Now, standing beside Charles, he took a breath. He would have to speak to Peter at some point; he would have to tell him goodbye. He had thought for weeks about what he might say, but anything he deemed meaningful he knew Peter would find trite, and anything pleasant and uncontroversial seemed like a waste of time. He had something that Peter did not—life, the promise and expectation of years—and yet he remained intimidated by him. Do it now, he told himself. Talk to him now, while the room’s still empty and no one will be listening to you.
But when he finally sat down on Charles’s left, Charles and Peter didn’t pause in their low, murmured conversation, and so he instead leaned against Charles, who took his hand again and squeezed it, before turning to him and smiling. “I feel like I haven’t seen you all night,” he said.
The night is young; and so am I, he said, an old joke of theirs, and Charles put his hand on the back of David’s head and brought his face close. “Will you help me?” he asked.
He had been warned beforehand that Charles would need his assistance with Peter, and so he stood and helped Peter into his chair before pushing him out of the room and down the hallway to the left, past the slant-ceilinged closet, to the little bathroom wedged beneath the stairs. This bathroom, Charles had told him, was legendary: At earlier parties, in earlier years, when Charles was younger and wilder, it was to here that people would sneak away, in twos and threes in the midst of dinners and late-night gatherings, with everyone else sitting in the dining room or living room and making jokes about the disappeared, greeting them upon their return with hoots and laughter. Did you ever go in there with anyone? he had asked, and Charles had grinned. “Of course I did,” he said. “What do you think? I’m a red-blooded American male.” Adams called this bathroom the powder room, which he intended to be decorous, but which Charles’s friends had found hilarious.
Now, though, the powder room was only what it was—a bathroom—and these days, there were two people inside of it only because one was helping the other use the toilet. David helped Charles help Peter stand （for, as thin as he was, he was, curiously, heavier than he appeared, his legs almost useless beneath him）， and once Charles had his arms wrapped around Peter’s chest, he nodded at them and closed the door and stood outside, trying not to listen to the sounds Peter was making. He was always perplexed and impressed by how much waste the body was able to create until the very end, even when it was given little to digest. On and on it went, the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry.
There was the noise of the tap turning on, and hands being washed, and then Charles calling his name. He opened the door and maneuvered the chair into position and then helped lower Peter into it, replacing the pillow behind his back. David had been avoiding Peter’s eyes, certain that Peter resented his presence, but as he straightened, Peter looked up, and the two of them looked at each other. It was a brief exchange, so brief that Charles, arranging Peter’s sweater around him, didn’t even notice, but after they returned Peter to the living room—now filled once more with their guests, the air scented with sugar and chocolate and the coffee Adams was pouring into cups—David again pressed himself against Charles’s side, feeling childish but also in need of protection from the anger, the fury, the terrible want he had seen in Peter’s face. It was not, David knew, directed at him specifically but, rather, at what he represented: He was alive, and when this night was over, he would climb two flights upstairs and maybe he and Charles would have sex and maybe they wouldn’t, and the next day he would wake and choose what he wanted for breakfast, and what he wanted to do that day—he would go to the bookstore, or to the movies, or to lunch, or to a museum, or simply take a walk. And in that day he would make hundreds of choices, so many he would lose count, so many he would forget to notice he was doing it, and with every choice he would be asserting his presence, his place in the world. And with every choice he made, Peter would be receding further from life, further from his memory, would be becoming a matter of history with each minute, each hour, one day to be forgotten altogether: a legacy of nothing; a memory of no one.
* * *
For most of the night, Peter’s guests had been circling about him rather than engaging him directly. Sometimes someone near him would turn to him in the course of conversation with someone else—“Do you remember that night, Peter?”; “That guy, Peter, what was his name? You know, the one we met in Palm Springs”; “Peter, we’re talking about that trip we went on in seventy-eight”—but mostly, they talked only with one another, leaving Peter to sit there on the far end of the sofa, Charles at his side. They were all scared of Peter, David had long since realized, and now they were especially scared of him, because this was the last time they would see him and the pressure to say goodbye to him was so great that they were ignoring him instead. Peter, however, seemed content with his position. There was something majestic about his calm, the way he moved his gaze over his friends, all gathered there for him, occasionally nodding at something Charles said to him, like a massive old dog that sits by his master’s side and surveys the room, knowing that there would be no threats to his owner’s safety that night.
But now, suddenly, as if commanded by a call only they could hear, people began approaching Peter, one by one, bending and talking into his ear. John was among the first, and David nudged Charles, who made to stand, to leave and give Peter some privacy, but Peter placed his hand on Charles’s leg and Charles sat back down. And so, instead, he and David stayed, watching as John returned to his place in the chair on the other side of the room, and was replaced by Percival, and then Timothy, and then Norris and Julien and Christopher, who all in turn took Peter’s hands in their own and bent or knelt or sat beside him and spoke softly to him, having their final conversations. David was unable to hear most, or even all, of what they said, but he and Charles remained still, as if Peter were the emperor and these his ministers, come to deliver bits of news from across the realm, and they were servants, never meant to hear any of it and yet unable to flee back to the kitchen where they belonged.
Of course, what Peter’s friends had to say wasn’t confidential at all but banalities delivered with the intimacy of a secret. They spoke as if Peter were ancient, and his memory long gone. “I do remember, you know,” Peter would normally say, as he always did when someone prefaced a story with “Do you remember?” “I’m not that far gone.” But in this moment he seemed to have acquired a new kind of grace, one that manifested itself as patience, and he allowed each person to hold him against them, talking at him without seeming to need a response. He had not thought Peter would be interested in, much less capable of, being good at dying, but there he sat, generous and stately, listening to his friends, smiling at various moments, nodding his head and letting his hand be held: