To Paradise

Yet, despite their mutual attraction, they delayed actually having sex for weeks, because they both wanted to avoid the conversation they would first need to have, the conversation that was written on the faces of so many people they knew.

Finally, he had brought it up himself. Listen, he’d said, I don’t have it, and he had watched Charles’s face sag.

“Thank god,” he had said. He had waited for Charles to say that he didn’t have it, either, but he didn’t. “Nobody knows,” he said. “But you should. But aside from Olivier—my ex—no one else does: Just my doctor, him, me, and now you. Oh, and Adams, of course. But no one at work. They can’t.”

He had been momentarily speechless, but Charles had spoken into his silence. “I’m very healthy,” he said. “I have the drugs, I tolerate them well.” He paused. “No one has to know.”

He had been surprised, and then surprised at his surprise. He had made out with and even dated men with the illness, but Charles seemed the antithesis of the disease, a person in whom it would dare not reside. He knew that was silly, but it was also how he felt. After they became a couple, Charles’s friends would ask him—half teasing, half serious—what on earth he had seen in their old, old friend (“Fuck you,” Charles would say, grinning), and David would say that it was Charles’s confidence (“Note that he didn’t say your looks, Charlie,” Peter would say). And while that was true, it wasn’t only what attracted him, or rather not just; it was Charles’s ability to project a certain indestructibility, his radical conviction that anything was solvable, that anything could be fixed as long as you had the right money and connections and mind. No less than death would have to yield to Charles, or so it seemed. It was a quality he would have for the rest of his life, and the thing David would miss the most about him when he was gone.

And it was that same quality that allowed David to forget—not always, but for periods of time—that Charles was infected at all. He saw him take his medication, he knew that he saw his doctor at lunchtime on the first Monday of every month, but for hours, days, weeks, he was able to pretend that Charles’s life, and his life with him, would go on and on, a roll of parchment unscrolling down a long grassy path. He was able to tease Charles about how much time he spent in front of the mirror, the way he patted creams on his face before they went to bed, flexing his mouth into different grimaces, the way he would examine his reflection after getting out of the shower, holding his towel in place around his waist with one hand as he twisted his neck to examine his back, the way he would bare his teeth, tapping at his gums with his fingernail. Charles’s self-scrutiny was the result of middle-aged vanity and insecurity, yes, the kind that was exacerbated by David’s presence, by his youth, but it was also, David knew—knew, but tried to ignore—an expression of Charles’s fear: Was he losing weight? Were his fingernails discoloring? Were his cheeks hollowing? Had he sprouted a lesion? When would the illness write itself on his body? When would the drugs that had so far kept the illness away do the same? When would he become a citizen in the land of the sick? Pretending was foolish, and yet they both did it, except when it was perilous to do so; Charles pretended and David let him. Or was it that David pretended and Charles let him? Either way, the outcome was the same: They rarely discussed the disease; they never even said its name.

But though Charles refused to claim the disease for himself, he never denied it in his friends. Percival, Timothy, Teddy, Norris: Charles gave them money, he arranged appointments with his doctor, he hired cooks and housekeepers and nurses who would dare, would deign, to help them. He had even moved Teddy, who had died shortly before David had begun seeing Charles, into the study next to his bedroom, and it was there, surrounded by Charles’s collection of botanical prints, that Teddy had spent his final months. When Teddy had died, it had been Charles, along with Teddy’s other friends, who had found a sympathetic priest, who had arranged the wake, who had divided Teddy’s ashes among them. The next day, he had gone to work. Work was one realm, and outside of work was another, and he seemed to accept that the two would never overlap, that his friend’s death would never be an adequate excuse for coming in late or for not coming in at all. His grief, like his love, was something he would never expect anyone at Larsson, Wesley to understand or share. He was exhausted, David would later understand, but he never complained about it, because exhaustion was a privilege of the living.