As David watched him go, he wondered, as he sometimes did, what Adams’s life was outside of the house. What did Adams wear, to whom and how did he speak, when he wasn’t in Charles’s house, when he wasn’t in his suit, when he wasn’t serving? What did he do in his apartment? What were his hobbies? He had every Sunday off, as well as the third Monday of every month, and five weeks of vacation, two of which he took in early January, when Charles was skiing. When David asked, Charles had said that he thought that Adams had a rental cabin down in Key West, and that he went fishing there, but he hadn’t been sure. He knew so little about Adams’s life. Had Adams been married? Did he have a boyfriend, a girlfriend? Had he ever? Did he have siblings, nieces or nephews? Did he have friends? In the early days of their relationship, when he was still getting accustomed to Adams’s presence, he had asked Charles all of these questions, and Charles had laughed, embarrassed. “This is terrible,” he said, “but I don’t know how to answer any of these.” How could you not? he’d asked, before he was aware of what he was saying, but Charles hadn’t been offended. “It’s difficult to explain,” he said, “but there are some people in your life where it’s just—it’s just easier not to know too much about them.”
He wondered now if he was another one of those people in Charles’s life, someone whose appeal would not only be ruined by the complications of his history but who had indeed been chosen because he seemed to have no history at all. He knew Charles was unafraid of difficult lives, but perhaps David had been attractive because he had appeared so simple, someone not yet marked by age or experience. A dead mother, a dead father, a year in law school, a childhood spent far away in a middle-class family, handsome but not intimidatingly so, smart but not memorably so, someone who had preferences and desires, but not so strongly held that he would be unwilling to accommodate Charles’s. He could see how, to Charles, he was defined by his absences—no secrets, no troublesome ex-boyfriends, no illnesses, no past.
Then there was Peter: someone whom Charles knew intimately, and who in turn, David was belatedly realizing, knew more about Charles than he ever would. No matter how long he stayed with Charles, no matter how much he might learn about him, Peter would always possess more of him—not just years but epochs. He had known Charles as a child, and as a young man, and as a middle-aged one. He had given Charles his first kiss, his first blow job, his first cigarette, his first beer, his first breakup. Together, they had learned what they liked in the world: what food, what books, what plays, what art, what ideas, what people. He had known Charles before he became Charles, when he was just a sturdy, athletic boy to whom Peter had found himself attracted. David could see, too late, after months of struggling to find a way to talk to Peter, how he could have and should have simply asked Peter about the person they shared: about who he’d been, about the life he’d had before David had entered it. Charles may have been incurious about David, but David was guilty of the same incuriousness; each of them wanted the other to exist only as he was currently experiencing him—as if they were both too unimaginative to contemplate each other in a different context.
But suppose they were forced to? Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely? What if Manhattan was a flooded island of rivers and canals, and people traveled in wooden longboats, and you yanked nets of oysters from the cloudy waters beneath your house, which was held aloft on stilts? Or what if they lived in a glittering, treeless metropolis rendered entirely in frost, in buildings made from stacked blocks of ice, and rode polar bears and kept seals as pets, against whose jiggling sides you’d press at night for warmth? Would they still recognize each other, passing each other in different boats, or crunching through the snow, hurrying home to their fires?
Or what if New York looked just as it did, but no one he knew was dying, no one was dead, and tonight’s party had been just another gathering of friends, and there was no pressure to say anything wise, anything conclusive, because they would have hundreds more dinners, thousands more nights, dozens more years, to figure out what they wanted to tell one another? Would they still be together in that world, where there was no need to cling together from fear, where their knowledge of pneumonia, of cancers, of fungal infections, of blindness, would be obscure, useless, ridiculous?
Or what if, in this planetary shift, they were knocked sideways, west and south, and returned to consciousness somewhere else entirely, in Hawai‘i, and in that Hawai‘i, that other Hawai‘i, there was no reason for Lipo-wao-nahele, that place to which his father had removed him so long ago, because what it had tried to conjure was in fact real? What if, in this Hawai‘i, the islands were still a kingdom, not part of America at all, and his father was the king, and he, David, was the crown prince? Would they still know each other? Would they still have fallen in love? Would David still have need for Charles? There, he would be the more powerful of the two—he would no longer be in need of another’s largesse, another’s protection, another’s education. Who would Charles be to him there? Would David still find something to love in him? And what of his father—who would he be? Would he be more confident, more self-assured, less scared, less lost? Would he still have had use for Edward? Or would Edward be a speck, a servant, a nameless functionary his father passed, unseeing, on his way to his study to sign documents and treaties, his handsome face aglow as he walked barefoot across the gleaming floors, the wood polished every morning with macadamia oil?
He would never know. For in the world in which they lived, he and his father, they were only who they were: two men, both of whom had sought succor from another man, one each hoped might save him from the smallness of his life. His father had chosen poorly. David had not. But in the end, they were both dependents, disappointed by their past and frightened by their present.
He turned to watch Charles wrap a scarf around Peter’s throat. They were silent, and David had the feeling, as he often had when watching them, but which he had most acutely that evening, that he was a trespasser, that their intimacy was never his to witness. He didn’t move, but he didn’t need to—they had forgotten he was even there. Peter had originally thought he might spend the night in the house with Charles, but the day before had decided against it. His nurse had been called, and was coming with an assistant to pick him up and escort him home.
It was time to say goodbye. “Just give me a second,” Charles announced to them both in a strangled voice, and left the room, and they could both hear him running up the stairs.
And then David was alone with Peter. Peter was in his wheelchair, swaddled in his coat and hat; the top and bottom of his face were obscured by layers of wool, as if he wasn’t dying but mutating, as if the wool were creeping over him like a skin, turning him into something cozy and soft—a couch, a cushion, a bundle of yarn. Charles had been sitting on the sofa to talk to him, and Peter’s chair was still angled toward what was now an empty seat in an empty room.
He went to the sofa and sat where Charles had sat, the cushions still warm beneath him. Charles had been holding Peter’s hands, but he did not. And still—still: Even as Peter gazed at him, he could think of nothing to say, nothing that was not impossible. It would have to be Peter who spoke first, and, finally, he did, David leaning toward him to hear what he would say.