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 alclass="underline" 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 disease.
‘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.’