To Paradise

For days, he did not leave: not his bed, not his room. He was tormented by thoughts of Andrew, and of his degradation, and if he was not thinking of one, he was thinking of the other. It seemed that if he stopped engaging with the world, then it too might stop engaging with him, and as days turned into weeks, he lay in his bed and tried to think of nothing, certainly not of himself within the world’s dizzying vastness, and finally, after many weeks, the world did indeed shrink to something manageable—his bed, his room, his grandfather’s undemanding daily and nightly visits. Finally, after nearly three months, something broke, as if he had been encased in a shell and someone—not him—had tapped it open, and he emerged feeble and pale and hardened, he thought, against Andrew and his own mortification. He swore, then, that he would never again let himself feel so passionately, never let himself be so full of adoration, so replete with happiness, a vow that he would extend not just to people but to art as well, so that when Grandfather sent him to Europe for a year under the guise of a Grand Tour (but really, they both knew, as a way to avoid Andrew, who was still living in the city, still with his beau, who was now his fiancé), he moved lightly among the frescoes and paintings that loomed down from every ceiling, from every walclass="underline" He looked up and at them and felt nothing.

When he returned home to Washington Square fourteen months later, he was cooler, more distant, but also more alone. His friends, those quiet boys he had neglected and then discarded once he had begun seeing Andrew, had found their own lives—he rarely saw them. John and Eden too seemed to have become more capable than ever before: John was soon to be married; Eden was in college. Something had been gained, a sense of remoteness, a greater strength, but something had also been lost: He tired quickly, he craved solitude, and his first month at Bingham Brothers—where he began as a clerk, as his father and grandfather had both done upon their entry into the company—was so taxing as to be almost debilitating, especially when compared with John, who was training alongside him and yet whose numerical dexterity and general ambition distinguished him from the beginning. It was Grandfather who suggested that David might have contracted an illness, something unknown and depleting, on the Continent, and might do with a few weeks’ rest, but they both knew that this was a fiction, and that he was giving David a way to excuse himself without having to actually admit failure. Weary, David accepted, and then those weeks became months, and then years, and he never returned to the bank.

He did his best to forget the wildness of emotion, the passion, that he had felt around Andrew, but sometimes he was gripped with the memory of that time, and its humiliation, and he would retreat once more to his room and take to his bed. These episodes, what he and his grandfather would come to call his confinements—and what his grandfather characterized, delicately, to Adams and his siblings as his “nervous trouble”—would usually be preceded or succeeded by a period of mania, frenzied days he would spend feverishly shopping, or painting, or walking, or at the bordello: all things he did in his normal life, but intensified and excessively writ. They were, he knew, ways for him to escape himself, and yet he had not invented these methods; they had been invented for him, and he was at their mercy, they made his body move either too quickly or not at all. Two years after his return from Europe, he had received a card from Andrew announcing the adoption of his and his husband’s first child, a girl, and he had written a congratulatory note back. But then, that night, he had begun to wonder: What was the purpose of Andrew’s note? Had it truly been sent intentionally, or was it an oversight? Was it a gesture of friendship, or was it meant to ridicule? He sent a longer letter to Andrew, inquiring about him and confessing how he missed him.