The only thing not put away was the misshapen brick of dark chocolate, scarred and dusty in parts like an oversize car battery. This, like the double-chocolate cake, was a signature of Charles’s parties, and the first time David had seen it, seen how one of the waiters had taken an awl and stuck it in its side, tapping it with a small hammer as another waiter held aloft a plate to catch the splinters that fell from it, he was enraptured. It seemed both improbable and ridiculous that people should order a cube of chocolate so big that they had to actually carve it with a hammer and chisel until its sides appeared to have been gnawed on by mice, and even more unlikely that he should be dating someone who thought this was unexceptional. He had described it later to Eden, who had scoffed and said unhelpful things like “This is why the revolution is coming” and “You better than anyone should know that eating sugar is an act of hostile colonialism,” but he could tell she was entranced as well by something that seemed like a child’s fantasy brought to life—after this, why shouldn’t one expect to find the house made of gingerbread, the clouds made of cotton candy, the trees in the Square made of peppermint bark? It became a running joke of theirs: The omelet she made was good, he said, but not chocolate-mountain good. The girl she’d had sex with the night before had been fine, she said, but she was no chocolate mountain. “The next party, you have to take a picture and prove to me the depth of Charles’s capitalist depravity,” she told him. She was always asking him when the next gathering would be, when she would finally get to see the evidence.
And so he had been excited to invite Eden to Charles’s next party, his annual pre-Christmas gathering. This had been last year, shortly after he’d moved in, and he had been nervous to ask, but Charles had been enthusiastic. “Of course you should bring her,” he said. “I’m looking forward to meeting this spitfire of yours.” Come, he had told Eden. Come hungry.
She had rolled her eyes. “I’m only coming for the chocolate mountain,” she said, and although she had tried to sound blasé, David had known she was excited as well.
But the night of the party, he had waited and waited, and she had never appeared. This had been a sit-down dinner, and her place had sat empty, her napkin still pleated on her plate. He had been embarrassed and concerned, but Charles had been kind. “Something must have come up,” he had whispered to David as he slid back into his chair after calling her for the third time. “Don’t worry, David. I’m sure she’s okay. I’m sure there’s a good reason.”
They were drinking coffee in the living room when Adams approached him, looking disapproving. “Mister David,” he said to him in a low voice, “there’s a person—a Miss Eden—asking for you.”
He was relieved, and then angry: at Adams, for his condescension, and at Eden, for being late, for making him wait and worry. Please bring her in, Adams, he said.
“She won’t come in. She asked for you to come out. She’s waiting in the courtyard.”
He had gotten up, grabbed his coat from the closet, and pushed past the scrum of waiters and out the back door, where Eden stood on the cobblestones. But just before he exited the building, he had stopped and seen her, looking up at the warm-lit windows that were fogging over with steam, at the handsome waiters in their shirtsleeves and black ties, her breath coming out in puffs. And suddenly he’d understood, as clearly as if she’d said it aloud, that she had been intimidated. He could see her marching west down Washington Square North, stopping in front of the house and checking and rechecking the number, and then, slowly, climbing the stairs. He could see her looking inside, seeing a roomful of middle-aged men, most of them somehow discernibly rich even in their sweaters and jeans; he could see her faltering. He could see that she would have hesitated before lifting her finger to press the buzzer, that she would have reminded herself that she was just as good as they, that she didn’t care about their opinions anyway, that they were just a bunch of old, rich white men, and that she had nothing to apologize for and nothing to be ashamed about.
And then he could see her watching Adams enter the living room to tell them dinner was served, and although she knew already that Charles had a butler, she hadn’t actually expected to see him, and as the room cleared, she would have squinted and realized that the painting on the far wall, the one that hung over the sofa, was a Jasper Johns, a real Jasper Johns—not the reproduction she had tacked up in her bedroom—and one which Charles had bought himself as a thirtieth-birthday present, and which David had never told her about. She would have turned then, and stumbled down the stairs, and walked a lap around the Square, telling herself that she could go inside, that she belonged there, that her best friend lived in that house, and that she had every right to be there, too.
But she couldn’t. And so she would have stood outside, just across the street from the house, leaning against the cold iron fence surrounding the Square, watching the waiters present the soup, and then the meat, and then the salad, and wine being poured, and, although she wouldn’t have been able to hear, jokes being told and everyone laughing. And it was only when all the guests had stood that she, by now so chilled she could barely move, her feet numb in her old combat boots that she’d mended with electrical tape, would see one of the waiters duck onto Fifth Avenue for a smoke and then disappear into the back of the house and realize that there was a service entrance, and she would go there, leaning on the buzzer, announcing David’s name, refusing to enter that golden house.
He knew, looking at her, that part of her would never forgive him, would never forgive the fact that he had—even unintentionally—made her feel so uncomfortable, like such a nothing. He stood on the other side of the door, in the sweater and pants Charles had bought him, the softest clothes he had ever worn, and looked at her in what she called her fancy outfit—a frayed wool herringbone man’s coat, so long it brushed the ground; a brown thrift-store suit worn shiny from use; an old rep tie in stripes of orange and black; a fedora pushed back from her round, plain face; the thin mustache she drew with eyeliner above her upper lip for special occasions—and understood that inviting her here, having her witness his life here, had taken from her the joy of wearing those clothes, of being who she was. She was dear to him, she was his closest friend, she was the only one he had told the real story of what happened to his father. “I’ll cut anyone who messes with you,” she would say to him as they walked through a dangerous part of Alphabet City or the Lower East Side, and he would try not to smile, because she was more than a foot shorter than he was, and so plump and ticklish that just the thought of her barreling toward an assailant, knife in hand, made him grin, but he also knew she meant it: She would protect him, always, against anyone. But by inviting her here, he had failed to protect her. In their world, among their friends, she was Eden, brilliant and witty and singular. In Charles’s world, though, she would be whom everyone else saw: a mannish, overweight, short Chinese American woman, unfeminine and unattractive, charmless and loud, in cheap secondhand clothes and a mustache made of makeup, someone whom people ignored or laughed at, as Charles’s friends surely would have, despite their efforts not to. And now Charles’s world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.