To Paradise

But what point was the truth? When he had been at his third-rate college, he had once told his boyfriend at the time—a lacrosse player who, outside of his bedroom, either ignored David or pretended he didn’t exist—the abbreviated story of his family, and the boy had scoffed. “Very funny, man,” he’d said. “And I’m descended from the queen of England. Right.” He had insisted, and finally his boyfriend had rolled over onto his side, away from him, bored by David’s stories. After that, he had learned not to say anything, because it seemed easier and better to lie than it was to be disbelieved. His family was a remote fact, but even so, he didn’t want to hear them mocked; he didn’t want to be reminded how the source of his grandmother’s pride was for most people a subject of ridicule. He didn’t want to think about his poor lost father.

So: We’re from the penniless side of the family, he said instead, and Charles had laughed, relieved.

“It happens to the best of us,” he said.

In the taxi downtown, they had been quiet, and Charles, staring straight ahead, had placed his hand on David’s knee, and David had taken it and moved it atop his groin, and had seen, in shadows, Charles’s profile change as he smiled. They had parted chastely that night—Charles dropping him off on Second Avenue, because he had been too embarrassed for Charles to see the building where he actually lived: Charles’s house was only a mile west from him, but it might as well have been another country altogether—but over the following weeks they met again and again, and six months after their first date, he had moved into Charles’s house on Washington Square.

He felt he had grown simultaneously older and younger over the months he and Charles had been together. Isolated from his own friends, he spent more time with Charles’s, sitting at dinners at which Charles’s polite friends tried to include him in the conversation, and his not-so-polite ones made him the subject of conversation. Eventually, however, both groups would forget about him, their talk turning to more arcane points of the law or the stock market, and he would excuse himself and creep off to bed to wait for Charles. Sometimes they would go to Charles’s friends’ houses for dinner, and there he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for—until it was time to go home (early, thankfully).

But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat: all the things he had had to do for his father; all the things he wished his father would have done for him. He knew he should feel infantilized by how obviously unequal their life together was, and yet he didn’t—he liked it, he found it relaxing. It was a relief to be with someone so declarative; it was a relief not to think. Charles’s self-assuredness, which extended to every aspect of their lives, was reassuring. He gave orders to Adams or to the cook with the same brisk, warm authority that he used with David when they were in bed. He sometimes felt as if he were reliving his childhood, this time with Charles as his father, and that made him queasy, because Charles wasn’t his father; he was his lover. Yet the sensation persisted—here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier. Here was someone whose rhythms and patterns were explicable and dependable and, once learned, could be relied upon to be maintained. All along he had known that something had been absent from his life, but it wasn’t until he met Charles that he understood that that quality was logic—fantasy, in Charles’s life, was confined to bed, and even there it made sense in its own way.