After about a week, David wondered why he hadn’t thought of getting Leon’s telephone number. Leon’s fund must have a name, he thought. Or maybe I could find him through the LSE.
But then it faded, the impulse to phone Leon. David was on the phone or in meetings or on an airplane constantly. He had planned it that way on purpose—to wrap up everything with all his clients without missing a beat. That was why the kids were in Virginia and he was here alone. He hadn’t wanted to think too much about what was going to happen to him. He wanted to work non-stop and then split. For good.
Leon was a temptation for David to have a life of his own, and David firmly told himself that he didn’t have time for that. He didn’t have time to get off the treadmill. There were people in the office and all over the globe clamoring to know everything he’d done with all his clients for the last ten years. And there were two or three big deals to wind up. Just now, he didn’t go anywhere without an entourage of baby bankers, analysts, and younger, hungrier partners. Hour after hour he would talk, talk, talk, and they would write it all down. They jabbed it into Blackberries, snorted it into Dictaphones, voice-mailed it to their ten closest buddies. It was a juggernaut of his own devising, the little corps of vultures flying around Europe with him, circling the globe, hovering at meetings, in hallways, flocking under his elbows in hotel bars. They were like so many members of his funeral cortège in their sober suits and with their eulogizing smiles.
Man, they suck up to me, he thought to himself. And tomorrow I’m gone, I’m dead.
The strategy had been never to have an empty second. That was always David’s strategy.
Then Leon phoned him.
‘Let’s play squash tomorrow.’
David automatically said yes. It was like he had been waiting for the call. ‘I might have to cancel something.’
‘The court’s at seven a.m.’
‘Bloody hell, Leon. I reserve seven a.m. for CEOs only. And for them I only have to move my mouth.’
‘Baby, I don’t move anything at all unless it’s for a friend.’ And there was the great, rolling laugh. David laughed, too.
The birds were singing before five, and the summer dawn was long. It didn’t feel that hard to get up, David thought, when it was just for a game of squash. He’d been half-awake for a while anyway. The yellow light slanted low across the empty rooms, bright, inviting, as he slipped down the stairs and out to the street.
He had whites, but no racket. There was the blue Mercedes his secretary had sent. The driver raised a hand, then got out and opened the back door for him.
David was carrying nothing except his cell phone and two twenty-pound notes. It felt odd with his shorts on in the back seat of the car, like a kid going swimming at the country club. His bare legs stuck to the tan leather.
Leon was waiting by his bike in the parking lot at the Queen’s Club. The stadium was still up from the Stella Artois tennis tournament, acres of white canvas, rows of empty bleacher seats, a few jumbled green plastic chairs. The green pipe railings across the top of the brick terraces around the center court gave it all the air of an empty cruise ship that had arrived and disgorged its passengers.
David felt a little whiff of excitement, as if he could still hear the roar of the crowd that had jammed the bleachers. Just crossing the clean, empty morning air in such a large seating area was like walking out on the court to play in the tournament. He felt eager.
‘I’d forgotten about the tennis tournament,’ David said as he walked up to Leon. He extended a hand, as if to shake, then slapped Leon on the biceps instead. Leon slapped him back.
‘The press only cleared out of the squash courts yesterday. The whole place gets turned upside down for weeks.’
‘Shouldn’t we be playing tennis? It’s such a great morning.’
‘Takes too long,’ said Leon. ‘And you might win.’
‘So you’ve been playing a lot of squash, have you?’
‘A bit.’ Leon smirked.
‘I don’t even have a racket anymore. That’s how big your advantage is.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Leon steamrollered his excuses. ‘They’ve got plenty of rackets at reception.’
The inside of the club was a maze of shiny, fluorescent-lit underground passageways. Leon opened one door, then another, walking fast, his bag and his leather jacket shifting rhythmically against his back. David scurried to keep up.
‘I can’t believe how you belong to this club and know your way around. It’s like you’ve been in London forever. I’ve belonged to this club for years, and I could never even have found the squash courts.’
‘That’s because you never come here,’ said Leon, ushering him into the little lobby at the back of the courts.
David looked him in the face, half-startled. Then he said, ‘How’d you join anyway?’
‘Ex-pat. You just pay double and promise to leave town after a few years.’ Then Leon smiled. ‘And I sucked up to some coaches. If you take a few games off people, they sit up and beg, you know?’
‘So Leon,’ David asked, drawing his words out, unzipping the case of the borrowed racket, ‘you haven’t forgotten who taught you how to play squash, have you?’
‘I haven’t forgotten.’
Leon opened the door to the glass-backed court, stepped inside and began to sting the ball hard against the front wall. Smack, smack, smack.
The racket looked tiny in his hand, the ball was a black oval blur, skimming the side wall all the way to the back corner, holding on like it was gummed.
David squinted at the ball as he came in and shut the door. He paddled his feet on the floor, springing on his toes, reminding himself of the red line that was the T, reminding himself of the four corners of the court, feeling for a groove somewhere in his brain that was the squash groove. It had been a deep groove once, totally established, an array of shots he could easily produce and just as easily conceal from his opponent, a long strategy, a canny anticipation of his opponent’s every move.
But now he felt unaccountably winded, even before striking one ball. His legs were heavy and stiff. He was afraid of Leon’s enormous reach, of his precise, evident power, and the fear was triggering a series of physical responses that David could recognize as having some purely chemical basis but that he couldn’t overcome.
How did we use to do this? he asked himself. We had nerves every time we went on the ice to skate. How did we fucking get past the sick feeling and play hockey?
Leon crossed the ball to him and David could barely make contact. He lobbed it back niftily, dancing his feet, gritting his teeth. He tried to shut Leon out of his mind. He hit a few rails to himself, hard, ignoring the fact that they bounced off the wall sloppily. Just break a sweat, he told himself. The shots will come.
After they warmed up and Leon won the spin for serve, the paralysis hit David all over again. He couldn’t get into the game, couldn’t lose himself in the physical effort of it. He kept concentrating without wanting to on his feeling of anxiety, on his vertigo.
But he managed to keep the ball in play, and they ran each other around the court a little. Leon was playing a simple game, all rails to the back. It was almost arrogant, the way he didn’t bother to do anything else at all, just hammered on with the same easy movement. David mixed it up: boasts, drops. But they weren’t good enough. They were a nervous cover for a lack of discipline. He knew he would have to be more patient. He lost the first game quickly. The second went a little better.
The rails were coming deeper and straighter now; Leon had to get off the T and retrieve them. There were three long rallies in a row, killer points that went on for ages. David won one of them. Leon was forced to use some defensive boasts from the back of the court. David dropped a winner just above the tin. They were both gasping, taking their time to walk back for the serve.
But David felt like he just couldn’t get to the bottom of Leon. The better he himself played, the better the squash was, and he couldn’t tell how good Leon really was. Maybe I am testing him, he told himself. He has to be tired; he has to be a little tired.
Leon didn’t flag. They were both streaming with sweat. After Leon won the second game, David burst out of the court and hung over the water fountain, panting, sucking it down. Leon came over slowly, leaned down for a sip when David stood away from the cooler.
I have to win the next one, David was thinking as they went back into the court, or it’s a doughnut. He had never lost to Leon 3-0. He had hardly ever lost to Leon at all. And the fear started again.
He didn’t return Leon’s first serve. Missed it completely, standing flatfooted.
This is not the way, David thought. The fear feeling was worse than losing could possibly be. What’s the crisis? I can’t do magic here, he said to himself. I’m playing pretty fucking well for a guy my age who doesn’t even own a racket. This is decent squash. In fact, this is the goods, if you ask me. If Leon is in better shape and has been playing more, he’s going to win. So fine. So he wins.
The relief lifted his game a little. But David was too sophisticated an athlete not to know that he was close to letting himself off the hook. His body would take a break if he didn’t tell it there was a crisis. He still had to go for it even though his head was swimming.
At last he began to get down to some layer of his being that remembered how to be more crafty. He realized, for instance, that up to now, he hadn’t really been watching Leon. Leon had been playing such a simple game that David thought he knew what Leon was going to do with every shot. But Leon had dropped the ball across court twice now, that low little slice when David had expected another rail, and David hadn’t gotten to it in time. So he made himself glue his eyes to Leon, tried to burrow right into Leon’s brain, under Leon’s skin. What was Leon thinking, what was he going to do next?
And now time stretched out for David. He began to see it all before it happened. Leon shrank before his very eyes from a giant David couldn’t get the ball around, to a normal-size opponent with predictable responses. He could move Leon from side to side; he could force him to scramble to the front wall; he could push him to the back with a lob. And David felt like he had time to move his own body into the right position to hit the shot he wanted to hit, not just a desperate bunt.
That effort brought the score to 2-1, and David was on a high now. He was beating Leon with his brain, not just his body. He was thinking that he still knew what Leon was all about, despite the time that had passed and despite everything else. This was not a stranger he was playing squash with. This was his best, his oldest friend. His mind was at least as good as Leon’s, maybe better. He could outsmart him if he stayed absolutely focused—if he wanted it more than Leon.
From the lobby at the back of the courts or from the gallery above, it might have been hard for a spectator to feel the intensity that had built up on the court. It looked like two decent club players having a long, hard match. One guy was bigger, stronger, a little slower; the other was smaller, darker, a scrapper. They hardly spoke and there were hardly any lets. The points were long for middle-aged guys, but they looked like they were in pretty good shape. Still, they were getting red in the face, both of them.
In the end, when the smaller guy won the match in a tie-breaker in the fifth, a spectator might have wondered whether the bigger guy had really used all his strength. It seemed like maybe he could have prevented some of those drops, if he had consistently hit the ball as hard as he sometimes did. The big guy could put unbelievable pace on the ball, a low kill-shot, from just about any position on the court it seemed. But he didn’t use the shot much. Maybe he was feeling under pressure; maybe he was too tired.
In the court, the battle was personal, familiar, age-old; an engagement so deep that it cut backwards through time. It had always been going on; it had never stopped over the last twenty-five years between these two. They ran so hard and so long that their bones ached, their hips in the joints were raw with grinding, their ribs were aching from the pounding over the pale sanded floor, and the grips of their rackets were slippery in their hands, so that they had to wipe their hands on their soaked shirts, their soaked shorts, the walls of the court, had to open the door of the court and scrape the grips against the edge of the glass to get the slick of sweat off them.
Leon folded David in his arms after the last point. He slapped him on the back, the sweat splatting everywhere.
‘You haven’t changed one fucking bit, you bastard. You are not a quitter, that’s for fucking sure.’
David was satisfied, drunk with exhaustion, hanging on Leon while he caught his breath.
‘You’re the only guy in the world who could pull that level of effort from me anymore,’ David said. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do any work today. That was major.’
At first, they couldn’t even laugh. They grinned at each other. David hung down over his legs, half-crouched, and leaned on his thighs.
‘Don’t sit down,’ Leon said, ‘it’s bad for your heart.’
‘Oh, that’s crap. You’re still spouting that crap those coaches told us at Princeton.’
‘I’m serious, catch your breath first. Come on.’
Leon led David out of the court. They walked around the little lobby like cats in a cage, pacing as if the air would be better a step further on, hands on hips, splayfooted, hearts dangerously pumping.
David bent double again, stood up, looked at Leon. ‘I thought it was over, game three; you let me off the hook. You should never let up like that, man.’
Leon grinned. ‘You do what you can do. What’s next? Do you want to get breakfast?’
‘I don’t have clothes. I came like this.’
‘No group showers for you, huh?’ Leon leaned down and rummaged in his bag, then pulled out a white sweater. ‘Wear this so you don’t get cold. I’ll grab some towels, and maybe we can eat something outside.’
The locker-room and the dining-room were deserted. They took cereal and fruit out onto the terrace above the center court. The workmen had arrived and were taking down scaffolding poles, rolling up canvas. The poles clanged in the air, trucks moved about. The sun was warm, glittering on the windows and the roofs of the mansion blocks lining the far side of the club.
‘Great game, Dave. I enjoyed it—well, most of it.’
‘I feel like I’m in college again, Leon. I’ll probably feel like I’m in hell tomorrow morning when I try to move my legs, but it’s great to play. It’s amazing all the stuff you just don’t get around to.’
‘They have squash in Virginia. You should play there.’
‘Yeah, if I can find someone to play with, I guess. With the kids and Elizabeth, I’ve lost touch with—I don’t know—everyone. Where is everyone?’
Leon wrapped a towel around his neck and then picked his jacket up off the chair where he had dropped it and put it on. ‘I don’t know. Who’s everyone?’
‘I feel like we all used to know a lot of people. There was a gang—a gang we went to school with, Princeton people, and people from before that.’
‘Your gang more than mine, David. But you moved to London, you know. And you got married. They’re all doing their lives. Everyone’s grown-up, busy.’
David settled deeper and deeper into his chair. He couldn’t be bothered to reach for his food. He felt profoundly content, as if his body were dreaming, weighted down, nerveless. And he felt completely at one with Leon, in the bright, still morning. He felt as if he could talk to Leon about whatever came into his head. He felt unguarded.
‘It’s the marriage thing, isn’t it? It cuts you off from friends,’ he said.
‘For me there was a bad phase,’ Leon replied, arranging cutlery, unfolding his napkin, ‘when everyone was all about marriage and having babies. The baby thing gets in the way; it takes up so much time. But babies grow up. Children I like.’
‘Let’s keep in touch, Leon—when I move back to Virginia.’
‘I’m cool. I get back to the States pretty often.’ Leon tipped his head back and drained his water glass. ‘It’s up to you.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s up to Elizabeth.’
‘Don’t let it be up to her, Dave.’ Leon gave him a comical look.
David wondered about it for a minute. Then he said, vaguely, ‘She does a lot of stuff for me.’
As he sat there in his sweaty daze, he started to reflect on the way that over the years he had stopped doing much of anything for himself. Early on in his marriage, he had discovered that Elizabeth seemed to know what he needed to do before he knew himself. She took pressure off him that he hardly knew was there, and the sensation of lightness had been an unexpected boon. Later, he got used to the freedom; he forgot how he came by it, and he didn’t know whether Elizabeth was glad or resentful. He didn’t even wonder about it.
Personal calls, arrangements—they were all done by her or by one of the secretaries. If he exercised, it wasn’t like today. It was with someone paid to train with him, someone hired by Elizabeth. When they went out in the evening, to dinner parties or plays, he was given printed instructions, and it was usually with clients or with people Elizabeth was pursuing for the foundation. They called their evening companions friends, but they weren’t friends in the sense that Leon was a friend; they weren’t people who had first liked you for entirely personal reasons and had made that instinctive liking into a bond that distinguished itself from the other bonds of the adult world—business, property, marriage. Was friendship—unfiltered emotional affinity—a luxury of the young, David wondered, or of the unsuccessful?
Maybe his whole life was now just a piece of commerce; nothing happened by chance or on the spur of the moment. Every second was scheduled, especially lately. Every human encounter had a purpose separate from the announced one.
‘I’m like a public institution,’ he said out loud, ‘I have no private life.’
‘Well, maybe you gave Elizabeth reasons to want to run your life for you. I wouldn’t let anybody do that for me—to me. She’s trying to get right inside your head, Dave, that’s for Maoists. Don’t act so guilty. You can pick your own friends.’
Leon looked David over like he expected David to object, to say something like, I do pick my own friends. And David did feel defensive. It wasn’t just about Elizabeth. He was alarmed by Leon’s knowingness. Leon had a hunch all over his face. There was more to this conversation than either one of them was letting on.
So David shifted the subject sideways, saying loudly, in pretend anguish, ‘I felt bad for years, Leon, that I stole her from you. Jeezus! You let me suffer!’
‘Don’t blame me. You made your own decisions; it’s your own conscience torturing you.’
‘Well, what was that you said the other night—you gave her to me?’ David’s voice became animated. ‘What on earth did you mean by that?’
Leon put a piece of pineapple in his mouth and chewed it slowly. He still had the don’t-blame-me look on his face, shrugging just with his eyebrows and his lips.
‘On your wedding day—I gave the bride away, remember? The orphan bride?’
‘Oh, come on, Leon.’ David smiled. ‘That’s not what you meant.’
‘Well—’ Leon made him wait. ‘It was obvious to me and it was obvious to Elizabeth,’ he finally said, ‘that the only girl you were ever going to want was somebody else’s girl. We had that much worked out. Anything else was too easy for you.’
‘So what—you set me up? The two of you?’ David was laughing, his face glowing with disbelief.
Leon looked uneasy. ‘It wasn’t really like that.’ He sat back and fiddled with the zipper on his jacket, zipping it up, zipping it down. ‘It’s not like I was going to marry her myself, Dave. You were both my friends.’
David nodded. He wasn’t sure what to make of Leon, the look on his face, his uncertainty.
‘So what went on with you guys anyway?’ David asked the question he had wanted to ask on the way home from the Oxo Tower, even though now he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
‘Not a lot!’ Leon laughed. ‘There is nothing the least bit kinky about your wife. At least if there is, I don’t know about it.’
‘Yeah, but…?’ David couldn’t leave it alone.
‘Yeah, but, but, but. Did we never talk about this, David? She was an elegant, gorgeous, brilliant thing. She was a spoiled brat. That dad of hers must have been some mixed-up asshole. He spoiled her and he starved her, too, for—I know this one—approval. So that’s what she needed—approval. But she didn’t want too much attention. Or at least she only wanted just the right kind of attention, from just the right places. Most people never counted for her at all. And all the clothes—they were part of it. She always wanted to wear things nobody else could buy, be unique in how she dressed.
‘Music she couldn’t get enough of. When she and I were going out—if you want to call it that—she was playing the piano probably five or six hours a day. Maybe there was a chance for it at one time, before she started all that modeling. Or at least she thought so. She was picturing herself on the concert platform. She didn’t want a boyfriend—not a real one. She wanted someone to take her out but not to mess her around. She didn’t want any bruising—not on her precious hands, not on her spirit. It was all about staying totally available to the music. Clean, ready.’
Leon paused and gave David a saucy look. ‘I can’t imagine how you got through to her, David. Maybe she thought you were gay, too, being my friend and everything?’
‘She knew you were gay?’ David was too tired to move, but he felt as though he were sitting up straight with surprise.
Leon was silent. Then he said, ‘No.’ He seemed thoughtful, almost sad. ‘In the beginning, she didn’t know I was gay.’ He said it very slowly, and David felt as though the words came out automatically, covering some deeper train of thought in Leon’s head that Leon wasn’t revealing.
Leon repeated himself. ‘In the beginning she didn’t know I was gay.’ He buttered a square of white toast, took a bite, and spoke a little more quickly, chewing. ‘Although she can’t have thought about it much. She can’t have thought about me, I mean. Maybe the point was not to think, though. Maybe that was the point for both of us. She had this idea about “gentlemen”. Real gentlemen were creatures of the spirit only. All the flesh-and-blood men had proved to be assholes, I guess. She wouldn’t say it that way; I don’t know what she would call them. Vulgar, maybe, or lacking background? But, David, I was the same as her then. In the beginning, when I first met her, I was trying to bury part of myself, hide it, ditch it. Dating women? Oh, my God! I was doing without flesh and blood, and I was trying to put on the same act as her. Something refined, something without conflicts, difficulty, pain. It was all show and no sex for both of us.’
David sat nodding, his muscles stiffening, his mind limber. He still felt a good, free energy talking with Leon, but he also felt fear somewhere deep in his gut, fear like regret, something he needed to brood on, something he needed to salvage. He didn’t let his mind settle on exactly what it was; he didn’t want to look it in the eye.
‘You sound kind of bitter,’ he said to Leon.
‘Naw.’ Leon finished the toast and picked up another piece. ‘We were growing up still. Those times were different. I loved taking her out. God, she was stylish. And she was witty in that ruthless way of hers, that relentless, funny disdain for herself and for everyone—she was subtle and she was brutal. It gave life a certain comedy. I needed that. I was in much more pain than she was.’ This statement settled between them with a slow weight of seriousness; then Leon picked his voice up slightly, lightened it, spoke more quickly.
‘She loved the opera, all dressed up, lipsticked, still as a stone, in heaven somewhere inside her head. And we went to a lot of stuff at Carnegie Hall, too. I guess those were all her rivals up front, dashing and tinkling away on those shiny grands. It must have been torture for her, in a way. She never said much. Tight little observations about this or that in their playing. Wouldn’t get down and dirty on them though. That would have been in poor taste.’
And now Leon held out his arms, as if it should all be obvious. ‘Think of the appeal for me, David, her classiness. A boy from the sticks, a hockey player, a hick. I learned all about music, food, which fucking fork to use. She was like an embryo diva. You know we gays—we can’t get enough of those bitch divas.’ Leon winked, then scowled; his tone soured. ‘She and I were a perfect date. She went to bed early and so did I—until later on, when I finally gave myself permission to actually be gay. Then I’d drop her off early and still have time to cruise or hit the clubs downtown or whatever I had the nerve for.’
David was agog. He said nothing at all for a minute, then, ‘So what about the cruising? What’s that all about?’
‘Oh—it’s like men with whores, you know, only you both want it for the sex. Both sides are looking. I mean sometimes it’s free, sometimes you pay. And you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to pay until it’s all over.’ Leon rolled his eyes, as if David must know all the funny, awful tales about being made to pay. ‘It can be nice. It can be nasty. That scene’s over for me now. For lots of reasons.’
David nodded, self-consciously adopting a grave expression, thinking he knew the reasons or could guess them, wondering whether it was more AIDS or more true love, and too embarrassed to ask and expose just how naïve he was about Leon’s way of life.
‘Maybe I am bitter,’ Leon said. ‘God, it sucked for me being gay then, even in New York. What was I doing, trying to take out girls, conducting pseudo-romances? Squeezing some drop of self-regarding pleasure out of looking like an image from an ad campaign, two gorgeous youngsters on the town, brimming with talent, scrubbed, groomed.’
Leon was on a rant now. ‘It was unbelievably superficial. No food in it. The truth is, David, when I started having a real gay life, I wanted her to know. By then, she was having a real straight life with you—happily headed for marriage. Christ, I saw her through to that, holding her hand, after you’d left town. And here’s something you should know, because I realize now that it affected me a hell of a lot and I think you will understand. One night—I guess after you’d already gone—I turned up with a boy I was hot for—all part of trying to be honest about myself, and of Elizabeth letting me, encouraging me. But the evening didn’t go well. The boy wasn’t what she expected of me. I remember he had on a mint-green jacket, polyester or something, shiny, wide lapels. God-awful. Somehow, because of that jacket, I slipped categories with Elizabeth. I didn’t understand it then; I just accepted the hurt. But I can see it now in her eyes: one look at my all-sex, no-taste date, and she took back her—love—or friendship—or whatever it had been. I tried to forget about it at the time, let things go back to normal, whatever normal was. But last week, on the bike, after I dropped you off, it came back to me so intensely after years and years, and I guess that, underneath the surface, that night must have gone on making me hide myself from you, from both of you. I can remember that it set me back—back to dating women, to needing—whatever it was I used to need from Elizabeth. That’s why I had to give her away at your wedding, instead of being your best man, David. My mistake. Because that night should never have affected my conviction about myself; it should have affected my conviction about Elizabeth. She just couldn’t handle it when her fashionable, sepiatoned escort who she knew was maybe a little bisexual in some Edwardian white-tie-and-tails, white-man-visits-Harlem-jazz-club sort of way turned out to be a man who fucks and gets fucked by other men, no atmosphere, all raunch and haunch.’
The rant stopped on a dime. David held his breath, but not another word came out of Leon.
They sat for a while, blinking at the sun like lizards on a rock. But inside, their blood ran hot, their minds were hopping. David sensed a depth of rage in Leon that amazed him; and toward his own circumstances he felt a bottomless, unfamiliar horror, like he might vomit up his whole life, in revulsion, panic. What was it about Elizabeth? She seemed—awesome.
After a while David said, ‘I’ve got to get to the office.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe I’ve got to get divorced, too.’
‘You can’t, Dave. You’ve got kids.’ Leon said this with the utmost matter-of-fact casualness.
‘Fuck. You’re right. I can’t get divorced. I’ve got kids.’
They burst out laughing.
Then they just went on sitting there for a while, until Leon said softly, ‘And besides you can’t leave your wife if she’s sick.’
‘If she’s—?’ It hit David like a bomb. ‘What do you mean? Sick?’ Inside him was chaos and brimstone, smoke rising, passers-by running in every direction. The ruin of his life exploding into the open, into the quiet daylight.
Neither one of them spoke. And there was pounding blood in their ears, intense consciousness of one another, a sense of exposure. The moment went on and on.
‘You’ve been in touch with Elizabeth, haven’t you?’ David at last forced himself to say. He stared into Leon’s eyes, into Leon’s faithful, brown-yellow, kind eyes. He felt full of fear and mistrust and suspicion.
Leon didn’t flinch. ‘David—I’ve been here a year. Of course I called you guys.’
Now David’s guard was up, the coolness, the flashing contempt. ‘You asshole. You should have told me. You know you should have told me.’
‘There are a lot of things I should have told you a lot of times. We could spend the rest of our lives on the things I haven’t told you. And then there are all the things you haven’t told me.’
There was a hint of accusation in Leon’s voice. David tried to ignore it, but he wondered why Elizabeth hadn’t said anything to him about Leon being in town. Didn’t she want to see Leon anymore? Or had she been keeping something from him that Leon knew all about? What the hell was going on?
‘What’s the deal, Leon? What do you fucking want from me?’ David was shouting, and Leon shouted back.
‘David, she seals you off. I called you lots of times. It wasn’t until I came back to London after Christmas that it ever even dawned on me Elizabeth hadn’t told you I was here, and by then it was—harder—to keep calling. You have no personal life, David. You said it yourself. You’re an institution. What I want is the same as ever. I want to be your friend.’
‘Why?’
Leon sighed. ‘This is getting schmaltzy, Dave. I like you. Do I dare say I love you? You’re worth knowing because you think—at least you used to think—about everything, every waking second. By now you’ve probably discovered what I’ve discovered: most of the people are not worth knowing. And I’m pretty sure I don’t mean that the way Elizabeth would mean it. There are only a handful of people that you might have shared your youth with. In my case, the handful is dust—dead and buried. I was not trying to make a big deal out of this. The years are going by; there are things I remember that—move me.’
It seemed like a heartfelt speech, but David was so angry that he couldn’t understand what Leon was saying. And he was so physically exhausted that his legs began to tremble. He couldn’t make them stop trembling, and he didn’t know whether he would be able to get up out of his chair. It was like a storm inside him, rattling and rolling; he was helpless in its grip.
Leon watched him, waiting for David to answer him. Finally, Leon said curtly, ‘And besides, if your wife is crazy, maybe you need a friend, you fucker.’
David didn’t answer. It was true that Elizabeth had not been very well. Not since last fall, Thanksgiving time. Maybe longer. But she was fine now; she’d be fine.