Easy like a fox. Ludo handed Dan a credit card for household expenses with a rueful look that must have been useful to him in court. If Dan wanted to fuck him over, he seemed to say, then this would be a good way to do it, too. But Dan did not fuck him over. Or not much. And five years later, there they were, like a pair of sweater queens, sniping at each other about Dan’s mother, because ‘mother’ was one of those words for Ludo, She’s your mother.
Ludo’s mother Raizie was back in Montreal. Eighty-three years old, she was on a kaffeeklatsch circuit with the escaped matrons of Mile End, over in leafy Saint-Laurent, where no one, it seemed, could believe their good luck, or their bad luck, because if their son wasn’t buying a country place, he was in the middle of a terrible divorce. The daughters lost weight or they found a lump and one grandchild outshone the next. There were also disasters, of course. Men died. Women got depressed. Sons were seldom gay, it had to be said, but life was good enough for the escaped matrons of Mile End to leave some room even for this sad surprise and they were able to enjoy them both, Ludo and Dan, when they showed up. Dan was not the first man Ludo brought home but, as Raizie said, cupping his face with her dry old hand, ‘You are the nicest!’ There were no doubts. They went over to Montreal, twice, maybe three times a year, and Ludo came home each time more contented and capacious.
Dan liked to watch Ludo about his mother’s house, a big man in a small space, the dinkyness of his hands as he washed her china cups, the unembarrassed way he sat in the old recliner, the way he said, ‘Raizie, Raizie,’ when she fretted about the past and all the things that could not be put right. It seemed to Dan that Ludo spoke many languages — even his body spoke them — while he, Dan, spoke only one. They went over to his sister’s house, and her teenage children gazed at Ludo like they knew he was something belonging to them, but they weren’t sure what, exactly. Or not yet.
Meanwhile, he, Dan, had not been home to Ardeevin for three years, maybe five. Donal, Rory and — what was her name? — Shauna — they were different people already. Those boys of piercing purity, with their beautiful country accents if they ever brought themselves to speak, and the mottled blush when they did because their uncle was a queer: no one told them that he was gay, they just figured it out for themselves. In this day and age. And he, Dan, maddened by the shame of it, carried a boner with him all the way back to Dublin and, one time, fucked a guy until he yelped in the washroom on the train.
The ground rushing under them in the crescent-shaped gap at the bottom of the bowl; a thousand flickering railway sleepers and the cold earth of Ireland.
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.