To Paradise

“I should hope so,” Charles said, still smiling, and he unlocked his office, and took the box, which he set on his desk while David waited in the doorway. “You know,” Charles said, after a pause, turning back to him, “I think you owe me a favor after this.”

Do I?, he finally managed to say.

“I think so,” Charles said, stepping close to him. “I saved you, didn’t I?” He smiled, again. “Why don’t you come have dinner with me sometime?”

Oh, he said. And then again: Oh. Okay. Yes.

“Good,” said Charles. “I’ll call you.”

Oh, he repeated. Right. Yes. Okay.

They were the only ones in the office, and yet they both spoke quietly, almost in whispers, and when David walked away, back to the paralegals’ area, his face was hot.

The dinner was arranged for the following Thursday, and on Charles’s instructions, he had left the office first, at seven-thirty, and had gone alone to the restaurant, which was dark and hushed, where he was seated in a booth and handed a large menu in a leather case. A few minutes past eight, Charles arrived, and David watched as he was greeted by the maître d’, who whispered something in his ear that made Charles smile and roll his eyes. After he sat, a martini was brought to him, unbidden. “He’ll have one, too,” Charles said to the waiter, nodding at David, and when he had been given his, Charles had raised his glass, ironically, and touched it to his. “To non-exploding pens,” he said.

To non-exploding pens, he’d echoed.

Later, he would look back on that night and realize it had been the first real date he had ever been on. Charles had ordered for both of them (a porterhouse, rare, with sides of spinach and rosemary-roasted potatoes) and had led the conversation. It soon became clear that he had certain ideas about David, which David hadn’t corrected. Besides, most of them weren’t wrong: He was poor. He hadn’t had a fancy education. He was naïve. He hadn’t been anywhere. And yet beneath those truths were a set of what Charles, in the courtroom, would have characterized as mitigating factors: He hadn’t always been poor. He had once had a fancy education. He wasn’t completely naïve. He had once lived somewhere neither Charles nor anyone he knew could ever go.

They were halfway through their steak when David realized that he hadn’t asked Charles anything about himself. “Oh, no, what is there to say? I’m afraid I’m very boring,” Charles said, in the careless way that only people who knew they weren’t boring at all could. “We’ll get to me. Tell me about your apartment,” and David, drunk on both gin and the unusual sensation of being treated as if he were a source of great fascination and wisdom, did: He told Charles about the mice and the window casements seamed with grime, and the sad drag queen whose favorite resting place was their stoop and whose favorite two a.m. ballad to bellow was “Waltzing Matilda,” and about his roommate, Eden, who was an artist, a painter, mostly, but whose day job was as a proofreader at a book publishing company. (He didn’t mention that Eden called him every day at the firm at three p.m. and that the two of them talked for an hour, David whispering into the phone and feigning coughing fits to disguise his laughter.)

“Where are you from?” Charles asked, after he had smiled or laughed at all of David’s stories.

Hawai‘i, he said, and then, before Charles could ask, O‘ahu. Honolulu.

Charles had been there, of course, everyone had, and for a while David spoke around the edges of his life: Yes, he still had family there. No, they weren’t close. No, his father was dead. No, he never knew his mother. No, no siblings, and his father had also been an only child. Yes, one grandparent—his paternal grandmother.

Charles tilted his head and studied him for a moment. “I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” he said, “but what are you? Are you—” He stopped, stymied.

Hawaiian, he said, staunchly, though it wasn’t the whole truth.

“But your last name—”

It’s a missionary name. American missionaries started arriving in the islands in significant numbers in the early nineteenth century; a lot of them intermarried with the Hawaiians.

“Bingham…Bingham,” Charles said ruminatively, and David knew what he would say next. “You know, there’s a dormitory at Yale called Bingham Hall. I lived in it freshman year. Is there any relation?” He grinned, his eyebrow lifted; he already assumed there wasn’t.

Yes—he’s an ancestor.

“Really,” Charles said, and leaned back in his seat, his smile fading. He was quiet, and David understood that, for the first time, he had surprised Charles, surprised and disconcerted him, and that Charles was wondering if his assessments of David had been correct after all. He had spent less than an hour with Charles, but he knew already that Charles did not like to be surprised, did not like having to recalibrate his opinions, the way he had decided to see things. Later, after he had moved in with Charles, he had looked back at that moment and had recognized that he could have redirected the course of their relationship; what if, instead of responding as he had, he had instead said something like: Oh, yes, I’m from one of the oldest families in Hawai‘i. I’m descended from royalty. Everyone there knows who we are. If things had gone differently, I would have been king. It would have been true.