“Oh Yale, learn to take a compliment.”
He managed to keep her on the phone for twenty minutes, telling her about the gallery space, the donors, the university. She told him the rabbits were into her lettuce, or someone was eating her lettuce, and didn’t that sound like a thing the rabbits would do? Yale ran the dust cloth along the television, the picture frames, the antique shaving mirror he kept out here on the bookshelf, the wooden box that housed Charlie’s childhood marble collection.
She said, “This must be costing a fortune. Is Charlie there?”
“He’s out,” Yale said, as cheerfully as he could.
“Well. Tell him his old mum had two sons last she checked, and it’s been weeks since she’s heard from the one she carried.”
He said, “We love you, Teresa.”
* * *
—
It was the absolute middle of the night, Yale could tell without rolling toward the clock, when he heard the door and then the refrigerator, when he saw the hall light through his eyelids. He said, “Charlie?”
There was no answer, so he sat up, swung his feet off the bed. And there was Charlie’s silhouette, leaning against the doorframe. Drunk.
Yale would have shouted if he were more awake, but he could just barely manage to speak. “What the fuck happened?”
“I could ask the same.”
“No, you couldn’t. No, you could not. I go—I go upstairs for five minutes. What the hell time is it?” He grabbed his alarm clock, turned the red numbers toward himself: 3:52 a.m. “What happened to you?”
“I went out after.”
“After what?”
“The raid.”
“There—the cops came?” It was the first thing he’d considered, but he’d dismissed it so quickly.
“What? No. After we went to Nico’s.”
Yale looked around the room, made sure he was awake.
Charlie said, “Look, I don’t know when you vanished, but by the time we went to Nico’s, you were missing. I hope you had a brilliant time. I hope it was splendid.”
Yale said, idiotically, “You went to Nico’s.”
“We raided his apartment.”
“Oh.”
“We went— You know how his parents weren’t going to let Terrence back in. But Terrence had a key, and he was—were you gone by then?” Charlie hadn’t moved from the doorway. It seemed to take him great effort to assemble a sentence, even to form consonants. “He had the key and he showed it to Richard, and Richard said we should all go there straightaway. And we did. And Fiona’s going to cover for us. And we got his stuff. Look.” He started unwrapping something from his own neck. Backlit as Charlie was, Yale could only see the long untwisting of it.
“Is that Nico’s scarf?” He was trying to piece it together. That everyone had abandoned their drinks en masse and walked to Clark to divvy up Nico’s belongings. That they had pillaged, in the best possible way. And he hadn’t been there.
Nico wore that stripy orange scarf everywhere. It was how you’d recognize him from across a winter street.
“What about the servers? The boys with the food?”
“I imagine they took off. We just moved the party. But you were already doing lord knows what.”
“Charlie, I was lying down. For like five minutes, upstairs.” Maybe it had been half an hour, but wasn’t it basically the same?
“I know where you were. It was a great topic of conversation.”
“And no one came to get me?”
“We didn’t want to interrupt you.” Charlie seemed furious—seething, barely holding something in.
“From lying down with an upset stomach?”
“Everyone saw you go up with Teddy.”
“Teddy?” He wanted to laugh but stopped himself. It would sound defensive. “Teddy left. He walked out the front door when the slide show started.”
Charlie was quiet. He might have been processing something, or he might have been about to vomit.
Yale said, “Even if he stayed, what the hell would I be doing with him? Listen. I went upstairs because I needed to be alone.”
Charlie said, slowly, unsurely, “I saw him. I saw him during the slide show.”
“Are you thinking of the picture? Teddy dressed up as Cher? Charlie, sit down.” He didn’t. “Listen: I felt woozy, and I came down maybe five, ten minutes later. Fifteen at most. And I thought—I don’t even know what I thought. Everyone was gone, and I was the only one left. It was the weirdest fucking moment of my life. And I still don’t understand why you’re getting home ten hours later.”
“I—we went out after.” Charlie sounded, bizarrely, disappointed—as if he’d hung so much anger on Yale’s having been with Teddy that he didn’t know what to do with himself now. “Fiona said you were with Teddy.”
“Fiona is the ‘everyone’ who saw this?”
“The main one.”
“Fiona was wasted. And Christ, she’s been a wreck.”
“You were both gone. You both vanished at the same time.”
“And she saw us do what? She saw him carry me up the stairs like a bride?”
“No, she just—I asked where you were, and she said you were upstairs. And I said, ‘Why would he go upstairs?’ and she said, ‘I think Teddy’s up there too.’” And then he paused, as if he’d just heard how ridiculous he sounded.
“Okay then.”
“But she kept saying it.”
“Well, she was drunk.”
“Go back to sleep,” Charlie said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
* * *
—
Yale hadn’t expected to fall asleep, but the next time he rolled over it was 6 a.m. and Charlie was curled into a ball beside him. Two full water glasses and a bottle of aspirin sat on Charlie’s nightstand next to his usual bottles of vitamin B and ginseng; he expected to wake up hung over. It was a scene Yale would rather miss any day, but especially now. At least Charlie’s paper had been put to bed early this week, so they all could attend the party. The drivers would distribute the paper today while the staff slept in or hunched over toilet bowls.
He watched Charlie’s ribs rise and fall through his pale skin. Blond freckles covered his shoulders, his face, his arms, but his chest was polished ivory. He was soft, as if his skin had never seen the weather, and when a bone—an elbow, a kneecap, a rib—showed through, it was like a foreign object poking at a piece of silk.