The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “Aren’t they precious? Tom was feeling Oriental,” Richard drawled. He’d come to New York from Alabama thirty years ago, and had become more Southern with each passing year. His partner Tom Kim had taken a sushi-making class at the New School; he’d spent the afternoon chopping cucumbers into matchstick-size pieces, rolling dried seaweed on bamboo mats. Richard had shopped for the sake, the jasmine-scented tea, the coconut sorbet for dessert.

  Among Billy’s friends, Tom and Richard entertained most often. They lived on Park Avenue in a classic four/five owned by Richard’s old boyfriend Harry, who’d died back in the eighties. Harry had inherited the place from his stepmother, a friend of Brooke Astor; he’d sold it to Richard on his deathbed for the price of fifty dollars—a matter of convenience, simpler than making a will.

  The men arranged themselves around the antique table, also from Harry’s estate. (Welcome to Tom, Dick, and Harry’s, Richard sang when opening the door to guests.) Billy wondered how Tom could stand it, his life furnished with his predecessor’s treasures. It would make me crazy, he confided to Srikanth. To which Sri responded: Tom is an architect. He appreciates beautiful things.

  Of the four couples, three lived on the Upper East Side. The fourth, Oscar and Eddie, had a loft in the west thirties, a cavernous space that doubled as Oscar’s photography studio. The composition of the group had changed over the years, as the men coupled and uncoupled. Before Eddie, Oscar had lived with a cartoonist named Raj, known to Srikanth by some mysterious Dosco connection. It was Raj who’d brought Sri and Billy into the group. Raj had since moved to San Francisco, but Sri and Billy remained regulars at the dinner parties. To Billy these men were closer than family. They were his dearest friends.

  “That’s all you’re eating?” Nathan asked, eyeing Billy’s plate of sushi. “Didn’t you run fifty miles today?”

  “Nope,” Billy said. “I don’t start training for Boston until January. I’ve been sleeping late and eating like a pig.” He’d finished the New York Marathon in three hours and two minutes, a personal best. Except for easy jogs through Battery Park at lunchtime, he hadn’t run since the race.

  Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “Do I believe you?”

  Billy grinned. He knew that Nathan and Jeremy considered his training schedule compulsive. Don’t take it personally, Sri would tell him later. They’re just practicing their profession.

  “I’m fine, Nathan,” said Billy. “Hey, take it easy on that coconut. Full of saturated fat.” When Sri chastised him later, he would protest: I was only practicing mine.

  “This is so civilized,” Eddie said, sipping his tea. “God, I wish we had a dining room.”

  Billy glanced across the table at Sri, who wore a sly smile. They would laugh about it later, how their friends talked of nothing but apartments. For a long time Billy had found these conversations fascinating, the myriad ways people—gay people—lived in the city. Tonight, though, the conversation depressed him: rent control, condo fees, the impossibility of finding an honest contractor. The dialogue unchanging, year after year. His friends were not vacuous people. They were well read and well traveled; they did interesting work. Richard was a literary agent, Nathan and Jeremy psychotherapists, Eddie a classics professor at Hunter. Yet when the group convened, they spoke mainly of real estate, as though the rooms they lived in mattered as much as—perhaps more than—what transpired inside them.

  It was Srikanth who’d opened this world to Billy, with his vast network of friends and acquaintances and, Billy suspected, past lovers. He didn’t ask whether this was true, and Sri never volunteered the information; such revelations didn’t suit his oblique style. As Sri’s boyfriend, Billy was invited to gay brunches and housewarmings, seders and Easter buffets. He saw the insides of gay brownstones, medicine chests with his-and-his razors, the elegant bedrooms where men slept side by side. He was touched, profoundly, by the everydayness, the intimate banality of these shared lives. At the same time he sensed unspoken reproach. Of all their friends, he and Sri were the only couple who did not cohabit. Though he spent every night at Billy’s, Sri had kept his apartment on Riverside Drive. A matter of convenience, Billy told anyone who asked. To which Sri, the presumptive beneficiary of this convenience—Sri who each morning schlepped ninety-eight blocks across town to Columbia, who spent twenty grand a year renting an apartment he never used—simply smiled.

  That smile was an invitation to discussion, one Billy chose to decline. There were certain conversations he didn’t wish to have. These included, but were not limited to, religion, past sexual partners, and the price of anything. (He’d been raised to consider such discussions crude.) And, of course, his family. Above all, he disliked talking about the future. He had only just gotten comfortable in the present.

  “Billy?” Tom was speaking, smiling quizzically, and Billy realized he’d been asked a question.

  “Tom invited us for Christmas Eve,” Sri murmured.

  “Oh. Sorry.” Billy colored. “That sounds great, but I’ll be at my mother’s in Boston.”

  A sudden silence.

  “Well, I’m free,” said Srikanth. “I’d love to come.”

  Glances were exchanged around the table, or maybe they weren’t; Billy was aware of his tendency toward paranoia. He knew that he and Sri, their separate holidays and apartments, were a topic of much speculation; that his friends considered him closeted, a term he found silly, antiquated, and, in this case, wholly inaccurate. In the past week, he and Sri had attended a wedding and two holiday parties; to their friends and colleagues they were a very public couple. When it came to family, Billy simply opted for privacy. That he’d never met Sri’s parents—his mother was dead, his father aged and senile and in a nursing home in London—provided additional justification: the relationship was perfectly symmetrical. Billy suspected that many couples, given the choice, would prefer a life without in-laws. In this way he and Sri were luckier than most.

  He had developed, over the years, a way of managing his family, a protocol he thought of, privately, as the System. He phoned his mother twice a week. For Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Mother’s Day he traveled to Concord; each October Paulette spent a weekend with him in New York. The System prevented surprises, which Billy detested; it kept Paulette’s expectations—and his own guilt—in check. The rest of his family demanded less attention. He spoke with Gwen every other weekend; Scott, approximately never. For years his brother had been unreachable, with California addresses that changed every few months, phone numbers disconnected faster than Billy could write them down. Thus his System had evolved without taking Scott into account.

  For most of Billy’s life, his father had required no management whatsoever; Frank had spent Billy’s childhood and adolescence sequestered in the lab. But lately the old man had made friendly overtures—phone calls, invitations to lunch—which Billy found distressing. Unlike Paulette, Frank didn’t shrink from asking personal questions. More conversations Billy didn’t wish to have.

  Of his family, only Gwen knew about Srikanth. Billy had not told her; she’d found out due to circumstances beyond his control. Two years ago, driving back to New York from a Pearse class reunion, he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and totaled his car on I-95, a week before the Boston Marathon (this fact was more devastating than his broken ribs). A card in his wallet had listed Gwen’s name and phone number; she’d flown in immediately from Pittsburgh to make sure he was okay. He’d been asleep, zonked on painkillers, when she rushed to his hospital room and found Sri at his bedside. Billy wondered, often, what the two had said to each other. He’d never worked up the nerve to ask.

  Now, sitting around the dinner table with his friends, he sensed, and resented, the unspoken censure. He was a failure as a gay man, a traitor to the tribe. He could redeem himself only by surrendering his dignity in grand fashion, confiding the most intimate details of his life to all who knew him, whether or not they cared. A vulgar confessional, cheesy and narcissistic; such a display, Billy felt, would
be demeaning to all concerned. Self-revelation was not the Drew way. It was a lesson he’d absorbed from his maiden aunt Martine, about whom he’d always harbored suspicions. Martine shared a house in Taos with two other aspiring Georgia O’Keefes, yet felt no need to explain herself. Billy had never met anyone more self-involved than his father and Scott, more uptight than his mother and Gwen. He saw no reason to burden them with information they certainly didn’t want to hear.

  That summer, at a birthday party, he’d been tag-teamed by Nathan and Jeremy, the two psychotherapists, who’d suggested a few sessions of family counseling for Billy and his parents. His first response was laughter—the mental image tickled him. A moment later he was furious. Nathan had chalked this up to arrogance—Typical physician! You refuse to think beyond the medical model. But Billy’s objections ran deeper. Heterosexuals were allowed their privacy: if he’d had a girlfriend, no one would care whether he introduced her to his parents. But because Billy was gay, Nathan’s arguments had a moralistic tone, as though simple discretion were a betrayal of homosexuals everywhere. Billy found this idea ludicrous. Thousands of gay men have come out to their families, he told Nathan, and it hasn’t done a thing for me.

  I see, Nathan said dryly. So it’s every fag for himself.

  Exactly, Billy said. He’d spent his childhood in a state of unease, forced to play on sports teams; the experience had taught him that he wasn’t a joiner. He had registered to vote as an Independent (another fact his friends found shocking). He didn’t feel, or want to feel, solidarity with anyone.

  GWEN PHONED the week before Christmas—a Sunday morning at eleven thirty, her usual time to call. They’d settled into this habit long ago, before Billy’s car accident had outed him to his sister. He’d been unattached then, his social life more complicated, and late morning was a discreet hour: it allowed them both to avoid asking, or answering, indelicate questions about what each had done, or not done, the night before.

  Billy imagined Gwen in her sunny kitchen, the windows so crowded with plants that from the street, the apartment resembled a greenhouse. The one time he’d visited her—four years ago? five?—he’d found all those plants a little creepy, their broad leaves pressed against the glass like splayed hands, pleading for rescue. He could picture her now, drinking her tea in striped pajamas that looked, and perhaps were, made for a little boy. Billy himself lay sprawled on the sofa, the Sunday Times spread out before him, the remains of breakfast—flaky croissants from a new bakery Srikanth had discovered—littering the coffee table.

  “I’m flying out Wednesday,” Gwen explained. “Dad’s meeting me at the airport.”

  “I thought you were renting a car.” Billy moved to clear the table—he hated a mess—but Sri beat him to it. He brushed the crumbs onto a tray and carried the jam-sticky plates to the kitchen.

  “I am,” Gwen said. “But there’s all that road construction in Boston. The Big Dig.”

  “It’s not finished?”

  “Next year, I guess. Anyway, Dad wants me to follow him back to Cambridge. He’s afraid I’ll get lost again.” The year before, mystified by endless detours, Gwen had spent two hours circling the city. Finally, in desperation, she’d called Frank from a rest area on the Mass Pike. When Billy heard of her misadventure, he’d been livid. It was just like their father to let Gwen wander a labyrinthine city—reduced now to a massive construction site—at rush hour, among the most aggressive drivers in the world. In Billy’s view, New York cabbies were courtly by comparison.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Billy said grudgingly. For once the old man was thinking of someone besides himself.

  “Hey, why don’t you meet me there?” Gwen said this with elaborate casualness, as though the idea had just occurred to her. More likely she’d pondered it for weeks. “Dad’s dying to see you.”

  “I doubt that,” he said sourly, though he knew she was right. Their father had always favored him. It was one of many failings Billy held against him.

  “Oh, come on. Just for a day. A day and a night. Then we can drive to Mom’s.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I already told him you were coming,” said Gwen.

  “You did what?”

  Sri returned from the kitchen, fished the crossword from the pile of newspaper. Billy made room for him on the couch.

  “Billy, he wants to see you. And he’s lonely. He hasn’t been himself since Deena left.”

  “I can’t believe you said I was coming.”

  “Why are you being so stubborn?” said Gwen, the most stubborn creature on earth.

  “I’m not stubborn.”

  “Billy.” Her voice was very small; she had gone into wheedling mode. “Please?”

  “Seriously, I can’t. I’m on call Wednesday.”

  Sri looked up from his puzzle, his lips twisted in amusement.

  “Oh,” said Gwen. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I forgot.”

  Sri rolled his eyes.

  Gwen sighed. “Then I guess I’ll see you at Mom’s. Can you come early, at least? Don’t leave me alone with her.” Gwen paused. “And tell Srikanth I said hello.”

  “Will do,” said Billy, and hung up the phone.

  “You are the worst liar in the world.” Sri scratched idly at the crossword with a ballpoint pen. In ten minutes the boxes would be filled.

  “Me? You have no idea what you’re writing there. They’re just random letters. You’re lucky I can’t read your Hindi handwriting.”

  “I’m just trying to impress you,” said Sri.

  “I’m already impressed.”

  Sri smiled. He was stunningly handsome when he smiled; knowing this, he deployed the smile sparingly. It was as if he’d spent his life surrounded by mirrors, so accurately did he gauge the effects of his good looks.

  “What’s happening Wednesday?” he asked.

  “Gwen’s going to Boston. To see my dad.”

  “Ah.” Sri waited for Billy to continue. Then, when he didn’t: “You don’t want to go.”

  “Jesus, why would I? One day at my mother’s is punishment enough,” said Billy. “You know all this.”

  “I do?” I’m listening, his tone said—but it was an invitation, not a demand. Billy loved this about Sri: his coolness, his subtlety. There were no scenes with him, none of the high opera Tom and Richard sometimes engaged in, or the confusing emotional tango Billy had stumbled through, years ago, with Lauren McGregor.

  “I saw him a few years ago,” Billy said. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it.”

  This was a gross understatement. That dinner in Concord—the first time in a decade his parents had suffered each other’s company—had been excruciating for all concerned. All but Billy’s brother, Scott, whose return to New England had occasioned the debacle. When Scott arrived with his noisy tribe, he was already bleary-eyed; he disappeared periodically into the guest room to fire up a joint. While the rest of the family bled, Scott had wandered through the day in a fog. (Typical! Years ago Billy had given his brother a nickname: Scott Free.) Their father, for some unknowable reason—sadism? childish spite?—had brought his then-girlfriend Deena. Paulette, unprepared for this bombshell, was icily polite; Deena made the best of a bad situation by drinking an entire bottle of Sancerre before dinner. She’d spent the evening sleeping it off in the guest room while Frank and Paulette glared at each other across the table.

  “You never mentioned it,” said Sri.

  “It was before I met you,” Billy lied.

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I guess so. I haven’t noticed. I have nothing to say to him.”

  “Maybe he has something to say to you.”

  Undoubtedly this was true. Given half a chance, Frank would talk Billy into a coma, a hazard of thirty years in the classroom: a compulsion to lecture, an unnatural ease in one-sided conversations. Utter obliviousness to the listener’s boredom, irritation, or outright rage.

  “He only talks abo
ut his research,” said Billy.

  “Which is.”

  “Oncodevelopmental biology.”

  Sri raised his eyebrows. “This is a remarkable fact to keep quiet for so long.”

  Billy shrugged, rose to refill their mugs.

  “It’s fascinating, how gene-expression patterns that are normal in the embryo drive malignancy in the adult. Similar, really, to the dys-regulated genes in heart disease. Too much Mef-two and whammo!” Sri broke off. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’d love to know more about his research. We would have a great deal to talk about.”

  That’s why, Billy thought.

  HE’D MET Sri at a conference in Toronto—nearly four years ago, before Billy joined his group practice, when life was simpler and they both had time to attend such things. Billy had registered at the last minute; he’d planned to spend that Monday running the Boston Marathon, but had been sidelined by an injury, a painful groin pull. He and Sri would laugh about this later, how they owed their meeting to Billy’s groin.

  Sri was an MD fellow at Columbia, giving a talk on myocardial transcription factors, a hot topic in the early nineties. Listening to him speak—the crisp British inflection, the public school accent—Billy had felt something move inside him. Sri’s beauty would have been striking anywhere; but in a conference room full of decrepit old men, it seemed, truly, obscene.

  Is he? Billy wondered.

  At the time—and even still—he had little instinct for such things.

  The paper was received with enthusiasm; the team leader, a venerable professor at Columbia, was mobbed with questions. Sri stood off to the side, alone; Billy had a clear shot. How do I do this? he wondered. He had never approached a man before. The others—what few there’d been—had always come to him.

  Sri’s eyes, up close, were the color of coffee. His mouth looked firm and juicy, like a ripe plum. Billy’s question, involving MyoD—the mother of all muscle-gene regulators—could have been answered in two minutes; but Billy surprised himself by suggesting a drink at the hotel bar.