Do we have to talk about it? he’d ask Charles.
“No, we don’t,” Charles would say. “But I just don’t like seeing someone as bright as you waste his time being a paralegal.”
I like being a paralegal, he’d say. I’m not as ambitious as you want me to be, Charles.
Charles would sigh. “I don’t want you to be anything but happy, David,” Charles would say. “I just want to know what you want in life. When I was your age, I wanted everything. I wanted influence, and I wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and I wanted to be respected. What do you want?”
I want to be here, he’d always say, with you, and Charles would sigh again but also smile, frustrated but also pleased. “David,” he’d groan, and the argument, if that’s what it was, would end.
And yet sometimes, on those summer nights, he thought he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be somewhere between where he was, in a bed dressed in expensive cotton sheets next to the man he had grown to love, and on the street, skirting the edge of the park, squealing and clinging to his friends when a rat darted from the shadows inches from his feet, drunk and wild and hopeless, his life burning away, with no one to have dreams for him, not even himself.
* * *
In the living room, two of the waitstaff were circulating, refilling water glasses, removing empty plates; Adams was delivering drinks. There was a bartender among the catering crew, but David knew that she was being held hostage in the kitchen, her attempts to help rebuffed by Adams, who liked to make the drinks himself and would allow no one to disrupt his methods. And so, for every party, Charles would remind the party planner to instruct the caterer not to bring a bartender, and every time, the caterer would bring someone along “just in case,” and every time, he would be consigned to the kitchen and not allowed to do his job.
From his position beside the staircase, he watched as James entered the room, watched the other guests watch him, watched them register his ass, his eyes, his smile. Now that David wasn’t in the room, he was the only nonwhite person there. James bent over the Three Sisters and said something that David couldn’t hear but that made them all laugh, before straightening and leaving with a stack of plates. A few minutes later, he returned with clean plates and the platter of pasta, which he offered around the room, balancing the dish atop the palm of his right hand while holding his left hand in a fist behind his back.
What if he were to say James’s name as James exited the room? James would look about, surprised, and then see him and smile and come to him, and David would take his hand and lead him to the slant-ceilinged closet beneath the staircase, where Adams stored the house’s supply of mothballs and candles and the burlap bags of cedar chips that he tucked between Charles’s sweaters when he was packing them up for the summer, and which Charles liked to toss into the fireplace to make the smoke more fragrant. The space was just high enough to stand in, and just deep enough for one person to kneel in; he could already feel James’s skin beneath his fingers, already hear the sounds they’d both make. And then James would leave, returning to his duties, and David would wait, counting to two hundred, before he too left, running upstairs to his and Charles’s bathroom to rinse out his mouth before returning to the living room, where James would already be offering people another helping of steak or chicken, and sitting down next to Charles. For the rest of the evening, they would try not to look at each other too much, but with every rotation through the room, James would glance at him, and he would glance back, and when the catering crew was cleaning up, he would tell Charles that he thought he’d forgotten his book and would slip downstairs before Charles could respond, where he would find James just as he was putting on his coat, press into his palm a piece of paper with his telephone number at work, tell him to call. For weeks, maybe months, thereafter they would meet, always at James’s, and then, one day, James would start dating someone or move away or simply grow bored, and David would never hear from him again. He could see and feel and taste it so vividly that it was as if it had already happened and he was reliving a memory, but when James finally did come into view, walking back to the kitchen, he made himself hide, turning his face to the wall to keep from the temptation of speaking.
This constant desire! Was it the fact that it was dangerous to have sex the way he used to, or that he and Charles were monogamous, or was he just restless? “You’re young,” Charles had said, laughing, unoffended, when he had told him. “It’s normal. You’ll grow out of it in the next sixty years or so.” But he wasn’t sure it was that, or perhaps not only that. He just wanted more life. He didn’t know what he would do with it, but he wanted it—and not just his own but everyone’s. More and more and more, until he had stuffed himself with it.
He thought, inevitably, of his father, of what his father had craved. Love, he supposed, affection. But nothing else. Food did not interest him, or sex, or travel, or cars or clothes or houses. One Christmas—the year before they left for Lipo-wao-nahele, which means he would have been nine—they had been assigned at school to find out what their parents wanted for the holiday, and then they would make that thing in art class. Of course, what their parents really wanted they couldn’t make, but other children’s mothers and fathers seemed to understand that, and had answered with something plausible. “I’ve always wanted a nice drawing of you,” someone’s mother said, or “I’d love a new picture frame.” But David’s father had only taken his hand. “I have you,” his father said. “I don’t need anything else.” But you must want something, he had insisted, frustrated, and his father had shaken his head. “No,” he repeated. “You’re my greatest treasure. If I have you, I don’t need anything else.” Finally, David had had to explain his dilemma to his grandmother, who had stood and marched over to where his father lay on the porch, reading the paper and waiting for Edward, and snapped at him, “Wika! Your son is going to fail his school assignment unless you tell him something he can make for you!”
In the end, he had made his father a clay ornament, which was fired in the school’s kiln. It was a lumpy thing, only half glazed, in the shape of what was meant to be a star, with his father’s name—their name—scratched into its surface, but his father had loved it and had hung it above his bed （they hadn’t bought a tree that year）， hammering the nail in himself. He remembered how his father had almost cried, and how he had been embarrassed for him, for his happiness over something so stupid and ugly and inexpert, something he had made hastily, in just a few minutes, eager to go outside to play with his friends.
Or, perhaps, this constant yearning for sex was Charles’s fault. He had not been attracted to Charles when they met—his flirting had been automatic, rather than from any genuine feeling—and when he had accepted his invitation for dinner, it was out of curiosity, not desire. But midway through the meal, something had shifted, and the second time they met, at Charles’s house the following day, their encounter had been feverish and almost wordless.
Yet, despite their mutual attraction, they delayed actually having sex for weeks, because they both wanted to avoid the conversation they would first need to have, the conversation that was written on the faces of so many people they knew.