could see he had been crying, and Charles never cried. “Thank you,” he said to David, and, holding the plate out for Peter: “See? No fish. Just like you commanded.”
“Excellent,” said Peter, turning his skull-like face to David. “Thank you, young man.” That was what Peter called him: “young man.” He didn’t like it, but what could he do? After this weekend, he would never have to bear Peter calling him “young man” again. Then he realized he had thought that and felt ashamed, almost as if he’d spoken aloud.
But for all of Peter’s strong opinions about the food, he had no appetite for any of it—even the smell made him gag, he said. And yet, for the rest of the evening, the plate David had brought for him sat on the side table to his right, a cloth napkin bundled around a set of utensils tucked beneath its lip, as if he might at any moment change his mind, pick it up, and consume everything it held. It wasn’t the illness that had eliminated his appetite: It was the new course of chemotherapy he had begun taking a little over a month ago. But the drugs had once again proven useless; the cancer remained, but Peter’s physical strength had not.
He had been bewildered by this when Charles had told him. Why had Peter started a course of chemotherapy when he already knew he was going to kill himself? Beside him, Charles had sighed, and was silent. “It’s hard to give up hope,” he said at last. “Even until the very end.”
It was only after more people had drifted back into the living room with their own plates of food, tentatively arranging themselves onto chairs and footrests and the second sofa like courtiers assembling around the king’s throne, that David felt he could go get himself something to eat. The dining room was empty, the platters diminished, and as he was filling his plate with what he could, a waiter entered from the kitchen. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry. We’re bringing out more right now.” He saw that David had been reaching for the steak. “I’ll bring out a fresh batch.”