* * *
Now it was nine p.m., and the dishes on the dining-room table had been removed and replaced with desserts, and once again, everyone roused themselves to cut slices of pine-nut tart and polenta cake, its surface glazed with candied rounds of orange, and a double-chocolate cake made from a recipe invented by Charles’s grandmother’s cook, and which he served at every dinner he hosted. Once again, David followed the guests into the dining room to fix plates for Peter and Charles.
When he returned, James was setting a platter of dried apricots and figs and salted almonds and shards of dark chocolate on the coffee table near the sofa where Charles and Peter still sat, and David watched the two men watch James, their faces alert but unreadable. “Thank you, young man,” Peter said, as James straightened.
He avoided looking at James as they passed each other in the entryway, James’s left arm brushing against his right one, and set Peter’s plate at his side, and handed Charles his, Charles grabbing his hand as he did. Next to them, Peter watched, his expression still unreadable.
He had met all of Charles’s other close friends before Peter, and the combination of Charles’s apparent reluctance to introduce them and his frequent invocation of Peter’s name and opinions—“Peter saw that new production at the Signature already and says it’s garbage”; “I want to stop by Three Lives and buy this biography that Peter recommended”; “Peter said we must go to the Adrian Piper show at Paula Cooper as soon as it opens”—made him nervous. By the time they met, three months into his and Charles’s relationship, his nervousness had hardened into anxiety, which was compounded by Charles’s own. “I hope the food’s okay,” Charles fretted, as David hunted for one of his socks, only to realize it was on the bed, where he’d left it five minutes earlier. “Peter’s a very picky eater. And he has excellent taste, so if it’s not good enough, he’ll say something.” （“Peter sounds like an asshole,” Eden had said when David had told her about him, or at least the secondhand Peter he knew, and David had to now stop himself from echoing her aloud.）
He was both fascinated and alarmed by this version of Charles, so flustered and discombobulated. It was something of a relief to see that even Charles could feel inadequate; on the other hand, they couldn’t both begin the evening feeling this insecure—he was counting on Charles to be his defender. Why are you so nervous? he asked Charles. This is your oldest friend.
“It’s because he’s my oldest friend that I’m nervous,” said Charles, stroking his razor beneath his chin. “Don’t you have a friend whose opinion matters more to you than anyone’s?”
No, he said, though he thought of Eden as he did.
“Well, you will someday,” said Charles. “Damnit.” He had nicked himself, and he grabbed a square of toilet paper and held it against his skin. “If you’re lucky, that is. You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.”
Why?
“Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”
But was that really true? He thought of his father, who definitely had been afraid of Edward. He had wanted Edward’s approval, that was true; and Edward had challenged him, that was also true. But Edward hadn’t wanted his father to become better—not smarter or more educated or more independent-minded. He had simply wanted his father to—what? Agree with him; obey him; keep him company. He had pretended that such obedience was in the service of a greater mission, but it hadn’t been—it had been about finding someone who might finally look up to him, which is all anyone seemed to want. The kind of friend Charles was describing was someone who wanted you to become more yourself. But Edward had wanted the opposite for David’s father. He had wanted to reduce him into something that didn’t think at all.
Well, he said, but isn’t your friend supposed to be nice to you?
“That’s what I have you for,” Charles said, smiling at him in the mirror.
When he finally did meet Peter, he was surprised by how mesmerizingly ugly he was. It wasn’t that any one feature was so disagreeable—he had large, light-colored eyes, like a dog’s, and a bony, confident nose, and long dark eyebrows that seemed to have grown as a single unit rather than as a collection of individual hairs—but the combination was unharmonious, if compellingly so. It was as if every aspect of his face was determined to be a soloist, rather than a member of an ensemble.
“Peter,” Charles said, hugging him.
“Charlie,” Peter replied.
For the first part of dinner, Peter talked. He was someone, it seemed, who had a strong and informed opinion on virtually any topic, and his soliloquy, fueled by small comments and questions from Charles, went from the repointing work on Peter’s building to the revival of certain nearly extinct squash varietals to the flaws of a highly acclaimed recent novel to the charms of an obscure, newly republished collection of brief essays by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk to the connections between anti-modernists and anti-Semites to why he would no longer holiday in Hydra but, rather, in Rhodes. David was ignorant about all of these subjects, yet through his mounting unease, he found himself intrigued by Peter. Not so much by what he said—he was unable to follow most of it—but by how he said it: He had a lovely, deep voice, and he spoke as if he enjoyed the feel of the words coming off his tongue, as if he were saying them only because he liked the sensation of doing so.
“So, David,” said Peter, turning to him as David knew he must. “Charles has already told me how you met. But tell me about yourself.”
There’s really not much to tell, he began, looking briefly at Charles, who gave him an encouraging smile. He recited the facts that Charles already knew, as Peter stared at him with his pale, wolfish eyes. He had expected Peter to be interrogatory, to start asking him the questions everyone always did—So your father never worked, ever? Never? You didn’t know your mother? Not even a little?—but he had only nodded, and then said nothing.
I’m boring, he’d concluded, apologetically, and Peter had nodded, slowly and gravely, as if David had said something profound. “Yes,” he said. “You are. But you’re young. You’re supposed to be boring.” He had been uncertain how to interpret this, but Charles had only smiled. “Does that mean you were boring when you were twenty-five, Peter?” he asked, teasingly, and Peter had nodded again. “Of course I was, and you too, Charles.”
“So when did we start becoming interesting?”
“That’s a big assumption to make, isn’t it? But I’d say in the last ten years.”
“That recently?”
“I’m just talking about myself now,” Peter said, and Charles laughed. “Bitch,” he said, fondly.
“I think that went well,” Charles had said that night in bed, and David had agreed, though he actually didn’t. Since that night, he had had to see Peter on only a few more occasions, and each time, there would be a pause in the conversation in which Peter would turn his large head in David’s direction and ask, “So what’s happened to you since I saw you last, young man?,” as if life was something that David wasn’t experiencing but was, rather, having bestowed upon him. And then Peter had gotten sicker, and David had seen him even less, and after tonight, he would never see him again. Charles had said that Peter was dying a disappointed man: He was a renowned poet, but for the past three decades he had been writing a novel, yet it had never found a publisher. “He had assumed it would be his legacy,” Charles said.