Canarino

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?’