by Anne Enright
‘The poet. That Irish poet.’
‘Yeats?’ said Arthur.
On which, to everyone’s amazement and delight, Dan opened his mouth and a ream of poetry fell out. Line after line – it was like a scroll unfurling along the tabletop, a carpet unrolled. And each of us, as we heard it, realised where we were, and who was with us. We saw our shadows shifting on the back wall, the office cleaner across the way in trembling fluorescent tinged with green, the dark city brown of the sky.
Dan finished, placed a hand to his chest and inclined his head. There was applause. Alex told him he had a voice like wild honey. And a face, said Massimo, like some portrait with a red hat, what was that one? In the Palazzo Pitti. Some cardinal, anyway, in a red hat.
Dan said, ‘Don’t fucking cardinal me. Whatever else you do.’ And we all laughed. And then we looked at him. That mixture of shyness and blurting arrogance: he was quite the thing, we thought. And we also thought about his freckled white skin, with the blue veins under it, and about his uncut Irish cock.
‘You are so wrong,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m thinking Dutch. Something direct and entirely austere. Like that wonderful sandy-haired boy in the Met.’
And in fact, Arthur walked up to the museum a couple of days later, going through the rooms until he stood in front of it again, a sixteenth-century boy in velvet black against a green background; oil on wood. It was the honesty of the wood that did it, because the full-lipped young man did not, himself, look especially truthful or sincere. The picture was full of integrity, the boy might be anything at all.
After the lamb they had figs poached in marsala with a mascarpone mousse. Alex took off his jacket to help with the plates, and he and Massimo moved with such synchronous ease, you knew they loved each other still.
Greg lit up a cigarette and contemplated Dan through half-closed eyes.
‘So. Ireland,’ he said. ‘Are you from, like, a farm?’
Dan refused the question with a smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Greg. He was flirting now.
‘Actually, yes,’ said Dan, relenting. ‘Yes. We have a farm.’
‘Billy grew up in Elk County, Pennsylvania but he’s not reciting Whitman. Are you, Billy?’
‘Why not?’ said Dan, looking to Billy. ‘Why not?!’
‘Just,’ said Billy.
‘He’s wonderful.’
‘Is he?’
‘I sing the body electric,’ said Dan, raising his preacher’s hands, and we looked at them; the square bones of his knuckles, the tiny tremble in his fingertips, held open that moment too long.
And we looked at Billy, who blushed in the candlelight.
‘What’s the next line, Billy?’ said Greg. ‘You see how dumbass the American education system can be? What’s the next line?’
But Billy was too busy falling in love to think about the next line so Alex quietly filled it in. ‘The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,’ as Massimo set down some glasses for port, and reached to the counter for the platter of cheese.
Later, Greg wondered, if he had not needled Billy then Billy would not have turned to Dan and to all that Dan offered him, there at the table: the guilt and the glory; the pomp and cruelty of his love. And he wondered also if it could have played out in any other way. They made such a handsome couple. It was meant, we all knew it. Dan and Billy, Billy and Dan. It had to be.
After cheese, and more cigarettes, and the offer of whiskey, tequila, more wine, Massimo went over to the window to throw down a key, and a whole bunch of people came up on their way out clubbing: Jerry from the Fawbush Gallery, that landscape gardener who did white plantings all over the Hamptons, Estella who was an outrageous queen and this guy in a Weimar-type leather thing – call it a corset – with a German accent no one believed for an instant and considerable quantities of cocaine. Jessie’s archrival Mandy was also in the mix, with her glossy trustafarian hair and mid-Atlantic drawl and, years later when Jessie was truly fat and Mandy still wonderfully slim, they met and remembered that evening which went on till dawn, and all the hard work they put in, years of it, helping, loving, mourning these men.
A few weeks after this dinner Greg was admitted to St Vincent’s for the first time. It was just a thing, he told Billy, they would blitz him with anti-fungals and let him go. Jessie brought him in a cab, with six pairs of ironed pyjamas and a cotton kimono with beautiful cross-hatchings of indigo blue. Greg had a problem with his mouth and tongue. He also had a haemorrhoid that obsessed him more than it deserved, though Jessie told him her father had a real bunch of grapes hanging out there for a while, and she went off to find ice. She also found a bag of doughnuts to fatten him up, then ate most of them herself, but she sat there for another hour and laughed at every small thing.
Arthur arrived with champagne and they pretended to drink it. He said when Max was first up here in the sevens, just two rooms down, the staff slid his food tray across the floor, and he had to change his own sheets. He said it was so much better now, thank you Dr Torres – how was he, by the way? And Greg said, ‘I think he’s just exhausted, he’s just working so hard.’
The drip went in. Billy did not come and, after a while, the visitors went home.
Three hours later, Greg started shaking. He was cold in places that were new to him, and sweat pooled at the base of his neck. A nurse came in to switch on a bedside fan and fold down his sheet. An ordinary white woman in her fifties, she looked at his terror and acknowledged it, eye to eye. Then she left.
Greg could not catch a breath. He pulled the air into him in tiny, shallow draughts, on and on, his body panicking until his mind snapped free and started to wander around the room – also around the thoughts that were in the room, and the memories that were hiding in the corners and under the bed. There was the occasional hallucination: a woman – who looked like his mother but was not his mother – sat in the chair sewing a long grey smock for him to wear when he was dead. Dr Torres, who might really be there, leaned over him and smiled. There was a panting cat draped across the top of his skull and he was terrified of its claws. This went on all night, until a tray startled him and he realised it was only supper time. The night was yet to come.
Two men died towards dawn: at least Greg was pretty sure that men died. He could hear praying in Spanish, then people weeping and helping each other away. In the morning, a man covered in Kaposi’s stood in his doorway and said, ‘I just need enough to do it. Don’t you think?’
The fever was less on this second day. Greg was able to swallow some Xanax, a big tub of which a tranny nurse called Celeste slapped down on his locker.
‘You want a cigarette, honey? You want some tea?’
All day, Greg drifted in and out of sleep, watching the sunlight cross the room, and the shadow following it. He smiled and thought about Billy and Dan, trying to imagine how they were together: he just couldn’t see it.
And this was strange, because no one else had any trouble seeing it. They were two beautiful young men up in the big city. One was pale and interesting, the other easy and tan, and Billy flung a friendly arm over Dan’s shoulder as they took the ferry over to Fire Island while, back in St Vincent’s, the Xanax kicked in.
It was a long, hot weekend.
On Monday morning, Greg woke to see Billy standing in his hospital room.
‘Hello.’
There are hours and days that change people, and they both had been changed. They were different people now. After a moment, Billy stepped up to kiss Greg briefly on the mouth. And this was such a nice gesture in that place of death, it was as though Greg’s fever had never happened and Fire Island was just a dream – though it was not a dream. Billy and Dan had taken several and various substances, they had danced till dawn: we all saw them, and we liked the way Dan kept his shirt on when everyone else stripped down; the two top buttons undone and his sternum gleaming in there, white as the inside of a seashell.
‘Where were you?’ said Greg.
�
�I got a house-share in the Pines,’ said Billy. ‘Didn’t I say?’
‘Gold dust,’ said Greg.
‘I know.’
When Billy came back in to the hospital the next day, Greg was sitting on the edge of the bed, very weak but determined to go home. Billy had to find his pants, and push each leg up over Greg’s knees. Then he leaned in for an awkward hug, to lift him up off the bed and slip them up the rest of the way.
‘Oh God,’ said Greg.
‘That’s it,’ Billy said.
‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’
‘Good luck with that bitch,’ said Billy. ‘Is this your shirt? Arm. Shush.’
Greg had started to moan. He moaned incontinently. He dribbled noise.
‘Hush, now.’
Billy got Greg’s shirt on and struggled with buttons and cuffs. He pulled his belt tight, attempted and abandoned the zipper, then he turned to sit beside Greg and for a moment they were both slumped on the edge of the bed.
‘Quiet down, will you? Come on.’
The legs he had just handled were the same legs Billy had once hauled up on either side of himself, while Greg’s dark and dreamy eyes looked up from the pillow. They were the same legs, except they were half the circumference. They were the same bones.
After he got Greg downstairs and into a cab and up the three flights to his walkup in the East Village, Billy didn’t have the energy to settle him in. He phoned Jessie and left a message on her answering service. Then he turned to Greg, who was collapsed in a chair with his coat still on.
‘I think it’s working,’ said Greg. ‘I can feel it lifting.’
He took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ said Billy, setting a hand on his back. Then he left.
Greg sat in the silence after the door had closed and realised it was true. His blood was singing; some weight was gone. So he did not care that Billy was off to see Irish Dan, that they would spend the night together, and the morning also. He did not mind that Dan would twist Billy’s love, somehow, and make him sad, because Greg had survived a course of amphotericin B, that bastard. He was still alive.
Dan did not shrink from Billy’s arm, thrown over his shoulder on the ferry, but he did not seem to want sex when they arrived at the Pines, or he did not want the sex to be good, or interesting or slow. And this was surprising because no one went to Fire Island just to walk along the beach. The only move Dan made, when they were finally in the house that Billy had organised, all tubular chairs and walnut floors, with its white linen curtains and Billy attractively arranged on the bed, was to unzip his fly. He did not let Billy near his ass, which was a pity, because Billy really wanted his ass. He turned away (which was fine) from Billy’s kiss. He might as well have folded his arms. For someone else, this would have been a challenge and a delight – a whole weekend to drag this Irish boy out of the closet, kicking and screaming with raw pleasure and afterthrob. But this was not Billy’s style. Billy wanted to talk to Dan. He wanted to put his tongue on the salt corner of Dan’s eye, where his eyelid trembled shut. He wanted to make him happy.
He also, personally, wanted to come. But Dan had no manners in that regard and, when Billy ended up doing the honours himself, he seemed to sneer a little, looking down at him from a height. Which was also fine. If sneering turned out to be Dan’s thing, there were plenty of guys who liked that too.
You could not say that Fire Island was entirely happy in the summer of 1991, but it was defiant, and happiness was there on the horizon, if you lifted your eyes to the sea. Dan did not seem to notice the sea. He watched the Friday night crowd at the Botel from behind a beer, followed by another beer, while Billy smiled and deflected offers of various kinds of fun.
Dan said, ‘They all look sort of identical.’
‘I know,’ said Billy. Though he was wearing the same short shorts and lace-up ankle boots as two hundred other men out on the dance floor.
Billy, meanwhile, was worried about the house-share, which was through a friend-of-a-friend with no mention of the cost. The beers were outrageously expensive and Dan drank steadily then looked for more. In the middle of his, maybe, third bottle, he turned to Billy and said, ‘Tell me. What do you want?’
‘What do I want?’
This was such a strange question, there in the middle of two hundred bare torsos, all holding the scent of the day’s lost sunshine, that Billy got a bit distracted and had to say it again: ‘What do I want?’
Later, Dan relaxed a little in the darkness of their room. He did not complain about the double bed and allowed Billy to touch him down his back and legs. But he stayed curled over an undoubtedly steaming erection, and Billy woke early and so horny he had to slip out before Dan knew that he was gone.
‘Where were you?’ Dan was in the kitchen when Billy came back, he was opening and closing cupboard doors.
‘Just took a walk,’ said Billy, not mentioning the remnants of the night’s dancing he found wandering the dawn; a very pink blond boy who knelt in front of him, and a massive, tripping Blatino he leaned against, who jabbed a finger at his ass, and then got it right in.
‘A walk?’
‘Just in the woods.’
‘Right.’
They went down to the harbour for breakfast, and then walked far up the beach to find a quiet spot. Dan undressed under a little towel, he wriggled into his swimming trunks before he let the towel fall, and Billy thought this was the sweetest thing he had seen in a very long time. It was already hot. The sea was big and languid, dropping slow waves on the sand. They waded right in. Billy splashed about a bit and ran back up to the bags while Dan floated on the swell, watching his toes. Then he reached over into a lazy crawl. A bunch of guys ran out of a beachfront property, shedding flip-flops and shorts and they ploughed into the water, all brown backs and white glutes. Billy could feel their skinny-dipping pleasure as the sea swirled higher, and two of them turned to kiss in the waves. He watched them for a while, then squinted after Dan who was quite far out now, his silhouette made uncertain by sunlight on the water.
Minutes passed. Dan was so small in the distance that Billy could not tell if he was heading out or coming home. He sat there, suncream in hand, waiting for Dan to turn back in and, after a long while, it seemed that he had – definitely, Billy thought – Dan was definitely closer now. The figure switched from overarm to breaststroke; Billy could make out his pale features and his water-darkened hair. It was Dan, of course it was. He was right there, just beyond the breaking waves. He dived under, with a curving bob and scissor kick of his long white shins, then surfaced and lay on his back for a while. Each swell that lifted him set him down closer to shore until he turned to catch a breaking wave, scrabbling as he rode the surf, with his mouth pulled down. He ended up on his hands and knees on the sand and he considered this for a moment, before standing heavily to his full height and walking on to dry land.
Billy shifted on the stripy towel, trying to look indifferent.
‘What took you so long?’
Dan, when he sat down beside him, was wet, cold and very solid.
‘I was swimming home.’
‘Oh my.’
‘Just over there – see? Three thousand miles thattaway, that’s where I am from.’
‘You miss it,’ said Billy.
‘Fuck no.’
Dan eased his goose-bumped legs straight, then lay down carefully in the sun. His muscles jolted and relaxed and after a while he was still. The wind was warm. The waves arrived one by one on the shore. Dan picked himself up a little and set his heavy, wet head on Billy’s chest. Then he moved down to settle his ear in the soft arch beneath Billy’s ribs.
Billy lay there looking up at the blue of July. He wondered if he should put a hand on Dan’s drying hair and then decided against it. For some reason, he remembered a boy at high school – not good looking as Dan was good looking – a boy called Carl Medson.
‘I knew this guy once,’ he said. ‘Like
when I was sixteen.’
‘And?’
Carl Medson’s sister was slick with lip gloss and his mother flirted with Billy in a truly disturbing manner. She was kind of mad. There was a paper seat on the toilet, and when you opened the refrigerator, everything in there was covered in Saran Wrap, even the cartons and jars. Carl Medson moped after Billy for, like, a year though they never did anything except sprawl around in his bedroom listening to music, until Billy couldn’t take the suspense any longer. One day he let his hand drift – joke! – on to Carl’s package and the next thing you know – pause, move, pause again – he had Carl Medson out of there and in his hand. And Carl has one of those dicks where the foreskin doesn’t roll back – Billy’s never seen it before – a little tight ring, like the mouth of a string bag, and tucked in, down there, a sad, locked-in dick. You know? Let me out!! Like you are supposed to stretch it, as a kid, but he had never touched himself, not ever. And Carl just turns away from him, and zips up, and they don’t really hang out after that. Married now, and moved to Phoenix.
‘So he must have got that much sorted out.’
‘Huh,’ said Dan.
A little bit later, Dan said, ‘I am going to get married,’ and he sat up, alert to the sea.
‘Oh?’ said Billy.
‘I am.’ Dan kicked the end of the towel and pulled it square on the sand.
‘Anyone in mind?’
‘Yep.’
He studied the horizon. ‘I love her,’ he said. ‘And I love the look of her and the shape of her, and I love the way her body is, and I just think it feels right. All of that. You know?’
‘Great.’
‘We have sex,’ said Dan.
‘I know,’ said Billy, who had a queue of sad bastard married men and did not need another one, though this, clearly, was what had washed up, one more time, at his door.
They went back to have lunch at the house, with the other housemates fresh off the ferry, and the friend-of-a-friend was just great; very upfront with them both about the bill. Dan did not say, ‘Oh, I don’t have to pay because I am not actually gay, you know.’ In fact, now they were agreed on the subject of his essential and future straightness, Dan chatted, drank wine and trailed after Billy to their room, where he spent a salty, sunny few hours on the bed with him, and in the shower, and in the chair, followed by a little, last eking out against the cedar-scented wall. He kissed Billy as though he loved him, all afternoon.