IMMEDIATELY AFTER LUNCH Darius tried phoning the number Sohaila had given him. He didn’t have a cell phone at that time so, like a bee, he had to keep visiting pay phones on the street until he found one that still worked. Each ring had its own discrete emotion, from the second, when he particularly hoped Oliver would pick up, to the fifth, when he despaired and the answering machine answered. Darius hung up as fast as he could. He didn’t want a messageless hiss to betray him, and he thought it might. But his reflexes were too slow. The phone kept his quarter. Upset because of his father, he called the operator and complained imperiously about the mechanical theft. He sounded demented, a righteous monster, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted his quarter back. Seething, he debated going straight to Oliver’s address on Cedar Street, which wasn’t merely downtown but in the financial district, well below Chambers Street and near the very toe of Manhattan, a neighborhood Darius had hardly ever visited. But he was wary of being turned away.
He took the A train uptown. The rocking of the car and the considerate aloofness of the passengers, which can look unfriendly but is actually a very democratic and sociable public behavior, soothed him slightly. On impulse, he hopped off at 125th Street, well before Inwood. The whole spindly station, on high trestles over the street, trembled when the train jerked back into motion. The railing under his forearms stilled. Darius was leaning there to calm himself further, gazing across the boxy, drab cityscape of Harlem.
His idea was to visit Alan Wilkinson, spend the afternoon, then all night, with him. Until then, he’d refrained from ever visiting Alan unannounced (which was onerous, because Darius was still so young that all appointments and pre-arrangements felt constraining). Today a sense of emergency made dropping in seem all right. He climbed Broadway toward Columbia. He broke a sweat. He always walked fast, and it was sunny and warm for November.
The building on Claremont had a grand buff-colored portico. The lower third of the four granite columns had been painted battleship gray. The inevitable modern brown aluminum door and window frames showed the building had been updated on the cheap. A steel panel of apartment buzzers was as dense as a bingo card. Darius pressed 2F and stared through the plate glass at the pink terrazzo, a 1940s update. He caught the faint whiff of roach spray, even from outside. He ignored a weak, mysterious hesitation.
When he heard hallooing, Darius backed off the front steps. Alan was leaning out a window directly above the pediment, peering over an abatis of metal prongs set up against pigeons. He chuckled when he saw Darius and commented, “That’s bold of you.”
It wasn’t promising that Alan would mention this first thing. “I had an inspiration to talk with you.” Darius tried to sound humorous and relaxed.
“Ah.” Alan didn’t move.
Darius stared at him, then looked up and down the deserted avenue, astonished to be kept waiting.
“You’re passing through the neighborhood?” Alan asked.
“In a manner of speaking. Do you mind opening up?”
“Right, right,” Alan grimaced, submitting to good form. “I’ll buzz you. But wait in the lobby. I’ll come down.” His head bobbed, and he disappeared.
Darius waited in uncertainty in the cloying atmosphere of the lobby. Why couldn’t he come up? When Alan pushed open the elevator door with its single round porthole, at least he was smiling. He made a surprised face at the unpleasant smell, but he did that every time he was in the lobby with another person. His pale, blue-striped Oxford was untucked. His hands were in his pockets to the knuckles. He indicated the front door with an elbow, then looked down to glimpse the watch on his wrist in passing. “Go for a walk?” He led them up Claremont and over to Riverside Park, moving with the peppy stiffness of a young academic in the flower of unused strength.
The witty story Alan told about Sidney Morgenbesser increased Darius’s uncertainty. Darius wasn’t able to get a word in for a long time. He’d been expecting flashes of intimacy or tenderness. He’d expected them to converse with simple directness. He’d expected all that, even though nothing like it had ever happened before with Alan. Darius bowed his head. Alan’s story seemed to be crowding him into self-examination. He did notice Alan’s eyes roll toward him once in a horsey, affrighted way, as if at a dropped match on a bed of pine needles.
Darius disliked a virginal meekness he was powerless to repress in Alan’s company. “I keep thinking,” Darius mused when he had the chance, sounding obligingly inhibited, “There must be mental states it would be mistaken to characterize as thought.”
Alan shot back, “Of course. Ninety-nine percent of what takes place in the mind isn’t thinking.”
“Oh.” Darius paused. “To me it was a new—or the idea had special significance—”
They were coming down Riverside Drive’s great promenade, which overlooks the park atop battlements. The sun made the sycamore colonnade’s vault of still-yellow leaves glow like burning paper. More leaves made an airy clatter at their feet. Between breaks in the trees the Hudson River appeared as a painful white blaze. Only the roar of the invisible West Side Highway had to be edited out—or particularly attended to.
A confession came out of Darius at long last. “My father—there’s a difficult situation going on with my father.” Dry as the ochre leaves his feet scattered, Darius made this awesome announcement as mere explanatory matter. He rushed to get to a more abstract point. “He used to be obsessed with beading—my father, which sounds weird—is—and even as a kid I remember wondering, what can he possibly be thinking about? Because, really, doing that must have been like counting. Just counting all the time. The lowest form of math. Like Intuitionism. You said it was uninteresting. But can you imagine spending your life counting—like—counting sheep? Which of course you do—”
“Right.”
“—to fill your mind when you want to sleep—to stop thinking.”
“Is this what you needed to tell me?”
“No. I’m just talking. It’s whatever comes into my mind,” Darius said truthfully. “I suppose I was having a bad day somehow. My mother gave me some money.”
“Isn’t unhappiness an inappropriate reaction to windfall profit? I suppose your charm is your inversion of—”
“What do I invert?” Darius asked, greedy for an answer. “Or do you mean I am an invert, which of course—” Then, feeling the remark was perfectly at random, he threw out, “Is this love?”
The question had a faint resonance, as if the future had flicked at it to make it ring like a wine glass. Darius was surprised when, in the present, he saw Alan’s face change. The change of expression showed that Alan, at any rate, thought they’d come to the difficult, substantive part of the conversation. Gravely, he said, “I seem to have a surfeit of opportunity in that area. Just at the moment. With you and Tom.”
“Oh, really? But if you know what you want—” Again, he was surprised when Alan’s face looked like he was hearing something infinitely remote from what was intended. Airily, Darius went on, as if hazarding a mildly funny comment. “I mean I feel attached to you—”
Alan made the whispery puff of laughter that well-behaved people produce to stopper a flash of cruel annoyance. “Sometimes opting for a less than optimal—”
“I think we’re a lot alike, and I feel attached to you.”
Wintry, abstract, Alan observed, “Love is almost always unequal, isn’t it? Besides being non-commutative—”
With effort Darius interrupted. “But, you know, I didn’t really even realize there was an issue like this—” His thin-fingered hand shunted vaguely between them, his usual denotation of love. “—between you and Tom. You and me—maybe, maybe. Perhaps.”
“I think things were probably somewhat up in the air with Tom when you and I met. But he’s been finding it rather confusing to have you come by the apartment so much, though it’s added-value, in a manner of speaking, for our sex life. Just having you around livens things up.”
“Oh, that’s why I couldn’t come up. He’s there.” Darius sounded happy to have the little mystery cleared up.
“No. No, actually. He’s not. But I made him a sort of promise.”
Darius frowned in perfect confusion. “A promise. That’s so—abstract. That’s nothing.” He murmured, but he felt his earlier anger coming back. It wasn’t directed at Alan, but at the idea that a promise, a word, something with no physical reality, could be a bar to him. He was maddened in the way criminals must be when the verdict goes against them. The law looks like weak stuff, invisible conventions, an elaborate play of whim, or the secret language of inimical persons. Not like something that should have any impact on personal desire or personal freedom.
“Is it that we’re alike?” Darius asked.
“I don’t think we’re alike.”
Darius couldn’t decide which felt worse, not being with the person he loved or being doomed to be unlike him.
After a long tutelage in self-control, it hardly registered with Darius that Alan and he no longer had sex and that he never went to the Claremont apartment anymore, never saw Tom Samuels. Darius had such a feeble perception of time passing that he almost thought it had always been like this. Time was unreal. He could wander to a different spot in time whenever he wished, out of sight of the place he’d been before. He did once come upon Tom browsing eight or so early disco records laid out on a peddler’s blanket on Broadway. He went over to him and noted quizzically, “We never see each other anymore.” It wasn’t that Darius was demonstrating insane self-control, as Tom might have thought. The beautiful boy pulled his hair aside to eye Darius as he would look at a door through which someone was expected to come at any moment. But just then Darius didn’t know why he and Tom never saw each other. He couldn’t help looking Tom up and down, thinking he’d like to start seeing more of him. Or, since getting to know someone involves a notion of time passing, that he’d like to be the type of person who got along easily with Tom. And too bad he wasn’t.