The day after he played squash with Leon, David heard from a client who was fond of her that Madeleine Hartley was back in London. They were standing on the curb outside Number 1 Aldwych waiting for the client’s car to pick him up after lunch; it was a warm day, overcast, muggy.
David was surprised at the news and he tried not to believe it.
‘Who’s she working for?’ He couldn’t stop himself from asking; he tried to sound as though he didn’t care.
‘I don’t know.’ There was a pause.
A red double-decker bus roared past, churning the heavy, dirty air, and they both stepped back instinctively.
Then the client said, ‘Actually, what I heard was that she’s not working. Quit her job in Hong Kong. I thought she might be coming back on board with you. But then, of course, you’re leaving town yourself.’
‘Yeah.’ David felt the blood burning his neck and rising to his cheeks. He leaned down and fiddled with his shoelace, hanging his head long enough to achieve a natural flush. His thighs and buttocks ached from the squash; his suit felt tight and sticky. Then he stood up again, rubbing his eyes and his red cheeks with pretend casualness. ‘All the more reason to get her back here, though,’ he said. ‘She knows all my clients so well. You’re all nuts about her.’
David smiled and the client smiled. The client’s car pulled up and the driver started to get out and come around to open the door. The client waved the driver into his seat and reached for the door handle himself.
‘It’s what I was thinking,’ the client said, getting into the car, ‘that you’d be getting her in to fill the hole you’re leaving.’ Then he shut the door and waved to David as the car pulled away.
For a few seconds, David just stood there on the wide gray pavement. He felt winded, as if he had suffered a blow to the chest. He couldn’t think what he was supposed to be doing; whatever it was, it didn’t seem very important.
He ran his hands through his hair, looked at his watch, and then put his hands in his trouser pockets. He started to walk slowly along the pavement. The skirts and tail of his double-vented, pinstriped jacket lifted and flapped over his wrists and behind his elbows.
Has she really come back? he wondered. He marveled at her discretion in not calling him, at her self-discipline. But that’s what we agreed, he thought. She’s just doing what we agreed.
Six months. She’s a beautiful young woman. In his mind, there was the shadow of another man, a towering passion. He knew she was capable of it. A bonfire. He had begged her to move on with her life.
Madeleine was all about life. Even her sorrow had been passionate, her raging farewell, her extravagant physical desire on the last night they had spent together. She’d have outgrown all that pain by now, thought David. And he remembered Elizabeth’s hunger strike, the icy bid for martyrdom. It terrified him still.
He came to an intersection, shuffled in the crowd, was carried across the street in the dull, summer buzz. He bumped into someone, felt surprised, apologized. On he walked, in no particular direction. The Thames shimmered and slid in front of him, the traffic along the Embankment shouted and paused, shouted and paused.
Had Madeleine been approached by somebody else in the firm? he wondered. Had she been in the building recently, to talk with a colleague? David realized he wanted to claim her still. He wanted to know which suit she had been wearing. Maybe a new one. He wanted to know everything.
Was she lying low on purpose? Keeping out of his way until he was gone? He thought he could guess her train of thought. But on the other hand, there was information they no longer shared. There was plenty they no longer knew about one another.
If she was coming back to the firm under somebody else’s wing, having worked so closely with David, wouldn’t it look odd? What had she told people? But the more he thought about it, the more he saw that people would probably assume there had been friction between him and Madeleine, that she had left because she didn’t want to work with him anymore, and that she was now coming back because he was leaving. Or otherwise, they might think that she had left against his preference and was too embarrassed to come back until she heard he was retiring.
There were any number of rationales, David decided. It’s a smart move for her; she deserves to make good now on what she had done before. Madeleine ought to come home whenever she likes. She’s entitled to make her way however she wants to.
What had happened before Christmas was unbelievably cruel to her—harsh beyond words, David thought. It’s too bad I didn’t leave the firm then. At least I could have done that for her. God, she took it well.
‘I never expected you to leave your wife,’ she had said. There had been no sign of self-pity or accusation. ‘You never told me that you would, and I knew from the beginning how much you cared about your children.’
David noticed a black taxi humming beside him with its yellow light on. He lifted his hand and the driver nodded at him, one hand on the wheel, friendly. So David got in.
With a chalky tongue, he gave Madeleine’s address in Brixton. The driver accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. David felt the sweat slide beneath his arms, and the awe grip his throat. He would see her once, as a friend, to wish her well. To say goodbye.
He rode along for a few minutes with the windows open, the breeze riffling his hair, soothing him. But he sat forward on the black leather seat, without doing up his seatbelt, gripping the handle above the window.
I ought to call and tell her I’m coming, he thought. Maybe she isn’t even living in that house now. Why would she be home in the middle of the afternoon anyway?
But she was home. She answered the phone almost immediately.
‘Hello?’
David sat back in the seat, pressing himself against it with his sore legs, gripping his cell phone with useless fingers.
‘It’s David.’
There was a small silence.
Then she laughed. ‘I know it’s you. I can see your mobile number displayed on my telephone. It’s not as if I’ve forgotten it.’
‘I’m coming to see you.’
There was another, bigger silence. David felt his mouth filling with saliva. It was an inexplicable sensation, as if all he would like to say to her was taking the form of a flood of spit, and the spit was making him inarticulate.
Then Madeleine said, ‘I want to see you, David. I’m sure you know I want to see you. But—perhaps you shouldn’t see me.’
‘I’m already in a cab, Madeleine. I’m halfway there. I’ll only be in London for a few more weeks. We’re selling the house. There might not be another chance.’
‘David, I’ve been meaning to ring you. There are things we should discuss.’ He could feel hardness in her voice; maybe it was anger, he thought. It made him cold with uncertainty. When they were together, she had never chastised him, though he deserved it for so many things. Now he realized he was inviting her to attack him by calling up and thrusting himself upon her in this way. It wasn’t even polite, what he was doing. He was relying far too much on their old sense of commitment. Why should she field his impulsiveness now?
All he could muster was, ‘I’m sure there are things we should discuss. I’ll come whenever you like, Madeleine. Or take you out somewhere, if that would be better.’
Again she laughed. It was so unexpected, the laughter. David was bewildered by it.
‘Going out is a bad idea,’ she said.
Then neither one of them spoke for a long, bursting moment.
‘So, do I tell the taxi to turn around?’ David finally, hopefully asked. ‘We’re already at Coldharbour Lane.’
He heard her take a big breath. ‘You may as well come.’
Her narrow street was greener than he remembered it. It seemed almost crowded with leaves, a festival of summer color, bright even in the cloudy weather.
By the time he pulled up at her door, all the old excitements had assaulted him—desire so pungent that he found it difficult to pay the taxi, to squeeze through the tightly parked cars, to climb the steps, and to wait, incandescent, on her doorstep.
When she opened the door, she offered the sweetest, familiar smell that he had learned to name as mimosa and fig. He couldn’t stand back from her, the blur of tumbling hair, the cameo of her well-loved face, her frank, enormous eyes. He melted over the doorstep, supplicant, lost, filled with sorrow and apology and passion.
In the tiny hallway, they embraced as closely as they ever had, and Madeleine withheld nothing to defend herself. But David felt an astonishing change in her figure and pushed her away in disbelief, gripping her forearms, looking her up and down.
‘You’re pregnant?’ he said.
She nodded, solemn-faced. And then she broke into a broad, easy smile.
‘Come and sit down,’ she said.
‘Unbelievable.’ His voice was hoarse. He didn’t release her. He just stood holding her there in the hallway, his head singing with amazement and with questions.
Madeleine was calm. She went on smiling at him like a complacent madonna, and David could feel that, despite his own vertiginous, crazed sense that everything was completely out of control, she was content.
‘Jesus, Madeleine. How did this happen?’
‘It’s quite hard not to make fun of you for asking me that. Come on.’ She dragged him into her drawing-room and pushed him down onto the squashy red sofa.
‘Is it mine?’ He was scared to ask.
‘Of course it’s yours.’
‘Did it—weren’t you—what about birth control?’
‘Evidently I wasn’t doing it right—whatever I thought at the time.’ She smiled slightly. ‘If I hadn’t been so in love I expect I would have been a lot more efficient about it.’
‘Jesus.’ David’s pulse raced with an urgent sense of seriousness and obligation, a half-conscious fear of legal action, of public shame. But over his face crept a satisfied grin. He couldn’t help himself. He loved this woman. He loved the thought that she was pregnant with his child. ‘Jesus,’ he said again, and then the fear returned.
‘Don’t be afraid, David. I’ve got my head around this by now. When I say it’s yours, all I mean is that you are the biological father.’
He was taken aback by this remark. His smile vanished, and he looked at her in guilt and confusion. How could she read his thoughts before he even knew them himself?
She sat down beside him, a little awkwardly, so that he stood up, embarrassed, thinking he should help her somehow. But she settled herself with a pillow at the base of her spine before he could think what to do, and then he gave up and sat down again.
‘I knew you’d be beside yourself, David. How could you feel differently? But this is what I want. I have always believed you loved me, despite everything that happened. So I told myself that you would let me have this baby. That you wouldn’t try to stop me.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t try to stop you.’ He bridled at the implication, but he wondered what he might have said if she had come to him with this news when they were still together. It wasn’t at all clear to him how he might have reacted.
‘Well, you can’t stop me now, anyway. It’s far too late. It’s due in September.’ She smiled. ‘Would you like something to drink?’
‘In a minute.’ He took a breath, hesitated. What could he ask her? Where did he stand with her? ‘Can I—will you tell me…’ Then he had to start again. ‘Madeleine, what’s the deal, then? How is this all going to unfold?’
She smoothed her white cotton shirt over the mound of her tummy with both hands, looking down meditatively, then she raised her eyes to David’s face, with a slow outward breath.
‘I wasn’t intending to come back to London until after you’d gone, David. But it’s just safer medically for me and for the baby to settle here now—in plenty of time. I really wasn’t expecting you to be involved. It’s not that I wanted to deny you anything, either. It’s just—well, it was survival for me, that’s all. This is something I absolutely have to do. That’s how our relationship turned out—isn’t it? There were things you had to do, and I knew about them, and I discovered the hard way that they were real and could not be altered. I like to think that one day, somehow, we might be able to share the fact of this baby in a happy way. But you have to believe me when I say that I was never intending to force anything on you. Trust me, David. We were always honest with one another. I have all my ducks in a row. I’ve got plenty of money. My mother and father have accepted the situation and perhaps they are even beginning to feel cheerful about it. No one need ever know whose baby this is, David.’
David found this speech almost unbearable. How could she be so collected and so brave? Where did a woman like this come from, who made no demands? Who didn’t even imply them? Her generosity was reckless. And he felt in himself an almost overwhelming impulse to interfere, to tell her she couldn’t do it without him, that it would be much harder than she realized. But for the time being, he managed to cling to his sense of her as a free person, deserving of his respect.
Listen to what this woman is saying, he told himself, listen to what she has decided she wants. He looked at her without talking until he felt moved almost to tears.
At last he said, ‘You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?’
‘Pretty much constantly for the past six months.’
‘But what are you going to tell the baby?’
She frowned slightly for the first time since he had walked in. Then she looked down again. ‘I know.’
They both fell silent. There was no good answer to this.
David slid toward Madeleine on the sofa and put his arms around her and pulled her head against his chest and held her tenderly.
‘You blow my mind, Madeleine. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met.’
‘It’s more difficult now that you’re moving back to the States.’
David laughed. ‘That’s an understatement—’ And now the tears crept out around his eyes as damp patches of laughter.
After another minute he said, ‘And what about when you get your figure back, and you’re a gorgeous yummy mummy or whatever they call them now, down at the nursery school or back at work and some guy comes along and asks you to marry him? Then whose baby is it?’
‘The guys don’t wait for you to get your figure back.’ Madeleine sat up and twinkled at him. ‘I’ve been hit on ever since I can recall, and now I find there’s nothing sexier than a pregnant woman. It’s something to do with all the extra blood circulating through those tiny, intimately positioned capillaries.’
David blushed with outraged possessiveness and wiped his eyes. Then he was forced to smile. ‘It’s my fucking baby!’ he half-laughed, half-shouted. ‘You’re trying to get me to leave my wife, you—temptress!’
‘I don’t need you!’ Madeleine cried. ‘Nor anyone else for that matter! How dare you accuse me of trying to manipulate you!’
They were both laughing, and both shouting with excitement and undirected joy, and he kept his arms around her and kissed her face, and then he kissed her mouth, and she kissed him back.
‘Jesus,’ he croaked, ‘you make me delirious. Nothing has changed.’
‘Everything has changed,’ Madeleine said.
‘I love you, Madeleine. I want to be with you. I want to go to bed with you right now. I want to be with you when you have this baby.’
‘Be careful what you say. It’s different for you when you’re outside this room. It’s always different.’
Suddenly David stood up. ‘This is unbelievably painful. It’s just going to get worse, isn’t it?’
He walked to the window, pulled back the film of white curtain, and looked out into the road. The trees were still and near, springing with green. Nobody passed.
‘Maybe you should kick me out now.’
‘David, I’m not kicking you out. Make up your own mind when to leave.’ She stretched her hands up over her head and yawned, and David saw how broad and full her chest and belly had become. ‘Shall I get you that drink?’ she asked.
‘I’ll get it, Madeleine. And I’ll get one for you.’
He walked quickly along the hall to her bright little kitchen with its stainless-steel counters and its glass doors opening onto the paved patch of garden. In the refrigerator, he noticed yogurt, tofu, bulging roots with earth on them, plastic bottles of fruit smoothies. Once, he thought, the refrigerator had contained hardly any food at all, plenty of champagne, boxes of chocolates that he used to give her, caviar.
He opened a bottle of Vichy water, took a swig and put it back into the bottle holder on the door, then he brought Madeleine a smoothie.
‘Would you like one of these?’ he said, handing it to her.
She smiled gratefully.
‘I’m leaving now, Madeleine. Before I hurt you again by mistake.’
He saw something wash through her eyes as she looked up at him and nodded. Resignation, maybe? He wasn’t sure.
‘I’ll let you out.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘why don’t you call?’
David wandered aimlessly for a long time before he found a cab. He kept on saying to himself, I need to think. But he couldn’t think. Thinking for David had an outcome. When he said to himself, I need to think, what he really meant was, I need to solve this problem. But he couldn’t solve it. There was no solution.
It felt as though he went on walking those lonely suburban roads for days after he saw Madeleine. He was in a maze—hot, driven, desperate. Every train of thought was like a series of physical steps which led to the same dead end.
Taken to an extreme, he saw two entirely separate families in which he was meant to play the role of father. There was Hope and Gordon; and now there was an unborn someone. There were two entirely different mothers. One mother was probably incompetent; the other was his heart’s desire. I can’t do it to Gordo and Hopie. It’ll wreck their lives. And David knew for certain that this was true.
As he lay sleepless at night in his enormous empty house in Belgravia, as he went through the motions of work which interested him less and less and where he sensed that he was increasingly unimportant, he thought constantly about Madeleine. He felt he wouldn’t be able to leave her alone in the end. It was not only his unfinishable desire but also the feeling of what was right and what she deserved. His sense of justice urged him to commit himself to her publicly in the most old-fashioned way. At least once every hour he reached for his cell phone, then made himself put it down. If he called her, he had to be sure. Sure of what? His heart was committed, but every practical arrangement he could dream up fell apart in his mind before he even completed imagining it.
Elizabeth was an incomparable foe, an insurmountable obstacle. It was not a figure of speech, David thought, to say that she would rather die than let him have what he wanted. And Francine was around the house every day, cleaning what little there was to clean, walking Puck, and in every way reminding David of just what he was dealing with. She kept her hours as accurately as a nuclear clock, washed his dirty laundry almost before he had dirtied it, and closely monitored his comings and goings. Or at least that’s how it now felt to David.
Francine had overcome the shyness of that first night after Elizabeth and the children had gone, and she now asked in advance when and what he would require to eat on the days he was in London. She was increasingly comfortable in her charge of the house. Whereas once David had felt mildly concerned not to shock Francine or be rude to her, he now began to wonder whether Elizabeth had set Francine to spy on him. He knew that he would never have wondered such a thing if he hadn’t been entertaining thoughts of renewing his secret life. So far, he had nothing to hide from Francine; still, he sometimes found himself calculating how much it would cost to get Francine on his side. He felt inhibited by her correctness and by her custodial attentions.
Faced with the biggest decision of his life, David felt that he was losing his nerve. Time seemed to have slowed down; it was standing still all around him, waiting for him to act, daring him; yet his heart raced uncontrollably at the thought of whatever action he might take. He was afraid that whatever he did, it would be wrong. In fact, he knew that whatever he did, it would be wrong. Morally, there was no right move.
Eventually, he began to think he had to talk to someone. He couldn’t talk to Madeleine or to anyone at work, so he considered talking to Leon.
One morning as he was riding in a taxi to City Airport on his way to Paris for a lunch meeting, he thought to himself, Leon has coped with some extravagantly difficult love situations, and he has figured them out. The night we ate at the Oxo Tower, I could feel how much he’d suffered. Leon understands illicit. He understands illegal. For God’s sake, Leon couldn’t even reveal himself to the person he loved, his best friend—me. That must have been a fucking nightmare. Worse than adultery. And David had a shiver of insight into the cliché phrase, ‘The love that dares not speak its name’.
Then he thought, But it isn’t the same as the situation I’m in. For one thing, I’ve done this to myself somehow. It’s my own fault. At least, that’s what people would say. Leon might resent it if I came to him with this mess. Maybe he’ll find me more lacking than ever and side with Elizabeth.
His thoughts circled and toiled. David didn’t know how to settle anything anymore. He was stuck.
Do I trust Leon? he wondered. He thought about the way, after their squash game, Leon had let slip that he had been in touch with Elizabeth last winter. He had concealed this fact from David, and David was pretty certain that Leon had intended to go on concealing it. When Leon had suddenly referred to Elizabeth’s illness, David thought, it took them both by surprise and ruined an otherwise beautiful morning. They hadn’t spoken to each other since.
Could Leon, like Francine, be a spy? Now that I think of it, why did Leon call me on the very night that Elizabeth left town to take the children to Virginia? How could that be a coincidence? Did Elizabeth ask him to do that? Did she set Leon on me to keep me occupied during the summer months and make sure I came back home to Virginia like a faithful husband?
David thought, It can’t be possible. I just can’t believe that Elizabeth is more important to Leon than I am.
But then he also thought, There is a considerable issue of trust with Leon. Whose friend is he? Why did Leon never tell me he was gay when Elizabeth seems to have known for years? What’s that all about? And why didn’t Elizabeth tell me that Leon’s gay, for that matter? Or did she think I already knew?
Then David began to make the same calculation about Leon as he had already been making about Francine. If Leon is some sort of spy, how much would it cost to get Leon on my side? What would it take to turn him? At this point David laughed out loud.
I know exactly what it would take to turn Leon, he thought, and I’m not doing it. What a melodrama that would be. Elizabeth would freak out completely if she thought that I had gone to bed with Leon.
The taxi was crossing Tower Bridge; David had the windows open in the back. He looked out at the river and thought about riding behind Leon on the motorcycle. He laughed again.
Leon is the one friend I have who would see how funny that is—me seducing him to turn him against my wife. I like Leon far too much to play games with him. My basic relationship with Leon is one of total trust. Why am I doubting that? I still trust Leon, despite what happened at Queen’s.
On the little airplane over to Paris, his ears shifting and popping with pressure as they climbed, David remembered a night at Princeton maybe just before Christmas during their Freshman year, when he and Leon had both played two whole periods against Yale and Leon had scored two goals, one with David assisting. Afterwards, they had gotten drunk on beer in the pub on campus and then they had gone outside and sat on the lawn in the cold and smoked a joint.
The grass was frozen and felt like so many points of ice breaking under their asses and legs as they rolled around trying to keep warm. They were exhilarated, exhausted from the game, a little bigheaded with their achievements. But they also felt excluded and put down. They couldn’t hang around with the other Varsity players because the others were upper classmen and had gone to parties at the eating clubs. Junior Varsity players didn’t interest David and Leon; the pair were already too arrogant to consort with their own classmates. So they had only each other to show off to.
There they were in the pitch-dark winter night, in their jeans and sweatshirts, Leon with a ruined, dark-red down parka, stained with grease and time and half the down beaten out by wear, David with a navy-blue overcoat from Brooks Brothers that marked him out as a Manhattan debutante’s date. As their spindly joint got smaller and glowed hotter, they started to laugh.
They laughed and rolled around, getting colder and colder, until David said, ‘Let’s go swimming.’
They were both too drunk and too high to see that this was anything but normal at midnight in December. It would be warm and delightful in the pool. It was an irresistible plan.
They walked down to Dillon Gym where they easily found a tall, mullioned window left open, warm air easing out of it like smoke; it looked to them as attractive as a palm tree moving in a desert island breeze.
In they went over the sill, and David could still recall that as the adrenalin had pumped with their trespassing, he hadn’t felt at all drunk or high anymore; his head had cleared.
They had gone in through part of the boiler plant and they were afraid to open doors. They crept around seemingly forever, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in the shine from the security fixtures outside the windows. Eventually they found the pool, a vast, flat exhalation of blue light, dripping and echoing in the hollow cave of the brick basement.
David stripped off and threw himself in with a shout. It felt colder than he had expected, shocking, harsh with chlorine. Then he had climbed out of the pool and scaled the high dive, calling out to Leon, ‘Get in! It’ll warm you up! It feels great!’
From way up on the high diving platform, he could see Leon slowly take off all his clothes and walk reluctantly to the edge of the pool.
‘Get in!’ David had called again.
Leon threw himself gracelessly at the water. It wasn’t a dive; it wasn’t a jump. It was an appalling bellyflop. Up on the high dive, David had watched with horror. Oh my God, he thought. Leon’s going to drown! He must be really drunk. And David had watched Leon flailing away in the pool, his arms whacking the water rhythmlessly, his bent legs flapping without strength and without purpose.
But Leon wasn’t actually sinking. He was sort of swimming, sort of dog-paddling, his gasping mouth held up and lolling grotesquely from side to side as he struggled along, eyes squinched shut.
Leon doesn’t know how to swim! David had been bowled over when it occurred to him.
Then he had seen a light moving, the weak beam of a flashlight at the bottom of one of the tall windows. He had dived toward Leon, surfaced, grabbed Leon’s arm and pulled him to the side of the pool.
‘The proctors are coming. I saw a flashlight!’ He had panted it out desperately, water streaming off his face and spitting through the air. ‘We’re making too much noise.’
Then he ducked under, put his shoulder under Leon’s ass and hoisted him up onto the pool deck in a splurge of water. Leon crashed and scraped on the slimy small tiles, cursing, and David pulled himself out next to him, laughing. They scrambled and slid on the slick floor, snatching up their damp clothes, shivering.
David pulled Leon down behind a huge, gray, wheeled canvas bin full of swimming team equipment—flutter boards, lane ropes, lifesaving rings. It smelled of mildew and chemicals. Here they crouched, shrugging on their clothes, dripping, teeth chattering. Then they ran, bent over, back to the boiler room with their shoes in their hands, and climbed out the window.
As they hopped on the pavement outside, trying to shove their feet into their shoes without stopping to untie the laces, a light slid over them from inside the window.
‘You gentlemen weren’t in here, were you? You wouldn’t ever come in here at night in this pool, would you? You know how dangerous that could be, eh? You could get in a helluva lot of trouble for that, you know.’ The voice was big, booming, faintly southern.
David couldn’t see a face, only the high mullioned window and the beam trained straight on their faces. He sensed indulgence in the voice, indulgence toward gentlemen who might have forgotten themselves and wouldn’t do it again.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘we would never come in there. Not at night, sir.’
David and Leon had both stopped hopping; they were standing on the icy pavement in their bare feet, holding their shoes, their wet hair freezing at crazy punk angles.
‘You boys better get someplace where you belong at this time of night. And maybe you better remember that I know just what you both look like.’
‘Yes, sir!’ they both said, and practically saluted. Then they ran all the way back to Holder Courtyard.
In his room, David said, ‘Leon, you didn’t go to Hotchkiss, did you?’
‘I did.’
‘It’s hard to believe, man. And some of the other stuff about, I don’t know, how you spent your time growing up, summers and stuff. I’ve never met a boy who couldn’t swim.’
‘I can swim. Maybe I never had any lessons, but I passed the swimming test, didn’t I?’
David didn’t say anything. He hadn’t been there when Leon took the swimming test. He hadn’t thought about it. He was weighing up the fact that Hotchkiss doesn’t play against St Paul’s because it’s too far away. He couldn’t have run into Leon at a hockey game.
Then eventually Leon said, ‘I did a year at Hotchkiss, post-grad.’
‘So why did you make yourself out to be such a preppy?’
There was another silence. Then Leon said, ‘It seemed to fit. With what—everyone else at this fucking school was saying.’
‘You don’t have to be like the other people here, Leon. Why waste your fucking time? I like you. You don’t have to lie. Just be yourself.’ Then he pushed Leon hard, playfully, so that Leon fell against a chair, saved himself. ‘It was totally unconvincing anyway,’ David went on. ‘What makes you think you can hide your real self from people anyway? From your friends?’
Leon had laughed self-consciously; David had laughed, too. They had laughed for a long time, still a little high, a little dazed from their adventure, overexcited. David had never told anyone. The real details of Leon’s background had pretty much emerged by the time they graduated. And they had been friends, David thought, ever since that night.
Though of course, now, it all had a different meaning to David. There had been a whole layer of truth beneath the truths of that night, a huge confidence that Leon had not shared. But that was more than twenty-five years ago; the whole world had changed and changed again since then, David thought.
So what am I dealing with in this friend? David thought, as he left the airplane in Paris. Is Leon out in the open now that he’s out? Do I know Leon?