LOADING DOCKS, BIG boxes of painted steel tread plate, squat in front of many of the old manufacturing buildings in Tribeca and Soho. A handsome, severe-looking young man, Alan Wilkinson, often sat on the one in front of his building. It was painted fawn brown to match the nattily restored structure behind it. Atop a row of brown cast iron columns, fresh gilding read, Mohawk Electrical Supply Co. This was the home of a famous interior architect. The architect was in Paris for the summer visiting his friend, Andrée Putman, and putting finishing touches on former TV star Susan Dey’s apartment. What Alan was doing living in the man’s Tribeca place was anybody’s guess. Alan was mysterious about what he did. Though a graduate student in the Philosophy of Mathematics there, he was rarely seen uptown at Columbia. No one knew where his money came from, whether he was actually a student, if he ever worked, or why he would enjoy chatting for hours with a freshman he’d met on campus the year before, Darius Van Nest. Darius didn’t think Alan was gay. The architect obviously was—just look at his furniture. And Alan definitely had one foot in the city’s glamorous gay circles. He’d played Darius flirty messages David Hockney left on his answering machine. But Darius had a feeling Alan was mostly trading on his good looks and charm—an old-fashioned, tweedy, Keynesian, public charm built of well-turned anecdotes and a vast stock of witticisms.
Darius approached from Canal Street. His grin felt as stiff as putty. Alan acknowledged him with a fractional nod and an inviting, scornful chuckle. Even the slight emotion of greeting embarrassed him. He sat on the brown loading dock with indoorsy unease. He cadged a cigarette. A cigarette break was the excuse for most of their meetings that summer. Alan wasn’t allowed to smoke in the interior architect’s place. In fact, he hardly smoked and never carried cigarettes. So Darius took an hour-long subway trip from Inwood to offer up one of his own Marlboros. They would smoke and talk on the loading dock.
Almost at once Alan embarked on a clever story about “Van” Quine, and Darius tried to glean from his amused tolerance exactly what Alan felt about the philosopher. Condescending affection, Darius decided—the same feeling Alan expressed, even more strongly, when he talked about Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein made him frown slightly, as if the duty of admiring such a peculiar genius were irritating. Nietzsche, he dismissed, “Really just psychological poetry, don’t you think?” And he was wholly dismissive of anyone French later than, say, Voltaire. This was a wonderfully intimate, impressionistic way for Darius to pick up a little philosophy.
Not that Darius was shy about unpacking his own ideas, such as they were. Alan listened with the cool patience of a Ms. Brzostovsky. He pointed out that Darius’s slashing reductivism wasn’t as scientific as Darius liked to think. He fondly accused Darius of being an Intuitionist. With evident distaste, he quoted the first principle of Intuitionism, The perception of a move of time may be described as the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained in memory. If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities. And it is this common substratum, this empty form, which is the basic intuition of mathematics. “Yes!” Darius exclaimed.
“It’s Jan Brouwer. And you don’t want to go that route.” Darius asked why not. “Besides him being odious—misogynist, anti-Semite, borderline fascist—it’s just uninteresting. Nothing comes of it. It’s a mathematical cul-de-sac. Most thinking people would say it’s the sort of truth that, even if it is true—well, basically, so what!”
With more pleasure, Alan tore open the empty Marlboro box and on the blank interior sketched a proof of the infinite density of the number line. Darius held his cigarette for him while he drew. Although he was mostly unconscious of Alan’s good looks, or of his physical presence at all, Darius always became giddy, almost drunk on the gorgeous abstractions Alan talked about. They made his chest tighten.
The number line got them onto time, which Alan delighted in proving, as philosophers can, was unreal. Darius insisted that there had to be an instant of fundamental tininess, and that these instants had to be out there—for real in the real world—strung like beads. Alan argued that there wasn’t any real framework on which reality could hang. There were no passing instants in the void, only worldly things changing, which gave the impression of instant following instant, that is, of time.
The way they talked, the fuddy-duddy pomposity of their turns of phrase, was saved because they were young and good-looking. They sat on the loading dock with a slight all-over awkwardness as if they didn’t know what to do with having bodies. Their high-flown periphrases and nerdy point/counterpoint couldn’t possibly have sounded right before they reached age sixty, if ever. But they were young. Even Alan, who downed a bottle of claret every night, would, after spending all day studying or thinking or writing, go out in a T-shirt and gym shorts and start running up Greenwich Street, block after block, just to clear his head.
Darius had changed in the unreal passage of time. His head was still big. But his features had equalized. He’d grown into dramatic, faintly Tatar or Semitic, good looks, as if he carried a trace of his mother’s blood after all. His body had continued to lengthen. But he remained gawky, and his awkwardness suggested an insanely well-defended virginity—which is to say, it suggested sex, the last thing Darius intended.
In little Duane Park across the street from the Mohawk Electrical Supply Co., nine dusty sycamores were as still as cut flowers. A policeman in jodhpurs sat on a roan, which stamped twice and scratched a fetlock. A building was being restored on the far side of the park. While Darius and Alan talked, the illusion of time was marked by the rattle of debris falling through a six-story chute of nested blue cones. The shirtless workers, all brown originally, were matte white with plaster dust.
Darius tried, “Maybe we’ll get a place together this coming year. I could see that. Somewhere close to Columbia.” He felt he was just talking, not making a firm proposal. “I’m tired of Inwood. My sublet’s not as nice as yours.” He turned his head fractionally to indicate the slender colonnade behind them.
Alan raised his eyebrows. This was his resting expression of attenuated amusement. Judiciously, he answered, “That’s an attractive concept. Regrettably, I already made a commitment to Tom Samuels. He’s gotten a place on Claremont Avenue.”
“Ah, are you two...?” Darius asked delicately. His hand loosely shuttled between their chests to mean love, or anything like it.
“Uh, no,” Alan said with a pitying simper. “I realize he’s considered a famous beauty. But no.”
“I was only thinking it might be convenient. For our studies.” Darius meant the torn cigarette pack. “Sharing an apartment could enable our eternal, elevated dialogue.”
“More Stoa or Garden?”
“Oh, Epicurus, definitely,” Darius said. “I’m an entirely sensual creature.”
“That would be nice. Awfully appealing. As a matter of fact, Tom’s always been, in a manner of speaking, oriented toward the gutter, so a loftier atmosphere has a lot of appeal.”
Chatty suddenly, Darius said, “Well, it’s too bad you can’t. I don’t know what to do then. I’m being pursued by that guy, Ali.”
Alan’s expression was discreetly inquiring.
“He thinks I should join St. Anthony’s. Or even live with him. I was looking for a good excuse to say no.”
“Who is this Ali character?”
“Oh, I thought everyone knew him at Columbia. A very elegant—Kuwaiti, maybe? I’ve gone to a party or two with him. He must be forty or something. A big mystery. You know, one of those types who haunt colleges. Hard to imagine they’re students. I think he just rifles the student directory. Preying on freshman, probably. Sort of like you, come to think of it. But talking with him isn’t as interesting. He kept following me around last year and finally just introduced himself. He stares at me like he’s got handcuffs in his briefcase.”
After the academic year began, Darius found himself observing Alan and Tom Samuels from afar, not sure whether he felt jealousy or what. They were giving a campus tour to Alan’s Tribeca architect—a frizzy gray-haired man wearing a green woolen cape, though it wasn’t cold. They’d paused by the statue of Alma Mater to take in the view down the steps. Black-eyed and dashing, a little cruel, even wearing tweed, Alan’s face was wine-flushed. He squinted in the bright September light. He seemed to look down his nose at the teeming quadrangle. Tom, by his side, truly was a beauty. He wore a seventies disco revival outfit and stood with a Bronzino kink in his lumbar spine. Silky hair bothered his right eye picturesquely. He kept nodding coyly into the hand that rose to deal with it, feigning attention as Alan smirked his way through, probably, some ingratiating Evelyn Waugh anecdote. The architect threw his head back in laughter and swished his cloak from his shoulders.
Darius had been able to escape Ali’s clutches. He re-upped his sublet in Inwood, the remote northern panhandle of Manhattan. He started joining Alan for cigarette breaks at Tom’s Claremont apartment, a much shorter trip than Tribeca. Tom always happened to be out. Who knew where? With hustlers. Or tied up (literally) for the weekend at an art dealer’s place on Fire Island. Darius was curious about the absent roommate, though Alan sounded bored with him. Maybe they’d been boyfriends briefly. Perhaps that had been Alan’s one indulgence in that direction.
Alan once gave Darius a supercilious tour of Tom’s desk. He may have wanted to observe Tom through fresh eyes. A row of clipped newspaper photographs was stuck along the wall over the desk. An incorrigible aesthete, Tom had used unusually stylish pushpins with tiny striped resistors for heads. Apparently he had a fascination for cute murderers. Wearing a smile of worldly and accepting distaste, Alan flicked at a halftone of Paul Cox, a blackout killer well-known at the time. To tell the truth, Darius found the whole thing unsettling—not the murderers themselves but Tom’s preoccupation with them. He asked Alan about each picture, drawing the moment out, just because the thing was unpleasant, curious.
“And who’s this one?” At the end of the row a strapping Latino boy looked down at his lap. The older woman with him glared at the camera with hostility.
“Uh, that’s Raimundo Azil. With his mother.”
“Who did he kill? Or they?”
“No one. He’s not a true member of the set of cute murderers. It’s an old picture, I think. Maybe his brother was murdered by the Sinaloa cartel and he witnessed it? I can’t remember exactly.”
“Never heard of him,” Darius said with a touch of Oliver’s brusque finality. Though Raimundo was cute.
“Of course—let’s—” Gallantly, Alan made an ushering motion toward his room, his unmade bed. “Sheet’s a bit gamey, I’m afraid. But I don’t understand it either. I think Tom has an empathic deficit, but that may be common among very good-looking people.”
“I may have an empathic deficit, myself,” Darius ruminated with naïve self-absorption, causing Alan to smile. Darius lowered himself to the edge of the bed, deep in thought, eyes straying back through the door to the cute murderers. He was remembering his old fascination for the juveniles locked up in that Camden courthouse. Was that so different? He was certainly a little bit gay himself. Not committed like Tom, maybe more experimental.
“I wouldn’t say so. Though you’d obviously be an exception to the good-looking rule.” Alan remained standing with public-seeming awkwardness. He wiggled his hands, only to the knuckles, into the front pockets of his jeans.
“Thank you,” Darius said with a strange blush. “How was his brother killed?”
Alan spun and glanced out of the room at the cute murderers. “Oh, pretty distasteful, I’m sure. You’ll have to ask Tom some time. He loves talking about them. We were at a dinner the other night and he put everyone off their feed with one of them.” His chuckle was as polished as a pundit’s on TV. (As a matter of fact, Alan had had lunch the day before with a scout from the PBS Newshour. “A miserable showing,” he reported suavely.) “Tom has a weakness for anything gruesome. He noticed—which is actually somewhat clever—that all these methods of butchering people are named after clothing—the necktie in Colombia. Necklace in South Africa. Sierra Leone—short sleeves or long sleeves.”
Darius laughed. The mere linguistic observation pleased him. “Excellent.”
“Hmm. You do have a cold streak, yourself, don’t you?”
“I’m not as good-looking as Tom, though. By far.”
“I suppose he’s got a conventional something or other. Surprised you would go for it.”
Darius gave him a dignified little frown of incomprehension. What was Alan talking about? Go for?
“I would have thought, with your recherché tastes—”
Flattered, Darius grinned, “Which tastes?”
“Oh, I was thinking Raymond Roussel, Oulipo. And who was the American artist no one ever heard of?”
“Colin Vail. But those aren’t people. Those are artistic tastes. Am I recherché with people? I mean, I can see as well as anyone that Tom is incredibly handsome, but that doesn’t mean—well, I’m not sure what you meant. Do I seem to go for him?”
Alan considered a long time. “For some reason,” he said slowly. “I think it would make me exceedingly unhappy if you ever had sex with him.”
Astonished, Darius didn’t know what to say. The turn in the conversation stunned him. “I—why would I ever, remotely, think of that?”
“Right, it probably wouldn’t work,” Alan said, flustered, but comfortably so. “That’s what I’ve been imagining. That you were more catcher than pitcher.” He pronounced the words with overbred archness.
Darius was visibly taken aback again. His mouth hung open in a way that made Alan laugh. “Catcher?” Darius repeated with matronly shock, to idiotic effect.
“Oh, sorry! Was that too—?” Alan seemed amused, pleased even, by his own slight embarrassment. “Maybe it’s not the right moment. After that ugly talk about murderers. People get spooked. And I think I didn’t explain it well anyway. Because what I’ve really decided is it would make me deeply unhappy, if you and I didn’t. I’ve been hoping that might be the drift of all this. You and me.” Alan made the same small shuttling gesture with his hand that Darius had made to ask about anything romantic or sexual between Alan and Tom.
A long pause intervened during which time, if real at all, shifted speeds or stopped and restarted.
Darius couldn’t have been as gobsmacked as he felt. But our minds are so easy to trick. Since the language wasn’t entirely explicit, he wasn’t sure he’d actually caught on. At the same time he was obviously catching on, because his heart raced and he seemed to lack oxygen. And he was a catcher, right? The less self-conscious Darius—the one who was obviously catching on—lowered his eyes to the floor. For the first time in ten thousand years this other Darius spoke, “All right. I guess. That would be OK with me. Definitely.” It was as simple as that.
“Oh, good.” Alan patted his tummy contentedly.
“What? You mean, right now?” Getting no response but raised eyebrows, Darius let his right hand touch the gamey sheet.
Alan was a gentlemanly seducer. Darius was corpse-like, though this wasn’t even the first time he’d been fucked. That had happened at Choate with presexual matter-of-factness—my turn, your turn—with a pot-smoking misfit from Allentown, PA. This was different, clearly gay. Alan used hair gel from atop his dresser. “A serviceable colloid,” he explained. And one that spared him the indignity of buying louche commercial lube. The condom was opened with as much furtive romance as a packet of Sweet’N’Low. Sex was intensely pleasurable and over quickly.
After his corpse-like performance, Darius became frisky, a monkey—childish in a way he would never want anyone to observe—ever. The giddy behavior was disgusting to him, but he couldn’t help himself. He felt a pet-like freedom touching Alan’s body. While Alan lay there in masculine torpor, Darius cupped his broad feet, stroked his thighs and his chest. When a placid, disapproving frown crossed Alan’s face, Darius pouted, “I’m allowed!” And he frolicked all the more but hated it. He hoped his silliness this afternoon would be obliterated from the permanent record of himself.
Alan mentioned that he needed to do a little work. Darius, he said, was free to lounge around. He left the younger man in bed. This grown-up and abrupt treatment of sex was new to Darius, but he said nothing. He lay perfectly still. His body felt strange, as if a hound had been baying inside him and his hindgut still echoed with the sound. Only his eyes moved, touching every object in the room, roaming, touching more. He was at an extraordinary pitch of emotion. He felt an ecstatic sense of defeat, which it never occurred to him not to identify with homosexuality. Like Alan scribbling one of his incessant truth tables, Darius coldly entered several facts about himself into the cells. Not only was he homosexual, he was also a catcher, a bottom. And since humiliation and getting fucked were more or less the same thing, he must also be a masochist. Oh, and a follower. Yet somehow all this wasn’t wholly awful. Though in his present condition, he wasn’t able to categorize or judge anything the way he usually could.
His gaze slurred across the floor to a photography book propped against the baseboard. The cover looked a little like Ansel Adams but that was probably too mainstream a taste for the Alan/Tom household. The glazed paper of the dust jacket was torn in places. The corners curled. It bore a dirty orange 50% off sticker. Despite all that, the image of a snowy mountain peak gleamed majestically. On one side of the mountain, the snow was blinding. On the other, a jagged black shadow ran down its flank. Darius drew an obscure lesson from the contrast. Nature had its arrangements of light and darkness, sun and planet, against which there was no appeal. A common substratum of all twoities. His old visit to juvenile hall had, perhaps, introduced him to a remote projection of this possibly cruel fatality. Now Darius knew he was a creature of shadow. He wasn’t unhappy, though. More crushed and exalted.
Because Darius assumed his own masochism was inevitable, then so was Alan’s sadism. A laughable delusion followed on the heels of his truth-tabulations about his sexuality. Darius started scanning the room again and half-expected to notice instruments of torture lying casually amongst the ordinary objects. Broken squash racket? Whom did Alan beat with that? And Alan really was mysterious. It was the most carefully curated aspect of his character. Could he be in the set of cute murderers himself? Darius wondered. Emotion made it seem almost plausible that, instead of “studying,” Alan had gone to another room to prepare knives or ropes. Darius ignored the fact that a cute murderer wouldn’t have been so correct about using a condom.
Love is commonly described as a feeling. This is comical, but anyone who knows is forbidden to laugh. His education was laughable, his ignorance to weep over, but it is our duty to forgive Darius when he confused emotion with love. When he failed to notice his complete ignorance about his ruthless Apollo, Alan. Or when, in the fever of feeling, he assumed Alan and he were bound tightly together from this day on.
He was surprised no major changes came about between them. They got together often enough, had sex quite a few times. But an overall suspense lingered, which Darius supposed was a part of love he couldn’t account for. He’d have to get used to it.
Inevitably a worldly template for being gay came crashing down on him out of the blue sky. That he had always known was the first certainty. His friendship with Barry Paul was sanctified and promoted to love retroactively. Stan’s smirk when presenting him a print of Gerôme’s Pollice Verso one birthday years ago was seen for the hint it was. His dire fascination for the imprisoned boys in Camden was easily explained, too. Even his uncanny sympathy for Colin Vail seemed born of an affinity too deep to be called taste. But this new way of looking at things wasn’t simply happy, headlong puzzle-solving. His doggedness in wrestling down plain awareness for so many years frightened him. How could he have been so severe? Looking at things through new eyes did anything but prove to him the reality of change, however. He’d uncovered a deeper layer of the immutable. That was all.
Darius started going downtown to gay bars with Alan and Tom and their friends. Even the famous architect would put in an appearance. Reassured by their air of superiority, Darius stuck close to his gang. They were far too grand to play at introducing him to the mores of gay subculture. Gay graybacks in the provinces may have done that still, but these brilliant New York friends were only slumming. They were too elevated to be part of any subculture.
Life in Inwood was listless and vacant, not at all the life one hopes for in a great metropolis. So, Darius spent as much time as he could at Alan and Tom’s Claremont Avenue place. The poisoned syrup smell of roach spray hanging in the pink terrazzo lobby became the way marker of a strange, ungraspable mood. During long evenings at the apartment, Alan practiced his anecdotes. Darius leafed through the gay rags rolled into sweaty batons that others had carried back from bars. In public he wouldn’t touch these free magazines or even deign to look at the slumping stacks of them in bar vestibules. Tom, if he was there, presided with an indecipherable smile. He crossed his legs and leaned back against his desk under the murderers as gingerly as he’d lean on an umbrella. Virile, voluptuous thighs squeezed his hand. He had the sort of Praxitelean body that, no matter how languidly disposed, doesn’t look effeminate.
Darius was never asked to stay the night when Tom was home. Which Darius found strange, because he was the boyfriend and Tom was only the roommate. Alan wouldn’t suffer questions, however. And Darius wasn’t in the habit of asking them. From Sohaila, he’d adopted that perverse pleasure of not knowing things. Even so, he’d nose around if Alan left him alone in the apartment. That’s how he found a drawer full of papers in Alan’s dresser. Witticisms, anecdotes, definitions and quotations were all scribbled down and stored in a shifting heap of scratchpad paper, Post-It Notes and torn napkins. Here was the first principle of Intuitionism written out in skipping ball point with the annotation, “Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer—finally uninteresting—nothing evolves from it—mathematical cul-de-sac—” Darius, who felt the self should be extemporaneous, couldn’t have been more shocked by the mess of notes. Because here was Alan’s software. The material of his personality. After that, Darius eyed Alan when he was speaking and wondered how much of it was memorized, diligently prepared, and therefore unreal. He kept the discovery secret. He husbanded it, because maybe it was a useful mote of power.
Darius considered Alan mysterious but didn’t realize he was almost as mysterious himself. He never recounted stories about his childhood. Alan’s minimal curiosity about him made this less noticeable. But even Alan had once exclaimed, “Do you even have parents? It’s hard to imagine.” Something kept Darius from confiding. With a nervous discretion so total it looked sinister, Darius buried the basic facts about himself. For instance, he never told Alan that his father was probably mentally ill. Or that his father had invited his mother’s lover to live with them in a perverse ménage in New Jersey. Or that he’d been in love once before, his boyish love for Barry Paul. Or—above all—that he was adopted. He wasn’t forgetful of these facts, of course. In Alan’s presence, they’d sometimes catch light in the front of his mind. He would almost read them off out loud like lines on a teleprompter. But then adoption, or whatever it was, would wink into shadow. With an interior shrug, Darius said nothing. The fact about himself was rejected not as too charged but as irrelevant.
When sophomore year was well under way sometime in late November, Sohaila came into the city for an appointment with her gynecologist. She insisted it was nothing. She’d grown almost mistrustful of Darius in recent years. She feared questions. She seemed evasive and shy with him.
La Côte Basque was the obvious rich person’s place she’d chosen for lunch. At every table, women had the shrink-wrapped look of surgery. Men wore Palm Beach blazers and strange suntans. Sohaila offered Darius both cheeks to kiss. Then she fussed unduly with the complicated drapery of her neckline, tiny, stressed dimples appearing in her cheeks.
After two salads arrived, and they’d begun shifting the lettuce about with their forks, Sohaila spoke up as if lightly diverting the conversation, except there hadn’t been any conversation. “Dah-li-ush, I wanted to mention, your father has finally moved out.” Her strange lack of emphasis was meant to make Darius think Oliver’s moving out had been an issue for a long time. “I have the information for you in a minute.” She gestured at her purse on the banquette next to her, inattentively striking it, so the golden chain links of the strap trickled like a startled viper. Darius was quick. He caught the chain with a finger and passed it back to her. “You can try calling him, when—when you like,” she finished, heaping the metal purse-strap back in place on the seat next to her.
“When did this happen?” Darius kept himself from sounding shocked. He didn’t want her to freeze up.
“It had to eventually, no?”
“But where to?”
“I’ve got it for you.” She struggled not to sound annoyed. She forced her voice to rise airily, “The city.”
“Here?”
“Yes, yes. Downtown.”
“Dad is living downtown? Here?” Darius was incredulous. He couldn’t keep it out of his voice.
Sohaila seized on his tone to snap, “Yes. He’s living downtown. So what? You live—wherever you live. I live in the house. So, now we know.”
“Inwood. I live in Inwood.”
“Fine. Inwood, then.”
“But what do we know? What are you talking about—Now we know?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Dah-li-ush.” She feigned exhaustion. “I just wanted to let you know. I feel—good about it.”
“But when did he go? I never heard anything about this.”
“Oh, Dah-li-ush. When? A while ago. I don’t remember. What does it matter?” She was especially evasive.
“Please, tell me when.”
“A few months. Perhaps. Honestly, I’m not sure.”
Darius was surprised by how unhappy this detail made him. That so great a change had been made without him ever knowing. “You couldn’t have told me earlier?” The last time he’d been to the house had been in August. Oliver hadn’t appeared, but that by itself wasn’t unusual anymore. He’d last seen his father five months ago. “Was he there in August?”
No was the clear but unspoken answer. “Dah-li-ush,” Sohaila sounded pained. She recited an evidently prepared remark. “We weren’t sure at first what his plan was.”
“Whether he was gone?” Darius had lost his self-control and was sounding petulant.
Sohaila did her best to act tough-minded. “Also, listen. You’ve struck out on your own. So have I. You don’t live there anymore, and there’s a lot about my life you don’t—” She was starting to sound harsh to her own ear. “Look. We didn’t know what he was up to. Do you notice it never occurs to you to blame him? Has he ever let you—or anyone—know what he’s up to?”
“I’m not blaming. You mean he left without a word?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed. But there was a reedy evasiveness even in this.
“He’s been here all this time?”
“But Dah-li-ush. When have you ever seen much of him? Believe me, believe me, I know it’s crushing. Of all people, I do know this. It’s terribly sad he’s gotten the way he has, but what can either of us do but get on with our lives?”
“We could try to help him,” Darius protested childishly.
“Yes. It’s nice to say,” Sohaila admitted. “But when you have no idea how to reach him? When you have no idea if he’s alive or dead for months?” The stressed dimples appeared. She was annoyed with herself for letting the cat out of the bag.
Darius absorbed this. Sohaila had been trying to protect him. She used the tines of her fork to make cross-hatching in the pollen-colored dressing on a tomato. Oliver had likely vanished. It may have taken all this time to track him down. Darius could understand his mother’s discomfort. She would have felt she’d misplaced her ex-husband. Hateful and difficult as he was, Oliver still engendered a woeful sense of responsibility in Sohaila and Darius.
“How did you find out where he’d gone?”
Sohaila looked miserable that he’d gotten to the stratum of her real unhappiness. Her heavily lined eyes gave him the steady, challenging look that fortune-tellers sometimes have when they look up from their knitting or from a small TV and out the plate glass of a red-curtained storefront.
“Mom, I’m not trying to take you apart,” Darius said sensitively. “And if I ask about the doctor’s appointment, it’s just out of concern. I don’t want to get anything on you. The truth is we hardly ever see each other alone anymore.”
“Dah-li-ush. I know.” She was exhausted and shy. “The doctor—it’s a feminine thing and not serious. I promise. No. And, as a matter of fact, Stan hired a person. A private detective. I don’t know how these things work. Apparently it’s very simple.”
“Ah.” Gently, Darius pressed, “You were in touch with him, then? Finally? Dad.”
“Yes. It’s the reason I say you might have trouble. He’s got a machine and you call many times before he might get back to you. Then again, you could have less trouble than I did.”
“Is he seeing anybody at all? Any human contact?”
“How would I know?” she asked. Then she said certainly, “No. I don’t think so. But in the city, you can feel like you’re seeing people,” she added hopefully. With the fanatical daintiness that soothed her, she cut her tomato in minute pieces. As she ate these, the muscles of her face didn’t move at all. Finished, she posed her knife and fork on the edge of the plate. She cocked her head at the abundant remains of the salad. “I always believed it was a cultural difference with us. Many years I believed that. Not that he was anywhere near as bad in the old days. This is almost funny, but what did I know? Everything was so strange to me. And dreary! Americans hate colors. There were no colors anywhere. All the houses were white and gray. Which, by the way, is why it was such a tremendous pleasure when Stan took me to Bermuda. Pink! But up here—” She shuddered. “And Oliver I thought was just—American. Now I know it wasn’t like that at all. But he was severe and impressive like the houses. I assumed I wouldn’t have to think for myself. This is a sick desire Muslim—perhaps all—women deal with. But then maybe you understand,” she finished with a slight chill. A month before, Darius had dutifully, and very formally, told her he was gay. After an immense pause, she’d commented politely that that must give him a great understanding of all people, both women and men. The subject had never come up again. Now, she murmured, “Death and The Maiden. Who can be playing that here?”
“I don’t think there’s any music. I don’t hear anything.”
She shrugged in embarrassment and seized her quilted black leather purse. With a sly look at the other diners, she took an envelope from it, which she handed to Darius.
Darius glanced inside, saw what it was but not how much. Thirty hundred-dollar bills, he counted later. His face crumpled with pity at her ineptness. He posed the envelope against a water glass. “Mom—”
“Take it! Take it!” Sohaila’s eyes flashed. “Don’t be foolish!”
“Mom. We’re not living in some—caravan—” He stopped. Oliver used to tease her about her tribal streak.
“Dah-li-ush! Look where we are! I’m no mush khour! I don’t wear my—gold coins strung around my neck. Really! You’re foolish. Take it, will you? It should be yours. I found an old checking account I can still write checks on. I think your father’s forgotten all about it, so I take a little here and there. I may not be as smart as you’d like, but I’ve got sense. Take it and save it. It’s real money. This is sensible. I know about the world.”