BARRY WASN’T SAYING much. Dim familiarity with his teacher from the distant past towed his present self like an empty skiff. For her part, Jane mistrusted the sequence of events since they’d finished lunch at a pink-and-chartreuse place in a cute commuter town. In fact, she couldn’t remember why she drove him home or decided to drop in or fastidiously climbed the narrow stairs to see where he lived now—over some New Jersey millionaire’s garage, it seemed.
All afternoon she kept noticing a kind of worry afloat behind Barry’s brown-eyed, lopsided-smiling sweetness, something she had no memory of. She supposed it was adulthood. During their first phone conversation, Barry had mentioned wanting to ask her something. A passing terror came over her that he would be completely different. That she’d destroyed him, and he was coming after her, his wizened soul in his palm to shame her. Penitently, she met him anyway. At a glance, more than a decade’s fear dropped away. He wasn’t after her. There was only that odd worry in his eyes, something private-seeming for a boy she remembered being utterly transparent.
The impersonal effects of time triggered faint grief, which distracted Jane from the narrow business of meeting Barry after so long. His slight pudginess. Unmanicured threads of beard on his neck. Little flaws and scars and nascent wrinkles and maybe even thinning hair. Her short-term memory shortened even further to pure observation. She was fascinated by Barry’s heavy-pawed masculinity. Not only was it grown up, but also completely unlike Nathan’s gentlemanly primness.
As she expected, the apartment had hardly any furniture except a bed, neatly draped with a duvet but not exactly made. They sat on it, Barry leaning back on his elbows, Jane leaning forward over crossed knees. They sat there quite a while, expressions nervously explicit from time to time, fingers quirking on the surface of the duvet. Barry purred or groaned at the back of his throat, an against-my-better-judgment noise. Neither of them resorted to words, which paradoxically seemed liable to gum up everything. Barry’s palms drummed at his sides. When one of his hands stopped, tensed, Jane’s fingers slipped under it, forcing themselves between a callused palm and the bedspread.
Barry smirked vaguely when she was naked. She frowned. Even his silken penis with its flaring, hat-like, mauve-tinged tip—even it—had aged fascinatingly, acquired a saltiness and a scribble of thick veins. He didn’t have much hope of punching past her tonsils, but slowly, deliberately, he tried, playing at inconsideration—a streak of hostility, perhaps, which he was basically too cheerful to notice in himself.
Jane threw herself backward on the duvet, but Barry disregarded her vulnerable wrists or simply didn’t pick up the hint. This in itself was sexy. It wasn’t a winking game for him. Inept, rough and very strong despite their unbaked pallor, his hands ran over her, kneading a little, possessive but aimless, unsure of the point of it all. His face went slack in concentration. Jane could already feel the depression to follow, fugitive as a ghost and, for the moment, outrun by pleasure. It was going to hit the second they were finished. And sure enough, the depression was right there in the room, all but laughing at them the instant they came to themselves.
They caught their breath. “That was a mistake,” Jane said the obvious. “Nice, but a mistake. Probably.”
Barry had to clear his throat several times. He chuckled weakly. He tried to shrug but couldn’t quite since he was lying on his back.
“Of course, it was,” Jane agreed with herself.
Finally, he admitted, “But I’m not all that surprised.” He frowned at the ceiling. A word or two began and died on his lips. Each caught the other’s eye a few times. They settled on not looking. Barry stared through the never painted bathroom door, wishing he were in the shower already.
Trying to season the unhappiness, Jane drily complimented him on having a big dick, which made him snort.
“I’ve never been told,” he lied.
“What? Do you only see virgins?” This came out harsh, instead of ironical.
“No. Not at all.” Answering the virgins crack made him sound flat-footed, he thought. A cross frown appeared for a second, unusual for him. “No. I haven’t been with anybody for a long time.”
“Of course, you’re not the type: all virgins all the time.” Jane squeezed her eyes shut at her involuntary virginity talk.
He made a dismissive sound, rude about his own attitude not about hers. Surely, you knew what would happen—that much was clear, Jane thought. “Oh, Barry,” she said. “So maybe it was stupid. But so what? It’s not the end of the world.”
They used the bathroom one after another. Their present personalities had come back, as thick as wax on preserves, and they made a grown-up effort to forget their unhappiness, which nevertheless didn’t decrease.
“I’m surprised you’re not with someone, Barry. You’re a wonderful guy, and you have that same gift you always had—making people feel good.”
“I was seeing somebody,” He countered childishly. He didn’t want to talk to her, but, as a sop, he commented, “Maybe it would surprise you, but I’m actually pretty happy where I’m at in my life.” He looked at her so seriously he might have been comparing now to the past. She wasn’t sure.
Feeling guilty about extinguishing his earlier good mood, she tried, “You were always wiser and more—grown-up. Probably why we got into trouble in the first place.” She corrected herself, tapping her sternum and mouthing, Why I did. Between their present selves—even them—what had happened was extremely awkward to mention. “There was never anybody when you were away? Or out West?”
“Yes, I just told you,” he said.
“Right-right!” she whispered. His hint of self-pity, so at odds with his personality, so at odds with the note of happy contempt in sex, was just the sort of concealed weakness that saddened Jane about men. “Have you seen our little Darius Van Nest since coming back?” she asked just to change the tone of things. “Of course you did. You told me. He gave you my number.”
“Darius knows them out here, I think,” Barry chucked his head in Preston and Bea’s direction. “Or used to. Or his family did or something.”
“Well, and I guess you’ve heard. Our favorite rich kid’s father—” Jane immediately corrected what sounded like a sneer. “Darius, I’m afraid his father is… Of course, you know. But that’s why he and I got together. He wanted to consult my friend Nathan.” She mentioned the name without a flutter, a minor but perfect deception. “Also, I owed him money, but that’s another story,” she slipped in wryly. She used the past tense.
Barry asked in astonishment, “Why did you owe him money?”
“I didn’t, really. It was that very affected French tutor he had. I happened to meet him in the city years later. I was the go-between for a money problem between him and Darius. All very complicated.” Another smooth lie, though she wondered why she’d bothered to confess in the first place.
“You never liked him much.”
“Who? David?”
“No, Darius.”
“I don’t know. He was just another student.” That didn’t sound true. “He probably made me feel like a crude Polack. I imagined his family were all vile, weary aristocrats. That was a turn-off.”
“But we were kids, him and me. He was just acting pretentious.”
“You were kids,” she echoed forlornly. “And even though he was a little gay boy, he probably never came on to you,” she added.
“That’s right, he never really did. And I loved him. I probably would’ve messed around with him, too. It wasn’t that unusual.” He grinned in a Barry-like way.
“He didn’t. I did,” she sighed.
“You don’t have to sound so tragic,” he told her.
“What did you want to ask me?”
“You know, you didn’t fuck me up. I’m not stuck on this one thing that happened in my life.” He jumped up and clapped his hands energetically. He returned to the bathroom. “Quick shower!” he ordered himself. “OK, if I’m first?”
“But what did you want to ask?” she called. Her frown felt pettish.
Barry called through the door, “Oh—I guess, I wanted to know—” He laughed at his own naivete. “Since I can’t remember for me, I wanted to know if—back then—if you were in love with me. Or thought you were.” He didn’t sound as if he still wondered or cared.
“It was depressing,” Jane said to Rolf. She had to tell someone, and they had quickly become friends. But she only talked about this time in the garage apartment, not about the original sin. “Like something you do in high school.” That particular word choice made her drop her face into her palm for a second. She kept cutting it close with Rolf. “And not made up for by the sexiness at all. At all. Which is depressing in itself. Maybe that’s it, in fact. You realize you’re getting old—not you, but someone my age—and you’re too weak not to protect yourself—not to not do that wonderful, idiotic thing. Of course, he wasn’t any happier about it than I was. Miserable, I think. With him it wasn’t guilt, though, but maybe some buried resentment. Like he’s forever under my power. Because I was his teacher, I mean. But he kept trying not to seem young, to be exaggeratedly not that way. He actually said Thank you. Which I despise. It gives me the creeps. Like women give up something.”
“Don’t they?”
“Of course not,” she said scornfully. “Rolf, that’s so primitive of you!”
“I can’t believe you slept with an ex-student!” He sounded admiring.
“Mm—”
“You’re unstoppable. More women should be like that. Dare to be the aggressor with men. Unless—well, it wasn’t that you thought you’d missed the boat and wanted to catch up with this guy?”
“With a student? Ex-student? God, no! First of all, I feel like never seeing him again. The thought makes me—”
He smiled. “The post-coital black mood. Anti-sex really, and it’s like—like love—like the inverse of love!”
“You would know about inverted emotions.” That was a bit too harsh to be funny. “Or Darius would.”
“Homophobe!” Rolf exclaimed happily. But the mention of Darius made his face fall after a moment.
Jane insisted, “And in no way have I missed the boat sexually. Just for your information.”
“Maybe, I was thinking more about me,” Rolf admitted.
Jane looked around Severine’s apartment. “Why is Darius living here with you? I though he was rich.” She sounded irritable all of a sudden.
“He’s here because his father’s place is right around the corner.”
“Oliver’s down here? How strange. Not exactly the neighborhood you’d expect. You’ve never met him, have you? Awful, awful man. Partly because of him, I always wished I could’ve been—more compassionate with Darius, but I had such a hard time. Has he mentioned his school days much? Or talked about me?”
“You mean other than you being his teacher?”
“Maybe. I felt we had a little trouble connecting when he was a boy. Frankly, I should never have been teaching. I mean, I liked it, but—”
“He hasn’t talked much. If anything, he said you were his favorite, I think.”
“Promise not to tell him, but that former student I was just telling you about, he and Darius were friends back then. Good friends, even.”
“Wow. That is young.” Rolf’s manners slipped for once. He had no idea.
“Thanks!” She slapped his enormous knee. “But really don’t mention it, unless—unless you have to for some reason. Not that it’s important. Lawrence was another world. In fact, I find myself much more—tolerant of this new, grown-up Darius. Tolerant is a snooty way of putting it, isn’t it? And you love him. I’m sorry.”
“I do love him. God knows why? But I certainly understand how someone could find him maddening. As a matter of fact, even I’m getting to the point where—well, he’s been elusive with me for a long time. Let’s leave it at that. And now this apartment is wrapping up, so—you don’t know his friend, Flossy, do you? More like a family acquaintance.”
“Flossy? A girl?”
“No, very much a boy. Gay.”
“Is that some kind of drag name?”
Rolf howled. “I never thought of that. It does almost sound that way. But no, I think it’s—it must be a childhood name or a nickname.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know him. You’re the only friend of Darius’s I’ve ever met. Since school, anyway. Has he ever mentioned a school friend called Barry?”
Rolf shrugged, not even recalling Barry’s name from the UN lunch. “I don’t remember. He’s talked about some friend he felt the classic longing for, the gay boy longing for his straight best friend. But all of us have felt that at some point.”
“I suppose it could’ve been Barry. Or any number of boys, really.” Jane smiled blandly.
“But what was he like as a boy? Darius? He said he was artistic in a way. But he’s so self-deprecating.”
“I suppose he was a little arty,” Jane said grudgingly. “I was English, not Art, so I never saw anything.” In truth, Darius had loaded her like a parent with his fond creations, all disposed of long ago.
“Was he happy?” Rolf asked.
“No,” Jane drawled. “He had his manic episodes. That looked like happiness. And he had a gruesome streak. He loved the Borgias.”
“And according to him, he had—” Rolf continued avidly. “He had an almost mystical relationship with the artist who killed himself in their house. Colin Vail. He still knows his sister. She’s incredibly grand, but ancient now.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Jane rat-a-tatted. “Well, that’s not true. I do. It’s interesting. I do know about the Vail person, the artist, and I think I’ve heard some of his story. Suicide—all that. Darius never actually knew him.”
“But he grew up sleeping in the man’s bed,” Rolf said empathetically. “Can you imagine?”
“Darius hasn’t mentioned me in connection with this Vail artist?”
With a blank look, Rolf showed her he was entirely in the dark.
Jane explained, “There’s a very weird, winding story about a series of Vail drawings, and I’m tangentially involved.”
“I know those drawings! I don’t know the story, but Darius and I have talked about them. As art. He thinks they’re fakes.”
“Who knows?” Jane shrugged. “What they really are—and Darius knows all of this—he probably didn’t tell you out of consideration—but what they are is stolen. By the old French tutor—”
“My God, I met him at the show! The Vail show.”
“Right. David. A slightly oleaginous, downward-spiraling guy.”
Rolf looked aghast at Jane’s cruelty.
She smiled to put a patch on his shock. “Anyway, I met him here in the city, and he convinced me to sell these drawings for him. I didn’t know he’d stolen them. Well, I suspected, but... Anyway it’s old news and hugely embarrassing. I have nothing to do with David now. But of course, I owe Darius money from the sale. I’ve been meaning to—”
Hurt, Rolf murmured, “I can’t believe he didn’t tell me this. We’ve talked a lot about those drawings. We both thought there was something off about them.”
“Have you ever owed somebody something—money—and it’s not that you can’t get it—that’s no problem—but you just can’t bring yourself to pay it back?”
Rolf laughed. “Have I been reluctant to part with money? Of course. You don’t want to pay Darius for the drawings?”
Jane made a face. She hadn’t meant to be quite that transparent. She’d wanted to be like brother and older sister with Rolf. She’d planned to subtly guide this ethical dialogue with her own gentle hand. Suddenly Rolf didn’t seem like such a tame companion, much less sibling. She hadn’t realized how much it meant to her to be liked by this sophisticated young German. She ignored a pang of disappointment. “Of course, I’m paying him! I have to borrow the money from Nathan temporarily. Which is awkward in a very minor way. That’s all.”
“But he’s your husband.”
“No, Nathan and I aren’t married. Yes, we might as well be. I just don’t like to—well, I hate dealing with money. Simple as that.” Jane rolled her eyes hoping to lighten the mood by seeming ditzy. She grabbed one of Rolf’s Nepalese pillows, an elaborate brocade glinting with sequins and bits of mirror. She held it tight to her belly. Its edges hidden by her upper arms, she looked, for just an instant, like a jewel-bedizened goddess of love. The tall windows behind her were just high enough for an open rooftop view stretching to the river and beyond into the next borough. In the afternoon gloom, the broad, anonymous-looking cityscape, cubic and drably colored, appeared perfectly motionless, like a boring panoramic photograph, until your eye caught the near-secret trickle of traffic, the lengthening smoke from venting boilers. It was real.
Darius got into the Cedar Street apartment with groceries for Oliver. Gratitude about the unbolted door was shadowed by self-pity that he should feel, of all things, gratitude to be allowed to bring groceries to his father. Maybe the door’s mysterious binary state—sometimes bolted, sometimes not—betrayed rationality on Oliver’s part. He seemed aware that he needed food sometimes, and he had the wit to let it into his privacy. Darius never had the impression he was wanted for himself or for company. But the brutal functionality of their relationship was comfortable. It had none of the anxious perhaps that love always did.
On the far side of the dim room, Oliver was lying, like a knight’s effigy, on his single bed. Every so often, his hand waved at a pestering nothing then came back to rest with the slowness of a jeweler tweezing a diamond into place. His hands had no dexterity. Frozen, root-like, they found their place atop the hem of the sheet crossing Oliver’s chest. They stopped. From where he lay, Oliver watched Darius enter the loft but said nothing. Darius bustled into the kitchen with the bags, hoping to conjure an air of normalcy. He passed close enough to hear his father test a few word-sounds in a raspy voice.
“Thank you,” Oliver said belatedly. His mouth quietly smacked at the taste of his voice. He probably hadn’t spoken since the last time Darius had gotten in. His stiff hands came into motion again, making crippled gestures as if to fling his sheet away.
While unpacking the groceries, Darius surveyed the kitchen. New paper towels had been stuffed in the refrigerator. Oliver had been using a coffee cup with a bullseye mineral deposit on the bottom. Not for coffee. There was nothing to drink but tap water. Oliver was two tuna fish cans from starvation.
The kitchen had a small window, narrow as a loophole, covered by an old-fashioned parchment shade. As he did every time, Darius pulled the shade away with his finger. Behind it, opaque black cloth had been duct-taped across the glass. He touched the waxy cloth. Close up, it didn’t suggest madness, but Darius checked on the black cloth every time, in case the reality of the situation became incontrovertible to him. It never did.
His visits to his father were untethered from the normal world. The moment he walked in, a fog of uncertainty overcame him. He knew he ought to take an afternoon to sound out Rolf or Cassie or Nathan Kimmelstine, or now, even Barry. The truth of his father’s condition could only be established through talk, the simple social back-and-forth he and Oliver were both incapable of. Nevertheless, Darius felt at home in the loft’s dense atmosphere of make-believe. It made sense to him in the same way Oliver’s brutal emotionlessness did. No one was here to argue. No one was here to propose or dissuade. Decisions were unnecessary in the home-like stupor.
Darius didn’t want it to remain this way. He tried to bring the world in with him. He had plans he clung to. Hidden in his pocket, his fingers made arpeggios against his thigh, muscular and silent. The sequence of fingertips represented his to-do list. Food. Clean. Health check. Disable bolt. Arrange geriatric nurse visits. Coming out of the kitchen was like stepping on stage. He crossed the scrappy, narrow nineteenth-century floorboards, earth-colored with age. The floor was startlingly vocal, creaking. The strange animal whines stopped when Darius stood over his father’s bed.
Oliver was almost sitting up now, an odd, half-reclining posture. “One thing,” Darius began, curling a sweaty forefinger in his pocket. “I keep wondering if it isn’t time for a—sort of a maid or assistant to come over here. A few times a week? At least. In my opinion it definitely is time.”
That got nothing. Shifting, Oliver sighed or huffed. Darius realized his father was trying to sit up fully. His feet had snagged in the sheet. Darius lifted his arm to pull the sheet away, but he saw Oliver brace for a tug-of-war. Root-like hands clamped on the threadbare cotton. Apparently Oliver wanted to sit up but he also wanted to remain entirely draped in the unclean sheet. Darius helped him accomplish this.
In hand the uncleanness of the sheet was obvious and unpleasant. The mealy bedclothes also reeked of sweat or ferment. A metallic tang of urine ran through the fug. Darius recalled the muddy-colored bums of his childhood years, the men who’d huddled at gratings, in abandoned doorways, on the grimy marble of Grand Central.
“Tired?” Darius asked. “It looks like you have some weird something under your eye.”
Again, no response. Oliver’s hands let go of the sheet to twiddle at a non-existent something. His sudden movement, full of nervous precision, made his general immobility look less like feebleness than like a yogi’s eerie self-mastery. The silence between father and son felt like something, too, a coiled stillness. Not for the first time, Darius feared he’d put things off too long. The fear drifted from him almost lazily, another misty uncertainty. His father watched him like a listening dog.
“For some reason, I was just remembering the time we came to the city together. The time I was at Choate, and you were seeing Cassie Vail. That was a good trip. That was the only time we went anywhere together. I told you about the show Cassie put on, right? And afterward I went out to her place for the weekend. She always asks about you. There was also a woman named Sayles who claimed to know you. Actually a lot has gone on since last time.” Darius didn’t usually bother to chat like this when Oliver was unresponsive. “One thing I’ve really got to do—this was something Cassie told me to do—and everyone, really—I have to make another set of keys, so we can give one to the nurse person or whatever. That way they’ll be able to get in here. Whatever person we settle on. I was thinking maybe every day for an hour would be good? I don’t know if that’s how it works. I’ll keep asking around. When you do the research, you find out these people have all got a system. You have to conform. I guess to yourself your problems look really particular, but to everybody else, they just fit their system.”
The dog spoke! Something about his son’s soliloquy must have jogged Oliver, who said, “Perfectly fine.” He then turned his head to the side with a mild expression like, Who said that?
“Good!” Darius exclaimed instantly. After that, the silence coiled up again. Darius tried a few more Goods, each one smaller. The loft felt like nature, a desert landscape, and the coyote had barked or rocks had tumbled, indicating, somewhere, a living presence.
“You liked his stuff,” Oliver croaked. It could have been a question or just a memory. His tone, for a change, had a touch of the old, healthy unpleasantness. “The art shit.”
Darius figured out he meant Colin Vail. “I do like it. Always did. You probably remember I do.” The room seethed. Darius doubted whether his father could sustain an exchange of remarks for long. He reached out for the sheet. “Let me take that. There’s a good one somewhere, I bet.” He was worried Oliver had wet himself under the sheet. But the old man remained rigid, and Darius couldn’t just drag the sheet away from him. “Well, I’m glad you’re OK about the person coming. Don’t bolt the door. And I’ll be here, too, the first few times at least.”
At length Oliver interrupted another long, desert-like hush. “You got any money?”
Because the old man said money out loud—the first time he’d mentioned it since his immurement here—Darius grabbed at the opportunity. He was blunt. “Actually that’s an issue. You talked about it a long time ago and made it sound like I was supposed to get something, but I have to tell you—something I’ve tried to talk to you about before—that mom is in desperate shape as far as money goes. She’s about to give up the house. Stan is also still talking about suing. He doesn’t trust how you set things up for us, Mom and me. You probably don’t realize how hard you’ve been to approach about—”
“Oh, I do.”
“You do?”
Darius had to pull Oliver’s next words from a whispery thicket of sound. “I understand everything microscopically.”
With complementary precision, Darius answered, “I don’t know what you’re thinking of.”
“You think I’m dying?”
“No,” Darius said automatically. Haste made it sound like a lie. “No.”
With agonizing slowness, Oliver raised his forefinger to the red sore Darius had noticed earlier under his eye. He grazed it several times too feebly for normal skin even to sense the touch. Oliver’s skin was unearthly white. Darius had thought about this pallor on and off for a long time. He assumed at first it was the natural result of never getting any sun. But Oliver’s skin had turned paper white, opaque white. It didn’t look natural, and close up it looked unreal, even impossible. A few blue veins showed in Oliver’s forearms and temple, like serpents frozen in thick ice.
Whenever Darius registered a novel detail connected to his father’s decline—the strange whiteness, in this case—his heart raced and he flushed with fear. Anxiety about Oliver’s death crested. Then it quickly receded when the loft’s bizarre, altered normality reasserted itself. Oliver calmly breathed and blinked. Darius felt his heart rate return to normal and the flush burn off. An existential boredom rushed in. “I don’t know what that is under your eye. But now maybe somebody can look at it.”
Oliver swung his legs out with three kicking motions. He pushed himself up to a sitting position. Very unsteadily, he stood. He kept the sheet wrapped around him like a child playing king. “You’re able to walk and get around all right?” Darius asked. He stood back, his hands raised at his father’s precarious balance.
Oliver gave him a withering look so slowed down it was almost unreadable. He shuffled toward the kitchen. “I used to have a lot of multidimensional activity going on in here,” Oliver mumbled. Such a long sentence seemed to cause him pain. He had to stop walking and raised squinting, watery eyes to the pressed tin ceiling. “I can barely piss. A few drops.”
“What about the money?” Darius asked.
“I need a cracker.”
“What about money for mom?
With a ghostly form of his old severity, Oliver croaked, “Everything was arranged a long time ago. I don’t remember. I honestly don’t remember.” He passed into the kitchen.
“Is there anything in Philadelphia? Stan says there’s an investment company somewhere.”
“I don’t remember.” Oliver hacked. A cracker sounded like the last thing he needed.
While his father was in the kitchen, Darius took a tiny metal plate the super had provided him and a tube of polyurethane glue from his pocket. He opened the apartment door in stealth. He smeared the metal square with glue and after using his fingertip to brush clean an opening in the doorjamb, he pressed the plate inside the hole. The thickness of the plate would shrink the size of the hole enough to keep the bolt from sliding into it. At the same time, if Oliver examined the bolt, the hole would appear relatively normal. Visually, the edge of the inserted piece might look like part of the metal strike plate that covered the whole doorjamb.
After saying goodbye to his father and dropping many more casual reminders about the visitors coming soon, Darius closed the door. He thanked the super on his way out. Spiking the bolt had been the Maltese’s idea. His pot-bellied gravity, the unfriendly kindness of his dark, expressionless eyes made Darius feel trivial when he shook the man’s hand. His thanks were ornamental, his own assistance to Oliver obviously inadequate. His delay, nerves, affectations, fine distinctions, attention to detail—all of these were a structure as frail and merely suggestive as one of Colin Vail’s paper villas or a Vail/Van Nest drawing—one the mysterious fake collaborations now dispersed to oddball art collectors. The keys to his father’s apartment weighted Darius’s front shirt pocket like a steel teat. At the hardware store, new keys with a strawberry sheen shrieked as their fangs were ground.
Afterward, Darius stood on lower Broadway for a long time in stunned inaction. Annoying as they were, the crowds struck a chord with Darius. All strangers seemed dear. He’d heard that overflowing tenderness like this sometimes affected people who were dying, perhaps because the dying know they have to hand off consciousness any minute to whatever fools happen to be around, so why not love them? Standing cow-like, Darius saw a particular stranger in the crowd, a very nice-looking boy laden with bulky Century 21 bags. This turned out to be Flossy Sayles. The last person he wanted to see. Darius almost hid, almost turned away, but he didn’t have the alertness to do either. Passively he let Flossy’s sticky glance turn into recognition.
From a few yards and very far away, Darius watched the other boy, not unhappy or excited, merely curious now. Flossy had been on a clothing shopping spree. That much was obvious. And he could tell Flossy was pleasantly surprised to see him. Darius was too exhausted to be flattered by the strange enthusiasm. But it intrigued him. He thought of Flossy as cool, appealing but not overly nice. Flossy charmingly deprecated his shopaholism, raising the bags as evidence. Did his materialism embarrass him? But nothing would especially embarrass Flossy in front of Darius.
Of course, Flossy hadn’t bought Sohaila’s taxes in the end, but knowing that Darius’ mother was in arrears created an illusion of intimacy for him. He meant to take advantage of it.
At Flossy’s suggestion, they wandered from Chambers Street across the sun-stuffy skyway to the Winter Garden, where free concerts took place at that time of day. Today, surprisingly, it was Patti Smith at the beginning of a comeback. To Darius, the stroll, the concert, even Patti Smith, had a dream-like civility. When he commented on this—some babble about a genteel universe parallel to this grim real one—Flossy smiled uncomprehendingly. Thinking Darius was talking about the palm-colonnaded Winter Garden, or about the city in general, Flossy said his older sister and brother, Anna and Philip, pretended to hate the way New York had gotten. “They would say this is police state. Or Vienna. Boring. But I’m like you. I like it.”
“I have to say it’s causing me a kind of cognitive dissonance to see her in this place.” Darius nodded at Patti Smith and her little mob of black leather devotees in the sun just outside. New York harbor sparkled like a children’s book illustration behind the stage.
As they chatted, Darius didn’t think anything was going on at first. Flossy cheerfully selected and repositioned chairs for them. He arranged his bags in front of them with an air of satisfaction. He even unstapled a few of the bags to show Darius a sweater he’d bought, several shirts and a not-jeans pair of pants. In passing, he mentioned his best color was green. And that he thought Darius was a man-in-black type. “But not like them.” He gestured at the retro Patti Smith audience. He asked about the keys Darius had been toying with this whole time.
Darius used them to catch the afternoon light in a stuttering, bloody rhythm. “They’re not the keys to happiness,” he said wryly.
Flossy shrugged. He philosophized, “My key is I don’t care. I’ve always figured if I ever do anything too embarrassing or painful, I can just kill myself.” Darius thought this was a strange remark coming from an inhabitant of the parallel universe of civility and palm trees and nice clothes—and one who seemed so healthy-minded at that. “I wanted to ask you about the man we all had lunch with—your roommate or—?”
Darius frowned into his palms. “Rolf? He’s a count.”
“So you said.” Flossy smiled drolly. “I thought he was great. Most of the people I know are airheads. Business types like me, I guess. I couldn’t tell if you and he—”
“I don’t think you’re an airhead,” Darius said automatically. “Oh.” He suddenly realized this was a particular kind of conversation he’d never had. A charming movie plot point he’d never experienced in life. Love had never struck him as subject to a plan or decision, or people subject to claims. “Oh, oh, oh. No. We’re friends. Feel free! We had a brief something in Paris, maybe, but—and as a matter of fact I think he said he found you—you know—appealing. I know him incredibly well. And he’s—”
Flossy put a stop to Darius’s writhing. He’d found out what he wanted. “I definitely didn’t mean I’m an airhead. I care about appearances. A lot. My Dad would say too much.”
“Kill yourself!” Darius repeated, waggling the keys on their wire ring.
“No,” Flossy reassured him.
“And isn’t that backward? With your dad? Isn’t the parent supposed to care more about appearances than the kid?”
Flossy made a showy two-handed gesture at his bags of new clothing. “Not in my case.”
Darius smiled weakly at the hint of camp, and Flossy wondered whether he was that particular type, the ultra-stiff, slightly homophobic gay person. Ex-military almost. (Office-worker military, not the macho kind.) Darius said, “They’re to my father’s place, these keys. I’m sorry. I was just over there, and that’s why I probably seem distracted. He’s a very difficult guy. I find it depressing.”
The party was on a Sunday night. They were calling it a de-warming party, because it was the end of all housewarming. The management of Severine’s loft, irritated by the chore of suing its own tenants, hadn’t been fussy about maintaining the boiler or anything else. The apartments were indeed cold. They were also all empty now except for Severine’s. After moody transatlantic consultations with Rolf, she, like the rest of the tenants, was finally going to accept ten thousand dollars to abandon her lease. Rolf and Darius would have to move out.
They spent the day together. Darius had the fantasy to make their farewell party glamorous. That was impossible, of course, given their futons and frat house red plastic cups. But Darius bought quail’s eggs and exotic radishes in Chinatown and planned to serve them with little dishes of salt from Khewra, Pakistan.
After shopping the streets for a while, they found themselves in a glitzy mall. Except for herbalists, a not too clean noodle shop and sparsely provisioned jewelers, most of the storefronts were empty, which gave the place an air of financial speculation gone wrong. Darius was conscious of being solemnly eyed by idle patrons, as if he’d interrupted a game of dice or worse. The mall punctured his mood. When he teased Rolf about Flossy’s possible interest in him, hoping to lighten things up, Rolf reacted angrily. They returned to the loft, both unhappy. They readied everything for the party, hardly talking at all.
After an awkward and mostly distracted conversation with two early birds, Rolf started welcoming guests who arrived in cheerful knots. They talked, formed groups, exhibited personalities and behaved independently. This ordinary spectacle pleased Rolf, as if something he’d built with his own hands worked the way it was supposed to. A pompous young sage from the U.N. held forth on the Balkans and had to endure someone’s raillerous boyfriend, who said he was sick of Balkan nativism and was sorry they hadn’t all killed each other off. A French girl made an illuminating comparison to Africa, and Rolf, letting Darius handle the door for a while, invited Jane to make a Ford Foundation-related comment. Jane had come alone and was noticeably the oldest person there.
Darius found his way to a corner and pretended to arrange the radishes and hard-boiled quail’s eggs. The crowd struck him as a little boring, glib, but he admitted to himself that he was out of sorts. The only person he looked forward to seeing was Barry Paul.
Dean Quinn, a completely unexpected apparition, had come in from New Jersey with Flossy. Dean stood in the middle of the room, apparently at ease but talking to no one. A smirk made him look unapproachable. Elbow out, he raised his red plastic cup of whiskey-and-soda to his lips at long, relaxed intervals.
Drawn by the blond arrogance, Darius approached him and joked confidentially, “You have a look of Satanic pride standing here.” They introduced themselves and made the Lawrence Academy/Barry/Flossy connection rapidly without undue excitement. Darius talked to Dean in the sourly ironic tone that got him into trouble with Rolf. With Dean, it was a good fit. Dean’s smile became more and more natural.
“Not that I meant you looked evil at all,” Darius said, ingratiatingly or maybe not. In any case, it wasn’t true.
“I don’t know this crowd,” Dean said.
“They’re interesting. Friends of my friend Rolf, mostly,” Darius commented blandly.
“Seem sort of intellectual. I’m used to business types.”
“You were doing some insurance thing? I remember now. Someone was talking about you and mentioned insurance. Flossy, maybe.”
Dean looked at him narrowly. “I’m between careers.”
“Ah,” Darius said, not sure how to respond to Dean’s defiance.
Pumping defiance into pure aggression, Dean then said, “I just got back from Hawaii. My fiancée and I broke up. For the second time.”
“I hope—I hope it was amicable.”
Dean hitched his wire rims with an ugly contortion of his beautiful face and seemed to enjoy Darius’s discomfort. He said, “To be honest, it wasn’t something I particularly wanted. But I was having some troubles. Now she wants me dead.” He smiled.
Darius scratched his chin. Oliver had taught him to be unafraid of getting mauled in conversation. He said, “That reminds me of a time—also at a cocktail party—some guy told me he just found out he had Lyme disease. I think he wanted me to go away.”
“No,” Dean touched his forearm. “Don’t worry. I’m a little sensitive is all.”
Before he could stop himself, Darius made a cutesy remark. “I like you. Maybe you’re nice underneath?”
Dean laughed and repeated Nice. It wasn’t a word anyone would use to describe him. It made Darius seem appeasing and false, which felt surprisingly good to Dean.
Embarrassed by the weird declaration, Darius voided it, asking when Dean thought Barry was coming. Dean said he doubted Barry would show up at all. He looked significantly at Jane across the room and murmured, “Because of—obviously—” He added, “You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” Darius said. He was cool to Dean for the first time, too subtly for Dean to notice.
“I think they hooked up again, believe it or not.”
Again, Darius repeated, as Dean had repeated Nice.
“Like now. Weeks ago. When they met.” Dean raised his eyebrows.
“But he won’t come tonight, even so?”
“That’s probably why he won’t. I’m only here cause Flossy has a crush on the guy who lives here. Flossy can’t do anything alone.” Dean tilted his head and said unexpectedly, “You seem smart. Maybe you can tell me how I fucked up with Pia.”
Darius shook his head. No.
Dean barreled on, “I tried to make up with her by buying these earrings. I took them down to Hawaii. A total fucking waste. She never threw anything before. She never got mad at me like that, until this time.”
“What’d she throw?”
“The earrings. One of the stones broke. It actually broke. I thought she was just mad about the money.” He chuckled incongruously as though this were party chat. “It all happened because there was this—there’s some business pressure I’ve been under. Flossy’s family knows about it—cause I’m living out there with Barry—like I said before,” he explained incoherently. “Anyway, she isn’t going to forgive me for some decisions I made. Like ever.”
“Maybe you’re better off. I don’t know.” Darius thought of ending the conversation. “I know sometimes a couple can get stuck and then it’s hard—forgiveness.”
“You don’t understand. She’s Asian. They never forgive.”
“You’re positive Barry’s not coming?”
Dean looked at the crowd contemptuously. “He won’t come.”
“Well, I’m sorry about your girlfriend.”
“She’s a bitch. Luckily I’m bi.” Dean said this with a flash of giddy hostility. Naturally, it stopped Darius from going away, but he couldn’t think of anything to say in response. He bobbled three useless thoughts in mind. Dean was not coming on to him, because the confession was purely hostile. Dean was the least gay-seeming person in the world, so maybe he was joking? Could Dean be the kind of aggressive, closeted guy who was actually a total, almost masochistic, bottom?
As Darius eyed Dean, becoming a little more sure that he wasn’t joking, he decided the last idea was closest to the truth. Dean stared back with unpleasant defiance. Darius asked, “Did she find out? I mean if you’ve been—the whole time—?”
“On the down low?” Dean snarked.
“And didn’t you say she was your fiancée?”
“I did say fiancée. So what? It’s not weird. Every so often you sneak off to Asbury Park and fuck some guy. Big deal. That doesn’t have to affect your real relationship.”
Darius snorted and shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’m gay—and you knew that, right?”
Dean made a broad do-I-look-like-an-idiot expression. Darius felt the usual twinge of irritation, which he blamed more on himself than on Dean’s constant, unfriendly playfulness. Darius was also wounded, because—to be honest—he found the handsome blond wildly attractive. It was a chore suppressing even this passing, party desire, like the straight schlub cowed by a model. It reminded him of being with Oliver, though Oliver was the opposite of physically attractive. It almost made him wish for the Marquis, a man who’d hardly been there at all.
Darius and Dean made a vague promise to get together. Darius ducked over to the table littered with bits of eggshell and radishes scored by front teeth. He’d insisted indoor smoking be allowed and someone had stubbed a cigarette out in the salt. He surveyed the tabletop as if doing something.
Jane left early, after Rolf had sequestered himself in a long smiling-touching conversation with Flossy. Dean woodenly ended that, shepherding his driver out. Later but not truly late, Rolf tried to rouse the clay-footed stragglers. An hour earlier, someone had turned the music higher hoping to get everyone to dance. It hadn’t worked. After Flossy had gone, Rolf’s genial host act wore thin. He stalked over to a little screen running iTunes. He frowned at it with a hint of German censoriousness as his oversized fingers pecked the volume down. He started carrying things to the steel counters of the galley kitchen. Darius disapproved of this on principle, but he was too indifferent to ask Rolf to stop the unfestive chores.
“Don’t clean up,” Darius ordered when they were finally alone. “It’s awful in the morning, but it’s much better now,” he said with the authority of a socialite. “Maybe just whatever’ll be really gross.”
Rolf spread his arms for a celebratory hug. Picking up the radish and salt dishes, Darius managed to get past him with half a hug, patting his back skittishly.
“You tell me what’ll be really gross,” Rolf called after him.
“Oh, any creamy, saucey things. Cups and bottles are OK to leave.” He came back and flounced into a chair facing the loft’s anonymous city view.
Rolf continued straightening up. “I think that was a big success.”
“You do?” Darius said doubtfully. “Some people didn’t come. You think everyone had fun? They left so early.”
“It’s almost midnight. Who didn’t come?”
“Barry Paul.”
“I think everyone had fun. Everyone I talked to did.”
“That’s nice.” Darius was sitting with his back to the room and listened to the peaceful clatter behind him as Rolf carried things to the kitchen. For a minute, eyes full of tears like lenses, he toyed with his vision. He blinked at the glinting Nepalese pillow. The tears disappeared to the nowhere they’d just come from—maybe his eyes absorbed the excess. “You had a good talk with Flossy?”
“Mm.”
“Did you see the beautiful blond guy who came with him?”
“Yeah.”
“He told me he’s bi. I didn’t think he looked it at all. Did you?” Darius still sounded supremely indifferent.
Rolf came around and knelt by his chair. He looked at his friend so intently Darius had to close his eyes for a second. Rolf didn’t touch him, but he steadied his hand on the arm of the chair against which Darius had tucked up his knees. Darius had to force himself not to move his knees to the other side. “Have you called the home health care people?”
“Not yet,” Darius answered. “I think I drank more than I realized. I don’t want to leave this place.”
“Moi non plus.”
Later on, Darius was unable to sleep. Once he rose stealthily to masturbate with the most delicate attention to silence. Metabolizing alcohol and Dean and thoughts about Barry and Oliver and Rolf and Jane combined in a faint nausea of love behind his sternum.