To Paradise

Not that he had anywhere else to be. His future was a vague, vaporous thing. He wasn’t alone in this; so many of his friends and classmates were like him, drifting from home to their jobs and then home again before going out at night to bars or clubs or other people’s apartments. They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive. He had one friend who, after his lover had died, had started gorging himself. Anything he had, he spent on food; David had gone out to dinner with Ezra once and had watched in horrified awe as he had eaten a bowl of wonton soup followed by a plate of wok-fried snow peas and water chestnuts followed by a dish of braised beef tongue followed by a whole Peking duck. He had eaten with a kind of steady, joyless determination, tracing his finger through the last streaks of sauce, stacking the empty plates atop one another as if they were completed paperwork. It had been repellent, but David had understood it as welclass="underline" Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food. Over the months, Ezra gained weight, at first slowly and then quickly, and now he was fat. But as long as he was fat, he wasn’t sick, and no one would ever think he was: His cheeks were hot and pink; his lips and fingertips were often slicked with grease—wherever he went, he left evidence of his existence. Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable.

But David’s distance from his own life made less sense to him. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t poor, and as long as he was with Charles, he never would be. And yet he was unable to imagine what he might be alive for. He had completed one year of law school before his finances had forced him to drop out and take the job as a paralegal at Larsson, Wesley three years ago, and Charles was always telling him he should reenroll. “Anywhere you want, the best place you can get in,” he’d say. (David had been attending a state school beforehand; he knew Charles would expect better from him.) “I’ll pay for all of it.” When David demurred, Charles would be puzzled. “Why?” he’d ask. “You did a year—you clearly wanted to do it before. And you have a good mind for it. So why not continue?” He couldn’t tell Charles that he hadn’t actually had a particular passion for the law, that he didn’t understand why he had applied for law school in the first place—except that it had seemed like something his father might have wanted for him, something that might have made his father proud. Going to law school fell into the vast category of being able to take care of himself, a virtue his father had always impressed upon him—a skill his father was never able to possess.