He left, and David looked after him. He was young and handsome and male （everything that he’d strictly forbidden）， and when he returned, David stood aside silently and let him remove the empty platter and put the new one down.
That went quick, he said.
“Well, it should. It’s really good. We had a tasting beforehand.” The waiter looked up and smiled, and David smiled back. There was a pause.
I’m David, he said.
“James.”
“Nice to meet you,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed.
“So, is this a birthday party?” James asked.
No—no. It’s for Peter—the guy in the wheelchair. He’s—he’s sick.
James nodded, and there was another silence. “This is a nice house,” he said, and David nodded back. Yeah, it is, he said.
“Who owns it?”
Charles—the big blond guy? The one in the green sweater? My boyfriend, he should have said, but he didn’t.
“Oh—oh yeah.” James was still holding the platter, and now he rotated it in his hands and then looked up again and smiled. “And what about you?”
What about me? he asked, flirting back.
“What’s your deal?”
I don’t have a deal.
James gestured with his chin toward the living room. “One of them your boyfriend?”
He didn’t say anything. Eighteen months after their first date, he still found himself occasionally surprised that he and Charles were a couple. It wasn’t just that Charles was so much older than he was; it was that Charles wasn’t the sort of man he had ever been attracted to—he was too blond, too rich, too white. He knew what they looked like together; he knew what people said. “Well, so what if they think you’re trade?” Eden had asked when he confessed to her. “Trade are people, too.” I know, I know, he said. But it’s different. “Your problem,” Eden said, “is that you can’t accept that people just think of you as some brown-skinned nothing.” And, indeed, it bothered him that people assumed that he was poor and uneducated and using Charles for his money. （Eden: “You are poor and uneducated. Besides, what do you care what these old fucks think about you?”）
But what if, instead, he and this James were a couple, both of them young and poor and not-white together? What if he were with someone whom he could look at and see, if only superficially, himself? Was it Charles’s wealth, or his age, or his race that made David feel so often helpless and inferior? Would he be more purposeful, less passive, if things between him and his boyfriend were more equitable? Would he feel like less of a traitor?
And yet he was being a traitor now, by not claiming Charles, by his guilt. Yes, he told James. Charles is. He’s my boyfriend.
“Oh,” said James, and David watched something—pity? disdain?—flicker across his face. “Too bad,” he added, and he grinned and pushed open the double doors to the kitchen, disappearing with his platter, leaving David alone once more.
He grabbed his plate and left, feeling both an intense embarrassment and, less explicably, a kind of rage at Charles, for not being the sort of person he ought to be with, for making him feel ashamed. He knew this was unfair: He wanted Charles’s protection, and he wanted to be free. Sometimes, when he and Charles were sitting in the study on a Saturday night they had chosen to stay in the city, watching a video of one of the black-and-white movies Charles loved from his youth, they would hear the sounds of a group of people on the sidewalk below them, passing beneath the house on their way to a club or bar or party. He would recognize them by their laughter, by the pitch of their voices—not who they were specifically but the kind of people they were, the tribe of the young and broke and futureless to which he himself had belonged until eighteen months ago. He sometimes felt like one of his ancestors, coaxed onto a ship and sent bobbing around the world, made to stand on plinths at medical colleges in Boston and London and Paris so that doctors and students could examine his elaborately tattooed skin, his necklace of twisted ropes of plaited human hair—Charles was his guide, his chaperone, but he was also his warden, and now that he had been taken from his people, he would never be allowed to return to them. The sensation was most profound on summer nights, when they kept the windows open, and at three a.m. he would be awoken by groups of passersby, singing drunkenly as they rounded the Square, their voices gradually disappearing among the trees. Then he would look at Charles in bed by his side, and feel a mix of pity and love and revulsion and irritation—dismay that he was with someone so different; gratitude that that someone was Charles. “Age is just a number,” one of his more vapid friends had said, trying to be nice, but he was wrong—age was a different continent, and as long as he was with Charles, he would be moored there.
Not that he had anywhere else to be. His future was a vague, vaporous thing. He wasn’t alone in this; so many of his friends and classmates were like him, drifting from home to their jobs and then home again before going out at night to bars or clubs or other people’s apartments. They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive. He had one friend who, after his lover had died, had started gorging himself. Anything he had, he spent on food; David had gone out to dinner with Ezra once and had watched in horrified awe as he had eaten a bowl of wonton soup followed by a plate of wok-fried snow peas and water chestnuts followed by a dish of braised beef tongue followed by a whole Peking duck. He had eaten with a kind of steady, joyless determination, tracing his finger through the last streaks of sauce, stacking the empty plates atop one another as if they were completed paperwork. It had been repellent, but David had understood it as well: Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food. Over the months, Ezra gained weight, at first slowly and then quickly, and now he was fat. But as long as he was fat, he wasn’t sick, and no one would ever think he was: His cheeks were hot and pink; his lips and fingertips were often slicked with grease—wherever he went, he left evidence of his existence. Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable.
But David’s distance from his own life made less sense to him. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t poor, and as long as he was with Charles, he never would be. And yet he was unable to imagine what he might be alive for. He had completed one year of law school before his finances had forced him to drop out and take the job as a paralegal at Larsson, Wesley three years ago, and Charles was always telling him he should reenroll. “Anywhere you want, the best place you can get in,” he’d say. （David had been attending a state school beforehand; he knew Charles would expect better from him.） “I’ll pay for all of it.” When David demurred, Charles would be puzzled. “Why?” he’d ask. “You did a year—you clearly wanted to do it before. And you have a good mind for it. So why not continue?” He couldn’t tell Charles that he hadn’t actually had a particular passion for the law, that he didn’t understand why he had applied for law school in the first place—except that it had seemed like something his father might have wanted for him, something that might have made his father proud. Going to law school fell into the vast category of being able to take care of himself, a virtue his father had always impressed upon him—a skill his father was never able to possess.