To Paradise

By then he had been living for two years on the Big Island. Back he had gone to the house on O‘ahu Avenue, where he had found his grandmother in the sunroom, sitting in her cane-backed chair, gripping the ends of its arms with her long, strong fingers. He had spoken, and she was silent, and at the end, she had finally looked at him, once, before turning away again. “You’re a disappointment,” she said. “You and your father, both. After all I did for you, Kawika. After all that I did.”

My name’s not Kawika anymore, he said. It’s David. And then he had turned and fled before his grandmother could say anything else: You don’t deserve to be called Kawika. You don’t deserve that name.

Months later, he would think of this conversation and cry, because there had been a time—years—when he was his grandmother’s pride, when she would have him sit next to her on the love seat, pressed against her side. “I’m not afraid of death,” she’d say, “and do you know why, Kawika?”

No, he’d say.

“Because I know I’ll live on in you. My purpose—my life—will live on in you, my pride and joy. My story, and our history, lives in you.”

But it hadn’t, or at least not in the way she’d intended. He had failed her in so many ways. He had left her, he had rejected his home, his faith, his name. He was living in New York with a man, with a white man. He never spoke of his family, or his ancestors. He never chanted the songs he had been taught to chant, he never danced the stories he had been taught to dance, he never recited the history he had been taught to revere. She had assumed that she would be preserved in him—and not just her but his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. He had always told himself that he had chosen to betray her because she hadn’t loved his father well enough, but lately, he had been wondering whether his betrayal was deliberate or whether it was attributable to something deficient within him, some fundamental coldness. He knew how happy Charles would be if, after one of their conversations, David would promise Charles that he would be Charles’s legacy, that Charles would always live on in him. He knew how moved Charles would be if he did. And yet he never could. Not because it wasn’t true—he would love Charles, he would tell all his future lovers, his future husband, his future son, his future colleagues and friends, about Charles for decades after his death: the lessons he had learned from him, the places they had visited together, the way he smelled, how brave and generous he had been, the way he had taught him to eat marrow, escargot, and artichokes, how sexy he had been, how they had met, how they had parted—but because he had had enough of being someone’s legacy; he knew the fear of feeling inadequate, the burden of disappointing. He would never do it again; he would be free. What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

Now, standing beside Charles, he took a breath. He would have to speak to Peter at some point; he would have to tell him goodbye. He had thought for weeks about what he might say, but anything he deemed meaningful he knew Peter would find trite, and anything pleasant and uncontroversial seemed like a waste of time. He had something that Peter did not—life, the promise and expectation of years—and yet he remained intimidated by him. Do it now, he told himself. Talk to him now, while the room’s still empty and no one will be listening to you.

But when he finally sat down on Charles’s left, Charles and Peter didn’t pause in their low, murmured conversation, and so he instead leaned against Charles, who took his hand again and squeezed it, before turning to him and smiling. “I feel like I haven’t seen you all night,” he said.

The night is young; and so am I, he said, an old joke of theirs, and Charles put his hand on the back of David’s head and brought his face close. “Will you help me?” he asked.

He had been warned beforehand that Charles would need his assistance with Peter, and so he stood and helped Peter into his chair before pushing him out of the room and down the hallway to the left, past the slant-ceilinged closet, to the little bathroom wedged beneath the stairs. This bathroom, Charles had told him, was legendary: At earlier parties, in earlier years, when Charles was younger and wilder, it was to here that people would sneak away, in twos and threes in the midst of dinners and late-night gatherings, with everyone else sitting in the dining room or living room and making jokes about the disappeared, greeting them upon their return with hoots and laughter. Did you ever go in there with anyone? he had asked, and Charles had grinned. “Of course I did,” he said. “What do you think? I’m a red-blooded American male.” Adams called this bathroom the powder room, which he intended to be decorous, but which Charles’s friends had found hilarious.