Avery yelled, “You faithless bastard!” and threw one of the Chinese bowls. Tim ducked, and the bowl hit the architrave and shattered into small pieces. When Tim bent to pick them up, Avery shouted, “Leave it! I don’t want it. I don’t want any of them. They’re all going in the trash bin.”
Ignoring him, Tim picked up the pieces and put them on the table. Then he got a clean glass from the kitchen and poured some of the Clos St. Denis. He sniffed at it and made an irritated sound, picking out a few cork crumbs.
“I was laying this down.”
“Seems to be your favorite occupation.”
“If you wanted to get tanked up, why on earth didn’t you use the Dao? There’s half a dozen bottles in the larder.”
“Oh, yes—the Dao! Any old rubbish will do for me, won’t it? I haven’t got your exquisite palate. Your celebrated je ne sais quoi.”
“Don’t be silly.” Tim took a thoughtful swallow. “Wonderful fruit. A lot of style. Not as big as I expected.”
“Well hoity lucking toity.”
“I’m tired.” Tim removed his muffler and coat. “I’m going to bed.”
“You most certainly are not going to bed. You are going to leave my house. And you are going to leave it now!”
“I’m not going anywhere at this hour of the night, Avery.” Tim hung up his coat. “We’ll talk in the morning, when you’ve sobered up.”
“We’ll talk now!” Avery leaped up from the table and stumbled over to the hall, where he stood at the bottom of the staircase barring the way. Tim turned then, made his way to the kitchen, and started filling up the coffee-maker. Avery followed, crying, “What do you think you’re doing?” And “Leave my things alone.”
“If I’m going to stay awake, I need some strong coffee. And so, by the looks of things, do you.”
“What did you expect? To come home and find me all sweet reason? Clearing up after the Last Supper? Counting out your thirty pieces of silver?”
“Why are you being so dramatic?” Tim spooned the Costa Rica out lavishly. “And come and sit down before you fall down.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d love it if I fell and hit my head and died. Then you’d get the shop and the house, and you’d be able to move that bloody little tart in here. Well, you can think again, because first thing tomorrow I shall go to the solicitor’s and change my will.”
“You can do what you like tomorrow. For now, I should concentrate on parking your bum on something and getting this coffee down you.”
Avery, allowing a moment for a disdainful pause, thus making it clear that any move he might be inclined to make would be entirely of his own choosing, made his erratic way over the kitchen floor and contemplated the north face of the Bentwood stool. Somehow he managed to clamber up and hang on, swaying like an aerial mast in a high wind.
The rich, homely smell of coffee filled his nostrils cruelly, recalling a thousand shared starts to happy days and as many intimate and gossipy after-dinner exchanges. All gone now. All ruined. He and Tim would never be happy again. Avery’s eyes filled with sorrow as the utter terribleness of the situation struck him anew, and a thrill of pain stabbed clean through the deadening haze of alcohol. A needle to the heart.
As Tim passed the coffee, he folded Avery’s limp, unresisting fingers around the cup, and this gesture of concern was the last straw breaking the back of Avery’s anger and releasing a great gush of tears. And with the release of tears came an overwhelming need for contact and solace. He cried, “I trusted you …”
Tim sighed, put down his drink, pulled up a second stool, and sat next to Avery. “Listen, love,” he said, “if we are going to have a heart-to-heart at this ridiculous hour of the morning, let’s not start with a false premise. You have never trusted me. Ever since we started to live together, I’ve known that whenever we’re apart, you do nothing but worry and fret over whether I’m meeting someone else or that I might one day meet someone else. Or that I’ve already met someone else and I’m concealing it. That is not trust.”
“And you can see why now, can’t you? How right I was. You said you were going to the post office.”
“I went there first. Don’t worry. All the books went off.”
“I didn’t mean that,” screamed Avery. “You know I didn’t.”
“It was of no importance,” said Tim quietly. “Not compared to us.”
“Then why? Why risk you and me … all this… ?” Avery gestured at the cozy sitting room with such vigor that he slid off his perch.
“God—you’re pixilated,” said Tim, helping him back up.
“I am not pissilated,” wept Avery. “I mean … if it wasn’t David in the box, I thought it might be Nico … or Boris. I never in a million years thought it could be you.”
“I don’t see why not. You know my sexual history.”
“But I thought you’d turned your back on all that,” said Avery. Then: “Don’t laugh.”
“Sorry.”
“And why Kitty, of all people?”
Tim shrugged, remembering the combination of fragile bones and tough, sly cherubinical smile that had briefly excited him. “She was pretty, and lean … quite boyish, really …”
“She won’t be boyish for long,” cut in Avery. “Very unlean and unpretty she’ll be.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted her for long,” said Tim. And for a second he looked so desolate that Avery forgot who was the guilty party and almost made a move to comfort him as he would have done before the betrayal. “If it makes you feel any better,” continued Tim, “it was Kitty who started it all. I think she regarded me as some sort of challenge.”
“Some people don’t seem to know the difference between a challenge and a bloody pushover.” Avery braced himself. “How long … how many… ?”
“Half a dozen times. At the most.”
“Oh, God!” Avery gasped as if from a body blow and covered his face with his hands. “And was she … I mean … has there been. …”
“No. No one else.”
“What shall I do?” Avery rocked from side to side on his stool. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Why should you do anything? It seems to me more than enough’s been done already. And don’t blubber.”
“I’m not.” Avery took his little butterball fists, shiny with moisture, from his teary eyes. His pale yellow curls, limp with sorrow, looked like a ring of scrambled egg. He choked out the next words. “I don’t know how you can be so heartless.”
“I’m not heartless, but you know how I hate these honky tonk emotions.” Tim tore a piece off the paper-towel roll and mopped Avery’s face, which was crisscrossed with rivulets of tears and mucous and sweat. “And give me that cup before it’s all over the floor.”
“Everything’s soiled … and … spoiled. I just can’t bear it anymore …”
“I don’t see how you can possibly know that until you try.” This cold, sinewy reasoning brought Avery to a fresh pitch of misery. “I mean it, Tim,” he cried. “You must promise me faithfully that you’ll never ever ever again—”
“I can’t do that. And you wouldn’t believe me if I did. Oh, you might now, because you’re desperate, but tomorrow you’d start to wonder. Any by the day after that…”
“But you must promise. I can’t go on with all this insecurity.”
“Why not? Everybody else has to. Your trouble is you expect too much. Why can’t we just muddle along like Mr. and Mrs. Average? You know … doing our best… picking each other up if we fall … making allowances … Cloud nine’s for retarded adolescents.” Tim paused. “I never promised you a rose garden, as the saying goes.”