The Green Road: A Novel Page 16

  Now that’s what I call gay.

  No, Dan could not go home. Or if he did go, it was not Dan who walked in the door to them all.

  ‘Well, hello!’

  It was someone else. A terrible version of himself. One he really did not admire. He might bring them out to Toronto, but they would not know where to put themselves or what to say. And their wretched mother, Constance, who disbelieved everything he said and did – every single thing. Dan could not eat his lunch without her doubting him.

  ‘Oh my god that is so good.’

  ‘What, the bread?’

  Disbelieving the contents of his own mouth.

  ‘Yes the bread, Constance.’

  Anything other than ‘white’ or ‘brown’ was an affront to Constance. Food itself was an affront. She lived on bad biscuits, because there was no harm in a biscuit, and she had fat in places Dan had never seen before. That time in Brooklyn, she wore a sleeveless top in the heat and the flesh popped out in a globule between breast and armpit, which was a whole new place for Dan. It was like a new breed of arm. And now it was everywhere he looked. Walking down the street. Everywhere.

  ‘I’m sure she’s perfectly fine,’ said Ludo, getting into bed beside him after dinner of stuffed peppers followed by a pomegranate and apple salad and a long evening talking about the Madigans.

  ‘It’s family,’ he said.

  And of course Ludo would love Constance, with her deliberate stupidity and her supermarket hair. That was not the problem. The problem, Dan realised, was that Constance would not love Ludo, as he loved Ludo. She just couldn’t. She would not have the room.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Dan.

  ‘Go!’ said Ludo,

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Stop off in New York on the way.’

  Dan did not answer.

  He loved Ludo. When did that happen?

  Dan liked Ludo. He liked the familiar things they did in bed and he also found Ludo useful. As Ludo found Dan – useful. They made a good couple. Dan could put people together in three or four different towns, he knew how to make things beautiful and easy: everyone upped their game for Dan. So of course Ludo found all this wonderful and enhancing – as he liked to say – to be around.

  And Ludo loved Dan, of course he did. From the very beginning Ludo had loved him. Totally. Abjectly.

  Dear God I love you.

  But that was four or five years ago. These days, Dan did not know if Ludo still loved him, or if Ludo was just nice to him all the time. What was the difference? The difference was the yearning he felt for a man who was within arm’s reach. The difference lay in the fantasies of death and abandonment that happened in hypnagogic flashes as he turned to sleep by his side. If Ludo got sick, he thought, he would lie the length of his hospital bed, like Ryan O’Neal beside Ali MacGraw. Without him he was nothing. With him, everything. Wherever they were, the smell of Ludo’s skin was the smell of home.

  This was terrible, of course.

  Dan did not believe in romantic love – why should he? – it had never believed in him. After Isabelle, he had pined for various beautiful and unavailable young men, but the word ‘love’, for Dan, was so much wrapped up in the impossible and the ideal, it was a wrench to apply it to the guy who was sitting up in the bed beside him, reading legal briefs in the nude. The half-moon glasses didn’t help.

  I love you, he wanted to say, instead of which: ‘My fucking family. You have no idea how they go on at me. You have no idea what I have to put up with over there.’

  Ludo said that getting insulted was a full-time job. He said he’d love to do it himself, but he didn’t have a gap in his schedule, he needed his sleep, he loved his sleep, he did not want to spend the delicious hours of the night lying there, hating.

  ‘It keeps me sharp,’ said Dan. ‘It gives me flair.’

  ‘You hit forty, my love, these things are no longer attractive,’ said Ludo, looking at him over the rim of his glasses. ‘After forty, it’s give, give, give.’

  And the next morning, a FedEx guy called to the door with an envelope that had Dan’s name on it, and inside was a ticket for the front of the plane.

  Dan put the envelope on the kitchen table and looked at it while he drank his coffee and planned his day. He did not have a whole lot on. Ludo had stuck him in therapy once a week with Scott, a completely blank Canadian guy with a sweet and open smile. Now Dan talked to Scott in his head about being in love with Ludo, the unbearability of it. Scott seemed to indicate that unbearability was a good thing.

  ‘Stay with it,’ he said.

  In fact he had been, for an anguished, tear-streaked fortnight, in love with Scott. He knew it wasn’t real, of course, but now the damn stuff was out of the bottle, it seemed to be moving around.

  Love.

  Dan traced it around the house, a sweetness coating everything Ludo possessed, his gee-gaws and tchotchkes, the hideous paintings and the ones that weren’t so bad. Everything full of meaning, throbbing with it: the little sherry glass of toothpicks in the middle of the table, Ludo’s tube of shaving cream for a morning ritual that only stopped at the collar line.

  ‘You know what this means,’ he said to Scott-in-his-head.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It means I am going to die.’

  And Scott-in-his-head smiled a sweet, Canadian smile.

  In the event, Dan was sidetracked, in that week’s session, by the memory of his father in absurd, high-waisted swimming trunks. High also on the leg, they were the exact shape of the pelvic section of a plastic, jointed doll. Black, of course. It must have been on the yellow beach at Fanore. His father would join them there after a day working the land, the only swimming farmer in the County Clare. And one time Dan flung himself at his father’s wet legs as he made his way up the beach and his father shrugged him off. That was all. Dan, who was weeping for some reason, hurled himself at the wet woollen trunks and was pushed back on to the sand. His shoulder was grazed by a rock which is why, perhaps, he remembered it, this utterly usual thing – his father moving past him to reach for a scrap of towel.

  ‘I’m foundered.’ That is what his father used to say, when he came in from the freezing Atlantic, shrunken, his muscles tight to the bone.

  And Dan wept for his father. He could not believe this man was gone and his body – which must have been a beautiful body – destroyed in death. Because his father never felt dead, to Dan, not in all the years: he just felt cold.

  Scott sat across from Dan, his careful face flushed with the effort of staying with him in his sorrow, while Dan threw one Kleenex after the other into the wooden wastepaper basket at his feet. He thought about all the discarded tears that ended up in it, from all the people who took their turn to weep, sitting in that chair. Many people, many times a day. The bin was made of pale wood, with a faint and open grain. It was always empty when he arrived. Expectant. The wastepaper basket was far too beautiful. The air inside it was the saddest air.

  Dan told Scott about an afternoon in the desert, many years before – it was the first time he’d made a move on a guy, really wanted him, in this amazing place outside Phoenix. The house was built of rammed earth and set flat to the landscape, and there was no pool, just walls of glass in room after room built aslant to the sun and always in shade. Outside, the Sonoran Desert looked just the way it was supposed to look, the saguaro cactus standing with his arms held up, a bird flying in and out of a hole in his neck. The heat of the day was translated into night with a sunset of Kool-Aid orange, giving way, in streaks, to pink and milky blue. And Dan was stilled by the desert light that washed his lover’s body with dusk and turned it into such an untouchable, touchable thing.

  ‘Yes,’ said Scott – who was, at a guess, straight as the Trans Canada Highway. And he followed the ‘yes’ with a silence that grew very long.

  ‘It’s just. I don’t know if I am losing all that, with Ludo. I don’t know if I am losing it, or if it’s all, finally, coming good.’<
br />
  ‘I see.’

  Scatter cushions and oak dressers – in Toronto, Dan thought. Here we go.

  The night before he left for Ireland, Dan told Ludo that he loved him. He told him because it was true and because he thought that, this time, the plane might fall out of the sky. Or he might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983, with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. He would never make it back to Rosedale, Toronto and to this man he had loved for some time.

  This was why he had decided to go home, he said. Because he loved Ludo and Ludo was right, it was time to sort out his past, deal with himself. Time to become a fucking human being.

  It was a mistake to tell Ludo all this, because Ludo immediately wanted to open the last bottle of Pommery and suck him off and get married. Dan had a flight the next day, but Ludo brought the champagne to bed and marriage would be a blast, he said. He found the sheer legality of it incredibly erotic. And very tax effective. If he worked it right, there was no telling how much they could save.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’ said Ludo.

  ‘I just.’ He was talking about Ludo’s money.

  ‘Oh toughen up,’ said Ludo. ‘Talk to a woman, they’ve been doing it for years.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dan, who did nothing but talk to the wives of rich men. He talked to them about their husbands’ paintings and their husbands’ ghastly wallpaper. (Take it down! was his cry. All of it. Down!) Dan loved these women; their woundedness and their style; he admired the way they rose to their lives. But he did not want to be one. That would be a convergence too far.

  ‘Don’t be too proud for me,’ said Ludo. ‘Don’t be too proud, is all.’

  ‘Proud?’ said Dan.

  ‘Defensive,’ said Ludo. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Dan. And he put his head on Ludo’s chest, where it met the ball of his shoulder; in that dent.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘All you ever do is take!’ This from his mother, some time, from the black and white movie of their relationship, Whatever Happened to Baby Rosaleen. ‘All you ever do is take!’

  Isabelle sending him a postcard, the year she moved upstate: ‘I was going to send back all the presents you gave me over the years, then I realised – you didn’t.’

  And it was true that Dan stalled in the shop if he was ever obliged to buy a gift. Stalled, refused, could not calculate, drew a blank, was a blank. Walked away, as though from something terrible and, by the skin of his teeth, survived.

  Another postcard, the next summer, from Dublin, a vintage thing with green buses going down O’Connell Street. And on the back:

  ‘I am still alive.’

  This was from an exhibition they saw together in Dublin, himself and Isabelle, when they were, maybe, eighteen. A book of telegrams by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara, sent over the course of a decade to the same address and all saying the same thing: ‘I am still alive.’ The exhibition was a moment of complete excitement for Dan – it was a shaft of light that told him he had been living, all his life, underground. This was long before New York, long before he found conceptual work tiresome and even longer before he met the man, or thought he had, at a Starbucks around the corner from the Guggenheim, where the server called ‘Kawara!’ and Dan felt his knees weaken in his chinos. I am still alive.

  Isabelle’s last card was from Barcelona.

  ‘Gaudete!’ it said, and on the front those curvy balconies by Gaudi.

  And after that, none.

  There were tears in his eyes. Dan never cried until he started with Scott; now he was weeping full time, he was leaking into the slackening skin of his lover’s arms.

  ‘There, there,’ said Ludo, who had a breakfast meeting at eight.

  ‘It’s not the money,’ Dan said. ‘I mean.’

  ‘Fuck the money,’ said Ludo.

  ‘It’s not the money,’ he said.

  And it wasn’t. Dan thought of himself as more cat than dog. He did not need much, he could do as well without. So it was not the money that made Dan weep in the arms of Ludovic Linetsky, as he decided to marry him, for richer for poorer, all the days of his life. It was the sound of Ludo’s wonderful heart, deep in his chest. Because Dan might make a good cat but he was a raging blank of a human being and he knew he would fuck this good thing up, just like he fucked up all the rest of them. He would look at Ludo some day – he could do it now if he liked – and just not care.

  And where would that leave Dan?

  Alone.

  Useless and alone.

  Normal life was a problem for Dan. He was beginning to see that now. Small things upset him. He would have a petulant old age.

  ‘I’m not. I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ludo. ‘You’re straight.’

  He was out of the bed and rummaging in a drawer now and he came back with a small hinged box of brown lizard skin and, inside, a pair of cufflinks: silver, inset with a fat little piece of amber. Dan took them out. They were lovely, and worth very little; the amber worn small and smooth as a butterscotch sweet in your mouth.

  ‘Marry me,’ said Ludo.

  The cufflinks were his great-grandfather’s, he said, all the way from Odessa. Dan rose to his knees on the bed and held the little box in his hand. He had no shirt to try them against. He was naked and shivering. He was getting married.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’ said Ludo. ‘For nothing.’

  They made love all night – two men, no longer young – and they talked it all out. He would grow old with Ludo, in a big house on the wrong side of a leafy street in Rosedale, Toronto. Dan stuck the tip of his tongue into Ludo’s mouth, all night, into the chaos and mass of him. He took the malty sweetness of Ludo’s body as a memory and a talisman, to keep him company on the journey home.

  Dublin

  IF ONLY SHE could keep it in a box, Hanna thought, or a jug, or a thermos, something sealed, to stop it crusting over where the liquid met the air. A Tupperware box might do. What she really needed was one of those plastic bags that they used in hospitals, vacuum sealed, the ones they hung from a drip stand. A bag of blood. She could put it in her new fridge – God knows, it looked like something you would find in a morgue – she could put her blood in a bag, any sort of bag, and squeeze down until the air was out of it and then just tie a knot in the top. Hang it from the wine rack. Close the door.

  Hanna tried to lift her head, but her cheek was stuck to the floor. The blood was eye level, it was spreading and congealing at the same time. It was a race to standstill. But even though it stopped as it went, Hanna could not see the extent of it, because her eye was flush with the ground. The edges turned hazy as the blood oozed away from her, across the white floor tiles.

  There were plastic bags in the high cupboard – which wasn’t much use to her, down here. Hanna had put the bags up high so the baby couldn’t smother himself. And there were safety catches on all the bottom presses, which is why she would not be able to kick one open, so there you go – sometimes safety was not what you needed most. Sometimes what you needed was a little plastic bag to put the blood in, so when the men came they would be able to put it back into you again. Or see, at least, that you had not meant to die.

  She had slipped.

  Hanna thought she had slipped on the blood, but actually the blood had come after. And she was still holding something in her right hand. A bottle. Or the neck of a bottle. The body of the bottle was no longer there.

  Hanna didn’t know how anyone could break a bottle and fall on it at the same time, unless they were very fucking drunk. Maybe she had been hit from behind. Maybe the attacker was going up now to the room where the baby slept, and he would do things to the baby. Nameless things. He would steal the baby or damage the baby and leave no mark, so no one could tell that he had been
and gone.

  The bottle broke, and then she sat down on the bottle and, after that, she was lying on the floor, looking at the spreading blood. Which must be coming from her leg. In which case, she was going to die.

  The blood was dark, which was possibly a good thing. It was getting darker. It came quietly and then it stopped.

  It was probably time to call Hugh though she did not want to call Hugh, she did not think she could. So unless the baby cried and woke him, he would not notice she was gone. And the baby was not crying, for once. They never did what you wanted them to. A little opposite thing, that is what came out of her. A fight they wrapped in a cloth. Push it, grab it, knock it away: she was feeding him once, and the spoon skittered away so she had to duck to retrieve it and the look he gave as she rose from the floor was one of pure contempt. It was as though he had been possessed – possibly by himself, by the man he would some day become – looking at her as if to say, Who the fuck are you, with your pathetic fucking spoon?

  Good question.

  Oh the baby. The baby. Hanna loved the baby and did not want to doubt him even now, drunk as she was and dying on the kitchen floor. But she did sort of think that, if she did die, it would be the baby who had killed her. It would be that fat, strong boy, with his father’s ears and his father’s smile, and nothing of Hanna in him that she or anybody else could see.

  Hanna rested her head, and did not try to move it again. She was happy enough where she was. There was no need to get up, just yet. She would stay, for just a few minutes more, between things.

  There was a tickling in her hair, a cooling unpleasantness at the back of her neck. The blood was coming from her head.

  Hanna didn’t sit down on the breaking bottle so much as crack her skull off something – the door of the press, perhaps – then break the bottle as she fell. If she put a hand to her head, she would feel an opening in her scalp, and inside it, her skull. The raw bone.

  Hanna closed her eyes.

  The kitchen floor tiles were new and she said to Hugh they were too shiny and too hard so everything would smash as soon as touch them, but Hugh wanted a kitchen that looked like an operating theatre or like a butcher’s shop, with steel and concrete and metal hooks hanging off metal bars. In a tiny little semi-detached. Hugh wanted a man kitchen. A serial murderer’s kitchen, with a row of knives pinned to a magnetic strip along the wall. Hugh cooked twice a year, that was the height of it. Every bowl and dish dragged out, the place covered in flour. The rest of the time he heated something up in the microwave or got in takeaway. Hugh was annoying and Hanna could not leave him. Not after she had died in the new kitchen, with the baby asleep upstairs.