I'm not sure many people are still on this site, so I've posted this fic on AO3 and am about to update it over there as well, if that's your reading preference these days! I'm under the same username, SekritOMG. If you're happy with tried-and-true FFN, please enjoy.


As the weeks beat on life calmed considerably, which was just as well; spring was encroaching, or perhaps we were already in the thick of it. From the windows of my flat, dusty and leaden though they were, I could see little pinpricks of white begin to dot the lawn of Hoxton Square. It rained torrentially one day; the sun came out the next. The schoolchildren we passed on London's glistening streets began wrapping their cardigans around high, plaid waists. Premature, perhaps, but I empathized. After so much bad news I would take what I could get. The landscaper Kyle's parents used came to plant lush boxes outside his windows. This was an unexpected treat. "I don't want their pity flowers," he said, yet he didn't send the gardener away. The result was an explosion of color wherever one looked. "It's so garish," he said, but he loved it. On one occasion, then another, I caught him staring out the window.

So many things were left unsaid. Every morning, Kyle headed to work. There was no point in begging him not to go, much less ordering. Nothing short of death was going to break him of the habit. He had seven weeks of paid holiday in a year, a ridiculously generous sum. One two-week swath was set aside for our upcoming trip to New York. I dared not even mention it, worried he might have forgotten. Worse, I feared he might realize he couldn't spare the time off and cancel. Desperately I hoped he'd take the opportunity to relax and realize he didn't miss the grind at all.

One benefit to this insistence on a routine was that any time he spent at the office was time I spent with Wendy. The baby, of course, often accompanied. Understandably, she was in a morose funk. Wendy, that is, not the baby. The baby was a fussy delight. Her hair and her smile and her sensitivity all made her seem, at last, less like an infant and more like a young person. She squealed in delight and in terror, reached for me when I said her name, and sat up herself to fling toys brutally onto the carpet. She had a tiny personality; it was impossible to describe but it was there, and the only downside to watching this emerge was knowing Wendy would never see who this little person might one day become.

"I couldn't even think of it," she said. "I won't allow myself to speculate."

"It might be of some comfort," I suggested.

"Please just let me be numb." She said this over a plate of tea sandwiches in which she had, over the course of one hour, barely made a dent. Of the eight sandwiches six remained, in a part-circle ringing the plate, shreds of watercress littering the presentation for some color. I had to admit to myself that I didn't know what to do with a depressed person. In her presence I thought often of Kyle and his determination to march on. Once I made the mistake of bringing this comparison to her attention.

"As if you can't imagine any reason we might handle things differently," she said.

"I can imagine loads of reasons," I replied, "it's just, well, there are alternatives to this, or more than one road ahead."

"But that's the problem, Stanley. There has only ever been one road ahead."

"Clear a new path," I said, desperate to continue the metaphor, to push it as far ahead as she'd allow.

"You don't understand." She sighed, and pushed away the plate of sandwiches. Willa grasped at them from my lap, but was too far to cause any damage, save for some watercress that wound up on the tablecloth. Wendy removed it back to her plate. "I'm too tired to make a new path. I'm nearly 40 and I'm spent. I don't want you to compare me to Kyle. I can't be Kyle. I haven't got his strengths and I haven't got his flaws. Behind me is the weight of four decades, down the drain. I just have to come to terms with it and move past it. It's sad for me, all right? ... Actually, no, 'sad' is such a meek term. It doesn't mean anything in this case. It's over, Stanley. It's just over. I am over."

I began a reply beginning with, "No—"

She cut me off. "Don't even start. I won't hear it from you."

"Won't hear what?"

"What have you got? Excuses? Encouragement? I don't want to hear it. Especially not from you."

"Why not? Is there something wrong with me?"

"In a sense," she said, "by which I mean, you're a bit of a wallower. If you're not diagnosably depressed then at the very least you're such a depressive. You're persistent, I suppose, but it's in this enduring, passive way — no fault of your own, seeing as it's incredibly middle-class English, isn't it, this 'hanging on in quiet desperation,' as I believe Pink Floyd once sang."

"Isn't that reference a bit below you?"

"Why, should it be? I have ears, Stanley. I hear music like everyone else does. I have ears. The problem is that no one's ever considered whether or not they actually functioned the way ears were meant to, you know, as receptors. No one ever cared if they were hooked up to my brain, if I could make sense of what I was even hearing. What's that silly term you used to have, for earbobs? As in, when a drag queen would wear them."

"Earbobs? Oh, earrings."

"Yes." She clutched her lobe, as if to indicate.

"I don't know, I suppose — auntie nells, and then, auntie nell … fakes? Phonies? Auntie nell phonies, something like that. I wouldn't call that my term, you know, drag wasn't something I practiced, much less with earrings."

"It's curious, isn't it, that thinking back on it I can identify very much with the idea?" The baby was playing with some filling she'd scraped out of a sandwich, and Wendy shook it from Willa's hand and wiped each little finger off with a napkin.

"Which idea?"

She didn't look up. "Drag, you know. The performance. Acting a role. I have a degree in French literature, Stanley, I still understand some theoretical ideas about how we relate to ourselves. And I think there is something fundamental about me which will make it difficult to continue. Beyond illness, I mean. Something that's ingrained in me too deeply to extract."

"Do you know what I find interesting about that idea? I recall being younger and trying to explain something about queerness — that it's ingrained."

"Well, I don't remember that specifically."

"Not a particular conversation, Wends, but a general idea. And — you tried to get me to sleep with you."

"Did I?"

"Yes, but then you backed away."

"Well, I wouldn't have wanted to get pregnant." She bounced her thigh to lift Willa up, and the baby tried to squirm out of her arms. "Oh, you aren't going anywhere," Wendy hissed, tightening her hold. She looked up at me again. "Anyway, then maybe you understand why I don't want to argue with you about persisting and keeping my chin up and so forth. There is literally a sinister and uncurable thing in my body, and it's hard not to feel like it's just the end. And before you say anything, I am not saying Kyle has many distinct social advantages over me, but I think when you're a man, and when your mother is American, at the very least you somehow develop the notion that you can just do anything. Well, I don't feel that way about myself. I just feel over. I'm just done. And I know you feel that way too, in many senses."

"Which way?" I asked.

"You know, simply crushed by the weight of it all. Sort of unable to breathe."

"I hope you don't mean my asthma? You could write something about it. An editorial of sorts."

"I mean your depression," she said. "And anyway, it's over. I'm not a writer. I'm just a shell."

"You're not a shell."

"Well, maybe I'd like to be one. Maybe I'm tired and I don't see the point in trying to contain anything anymore. It was nearly impossible to coax my body into sustaining life, anyway." She bent her head, her unstyled hair falling to brush the top of Willa's. "I should have done more for you, darling. I should have burned this whole damn place down." She looked up at me again with saucer eyes, naked and sunken. "You need a purpose."

"Me?"

"Yes, you. You're not dying."

"Sometimes I wish I had," I said.

"Oh, you idiot, Stanley, don't wish that!"

"The idea of doing it without Kyle isn't exactly appealing to me. And I've got my little memoir thing, but then that'll be done, and — what? I don't really want a job — a real one, anyway."

"I'll think about it for you," she said, walking me to the front door, Willa in her arms. "I hate saying this, but I need you. I'm glad you didn't die."

"I'm neutral on it, honestly. Say what you want about the difficulty of womanness but you're so incredibly needed. No one needs me in a social sense. Without Kyle — without you — you understand we're expendable, entirely pointless. I'm referring specifically to homos. Thought I rather dislike that term. It's not fun anymore."

"As I said I'll think about it," she said. "You need a purpose."

"Well, that feels ominous." I kissed both her and the baby farewell and walked the perimeter of the garden square to find my way back to the train. The pavements shone with the rain I'd missed while fruitlessly coaxing Wendy to eat. Her assessment of depression weighted me down, so perhaps I felt reluctant to go underground for that reason. I passed by the Tube stop and just walked, without aim, until well into the afternoon.

XXX

That night's dinner was a small one, stilton and apple turnovers from Fortnum with a small salade mixte on the side, served on feather-light china embossed with an oriental pattern of golden willow trees and other indiscriminate hodgepodge. It didn't match the rest of Kyle's china. "Oh, this," he said dreamily, pushing greens around his plate so I wouldn't notice how few leaves made it onto his fork. "Just some spares I rummaged somewhere. You know me, dear, I'm easily enticed by pretty things." He tried to turn this comment into a come-on by winking, but it was more camp than courting, and he shook it off when I didn't react, muttering, "Well, I suppose we could use a bottle of wine" and disappearing into the kitchen to get one from the refrigerator, a half-drunk white. "I'd offer you a real drink," he said, handing me a wine glass, "but I'm too tired to make one."

"This is fine." I accepted it and clinked my rim against his, which produced that note of solid clarity and disruption, glass against glass. The truth was that as much as things seemed normal, or normal for us, there was a weight of sadness that had settled on our interactions. We had been over, and over, the identity of the informant who'd done us in. There were evidently so many facets to this mystery that it bore continual reexamination. The fact was, though, that we examined the same group of suspects, tossing aside the unlikely ones — who would accuse Butters, of all people? — and circling back around Eric.

Secretly I dreaded this topic's revival over dinner, but I could sense a preoccupation in Kyle which seemed like an inclination to go back through this conversation. He couldn't talk to me about work, really, for my position remained that he should not be working, and in fact before all the pre-AIDS business his job was never something he wished to discuss, as if knowing it paid well but was boring, and that our relationship existed outside of that. Partway through eating his turnover Kyle looked up at me and asked if we should put on Radio 4.

"Great idea," I said, doing it at once. The evening's programming turned out to be politics, and as I was sitting down again I had a momentary anxiety over whether we should listen to the radio at all, for fear that something provocative about Sheila might come on. But this at least gave us something else to react against, something about the recent Beirut kidnapping, a topic both neutral and infuriating. Soon Kyle was ranting along with one of the commentators, though as far as I knew he didn't really care about Middle East and never had.

"Do you think it's a problem," I asked while cleaning up, "if we sit only in silence or with the radio?"

"Instead of what, Gregorian chant? Speaking in riddles?"

"Just talking," I said. "As usual."

He was still for a moment, standing next to the dining room table with his plate of nearly eaten salad in his hands. "I think the mark of a comfortable relationship is one where you can sit in companionable silence. Why, does it bother you?"

I thought about what I wanted to say, really thought about it. And Kyle, being kind, sat back down and put his cheek on his fist and waited as I tried to characterize my feelings. I finally managed, "It's just that I don't really want to dwell on bad things anymore, and yet I'm compelled to worry that if we don't fill every single minute we're wasting time."

"Oh, I don't think that's true. But can't we dwell on bad things if they're about other people?"

"I feel as though at some point in this I should have learned not to wield my judgements like a weapon."

"Oh, rubbish, that's silly. Let's talk about Eric's prostitute. Where do you think he is now?"

At this point I sat back down as well, leaving the handful of silverware I'd been clutching on the kitchen counter. "I think he might be in some man's bed."

"A bed if he's lucky."

"How far do you think eight-thousands pounds would go?"

"I don't know." Kyle closed his eyes, as if thinking deeply on some weighty matter. Without opening them, he said, "That was just a wad of cash I had, you know, I did not premeditate on the idea of giving him that sum precisely. It's tricky, though, isn't it?" He opened his eyes then, looking straight into mine. "Because the problem with a sum of money like that is, it both is and is not a lot of money. Context is everything here. I wasn't thinking. I just gave that little whore all of my money because I wanted to get him away from Eric at any cost. I thought to myself, well, if this is what I've got, then this is the cost. Of course, I was very naive in assuming that would be the full cost, for as we've learned Eric's lust for vindication knows no bounds."

"That's assuming Eric tattled," I said.

"Well, we've been over it and over it," Kyle replied, "and who else might it have been? Unless you think it was Kenneth himself. Maybe he sold it to the tabloids, anonymously, for a sum. Maybe he's halfway to Tahiti right now, laughing."

I scoffed at that. "He hasn't got a passport, so his freedom to roam must be limited to Britain. So to speak."

"What's that mean?"

"Well, he probably couldn't, or wouldn't want to, head to Ulster."

"Oh, don't bring Ulster into it."

"Just, realistically," I said. "I'm not angry you gave him the money. It's not my money — wasn't my money."

"Our money, Stanley—"

"But, I do think I would have liked to have been consulted."

"You would have sent him back to Eric."

"There was no sending him back," I said, "he wasn't a purchase from a mail-order catalogue, even if he was a rent boy. He is, or was, a person with free will. What kind of kid like that is going to turn down that sum? He might have chosen differently, had you not offered it. And now I'm afraid something horrible's happened to him. If he's living on the street and he's got eight-thousand pounds, how long do you reckon it'll last before someone cottons onto the cash in his pockets and threatens him or just steals it or — god, who knows, something much worse. It's not like he's got a bank account. He could easily do himself in with that kind of money, you know, he could overdose on junk or something. I actually worry about it."

Kyle reached out for me, grasping my forearm. "Did you love him?" His voice was trembling.

Sighing, I took his hand in both of mine. "I cared for him, at some point. Even still, I suppose. It feels, in retrospect, like the way I cared for my nieces and nephews when I was younger, with a sort of detached sense of responsibility. But I didn't love him, jesus christ, could you say you loved everyone you've slept with?"

"No." It came out wavering. He sounded shocked at his own honesty. "But I wanted to, Stanley. I really wanted to think I loved all of them." His eyes began to glisten, reflecting the overhead lighting from above the kitchen counter.

"I know. It's a lovely thing about you."

"I was so fucking scared. Long before all of this AIDS anxiety, honestly, I was so scared that you loved him, and I thought, well, I really can't compete with someone so young, and so straight, so exotic..."

"I find you very exotic, darling, don't worry. Kenny's very Aryan-looking, he's hardly exotic."

"Well, no wonder Eric liked him? But then, I know what you mean."

"I am worried about him," I said, "and I hope you can understand that the way in which I cared for him is not a threat to you."

"I'd actually like to put it out of mind entirely."

"Well, I am a bit weary of this ongoing speculation over who did it, but say one final thing on the topic — it wasn't Kenny."

"It's sort of willfully ignorant of you to exclude the possibility, isn't it?"

"No, because if it had been, I'd be in jail. Eric too."

I was sick of pregnant pauses, and yet I found myself in a life where what was not said had become the axle on which the wheel of my life turned, propelling me forward in some ironic twist toward reconciliation. Kyle's mouth was so still that I could see the slight downturn at the corners, something I must have known was there, and yet he spent so much time talking that I'd never really thought about it. It's a depressing thing, two men sitting in silence at a dining room table, the gravity of their situation the thing around which both are orbiting. Kyle would have been horrified to know that I saw some signs of middle-age in his features. And yet — what a pity he'd nearly reached 40 and wouldn't be allowed the privilege of the other half of his life. Distinctly I thought to myself, in that chair at that table, that he would probably consider it a blessing. There is a kind of party wisdom which dictates that one should always leave at the height of fun, before things take a downward turn. Maybe AIDS was a boon, actually. Maybe the new model for gay life should be to depart halfway through.

"Well." Kyle stood and pulled at the hem of his waistcoat. "Would you be a dear and finish this? I want to go relax."

"All right."

He pecked me on the cheek and said, "Do me a favor and bring me a drink. I'll be in the bath."

I listened to his footsteps recede and spent the duration of the clean-up wondering what sort of drink I ought to make, as I hadn't thought to ask him. Maybe he shouldn't have been drinking at all, and in fact this had been the theory on which we'd been working for quite some time. And yet I also wondered why that should be and whether it was true, in addition to whether it might hasten his demise to cater to these whims. In any case the matter was that we knew nothing, utterly nothing.

Allow me to expand on that. Now, as a function of recollection, it seems obvious just how under-exposed we were to AIDS and its effects as a social phenomenon. You would think it were absurd, wouldn't you, seeing as one friend (insofar as old Clyde Donovan could have been considered a friend of ours) had died from its complications, and another had shot himself rather than suffer it. It only occurred to me years later that in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, where it really and truly stalked people, AIDS as a disease became a topic of discussion which lent itself to speculation and conclusion amongst social circles. At the time, as I stood there loading Kyle's dishwasher, I had no comprehension of how little exposure I had to this illness as a cultural phenomenon, even as I was living it presently, wondering what kind of drink to make him. In any case, later on I would read, in memoirs and gossip tracts — the effect of AIDS upon first-person reminiscence writing being the invention of the literary genre of the gossip-memoir — about how gay men in other places pieced together their own sort of science, half medicine and half hearsay, to quell the shortcomings of their physicians. Those men were taking care of each other, but in Kyle's flat we could barely decide how much to drink in excess in the bath after dinner.

I made him a glass of champagne (well, sweet prosecco) with a few raspberries tossed in for good measure. Kyle accepted it gladly, stretched out in the bathtub with the water running, a lone candle lit by the sink. He had the lights on but I switched them off, and in the dark the candle's warm glow shone against the mirror and lit the room romantically. I put the lights on again and he said "don't do that," the rim of the flute at his lips, but I only wanted a look at him, just for a moment. The water rose just to his tits, his body pale and a bit too gaunt, though I told myself it was the distortion of the bath that caused it to look that way. Lights off again, I sat on the toilet with the lid down and looked at him, his skin suddenly flush again in the kind atmosphere of candlelight. He balanced the glass on his stomach, its stem partly submerged. "That's better," he said — meaning the light, I supposed, or maybe just broadly. For my own part I was racked with apprehension over whether he wanted me to give him a hand job or something. His dick was not hard but maybe it would become hard, and then I'd feel responsible for doing something about it, and much to my chagrin I was torturing myself over this when he said, "We have to talk."

"You always have to talk," I said, though instantly I was panicked.

"Well, don't make fun of me. I'm very good at it."

"Yes." I nodded, though my internal apprehension had caused me in a split second to decide that Kyle was about to dump me over the conversation we'd just had concerning my involvement with Kenny.

He took a sip of his drink and the heard the water sloshing around in the tub before I saw some gently creep over the lip of the bath and trickle to the floor. Kyle seemed not to notice. "I don't think I can go away." He waited for a reaction from me, and when I didn't give him one (no idea what sort of look was on my face at all) he clarified: "To the States, I mean. I don't think I can travel so far."

"Why?" Now I was worried for a new set of reasons. "Are you unwell?" I nearly smacked myself. "I mean, do you feel like you can't?"

"I feel like the fucking Gestapo are watching me. No, that sounds rash. I think I'm being spied upon."

"By who or what?"

"Realistically, you mean? MI5."

"Darling, no."

"Well, they believe I'm funneling intelligence to the Russians, remember?"

"I thought Christophe was blabbing to the Russians."

"I suppose." Kyle took another drink, finishing it. He handed the empty flute to me.

I rolled it in my hands. "I don't think that should prevent you from going." I put the empty flute on the counter.

Picking raspberry seeds from his teeth, he made me wait a moment, wondering what he'd say. "I feel awful and guilty," he came out with, in just such a way that I believed him. "And I'm sad, because I wanted to see New York again. I wanted you to see it, you know, I wanted to show it to you."

"I know. But feeling like a vacation doesn't make you a Russian spy."

"I just can't do it," he insisted.

"You don't have to, Kyle. It was absurdly generous of you to offer in the first place."

"I know." He was mumbling, barely audible. "I am very generous, aren't I."

"You are, actually."

"Am I a good partner?"

"What kind of question is that?" I asked. "I mean, yes, of course, but—"

"I feel so torn up about this!"

"Please don't."

"I'll never see it again." At this point I began to wonder if he'd start crying, and furthermore, if we were ever to share a day together again that did not end in him crying. Fortunately, he just quivered a bit and moaned to himself, very unlike the perverse jerk-off I'd presumed he wanted. Now he was covering his eyes, somewhat muttering, "I can't help but think of all the places I'll never see."

"Well, then we should go," I said, "I really can't imagine MI5 is stalking you, and if you must verify I couldn't imagine we couldn't ask, I don't know, Wendy if she might know—"

"I can't bother Wendy," he said, sounding bitter. "And I can't go, I'm sorry. I'm tired, I'm not well."

"I know. All right, well, don't feel badly about it. There's no need to be sorry."

It was like that quite a lot over the coming period of our lives, a series of realizations that we were now in mourning for some other once-common aspect of our relationship. You do begin to wonder if this is the last bath you'll watch him float in, the last time he'll shove a champagne flute into your hands and watch as you wordlessly remove it to the bathroom counter, the last time you'll get down on your knees next to the tub and kiss his damp forehead as hot tears stream down his face. But he is not bawling, and you are not crying; the only sound in the room is the water splashing against the sides of the tub and the overcompensating guzzle of the fan that's running over your heads. I left my lips against his skin and felt my forearm becoming wet as it rested against his chest. I shut my eyes and said, "You are good."

"But you're a horrible judge of those things," he replied.

And I laughed at that, because when you are in a perpetual state of mourning you must laugh, even if things are not terribly funny. You must pretend that tragedy is funny and laugh at it, because it's real either way.

XXX

One afternoon I was sitting in the coffee shop off Old Street, struggling to finish a section of the day's Guardian and worrying over nothing. I hadn't been out lately, and Kyle's recent worries about stalking were making me feel a mingled combination of fretful and dismissive. On one hand, his paranoia shouldn't have been indulged; yet, on the other, it must have been with good reason that I had this feeling of heightened anxiety, for around the time I began to contemplate another sour cup of dredge-like coffee, I was approached by a man who stood up and cleared his throat until I looked up at him and recoiled.

It was Gregory, my MP; I'd not seen him for many years, to the point that I could not recall his name. "Are you busy?" he asked, bending at the knees to emphasize his inquiry. In each hand was a paper cup of coffee.

"Er—" I was, though not extremely so. "I suppose not."

"Care for a coffee?" He proffered one to me as he sipped from the other. "I don't know what you take in it," he said, as I accepted the cup.

"Nothing, typically." I rubbed my eyes, trying to recall where we'd last spoken; I was now so many years removed from a life of tricking bachelorhood that it took me a moment to remember we'd had sex, and he'd told me he knew Christophe and all of that business. "Funny meeting you here. Shouldn't you be working?"

"It's not funny," he replied, "and I am working. It's not coincidence — I'd have a word with you?"

Without another utterance I stood up and left my paper, going out into the dreary gray of a May afternoon. It wasn't raining but it had that morning, and the excess was still standing in the pavement cracks and plugged gutters. He followed me out in his jeans and crisp salmon button-down, looking a bit less proletariat than last time. He hadn't aged much, though he had grown a bit stiffer in his movements.

"You followed me here," was the first thing I said.

"I didn't follow you at all. I found you."

"But you knew I was here."

"Oh, I knew, yes." He sipped his coffee.

"What the fuck?" I asked, pointedly.

"Should we go back to your place?"

"Flattering, but I'm taken."

"Oh, not like that," he said. "Just to talk."

"You've been keeping tabs on me."

"Only so far as I've been keeping tabs on Mr. Broflovski." Finally, he had my attention.

The whole walk back to my flat I was fuming. It didn't help matters that he was exceedingly cordial, thanking me for my willingness to go along with his scheme and assuring me he understood that it was, actually, incredibly creepy of him to have come to me like this. "But this can't go on the record," he said, as soon as he'd taken a seat on my living room sofa. "So meeting at my office wouldn't help much, and I couldn't have an appointment with you in my book." This actually stood to reason, given that I was associated with Kyle and Kyle was now associated with a Soviet spy; Gregory was a liberal MP, and it surely wouldn't have done to be linked in some way back to that affair.

"Well, dear, I wanted to clear up the matter," he explained, "with Chris and that unpleasant situation."

"Uh huh." The moment was surreal. "Why, are you here to commiserate? Didn't know he was a spy?"

"Oh, he's not a Russian spy." There was an infuriating dismissiveness in Gregory's tone. "He never was."

"So you want me to clear his name?"

"No! Oh, no, I'm sorry, Mr. Marsh, but your vouching for him wouldn't clear anything. Chris was never a Russian spy, just my better half. Well, some other things, too, but you needn't hear of that. We had an agreement, though, that one day he might have to turn himself in to implicate Mrs. Broflovski."

I nearly dropped my cup of coffee on the floor. Suddenly I felt faint. "Are you mad? This doesn't make any sense!"

"Of course it makes sense," he said. "See here. If we want to get our majority back, it's going to take some drastic measures. I've been looking at vulnerable seats for years now, and I think hers can be the building block of a new liberal coalition. I mean, it will be, since she's out now. I did a bit of pre-planning with Chris and had him bait your Kyle along for a moment. Just when I was convinced nothing good was going to come of this plan, I got a visit from Craig Tucker, with whom I think you're acquainted. He told me he'd just heard from your friend — a Mr. Cartman, I believe — that Kyle was ill. So just when you think it's all been for naught! These things just — come together." He snapped his fingers. "How's that for an explanation? And it worked, I'm telling you. We just recently made gains in the local councils, after all."

I must have been sitting there gap-mouthed, for he was looking at me funny. It felt suddenly as if I had been cast in some third-rate spy caper. He even had the look of a villain, with his coffee cup in hand while his elbow rested on his fist. He was grinning like a madman, and I had half a mind to sock him — then reconsidered, since I'd spent that chip on Eric. I almost regretted waiting, though he'd been so fundamentally awful for so many years that in retrospect it had been the most fitting gesture. In any case, now I felt like a player in some kind of farce.

He spoke up again: "One day, I think you'll see that the extreme measures were quite justified."

"Justified!" I finally shouted. "What kind of perfectly evil, absurdist Ian Fleming cut-rate bloody bullshit!" For good measure, I threw my empty coffee cup at him.

It fell at his feet. "Oh, calm down."

"Calm down! You've traumatized my poor boyfriend, and then you dump all of this on me like it's some revelation — do you know the work it takes to convince him no one's out there hunting him? We were going to go to New York — it's not fair — of all the people on whom to inflict more pain — there isn't even any logical reason to tell me all this!"

"Of course there is," he said. "My conscience."

"Your what?"

"I feel bad. Surely that means something to you?"

"Get out," I said. "Get out, get out!"

"I've told myself many times you'd understand what I was doing. It's for the greater good—"

"What greater good could there possibly be?"

"For a more liberal society. Do you've any idea what the government is doing to this country? I don't want children to grow up thinking there's no hope for them. So much is in the hands of so few — I mean resources, of course, but it's also this abhorrent class system, and the tightening social mores. We should be working toward another 1967, not burying our heads in the sand as if that fixed all the problems. I think anyone who spent his youth in the 1960s has to be disappointed. Look at this place — aren't you disappointed? Don't you want to live openly, and not in — well, not like this?" He gestured around with his fingers.

"If you want to improve people's lives," I began. I paused. "If you want to improve queer lives," I said, "you've well and truly blown it. You've hurt Kyle just as badly as anyone else ever has. To say nothing of Christophe, my god."

"Chris was complicit in this from the beginning," said Gregory. "My co-conspirator, if you will. He understands — a very simple belief we share. I wish he hadn't ended up behind bars here, but that's the way it goes — in war, you're shat upon. But if we keep working toward the society we want, his efforts haven't been in vain."

"Well, I'm not a culture warrior. I've never lifted a finger for any of it."

"Yes, and isn't that just a bit reprehensible? And yet you've enjoyed the benefits just as much as I have. Doesn't that make you a bit of a hypocrite? You're angry at me for unburdening myself on you, when you should be angry at complacency, both in yourself and in others."

"Jesus," I hissed, "am I awfully sorry I ever met the likes of you! You're just a sociopath!"

"I don't know," he said, "which of us seems like a sociopath? Maybe I'm doing unkind things, or the decisions I've made carry a kind of gray morality. But I did them for a kind of end-justifying-the-means purpose. I love this country, and I can't bear to see it suffer. You're just a selfish drunk, honestly, but I don't think these revelations are going to leave this room."

"I'll just tell Kyle," I said, "and he'll tell his mother—"

"No, you won't, and even if you did go on and do that, what good would it do? Mrs. Broflovski isn't going to get her seat back. It doesn't work like that. And anyway, I'm convinced you won't tell him. You love him too much."

I swallowed. "And if I love him, wouldn't I tell him what I know?"

"I don't think so," said Gregory. "You wouldn't hurt him." When I didn't respond, he said, "Oh, I'm not insane — 'this didn't happen' is what you said after our liaison, if I recall correctly. Don't tell me it wasn't; I'm a politician, dear, it's in my nature to recall what people said. My job, to some extent."

I said, "Well, if we're bringing that up" — meaning our romp — "you said honesty was important to you, last time, so how could you counsel me not to tell him?"

"I'm simply predicting you won't. I never lie, actually. I haven't this whole time, if you noticed? I suppose that's why it was important for me to tell — someone. Since I've lost my confidant, you know. I'm afraid if I so much as went to visit him, it'd bode poorly for both of us. So thank you for being so kind as to listen to this, dear. It means a great deal."

"I'd really love it if you left now," was all I could manage to that.

After he'd gone, I was left feeling rather shaken. I stumbled up the stairs, all this fresh information starting to make my head swim. Collapsing into bed, I reached over for the inhaler I'd gotten from A&E as I tried to get myself straight. Perhaps just the idea of having one in hand made me feel a bit better, and as I lay there I began to feel — not better, really, but improved. He'd left me with a shortness of breath that I was sure had to be emotional at its root; this didn't feel like an asthma attack, but one of conscience.

The truth was, this awful man knew me pretty well, for someone I'd met only once, some years before. He was absolutely correct in surmising that I'd never tell Kyle these things. Regretfully, I'd gone upstairs without anything to drink, and entertained the idea of running back down for a bottle of whisky or gin before crawling back up to bed and drinking myself into an early sleep. Yet I felt so defeated that even as I wanted to do that, all I could manage was to just lie there.

XXX

Not too long after this disturbing incident, just a few days past, I received a call from Butters, who did not fail to dispense even with formalities. "You won't like why I'm calling," he said, and I could tell that he was right. I was at home, sitting at the typewriter, trying to bang out some writing before I had to go meet Kyle for dinner.

"Okay." I got up and carried the telephone over to the couch, where I stroked the rotary dial and tried not to dwell on the time in my life when this phone had reminded me of the sexual promise in my relationship with Kyle, not yet fully realized. "What can I do for you?"

"It's not actually for me, Stanley, though I can't say I wouldn't be pleased just the same."

"Fine, what?"

"Don't be short with me," Butters said. "It's just, I really think you should apologize to Eric. It would mean so much to him. And I'm calling to plead with you to do so."

Somehow I was not shocked to hear this, and yet it made me hugely angry. "No," I said, "just no."

"You do know he has AIDS, I presume?"

"You presume correctly," I said. "But you do know he's a terrible human being, right? Far be it for me to say anyone deserves to die suffering, but honestly, Miss B, if anyone did—"

"That's awful," he said, with disgust in his voice. "Really, really awful."

"Is it really? Do you have any idea what he did to Kyle?"

"I'm definitely not saying that grabbing him was appropriate! But he was worried about Kenny, and desperate, and desperation makes people in love do rash and ill-advised things."

"Oh, it was just that he was in love with Kenny and had nothing to do with being a vindictive piece of shit," I said. "Right, yeah. That's not the kind of line he'd feed someone like you to get you to coax an apology out of me."

"You didn't spend as much time with them as I did! What does being vindictive have to do with it?"

At that moment my resolve to keep Gregory's confessions to myself was tested. Part of me was very tempted to break the promise I'd made to myself, because I was certain that if I told Butters about the extent of Eric's treachery, Butters would have to question his loyalty. At the same time I knew, I just knew, that if the whole truth ever came to Kyle, he'd be miserable. Then I became angry again, cursed with the burden of having to walk this thin line.

I had to do whatever I could to put myself between Kyle and further misery. I would bear anything to keep him from just a modicum of pain: "No, Butters. No. A thousand, one million times no. I'll never apologize to him. I'm glad I broke his nose. … I wish I'd killed him."

"That's really too harsh," said Butters, "and it sort of makes me sad. You're not an unkind person, let alone a murderer."

"You know what? I am pretty sure I am an unkind person."

"Then don't you want to do something kind for once?"

"Not for Eric Cartman."

There was a brief moment of silence on the phone. When Butters spoke up again, there was an audible sadness in his voice. Sighing, he said, "You know why I have to try."

"And you know why I can't forgive him. Could you forgive the person who murdered Bradley?"

He sucked in a breath of air. "Oh, gosh. Don't even ask me! I have no idea who that was, for one thing. It's easy to hate an empty abstraction of evil, which also makes it easy to withhold forgiveness, because I can't put a name to that person, or people. I privately forgave Scotland Yard for not following through on the case, I suppose, because I don't think carrying that kind of anger around with me would be healthy! There was only enough hate in me for one person, and that was my father. But it's not a good comparison — Eric didn't kill anyone, for one thing! For another, we're talking about a group of nameless brutes I never met, evil though they might have been, whereas Eric is someone you know. He's your friend."

"He was never my friend."

"Then I'll leave you with this," Butters said. "Christ preached forgiveness. And I know you don't share my beliefs, and I know I don't talk about them often, but that's important to me."

"If you believe in that story then you know the end of it."

"In what sense?"

"Christ was murdered, Butters."

"Oh. Well, sure, but it just goes to show that as humans we can endure much more than that, because he suffered for us, and from his grace we should learn forgiveness. That's what I'd say if I were confronted, um. With whoever hurt Brad."

"But you believe you'll be with him again."

"Yes. In paradise, you know."

Regrettably, I laughed at that. "Well, I don't believe I'll ever see Kyle again. I don't share that with you, as you said. All we have between us is the time we're alive on earth together, and I can't spoil that by entertaining the idea that Eric's just misunderstood, or that he acts out because he's in pain, or something. We are all of us in pain, you know, and somehow most people manage to avoid physically brutalizing those weaker than them even once, let alone repeatedly over a number of years. I don't think he deserves my forgiveness, and I don't think my forgiveness would do anything for Kyle, who is, after all, my priority."

"Well, at the very least I can understand we've different approaches to this."

"Yeah," I said, "really different."

"Well, thanks anyway. And er — see you soon?"

"Yeah, see you soon."

"Give Kyle my love."

"Uh — say hi to Douglas."

"I'll tell him you said hello. Take care. And thanks again."

I hung up the phone a bit rattled, wondering what he'd thanked me for.

XXX

I felt like I had to do something at this point, something for Kyle. The weight of carrying around Gregory's revelation was wearying, and Butters' sentiments on the topic of salvation had actually thrown me off somehow. I'd believed what I told him, about life on this earth meaning the most, and yet I consistently felt as if I was failing that ambition. Granted we didn't share a traditional relationship by any means, but the idea of keeping secrets from Kyle, even if I knew that would do him the most good, was upsetting. Taking an evening to write and drink by myself in order to clear my head, I was shocked to find a fully stocked bar in my flat, as if I hadn't been drinking at all lately. Always a neatly linear writer, I tore through the final third of a bottle of Loch Lomond and tried to deviate from the timeframe, beginning to retell the incident of my first encounter with Kyle. Maybe reflecting on this would help me in some capacity.

But maybe I wasn't ready to tell that story, even to myself, on a typewriter. Maybe I didn't know how to put Kyle's presence in my life into context. Yet I didn't know what else to do for him. Typing furiously, I lost myself in the details of what he'd been wearing: a sort of salmon-colored belted coat and white slacks, which looked perfectly ridiculous; you don't forget that sort of thing. But I struggled with the length at which one should write about something of that nature, and having failed to finish describing my youth in good detail, I worried that the drama of such a person's entrance into the narrative of the memoir would be lost on the reader. Telling myself there were no readers had no effect, because even I, a social outcast, imagined myself writing for a reader. My reader was Kyle, I supposed, though I worried that I'd never be able to tell a story about him in whatever time he'd left to live. Dejected, I pulled the page, half-blanketed with typewriter ink, and began to take it to the storage closet where I kept failed drafts of my own writing. Before I got there a sudden urge overtook me and I ripped it in half, first lengthwise and then again until I had nothing but a pile in my hands of typewritten confetti. Fuck it, I thought to myself, I'll just take him away somewhere. I might have been a little bit drunk. Tipsy, the kids call it. Prose was inadequate.

Somehow I passed out on my sofa and got up at 6 the next evening, which was quite a while for anyone but I hadn't slept in a time. "Are you all right?" Kyle asked. He was shaking me, and I remembered that we had dinner plans. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing's the matter with me." I sat up, rubbing my eyes, feeling like I'd slept on something twice as stiff and half the size of my actual couch. "Look, I'm up."

"Jesus," said Kyle. "What's going on with you?"

"Nothing," I said, "I'm fine, I'm up."

"I'll make tea." He got up and walked over to the kitchen. "What's all this on the floor? Why is there an empty bottle of Scotch in the sink? Why are you sleeping at 6 in the afternoon? I don't even understand!"

I got up and followed him to the kitchen, where he'd pulled the bottle out of sink and was filling up the kettle. "What's to understand? I tried to write, drank too much, realized it was rubbish, tore it up."

"Well, what did you do all day?" He shut off the tap.

Shrugging, I said, "Slept, I suppose."

Lighting the burner, he kept talking: "You shouldn't tear up your writing! Jesus, Stanley, you're a writer. Don't just throw it away like it doesn't mean anything." Kettle finally on, he spun around to lean over the counter. He looked good, actually, better than he had in a while; it could well have been the lighting in my flat, which was partly obscuring and partly yellowish afternoon light, a combination which seemed to flatter the more unusual angles of his gaunt face. He'd done a good job with his hair today, too, the characteristic fall of it over his brow just the right shape for his features. I felt guilty all over again.

"Let's go away," I said, reaching out to tussle his hair. "Soon. For your birthday."

He just scoffed. "You know I can't go anywhere."

"But you already took the time off work."

"I just don't think I can fly overseas. I can't do it. Don't make me feel bad about that."

"Well, then don't feel bad," I said. "Let's go to Spain. We've never been. It's near. We could go to Barcelona. We could sit on the Mediterranean and eat fresh catches straight from the boats."

"Those beaches are run-down and as an immune-suppressed person I wouldn't eat shellfish straight off those boats if I wanted to live another three months, which I do."

"All right, how about Amsterdam?"

"For what, to ogle lady prostitutes?"

"Well," I tried to joke, "at the very least it would take me quite a while to finish with one of them, so I'd feel like I was getting my money's worth."

"Disgusting! Stanley, look, I appreciate the sentiment, but you're being an idiot." He paused. "I prefer Paris. That's where I'd like to go."

"Then let's go there."

"Stanley…"

"Just think about it," I said.

He stood there gaping at me, as if at a loss for words. So rarely was Kyle dumbfounded that I began to feel anxiety creep into my consciousness; he was truly startled, locked in his own sense of apprehension. At the same time he looked so good — a half-pout on his lips, more fullness in his cheeks than I'd seen lately — that I almost wanted to kiss him. As soon as the notion settled on me, I had to. I came around to the other side of the counter, pulling him against me with my hands cupping his arse.

"Say yes," I insisted.

"I don't know." It came out a scratchy whisper.

"We should do something fun."

"You hate fun now."

"Well, I like making you happy."

His palms were sweaty, flat against my chest. "Sometimes I doubt it."

"Don't doubt it." I kissed him until the interruption of the kettle pierced the moment.

While our tea was steeping we sat on the sofa and he slacked against my chest, playing with the collar of my T-shirt. "Some days I think I'm fine," he said, his foot, in a baby-pink cashmere sock, pressed against the trunk I used for a cocktail table. "Why shouldn't I go to Paris? Or New York, for that matter. I feel as though if I were bedridden, I'd at least know I couldn't do those things for certain."

"So let's just do them," I said. "You drag yourself to that damn office every day. If that's worth doing but traveling isn't, I'd have to assume it's because you think you don't deserve it."

"Maybe I don't. Maybe there are things you don't know about me, and maybe I really don't deserve it. I've been working since I was 21, so it's normalcy. It's easy. I have clients who won't even meet with me."

"You didn't tell me that."

"Well, we have conference calls. I said it's easy."

"So if we stayed here and didn't go anywhere you'd be sitting in your office having conference calls with clients who think they'll catch AIDS from being in the room with you?"

"Stanley, you don't know what I get out of that job. You've never had a job." By this point he'd wormed his fingers an inch or two under my shirt, and even as he said this he was playing with my chest hair.

I shoved his hand away. "Not so long ago I stood in your office and watched you plead for a shred of human understanding, and I stood there thinking, well, it's quite all right I've never had to deal with this."

"You're not being pragmatic, dear."

"Just let me take you to Paris."

He sighed, slumping against me, all of his weight pressed upon my torso as he pushed himself to agree. "I will on one condition."

"What's that?"

"Kiss me again."

"You drive a hard bargain, darling, do you know?"

He licked his lips. "I know you don't kiss me often enough."

"Well, that might be true," I said, before plunging in to seal our little agreement. He was right; I hadn't kissed him often enough lately, and we hadn't been properly intimate since his diagnosis. Against his soft, sticky lips, I wondered if we would have a chance to rectify that soon.

Why else do people go to Paris?

XXX

I called Wendy and asked if she might like to help me with a straightforward but nevertheless delicate task. I wasn't convinced she'd be interested, and as the phone rang I wondered how many mundane days of errands we'd be able to look forward to. But when she picked up and I invited her to go watch shopping, she said, "Well, yes, of course. I'd be delighted. But first you've got to help me with a task of mine."

Sorting dresses, it turned out. Clothing. Wendy had a most enviable wardrobe, both iconic prêt-a-porter and couture. She loved the French ateliers, took significant advantage of them in the waning days of the golden age of the great designers, which coincided with her early 1960s debutante career through the initial years of her married life. By the 1970s, though, she had begun to champion British designers, visiting me often on the King's Road and frequenting the local talents.

So when I got to Black House and upstairs to her bedroom, all of her mirrored closet doors were flung open, and she was making a checklist whilst listening to the wireless. The baby sat in her swing, gurgling to herself.

"I don't know what kind of help you think I can give you with this," I said. "I think you should just keep everything."

"A dead lady can only wear one dress," she replied.

"Now, technically, I'm not sure that's true."

She rolled her eyes at me. "Well, I'm not taking it with me. This is my legacy, can you believe it? A pointless collection of bygone fashions. I've never felt so depressed about having lived the way I've done."

"Wends," I said, taking Willa from her swing. "You've lived rather well."

"As a society matron. Hostess. Patroness."

"You gave your time to people, to ideals." I had sat down on a chaise while she sorted blouses, the baby in my lap. Willa kneaded the sleeves of my T-shirt and drooled and squealed, and I bounced her with my legs, thoughtless, just because she liked it and softened agreeably against me. "What else might you have done?"

Now Wendy put her hands on her hips and turned to me, frowning. "Do you really not have the capacity to imagine anything else I might have done with my life than run a household and throw parties?"

"You had all the money in the world and all the priceless privilege most people can't imagine," I said. "Isn't fashion a kind of art?"

"Fashion is a business."

"Isn't art a kind of business?"

"Stanley," she said, sitting next to me on the chaise. Willa reached for her, and she took Willa from my lap and rocked her daughter in her arms. "You don't have to justify my life to me. I know what I am, who I was."

"Who you are," I said. "You're not dead yet."

"But I will be." She brushed some hair from her eyes and I saw it, her illness reflected in her gaze, how big her eyes seemed now with her vigor slowly fading. It wasn't the same look I read on Kyle, the terrified resilience that comes with wanting to fight. No, Wendy's face was untense with exhaustion and resignation. I wished suddenly that I'd seen it before, hating myself, feeling as though I had failed her. Then I remembered that little, if anything, could have been done, and I only wished that Clyde had held on for longer so, by extension, Wendy might have had a slower, more ignorant decline.

The issue at hand was which gowns to donate and which to save for Willa. As Wendy pushed through the garment bags in her closet, I wondered why she couldn't save all of them for Willa, but then it occurred to me that so much of Wendy was invested in the little sub-areas of the arts to which she gave her time. There was the opera, but also the V&A, on whose fashion advisory council she sat; the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, to which Wendy had never been.

"I don't think you should give your clothes to a museum you've never visited, in a city you've never visited, in a country you've never visited, over an ocean you've not crossed," I said. "Honestly, I think that's my best advice."

"But there is so much," she said. "Isn't that what the great industrialist used to do? Spread the wealth around? I'm thinking of the Carnegies, or the Rockefellers."

"Maybe they did, Wendy, but you aren't an industrialist; you're a member of the British aristocracy. That system's built on primogeniture."

"No need to remind me." She sighed deeply. "Look, some of these are vintage. This one's Lanvin." She pulled a black garment bag from the rack and hung it on the closet door to unzip it. When she did, I saw it was a flapperish silhouette studded with roseate flourishes on a checked pattern, the predominant color a salmon pink; the rosettes themselves were magenta at the edges of each ribbon-petal, the color fading in degrees to a very pale blush of incredibly light pink.

"This must be 1920s," I said.

She nodded. "Early twenties. I don't think this would fit me now. You know, after the baby."

"It would definitely fit," I said, looking at the straight silhouette that dropped without definition from shoulder to hip. "You've barely eaten anything since you had the baby."

"Are you suggesting I try it on?"

"Do you want to?"

"I don't think I should, if I want to donate it."

"You should keep this one for Willa."

"I worry it won't fit her," she said. "I worry she'll take after Token's mother."

"What's wrong with Token's mother?"

"Nothing, but I don't think this would work on her frame."

"Are you saying she's fat? I don't think she's fat."

"I'm just saying that if I could look forward to watching my daughter grow up I could keep all of my clothes and then dole them out as necessary, according to fit and occasion and taste."

"Well, keep all of them, if you can't," I suggested. "Put a stipulation in your will that the collection is to be donated after Willa reaches 21 and takes fifty percent, or whatever. I don't know, you've got a lawyer. Invent something."

"That would still require that I catalogue everything!"

"I love cataloguing things."

"No, you love shoving things into a closet and pretending it's an archive."

"What's the difference between an archive and a closet?" I asked.

"I don't know. A foundation? An endowment?"

"Terminology." I crossed my arms. "If you must know."

We sat down for lunch in the den, where Wendy served me a tray of deli meat Bebe had sent over earlier in the week. With it she rustled up a package of Carr's and some grapes which were looking a bit haggard, sections of orange slices with the rind on, and a package of Maryland chocolate chip cookies, which she spilled onto a plate. She stuck a bottle in the baby's mouth and we split a pot of tea.

"When someone dies," she said, leaning over, the baby in her lap, "suddenly all of this food appears. I find myself wondering, where did I get these biscuits? Since when have I had these crackers? Someone just — brought them over."

"Kyle would be very sympathetic to that," I pointed out. "It's very in keeping with his modus operandi — if something goes wrong, get some food."

"I thought he wasn't eating, either."

"He's really lost his appetite, I suppose, but that's hardly stopped him from buying food. It must be his single largest expenditure, after clothing — I mean, since we haven't had coke since the new year." Wendy was looking at me; she had a section of orange in her mouth and was trying to mop up the juice from her hands as she was feeding the baby, so I had a moment to dwell on the fact that for the first time in many years, recreational drugs weren't a part of my life — I was neither taking them nor around people who were taking them. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen some cocaine — over Kenny's birthday, which seemed like ages ago. It was difficult to internalize the fact that I might never snort coke again, that new year's might have been the last time. It wasn't that I missed it, or wanted more; it simply felt like an auspicious ending, and I hated the idea of knowing precisely when the last time was.

When she'd swallowed the orange slice, she wiped her mouth and asked me, "Did you want to get Kyle a watch, or something?"

Still thinking about drugs, I was caught off-guard. "Oh. Yes. For his fortieth. Now, of course, you understand, Kyle's quite sensitive about his birthday anyhow. He doesn't like getting older. And this year…" I trailed off into a sigh. "Well, let's just say that whatever I do had best be a resonant gesture."

"And you've an idea?" she asked. "You want to get him a nice watch?"

"Precisely. He has this book on the jeweler Van Cleef and Arpels. And he is always saying he is late. Is late, actually, punctuality hasn't meant anything to him in 20 years. So, a watch, I figured. He would appreciate a watch."

"It's very Wallis Simpson of him."

"Well," I said, "he is an American. Of a kind."

"With that hair I'd guess Highlands wench before I guessed American."

"Don't be a bitch about him, Wendy." I sighed. "I do want to do something nice for him. Money's no object."

She shifted her weight, and I could tell she was uncomfortable. "How could it possibly not be? You don't have any money, Stanley."

"I could get some, if I had to."

"Really." It came out curt, significantly not a question. "And how, pray tell?"

"I have some things I could sell," I admitted. "The flat, for one."

"Sell your flat? I forbid it!"

"I thought you wanted me to move in with Kyle?"

"I just said he had nice rugs," said Wendy. "And maybe you should, I don't know. But don't sell your flat to pay for a watch. That's an incredibly short-sighted decision." She took a bite out of a cookie.

"Then, the cottage."

She swallowed. "The what?"

"My uncle's cottage," I clarified. "There's money leftover. From the sale, I mean. Kyle had me put it in a bond but I could get it at a loss if I wanted the cash."

"Oh? Well, then, there you go."

"Yes, there I am."

"Was it nice? The cottage, I mean."

"What a question," I said. "No, of course it wasn't 'nice' in any respect, but it was someone's home, and he left it to me for some reason. Maybe he thought I'd want to live there; I don't know. Maybe he put me down as the inheritor before we had a falling out, and never changed the will. It's possible he didn't realize he'd outlive his lover, and assumed I was less likely to kick the poor sap out than my father. To be honest, I'm not sure if he realized I was gay or not." I sighed, burying my head in my arms. "Well, it doesn't matter now. Seems fitting, since he was in the closet, that I should take that money and use it to buy Kyle the gaudiest, most disgusting watch I can find."

"Or you could get him something he'll use?"

"Kyle can be pragmatic, but I want this to mean something. No, I think it has to be awful. I think it'll pack more punch."

Wendy rolled her eyes at this, but she promised me that the next day she was having someone from the V&A over to look at some of her dresses, and she would make an inquiry on my behalf about watches. Just a few days later she rang me and announced that she had the name of a dealer, and she'd go with me, if I wanted accompaniment.

"If you can bear to consider watches for Kyle deeply enough to lend me some advice, then of course, I'd love it if you'd come along."

Instead of answering directly, she asked, "Why do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Act as though I despise him. I don't think I ever said more than that I found it boring to talk about him as an object of desire when your need for him was unrequited. And he is a serious bitch, you can't argue with that. But I don't hate him!"

"Well," I said, "you don't have to like him."

"That's so incredibly irrelevant. I offered to go with you. I don't really have the time to convince you to accept my company."

So we set out the next morning to a weird little shop in Hatton Garden, a dealer of antique jewelry who Wendy assured me would have something Kyle wanted, or at least, something I would want to buy for Kyle. I met her at home and we took a taxi over with the baby, who was a pro with cabs but didn't care for jewelry. She fussed quite a bit, so much so that Wendy shoved a pacifier in her mouth. "You know how infants are," Wendy explained to the flustered dealer, who was of my parents' generation, a fussy anachronism in a three-piece suit, though he stripped down to shirtsleeves to bring us trays of watches. Actually, Willa was nearing the eight-month point, so I am not sure "infant" was the right term; as soon as she was quiet, Wendy strapped her into the carrier and put it on a stool on the wall. "She won't bother us," said Wendy, hands folded in her lap. She was back in her Ferragamos and lipstick, clearly moved by this appointment out.

The dealer was a relic, but he was cheerful, and he gave us a little story about how his great-grandfather was a clock-maker, his grandfather … and so on. Apparently there was better money in selling nice clocks that making them, or maybe it was a point of contention within the family that had led him to make this startling statement: "Clocks are my father's game. I do watches." He said this with such conviction that I had visions of the gothic horror stories concerning the fate of those who confused clock-making with watch-dealing. With his gray hair styled in the wet-look and pink pocket square, he was of that generation of men that could, at the most intense point of dandification, be easily confused for gay, or rather, could be very difficult to tell.

Just so he didn't think Wendy and I were a couple, I made it clear by leaning forward and starting very loudly that I was looking for a pocket watch for my boyfriend, whose fortieth was fast approaching.

"What's he like?" the man asked me, as if I'd asked for something no more scandalous that a light for my cigarette at the bus stop. "Tell me about his tastes."

"He's the gaudiest man on the planet," said Wendy.

I rolled my eyes at that. "I wouldn't go that far, but he does like to look good. Status matters. He's fey but not womanly, doesn't go in for drag, has an eye for opulence, but he doesn't like to look cheap or even sensational. And he's a ginger, so he'd look better in gold than in silver. Also, he loves the French. As a matter of course. He's got a Van Cleef book, and a Poiret book, though I'm sure he wouldn't refuse Cartier if someone offered it to him."

"Does he have a lot of jewelry?"

"Cufflinks," I said, "though I don't know how often he wears them. We're not formal."

"And he doesn't have a watch already?"

"No, and he's always running late."

"It's rude, actually," said Wendy.

"Is he easily offended?"

"Very," said Wendy, just as I was saying, "No."

Our dealer stood up. "I've two ideas," he said. "Let me get the help—" and he hollered for his little assistant, a sheepish girl who'd let us into the shop; we'd barely noticed her, or at least, I had barely noticed her. She tripped into the room, her pumps scuffling on the wood floors, while her boss told her to run down to the safe and bring up trays 40 and 170, whatever that meant. The idea of an organizational system particular to any watch salesman, let alone this one, was beyond me. When she was gone, he seemed to go back to busying himself with correspondence, as if we simply weren't there at all. I was left to study the chintz wallpaper and brass scones with milk-glass while Wendy engaged me in idle chat about getting lunch.

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

"No, but you should eat something," she said.

"We're not too far from my flat, so maybe I should just go home after this."

"You have to eat."

"Why is it that I have to eat, but no one else does?"

"There's a nice bakery around the corner from Lincoln's Inn Fields," she said. "We could get a sandwich and then go into Soane's Museum. I'd do that with Token, when we were first married. I'd meet him for lunch and we'd go look at the Hogarths. It was always funny to me how they made you line up along the gate, even as there was never anyone in that place."

"It couldn't hurt to see some Hogarths," I said. "Is it the Rake's Progress?"

"Yes, and some interesting vedute, and a great Egyptian coffin down at the bottom of the atrium, in the cellar. With Roman emperors clustered all about it, you know, like they're going to a funeral."

I doubted there were emperors in the basement of Soane's townhouse, but before I had a chance to correct her, the assistant reappeared with trays 40 and 170. "Don't be rude," the dealer barked, and she disappeared again, only to return five minutes later with a tea tray.

In the meantime, we were shown our two options. "Now this," we were told, as if it were the second presentation, "is exceptionally fine, but an acquired taste. Van Cleef made these in the mid-twenties, and there's no mistaking the design. The arms are gold sheets and the trick is this—" I saw no arms, just a huddled oriental figure with its smooth egg head nestled in the golden heap that was the body. There was a button on the watch's side, though, and when the dealer pressed it, the arms raised to tell the time, the figure's left pointing to the minute, its right to the hour.

"They call it the Chinese Magician. It's unconventional."

"I'll say," said Wendy.

"There are only so many ways for a watch to flout convention. See, the gears are really something—"

Afraid to even handle that watch, I forced myself to listen to the narration of how the watch functioned. Its milky face picked up the gold like a dream and I tried to imagine it in Kyle's grip, staring at the hands as they opened for the time.

The other watch got less preamble, a late nineteenth-century filigreed cover which flipped open to reveal a numberless face and two hands which curled together like the ensorcelled metalwork of the art nouveau Metro stops of Paris. It felt utterly useful, even for its overbearing gleam, and the knob of its winding mechanism was molded like a tulip bud about to open, its petals clenched tightly together, a slight softness to the definition where someone's careful but greasy fingers had turned and turned this knob over again until its features blurred just slightly.

"So it's conventional," said the dealer, "but remarkable in this sense." He turned it over in his gloved hand and revealed to Wendy and me an engraving on the back, in dropped Roman capitals:

For DE: Always. FL.

"Who are DE and FL?" I asked.

Our dealer sighed, tossing a glove across the table for me to pull on. "I'd been meaning to find out before I sold it. Alas."

"Is there a way to find out?"

"If there is," he said, "I'll have to let you know. A Bavarian count sold this to me, a very very old man. He was the son of some old count of Tattenbach, fabulously wealthy in his youth, but put out a bit by the Great War. I think he got spooked by the Beer Hall Putsch, laid low in Kent for a time. He's dead now, of course, a few years ago. But he was one of those Weimar queens, you know the type: half tux and half leiderhosen. He was a neat 100 at death. This thing didn't come cheap. I think he was sad, actually, having watched Europe expand and contract around him. Getting pushed out like that, I cannot imagine. So there's a story behind this piece."

I held it in my gloved hand, the rhythmic throb of the seconds ticking against my fingers.

"So you've a choice," he said, "unless you want to see something else. That's history there, that watch, deep history. Our Bavarian didn't know where he got that thing, and it might have been nothing more than a trinket, you know, Wilde handed out gold cigarette cases like candy. Or here" — he pointed to the Chinese Magician — "you've got a feat of engineering, deco-slick, an ingenious little bauble. If money's no object, this is the best I've got."

I looked at Wendy, hoping she had some kind of answer, but he face was passive, giving up no suggestion. Just as I was about to ask her, Willa spit out her pacifier and the cry breached my concentration. "I'll get her," said Wendy, getting up. She left her half-drunk cup of tea on the tray and walked back to the stool where she'd put the carrier.

"So?"

"I need more time," I said, hoping to get some direction.

"Well, take all the time you want, but be quick about it." The dealer reached out for the watch and I gave it back to him, and he settled it back into its tray, still ticking.

Without a stroller, I offered to take the carrier on the short walk up Holborn, which was nice enough given the sunshine and dry breeze but stifled by the lawyers on lunch break, some of whom were still in robes and wigs, mostly men. The women smoking around the Chancery Lane Tube were mostly in jewel tones and shoulder pads, their hair chopped to the bases of their skulls like they wished for masculinity while holding it back with a hand set with acrylic nails. Everyone looked old, not just Wendy and me but everyone, and I had nothing to say because until recently I thought of Wendy and myself as dilettantes, the baby a prop. Now I somehow saw that a middle-aged man and woman carrying a child around, shifting the duties between the two of them, looked like a family — and I remembered the unflattering and unkind things I thought about couples with children, even still. The idea depressed me, but walking up High Holborn I was loathe to admit that I played any such role.

There was indeed a little cafe at the intersection of Whetstone Park and Gate Street, a queue of gabby lawyers spilling out of the door. We said little to each other, aside from Wendy's reminder that I should give Willa a bottle. She pulled it from the bag slung over her shoulder and handed it to me, and for a moment I stood there in this conflagration of the enviably employed, wondering what kind of life I could have had if I'd pursued a conventional route and held a job and had a wife. Willa made a soft kind of sucking noise as she drank formula from the bottle, and its appearance unsettled me — neither water nor milk, but some unpleasant negotiation between watery milk and milky water. She looked up at me with clear eyes and I realized I wasn't holding the bottle for her; she was doing it herself. Even the suckling noise she made was unsettling, the nauseous marriage of flesh and rubber, bizarrely sexual in such a particular way.

The food looked good, though, by the time we reached the counter. I talked Wendy into splitting a slice of quiche and a fairy cake with a paper Union Jack attached to a toothpick which pierced the crusty surface of the jagged application of frosting. The quiche was cheddar and mushroom and it came with a side of over-dressed rocket. We also got iced teas and sat at a wooden picnic table we shared with a pair of solicitors in the formal garb, which reminded me an awful lot of a Granada serial. At this point we weren't saying much and I assumed that after lunch we'd head back to High Holborn and go home. But as I was finishing my half of the fairy cake, Wendy asked if it was too late to go into Soane's Museum.

"I'm getting that awful feeling," she added, "the one where every decision left unmade leaves me haunted by regrets. Even though I must have been in there hundreds of times."

"Hundreds, really?" I asked.

"Well, dozens." She rolled her eyes at me. "I really want to see the Hogarths."

When we got to the door we were told there were no children allowed in the house, and that the carrier wouldn't fit through some of the narrower spaces.

"We could leave the carrier by the front door," I suggested.

"Those are the rules, I'm afraid," was the reply.

"We'd really hoped to come in," I pressed. "She's quite a well-behaved baby. Aren't you, Wills?"

"I don't make the rules, sir."

"Please." Wendy cleared her throat. "Forgive me for the drama of this request, but I'm terminally ill."

"You're terminally ill?" It was asked with a raised eyebrow, a bit of doubt to the question.

"Yes, and I — my late husband was a barrister and I used to meet him here. I want our daughter to see it."

"There are rules—"

"Oh, jesus." Wendy opened up her handbag and pulled out her wallet, withdrawing a fifty-pound note. "Is this enough?" she asked. "Honestly."

When we were standing in the front room peering out the arcade windows onto Lincoln's Inn Fields, the carrier left by the front door, I said to Wendy under my breath, "That was one of the sloppiest bribes I've ever seen."

"Thanks," she said. "Well, it got us in, so what's the matter?"

"No matter, I suppose. Good work."

"Money can get a person anything," she replied. It felt true, and the house must have been the greatest testament to that. Living there, I couldn't imagine, but with its tight passages crammed with objet d'art, musty smell, and sloping floors, I did see how the place could be intrinsically romantic.

Whatever the shortcomings or benefits of the place, all was lost on Willa. Wendy tried to explain the plot of A Rake's Progress: "Sarah loved him very much, but he never had time for her — see, even in the last image, he's looking away, as if she's hardly there. He is dying, and he's been stripped of all his worldly things, surrounded by inmates in the madhouse."

After this I grew quickly burnt out on hearing Wendy's interpretation of Hogarth's moralizing canvases and wandered into the atrium to stare down at the sarcophagus that, appropriately, dominated the cellar, festooned with antiquities. I'd never fixated on the interior, but though it was domed with glass I was able to make out the ghostly profile of a woman facing to the left, as if she were standing on the foot of the calcite sarcophagus. The milky, porous character of the rock caught the dim light in the house in such a way that she seemed to glow, until I tilted my head to get a better view and she was fully obscured, every inch of her phantom form hiding in the fabric of the sepulcher, from her heavy wig to her spindle-limbs and sheath dress. I headed back to Soane's small painting gallery but Wendy wasn't there, and I wondered if she hadn't taken the baby upstairs.

I didn't want to go upstairs but the museum was, to some extent, on a "path" I had to follow, so I ascended, assuming I'd find Wendy in a drawing room, which I did not. I went back down again and missed her as I stepped outside, as if the house had eaten her alive. She had to be in the house still, I figured, and went to go sit in the park, on a bench next to a lawyer (I presumed) in a gray suit with a mint-green shirt and white collar, and half-scabbed shaving nicks on his cheeks. He was reading a copy of the Evening Standard and drinking a Coca-Cola from a can, and though I didn't want to stare it bothered me greatly that I could not figure out how old he was. He seemed my age in some sense, but I had lost perspective on whether men who seemed my age were truly my peers, or if they merely matched the image I had of myself.

For the first time in a long time I found myself alone in a park without a book or paper, and I glanced around with anxiety wondering what to do with myself; how could I just sit there? I tried to play my own game and scanned the professional crowd, not quite cruising but wanting to talk myself into doing so. What would I have done if I'd linked eyes with someone? Looked away, I suppose, averting my gaze; I'd have to stay put, because getting up and walking away would have suggested I wanted to be followed. No one caught my eye, figuratively; the business set was beyond me now that I had my little thing with Kyle. I felt some sense of relief as I determined to get him a watch, to present it to him with the weight required to carry my feelings expressly and directly, without confusion, with pure intent.

The man beside me got up and walked away; he left the Standard beside me but I didn't pick it up, staring at his behind as he went. Before I could reach a verdict he turned away, and I realized he was both younger than I and unattractive, maybe in his early thirties. Definitely not gay. There was no particular science I applied to these judgments; it had been so long since I'd indulged in the sport of speculation that my study of the crowd began to turn inward until I felt isolated, wondering who was looking at me and what they made of a man in jeans and a T-shirt sitting alone on a bench in mid-afternoon.

Eventually Wendy made it out of the house alive and with the baby; her timing was impeccable, as I was just about to grow worried. "You disappeared," she said, handing the carrier to me. "I wondered if you hadn't gotten lost in there."

"I just finished," I said, trying to shrug it off, casual.

"Well, I'd like to go home now," she said, "if that's all right with you. The baby needs a nappy or something."

It seemed to me that this "something" was very vague, and possibly an excuse to get away from me, since in my experience needing a nappy was rather definitive. In any case, I walked her to a taxi, too resentful to offer accompaniment on the way home, given my assumption that she was sick of me. Even after Wendy waved farewell through the window, I stood on the pavement seething with abandonment, wondering just what I was supposed to do with myself now. Eventually it occurred to me that it had been in this area just recently that I'd lost my copy of Genet.

So I trudged over to Foyles and bought a new copy of Our Lady of the Flowers, trying to ignore the other shoppers, whose presence in a bookstore in mid-afternoon on a weekday might have reflected back on my own somehow. As soon as I'd tendered my handful of change, I felt guilty for buying a book I could just as easily have found at the library, especially as I'd already owned this book and lost it somewhere. As penance I forced myself to sit down at Maison Bertaux with a pot of tea and a Napoleon, or a mille-feuille, as plain as plain could be, with unflavored custard between the slices of puff pastry and an abundance of confectioner's sugar dumped on top. The damn sugar got everywhere, painting my jeans with the dusty look of a coke bender, though it was just sugar and nothing more. Luckily for me there was a table on the street under the awning, and I sat at a narrow table between a pair of squawky queens on one side and a foul-smelling kid on the other; he seemed unwashed and was scribbling in a little pocketbook. He had the distant look of Eastern Europe; maybe he was a political refugee. Actually, he looked, both in age and in damage, a bit like Ike Broflovski had the day he reemerged from his time in Bermondsey or Barnet or whenever he'd said he'd gone when he disappeared. It was a kind of disaffection, someone thoroughly over it, just trying to conform to a social type without putting his heart into it, as if in the waning twilight of a youthful phase about to fall away and reveal and adulthood of bland mainstream meanness.

I thought back on my own youth and remembered the moment when I'd realized bleached hair looked bad on me, and suddenly I had a very visceral flashback to standing in the toilet in my ensuite at Magdalen, hating that my peroxide hair clashed with my black brows, and wondering why I was trying to be anything when society thought I was nothing. Then, not for the first time that day, I felt sick with the thought that I had never really outgrown my youth and maybe it was sad, rather than radical, for a man of forty years to be eating pastries and sipping tea and reading French experimental fiction under an awning on Greek Street in the middle of the day. The problem was that I looked around and saw that I was surrounded by a city full of other people like me, and mostly what I had wanted to be was unlike anyone. I had wanted so badly to be like Kyle when I first met him, but the problem was that I wasn't as brave as Kyle was, and I wouldn't work as hard as Kyle did; there was no way for me to reconcile that he somehow had a place in the world, with people who needed him, and yet when he was dead I wasn't going to be anyone for anyone.

This realization, combined with the smell of the dead-eyed kid next to me breathing noisily into his book as he scribbled on its pages with a biro, made me terribly unhungry. I pushed the mille-feuille away and cracked open the spine of the Genet, ready to get to work. That was my penance; I would force myself to read the whole thing, even the parts I'd done already, for losing my first copy and wasting money on a new one, and for generally being a useless drain on society. I would take in every page in this tome, even the blank ones; perhaps especially the blank ones. And I turned to the title page, and read through the copyright information, finally landing on this dedication, which I had apparently missed on my first reading:

Were it not for Maurice

Pilorge, whose death keeps

plaguing my life, I would

never have written this

book. I dedicate it to his

memory.

J.G.

Immediately I had to know who Maurice Pilorge was.

For a moment I sat there with the page shuddering lightly between my fingers as I tried to decide to mark the page so I would remember to look into the Pilorge matter. Ultimately, I didn't — I couldn't.

XXX

My recollections of the events and circumstances surrounding this period begin to grow confused; so much was happening in so little time, surely there can't have been a moment to pause and reflect? I grope for recollections of calm evenings at home, or dinners out with Kyle followed by a night of reading together in bed. Mostly the time between the scandal and Kyle's birthday coalesces for me into a series of notable punctuations, some of which I've described above. Another such incident was a trip my mother made to London. She hadn't been up for several years and had scarcely done it on her own. I was shocked, rather, when she rung to say she wanted to see me; while I didn't ask why over the phone, I had some idea.

"Do you think she's going to take you to task?" Kyle wanted to know. "You don't have to go see her. You don't owe her anything."

"I don't think she's going to take me to task," I said, "and I intend to see her." She had made up some excuse about shopping for a new shawl to wear to church, but it was rubbish. She was coming to see me, that much was clear. I agreed with Kyle on the point that I didn't exactly owe her anything. Yet she rarely asked anything from me. Why would I begrudge her a visit? "You could come, if you liked," I offered.

He bristled at that. "I have work, thank you. Someone's got to keep the lights on around here." Never mind that we were in my flat, where I paid my own electric bill. The point had been made.

She took a coach to Victoria, and I met her in our usual place, away from the station in a little tea sandwich of a park called Grosvenor Gardens. I say "our usual place" though my parents had only come down to London via coach a handful of times since my move there in 1967. I was thinking of this as I got off the Tube, emerging into the daylight and blinking at the brightness. Come July it would be 19 years since I had landed, frightened and miserable but very hopeful about the future, in the capital. She was sitting on a bench, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

"Oh, Stanley," she said, looking up to me. "Look at you."

"Look at me what?" I bent to give her a kiss on the cheek, and she shirked for a moment, shrinking away. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, dear, I just need to push myself to do it. The doctor told me it's not contagious."

"What's not contagious? AIDS? It is contagious, but not via kissing your mother on the cheek. And I don't have it anyway!"

"But—"

"Let's get lunch," I said, though I had never wanted to be roped into this conversation. She wanted to eat somewhere special, and with Kyle on my mind I marched her down the road, past the palace, and through the park to Fortnum & Mason.

"This is probably too fancy for me," she said, "when I said 'special' I didn't necessarily mean — this."

"Well, what did you mean?"

"I don't know, exactly, but — not here."

"This is Kyle's favorite place," I said, "so while I can't say it's my favorite place in the universe, I suppose in that regard it's special."

"What does he like so much about it?"

"I suppose just the fact that it's posh and he's a social climber."

"Is he?"

I shrugged, poring over the menu. At first I decided to be prudent and order only a starter of celery root soup, but then I saw my mother's pinched expression, worry in her eyes, and to be encouraging I announced that I was ordering a whole roast Dover sole.

"I'm not that hungry," she demurred, "but get what you like."

"Kyle will pay for it," I said.

"Is that quite all right? Does he have an account here?"

"You'd think so, but no. I do, however, have his charge card."

"Won't he mind?"

Again, I merely shrugged.

"I wish you'd stop shrugging!"

"He's really not ungenerous, but that's the extent to which I'll comment on it," I said, meaning money.

She sighed and clutched the menu. In a weirdly old-fashioned twist she was wearing white gloves, though it was very springlike outside and out-of-season, not to mention out of style. I could tell she had something to say because she kept glancing around and craning her neck and narrowing her gaze on me before turning away and taking a cagey sip of water. It had been years since we'd sat together like this, without really saying much, waiting on someone else to come and facilitate our meeting. Usually my mother acted as an intermediary between myself and my father, though even as I sat there across the table from her I couldn't say whether I'd ever see my father again.

Finally, I ordered my sole and she asked for a starter of potted shrimps and a plate of toast. As the waiter walked away she said, "I'm not very hungry."

"You said as much."

"And I'm not sure it's appropriate to make that poor man pay for my lunch," she continued. "I've not been very kind to him."

"Well, better than most people, honestly."

"I'm ashamed of that way I've acted."

It took me a moment to think of a response. I took a gulp of water, wishing I'd ordered a drink, though I should have been glad my mother didn't know I drank at lunch. Finally, I said, "Most people should be ashamed of the way they've acted."

"Do you mean generally?"

"I mean toward queers specifically."

"Oh." She looked down at her lap, and she raised her head again her cheeks were bright red. "As soon as I heard I wanted to make certain you were all right."

"I'm fine," I assured her.

"You aren't ill?"

"Do I look it?"

"You understand my concern."

"Not really, no," I said. "But what's so great about understanding, anyway?"

"You're my son! I don't want you to think you don't matter, or that I don't care."

This bothered me, because the reassurance she offered was so flimsy and so hollow. "Those are the most abstract, least weighty expressions of parental concern in the world."

She said, "Your father thinks you're obstinate and irresponsible. He thinks it must be fun, to live free from the burden of family and without having to provide for anyone."

"He's a fucking idiot," I said.

"Stanley, don't call your father an — effing idiot."

"He's a bloody moron if he thinks it's fun. He should try it. He should try it, and see how much fun it is."

"Why are you so angry?"

"Why aren't you? You're the one married to that sociopath."

Perhaps I expected her to take exception to my insolence, but she didn't. Instead, she sat back in her chair and sighed, as if giving up. "You know," she said, spreading her hands across her lap. "I am, it's true. No one's more aware of his shortcomings than I am. But you know what, Stanley, he isn't wrong about anything. You never give him any credit."

"It's not my job to give him credit."

"Stanley." She sighed my name with the kind of sad resignation I knew some mothers felt toward their children. "I had to learn this a long time ago," she said, and suddenly she seemed incredibly old and sort of feeble, her face taut around her mouth and slack under her eyes, the skin dry and creased like an old handbag, exposed to the elements and opened too many times. I didn't want to be the cause of that disappointment, so why was I here? "You're an adult. You're 40. That's younger than it once was, but it's old enough to know that anger is an illusion. It doesn't amount to anything. I spent so many years of my life wondering, why am I with this man? Why is my daughter repeating my mistakes? Why is my son a homosexual? Literally, I've asked these questions — but there aren't any answers, do you know?"

"You're confusing behavior with inherent characteristics."

"What's the difference? One causes the other."

"Does it?"

"I don't know, Stanley, but here is what I always wished. I wished you'd married and had children, not for the sake of normalcy, but because I think you'd have come to understand something about what it's like to have a husband or a wife, in the sense that you have to give up part of yourself. You have to concede things. You cannot be this rigid person who won't bend and won't suffer. You must accommodate someone else. I think if you'd seen this you might have come to understand why I couldn't do more for you. And, I'm sorry, I think. For not doing those things."

"What things?" I asked. "What do I take away from this? The idea that if I were married to my own father, I'd have sympathy for him? Or if I were married to him, I'd have to fundamentally shift myself to fit into that relationship? I don't really understand."

"The point isn't about your father, exactly. Just that, well, I wish you understood better the position I have been in. No one's ever really asked me what it's like to be married to him, you know."

"You could have divorced him, you know."

"Sweetheart, I'm Catholic," she said, "and besides, I didn't want to. I just find it odd that no one's ever asked me what it's like, is all."

I wasn't sure what she was getting at. "Would you like me to ask—?"

"No, that's all right." She sniffed, and took a sip of water. "I'm just fine."

"Well, look. This is all well and good, except that I disagree fundamentally with the idea that marriage should require shifting oneself to accommodate a partner. What kind of partner doesn't want you as you are? I'm with Kyle, right — he might as well be my husband. You know that, I suspect. We can't really use that word, but it's good enough for now."

"Would you marry him if you could?" she asked.

"If he wanted that."

"And would he?"

"My god, yes. He'd be beside himself with glee, I'm sure. If it's ever legal — I mean, if he lived to see it. The point is, maybe it's because we're both men, or perhaps due to the fact that we've known each other quite some time, there's rather a lack of pretense. He knows me, and I know him, and that includes everything, even the bits I don't like. Yet I don't tell him to rearrange himself for me. I've never asked him to do that."

"It's just that you've never come to a crisis together," she said.

"Oh yes," I said starkly, "we bloody well have."

The words sat there for a moment and she took another sip of water, her expression as soft as I'd ever seen it. Finally, she put the water glass down and said, "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too," and that was the final bit of our conversation over lunch, or the substantive part of it at least. I ate only a third of my sole and talked her into taking it home for my father's dinner, which she'd be unable to prepare after spending the day in London. I asked her what she was going to eat for dinner.

"Oh," she said, "you know me, I'll make do." I had a vision of my father flaking bits of microwaved fish from a paper platter as my mother spooned two or three baked beans into her mouth. They'd be sitting at the dining room table with their typical evening diet of soft jazz on the wireless, my father grousing about so-and-so and this and that and if I knew him then he'd probably be on something about rocks, not bothering to ask her about her day, until she turned away and went to put her dish into the sink. Then he'd call after her, "Hey, hey Sharon," like some child she'd forgotten, lost and gone forever. The accuracy of this scene pushed me to pay for lunch with my own money. Kyle would have been thrilled to take me out, but he probably would rather have been there himself. I couldn't contaminate his love of the place by using his money to pay for my father's dinner.

We said goodbye outside on Piccadilly, as I was going to get on the bus.

"You know," she said, smoothing my hair down, "it would be nice to hear from you more often."

"There is nothing keeping you from getting in touch with me."

"We should each try harder. Put more effort into it, you know?"

"You're ashamed of the way you've acted," I said, "and yet you're perfectly tolerant of everything Randy's said and done to me."

"You have to let go of your hatred for your father! Move past it already."

"I'd move past it if it were some slight, or some minor disagreement. You know I can't be more in touch with you, and it's not because of me."

She stood there for a moment without any sign of thought on her features. In a moment she'd turned it all off, the lights off, no one home.

I continued: "You can have a relationship with me, or you can protect Dad, but you can't have both."

"It's unfair, having to pick."

"Honestly, what is fair? Kyle is dying."

"I'm sorry. He doesn't deserve that."

"You're right, he doesn't. He's an outstanding human being. I wish you knew him better."

"I do too, to some extent. In a small way."

"Then that's on you. You know where to find me if you want me."

She kissed me on the cheek and walked me to the bus stop, where she gave me a 20-pound note and a slice of tea cake, which she'd saved for me in a plastic bag. For a moment I thought she'd wait with me for the bus, but after a few minutes she simply grew impatient and shrugged off with a sort of coy, "Well, that's me," scuffling down Piccadilly to get a taxi. It would be quite some time before I saw her again; my last view was of her shoe as she pulled her foot inside the car, a moment before the door slammed.

XXX

Kyle's 40th birthday was a low-key affair in two parts; the first was a dinner at his parents' cooked by Sheila Broflovski. When we arrived the foyer smelled of meat and dumplings and rich sauces, lard and chicken fat stewing together with gluten and mushy vegetables. Peasant food. When Kyle smelled it, his eyes lit up. "It's fantastic I have an appetite tonight," he said as he hung his coat. (The rain that afternoon had been relentless — until it had relented as we'd called for a taxi.) "I am going to eat myself silly! But I'm old now. I think I deserve it."

When we went into the kitchen to see his mother, he exclaimed, "You didn't have to make all this!" But his eyes were dancing at all the effort she'd gone to for him.

"Ah, it was nothing." She kissed his cheek — and mine, but she squeezed his and kissed him a second time. "No trouble is too much trouble for my eldest boy. And besides, I have so much time now that I'm unemployed."

His eyes darkened. "Mommy," he chided. "Don't joke."

"Who's joking? It's only true."

"You could get a job," I suggested, perhaps with a touch of hypocrisy.

Kyle sighed and said, "Stanley, what ever, why," as if I'd offered up something really ludicrous.

"You know," she said, "it's not the worst idea I have ever heard. But, no, I'm too old for a job, seeing as I never had one in the first place."

"No?" I asked.

"Well, no, not a real job in the occupational sense. My family was in the garment trade, you know, it wasn't so unusual at the time. So I'd help out with that when I wasn't in school, but it's not fair exactly to say I was paid for it. Then I forced my way into an education, and I didn't really leave, and I was a bit of a housewife I guess until I ran for my seat. And that brings us up to recent events, and I wouldn't even know where to start with a job. Where would I get references, for one thing? And more to the point…" She trailed off. "You know, I hate to admit this, but. I'm kind of tired."

"In what sense?" Kyle asked. "Should I be worried?"

"Don't waste your energy worrying about me, Bubbe," she chided. Then she went back to the cooking. "Help yourself to a drink," she offered, opening a drawer and pulling out a meat tenderizer.

Whilst considering whether it would be correct or kind to offer to help, yet just before I could offer any assistance, Kyle pulled me out of the kitchen and toward the bar, where he made himself a gin and tonic and, without asking, a stiff whisky for me, in a heavy crystal tumbler. "I doubt she'll serve champagne." Kyle raised his glass. "Cheers."

A lot had happened recently; that much couldn't be denied. Kyle's actual birthday, the Monday of that week, had been a low-key dinner out for the two of us at the restaurant at the Ritz, in the hushed dining room with thick, creamy linens that left a dusting of fine lint on the diner's thighs, the basket of rolls so warm the paddled butter with its knots and ridges melted into the bread on contact. The mood in the room was so subdued and so thick with status that I was deterred from handing over the watch, whereas up to the moment we'd sat down I'd thought of presenting it to Kyle over dinner on his birthday, and then treating Paris a bit like a honeymoon. The palatial setting with its linked garland chandelier would have set the right tone.

But I was overcome at the last minute by how incredibly misplaced it would have been to cause a scene in this stately old salon of Americans with expense accounts and dowager baronesses. I kept the watch in my front pocket throughout the meal, during which time I began to think of Paris as an elopement. Only in the cab on the ride home, when Kyle began to paw at my trousers, did it occur to me that I was nervous and wasn't thinking things properly through. I begged him off by saying that if he didn't stop I was going to come in my pants, which did not deter Kyle, though it did get us thrown out of the taxi. Crisis averted. On Tuesday night Butters took him out for dinner, leaving me to drunkenly write 10 pages of remarkable musings on the topic of fighting with my mother. When I'd gone over to Kyle's the next evening, he had a new throw pillow on the sofa, embroidered with the phrase, 39 Again.

"How long do you think I have to keep this out?" Kyle asked. "Realistically."

"I think you can put it away now so long as you bring it out again whenever Miss B drops by."

"Oh, thank god," he'd said, whisking it away.

Now it was Thursday evening and we were sitting in Kyle's parents' garden, where Sheila planned to serve dinner. It was a special request from the guest of honor, who'd installed himself at the head of the table and was drinking his gin and tonic in a rather theatrical way, swirling the glass between sips and gesturing with it, perhaps performing the part of head of the house, knowing he'd never inherit that role. "I hope my mother doesn't wear that ridiculous wig to my birthday dinner," he sniffed. It was light out still but the gas lamps were lit, and all around us were the arrangements his parents paid wispy-handed florist's assistants to pot for the space. Everything was soft pink and lime green, the quintessential colors of 1986. Add some leatherette in tan and the Islington garden would have looked like a schoolgirl in a Sussex cafe, tapping that afternoon fag against the ceramic saucer of her coffee cup.

"The wig's all right." I said, "but I worry about the fact that your father hasn't come down. Is he coming at all?" There were seven settings at the table, with a highchair.

"You should know by now that Daddy never comes to dinner before he has to." Kyle sighed, resting his cheek against the cocktail in his hand, where it left a wet, red mark. To hide the circles beneath his eyes he'd used his foundation trick, and from a certain angle when squinting his red cheek almost made him look pretty. It had been a long time since I'd seen him dress extravagantly in front of his parents, but here he was in white linen slacks that betrayed the redness of his arousal and what must have been an old women's cardigan over a brick-red T-shirt. The sweater was both subdued and shocking, with sleeves that belled out slightly and a dramatic, draping collar that turned quickly into a column of white leather herringbone-weave buttons. Only now, in the garden, did I see this outfit fully; when he'd appeared before me to leave the flat earlier he'd been wearing a mackintosh.

Just after Ike arrived, Winnie in tow, Kyle's father finally joined us. The first thing he said, to Ike, was, "Where is Flora?"

I hadn't even realized she was missing.

Ike had Winnie in his arms and the baby was bawling, about which Ike hardly seemed pleased in the first place; the question from his father made him tense up. He strode toward the table and strapped the baby into the highchair. Finally, with all of us staring expectantly at him, he said: "She doesn't like any of you."

"Well, she's as gracious as you are," said Kyle, "so maybe this match is better-fitted than initially believed."

"Gossip about it later. I don't care if it's your birthday. Actually, I've a present for you." Ike turned and ran into the house.

"Where is he going in a hurry?" Kyle asked. "I was only teasing."

"You touched a nerve, darling, clearly."

"Best not to tease your brother," Gerald said. He was eyeing the table with suspicion, perhaps unsure where to sit since Kyle had deposited himself at the head. "He works very hard."

The present turned out to be a bottle of baby formula, and Ike's insistence that Kyle feed it to Winston. "You love this sort of thing," Ike said to Kyle's insulted look.

"What sort of thing?"

"Feeding babies."

"He's the only one I've ever fed!"

"Well, that's great, you've a rapport then."

Still holding the drink, Kyle's face relaxed from a look of total disgust to one of resignation. He did feed the baby, but when Ike came back from his second trip into the kitchen with beers for himself and his father, Kyle took on a preachy tone: "My birthday is important. You should have bought me something extraordinary. At least taken me out to dinner. I certainly hope this isn't my only present tonight."

I leaned over and said, "I'm sorry to report my gift's coming later."

"That's disgusting. Don't imply that in front of my son."

"I wasn't implying anything," I said, "I've bought Kyle a gift and I'll give it to him later."

Kyle looked at this father. "I hope you've gotten me something, at least."

All he got in return was a stiff, "Your mother's taken care of it."

"Well, goody." Kyle continued to feed the baby until the bottle was half empty, at which point he handed Winston to me and slammed the bottle down on the table. "There, Winnie, Uncle Stanley will finish up for you. I can't risk a baby getting sick on my sweater."

"Really pleased you're in such an excellent mood," said Ike.

Winnie looked up at me with lazy curiosity in his eyes, clearly about to bellow at the relative stranger in whose arms he'd been placed. Then I popped the nipple back into his mouth and his face clenched with the near-orgasmic satisfaction you really only see in creatures without language skills. He didn't have Willa's personality or pretty curls, just the instinctive responses of a young animal. Better was the look on Kyle's face as he watched me, half stupid with need, half breed me, which was something one overheard men gasp in the back rooms of nightclubs. I would have done it, were it possible, and advisable. Then I would have regretted it, so better it wasn't possible anyhow.

When Sheila served dinner it was chicken and dumplings, "But not in a Southern way," whatever that meant. The dumplings were cut with chicken fat, and alongside the wilted green bean-and-canned corn medley she served a plate of crisp, salty skin, the byproduct of all that rendering. Kyle hadn't eaten so much at one time for so long that watching him consume a palmful of fried chicken skin could have made me cry out of relief, were that the sort of thing I did. Instead, I gazed admiringly at him, picking at the food and drinking canned beer that was warmer than it should have been.

The triumph of the meal was the cake. Sheila's cooking wasn't much, but she was apparently a fine baker. Cakes had never held much sway for me; from their glossy fondant casing to the dense, fruity insides, I tended to prefer nothing for dessert over a cake. This one was nothing much to look at, just a fudgy frosting on the outside and moist yellow cake on the inside, the icing uneven and crumby. It came to the table unadorned and Kyle demanded birthday candles, "On which to wish," and though he was smiling there was a weight to this inquiry, something more than a request.

Sheila turned off the lights on the house façade, and Kyle's face was lit from beneath in the glow of a dozen flickering candles dripping wax onto stiff frosting. I wondered what he was going to wish for. "Don't sing," he said, and so no one did, unless one counted the baby, who did not like the dark and began crying, or maybe it was the sudden change in atmosphere. I wanted to go to Kyle but I wanted to observe him, too, and so I stayed across the table, trying to find the precise moment when he settled on his wish, and I wanted to know what it was, too. I tried to imagine what Kyle would wish for. He loved things and yet he owned so many things; he had me, though I despaired to think he'd wish for someone better. Was it something ephemeral, something of consequence, for some event to come to pass? More of something, less of something, something for someone else entirely? In considering all of Kyle's potential wishes I failed to notice that he'd prepared to blow out the candles, and in an instant the garden went darker and his face disappeared; Sheila, clapping, put the light back on, and I saw wisps of cheap smoke clearing around his face.

We sat down at the end of the table and Sheila began to slice the cake. "Shouldn't I slice it?" Kyle asked, his cheek on clenched fist. '

"I don't want you to cut yourself, bubbe."

"Better let your mother do it," said Gerald.

"Very well." The first slice was presented to Kyle and he drank it in with big eyes, licking frosting from the tip of his thumb.

Once everyone else had been served, Sheila sat without cutting herself a slice. As Kyle was eating she reached over to tuck some of his hair back. He gave her a grateful look, which was remarkable; if my mother had done the same to me, I'd have probably batted her hand away. "This is great," Kyle said. "I needed this."

His mother leaned over and, with a fork, cut a hunk from his slice of cake. "I have something else for you. Wait a moment." She put the fork in her mouth and pushed herself off the table, hustling from the room.

"What's all this?" Kyle asked his father.

"You'll see."

Holding the baby, Ike said nothing.

Sheila came back outside holding a large paper envelope, her reading glasses on. "All right," she said, "don't get cake on this."

"What is it?" Kyle asked.

"This is paperwork to enroll in a drug trial," she said. "It's a compound called azidothymadine." She was beaming. "I pulled some strings."

"What strings? Mommy, what is this?"

"This is the literal end of my political career. I've cashed in every single chip, Kyle. It's a drug trial, for an AIDS drug. Um. I don't understand the science, if I'm being honest, but I'm told this is the thing, this is the ticket."

"This is a cure for AIDS?" Kyle pulled the papers out of the envelope, trying to make sense of them.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe."

"No it's not," said Ike. "Don't do it."

"Don't do what?" Kyle asked.

"Don't take that. That compound's been around forever. It's not a cure for AIDS."

"It could help," said Sheila, "my contacts in Bethesda said the study was highly praised by the CDC, and they had very good expectations."

"Of course they do, they don't have anything else. Do you know how much Burroughs-Wellcome is going to make on that? My god, you'll kill him."

"How could this drug possibly kill him?"

"It's a cancer drug nobody ever used because the side effects are horrendous. The cure is worse than the disease, you know, literally. It's been sitting on the shelves since the sixties because it's no good. What of that doesn't make sense for you?"

"Ike, bubbe, where is this coming from?"

"I'm a bloody physician, is where, do you not think I keep up with the literature?"

"You're a general practitioner—"

"Is it not clear that I've an interest in this? None of you ever listen to me! Well, you know, I know what I'm talking about. Don't do it, Kyle. That's my birthday gift for you. Don't sign that."

"Ike, I can't believe this!"

"You don't have to like me, Mother, but you could at least believe that I wouldn't advise someone to not take a life-saving drug!"

"Excuse me." Kyle slipped the papers back into the envelope and stood up. "We should be leaving. Stanley?"

I got up and pushed away my plate of cake. "This was lovely," I said.

"I think there's a lot to think about," said Kyle. "I mean, honestly."

"Don't go," said Sheila. "Honestly, Kyle, I'm serious — it took a lot of work to get this for you."

"Yes, that's the most important thing, isn't it — not whether it's safe, but whether declining to take it would be a waste of your time."

"I don't like the insinuation that I've been wasting my time, Ike!"

Kyle put a hand on my arm, then another. "I cannot stay and listen to you fight," he said. "Please, just — I need to think."

"Kyle—"

"I just got tired. We really need to go."

Suddenly the atmosphere was tense and as Kyle's family clustered around us to say goodbye, I felt myself wavering, as if hesitant to leave. Kyle kissed everyone on the cheek and absolutely smothered Winnie, who had fallen asleep by the time Kyle snatched him up, pressing his lips to the baby's damp cheeks.

On the walk down to the Angel to catch the Tube, I suffered in silence for a few minutes before deciding I had to know what Kyle had wished for.

"Well," he asked me, "what do you think?"

"Not to die," I said, "obviously," without hesitating.

Kyle stopped walking and stood there, staring at me. "I don't know if I should tell you," he said, "but then, you're so much my other half that I don't really see it as telling someone else a secret. I did not wish not to die." We stopped walking and he shrank back from me, wiping his nose with his wrist. "Everyone dies, you know, what's the point of wishing that? My only wish is not to die in pain."

"Kyle—"

"I've thought about it for months now," he said, "what I would wish for on my fortieth birthday. I can't get poor Clyde out of my head. I don't want a group of bereaved gawkers looking down at my disgusting old body. I'm really worried about it."

"You're not disgusting," I said. "You're not going to be like Clyde."

"Stanley, you can't just keep saying this won't happen, or that won't happen — we don't get to pick what happens! That's why it's a wish, rather than a decision. If I could merely decide to have whatever I wanted right now, a Rolls Royce would pull up and whisk me away to some palace where I'd be draped in crown jewels and anointed. The idea of getting to choose what'll happen — it's pure childish fantasy. You must let it go."

"Well, that's rubbish, darling, I know you. You don't want to be anointed."

"Then what do you think I want?"

"Honestly? I think you just want to be treated like a normal person, and while I think Clyde is a stupid measure by which to rate normalcy, if we put it into that very bizarre and truly specialized context, well, look." I sighed, crossing my arms. Kyle stood there looking to me, his hair fiery under the sepia glow of a streetlamp. "Clyde was in the closet."

"I know that."

"Well, he wound up with a bunch of gawkers around his bed because he spent his whole life pretending he was something else, and everyone who knew him had to know him through a veneer of performance, this hapless masculinity he wanted to project. He never had conversations with the people he loved about what he wanted, not in general during his life or at the end of it. So all these people had to squeeze in around his bed because that was the only time they'd ever see the truth of him, you know, stripped bare like that. You're never going to be Clyde, darling."

We were standing three feet apart, the streets mostly deserted; a group of teenagers sat on wire garden furniture in the front yard of a terraced house across the street, but otherwise, we were alone. The low din of their revelry and the occasional waft of their cigarette butts was the only intrusion they made into our conversations.

I cleared my throat. "You're the bravest person I know. And you're immune to gawking."

He blinked his wet eyes. His voice shook: "Is that my birthday present? Telling me I'm brave?"

"No. No, that's coming later."

"I wish I could hug you." He wiped his eye with the sleeve of his shirt, and it left a wet spot on the cuff. "I wish I could kiss you."

"You can when we get home," I said, "and we can go back to your place, if you want, though I'm closer."

"Actually, I want to be kissed."

"I can do that."

He tented his fingers over his mouth, throat bobbing as he swallowed. He kept blinking away tears. "Do you think that drug will kill me?"

"I don't know," I said, "though if, as you said, everyone dies anyway, it might not hurt to try."

"Can I tell you what I really want?" He didn't wait for me to agree. "I just want you to be with me when I go, okay? Maybe I'll be senile and won't even know who I am, let alone who you are, but if I can wake up tomorrow morning knowing you'll be there, I'll feel better about it."

This felt like the scene at the climax of a postmodern romance, two lovers connecting in the street while they kept themselves three feet apart. It was my moment, I felt, the greatest and saddest love scene I'd ever play.

Maybe because there was a confounded look on my face, Kyle took a step forward and said, wetly, "I take quite a lot of solace in the fact that you talk about going home together and you literally mean, you know — our home, together, without even the slightest regard for where that is specifically, because just the two of us together is home, without any other — I don't know, I'm so rambling—"

For years I've regretted the fact that I didn't sweep him into my arms then. You want to forget — I wanted to forget — the boys across the street, the constraints, both real and imagined — you want to live inside of a story, to give yourself emotional catharsis. You want to be a writer so you can project your own experiences onto your characters, so you can give your readers the beats they expect, so you can imagine the pure satisfaction of a story's crescendo.

But, this isn't a fiction. I can't give you that. It didn't happen. I said, "Well. All right, then." Kyle sighed and wiped his eyes again, kicking at the pavement with his pricey loafers. We shuffled back to my flat in silence, frustrated, my mind racing with programmatic self-loathing: a real man would have done it, consequences be damned. But I couldn't fight off six teenagers, and even if there was the slightest chance they'd have acted on it — would they even have noticed?

We got back to my flat and he sat down on the couch, started sobbing. When I did kiss him it was warm and damp and consoling. "Jesus," he said, "jesus, I'm forty. Why am I crying?"

"Because what else is there?" I asked.

"I don't know," he cried.

"Let me — I'll make tea."

"Okay." He sat up straighter as I got off the couch.

XXX

Two mornings later we awoke, dressed silently while the sun rose over Hyde Park, and flew to Paris, Stansted to Orly. Not glamorous, but it would do. Kyle and I had been to France before, both separately and together. I had also been to Paris with Wendy twice, once in preparation for her impending nuptials, when both of us were lithe and optimistic and stupid. She spoke flawless French, and ordered about the assistants in Mr. Balenciaga's shop in perfect fluency. With her long, dark sweep of straight hair she could have passed for native, but the short hem of her heavy wool skirt betrayed her British stock. The wedding gown they constructed for her that week was pure sculpture, gathered in feminine drapes across her hips; the sleeves fitted her like a second skin. When I thought of Paris, I thought of Wendy in her youth, laughing as her fork shook clenched beneath shell-colored nails. I bought a navy blue sweater with a V-shaped neckline that same trip, and wore it to Parisian saunas where I knelt in front of swarthy Gauls with damning enthusiasm. The tone of this current trip was going to be somewhat different.

Kyle, or Caroline on his behalf, had booked an opulent room overlooking a trafficked boulevard. There was one king-sized bed, the headboard more intricate than the plot of a Russian novel. Fleur-de-lys were everywhere, dripping from the crown molding and etched into our mirrored bathroom. The tub stood on four brass feet, deep enough to submerge a full-grown man. I had no special knowledge of what Kyle had paid for this room, but the platters of summer fruits and bucket of chilled champagne that greeted us on arrival suggested that it was more that I'd have done. Of course, on my own volition I'd never have decided to go to Paris. But it was Kyle's 40th birthday, and I understood that he meant to waste no opportunity to live his life as fully as he could. Since for him this meant spending money, here we were. It took effort to remember that I'd wanted this for him — for us.

Everything about the room, the bed and the tub and the balcony with its view of the city, seemed built to accommodate a honeymooning young couple. In the lobby at reception, though, I'd spied only portly old men and their gaudy, tight-faced wives, teetering on unwise heels. I couldn't imagine having sex in this hotel; everything looked too preposterous and regal to contaminate. Upon drinking my first mouthful of champagne, I began to worry that I was going to have to perform, and upon deeper considering I realized that I didn't know how. Kyle, for his part, was acting very touchy, in the literal sense, maneuvering himself into the angles of my body.

But it was Paris, after all, and it was real champagne we were drinking from real champagne grapes, romance sewn into the experience in some untraceable yet undeniable way. My French was better than Kyle's, which always served to annoy him; he fancied himself such an intellectual and a bit of a Francophile, but it was I who ordered our ice cream cones at the touristy window on the Ile Saint-Louis. He had a disgusting licorice and custard combination, while I ordered banana with strawberry sorbet. "That is so unoriginal," he said, refusing to try mine.

"You don't even like licorice, though."

"I like it well enough."

We stood on a corner of two narrow streets on this tiny, ancient island. Kyle did his best to lick at the scoops seductively, and I wondered why I'd come. "Don't you want any of this," he said, angling it toward me.

So I tried some of the licorice and immediately buried the taste under strawberry sorbet. His cone was dripping rapidly, for it was just hot enough out for a slow eater like Kyle to end up with a mess on his hands. After finishing the cone he stood there licking the residue from his fingers, all the time giving me a side-eye meant to be an entrapment. Instead I let him take the crook of my elbow and we walked along the river, the mid-afternoon sun intense above us. So used to dreary England, I thought back on our trip to Thailand long ago, and how he'd slathered himself in sunblock before an afternoon at the pool. For a moment I wondered if I shouldn't force him into an apothecary for a tube, and then I thought of the way he'd look with a splotch of red across his face, the heat of it on my hands as I held his cheeks, kissing him. Would he taste of custard and licorice? We were walking very slowly, with his head on my shoulder. It was as they always said, in Paris; the French would not bat an eye at two men in love.

"The Germans call this spazierengehen," I said, as we hobbled across the uneven pavement of cobblestones.

"Oh?" Kyle seemed interested in his bit of trivia. "Do they? Where did you learn that?"

"Kenny," I admitted. "He told me once."

We sat on a bench at the river, the first of many on that trip, and curled together. It was lovely just to breathe, to pause and not be looked at. I wanted to fret over how light he felt against me, but I had my arms around him, so at the very least I knew he could not float away. The ice cream was the most I'd seen him eat at one time in quite a while; it followed, then, that he refused any kind of lunch, joking that he didn't want to get fat on the trip.

"I'd be so incredibly pleased if you did," I said.

"You'd leave me for some young boy who lifts weights."

"I'm not even sure where you'd getting that from. You'd look healthy. Isn't that good enough?" He didn't think so, but in any case, I was hungry for lunch, and we went into a boulangerie and I came out again with cold pork pate and grainy mustard on a small baguette, a coffee, and an apple. We then walked over the Pont Saint-Louis and I ate my small lunch and drank my coffee while Kyle read the paper, or at the very least looked at the pictures and skimmed the captions; he did not read French but someone had left it on our bench.

Begging him to take a bite grew wearying, so I decided to interrogate him as to whether he wanted to see a cathedral, and, if so, whether that would be the Saint-Chapelle or Notre Dame de Paris.

"I've been to Notre Dame," he said, "and I cannot stand the thought of all those headless biblical kings."

Remarks like this were haunting; what did he mean, exactly? Was iconoclasm an affront to his royalist sensibilities, did he feel a connection to the Judean kings of old, was he simply bothered by a stark reminder of mortal vulnerability? I found myself fixated on this as I balled up the wrapper from my sandwich and tossed it, with the apple core, into the garbage. With some hesitance I offered Kyle my arm; even as I knew we were safe, that some progressive spirit veiled the continent which should allow us to freely pass through the city without fear of any special antagonism. Yet some deep social conditioning kept giving me pause.

Perhaps because I was already ill at ease with walking hand-in-hand with Kyle in public, our entrance into Saint-Chapelle nearly knocked the wind out of me, and I stood there under that midnight vault of golden fleur-de-lys, shining like stars in the night sky, unable to speak or even fathom the holiness of the place. It had been many years since I'd considered myself Catholic, and I no longer thought about my lack of faith in any regular sense. And yet the entire chapel hummed with an energy, triggering some latent sense I'd long buried, which spoke to me a truth about the special knowledge of this particular kind of belief. It was not a feeling of belief itself, as I'd shed that years ago and could never get it back. But I felt something incredibly deep and possessive under those glowing windows, the whole place shimmering like a jewel-encrusted box, itself a glorious relic. You can't know; you can't know, you can only believe, and in the moment that I stood in the holy chapel built by an honest saint my heart ached for the fact that I knew, with precise certainty, that I could never believe in anything again.

Kyle touched my shoulder. "What's wrong? Are you all right?"

"I'll be fine," I said.

So, numb and hobbled, I took him around and answered questions about the stained glass program or the theological underpinnings of the chapel. I was no expert in Rayonnant gothic or the technical aspects of glazing, but anyone who spends the first 15 years of his life in the pre-Second Vatican Council church must have at least some insight into the trappings of medieval Catholicism. When we stood in front of the glowing rose window and Kyle said, "This is all too much — I cannot make out any of it," I grasped him with one hand and pointed with the other: "The middle is Christ enthroned, darling, even if you can't make out that much it's a reasonably safe guess."

"I used to read Blake," he said, "I used to love the pictures. They were like stained glass on a page."

"But he was an Anglican."

"It's all gentile to me. But, my point is — I had this deep connection to a beautiful thing, and it used to move me. Why doesn't this move me? All I feel is self-pity all the time."

"We should have gone to Notre Dame first, then this would have cheered you up."

"I'd actually like to go back to the hotel and take a nap."

We ended our first night with room service, and two dozen white roses I'd had sent up from the florist the hotel used, conspiring with the concierge while Kyle dozed. At first I'd felt trapped in the hotel, angry to be spending so much money so Kyle could sleep, something he could very well be doing back home. My mood improved after I ran back up to the room and grabbed my Speedo and my recently purchased copy of Our Lady of the Flowers; I'd read it once, having flown through it, but I wanted to read it again, in Paris. I had a fantasy about reading it by the pool and then doing laps, then falling back onto a deckchair and picking the book up again, soaking the pages, air-drying while I soaked up the text. For someone who loved literature so much I did an awful lot of re-reading, and though I'd sincerely pledged fealty to the English language, Genet had been translated and I found I didn't care. I knew no more about Maurice Pilorge than I had on first reference. But, I felt, maybe the truth of it was buried somewhere in the text.

The pool, much to my disappointment, wasn't really built for lap-swimming, but I tried anyway, to limited success. I'd been back on my usual routine, without Kyle's knowledge; he'd forbidden me from swimming, which he felt was worsening my asthma somehow, but I had an inhaler now, and I didn't know what else to do for exercise. Admittedly it was obstinate or fatalistic, but I didn't know how to live without swimming. It was a pristine set-up at the George V, a proper natatorium to go with an elegant spa, at which Kyle had booked multiple services: he'd have a manicure and a pedicure, a wrap of some kind, a facial, a massage. As I came up on the wall and gazed at the trompe-l'oeil gardens that served as backdrops, I wondered whether he'd have a male masseuse, or whether he could request one.

The longer I stared the fussier the décor seemed, as if it was all fraying around the edges, going soft. I did another lap. This luxury didn't last much longer, for a family arrived, the mother kitted out in a suit that took me back to some of the rough clubs of the 1970s, when everyone was mad for the piggy thing and stiff leather and chains. This suit in particular was narrow at the crotch, just a thin concealment which confided in the viewer that she'd had every trace of body hair along her thighs and in the creases of her intimate areas removed. It followed up her torso, the jut of every bone, every rib on display. A golden chain pinched it at the right armpit right above the barest hint of her breast, keeping the suit taut. It was really something, not meant to be swam in. Her husband was chunky and conventional, and so were the children. They splashed into the pool and I climbed out of it, fleeing back to my book. I decided to go drip-dry in the sauna until dinner was served.

XXX

Though he didn't take naps at work — though I hardly knew him to nap — Kyle began sleeping for an hour or so in the early afternoon each day of our trip. Pretending not to understand why this prompted me to repeatedly ask if he was feeling all right; nevertheless I caught him with a smug grin when I pressed a palm to his face to make sure he didn't have a fever. My mother used the back of her hand when trying this out on my older sister and me, but that wasn't really tactile, and I thought to myself, well, this is a civilized nation. Ike had told us before departure that France was leading research into le sida and encouraged Kyle to make an appointment at the Institut Pasteur. "This is a vacation," Kyle had protested, "it's my birthday."

"Your birthday was over two days ago," Ike had replied, "so stop living in the past."

But that was quite a challenge. Everything was the past. At the Louvre we examined the fleshy body of an Egyptian scribe, his reddish-brown skin tone offset by a primitive little kilt. As I crept around it looking at flaws and chips in the painted limestone, Kyle muttered hints under his breath about the sitter's sex life: "This one liked to give it, Stanley, don't you think? I can see him over some writhing little slave boy from the harem, who'd suck those tits like he loved being forced to do it—"

"I don't think this is a portrait," I said, tapping on the label "I think it's generic. It's the idea of a scribe."

"You used to be fun," he pouted. I hesitated to point out that after three hours on his feet and lunch at a mediocre museum café, he was utterly wiped out, needing to go back to the hotel to nap. It was the perfect time for me to swim, which gave me a moment to consider whether I was truly no longer fun. I decided I was, in fact, incredibly fun, and that other people should become fun in the same way as me, which involved a lot of reading and quiet contemplation. When that same family came back, the mother in her au courant bondage swimsuit and the children with sunburned faces, it occurred to me through my frustration that I hadn't taken a drink in well over 24 hours. I remedied this by waking Kyle up with a bottle of Roederer blanc de blancs after my shower.

He told me he'd dreamt highly erotic things, and that though it was late afternoon and all we should forgo getting dressed to roll around nakedly. Still wet and undressed after the pool, I was reminded that I was fun and sex was fun, so transitively, taking him up on it made good sense. As we groped around I wondered exactly when I'd stopped wanting to fuck everybody all of the time. In my early 20s I'd gone through rigorous, somewhat violent behavioral therapy designed to turn me off from sex with men; that hadn't worked, though I'd known it wouldn't, and perhaps in some sense that had been the point. Yet it was the grim reality of holding Kyle's vulnerable, shaking body against mine that ultimately did it. I wanted to love him without complication, just as I'd wanted to kiss him in the street the night of his birthday dinner. For years I'd wanted to tell him what he meant to me: everything, actually, that anything good in my life was merely the result of having met him at an impressionable juncture when I'd needed someone with his virtues (and his shortcomings) to show me humanity's full extent; no one suffered like Kyle suffered, and no one had passion like Kyle's passion. In a way I felt like a hero in some story I was writing, and in my own mind I was the sole answer to social unfairness. But as we held each other in that bed, pressing our hips together, some deep sense of shame infected me: for enjoying this, for my unwillingness to commit, for my desire to commit.

We didn't really hear the words "AIDS crisis" for many years, and again, if that's because we were self-isolating and jaded or it just wasn't used around us, well, that is unclear. But what is clear is that even as I felt prepared to make a fairly traditional gesture of fidelity through the presentation of material goods — even as Kyle tongued my jawbone and whispered that he was going to come in my hand — I knew I was in a moment of deeply personal crisis. For many years I had defined myself against a wish to possess him, and now I could appear triumphant as a supporter to his tragic figure. When he was moping I could reach out to settle in around the losses, to make them up as personal emotional gains.

Yet I also thought about the kind of person I'd been as a boy, before I met him: solitary, bitter, not even of this world. As I'd been swimming before I'd been thinking of how he didn't want me doing that, and this naturally led to the question of whether I should encourage him to sign onto Sheila's drug trial or not.

I would have given anything for an answer, but none was forthcoming. I was left with the haunting sense that this would probably be our last vacation. He was very chatty over dinner, and even finished a bowl of bouillabaisse, fragrant with sea robin and velvet crab, a savory cream spread on garlic toast afloat on the surface of the broth as it sponged up liquid, beginning to dissolve as Kyle slowly spooned one bit after another to his lips. It served only to remind me of eating langoustines over choucroute garnie with buttered and peeled new potatoes at Bofinger with Wendy after her wedding dress fittings. (Always after; she'd starve herself all day.) I made a mental note to take Kyle there another night.

After that, the trip gained the feeling of a whirlwind tour as we began, in earnest, to take in as much as metropolitan Paris had to offer. Kyle still wanted an afternoon nap but he could be talked into having them in nontraditional spots; he slept by the pool one afternoon after I'd talked him into letting me swim with the pervasive rationale that we were on vacation; the next afternoon he slept on the grass in the gardens at Versailles. We sat there wondering whether it was allowed, since there were no signs, but the lawns seemed too manicured to allow for humans trampling across them. No one else was on the grass. We walked out past the most distant fountain, the gurgling trickle of dormant waterworks music in the background as we went further away from the crowds and the guards. It wasn't for long; we slept only half an hour before the sun woke us, low enough that it was now shining through the leaves and painting shadows across the lawn. Kyle rubbed the sleep from his eyes, a hatched pattern of grass blades impressed upon his cheek.

We walked back, slowly, to the chateau, hand-in-hand. "I like all the pomp," he said. "I think of myself as a rococo sort of person, if that's a thing a person could be. The idea of being watched while I dressed, though — while I ate and slept…" He rubbed at the fading grass marks on his face with his free hand.

"You don't know what it's like to have that kind of audience," I said, "none of us do."

"I still feel a bit persecuted," he replied, "from the whole Christophe debacle. All those photographers outside, or don't you remember? Or, didn't you care?"

"I cared, but not for myself. Seeing you like that wasn't easy, Kyle, my god, it was like—"

He interrupted me. "It was like something I'd experienced before. Back at school. I used to cry every night, at school." He paused. "Every single night."

We stopped walking in front of a statue of Urania. Under her detached gaze we unlinked our hands and turned to face one another.

"You can tell me, you know."

He just shook his head.

"Well, you ought to tell someone."

Shifting, he rubbed his neck absently, his shoes tracing an abstract pattern in the gravel under his feet. He was wearing something that fit his definition of leisure-couture, a pair of linen trousers and a tight lavender T-shirt; little bits of grass and earth were stuck to his arse and I brushed some of it away.

"You're so fussy," he said. It sounded like something was caught in his throat.

"Sometimes opening up about something can be cathartic—"

"Oh, could it? That's especially rich coming from you and going to me, Stanley. Getting you to open up is like trying to wrench open an oyster shell without an oyster knife. It's a bloody, disgusting process. You end up bashing the thing against a hard surface and wearing it down, breaking it down until it's shattered and there are these — pieces everywhere…"

"I'm like an oyster? Talking to me is like smashing open an oyster?"

"Well, the messy effort part, yes."

"I'll believe you've eaten an oyster that wasn't shucked by someone else when I see it with my own eyes."

He grabbed my arm. "My point is that I am the one who is always trying to get you to be direct with me — not the other way around. I would tell you if I wanted to, heartface, I would, but I don't. If I wanted to be direct about it, this thing we're dancing around, I'd just tell you. But it's very painful for me. I wasn't formed. I wasn't a person. And I'll never be a real person, in some sense, because any chance I had to ever feel secure was ruined at a very young age. It's just that the idea of being watched so bothers me, of being made a spectacle to someone else, to many people — we need room to breathe. That's why I had to chase you away back in January. I didn't want to be evaluated while you were processing things. Please tell me you understand." He took a breath. "I don't want to be made a show of. Not when I'm down."

These sentiments rattled around in my head as we were jerked back and forth on our train back to the city. In the gift shop Kyle had bought a little paperback about the succession of French kings, and he ghosted his fingers over the glossy portrait reproductions, teasing the curls on a wig or the gems at a bosom. "What a dreary lot," he said, pressing his cheek against my shoulder. "You see, it was spectacle that killed them. They lift you up until they're starving, and then they turn on you like you stole their food."

"Well, isn't that precisely what happened?" I asked, tracing an instinctual yet random pattern across his thigh with my thumb. "From a historical perspective?"

"No, in this case it was that the French people kept giving their resources to the crown, and then one day they all just internalized that they'd been complicit in their own subjugation."

"But you can't blame those people, you know, they were peasants in a system they barely understood. When you're in that social prison you don't feel you have any kind of agency. No one gives you the resources to even ask yourself why you're being restricted. Perhaps you don't realize you're being restricted."

"It's really a shame you don't vote," he said, flipping to the next page of the book. The visage of Bonaparte greeted us, a far cry from the overrated Capetian coinage profiles of the book's earliest pages. "Maybe when I die you can take up that cause in my honor, so Labour can keep up their totals."

My thumb stilled against his slacks. I was reminded of Gregory. "I'll think about it."

We had dinner at a tiny no-name bistro across from the river in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, recommended by Wendy. Our last night was to be spent at Guy Savoy, but tonight felt more ideal somehow, without any kind of dress code or even a restaurant name to toss around over drinks after we returned to London and had to mill the details of our trip into the grain of social subsistence. It was difficult to imagine my lone audience member, Butters, really caring. Kyle ordered a bottle of thick red wine and a plate of oysters, which came inexpertly shucked, and he ate them with as many performative sighs as he could muster to make a point.

"Tomorrow night" — our second-to-last — "let's have cheap Chinese from one of those market stalls, where they scoop your food into a box and pop it in the microwave."

"What about a falafel?"

"I'm too old to learn to love that," he said.

We split a roast chicken for two as our main, and it came with pan drippings and a plate of wilted broccolini alongside pureed potatoes and a refilled bread basket. I understood why Wendy had sent us here: the food was mediocre, the atmosphere picture-perfect, with the low-burning fire keeping the room just a bit too warm, the wine in nondescript stemless tumblers, and a red-and-white-checked curtain gathered with rope to give us a view of the passers-by, mostly students from the area. The other diners in our bistro were hobbled over their plates with age; every table other than ours was wreathed in cigarette smoke, and even the proprietress (her husband was the chef) served us with a Gauloises barely supported by her lower lip. Another, unlit, was tucked into her streaky gray updo. The place was Paris as you'd want it to be, rather than how it should have been. We'd see that the next day when Kyle intended to drag me on an all-day tour of Paris' retail establishments. In any case, I knew why Wendy had sent me there. I made a mental note to buy her something, and then slowly I realized that she had no use for anything. I'd bring back something for Willa, then. Settling on that made the cheap wine go down easier.

When Kyle left with his arm out, intending to flag a taxi, I grabbed his wrist and said, "Actually, let's have a sit." He looked at me like that was crazy, since we'd just spent our two-hour meal sitting; the dense feeling of profiterole cream lingered in my mouth, so I could imagine how he felt at the moment.

"I'm tired," he whined, "and I want to go back to the hotel."

"Don't worry," I insisted. "I think you'll like this."

We sat down on a bench under a copse of trees right on the river, and as I reached into my back pocket, I began to tremble. Suddenly it was much hotter out here than it had been in the restaurant, even with the fire going inappropriately for late spring.

I'd had the jeweler put the watch in a plush box, the hinged type with a dramatic open. When I got it out of my pocket but before I had it open, Kyle lunged forward and grabbed my thigh with one hand. I said, "Careful," prying the box open; it was flatter than a ring box, but I suspect he anticipated a ring, for when I presented it to him and took a breath so I could perform a little speech, he sat back up with a let-down, "Oh," and developed a look of consternation on his face.

"I had something to say," I managed.

"It's not funny," he replied.

"What's not?"

"Giving me a watch for my birthday. Even a beautiful one. It's — it's unspeakably cruel."

I was taken aback, snapping the box shut. "By what measure?"

"Because it's — time is running out? Just, it's such a grim reminder of, you know. The fact that I am dying."

"Kyle! That's not why I wanted to give you a watch."

"No? Why, then?"

"Because you're already saying you're late to everything—"

"I'm hardly late to everything..."

"—and that you need to get a pocket watch. You've been saying it for years. You've been saying it since we were kids. So, I got you a pocket watch. Look. It's beautiful." I pried the box open again, taking one of his hands. "And you're beautiful, and you should have beautiful things." I placed the watch into his open hand and watched him study it, tracing his fingers along the encasement and rubbing his thumb around the turning mechanism.

He studied the magician through the clear, unscathed face. "How does this even work?" he asked. "I've only seen pictures of it."

"You have to wind it," I said. "Go ahead. Wind it. Whenever you're ready. Then you check the time and the arms — well, you'll see, it's quite clever. I just really hope you like it."

Quietly, he said, "I don't know. You said you had a little speech or something?"

"Well, just — only that, well. I wanted you to know. Um." It felt as though all of my education, all of my literary notions, has suddenly walked out the door. "I have said that I would take care of you, and I wanted to give you something that, well, I suppose it's like a little promise, I mean — that I will."

"Stanley, what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I could tell you that I want to take care of you, and that I'm going to do it, but here is a little object that I think maybe, um, symbolizes that I'm — you know, I'm serious about it. And you can carry it around with you every day, you know, and sort of — use it and look at it, and I hope it'll remind you that the sentiments behind it were legitimate."

"Stanley." He put his hand on my thigh again. "Are you giving me an engagement ring?"

"Well, it's a watch, um—"

"Are you asking me to marry you?"

"Not in like, a camp sort of way—"

"This is the campiest bloody watch I've ever laid my eyes on." He dangled it in front of my face, chain and all. "I mean, did you get a good look at it, Stanley, it's positively racist."

At a total loss, I said, "Well, I thought you'd like it."

"Like it?" he asked. "I've never been so in love with any thing in my life!"

"What about that dildo?"

"Which one?"

"You know, that black one—"

"Yes, that one. If we're being honest, I only liked it because you gave it to me. But I had been thinking that we could get some use out of it, maybe."

"Yeah?"

"No, forget about that. I think we were having a romantic interlude."

"Okay." I swallowed. "You know I can't ask you to marry me. And maybe I find that a bit relieving, because if I tally up all the people I know who're married, I can't say most of them are terribly happy. But if you leave aside the terminology, I think the sentiment's the same. I've been in love with you for 20 years. And when you go to work, or when you're somewhere without me, I just want something — I want to be there with you, a little bit. So you know." I sighed. "That's all, really."

"That's all?" He was beaming. "Stanley, that's everything."

"Since I was 19."

"I know. I always knew."

"See, I didn't know," I said. "I mean, that you knew."

"Come here," he said, and he leaned forward and kissed me.

I put my arms around his shoulders, pressing into him, the heavy feeling of dinner nearly forgotten.

He pulled away, wiping his lips with the back of one hand and stashing the watch in the pocket of his blazer. "I want you to take me back to our hotel room and make love to me."

I looked at him in the moonlight, little white Christmas bulbs strung along the branches of the trees and the awnings lining the Seine and even in the distance, some rooftop flats had outlined terraces. As I looked into his green-ringed eyes, the tiny lights of Paris shone back to me, tranquilly beautiful, content and brilliant.

"How?" I cupped his chin. He shut his eyes, only for a moment, and in that fleeting moment I felt alone. Soon enough, though, I was rescued.

"The way you've always done."

"I can't do that, though. You know. It isn't sensible or even possible."

"Amor vincit omnia," he said, with a smooth, Germanic winkit.

"No, I'm not joking. How do you want me to make love to you? Kyle, darling. Dolly. I don't know if I can."

"Yes, you can." His arms wrapped around me, and his chin tucked against my neck. He smelled like fine perfume and pine and the musty old bones of the Catacombs and virtually everything else to me. I prayed he'd hold me tighter, and somehow he knew, clenching me in his embrace. "Just put it in."

"But I don't think I can do that. And I don't know how else to do it."

"Stanley, don't be silly, of course you can."

"No, I don't, darling. I don't know how to be with you and not be with you, fully." I sighed, trying to clarify: "There are people who can do things in moderation, and there are people who can't. If I can't have everything then I can't have anything, don't you see? I've always been like that, you know."

"I know," he said, "but I need it, please, I'm not even horny, just for my mental state — I have the idea of dying unloved."

"That's not going to happen," I said.

"But physically, Stanley, I need to be with you physically or what is the point? Can't we just get a packet of condoms? I bought lube." He looked at me with eyes full of sentiment, somehow less searing than the looks he was giving me while I was feeding his nephew, though here at long last we were actually talking about sex.

When I stood up, I think he knew I was going to acquiesce. "Come on," I said, pulling him off of the bench. "Let's find a cab. Don't forget your watch."

"I wouldn't dare."

We walked back up the river and over the Pont de l'Alma. Beside the sculptural lick of flame there was nothing of note to see, and the bridge lacked almost any signifier of specialness. It was convenient but unromantic. At the tabac nearest to our hotel I bought a packet of condoms; Kyle promised me he'd bought a bottle of what he called "safe lube," patiently explaining that it was highly recommended and that from now on men would be using this stuff, saying, "This is the future of sex," by which I was certain he meant the future of gay sex, since I could never imagine what sex with a woman would be like, though I felt reasonably assured that it should mostly bypass the issue of how to shove a phallus up the human rectum. The weirdest things triggered my imagination lately.

I forgot about that, though, when he undressed and sat beside me. I took him into my arms and kissed him; he unfastened my jeans while I felt along his ribcage like I was reading braille, figuring out the meaning and character of each ridge and each depression until I had the rhythm down. Hints of his sickness turned me off, but I felt like I had to confront it; I had to reconcile his illness to the fact that I loved him, and no amount of avoidance would cure him. Maybe he should have understood that it wasn't so awful or so shocking that I had a hard time getting fully erect, but I also knew that he'd wanted me to be the one who seduced him into this relationship, and eventually he'd just grown to understand that that wasn't me, I didn't do that, and he was going to have to give something up. I just kept kissing him and gripping the bony contours of his body until he put his hands on my hands and said, "Stanley," very soft, and I could tell that it had bothered him, and he really wanted me to stop. But I found something about it absorbing, maybe even reassuring.

The room was just a bit stuffy, the air trapped while we were out during dinner, no windows left open. I left Kyle on the bed to open the double-doors that opened to a short veranda. The breeze was a relief as I slid out of my jeans and pants, pulled off my shirt, and felt Kyle grab me from behind, putting his cheek to my shoulder.

The hotel had a courtyard, over and around which the building stood, concluding its rise in terraced levels that fell back from the facade. "Do you think people can see us?" I asked, "I mean, through the window."

"God," said Kyle against my back, "I really hope so."

Presumably it was dependent upon whether our lights were on; a table lamp beside the bed was lit, and I did not know whether this would be sufficient to illuminate us across the inky blackness of the airless room. Together, we fell back on the bed. Kyle reached over me for the package of condoms, which were nondescript. I had long ago bought into the theory that putting on a condom could be erotic when handled with the right attitude, but Kyle had never put one on me before. It was actually hot because it was so out of the ordinary for us; he did not even suck dick, and in general took the position that being the "passive" partner was more literal than euphemism. As soon as he looked up at me, the unwrapped thing shaking in his hands, I could tell he didn't know what to do, but he wanted to try, so I told him to squeeze some of the lubricant into the tip of the condom and then try putting it on me.

"This is so awkward," he said, concentrating deeply on this task.

"I can do it, you know, you don't have to."

He looked up. "Well, I want to." If I was only half erect before, the situation changed (improved?) as soon as he grabbed my dick and began to roll the condom up, or down — toward the base, in any sense. I tried to focus on this, but the look on his face was infinitely more fascinating to me. Kyle had lovely hands but a lovelier and more telling face, which belied his nervousness. I thought back on our first night together, not the first time we had sex but the night three and a half years before when he'd pushed me against the door of my flat and told me he wanted me, and that we had been wasting time. In my memory he was so confident, knowing what he wanted and taking it. In reality he must have been scared, and I imagined that, over those three and a half years together, I'd become more expert in reading the subtleties of his sex faces — all of his expressions, of course, but this look of insecurity and trepidation was especially revealing to me. I figured that most of the men he'd been with hadn't any patience for a moment like this, drawn-out and raw, my heart pounding in my ears.

Sex is just as hard to write about as it is to have, by which I mean if it's a breezy sort of encounter that ends quickly you might not have much to say about it, and then it's easy to compose a synopsis, or give a general impression: fucked a chap after a swim, calves as solid as iron slipped off my back in the steam room. Or the sentiment: left empty in more ways than one, light-headed and clear of conscience. With Kyle I'd never be able to reduce it to bare characterizations again. I was in him for an hour, it seemed, though I wasn't looking at the clock; it felt good physically but Kyle was correct when he'd said that he needed this for literary or emotional affect. I sank into him and lingered there for ages, our mouths entertaining themselves, our skin a little damp from the muggy room, fusing us to each other and to the bed. It was a side-by-side position at first, his hipbones atop mine with a leg across my side, giving me little pushes to "come on" or "fuck me" or whatever, slurred onto my mouth as I pushed into him in the shallowest, gentlest little movements I could produce.

It had been a while since my last experience with a condom, and to this day I will swear by their staying-power effect, which, granted, not everyone wishes to achieve. Not that I have had much to do with condoms in recent memory, but for a time they became the center of my world. In that room at the George V I could not shake the oppressive feeling that the one I had on might tear or somehow become dislodged from my erection and contaminate the whole experience. At the beginning I kept grabbing for the base of my dick to reassure myself that it was still attached. It put the sloppy concern I'd had for protection to shame, though Kyle grabbed my hand at one point and said, "It's still there, don't worry," his nails against the skin on my shoulder and his other hand over my ear. It seems ludicrous that he had the gall to tell me I shouldn't worry. Someone had to.

I remember this particular night with perfect clarity, but the memory of fucking him against that bed is in many ways to painful to fully excavate. If a person can reach his apotheosis through sex then I think we did so in that hotel room. I'll have the mechanics of it forever stamped upon my heart: the way he forced his fingers into my mouth; the way I pushed him back against the headboard, the way he looked up at me and kissed my face indiscriminately and pulled on my hair, crying out as he came and panting between gasps that he wanted to be my wife. I came too, half relieved and half terrified that doing so was selfish, that I was implicated in his demise. You can't look back and prove fault, but I did have to remind myself to just enjoy this, enjoy it while it was happening — I grasped his face and kissed his mouth as I finished in a protracted rhythm that slowly tapered off, leaving me to grab the condom around its opening as I pulled off.

"Don't go," he said, but the bargain was that I had to. I tied the thing off and considered flushing it down the toilet before I realized that if it were to cause a plug it would be far more humiliating than simply tossing it. I let my British shame get the better of me and wrapped it in toilet tissue several times before burying it in the bin. I took a warm hand towel back into the bedroom and cleaned him up, though he was a fastidious person in the first place, so most of the mess could be attributed to me. Once I'd taken a kind of macho pride in that kind of thing, but I was too tired to really feel anything but utter defeat. I should have been happy; while I patted dry his pale thighs he was lying on his stomach playing with the watch, making the magician throw his arms into the air to get the time.

"It's nearly midnight," he said, trying to look at me over his shoulder. "It's been such a long day."

"But a good one, I hope?"

He turned over and propped himself up on his elbows, leaving the watch beside him on the duvet. I couldn't help but count his ribs and he threw an arm over his stomach when he caught me. "You're tired."

"I'm not that tired," I said.

"Well, I'm spent." He lowered his eyes. "Come to bed, please."

I wash I could say I rested easily that night in my overpriced, slightly worn hotel room. The sheets were cool but Kyle's body was so warm he was sweating. It did not matter how fancy the place; the French had an easy indulgence for stiff, heady summer air. But Kyle would have sweated wherever he was.

XXX

Paris had been a blur, like a week of blissful isolation. The longer we'd stayed, even by the hour, it seemed less and less as if we'd come from across the Channel and felt like some beautiful ongoing existence with no end and no beginning, like never having been anywhere else. Of course, then we got up one morning and packed our bags, gave them to the bellhop, and walked around the corner to a sidewalk café with tables on the pavement, under a broad awning and facing the scooters parked along the curb. We took a typical French approach to this last breakfast, sharing a sparse basket of viennoiserie and café au lait served in two warm carafes, one of coffee and one of milk. Whispering to each other as we gawked at passers-by, Kyle leaned across the table with some apricot preserve on the end of his butter knife. Smearing it across an open demi-baguette, he said, "I just think the French have the most masterful understanding of fashion. Have you been appreciating these women? They look like the quasi-butch lesbians of the 1950s. It's the most remarkable thing."

"Well," I said, "I don't know how you would know what that looked like."

"Stanley, I was there."

"You were where, spending time with lesbians in the 1950s?"

"Well, I was alive," he said, folding the baguette into his mouth. "Anyway, the point is, it's inspiring. It makes me want to be a better person. I wish I had time left to be a better person."

"Yes, unfortunately I think we have a plane to catch."

He rolled his eyes. "Well, how much time until this flight, then, anyway?"

"I don't know. You're the one with the watch."

Somehow he managed to fish it from his pocket and flip it over whilst sipping from the handleless coffee cup. "Just enough to finish breakfast. If these pastries weren't so stale I'd take them home. Actually, I'll take them home anyway." He lifted them right out of the basket and folded them up in a peach-colored napkin: a pain au chocolate, the other half of the baguette, and a sticky sort of roll that looked like a wilting four-petalled flower. "I suppose we can have these for breakfast tomorrow."

"I thought you said you wanted to be a better person."

"Well, I did, but then I said it was too late."

I paid the bill in a fistful of francs left in the looted pastry basket. We walked arm-in-arm around the corner again, Kyle sighing deeply enough that I had to ask him, "What?"

"You know," he said, "before this trip I was certain I'd never want to go home. But I'm fine with it now. I just — miss my flat."

"It's just back there waiting for you."

"Well, I hate thinking about how there is a finite number of days I'll even be able to spend at home."

"Must everything turn into this morbid accounting?" I asked.

"Well, no, but I cannot simply put it out of mind, either. Just — stop it, you're ruining the sweet thing I wanted to say to you." He stopped walking and pulled me toward the curb, where a tiny tin-can two-seater car was trying to pull into a cramped little space. "I won't miss Paris as much as I'd assumed," he said. "Except for this." He grabbed my T-shirt and kissed me.

I think in romances you read mostly about passionate embraces which tear between two lovers like cracks of deafening thunder. In Britain it's obvious why such gestures have the power to incapacitate; we are so naturally trained to detach from our passions that the mere expression of this kind of added lust leaves one speechless for a moment, unable to really process that kissing is awkward, that the mouth of a man who's just been drinking sweet coffee and eating bread smeared with butter and apricot jam doesn't even taste particularly good; it's difficult to want to linger there. The power of doing it publicly, though, left me feeling slightly drunk even as we settled into our seats in the terminal at Orly and waited to file into the plane. There was no champagne this time; the celebration was over. Kyle fell asleep on the short flight and, just before landing, his head tipped heavily against my shoulder.

XXX

It had turned to June, somehow, while we'd been away. It would be summer soon, proper summer, and as it turned to summer England would ripen to its very best, a mélange of country weekends and Pimm's cups, late sunsets, gooseberry fool and lawn tennis. I had no country house invitations, did not like gooseberries, had no interest in lawn tennis, and could go years without a Pimm's cup. I couldn't do without the late sunsets, though, because I was slow to bed and slow to rise, and the narrow passages of the ancient city around me opened up with late evening daylight. When it rained, the puddles shone like mirrored glass. When it was sunny, even the lawns in London's parks became that grasshopper green color, as thick as shag carpeting.

Work was trying, even for me, a man who had a real deficit of work to do. Perhaps thinking back on Paris bothered me, in the sense that it felt as soon as I was back in Kyle's bed that we had never been away at all. Following the trip we resumed having sex with some trepidation, perhaps owing to a growing sense that, rather than a looming threat, being together in that sense could offer a form of latent security. Yet there were obstacles, too. Even when I had attempted to have promiscuity safely I'd been miserable at it, half forgetting and pressing forward guiltily, not imagining I could be infecting anyone, or vice versa. Safe sex hadn't been something I'd ever worried about with Kyle, since we were in love and the idea of making a new family between the two of us to the exclusion of other people had always felt like a kind of safety in itself. If I'm coy about this it's because we simply did not know what we were doing, and this didn't come easy. Kyle was fine some days and not others; despite the fact that he wanted sex very badly he also did not really want it with rubber gloves and sliced-open condoms in between my mouth and his ass. Still, we were trying, and at the same time I was trying to write. It was growing hot outside, and I was content to spend the summer trying at these two things. We got sunny days and meringue desserts on restaurant menus; girls wore their hair in fat, greasy plaits; men laid shirtless in the city squares, their oiled tits pointing up toward the midday sun. It was summer, a louche summer. I was sort of thrilled to press through it.

Then Wendy called and asked us to a picnic. Not just me, but Kyle as well. This was out-of-the-ordinary on most counts. She would not leave the house anymore, or at least not often; somehow, as we had been in Paris, she had receded even further back from the brink of social integration, and now I saw her only with Bebe during terse late luncheons during which she stared ahead and held the baby, sleepy-eyed while we chatted stupidly about clothes and Bebe tried to get me talking about Kyle and Christophe.

"But do you think it was Christophe who gave him AIDS?" Bebe pressed, holding a triangle of salmon sandwich in her hand. It felt like she couldn't be bothered to eat it until she was assured, somehow, that the source of infection was identifiable. "It must have been, I assume?"

I was reminded of the years, before they'd both thoroughly grown to doubt me, when my mother and sister had turned to me for advice on etiquette and manners and so forth. Simply because I was a homosexual, they'd assumed I knew something about a subject which they had through some biased and flawed logic decided was effete or sexless and therefore probably within my domain. Never mind that I had no domain, that I lived entirely outside of the boundaries of social acceptability in every single way, that I had no job and no furniture and drank at all hours of the day, and that I sucked dicks in park cottages without even so much as asking for the man's name, simply to discover whether anyone would try to stop me. They'd just projected their assumptions onto me. They'd just assumed. And now I was here sitting across a half-laid tea table from Bebe, who was a nice woman and she truly meant well, I had realized after many years, and yet she had just assumed, too. She'd assumed that Kyle must have gotten AIDS from Christophe, because Christophe was some gross Soviet French degenerate, and therefore a security risk; this assumption had surely grown alongside the assumption that I knew anything about AIDS. We were sitting at the table with Wendy, who had the beginning of actual lesions, and surely I was the expert on in the room on AIDS.

"He doesn't have AIDS," I said, trying to sound as bored as could be managed.

"Oh!" she said brightly. "Well, that must be a relief."

"He has the virus the causes AIDS," I continued. "AIDS is the final stage of the virus and the diagnosis entails a set of criteria which Kyle does not meet yet."

"I suppose that must be rather a relief for you," Bebe repeated.

"How should I define relief?" I asked her.

"But he will." Wendy sat up; her sudden interjection had terrified me. Something about the tone, a kind of weary resignation, was haunting. She pulled her hair back; she had gotten it trimmed and blown out the day before, so it looked for the first time in a while like her old hair, which had been as rich and as lustrous as she had been in her prime. But her face was hollow, the inky start of a lesion just cresting over the neckline of her V-neck T-shirt, the sleeves pinched at the shoulder so that they puffed slightly, powder-blue like a hospital gown and quite unlike her, even as that color was quite appropriate for prime spring. She cleared her throat and said, again, "He will have it, though. It's just a matter of when."

"What about a cure?" Bebe asked.

"What about it?" Wendy raised her brows.

"Well, you'd have to think they'll find a cure? I know it's very corporate to suggest that the market will just fill that niche, but surely someone's working at it."

"No one's working at it," said Wendy. "No one cares if gay men die."

"I'd care."

"Well, Bebe, it's up to you to find a cure for AIDS then, I suppose." Wendy rolled her eyes. "Good luck."

On the way out of the house, Bebe had turned to me and said, "Don't take it personally."

"Take what personally? Have I taken anything personally, ever, in the entire time you've known me?"

"I don't know." She tucked some of her frizzy hair behind an ear, revealing a stud of clustered seed pearls about the size of a pound-coin. "I don't know, Stanley. But I do know she really needs you. This Token thing — I could kill that man. I could absolutely kill him, if he hadn't done it for me."

I took a step toward her, hoping her floor-length skirt wouldn't get splashed by a passing taxi. "And what do you think killed him?"

"You mean, why do I think he did it? I don't know." She sighed. "Jason doesn't know, Craig doesn't know. Watching Clyde die surely didn't help. Whatever it was. Maybe he was just selfish. Who knows why people do the things they do? But look at her, Stanley. He's destroyed her. I'd kill him if I could! Honestly. Not to be dramatic." She checked her wrist for the time, looking up. "I have to get the kids."

"Yes. And I—" My words hung there. "I literally have nothing to do," I lamely told her.

"Well, I really wish you all the best," she said. "Honestly." It wasn't clear to me whether she meant in regard to my nonexistent job or Kyle's illness, or if she was just offering the barest hint of a fond farewell. She walked to Berkeley Street and hailed a taxi; I trailed her away from the square but then made a point of refusing to wait. If this was a rude gesture, then perhaps it was simply a long-delayed gesture of defiance.

In years past, back in the 1970s, I might have floated toward the Serpentine and found a cruisy little men's room to investigate. Instead, I plodded directly back to my flat, where I waited for Kyle to get off work by drinking tea and jerking off on the sofa. Not an afternoon to be proud of, but I figured I could afford to wallow.

Dreading Wendy's invitation to a picnic, Kyle complained that I'd accepted on his behalf up until the evening before, when he asked what Wendy would be serving us. "Nothing, I should think," I said, staring out from the living room couch onto the frenzy of flowers on his balcony, lit up in tropical colors against the setting mid-June sun. "I told her we'd take care of things."

Predictably he was angered that I hadn't told him this in advance, which meant he hadn't found the time to put together an overly elaborate lunch.

"Well, you don't eat anything," I said, "and Wendy doesn't eat anything, and I never ate much to begin with, so what does it matter?"

"It's just very like you to neglect to consider that I might like to plan a nice lunch. Do I look as if I am in any mood to picnic? We could have had caviar."

"So caviar would put you in the mood to picnic?"

"Of course!"

"I'm sorry. I said I'd call her in the morning to find a spot, and she's bringing the baby, so we'll have to bring some food."

"Maybe the baby eats food?"

"Surely she eats something."

"Wendy doesn't nurse, does she?"

"No," I said, "but Willa's old enough now that she wouldn't be nursing anyway, would she?"

"I think babies nurse for years in certain cases," said Kyle. "I was nursed for quite some time." He paused. "I was really a very undernourished newborn, given my mother's difficulties and so on, but then she nursed me and I became very robust."

I couldn't help but think that Kyle had never been robust, that even when he was depressively gorging himself in times of benign crisis he had the look of a spritely sort of creature that might dash off at any minute. "Okay, well, that does make sense. Whatever."

That night we tried to fuck the old-fashioned way: Kyle on his hands and knees so I could take him from behind, his cock an easy grab around his trembling, naked body. I was about to suggest we try it on our sides, for I couldn't imagine any other position in which I wouldn't have to stare at the rhythmic outline of his ribs. With our new bottle of safe lube I tried to get something going, but on each withdrawal I had the feeling that the condom was about to fall off. We tried to make a joke of it, or Kyle did, suggesting he was "virgin-tight" and daring me to try again. But I was scared and couldn't finish inside of him; as an alternative we jerked each other off while necking, which had the touching poignancy of our first university make-outs, huddled under blankets on our creaking Magdalen mattresses, as if the college itself were groaning in protest against our unnatural behavior. Kyle cried when he came, which was sweet, and told me he loved me and he wished we could forget about Wendy's picnic plans in favor of bed. It sounded all right to me, though I refused to deny anything to Wendy, who rang at 10 and woke us up. Kyle was annoyed until, in eavesdropping, he learned that we were going to picnic in Hyde Park and that Wendy would meet us at the awful statue of Achilles.

"Great." Kyle was out of bed with a kind of vitality he'd not displayed in years, let alone recent months. "We're going to the food halls at Harrods."

"Darling, no," I begged, clinging to the pillow. "Anywhere but there." But there was simply no denying him. I got up and threw on a T-shirt and jeans, lamenting the foolishness of a weekend trip to another overpriced relic mainly tailored to tourists. We then argued about the merits of walking versus a taxi, until Kyle just relented and agreed to cut across the park with me, which he then made sound very charitable as we set out, our coats gathered in our arms preventatively, and two umbrellas and a large quilt tucked under my armpit.

"I'm a very flexible person," he was saying, and I didn't argue with him. "We could be there by now in a cab. Look at you, carrying all of that like a pack mule." I'd feared that recent rains left the ground muddy around the park, which Kyle wouldn't have liked, but the ground was solid and without a trace of damp. I knew he liked to impress, perhaps Wendy most of all, and was surprised that he'd worn a modest pair of black trousers that cuffed around his ankles, mint lace-ups without socks, and a light cowl-necked sweater. I remembered him wearing it before to go out, back in a time just a few years ago when he'd been trying to pick up men and ended up going him with old Clyde. That world was as dead as Clyde now, or at least it was for us; I'd recently heard someone in the locker rooms tell a friend that he had been to Camp recently and found it sparsely populated. I considered asking Kyle whether he wanted to find a new club, maybe a leather bar, or whatever kind of place had taken precedence over the old ever-changing places. In later years it would dawn on me that perhaps eventually there would be no more gay clubs and straight clubs, or gay bars and straight bars, but simply clubs and bars. At that point the thought didn't occur to me. I decided not to say anything to Kyle on our walk, though, until we got to the store and he opened the door for me, a gesture for which I thanked him.

"Well, you're carrying all of that stuff, I mean, the least I could do was open the door." For someone who ate barely anything, he certainly did not hold back in the food halls, buying caviar and smoked salmon, toast points and a baguette, a ripe Époisses with grapes and Seville orange marmalade, cold pork pies, spicy whole seed mustard, a jarred spread of shrimps, and a box of 10 outrageous éclairs, each lacquered with white-chocolate and elaborately festooned with kiwi and pineapple bits, then glazed with sticky film so that they shined like oblong fairy cakes. I found out all of this after lugging the blanket and our coats and umbrellas over to the wine counter to get a bottle of something, which I brought back to Kyle. He grasped the champagne with both hands and read the label. "Drinking in the park isn't legal, is it?" he asked the man the behind the counter. "But you don't think they'll bother us, will they?"

"I don't know, sir," said the man in the white smock. He had a touch of Cockney in his reply. "They can't stop you if they don't find out."

"Well, good." Kyle paid with a charge card, and said, "Cover your eyes, Stanley. I don't want you to be shocked upon seeing the total."

When Wendy saw our provisions, she said, "What kind of nonsense is this? I said we'd have a picnic, not a wedding reception."

"What if it is our wedding reception?" Kyle asked, as I spread out the blanket.

"Don't joke about it," said Wendy. "They're no fun. They're just exhausting. The attentions of hundreds of people pulling you in myriad directions, it's just — such a drain."

"Well, yes, of course you can be dismissive of something everyone expected you to do. Think about what it must be like to be told that you can't?"

She sighed, hoisting the baby's carrier. "I don't have any patience for that. Believe it or not I wanted to talk about something serious." Sitting on the quilt Wendy tucked her feet under her, having actually dressed and made herself up for the occasion. It was the first time in a while, at least that I'd seen. She looked good, considering, in a surprising way, her outfit made of a curious grouping of bits from eras past: white flat-footed boots, a pair of butter-yellow skin-tight jeans, a baggy sweater that hung off one bare shoulder, the gentle lilac tone a nice compliment to her hair, held back with an alice band.

"You look good," I said, trying to uncork the champagne. The bottle was sweaty and I had to assert my grip a second time to get it open.

"Thanks," she said. "I really don't know why I bothered. I don't know. I guess I was bored. Or maybe this was important. I don't know."

"Well, so stop holding us in suspense," said Kyle. He was digging through the Harrods bag, trying to put out the food as if for a garden party: grapes spilling artfully off the cheese here, the salmon draped around the platter, grouping the marmalade and shrimps and caviar together with plastic spoons for serving or smearing. "I'm known to show up at the mere suggestion of an invitation, but honestly, I won't go just anywhere. I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding about me."

"So?" Wendy asked.

"So, get to the point," said Kyle. "Salmon?"

"No, thank you," she said. "You know, I think you overestimate how often people think of you. It's not an insult, you know, I think it's a generalization. Everyone thinks she or he's being closely observed, but most often people aren't thinking of them at all."

"Well, maybe it's just that I think of myself as being easy."

"You're not easy by any measure," said Wendy.

"You're right," I said, "she's right, you're not."

"We had such a lovely time in France," said Kyle, beginning to regale Wendy with a story about our trip. I'd not only heard him tell it before, but I'd been there, and so I restricted my mental energy to serving myself a bit of mustard with a bit of salmon. Just having seen the bill for this purchase I'd sort of thought to myself oh, typical Kyle, overpaying for food again, just sort of throwing away money to plug up the void no man, not even I, could ever possibly hope to fill. But then I sat down in the early afternoon light on the electric green grass and held a piece of smoked salmon on the end of a fork, sliced so thinly and so oily that the light penetrated it and it shone and glistened like the windows of the Saint-Chapelle. It was salty and so light, the briefest and most divine pleasure. It was so good that I nearly apologized, but then I realized that I hadn't actually told him any of this and didn't really have anything to apologize for.

I did say, "Good salmon," interrupting Kyle's narrative of our afternoon at Versailles, about which Wendy seemed relatively unmoved, just kind of nodding the way one did for an incredibly irrelevant story.

Instead of replying to me directly, Kyle said, "Smoked salmon makes me think of this one afternoon the first time Stanley came to stay with me in London. We weren't here, but in some square not far away — Golden Square, maybe—"

"St. James' Square."

"—St. James' Square, right, and we had just been to Fortnum's, and I'd bought us a bounty of smoked salmon. And if you can believe it Stanley hadn't had smoked salmon before, and it was the most encouraging thing, you know, his eyes lit up like a child on Christmas morning, not that I've ever been to Christmas morning, but it was how I imagine that looks — pure delight. Just, shock and pure delight. With his bleached hair, which was awful, and painted nails probably, since I was always trying to get him to do that kind of thing."

"I can't remember painting my nails."

"But you remember the hair, right? Because it was inexcusable."

"Your hair wasn't exactly restrained either, darling, though I dare say it was memorable."

"Everyone looked insane in the sixties," said Wendy, trying to be diplomatic.

"You didn't," I said, "you always looked like a page out of Vogue."

"Well, of course Wendy would look like Vogue and I'd look insane. Typical, it figures. Would you make me a plate, Stanley?"

Leaning over for a plate, I wondered how much he'd want to eat. Maybe he'd just tell me when to stop piling on food. A cluster of grapes? Why not. Some caviar, surely, I thought to myself, heaping it onto a toast point.

Over my shoulder, Kyle said, "He's very handsome, isn't he? Sometimes I look at him and I just — I want to kiss him."

"Well," said Wendy, "why don't you?" She reached over and grabbed some grapes.

"Because nice girls wait to be kissed," he said, "and anyway, you know we can't. But that was what was so nice about being in Paris. I did. Whenever I wanted. Has Stanley told you my theory? I think I am being spied upon."

"Oh, no, he hasn't. And, actually — no, you aren't, who would spy on you? And what for?"

"MI5, or some intelligence service, and the what for is obvious! They think I'm in with the Russians."

"Kyle," she said, "no one thinks that. I'm really sorry about all that Christophe stuff, honestly. But no one thinks that."

"Clearly someone does, and I'm dying to find out who. They interrogated me!"

"Yes, I heard your interrogation story." She popped a grape into her mouth. "But that's not why I asked you here."

Kyle had dug into his plate of food, eating a caviar-laden toast point with real gusto. While he was chewing, I said, "As you can see, we are dying of curiosity."

"All right, well. It should be painfully obvious to both of you now that I am going to die. Though not necessarily from curiosity."

Kyle leaned in, some caviar left on his lips like tiny black pearls, or the little seeds that fell from packets when my mother planted her vegetable garden behind our townhouse when I was a child. It was not such a bad comparison, given that fish eggs and seed packets both begot foodstuff. Kyle licked the remainder off his lips and said, "Are you really serious?"

"Yes, I am serious, and I mean soon. Look at me."

"I thought you looked good," I said.

"Well, thank you, but I feel like this is the end. It's over. I am over."

"Do you know, there are support groups for this kind of thing," said Kyle, "end-of-life support groups where you talk with others in your predicament and try to make sense of the situation. I haven't been to one, but — I might regret even offering this — we could go to one together, if you liked. I've been given all of these fascinating pamphlets, I mean, you don't have to go alone."

"Thank you, but I have the same pamphlets. And what I am trying to do is make sense of the situation. Though it's generous of you to offer."

"You should take me up on it," said Kyle, shoveling more caviar onto his plate. "I am serious, Wendy, I'm offering. I could use — that."

" 'That' what, you mean, a support group?"

"Maybe, I don't know. But someone else to talk with who's also going through it."

She dropped the bare grape stem in her hands onto the lawn, and sighed, heaving Willa from her carrier. She'd been a patient girl all through our little picnic, but now she started to whine, and Wendy gave her a finger to suck. She looked up at Kyle and said, "We could. I could think about it. But I was actually hoping you would be willing to. Well. Take Willa."

"Me?" Kyle asked. "Wendy, I've got maybe a year on you, and that's being generous."

"I know," she said, voice laden with something — a kind of hitch, a soft hesitation. "I just meant, you and Stanley. He's her godfather." She turned to me. "I need you to do this."

"But I'm not her father," I said, "I'm not even her blood relative. Craig's her godfather, too. At least he's got a wife."

"I don't want her raised in that loveless siphon along with all of Craig's little miscreants. He's miserable. They're all miserable. He was very dear to Token, and Craig should be in her life, but I don't care if you haven't got a wife, Stanley. You've got Kyle. That's enough. And her grandparents can't do it. Neither Token nor I ever wanted her to grow up in a loveless marriage, raised by two detached people who didn't know how to raise a child when theirs was young — forget the four decades between then and now. And even worse would be if Willa were constantly shipped back and forth between mine and Token's — ridiculous. No girl can grow up that way." She shook her head. "This is what he would have wanted. This is what I want. She'll be happiest this way."

"All well and good," Kyle said. "But assuming you and Token were raising Willa. Theoretically. Wouldn't that be another loveless marriage? What good would that have done her?"

"Darling, that's too harsh."

"It's not too harsh," Wendy corrected. "It's a good question. I assure you, our home would have been very loving and warm."

"I'm sure your parents thought that, too. And Stanley's."

"No, Kyle." Wendy's voice dropped. "They didn't think about it. They didn't care."

"That is enough," I announced. "It's one thing to politely decline, but let's not insult anyone."

"I don't find it insulting in the least," Wendy said. "I want any man who's going to help foster my daughter to ask whatever questions he sees fit."

"Thank you. But who said I was declining? Or accepting? It's quite a bit to think about."

"It's Stanley's decision." Wendy gathered the baby up into her arms, and Willa reached out aimlessly, yowling for something, articulating little pre-words that sounded as though they had a meaning, and yet resisted the shame and form of recognizable English. "I want her with both of you, but he'd be her legal guardian."

"Well, you must know I can't give you an answer right now," I said, "though it suddenly occurs to me that you might have been thinking of this some time ago, when you told me I ought to find something to do, or rather, that you'd find something for me to do?"

"The thought had crossed my mind," she said, "but in a rather more self-involved way this is merely the best option for Willa. I truly believe it."

"But you see, that's not self-involved at all."

"Isn't it, Stanley? She's hardly a person in any real sense. I've never been able to make heads or tails of my feelings, and I hope you won't repeat this—"

Kyle asked, "To whom would it be repeated?"

"—but I don't think I can connect with her at all, except as an extension of myself. If I care what happens to her, it's out of a fear for myself. She's — she's just an extension of myself, and I've struggled to face this. I shouldn't have had children."

"I don't see how that's different than literally anything else, though," said Kyle. "That's just parenthood as a function. Propagation is merely instinctual. I find myself thinking constantly of ways to make it happen. I've been having sex with men since I was 13 or 14 and some small part of me has never quit the idea that if I only did this, or I only did that, or I just did these other four things, I could have a nice normal life with a wife and a family. It's just the human condition to suffer the weight of that."

"But when you say 'suffer the weight' you're being figurative to some extent, whereas I'm telling you, I never wanted this. I shouldn't have been a mother. It's just that I had people on all sides of me telling me that was the only thing to do. And I had Token there with me, so I saw the reality of the little scenario you describe, wherein he did those four other things, and it never made either of us happy. I don't know what happiness is. I've never known. Can you say you know?"

"I know," said Kyle, "I mean, I think so."

"Okay, and how would you describe that?"

He thought for a moment, reaching over me for grapes. "Well," he said, once he had a bunch of five or six in his grasp and had sat back up. "I suppose it has something to do with acceptance, cliché as it might sound. It's not that there's nothing left to be sad about, or afraid of, and I couldn't say everything is perfect. But for the first time, perhaps the first time in my whole life, I feel as though everything's going to work out, not in the sense that I should get everything I want, but maybe in the sense that I am moving toward a conclusion." He put a grape into his mouth and spoke around it: "It's possible that being laid bare really helps with that."

"Well, all right. That's nice to hear."

"I don't know," said Kyle. He then swallowed his grape.

"That's all I care about." She turned and took the baby off her carrier and, slowly, handed her to Kyle.

"What are you doing?" Kyle asked, but he took Willa into his arms, at first with a look of quiet desperation on his face, and then it softened into a beatific look of what I can regrettably only manage to describe as pure joy. He looked at me, and at the baby, and let her curl a few fat fingers into the cowl neck of his sweater. "Oh my gosh," he said; Willa shrieked at him.

"Support her head," Wendy said. "She's nine months so she can do it herself, but she likes it. Go ahead."

I'd seen Kyle hold his nephew often enough that this sight didn't jar me, yet nor was I pleased. It was an inversion of the natural order I was used to, where Wendy had spent 10 or 15 years trying and failing to have a baby, after so many near-victories and disappointments, the goal of reproduction a kind of steady beat to which she'd been marching for the longest stretch of her adult life. And I'd thought she'd have been great at it, too, a naturally loving but firm mother figure, a far cry from the detached nanny figures of Kyle's childhood or the starchy Catholicism of mine. But she'd put Willa in Kyle's arms and had come just shy of admitting that she'd never wanted to be a mother, and wasn't enjoying it. I thought back on Bebe's comments to me outside of Black House a week or two prior, about what Token had done to Wendy, as if he'd poisoned her somehow, ruined her.

"I cannot imagine this won't sound somewhat controversial," she said, "but I enjoy the two of you. You know, as gay men." It was an old refrain from our university lives, a straight shot from the distant past reaching into our summery weekend in the late-late spring of 1986. "And I envy you both, because you don't know what it's like to live without options."

"Are you insane?" I felt as if I'd been down this road with her before, many times. "Being gay is having literally no options, Wendy, none."

"I have a lot of money," said Kyle, into the baby's hair, "and that certainly opens up some options, but I think if I didn't have it I'd be kind of screwed."

"If there's one thing I want to do before it won't make a difference to you anymore, Wends, it's get that across. Everyone's got their own afflictions, but this one really isn't very fun. Maybe it's ironic that AIDS is a wasting disease, because I feel like I've been atrophying my entire life. Maybe art is the only stopper, I don't know. But it's not fun. It's never been fun."

"I just think that's because of you," she said. "I mean, I think you've always been sort of depressed. And maybe if you had some other purpose, it wouldn't matter."

"I can't have a purpose because there's no social role I'm fit to fill! Maybe if I'd stuck around Oxford and ended up tutoring undergrads, like Garrison. But he didn't seem so terribly happy."

"He died, you know," said Kyle.

"Excuse me?" I nearly snapped my neck turned to gape at him.

"Miss B told me. I guess she heard from someone in her antiquarian lit circle."

"You might have told me," I said. "When was this?"

"I don't know. Ask Butters."

"Well." Wendy sighed. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Sorry? Jesus, we haven't seen that man in 20 years. Don't be sorry." I turned to Kyle, almost but not entirely afraid to ask: "What did he die from?"

Kyle sighed. "I'm not certain. That wasn't part of the gossip."

Turning back to Wendy, I said, "Look, it's not fun. It's never been fun. Being shown, and in many cases told, you are unable to make any contribution to society isn't fun."

"Can you honestly say you never had any fun at all, though?" she asked.

"We did, of course," said Kyle, "or I did, at least. But you do have to ask, at what cost? At what price was all that fun? You're paying for all of it now, aren't you? Well, me too." In his arms, Willa began to squirm. "How do you stop this?" he asked Wendy.

"I don't know." She buried her head in her hands. "I think you just have to ride it out."

"We'll have to talk about it," I said.

"Well." She smiled at me, for the first time all afternoon. "I guess that's a start."

XXX

We had much to discuss, and so that night I took Kyle out for Thai. He tended not to like ethnic foods, but he would abide by this restaurant, which served a piece of grilled chicken breast on a bed of white rice with a sticky-sweet pink sauce. He was still feeling rather ambivalent toward food; he wouldn't have eaten much better anywhere else, ordering a glass of white wine to go with the chicken and carefully taking five minutes to eat one prawn cracker from the basket that sat on the table all day, and probably every day until it was exhausted. I ordered a green papaya salad which Kyle insisted on tasting. "You won't like it," I warned him.

"Why not?"

"It's quite spicy."

"I am not some child," he said, scooping up a spoonful of the papaya. Within a moment he was gulping down wine, finally crying, "That's remarkable!"

"Stick with the chicken." The restaurant was both empty and dark enough for me to feel comfortable giving his thigh a squeeze.

"Are we going to talk?" he asked, pouring himself a second glass.

"We should, yes."

He nodded, and what he said surprised me: "We're going to do it, of course."

"We are? Darling, that's insane. We can't take care of a child."

"Why do you think that?"

"Come on," I said, "you know why."

"Well, who's to say she'll die before I do? Then you won't have to worry about my care getting in the way of things."

"Darling," I said, quietly. It was a ghastly thought, and equally implausible. "I think you know she's really very sick."

"Then we have to do it! I know you think I am this crazed harridan, but I like Wendy. She's got to be worried about who's going to take care of her baby. I know she didn't quite say as much, but do you really want her spending the end of her life worried over what's going to happen to the girl? Jesus, if you were in her position you'd be worried sick over it. Or sicker, I suppose. In either case, what else has she got? Her husband's abandoned her. Her parents are useless in this situation. You swore in some Anglican church before the English god that you'd do it. And besides, she's your friend! You should do it to help her. I know what I'm talking about, Stanley. Terminal illness…" He trailed off. He shook his head. "Well, anyway."

"Look. It's not that I don't appreciate what you're saying, but it doesn't do any good taking on a project you're going to botch. We don't know anything about taking care of a baby, not as a permanent status, and that part's easy compared to rearing the child it grows into. Then you'd got to consider the fact that I committed myself to you, Kyle. Maybe two men could make sense of a baby, but one man can't take care of a child and his dying partner. So if we say no it would be for your sake!"

"My sake?" Kyle clutched a hand to his chest. "Have you paused to consider that perhaps I might want to do it?"

"No," I admitted. "I really hadn't."

"Well, I do! Stanley, I do, I want it. It's not that I believe it will be easy, I'm certain it won't be, but — I always wanted one. A baby, I mean. I mean — I wanted my own." He sniffed and wiped at his eyes. "I wanted to be a father. I wanted that."

"I know." Grabbing his hand, I squeezed it. "I know, darling."

His voice started to warble; he was crying at the table: "I wanted a family. I wanted so many things but I wanted that most of all."

"I know, darling. It's all right, it's all right."

"It's not all right, god, I feel like I say that all the time but it is not all right, all right, god. It's not." He rubbed his eye, like a child, with the heel of his hand.

The result of living consistently through trauma, as I had done, is that I was so used to Kyle's crying that it really didn't move me at all anymore. It broke my heart every time, but I was so used to having my heart broken that I just felt safe in the knowledge that the sinking feeling of pain I experienced when he cried was going to be fleeting. It was not going to kill me. I was going to live with it.

That evening we lay in bed, Kyle and I, in the loft of my flat overlooking the nighttime dead of Hoxton Square. It was quiet in the flat except for Kyle's breathing and the dripping tap I hadn't fixed in the bathroom — or, more likely, called someone to fix for me. Handiwork would never be my forte, and the older I got the more aware of this I became. In the Guardian I was reading obituaries. No one I knew was in them this week, but surely I'd begun to notice that daily, cultured men between the ages of 25 and 50 who "never married" were passing on from innocent-sounding ailments. Yesterday a 37-year-old stage director for the National Theatre had passed on due to meningitis, and today his life's story was presented to readers in the black, solemn ink of newsprint. Initially I'd been reading the obituary to Kyle, but he'd asked me to stop. So I did, and he kept his head on my chest and his arm around my waist, breathing steadily.

As I was considering whether I might put down the paper and go to sleep, Kyle suddenly said to me, "We're being so stupid."

"Oh?" Now I did fold up the Guardian, and dropped it onto the floor. "Stupid about what now?"

"It's just ridiculous, Stanley, isn't it? That we've been living apart for so long?" He sat up and shook out his hair; he wasn't wearing a shirt, although I insisted on pajamas, always.

I shrugged. "I don't really know what you mean; we spend most of our time together."

"Exactly, dear. Exactly. Stanley, when are you going to move in with me?"

"I'm not planning on moving in with you."

Kyle sighed. "Well, why not?" He put his hands on his hips, pantomiming dissatisfaction. "This is a pitiful excuse for a marriage, trudging back and forth between my flat and this hovel you call home. We're not kids anymore, you know, and nothing short of death's going to interrupt our courtship, heaven forbid, so why don't you just move in with me already?"

"Well—"

"I'll cry if I get 'no' for an answer."

"Darling." I gathered him up into my arms, and he clung to me, pressing a kiss to my hairline. I kissed him back, on the lips, without tongue. "I've spent two decades listening to your crying," I whispered to him. "What makes you think I can't stand a bit more?"

"This isn't a joke!"

"I'm not joking. Kyle, I adore you, but this is my home. This flat is the only thing I've ever been able to provide for myself. It's my only adult achievement. Therefore, I think it's only wise that you move in with me."

He let go, shut his eyes, crossed his arms. "This is going to sound cruel, my dear, and maybe it is a bit, but someone needs to say it: Stanley, your flat is a joke. It was never meant to be lived in, and I'm not moving into it. Ever. It's a joke. Not a hilarious one."

"Don't insult it! This is my home, Kyle. I live here."

"Well, I'd rather you decided to be at home in my home and came to live with me!" He uncrossed his arms. "You don't have to sell your flat, necessarily. Just — just think about rentals. Perhaps it's a smart idea. We'll make a little money that way."

"We?"

"Well, yeah." He rolled his eyes. "Isn't that what married people do, combine their assets? You're not shy about spending my money, after all."

"Look, joking and homosexual metaphors aside, we are neither married nor can we ever be married, and this flat is all I have to my name."

He looked serious. "You have me."

"It's entirely different. It's inconceivable that you'd put yourself and my flat in the same category."

"Yes, I should be a category above your flat!"

"They're different!"

"Stop being so cruel!" He rubbed at his eyes, which were red, and now I was positive he was about to begin weeping. But he didn't; his voice just cracked with uncertainty while he spoke to me: "I think rather than cruel you're mostly in denial. You have to consider reality, you know, it's not going to go away: Wendy is trusting us to raise her daughter."

"And you don't think a child can be raised in Hoxton?"

"I'm sure plenty of children have been raised in Hoxton, but I have two bedrooms, plus a den, and my flat, elitist and showy, will allow for privacy. Lord knows, I don't expect to see it, but she'll be a young woman one day, and she'll want some kind of privacy. Hell, we'll want some kind of privacy. Don't you want a door to our bedroom? That locks? You really want to raise someone else's little girl, some viscount's daughter, in a former factory? Stanley, look at this place. There's only one place to take a bath."

"We must learn to adapt is all."

"Well, consider this, won't you? I'm … not well." His eyes, formerly hopeful, tilted down into resigned misery.

"You're fine," I panted, taking his wrist. We looked at each other, and he looked absolutely destroyed. I wondered how I looked, and was glad I couldn't know. "You're really okay," I repeated. "All the finest doctors in London are going to help you — they'll develop drugs — there may be a cure next year, for all we know." I knew I didn't believe what I was saying, but the sadder he looked, the more I said: "You could sign on to that study of your mother's. It might buy you some time. Look at what you've made it through thus far. You're not — it's not — my god, you're not like Clyde, covered in lesions and struggling to breathe. You're healthy, you have T-cells—"

Kyle crawled back toward me, putting his head on my chest, grasping my arm and waiting for me to coil him back up into an embrace. Once I did, he swallowed, and said, "I will be like Clyde. I will be, we have to remember it."

"Oh, no, you won't."

"I will. Stanley, please. Please understand. I'm sick, and there is no getting well, merely ups and downs in the merciless march toward death."

"I don't like to hear that."

"I don't like to say it."

"Then let's not."

"We have to! We have to, I'm sorry, we have to. I have to, you have to, it's — well. How many years did we delay admitting to each other what we wanted, stumbling through a stupid pantomime of life as if it were even duly satisfactory? Let's learn from our mistakes. Please move in with me. Don't sell this flat, just keep it. Lease it, use it for storage, it's irrelevant. But Willa won't be happy here as she grows older, and I won't be happy here as I grow sicker. There is one bedroom, up a narrow staircase. There is only one tub. It's impossible to find a taxi nearby" — he knew that wasn't true, but I wasn't going to contradict him — "and it isn't my home. If I am going die, please let me do it in my flat. And please be there with me when it happens."

Reality is a sobering thing. Then again, my relationship with Kyle had long been sobering.

"Kyle," I said.

"Stanley," he replied, pleading. "You said you would take care of me."

"Of course, I will." I meant it.

He shook his head. "But you have to stop thinking of it as something to do later. I'm in bed with you right now."

"We have to continue this tomorrow," I said, reaching over to shut off the light. "Good night, darling. Sweet dreams."

From behind, he embraced me, kissing me on the shoulder. "Good night," he whispered to my ear. A few minutes passed, and it was very still. I could hear the pocket watch ticking away on the nightstand, a whole bed away from me, and I felt Kyle's breathing against my back, steady and reassuring. Then, just as I was set to drift off to sleep, he shifted against me, and said, "I love you, Stanley."

I was too tired to say it back to him, but that night, I slept soundly. There was no clear reason why this should have been.

There was much to think about.


End Part II.

If you're still reading this fic, thank you! There's one chapter left to go. No promises about posting, since I want to finish up some other fics first, but I've got part of the final installment drafted and have a missing scene in the forthcoming S/K zine project I'm putting together with Nhaingen. More information is at stankylezine Tumblr; check it out if you're interesting. [ETA: this was a typo but I'm leaving it.]

I welcome feedback, positive or negative or ambivalent, and would love to hear from you. Thanks again.