In fact he had been, for an anguished, tear-streaked fortnight, in love with Scott. He knew it wasn’t real, of course, but now the damn stuff was out of the bottle, it seemed to be moving around.
Love.
Dan traced it around the house, a sweetness coating everything Ludo possessed, his gee-gaws and tchotchkes, the hideous paintings and the ones that weren’t so bad. Everything full of meaning, throbbing with it: the little sherry glass of toothpicks in the middle of the table, Ludo’s tube of shaving cream for a morning ritual that only stopped at the collar line.
‘You know what this means,’ he said to Scott-in-his-head.
‘Yes?’
‘It means I am going to die.’
And Scott-in-his-head smiled a sweet, Canadian smile.
In the event, Dan was sidetracked, in that week’s session, by the memory of his father in absurd, high-waisted swimming trunks. High also on the leg, they were the exact shape of the pelvic section of a plastic, jointed doll. Black, of course. It must have been on the yellow beach at Fanore. His father would join them there after a day working the land, the only swimming farmer in the County Clare. And one time Dan flung himself at his father’s wet legs as he made his way up the beach and his father shrugged him off. That was all. Dan, who was weeping for some reason, hurled himself at the wet woollen trunks and was pushed back on to the sand. His shoulder was grazed by a rock which is why, perhaps, he remembered it, this utterly usual thing — his father moving past him to reach for a scrap of towel.
‘I’m foundered.’ That is what his father used to say, when he came in from the freezing Atlantic, shrunken, his muscles tight to the bone.
And Dan wept for his father. He could not believe this man was gone and his body — which must have been a beautiful body — destroyed in death. Because his father never felt dead, to Dan, not in all the years: he just felt cold.
Scott sat across from Dan, his careful face flushed with the effort of staying with him in his sorrow, while Dan threw one Kleenex after the other into the wooden wastepaper basket at his feet. He thought about all the discarded tears that ended up in it, from all the people who took their turn to weep, sitting in that chair. Many people, many times a day. The bin was made of pale wood, with a faint and open grain. It was always empty when he arrived. Expectant. The wastepaper basket was far too beautiful. The air inside it was the saddest air.
Dan told Scott about an afternoon in the desert, many years before — it was the first time he’d made a move on a guy, really wanted him, in this amazing place outside Phoenix. The house was built of rammed earth and set flat to the landscape, and there was no pool, just walls of glass in room after room built aslant to the sun and always in shade. Outside, the Sonoran Desert looked just the way it was supposed to look, the saguaro cactus standing with his arms held up, a bird flying in and out of a hole in his neck. The heat of the day was translated into night with a sunset of Kool-Aid orange, giving way, in streaks, to pink and milky blue. And Dan was stilled by the desert light that washed his lover’s body with dusk and turned it into such an untouchable, touchable thing.
‘Yes,’ said Scott — who was, at a guess, straight as the Trans Canada Highway. And he followed the ‘yes’ with a silence that grew very long.
‘It’s just. I don’t know if I am losing all that, with Ludo. I don’t know if I am losing it, or if it’s all, finally, coming good.’
‘I see.’
Scatter cushions and oak dressers — in Toronto, Dan thought. Here we go.
The night before he left for Ireland, Dan told Ludo that he loved him. He told him because it was true and because he thought that, this time, the plane might fall out of the sky. Or he might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983, with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. He would never make it back to Rosedale, Toronto and to this man he had loved for some time.
This was why he had decided to go home, he said. Because he loved Ludo and Ludo was right, it was time to sort out his past, deal with himself. Time to become a fucking human being.
It was a mistake to tell Ludo all this, because Ludo immediately wanted to open the last bottle of Pommery and suck him off and get married. Dan had a flight the next day, but Ludo brought the champagne to bed and marriage would be a blast, he said. He found the sheer legality of it incredibly erotic. And very tax effective. If he worked it right, there was no telling how much they could save.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t know.’
‘What?’ said Ludo.
‘I just.’ He was talking about Ludo’s money.
‘Oh toughen up,’ said Ludo. ‘Talk to a woman, they’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dan, who did nothing but talk to the wives of rich men. He talked to them about their husbands’ paintings and their husbands’ ghastly wallpaper. (Take it down! was his cry. All of it. Down!) Dan loved these women; their woundedness and their style; he admired the way they rose to their lives. But he did not want to be one. That would be a convergence too far.
‘Don’t be too proud for me,’ said Ludo. ‘Don’t be too proud, is all.’
‘Proud?’ said Dan.
‘Defensive,’ said Ludo. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ said Dan. And he put his head on Ludo’s chest, where it met the ball of his shoulder; in that dent.
‘OK.’
‘All you ever do is take!’ This from his mother, some time, from the black and white movie of their relationship, Whatever Happened to Baby Rosaleen. ‘All you ever do is take!’
Isabelle sending him a postcard, the year she moved upstate: ‘I was going to send back all the presents you gave me over the years, then I realised — you didn’t.’
And it was true that Dan stalled in the shop if he was ever obliged to buy a gift. Stalled, refused, could not calculate, drew a blank, was a blank. Walked away, as though from something terrible and, by the skin of his teeth, survived.
Another postcard, the next summer, from Dublin, a vintage thing with green buses going down O’Connell Street. And on the back:
‘I am still alive.’
This was from an exhibition they saw together in Dublin, himself and Isabelle, when they were, maybe, eighteen. A book of telegrams by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara, sent over the course of a decade to the same address and all saying the same thing: ‘I am still alive.’ The exhibition was a moment of complete excitement for Dan — it was a shaft of light that told him he had been living, all his life, underground. This was long before New York, long before he found conceptual work tiresome and even longer before he met the man, or thought he had, at a Starbucks around the corner from the Guggenheim, where the server called ‘Kawara!’ and Dan felt his knees weaken in his chinos. I am still alive.
Isabelle’s last card was from Barcelona.
‘Gaudete!’ it said, and on the front those curvy balconies by Gaudi.
And after that, none.
There were tears in his eyes. Dan never cried until he started with Scott; now he was weeping full time, he was leaking into the slackening skin of his lover’s arms.
‘There, there,’ said Ludo, who had a breakfast meeting at eight.
‘It’s not the money,’ Dan said. ‘I mean.’
‘Fuck the money,’ said Ludo.
‘It’s not the money,’ he said.
And it wasn’t. Dan thought of himself as more cat than dog. He did not need much, he could do as well without. So it was not the money that made Dan weep in the arms of Ludovic Linetsky, as he decided to marry him, for richer for poorer, all the days of his life. It was the sound of Ludo’s wonderful heart, deep in his chest. Because Dan might make a good cat but he was a raging blank of a human being and he knew he would fuck this good thing up, just like he fucked up all the rest of them. He would look at Ludo some day — he could do it now if he liked — and just not care.