A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one’s antecedents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good-bye.
“I don’t know,” William said. “It doesn’t seem fair to put any pressure on Sharon.”
“Heaven forfend. But I did promise Corinne I’d speak with Sharon. And, after all, I haven’t actually seen her for some time.”
“We could just go have a plain old visit, though. I don’t know. Urging her to go to Corinne’s — I’m not really comfortable with that.”
“Oof, William, phrase, please, jargon.”
“Why is that jargon?”
“Why? How should I know why? Because it is. You can say, ‘I’m uncomfortable about that,’ or ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’ But ‘I’m uncomfortable with that’ is simply jargon.” He picked up a book sitting next to him on the table and opened it. Relativity for Dummies. “Good heavens,” he said, snapping the book shut. “Obviously Martin doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. Why bother to mention that to me? Does she think I’m going to ask Martin whether it’s true that he’s been misrepresenting the value of his client’s stock? Am I likely to talk about it? I’m perfectly happy to read about it in the Times every day, like everyone else.”
“You know,” William said, “we could go away early this year. We could just pick up and leave on Wednesday, if you’d like.”
“I would not like. I would like you to play in your concert, as always.”
William took the book from Otto and held Otto’s hand between his own. “They’re not really so bad, you know, your family,” he said.
Sometimes William’s consolations were oddly like provocations. “Easy for you to say,” Otto said.
“Not that easy.”
“I’m sorry,” Otto said. “I know.”
—
Just like William to suggest going away early for Otto’s sake, when he looked forward so much to his concert! The little orchestra played publicly only once a year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Otto endured the grating preparatory practicing, not exactly with equanimity, it had to be admitted, but with relative forbearance, just for the pleasure of seeing William’s radiant face on the occasion. William in his suit, William fussing over the programs, William busily arranging tickets for friends. Otto’s sunny, his patient, his deeply good William. Toward the end of every year, when the city lights glimmered through the fuzzy winter dark, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, William with his glowing violin, urging the good-natured, timid audience into passionate explorations of the unseen world. And every year now, from the audience, Otto felt William’s impress stamped on the planet, more legible and valuable by one year; all the more legible and valuable for the one year’s diminution in William’s beauty.
How spectacular he had been the first time Otto brought him to a family event, that gladiatorial Christmas thirty-odd years earlier. How had Otto ever marshaled the nerve to do it?
Oh, one could say till one was blue in the face that Christmas was a day like any other, what difference would it make if he and William were to spend that particular day apart, and so on. And yet.
Yes, the occasion forced the issue, didn’t it. Either he and William would both attend, or Otto would attend alone, or they would not attend together. But whatever it was that one decided to do, it would be a declaration — to the family, and to the other. And, the fact was, to oneself.
Steeled by new love, in giddy defiance, Otto had arrived at the house with William, to all intents and purposes, on his arm.
A tidal wave of nervous prurience had practically blown the door out from inside the instant he and William ascended the front step. And all evening aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, and siblings had stared at William beadily, as if a little bunny had loped out into a clearing in front of them.
William’s beauty, and the fact that he was scarcely twenty, had embarrassed Otto on other occasions, but never so searingly. “How intelligent he is!” Otto’s relatives kept whispering to one another loudly, meaning, apparently, that it was a marvel he could speak. Unlike, the further implication was, the men they’d evidently been imagining all these years.
Otto had brought someone to a family event only once before — also on a Christmas, with everyone in attendance: Diandra Fetlin, a feverishly brilliant colleague, far less beautiful than William. During the turkey, she thumped Otto on the arm whenever he made a good point in the argument he was having with Wesley, and continued to eat with solemn assiduity. Then, while the others applied themselves to dessert, a stuccolike fantasy requiring vigilance, Diandra had delivered an explication of one of the firm’s recent cases that was worth three semesters of law school. No one commented on her intelligence. And no one had been in the least deceived by Otto’s tepid display of interest in her.
“So,” Corinne had said in a loud and artificially genial tone as if she were speaking to an armed high-school student, “where did you and William meet, Otto?”
The table fell silent; Otto looked out at the wolfish ring of faces. “On Third Avenue,” he said distinctly, and returned to his meal.
—
“Sorry,” he said, as he and William climbed into the car afterward. “Sorry to have embarrassed you. Sorry to have shocked them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But what was I supposed to say? All that completely fraudulent interest. The solicitude. The truth is, they’ve never sanctioned my way of life. Or, alternately, they’ve always sanctioned it. Oh, what on earth good is it to have a word that means only itself and its opposite!”
Driving back to the city, through the assaultively scenic and demographically uniform little towns, they were silent. William had witnessed; his power over Otto had been substantially increased by the preceding several hours, and yet he was exhibiting no signs of triumph. On the contrary, his habitual chipper mood was — where? Simply eclipsed. Otto glanced at him; no glance was returned.
Back in the apartment, they sat for a while in the dark. Tears stung Otto’s eyes and nose. He would miss William terribly. “It was a mistake,” he said.
William gestured absently. “Well, we had to do it sooner or later.”
We? We did? It was as if snow had begun to fall in the apartment — a gentle, chiming, twinkling snow. And sitting there, looking at one another silently, it became apparent that what each was facing was his future.
—
Marvelous to watch William out in the garden, now with the late chrysanthemums. It was a flower Otto had never liked until William instructed him to look again. Well, all right, so it wasn’t a merry flower. But flowers could comfortably embrace a range of qualities, it seemed. And now, how Otto loved the imperial colors, the tensely arched blossoms, the cleansing scent that seemed dipped up from the pure well of winter, nature’s ceremony of end and beginning.
The flat little disk of autumn sun was retreating, high up over the neighbors’ buildings. As Otto gazed out the window, William straightened, shaded his eyes, waved, and bent back to work. Late in the year, William in the garden…
—
Otto bought the brownstone when he and William had decided to truly move in together. Over twenty-five years ago, that was. The place was in disrepair and cost comparatively little at the time. While Otto hacked his way through the barbed thickets of intellectual property rights issues that had begun to spring up everywhere, struggling to disentangle tiny shoots of weak, drab good from vibrant, hardy evil, William worked in the garden and on the house. And to earn, as he insisted on doing, a modest living of his own, he proofread for a small company that published books about music. Eventually they rented out the top story of the brownstone, for a purely nominal sum, to Naomi, whom they’d met around the neighborhood and liked. It was nice to come home late and see her light on, to run into her on the stairs.