Читать книгу Canarino - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 7

It was twilight, that long English twilight that goes on forever in June. London clanged and hummed somewhere above the rooftops and beyond the pendulous, dusty green of the garden square as David dropped his carry-on bag in the tiled portico and fitted his skeleton key in the top lock. The massive black door was swollen tight with late-afternoon heat. The bolt scraped uncomfortably, and then the slim Yale key felt as though it might snap off rather than release the latch. He heard his taxi shudder into gear and pull away. The door swung back on an empty house. No one greeted him; they had left this morning.

He slung the bag into the bare hallway, shutting the door. There was no table and no silver tray to drop his keys on, nothing but the wide limestone paving slabs and a few skittering pieces of the movers’ shredded cardboard stirred up by his entrance. He turned around where he stood, holding the keys in the air, searching, as if the table and the tray might magically reappear. But they’d gone to Virginia with Elizabeth and the children. He decided to put the keys back in his pinstriped trouser pocket.

The hallway seemed enormous. Had the staircase always been so far from the door, he wondered? His shoes echoed on the stone floor; he liked the sound, the sharp, official click of his heavy-heeled black brogues. He put his hands in his trouser pockets, feeling the keys there, and began striding through the dim, quiet rooms, casually, just to see. She’d left him a little round table and a chair in the dining-room, wrapped around by the splendor of her green, oriental silk wallpaper—as if he might want to eat at home, all alone, watched over by printed Chinamen and ferns.

He pulled the keys from his pocket, dropped them on the little round table, then strolled back along the hall and climbed the stairs, his shoes sliding precariously on the thick, woven-straw runner, silenced. He gripped the polished wood banister, and, out of habit, glanced up as he mounted and swung slowly around toward the drawing-room door. The stairwell seemed to swirl away backwards above him, narrower and tighter as it rose, floor upon deserted floor, all the way to the so-called nursery below the rafters.

That word will never fly back in Virginia, David thought. Nursery. The Edwardian childhood thing might charm a few snobby old ladies, but how long will it be before the nanny jettisons her uniform and starts calling herself a babysitter? Or worse, leaves altogether? He pictured Gordon in his white summer shorts and little Hopie in her white linen dress, pleated and smocked across the chest; Elizabeth dressed them as if, any minute now, they would be playing croquet with the Queen. Did they possess any blue jeans? David had no idea.

The drawing-room doors were ajar. Through the high, broad opening David caught sight of the gilded, cornflower-blue silk Louis Quinze sofa. He laughed—at himself and at his wife. A man can’t sit on that, he thought. Surely it was designed to prevent people wearing out whatever expensive fabric it was covered in? It’s like a very thin woman in a couture dress, fabulous to look at, fragile and hard to the touch. Why did she leave me that, of all things?

He entered the room and walked around the sofa, clicking his heels on the newly carpetless parquet. It was a beautiful object, with its bowed legs gracefully pincering the floor, perfect and complete in itself. He sat down on it, gingerly. Its creaks and delicacy didn’t seem familiar. I’ve never even sat on this thing before, he thought, in how many years? Maybe she’d been told it wouldn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic, or the extremes of temperature in Virginia. He was sure Elizabeth loved the sofa; he could remember an imploring telephone call from a Sotheby’s showroom just as the auction was about to begin. He had agreed, as he generally did, that she could spend as much as she liked. Six or eight years ago by now? Was it before Gordon was born? Just afterwards?

David put an elbow on one arm of the sofa and leaned against the back. It didn’t yield, nor did it break. I guess she didn’t want me getting too comfortable, he thought, stiffly perched. His eyes slowly swept the long room, huge, shadowy. The high white ceilings seemed to hover above the thickening glaze of evening light. There above the black-veined white marble mantelpiece was the portrait.

Jesus, he muttered. She left that, too, my tenth anniversary present. All the company I’ll need for the summer. Maybe the paint hasn’t dried and it couldn’t be packed?

Elizabeth, eight feet off the ground, looked down at him, her long, pale arms draped around the children on either side of her, all three of them dressed in white, their blonde heads shining like ridged gold as they lolled on the very same blue sofa where he himself was sitting now, the black Chinese pug at their feet. It was a romantic composition; David couldn’t remember which nineteenthcentury society painter it was that Elizabeth had chosen to model the portrait on, but he had teased her that the elaborate gilded frame looked naked without a little gold plaque, ‘Mrs David Judd and Her Children’. She hadn’t laughed at his joke; the plaque, somehow delayed, had been attached the very next morning. Then a day or two later, a man had come in to rub some of the gilding off the frame; Elizabeth had found it a little too bold.

Despite the artful languor of Elizabeth’s pose, there was a quick energy in the picture, something startling and modern. In the weeks since the portrait had been hung, David had noticed it only half-consciously. He looked more carefully now, trying to see exactly what it was. Maybe Elizabeth was too skinny for a nineteenth-century society matron? You could see her wedding rings slipping toward her knuckle where her left hand hung down over Hopie’s back, as if her fingers, when not posing to be painted, were active, competent, washed dishes or drove a car. Her gauzy white skirt fell about her hidden legs in timeless folds, but there was a hint of edgy tailoring at her waist and neck, something a lady’s seamstress wouldn’t have produced, something that had stalked down a catwalk. Gordon was sitting demurely, tilted just slightly toward his mother, a twist of smile breaking out or just held back at the far side of his gap-toothed mouth, but Hopie was kneeling up on her hands, really, wasn’t she? She was turning sideways toward the painter, defiant, kittenish, ready to pounce. Were polite little girls allowed to sit like that before, say, the nineteen-sixties? Was Elizabeth actually holding Hopie down with one hand?

And their blue eyes, six intensely blue eyes, had to have been rendered by some modern technique of painting. They glowed with the watery, aquamarine light that the ocean reflects from a cloudless blue sky on a hot, still summer day somewhere off the coast of New England; those were American, sunstruck, beachgoing eyes. That was it, thought David. And even though they had sat for the painting during the winter, Gordon and Hopie were far too brown, weren’t they? They didn’t match Elizabeth’s stately pallor. In fact, they looked like wild children or tamed hippie kids beside her. The more he looked, the more David felt that his rather beautiful, playful children with their freckled, unformed faces seemed a little out of place in the ambitious formality of their mother’s fantasy.

He laughed to himself again, benevolently—as he had laughed at the sofa, and as he had laughed when first presented with what he still couldn’t help thinking was an absurd gift. Benevolence felt right. It felt—optimistic. All along, he had assumed that Elizabeth, too, found the portrait just a little bit comical; but she had said nothing to confirm whether she saw any pretentiousness in it. Was it an overt bid to join generations of arriving bourgeoisie opulently displaying their wealth and beauty? He couldn’t ask her; what if it was—in earnest?

Her face in the portrait was creamy, expressionless, weirdly still. The majestic bone structure was all there; it showed just as well in paint, David thought, as it did in glossy photographs. She seemed unaware of the giggling fidgets barely repressed in the body language of her children, or at least she seemed undisturbed by them. Her calm was deep, otherworldly. And yet there was something long-suffering, even beseeching, in the shallow curve of her pale pink lips. Her long brown-gold hair snaked and looped around her face, over her shoulders, into matching loose coils on her chest. Below her fearsome, stylishly plucked brown eyebrows, her famous iridescent eyes were perhaps not exactly the same as the children’s eyes, David thought. They glittered a whiter aquamarine, almost like fabulous slivers of blue ice.

David got up from the sofa, walked to the leftmost pair of French doors, unshot the gleaming brass bolt, threw the doors open, and stepped out on the balcony. He could feel the grit of the city abrading the soles of his shoes; the black wrought-iron railings as he leaned on them with both hands were rough with soot. He liked it. He looked across at the heavy, suspiring trees in the square; for all their green, he thought, they’ll never clear this air. It’s a losing battle.

A car passed just underneath him, kissing and sucking the pavement softly with its rubber-bound weight, moving the twilight. He imagined he could feel particles rising on its wake, entering his nose, his lungs; he breathed in like an addicted smoker. The hot city evening thrilled him; it reminded him of New York, which had been hotter, dirtier, and which, in twelve years in London, he had never really ceased to long for.

The air seemed to rush and swoop in the distance, like voices swelling, shouting, dying. A siren blared to the east, then another, faster one; both faded. He could hear birds, tuneful ones, in the garden, though he couldn’t see them. The pale, narrow band of sky visible between the trees and the houses seemed to soar up into a wide dome spreading over immeasurable life and variety—neon, hopping, embattled, unpredictable.

It still excites me, David thought, the fighting, vulgarity, noise, surging threat and promise of it all. Nobody even knows I’m in town, apart from one or two people at the office. It’s like freedom all over again, being small in it, anonymous. He slapped the railings with the palms of his hands; they didn’t wobble, didn’t even vibrate. So solid, this house, this success.

Here I am, David Judd, a very rich man, in my mansion in Belgravia, about to retire from investment banking and go home. Whatever that is. Somebody said home is a place you can freely go both in and out of. Why does America make me think of my grave? I’m only forty-seven. He slapped the railings again, hard, so that his hands stung and the little bones at the top of his palms ached with the smack.

There on the balcony, David felt like he was on the edge of a precipice. It was a moment of freedom, and a moment of uncertainty. The moment lasted a long time. He looked out at the gathering dusk, feeling the dull continual energy of the city, listening to its throbs of activity, sometimes remote, sometimes nearby. How could anyone engage with it all? A single life was narrow, short. The city was only an idea, he told himself, an endless seduction that nonetheless ended—ended in just a handful of recognized achievements, familiar relationships, habitual activities, done deals, inescapable commitments. He dusted his blackened palms against each other, swept both hands back through his floppy brown hair, holding his thumbs free, stiffly cocked, and went back inside.

There was a light clatter on the parquet in the drawing-room doorway, then the sound of desperate claws sliding and failing to grip. In the small remaining light, David saw the children’s pug right itself on the slippery floor then bound onto the sofa. The dog made a sleek black arc in the gloom, quick, coiled, darting, then stood on the priceless blue silk, snuffling like a happy fool.

‘Why is the dog here?’ David said out loud.

He felt a bubble of unexpected excitement. Elizabeth must have changed her mind! But the excitement passed instantly. It was followed by a shock of fear. Where were the children? Something had gone wrong.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, he chided himself. That’s ridiculous; someone would have phoned. He looked at his watch. After nine. They must be there already; Elizabeth will call.

He reached down and stroked the dog. ‘I hate pets,’ he cooed at it, ‘and you are making me feel pretty fucking lonely.’ The dog whined and fawned, raking the sofa with its claws, daintily slobbering.

Then David said, still gently, ‘I’ve got two more trips to the Far East before I quit, buddy, and meetings all over Europe, and I’m hardly ever home anyway. I don’t know what the hell you are planning to eat. And I’ll tell you what’s worse: I am not going to carry you to Virginia at the end of the summer. Those selfish little kids of mine were only pretending they loved you; that’s what I think. They obviously forgot all about you. God only knows what’s going on in their mother’s head, because she’s been telling me all she wants is dogs and horses and open fields.’ He scratched the dog’s ears and pulled them with both hands.

‘I think you better get off this damn sofa, for starters.’ And suddenly he picked the dog up and dumped it on the floor so that it fell on its side. It sprang up and tottered out of the room.

‘There has to be someone here for the dog—one of her Filipinas. She must have told me.’ David ran unyielding fingers through his hair again, as he made for the stairs following the dog.

There were lights on in the kitchen and he could hear noises before he even got to the bottom of the basement stairs—water running, cabinet doors opening and shutting, then the roar of the garbage disposal.

I was never alone for a second, he thought. Elizabeth has it all organized. He felt a little irritated, a little disappointed. But he didn’t feel surprised.

‘Yes, Mr Judd, good evening, sir.’

She said it with a shy smile, stiffly. David was pretty certain that her name was Francine, but he wasn’t willing to risk it. She already seemed embarrassed, being there in the house with him all alone. He just nodded at her, trying not to notice. But he thought maybe she was a nice woman; she’d been around a longish time; she was, he thought, Elizabeth’s favorite. She had children of her own. Elizabeth was always saying she felt guilty taking a mother away from her family. That’s why there were three different Filipinas, more even; David didn’t know. They all wore the same blue-and-white-striped uniform which didn’t help him with telling them apart.

‘I have some cold drink for you, sir, if you would like a beer. I can open it for you, and I can serve it in your study before your dinner.’

David blinked at her, trying not to look startled. ‘Fine. In my study. What’s the dinner?’

‘Just simple chicken, grilled plain, and some salad, sir. Maybe you like a little rice?’

‘A little.’

David turned around and went back up the stairs. Usually when he arrived home, the children’s supper was long over; there might be something left out that he could pick at if he was hungry. He poured his own beer if he was having one. More often than not, he ate out, either with clients in London or in some foreign city. He hadn’t lifted a finger to cook or clean for years, but he was taken aback by the sudden attentions of a personal servant. How would he stand the scheduling? The scrutiny? The need to be polite? What was Elizabeth thinking?

His study was another surprise. The movers had packed absolutely everything. There was not a photograph, not a book, not a paperweight in sight. Even his desk was gone. The telephone and the fax machine were sitting on the floor beside a small pink-and-green-flowered armchair that David thought might have come from a spare bedroom upstairs. The chair looked absurdly feminine in the walnut-paneled room. His computer, with the screen and the keyboard, had been transferred onto a rickety-looking work station that he’d never seen before; did it belong to the children? Had Elizabeth bought it especially? Such a cheap sort of thing? There were faint black outlines on the beige wall-to-wall carpet where his desk and his files and his various chairs had once stood, a few more on the walls where his maps of London and New York and his New Yorker cartoons had hung. He opened the paneled supply-cupboard door; it was nearly empty—just two reams of copier paper, some stationery, a few pencils. He ran a finger over a shelf in the bookcase. Already dusted. David thought he could still smell cigars, sour and fragrant. Unpackable, he said to himself, the vile, rancid cloud.

Francine came to the door with his beer, in an enormous misty mug, on a tray. David smiled broadly, practically guffawed. A chilled beer mug? He didn’t conceal his pleasure.

‘That’s great, Francine.’ He took a long pull at the inch-high foam and smacked his lips.

‘It’s up to me, the glasses, now the house manager is off. In Peter Jones, I wasn’t sure, but maybe this one is nice for a bachelor—for just a few weeks, I mean. And I have others if you prefer it?’

David ignored the anxiety in her voice. ‘What about the dog, Francine? Did my wife tell you what her plans are for Puck?’

David thought Francine looked a little nervous, but right away she said boldly, ‘Don’t worry about the dog, sir. He’s my responsibility. It’s no problem with me at all. I walk him plenty and the walking is good for us both.’

She was still gripping the tray with both hands, then she released one hand, letting the tray hang at her side for a moment before lifting it again and offering it to David.

‘Do you need this, for your drink, sir?’

David looked at Francine silently and took the tray, placing it behind him on the empty bookcase. He took another sip of his beer, shifting his feet on the carpet, broadening his stance.

Francine was definitely pretty, David thought. Her brown eyes had a soft look at the edges, gentle, lively. And actually, the uniform was appealing; it gave her that aura of sweetness and willingness that nurses sometimes have. Not an aura he felt inclined to disturb, just one he enjoyed. Women go for soldiers, why can’t men go for nurses? David mused. He could see that Francine had on some sort of thick slip underneath her uniform, displaying more modesty than most of the young English nurses he’d seen in their uniforms which were generally notably transparent.

David liked to size people up precisely; now that he’d noticed Francine, he was curious as to exactly who she was. He concluded that the slip was a mark of her conservative background and her status as a mother; it commanded his respect. Maybe that was just what Francine had intended it to do, he thought.

‘How does Puck get to Virginia, Francine?’

‘Mrs Judd has made arrangements, sir. For the end of the summer.’ Francine glanced behind her, as if she wanted to leave. Then she smiled at David.

‘I think Mrs Judd wants to settle the children first. Excuse me, sir, but the water is maybe boiling now. I’ll lay your place in the dining-room?’

David grunted, and she was gone. It made sense, settling the children, he decided. But if the damned dog could stay, why the hell couldn’t he have his desk and his files? Was there a TV in the house? Had she taken the bed?

He took off his jacket and laid it over the computer screen, then picked up his beer again and collapsed into the little pink-and-green chair. It was a snug fit. He slopped beer over his lap as both elbows struck hard against the arms of the chair.

‘Well this sucks!’

He craned forward, laughing, fishing about with his tie to see if it was wet. He could feel the beer running between his thighs. Francine, he thought, you’re going back to Peter Jones tomorrow to buy me a real chair. He pictured a huge leather recliner on sale; Elizabeth would be horrified, but he couldn’t stop the thought. She’d never know anyway. Maybe Francine would like to take the chair home in August when he left. She deserved some booty if she was going to be unemployed.

As he stood up to shake the wet off his trouser legs, the telephone rang. He ignored it. It went on ringing and he patted his hips and his chest, where his jacket pockets might have been, thinking about his cell phone. Anybody who seriously wanted to reach him called him on his cell phone. He looked at his jacket hanging over the computer screen and thought, I left the phone downstairs in my bag. Still, he picked the jacket up, felt the weight of it, shook it a little, batted at the pockets. Then suddenly he reached for the phone on the floor, thinking, Maybe it’s Elizabeth. They must have arrived.

His voice was just a flat bark. ‘Yup?’

‘Is that David?’ It was a man.

Nailed by the office; guess I’m a sucker. ‘Yup, it’s David. What is it?’

‘Do you mean who is it?’

‘Oh, Christ.’ But David’s blood was already rising; he was always ready to spar. He knew the voice, a big, deep American voice. Teasing, basically friendly. Who the hell was it?

‘David! It’s Leon!’

‘Jesus! Leon? How’d you find me here?’

‘It’s just your house, isn’t it? This number?’

‘Yeah—barely! I’m about to sell the house and move home!’

‘Home?’

‘Well—Virginia.’

‘Virginia?’

‘Jesus, Leon, where the hell are you? Are you in London?’

‘Of course I’m in London. I live here. I’ve lived here for nearly a year!’

‘You’re joking! What are you doing?’

‘Calling you.’

‘Asshole! Come over and have a beer with me. I’m all alone in Belgravia. Ditched by Elizabeth and the kids till the end of the summer. A quivering wreck!’

‘I’m there. I’m staring at your address. Give me twenty minutes.’

How could Leon spend a whole year in London and not call until tonight? It was unbelievable.

In college, David had seen Leon every day, twice a day, all day long and half the night. And afterwards, those strident, crazy years starting out in New York. Twenty-five-hour days at the office, it had seemed like. The towering, gut-boiling canyons of steel and glass. The sweaty shock of competing full-out with everyone in the whole world all the time; bosses and colleagues who didn’t necessarily want you to win and who didn’t necessarily even look upon you as a team-mate; results that made the real newspapers. We went into that life full-bore, David thought, busting for action action action. Everything so fast-forward that pretty soon nothing else would do. Speed-addicting days, with the occasional split second of wrung-out leisure in that airless walk-up on East 12th Street, drifts of dirty clothes on the floor, tin-foil-and-white-paper packaging from the Chinese carry-out erupting from the kitchen trash can. David could just about smell sesame noodles, pizza, stale beer. He thought of their slapstick antics trying to clean the place up and make it seem like a real apartment when one of them wanted to bring a girl back.

Time was nothing. Gone.

Are we that old already? That duty-ridden? What are we doing with our lives, that we move further and further forward without holding on to anything from the past? How did I lose touch with Leon of all people? My best friend, among a lot of good friends.

He pictured Leon’s huge, bounding limbs that could look so ungainly at first, his scraggly blondish hair, long, thin, never really combed. His colossal, uncontrollable grin that peeled his lips back like an apple, or something bigger, a melon, being sliced open. Leon seemed like an enormous dog, a yellow Lab, but he was so much more collected than that. In sport, his timing was perfect, incredible. And when David pictured Leon, he saw the dirty-blond hair lift slightly over the ears, as if Leon were in motion.

Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, David saw Leon, as he’d seen him for years in his mind’s eye, skating fast, his ice hockey helmet clamped onto his head like a flying ace’s, hair blowing out through the ear pieces, and the pads which made their team-mates into blimps and clowns hanging loose on his giant’s physique, his stick swinging like a pendulum backwards and forwards over the bladescored ice, the puck cradled, babied, protected, then slapped silly into the goal.

His timing was perfect, tonight, too, David realized. When did I ever need Leon’s company more?

He opened his closet door half-expecting his clothes to be gone. But there hung the sober row of dark, handmade suits on heavy wooden hangers, neatly spaced, the elbows ever so slightly bent so that the jackets seemed to be politely offering him their arms. He tugged a pair of khakis off the last hanger and felt around on the shelf above for a pullover. The bedroom, David thought, looked relatively undisturbed by the movers. Some things were missing—the mirror above his chest of drawers, for instance, and his bedside table. Had she left every telephone like that on the floor?

He bent down and pressed the intercom then stood up to buckle his belt.

‘Hey, Francine.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I’m expecting a friend. Bring up a couple more of those beers when he gets here.’

‘Yes, sir.’

When he had changed his clothes and splashed water on his face and hands, David went back down to the drawing-room and turned on the lights. It was an absurd choice, the blue silk sofa or the pink and green flowered chair in his study. None of it suits Leon any better than it suits me, he thought. It might as well be made of matchsticks.

He went out onto the balcony in the tawny semi-darkness of the lamp-lit street. His mind was streaming with images from the past, easily, unexpectedly. He felt amazed at all the time that had gone by. He had reached a watershed without meaning to; he might have missed it altogether.

I’m always about the next thing that’s going to happen, David thought to himself. I’ve been poised on the balls of my feet, on the edge of my chair, convinced that there will be nothing more and that I’ll be bored out of my mind.

What if I were not so afraid of being bored? Would life pass more slowly? Could I choose what to do on purpose, shape my destiny a little? Instead of lying like a feeding fish on the current, putting myself in the way of an endless stream of events and just reacting?

He began to wonder whether what had happened so far in his life might be all he should expect. And he thought: A lot of it’s lost, dammit. But if I could go backwards to those lost events, have them all again, it might be enough to carry me for a long time. For ever? Maybe. Nothing was connected up; it had just gone on endlessly happening, with no time for reflection. His experiences seemed disparate, tumultuous, unrelated. Some things, he thought, he might have paid too little attention to, so that he wouldn’t be able to recover them now if he wanted to. But the human mind is deep, he thought to himself. It’s all in there somewhere.

A motorcycle roared at the end of the square, then rocketed around it, blasting the sedate doorways and windows one by one. It stopped practically at David’s feet, on the single yellow line beneath the streetlamp.

Once the engine died and the noise stopped, David paid no attention, but then as the black leather rider made for his own front door, David suddenly called out brazenly on the velvet air.

‘I thought you were a fucking courier! When did you start riding a motorbike?’

Leon took off his helmet and tilted back his head, smiling broadly. Then he put a finger to his lips and whispered loudly and hoarsely, ‘You’ll wake the neighbors!’

David laughed. ‘Fuck ’em! They won’t be my neighbors much longer. Wait, I’ll let you in.’

As he hurried down the stairs, he realized he was thinking about his legs. How quick was he now, really? As if Leon could see him, judge him, from the other side of the front door.

When David opened the door, Leon was standing back from it on the sidewalk. He had one foot on the portico step, one hand on his thigh, slouching. He seemed huge, black, his face in shadow, his hair glinting yellow, lit from behind. David heard the creaking of his biker’s leathers as Leon stood up to his full six feet four inches, and he felt a coolness between them, a sudden sense of uncertainty, then Leon closed the space between them in a stride and wrapped David in his arms.

David slapped Leon on the back, punched him in the biceps.

‘Christ, it’s good to see you!’

‘Look at you, Dave, still a fucking preppy, in your little navyblue sweater and your khakis. You’ll never change!’

Leon seemed to fill the hallway. His hair was cropped now, and as he smoothed it, David saw how sleek, how sharp he looked. The massive square jaw shaved clean, shining, and underneath the husky black leather jacket was a tight-fitting dark green turtleneck made of something stretchy, a Mr Spock job without the insignia of the Starship Enterprise on the chest. The padded leather trousers fit snugly up to the rib cage.

‘Aren’t you hot in that gear?’

‘England’s never hot. Come on!’

They looked at each other, smiling. David crossed his arms, nodding at the floor, then gripped his elbows hard, kneading them.

‘You look just a little older, Dave, and a little wiser maybe where the flesh has worn away. You are definitely thinner, man. Not a lot of gray, though. How are you?’ Leon put a hand on either side of David’s chest and shoved him backwards ever so slightly.

David went on smiling. ‘Well, I don’t know. Fine, I guess. Or maybe you’re going to tell me how I am. You never looked better, Leon, that’s for sure.’

Leon danced his hips from side to side and laughed. ‘You should try wearing leather, man; what are you waiting for?’

As he closed the door, David saw Francine hanging around in the back of the hall with her loaded tray.

‘Beer?’ he said to Leon. ‘I have nothing else to offer, at least I don’t think I do. I don’t even have chairs.’

Francine’s hands trembled ever so slightly as Leon lifted his mug from the tray.

‘Cheers, David! It’s been too long.’ He swallowed half the mug on the spot. ‘So let’s go out. Let’s go somewhere and eat, or drink anyway. We can take the bike.’

David felt a little surge of adrenalin. He studied his beer, waiting for Francine to start down the stairs. ‘I haven’t been on a motorcycle in twenty years,’ he said, smiling, ‘and hardly ever then.’

‘Nothing to it if you’re the passenger. I won’t dump you in the road, Dave. It’s a gorgeous night. If we get wasted, you can take a cab home.’

‘Let me shut the doors upstairs.’ His heart was leaping at it. ‘It’ll just take a second.’

Leon followed him up to the drawing-room. When the French doors were bolted, Leon said, ‘Would you look at that fucking picture of Lizzie. When did you have that done for her?’

‘She had it done for me. She and the kids. For our last wedding anniversary.’ David felt embarrassed explaining, and, sure enough, Leon threw back his head and roared.

Then he raised an eyebrow at David. ‘Elizabeth Ruel had that done for you? No way, man! Elizabeth Ruel had that done for Elizabeth Ruel!’

David felt even more embarrassed. Not so much about the picture, and all it seemed to represent, but at the fact that, even after so many years, Leon knew everything about him. There was no escaping it. You couldn’t bullshit Leon. He could look like a thug, act like a fool if he felt like it, but Leon was a chameleon and he knew all the moves—his own, and everybody else’s, too. That was why David loved him. It came over him now in a wave, that he had always trusted Leon completely because there was no alternative. You couldn’t hide from him and you couldn’t run from him either. And for all his strength—of mind and body—Leon had never done David any harm.

There and then, as if reading David’s mood and his thoughts, Leon pulled a classic stunt. He put his arm around David and hugged him warmly to his side.

‘It’s an amazing picture, Dave, seriously. Beats the hell out of all her magazine covers.’ He raised his free hand toward the picture. ‘This takes her right out of time; shows her as the beauty of the ages. Forget Helen of Troy. Lizzie knows exactly what she’s up to with visual effects, doesn’t she?’ He dropped both arms. ‘So how old are your kids now?’

‘Gordon is seven; Hope is four.’

‘They look pretty happy. A little stir-crazy, maybe. You think they belong in America?’

David shrugged. ‘Elizabeth thinks so.’

‘How can she? If she’s having them painted like that? That’s nothing to do with America, that painting!’

‘Well, maybe that’s why she left it behind. Or maybe it just marks the end of something. A souvenir.’

‘That’s a huge painting, Dave! They’re lost in it, the three of them—as if they didn’t belong anywhere at all. I mean not anywhere real.’

David just looked for a while. The figures were about life-sized, he thought, but the drawing-room around them had no distinct edge to it. The blue and red oriental carpet flowed away over an endless floor, the walls soared out of sight as if to the sky. There was the great swag of dove-colored silk at the back, curtaining one of the French doors, but none of the other furniture that used to be in the room was shown.

Finally he said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s nothing Elizabeth likes more than empty space, I guess. Big houses, big rooms, open fields, long driveways.’

Leon looked at David. ‘Still trying to get away from everyone, is she?’

They both laughed.

‘Is that a real dog?’ Leon pointed.

David laughed. ‘That’s Puck.’

‘Puck? I hope not! One face-off and his brains would be all over the ice. Jeez, David!’

‘It’s hockey for me; Shakespeare for Elizabeth. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The children thought it was funny. Well, I think it’s funny anyway. Maybe the children don’t even know. I can’t remember.’

The grilled chicken and the rice had grown cold by the time the door slammed behind them and the bike started up. Francine went into the dining-room and looked at the two untouched plates of food she had put out, the bowl of salad, and the bottle of white wine on the little round table. Then she went back into the hall, walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out in the street. She could still hear the bike, maybe half a block away. She shut the door, went back to the dining-room, and sat down in the second chair she had carried up from the kitchen. Quietly, contentedly, she ate Leon’s plateful of dinner; that plateful had been her own to begin with anyway.

David and Leon went to the top of the Oxo Tower because David couldn’t possibly get enough, now, of the London night. The restaurant was noisy and smoky; the city twinkled and floated just out of arm’s reach on the other side of the glass walls, its invisible depths landmarked by the familiar dome of St Paul’s, the carnivalesque Millennium Wheel, the glinting black Thames snaking through it.

There were certain things that had to be established between them; David thought the best way to start was by ordering margaritas. They ordered food, too, scallops, steak. The staring emptiness of David’s house had made them both self-conscious, and they began to recover from it only after their second drink.

Still, they carried on a businesslike series of questions and answers. When was the last time they had seen each other? Why had it been so long? What had each of them been doing during all that time?

‘I remember that place you had in the Village. You sold it?’

Leon shrugged. ‘Sometimes I regret that; I’ve got another place now, much bigger. I’m hardly ever there, though. I was in Boston for a long time. The fund manager thing I went up there for was boring, and at first I thought I should never have quit trading. Fifteen star years I had. Anyhow, I knew right away I shouldn’t have left New York. But I liked lecturing at the Business School. That kept me sane. What kept me in town, though, was the ice hockey team.’

‘What—the Harvard ice hockey team?’ David was surprised.

‘My second youth, man! I went to a few of their home games, and I gave them some cash, and then I wheedled my way into some coaching. Just specialized stuff, you know—mental toughness, into-the-net-not-near-it, winning a man down. It was a blast. Pure boyish fantasy.’

David laughed. ‘You must have felt like a shit when they played Princeton! Who’d you root for?’

‘You root for the team you’re involved with. You can’t help it, can you?’ Leon tried to sound dismissive, but then he grinned. ‘Of course I felt like a shit! And they all knew it—they all knew I had played for Princeton!’

‘So why aren’t you an ice hockey coach now?’ David egged him on.

‘Not enough money. And—’ Leon waved two fingers in the air and called out to a hurrying waiter, ‘Can you bring us two more margaritas, please?’

The waiter fluttered, as if he’d been accosted while daydreaming, then showily collected himself. ‘Of course, sir, two more margaritas.’

‘And?’ said David.

‘And—you’re joking, aren’t you? Hockey is where I came from, man; it’s not where I’m going. It never was.’ Leon sounded impatient.

David looked at Leon, thinking about where he came from—Babbit, Minnesota. David had never been there, but he could remember meeting Leon’s parents the week he and Leon had graduated from college—gray, defiant, taciturn, overwhelmed by Princeton. He remembered his painful sense of obligation to try to like them and draw them into the hectic partying for Leon’s sake and for the sake of some self-conscious idea of social equality, of wanting to come across as an ordinary, unsnobby guy. He also remembered his fear that he would fail and later his certainty that he had failed. It had been impossible, despite vast quantities of alcohol consumed on all sides.

David’s own parents had come down ahead of time for his father’s class reunion, and then they’d gone straight home to New Canaan until the morning of graduation. They preferred their own friends and their own generation. They had barely shaken hands with the Halbergs; nevertheless, David’s mother had quietly observed that people didn’t get to be like Mr and Mrs Halberg without a lot of hardship, struggle, barbarity. It shocked David still, his mother’s remark and his own sense that she was right about the barrenness of their demeanor. The Halbergs appeared to have no conversation, no joy, no desires even. Leon’s father wasn’t even sure that he should have taken a week off from the iron mine to watch his son graduate, to meet Leon’s friends, to see where Leon had spent the last four years.

And yet amidst the landslide of seven other children, the Halbergs had produced Leon. They had put him out on the ice in hockey little league by the time he was four. All they had ever seemed to understand about Leon was that year after year he was the best hockey player in his age group that anyone in the town had ever seen. He was the best in any age group by the time he was ten. They couldn’t understand why he wanted to leave Babbit, how he got himself to Hotchkiss, to Princeton, why he didn’t want to play professional hockey. David liked to think that he himself did understand, but for all the comfort of his own upbringing, there was something in David that was just as hard as the Halbergs.

‘So you mean coaching college teams is fine, but not professional hockey, where you could get real money?’ There was a goad in David’s voice, as if he was jealous of what Leon so lightly passed up.

‘Oh, come on, Dave! Get real. It’s no different than when we left college! Hockey’s brutal! We were both out of that years ago. I’m one of the luckiest college ice hockey players ever. I have all my teeth; I never broke my nose; I got a great education basically for free. I have a life no one at home could have dreamed of. Why would I want to coach professional ice hockey? I never even wanted to play professionally. You could have played—why didn’t you play?’ Leon’s voice resounded with some admonition: why are you giving me such a hard time? He was calling David’s bluff.

‘I wasn’t as good as you, Leon.’ It came out quietly; even now, David found it hard to admit.

But Leon took no pity on him. ‘You were plenty good enough! Don’t bullshit me. You would never have dreamed of playing professional hockey! A country-club boy from suburban Connecticut—and wind up in a house like that, with Elizabeth? Give me a break! Why would I want to do it any more than you, David? I may have a rough background, but I left it behind when I was eighteen.’

Now David wanted to change the subject; somehow they had gotten into an ancient rut. They were grating on each other, right down to the bone, and it made him feel tired.

‘So London? What brought you to London?’

‘Well, after Boston I went back to New York and started up a hedge fund two or three years ago. Made a ton of money, bought a new place uptown, on the Park. Then I came over here to find some more clients, basically. Share the wealth. I’m lecturing at LSE a few times a year. Eyeing that new business school in Oxford.’

David resisted making a joke about the new ice hockey rink in Oxford.

Leon went on, ‘And I am seriously planning to pick your investment banking brain for my own benefit and the benefit of my clients, Dave. What are you going to do with all your smarts in Virginia, anyway? How’d she persuade you?’

This elicited a monumental sigh. David wasn’t sure he knew the answer, and the topic seemed endless.

‘She was never happy here. At least that’s what she says. After September Eleventh, this whole American thing got to be such a big deal. She never stopped telling me that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what it means to be American. She got desperate about the children’s education; they had to go back right away. She bills herself as a country girl at heart; just wants to be back in the US of A, riding, walking, whatever. Elizabeth never took to the English countryside, the village life, the county thing. Can’t stand all the competitive socializing. It gives her claustrophobia.’ He shrugged with his eyebrows, half-closing his eyes, giving in. ‘She has a point; it is relentless, the jockeying for position. And the reward for success is having to go on doing it forever. It’d be one thing if you could make money out of it, but it’s all about getting the next invitation.’

Now he gave a sour chuckle, sighed again, smaller, and drained his glass, then fingered the salt still stuck to the rim, tasting it from his fingertip. ‘So she’s found this big place. I guess it’s beautiful—in the sticks, somewhere outside Washington. Well, not in the sticks for her. For her it’s right in the middle of her map of places that matter. She’s got that all figured out—I can tell by the price tag. It’s in Culpeper County, out beyond Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, near some little town I’ve never heard of, Rixeyville. Secluded, discreet, private—whatever the real estate agents say. Nobody will be able to see her in the middle of her thousand acres, not unless she drives to town or lets them foxhunt across her land.’

‘But what are you going to do there, Dave?’ Leon looked comically horrified.

‘Well. She put a lot of pressure on me. I let her, I guess, for various reasons. I got what I came to London for; I came for the money. I’ve got so much money I don’t even count it anymore. I’m literally giving it away now. I mean Elizabeth gives it away. So maybe I’ll help her do that—run this foundation she started. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe eventually local politics.’

Now Leon grinned and threw both arms in the air. ‘Or national politics!’ Then he put his hand on his heart and said with tipsy grandeur, ‘I have a dream…’

Politics had been David’s adolescent obsession—his heroes the Kennedys, Martin Luther King; his music Joan Baez, Bob Dylan; his hair down to his shoulders.

‘Now I see the strategy,’ Leon taunted.

‘It’s not that focused, buddy,’ said David. Again, he felt embarrassed by how well Leon knew him, by Leon’s reminding him of ambitions he had hidden even from himself for the last twenty-five years.

‘Somebody needs to come along and save the world. Just do it, man!’ Leon flagged the waiter again and ordered their fourth round of drinks. He had cleaned his plate; David was still playing with his steak.

‘Aren’t you scared you’ll be bored otherwise?’ Leon asked.

‘Petrified.’ David felt as though his whole life was being exposed as a sham. What he had done up until now was not what he had once, in his youth, idealistically intended to do. And what he was getting ready to do next seemed entirely unclear, half-submerged in shallow, domestic anxiety. If he had ever had a sense of what his life was for, he seemed, now, to have lost it.

‘So why are you doing this? You’re going to hate living on a horse farm.’

Leon was leaning across the table now, his face only a few inches from David’s; his eyes were glinting with a mixture of curiosity, sympathy, and something like a promise that he could help fix things. He was intensely soliciting a confidence. David felt as though Leon was saying out loud,You can trust me; we used to be so close. We are still so close.

The two of them just looked at each other for a long time. The waiter hovered, rigid with expectation; they ignored him. He went off in a huff.

At last Leon said, ‘Is everything all right?’

David said, ‘Everything is fine.’

Leon nodded.

Then David said, ‘We’ve been married a long time. Ten years. Stuff happens, as everyone knows. I was never home enough. She put the screws on me, and we have a deal. I think it’ll work. For now, I’m sure Elizabeth is right—because of the children.’

Leon was solemn. ‘So what happened? What stuff?’

This was followed by another long silence. Then the tortured start of a smile on David’s face. His lips trembled, their corners twitched backwards and forwards. He looked at Leon and then felt his face getting hot. Suddenly, the pair of them broke out in shouts of laughter, drunken, relieved, vomiting up tension in convulsions of half-crazy joy.

The waiter turned and stared at them, hands on hips. Leon raised his eyebrows. ‘Get her!’ he said.

David turned to look at the waiter. Then he turned back to Leon.

‘Let’s have one more drink and split,’ he said.

So Leon stuck his arm in the air, two hot-dog-size fingers extended. ‘Two more?’ He said it nicely, politely, and the cross little figure of the waiter melted into action.

‘I feel like we must have already had this whole conversation before I married her, Leon! God, it’s great to see you. You don’t need to hear about my love-life. I’m a married man and that’s all there is to say. Let’s hear about your love-life. That has to be more exciting than mine. Are you still going out with all those gorgeous long-legged things? Those nubile Catholic maidens who play golf and speak five languages? Aren’t some of them heiresses that you should have married by now?’

‘I’m not married, David. Pretty obviously not married.’ There was no emotion in Leon’s voice.

David wondered whether this concealed disappointment, and he wondered how to ask. He felt uneasy and a little afraid, conscious, as he had not been for years, that he was the one who had ended up marrying Elizabeth. That Leon had refused to be his best man because he had already promised Elizabeth he would walk her up the aisle. That there had been something strained about the whole thing. He said, ‘Marriage is not part of the myth you’re making?’

‘Not part of my myth. Nope.’

Was there recrimination in Leon’s voice? Maybe he could kid it out of him. ‘So—what—you remain just permanently slightly unavailable? Is that the everlasting draw for chicks? What if you lose your looks?’

Leon relented. ‘Well, that’s a worry. That happens to everyone no matter what. And I hope Lewis won’t leave me because of that. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to him, though, when I lose my looks.’

David cocked an eyebrow. He dived for his water glass and knocked it across the white tablecloth.

‘Lewis?’ he asked, flopping his napkin at the flood.

‘Lewis,’ Leon said, deadpan, nodding.

David felt himself starting to laugh. This was a hockey player’s joke. But he pressed his lips together hard, then rolled them around his teeth, holding it back. He sensed Leon waiting for his reaction, studying his face.

David was terrified. He had to get this right. He had to know whether Leon was telling him the truth, and if it was the truth, he had to receive it well. He had to be cool. But there was no touching bottom. It was a huge swamping shock, Leon’s casual revelation. Of course it was true. I should have known, David thought to himself; I should have been able to tell. But then, the next instant, he thought, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what Leon is telling me.

David didn’t like the feelings he was having, a mixture of anger and confusion. He was checking for a sense of personal distaste, but that was far less prominent than his sense of having been tricked. Even so, he had a flicker of care for Leon, and he knew that was the emotion to hold on to. Above all, he didn’t want to over-react. He managed to ask what he thought was an ordinary question.

‘Was it always like that for you?’

But, of course, Leon saw through him. ‘Are you really so surprised?’

David tried to shrug it off. He started to laugh, now, just a little. He was thinking they were both pretty drunk and this was all a kind of surreal episode, up here in the night sky, like they were flying, dreaming.

The waiter quietly set their drinks on the table and Leon asked for the check. David realized that he now had a completely changed sense of Leon’s rapport with the waiter, as if they were in a special, coded relationship which he could never share, never begin to understand. He found himself wanting to make some chance remark that the waiter would overhear, indicating that he, David, had known Leon for years, that theirs was an indissoluble bond, above sex.

Leon was looking at David, waiting for his reply. ‘Are you really so surprised?’ he asked again.

For a host of reasons, his friendship with Leon had never seemed so important to David as it did tonight. He wanted to hold on to it, no matter what. He looked straight at Leon, in the simplest way that he knew how.

‘You’re a good friend, Leon. I’ll be honest. I’m flabbergasted—I really am. You were my closest friend for what—six or eight years at least? Longer, maybe ten?’

Leon said, ‘And you were mine. You were all I wanted. You were it.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me?’ This came out of David like a plea, and out of nowhere he felt a terrible pain, a terrible regret. There was an unfamiliar sensation of collapse in his chest and around his eyes, like he might suddenly begin to cry. He was surprised at all this emotion, almost overwhelmed.

‘I wanted to be with you. I thought you’d hate me if you knew. It was pretty simple.’

‘Why would I hate you?’ It was a ritual question; it had to be asked even though it wasn’t seeking information. It was claiming the tolerance of hindsight. And it was offering acceptance long after the fact.

‘Who at Princeton was cool about being gay in the nineteen-seventies? Not even gays. No one. Period.’

David didn’t say anything. When he thought of Princeton, none of this figured. It just hadn’t been part of what he could remember. He couldn’t begin to imagine it. ‘You were—’ he tried to act nonchalant when he said the word—‘gay—at Princeton?’

‘I was gay at Princeton.’

What had Leon been doing? Had he been leading some completely different life that David had been entirely unaware of? Christ, they had sometimes shared a bed. But that was just as friends, David told himself; it wasn’t changed by finding out that Leon was gay.

Leon leaned toward him, arguing, ‘If you came out at Princeton, you had to be only gay, nothing else. You couldn’t also be a jock or a preppy or whatever. I knew so many people who regretted coming out. It closed all the doors. That’s not what you go to Princeton for, to close down your options! I knew more people who just didn’t come out. It was a different planet!’

David was reduced to nodding, staring at Leon, trying to take it in, trying to achieve a feeling of empathy just by holding Leon’s eye, by not flinching. Again he pleaded, only half-realizing he was doing it. ‘And afterwards, in New York? Why didn’t you trust me?’

Leon batted it away with a gesture of the hand. ‘It would have changed everything, David. You were the one certain thing in my life—in those days, the rest was constantly shifting and shaking. Think of the times we had, great times.’ He looked at David for a long moment without saying anything, and David knew it was an important look, and he tried to read it.

‘Well, Christ, I wanted you to know,’ Leon said, and he started to say something more, but then he changed his mind.

In exasperation, sorrow even, David raised his voice. ‘I feel completely confused. I don’t know what to think. I just can’t believe what you are telling me. It changes everything, even now, Leon!’

‘Well.’ Leon was thin-lipped. ‘So I was right.’ He tossed his head and looked at his watch.

David felt the strangest mixture of guilt and dread. There was a pain that he could sense down so deep in Leon that it was almost unfathomable, and it was covered over with some hardness that was harder than all Leon’s muscles, like there was a slug of lead buried somewhere in his torso, grown over with tendon and scar tissue and effort, or a vein of iron ore that David could mine only with the vicious violence of a pickax on Leon’s flesh. David didn’t want to get at that pain; it frightened him. But he could sense it there. He knew it was his pain somehow, too, not just Leon’s. He ran his hands over his hair, barely touching it, thumbs rigid, extended.

By way of a peace offering he said, ‘So what about Lewis? What’s he like?’

There was a long pause. Then Leon accepted it.

‘Lewis is a honey.’ And Leon grinned the grin, splitting his face with light. ‘That really describes him, I swear to God. I have no hesitation in bragging. He’s wise and he’s subtle. He gets things that people never get, nuances. And he’s patient, too, like someone who isn’t worried about getting his share. Or—as if he’s already been served, and he’s just enjoying it.’

‘So how old is he? A hundred?’

‘No. Younger than us—thirty-eight.’

‘And?’

‘And what? You want details?’

‘I always gave you girl details. Try me. Teach me, for Christ’s sake!’ David smiled, raising both hands in expostulation.

‘Well, wait till you meet him. You’ll see. He’s gorgeous to look at, sexy—skinny but pretty strong. Not as tall as me, but then who is? Great legs and—’ Leon paused, a flush spread suddenly over his grin, and then he said, ‘He wears glasses, big brown eyes. And—you notice his cheekbones, or the way it’s sort of hollowed out underneath them, and his lips. He’s got amazing big lips, beautiful.’

Leon looked sly, reflective.

David leaned closer, lifting his chin.

Leon said, ‘And he’s black.’

‘Okay,’ said David very slowly, blankly. ‘Whatever.’

Then they both burst out laughing again, and they went on laughing for a long time, pushing their chairs back from the table, rubbing their faces. The restaurant was empty. David was exhausted. He could hardly react to anything anymore. He was feeling completely silly, as though he’d been rolling on the floor, tickled hard.

‘Is black the only thing I need to know about him?’

‘He’s a doctor—psychiatrist. Harvard Med School. He’ll be over here sometime. You’ll meet him.’

Downstairs was deserted. Not all the lights were working in the lobby outside the elevator and there were dark pockets of night and shadow all around as they pushed through the heavy glass doors into the cobbled yard. Trash was blowing around on the breezes from the river; graffiti seemed to have appeared on the walls while they were upstairs. David felt as though bums might like to sleep here, might be urinating nearby, warm in their grime, muttering. But there was no one in the humid night.

Where was the street, he wondered? And the traffic? Everything seemed still, sequestered. He couldn’t remember how they had entered the yard, through which archway. He reached for his cell phone half-consciously, then remembered he hadn’t brought it. He was picturing a taxi, but not very clearly.

Leon threw an arm across his shoulders and said, ‘The bike’s over here,’ pulling him toward the gate.

‘Yeah,’ said David, remembering their flash arrival, their slipstream ride through the lazy, honking conga line of traffic, red brakelight upon warm red brakelight inviting them to ease past. He had liked the feel of it, tipping and diving through the flow of cars, like ballroom dancers on a crowded floor. But he was reeling now, loopy with drink, and so he automatically tightened his attitude. It was a habit for self-preservation.

‘Okay, I’m wasted,’ he said to Leon. ‘Help me find a taxi.’

Leon laughed. ‘You’ll be okay. I won’t let you fall off.’

‘What if you fall off?’

‘That’d be a bummer for both of us,’ Leon said, ‘so I won’t.’ He zipped his jacket crisply and heaved the bike off its stand. ‘I’ll get you home, safe and sound, Dave. Trust me. But you’re going to get fucking cold, so you’d better hug tight.’ Then he threw one huge leg over the bike and leaned forward, starting it with a rushing explosion and playing through the gears.

David stood by, shivering. This is not like the ride we had before, he was thinking. This is completely different.

‘Come on!’ Leon commanded. ‘It’s going to rain!’

So, tentatively, David got on the bike. He sat up very straight and felt around behind him for something to hold on to. Leon started to creep the bike forward with his feet down on the pavement, and David swung stiffly from side to side, a dead weight, his neck rigid, his throat muscles aching. He gripped the seat cushion between his thighs.

Leon stopped and turned around, his huge black jacket squeaking, his elbows knocking into David’s ribs, and shouted above the engine.

‘Put your ass on the seat, man, it’s not going to rape you and neither am I!’

It struck David to the core; he couldn’t even pretend to laugh, he was so ashamed.

‘If you’re drunk,’ Leon said, ‘just give in. I can ride much better if you hold on to me. Shut your eyes; who the hell is going to see you at this time of night?’

‘No way I’m shutting my eyes,’ David said, and now he chuckled. ‘I’ll lose it completely. I’m okay.’

He put his arms around Leon’s waist, tentatively. Then he tightened his grip just a little, and snugged up behind Leon’s bum. It felt fine; it felt comfortable. Jokily, he laid his cheek against Leon’s back, just for an instant, pretending to adopt a lover’s posture, partly out of clownish daring, partly out of humility, and partly out of love. Then he sat up, still holding on. ‘Go for it.’

Leon was already away, slowly at first through the yellow glow of night-time Lambeth. David loved everything about it. He knew it was the simplest pleasure imaginable, the thrill of movement, wind on the face, no helmet, no burdens. The little turns were almost like skating, he thought, dipping, gliding. He imagined he was skating along, right behind Leon, exactly in time with him. Through the heavy jacket, David could feel the muscles drop and flex under Leon’s arm when he changed gear, he could feel them tighten all the way down Leon’s ribcage when he braked. He still knew Leon’s body as well as ever. It was a beautiful body calmly engaged in a task; it wasn’t sending David any particular message. It was simply carrying him along, as if on its back. They leaned together, this way and that, hips tilting, backs bending, weaving through the streets.

The buzz was soporific, but the lashing air was bracing. Leon was like a tree trunk with a heartbeat, massive, warm, absolutely steady; David just nestled there, grinning with joy. It didn’t even occur to him to ask Leon to teach him how to ride the bike himself. He just let himself be carried along like a happy child, with Leon in charge.

As they crossed Westminster Bridge, he felt the night full around them, the wide glowing sky, the oily sheen of the broad river just visible over the parapets, the luminous blond Houses of Parliament bristling at the darkness with their neo-Gothic complexity, their barbs and notches. An airplane winked red and gold as it sighed and settled toward Heathrow. London seemed so familiar now, gently lit. It seemed to lie down like a constant creature at their flying feet. Its coziness surprised David, its tameness.

Twelve years, he thought to himself. I’m very used to all this. And I’ve never seen it like this before, either. Never loved it consciously. Then he thought, Of course, I’m drunk. And I’m—euphoric. That was the word, he thought. Euphoric with what? The summer night, the wild pleasure of being with Leon, the motorcycle. Caution thrown to the winds, anxiety jettisoned. It’s like being outside of time, he thought. Free of it. Just free. Like when we were young and we didn’t even know yet what time was. When we only thought of time as something separating and labeling the activities in a day. A practice, 7 a.m.; a lecture, 9 a.m.; a meal, noon; a date, 7 p.m. It’s like being free. I used to be free with Leon.

Zooming up Victoria Street, he pondered it, Leon and Lewis. Leon and anyone—it was not what he had ever thought. Or it was, but he’d been seeing it all at a slant or through a haze, not getting it, not understanding it. Where was the sex in Leon, that he could have kept it so buried like that? I felt like I knew him as a physical being. How did I miss it?

Then David thought maybe that was the thing that had marked Leon out for him, lit him up, made him a better friend than all the other friends. I don’t mean sex, thought David, I mean charisma. It’s based on something to do with sex, maybe, that pull Leon has, but it’s not sex. And in his drunkenness and happiness he foggily pictured Leon and sex, and he found himself just staring at the picture inside his head, not getting it. Then, staring a while, maybe getting it just a little, his breath shortening, his pulse missing half a beat. Okay, I get it. I get sex. Maybe not kissing, but okay, sex.

But David didn’t want to go there, in fact. It wasn’t repulsion, as he’d already briefly reassured himself in the restaurant. It was more like inertia. Funnily enough, he thought, I’m just too old. I’m too used to women; I’m hooked on them. Maybe I could have done the other thing a long time ago. And he tried to feel backwards in his sensations to some youthful, polymorphous self that might have liked sex with Leon. Naw, he thought. It could only have happened if girls didn’t exist at all. I can see it in the army, in prison. Yup. You would, especially after a while. But in real life, there wasn’t even enough time to get at all the girls; I would never have gotten around to boys. I can tell where those feelings are in me, David thought, but I’m just straight. I’m definitely straight—and Leon’s not.

It made David feel bad, as if the only way he could really take Leon seriously and respect what he now knew Leon was, was to be like him. There on the back of the bike, on the back of Leon, was about as close as he could get to experiencing the world as if he were Leon. But the sex thing still separated them. He thought he ought to be able to muster a greater show of solidarity, some minimal show of sexual bi-dexterity. It made him feel like a square. What, for instance, would he do even to signal neutrality? He could only think of the broadest vulgarities like ogling a guardsman or that waiter back at the restaurant.

Again he considered Leon and Lewis. He guessed that if Leon was in love with Lewis, then maybe the feelings that Leon had left over for David were the same feelings that David had for him. Boundless enthusiasm, rivalry, respect; an appetite for play, hour upon hour, and for making fun of the world from the place in their heads where they both knew they saw things exactly the same way—always had, always would. But Leon had hidden the more specific emotion from David for a long time. The arousal, the teeth-stinging passion that wore at you. David felt sure that had been part of Leon’s revelation—the being-in-love thing was back there somewhere between them. And at Princeton, probably in New York, too, David had walked right by it, day after day.

David cringed. If I had known then, how the hell would I have coped with it? There wasn’t any way. I wouldn’t have coped with it at all. Through his mind raced vivid pictures of himself, much younger, outraged, hurling Leon away from him. The pictures were very physical. Leon was like a chair being thrown through a window, a fire extinguisher crashing down the stairs outside their dorm room. He was bruised, reviled, stomped on. The fighting was bloody, even though, in David’s imagination, Leon didn’t fight back. It was a beating, a massacre, and in his rage David scraped his skin clean, tore at his own flesh.

So Leon had gotten that right. And it played on David’s heart again, as it had in the restaurant, only this time he knew what was causing the pain, and the pain didn’t frighten him as much because he had the proof of Leon’s being okay, thriving in his arms at this minute on the bike. It has to be called beautiful, David thought, that we have aged and mellowed to the point of getting past this revelation without a rupture. Leon was maybe some kind of emotional genius; how did he know what to do?

Then David realized he wasn’t exactly right. There had been a rupture, in fact. At least there had been a hiatus in their friendship because it must have been five or six years now since they had even spoken to each other.

Had it been just a break in the rhythm, a fading of their energy toward one another? He thought about the parade of girls in his bachelor life, how seamlessly they had moved in and out, the ones who stayed the night, the ones who stayed the week. And he thought about the toiling hours at his desk and the all-nighters at the printers when a deal was priced and how the days and nights had blurred into a constant round of hasty, barely kept dates, a cocktail on the way back to the office, dinner at eleven o’clock at night, maybe even with a different girl who might go wait for him in the apartment until dawn. When had he ever slept? When had he ever been at home in that little apartment for that matter? Had Leon minded all those girls? Had it felt like neglect?

Weekends were spent everywhere but in the city—in the mountains, at the ocean, on some physical adventure, climbing or skiing, swimming or dancing, in the rattling old station wagon full of warped, outdated tennis rackets, torn sails, mateless shoes.

But even after he and Leon had decided that each of them could afford his own apartment, even after they had agreed to make a stab at civilization, at privacy, at cleaning-ladies, they had gone on seeing each other. Leon was present in David’s memories of work, of play. He was omnipresent, for that matter, David thought. Ten years, fifteen years after college, they’d still been good friends. Close. And he had met Leon’s girlfriends. Leon had always introduced them. Every single one was offered up for David’s inspection.

Or was it for his delectation, David suddenly wondered? What on earth had Leon been doing with all those girls?

And then David’s thoughts stumbled over Elizabeth.

He felt uncomfortable, exposed.

Until tonight, David had never really admitted to himself that he had spotted Leon with Elizabeth and had screwed his friendship with Leon, ruthlessly, recklessly, easily, in order to get her. But now he also realized that this half-repressed scenario he had so carefully pretended not to have a guilty conscience about was entirely irrelevant. His sensation of guilt was accurate, but he had hurt Leon in a different way than he had been able to understand. Maybe the friendship hadn’t really changed that much after all; maybe Leon had just needed to go lead some different kind of life.

This brought David to maybe the biggest puzzle of all, and they were nearly back at his house. What about Leon and Elizabeth? How had that worked then, the relationship between Leon and Elizabeth?

Leon idled the motorcycle just outside David’s front door, and David climbed off in a reverie, stiffly, as if all his limbs were numb. His knees felt tender as his feet struck the pavement and he wobbled a little, then stretched.

‘What about Elizabeth?’ he asked, yawning, running his hands through his hair.

Leon idled the bike lower, quietening it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I always felt like a shit that I stole Elizabeth from you,’ David said. ‘When you guys were going out. You remember—you introduced me to Elizabeth?’

‘You didn’t steal Elizabeth from me, man! She was a gift. I gave her to you!’ Leon backed the bike away from the curb, turning the front wheel into the road. ‘I thought you’d be perfect together.’

It started to rain, just a few big heavy drops at first, then suddenly, with a swishing susurrus, a downpour.

‘I’ll call you,’ Leon shouted, revving the bike. And he was gone.