The Green Road: A Novel Read online

  Dinner was a giddy occasion, with a couple of high performance housemates and their quiet host, who had carried steak and salad all the way from Chelsea. After which, they all washed and changed, downed a ritual martini in the living room and sailed off down the boardwalk. It was a big party weekend on Fire Island and temptation was everywhere but Billy and Dan danced only with each other; they laughed and even smooched a bit out there on the floor, and when Billy went off to queue for the toilet he came back with a couple of pills. He took one and let Dan lick out the other from the crease of his palm.

  Bliss.

  We can assume, of course, that Dan went back to his melancholy little apartment and his brave wife-to-be, and held all the beautiful men of Fire Island in great contempt for being helpless to their faggotry when his was so clearly under control. But tripping on Ecstasy under a July moon, he was the happiest queer in New York State. And of course we all knew he wasn’t really queer, he was just queer for Billy, because who wouldn’t be? It wasn’t like he wanted to go down on – I don’t know – Gore Vidal. Dan loved Billy because it was impossible not to love Billy, and so we sang that same old sad song, as they touched each other in the trees’ moon shadow; as they paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

  We met the brave little wife-to-be later, when she came back from Boston, where she had been doing some kind of MFA. She was nice. Skinny, as they often are. Slightly maverick and intense and above all ethical. She had long hair, a lovely accent, and she was writing a book, of course, about – we could never remember what the book was about – something very Irish. As beards went, she was a classic beard. A woman of rare quality – because it takes a quality woman to keep a guy like Dan straight – throwing her heart away.

  Or not.

  Who is to judge, meine Damen und Herrrren? At least she had a heart to throw.

  This was Dan’s fifth year in New York City – he had only intended staying for one. He arrived in the summer of 1986, and moved in with Isabelle, who had been there since May. A friend got him some evening shifts in a bar over on Avenue A and he spent the days stacking and retrieving shoeboxes in a basement on Fifth. After a few months down in the dark, they allowed him up on to the shop floor and Dan pretended to be good at selling shoes in order to cover the fact that he was really very good at selling shoes. He was a beautiful young man with a cute accent and a terrific eye. By Christmastime, he was dashing over to photo shoots with emergency Manolos, he was bringing boxes to clients in their homes. Some of these clients tried to sleep with him. All of them were rich, and most of them were men.

  The first time it happened, Dan was kneeling at the feet of a sixty-year-old multimillionaire in a penthouse just around the corner on Central Park South. He was lacing up a pair of chocolate brown brogues over his skinny ankles and grey silk socks, when the guy said, ‘Ireland, eh?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dan, as the multimillionaire settled his crotch an inch or two higher in the large white chair.

  ‘I had a wonderful young friend once who was Irish. Where are you from?’

  ‘I’m from County Clare.’

  ‘Well, that’s where he was from. Isn’t that a coincidence?’

  ‘Yes, that is a coincidence,’ said Dan.

  ‘He was a marvellous young man.’

  The picture windows looked over Central Park and Sixth Avenue. The floor was white, the furniture was white, and the old man’s dick, in the middle of this great panorama, seemed both intriguing and sad. This is the flesh, Dan thought as he pulled the laces tight, in which such money is contained.

  And Dan forgot for a moment that he was a spoilt priest and English literature graduate with plans to go home, after his year abroad, to do a master’s in librarianship. He forgot that he was a shoe salesman, or a barman, or even an immigrant. For a moment Dan was an open space, surrounded by a different future to the one he had brought in through the door.

  He said, ‘I think this is your size. I think this is you.’

  Dan joked with Isabelle about the multimillionaire, but mostly he did not mention the men who caught his eye or gave him things, in the bar or on the street. He told her he was desperate to get out of shoe sales, but he did not tell her he had sensed some new ambition in himself while she trudged on, teaching English as a foreign language, not writing her novel. Isabelle wondered if postgraduate work was the answer to the feeling she had of getting nowhere – not in this town, but with herself. Dan wanted to tell her that herself was not the project any more. This was New York: the answer was all around her, for God’s sake, not inside her head.

  Dan kept his eyes open, now. He noticed people’s desire. He got a job with a fashion photographer, humping gear around Manhattan. He spent his days carting tripods and bags, getting yelled at, getting cold, running for miso soup, running for hard boiled eggs, black coffee, Tabasco, very dry champagne. The pay was less, but you would not think it to look at Dan, who attracted sample size jackets and many invitations by being very open and a little bit wry. Dan was always surprised by things, but never shocked. And he never put out.

  This was the man that Billy fell for, four years later, by which time, Dan was moving into the fine art scene. Billy fell for a man who was discarding his former self before he had found a new one, a man who dabbled in guy sex but who still loved his girlfriend. He fell for a liar and a believer, though what Dan believed in was always hard to say.

  So pale and ethereal when he arrived, by the end of the summer we thought there was something freakish about Dan: this very ascetic head, with proud – savage, almost – cheekbones. He looked liked the wrath of God, Billy told him once, when the light was right. And Dan laughed and said, ‘You have no idea.’

  If Fire Island was an aberration, then it would be his last because Isabelle was about to finish up in Boston, she would be back in New York at the end of July. When the boys came back to the city they had ten days to kiss and part, which should have been enough, because Billy liked to keep moving and Dan wasn’t gay, he was just very visual. In those ten days, they did it all: they found a perfect coffee place off Christopher Street, and a wine bar on Bleecker. They bought Billy a pair of art deco bedside lockers in this beautiful yellow wood that turned out to be English yew. They saw The Double Life of Véronique and The Commitments, they went to the Frick where Dan stood in front of Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap for the first time. And, when they went back to Billy’s place, they had conversations that lasted till dawn. They had bitterness and blame and pointless sex. They had sudden sex. They had sex-while-weeping, and tender sex, and rough sex, and leave-taking sex. And then Isabelle came back to town.

  But it was not Isabelle that did for Billy in the summer of 1991, it was the way he could not reach Dan, no matter how deep he fucked him, as though all the gestures of their love were beautiful and untrue. It was not as if Billy was looking for anything long term, but he was looking for something in that moment. Recognition. The feeling that what they were doing was real to Dan too.

  Oh Danny Boy.

  Of course he was charming. Of course he was beautiful. Of course.

  When Isabelle came back, she and Dan took a flight to California, where some friends were staging a wedding in Big Sur. Billy had another offer for Fire Island, but he could not face Fire Island, and he did not go back on the scene. He did have sex with a guy on Saturday night, but coming made him feel like he was reaching for something that melted in his hands. So he visited with Greg, who would not venture too far from his air-con, and they sat around and did not mention where Billy had been for the past few weeks, while Jessie wiped down the counters in the kitchenette and glared at him, for being too easily forgiven when he arrived – so hunky in his wife-beater vest – at the door.

  Greg had gained some weight. He didn’t do that smacking thing with his mouth any more, as though tasting some residue. He sat in his big lounge chair with a careless leg hooked over the arm, and was enthusiastic now, even about his dise
ase.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, when Billy told him he looked great. Greg said he was so anxious now, all the time, he was tossing down the Xanax, and there was a drug called Demerol, this opiate they doled out, that made him feel just wonderful. He felt as though we were all connected.

  It was enough, said Greg, to make you want to go back in there, all you had to do was make it into the elevator and then up to Sister Patricia who enfolded you with love, and then there would be the Demerol to fill you up with love on the inside. He said he had switched allegiances, Dr Torres was a prince but Sister Patricia was the person into whose eyes.

  He paused and tried again.

  Into whose eyes.

  Billy leaned in as though to show his own eyes, faithful unto death, but Greg twitched away and said he was thinking about getting some therapy, though – and he chewed down on the words as he quoted Celeste the tranny nurse saying. ‘Nothing makes a girl look more relaxed than a few pints of embalming fluid.’

  ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Oh, you got to love Celeste,’ said Greg, and Billy glanced over at Jessie, who forbore.

  Billy’s heart did not start to break until the day he knew that Dan was back in town after the wedding in California, and that he would not be in touch. And Billy’s heart did not break properly for a week or two after that when he realised it was not disappointment he had been feeling, but hope, and that this hope was fading with the turning weather. Soon, soon it would be true. Dan would not have called. Besides, if Dan missed him, then he could just go out and find a guy who looked a bit like Billy, and pull his damn zipper down. And that was supposed to be fine. Because if Dan came out, he would be happy, and every gay man in New York would be happy, and the world would be, by so much authenticity, improved.

  But Billy did not care if Dan was out or in, any more. All he felt was the weight of Dan’s head on his solar plexus, there on the beach, the waves dumping their heavy load of water, and the sea pulling it back, over and over. And he wanted Dan to meet Greg again, before he died.

  But September passed and Dan did not call.

  Various things happened. Massimo went off with Mandy to her family bolt-hole in the Caribbean, Billy held a dinner party which was a qualified success. Arthur published his book on Bonnard and wept for Max (who had detested Bonnard: who spat at the mention of Bonnard) at the launch. Then Emily von Raabs came to town and she hosted a large and informal supper in her wonderfully ramshackle house on East 10th. Emily had loved Christian, back in the day, so Greg brought Billy along as a kind of protection from all that, but the Countess had a new favourite young man now, an Irish dealer called Corban, who was the most charming man you could hope to meet. And Corban brought his old friend Isabelle, and Isabelle brought her interesting boyfriend Dan.

  Emily Gräfin von Raabs (originally from Ohio, now from everywhere) sat sixteen around an old oval table and kept everything simple. A main course was set, buffet style on a sideboard at the top of the room, salad was passed from left to right; it was very homely and hands-on with just one server topping up the wine.

  She had Richard Serra next to her, and he was incredibly handsome and, dare one say, monumental. And Kiki Smith was there, which always improved things. Artists, Greg said, are like wild animals in a room like that; it is like being in a a forest, suddenly, instead of a zoo.

  As for the rest of us, the wine went down and the volume went up and the question that idled around the table was: Who has slept with whom? And of course it does not matter, because past sex is not as exciting as future sex, it is just a low hum under the melody of what is yet to come. Billy looked Isabelle over, when they moved through the double doors for coffee: the unreliable little ribcage, with a pair of those flat little triangular breasts like flesh origami: also lumpy bits from waist to hip where her underwear was a bit too pragmatic – she would look better without, he thought, though Isabelle was not the sort of girl who would ever go without. The most surprising thing about her were the shoes, which were black to match the rest of the outfit, but with fabulous, bloody red soles. She walked in them like a child playing dress-up.

  Well, each to his own, Billy thought and he met Dan’s eye with the easy lack of interest he had learned all his life to show. He said, ‘You know Gregory Savalas? Greg does the Clements’ estate. And now Max Ehring’s, am I right?’

  They might as well have never met, never kissed. That was the code.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Greg. ‘That’s legally all very. That will take a while. I’m just, literally, collating what’s there.’

  ‘So sad,’ said Dan. ‘I am one of Ehring’s biggest fans.’

  ‘You are? That’s nice to hear.’

  ‘I am. I just think the work has such vitality, you know? So hard to believe he is gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Greg. ‘He was a dear friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dan.

  They stood there. Greg who loved Billy Walker and Billy who loved Dan Madigan and Dan who loved Isabelle McBride. He really did.

  And Isabelle, who felt self-conscious for some reason she could not identify, took another slug of wine.

  ‘You know he left hundreds of uncatalogued pieces, just thrown about,’ said Greg. ‘Of course we left the main studio just exactly as it was.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Dan.

  Billy couldn’t stand it. He had slept with both these men, and they were talking horse-shit: they were speaking some kind of non-language to each other.

  ‘I can’t help wondering,’ he said, ‘if dying wasn’t the best thing to happen to Max. As an artist, I mean. Is that a terrible thing to say?’

  Greg blinked, slowly. He turned to Dan. ‘You know, sometimes I think I am in the wrong business,’ he said. ‘Because I would prefer if Max painted nothing and was still here. Alive, I mean. I would prefer him to be alive. Even if he was just, you know, serving the wine.’

  ‘You do? I mean, you would?’ Dan seemed genuinely surprised.

  Isabelle, as though used to this slight gap between her boyfriend and the world, reached over and pressed Greg’s hand.

  ‘You are so right,’ she said.

  ‘Is he?’ said Dan, persisting.

  ‘Yes he is,’ she said.

  And Greg turned aside, briefly, to hide his tears.

  It was two days after this encounter that Irish Dan turned up at young Billy’s door – ashamed of himself, clearly. They had sex but didn’t like each other for it, and afterwards Dan went home.

  ‘Everybody dies.’

  This is what he had said in Emily von Raab’s drawing room, after Greg had pinched the tears back with finger and thumb.

  ‘You die of something,’ said Dan. ‘You die young, you die old, it is not the fact that you die that matters. It is what you do that matters. What you make.’

  It was not clear who he was trying to convince.

  ‘I didn’t know you liked his work so much,’ said Isabelle.

  And Greg thought about the corpse, laid out on a trestle table in the studio, in his working overalls and boots, how it looked nothing like Max, because Max was all movement and annoyance. Max was a constant pain in the ass.

  ‘I respect the work,’ said Dan. ‘The work is not beautiful, and I would prefer if it were beautiful. The work is violent and garish and he put everything he had into it, and I respect that.’

  ‘Right,’ Isabelle said.

  ‘Also, you know, the work is of the moment. This moment. I like that. I need that. I think if we don’t have that we are just travelling blind.’

  Dan’s hands were in the air, he was making the big gestures, and there he was again, the priest, offering it all, demanding it all: truth, beauty, everlasting life.

  Or six months on a wall at MOMA, Greg thought, followed by a thousand years in storage, somewhere undisclosed.

  Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what
he got. At midnight, he was back out on the street and heading home.

  That was the 5th of November. Eight days later, he came back for more. Then a short two days after that. He managed to stay away for another week. On the 21st of November, Billy picked up the intercom and said, ‘Fuck you, Dan.’ But he buzzed him in anyway. Three nights later, he came down the stairs to the front door, and said, ‘Let’s walk.’

  The streets were wet and the air clear after rain. The boys’ winter coats were both open to the mild night, their long scarves hung down, blue and green. Dan said he was fighting with Isabelle. That was one of the reasons she had gone to Boston, they had been fighting for maybe two years. Also she had met someone up there, a guy, who was, incidentally, as queer as all get out, which was not the outcome he had wanted for Isabelle, but it was her choice, so maybe it had been a terrific waste of time, his feeling guilty all those years.

  ‘Have you told her?’

  ‘Told her what?’ said Dan. ‘I love her. I have always loved her. And I fucked her willingly. And none of that is a lie.’

  They ended up kissing up against a chain link fence, in a deserted lot by the East River, hands sliding in each other’s come, waiting to be knifed by a passer-by.

  So that was it. Dan went home at Christmas a new man and he came back to New York ready for more. He found Billy laid low with a cold and made him a hot whiskey to the Irish recipe with lemon and cloves, and he beefed on about his family, his mother who was the usual nightmare, his sister who was pregnant again and developing a martyred air.