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Chapter Text

I stayed on longer than I should have in Boston, which is to say that I stayed for about a week after Camilla left.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to stay, but that I had the feeling that I shouldn’t. It seemed self-evident to me that hanging around Francis in the state he was in would involve a return to the tired old routines of the post-Bunny, pre-Henry days. Still, desperate as I was for decent company, I convinced myself that to linger for a week or so could do no harm. I was working on rewriting a segment of my thesis at the time, so there was no pressing need to return to California- I felt I could use the change of scenery. More subconsciously, though I was sore about Camilla’s departure, the sight of Francis pale and keenly self-conscious in his hospital bed had reminded me that I had missed him too, perhaps more than I had realized. Though he got on my nerves (and, I am sure, I on his) I had never once considered cutting ties with him, and the deathly fear that had consumed me upon receiving his letter still lurked within me whenever the discussion of his marriage made him turn especially morbid.

Francis hadn’t expected me to stay, and seemed pleased by my choice, though not especially enthusiastic. This did not surprise me: when he wasn’t being exhaustingly needy Francis was always oddly reserved with his affections. In our early acquaintance I had been perpetually uncertain whether he liked me at all; later I had long-sufferingly endured his barrage of apologies whenever he felt he’d pushed me too far.

“You can stay at mine,” was all that he offered, when I informed him of my decision. I did not argue a great deal. There was certainly room for the both of us, and my hotel room, booked last minute, was costing me a pretty penny. He and Priscilla had their own apartment- a wedding gift from her father, apparently superb- but did not live together yet, which further swayed me.

I had not seen Francis’ apartment since his release from hospital- for some reason we had mainly stuck to Camilla’s hotel room, sometimes mine, when we weren’t out exploring Boston. I liked it immediately: the living-room was cluttered, spacious, and lovely, with tall cream walls and large windows that led out to a balcony that was visibly unused.

“I did consider jumping,” Francis said, thoughtfully, when I gazed out onto the street. “But I wasn’t sure about the drop. I never had much of a head for numbers.”

He showed me to the guest room, then retreated to the kitchen as I laid out the contents of my meagre suitcase. I had brought almost nothing with me in my mad dash to the airport, and my two pairs of clothing looked ridiculous in the varnished drawers of the antique armoire. As I sat on my bed undoing my shoes I thought of my first visits to the country house, the way I had felt almost expected to explore, left to my own devices so that I could discover its wonders in my own time. I missed our leisurely nights there more than I missed anything in the world- the way the days stretched like honey, the wild unpredictability of our routine. Even knowing what they had kept hidden from me at the time, my memories had remained untarnished, imbued instead with some special significance, perfect vignettes of joy against the creeping darkness.

Francis had fixed himself a drink by the time I re-emerged, sprawled bonelessly over a magnificent green velvet couch. He tilted his head in my direction to acknowledge my arrival.

“I can’t cook, I’m afraid. She’s got all of my knives.”

She was Priscilla. They had made some kind of arrangement to rid the apartment of sharp objects in the early stages of his recovery, but Francis had insisted on his silverware being looked after, and so it had ended up in his fiancée’s care. It occurred to me that he had painkillers on hand, procured by the hospital no less; I frowned tentatively at him.

“Are you meant to have alcohol around?”

Francis snorted, eyes meeting mine with real amusement. “They’re trying to keep me from killing myself, Richard.”

I disliked his way of talking about it, but I didn’t want to start a fight, so I went and poured myself a glass too, warm whiskey shining golden in the late-afternoon light.

“We could order something in. Or we could go get dinner.”

“God, anything but that,” Francis sighed, pressing his fingers to his temple. “I can’t bear the idea of all those people staring.”

I would have accused him of being self-obsessed, but in truth in the area in which he lived there were high chances of being recognized, and of course the news was making the rounds, despite attempts to keep it hush-hush.

“Then we’ll order in. That place Camilla and I went to did deliveries.”

It hurt to speak of her; I almost didn’t catch his reply, stuck on the rawness of her absence. The weather had remained dismal since she’d left, which I felt was fitting.

“Ostra?”

With some effort, I shook my head: “Mamma Maria.”

“Oh,” Francis said. “Italian.”

“If you’d prefer something else-“

“No, that’s fine.”

“You’re the local.”

“I don’t have much of an appetite anyhow.”

In the end I ordered from some obscure Thai place, and the food was good enough that I forgave Francis the headache. I fell asleep on the couch just past midnight to the sounds of the Smiths, dead drunk and not entirely certain we weren’t waiting for the phone to ring, half convinced Camilla would return at any moment with a wry smile and a bottle of wine in hand.

Though Francis’ agoraphobia had receded enough since New York to accompany Camilla and I on our walks around town, his recent infamy made him reluctant to step foot outside within proximity of his home: he seemed wholly content for us to spend the entire duration of my stay doing nothing holed up inside his apartment. For my part I felt obliged to get him outside, and privately also did not entirely enjoy spending so much time inside the very rooms where he’d prepared to take his life a fortnight prior. Planning excursions was more complicated than I’d anticipated, however- with Camilla we’d merely drifted along the streets and had meals in nice little restaurants, but when it came to planned outings Francis was difficult to please. He demonstrated little interest in any of the places I suggested we go to, finally waving a hand to cut me short.

“Choose what you like. I’ve been to so many of these places with her that every nice spot in town’s been thoroughly tarnished.”

Francis and Priscilla did, in fact, have regularly scheduled dates, though these had become increasingly wedding-related in the aftermath of his botched suicide- on the day Camilla had left Francis had barely managed to free himself from ring-shopping long enough to see her off. Their engagement itself, I came to learn, had been swift, with little preceding courtship; they were a good match on paper, and it was the done thing in those circles. If they had attended any of the places I had suggested it was to be seen in company together. I wondered suddenly if returning to these spots on Francis’ arm was a good idea, but he must have read my mind because his expression went droll.

“The ring’s on her finger. I’m allowed to have friends again. Besides, they might as well recognize my best man by the dread day.”

This was the first I had heard of any such a position; I turned towards him with surprise.

“Who did you think I would ask?” Francis said, reasonably enough, and then abruptly went more brittle, gaze suddenly pleading. “You’ll do it, won’t you? I have no one else.”

“Of course,” I agreed, hastily, and Francis smiled, all ingratiating relief, and that was that.

Our first outing was a disaster. Everything Francis had derided the place for proved true- infinite queues, hordes of tourists and a lackluster, pretentious exhibition- leaving me hot and claustrophobic and embarrassed of my faux pas. Francis didn’t rub salt in my wounds, which was little consolation, the reason being that the crowds had made him so increasingly panicked that we ended up leaving halfway through the tour. We left the building in a hurry, myself raw and impatient and Francis taking shuddering gasps with his hand pressed over his eyes and his scarf whipping me in the chest. To make matters worse, as we attempted to retreat to his apartment, we had the misfortune of running into one of Priscilla’s friends, an inquisitive sharp-nosed wisp of a woman who kept us trapped for a good few minutes as Francis slid dangerously into outright contempt, reminding me of his infamous fall-out with Marion.

I managed to extricate us from the situation with some vague allusions to a meeting with a tailor, though we didn’t get far before Francis abruptly dropped into the nearest bench like a bag of bones, grasping wildly at his pockets before he extricated his wallet and pushed it into my hand.

“Get me a smoke, please, I can’t breathe.”

I nearly told him that smoking would do nothing for his lungs, but I was on autopilot, zigzagging towards the nearest corner-shop and forgetting until I returned the wallet that I was no longer flat broke and desperate not to look it, and could very well have paid for the cigarettes myself.

I could have taken it the wrong way, but it occurred to me that probably Francis had forgotten too. I passed him the cigarettes, which he lit in a practiced motion despite his unsteady hands, whole body stilling slowly at his labored exhale.

“I never did find out what happened between you and Marion,” I said, after a moment, watching the smoke dissipate above us.

It startled a laugh out of him- authentic, if wretched, enough so that I looked back at him, found a spark of life in his lidded eyes.

“Let’s not ruin that mystery for you, then.”

I shook my head, relaxing. “I still can’t believe she married Bunny’s brother.”

“Cold-hearted bitch. Though that’s nothing on what they called the off-spring.”

“Extremely weird,” I agreed, glad once more to have someone nearby who understood just how off-putting it was. “I wonder if she thought it’d make it seem more proper if they paid him his dues.”

“Heaven forbid I ever understand what goes on in that woman’s head,” Francis said, disdainfully, and leant back in the bench, settled once more.

Our next excursions were more successful. We went to a museum on Tuesday, and against expectation found ourselves wholly engrossed in the tiny antiquities wing. I dwelled with relics as Francis murmured senseless bits of Greek to himself, which I first assumed to be the product of years without practice until I realized he was merely translating off broken pieces of pottery. After that we stuck to museums; there was an enormous amount of them in Boston, and I wasn’t staying long enough to exhaust even a third.

We developed a routine: I worked mornings, mostly, editing my thesis, while Francis alternated between wedding preparations and sleeping in past noon. In the former instance he’d be up and dressed to the nines almost as early as I was, looking marvelously unreal with layers of finery draped around him like armor, returning hours later to collapse into the couch with the look of a man on the brink. In the latter he would prowl the apartment bare-footed, a myriad of different gowns trailing him like an emperor’s cape, doing little more than languish until I set my things away.

He was worse company when he’d seen Priscilla in the mornings, but he was distracting when he was around, even without direct interference- he listened to his records, sighed incessantly, ransacked the room looking for some unknown object of distraction, and most of all drew my eye like a moth to the flame, my gaze tripping from my scrawled annotations to the intricate designs of his gown as it flashed by me. All the years of living in California had left me at the mercy of my East Coast romanticism- it was invariably a relief to set my pen down.

For the most part we got along. It had been long enough since we’d spent time together that Francis’ moods were not wearing on me, and given the circumstances I was more understanding than I might have otherwise been. We steered clear of dangerous topics, talked mainly of our graduating year and what they were up to, the news, the art we’d seen in the museum, and the nothings I’d come to associate with conversations with Francis. These were the conversations that I could never remember segueing into, nor finishing- they came to be organically and sustained themselves without clear focus or conclusion.

On one subject, predictably, we could not see eye to eye. Prolonged exposure to Priscilla was making me increasingly horrified by his impending marriage, treated by all parties with renewed urgency in the aftermath of his hospitalization, and though I harbored no great hopes of changing his mind I felt duty-bound to offer token protests. Black Hole was too tame of a nickname for her- she was more than a conversation killer, seemed to suck the poetry out of every room she stepped foot into, draining the color out of Francis by simple proximity. I pitied her but could not delude myself into liking her even a little. This wasn’t out of some gentlemanly defense of Francis’ virtues, though the way she spoke to him like a disobedient child made me bristle- her company reminded me insufferably of Plano, a total absence of meaning.

Francis would hear no more of my initial protestations, naturally; he was entirely resigned to his doom, and seemed to me perversely pleased by his martyrdom. This angered me, but I could think of no suitable argument to convince him of his own capacity for something other than this pastiche, and as our arguments always ended the same way I didn’t escalate.

The week came and went faster than I’d thought. I was due to drive back on Sunday, but by Friday evening I hadn’t so much as called a rental. I justified this to myself by reference to the fact that Francis was insisting on paying my way home, since (in his words) if he was to whore himself out he might as well make use of his fortune. Last minute prices would not be an issue. Really, of course, I was just putting off my return. For all that I wasn’t exactly happy in Boston, I felt more like a person there- more awake. I was reluctant to return to the monotony of the West Coast.

Francis had been out shopping for God knows what- corsages, I thought, or maybe cakes- all afternoon, but he returned bearing bags that he flung half-assedly my way, his weak throw landing them squarely near his own feet rather than mine before he glided away to shed his layers. I picked up the bags; they were loaded with clothes.

“I’ve never seen you in orange.”

Francis gave me a look that implied I was mentally deficient.

“They’re not for me. She’s started insinuating I’m housing the homeless.”

Given that I had barely laid eyes on Priscilla all week I had to wonder how she knew I’d been rotating my three available shirts, but I was too busy staring down at the clothes to labor the point. All brand names, naturally, and doubtlessly worth a month’s salary apiece.

“This is- I wouldn’t even have the space in my suitcase to take these back home.”

“Buy another suitcase.”

“Francis,” I said, incredulously, and to my surprise found myself teetering on the edge of a laugh. “What am I supposed to do with all of this?”

“Wear it,” Francis answered, and did not smile, though his head tilted in a way that suggested a smile. I laughed.

“Silks and velvets?”

“Couldn’t hurt you to try,” Francis said, swanning back into vicinity. “Unless California has finally outlawed style.”

“Fuck off,” I said, but I was thinking of all the suits he’d passed onto me that I still wore, and my first fascinated sightings of Francis wandering the campus like some time-travelling dandy, and I found myself quite touched.

I was not, however, so touched as to try any of the clothes on within sight of Francis. Instead I packed the store-folded clothes into my suitcase, tried not to look at the price tags, and failed to rent a car home.

Saturday morning, I was struggling through a paragraph when perky knocking startled me out of my focus. I spared a look for Francis’ room, where the door was just open enough to reveal a cavernously dark interior, then patted myself down and went for the door.

“Richard!” Priscilla exclaimed, as I swung the door open, in breathily happy tones like she hadn’t expected to see me despite knowing full well I was staying there. “How are you? I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“No, no,” I said, standing back to let her in. She didn’t move from her spot in the doorframe. “Sorry, I think Francis is asleep, if you wanted to…”

“Oh, dear,” Priscilla said, peering into the apartment. “I better come in, then.”

She came in. I closed the door. We stood there for half a second until I realized she expected me to fetch Francis.

“I’ll just…”

“Would you? Thanks awfully.”

I had not actually been inside Francis’ room yet. In the pitch-black he slept in I could only see the parts of the room illuminated through the door, slivers of the broader picture: a formidable wardrobe, chocolate in color, stood near me, a pair of slippers flung nearby; there was an imposing chaise straying far from the desk, where a silver typewriter lay discarded, and then the foot of the bed, littered with Persian throws, Francis invisible beneath the layers and the darkness.

I called out his name, received no response, and glanced behind me, stepping into the room and pulling the door half-shut.

“Francis, Priscilla is here.”

More silence; I resigned myself to waking him by force. As I passed the desk my eyes caught on the creamy white of the writing paper stacked neatly in the corner, and I realized with a sick thrill that I knew the texture. If I had tried the fountain pen I knew the ink would have emerged in the same dark blue that had summoned me there.

Recognition made me uneasy as I approached him. Henry had slept little and poorly; Camilla and Charles were light sleepers, but though Francis had grown insomniac when he slept he slept like the dead.

I shook him awake not entirely gently, uncomfortable to be touching him as he lay there unconscious. Francis was a monster when roused from sleep, so I was half bracing to be hit by a lamp, but instead he bolted upright in such an abrupt movement that I startled and hit the window, tugging the curtain along with me as I righted.

“It’s me, it’s me,” I said rapidly, because the light was hitting half of his face now and his expression was one of sheer unseeing terror. “Priscilla sent me.”

“What?” Francis stammered, eyes catching mine without recognition. When I made to repeat myself he blinked hard. “Christ! Richard?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, half-defensive. “Priscilla is here to see you, I didn’t know what to tell her.”

“Vapules,” Francis hissed, making an abortive movement towards his head before dropping his hand, eyes puffy with sleep. “What the hell does she want?”

“How am I supposed to know?” I asked, though I was more sympathetic now that I knew he hadn’t omitted to warn me on purpose. “She just said she was- actually, she didn’t say anything.”

“Will wonders never cease,” Francis said, flatly, and swung his legs out of bed. “She’s probably gone through your things by now to make sure we’re not fucking.”

The thought as much as the language alarmed me, and I remained rooted to the window as he stumbled past, my collar prickling at my throat.

“Why would she think that?”

“You have a certain air to you,” Francis replied blithely, swinging the door to his wardrobe open and peering at the endless collection of shirts hanging inside.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, moving to get a better look at his face and uncomfortably aware of Priscilla’s potential presence anywhere in the apartment.

I meant it in disbelief, though it must have come out defensively, because Francis paused to look at me with cool amusement, and I realized he’d been stringing me along.

“You’re a man that I’ve exchanged five words with. The bar is low nowadays.”

I tried not to look too relieved, though I was still discomfited at the idea of our relationship being misconstrued, and I felt Francis was enjoying my discomfort.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Entirely baseless,” Francis agreed, as he reached for a shirt, though there was a certain je ne sais quoi to the statement that questioned its veracity, and as I was loathe to be reminded of any youthful lapses in judgment I chose that moment to leave him be.

Priscilla was sitting on Francis’ couch with no sign of having left it, oddly poised; I was accustomed to seeing only fragments of the couch visible beneath his sprawl, and it seemed incongruously lavish when she was occupying a third of it, legs crossed at the ankle in a dated fashion.

“He’s coming,” I said, redundantly, and made for my desk, feeling as though I should add something in his defense. “He’s been tired since the hospital. It could be the painkillers.”

“Oh, yes,” Priscilla nodded, as though this was some great wisdom on my part, and then said nothing more. I hesitated, looking back at my papers, then bravely attempted a follow-up.

“It’s a normal reaction to the chemical imbalance, I think.”

“Francis said you studied medicine,” Priscilla noted, in complimentary tones, which surprised me for a second, then made me feel a brief burst of fondness for him. The lot of them had always considered my brief time in pre-med as a foreign, near-mystical accomplishment, deserving of reverence but irrelevant to our lives.

“I did, briefly. I switched to Greek before Hampden.”

“Oh, yes. Classics. Very interesting.”

How Henry would have disdained her, I thought, and gave up, returning to my writing until Francis emerged in head-to-toe black like a gothic widow and Priscilla swept him off to some urgent wedding endeavor she absolutely needed his input on, darling; she had tried to call ahead last night but no one had answered, and really she would have rescheduled but this venue was just perfect and there was such a waiting list to see it, he understood.

“It was so nice to see you, Richard,” was her greeting, Francis only sparing me a dead-eyed grimace before they were gone.

I wondered as they vanished what on earth their future home might look like. I had never set foot inside Priscilla’s apartment (shared with her lady friends, Francis informed me, with dark relish), but I imagined it to look like something out of a homeowner’s catalogue, white walls and square furniture and a lot of shelves stacked with blocky color pieces. By contrast it would have been hard to situate Francis’ in any time or place, except that it was to my eyes faintly Parisian and supremely old money, best encapsulated by his grand wardrobe. Juxtaposing the two styles was like trying to pair a nice Chardonnay with a New York street-vendor hot dog, or perhaps more aptly a gin & tonic with a pasta salad. I wanted to imagine them existing in a hideous clash of décor, Francis’ classical bric-a-brac overflowing on the tidy plastic shelves, but I couldn’t buy into the image. Most likely the illustrious apartment would be devoid of his casual maximalism.

Francis returned after lunch in a foul mood, slamming the door and muttering an unbroken string of insults in French, which was poor timing, as I needed to inform him that I’d successfully managed to find a car to drive back with the next day. Miraculously, when I bit the bullet and did so, he merely nodded absently, busy searching for his lighter.

“If you’re not flying you can at least fit the clothes in the trunk. Where is that damn thing? I swear she threw it away when she was in here this morning. You don’t have one on you, do you?”

I didn’t, but in the end he found a spare hidden within a sturdy copy of one of Pliny the Elder’s works, and sat there propped up against the bookshelf with a darkly satisfied look as he lit a cigarette.

“I daresay I shall have to hide all of my vices in Ancient Greek.”

Francis conceded to dining out, though not nearby, and we returned to a place we’d been to with Camilla. Francis’ hold on his utensils was strained and he ate little, but I was distracted by the unreality of being back there without her, gazing at the empty chair as though I might be able to conjure the lovely curve of her shoulder or catch the echo of her low voice just by looking hard enough. Somehow despite our individual preoccupations it was nice enough; I felt grounded by his presence, the restlessness of his hands. At various points I refocused on him long enough to watch him giving the other customers an unconscious once-over, and felt I saw him as they must have, eerie and aristocratic.

“You could come visit, sometime,” I found myself saying, though even as I spoke the words I felt mortified for having said them. Francis stared at me in astonishment.

“To California?”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” I muttered, pained, which did nothing to lessen his incredulity.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t. To be honest I don’t even know that you can. You look depressed.”

This was laughable coming from him, but didn’t annoy me as much as it could have, given how grotesque his audible concern was.

“I’m doing fine. The weather’s better over there.”

“I suppose you have less of a chance of freezing to death,” Francis said, considering, and this was so inconsiderate it made me huff out a laugh, sinking back into my chair and ordering another glass of wine.

I didn’t want to get very drunk, as I had a long drive back, but Francis shared none of my qualms. By the time we reached his apartment he was unsteady on his feet, and he wasted no time fixing himself another drink.

“I’m toasting to your departure. Dignitas amicorum pie zeses vivas.”

When he was drunk he turned to Latin often, as he had at Hampden- I recalled with stinging clarity the way he and Henry would switch between English and Latin throughout some pedantic argument, Charles amused and Camilla indulgent as Bunny complained and I struggled to follow. At the time I had thought little of the group’s individual friendships, too preoccupied by my own place within it, but in the years since I had often pondered the relationships between them. Henry and Francis had been remarkably distinct individuals, but they had been good friends- both had liked to argue for argument’s sake, and had often monopolized the conversation debating the finer points of anything from military instructions to French poetry with genuine interest. Despite appearances they even bore some similar traits- none of the others could match their cool condescension, nor their palpable concern for the doings of the group as a whole, both reliably in-the-know. How they had first become friends I nonetheless had no idea.

I should have expected Francis’ humor to turn sharply; he’d been too docile all afternoon. First he went morose, then he went mean, retreading the finer points of my split with Sophie.

“It’s nice that you still talk. How many years since she left? And you talk about her boyfriends? Very modern of you.”

Predictably, past a certain point, he turned abruptly regretful, eyes hollow as he stared my way.

“You’re not coming back, are you.”

“I am. For the wedding.”

“You never want to see me again.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t lie to me. You’re repulsed. Oh, God.”

“Francis, I’m not.”

“See, you are angry. Oh, won’t you stay, please? I’ll behave.”

“I’ll be back for the wedding,” I repeated, as he moaned and buried his head in his hands.

“The wedding! My funeral, you mean. You’ll recite poetry for me, won’t you? Like Henry. Don’t let them read some godawful Psalm.”

I dragged him to bed, which was quite a feat in the face of his fits of emotion, but as soon as I had him flat on his back he stilled and burrowed into his bedding, breaths shaky and eyes wide and unhappy as he stared at me.

“I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad at me.”

“It’s fine,” I said, exhausted and wanting to be gone. It was pouring outside. “Go to sleep.”

In the morning he was hungover and quiet, and we exchanged few words before I was off. The last I saw of him was his silhouette watching me from the window, long slender shadow with torchlight hair.

I drove back to California at a measured pace, the rain and endlessly shifting landscapes a convenient backdrop to my thoughts, which circled endlessly back to Camilla, Camilla on the platform with her eyes like pale clouds, Camilla alone with some old woman in her childhood home, living amongst ghosts. I missed her so much it made me want to cry, worsened by the gut-deep knowledge that our parting had been decisive. For years after Sophie- even during, which I sensed she had known- I had maintained hope, imagining an encounter just like the one we’d had- our paths crossing, my proposing- and it had been long enough that I had thought she might say yes. We would have made a life for ourselves, somewhere, anywhere, and been happy, eventually, painstakingly, for I was always happy when Camilla was with me, and would have endeavored to make her so too. But she loved Henry, and Henry was too present a ghost- now, then, always.

The certainty followed me in and out of motels, solidifying across the days. There was no miracle left for us- no final happy endings. We would see each other at the wedding, and one day her grandmother would die and she would live again, and we might see one another, but she would never be mine, to balm the pains of our reckless youth.

The sun shone brutally as I pulled up to my apartment, and that night I dreamt of Henry, impassive and dead and incisive, and awoke in a dead sweat, calling for Sophie, though it had been years since we’d shared a bed.

Little of note happened in the time between our brief reunion and the wedding, which was scheduled for two months away. I got the impression that what Francis referred to nebulously as ‘the cabal’ would have had it done within a week of his release if they could have, but Priscilla wanted a Spring wedding, and so a Spring wedding it was to be. I heard from him a handful of times across the weeks, and wrote him in return, but he was swamped with wedding preparations, and from the sounds of it could barely find the time to breathe unaccounted for.

It’s like some sick satirical play, he wrote, in one letter. If I weren’t in it myself I’d find it hysterical. As it is I am of a Keats-like disposition and half-hoping for a similar fate to put me six feet under before I am subjected to another petits fours tasting.

I heard nothing at all from Camilla.

In the meantime I focused on my dissertation, though I found it harder to stay on track than I had before the interruption. Dissecting the chaotic pessimism of the play kept pulling my thoughts back to the black camp of Francis’ impending wedding, and having seen the both of them had alerted me to some subconscious parallels between our story and the text that made me reread my entire draft with the sudden dread feeling of having exposed myself somehow. Rationally I knew that the subject matter was fairly par for the course for the genre, but the outlandish violence and vicious cynicism of the piece seemed to me suddenly obvious, the kind of thing Julian or Henry would have found transparent. I did not enjoy the editing process.

About a month before I was due to return to Boston, I was out in town searching for a bookstore when I quite literally ran into Judy Poovey, whom I nearly failed to recognize until she startled and looked me up and down.

“Richard Papen?”

“Judy?” I returned, half-unsure; somehow I had begun to assume I would recognize her from afar if ever I saw her on account of her usual lycra ensemble.

“Holy shit,” Judy said, and to my utter surprise gave me an enthusiastic hug, so genuine in its warmth that I found myself returning it.

We had lunch at a nearby restaurant Judy swore by, some Asian fusion place where one of the waitresses asked for her autograph as Judy beamed a mega-watt smile her way. She knew all about my life, somehow, where I worked and what I was doing, and was sorry to hear about that whole Sophie mess, though honestly she’d never thought the two of us would last anyhow.

“I heard you saw Francis Abernathy last month. Is it true he has AIDS? I heard from Ashley Greene- oh, Ashley, you know Ashley, the one with the hippy skirts and the loudmouth meth-head boyfriend, she’s with Cloke now- that he was in hospital, hush hush, and his fiancée wouldn’t say a word about why, so now Ashley’s convinced it’s AIDS even though I told her if it was AIDS the woman wouldn’t very well be wanting to marry him still, would she?”

“He doesn’t have AIDS,” I said, neutrally, and scrambled for an alternative. “He had a cancer scare.”

“Cancer? No shit? That’s awful,” said Judy sympathetically, stabbing at her sushi. “I always liked him the best out of your friends, after poor Bunny. Wasn’t as creepy as the twins or that Winters guy. No offence.”

In truth Judy had not liked Francis at all in our time at Hampden, mainly because he kept impatiently appearing in my room when she was trying to seduce me, but time or his brush with death had clearly mollified her.

“Still, I gotta tell you, I was pretty surprised when I heard he was getting married. I always got the vibe he wasn’t really of that persuasion, if you know what I’m saying.”

When I merely shrugged, offering no information, she pushed onwards.

“I guess you’re going to the wedding? That’ll be an event, no doubt- he’s about as loaded as she is. Weddings are a good time, mostly. I went to Frank’s last year and that was a spectacle- they had the Human League come play, and they were pretty good, but I missed half of their set because Tracy was having some nervous breakdown in the ladies’ because it’d been too long since she did coke, whatever, whole mess, ruined my Prada dress. You should’ve come! I guess you were too busy with your dissertation, Mr. Bigshot academic.”

This was said pityingly. I managed a nod as she set down her chopsticks.

“Anyways, what about you? You seeing anyone? It’s been a while since Sophie.”

“No one,” I said, and tried not to make it seem like an offer. “I’ve been busy with work.”

“Oh, sure,” she replied, sipping thoughtfully at her mango drink. “I get that. I was engaged for a while back there, but when this whole aerobics thing started working out he just went crazy. Calling me all the time, thought I was sleeping with every dancer on set, blah blah blah. I think he just felt emasculated. Disappointing, though.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I told her, and found myself meaning it. She smiled in response, and I thought with mild astonishment that Judy was actually quite beautiful, despite the overwhelming LA-ness of her, big hazel eyes and an open, well-proportioned face. It was no wonder she’d made it onto TV.

“Yeah, well. Love’s a bitch. Pity there was no wedding, though. I had this crazy nice dress picked out. I still haven’t returned it because I like looking at it too much. I was thinking I could cut it up and turn it into a number for the show somehow.”

“You still sew?”

She laughed. “God, no. Don’t have the time. But some things you just don’t forget, right? Like riding a bike, or whatever.”

For my part I was terminally incapable of forgetting what I should have, but I couldn’t tell her that, so I changed the subject. “How is the whole aerobics thing working out?”

“Don’t get me started,” Judy said, and then launched into a five minute tangent that was part-complaint and part-bragging, managing nonetheless to be mindlessly entertaining, of which I cannot recall a word.

As we gathered our things (Judy had insisted on covering the tab, and refused to hear any ‘macho bullshit’ that said otherwise) she paused to look at me quite seriously, hand stilled atop her monstrous purse.

“I hope you’re taking care of yourself, Richard. You look pretty strung out these days.”

I assured her I was fine, but she persisted, eyes still on mine: “I still think about it a lot, y’know. All that stuff with that study group of yours. What happened to Bunny Corcoran, and then that godawful business with Henry Winters at the end- my god, I mean. Shot you and everything! I always wonder how you’re getting on nowadays. When Ashley said about Francis I thought he’d offed himself or something.”

“I’m all right, really,” I said, my heart in my throat. “That was long ago.”

She gave me her card as we parted ways- flashy, laminated, oddly sympathetic- and made me promise to call sometime, which I did mostly sincerely despite knowing full well I wouldn’t. Then she was gone, her strong fruity perfume clinging to my clothes for the rest of the day, and I thought about all the unkind things my journal said about her and forgot entirely that I’d been on route to a bookstore.

Francis, when informed of this encounter, was not appropriately astonished by her appearance (you are both in California- I assumed you’d seen her around) though he was supremely irritated to learn that Ashley Greene (of whom I still had barely any recollection) was keeping tabs on him. For my part I felt somehow unsettled by it- not upset, but unmoored somehow, something about the very present reality of Judy a sharp contrast to my own doings. In college I’d found her brand of reality distinctly unappealing, meaningless in comparison to the heightened state of existence I lived in, but without my friends to orbit my devotion to the long dead felt a less noble pursuit, more like the withdrawn obsession of a man without connection to the real world. That was probably how she had seen me, throughout our lunch- reclusive, rootless, stuck on the familiar. I was not entirely sure this was incorrect.

For some reason I kept thinking about her saying: ‘Some things you just don’t forget, right?’, in her usual frank tones. A bland platitude, nothing meant by it, but it needled at me for days until I remembered some night at the twins’ place, after the Bacchanal when Camilla’s voice was still thrillingly raspy, Charles reciting Sappho, low and almost dream-like:

You will have memories

Because of what we did back then

When we were new at this

Yes, we did many things, then- all

Beautiful…

I was expected back in Boston three weeks before the wedding so I would be around for the confusingly numerous rehearsals and what Francis unhelpfully categorized as ‘best man duties’, but had insisted on returning to California at the end of the week and only flying out again the day before the actual wedding, because (as I explained to Francis) I could not possibly take three full weeks out of my schedule for the sake of a farce of a wedding that Francis himself took great pleasure in deriding, and besides that I had deadlines to meet in the second week, which he might have understood if he had ever finished a degree. In truth I could have fairly easily managed to cram my last-minute editing and had depressingly little other engagements during that period, but I could think of little I wanted less than to spend nearly a month embroiled in pre-wedding hysterics, Francis’ included, especially when Camilla was only due to attend the actual event. Since my travels were paid for this seemed the most convenient arrangement. He was relieved enough by my promise to attend rehearsals to allow it.

Boston in the spring was startlingly beautiful, soft sunlight and blossoming greenery rendering it unexpectedly picturesque after the grey austerity of winter, and I was almost in good spirits when I reached Francis’ apartment. I’d been greeted at the airport by a cab driver with my name on a sign, and he spent the whole drive cussing out every other taxi in our vicinity with a heavy, drawling Boston accent that shared almost no similarities with Francis’ own, much to my amusement.

The door to Francis’ apartment was ajar; as I stepped in I noticed around five people I had never laid eyes on before all loudly talking over each other, boxes piled this way and that and half of Francis’ things scattered around his living room. At the center of it all stood Francis, somehow paler still than I’d last seen him, bundled in his overcoat despite the pleasant weather, his gaze so unfeelingly empty it bordered on the comical. Somehow he sensed me entering, his head whipping around to situate the intruder, and then almost miraculously life returned to his gaze with such open relief that I half-forgave him whatever horrors the week would entail.

“Save me,” he said in Greek, and as I smiled sympathetically the others in the room turned on me with united curiosity. They were family, I realized, taking them in, cousins maybe, this one albino-pale, that one slender and hawkish, two of them with flaming red hair.

“Oh, Papen,” someone said, to collective understanding, and then I was accosted, hands shaken in a neglectful sort of way, assessing gazes and queries overwhelming. Francis, behind them, sat down on a box and poured himself a drink.

The first day went by rapidly. I was an efficient packer, moreso than Francis and definitely moreso than his cousins, who could not agree on the smallest of matters and begrudgingly deferred to my judgment as the lone outsider in the place, and the simple menial repetitiveness of the task was perversely relaxing to me, even as Francis flitted about like a silvery moth, protesting some decision or other. His cousins, despite their blatant snobbery and constant in-fighting, were not unpleasant company, and seemed to genuinely care for one another beneath the snide remarks, which made me like them better. They in turn seemed quite happy to meet me, though they knew little of me beyond who I was and that I’d fallen on my sword to take over best man duties.

One thing they were all in agreement over was their disdain for the Black Hole, which was the gentlest of the names they called her. I don’t know if they knew about Francis exactly, but given that they were all around our age I suspect they shared the same kind of unspoken assumption that had followed him around Hampden, and though they didn’t seem to know of his grandfather’s ultimatum they all saw the wedding as an obvious sham. I was surprised that, given all of this, not one of them appeared to be trying to dissuade Francis of going through with it. When I obliquely broached the subject with the youngest, Louis, he barked out a laugh.

“Christ, it’s not like they’ll have to see much of each other afterwards.”

The cousins dissipated around dinner, leaving Francis and I alone in a half-packed apartment. The kitchen being in the unpacked half, I almost expected him to cook, but he was on the phone before I knew it, ordering Italian.

“Whose bright idea was it to attempt a move two weeks before a wedding?” I asked, over pizza, sat perched on a carton box as Francis made a disparaging noise.

“It wasn’t by choice. Of course she’s all up in arms because I’ve left it too late, like she hasn’t been dragging me across town all day every day for the past month, threatening to put her bridesmaids in coral and whatever else-“

He was eating his pizza with a knife and fork, hands still gloved, and the sight was both reassuringly absurd and disquieting somehow. I felt as though I should force him to remove his gloves and check for some unsightly wound, despite knowing he had two of those already, and just where they sat.

“Are you both moving everything in now?” I queried, still curious as to their choice of décor. Francis quietened, set down his fork, shook his head.

“Oh, no. No, the apartment is furnished already. Part of the gift.”

“You’re throwing your things away?” I exclaimed, sounding as dismayed as I felt- he had priceless first editions in his bookshelves, a bust of Byron I was enamored with, the green couch- which made him relax enough to laugh at me, not unkindly.

“God, no. I’m storing them at my great-aunt’s apartment. Marlborough Street.”

“By the Public Garden,” I blurted, remembering. “She’s still alive?”

“She died five years ago,” Francis said, looking to the side. “She left me the place. Skipped my mother entirely, which was not entirely unexpected but quite the upheaval regardless.”

This raised the obvious question as to what he was doing in this apartment to begin with, and he fidgeted restlessly for a moment before glancing back my way, between aloof and uncomfortable.

“It’s a bit of a dump, to be honest. Crammed between neighbors, traffic like you wouldn’t believe- and it’s gloomy, top floor and musty wood, you know.”

I said nothing, though my skeptical silence got to him anyhow, and he got defensive, mouth pulling and brow furrowed as he avoided my gaze.

“I lived there with Kim. For a while. Scene of the crime, if you will.”

My face heated a little at the image, part sympathy, and I found myself unsure what to say, which made him smirk bitterly and turn the tables, now fixing me as I looked elsewhere.

“If there’s anything you want feel free to ask for it. I don’t know how you decorate your place but I’m sure you can find something to your tastes.”

Nearly everything was, of course, and nearly everything would have looked stupidly out of place in my barren apartment. My skin prickled; I resented his knowing tone, like he was making some kind of point. I knew the point: he had more money than I could ever dream of. Given what he was giving up in exchange for it, I did not find this enviable.

The phone rang. Francis, compulsively, had lifted it before I’d even looked towards it, bent sideways to press the receiver to his ear.

“Hello?” He paused, wary expression vanishing completely. “Oh, hello, ducks. How are you? Fine. No, don’t, it’s been revolting. Yes, so do I.”

It was Camilla, I knew, and stupidly wished I was sat nearer, to catch the tail-end of her words. Instead I stared raptly at his face for some hint of what she was saying, trying to decipher the way his brows pulled together. Bad news, I thought, and felt excessively queasy for it, though rationally I knew what she must be telling him: that she couldn’t make the wedding, for some reason, or at least might not be able to.

“Right,” Francis said, after a long pause, and quite instantaneously transformed into the picture of sensibility, crossing his legs and sliding into an upright position, voice supremely reasonable. “No, of course not. Oh, really, Camilla. It’s going to be perfectly ghastly, you’re hardly missing out.”

I registered the dismal news with a sinking feeling, but I was distracted by the mild, understanding way with which Francis was receiving the news, astonished by his placid tone.  He and Camilla were closer than I often bothered to remember, had always shared an easy understanding that translated to his treating her with more patience than he had with the rest of us- I was sure if I’d cancelled on him he would have teared me to shreds. Then again, I was prone to mischaracterizing Francis as more of a hysteric than he really was- quite possibly he would have dismissed my apologies with no more than cynical pragmatism.

Francis had moved on to offering medical advice, so-and-so remedy he swore by, which alarmed me for a second before he told Camilla to pass on his greetings to her grandmother, all inscrutably genuine concern.

“Poor thing. Tell her I still have that Woolf miniature she gave me. Oh, god, don’t remind me. All right. No, don’t bother, I’m telling you.”

He laughed, abrupt, teeth flashing, cradling the phone to him.

“Would you? You beast. She might keel over. We can split the register profits. Yes, you can. Well-“ He paused, turned as if remembering me. “Yes, he’s here. Il te fait les yeux doux. I’ll tell him. All right. Much love to Dorothea. Bises and all.”

She didn’t want to talk to me, I thought, childishly, as Francis leaned back to hang up the phone. Maybe this was all a cover- inventing an ailing grandmother to avoid seeing me again. Paranoid as I knew I was being, it was the sort of thing Camilla might easily have done, avoidant by nature and an excellent liar to boot.

“She’s not coming?” I asked, nonetheless, rather hopelessly. Francis cast me a half-pitying look.

“The old woman’s been hospitalized. She said she might make it to the wedding if things improve rapidly but I told her not to bother if her grandmother’s still so poorly. Hardly a joyous occasion.”

I was, unreasonably, angry with him for being so callous. If he’d thrown a fit Camilla would have tried harder to make it, for his sake if no one else’s.

“If you’re so hell-bent on going through with this thing you could stand to treat it like less of a joke.”

“And how do you expect me to act?” Francis retorted, piqued. “I’m doing everything that’s required of me. I suppose I could undergo a lobotomy and fall madly in love with her, if that’ll make it easier on you. Better men have tried and failed to set me right.”

Slightly abashed, I murmured a vague apology. Still uncommonly gracious, he didn’t press the issue, just rolled his eyes and settled back into the couch.

“I’m sorry too. I’d have liked her around, if only so you wouldn’t sulk.”

What to say of the rest of the week? Above all it reminded me of that hellish time we spent at the Corcorans’ place before the funeral, a sort of feverish insanity exacerbated by the incessant comings and goings of people who all seemed to know each other intimately, myself on the outskirts wishing to be anywhere else, a morbid sense of artifice at the heart of it. I had not wholly understood the gravity of what we had done until Bunny’s father had broken down into an alarmed Francis’ arms, and similarly it had not dawned upon me that Francis was really and truly marrying this woman until I had spent an ungodly afternoon somehow roped into helping her bridesmaids book a venue for her hen party. In the aftermath I frantically called Francis to demand if I was supposed to be planning him a stag do, though really what I wanted to ask was if he was honestly going to go through with it.

“Are you insane?” was his response, unfortunately well-suited to both of my queries. “Just smuggle me in some cigarettes.”

In truth I saw little of Francis alone throughout the days- he was incessantly being sought after this way and that, most often by Priscilla, who had taken the time to tell me how sorry she was to hear about ‘dear Camilla’ not making it in the end, and who I consequently liked less than ever. I had somehow ended up in a sort of field manager position where I was silently agreed to be the best point of liaison between the families and the caterers for undoubtedly offensive reasons, so I didn’t have much time to feel too sorry for myself, but I was intensely relieved in the evenings when it was just myself and Francis again, moody though he was.

Dress rehearsal was Thursday, the day before I returned to California, and it was then that I met the vast bulk of the Abernathys as well as Priscilla’s family, having until then only met those of Francis’ cousins willing to help him move. I was immediately set upon by Francis’ mother, who could have passed for her late thirties, in a somewhat alarmingly figure-hugging dress; she called me by name and kissed me effusively on both cheeks.

“It’s so good to see you, honey, aren’t you handsome?”

Incredibly, her hair was still that same redder than Titian shade, a sole point of similarity between her and her son; I was as always struck by the total absence of resemblance between them barring the fine line of her bones.

“You look well, Mrs Steyn.” Steyn was the name of her current husband, which I only knew from her Christmas card. She waved a laughing hand.

“Oh, darling, I’ve told you to call me Olivia or you’ll lose track.”

“Maybe someday, Mrs Steyn.”

“Where is that son of mine, anyhow? Oh, there- Francis, baby, come greet your mother! Gosh, he looks awfully tired, doesn’t he? I keep telling him I could book him a room at the resort if he needs to unwind before the wedding, but he’s so stubborn- there you are, lovey, Richard was just agreeing that you look awfully tired- and why are you so wrapped up?”

“There was a chill breeze this morning,” Francis said, deadpan, bending long-sufferingly to kiss her cheek. “Priscilla was asking if you’d come over so we could seat you.”

“Far be it from me to upset Priscilla,” his mother said, in suddenly sardonic tones, before looping her arm with mine. “Richard will walk with me, won’t you? I was so happy to hear you were best man. Such a shame those other boys can’t be here for the big day.”

To my horror, her voice had broken dramatically on the last word; Francis grimaced, intervening.

“Did you see the Barbours are here?”

Instantaneously her expression cleared; she pursed her lips and followed his gaze. “Oh, perfect. Don’t let them talk to you about boating, Richard. The whole family’s obsessive.”

“I hear Barbour Junior’s nearing engagement,” Francis said, dryly. “I hope she’s partial to the open seas.”

Rehearsals themselves went fine. I had little to do besides stand behind Francis as he recited his vows with the perfectly bland cadence of a radio advertisement for household appliances, and took the opportunity to scrutinize his family as they sat spread across the pews. Francis’ grandmother had passed, but his grandfather sat by his mother, and it was him my eyes strayed to most often. He looked as I had imagined him to look, tall and severe with the vague appearance of a bird of prey, hawkish aquiline features and a foreboding air. He had Francis’ nose, and, when I exchanged all of two words with him, revealed himself to have his expressive eyebrows, which did a complex dance of micro-expressions as we shook hands. He was patient with his daughter and gruff with Francis in a way that made it abruptly apparent to me that there was real affection between them, which made the way Francis flinched away from him all the sadder.

I think it was sinking in for Francis that he was going to be married in a week and spare’s time; though he remained, as always, collected around the public, there was a manic glint to his eyes that surfaced whenever I looked his way. To make matters worse, Priscilla was for some reason performing subtle torture the likes of which the Soviets would have applauded throughout the whole event, French-manicured nails perched neatly on his arm as she wondered aloud whether it mightn’t be nice if they drove a hired car to the venue instead of his old Mustang, because it’d be so inconvenient if it broke down, wouldn’t it, and you never knew with vintage cars.

Francis wore his easy, elegant courtesy like a well-fitted mask until the moment we got into the taxi, where he began near-spontaneously to hyperventilate.

“Jesus, Marie et Joseph. I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying. You’re having an episode.”

“I’m dying,” Francis said, breaths coming quick and superficial, his hands clawing at his cravat. “I can’t breathe. Oh, God. We need to go to the hospital.”

“We don’t need to go to the hospital,” I sternly told the cab driver, who was shamelessly eavesdropping and now looking alarmed. “You know how to deal with this. You just need to slow your breathing. Open your window a little.”

“I can’t, I can’t,” Francis gasped, bending double, and so I cursed and reached over him to roll his window down, breeze whipping his hair wildly as he clutched at his collar. “Oh, God.”

The drive wasn’t long, twenty minutes or so, but this worked against me- his anxiety spiked at intervals, so that by the end of it he was in a similar state that he’d been in at the start, his head pressed against the seat in front of him, his shoulders shaking. By this point I was both worried and losing my patience, which loosened my lips long enough to start us on an unfortunate tangent.

“Look, you’re not dying, you’re having a nervous breakdown because you’ve just sat through a wedding rehearsal to the woman you know damn well you shouldn’t be marrying.”

“Are you serious?” Francis demanded, outraged, between shuddering breaths. “Are you seriously doing this right now, Richard? What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? You’re freaking out in the back of a taxi cab because you hate your future wife!”

We had arrived; Francis furiously shoved an excessive amount of bills through to the driver before half-falling out of the car on unsteady legs.

“Freaking out,” (said in his violent imitation of my increasingly defined West Coast drawl) “You think I’m freaking out? Do you really, like, totally think so?”

“Yes, I do,” I said coolly, and took the opportunity to shove him inside, which he hadn’t expected, falling onto the banister to right himself. It was the first time I’d actually touched him since I’d arrived, and I suspected also in years; through the layers he was shockingly gaunt, nearly anorexic in build. Somehow this above all else finally drove me over the edge.

“This is insane. You can’t go through with it.”

“Oh, stop,” Francis snapped, turning for the stairs, but I wasn’t finished; weeks if not months’ worth of bitten-back protests were fighting for purchase inside my chest.

“It’s completely unhinged. She won’t let you smoke, for chrissakes- she’s going to make you lose the Mustang, you’re not even moving your things in with her-“

“Yes, thank you, Richard Papen, I hadn’t noticed-“

“And all because you’re, what, too lazy to hold down a job-“

“Not all of us were born with a wrench between our hands-“

“What good is money going to do you when your wife holds the purse-strings?” I exclaimed, as he stalked white-faced into the apartment. “She’ll let you buy a shrug every five years, is that it? Pay you extra if you share her bed once or twice?”

“Shut up,” Francis hissed, wheeling on me, “You don’t get to come sermon me-“

He was furious, gone a blotchy pink, but I didn’t relent, beyond aggravated by his obstinate cowardice.

“What did you expect me to do? Congratulate you? I’m ashamed of you!”

He reeled as though I’d struck him, his eyes narrowing with vicious intent, but a loud banging sound from somewhere in the building made us both jump, my abdomen aching distantly in false remembrance as Francis clutched the sofa, voice panicked.

“What was that?”

“A door slamming,” I said, after a beat, with somewhat less certainty than I’d have liked. He was wild-eyed when I glanced back, and I was sure he was envisioning just what I had, for half a second, Charles appearing on some mad vengeance quest gun in hand.

Francis’ gun, at that. I tended to forget this detail.

“God,” Francis said, heavily, and sank into the sofa. I was no less angry at him now that I’d calmed down, the tension in the room simmering in the silence; the sight of him collapsed into the velvet only made me more aggravated, caricature of a spoilt rich man that he seemed sitting there.

He would go through with this, I realized, with disgust. For all of his theatrics he would prefer a miserable life in the lap of luxury to the perceived degradation of a life amongst the commoners.

If he did, I doubted whether I could ever stomach the sight of him again.

The sun, near setting, was casting an unnatural, almost bloody haze throughout the room, strawberry-gold reflecting in broken fractals over what little furniture remained standing. Francis looked at me between his fine, bony fingers, and with the light hitting him just so his right eye turned abruptly and abnormally clear, the pale translucent green of some lost Egyptian alabaster; it was this eye which fixed me with a queer coolness that I hadn’t seen from him in quite some time.

“It must pain you terribly that I’m so mundane at my worst.”

I found myself briefly wrong-footed, my anger put on hold in the face of my wary confusion. All at once I had recognized the look he was giving me as the sibling of the gaze that had assessed me upon our earliest meetings, back in the days before I’d even known he didn’t need the pince-nez he sat peering downwards at me through.

“Poor Richard,” Francis continued, an almost humorous slant to his brittle tone. “Rotten luck to be stuck with me and my tremendously banal self-immolation when you would’ve so preferred another funeral. I assure you I’m just as disappointed as you are.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I managed, equal parts taken aback and appalled by his sudden, strange cruelty. Francis only rested his head more heavily in his hands, so I found myself confronted instead with the shadowed half of his face, expression lax with distant self-satisfaction. Gone were the earlier nerves; even his hands were still.

“Oh, come off it. You liked us all best at our most mythical. I don’t think you even begrudged Henry his machinations until you realized he had no perfect masterplan.”

“Don’t,” I snapped, indignation throbbing furiously under my ribs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

My final confrontation with Henry as he sat coolly tending to his flowers had sprung painfully to mind, my stomach in knots now as it had been then, remembering half-filtered my stinging, disbelieving betrayal, the persisting hope that at the last instant there would be some kind of explanation that did not confirm all of my worst suspicions.

“Charles was a lost cause, of course,” Francis said, consideringly, eyes flicking to the window. “Vices are all well and good until they get embarrassing. Now, Camilla- there’s a consummate professional. Never let the cracks show, unless you count her tragic waif act by the end.”

Shock was starting to give way to real wrath; I found my fists clenched.

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

There was an ugly sort of satisfaction in his gaze when it slid back to me, as though he knew full well how far he was pushing me. For all my disillusionment the events of that year still held an unreal, fantastical aura in my mind that made me recollect even the darkest of them with wistful care, like an archeologist handling some fragile instrument of ancient suffering. After Henry I had endured the collective crass speculation of my classmates alone, but never had any of my surviving study group broached the topic with such flippant irreverence. I found him hateful, a weak pale thing lashing out at the only person in the world who still gave him the time of the day.

“You never did know her very well. I suppose that’s why you asked her to marry you.”

I have never hit anyone save in self-defense, but it was an effort to keep my hands clenched by my sides; I had stepped forwards before I caught myself and stilled. Until then I hadn’t even known he knew; the thought of her telling him sickened me.

“I love Camilla.”

“And yet here you are,” Francis said, abruptly morose, averting his eyes. “Perfectly loveless observer of my daily agonies.”

Unthinkingly I stepped away, turning my back to him as I swallowed, my eyes fixed unseeingly on the skyline. Now that he’d made his point I didn’t want to look at him.

The whole thing reminded me unsettlingly of the time I’d questioned him about the twins, my startled realization that he was just as observant as I was and indubitably more self-aware, if in an infuriatingly passive manner. There was nothing I could exactly dispute in his accusations, though I burned to do so. It was true that Francis was the person I least deified of the group, ever since Bunny’s murder- even Charles held some allure as a fallen angel of sorts, his descent into obscurity incomprehensible to me. Equally true was the observation that he was now as he had been then my closest acquaintance amongst all of them.

What this said about me I didn’t want to think about. So my romanticizing had persisted even after I’d seen the study group crash and burn; this I could accept, some scornful part of my mind placing the blame squarely on Francis’ shoulders for being ultimately unremarkable. Beneath this awareness, however, lay a more troubling insinuation, which I refused to accept. I loved Camilla, it felt to me, wholly and entirely, not because of her half-present starlit mystique but because of the real woman that lay beneath it. I could not stomach the accusation that this real woman, whatever she was, was unknown to me still, even as I remembered the way she’d looked at me that last night by the river. It’s not enough.

I had been rooted to the spot; I turned now to find Francis staring thoughtlessly at the wall behind my head. It bewildered me that he’d chosen now of all times to launch this attack on me unprompted. Francis was often spiteful, and even in better days prone to a sort of charming cruelty, but he was rarely so pointed in his offences, these days limited to lone barbs that stung without breaking skin, old defensive jabs that Bunny might’ve made.

“What’s the matter with you?” I heard myself ask, immediately regretting it for how nakedly upset it sounded. He barely looked at me, shoulders twitching around a sigh.

“What’s not. Oh, who knows. Maybe I thought it might make you feel better if I was a little heinous.”

“What?” I asked, automatic, though I could wager a guess, if only from the previous subject of discussion. I was at a loss for what to say. I couldn’t protest that I hadn’t liked them all best at their most superior- he wouldn’t have believed me even if I had, and I was uncomfortably conscious of the many times I had found Francis most insufferable when he was at his most inarguably human.

“Maybe I thought it’d make me feel better,” Francis offered, around a self-indulgent shrug. “There’s no pleasure in one of us being so perennially superior all the time.”

It felt suddenly embarrassing to still be poised for a fight; I wavered with indecision for a second before sitting heavily atop the box furthest from him. The worst part of his whole campaign was that it had worked; I had completely forgotten the wedding, entirely disquieted by his accusations. Maybe because he was too self-absorbed to bother, or maybe because he was too listless to care, Francis didn’t often bother to indicate how well he understood me; I felt uncomfortably seen, raw and unhappy about it, even as some conflicting part of me preened under the attention.

“I love Camilla,” I said, redundantly, because I didn’t want him to take my silence for admission. “You wouldn’t understand.”

He didn’t rise to the bait as much as I’d hoped. “Because I’m incapable of it?”

“I didn’t say that. You loved Charles once.”

This made him face me, though unblinkingly. “And that was the same?”

He didn’t love you either, I could have said, but this he knew as well as I did, and he had not said the same of Camilla in my regard, so I didn’t.

“No. If it was you wouldn’t be marrying a woman you loathe because you’re too much of a coward not to.”

“I understood him,” Francis said, gaze suddenly heavy. “If you understood her you’d be resigned to it too.”

I was angry again, in part because I was tired of his rubbing salt in the wound and in part for the same reason that we’d started arguing in the first place.

“Resigned to it? You’re not resigned to that- you’re resigned to everything miserable and pathetic you could possibly wallow in for the rest of your days.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Charles has a life,” I protested, bitter. “A lurid joke of a life, but he has one. Camilla is doing something with hers. I’ve got my work.“

“Oh, your work,” Francis snorted, humorlessly. “A real study in moving on.”

I ignored the jab, unwilling to be sidetracked. “I’m free to have a life. You’re choosing to throw that away.”

“Don’t start again,” Francis said, pinching his brow exhaustedly. “What life? Manning a till at the nearest gas station? I have no interest in freedom. I’d die within a week.”

“You have connections,” I snapped, exasperated with his passivity. “If you cared you could do whatever you liked.”

He stared at me with bleak disinterest. “But I don’t. I don’t know why you refuse to accept that.”

Someone has to, I thought, though really no one did. It wasn’t as though I was in the habit of thinking Francis better than he was, as he had so tartly reminded me himself minutes prior. There was something about this particular failing that genuinely upset me, though I couldn’t have said why. Even with his lack of a degree and his poor work ethic I knew that his name and status would open doors out of my reach if he bothered to look for them. His acting as though the life of the average American was some unthinkable horror, or that it was so entirely beneath him just because it involved some effort on his part, was supremely aggravating in consequence. To add insult to injury, his self-portrayal as some helpless aristocrat wasn’t even accurate- though Francis had been lazy even in college he’d never submitted an assignment late or half-assed the way Bunny had. He was wholly capable of working.

“Because it’s bullshit,” I said, collecting myself. “Henry killed himself so we wouldn’t spend our lives in jail, and you’re sitting here making one for yourself.”

This was harsher than I’d fully intended; Francis’ expression turned stricken before he screwed his eyes shut and rubbed at his face.

“He can’t have expected much better from me.”

“It’s not like you’re incapable, for God’s sake-”

“Richard,” Francis interrupted heavily, with a hint of his habitual anxiety finally creeping through his impassiveness. “I am a lost cause. Please stop making this harder for the both of us.”

This, finally, was a familiar refrain, and on another night I would probably have given up and left, found myself the recipient of a barrage of apologetic voicemails once I returned to my room. On this occasion, having just been verbally dissected by the very person now asking for a ceasefire, I couldn’t bear the return to routine. If Francis was right that I knew him for what he was- if Francis in turn knew me so well- then why couldn’t he grasp that I would never accept the fatalistic act he seemed to be performing for his sole enjoyment? Didn’t he know what was at stake for me?

“I won’t accept that.”

“And why not?”

“Because if you’re a lost cause, then there’s no point!“ I stopped myself, painfully self-aware and willing the same discomfort upon him: “You’re the only one who could still-“

Live, I wanted to say, and I realized it was true. Henry and Bunny, Julian and Charles, Camilla by choice- they were lost to me. Francis was all I had left, the only one of them whose life and mine still ran adjacent, and though he treated the whole ordeal like an inevitable joke, I was convinced the marriage would kill him, if not physically then in every way that counted. If I lost Francis I would be alone, and for as much as I had tried to pretend I had a life beyond them, beyond then, the idea of severing even the last frayed threads between us filled me with deep despair. Even in the years we hadn’t been in close contact I’d been able to hang onto some vague idea of how they were all getting on, and the reality I’d been confronted with upon receiving his letter had only just begun to sink in. There was nothing left to me of that time beyond my memories and a man determined to surgically destroy himself. The realization was soul-deadening.

I glanced upwards: Francis was looking at me, his expression hard to read, almost speculative.

“So you need me better.”

The way he said it made it sound so juvenile I almost denied it outright, but somehow the phrase reminded me of something Henry had said in the aftermath of my winter fiasco, one night as I stumbled over my thanks, the blank glint of his glasses and the faintly surprised subtext of his voice. You needed me: factual, dismissive, not entirely devoid of warmth.

“Yes,” I said, half a decade too late, answering a ghost. Francis’ expression went wistful.

“And that’s meant to be enough.”

Camilla’s detached regret drifted through my mind; I felt on the verge of hysteria. “Yes.”

When he only turned a shade more mournful I sat forward and gripped his arm until it must’ve hurt, forcing his gaze upwards.

“Francis, I’ve put up with your neuroses for as long as we’ve known each other. I’ve driven you to hospitals and specialists more times than I can count. I have sat through barrages of insults and apologies time and time again. You owe me. If you go through with this I swear to God I’ll never come running to the rescue again.”

It hung in the air for a long, unbroken moment, and in that instant I knew we were thinking the same thing: easy bluff to call.

Francis, though, said nothing, and I was abruptly sick of him; I stood, shrugged on my coat, and was out of the door before he had so much as called after me. We did not see each other again before my return flight.

On the plane ride back I thought of Francis’ farewell letter, and his eternal affection for Rimbaud, Rimbaud whom I’d always assumed died young and tragic, who had in fact almost made it to forty by virtue of a spectacular spiritual suicide midway through his life. Rimbaud, whom I’d known not a word of until lazy days out on the lake with Francis himself, reciting for Charles and Camilla’s amusement, mine, Henry’s, his own. A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes. Francis’ easy, snobbish French, tailor-made. Cheerfully, Francis, at his happiest when he was performing for a captive audience.

I wondered, staring at the clouds and feeling like I could cry, if I was doomed to leave each of them behind on the foulest note imaginable, and if Francis was to join my parade of ghosts, remembered most fondly only once I was certain never to see him again.

I found several messages awaiting me on the answering machine, though none from Francis. One, the most recent, was from a number I didn’t recognize, but before I could listen to it the phone rang anew. I picked up; no one answered.

“Hello?”

Silence. I half expected someone to shout ‘boo!’ or a put-upon accent to threaten me for money, but there was no sound on the other side, not even faint breathing. I waited a second longer to no avail; the voicemail the number had left was equally soundless. I felt keenly aware of my empty apartment as I stared at the receiver.

I entertained the idea of calling Sophie, but I knew as soon as I thought of it that I didn’t want to talk to her about Francis or Camilla. She had been probably more patient than I deserved across the years, out of sympathy for the deaths that had devastated my friend circle, but she had always sought honesty from me that I was wholly incapable of providing. I think she thought I was emotionally stunted, which perhaps I was, but the truth of it was that I knew very well I could never tell her even half of the things that haunted me, and as a result never told her anything at all.

There was no one to call, I concluded. The one person I really wanted to talk to was Camilla, and not simply because I always did. We hadn’t spoken about the wedding in the days we’d been together, all of us unwilling to sour the mood, but I was desperate to know what she thought about it. I was convinced she would virulently dislike Priscilla, but I was painfully aware that in no way guaranteed that she would take my side of the argument. I was rarely sure of what position Camilla would defend in a dispute. More often than not she chose to remove herself from conflicts rather than engage.

I had no such doubts when it came to Henry, who would probably have refused to attend the wedding on principle; I found myself wondering what he would have done in my place. Undoubtedly Francis would have listened to Henry, if he’d lost his temper at him. Then again, if Henry had been alive, Francis would never have gotten to this point to begin with.

I thought of Charles and faltered. Maybe, maybe. Henry’s motivations were as inscrutable to me now as they had been then.

My mind returned to Francis’ accusations, all the more cruel for the factual way he’d stated them. Even alone I felt the need to defend myself, protest that I had liked Bunny flaws and all, that it was not the broken pedestal but the dangerous spiraling that had turned me off Charles, that Francis could not expect me to prefer him to people who had not made their problems my own, but no sooner would the thoughts occur to me that I could hear the rebuttals follow suit. I had not liked Bunny well enough not to kill him. Charles had been no more of a danger to me than Henry. And, most damningly, I had certainly jumped at the opportunity to help a group of murderers make their problems my own.

The Revenger’s Tragedy had taken to tormenting me; as I searched Vindici’s final soliloquy for a particular quote I was arrested entirely.

Is there one enemy left alive amongst those?

’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes.

For the first time in a while, I wondered if Sophie still knew anyone in the drug business.

For the next week I did nothing but write and edit, almost feverishly, at times convinced I was producing ground-breaking analysis and at times sure I was raving like a madman without rhyme or reason. The date of Francis’ wedding crept closer without my hearing anything from either him or Camilla, which I was unhappily aware of, since I had not yet managed to decide whether I would go or not.

As a result of my manic period of concentration I found myself submitting my dissertation a day early, to my chagrin, since it left me with an entire weekend to debate my attendance. In lieu of doing so I went out into the city, walking up and down the lanes of towering palm trees and watching the passersby. I invented lives for them: a drug addiction for the twitchy suit, a broken heart for the aimless skater boy, a string of robberies for the cold-eyed woman in furs despite the heat. They came and went in instants, leaving me to my fictions, and I wondered what they saw when their eyes glanced off me: a twenty-eight-year-old roaming the streets alone in Francis’ old Sulka blazer, looking more put-together than I felt, passing for younger than my age if they disregarded what Sophie had affectionately called my ‘old man’s eyes’.

My plane ticket was still booked. I didn’t pack my bag until the morning of my flight, half self-sabotage, but I made the flight with time to spare, and sat regretting my decision for the entire ride. Nothing but a sense of grim obligation had motivated my going- I didn’t especially want to see Francis, and I definitively did not want to attend the wedding, but I felt compelled to show up for him if only to prove my point. I would be there for the ceremony, and I would fulfil my role dutifully, and then I would never see him again. Nauseous as the thought made me, I was more worried that he’d somehow manage to talk me into feeling sorry for him again. Pathos in Greek does not mean what pathetic does in English.

I went straight to the hotel when the plane touched down. The wedding was not until the next day, and I had no intention of socializing with anyone until then, least of all the groom. At a loss for anything better to do and unwilling to risk running into any of the other guests in the hotel or whereabouts, I put on the television and watched a terrible procedural drama, the kind of thing I always watched in hotels and then regretted watching because I couldn’t stop thinking about what they got wrong.

I must have fallen asleep at some point, though I hadn’t thought myself tired and I was not in the habit of sleeping in the day unless sedated or sick, because it was late afternoon when the hotel phone ringing startled me out of bed.

“Richard?”

It was Camilla. I was instantly awake, my breath caught in my lungs.

“Camilla?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you for fifteen minutes,” Camilla said, low and tense. “Where’s Francis?”

“I don’t know,” I said, still reeling from the sound of her voice. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Charles called me,” Camilla announced, a punch to the gut, a waver to her even tone. “Someone transferred an ungodly amount of money into his bank account this morning. I called my bank and they confirmed the same. He’s not answering his phone.”

“Fuck,” I said, head pounding violently. “Did you try-“

“She hasn’t seen him all day.”

“Fuck,” I repeated, hastily pulling my shoes on and fumbling for my wallet. “Okay. I’ll go check his place.”

“Call me,” Camilla answered, simply, little click following her words, and then I was rushing out of my room and down the stairs, diving into the first taxi and reciting Francis’ address in one impelling breath.

My driver drove like a madman, sensing my urgency. All the while I clutched the passenger handle white-knuckled, running through odds, thinking stupidly that if he’d gone for the balcony after all he might at least have survived the fall, praying he hadn’t done it with a gun. I was out of the taxi before it had even fully stopped moving, shoving money at the driver thoughtlessly as I sprinted up the stairs, importunely voiceless until I found myself facing his door, left hanging carelessly ajar. Then I found my tongue, winded as I was.

“Francis?”

His apartment was empty, scrubbed clean; there was nothing inside, nor any sign of life. The balcony door was closed. My first insensible thought was relief to not have found him hanging poignantly from the living-room chandelier.

I checked the bathroom, but it was empty too, my reflection wild-eyed, so I doubled back to the guest room, then finally Francis’ room, bright and empty, the curtains gone. The smaller wardrobe had been left behind, and it was as I stared despairingly at its beautiful varnished wooden door that I registered the slim bony ankle protruding from it.

I wrenched the door open: Francis was sprawled horizontally across the floor of the wardrobe in his wedding suit, back propped up against one side and head lolling bonelessly forwards. There was an empty bottle of whiskey by his feet and a bottle of pills between his legs.

The latter was closed.

I folded to my knees without much conscious thought, heart hammering so violently with surplus adrenaline that I might have erroneously suspected a stroke. He twitched my way, eyes hollow and expression impassive.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What’s going on?”

Francis closed his eyes and let his head hit the wardrobe, two fingers closing possessively around the pills.

“I’m not getting married.”

I didn’t know how to react; I wanted him to give me the pills. He reeked of alcohol.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve not decided,” Francis slurred, eyes flickering open to stare ahead. “If I can stomach it.”

“The wedding?”

He shook his head impatiently, the excessive movement making him sway. “No, I told you. I told- him. I’m not getting married.”

“Then what?”

“Everything after,” Francis mumbled, fingers twitching around the bottle’s lid. “La chute.”

“God, Francis. Suicide’s hardly the easy way out.”

“I can’t do it,” Francis said, almost pleading, looking my way now. “I really can’t. I know you think I’m lying but I’m not.”

“Look,” I said, calming myself, going reasonable. “Look, you’ve got things set up, don’t you? You have some money of your own- Camilla will pay you back, and Charles- and you have the apartment, and your things are there, and you have the Mustang-“

“Doesn’t matter,” Francis groaned, making a sudden effort to pry open the bottle; I wrenched it from him easily, his movements uncoordinated, and his breathing sped up. “I can’t, they all hate me, the whole of Boston’ll know by tomorrow, I can’t stay here and make a spectacle of myself-“

“Then don’t- go to Paris, or London-“

“On whose money?”

“Come stay with me then,” I blurted, with immediate regret, the offer as inevitable as it was foolish. “Lay low for a while. You’ll figure something out.”

“In California?” Francis said, in the same way that he’d once said ‘no, not that bad’ upon Henry’s suggestion of their facing life in prison. I could have laughed at him.

“Just temporarily.”

He didn’t budge; I resisted the urge to scrub at my face.

“It’s not worse than death. We can- look, we could take your car, drive down, it’ll be fun.”

And Francis, against all expectations, laughed, cynical and delirious.

“All right.”

So I dragged him out of his wardrobe, and out of his apartment, and we went to find the Mustang, which I drove to the hotel while Francis lay flat on the backseat convinced an ambush was awaiting us there. I left him there as I ran up to my room to collect my things. Camilla picked up instantly.

“He’s fine,” I said, which was untrue. “He’s not getting married.” Which wasn’t.

“I see,” Camilla said, almost unsurprised, and wished me luck.

“We could go get some of your things,” I told Francis, when I returned to the car, but he wouldn’t hear a word of it, fancying himself a fugitive, and so instead I told him to go to sleep and stop being ridiculous and drove us out of Boston in a surreal state of calm, the Mustang’s steering wheel familiar beneath my hands and Francis tossing and turning in the backseat.

The reality of the situation hit me once the sun set. Francis had finally fallen asleep at some point, and my eyes were starting to ache, because I’d been driving for several hours in dead silence with the same kind of focus I remember seeing on Henry’s face as we spun in the muddy forest floor.

He really wasn’t going to marry her. I was smuggling a runaway groom across state lines. And I was taking him to my place- my place, on the West Coast, while he was suicidal and in shock and ultimately determined not to look after himself. Jesus. I wasn’t entirely sure we would survive the five-day drive, let alone some indeterminate amount of time living on my wages in close proximity.

I had done this, I thought, with a dawning sense of realization. I had no idea why Francis had finally chosen not to go through with it, but I knew our argument had pushed him to it. He was my responsibility from now on; unfair though it was, it was up to me if he sunk or swam. This had not occurred to me before, and I could feel myself teetering on the edge of delirium.

I had been driving for four hours and some by then; we had passed New York, and we needed to stop somewhere for the night. I imagined telling Francis we were sleeping in a motel in New Jersey for his first night as a free man, then drove us all the way into Philadelphia in an increasingly manic state.

He must have been awake for some time without speaking, because he sat up as soon as I pulled into the Nazareth Motel, feeling as weary as the impoverished parents-to-be who had once been turned out by its namesake. He was still drunk, and I don’t know how conscious he was of what was happening, because he said nothing as I checked us in and guided him to the squat gray building we were staying in.

The rooms were nondescript, beige and poorly decorated and off-putting. I locked the door behind us and immediately collapsed into one of the dingy beds, suddenly so exhausted I could barely see straight. I wanted to take care of things, faint thoughts of dinner or a shower flickering in my mind’s eye, but I felt unable to raise my head from the scratchy pillow, and so only just about managed to locate Francis where he stood unmoving by the foot of his bed, my voice raspy and my Plano accent pronounced.

“Please don’t kill yourself while I’m asleep.”

I didn’t catch his response.

I slept fitfully, and when I awoke early the next morning to sunlight hitting my face through the cheap curtains I was completely at a loss as to my whereabouts, for a moment thinking myself returned to my parents’ living room. My memories returned slowly: motel, suitcase, wedding, Francis. I found him sat at the foot of the bed staring at the wall, still in his crumpled suit, gaunt and eerie in the half-shadows. He didn’t appear to have slept, but his hair was wet.

“Shower’s free,” he said, without looking at me. I was relieved enough to hear him talking that I complied on instinct, fitting somewhat difficultly into the shower and imagining against my will what he must have thought of it.

I felt better once I’d brushed my teeth and changed my shirt, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to offer him either my toothpaste or a change of clothes, the silence suffocating as I packed my bag. Stress and the complete inability to predict his mood were making me irritatingly nervous; I cleared my throat several times with the intention of talking without managing to do so.

“Would you like breakfast?” I finally managed, pinching my wrist, on the fifth attempt. I was rewarded with a vague, dismissive shake of the head.

“No.”

I was hungry, but not hungry enough to endure a motel breakfast in dead silence. I checked us out and filled up the Mustang. Francis took the backseat, looking pale and ill. I remembered us all arguing over hangover remedies, his stubborn insistence on the superiority of his methods, and my lungs stung.

We drove in silence again, because I felt I couldn’t risk the radio, but eventually I got a grip and made myself look at him in the mirror, clearing my throat again.

“So, the money.”

I wasn’t sure I’d get a response, but it came, listlessly.

“Trust. Dividends. Not a life’s worth of savings.”

“From the sounds of it it should last you,” I said, ignoring his tone. I was determined to be practical about it, force him into pragmatism and away from theatrics. “We’ll set you up an account once we get to the city, get Camilla’s half to start with.”

“Camilla’s half,” Francis repeated, slowly, and frowned unwillingly my way. “It’s not- I split it between the three of you.”

The way he was looking at me made me feel foolish for a variety of reasons; I got the idea he thought I’d accounted for myself and Camilla and forgotten Charles, which made my actual assumption somehow more embarrassing.

“We’ll each transfer our thirds, then.”

“Can’t do it all at once,” Francis mumbled, eyes flickering back to the road. “I had to do it in sequence. Took a while to go through. I suppose they had to verify the payment.”

I couldn’t imagine when and how he’d found the time to organize the transfers. It was an intelligent move, ensuring his family had no way of accessing the funds- he’d planned this carefully, which made me want to ask him what his actual intent had been: escape route or testamentary gift? I wasn’t sure he knew himself. He’d been halfway to suicide when I’d found him, but he hadn’t been surprised to see me.

“In any event you’ll have that money back,” I said, though privately I was not so sure about Charles’ portion. “And then you have the apartment.”

“I’m not living there.”

“I didn’t mean now.”

“I’m not living there.”

“Then you can sell it and live wherever you like.” I could only imagine the price it would fetch- Marlborough Street, of all places.

“A mansion in Vegas,” Francis said, peevishly. The sarcasm was more personality than he’d displayed since we’d left Boston, so I let it slide.

I had no idea how much money he’d actually dropped into my account, only Camilla’s assessment of ‘an ungodly amount’, which probably meant exorbitant to me and a few years’ pocket money for Francis. Still, knowing that there was this safety net in place, and secure accommodation, made me think there was no need for this all to end in catastrophe- if it were me, I could probably have retired there and then. The problem was Francis himself. He’d need to find a job- any job, something to do, just so he didn’t blow all of his money in a depressive pique and then starve to death in some high-rise in New York.

I wondered just how long I was budgeting for- if the old man died, which he surely had to at some point, there would be an inheritance involved, and though Francis had made it clear that he would be cut from the will his mother wouldn’t be. Whether his grandfather was the type of man who would draft his will to ensure that not a penny of his money reached Francis after his death I didn’t know.

We drove four hours, then stopped for lunch not far from Pittsburgh. The weather was nice, which I hadn’t noticed until then, the sun shining and the fields a lazy sort of pale green, tall grass swaying gently around my legs as I carried food to the picnic table where Francis sat, hair fire-red in the soft warmth of the sunlight, the rest of him washed out by comparison. I offered him a sandwich that he didn’t touch, then passed him a cigarette. He reacted as though manna had started falling from the sky, inhaling sharply and rousing from his slump long enough for me to light it for him, then fell back, closed his eyes like it hurt to do so, and took a long, deep drag from the cigarette, smoke curling from his lips with painful relief.

“God,” he croaked, eyes still shut, and repeated the motion. “Thanks, Dickie.”

No one had called me Dickie since Bunny. I ate both of our sandwiches.

We crossed into Ohio. I was tired from the long drives, but despite rationally having no reason to rush to get back I was not particularly in the mood to spend a week getting home like I had two months prior. Francis’ moodswings were unpredictable; I wanted him out of moving vehicles and macabre motels as soon as possible.

“Where are we stopping?” Francis asked, at some point, as we passed Columbus. I glanced back at him in the mirror.

“I thought I’d try to get to Indiana before we stopped. It’s only another hour or so.”

“Indiana,” Francis repeated, and then fell silent again.

Because it was earlier than it had been the previous night, I drove around a little to find a better motel than the former one, settling on a retro place with one of those glowing arrows pointing downwards that read VACANCY in big red letters. Francis was in less of a daze than he had been the previous day, and this made his  very presence seem somehow obscene as he trailed me into the linoleum-charged reception, brown velvet suit and perfectly tailored shoes screaming otherness as the girl behind the desk gave us a clearly suspicious look, probably suspecting some outlandish criminal enterprise.

Our room, to my tremendous relief, was a great deal nicer than the previous one, spotless and almost sweet, but Francis’ once-over cheapened it immediately, his expression long-suffering as he gingerly touched the linen on his bed before sitting atop it. I could sense him on the verge of inquiring if this was what he was to expect of life as a free man, and maybe he in turn could sense what kind of reaction this would have prompted, because he didn’t.

“This is the furthest West I’ve ever been.”

“What?” I asked, dumbly, and then rapidly: “Really?”

He nodded absently, looking for the world like some lost poet that had stumbled into a pastiche of tacky Americana, and I softened, moving to sit across from him.

“I have one more clean change of clothes, if you’d like it. It’s my reception suit.”

He accepted the bag when I passed it his way, discarding my dirty shirt before pulling out the suit and stilling with a sudden look of concentration, tilting his head in steady recognition.

“This is mine.”

“It won’t fit exactly,” I warned. “I had it tailored.”

He only nodded, turning the fabric half-wonderingly over in his hands. It was a gray Aquascutum with silver buttons; he’d gifted Charles the matching navy pair, I recalled, and we’d enjoyed the occasions upon which we happened to wear them simultaneously.

Our eyes met. He was surprised that I still wore his hand-me-downs, I could tell, wondering if I did so out of necessity or some emotional attachment. I hoped he wouldn’t ask, because both answers made me uncomfortable.

“It’s been an age since I wore Aquascutum,” was what he finally said, folding the suit, and then vanished into the bathroom, leaving me to search for the remote to turn on the tiny television propped up on the set of drawers.

He emerged midway through the evening news, swallowed by the jacket, requested the cigarettes, and then disappeared outside. I stared, alarmed, through the window, but he only went so far as the car, climbing onto the trunk and incrementally extending his long legs to stretch over the backseat, lighter flickering bright against the slowly fading light.

I sat there watching him until I caught myself doing it, then forced myself to shower too. Francis wasn’t Charles- there would be no reckless joyride in the three minutes I didn’t have eyes on him. I was relieved nonetheless to find him sat where I’d left him, now cast in copper by the yawning summer sun.

“Still here,” Francis said, caustic. I flipped him off and went to find dinner.

Though Francis liked to cook his eating habits had always been erratic, especially in times of stress- he was entirely capable of going a week without proper sustenance, which worried me, because he’d gone two days now without food and I wasn’t so sure he’d accept anything I tried to feed him. I thus returned to the Mustang bearing an eclectic collection of snacks for him and a plate of sad-looking fries for myself, the former of which I tossed onto the backseat before stalling by the convertible, unsure where to sit.

I opted for the driver’s seat just as Francis retrieved the bag, upon which he sifted through it and emerged holding one of three brands of ice cream I’d found.

“What’s this?”

“Dinner.”

He held up the other two. I shrugged.

“Entree, main, desert.”

“Haute cuisine in Indiana,” Francis said, on the edge of a smile, and unwrapped the painfully pink popsicle with the wary suspicion of a bomb-defuser. I found myself hypnotized by the sheer absurdity of it all, his pianist fingers making quick work of the tacky plastic wrapping, the flash of white canines as he bit consideringly into the top of it.

“You don’t bite a popsicle.”

“You do in Indiana.”

He ate the popsicle, then the melting cone; the ice cream sandwich he deemed abhorrent and refused to try. Root beer he tasted and then spent a full two minutes complaining about. I finished the ice cream sandwich with my cheek pressed into the headrest so I could watch him, having entirely failed to taste the fries I had polished off in the face of his brief and unexpected return to form.

Two ice creams were apparently his limit; afterwards he felt around for his cigarettes and got annoyed at the admittedly cheap lighter I’d bought. I had not, until then, realized how permanent the damage to his left hand was, but there was some kind of nerve that didn’t connect and left his thumb unbending. As I watched him visions swam before me of Francis at twenty-one, cigarette in his right hand and working the lighter with a practiced flick of his left, and before I did something stupid to reveal the wave of sadness that had hit me I leant forward and fixed his light for him, harsh exhale of ice-cream-cool breath tickling my fingers when I withdrew.

We sat and smoked in silence for I don’t know how long- five minutes, probably, or fifteen. The sun did not sink much lower, but then it was nearing summer. I didn’t mind the silence, but Francis and I were not particularly the type to share comfortable quiet; there was always conversation, or at least bickering of some variety. The silence made me uneasy, and left me with nothing to do but try not to stare at him too much. There was nothing much else to look at, and perched as he was atop the boot of the Mustang he half-blocked the retreating sun, so that when I looked at him I could not see his face, just the coruscated edges of his hair and the glow of the embers illuminating his twisting mouth.

I glanced back down at my half-finished root beer, and as I did Francis slid without warning from his seat atop the car, taking the few steps to our door and crushing his cigarette beneath his heel as he went. I didn’t know if he was headed to bed, and if so how to follow without seeming like a lost puppy, but he re-emerged within seconds, clutching something in his hands, and then stalked to me and extended the lighter. Mutely, and not entirely sure what I was abetting, I lit it. In one fluid movement Francis seized it and touched the flame to the thing he held, which I now realized was his wedding suit.

The flames flickered, rallied, and took, spreading along the lapel of the rich fabric, velvet igniting with amiable ease. Francis pushed the trash can open and unhurriedly dropped the suit within, fire leaping excitedly higher to light up his inclement expression as he stared unblinkingly downwards.

I should have jumped up and thrown my root beer over it, or at least demanded fair warning next time he committed arson on private property, but all I did was collect the detritus of our dinner and add it to the pyre, where we stood silently and grimly in the firelight until the smoke billowed so heavily that it stung my eyes. Then I closed the lid and snuffed the fire, mindful of the motel owners, and when I made for the room Francis followed.

I changed into my pajama bottoms this time around, and left my toothpaste on the sink.

I don’t think Francis slept much that night, though my luck was holding and I managed a decent amount of shut-eye before I startled awake from some confused nightmare. He must have hung up the suit before getting into bed, or else never laid down, because it wasn’t wrinkled on him when I found him smoking on our porch, where greeted me with half a nod.

“I’m out of cigarettes.”

“You can buy some from reception.”

“Can’t you go?”

“I’m not your butler,” I protested, but I didn’t want to start the day fighting over some stupid hang-up of his, so I went, and was rewarded with a grateful exhale and my packed bag.

He sat in the passenger’s seat, which neither of us commented upon, and took it upon himself to try and make sense of where we were going, which instantly put me on edge. Francis was an ideal navigator when on his home turf, the kind of person who could list off twenty easily recognizable landmarks for a tourist to find their way home by and knew every short-cut off the top of his head, but in foreign territory he was both hopeless and hyper-vigilant.

“Where are we going today?”

“Kansas.”

“Kansas?” Rustling. “Why not Oklahoma?”

“It’s faster through Kansas.”

“Oklahoma’s more south, though. Don’t we want to go more south? If we go through Kansas we’ll have to drive down from Nevada.”

“Utah. It’s the way I drove last time. It takes four days if you don’t stop to sight-see.”

“It’s not going to take us four days now. We’ve already been driving for three.”

“The first one doesn’t count, we left late.”

“How far is it from here to your place, anyhow? Forty-eight hours?”

“Thirty.”

“That’s at least two more days.”

“Look, I drove this exact way last time. It’s faster through Kansas.”

“It took you a week last time.”

“Because I was taking my time,” I repeated, peevish, “And stopping for breaks, because usually no one drives for five days straight by themselves without taking breaks.”

“I never asked you to do all the driving,” Francis defended, though when I gave him a flat look he turned to look at the road and gnawed at his thumb.

We got to Illinois. When I stopped for lunch Francis spread the map across the hood of the car and squinted at it.

“Route 66 starts here.”

“I know,” I said, irked. “It takes longer.”

“I didn’t say we needed to take it,” Francis replied, stung, and pointedly folded the map into a perfect square before returning it to the glovebox. I wavered, wrong-footed now that he was looking at me like I was being difficult, and absconded to find lunch.

He’d never been further West than Indiana, I thought, as I wandered through the gas station shop. And I remembered our winding drives to his aunt’s house, Francis at the wheel, perennially half-turned backwards to converse with the rest of us, always getting us there half an hour later than when we drove with Henry. I’d almost unfailingly taken the Mustang when I had the choice, both out of a concern for my life with Henry at the wheel and because Francis had the habit of half-patronizingly filling me in on the significance of some location or other as we drove- here Charles had nearly driven them into a tree once, here Bunny had stolen so many blackberries he’d been sick, here some reclusive actor was rumored to own a country retreat.

Stop romanticizing the ghosts of the living, I thought reproachfully, catching my thoughts meandering; you’re bad enough with the dead. But I couldn’t help myself from feeling like I was being unduly hard on him, in the circumstances. He’d just thrown his whole life away on my insistence, and I was shouting at him for trying to help. So much for trusting in his self-sufficiency.

He was still wearing my suit, so that the sleeves hung large and loose over his wrists, and as I was handing him the noxious blue Slush Puppy I’d gotten him as half a joke I got my first real look at the state of them, the scars shockingly pronounced against his paper-white skin, red and ugly and sore-looking.

Until then, I don’t know how, I’d managed not to see his bare wrists: he’d worn bandages at first, and then he’d been wearing gloves incessantly for reasons that now seemed transparent. I was morbidly transfixed by the damage, my own wrists aching in phantom commiseration- I’d imagined the cuts neater, but they ran jaggedly up and down his forearm with lawless determination, vivid images of Francis remorselessly repeating the action surfacing and leaving me light-headed.

God, I thought, remembering the way he’d run from the sight of Camilla bleeding. The maid had found him.

I don’t know what awkward urge would have overtaken me if I’d been allowed to spiral any longer, but Francis, having managed to yank the beverage free with an irritable sound, retreated, the movement obscuring his forearms, and I sank stiffly into the front seat and busied myself with my lunch, feeling wobbly and discomposed.

“Are you actively trying to poison me?” Francis asked, dubiously stirring his concoction with the straw. “There are plenty of ditches to drop me along the way that’d cost you less.”

“That’s not funny,” I exhorted, relaxing nonetheless. I had forgotten over the past few years that there were still people who could make light of our shared criminal record in my company.

He took an apprehensive sip of the drink, eyelids fluttering in contemplation as he winced.

“God, the sugar in this.”

“There’s root beer if you’d prefer.”

“Scelerum caput,” Francis admonished slyly. I snorted.

“Sure.”

He got brain-freeze midway through his drink and reacted with abject betrayal, clutching his forehead and glowering at me as I burst into startled laughter.

“Laugh it up, will you. God, that’s unholy. I think my skull is splitting open.”

“It’s just brain-freeze,” I managed, amidst helpless snickering. “You’ve had ice cream before.”

When we were finished with lunch I presented him with the map I’d bought, trying to pass for casual and knowing I wasn’t succeeding. Sights of Route 66.

“I didn’t say we had to take it,” Francis said, after a beat, restrained. I shifted in my seat.

“No, I know, I just thought…”

“Well, if you’d like to,” he said, finally, dragging his tongue over his teeth. It was still blue from the slushy. I started the car.

We joined Route 66 on the outskirts of Illinois, just ahead of Madison, which led us past what Francis drolly informed me to be the très célèbre Chain of Rocks Bridge, bookended by two quaint water intakes and resembling the skeleton of some great old beast as it hung derelict and oddly delicate over the Mississippi.

“I’m fairly positive there are regular murders here,” was Francis’ verdict, pronounced without irony. We didn’t linger.

The Mustang got us through Saint Louis and past a squat Art Deco building grandly named the Coral Court Motel, a yellow and brown ceramic abomination in a state of glaring disrepair which Francis announced with relish had served as the hiding-spot of an infamous murderer as well as a hotspot for adulterers in the fifties and sixties. We passed Saint Clair and its water towers, would-be humorously branded ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, which pained me and made Francis resume smoking. He nonetheless dutifully pointed out every piece of tacky Americana history that littered the path for the next good hour: there, the nation’s biggest rocking chairs, here a bar in which the ceiling was littered with women’s lingerie, “but sorted by color, so you can’t fault their commitment”.

For myself I was starting to ache some from the continuous driving, and grateful for the distraction, though really the glimpses of small-town tourist attractions and unpardonably kitsch landmarks created in me a sense of vague horror more than anything else, gaudy and artificial as they were. When Francis fell into gradual silence two hours from Springfield I regretted his narration.

Springfield was an incoherent, overwhelming ode to a lost decade or ten, neons and murals and bizarre, plasticine Elvis figurines clashing with Spanish Revival theatres, blue porcelain sky-scrapers and garages called things like Bud’s Tire & Wheel. I stopped at the latter for gas, and Bud himself, a nondescript middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap and a sturdy polo t-shirt, came ambling out to investigate the Mustang, approval evident in his suddenly friendly nod.

“’69 Ford. Good car.”

Francis, draped like a perishing maiden over the passenger seat, cracked a cold eye open to peer at him. “So it is.”

“Had a Santorini Blue myself. Sturdier ’n she looks.”

“Hm,” Francis said, and deigned to open both eyes, fingers tapping consideringly against his knee. “Held up surprisingly well so far. It’s been parked in a garage for years.”

“Where you boys driving down from, then? Boston?”

Francis’ eyes narrowed in suspicion, oblivious to the way his accent gave him away; I almost laughed at him, spoke before he could.

“Boston, yeah. Trying to make it to LA.”

“Cross country,” Bud said, obviously curious as to what Francis and I were doing in a retro convertible driving across the country. “Well, you’ve got a great car to do it in.”

“Thanks,” I said, as Francis hummed and sunk back into his seat. Unlike Charles, who was too likeable to resent, and Henry, who was frank in a way that spoke to people, Francis (like Camilla) had always stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the common folk, a mutual suspicion he was disinterested in remedying and which I did not want to exacerbate.

We could have driven on until sundown, but Springfield seemed as apt a place as any to spend the night. We stayed at the Best Western, a mid-century motel with an Elvis fixation whose receptionist cautiously informed me that their only available room only had a king-size, eyes flickering between Francis and myself in a way I did not very much appreciate.

“It’s fine,” Francis said, bored-sounding. “I won’t sleep.”

We took the room; I dragged him to the nearby Steak ’n Shake under protest, where he was plied into remaining by the towering strawberry milkshakes. I forced him to partake in my fries and spared a thought for the television I’d intended on buying by the month’s end, now lost to Francis’ hotly denied sweet tooth.

He was a picture sat cross-legged against the red leather booth in his too-large grey suit, hair tucked behind his ears as an afterthought and mouth sticky red from the way that he’d absently gnawed at the maraschino cherry atop his drink before remembering he hated the taste. I found myself thinking that the longer I spent on the road with him the less I believed he was really there. At the end of our meal the waitress shot me an unpleasantly loaded look that seemed to question who I was to be dragging this outlandish creature into their overpriced establishment.

Francis himself was in a distant, skittish mood; we returned to our room, where he gazed disdainfully at the décor before folding into the chair, pinching his brow and fixing the ceiling. I silently slid him the toothbrush and I HEART ILLINOIS t-shirt I’d picked up at the gas station, the latter of which managed to pull him out his brooding long enough to assume an expression of utter contempt.

“You can’t be serious.”

“I thought you might want something to sleep in,” I justified, refusing to yield. “And I need to go wash our clothes.”

“This is eighty percent polyester,” Francis said, clutching the t-shirt at arm’s length, somewhere between appalled and impressed. “Chinese orphans bled to make it.”

“You can sit around naked if you’d prefer. I still need to put the suits through the wash.”

In the end he threw me his suit from the bathroom and I departed to find the motel laundromat, where I spent an extremely uncomfortable half hour trying to read the paperback that I’d expected to distract myself with on the plane ride back while two burly redneck types played cards and exchanged muttered speculation about me. I didn’t wait for my turn at the dryer, estimating the pleasant warmth of the advancing summer season enough to dry our wet clothes as we slept.

When I made it back to our room it was maybe eight at the latest; the curtains were all drawn, and Francis was sleeping the sleep of the dead, wet hair haloing his head and blankets half-kicked off already as he shifted in place. He was wearing the shirt turned inside out.

I spent four hours watching the television on mute, hunched over by the foot of the bed, and when sleep finally found me I was still sat there.

Even if my back hadn’t been seized with agonizing cramps the next morning, I wouldn’t have been in a fit state to drive us to Texas. Three days of driving for hours on end had left me exhausted, sore, and keen to relinquish the steering wheel; my only obstacle was my co-passenger, whom I wouldn’t entirely have trusted not to drive us into incoming traffic even if he hadn’t decided to be steadfastly unsympathetic to my aching body. For whatever reason Francis found my sleeping woes objectionable somehow, and as a result very visibly thought I’d brought my current predilection upon myself.

Being that I felt I could hardly sit down without convulsing, I nonetheless braved his cold shoulder long enough to ask if he’d mind driving the first stretch, to which he inquired scathingly whether he was to be trusted with car keys now. I drove.

I managed to hold on well enough until we reached Oklahoma, Francis sat in the passenger’s seat with sunglasses he’d found in the glovebox lodged firmly onto his face and his smoke wafting persistently towards me as if the wind was taking sides, but I could only take so much; once Commerce came into view my neck spasmed in pain and I pulled off the road to clutch at my nape, my entire back so taut I couldn’t move.

“What? What is it?” Francis asked, alarmed, and when I shot him a dirty look he winced and perched his sunglasses atop his head to peer at my spine, mouth pulling with concern. “If it was that bad you could have said something.”

“I did,” I grit out, effortlessly rubbing at my shoulders. “If I’ve pulled something-“

“Oh, just- look, go sit on the backseat, let me see,” Francis instructed, gnawing guiltily at his lip. I complied begrudgingly, and he twisted to follow, press of cool fingers against my shoulders taking me by surprise and making me glance back at him in consternation as he perfunctorily prodded at my stiff muscles.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeing if you’ve pulled something,” Francis said, pressing harder each time I flinched. “I think you’re just stiff. It’ll wear off.”

His practiced motions were a tremendous relief, but even through my jacket it was an awkward position to be in next to a public motorway, leaving me to start nervously whenever I thought I heard a car approaching, shaking him off entirely when I saw that one was. By misfortune, in my hurry to put distance between us, I caught his eye, and the look of remorseful focus on his face was immediately replaced, his gaze gone cool.

“I’m not contagious, Richard.”

“That’s not what I…” I started, but none of my excuses would have held up any better, and so I fell silent as he took the driver’s seat, nebulously contrite for no good reason.

Francis drove carefully and well. For a while I lay flat on the backseat, watching the clouds roll overhead and losing myself to the endless blue and the distinct purr of the Mustang beneath me. I think at times I may have drifted in and out of sleep, but I was never conscious of where or when. At some point while I cloud-gazed Francis turned on the radio to a low hum, and the smell of his cigarettes at times drifted my way, soothing in its familiarity.

By the time I felt more able to sit upright we were passing Tulsa, and as I shifted to fit my legs onto the seat I gaped ahead at what seemed to be an eighty-foot-tall yellow eyesore of a statue, buckle shouting TULSA and expressionless face fixed ahead as his arm rested on an oil derrick.

“ὁ Κολοσσὸς Ῥόδιος,” I exhaled, half doubting my own vision. Francis, ahead, snorted, and his canny eye met mine in the rearview mirror.

“Less Helios than Plutus, I wager.”

“God,” I said, leaning to gaze at the colossus as we passed him by, sharp stench of oil half-imagined as my mind tripped over childhood memories. “What a creation. Imagine that looming over you day in day out.”

“I’d be praying for an earthquake,” said Francis, with a theatrical shudder, and since all was forgiven we devolved into an argument about Pliny the Elder all the way to Oklahoma City, where he grew nervous and withdrawn, so we drove on to El Reno and had lunch there in front of a giant mural that read CROSSROADS OF AMERICA.

“Crossroads of America,” Francis repeated, disdainfully, picking at my onion rings. “Isn’t that just the kind of thing you make your motto when the most traffic you see is people on their way to somewhere that matters?”

“Some biker is going to follow us to a motel and break your kneecaps.”

“I suppose that’s what you have to do for entertainment when you live in the crossroads of America.”

Francis was happy to drive us onwards, now apparently concerned I was angry about his earlier callousness, but I didn’t want to push my luck, so we traded spots for the drive to New Mexico, passing by one spectacularly underwhelming landmark after another. In Sayre Francis pointed out the courthouse, which I surprised myself by recognizing from the Grapes of Wrath, an old favorite of my erstwhile literature teacher. I was almost more surprised by Francis having seen the movie, as I was always surprised when any of the Hampden group revealed awareness of American cultural staples, but when pressed he could not remember when and where he’d seen it, only that he’d been otherwise preoccupied for most of it and could recall little beyond ‘hideous accents’ and ‘some vaguely Communist themes’.

Texas came and went like a blur, flat and rugged and home to an abundance of road-side crosses that made Francis mutter darkly about the Klan. I remember little of what we saw beyond our crossing the midpoint of the Route, suddenly 1139 miles from Los Angeles, a fact that I did not want to dwell on. Looking back I recall that the whole state seemed to me some dusty shade of orange, and it was uncommonly hot for the time of the year; I drove with my sleeves rolled up as Francis draped his jacket over his head like a shawl to escape the sun, warm balmy air thick in my lungs.

I forget most of the drive because for some reason I had found myself driving with Bunny in mind, remembering with sudden precision a late lunch we’d once shared on some autumn day when the weather was startlingly pleasant. I could see him just as he’d been, disorderly tufts of blonde hair catching the sunlight and elbows of his threadbare suit-jacket leant heavily on the table. He was in the habit of stacking the packets of sugars provided with coffee while he talked, the arrangement always slightly crooked, and I always found myself distracted by the teetering constructions, waiting for the inevitable collapse.

I can still hear him now, complaining about something or other, loud nasal drawl bouncing around the room without a care for its occupants. That day it was the hippies, I think, as it often was.

“That’s twice this week I’ve gone banging on their door because their brains are too fried to realize the rest of us don’t want to spend our nights listening to them caterwauling.”

“And they don’t listen?”

“No! Why should they? Don’t go to class, do they? Certainly not to a class like Julian’s, where the man’ll crucify your ablatives if you don’t slave over essays for a fortnight.”

I neglected to object that I had never seen Bunny start an essay with more than a day to spare, and that for that matter he was always hastily copying Henry or Francis’ work at the last minute because his translations were terrible. Bunny never really voiced these complaints seeking an honest solution for them, anyhow- just liked to garner our sympathy and soak in his own righteousness, a state of affairs we generally tolerated because he was always funny in his retellings. He was continuing unprompted regardless, nodding wisely to himself as he wagged a finger my way.

“Well, I tell you what, Richard old man, I’ve never been happier to see the winter coming, if it’ll force them all into hibernation until next year’s summer of love.”

And then, inevitably: “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have your wallet on hand?”

I’ve grown familiar with my ghosts, over the years, but I never have managed to find a pattern in their visits. Henry, or Henry the visitor at least, has his tells, but ghosts in their more natural form- memories, apparitions from a lost time- those appear to me without warning or natural cause. Week after week, still, I return to the ferns, to Bunny falling, to Henry’s unflinching gunshots, waking to silent screams that had terrified Sophie. But the other memories come and go without rhyme or reason, unearthed from who knows what recess of my mind, and though for the most part they are harmless they are almost more painful for it, a yawning hole in my chest once I remember the days that followed. That is what I recall of the Texas limb of our journey: the heat, and the breadth, and the well-known ache of missing something well and truly lost to me.

We arrived in New Mexico not long before sunset, and as we drove to our recommended motel Francis made a soft noise which brought my attention to our surroundings: ghost towns, one after the other, dilapidated husks with wistful names like Endee and Bard, all peeling paint and rotting wood. They lacked the grandeur of those ruins which invoke their glory days, and so instead appeared for what they were: sticks and stone, left to their own devices. The pale insignificance of them made me uncomfortable; I thought of Julian prompting discussion once, twinkle in his eye: Would you say we have forgotten how to remember?

We stopped for the night at the Blue Swallow Motel, as ugly as any of its predecessors but sign-posted by a sort of charmingly excessive neon sign boasting the namesake bird, olive-branch in its mouth.

“Someone’s forgotten their Genesis,” Francis commented archly, but he was placated by the promise of refrigerated air, and to my relief we had no repeat incident of the previous night, two perfectly adequate singles and an almost charmingly committed 50s décor greeting us inside our room. I left him to struggle with the remote as I found us dinner.

It was the first night we were both wholly conscious and not in a fugue state, which would have been fine had it not made Francis’ increasing testiness so hard to ignore. He was out of cigarettes, then (once I’d run to reception to ask for them) losing his temper at not being able to light them well enough; even once he could smoke he was dissatisfied with the taste and getting increasingly worked up about the news, banal though it was. In the end I went to sleep disgruntled as he paced outside, unhappily conscious of the impending end of the road trip. It was all very well to put up with his moods when we were driving coast-to-coast for a few days, but I had not yet come to terms with the knowledge that once we reached California he would not leave for far longer than I liked to think about.

This mood stuck with me the next day as we headed into Arizona, and though Francis drove he was in a bad way for most of it, twitchy and strung out like the slightest inconvenience would make him lose it. The Mustang, sensitive to its owner’s moods, complained increasingly at the climbs we were pushing it through, which made Francis even more on edge and kept me from appreciating the great sand-stone cliffs arches passing us by. When we stopped for lunch he accompanied me to the gas station to drop two bottles of tequila into my arms, the former of which he unceremoniously unscrewed as soon as I started the car, the golden liquid sloshing as the engine hummed to life.

Arizona saw us in little need of navigation, most of Route 66 still intact, which proved providential given Francis’ complete disinterest in playing tour guide. Here the great desert plains stretched in shades of red, pale green shrubbery defying the climate with inconsistent success. Subdued, I was lost in thought for most of the drive, Flagstaff coming and going with little notice paid, and it was only as we neared California that I begun to refocus on my passenger, who was by now well and drunk, curled up on his seat with the little liquor remaining in his bottle swaying gently as he rocked it to and fro. Somehow he had managed to get mildly sunburnt somewhere between Oklahoma and New Mexico, his nose and the very top of his cheeks a scattered sort of red, but his eyes were dark and sightless, a desert wanderer turned vulture-food.

We were closing in on the border when we stopped for the night; I could have driven us into the Golden State, but I was reluctant to do so, for admittedly irrational reasons. I imagine Francis was looking forward to getting to my place about as much as I was, so he didn’t protest. We found our last motel in a small border town, the only source of cold air in the room an ancient ceiling fan that stuttered every five rotations.

Francis, dead drunk but not mindlessly so, silently (and poorly) threw me the second bottle of tequila as he made for the shower. In the face of California I felt compelled to oblige, though I have never liked tequila and the oily burn reminded me of Judy Poovey loudly instructing her friends to do the lime last, the salt first, fucking hell, it’s not rocket science. 

I was tipsy by the time Francis emerged from the bathroom, down a suit jacket and looking naked as a result in my over-large shirt. His foot was bouncing a mindless rhythm against his knee as he perched atop the desk, but he seemed calm enough when he turned his gaze on me and blew out a breath.

“I need to tell you something.”

I think my instinctive and highly unreasonable first thought showed on my face, because his eyes narrowed.

“Before you ask, my body count remains unchanged.”

“I didn’t suggest any different.”

He took the bottle from me, swallowed an absent mouthful before looking back my way.

“Listen, I need you to understand this. I’ve done what you wanted, with the marriage, but my fundamental position hasn’t changed. Do you know what I mean?”

I shook my head, tentatively pulling from the bottle myself, and he shifted, eyes distant.

“It’s like this: I had two options, after my grandfather found out. Marriage, or death. At first I went along with the marriage idea, if only because I suppose I was wondering if it might work somehow, but I’m not insane, I wasn’t expecting marital bliss- so once it turned out predictably catastrophic I went the other route. Since that didn’t work I figured I might as well resign myself to marriage after all. And you- I mean, you were right, that it would be worse, the marriage, I’m not saying any different, but I need you to understand that I haven’t suddenly discovered a third option. This pipedream of independence- it’s not going to work, for me. And when it gets hard I’ll only have the one option left.”

I stared at him with mingled horror and aversion. “What, you’ll kill yourself?”

“I know you don’t like it,” Francis said, almost indulgently, like I was being so very gauche. “And I know you’d rather I stayed and toughed it out, but I’m selfish, Richard, this is the best I can do. It’ll be better for you than the marriage, anyhow. Once I’m gone it’ll just be you and Camilla, and maybe that’ll swing her.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, at a loss. “You’re as bad as Henry was.”

“I’m sorry,” Francis sighed, and seemed it, pale specter that he was on the cheap beige bedsheets. “It’s not that I didn’t find your whole appeal to friendship very stirring. But calling off the wedding was all I could manage. I’m not going to pretend this whole reinvention project stands any chance of succeeding.”

“You understand it would be worse, right?” I asked, voice rising sharply. “If you commit suicide, it’ll be worse.”

“No, it won’t,” Francis said, with upsetting calm, and as I was still staring at him he swayed to his feet and collected his cigarettes. “But I’m sorry anyhow. I just thought I should tell you.”

Then he was out of the door, and I was left in a semi-drunken stupor to boggle after him, not entirely sure I wasn’t going to throttle him myself.

The drive back to California was predictably terse. I had been spared a hangover, but I don’t know if Francis had; either way he returned to the back seat and lay there with his head propped against my bag and his long legs bent to fit on the seat, eyes shut beneath the sunglasses.

I didn’t know what to do with him now that the cards were on the table. Dealing with an active suicidal was one thing, but dealing with someone who is perfectly honest about their impending and conditional suicide was another. I don’t know that he realized that in penciling in his own death he was placing his continued survival in my hands, it now being myself alone who stood between him and things getting hard enough for option B to seem appealing. Either way I was furious, and somewhat in shock, wondering dazedly why I hadn’t just let him get married after all. Should I have predicted this turn of events? I didn’t know. I had been confident in my assessment that their union would be a fate worse than death, but I hadn’t registered just how convenient of a fate death had become in his eyes. Cheerfully, Francis. Perhaps I should have.

Driving through the Mojave Desert was a bleak welcome home. The Needle Mountains, in my eyes dark and foreboding, are the last spot of greenery for miles, and following Route 66 leads through junkyards and barren wastelands, a poor showing even by comparison to the gaudy sights of earlier stretches. Driving north to follow the Route brought me closer to Plano than I’d been since I’d left for Hampden, and I felt all the more erratic for it, imagining what my father would have said if he’d known what my life had come to since I’d fled east. I was so keen to get back to my apartment and out of the car that I didn’t bother to stop for lunch at the usual hour, and from San Bernadino I deviated from the Route at last, catching lunchtime traffic in Tinseltown in full swing. It was pushing two thirty by the time I managed to park the convertible next to Henry’s old BMW, the sight disorienting, and lead Francis up from the garage to the apartment.

It should perhaps not have surprised me, given that I had once contracted hypothermia rather than make my situation known to my closest friends at the time, but I had not expected to be hit with such a violent feeling of sick anticipation as we stopped outside my door, my hands clenched so hard around my keys I had to force myself to loosen my grip to be able to turn the lock. My own anxiety irritated me- I knew exactly what to expect, and the fact that Francis would loathe every second he spent in the West Coast was of no consequence to me. It was nearly a decade since Hampden, and I’d just helped him flee a sham wedding under constant threat of suicide- I didn’t exactly hold his judgment in high esteem.

We went inside; I opened the curtains, cleared my throat, and desperately failed to stop watching Francis for a reaction out of the corner of my eyes.

Long gone were the days where Francis played willing audience to the world around him, however; he stood immobile for a small infinity, eyes sliding from my littered, nondescript desk to my extremely plastic kitchen to my overflowing bookshelf and the yellow chairs Sophie had bought until he slid them shut, heaved a long and silent sigh, and then impassively folded himself into the IKEA sofa.

“So, this is home.”

“Only until I finish my degree,” I said, on autopilot, and then grimaced at myself for repeating a line I’d told Sophie several years and a degree ago. “It’s close to campus and the library.”

“It’s very you,” Francis said, neutrally. I tried not to feel stung.

“I’ve never really gotten around to decorating.”

“Exactly,” Francis murmured, almost to himself, and then blinked. “Do you mind if I take first shower?”

I left him to his own devices with a clean set of towels and another borrowed suit, then distracted myself from trying to remember how new my razor was by turning to the regrettable subject of where he would sleep.

When Sophie had still lived with me we’d shared a bed; I had no guest room, the tiny side-room currently housing nothing but my bike and two barstools that I had placed there because the sunset was visible from the narrow window inside. The living room was decently sized, and I had personally fallen asleep on the couch enough times to consider it suitable, but it was also my study.

I couldn’t give him my room, I reminded myself. I was doing Francis a favor; it wasn’t my fault his standards were so ridiculous. The fact that I would have given Camilla my bed without hesitation was irrelevant- because we could have shared, my brain whispered slyly, though some other part of my brain was unpleasantly quick to remind me that I had come closer to sharing a bed with Francis than I ever had with her. The reminder made me shudder. Francis was not Camilla, and if I started making unreasonable concessions to try and coddle him we’d never get anywhere. He’d have to make do with the couch until I found him a mattress somewhere.

Thus resolved, I phoned my bank, and was gleefully if suspiciously informed that yes, a Mr. Abernathy had lawfully deposited six digits into my account several days ago, and did I want to come in to discuss upgrading my rates anytime soon, and if they could do anything else for me they would be happy to, of course, Mr. Papen.

Not a life’s worth of savings, I thought, as I hung up. Jesus. The knowledge was nonetheless grounding- an anchor of tangible fact in the haze of disbelief I’d been operating under since I’d landed in Boston. If there was money, then there was a plan, next steps to take. We’d open him an account, and then find him a place to live, and he’d have more than enough to cushion him until he managed to tug a few strings and land some kind of job until Abernathy Sr finally bit it. This was fixable now, less infinite. I would deal with Francis and I would put up with the intrusion and soon enough I would have my apartment to myself and my life back on track.

I think I knew even then that things would not be so uncomplicated, but then when had I not? Plans have always grounded me, even the appearance of them. There’s a saying the Greeks had- τὸ δὶς ἐξαμαρτεῖν οὐκ ἀνδρὸς σοφοῦ- to commit the same sin twice is not a sign of a wise man. If my sins were to be dissected, I suspect I would be diagnosed as suffering from only a very pervasive handful, and where those are concerned I am not entirely sure I have ever stopped sinning long enough to start again.

Chapter Text

What can be said of Francis’ time in California? 

When I look back at the days between Bunny’s death and Henry’s- the second act of our little tragedy- my journal entries always surprise me in their incredible monotony. Of course I had learned from Henry’s mistakes, and so I hardly expect any passages retreading the specifics of our investigation-related concerns or my nightly horrors, but there is something chillingly banal in the way the days go by with the most mundane of comments. 

In F’s words: θάλασσα κα ὶ π ῦ ρ κα ὶ γυνή, κακ ὰ τρία . Someone flooded the bathrooms trying to flush weed down the shower drain. Later F nearly set my curtains on fire with his cigarette when JP burst in right as we were talking about Charles. He’s convinced he has pneumonia (common cold at most). No sign of H or Camilla. Behind on my French.

At the time I had thought myself a chronicler of some kind, convinced these mundane details would somehow immortalize those days in years to come so that reading over them would conjure the details I omitted. Instead they seem to portray the collegiate boredom of a student with no skeletons in his closet, days passing with my only entries fragments of our reading and the bare bones of my interactions within the group. The only honest thing in them is the faint outline of Francis, endlessly taking over entries to the author’s fluctuating frustration, off-set by days of anxiously noting his uncharacteristic absence. In this alone I can recognize the reality of that time, hidden just beneath the lines, the miserable sort of codependence we’d formed for a lack of anyone else to talk to, tangible in the way my pen scrawled on bad days and drifted on less bad ones. What my abrupt commentary fails to capture is the constancy of it- we went so little time without seeing one another that in the moment I barely had a sense of what the good or bad days were. Even when I was so sick of him I couldn’t stand to look at him I never considered ignoring his calls.

Having Francis in California was not dissimilar to that time, in that if I had chronicled the experience in the same way I would have only half-captured the feeling of it. There were bad days and less bad days, but mostly they all melted together into one unending cycle, nearly habitual despite the seven years that had passed and the unrelated crisis at hand. 

The very first days of his stay I can still recall in vignettes, perhaps because there was a sense of momentum to them. We set up his account in the face of reasonable suspicion on the bank’s behalf, aided by a teller who did not ask why exactly a grown, audibly East Coast man was opening a brand-new bank account in California using only a large transfer of money he’d made a week ago to a mediocre long-time client, but clearly wanted to know. We remained unflappable in the face of his scrupulously leading questions, myself gone calmly personable like I only do when selling a lie, Francis so superbly haughty that the adviser all but fell over himself to facilitate the process for us. Afterwards I called Camilla for her share, mesmerized by the rasping suggestion of a laugh in her voice as she asked how she was meant to know I wasn’t stealing a dead man’s money if the dead man would not speak to her. Of Charles nothing was heard or said. 

We went shopping; Francis acquired a half-decent mattress, and then clothes, five suits and two pairs of shoes whose combined price gave me palpitations but which I did not protest the acquisition of. Expensive clothes are made to last, as my hand-me-downs could attest, and Francis’ tastes had always run thankfully timeless, untouched by fads. 

I had never been shopping with Francis before; at Hampden he had always appeared bearing new suits without mention of their provenance, almost by magic, his hauls following holidays in France or to family homes. He behaved, I discovered, like a big cat on the prowl, a single look towards the eager sellers dissuading them from trying to interest him in the latest trends. At the very least I knew where to take him: the kind of high street classic boutiques I usually lusted after on my way to and fro the library, old money names with limited clientele on this side of the country. I think if I had tried to take him to the nearest mall the universe would have misaligned. 

I still had university obligations- my presentation, previously discarded, was frantically rehearsed in front of a semi-willing audience of one only because he refused to leave the living-room as I did so, to great stumbling and stuttering on my part. The actual panel presentation, by contrast, was a walk in the park. My hooding ceremony was the first of my graduations to be attended by guests: Francis, who had not gotten out of bed in three days, appeared without explanation amongst the attendees, red hair billowing dramatically in the wind, and though he was extremely disinterested in my coursemates and professors alike he was congenial with me in a way I’d almost forgotten he could be, distracting me entirely from the matter at hand. In the evening he cooked for us and refused to call me anything other than Dr. Papen , wicked twinkle in his eye.

On one memorable occasion, Judy Poovey called for me while I was out. Francis spent a solid twenty minutes on call with her before I returned from the store and interrupted in a panic, blindsided by this interaction. To my consternation Judy seemed very taken by him. 

“I swear to God, that Priscilla- what a complete bitch. Ashley said she was a total Nancy Reagan wannabe but I thought she was just being dramatic. Can you imagine what that marriage would have turned out like? Jesus, Richard, talk about a close call. Thank fuck you went and brought him back here.”

“Better than the alternative.”

“No kidding. You wanna know something, though? To be honest with you, I totally got that vibe from you guys at Hampden, but I never felt it was my place to say, you know? Like, after Bunny Corcoran died and he would just barge into your room all the time and talk to you in Latin or whatever- I told Tracy, I was like, maybe it’s not a me thing, maybe it’s a girl thing-“

“What?”

“Well, that’s not the point, anyways, I just wanted to say I think it’s great how this all worked out and you totally have my full support. We should do dinner sometime! I’m thinking of redoing my living room, and you guys have, like, the eye for that stuff…”

Francis, when interrogated, insisted he’d barely had the time to open his mouth before she’d launched into a probing monologue, already in possession of the broad strokes of the whole affair- Priscilla left at the altar, me carting Francis off to California- and a fantastical spin on my actual role in this narrative which recast me as the romantic hero. 

“I couldn’t get a word in edgeways,” Francis said, half-impressed. “Then she started telling me about all of the terrible things she’d heard about her and I got distracted.”

“You could have told her she had the wrong idea!”

“And spoiled her fun?” Francis asked, cracking a smirk that only broadened at my obvious displeasure. “Oh, don’t sulk. At least she’ll forgive you for turning her down so many times now that she can pretend she knew all along about our star-crossed romance. I doubt she’ll shout it from the rooftops, anyhow, I made a very emotional plea for secrecy.”

“She asked for my input on her living room .”

“She asked for mine on her shoe closet. Count your blessings.”

Strung together like this these memories paint a happier picture of Francis’ L.A. stay than is accurate: for the most part it was a grueling time. 

It wasn’t that Francis was being particularly unbearable, or at least not spitefully so; he was generally calmer than anticipated, but being that I was aware this calm was symptomatic of his fatalistic resignation, I would have preferred the neurosis. It was difficult, too, to counter his disenchanted cynicism in La-la-land, not least because it was a city I have never been able to bring myself to like. I could not very well take Francis to the Hollywood sign or the Walk of Fame, which were in any case teeming with visitors. In the summer Californians are a particularly embarrassing breed, but the hordes of sunburnt, loud-mouth tourists taking pictures of every inane glimpse of celebrity in sight are worse by any metric. As a result we spent most of our time in isolation as I tried to wrangle interviews for Francis and half-heartedly applied to a variety of teaching positions around the state. 

Having Francis around was taking a toll on me that extended beyond the stress of looking after him. Everything about California that he couldn’t abide made me defensive and then embarrassed for feeling defensive, less out of any personal affront and more because I felt compelled to account for my own continued tolerance of the place. In truth I don’t think Francis gave it much thought- to my perpetual unhappiness my Hampden friends had always seemed perfectly happy to accept my return to my home state- but I did, my dormant qualms about the direction my life had taken rearing their head with gusto. The more I struggled to find something to show Francis the more I remembered that there was nothing I liked about the West Coast. The days I managed to drag us someplace I liked were almost worse in their transparency: on one occasion I took Francis to the New Beverly, a favorite of Sophie’s and mine, where we watched a Cannes nominated piece that I only belatedly realized was the closing piece of a trilogy, a morose, philosophical and highly stylized romance whose happy ending depressed me and left Francis unmoved. Afterwards I lay awake deploring the fact that the best the city had to offer in my eyes was foreign cinema. 

My increasing feeling of entrapment was worsened by my recent graduation. I had nowhere left to go in the world of pure academia, and my success there seemed meaningless in terms of securing future employment. I could teach, but who the hell would I teach? I could write, but what audience was there for my writing? All of my best options were only loosely connected to my interests. I could, in any event, not picture myself educating the youth of tomorrow; I remembered the student body of Hampden only too well, and could not claim that I had grown to like most of them any better in hindsight. Writing I was more suited to, but there were few journals I could see myself contributing to for the next five decades of my life.

All of these anxieties might have surfaced regardless of Francis’ being there, but as it was I felt them all the more keenly in his presence, and somewhat unjustly blamed them on his continued residence in my apartment. This blame was not entirely unwarranted, as Francis was unsubtle in his dislike of all things Californian and casually dismissive of the positions I was applying to, but in any event it was easier to attach my growing turmoil to him than to accept that this was a quarter-life crisis I would have to confront sooner or later. Regardless I was in a constant state of contradiction, both wanting Francis gone and dreading what I’d do with myself once he was, my conflicting feelings on the subject exacerbated by the fact Francis was a terrible houseguest. 

Francis was not a terrible houseguest in the sense that Bunny would have been, nor even a dangerous wreck à la Charles or an intransigent presence like Henry. He did not destroy my apartment or stumble around in a constant stupor or rearrange everything to his tastes; to my surprise he did not even spend his days maxing out his credit card, having apparently accepted his fate as a pauper. He was terrible rather in the sense that he did nothing: never left, never took initiative, never displayed the slightest intention of re-entering society. Instead he spent his days sprawled over something or other, listlessly reading his way through my books or channel-surfing on the TV, and more often than not watching me go about my day with similar levels of disinterest. I was equal parts put off by his inactivity and his scrutiny, both of which made him an incredibly present addition to my apartment. 

I hadn’t realized until Francis’ unexpected addition to my household how long it had been since I’d lived with someone else. I hadn’t seen anyone seriously since Sophie, years ago now, and even when we’d lived together I’d lived primarily in my own head, a fact that had played no small part in our eventual break-up. That hadn’t been the first time I’d failed to adequately commit to the environment I lived in, eighteen years in Plano supporting her grievances; the first and only time I had spent more time in the real world than inside my head was as a student of Julian’s, one lone age of experiencing reality enough not to seek to escape it. Barely an age, at that- really it had been a handful of months, less even than that when I set aside all the time I had spent as a mere observer, an outsider day-dreaming his inclusion. 

I’d gotten that inclusion, but it had cost two lives and robbed me of any of the joy those days had held. And now Francis was living in my apartment, seven years down the line, leaving my towels on the floor and dirtying my kitchen counters and routinely setting off my fire alarm. I was left discomfited, almost antsy with the sordid intimacy of it.

I did not, naturally, voice most of these thoughts to Francis, save the most necessary. Had I kept the same sort of journal as I had in Hampden, I can imagine them would-be casually attesting to our main point of friction for the duration of his stay:

Applications to IJFS due next week. Grocery run- remember eggs. Talk to T about stairwell lights. F didn’t call KS back- ‘slept through the call’ . 

The issue was, of course, that I was determined to force Francis into a future he did not perceive as stretching beyond the end of the summer. I am not what I would call well-connected, but people tend to like me at a distance; I arranged meeting after meeting, wrangled interview after interview, dug through the newspapers searching for suitable positions. Some I didn’t expect Francis to look at twice, but a handful were jobs he could very well have thrived at- style consultant of some variety at a fashion magazine, or article writer for a classics journal. All were discarded at first glance, whether or not Francis bothered to follow-up. The closest he came to committing was one of the writing positions, for which he actually went into the city to meet with the girl I knew there. He got an offer; I didn’t learn about it until I heard back from the girl myself three weeks later saying how disappointed she’d been to hear he’d found someplace better-suited. 

There is little point to be derived from rehashing our arguments during this time. I was not unsympathetic to Francis’ moods generally, but on this subject he had exhausted my patience. I yelled, he sniped back, I lost my temper, he groveled. Sometimes he didn’t even bother with steps two to four, just buried himself under his blankets and mumbled incoherently into his pillow. Ugly things were said on both sides; I am not proud of my share of them, nor was I even at the time: I remember cutting myself off mid-tangent at the thought that I sounded like Bunny in his final days. I wanted nothing more than to speak to someone who would understand, but I couldn’t call Camilla for a variety of reasons that I reduced to the fact Francis would be listening in if I did. We were both going a little crazy cooped up together, and similarly unwilling to confront our individual demons, tempers worsening in consequence as the weeks went by. I was supremely tempted to self-medicate, craving the out, but pragmatism stayed my hand- if I succumbed to my vices we’d both be out on the street in days. Instead I begrudged Francis his as I hung onto sobriety with an addict’s resentment.

The whole thing came to a head during the last week of July in a spectacularly bleak fashion. 

July as a whole had been dire, incredibly hot, filled with application deadlines, the streets teeming with tourists no matter where I went. Francis refused to set foot outdoors, citing the sun and the people alike, and I was drowning in job-hunting and logistics, keeping myself busy out of necessity as much as a reluctance to engage with him. 

That particular week had opened with my mentioning not for the first time that I was due to move out of my apartment come fall, my latest tactic: since Francis refused to even consider any position that left him working in the Golden State, I was determined to get him out of my apartment and into someplace where prospects were less objectionable, across the country if not the globe. This strategy was met with no more response than I had received across the previous week: Francis, in a mood, didn’t stir from his nest, which aggravated me so much I decided to go grocery shopping as a distraction. Said distraction, unfortunately, only served to remind me that I was still playing butler to an agoraphobic who had spent a hundred dollars on a single bottle of gin the last time I sent him out to the store, so I returned in a worse mood than I had left, and we spent the rest of Monday communicating in snide asides and fatigued glowering. 

On Tuesday Francis somehow managed to mildly sprain his right wrist while trying to fix us lunch, leaving him with two handicapped hands and teetering on the brink of a panic attack for the rest of the day. The state of his left hand being a continuously sore subject, I curbed my frustrations enough to tread carefully around him, which only worsened his mood: he called himself a cripple and me Nurse Papen until we went to bed. 

Wednesday and Thursday were equally dismal. My air conditioning gave out sometime early Wednesday morning, leaving us sweltering inside as temperatures reached new highs in Los Angeles. The heat made me tetchy and left Francis wilting on the floor, every action rendered a gargantuan effort; I painstakingly forced myself to stick to schedule, sat sweating at my desk as Francis absconded to sprawl over the bathroom tiles, and bore my resentment quietly only because I was too hot to fight. Distraction came by way of deus ex machina: the phone rang late Thursday evening, causing Francis to twitch and myself to answer as a woman from the English department informed me that I had been invited to a faculty event, my application had sparked interest, etc, etc. I was agreeing enthusiastically before the woman had even finished her niceties, relieved beyond measure, not least because there was sure to be functioning AC at the university. 

When I somewhat curtly informed Francis of the nature of the call, he mustered half a nod. 

“That’s you settled.”

I chose not to dissect whatever double entendre could be hidden beneath this politesse. Settled was what I wanted. If this mixer went well I was a shoe-in. I had never adopted the easy entitlement of my peers of Hampden, always hesitant to call a game before the whistle blew, but I had been at USC for years and my credentials were solid. If Dr. Lawrence Green wanted to corner me and test my knowledge of medieval rhetoric for an hour it was a test I was happy to pass. I felt suddenly that my nerves over summer had been wholly unnecessary, a product of Francis’ contagious feelings of displacement. I had a life here, and a future. I was settled. With teaching hours I’d even have the time I’d lacked to fraternize- ask Sophie to return the favor, introduce me to some of her friends, move into the next decade and leave my twenties decisively behind me.

I spent Friday morning in good spirits, brushing up on my antistrophos and dialektike and scanning through my shelves for some lesser-known classic American novel I could feign a life-long interest in. It had been a while since I’d read anything non-Jacobean; I found myself enjoying the change of pace.

Engrossed as I was in my preparation, I could not help but harken back to the last time I’d really read with the intent of spirited conversation. Julian had always pushed us to take a certain position in our discussions, leading to regular back-and-forth with Camilla over her knack for shifting from one opinion to another so seamlessly that she never quite appeared to have been wrong to begin with. Despite his interest in hearing us defend our thoughts, however, it was accepted fact amongst us all that his position would necessarily be the correct one. How could it not have been? He had spent years mired in the texts we were only now scratching the surface of- only Henry could hope to compare. I have few happier memories than those brief moments in which I would hazard some answer that won me his gently impressed smile, always followed by some words of approval. Very good, Mr. Papen, very good. And, indeed, ἀλλὰ τί ἦ μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην - which, you will be able to tell me, of course, means- yes, precisely . Why all this about oak or stone? Sometimes the answer is simple.

I have come to realize I am generally at my most confident when I am happy with my plans. The prospect of steady long-term employment had centered me; I found Francis’ resistance to work doubly ridiculous now that I had all-but secured my own. Less the necessity of my own prospects I would be free to focus on his, more of a priority given my plans. I needed him gone by September - I couldn’t envisage forty years of teaching with him holed up like Bertha Rochester in the attic. 

Francis, like most neurotics, had a sixth sense for thoughts of this nature. By lunchtime he had settled into the couch and was fixedly watching me where I sat annotating Turn of the Screw as though challenging my renewed determination. The scrutiny itched; I was in too satisfied of a mood to confront it, but I could not ignore it entirely. When I remembered to eat dinner, sometime past nine, I decided I would not keep my silence and let him think his act was succeeding. For better or for worse I am not of the disposition to balk in the face of opposition.

“I’m going to start looking into accommodation for this year,” I said, thus, when I presented him with a plate of cold meats. “How are you getting on with the house hunt?”

Francis barely scoffed; when I stayed expectantly where I was he rolled his eyes half-heartedly. 

“Found a great little place on the Boulevard.”

“I’ve been in touch with the estate agent in Boston,” I reminded him, ignoring the sarcasm. “He’s happy to sell the apartment as soon as you ask.”

“And pack and send my things over to Timbuktu, yes.”

“If Timbuktu has better employment options for you, sure.”

“I could teach English at the University, if they have one.”

I didn’t rise to the bait. “I’d be happy to help you set that up.”

“Always so helpful,” Francis murmured, around an olive. I resisted the urge to force his head upwards. 

“I could be if you gave me anything to work with.”

“You’re not happy with the material?” Francis inquired, smiling thinly. When I didn’t react he sighed. “Can we not do this today?”

“As long as we agree on the next steps.”

“Really, Richard…”

“I’ll have the time to focus on this now. You won’t be missing any phone calls.”

“I told you, I didn’t hear it ring.”

“Well, I’ll be around to hear it next time. I’ll even drive you to your interviews so you don’t get lost again. Or confuse the buildings.” 

“I wasn’t in my right state of mind, I was sick.”

“And have since recovered, luckily. I say we start looking Sunday. Saturday, even.”

Francis’ mouth pulled; he shoved the plate away, where it toppled and almost fell off the coffee table. “I don’t feel well.”

My hands twitched. “You look fine to me.”

“I don’t feel well,” Francis repeated, mutinously, pulling his robe tighter around him. “It’s my head.”

Whatever patience my good news had earned me vanished entirely. “Could you stop lying to my face for a second?”

“I’m not lying, my head’s been killing me for weeks.“

“Right, and this is the first I’m hearing of it?”

“It’s not as though you care.“

“You’re unbelievable. Your head? Your head? Maybe it’s the lack of fresh air, or maybe it’s your neurons frying from lack of use . ”

“And he wonders why I didn’t tell him.”

“For the love of God, it’s been almost three months! You need to find a job and a place to live, Francis, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this until you stop pretending I’ll forget if you put it off long enough.”

“It’s like an obsession with you,” was the reply, tart, as he moved around me to stand, making for his mattress. I followed, blocking his way; though we were of roughly even height he was so thin and burned out I felt I could snap his bones one-handed. 

“I’m serious. If you won’t do it I’ll do it for you.”

“Let me through.”

“If it makes no difference to you I could find you an opening within the week,” I said, shifting to keep him at bay as his gaze turned heavy and bitter. 

“Would that suit you and your many plans this summer?”

“I just need to have this sorted out by the start of class.” 

His expression tautened. “I’m well aware you want me gone before that, magister .” 

Fatigued sigh. “You know that’s not what this is about.”

“I know exactly what this is about. You think I can’t tell the way you’ve been circling like a shark?”

“I told you from the start you could stay as long as you needed to.”

“As long as that doesn’t intervene with your plans, you mean? Couldn’t have me at home sullying your new beginning.” 

“That’s not true, and if you haven’t exactly been a comfort to have around that’s hardly my fault.”

“No, it’s mine, of course, everything is.”

“Stop acting like a child.”

“Such a burden for the good doctor Papen-“

“You’re certainly trying your hardest to be one!”

“And if I’d only been a shade blonder you might have borne your martyrdom more happily, isn’t that right?”

“Bringing her into this is pathetic.”

“Is that your medical opinion?”

“If you’re so committed to this act I’m sure I could find you a waiting job at Charles’ bar,” I snapped, chafed too raw to remain sensible. “Might even dispense of the need for accommodation entirely.”

“ Va te faire foutre ,” said Francis, hatefully, breaths coming quick. “This all suits you marvelously, doesn’t it, to have us at your mercy, so high and mighty because you’ll be reading Shakespeare to stoners come fall, brava -“

“You’re being hysterical.”

He stared at me savagely. “Let me through.”

This time I did. We did not speak again.

Though we had said far worse to one another this fight left a particularly bad aftertaste, perhaps because it felt so conclusive. With nothing in my own affairs to distract me and all of his excuses used up we had retreaded every collective beat of our previous arguments, down to the way he lashed out until I was too angry to continue the conversation. The difference was that he was plainly out of time and evasive maneuvers, a fact which we both knew; I was hardened to any of his previous tactics. I’d have him situated by summer’s end, kicking and screaming if need be, and that would be the end of this debacle. All that would remain was the unpleasant fracturing of our relationship and the cruel whispers of doubt that his varying accusations instilled. 

We spoke out of necessity on Saturday, or rather I spoke at him; he lay unmoving under his bedsheets the entire day, firmly disinterested in either making peace or responding to my tired demands for attention. It suited me just as well; he was less of a danger to the apartment when rooted in place, given he lacked the force of will to even reach for his cigarettes. I brushed up on my English Lit, dressed in tweed, undid a button or two, and departed for the university; to the corpse in the corner I indicated that I would not be back before midnight, and might well be out until morning. Francis rolled over without responding.

Heading into the university for the first time all summer felt like a visit to Elysium. Never had the pale red brick and white trim of Dornsife seemed so appealing a change of pace. Mudd Hall struck me as appreciably picturesque, its Roman Revival buildings a beautiful tribute to the arches and elaborate facades of architectural titans of yore; I was serene in the face of the chattering academics within. 

I spent the first hour or so rotating around the room playing nice and making friends. I knew a number of the academics by face or by name, though none particularly well; amongst the guests were a few familiar faces from my graduate year, the Claire Coburns and Arthur Zhangs whose dissertation subjects I had discussed over late nights in the library. My usual first impression nerves were faint; I was a stronger candidate than the people I recognized, and I could sense the faculty representatives liked me. My accidental aura of mystery had worked in my favor, leaving them with no specific expectations and pleasantly surprised by my easy conversation. I was not surprised when I was subtly directed towards more senior staff, Jim Kincaid and Lawrence Green and Rick Berg, middle-aged men with keen gazes and distinctive speech patterns. 

Green was the first to turn to me, sporting a ferociously untamed head of hair and an outdated moustache that only added to his sort of Doc Brown allure. He gave me a frank once-over even as he nodded to himself. 

“Yes, yes, come join us, sir- your name?”

“Richard Papen,” I said, shaking hands, firm like my father and nonchalant like Charles Macaulay. “PHD. I just finished my thesis.”

“On which subject?”

“The Revenger’s Tragedy.”

“Jacobean,” Kincaid said, considering. “Your poison of choice?”

“I like the dramatists from that time. Lately I’ve been reading Kit Marlowe.”

“And are you a subscriber to the Marlovian theory, Dr Papen?”

“Absolutely not,” I said firmly, earning me a laugh from Berg and a waggle of the brows from Green. “I think the man’s plays do him enough credit without assigning him authorship post-mortem.”

“Very sensible of you.”

“I try to be. I don’t think I could read so many Jacobeans if I wasn’t.”

We spoke for a good while; I made a decent showing. Eventually the group scattered, leaving me with Lawrence as we wandered into the library in search of some book or other he wanted to cite. It was getting late, the sun having set within the hour, and the library was cavernous in the electric glow. I paced politely up and down the rows as Lawrence searched for his page, my covert observation reminding me of my earliest encounter with the twins and Bunny, their blond heads joined and blotted ink on the pages scattered in front of them. 

“Yes, yes, here it is,” Lawrence said, voice dragging me back into the present. “When Bacon first describes Bensalem. But hear me now, and I will tell you what I know. You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem; nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world. Which is, I think, rather as we were discussing, that very direct reference to the pure by opposition to the sullied. But, as is the nature of utopia, it always seems to us only a temporary paradise: virginity, of course, is to be taken.”

“The contemporary obsession with virginity does connect fairly clearly to the idea of evil as an all-consuming force of corruption.”

“Precisely: once touched by evil, good is lost forever. Powerful metaphor.”

“Awaiting its antistrophe, you could say.”

“That you could, Dr. Papen! That you could.”

He went to return the book to its shelf as I stood staring into the dark rows of tables. The phantom of the past had crept its way into my head; not just the memory, but the literature now, the dark imbalance of the two forces. Antistrophe, Lawrence’s obsession of choice, was a Greek word by provenance, sung west to east, a reply to the strophe, but before even that it was a dance, ὰ ντ ὶ and στροφ ὴ, ‘turning against’. Beauty and horror, ecstasy and sorrow, stepping in turn. La danse macabre , Henry might have said, reserving a smile for Francis with the same off-beat humor as he’d declared our search for ferns. 

“As a classical man you’ll appreciate the gargoyles,” Lawrence was saying now, as I followed him mechanically outside, eyes following his arm unseeingly. “Diogenes with his lamp, searching for an honest man.”

Julian would have had his head for the mistranslation, I thought, wincing. ἄνθρωπον ζητῶ : looking for a man, where none is to be found, a scathing indictment of Diogenes’ fellow Athenians. 

I realized all at once that I did not want to spend another two hours feigning interest in any of the people milling around inside, these academics with their easy temperaments and pointless squabbles, so very deplorably modern. I had lost my previous cool: my composure was an effort to maintain for the rest of the event, every bit of honest enjoyment now a facade, and I was nervous to boot, a nebulous roiling feeling in my stomach that only worsened with each passing minute. I stayed as long as I could stand it, relieved beyond measure when the Head started thanking every person under the sun and releasing us into the night. I fended off two invitations to a nearby bar citing an imaginary appointment in the morning and clambered hastily into the BMW before anyone could chase me down.

I was only minutes from the campus when my dim nerves transformed into real concern, now with purpose. It was the first time in his entire stay that I’d left Francis to his own devices for so long, knowledge I’d chosen to suppress until then; at the thought of our confrontation the previous day I was now seized with trepidation. What in the hell had I been thinking? The finality of it seemed horrifyingly transparent, as did Francis’ accusations that I wanted him out of my feet. The BMW shuddered as I fought the late-night traffic, my reflection pale in the rearview mirror, as robotic as I’d been stumbling to my room after Bunny’s death. I don’t remember a minute of the drive, just my rapid flux of conflicting emotions: I was in turn angry at myself for my wild conjecturing, recollecting that I’d meant everything I said and that Francis had deserved it to boot, and sick with fear, struck with the terrible certainty that my last words to him would have been some disparaging aside. 

It was the third time that year I’d found myself in a panic chasing after Francis for the self-same reason, and by far the worst. I had spent the first flight in a state of suspended expectation, immediately relieved of my worst suspicions upon arrival at the hospital; the day before the wedding I had been in a daze of willing disbelief, the drive over too rapid for any of my thoughts to crystallize. This time I was driving myself to the scene of the crime, and the drive was long and slow, the clock creeping towards eleven as I gripped the steering-wheel. This time I was alone with the echoes of conversation ricocheting around my head and the shadow of Henry in the windshield, the way he’d handled Charles like a rabid animal at the end. This time I had Francis’ tired voice in my head saying I’m sorry, I thought you should know . 

I parked the car so poorly that I nearly took off the Mustang’s mirror, and ran up the four flights of stairs with my heart in my throat, the clock striking eleven as I fumbled with my keys, voice bursting forth with unsteady urgency when I managed to wrench it open.

“Francis? Francis? ” 

The room was empty, a fact I barely registered as I ran into the bathroom, ramming the door open without thought; I had not, until then, managed to connect the dots to the past, but I did then, unceremoniously, remembering Henry’s tolerant reproof as Francis shuddered: ‘ I still can’t go into Henry’s bathroom. Blood smeared on the porcelain .’ 

There was blood, then, on the floor, fat red drops, fresh, and Francis with my razor in hand, but the water splashed as he jerked upright, and I was struck with such excruciating, impossible relief that I barely saw him move, eyes stuck fixedly on the blood as it seeped from his wrists, the room swimming. 

‘You weren’t meant to- you said you’d be back-“ Francis was saying, startled, but I scarcely heard him; I was grabbing the razor from him so violently it went flying out of the room, my hands gripping his wrists in a blind panic, watching red bead between my fingers. It dripped into the water like it had that day at the lake, crawled down our hands like it had down Henry’s neck, the words stumbling half-formed out of me. 

“Don’t- don’t-“

“Richard-“

“Don’t,” I repeated, voice cracking, grip tightening helplessly, and then the water was sloshing heavily as Francis moved sluggishly upright. 

“Shh, shh. They’re shallow, they’re shallow. If you let go-“ 

My hands tightened reflexively, drawing more blood, but his voice stayed soothing, the same reassuring timbre I’d once watched him comfort Camilla with, a hypochondriac’s uncanny bedside manner. “If you let go we can get some bandages on them, they’re barely skin-deep. I’m sure you have some under the sink.” 

I took a shuddering breath, managing with difficulty to meet his eyes, wide as they were, his expression going pacifying when he met my stare. 

“It’s all right, I promise, just- get the bandages, I won’t move.“

I released him, stumbling upright with a choked noise when the bleeding immediately redoubled in volume, but he was still alive enough to try and push himself out of the bathtub, hands leaving pink smears along the rim, so I grabbed for the cupboard under the sink, grasped haphazardly at the sparse bandages I owned only because my upstairs neighbor had a nasty ankle-biter of a dog. I moved back in time to help him out onto the soaked bathmat, where he folded to sit cross-legged, blinking hard before refocusing on my face. 

“There we go. Can you manage-“

“Yes,” I wrung out, though my eyes were on my bloody hands. They weren’t entirely steady as I unrolled the fabric, which seeped through on the first stretch, my breath hiccupping before I clenched my jaw and wrapped his wrist again, again, again, until the red vanished and he was stopping my hand, redirected to his other arm. As soon as I had fastened the material I dropped the roll, fingers shaking, sleeves damp and knees soaked. 

Francis was shushing me again, hands flitting uncertainly around me; I met his gaze head-on at last, somewhere between agitation and frenzy. “I told you that it would be worse, Francis, Jesus, I told you-“

“I know, I know,” Francis repeated, rushed, apologetic, “I’m sorry, it’s all right now.”

“It’s not all right , what the hell are you talking about, I told you I needed- was I supposed to find you in the morning like the maid-“

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Francis hushed, like a mantra, low and unsteady. “I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t realize- I forgot you meant it, I’m sorry.”

“Jesus Christ,” I choked, pressing the back of my hand to my eyes, the sound of it painfully Plano, vowels stretched, uptalk heavy. “You didn’t realize ?” 

“I’m sorry,” Francis said, roughly, green eyes boring into mine when I managed to drop my hand. “I won’t do it again.” 

And, this being the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever promised me, I found myself laughing, if only to avoid bursting into tears. 

I was too drained and preoccupied to be embarrassed as we set to cleaning the bathroom, Francis in a less sodden set of clothes unflinchingly scrubbing the blood out of the tiles before I could offer to do so. He got dizzy halfway through from the blood loss, and I exiled him to the couch and force-fed him honey by the spoonful until he protested he was going to be sick. I finished wiping the bath clean by myself, groggy and exhausted, and upon my return found the razor quietly disposed of and the front door finally shut. Francis silently extended the accursed 100-dollar gin my way; I collapsed next to him on the sofa, accepting the bottle as I went. 

Tremors were still going through me at intervals; Francis either did not notice or was too polite to comment, eyes faraway as we passed the bottle quietly between us. I couldn’t think of what to say, so I waited for him to speak first, which he eventually did, half a sigh.

“I wasn’t really going to do it, before the wedding.”

I had suspected as much; I nodded slowly for him to continue, which earned me the ghost of a wry, surprised smile. 

“I meant to do it eventually, like I said. But I wasn’t going to do it then. I was just incredibly drunk and morbid.”

“The occasion did sort of call for it.”

“Do you want to know something heinous? I wasn’t even drinking about that.”

“No?”

He shook his head, half-wet hair curling absently under his jaw. “I planned on being a lot more composed when you showed up.” 

It didn’t entirely surprise me that he’d expected me to come despite our fight, but I was curious now, shifting to look at him as I nursed the bottle. “Something else happened.”

“There was a distinct lack of happening,” Francis corrected, smiling ironically. “Priscilla chose the day before our nuptials to inform me that our invitation to Charles had been returned undelivered I don’t know how many days prior. Not that I expected any different- she was the one insistent on writing to all of my old friends - but, well.” 

The brittle tone to his voice hurt to listen to; I swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, what for? I hadn’t been counting on his attendance. It just reminded me that he hadn’t answered my previous letter either. You’d think-“

But he said no further, shaking his head with resigned self-depreciation, and I felt extremely sorry for him, remembering Camilla’s pointed thanks, his dismissive discomfort. He’d paid for Charles’ rehab for years. I hadn’t even managed to look after him for a summer. 

“He was in Boston, for a while, a few years ago. I don’t know if Camilla knew. I certainly tried not to tell her.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“Well, of course you didn’t,” Francis said, but it wasn’t cruel; I grimaced and passed him the bottle. “Now you know, anyways. All caught up.”

“I really don’t want you gone,” I said, without cause, which earned me a fleeting smile, devoid of irony this time. “Not like that.”

“I know.”

“I hope you do. I’m serious.”

“I know,” Francis repeated, a little quieter, less reassuring, like he was trying to convince himself. I went to the window, opened it as wide as it could go, and lit us both a cigarette. 

“Montreal,” Francis informed me, the next week, thumbing at his bandages. “Don’t laugh.”

Dumbly, I said the first thing that came to mind, which was: “Does the Mustang even have snow tires?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Montreal?”

“Do you think that’s stupid?” Francis asked, pacing nervously. “I thought- well, there’s the French, and it’s not far from the weather I’m used to, and Canada’s less expensive…”

“I don’t think that’s stupid,” I said, which was true, unlike the last time he’d suggested it. “Where in Montreal?”

His pacing stalled and resumed. “Depends on how much the apartment sells for. Westmount’s anglophone and chic but it’s expensive and I’m not sure I want to live in the suburbs amidst the Molsons and Bronfmans. Outremont’s nice too but all French and very uppity. Otherwise Mont Royal is majority anglophone and on-island, but a little grimy.” 

“I doubt you’ll need to worry about costs if you sell Marlborough Street.” I hesitated, unwilling to break his momentum. “Are you sure you want to sell it? If you ever want to return to Boston-“

“No,” Francis said, knee-jerk fast. “If I go back there I’ll never set foot outside again. I have to sell it.”

“Okay,” I said, and that was that. I phoned the estate agent that afternoon. Francis took the phone from me halfway through, cool and suspicious, which saved him half of the fees I wouldn’t have known to protest. 

After the long dearth of action, everything seemed to progress at a terrible speed. The apartment was in ridiculous demand; the agent insisted Francis could nearly double his asking price if he held out until Christmas, but he would hear nothing of it. By the end of August the contract of sale was signed; having spent the month house-hunting through contacts in the city, his things already shipped across Vermont and sent to storage, Francis was ready to move in by September. Even the tripping point of visas had been astonishingly painless: his application had somehow reached a Corcoran niece, and (I presume after Mr. Corcoran getting wind of this) was immediately fast-tracked with the winking promise of work permits should the need arise. I could not even begrudge him the blatant nepotism, too stunned by his good luck, though as Francis put it: ‘ that family breeds like rabbits, Richard, they’re all over the place ’. 

For my part I had unceremoniously moved into university accommodation mid-August, my possessions and Francis’ following suit, and it was from there that we parted, his suitcase packed and repacked twenty-five times before he stopped fussing. The timing was unfortunate; I was due to start as Associate Professor in the last week of August, though for various reasons I was only actually needed after Labor Day, precisely the week during which Francis was set to leave. Of course I knew he wanted me to help him move, and furthermore I would have greatly liked to do so, but I couldn’t very well miss my first days on the job, and so he never asked, and we parted sort of awkwardly at the airport, my gut clenching as I watched him vanish into the queue. 

By some ironic twist Charles had transferred his share of the money into Francis’ account mere days before his departure, predictably missing a good ten or twenty thousand; he’d taken it upon himself to buy a decent suitcase and get his hair cut to college-length, red bob easy to track until it wasn’t. I spent the rest of the day distracted and forgetting I was home alone until my phone rang late in the evening and I picked up as rapidly as I’d ever laughed at Francis for doing.

“Hello?”

“Oh, thank God, I’ve been dialing the number wrong for an age- why do you write your sevens like that?” 

He stayed at a hotel for two nights; by the third he was set on his fourth housing option, a very pricey thing that was still well within budget thanks to the preposterous price the Marlborough apartment had garnered. Getting him to go through with the purchase took more convincing- he was incessantly talking himself out of it in a pique of anxiety and interrupting my classes to do so, culminating in my shouting at him in terrible Greek over my lunch break and accidentally supremely impressing a nearby cohort of my students as a result. By the next morning the whole year was convinced I had some mysterious past involving a thwarted love and a remote Greek island, and subsequently attendance hit unprecedented highs which my peers were quick to applaud. 

After our close cohabitation over summer, I felt I heard little of Francis throughout September, though my phone bill said otherwise. To date I am not entirely sure what he was doing with himself- adjusting to the city, perhaps, or else holing himself inside his apartment in a blind panic. Our conversations always managed to get derailed entirely from our daily doings, and though I asked for pictures largely to confirm he was alive and well I received none, as Francis was withholding any glimpse of his surroundings to ensure I kept my promise of visiting during fall recess. 

I was too proud to beg for the divertissement, but in truth I craved it. The evening of vague amusement I had spent with the senior faculty members had long faded from memory: teaching, I was finding, was hell on earth. 

I might have enjoyed the role better if I’d been teaching something else, or somewhere else, taken up Julian’s mantle and nurtured my small group of bright minds in that classical, fanatical mindset we’d shared. I will admit that for all Julian’s flaws that model of teaching still strikes me as meritorious, even while recognizing that Laforgue’s warnings had held true. Having faced the proletariat of academia myself I am inclined to sympathize with his elitism if not his criteria. 

I don’t know whether it is possible to overstate the horrors I was faced with in my first weeks of teaching. I was, naturally, biased from the outset, but if someone had set out to confirm each one of my biases they could not have done better than my first-year students. There was something bordering on parody about the whole gum-smacking, pot-smelling, protest-attending, Mac Plus wielding, tie-die wearing lot of them, painfully counter-culture young things with braying accents and connections to any variety of L.A. B-lister, eager to defend their undying allegiance to either Derrida or Foucault, comparing arrest scores and signed copies of The Woman Warrior. These were the spiritual successors of the exact liberal arts types I’d fled at Hampden, flipped sideways and dipped in the shiny plasticine of Los Angeles in the early nineties, toting convoluted screenplays or half-finished novellas, all ‘semi-autobiographical’ coming-of-agers with hard-hitting titles loosely related to the cause du jour : apartheid or the Gulf War, Wall Street more often than not. I had the misfortune of teaching the classics, and was thus assailed with think pieces on the hidden subtextual militant lesbianism of Edgar Allen Poe or Holden Caulfield by way of Kurt Cobain. Every bit of analysis was so painstakingly  subversive that their differing opinions all blended into one unimpressive refrain. 

It wasn’t even that I hated them, though at times I did, but that they depressed me. Even those of them whose work was tolerably interesting failed to appreciate the classics for what they were, too concerned with their own originality; I found them all achingly predictable in the same way that I had once viewed my classmates. USC was a private university; a vast majority of the rebels I taught came from Bel Air or Beverly Hills, glossy new money types whose post-university years would find them smoothly segueing into real estate or finance where their parents had made their wealth, or else coasting on allowances to make their independent drama films to no critical acclaim. There was no authenticity to their points of view, just pure reactive performance: I had believed that Henry was willing and able of taking a town under siege far more than I believed a single of my students would go on to become Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Possibly I was just old and bitter, affronted by their disregard for the lessons the past had to offer, or even their boundless self-confidence. Regardless I regarded them all with despairing scorn, every lesson like pulling teeth. 

I had tried, initially, to challenge their bad habits, engage in good faith with their dismissal of the significance of the works as they stood, offering probing questions and dispelling bad faith assumptions. Poking holes in their harebrained theories, however, was a Sisyphean task; whenever I managed to aptly argue someone into a corner I was met with blank, slightly embarrassed resentment as some other student jumped in to pursue a different angle. We were at a collective impasse: they would not see value in the texts on their own merits, and I could not see value in their wild reinterpretations. This was a less abysmal experience for them than it was for me; I got the idea they quite enjoyed getting their analysis torn apart, since it gave them the chance to complain about the establishment silencing them, and they treated me mostly without rancor, half-pitying my close-mindedness and half-intrigued by my positions. At twenty-eight I was distinctly younger than most of the teaching staff, and most of my younger colleagues were heavily L.A., the sort to attend Velvet Underground concerts alongside our students. I stood in sharp contrast with my suits and accidental Greek mystique, reclusive and extremely resistant to their sly attempts at fraternization; to my distress this kept my classes full to the brim throughout the semester. I dreaded the sound of my alarm. 

I might have obtained some relief from the hours of vacuous discourse amidst my colleagues, but though they were not so exaggeratedly unbearable as my students they were similar products of their environment in ways I was equally keen to avoid. The more senior professors, though disdainful of my perceived West Coast affectations and overly interested in discussing their petty gripes with one another or the University, were my companions of choice, but I saw little of them, given our misaligned schedules and their more glamorous commitments. Instead I found myself with only the younger teaching staff on offer, a hodgepodge group of try-hard new age intellectuals, laissez-faire modernists, and socially stunted obsessives with seventy-three published articles on punctuation in Cummings. 

Beyond the impossibility of conversation I was faced with the separate problem of being one of the few reasonably sane and sociable men under the age of forty in the faculty, and as such mercilessly hunted by nearly every non-sapphic female in the teaching department, a fate I had not especially enjoyed back in the days of co-ed halls and enjoyed even less now. Where Judy Poovey had lacked tact or subtlety she had at least been a decent neighbor; the same could not be said of my colleagues, who had little to offer by way of teaching credentials or appreciable academic insight. I was forever being asked to attend concerts or open mic nights or ‘intimate get-togethers’ by students and professors alike, and as a result found myself retreating hastily to my cramped office whenever the ball rang, an avoidance strategy that was then popularly attributed to my Stoic affect and previously hermit-like life as a PHD student. 

I cannot imagine anyone would be interested in the minutiae of my routine that fall. I spent my days heavily caffeinated, driving to the lecture halls in the mornings with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for visits to dentists or graveyards; there was an equal dearth of soul in my classes. Hours of mechanically attempting to engage the students with some lesser-known work of William Shakespeare dragged on mercilessly, broken up by intermittent retreats to my office, an overheated death trap with a sliver of a window and a horrendous seventies shag rug where I sat apathetically marking essays until the bell rang. Sometimes I chanced lunch on campus, and was more often than not drawn into conversations that managed to be as insipid as the radio advertisements I suffered through on my way to work despite the academic jargon they were coated in. So and so’s latest work was deconstructive post-modern third wave genius, but such and such was a total passé sell-out hack. Stephen King should be added to the curriculum as a master of neogothic prose, or else was barely above pulp fiction, the worst kind of popular writing and a blot upon the literary world. By the time I returned to my apartment in the evenings I was in a zombie-like state, going through the motions until I finally had access to a drink and a flat surface to crash on.

Since Hampden Sophie had accused me with diminishing levels of affection of being a workaholic, a claim I was hard-pressed to deny. There’s a Greek proverb- ‘a jackdaw is always found near a jackdaw’- which translates roughly to ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I have rarely flocked together with anyone I felt of a feather with, and even now I sometimes wonder that I ever did, half-convinced I dreamt the whole experience. All I had after Hampden were Sophie and her various friends, all eminently likeable and yet categorically not jackdaws; once we went our separate ways I never bothered to find any replacement for them. In school I had tempered my isolation with dreams of escape; after Henry I had no such idealism left in me, so losing myself to my studies had seemed as good a distraction as any, and it had sufficed until now. Yet teaching held none of the appeal that my thesis had, and with the passion lost I was left dispirited and keenly aware of the dead silence I spent my weekends in. 

As though my days weren’t dismal enough, I was sleeping terribly. Since Francis’ stay I had been troubled by disorienting dreams, not quite the nightmares of old but their equally persistent cousins, and though I had managed to sleep more or less through them while he was there they had worsened in intensity since the last few days before his departure. It got to the point where I awoke nightly to some ghastly apparition, images of a toga-clad Bunny or a gun-toting Charles crawling at the edges of my vision as I panted awake. I felt Henry was watching me again, not in the corporeal way he had in the hospital or upon my return to L.A. but in some subtler and more insidious fashion, forgotten fragments of him returning to me with searing precision as I went about my day, dark eyes on me in the halls or low rumbling Greek whispers in my living-room as I fell asleep. His suicide, which I had managed not to consciously think about in years, was permanently on my mind. 

For class once we had translated a recounting of the Battle of Thermopylae, a task I had set to on the porch of Francis’ aunt’s house, Camilla lazing in the afternoon sun with her head pressed to Charles’ knee and her bare toes brushing my ankles, her brother studying her translation with an idle frown as she tranquilly dismissed his questions. The story goes that ahead of this battle the king of Persia had sent notice to the Greeks, a demand that they lay down their weapons, met with scorn by the Spartan king Leonidas. It was his reply that the twins were parrying over, and that I had foregone my own work for in favor of awaiting the conclusion to their argument. Camilla was the best student out of us, but Henry was the native speaker, and his second in terms of linguistics was Francis; until one of them interrupted it was the sort of back and forth that could last an afternoon. Then the door had creaked open, and Henry had emerged, smile arch and decisive.

Camilla’s right . μολ ὼ ν λαβέ! 

In English, bastardised: come take them! 

I think of him saying that almost every time I revisit his death. No one has ever uncovered the truth of Bunny’s death, scoring him the win post-mortem; he knew it, dying smilingly as he did. His coup de grâce, Francis had called it, in New York, eyes cavernous and hands shaking. I don’t think I will ever know what Henry really was, but I will always remember him as he was in that moment, staunchly triumphant, jaw set and grip steady, Socrates with his hemlock. Come take them!

September came and went in silent misery.

Chapter Text

Given the unenviable position I had managed to trap myself in, I spent fall of that year verging on sleep-deprived, increasingly tempted to beat my students over the head with the Diogenes gargoyle, and (most of all) desperate for a hobby. 

I would not describe myself as the hobbyist type, unlike the vast bulk of L.A. inhabitants; I am not especially fond of sports or crafts, and would have rather swallowed nails than joined an improvisation group like Sophie had (I suspect jokingly) once suggested to me. Still, I was keen enough to spend less time seeing shadows that I seriously considered joining Judy’s aerobics classes for about a minute, at which point I threw in the towel and returned to journaling, an old pastime I’d picked up in my last year at Hampden and cast aside sometime between breaking up with Sophie and starting my PHD. Journaling is perhaps a misnomer: these were not the cryptic entries of first year or the pragmatic to-do lists of my daily life, but a sort of disjointed narrative hovering around the edges of that year, more storytelling than autobiography. I was too wary of having another Bunny incident to get into any details. Despite the vagueness, or perhaps because of it, I had managed to fill three journals before discarding the project the first time around.

I had brought the old volumes with me to the new apartment, and thus took less time than I might’ve to dig them out of my shelves, indulging in a read-through before I picked up where I’d left off. To my frustration I had managed to misplace some of them during the move, a loss that pained me mainly because it cost me some captured memories, now lost to time. I was resigned to revisiting the past in my hours alone- I had dropped the habit after Sophie in part because I blamed my inability to move on for our breakup, but given my current circumstances I could not pretend to resist the comfort. Truthfully I had missed the opportunity for recollection, and returning to the project after a few years’ distance left me with a renewed sense of perspective; I wrote incessantly, my weekends passing in a haze. Monday mornings hit me like bad comedowns, the world out of focus as I emerged from the past to the grating voices of L.A.’s best and bleakest. 

Fall break fell during the third week of October, three days’ leave and a weekend to which I added the two days of overtime I had done to cover a colleague’s external commitment. By that point I would have been happy to spend a week in Plano if it would free me of work; Canada had in my mind assumed an Eden-like glow. Upon Francis’ repeat warnings I packed warm (‘really warm, Richard, let’s not have a repeat of the warehouse’); to save money I had chosen to fly to Vancouver before taking the connection to Montreal, an eight-hour journey by air which saw me arriving groggily at Montréal-Mirabel at six on Wednesday morning, lugging my suitcase behind me and stumbling through the border agent’s questions in halting French. 

I was still trying to remember when I’d told Francis I’d be landing when I caught sight of him in the waiting area, clad in a spectacular chesterfield and a brilliant green scarf and looking with supreme disdain at the loud litter of children embracing their father near him. I was suddenly so glad to see him I almost jumped and waved. Instead I weaved rapidly past my fellow passengers towards him, unable to curb my smile when he spotted me. It only broadened with amusement when he barely spared me a greeting in favor of sighing in loud relief, waving me after him rapidly as he turned on his heel and made a beeline for the exit.

“I’m parked horrendously, you wouldn’t believe how busy this place is at this godforsaken hour. Is that all your luggage?”

The Mustang had acquired winter tires, and I sat peering out from the raised roof as we drove past Laval, Francis interrogating me about my flight with the knowing skepticism of the well-travelled as we crossed the river, gloved hands tapping intermittently against the steering wheel all the while. We crossed the Prairies and he scoffed at me as I peered outside. 

“There’s nothing to see, Richard, it’s hardly New York.”

“It’s the first time I’ve been abroad,” I replied, almost managing not to sound defensive about it, which earned me a startled look.

“God, really? If you’d have told me I might have risked Paris after all.”

In truth there was little to see until we approached his place, just small industrial stores and squat apartments; once we passed Outremont the buildings got noticeably nicer, and I could spot Mont Royal in the distance, half-hidden though it was by the trees.

I was mesmerized by the trees themselves. It’s hard to explain fall in Canada to anyone who hasn’t seen it for themselves- though Vermont had come close it had been so long since I’d gawked at the gold and crimson canopy that I was entirely captivated by the endless quilt of color, the sidewalks littered in a patchwork of russets and umber barely disrupted by the people walking over them. Montreal has more trees than any city I’ve ever lived in, adding to the oddly small-town feel which Francis was expounding on as we neared the Plateau. He was a city boy by upbringing, and God only knew used to the comforts of a métropole, but far too much of a homebody to enjoy urban life- he might have grown out of this trait with age in another life, but with two and a half murders under his belt his agoraphobia had cemented itself by then. In this regard Montreal made sense for him, a city but a small one, its residential boroughs not out of place in a large town. 

We pulled to a halt near the side of Mont Royal as the clock struck seven, Francis nodding sharply upwards as I stared. 

“Here’s home.”

All at once I was incredibly happy that he had never shown me his apartment before, because it left me to observe it for the first time with utterly virgin eyes. The building had been constructed in 1909 by a well-off Jewish benefactor to house the immigrants coming en masse from the East, his name etched atop the facade, and still wore its grandeur with slightly eclectic pride, clean square lines and neat red brick overlayed by the curving walls that lent it a touch of the Baroque. Wide, arch-framed windows peppered the stone, forest green balconies sat atop the third floors with perfect symmetry, and where the almost romantic banister of the staircase stopped there was a sort of balustrade carved out around the front door, three neat pilasters framing the entrance from the street. Every detail down to the Cambridge blue doors and the quaint mailbox was so far removed from the types of homes I was used to passing that it seemed to me taken from the pages of a storybook. 

“You like it,” Francis decided, watching me where I stood at the foot of the stairs. I did not protest this assessment: in fact I was completely charmed, and cautiously waiting for the spell to break.

I knew as soon as I stepped foot into the living room that no such awakening would come. The first thing my eyes landed on was the green velvet sofa, sat comfortably neighboring an antique bookshelf overflowing with the books I’d helped him box; from there I tracked the sprawling Persian rug, the twin armchairs from his great aunt’s apartment, the long wooden bench in the bay window, covered in paintings he hadn’t gotten around to hanging up. A pair of his shoes was carelessly lying by the coffee table next to a litter of glasses and a half-eaten mandarin. The whole apartment was the same, grand old things and Francis’ thoughtless clutter juxtaposed in characteristic fashion, like the home of some socialite personality of times gone by. There was something akin to impudence in the amount of family heirlooms he’d managed to cram into it, an aesthetic take-that of sorts, finely polished oak table in his dining-room and quality silverware in his kitchen drawers. In the guest room where I was to sleep he’d somehow fit a Steinway grand piano. 

“Oh, no, I don’t play,” he said, when questioned. “It was the violin for me, but I lacked the character for it. I stopped at twelve. Still, I figured if nothing else I could burn it for firewood.”

We ended up back in the living-room, Francis sinking somewhat anxiously into the sofa as I finally managed to recover from the heady mixture of intense jealousy and childish wonder long enough to give him the verdict he awaited. 

“It’s lovely.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. It’s lovely. Do you like it?”

“It’s decent now,” Francis side-stepped, tilting his head to scrutinize me. “You should have seen it in September. I spent a month living out of boxes. You actually mean it?”

“Yes,” I laughed, a little exasperatedly. As though I had ever taken issue with Francis’ style . “You’ve seen where I live.”

He wrinkled his nose, insultingly considering all at once, then sprung to his feet and swanned off into the kitchen. 

“What do you want for breakfast? I imagine you didn’t eat the airplane food. The smell alone…”

I was sorely reminded of the way he’d once spent days writing and rewriting menus ahead of dinners with Julian, losing his temper at us when we pretended to misplace some ingredient or other and then ferociously withholding food until we did our due penance. The memory made me smart a little as I trailed after him, counting empty spots at the dinner table. 

Francis looked better than he had over the summer, though he still looked sickly. He was disinterested in my rote questions about his life in Montreal, intent on grilling me about work instead, and since I had his full and focused attention I can’t say that I put up much of a fight. We spent much of that first day in and around the kitchen, Francis leaning forward in his chair as I recounted the horrors of teaching, flinching at apt moments and sort of grimly satisfied by the retelling. 

“Go on,” I said, at some point, resignedly tongue-in-cheek. “Say I told you so.”

“I’d never,” Francis retorted, eminently serious. “When have you known me to kick a man when he’s down?”

I waited. His brows quirked. 

“I mean honestly, Richard. Teaching? In Los Angeles? What were you thinking?”

“You’re a bastard.”

“Exposure therapy is one thing, but this is pure masochism. I’m sure you could find some leather-clad woman to whip you at far less of a personal cost.”

I choked on my water, and when I glowered wetly at him I was rewarded with a vulpine smile, the lueur espiègle in his eyes so jarringly pulled from my memories that I lost whatever quick retort I’d set out to make. 

I showered after breakfast, then sat at the piano for a while aimlessly fingering the keys and watching the trees through my window, trying to assess how he seemed to me through the faint unreality of the setting. He didn’t strike me as happy exactly- he was never of a sunny disposition, even when content- but he seemed more himself than I’d anticipated, or at least more wholly himself. He was quick-witted and carelessly elegant even in his worst moods, which placated me enough to put up with him but also tended to make me forget that he was as charismatic as the rest of them in better spirits. I was a little clumsy around him as a result, out of practice handling him when he wasn’t such a wreck.

I emerged from my room to find Francis perched precariously atop an armchair, tapping his cigarette against some kind of priceless ebony statuette. He chewed thoughtfully at his lip when he spotted me.

“I imagine you’ll be wanting to see the sights.”

“It’s up to you,” I reassured, honestly. I am not a demanding guest.

“I’m out of practice hosting,” Francis continued, almost critically. “I don’t remember the last time I had to show anyone around. And to be honest with you I haven’t exactly been playing tourist here.”

“It really doesn’t matter to me,” I emphasized, leaning against the wall. “I barely showed you around when you were in California.” 

“Yes, well, that was California.”

“Francis, I came to see you, not Montreal,” I said, then felt embarrassed for saying it. Mercifully his mind was elsewhere, frown crescent as he pulled from his cigarette. 

“It’s your first time abroad. I’m obliged to let you touch foreign soil for more than a minute. Besides I’d rather avoid a repeat of the last time any of us decided on an impromptu exotic getaway and didn’t properly appreciate the sights.”

We set off for Mont Royal around lunchtime, and spent most of the climb exchanging tidbits about mutual acquaintances. Francis asked after Judy Poovey. I received an update on Julian, now apparently sighted in Quantico. Every five minutes I would trail off entirely, thoroughly consumed by the sight around us. The three peaks were drowning in the reds and yellows of the fall foliage; the higher we climbed, the more we appeared to be emerging from an unfurling sea of color, the stuff of poetry. I have always felt a certain affinity for fall, its fading warmth and cool languor, the sense of loss it carries, but not until Vermont had it so wholly captured my heart- no longer for its symbolism, l es sanglots longs des violons de l’automne , but on its own merits: the honeyed bitter smell of the earth, the spendthrift gold and glory of the leaves, the mellow misty mornings. October in Montreal, after five years of Californian sunshine, nearly brought me to tears. If I could have I would have stopped time and lived atop that hill for the rest of my days, staring out into the blazing forest below, Francis’ windswept hair like a flickering torchlight beside me. I don’t know how long we stood there once we finally reached the observatory; for my part I was lost to the world.

“ Feuille-morte ,” Francis murmured eventually, contemplative: dead leaves. But my translation was too literal; he stooped to carefully pick up a vivid yellow-brown leaf by his feet, twirling it by the stem. “I had a coat in this shade.”

He looked up at me, and his expression shifted like I was being funny, brows knitting curiously. 

“Are you all right? You look sick.”

“I’m great,” I assured him, caught out, and tried to look less taken by the scenery even as a gentle breeze made fallen leaves flutter past us with dream-like solemnity. 

We descended slowly back into the city, mortals returned from Mount Olympus. I was cold then, noticing it for the first time; Francis reminded me in unimpressed tones that he’d warned me about the weather, and not to expect him to sacrifice his scarf just because I’d fallen prey to my own hubris. He hurried us back to his place nonetheless, muttering about bronchitis, and we stayed there as the sun set, nursing coffees and cigarettes. I was tired from the travel and Francis from the climb; I retired to the guest room without dinner and fell asleep within instants. 

We played tourists some more on Thursday, this time at the nearby Botanic Gardens, masterfully undersold by Francis and in fact housing acres and acres of themed gardens and Art Deco pavilions. I had bought a cheap camera in the morning and spent the day taking snapshots of everything in sight: the koi pond, the huge stone lion guarding the rose garden, the Ming Dynasty pathways, Francis half-turned and distracted ahead of me. A sculpture concisely entitled Lover’s Bench, of a man and a woman intertwined, a third figure by their side wearily looking elsewhere. Francis, this time aware of the camera, talking at me, hands gesturing about something or other. When he grew annoyed by my constant photography he seized control of the camera instead, taking rapid shots of me amidst the bonsai and staring at the river. We grabbed a late lunch in the gardens, sat overlooking a pond as I tried without success to convince Francis to introduce me to poutine; afterwards we wandered aimlessly back towards Outremont, kicking up leaves as we went. I stopped us outside a cramped little theatre, charmed by the indie facade and bright red doors, and somehow talked Francis into seeing a movie solely on the grounds of its name making us laugh. 

“Quentin Tarantino,” Francis pronounced dubiously, as we sat down for Fiction Pulpeuse . “That can’t possibly be his real name.”

“We know a Cloke .”

“If this is some kind of snuff film I’m going to hold it against you.”

Two hours, many deaths, an overdose, a dance number and incredible amounts of violence later, the credits rolled, leaving me entirely disoriented, somewhat titillated, and surprisingly impressed with the final product. We left the cinema in a torrent of discussion that lost little steam for the rest of the night; I went to bed still thinking about the diner scenes, and dreamt very intimately of Uma Thurman. 

On Friday Francis dragged us beyond our previous radius into Old Montreal, a sacrifice I appreciated; where I had loved Hampden for its austere Anglicanism, Vieux Montreal was similarly European in character, cobblestoned and markedly Gallic, sheltering public squares bordered by cafés and sprawling markets with names like Bonsecours. Mid-October is not a touristic peak in the city, and the area was blessedly quiet, so that if I didn’t account for the bright parkas and nearby traffic I could have almost fancied myself a time-traveler on the arm of a local, Francis perfectly becoming of the 17th century seminary we wandered by. Around lunchtime we headed to the Notre-Dame, a Gothic Revival beauty whose ornate stone facade towered over us as we approached, but there Francis faltered, drawing left of the steps to light a cigarette as I peered curiously at him. 

“You can go in without me. I need a smoke.”

When, to his clear irritation, I did no such thing, he fidgeted with his cigarette for a good minute before sending me a pleading look. 

“The lights inside are horrendously bright, you know. And my eyes are sensitive.”

“We don’t have to go,” I said, cutting him short before he could launch into a theory as to his failing eyesight. Considering that he’d commented on some loose seam on the cuff of my jacket that very morning I was disinclined to pretend to believe him. 

“No, no,” Francis sighed, with a fussy shake of his head, dropping his cigarette to crush it with his heel. “You absolutely do. I’ll endure it.”

It occurred to me as I followed him inside that perhaps his reluctance had more to do with setting foot inside a church again than any threat of early-onset blindness, but whatever that thought led to was lost to me the instant we crossed the threshold. 

I am not a spiritual person by nature. As a child I attended service sporadically, in a squat sandstone church where half the hymns were sung in Spanish, an experience I remember primarily as extremely hot and seemingly endless, hardly the stuff of divine inspiration. My father, sometimes, quoted Bible verses to ground his tirades, in limited selection: a son must obey his father, a wife must obey her husband, and so on. By the time I’d gone through pre-med and reached Hampden I was a nascent atheist, a stance only solidified by my surroundings. Out of all of us only Bunny had held any real zeal for the faith, albeit in characteristically self-indulgent fashion; though the others were Catholics they were so more in style than in substance. If I am honest, I think Julian’s wry dissections of modern religion played a heavy hand in our collective blasé dismissal of it, or at least in mine; I can still hear his droll chiding whenever I cross some eager believers preaching gospel to the masses. In any event after Bunny I could find no comfort in faith- if there is such a thing as hell, I am unavoidably destined for it. Yet despite all of this as I walked into the basilica I was struck by a sort of religious awe, so unforeseen that I nearly knocked into Francis as I ground to a halt.

Not since Julian’s office has a space affected me so profoundly. It’s the Plano in me, I suppose, having lived amongst ugly things for so long; I am easily taken by the old and grandiose. It nonetheless pains me to attribute my fit of passion to personal weakness when the location is so deserving of it. Upon first entry it draws the eye to the sanctuary, glossy pulpits racing by as the altarpiece dominates the room from up high, the suffering Christ and his companions alit as if divinely from within. Above them, great deep blue vaults crown the altarpiece, dressed in glittering stars; rows of high pillars, suspending the vaulted ceilings, are gilded in interwoven colors and patterns that seemed that day to shift and shimmer as the wintry sunlight reached them from the rose window above. I stumbled after Francis half-expecting a choir of angels to descend upon us, my gaze drawn dazedly to the pulpit, itself a frightfully ornate Gothic showpiece, rows of statues sat atop it with grave dignity, two prophets at ground level whose wooden eyes looked solemnly at me as I lingered by them. I shivered, turning back towards the entrance to clear my head, but my eyes landed instead on the colossal organs where they sat overlooking the room, vast and promising, and I remained no less entranced. 

Francis, who had vanished in the direction of the Virgin Mary as soon as we walked in, reappeared by the pillar closest to me, and cut off whatever he’d been about to say in lieu of staring at me with mild unease. 

“It’s some sort of primal passion with you, isn’t it? You look drunk.”

I shot him a heated glare; his hands shot up in self-defense. 

“Don’t bite my head off, I didn’t say it wasn’t pretty. You should come look at the windows.”

We had lunch near the harbor, after which we headed to an art gallery. In contrast to the basilica I was underwhelmed, but the pieces were interesting enough; after a while I wound up in the Indigenous exhibit, the clean strokes and distinctive colors engrossing, wide-winged eagles and broad-toothed wolves. 

Art always seems to me to invite reflection. I stood there thinking about the inconstant flashes of beauty that I held so dear, breaks in the senseless routine of my life. Places, people, words; Hampden, Camilla, Henry. There is no innate appreciation in me for the banal joys and simple pleasures in life- I yearn for greater delights, mindlessly, ever watchful for those glimpses of the sublime. My father had warned me incessantly that I would never be happy if I threw away my life for a pipe dream, and though I have never regretted leaving Plano I suppose he had the right of it. I lost a woman I could have loved because I couldn’t let go of one that was never mine to lose; I took a life and lost mine because a heavy-browed scholar invited me to do so. Even when I manage to grasp those elusive moments of completion I do so with a helpless melancholy, instinctively sensing their impermanence, like that which makes every sunset so particularly beautiful. Perhaps if I had been an artist I might have suffered life less harshly, consumed by the drive to capture the absolute even imperfectly; as it is I have no such bridge to sate my soul. Sometimes I think I have felt everything I can feel.

Looking at art makes me self-aware, perhaps because it is the one time I find myself surrounded by people playing the same part as I am. When I am one amongst a crowd of observers I can’t help but contemplate the compulsive nature of my own spectator role, so fundamental to my personality that I find it difficult to decipher. The Greeks believed temperaments were a physical matter, caused by simple excess or lack of body fluids, and when it comes to this part of myself I am inclined to believe them: it would take a lobotomy to curb my morbid longing for the picturesque.  

I heard myself exhale, returned to my body, and looked for Francis, craving proof of his corporeal existence. I found him sat on a chair not far off, gazing quietly at a sculpted fox, a picture I felt sorry for disturbing when he glanced up at my approach. 

“Sorry, I lost you back there.”

He shook his head impassively, coat fluttering as he stood.

“No need to apologize. It’s very becoming when you get all lovestruck over these things.”

I was fairly certain he meant nothing by it, since he was already righting his scarf and gliding towards the door, but I blushed regardless, conscious of the young woman stood nearby. 

“You’re meant to look at the art when you’re in a gallery.”

“There’s looking and then there’s you,” Francis snorted, holding the door for me and wincing at the cold breeze. “If you were left in front of some painting for fifty years you’d stay there perfectly happily so long as the paint didn’t dry out.”

He complained about his joints the entire walk back, portending his impending arthritis in the winter months. Since I knew better than to remind him that his grandfather was well into his eighties and still perfectly mobile, I tuned him out instead, eyes flitting around us to take in the passersby, for the most part families on their way back from school, children chattering in the pronounced twang of the region. My written French had reached a passable level over the course my studies, but spoken French was a different matter, and the Quebecois accent is hard on the ear. I caught only snippets of conversation as we walked. 

We ordered in for dinner, and as I was trying to establish whether or not a tip was required for the delivery boy I found myself broaching the subject of money, a topic that had metaphorically kept me awake since Francis’ departure in September. Though he wasn’t especially the sort to spiral into retail therapy, his tastes ran expensive, and I don’t think he’d ever been exposed to the idea of a spending limit except during those months where Bunny was bleeding them dry; I was dreading having to sit him down and inform him he’d blown his yearly clothing budget on some well-cut suit. 

As it turned out, however, I’d underestimated his self-awareness, because when asked he flippantly informed me that he had, in fact, set up a monthly allowance himself as soon as he’d visited the bank. 

“They thought I was an idiot, obviously, because I could just ask them to scrap it if I wanted to, but you know I loathe that sort of administrative hassle. I figure I’m more likely to starve for a while than drag myself down there to have it changed.”

Bordering on impressed, I asked how he was getting on with a budget; he laughed derisively. 

“What would I be spending money on? I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anyone. I suppose I eat. My phone bill is my biggest expenditure.”

We wound up playing cards until midnight, cross-legged by the coffee table, and that night I had no dreams I could remember in the morning. 

On Saturday, it got perceptibly colder; I was unceremoniously forced into one of Francis’ coats and warned against stretching it as we made our way to the Jean-Talon market, wind whistling menacingly as the leaves swirled in aimless patterns. Upon my comparing the temperatures to the latent heat in California Francis informed me he’d been told to expect snow by Halloween, and when I expressed my disbelief I was told to take it up with the Bouchard matriarch, a woman I had only sighted once ushering her children out of the nearby park looking like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

“ Relata refero . I’m not a meteorologist.”

“Do you remember how Henry used to have all the farmer’s almanacs memorized? Frost dates and harvests and all that.” 

“Him and his accursed flowers. Although of course the one time it might’ve come in helpful he was as blind-sided as the rest of us. I kept telling him: Henry, it’s really snowing now. And he wouldn’t even look out of the window, just kept saying it was an itinerant cloud formation or some such nonsense.”

He meant, I realized, the night of the murder, when I’d been stuck by myself and in the grips of hysteria. I have never enjoyed thinking about Henry so unblinkingly sending me home alone while he allowed Francis his company and left the twins to their own devices, just as I have never been able to stop wondering what the rest of them did that night. Did any of us truly realize what we had done then? I don’t think so. For my part it was not until Bunny’s funeral that it occurred to me that he was dead: until then I had been so preoccupied with our getting away with the act that I had not been able to confront its irreversible consequences. 

Perhaps Francis could sense I was about to ask questions he didn’t want to answer, or perhaps I am being ungenerous, but in any event he turned to me with abrupt speculation and drummed his fingers against his arms. “Can you cook?”

“I manage.”

“We could make something nice,” he continued, ignoring my slightly peevish tone. “But if I won’t manage a big meal if the best you can do is peel a carrot.”

I refrained from glancing at his left hand, mollified by the reflexive way he ducked it under his arm. “I can boil water too.”

“And he’s funny to boot,” muttered Francis, but when I smiled he dipped his head, mouth twitching.

He was unfamiliar with the market and skittish around the sellers until they started discussing their wares, upon which he turned inquisitive but unflinching as we worked our way through the stalls. I found myself watching the sellers closely as they interacted, intrigued by the way they talked to him: it was obvious they didn’t know what to make of him, but to my vague surprise the initial standoffishness was quick to disappear. Francis was never a man of the people, regarded with general suspicion by the townspeople we encountered, but the Montreal merchants seemed prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt- I think in part it was his willingness to converse in perfect French, cool Bostonian accent notwithstanding, or else his unfeigned interest in their stock. On one occasion he lost his temper at a butcher for trying to over-charge him and was rewarded with a laughing discount from the fisherman one stall over, much to my amazement. I was for my part very taken by the quaintness of it all, ruddy-cheeked commerçants discussing which wines to pair with this dark wisp of a dandy; every so often Francis would catch my entertained gaze and punishingly drag me into the debate, to the amusement of the vendors.

We spent the afternoon in the kitchen putting together a comically overstated feast, mostly on the basis of recipes Francis seemed to have memorized; when admiringly complimented on this he turned atypically flustered and swiftly changed the subject. It was a near-disaster, since he didn’t have a good portion of the necessary equipment and I was more of a hindrance than a help, but after a very close call involving myself, the salmon, Francis’ shoes, and copious amounts of butter, we somehow found our rhythm, and I revealed myself a decent sous-chef. The exaggerated effort of it all made for good fun- it had been years since I’d really cooked, and though Francis was incredibly particular and quick with the wooden spoon he was a better sport than he pretended to be, as well as generous with the tastings. Once everything that could cook or fry was doing so he turned to me and quirked a challenging brow. 

“Think you can manage desert?”

“Let’s do it.”

He sat propped up on the counter as I made pavlova, directing my movements with the whisk. With his sleeves rolled up his scars were on full display, dark and deep, and I was clumsy in my whisking for trying not to look at them, or be caught looking, which earned me increasingly forceful kicks to the side, Francis’ smile tilting sly when I swore and rubbed my knee. 

“If you put me out of commission you’ll have to finish this yourself.”

“Couldn’t have that,” Francis smirked, and passed me the baking tray. “Try to keep it even. We’ll stick it in once the fish is out.”

“That’s it?” I asked, surprised, shifting the mixture. “I would have expected there to be some trick to meringues.”

“Just hot air,” Francis refuted, ironic, and gestured to the fridge. “The berries are there for decoration.”

“So we’re done,” I surmised, wiping my hands against the towel and feeling fairly accomplished. 

As I set it back I found myself newly aware of our proximity, his socked feet brushing my legs and his spread palms inches from my fingers; I stilled uncomfortably, trying to read his gaze, focused and unreadable. 

“We’re done,” Francis echoed, and then slid off the countertop as I flinched, making for the alcohol cabinet. “What are you drinking?”

“Do you have a Pinot Gris?” I was thinking of Camilla.

“If you insist on a white you’d be better off with the Chardonnay.”

We had the Chardonnay with the salmon, then port with the pavlova, both of which were nicer than anything I’d had to eat in the past five years give or take. I drank more than I should have because I was talking too much, baited into sharing teaching anecdotes which devolved in an hour long tirade that had Francis in unsympathetic stitches: the half hour a student had spent trying to convince me the Great Gatsby was a metaphor for taking ecstasy on the grounds of the green light across the bay, the George Bush-as-Macbeth production I’d narrowly avoided seeing, the time I’d been very literally ambushed by the daughter of an A-list director hoping to negotiate her way through finals… By the time I got to the most recent incident, a convoluted tale that culminated in one of my students storming out of class when I queried how much his FTHESYSTM vanity plates had cost, I was out of port and out of breath, and Francis mercifully took over the storytelling by recounting what I’d missed of the buildup to the wedding. I was too inebriated to dwell on the implications of his failed wedding equating to my teaching career, sat leaning on my palm and shaking with laughter at the antics of his ex-fiancée now that she was safely in the realm of ex-fiancées. 

I don’t know when or how but at some point we ended up at the piano, some whim of Francis’ most probably, where he sat meandering one-handed by the keys while I sprawled atop the bed, listening to his song fragments. Charles, ever magnanimous, had tried to teach us all to play even a little, to various degrees of success. Bunny had no patience for the instrument, and Henry little interest; Francis and myself could be talked into staying, but he was fickle and I untrained, restricted to copying Charles’s leisurely movements one by one. 

“The first time I went to your aunt’s house Charles played for us,” I said, at some point, sick with nostalgia; Francis’ fingers stuttered and then resumed the mindless ditty he’d been playing for what seemed like hours.

“Better that than Bunny singing.”

“He wasn’t awful at it,” I defended, lost in the bright peals of laughter the twins had inevitably burst into once Bunny started singing jazz. “His Summertime wasn’t half bad.”

“You didn’t have him invading your shower to warble off some godawful love song at all hours of the day,” Francis retorted, and I was confused for a moment before realizing he probably meant Henry’s shower rather than his own, Bunny having rarely spent time alone in Francis’ apartment. 

“I wouldn’t have minded. You saw what my showers looked like.” 

He had, in fact, if only because I’d once dragged him there hyperventilating when he’d appeared in my room at four in the morning. Infuriatingly I think the sight of Judy’s belongings scattered across the sinks had shocked him out of it.

“Do you ever see him?” Francis asked, voice suddenly quiet, his hands stilling on the keys. “Bunny, I mean.”

I looked up at him, the sliver of his face I could see curtained considerately by his hair, and he continued, wavering. “I don’t. Not like I see Henry. I dream of him falling, all the time, but I never see him.”

Dry-throated, I picked at my laces. “No. I don’t- sometimes in nightmares. But he’s stayed gone since the- since he fell.”

“Just Henry, then,” Francis said, and laughed in a fragile sort of way. “I can’t even remember that farmer’s face. The one innocent in all of this, and it’s Henry that follows me. Is that dreadful of me?”

I stared at him silently, at a loss; his shoulders were shaking.

“I don’t- I don’t know. I don’t think-“ I swallowed. “The last time I saw Henry like that he said he’d been travelling. Sometimes I feel like he really is. Here and there.”

It sounded incredibly foolish said aloud, but Francis turned in his seat to look at me, so stricken I didn’t take it back. 

“Travelling. Between us?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” The thought troubled me; I thought of Camilla saying: I still love Henry . Francis gnawed at his lip, shaken.

“I went to see him in hospital, you know. And it- I mean, half his jaw was gone. You could see his tongue. It was-“ He stopped, looking sick, hands twitching erratically. “Even when he was lying there drugged up and bleeding his brains out I still thought maybe somehow he’d make it.”

He hadn’t been to see me in hospital- none of them had. I imagined him by Henry’s bedside, on the verge of fainting most likely, while I lay sedated in some nearby room- Francis, who wrinkled his nose at the gore in the Iliad, who’d sat with his head pressed to his hands after every visit to Charles, nauseous and distressed. 

There is a poem by Renée Vivien, L’Automne, which I had found in one of Francis’ Parnasse collections, and which opens: 

L’Automne s’exaspère ainsi qu’une Bacchante

Folle du sang des fruits et du sang des baisers

Et dont on voit frémir les seins inapaisés….

L’Automne s’assombrit ainsi qu’une Bachante

Au sortir des festins empourprés. Elle chante

La moite lassitude et l’oubli des baisers.

I thought of it then, in the grips of the fruit of the vine, heart-sick and restless, and wished feverishly I had gone to Hampden sooner, that I might have been left to ease out of my frenzied follies like Vivien’s bacchante rather than step into them soberly, never to know the violent delights that had set the whole calamity into motion. 

I spent the remainder of that night in the grips of an unending series of night terrors. In one I tripped after Bunny as he fell, my bones fracturing on impact but my fall broken by his body under mine, and lay there voiceless as the others peered downwards and retreated, choking on blood and broken Greek as the snow began to fall, Bunny rotting beneath me until the worms were leaving his body and crawling into mine, and as I screamed I tasted dirt, Henry stood with his decaying jaw calmly shoveling soil downwards, shirt smeared and blood clotting. I awoke gasping in abject terror and lay shivering under my sweat-drenched sheets for a good half-hour until sleep overtook me again. My dreams were no sweeter this time around, though I remembered them less in the aftermath, just Camilla clad in leaves like Eve in the Garden, nursing a snake as she wandered bare-footed through the Notre-Dame, and myself watching mute and helpless as the floor gave way behind her, one stone at a time, great rivers of blood rising to lap at her heels. 

One could assume that with time the rote nature of these visions had lessened their impact.  Unfortunately, my subconscious is not as rational as I am. In sleep I am no less petrified of these Freudian clichés than I was the first time they came after me.

I rose with a terrible headache sometime near noon, hungover like I hadn’t been in years and spent by my nightmares, stumbling ineptly into the kitchen in search of coffee. I found Francis wrapped in his silk robe on the bench by the window, head pressed childishly to his knees and hair full of senseless cowlicks; he seemed nonetheless less worn than I felt as I sank into the sofa, screwing my eyes shut against the light.

Predictably, his first words were: “Are you sick?”

“Hungover,” I croaked, gulping too-hot coffee and burning my tongue in the process. “I don’t drink much these days.”

“You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep well either.”

“I hardly sleep at all. I think I have fatal insomnia. It starts with panic attacks and hallucinations, and then inability to sleep. After that it’s dementia, and I’ve been showing symptoms.”

I raised my head heavily to fix him. “I think there are about thirty families that even carry the FFI gene.”

He looked more put out than reassured by my interjection, despite the fact I was right. The only reason I had any recollection of fatal insomnia was precisely because we’d studied it as an example of intensely rare disorders. 

“Well, my mother’s a chronic insomniac, and my great-uncle had terrible dementia. By the end we had to have him put away because he tried to stab my cousin with a Civil War saber.”

“If you were so far advanced you’d be in a constant pre-sleep state of delirium.” I failed to remind him that his symptoms were far more easily explained by the skeletons in his closet: he knew that as well as I did.

“Whatever it is it’s exhausting. I should have bought tonic.“

“Just have a coffee.”

“Caffeine gives me palpitations,” Francis dismissed, shaking his head. “Do you ever think we’re cursed? If we are I should like to complain to the divine authorities for drawing the short straw. My nerves are shot.”

I laughed disbelievingly at his tone. “If we are I don’t think we have much right to complain.”

“I think we’re past the point of that mattering at all.”

I sat there nursing my coffee and thought of a proverb I’d come across before I even came to Hampden: μὴ χεῖρον βέλτιστον. The least bad choice is the best . When this had all started- when Henry had sat across from me with his grave dark eyes calmly holding mine- I had operated under that idea. The farmer was dead: no need to ruin the lives of my friends over an accident. Bunny was a threat: there was nothing to do but silence him. The lesser of two evils. Of course I had been deluding myself, but then what was the better option? Turning them into the police would have spared Bunny and Henry, but a life in prison would have killed them one way or the other; Francis wouldn’t have lasted a year, and thinking about Camilla behind bars at the mercy of some warden still makes me sick to my stomach. When both choices are so woefully awful, what difference does it make which one is chosen? I don’t know. I’ll never know if I could have done things better than I did, and as such my choices will haunt me to my deathbed, every insignificant one of them. 

I had chosen to stay on at Hampden, afterwards. I had chosen to smile when smiled at once Sophie started looking my way. I had chosen to remain in California after she left. I had chosen, repeatedly, to rush cross-country to ensure the last of my friends who would talk to me didn’t leave me behind. Now I was sat on his couch in this pitiable apartment, filled to the brim with the tokens of a life lost to him, and I could not think of a choice left to me. Perhaps in ten years I would be adjusted enough to my position to marry some clever woman I worked with, and Camilla and Francis would make their excuses and never visit, my journals locked in some dusty garage, my wife commenting sometimes that she wished what went on inside my head, and in this facsimile of normalcy I would be safe enough to live out the rest of my years.

My head throbbed. I finished the dregs of my coffee, gone cold, watched Francis’ pale ankle swing to and fro from his perch on the bench, and was seized with the desperate desire to grab him and ask: What happened, that night, really? What did you do to that man? What did you do?

Instead I sat up and left to shower, Francis’ eyes tracking me as I went. 

We were subdued for most of the day, subsisting on leftover dessert and steering well clear of drink; Francis didn’t change out of his robe, curled up in an armchair reading Colette, and I sat by the window correcting some essays I’d brought along, barely paying attention to the content as I doled out passing grades. A young couple passed by on their way to a date, her blonde curls brushing his shoulder, and I found myself wondering about the demographic of Francis’ area of the city. Outremont was for the most part comprised of wealthy families, but the Plateau was more varied, and whenever we walked further out we neared the university, teeming with bright-eyed students chattering in a casual mixture of English and French. Where the young working professionals lived I wasn’t sure.

The subject reoccurred to me in the evening as we debated Francis’ dosage of sleeping pills, the conversation having redirected itself to our encounters with drugs over the years. 

“Would you go out near campus, if you were looking for that sort of thing?”

“So I can sit there like a decrepit corpse leering over school-children? I think not.”

“When we came back from the movies there were people our age on their way to clubs.”

He shot me a sharp look I felt was unwarranted, then shrugged. “Yes. I suppose there are a fair amount of clubs past La Fontaine.” 

I didn’t know how to lean into the possibility of his finding friends without being incredibly unsubtle about it. To my knowledge Francis had no friends besides myself and the other members study group, and those I presumed he had befriended through routine exposure. For all I knew he liked to be alone when he wasn’t in need of a therapist. 

“It’s good to have people our age nearby, at least.”

“If you’re trying to say something I wish you’d just say it,” Francis snapped, sitting abruptly upright to glower my way. When I gave him a startled look his brow pinched and he turned condescending. 

“That whole area is the Gay Village, Richard.” 

Instinctively I sputtered, thrown. “What?” 

I had had no idea, of course, or I wouldn’t have suggested it. It wasn’t that Francis’ inclinations made me uncomfortable exactly, but I had never wanted to know any details of his conquests, whatever they might have been- the thought of him and Charles was distressing enough, for reasons I could not voice. It probably reflected poorly on me that I had taken the revelation of Charles sleeping with his sister and a man with equal amounts of shock; somehow both were tied in my mind as illicit and perversely intriguing. In any event I had no idea what Francis’ modus operandi was- if he had flings at Hampden he had had them discreetly, and naively I tended to assume he had limited himself to drunken encounters with Charles and that one aborted incident with me, pragmatic as it was. I could not imagine him in some dark club dancing on the arm of a leather-clad Village Person. 

“Still, if you’re looking for a good time,” Francis was drawling now, waving an elegant hand towards the door: “Don’t stop yourself on my behalf.”

“I didn’t know,” I floundered, hot around the collar, then berated myself for engaging when he was so clearly being flip. But the subject had reminded me for the first time of the whole reason this marriage plot had come to be, and as I thought of all the easy, impersonal encounters I’d had with women over the years without having to give a second thought to who saw us I felt retroactively terrible for not asking about it sooner. 

“Have you heard from Kim at all, since-?”

It came out more timidly than I would have liked, but Francis seemed entirely taken aback by the question, eyes widening before he made a subconscious move for his cigarettes, avoiding my tentative gaze. 

“I won’t be seeing him anytime soon, if that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t want to?” I wagered, as inoffensively as I could manage, feeling well out of my depth. He found his lighter, thumb dragging along the ridges of the wheel as he bent towards it.

“He’s married.”

“Because of-“ I started, chagrined, but he shook his head, smoke dancing between us as he sighed. 

“He was married before.” He slanted me a defensive look. “It’s not exactly easy for any of us.”

“She knows now?” I guessed, uncomfortable, and received another headshake in return.

“No. But it wouldn’t be- I was independent before. I had my own money. We could meet at my apartment. I’d be his kept woman if I went back now.” 

His expression was suddenly fierce, the kind of embittered indignation I remembered him wearing when Bunny was going on one of his speculative tangents; his shoulders hunched as he set his lighter down. “Despite what you think of me I do have more pride than that.” 

I hadn’t been thinking otherwise; I only nodded, rapid and distracted, and the fight seeped out of him immediately, his face haggard against the glowing embers. I thought of the way he’d mentioned Kim, quick and off-handed: a lawyer, from Harvard. I would have liked him . I wondered if I would have; what it meant that Francis thought I would. I never got the impression he held my opinion in any esteem, except when it came to him. 

We went to bed not long after. As I brushed my teeth I decided that I would not have liked Kim, if only because his name reminded me irresistibly of a classmate I’d had in Plano whose favorite hobbies had included smacking her gum very loudly and calling me a queer for turning down her offer of a hand job in the backseat of the bus. 

We mutually agreed to ignore any unfortunate conversations had over the weekend by Monday, and so spent the day in general harmony, agreeing easily to go wander alongside the harbor after lunch. We did so for a good while, trading French as we went, Francis talking circles around me and I too stubborn to revert to English. My limited vocabulary made me blunt, much to Francis’ amusement; he incessantly sought to make me swear when there were children nearby.

“ Do you know how they say girlfriend in Québec? ”

“Amoureuse.”

“ No, that’s lover. And Parisian. Do you? ”

“ Obviously not .”

“Blonde,” Francis pronounced, smile wicked. “Par example: Richard et sa blonde.”

“ Shut up. ”

“C’est vrai. Why would I lie? ”

“ So for men it’s blond also? ”

“No,” Francis said, and blinked. “For men it’s chum.”

“Chum?” I repeated, stopping dead in my tracks. “Francis et son chum?”

He nodded; for a moment we stared at each other, and then I burst out laughing, the echoes of Bunny Corcoran less haunting than usual.

On the walk back Francis stopped without warning and dropped into a crouch, so rapidly I thought he’d tripped. In fact he had spotted a cat beneath a nearby bench, a fat tabby who barely resisted before leaning into his hand as he scratched behind its ears. I stood with my hands in my pockets watching them as Francis very politely addressed the catulus , the sight stirring memories.

“I remember you doing that.”

“With that beast of Charles’?” Francis asked, without looking back, very neutrally. I shook my head.

“No, before. On campus.” He glanced up at me and I shrugged, slightly embarrassed. “Before we knew each other, I mean.”

“Oh,” Francis said, slowly. “Yes. There was a Thai near Sanders Hall. I think it was one of the faculty’s.”

I could picture him then, tremendously exotic, long thin figure obscured by his dark greatcoat as he stooped to talk to the animal, and I thought as I looked at him then that Francis would age the least out of us, only go white and frailer still at some indeterminate age. I still remembered him as he’d been when Charles burst in that night, composed all at once, the portrait convincing to even those of us who knew better. With Francis I was never sure when he was most himself, which is perhaps why I found this unimportant little encounter so arresting, the kind of thing he did when no one was watching as well as when I was.

He was looking at me strangely as he gave the cat one last pat to the head and rose, though I could not have said why, save for the reminder of the rose-colored telescope I’d once watched them all from. 

“Have you heard from Camilla lately?”

“No. Not since the summer.” 

In truth I had last spoken to her to arrange the transfer of money into Francis’ accounts. I had spent more nights that I cared to admit with my phone in hand and her number on my mind, but I knew well enough that our brief communication window had been born of necessity. I would have been too aware of the imposition, and I didn’t want to face the possibility of reaching her voicemail. 

“I should call her,” Francis said, morosely, wrapping his arms around himself. “I haven’t spoken to her since before the wedding.”

“You haven’t?” I asked, surprised. I had assumed he’d resumed contact upon moving. Now I wondered whether she even knew he was in Montreal. “You should write, at least.”

“Spending her days in a hospice,” Francis murmured, shaking his head shortly. “I wish you hadn’t asked her to marry you. Or I wish she’d said yes.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Since she’d turned me down I had not been able to cling on to the hope buried deep within me all these years, but before that I had often succumbed to dreamlike visions of matrimony, mostly domestic, Camilla in overalls with paint on her cheek, Camilla’s hair catching the kitchen light, Camilla on a porch with her boyish knees tucked beneath her, the honeyed pallor of her hair, the effete grace of her chin. Rarely had I thought of a wedding, save to picture Camilla nymph-like in white, Madonna of the cool contraltos. All of this time later I loved her all the same; she could do no wrong in my eyes, where she resided permanently, every flash of a stranger’s white-gold hair capturing my gaze for a heart-stopping instant. If I could have I would have gladly spent the rest of my days even just watching her. 

I thought back to the museum: small wonder that I was Camilla’s body and soul when she was so gut-wrenchingly lovely, an epicene creature from a different age. In her presence my yearning was sated, the watcher in his rightful place, savoring every second as it slipped through my fingers. I had kissed her once, recklessly, and never forgotten the taste: love, I thought, was in recognition, no matter what Francis accused me of. I knew my own permanent dissatisfaction too well to defend his other claims, insecure and spiteful though they’d been: Camilla did not love me the way I loved her, and I did not know her the way I wanted to, wholly and completely. To listen to him tell it I didn’t even want that- loved her best because she had always kept me at arm’s length, reality at bay, the picture preserved. This I did not want to believe, but I thought of my own hypothesis- love in recognition- and could not help but ask myself when I had ever felt Camilla look at me in turn. I do not like to engage with reality, but in turn, I have come to suspect, reality has not often wanted to engage with me. The more people know me the less they want to.

I slept badly that night: I dreamt I was re-sitting my presentation, but I was speaking English and the panel Latin, and by the end of it as I lay bleeding on the floor Julian peered over the smoking gun and shook his head with congenial disappointment. You too, child?  

Tuesday was my last day in Montreal; I packed early and tidied my room despite my flight leaving on Wednesday morning. Francis, as always with these things, barely reacted to my making arrangements to leave, interrupting my calls to the taxi company to ask if I’d seen his missing cufflink anywhere and not lifting a finger to help me find a misplaced essay, finally located stuffed between bills in a desk drawer. 

“But this looks dreadful. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather forget it here?”

I wanted to climb back up Mont Royal, but Francis was tired and would not be moved, so I went alone, leaving him to his vices as I filled my lungs with the sweet earthy air, the fainting summer sun blinking my way as I rose above the city. Under my feet the drying leaves crinkled; I thought with a hot spike of blasphemy that for all their wisdom the Greeks had never known the tints of autumn like I did, and on this subject had little authority over me. As I stood overlooking the city I caught the eye of a nearby group of girls around my age, grad students perhaps, who smiled; I smiled back, and soon enough they were moving my way, friendly and festive. 

“ Lovely, isn’t it? ” 

“ Very lovely, ” I agreed, and the girl who had spoken started at my accent, though she recovered rapidly.

“ You’re not from here? ”

“ California ,” I answered, self-deprecatingly. “ Fall isn’t as nice .”

“ But I bet the winters are warmer! ” 

“ Yes .” 

We made small talk for a few minutes, the conversation engaging for its foreignness, and they were sad to hear of my imminent departure, making the kinds of silly promises only ever made to strangers- that they would call for me if they ever visited Los Angeles, and to come find them should I ever return. 

I wondered, as I made my way back into the city, whether I would, and when. Already the thought of stepping out into the sticky heat of LAX was making my head hurt, and I was tremendously jealous of Francis for the months he’d spend struggling through the snow. I’d have nothing better to do than visit by Christmas, or Easter, or over the summer, but there was the issue of money, too, flights to and fro Montreal a strain on my salary, and though Francis never turned down company exactly I wasn’t sure he’d necessarily invite me back so often. I didn’t know how he’d take the winter, or the months alone- for all that he seemed to be resisting the macabre charms of self-destruction, absence made Francis forgetful, watered down his promises. I had no idea if he’d even been looking for a job at all or resigned himself to slowly watching his money run out across the years. 

I made it back in time for lunch, having managed to recite off a meal’s worth of orders at the nearby bakery, and presented Francis with it as a pre-emptive peace offering. Only once we had broken bread did I broach the subject. 

“How have you been getting on with the job hunt?”

This earned me a cool smile, his fork set down carefully as he inclined his head. 

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t ask.”

I merely chewed on my meat with saint-like patience in response; he caved, leg jittering beneath the table as he glanced away. 

“I haven’t looked at anything, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve been busy.”

I had expected something along those lines, and truthfully didn’t feel inclined to press the issue too hard. He was mostly unpacked and mostly alive- after the turmoil of the last year I didn’t feel this was too poor a showing on his behalf, for all that his indolence made me apprehensive. 

He read my silence as disapproval, shooting to his feet with nervous scorn. 

“You don’t believe me. Stay there.”

I didn’t have time to reply; he was vanishing into his room, and then reappeared in the hallway holding something behind his back, familiarly anxious in a way that set me on edge. 

“What? What is it?”

“You might be angry,” Francis said, expression difficult to pin down. My nerves intensified, voice gone tense when I turned to face him properly.

“Just tell me what you’ve done.”

“Do you remember when you said I had connections?” Francis asked, almost ignoring me, eyes now scrupulously on his window. “In Boston, when you got all Marxist about it. My family won’t speak to me and anyone who’s ever met Priscilla would shoot me on sight, but you weren’t entirely wrong. I’ve been in talks with some people.”

His hands came into view; my stomach dropped with blank incomprehension. My missing journal was clasped between his fingers.

“What are you doing with that?” 

“I was looking for something to read,” Francis defended, inching back at the look on my face. “You left them all under the coffee table, it’s not like I went looking -“

“You read my journals?” I asked, and very nearly asked if he remembered what had happened the last time someone had had that bright idea. 

“The point being,” Francis was saying, rapidly now, “That one of my connections works at Random House, and is open to discussing a book deal.”

All of my mounting anger stagnated with a jolt; I blinked at him without following. 

“I don’t understand.”

“I sent excerpts,” he said, waving the journal. “Not the poetry attempts, which you should steer clear of- well, bits of the story, or whatever it is. I didn’t realize you could write. Anyhow I figured I might as well ask him if it was any good.”

“Ask your contact at Random House,” I repeated, feeling slow. “Who you know…”

“Biblically,” said Francis shortly. I stared. “Are you mad at me?”

“I,” I started, and then tipped my head back for a moment, trying to clear it. “I don’t know what I am. A book deal ? I’m not a writer . ”

“You’ve written three of these.”

“That’s not- well, exactly! That’s all I can write about, over and over, that’s not- there’s no story there I could publish.”

“Richard. You’ve written three of these. No details. No plot. Perfectly legible.” His fingers were tracing the ridges of the spine habitually. “It’s all a little modern to my tastes, but there’s an audience for everything.”

“What, fragments of us?” I asked, and it hung there heavily, something faintly pitying in his gaze. I shook my head, pinching my brow. “I mean, this is completely- there’s no way it would- did you send this to a lot of people?”

He shook his head. “Just the one. He said the style was kind of old school and a little purple, but the composition and nouveau roman airs were very in vogue right now.”

“He said the style was purple?”

Somehow this finally relaxed him; he was all but rolling his eyes when he stepped forward to set the journal down next to me. 

“Don’t get all sensitive. The offer’s there if you want it, but I’d recommend you get in touch fast if you do. That’s all.”

“I just don’t understand what possessed you to do this,” I said, unable to wrap my head around it. That he had some oddball connections in the world of art I could fully believe- that he had unscrupulously read through my private possessions did not surprise me. What I couldn’t understand was why. 

Francis hesitated a moment, brow furrowed and expression conflicted, before he pushed off from the wall and into the kitchen, finding himself a glass. 

“I thought it might do you some good to have somewhere to channel this. God knows if I had some artistic ability I’d be going at it day and night.”

I watched his profile as he fingered the tap, a plutonic skeleton with the neck of a Waterhouse girl, and felt haplessly fragile. 

“Did you like it?”

It was a child’s question, and an insecure one at that; I winced, emerging from my dumbfounded haze. Francis was looking at me like I’d said something incredibly absurd. 

“Of course I didn’t like it. But it was good.”

For some reason this struck me as the most Henry-like thing I’d heard in years. I was on my feet in seconds, journal clutched to my chest as I gestured vaguely towards the guest room.

“I need to pack this.”

I felt him watching me reproachfully as I left, though I did not turn to confirm the sensation; he was pouring water into the glass, the sound loud against the silence, my footsteps furtive until the door shut behind me.

I don’t remember what I did with myself between then and dinner. I reread my journal, I know- I think originally to remember what it contained, and to try and look at it through the eyes of this unnamed editor friend of Francis’, as a story worth reading rather than the obsessive ramblings of a madman. It had been years since I’d looked at it, and from an outsider’s perspective it made me cringe. Francis had been correct in accusing me of writing poetry, and very bad poetry at that, but though these attempts were mercifully scarce I felt as I read my way through it that it was impossible to read without looking right into my head. A large portion of the journal was devoted to the Bacchanalia, the historical event and its more recent incarnation- both were completely imagined on my part, painting disquieting snapshots of nights I had never witnessed, ecstatic horrorshows intercut with banal transcriptions of real conversations in a way that I had judged poetic at the time and now struck me as inelegant, jumping without preamble from one style to another:

Pravis et externis religionibus, but not alien then to us: we were all blood and wine, and wine and blood, enriching the broken soil like milk, foreign to ourselves foremost. Until then we had been in darkness, as wild things are, but moonlight broke sharply through the canopy, white light turning trees to marble, piercing the shifting shadows and us with them. From the divine frenzy there was no reprieve, yet the light had returned our bodies to us, and these we did not recognize, nor the faces that wore them, livid and dumb as animals are. Maddened blood, bleeding wine: beneath our flayed feet the forest surged, calling for dance and rite, meat and skin. 

We were not afraid.

“I prefer to think of it,” he would say, later, “As a redistribution of matter.”

Thinking of Francis reading this left me reeling, an emotion between mortification and intense dread lodged in my chest, too dismayed to be anger. The invasion of privacy was unforgivable and yet the least of my concerns. I was eternally at my most uneasy around Francis in the moments where he revealed some unsuspected insight into my psyche, and though I believed with troubled certainty that whatever my writing revealed about me he had already known, this was a level of detail I would never have disclosed willingly. The subject matter, too, pained me- not just them, but the bacchanal. I could only imagine what my ignorant reproduction read like to him, who had fled the scene with blood on his hands and never spoken of it since. 

The whole thing was ludicrous, his suggestion grotesque. I could conjure fifty reasons to dismiss it on the spot, even if by some twist of fate his contact’s interest was more than some polite ploy to remain in his good books. But I could hear his rebuttals as clearly as if he’d been in the room, a bored lilt to his words: well, of course I would have to quit the university- was that not incentive enough? Or: Why wouldn’t there be an audience for it? Hadn’t I seen what my students were reading? Or: If it didn’t work out, didn’t I have a doctorate to re-apply to the university down the street? After all, if I expected him to find suitable employment…

No, I told myself, repeatedly and judiciously. I would not call this intimate acquaintance of Francis’, and I would not chase the white rabbit when I knew very well that Wonderland was best summed up by its second chapter. I would write, but in my own time, and for my own consumption, and I would stow my journals away someplace where suicidal ex-libertines would not find them so easily. The timing was fortuitous, though it didn’t feel it, because I was leaving in the morning, and would not linger until I forgot the world which existed beyond the confines of Francis’ fabricated time capsule of an apartment.

So I packed away the journal, and checked my passport again, and sat at the piano feeling shaken and odd, thinking about matters that were neither here nor there, and which I had managed not to dwell on once since I’d first emerged sweating and rattled in Francis’ sterile hospital room. 

I emerged around dinnertime with the sheepish air of a child sent to his room, dreading confrontation and feeling incredibly obvious for my juvenile disappearance. Some unfledged instinct, forgotten to me, had wormed itself under my skin at the sight of my journal and had not left since; I felt erratic, not in my right mind. To my relief Francis was nowhere in sight, though this relief was short-lived: I wanted to part on good terms, and from his perspective he had made a great effort for me which I had melodramatically snubbed. 

As a conciliatory gesture I attempted to make dinner with what little was left in the fridge, scouring the recesses of my memory for some broth Camilla and Charles had made when pressed for time in the winter, consisting to the best of my recollection primarily of roots and red wine. The end result was bearable, and in any event lured Francis out of his room; he appeared silently at the dinner table, a dark pashmina shawl draped over his bony shoulders, and picked at the soup as I ate, seemingly oblivious to both my earlier slight and my current discomfort. I made stilted attempts at conversation, feeling nineteen and out of place, which were met with disinterested vagueness. At one point he interrupted me mid-sentence with sudden urgency, an unexpected hint of worry to his features.

“Are you angry?”

“What?” I asked, taken aback, and then felt twice my age, seeing us trapped in this eternal cycle of mutual exasperation. “No. Although you shouldn’t have read that.”

“I’m in it,” Francis said, laconically, and this curbed my habitual exasperation enough that I finished my soup in silence. His remained mostly untouched, but he stood to make us tea, and so I stayed, taking an awkward seat on the armchairs as the kettle boiled and he fixed himself a cigarette. He had developed a method at some point in my absence, a one-handed maneuver that lacked the elegant cupping motion of earlier days. When he offered me one I refused it, but I regretted the refusal, as it left me with nothing to do. 

The kettle whistled almost within the same second as the phone rang, Francis’ faraway expression going comically torn for a beat before he slid off from his seat and dashed for the phone, cradled to his shoulder as he looked my way. 

“Hello?”

I had risen to go take care of the tea, but at his silence I turned to look at him and found him white-knuckling the phone, my own skittish pulse speeding up in consequence. Even all these years later I sometimes pick up calls with the full expectation of some gravelly voice asking me to come in for questioning. 

Francis slammed the phone back down, the machine beeping in alarm, and met my apprehensive gaze with a volatile frown. 

“Ghost callers. Doesn’t it ever happen to you?”

I shook my head mutely, wondering for the first time if my own string of silent calls across the years might have been a more corporeal ghost than previously suspected. But I couldn’t imagine Charles going through the effort of tracking down either of our numbers, and besides it was ridiculous to imagine him knowing that Francis had moved. 

“I’m surprised you don’t have a cellphone yet,” I said, which was something I’d forgotten to tell him when I’d stayed at his in Boston. Whenever I’d seen L.A. businesspeople wandering around clutching bricks to their ears I’d spared a fond thought for him, amidst the what-ifs that naturally followed. If we’d had such a means of communication we might have reached Henry before he went to Julian’s that day. 

“Yes, well. I’m not especially mobile these days.” 

There was that: there was also the fact that no one called. I sipped my tea- too hot and too bitter for my tastes- so he wouldn’t spot the pity on my face. I have come to accept with age that I simply lack the sophisticated palate of my Hampden peers, though at the time I would have forced anything down at Bunny’s insistence to appear cultivated. Francis for the most part lacked any terribly off-putting tastes, save perhaps his hangover cures, but when it comes to tea I am deplorably Californian, and would sooner drink a liter of iced tea than endure his Turkish blends.

It wasn’t late, but it was dark out. If we were going to sit in dead silence until the clock struck twelve I would have to retire soon, unwilling as I was to go. I was kicking myself for the wasted opportunity, self-indulgently nostalgic for our midnight debates mere days ago. Once I got back to L.A. it would be nothing but small talk and pseudo-intellectual monologues again, with all the fabricated stakes of a theme park rollercoaster. 

I set my tea on the coffee table as discreetly as I could and steeled myself for some last-ditch attempt to draw him into conversation, annoyed by my clammy hands, but when I looked up I found Francis was looking already at me with the fixed focus of a child watching an insect scurry around a shoebox. 

“The tea’s kind of hot,” I said, stupidly, hating the way the vowels drawled into kinda . He was entirely still where he sat perched against the window save for a lone foot tracing the wooden carvings of the bench, and his expression was deliberate in a way Francis rarely was. I went silent. Francis stood. 

I don’t know why I stayed put. As I remember it my mind was entirely blank, stuck between fight and flight; I was still reeling from the day’s previous upheaval, and I was leaving in the morning. In any event I was paralyzed, and could not have moved if I had wanted to. 

He came to a stop directly in front of me, bare-footed against the rug, strands of too-long wine-red hair falling over his eyes when he stooped towards me, one slow movement like a bowstring pulled taut. I felt a pit open in my stomach. 

“Say no,” said Francis, lowly, almost melancholy. I swallowed, twitched towards escape, opened my mouth to tell him that he had the wrong idea. 

His name was all I said instead, my voice odd to my own ears, something pleading to it, and his expression shifted all at once; before I could correct course one of his hands was on my jaw and my throat stopped working. 

“That’s not no.”

I was incredibly dizzy, as though feverish, but this had gone too far already. Whatever Francis might have thought I did not share his inclinations- the incident between us had been nothing more than an ill-fated mishap, entirely forgotten, the product of circumstance. 

That was what I meant to tell him; what came out, around my impossibly dry throat, was: “I haven’t, since you-“

“ Pauvre Richard ,” Francis said, forgivingly, and then kissed me.

My eyes fell shut of their own volition; to my dismay he tasted like tea and cigarettes, so improbably recognizable that my lungs tightened and I let out a sort of unwilling gasp, unconsciously inviting. 

If I remembered anything from that fumbling encounter at Hampden it was that it had been incongruously enjoyable. It’s fun, I promise , Francis had said, and it had been- his wicked eyes, our huffing laughter at the state of my shirt, the way we’d stumbled over each other towards the desk. This, whatever it was, was not fun. I was not in the latent daze of some hysterical binge, and there was no murder to justify my gaffe- instead my heart was in my throat, my head was spinning, and I was consumed with twin urges to shove Francis bodily off me and crawl into his skin. He was crowding me into the armchair, and my hands were gripping his wrists, his lips dragging over mine; I was petrified that he would stop. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I thought dazedly of Lussurioso bemoaning his life: 

Attend me: I am past my depth in lust

And I must swim or drown.

Francis stopped kissing me; my eyes shot open. When I stared up at him I found his eyes bottle-green; his hand had slipped down to my neck, tracing my panicked flush. Whatever he meant to say I never knew; at the parting of his lips I was paralyzed no longer, but when I surged from the chair I went no further than his mouth. 

Matters progressed expeditiously.

I was awake when the taxi arrived in the morning, and awake when it left. 

The Greek word for ‘if’ is αἴκα. I have forgotten a lot of the Greek I once knew, but I remember aika , because it was a word Henry had once spent half a dinner convincing us was the most important word in the Greek language. This was not a position he genuinely maintained, but in a good mood Henry was surprisingly willing to play the stern scholar for us, defending some trivial position with the utmost seriousness as we attempted to poke holes into his fledgling argument. I am incapable of remembering the precise defense he presented, just as I struggle to recall the exact lessons Julian taught us- it is difficult, after watching a master perform, to remember what was said rather than the awe it inspired- but I remember his laboring the point of possibility. If . The whole world turns on if . If I hadn’t… If we hadn’t… That had been Francis, wistful and cynical. But Henry had shaken his head and called him small-minded: if was opportunity, not failure. It was the way the course of time diverged into multitudes. In reliance upon aika a man could move fearlessly through life. After all, when Phillip II of Macedon sent word to the Spartans, threatening that if they invaded Laconia, they would drive the Spartans out, did the Spartans not famously respond with that one succinct word?

If I could have, I would have taken that taxi. 

By some small mercy, I was in my own bed, which allowed me the reprieve to lie there unmoving for what felt like an age until I mechanically forced myself upright and into the living room. To my dismay Francis was there, halting me dead in my tracks, but he barely glanced my way, curled up on the green couch nursing a drink. He didn’t look like he’d slept. I stared at him for a moment like a deer in headlights before I managed to get to the phone, twisting immediately into the hallway so he wouldn’t hear me speaking. I dialed the teaching office robotically. When the secretary picked up I hadn’t decided on what to say yet, so I improvised, voice distant and unruffled. A family emergency. I couldn’t say. It wouldn’t be long. So sorry for the inconvenience. 

I wasn’t lying. I wouldn’t stay long. Just long enough to sort myself out and set things straight. If anything what had happened- which I was scrupulously not thinking about- was the sign I’d needed to remind myself that I had to get back. For all of California’s faults it had the distinct perk of sparing me this kind of encounter. I didn’t even know any homosexuals save Francis, except for one of Sophie’s friends from work, a bleached-blond thirty-something who insisted on everyone calling him Jay despite his name being Curtis, wore deep V-necks and puka-shell necklaces, and repulsed me in every possible way. 

I was still in the previous day’s dirtied clothes, a realization which struck me only when I was starting to undress and caught a look at myself in the mirror, my fingers gone clumsy as I went red. In actuality there was nothing especially telling to my rumpled state, but to my own eyes I looked exaggeratedly depraved, phantom hands on every wrinkle of clothing. I showered long enough to scrub my skin raw and then stood with my forehead pressed to the wall wishing I didn’t have to get out. 

“I’m going for a walk,” I announced once I was dressed, avoiding eye contact, and then saw myself out, realizing only belatedly that I was under-dressed in my own coat. I spent an hour at least wandering Montreal while fighting shivers, trying to clear my head.

I was extremely aware of how poorly I was handling my misstep. Even in the face of multiple murders I had kept a more level head, save one or two brief periods of irrationality; I had coped better with the more recent mess I’d been dragged into over the summer. If the worst job in the universe had left me only moderately depressed I should have been able to brush off a single lapse in judgment. For some reason this was different, more overpowering, harder to ignore. I might have accepted my malaise if it had been a question of the book, or the missed flight- but I was unable to focus on either of these, all my mental energy spent trying to avoid thinking of the previous night. 

It was no use: I could think of nothing else. I didn’t know what foreign force had possessed me, but I felt I was still in its trance somehow, a danger to myself. It rankled: I had thought myself more resilient to this sort of thing, though resilient was not the right word, as it implied there was something to resist. 

It wasn’t, I had to admit, that I had not expected anything like this to happen. At various points since his letter had reached me I had been wary of Francis making overtures: several nights during my first stay at his apartment, or at sunset in Indiana, in our room at the Best Western, pulled off by the highway in Oklahoma, after my graduation, even perversely after his suicide attempt. His motivation the first time around had been so entirely pragmatic- you were there - that I had been unable to stop myself from wondering what had stayed his hands since, given the similarly bleak times we’d found ourselves facing alone together. Of course I was relieved he hadn’t tried his luck since, but it had stayed in the back of my mind, a simmering unease, and now that he’d done it I could not understand what had prompted it on his part- what I had done to make him mistakenly assume his advances were welcome. 

He had been mistaken, of course. I was not attracted to him. This had been an unfortunate repeat of the first fiasco; I simply didn’t know how to respond to his come-ons without causing a fight, and I was confused, and emotionally strung-out. It had been too long since I’d been intimate with anyone. Admittedly things had gone somewhat further this time than the last, but that was hormones, a physical reaction to roaming hands and self-assured lips. Charles had used Francis for relief, and now he was shacked up with some woman in a rundown bar somewhere. It meant nothing.

Obstinately, my subconscious would not stop reminding me of the exact amount further we had gotten to- I felt as though every passerby near me could look see  through my clothes, had to fight the urge to cover my face.

It was Francis, that was all. I was easily manipulated in the face of losing my last real friend. The man himself held no temptation, nor did the rest of them. His insinuations about Henry and Charles were baseless- Charles resembled his sister, and for Henry I had felt boyish admiration, no more.

A child chasing leaves stumbled into my leg, and I flinched full body. There was a thumbprint of a bruise inches from the spot.

I remembered Francis saying he’d kissed Camilla, once, as a joke, drunk and mischievous, and Charles had nearly wrenched his arm out of his socket. If Francis was capable of kissing Camilla, deeply enough to upset her brother- but I lost my train of thought; the image was too perturbing.

I returned to the apartment numb and collected, the hot air inside a low burn against my stinging skin. Francis was where I’d left him, though dressed, in a beige turtleneck and dark slacks, jacket thrown over his shoulders as an afterthought. He smelled of sherry when I stepped nearer to catch his eye.

“I can’t stay on,” I said, striking a balance between firm and apologetic, the impersonal politesse of a service worker informing a customer that they were so sorry but their hands were tied, have a nice day. “I’ll probably go tomorrow, if I can get a flight.”

“Okay,” Francis murmured, around the rim of his glass. Slouched as he was he looked reassuringly fallible again; I dropped my crossed arms.

“I appreciate what you did, with the book. Maybe I’ll call-“ 

“Alexander.”

“Alexander,” I accepted, finding my footing again. “Sometime. I told you you could find something if you put your mind to it.”

This was the awkward part; I remained resolved, relaxed, my hands slipping to my pockets.

“Look, about last night-“ His eyes slid to me, coolly mocking in a way I had expected. “It shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just not- well, I’m not interested.”

His responsive, unpleasant smile was also expected, tired around the edges in a way that made me think of all the times he must have heard a variant of this speech, the knowledge tying guilty knots in my stomach. But we had done this song and dance the first time, and I knew what came next, his sharp features gone hard, his mouth derisively resigned. 

“Well, if you’re not interested.”

I had told myself I was not apprehensive, but the relief I felt at his acquiescence was immediate; I let out a silent breath, returned to the status quo. All at once I was dimly aware of how sore my thawing extremities were, and desperate to retreat to my room. There was nothing else to add; I hesitated, then gave him a contrite look that was at least a little genuine, more than willing to take the blame now that I was off the hook. 

“Sorry.” 

I knew immediately that apologizing had been a mistake. Where Francis had laid wilting he went still like a snake in the grass. Before I had the chance to say anything he was pushing to his feet.

“Sorry? Whatever for? It’s out of your hands.”

“I suppose,” I said, for something to say, alarm bells ringing in my head. He walked forwards until we were almost toe-to-toe, sherry sloshing in his glass; up close we were almost of a height, though he was so eternally starved-looking I often forgot it. “What are you-“

“But if you’d like to make it up to me,” Francis cut short, almost bored-sounding, alcohol disingenuously softening his clipped tone. “Say it like you mean it.”

“What?” My voice was strained. “I did. I do.”

“Indulge me.”

I was irritated then, shifting back like a cat on hot bricks. “Look, I said I was sorry. Don’t make this into something it’s not.”

“First you said you weren’t interested,” Francis corrected, mirroring my movements. “So, go on. Say it again, so we’re clear, the next time it slips your mind-“

“Stop,” I interrupted, agitated. “It wasn’t like that. I’m not- I told you from the start I wasn’t attracted to you.”

“And convincingly too,” Francis jeered, stepping forwards with the obvious motive of watching me back into the wall, eyes flashing with ugly satisfaction. “You forget I’ve read your diaries.”

Whatever composure I had regained during my walk was gone. “Shut up.”

“It’s not like we didn’t notice,” Francis said, offhand and cruel, his head tilting in bird-like fashion. “You should have heard what Henry-”

But he never finished speaking: I had struck him across the face, and he reeled wide-eyed backwards, hitting the ground with his palms outstretched as his glass splintered loudly against the wood. My knuckles throbbed, my head filled with static, and then I was gasping in belated shock and dropping to kneel by him, stunned and sorry. 

“Shit - are you okay?“

“Ow,” Francis said, unsteadily, a bruise blossoming on the apple of his cheek. I was sick with self-loathing, remembering vividly the way my head had used to spin when my father knocked me into the furniture; my hands were rapidly shoving the glass away from him, desperate for something to do.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, thinly, as he blinked dazedly my way. For once I could feel his own belated neediness working at my throat: Please don’t be mad.

“You’ve impaled yourself,” Francis informed me, averting his eyes shakily. I glanced down at my hands and found I had managed to get a shard stuck in my palm, which explained the burning sensation. He was taking all of it far less dramatically than he should have; I wondered if I was not the first to hit him after the fact, a thought which made me lightheaded with remorse.

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I was being beastly,” Francis dismissed, weariness steadying his wobbly voice. “Go put ice on that.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t move: with every second his bruise seemed to grow darker. I was thinking of Camilla’s scars; my throat worked helplessly.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-“

“I just told you-“

“No, not that, I- I shouldn’t have said that.”

This drew us both up short, his eyes narrowing inquiringly, my fingers spotted with red where I was cradling my hand.

“Shouldn’t have said what?”

“I don’t-“ I don’t know , I wanted to say, I can’t think , but it was unbearable to have him looking at me like that; before I knew it I had surged forward and my mouth was on his. 

He hissed in surprise, or maybe at the cold bite of it- my own face was smarting wherever we touched, his skin blistering against mine. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry, my thoughts discordant, but Francis was calm beneath me, and I needed calm badly. We stayed put I don’t know how long, and then he pushed me off him with something like patience, voice deliberately appeasing. 

“Go clean your hand.”

I did, pulse uneven and every muscle in my body tense with the need to get out, but I was never given the chance to bolt; as soon as I turned from the sink Francis was pressing me into the countertop, shattered glass carelessly abandoned in the living room. 

I didn’t leave the next morning. 

I spent the remainder of the week in a state of suspended crisis. Whenever I was left to my own devices I was terrible- later Francis sardonically titled my outbursts the five stages of grief, and the label was not undeserved. Denial and anger certainly fought for purchase inside me; several times I made it as far as the street or even the station before my sense of achievement revealed itself as delusion and I dragged myself back to the apartment. Never since Bunny had I suffered such a serious identity crisis, and as the fact that I am still incapable of seeing myself as a murderer might have alerted me to, I am not well-suited to confronting undesirable aspects of my personhood. The whole thing was an unforeseen nightmare, made all the worse by my increasing suspicion that none of it had been so unforeseeable after all.

I wasn’t like that, I kept thinking, with differing levels of certainty, followed immediately with derision: Like what? Gagging for it? My thoughts skipped unhappily between disconnected memories: Curtis, the questioning looks I got for asking after Francis at Hampden, Bunny’s glib denial, Charles knocking at my door, all the girls I’d ever touched. Kim Hollinger on the school bus. Laforgue, speaking of Julian. My slightly uncomfortable ambivalence towards the subject in class. Was it possible to have spent so long navel-gazing without dissecting such a glaring blind spot? Impossible, surely. The simpler solution: I wasn’t like that. 

In Francis’ defense, attempts were made to tether me to reality, but I was a difficult patient. I spent two afternoons holed up in my bed in a state of extreme self-pity doped up on cough syrup, and when I was awake and coherent I was either avoidant or fit to be tied, sleeping little and eating less. Francis might have been inclined to talk me through it, but the very last thing I wanted to do was have an actual conversation, and so instead most of our joint waking hours were spent otherwise occupied. I would have been more ashamed of throwing myself at him so often if I hadn’t been so distracted by the success of this strategy; in any event he never turned me down, and in fact was not above turning the tables on me. Whenever I started trying to talk my way out of my ongoing breakdown with varying levels of antagonism, I was unceremoniously cornered into the nearest flat surface and very liberally encouraged to shut up.

Of course, it was impossible to spend the entirety of the day in this fashion, even if I wasn’t at times overcome with the kind of skittish panic of a wild colt fleeing touch. Francis was both sympathetic and not, unwilling to engage with my various accusations and disinterested in holding my hand through the mood-swings, which made it all the harder to keep my guard up when he sometimes turned understanding, wearing me down little by little. By Saturday I was starting to settle into bargaining, but my awareness of this shift meant that when I did turn defensive it was with last-ditch brutality, a drowning man sinking his raft to spite his crewmate. 

On Sunday, I dragged myself out of bed sometime in the late afternoon to find that Francis had left me to find food. In his absence I self-indulgently came to the conclusion that he was at fault for all of this, a depraved lech set on dragging me down to his level, wholly indifferent to my personal qualms. He was, after all, the singular anomaly amongst countless women, a freak occurrence, some sort of modern succubus. Charles had had the right of it.

I suspect Francis had expected no better of me at this stage, because he was pre-emptively sighing as he toed into the apartment, unravelling his scarf as I stood staunch and mutinous by the window. 

“Let’s have it.”

I had been raring to launch into a very hurtful spiel, but I have never really possessed the dramatic self-importance of my Hampden peers; his flat expectance deflated me, and I went grave instead, raw in a less performative fashion. 

“You’re twisted.”

“So I’ve been told,” Francis said, shrugging off his coat, but he startled when I rounded on him in earnest.

“What is it, sadism? Or do you just not care? After everything I’ve-“ I had meant to be accusatory, but I sounded stung. “You sate your whims and expect me to put up with it?”

His brow set; my anger simmered. His bruise was a purpling yellow. 

“That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked, less sardonic than I would have liked. “It wouldn’t exactly be the first time you’ve used someone’s weakness to your advantage.”

“Christ,” Francis muttered, and chewed the inside of his cheek, uncertain. “That’s what you think this is? Stockholm Syndrome?”

“It might as well be.”

Francis’ eyes went big and serious. “You know I didn’t do this to you.”

“I don’t know anything,” I retorted, but it lacked conviction, and I was embarrassed then, running a hand through my hair with sudden exhaustion. “I think I’m going crazy.”

Francis looked at me for a long moment, then detached my hand from my hair and took it in his. Since he was hardly the tactile sort in everyday life it lent weight to the moment, an air of finality accompanying the gesture. 

“You’re not crazy. You’re just coping very badly with your latent homosexuality.”

It was the first time either of us had been so direct. I blanched, my voice defeated to my own ears. 

“I’m not.”

“Richard,” Francis sighed, but gently, the way he had once sounded when tipsily coaxing the drunker contingent of the group out of hysterics. “I don't know what you're so afraid of. It’s only me.”

My skin was crawling, but I stayed put, staring at him, trying to listen. It was true: it was only him. It was only us, in this apartment- in this city, even. If I could admit to myself that I was a willing participant, what did it matter? There was no audience, no extraneous repercussions, no one to defend myself to. Who did I even have left who knew me enough to care?

“Camilla-“ I started, which made him almost smile.

“Isn’t here.”

But if she were, I thought, except she wasn’t, and loved a ghost, and besides all that had shared a bed with her twin brother for years. What was it to her, if I spent the rest of my days holed up in Francis’ apartment in Montreal as a self-hating sodomist?

After everything- after the week I’d had, and the years of firm nothingness prior- this seemed an anticlimactic conclusion to reach, hard to swallow for how simple it was. My tone was plaintive when I exhaled. “It can’t have been this bad for you.”

At that Francis snorted, inelegant, and withdrew his hand from mine, leaving my fingers to drag over the ridges of his wrist. 

“You get used to it.”

“Francis,” I said, teetering on the verge of sanity for the first time in a week. “Why did you do it now?”

He blinked at me, lidded eyes inscrutable and expression just south of surprised, then thinned his lips. 

“Because you were here.”

I didn’t leave that weekend either. Instead, as Francis vanished into his room, I finally took care of the dishes that had been accumulating across the apartment, fixed the discarded television, did the laundry, gnawed at my nails until I drew blood, called the university with another flimsy excuse, and slept terribly. Francis didn’t emerge from his room until noon the next day, claiming a horrendous headache, but in between fixing himself a heavily dosed cup of tea and vanishing back into the dark he scrawled a number across the crossword and shoved the newspaper towards me where I sat sorting through my papers. 

It took me until nightfall to dial the number. I was greeted by a fast-paced New York drawl which turned marginally friendlier when I offered my name, and significantly warmer when I confirmed that Francis was alive, news of his mysterious disappearance having reached the Big Apple. To my vague disbelief Francis had been entirely accurate in his retelling; the speech I received was almost word for word what I’d been told by him, and by the end of the call I was being ordered to obtain a home computer and send him something typed he could actually use. 

“Call Jane Fonda,” Francis recommended, the next day, when I edgily addressed the computer I had in California. After some deliberation, I did.

“Fuck me,” Judy Poovey said, upon hearing my voice. “Richard? I knew you weren’t dead.”

After some reassurance and as little detail as possible I managed to get her back on track: sure, she could send her assistants over to my place to get my things for me if I had a spare key for her to use. My car from the airport too, no problem. In fact, if I needed, she could totally get a moving truck sent to us. Oh, it was no sweat, it was crazy how much money she had lying around nowadays. How was Montreal, anyways? She never had understood how I could stand the cold in Vermont. Though she guessed there were ways of keeping warm, huh.

I thanked her profusely, side-stepped her incredibly nosy questions about my sex life, and apologized for never taking her up on dinner; she graciously forgave me on the condition that when she passed by Toronto for her book tour I dropped by. 

Francis had no computer, but he had a typewriter, and this he leant me easily, appearing at intervals in my doorframe to peer over my shoulder at the growing pile of pages on my desk, or to raise his brow at my overflowing trash can. For his part I don’t know what he did with himself, save leave the apartment dizzily nicotine-scented, a state that would have bothered me less if I had not developed a pavlovian response to it at some point the previous week that now left me distressingly affected by his continued absence. Despite my griping he was an actual insomniac, and now that I was less of a visiting houseguest than a roommate he had given up on keeping reasonable hours for my sake, keeping for the most part to his room and leaving me largely to my own devices. Since I was not entirely comfortable with my continuous presence in Montreal I didn’t force his hand, and for a few days we saw little of each other. 

I caved when my belongings arrived at Francis’ doorstep via FedEx a neat five business days after my call with Judy, packaged in boxes and accompanied by a note from my self-designated ‘sugar momma’ asking if I’d been living out of a suitcase or something, knocking self-consciously on his door before poking my head inside the cavernous room. Francis, confoundingly, was fully dressed and lying on the floor, but he looked imperiously my way when I cleared my throat.

“My place’s rent is due tomorrow,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “It’d be a good time to tell the landlord, for next month, if-“

“That’s fine with me,” Francis said, with all the laissez-faire of a person who had never seen fit to care about trivial things like rent. He did not sound like he was extending the offer out of politeness, but then Francis was rarely polite, so perhaps I’d been foolish to worry. 

“Okay,” I said, and then bit my tongue, risking another subject. “I’ll need a work permit or something.”

“I’ll call the Corcoran spawn tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

I stood there a moment longer, lost in practicalities, and when I remembered myself Francis was observing me with a half-cocked smile, head resting against the leg of his chair. 

“I’m going to go unpack,” I said, flushing, and saw myself out. 

I unpacked alone, filling the guest room, an exercise made surreal by contrast to all of the efficient packing I’d done across the year. I’d moved all of my things only a few months prior with supreme pragmatism, but placed around Francis’ guest room they took on strange significance, the way I’d once felt about my meagre belongings lying on the floor of Henry’s apartment. My diplomas looked out of place shelved above the piano; my VCRs, which I’d forgotten to instruct Judy’s assistant to discard, were uselessly stacked in a drawer. All of the decent clothes in my wardrobe had been given to me by Francis.

When I’d put everything else away I stood staring at my books for a while before carrying them into the living room and slowly adding them to the bookshelf. Between us we had about twelve doubles of books, his all nicer than mine, which made me want to laugh, or maybe cry. The journals I stowed away in my closet, alongside my administrative folders and old memorabilia. It took a few tries to get my computer to start up, but the whirring and beeping drew Francis out like a startled cat, and he circled warily before deigning to stare at the machine with such distrust I had to look away to hide my grin. 

“It’s colossal.”

“It does what it needs to.”

There was nothing to eat; we went for dinner instead, the first time I’d set foot in an actual restaurant in months, and spent the entire time arguing over nothing in particular, to the consternation of nearby tables and my general relief. It wasn’t that I enjoyed arguing with Francis per se, but the low-level bickering was reassuringly normal, as were his exaggerated eye-rolls and scandalized gesticulating. When he spent the walk back complaining of possible food poisoning I was so lost to the routine that I barely noticed how closely we were walking together.

Afterwards while he showered I sat on the window-seat and stared at the living room, thinking: this is my living room, for now . Those were my books. There were none of my things left in California. If someone was to ask for my address I would have to say Montreal. 

“Do you remember,” I asked, later, as Francis skipped obnoxiously between channels to avoid ad-breaks, damp hair curling against his nape, “After we had lunch with Julian, and saw the letter-“

He shuddered. “Must we reminisce about that?”

“No, no- do you remember, when we left, and you were panicking-“

“I think the occasion called for it, Richard-”

“Let me finish, will you? You said we should cut our losses and run away to Montreal. Do you remember that?”

He turned to stare at me, brow knitted and TV-light painting his face in exotic colors. “What? Really?”

“You don’t remember?” I asked, surprised. He frowned, pursed his lips.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember half the things I say when my head gets like that. That’s bizarre.”

“It was a terrible idea,” I agreed, which earned me a foul look. “It’s funny that you ended up here after all.”

“Third time’s the charm,” Francis mumbled, and when I cast him a perplexed look he quirked his brow. “We were meant to run off to South America, originally. You know that.”

“Oh, right.” I had entirely forgotten this first plan of Henry’s. “I wonder how that would have worked out.”

“Fleeing to Brazil or something?” Francis shuddered. “I wouldn’t have lasted a week. The climate alone.”

I shook my head, lost in thought. Henry had had a way of making his every plan sound infallible, strategic to a fault, but with age I was more and more conscious of what a romantic he’d been. Wild escapes to South America, poisoned mushrooms, playing chess master with the FBI- even at the time I had steered him away from his fanciful schemes, plans he only reluctantly abandoned in the face of impracticality. Without him we would have all ended up in jail, but then without him I never would’ve been roped into a murder in the first place. How much of our escape had been pure luck? I still trusted in his manipulations, unwilling to discredit his stoic acumen, but I had not forgotten the look on Charles’ face, vicious and resentful, when he’d recounted the hours of interrogation he’d endured, half of it the direct result of Henry’s inability to bend the knee where the police was concerned.

Francis’ cold toes prodded my thigh; I glanced questioningly his way.

“This new zen thing of yours- it’s not denial by any other name, is it?”

“No?” I offered, not entirely sure what I was being asked. He only nodded a little skeptically.

“So you’ve been keeping your hands to yourself out of courtesy to my maidenly virtue?”

“Jesus,” I said, fighting the urge to redden. “No.” 

“To be clear I’m very happy to support your abstinent lifestyle if it’ll save me getting boxed again.”

“ Francis ,” I admonished, aghast, though he seemed to find my self-reproach funny, smile facetious. 

“It’s just you’re a little hot and cold on the subject.”

I suspected that behind the teasing he was really asking, wary of pushing me one way or the other, so I controlled my self-consciousness enough to answer. “I’m trying to take things slowly, that’s all.”

He gave half a nod, acknowledgment and a hint of relief, then smirked. “Your maidenly virtue, then.”

I protested half-heartedly, batting his feet away. “Don’t pretend that ever stayed your hand.”

“Well, that time on the boat.”

“Philanderer,” I accused, without bite, which made him break into a less lofty smile than he usually allowed himself, eyes crinkling with mirth.

“No one’s ever called me that.”

“I almost called you a succubus the other day,” I admitted, to make him laugh, which it did, sharp and startled. “It was harder to say out loud.”

“That’s awful,” Francis huffed, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth in that almost coquettish way of his. “I wish you had. We could have had a much funnier argument.”

“What the hell would you have said in response?” 

He thought about it for a second, then smiled, a more honest come-hither than I’d ever been afforded. “Well, your Latin’s off.”

“How?”

“Succubare is to lie beneath.”

Business advanced promptly.

It took another week or so for my new reality to really sink in. Until then I had not felt the change held any degree of permanence, but the more we went about our days the more I came to understand I was unlikely to be wrenched out of my bubble  anytime soon. I took this newfound awareness in relative stride, perhaps because I’d been facing so much upheaval by then that I was anesthetized to dramatic revelations. For better or for worse this was a fate I had at least somewhat envisaged across the years- Francis and I in wheelchairs sniping at each other across the hall of the nursing-home. The specifics were less of an ordeal.

For all that I was fairly self-possessed with my original meltdown out of the way, my subconscious at least was still overwrought; though I slept through them for the most part I had more nocturnal visitors than I’d had in a while. Night-time was in any event the time where I was most left to my own thoughts, and so often lay awake for hours staring at the ceiling wishing I could shut off my mind and succumb to sleep, haunted by any variety of concerns. 

Being that I was pretty preoccupied by my own affairs, it only occurred to me somewhat belatedly that for all Francis’ passivity he was not especially fond of great and sudden change himself, and that his late appearances into the land of the living were perhaps cause for concern. It wasn’t that he’d returned to his California state, or descended into his prior apathy; he was perfectly capable of good conversation, and when I happened to take a break from my writing he was fairly willing to accompany me for a walk, despite complaints. Most days he seemed to have adapted to my continuous presence far better than I had, fixing drinks for two and reminding me to get my own brand of conditioner so I’d stop using his. I was nonetheless concerned by just how long I sometimes went without seeing him at all- I would sometimes resurface from some day-long writing session to register he hadn’t left his room once. Even beyond insomnia I wondered if this hadn’t been what he’d done with himself before I’d come to Montreal- to my knowledge he had nothing else to do. But lethargic was a big step up from suicidally depressed, and anyways I didn’t feel I could force the issue when he was already being so accommodating. Instead I left him to his own devices, and he remained elusive. He took mysterious calls sometimes, inside his room where I couldn’t hear him; I had no way of knowing whether he was secretly job-hunting or talking to Camilla out of my earshot. For all I knew he was fueling a drug habit.

I would honestly have tried to talk to him about his mental state at some point by the week’s end- I was not so distracted as to fail to notice the ink-dark stains under his eyes- but my good intentions were circumvented by fate. On the same day that I finished my draft of the book’s first chapter, feeling both accomplished and petrified, I emerged from my room looking for Francis to review my work and found him sat on the couch with a thousand-yard stare, pale as a ghost. When I called out to him he started and looked swiftly out of the window, shoulders taut.

“What is it?” I asked, a touch insensitively, having experienced enough terrible news to immediately assume the worst. He shook his head twice before speaking.

“Nothing of concern.”

“Bullshit,” I said, which at least made him look at me. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Francis repeated, though less like the living dead this time, patting himself down for a cigarette before relenting. “My mother’s been readmitted.”

I had been expecting different, so in the time it took me to wonder who on Earth had his number as well as a line to his mother he was already on his feet, padding past me to his room as I turned with concern. 

“Is she alright?”

“She’ll be fine,” Francis said, curtly. “It’s not her first nervous breakdown. If you’ll excuse me, I have a headache.”

I hadn’t thought to ask whether he’d spoken to her since the wedding- it had been so long that I had spoken to my parents that I sometimes forgot there were people who did. I stood gazing after him with real worry for a good while- I honestly liked Olivia, though I could not speak to her parenting abilities. Her over-decorated Christmas cards were stacked in the box in my closet even now, signed with extravagant amounts of swirls and consistently scented with her signature Guerlain Shalimar. Despite how routine her visits to rehab were I could understand Francis’ reaction- on the heels of his vanishing act, it was hard not to feel as though he had contributed to this newest stint of hospitalization. 

The poor woman, I thought, remembering with a pang how desperately upset she’d been at Bunny’s death, Francis’ drawn expression once he’d finally managed to get off the phone. Momma’s boy, Bunny had called him often, in lieu of worse. 

I had dinner alone, no longer in a celebratory mood, and when I went to bed I was wracked with nerves, convinced I had written the worst insult to literature since Naked Came the Stranger. I fell asleep to vague thoughts of applying for work at the nearest La Belle Province first thing come morning. 

I could not have been asleep for more than a few hours when my door was slammed open violently and I awoke distressed to Francis clutching the side of my desk and making urgent motions my way, half-visible in the stray moonlight.  

“Richard?” His breaths were ragged.

“Yes,” I answered, stumbling out of bed. “What’s-“

“You need to get me to a hospital,” Francis interrupted, shrill and panicked; up close his pupils were huge. “I’m having a heart attack.”

My own shock wore off; I examined him warily. “Why do you think that?”

“Why do I think that ? I can’t breathe, it feels like there’s an anvil on my chest, and my heart isn’t working- ” 

“Okay, okay,” I rushed, before he woke half the street. “Calm down. You’re not having a heart attack. It’s a panic attack. You used to-“

But he was already barging out of the room, voice rising with disgust: “You think I don’t know the difference? I have panic attacks every second night and I don’t come running- oh, God, I can’t breathe.“

By the end of it he was sinking to the floor, clutching his chest, and I couldn’t spare a thought for the suggestion that he spent his nights like this, following him downwards. 

“Look, if you’re sure I can take you to the hospital.”

He gave me a panicked look, trembling full body. “I’m going to die.”

It had been so long since I’d dealt with him in this state that I wavered, unwilling to risk his being right. He’d gotten his anxiety under control over the years, or so I’d thought- even in the aftermath of the wedding disaster he’d seemed more depressed than hysterical, give or take a few shouting matches. But then I hadn’t monitored his every move, and I remembered endless showers and recent days where I saw no hint of him until mid-afternoon, wondering guiltily if I shouldn’t have suspected subterfuge. When it came to his psychological afflictions Francis was an incomprehensible tangle of panic and pride. 

“You’re not,” I decided, belated, and sat cross-legged in front of him, shaking off the last dregs of sleep. “It feels worse but it’s not a heart attack. You wouldn’t be able to talk through it.”

“Don’t diagnose me,” Francis snapped, voice reedy, and then groaned and grabbed blindly at my hand, pressing it to his chest. “Does that feel like palpitations to you?”

His pulse was rabbit-fast, heart pounding beneath my palm, and he was so audibly frightened that I felt an inappropriate burst of protectiveness for him, paranoid bundle of nerves that he was. 

“You’re hyperventilating, that’s all,” I said, unscrupulously authoritative. “If you can get your breathing under control you’ll be fine.”

“I can’t get my breathing -“

“Just recite something,” I suggested, squeezing his shoulder firmly. At the look he gave me I nodded insistently. “Anything. Go on. What’s that Louise Labé one you always used to do-“

“I can’t,” Francis groaned, breaths hitching, but when I pressed him again he glared at me. “If I go into cardiac arrest because you wouldn’t believe me-“

“I’ll resuscitate you,” I promised, and, remembering Henry’s odd knack for defusing his moods through gallows humor, inclined my head. “My mouth-to-mouth’s decent.”

“Salaud,” Francis wheezed, then screwed his eyes shut, head knocking back into the wall. “ Je vis, je meurs, je me brûle et me noie - I can’t, I can’t do this.“

“If you could do it that night with the absinthe you can do it now.”

“Oh, for the love of-  j’ai chaud extrême en endurant froidure, la vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure- j’ai grands ennuis entremêlés de joie …”

He was losing focus; I racked my brains for a good memory, Francis perched on the hood of the BMW as Charles and Camilla played enthusiastic spectators. 

“Ainsi Amour …?”

Tight shake of the head. “No, that’s later - tout à coup je lis et je larmoie, et en plaisir maint grief tourment j’endure- mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure.” Shuddering exhale. “Tout en un coup je sèche et je verdoie .”

“Ainsi Amour …”

“Ainsi Amour inconstamment me mène ,” Francis confirmed, and then trailed off, breaths slower now, the set of his mouth chagrined. Strands of hair were sticking to his clammy forehead; I could not quite bring myself to brush them away. 

“Better?”

“I’m not a child.”

As he was curled up on himself in his pajamas this was not especially convincing, but I let him go, sitting back to give him space.

“Have you really been having these every second night?”

“You would have known if I was,” Francis muttered, but when I didn’t back down he shrugged defensively. “None this bad. It happens on and off.”

“I thought- I assumed you were taking medication, or…”

“A third of people with panic disorders are untreatable,” Francis recited, sullenly. “They told me to stop smoking and try to minimize the stress in my life.”

I couldn’t help but snort at that, which earned me a pale smile. 

“Precisely.”

“You should have said,” I reproached, then caught myself. “Could have. I didn’t realize.”

“And what could you have done? Stayed up till three to talk me through poetry?”

“I don’t sleep well either.”

He hugged his knees, glanced at the floor. “It hasn’t been this bad in years. After my grandfather found out I had such a fit I nearly broke my ankle knocking around the place- it was abominable, he was screaming and I was in hysterics and Kim was trying to escape with his life… Bunny would have ruptured a lung laughing. Then it got worse before- well, before the letter. But even over the summer it wasn’t so bad. I think I was in shock.”

“At least California’s good for something.”

“Well, it produced you,” Francis said, which was so unambiguously earnest of him I thought I must have misheard him, but when I looked up he was fixing me solemnly. “Richard Cœur de Lion. What on Earth possessed you to come to Hampden?”

I shrugged, a little dumbstruck. “I wanted to get away from Plano.”

“God bless Plano,” Francis murmured, tiredly. I bit my lip.

“Have you been sleeping at all since I came?”

“Poorly. It’s not you. When there’s some kind of disruption-“ He shrugged. “The nocturnal visitors might be you, though.”

I did not dispute this; my ghosts were louder around the surviving Hampden crowd too. “But you’re okay, otherwise?”

It was a stupid thing to ask, but I didn’t know how else to put it. Francis only nodded jerkily.

“Okay,” I said, and then cleared my throat. “You should get some sleep.”

Sometimes I wondered why Francis had chosen to come to me with all of his medical emergencies, back in the day. Because he knew I’d say yes? Maybe. Surely not because I would indulge his hypochondria. Perhaps because I was the only one whose judgment mattered little enough to him that he could afford to have me see him at his worst. Or maybe there was more to it, the same kind of thing that had kept us talking despite our mutual exhaustion that terrible spring, some unspoken understanding that we were on the same side somehow. To date I don’t know that I have ever turned Francis away when he’s come knocking. 

Regardless, when he wavered in his doorframe I followed without a word, and laid myself on the other side of the bed without complaint as he curled into a ball and exhaled heavily. 

I didn’t sleep much that night, but Francis was asleep within minutes. 

In the morning, I woke from fitful rest when Francis dropped something in the kitchen, blinking groggily at the bright light. It was the first time I’d properly looked around his room, which was usually shut or plunged into complete darkness, and the first thing I laid eyes on was his glorious wardrobe, improbably transported into the corner of the room. I stared in befuddled delight at it for a good few seconds before remembering where I was and dragging myself heavily out of bed, tripping over a pair of shoes in the process and catching myself on Francis’ writing desk. 

My hand landed on paper, and I paused. 

“I was going to tell you,” Francis said, from the door, almost timidly. I continued to stare downwards for a second, reeling from the gut-punch joy of reading Greek, then looked up to find him clutching a cup of coffee defensively to his chest. 

“Are you…”

“A lot of the really old texts still don’t have decent modern translations,” Francis forestalled, avoiding my eyes. “Julian’s name still holds weight around those circles. I figured…”

I looked back at the desk, his sprawling cursive set out against a battered copy of what looked like the Iliad. In the last passage he had translated ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς as ‘rosy-fingered dawn’. 

“I don’t know. It’s probably abysmal. I just thought- I’m not bad at languages.”

“It’s lovely,” I said, because it was. Henry’s Greek had been the truest; Francis’ translations had always been less concerned with authenticity, carrying a Latin slant of gentility which made his transcriptions easy to pick out and hard for Bunny to copy without giving away their provenance. 

Francis shoved the coffee at me, gathering the pages anxiously once they were out of my grasp. “Don’t just say that. It’s been half a decade since you last read Greek, anyways.”

“It is, though.”

He cast me a doubtful look, relenting at whatever honest emotion was showing on my face, his hands stilling as he peered down at the paper. 

“I was never really- no one ever really thought I was good for much, before Julian. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic.”

He was good at plenty, but I couldn’t say that. 

“I’m literally writing a book about our university days under your instructions.”

“That’s different,” Francis dismissed, but the lines of his shoulders had softened, and I drank my coffee while skimming through the rest of his work as he stood there trying not to watch. 

November brought snow, endless amounts of it, more than I had seen since that first miserable winter in Hampden, filling the streets with sludge and the skies with blinding white. Francis griped incessantly about the former; I often lost track of time staring up at the latter, amazed after years of L.A. sunshine to find that I had not imagined winters in the North after all. 

I spent most of the working day writing, fighting with AOL to get said writing through to Random House, and routinely giving up on AOL and hunting down the nearest fax machine instead, sometimes picking up feedback or fielding calls from Alex Taney. The latter was usually cause for some entertainment, as Francis was resolutely disinterested in speaking to him for reasons he would not disclose, but being nonetheless incapable of letting the phone ring twice would regularly beat me to the phone and then hurriedly thrust it my way while Alex’s tinny voice impatiently complained of the cross-border lag. 

Writing itself was an odd exercise. Given the subject matter I was especially careful with the story, avoiding even oblique mentions of death or guilt that couldn’t be explained away by the mystical allusions. If I published under my own name people would undoubtedly draw a connection to the study group- the publishers, naturally, were in fact keen to use the sensational nature of the two deaths to advertise the book- but there was no way of reading it that could inculpate us of any crime save that of romanticism. Even if the highly stylized Bacchanalia descriptions were assumed to be factual, they were obviously disconnected from Bunny’s passing- there was nothing sacrificial or ritualistic about falling off a cliff in the middle of the day while the rest of us were all conveniently accounted for. As for the farmer, long-forgotten, even the FBI had wholly failed to draw any connection between his death at the hands of some wild animal and Bunny’s accident several months later, and the only possible witness to the group’s bacchanal follies had long-since been outed as a raging bigot and a conspiracy theorist on national television. I suspect I was being over -cautious in steering clear of any parallels- Alex was practically twisting my arm to include some dramatic death scene that could be coyly fielded off in interviews, the thought never having occurred to him that anyone would suspect me of being anything more than an unscrupulous sell-out if I did. 

Still, once I put the historical segments and the self-editing aside, I found myself once again writing the only story it seems to me I am capable of writing, or a portion of it at least. A reckless longing for by-gone times, a mad pursuit of some age-old truth, and in between follies juxtaposed fragments of reality: children, the lot of us, seeking something bigger than ourselves. It was harder to write with an audience in mind.

Francis, in some ways, was a worse critic than my actual editor, in that I was far more self-conscious when he was reading my drafts than when they were returned to me full of scribbled corrections. He held an odd regard for the text- at times he was horrendously nosy, ignoring my protests as he read over my shoulder, and at others he was extremely reluctant to look over it. Above all he was resistant to providing feedback on the substance of it, most notably the Bacchanalia itself, which frustrated me endlessly, given that I knew very well my own recounting was completely fabricated. 

“It’s good,” was all he said, the first time I managed to get him to look through it, and when I asked whether it was true at all he shoved the pages back at me and scowled. 

“Of course not.”

Later I asked if he thought I’d captured some essence of it, at least, and he was more obliging, finger tapping restlessly against the armrest of his chair. 

“I don’t know. You made it poetic. It wasn’t poetic when it was happening.”

“The bacchanal?”

“All of it. But that’s not a bad thing. I think people like you have been doing that sort of thing since the beginning of time. Making things significant, or literary somehow.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“I know. Only- how can I put this? In the moment, blood isn’t captivating or macabre or meaningful. It’s just red. You know what I mean?”

For his part Francis was doing sporadic free-lance jobs that he refused to tell me the details of out of some superstitious streak of stubbornness- the only indication of his deadlines I had were his early-morning appearances in my room as he bee-lined for the computer, ink stains all over his hands the pages that he’d hastily churned out overnight, ever the procrastinator. Other times he seemed to be working on projects out of a personal interest, or just for practice; of these I knew mostly of the Sappho fragments, mainly because Francis kept complaining about her Aeolic dialect. Unlike me he was not a focused worker- the apartment was full of discarded sheets of Greek, Latin, English and French, to the extent that I once found a passage from Metamorphoses in the refrigerator.

My own French, abandoned since university, was experiencing trial by fire. Montreal proper was for the most part still staunchly francophone, not least the area Francis’ apartment was in- I had by now scraped up the requisite vocabulary to comfortably communicate with the grocers and exchange in-depth greetings with neighbors, but this either conned them into thinking my French was better than it was or made them want to put me on the spot, and I was regularly cornered into lengthy conversations I could grasp about five words of, heavily accented and fast-paced regional slang going right over my head. Thankfully I am of the countenance which sets most people at ease, or some of my slips of the tongue might have cost me more than they did- the worst I endured was mocking. 

“It’s good for you to get out,” was Francis’ excuse for using me as a work mule, when I recounted my last ordeal over lunch, perfectly hypocritical. “Don’t look at me like that. I can’t catch cold right now.”

“You’re coming with me to the stores tomorrow.”

“Oh, don’t be petty. If I get pneumonia you won’t be so smug.”

“If you don’t come I’ll mix up my wines again.”

“If you’re resorting to threats so soon you must’ve really said something atrocious,” Francis gauged, tearing fussily at his bread. “It wasn’t anything religious, was it? They’re very sensitive to that sort of thing.”

“I didn’t burst in saying bonjour, ostie de tabernacle , give me some bread please, if that’s what you’re asking.“

“Then it can’t be that bad. In any event it’ll be good if you actually learn French. Having your dead languages outnumber your living ones is entirely pretentious.”

“I can feel Coptic swears being directed your way,” I warned, though I was too busy frowning to worry about Henry striking him down from beyond the grave. “What do you mean, my dead languages? I barely understand one.”

“Greek and Latin, Richard,” Francis stressed, looking at me dubiously. “Did you walk into a lamppost on the way back?”

“I don’t know Latin,” I said, bemused. “I never studied it.”

“What are you talking about? You quoted Seneca at me a day ago for not hanging up my towels.”

“I got that from Henry,” I said. He stared at me like I’d grown another head.

“You can’t be serious. But I talk Latin to you constantly.”

“Well- yeah. Exactly.”

“You honestly mean to tell me you learnt Latin by proxy through us?” 

“Only to the extent that you use it,” I said, embarrassed now. “I’m not exactly proficient.”

“I don’t believe this. What did you do, borrow a dictionary from the library to crack the code?”

“No,” I said, though in fact I had, and I had specifically because I was haunted by not having understood what he’d asked me at our first meeting. From the look on his face I think he might have guessed as much.

We hadn’t shared a bed since Francis’ attack, or not in the literal sense, rather. He was embarrassed, I think, and besides that we were neither of us used to regular bedfellows- since Sophie I hadn’t seen anyone, and whatever relationship Francis had had with Kim I didn’t get the impression it had involved breakfasts in bed. It was, I suppose, also easier that way- easier to retreat to our separate rooms come nightfall, rather than face the ugliness of the night with someone else watching. It was certainly easier for me than thinking about the implications of that level of domesticity. 

It wasn’t that I hadn’t learned my lesson from Francis’ episode- we spent several sleepless nights in the living room sharing cigarettes instead of suffering in our respective corners of the apartment, which at least kept the hallucinations at bay. But there was a difference between burning the midnight candle together and waking up to Francis’ face every morning, and it was not one I felt I had the capacity to broach.

Had I been five years younger, I would have spent far more time obsessing over the particulars of our arrangement. That Francis and I were friends was a given; that I was his current and potentially permanent housemate was something I could understand. That he had a habit of pressing his thumb lightly into the slight dip of skin where Charles had once shot a bullet clean through me when we kissed was a more earth-shattering sort of state of affairs, but one I was adjusting to. It was the remaining gray area of emotion I was wary of examining too deeply.

It wasn’t cowardice, or at least it wasn’t purely cowardice. I struggled intently to put any label to my feelings where Francis was concerned. He was my closest friend, but even at Hampden I had often found him entirely unbearable. I cared for him dearly but sometimes wanted nothing more than to keep him at arm’s length. It was hard to qualify my feelings the way I could have had he been a woman- with the opposite gender there was always some level of awareness, the possibility of romance almost immediately obvious in a new acquaintance. With Francis it was hard to separate the normal tenets of our convoluted friendship from the abnormal signs of something else. 

There was, too, the fact I had no inkling of what Francis thought of the whole thing. For someone so ostensibly emotional he was exceedingly inscrutable, not to mention typically unpredictable. Some days he transparently wished I had stayed in California; others he was so unwilling to be left to his own devices he would sit and write on the bathroom floor while I showered. Exposure was making me better at making sense of his volatility- for instance, though he was often unkind he was only cruel when he hadn’t slept in days- but Francis was at his most mysterious beneath all of the idiosyncrasies and insecurities, and for all that I had understood what he meant when he’d told me why he’d chosen now to make a move, I wasn’t even especially certain that he believed in love as such, let alone some form of romance involving myself. Being that I was equally happy to leave that particular matter untouched, I did not ponder the subject too often.

Regardless of these minor ambiguities, life in Montreal was proving to be resolutely not-terrible. I had bad days, obviously- in-between arguments with agents and trying to resist excessive editing to make the book ‘more commercial’, I was often paralyzed with the certainty that everything I had written was abysmal, and then forced to contend with either writer’s block or a deeply depressed mood that left Francis to rescue my manuscript from my attempts at literary self-immolation. Francis himself had not abruptly undergone a personality change, and thus regularly provoked my extreme irritation, sometimes purposefully. At times I had frightful visions of a future involving slamming doors and tearful apologies, myself gone gray and Francis with a smoker’s rasp. 

For the most part, however, things were better than I could have foreseen- certainly better than teaching at USC, and a great deal better than our cohabitation over the summer. We got along, as we always had, and with some degree of permanence to our coexistence there was less friction between us. I liked living with Francis- liked living amongst his things, liked his tastes in food and music, liked his conversation now that he was capable of conversing. There was something falsely nostalgic about spending so much time near him, breathing in the smell of cigarettes and cologne, as if reminiscent of some bygone childhood age. I had been struck by this thought over the summer, but it occurred to me with greater clarity now that I wasn’t distracted: I had no need to censor myself around him, as I had grown used to doing in company since Hampden. He already knew the worst of it. 

Francis was also taking me by surprise, in ways that were hard to define. He cooked for us fairly regularly, taking real pains to prepare actual meals; when he returned from an excursion to the market he usually stopped by my room to drop off some trinket or other he’d picked up for me, with little fanfare. When I had to go get my pictures taken for the dubiously arranged permits Suzy Ellis-née-Corcoran had set up for me he had lent me a tie he’d knotted for me and patted my cheek paternally while pushing me out of the door.

I don’t know why these kindnesses caught me off-guard- Francis had always been off-handedly generous, charitable in a sort of noblesse oblige way. But giving was easier for the have’s than the have-not’s, and I don’t think I had expected this to be some dependable trait of his rather than a perk of his wealth. I was beginning to realize that I had only briefly known Francis before he’d found himself a murderer, and that in consequence I had somewhat skewed idea of what he was like when not entirely miserable. Probably the same was true in reverse. 

Towards the end of the month, I don’t know how, Francis got in touch with some academic or other who’d read something of his and gotten excited by the connection to Julian, whose disappearance from the public eye was the topic of much intrigue amongst some of his peers to-date. She was Canadian, passing through the city on her way back to Toronto and wanted to get a coffee, a fact which I remained none the wiser to until Francis, see-sawing between nerves and antagonism, confessed over breakfast, a good ten minutes after he was supposed to have met her.

He was trying to pass it off as unimportant, something he’d let fall through out of apathy, but by the cowed way he avoided my eyes I could tell he was awaiting the inevitable reprimand with some sense of just deserts, and this more than anything made me suppress any of my initial reactions in favor of pushing away from the table and heading for the hallway, Francis scrambling after me alarmed.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s a ten minute walk,” I said, handing him his coat. “If she’s ordered a coffee she’ll be drinking it inside in this weather.”

He was wide-eyed, but at my expectant look he mutely slid his coat on, then his scarf. 

“What am I supposed to say?”

“You overslept. You lost your keys. It doesn’t matter.”

“She’ll think I’m awful.”

“I’ll try and clean up in case you invite her back for lunch,” I said, passing him his wallet. “Go on.”

He made it to the bottom of the stairs, then turned back towards me, pale-faced. 

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Go,” I said, but when he didn’t move I resigned myself to catching my death and shuffled out to the stairs, leaning down to tuck his hair behind his ear. “Tell her the one about Julian having shaved his head and moved in with the Tibetan monks.”

Francis wasn’t the blushing type, and it was cold out. Even so he was pink-cheeked when he nodded jerkily and set off down the street.

The woman didn’t come over for lunch- her train left mid-afternoon- but the offer was turned down regretfully, Francis informed me, so he expected we’d have to play host if ever she was back in Quebec. For his part he was almost bashful in a way I didn’t at all recognize, and I was only a little jealous for having missed their discussion, too pleased at how it had all worked out. 

He came knocking at my door that evening tousle-haired like he’d been sleeping, a smear of ink tear-drop perfect on his cheek, and self-consciously hovered around my desk for a minute while I tried to seem less curious than I was. 

“If you’re still looking for an epigraph,” he eventually let out, tapping anxiously at his wrist, “I may have something.”

The ink had long dried on the page he passed me. Sappho 147 , read the top of the page, and then, in careful strokes, after a number of crossed-out attempts:

Someone will remember us

I tell you

Even in another time

The breath left my lungs so violently that my head spun a little. I think I would have felt less seen if he’d presented me with a ten-page treatise on the inner workings of my mind; something bruising pulsed in my chest.

“Don’t feel obliged to use it,” Francis was saying, hard to make out through the roaring in my ears, but he stopped when I looked at him, unconcerned expression fading into something almost shaken. “What?”

The words stuck to my tongue. 

Maybe it was because one of the figurantes was distractingly flesh-and-blood nearby me, or maybe the constant specter of outside readership had just sunken its claws into my subconscious, but quite spontaneously I found myself stumbling over the untimely realization that I was making significant progress on a book whose protagonists were, for all intents and purposes, my friends put to paper. 

There was no practical element to my sudden crisis of conscience: Henry and Bunny were dead, and Charles I doubted was much of a reader nowadays. Camilla, however, unreachable as she was, was not unlikely to read the book, if it was published- I suspected it might be expected on my part to send her a copy, even. The idea was intensely uncomfortable. Francis was bad enough, but nothing that might spill into my writing was likely to surprise him. Though Camilla certainly knew more of my feelings than was helpful, the fact I’d asked her to marry me felt less importunely revealing than the way I wrote her, or Charles and Henry for that matter. The thought routinely stilled my hands on the keyboard, fingers twitching with indecision in the face of some choice of description that struck me as divulging too much. 

At the very least, I tried to reassure myself, these were not my journals proper- I had the power to rework the story so its leading figures were not seen in relation to myself, and to craft a narrative that moved them into the realm of fiction. It would have been intolerable to let Camilla read the pages and pages spent recounting the apricot blush of her cheeks in the autumnal chill or the way she rolled her tongue over the harsh consonants of the Odyssey. In earlier years, I will confess, I had sometimes pictured her doing just that, by some contrivance, glimpsing my feelings for what they were and finding herself taken by the way I saw her. In the aftermath of her rejection and everything that had followed my old fantasies mortified me.

It was impossible to assess my writing objectively, and my editor was of no use, since he had no context for my distress, which left me with Francis, whom I was understandably reluctant to approach on the subject. After four days of obstruction, though, I was at my wits’ end, and so dragged myself into the living room with the enthusiasm of a disobedient schoolboy being sent to the principal’s office. 

“Do you think there’s too much of me in the way I write you?”

“Me singular, or us plural?” Francis asked, who’d started violently at my unannounced intrusion. I smiled apologetically, distracted.

“You plural. I just realized- I’ll probably have to send Camilla a copy, if it makes it to publication.”

“Well,” Francis drew out, approaching tactful. He’d obviously realized this sooner than I had. “There’s a distinct change in tone from the journals, if that’s any consolation.”

“I’m not trying to be so subjective,” I said, somewhat plaintively. 

“I don’t think it’s possible to write anything objectively ,” Francis countered, gnawing on his pen. “Admittedly if I was writing I’d spend less time on her heaving bosoms, but it’s nothing she doesn’t know already, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It was worse when he was being sympathetic; I sighed and sagged into the couch with resignation. “I guess I should count my blessings that Henry’s not around to proof-read it.”

“Oh, God. Can you imagine?”

“I’d really prefer not to.”

“Richard, you know, this line on page fifty-three where you say her skin was like milk and honey is totally inappropriate for the era, considering the shortage of dairy in the turn of the century-“

“Don’t,” I begged off, but I was laughing, both at the ridiculous pitch of his voice and his abruptly stone-faced countenance. “I bet I’m not even describing the forest floor accurately.”

“Honestly, Richard, it’s common knowledge that ιερo`ν πε ́δoν and its salic conditions-“

“Its salic conditions!”

Not long after I’d recovered from this stumbling block, my writing woes escalated dramatically. In part this was my own fault- I was a prolific writer on the subject, and a poor editor, so that I had written fair amounts of a story without it being at all a cohesive one. Compounded with the publishers demanding I work on structure before any further substance, I was left in the throes of writer’s block, faced with largely disconnected segments that refused to fall obediently into place. None of my many attempts at crafting a table of contents could shape the story the way it needed to be told; I was left to spend my days mutinously avoiding my computer and watching Scoop on Radio-Canada.

Francis, ever eager to abandon his own work until the eleventh hour and marginally more adventurous than he’d been a few months prior, was quick to force me outdoors: for a few days we took the time to start playing tourists again, visiting the fine arts museum and an antique flea market where Francis sighted someone and started in surprise, pulling me aside to peer at a tall, thin man wearing an elegant scarf and negotiating decisively with the owner of a set of (to my eyes) fairly run-down chairs. 

“That’s Welton Blackwell.”

“Who?” I asked, wary of some kind of familial connection, but Francis looked more interested than appalled.

“Welton Blackwell. Blackwell and Hobart’s? They deal antiques in New York. I bought that wardrobe from them when I lived there.”

“He looks young for antiques,” I said, because he didn’t truthfully look much older than us. Francis scoffed.

“They don’t breed antiquarians geriatric.”

We didn’t stay long; Francis disliked being around things he couldn’t afford. Given that our most significant expenses were food and the heating bill we got by fine on his allowance for the time being, supplemented as it was by his sporadic translation jobs, but neither of us had a stable source of income, and I didn’t have the heart to budget his taste in drinks or his smoking habit. There was no surplus for luxuries, which he took on the chin more gracefully than I would have foreseen, but pained him nonetheless. For my part I had already sent in a bundle of applications to the university, prepared to accept the most mundane of research jobs if offered the opportunity- I had managed it fine at Hampden, and I was staunchly realistic about the selling prospects of the book. 

After the flea market we somehow wound up attending a performance of Antigone at a nearby theatre, largely because the tickets were so cheap, which should have alerted us to the quality of the production. When the curtains opened on Antigone and Ismene would-be sensually gyrating inside steel hoops, Francis looked at me with such total horror that I had to physically bite my hand to refrain from laughing out loud. We stayed until the entr’acte, inserted bewilderingly after Haemon’s departure, by which time we had both succumbed to entirely immature fits of laughter, Francis flushed with restrained hysterics and my eyes watering. We all-but ran out of the theatre, narrowly avoiding Creon’s actor where he sat smoking a joint on the steps, and spent the walk home setting each other off by recalling the mystifying choices made by the production, my personal favorite being the choir’s interpretative dance segment. 

“Thank god no one knows us in this country,” was Francis’ final comment, leaning against my arm as I fumbled for the keys. “I don’t think I would show my face outdoors if anyone had seen me there.”

I woke up the next morning to an empty apartment, a fact I didn’t realize until I’d gotten dressed and made myself a coffee, still groggy with sleep. I don’t know what tipped me off- the apartment was often completely silent, and Francis’s waking hours were irregular- but nonetheless I gravitated with vague suspicion towards his room, and froze when I saw the light filtering through his door. 

I pushed the door open: the curtains were pulled open, the bed was made, and Francis was nowhere in sight. My breathing was suddenly loud to my own ears; I took a step back, then two, until I was backing into the hallway wall. 

A floorboard creaked; I turned, then dropped my mug, coffee spilling everywhere as it bounced off the carpet. Bunny was watching me with a crooked grin.

“Hello, old boy.”

“This isn’t real,” I said, dry-mouthed but clear, the edges of my vision blurring. He was older, his jaw heavier and his hair duller, athlete’s build verging towards stocky, but it was him, not some Corcoran duplicate; I had known him instantly.

“No need to start saying your Hail Mary’s,” Bunny guffawed, stepping forward to clap me on the shoulder, his hand hot and tangible through my shirt. “So these are the digs, eh? Not too shabby- very old-school Europe, of course, but that can’t be helped.”

I couldn’t speak, too consumed by the impossibility of his presence, but this had never bothered Bunny before, and he shrugged and stuck his hands in his pockets jauntily. 

“No male nudes anywhere, which is a surprise. Put your foot down on that, have you?”

I was immediately ill-at-ease, wanting to be anywhere but there, but Bunny’s smile had gone edged, drowsy eyes glinting. 

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No? Cozy sort of housing arrangement you’ve found yourself here. Used to be that you thought you were too good for charity, but maybe there’s a price you’re willing to cough up here, if you catch my drift.”

“Where’s Francis?” I asked, because I felt he had something to do with his absence. Bunny assumed a thoughtful expression.

“Funny you ask. I thought you might know. I was thinking I’d ask him for a hand but I hear he’s flat broke nowadays- and his hands are a little so-so.”

I wanted to hit him, which he seemed to know, smile stretching with satisfaction. 

“You’re not really here.”

“Thanks to who?” Bunny asked, quick and vicious, though he was still smiling. “You’ve got a bit of a stain there, y’know.”

I looked down at my shirt and found it scarlet. 

“This is a dream,” I said, but my vision was blurring with panic, and I was trying to remember what I’d been doing before bed; when Bunny laughed it bounced merrily off the walls. When I looked up again the apartment was vanishing from sight, and Bunny, stinking with sweat, had his arm wrapped like a vice around my shoulders, my feet stumbling under his weight. Then it was snowing, but snowing dust, and from the smell alone I knew we were in Plano. 

I twisted violently to shake him off, but he was supernaturally strong, and forcing me to my knees; I scraped my palms raw against the sand, bowed head straining to make out the dull floorboards ahead. When they started groaning as footsteps thundered our way I began thrashing in earnest, blood splattering all over the floor from my sodden shirt. 

I don’t think the bullet ever reached me- instead, as dreams sometimes do, the image kept rewinding itself to the seconds before the gun went off, negligently clasped between coarse hands. I awoke screaming to the distant sound of thudding, bedsheets twisted to the point of near-strangulation and my scar aching as I panted. 

Lights went on in the hallway; Francis flung the door to my room open, hair in disarray and eyes wide. 

“Richard?”

“I’m okay,” I tried to say, but I was still breathing too quickly to speak, half-asleep enough to doubt his presence. “Is Bunny-“

His expression twisted; he abandoned his post to sidle up to me, pulling me free of the sheets and helping me sit up as the mattress dipped beneath his weight. 

“Dust by now. Do you want a glass of water?”

I shook my head- I was awake enough that I didn’t want to feel like any more of a child, and besides I didn’t want him to leave me alone. 

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Francis said, brow creasing. He sounded almost upset. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I answered, though my pulse was still racing and I was shivering, cold now that the covers were off me. “Just a bad dream.”

“I don’t think we have those,” Francis said, and pressed his sleep-warm palm to my forehead attentively. “You don’t feel hot, at least.”

He went to withdraw his hand: I caught him by the wrist and pressed my ear to it, listening for his faint pulse. Then I realized what I was doing and started, meeting his eyes with embarrassment. Backlit as he was they were hard to read.

“I’ll get the light,” Francis said, slowly, and when I shamefacedly released him and settled back into the bed he did just that. Then he was back at the bedside and gesturing for me to move; confused, I obeyed, and watched him make himself comfortable, hair fanning out against the pillow as he curled onto his side, bringing us eye-to-eye.

I said nothing, wary of misstepping somehow, something hot and uncomfortable lodged between my ribs, and Francis pushed at my shoulder with two slender fingers.

“Turn around.”

I did, and was rewarded after a second’s shuffling with his frigid feet between my legs, his forehead coming to a rest between my shoulder blades. 

My throat worked; I wanted to say something, maybe Thank you, or This really isn’t necessary , but I was hyper-aware of his breathing against my back, and I couldn’t manage it. Instead I lay there listening to him inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale until the repetition lulled me back into sleep, pulse gone sluggish and eyes heavy.

I woke the early next morning in a tangle of limbs, a very disgruntled Francis glowering at me where I had bolted upright, and stumbled full of excuses to my desk.

“What's the matter with you?”

“I have the structure,” I responded, apologetically fumbling for a pen and flipping a receipt to scribble across it. “For the book. It’s a Greek tragedy.”

It was beyond obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then: episodes, intercut by a symbolic chorus, introduced by a foreshadowing prologue. I had been writing to form without even knowing it. 

“Richard,” Francis said, after a pause. “Please tell me this isn’t because of the play last night.”

Since I could do no such thing, I set out to win his forgiveness otherwise. 

December promised a White Christmas, snowfall heavy and regular, and brought along an uptick in pace when it came to Random House, eager to get more pages before the holidays. Francis and I got into one spectacularly stupid fight over dry-cleaning of all things, which subsequently embarrassed us both enough to pretend it never happened. I wrote a Christmas card for Camilla, which I kept putting off sending, and for Olivia Abernathy, which I kept putting off asking Francis to send. I had never especially cared for the holidays as a child, but then Christmas in Plano looked nothing like Christmas in Montreal, grey slush lining the streets notwithstanding; I had secretly gone to observe the Santa Claus Parade on my way back from the shops, and was working on persuading Francis in a would-be casual fashion to drive out to a pine farm to obtain a Christmas tree. Though he looked down with old money condescension on the bright consumerism of modern festivities he was fairly amenable to my holiday spirit, but this would not readily extend to letting me use the Mustang to lug around a tree, and besides I was trying to downplay my uncharacteristic enthusiasm for the season.

To our mutual alarm, we awoke one morning to an invitation in our letterbox to an ‘intimate neighbor’s Christmas gathering’, from the Bouchards none the less. We were their neighbors only in the loosest sense, Francis’ apartment being on the very outskirts of their part of Outremont, but it was an insular community- this was a test of character as much as anything else. 

“We probably have to go,” I assessed, as Francis groaned and flung the invitation aside.

“We probably have to move, you mean.”

“It’s one party,” I said, retrieving the invitation. The card was pearl in color, elegantly understated. “It says intimate gathering .”

“That means everyone who lives in the area will be there,” Francis hissed. “We’re too old to pass as schoolboy roommates. What do you propose we do, claim we’re brothers?”

I winced. “Surely they won’t ask.”

“Of course they won’t ask. But they’re wealthy Catholics. If they get that impression we’ll be passive-aggressively picketed out within weeks.”

“You’re a wealthy Catholic.”

“Ex-wealthy non-practicing Catholic.”

Inappropriately, I smiled. “That’s not what I meant. You know how to mingle with these people. We’re foreigners anyways- they’re already assuming there’s something wrong with us they’ll have to pretend to tolerate. If you strike them as a kindred spirit they won’t go looking for reasons to force us out.”

“You’re awfully strategic all of a sudden,” Francis muttered, but he didn’t argue, tapping his foot against the leg of the coffee table. “God. We’re going to have to bring presents, you know.”

“Maybe we could cook something.”

“We.”

In the end Francis made an Opera; I bought wine, and chocolates for the children, whom Francis had completely forgotten about. I dressed under careful instructions- formal, but playing at informal- then bundled up in enough layers to look faintly ridiculous. Quebec in the winter is a great equalizer- no one can avoid looking like a Michelin man in the face of the weather. We could have driven, I suppose, but I was no good driving in the snow, and Francis was convinced there was black ice on the streets, so we walked instead, since the Bouchard residence was only a few blocks away.

The house itself, a three-story cream-colored Victorian mansion dating back to 1916, matched its owner with precision; I would have dawdled to stare had Francis not set off for the door, knocking once before standing back to give me a meaningful look. 

“Don’t try to seduce the wife.”

“What?”

“She’s blonde and regal. You play to type.”

I didn’t get the chance to reply; Mme Bouchard was at the door, blonde and regal indeed, her dark eyes scanning us so subtly it felt as though she hadn’t done so at all. 

“Mr. Abernathy. I’m glad you could make it.”

“The pleasure’s all mine ,” Francis dismissed, shaking off her accented English. “ This is my flat-mate, Richard Papen. I don’t think you’ve met. ”

“How do you do, Mr. Papen.”

“Enchanté,” I said, self-conscious and trying not to look it. “ You have a lovely home. ”

“You speak French too? That’s unusual for Americans.” This was said in complimentary tones; she stood back to let us in. “ You’re brave for walking. It’s freezing out. ”

“Richard wanted to see the decorations. ”

Inside a homogenous group awaited us- young couples, older ones, families for the most part, all French and well-dressed and well-spoken, though franker than their English counterparts. I was distracted by the interior, which turned out to be a blessing; the Bouchard husband, very proud of his home, took the opportunity to show me around and point out the period fittings, leaving me to make appreciative noises and monosyllabic comments for the better part of a half hour. Francis, in the meantime, was conversing with Mme Bouchard and an elderly couple I assumed to be her parents, sipping his wine knowingly when we joined the fray.

“I hope you haven’t been boring Mr. Papen.”

“Of course not. Richard is a lover of the arts. ”

“Francis was just telling us he’s from Boston, ” Mme Bouchard said, elegant chignon glinting in the light. “ We had our lune-de-miel there. ”

“Honeymoon,” Francis told me, when I lagged, and smiled. “ You didn’t consider Paris? ”

We made our way around the room, sometimes separating, polishing our story as we went. Francis is never so perfectly unflappable as he is in public, and we are both habitual liars; coming up with a plausible cover had proved fairly easy once we’d set to it. So Francis murmured asides about the girl who’d broken my heart, and I talked up his incorrigible philandering, backed up by the borderline flirtatious manner he addressed the women in the room. As luck would have it we were reunited when a middle-aged businessman took the initiative and asked us directly why on earth we shared a place, even a nice one like ours. I took a beat too long to answer, thrown by how little money meant to these people that they wouldn’t even consider the most obvious reason to share a home, which left Francis to raise a careless shoulder.

“Well, it’s easier, since we’re partners. ”

I froze, but the man was making an interested noise. “ Oh, you run a business together? ”

“Not quite. We both write. It’s a collaborative creative process. ”

“ And that pays good money ?”

“Oh, money… It’s a passion project. But Richard’s getting his first novel published soon. ”

With excuses out of the way the rest of the night was easy. The older folk in the room were largely disinterested in our careers, money savvy as they were, save one or two with an interest in the arts, but the younger women in particular were intrigued by the romantic allure of it all, and it was with them that I spoke the most. Our hostess had taken a liking to us, Francis in particular, I suspect for making for an interesting addition to her party, and knew of his Toronto correspondent’s work, and they spent a good half hour in conversation as Mr Bouchard looked skeptically their way and I hid my smile behind my wine glass. My French was not good enough to keep up with the convoluted conversation around me alone, especially several glasses into the night, so I ended up wandering off to examine the Christmas tree, a massive beast of a thing laden in crystal icicles and silvery fake snow, finding rather to my surprise that the children of the guests had gathered there to watch cartoons on the television. A good dozen heads turned to peer curiously at me where I stood in the doorframe before one of the Bouchard children remembered his manners and bobbed his head at me. 

“Bonsoir, monsieur.”

“Bonsoir. Do you mind if I sit here? I won’t- make noise. ”

He looked back at the collective, who shrugged, then shrugged himself. “ If you want. We’re watching Rudolph. ”

“ I see. Is it good? ”

“ It’s okay, I guess. Kid’s stuff. You talk funny. ”

“ Sorry. I’m not from here. ”

“William!” hissed his sister, batting at his arm. “ He’s American, remember? ”

“ American? ” This earned me the interest of the older children. “ From where? New York? ”

“ California. Los Angeles. ”

“Hollywood!” 

“ Are you an actor? ”

“ Do you know Tom Cruise?”

I made it back to the sitting room in time for coffee and desert, taking the offered seat between our hosts and Francis, who in the moment could have passed as a distant cousin of Mme Bouchard’s despite the total lack of family resemblance based on posture alone. He passed me a plate of the Opera as her dark eyes met mine, smile private.

“ You were with the children? How brave. ”

“ I don’t mind . ”

“ It’s a shame, ” she added, softly though not gently. “ About your fiancée. You would have made a good husband. Maybe one day, hm? ”

“ Thank you ,” I said, flustered, and took a rapid bite of the cake as she continued to gaze calmly my way. On the other side of us Mr Bouchard was making a begrudgingly impressed noise.

“ This is damn good, I’ll give you that. Wins you big points with the women, I’ll wager.”

“ Oh, it’s just a hobby,” Francis waved away, as Mrs Bouchard turned her smile his way.

“Paul couldn’t bake a cupcake. Richard, you’ve lucked out with your flat-mate.”

“He’s just making an effort for you,” I dismissed, jokingly. “ For Christmas we’ll probably have to order Chinese. ”

“ What are your plans for Christmas? Home to visit family? ”

“ No, it’s our first Christmas in Montreal,” Francis said, before I could repeat my spiel about what a tragic orphan I was. “ We’ll be going to mass at the Notre-Dame.”

This was news to me; I goggled at him whilst our hosts made appreciative comments. Twenty minutes and many goodbyes later it was the first thing I said once we hit the street. 

“We’re doing mass at the Notre-Dame?”

“You’re so predictable,” Francis complained, but he was proud of himself, smiling beneath his scarf. “I thought we might as well, if it’ll dissuade you from setting up a crèche in the living room.” 

I shook my head, amazed. “I take back everything I said. You are the world’s best flat-mate.”

“Always the tone of surprise,” Francis scoffed, smiling in earnest when I boldly knocked our shoulders together. “What were you telling those people? Half the men seemed convinced I was about to whisk off their wives.”

“I barely planted the seed in their heads. You just have that look to you.”

“Oh, yes. Real ladies’ man, I am.”

“I thought that you might be, before we met. Like a- David Bowie type, or something.”

“The paragon of heterosexuality, David Bowie.”

“Yeah, fine, I get it, I was an idiot.”

“You certainly kept a close eye on these things. I remember how concerned you were when you saw Henry kissing Julian, or whichever way around it was. A real defender of the cause.”

I sighed, but I was still too happy about the prospect of Christmas mass to begrudge him his mockery. “At least the neighborhood watch seem to have bought it.”

“You did a good job of looking tragic when the subject of marriage was raised,” Francis said, lighting a cigarette. “You know that red-faced wife-beater type- the one who owns a beer factory, or something?“

“Doyon?”

“Him. He came up to me when you were getting our coats and he said- he knew food was the way to get to a man’s heart, but now he guessed he knew dessert was the way to get between a woman’s legs.”

I stared. “Jesus. Seriously?”

“Now I understand why his wife looks so wretched. I thought she just had work done.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, just shook him off. Though I was tempted to tell him about the process behind said dessert.”

“Probably for the best that you didn’t,” I agreed, since the second Opera attempt had burnt to a crisp while its chefs were thoroughly distracted. “God, it’s really coming down tonight.”

“We’ll have your White Christmas,” Francis agreed, pulling his coat tighter around himself with a nervous moue. “As long as we’re not dead of frostbite by then.” 

“It’s ten minutes to the apartment.”

“It can set in within fifteen minutes when the wind’s out, Richard. My cousin lost his thumb in this kind of weather.”

“I think the snowblower it got stuck in had something to do with that.” 

“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are.”

 We walked the last stretch back in silence, eyes on the swirling white mass above, and though neither of us said a word we were both thinking of Bunny lying on the damp forest floor, blanketed by the falling snow.

I don’t know what it was, but the next morning when we were trying to decide on whether to brave the mounting snowstorm for supplies or subsist off wine and chocolate for a day longer, I had one of those out-of-body experiences where I zoned out from the conversation and took store of my current existence, the velvet softness of the couch beneath my hand and Francis’ sock-clad foot on my lap, locks of flame-red hair brushing his cheek as he reached to set his glass down. I saw him for a heartbeat without the lens of familiarity, or perhaps with a more honest awareness of it- a sort of arresting scarecrow of a man, fine-boned and foreign, sage-green eyes framed by long pale lashes. He would live to ninety and look fundamentally the same. I would love him all the while.

This in itself was not a realization. I had loved them all, transparently, and in spite of myself I still did- loved Camilla enough to propose in a fit of passion, loved Henry for all that he was dead and damned, missed Bunny and Charles though they were equal parts lost to me. If I hadn’t loved Francis I wouldn’t have endured him as I did. But I had never quite acknowledged that I loved him in some way that mattered- not the love of the poets. As he had once informed me himself, this was in part because we were too close for the thought to even occur to me- I knew him too well to love him like I loved Camilla. As for the rest, I’m not sure. Even at Hampden I had sensed some danger in putting a label to my feelings. Now I wondered if I had been engaged in a simple act of self-delusion. 

Nonetheless, the thought held true as I turned it over in my mind: I loved him, in spite of all rational objections. Unlike Henry, consummate believer that he was, I have never believed in soulmates as the Greeks did, but if twin souls existed I would not have been surprised to find he was mine, for all the good that did either of us. Je est un autre , as Rimbaud had said. 

Francis was still talking- something inane about his distrust of our neighbors two houses down on account of their admittedly hideous car- but at whatever was showing on my face he stopped short.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I rushed, guilty like a schoolboy, my heart racing with self-awareness. Except it wasn’t nothing, and furthermore I have never been good at controlling myself when I am overtaken by emotion; Francis looked at me like I was a lunatic, inching backwards warily. 

“It’s obviously not nothing. What is it?”

“Nothing bad,” I amended, testing it out, and after consideration finding it true. If he didn’t feel the same I would bear it silently- I was, after all, of a pining sort of disposition. There were worse fates to endure. “Sorry. I just realized something.”

It must have come out tellingly somehow, or else Francis could just read me better than I could read him, but his eyes narrowed and then widened, and I knew he knew. 

I bit the bullet then, almost calmly, the old nickname coming easy: “Francois -“

“Don’t,” Francis bit out, bordering on spooked, which was not the repudiation I’d expected. “You don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“But you do?”

“You don’t mean it,” Francis said, firmly, but it still sounded more frightened than angry, and I could feel my own features shift into something woefully affectionate in response, to his increasing agitation. “I’m serious. Don’t say it.”

“Okay,” I said, quietly, which was as good as saying it anyways, and when our eyes met he flushed uneasily, and didn’t stop me a few minutes later when I carefully nudged our fingers together.

I saw Henry again that night. It might have been because I was writing about him before I went to sleep, or maybe I was just due a visit; either way, when I turned onto my side to get comfortable I found him stood by the bookshelf, surveying the books in the perfunctory way Francis had used to when he was waiting for Judy and her friends to leave, though unlike Francis he actually seemed to be assessing their merits. 

I was suddenly wide-awake, and cold. His shoes left imprints on the carpet when he turned, glancing at the desk.

“You seem comfortable.”

“I thought you were done visiting me,” I said. I couldn’t hold my tongue in his presence. Whether this was because it was him or because he was dead I don’t know.

“Who says I’m here for you?”

This stung. I swallowed. “Where have you been?”

“I told you last time.”

“I wasn’t sure last time for me was also last time for you.”

He inclined his head in concession, but didn’t answer my question. “So this is how you’ve decided to make yourself happy.”

I said nothing, expectant, and sure enough he surveyed the room before finally fixing me, eyes beetle-black behind his glasses. 

“It’s all worked out very neatly. I hope you don’t feel you’re settling.”

“Not all of us would rather die than face reality,” I said, less sharp than sad. He seemed unconcerned.

“You never struck me as one for reality, Richard.”

I thought of something we’d read for class once- Zeno of Citium- and though I didn’t voice it I knew he’d shared the thought by the way his brow quirked. Wellbeing is attained little by little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself. 

“That’s your thesis? Interesting.”

I bit my tongue, felt obliged to defend the thought. “Life isn’t meaningless just because it’s mundane.”

“You really believe that?” Henry asked, patiently. “And you’ll still believe it when he’s sixty and less pretty?”

“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. “But you’re twenty one and dead. I get to figure that out for myself.”

He seemed, incongruously, amused, raising his brows. “ It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.”

And perhaps this was true of John Papen Junior, but Richard Papen had lived, for all the good that had done me- was living still with the consequences of that life. Whatever great beginnings we had once dreamt for ourselves had died with Bunny, one way or another.

Live forever. Perhaps Henry was doing just that, if only in our minds. But he was dead where it mattered, and eternity seemed a more hollow concept than it once had. Sappho, I suspected, had had the right of it. Forever mattered less than living with meaning, and meaning was impossible to attain alone. If a life was lived unobserved, who did it mean anything to?

I had begun to think that though I had spent most of my life craving the unattainable and likely always would, in those brief months where I’d grasped it, I had been happy not because of some abstract beauty within my reach but because of the people that had surrounded me. A beautiful elite, yes, but a beautiful elite that bundled up in a pile of limbs in the backseat of Francis’ Mustang, and sang loudly and off-key when Charles started on some ditty in earnest, and amused itself by making horrendous puns in Greek. Flawed people, and people that I never knew as well as I thought I did, but people who enjoyed each other’s company, and mine to boot. My first friends. Maybe my last ones. I had been as happy tipsily watching Camilla and Francis do a clumsy foxtrot as I had listening to Julian’s grandiose speeches.

What had Laforgue said to me once, lifetimes ago? It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.  

The crux of the matter was this: the study group had represented everything to me, but once it had fragmented it was the people I missed. I had lived the stuff of literature by their side, but in this Francis was correct: death, when witnessed, was ugly and sad, nothing more. Greatness meant little when it was dripping from Henry’s shattered jaw. Addiction was grim and grotesque. Beauty faded. I had learned too late that love doesn’t distinguish between the monumental and the mundane- I would have easily settled for the latter if it could have kept them alive and well.

Henry had loved, but he would not have agreed with me. He could have loved Camilla, and died to keep her safe, or he could have loved Julian and died to spite him. That there might be some meaning to staying alive instead would not have occurred to him. 

“Dying is easy, living is hard?” Henry summed up, clinically. 

“We’re pretty well-placed to think so,” I said, though what I had meant was simpler than that. Francis wouldn’t have died for anyone’s sake, save perhaps his own. But he was alive in part for mine, and though that would have meant nothing to Henry it meant enough to me. 

We looked at one another for a moment, his patrician features unflappable; in that instants I missed him profoundly, and wondered whether he saw Camilla at all, or if she was spared his visits. 

If he had been inclined to do so, I was sure he could have answered all my questions- where Julian was, if he was alive; what Charles was doing with himself, what he and Francis spoke of when he called on him. If he ever thought of Bunny in his travels. But Henry’s specter was silent, and behind me Francis was tossing and turning, and I had a call to take first thing in the morning, and weather-permitting a walk to the market. 

There is a passage in the Odyssey where Homer says: there is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. I was thinking of it as I took a last look at Henry, and then self-consciously rolled onto my other side to glance at Francis, fast asleep and frowning, his hand unconsciously gripping the very edge of my pillowcase, dark ridges visible above the cuff of his sleeve. 

Outside the wind was whistling, pitter-patter of snowfall heavy against the skylight. Hampden seemed suddenly a lifetime ago.

He would complain of the soie froissée in the morning, I thought, but then Francis liked to complain. I hooked my chin over his shoulder and draped an arm over his waist, and was asleep in seconds.