To Paradise

His role tonight had been demoted to that of a supervisor. “You’re quality control,” Charles had said to him. “I need you there to make sure everything looks as it ought to.” But he knew this was a kindness on Charles’s part—his presence here, as in many things, was amorphous and ultimately impotent. What he thought, his opinions, would make little difference. Here, in Charles’s house, his suggestions were as meaningless as they were at work.

“Self-pity is an unattractive quality in a man,” he heard his grandmother say.

What about in a woman?

“Also unattractive, but understandable,” his grandmother would say. “A woman has much more to pity herself for.”

His real job tonight (as on every night), he knew, was to be attractive and presentable, and this, at least, he could do, so he stood and climbed the next flight of stairs, to his and Charles’s room. Until five years ago, when Charles had bought a small condominium in a building one block north, Adams had slept directly above, on the fourth story, in what was now another guest suite. David imagined him kneeling on the floor, still in his black suit, his ear pressed to the rug, listening to Charles and Olivier beneath him. He didn’t like this vision, in which Adams’s face was always turned away from him because he could never determine what his expression would be, and yet he kept seeing it.

The party tonight was for another of Charles’s ex-boyfriends, but this one from so long ago—boarding school—that David saw no threat and no need for jealousy. Peter was the first person Charles had ever slept with, when Peter was sixteen and Charles was fourteen, and they had been friends ever since, their relationship sometimes sliding into a sexual one for months or years, though not in the past decade.

But now Peter was dying. This was why the party was on a Friday, not Charles’s preferred Saturday—because the next day Peter had a ticket to Zurich, where he was going to meet an old Swiss classmate of his from college who was now a doctor, and who had agreed to give him an injection of barbiturates that would stop his heart.

It was difficult for David to comprehend how Charles truly felt about this. He was upset, of course—“I’m upset,” Charles said—but what did “upset” mean, really? Charles had never cried, or gotten angry, or gone blank, not as David had when his first friend had died, seven years ago, and as he had with all the rest since; when he told David about Peter’s decision, he had done so matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, and when David gasped and nearly started crying himself (despite the fact that he didn’t know Peter very well and didn’t much like him besides), it had been Charles who had had to comfort him. Charles had wanted to accompany Peter, but Peter had refused—it would be too difficult for him, he said. He would spend his final evening with Charles, but then, the next morning, he would board the plane with only the nurse he had hired for company.