He opened the door and went to her. She looked up, and saw him, and they stared at each other in silence. Eden, he said. Come in. You’re freezing.
But she shook her head. “No way,” she said.
Please. There’s tea, or wine, or coffee, or cider, or—
“I can’t stay,” she said. Then why have you come? he wanted to say, but didn’t. “I have places to be,” she continued. “I just came to give you this,” and handed him a lumpy little package wrapped in newsprint. “Open it later,” she instructed, and he slipped it into his coat pocket. “I’d better go,” she said.
Wait, he said, and hurried back inside, where the staff was wrapping up the last of the leftovers, shrouding the chocolate mountain in tinfoil. He grabbed it—Adams raising his eyebrows but saying nothing—and staggered back downstairs, both of his arms wrapped around it.
Here, he said to Eden, handing it over to her. It’s the chocolate mountain.
She was surprised, he could tell, and adjusted it in her arms, listing a little beneath its weight. “What the fuck, David?” she said. “What’m I going to do with this?”
He had shrugged. I don’t know, he said. But it’s yours.
“How’m I going to get it home?”
A cab?
“I don’t have money for a cab. And I don’t,” she said, as David reached into his pocket, “I don’t want your money, David.”
I don’t know what you want me to say, Eden, he said, and then, when she said nothing, I love him. I’m sorry, but I do. I love him.
For a while they had stood there, quiet, in the cold night. From inside, he could hear the thump-thump-thump of house music begin to play. “Then fuck you, David,” said Eden, quietly, and she had turned and left, still lugging the chocolate mountain, the hem of her coat dusting the ground behind her in a way that made her appear, for a moment, grand. He had watched her round the corner. Then he went back into the house and returned to Charles’s side.
“Everything okay?” Charles asked, and David nodded.
They did the best they could, afterward. The next day he called Eden at home, and spoke into the answering machine—the message still in his voice—but she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t call him back. For a whole month, they didn’t speak, and every afternoon David would stare at his phone at Larsson, Wesley, willing that it would ring and he would hear Eden’s dry, throaty croak on the other end. And then, finally, she did call, one afternoon in late January.
“I’m not apologizing,” Eden said.
I’m not expecting you to, he said.
“You won’t believe what happened to me on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “Remember that girl I was fucking? Theodora?”
You wouldn’t believe what happened to me, either, he could have said, because by that point he had been taken by Charles on a surprise trip to Gstaad, his first time out of the country, where he had learned how to ski and had eaten pizza that had been covered with a drift of shaved truffles and a velvety soup made of pureed white asparagus and cream, and where he and Charles had had a three-way—David’s first—with one of the ski instructors, and for a few days, he had forgotten who he was entirely. But he never said that to her; he wanted her to think that nothing at all had changed, and she, for her part, let him pretend that she believed that, too.
What he also never said was thank you. That night, after she left and then the guests did as well, he and Charles had gone up to their room. “Is your friend all right?” Charles asked, as they climbed into bed.
Yes, he lied. She got the date wrong. She’s really sorry and sends her apologies. Eden and Charles would never meet, he now knew, but manners mattered to Charles and he wanted him to like her, or at least the idea of her.
Charles fell asleep, but David lay awake, thinking of Eden. And then he remembered that she had given him something, and he got out of bed and went downstairs to grope in the closet for his coat, and then for the hard little package. It had been bundled in the page from The Village Voice advertising escorts, their standard wrapping paper, and then tied with twine, and he had had to knife through its bindings.
Inside had been a small clay sculpture of two forms, two men, standing pressed against each other, holding hands. Eden had begun working with clay only a few months before David moved out, and although the forms were imperfect, he could see that she’d improved—the lines were more fluid, the forms more confident, the proportions more refined. But the piece still looked primitive, somehow, lively rather than lifelike, and that too was intentional: Eden was trying to repopulate the world with statuary of the sort that had been destroyed over the centuries by Western marauders. He examined the work more closely and realized that the two men were meant to be him and Charles—Eden had rendered Charles’s mustache as a series of short vertical strokes, had captured the sharp side part of his hair. On the bottom she had etched their initials and the date, and beneath those, her own initials.
She didn’t like Charles—on principle, and because he’d taken her closest friend from her. But in this sculpture, she had united the three of them: She had carved herself into David’s and Charles’s lives.
He climbed the stairs, back up to his and Charles’s room; he had gone to his and Charles’s closet, had worked the sculpture into a gym sock, and had shoved it into the back of his and Charles’s underwear drawer. He never showed it to Charles, and Eden never asked him about it. But years later, when he was moving out of Charles’s house, he found it, and in his new apartment, he set it on the mantel, and every now and again, he would pick it up and hold it in his palm. He had spent so much of his childhood feeling alone that when he began seeing Charles, he felt like he would never be alone, or lonely, ever again.
He was wrong, of course. He was still lonely with Charles; he was lonelier after Charles. That was a feeling that never went away. But the sculpture was a reminder of something else. He hadn’t been alone before he met Charles after all—he had been Eden’s. He just hadn’t known it.
But she had.
* * *
The guests had left, the caterers had left, and the house had taken on that particular desolate mood that it always did in the aftermath of a party: It had been called on to perform, brilliantly, for a few hours, and now it was being returned to its normal, dull existence. The Three Sisters, who had lingered the longest, had finally departed with half a dozen paper bags stacked with containers of food, John purring with delight as he received them. Even Adams had been dismissed, though before he had left, he had bowed, formally, before Peter, and Peter had bent his head in return. “Godspeed, Mister Peter,” Adams had said, solemnly. “I hope your journey is safe.”
“Thank you, Adams,” said Peter, who had used to call Adams “Miss Adams” behind his back. “For everything. You’ve been so good to me over the years—to all of us.” They shook hands.
“Good night, Adams,” said Charles, who was standing behind Peter. “Thank you for tonight—everything was perfect, as usual,” and Adams nodded again and walked out of the living room, toward the kitchen. When Charles’s parents were alive, and there had been a full-time cook and a full-time housekeeper and a maid and a chauffeur as well as Adams, all of the staff were expected to use the back door for their comings and goings. And although Charles had long since revised that rule, Adams still only arrived or departed through the kitchen entrance—initially because, Charles thought, he was uncomfortable disrupting such a long-standing tradition, but recently because he was old, and the back staircase was shallower, its steps wider.