Fic: Before I Turn Into Gold (PG-13)
This is, technically, the final part of the arc begun with After My Own Heart and Cutting Diamonds. Those, however, are predominantly Pinto from Leonard's point of view, whereas this fic is overwhelmingly about Leonard, and more specifically, about Leonard's feelings for Bill. As such, if you've read the other two stories, you may want to read this as the conclusion to that arc, but if you haven't, you can read it on its own without any difficulty at all, as there's not a lot of back-referencing.
Title: Before I Turn Into Gold
Pairing: Shatnoy, (Pinto)
Rating: PG/PG-13 (GASP!)
Disclaimer: This is not true. NOT TRUE.
Notes/Warnings: They're above, really. My only additional warning for this is that it insisted on being written in the second person, which some people find offputting.
A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes
were smoking out along the open road;
the night was very dark and thick between them,
each man beneath his ordinary load.
"I'd like to tell my story,"
said one of them so young and bold,
"I'd like to tell my story,
before I turn into gold." ~ Leonard Cohen, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes
You kissed him first in a time out of time, the touch of your lips as delicate as spun glass, and as chaste. You remember his eyes on yours in the moment preceding, the French window diminished and reflected in his pupils, making them unreadable. He smelled of chalk and sulphur from the shoot, and your hand drifted up to brush the residue of some powder from his hair, his temple, his cheek. He smiled at you, quirking the corner of his mouth, and turned his face to look at you unguarded.
And then, for a long low moment while the sun poured in, there was nothing but the grip of his hand on the curtain, the line of his arm; the sound of your breathing thickening together and his eyes on yours, his eyes, his eyes.
You felt you could have fallen into eyes like that and never even felt the motion. They were warm for you, golden, amber, copper, green. The light went through them like sun through blown glass, picking out the flaws that made them perfect, made them real. They were liquid, dynamic, temperamental, inclement; eyes that clouded and sparkled and shone as the sky shifted, vast beyond the glass. You always loved his eyes. You would have known them anywhere.
For a long time, they were all that you saw. Dimly, other things made themselves known to you, but quietly, unobtrusively, as if they sensed your need to hold his gaze unchallenged, to fall again endlessly into gold. His breath against your cheek, with its faint tang of whisky, so unlike him; and beneath that, smoke, the smell of Bill and of your father, long ago, when you were young. His fingers on your wrist now, neither questioning nor demanding, but only reassuring, neutral, his. The sun on his wristwatch, glinting.
It was only afterwards that you realised that his hand had been trembling.
He breathed in deep when you kissed him, a gasping breath, incongruous, like a swimmer breaking surface after a long immersion. His eyes closed, lashes bronze against your thumb on his cheek. It was a dry kiss, brief; his face flushed under your fingers and you felt the blood tingling in your lips, barely parted, barely touching. You remember the warmth of him next to you, his body taut with tension.
It was his eyes that drove you to it. The draw of it clenched in your chest and your throat and your groin; it tugged at the back of your jaw, metallic, like tears. If you had opened your mouth to his, you would have lost yourself.
You drew back instead, slowly, and forced yourself to breathe. His eyes were still closed, his face lit golden by a shaft of sunlight, uplifted. You looked at his mouth, so slightly, so sinfully unclosed, and your need for him caught you like a hook to the stomach, twisting. You remember that feeling, the burning in your limbs; the way your joints ached to pull him close, to kiss that mouth that you had touched; to kiss this man, your greatest friend, your more-than-brother.
This man.
He breathed your name in diminutive, Len. You had never heard such a tone in his voice; such sincerity, such awe. The rawness of it sang in the depths of yourself, with an intensity too great for you to handle. It seemed to slip through your fingers like so much water, leaving you numb. Oh, Bill.
You walked away with your back pulled tight with shock and shame, with a strangeness that soured your blood and swelled your heart.
He never had opened his eyes again. Sometimes, you wonder how things might have been, if you had let him look at you.
*
He used to drink black tea, like an Englishman. At first, the concept struck you as deeply discordant with his character, his vibrant ever-motion, the rush-rush-rush dynamism of him that seemed to scream coffee or nothing. At work, he threw back black-brewed battery acid like everyone else, wincing at the brutal strength of it and then grinning, as if to show he was man enough for anything that ever was poured into a forty-cup urn. At home, though, he drank tea, back in the black-and-white days before teabags, when everything had to be steeped and boiled and strained; when you had to debate such questions as milk before, or milk after? and oolong, my dear, or darjeeling?
It all seemed like a lot of deliberation for a man like Bill. You told him so, once, and he laughed and brushed it off, saying, "I am Canadian. You always forget that."
It was only after you kissed him that you understood what tea meant to Bill.
So many little things to draw together into the whole - kettle, tea leaves, teapot, teacups, strainer. You sat stiff-backed at his kitchen table, ankles crossed under your chair, and watched him padding to and fro, adjusting things, tending. You watched the curious angle of his shoulders slowly rectify itself as he worked. When, at length, he set the filled teapot down on the table, he raised his eyes to yours for the first time that afternoon, and they were bright and guileless, unflinching.
"I'm taking the girls to see the ball game on Saturday. You wanna come? Bring your gang and we'll make an afternoon of it."
It might have been any other afternoon. It might have been the previous week, or the previous month, or the month before that. Tea, you realised, was a ritual, for Bill, like gardening, or yoga. It absorbed him, calmed him; it took the fierceness of his feelings and muted them, siphoning them out like steam. You stared up at him, then, with the copper of your kiss still tart in the back of your throat, and he had put it aside, wilfully forgotten it. It was all in the tea, now, steeping steadily on the table, waiting to be drunk. Or poured away.
You couldn't blame him. After all, you had made it fairly clear to him that it had been a mistake.
In those days, Bill drank his tea with six or seven sugar cubes, disgustingly sweet, so saccharine-thick it was barely liquid any longer. You drank yours black and bitter, and, forgetting, swallowed the dregs.
*
When you were four, you slipped on a rock on the way to synagogue and cut your palm on a shard of glass. It bled. You were afraid, in part because when things bled, it meant they were dying; but also because your yamulke had tumbled to the sidewalk when you fell, and when you reached for it, you could not keep it from the blood, although you tried. You remember how afraid you were, of punishment. From your mother? or from God?
You cannot be sure, now. God and your mother were closely akin to each other, in your four-year-old mind.
After the tea, you remember, you went to synagogue. The car seemed to veer in that direction of its own accord, taking you quite by surprise. Still, you let yourself be led, and slipped inside. For an hour, you sat there, fingering the scar on your palm, and thinking of Bill.
Was it him you were afraid of? Was it God? They were both warm presences when you thought of them, turning them over in your mind. You couldn't be sure.
It was some days before you realised that the only person you were ever afraid of, really, was yourself.
*
Years. Strange, the way time seems to move a little more quickly the older you get. How unfair that, when you wanted so fiercely to be eighteen, old enough to strike out for California, two years seemed an eternity; and now that every grain of sand might be the last in the glass, the weeks go by like lightning. You didn't stop wanting him. You looked up one day and were fifty, and realised that you never would.
He was fifty, too. The beautiful thing about Bill is that he keeps up with you like that, inevitably. He will always be four days older than you. It is a constant. So many things about Bill, you think, are constant. Beside him, you feel a chameleon, or a shadow. What are you, in the end, after all?
An actor. A poet, a photographer, a writer, a father, a Jew. A son. A husband.
Sometimes, you wonder how far you can really claim to be any of these things.
When you were fifty, you looked up at Bill and saw him fully for the first time in years. You let yourself look at him, look at him, as if you were strangers. He was handsome, still; dark eyes, dark hair; a little dignity around the eyes and mouth, now. As a stranger, you wanted him. The realisation turned in your stomach, not sharp, any more, but dull, like nausea or love.
It exhausted you, the effort of watching him from across a room as if you did not know him. As if he hadn't been the most important person in your life for fifteen years. Pretending not to know him inside and out, not to feel it when he smiled, was like attempting to force your mind into a place for which it had no reference, and which it could not, therefore, imagine.
Bill is Bill. That's just the way he is.
*
Bill forgets things. Not inadvertently, under the influence of age or carelessness, but studiously, wilfully, obliterating whatever it is he wishes to unknow. In this way, you watched him forget your little half-kiss the day after it happened, the teapot in his hands and a smile on his lips. Sometimes you wonder whether Bill could ever, having willingly forgotten, be induced to willingly remember.
It isn't that you aren't, in a certain way, grateful for this capacity of his, to sublimate, ruthlessly and entirely, whatever might have proved impedimental. You have no doubt that, if he had allowed himself to remain as uncertain and confused and awkward as you felt in his kitchen that day in 1968, you would not be here like this, in another kitchen of Bill's, reading a newspaper that says it is 2009.
You cannot help wondering, though, whether you might have been here in a different way, reading this newspaper in a kitchen that was yours - and his.
This is a foolish thought, an old man's regret. You wish you could put it aside, drown it forever in tea and the continued pleasure of Bill's company.
But you aren't like Bill, and you cannot forget like that.
Somewhere deep inside you, the heir of a pain that drove you once says traitorously that you don't want to.
*
It is an odd thing, to know somebody for forty-three years. When you think about it, the numbers swim in your mind like things untethered, encrypted, seeking some point of reference and finding none. They are too big; because you cannot fully appreciate the enormity of them, you blind yourself to them instead, and believe them to be ordinary.
Forty-three years is a very, very long time to know somebody, anybody. Staring at the ceiling of your bedroom in L.A., you listen to the distant whisper of traffic on the midnight roads outside, your wife breathing. You love her. Your life is with her, now, here. So much has happened in those forty-three years since Bill walked onto the set and you thought he was charming for an hour, and then infuriating for three months. You got divorced. You got married. Your parents died. Everything, everything changed.
Through all of it, the only thing that ever stood unmoving, the touchstone of your existence, was Bill, a point of light around which everything hinged.
Forty-three years is a very, very long time to love somebody.
*
The part of your mind that belongs to an old man says that Zachary is very, very young. He is, it insists, an untried youth from a Byzantine mosaic, his eyes like black silver and his mouth like sin. Zachary is too young to know that love isn't flowers or the smooth tension of a young body, but an ache inside that will not submit to half a packet of ibuprofen, but quietens under the touch of golden eyes. It's knowing he's infuriating and smiling at it afterwards, when the argument has blown over; it's wanting to pull him into your arms whenever you see him, no matter what he looks like, no matter what he's done. It's you and Bill, really. It's you and Bill. He is too young to understand.
And then you look at him through the old man's eyes, the same you that sold newspapers in Boston in the Thirties, that drove taxis in L.A. in the Fifties, that loved and bled and was young. You remember that Zach is thirty-two years old. You remember the way he moved with Chris in tandem, that evening you had dinner together; the silent never-always in their eyes.
He says, "If I was him, I'd want to know."
"Even now, when nothing can come of it?" you hear yourself saying. Your voice is old to your ears, gravelled and throaty and dark. He came from nowhere, this old man. You wonder what Bill thinks of him.
Zachary shrugs. "He'd know," he says. "You'd know. That's not really nothing, is it?"
For a half second, you think to yourself that he is wiser than his years. Then, half-ashamed, you condemn the thought as unworthy, roll it away like a stone. He isn't so young, not really. But he is wise.
*
"Bill," you say. He's beside you on the couch, his elbow brushing yours whenever he moves, which is often: to fiddle with the volume control, to pat a passing Doberman, to rub the nape of his neck in the old, old way. "Bill. Can I tell you something?"
He looks at you sidelong, a dark look, as if he's suspicious, or worried. "Sure, Lenny, anything." He mutes the television. "You're not dying, are you?"
Against your will, you laugh. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but - "
He waves an irritable hand, not to be put off so easily. "Yeah, yeah, I know. I meant imminently."
You shake your head. Something clears behind his eyes, a little twist of gold uncoiling. "What, then?"
"It's gonna sound stupid."
He shrugs. It's a young man's gesture, all angles and twitches, and for a moment you see him by the window again, that day in the trailer when he shone like the sun. "You need to tell me, Len, tell me. I'm sure I've heard dumber things." A quirk of his mouth. "Even from you."
You duck your head, scratching your cheek to hide the smile. You know it isn't working. He's always made you smile, when he isn't making you furious. Sometimes even then. "Well. I mean, I am gonna die. And it's not going to be decades, Billy, even if it's not imminent as such. We both know that."
His eyes are wide, now, lion eyes, amber. You always loved his eyes. You would know those eyes anywhere. "Len, you're scaring me," he says, and you know it's true. In that moment, seeing the dark shadow of concern over his face, you know that if you told him you had weeks to live, he wouldn't know what to do with himself. You know that if you told him you could never see him again, he'd feel as if he wasn't Bill anymore. In that moment you know, with his eyes on yours, that whatever you say, you can't lose him.
"Bill," you say again. You like saying it, always have; the rich warm Billness of it in your mouth, comforting. You think about softening it, wrapping it up in something else, but that would be cheating yourself and him and Zachary, and so you close your eyes and it rises in your throat and you spit it out: "I love you, Billy."
Traffic, thready and faint outside. One of his dogs padding about in the kitchen. The sky doesn't fall. There isn't even a coldness to his quietude. You open your eyes.
He's smiling at you, one corner of his mouth lifted, one hand on your arm. His head is tilted slightly to one side, as if he didn't hear you. Desperation seizes you, the last of the wildness that drove you here in the first place and will not let you fall at this last stumbling block, his misunderstanding. "Bill, I love you," you insist, taking hold of his upper arms, gripping him there. "You know. Love you."
He touches your face. His expression, such as it is, does not change; but his eyes soften perceptibly, the amber swelling forward, his golden gaze. He leans forward, slowly, as if so you can move away if you want to, but you only sit bolt-upright, staring at him, misunderstanding yourself until his lips brush yours in another half-kiss, a second feather-touch. "I know, Len," he says, and smiles at your stunned expression. "Do you think I'm dumb or something? No, wait. Don't answer that."
You stare at him. Your eyes burn, your throat burns; your heart is beating under your sternum, misplaced and swollen and disbelieving. "You know?" You pause. "What do you mean, you know?"
He smiles a little more and runs a hand through your shorn hair, his face as soft as sunset. "I mean I know. Nothing was ever going to happen, was it? I didn't want to mess anything up by dragging it out again to thrash around. It might have spoiled things." He shoots you a look as you open your mouth, suddenly sharp. "And don't say you're sorry. I'm glad you said it."
"He said you would be," you say, quietly.
He tilts his head. "Who did?"
"Zachary."
He smiles. "I'll have to thank him. He's a clever boy."
"Man," you say, fairly. Bill shakes his head and smiles, because he's Bill, and you love him; and you laugh suddenly, because he knows, and you think - you think -
"You know I love you too, right?" Bill puts in, as if it has just occurred to him, as indeed it has just occurred to you, that he had yet to clarify this point. But even as he says it, you realise that you do know; have always known. Love was never the issue between you and Bill.
"May I kiss you?" you say, before you have time to stop yourself, perhaps to rearrange your question into something that sounds less like what you used to say in Boston in the days of bobbysox and Big Band jazz. "It's just that I never did, really."
He doesn't seem to mind being addressed as if he is a girl in a 1940's movie. On the contrary, he smiles at you, and lifts his face, and says, "Go on then," and the sun in his eyelashes is the most perfect thing you could ever hope to see.
So you kiss him, then, gentle and warm and finally, endlessly open-mouthed, and he laughs into your mouth with his young man's laugh and the ache in your stomach bursts out of you like sunbeams, fierce and bright and alive.
"Let's live forever, Len," he says, when you break apart. You only smile, and kiss him again.
**
Title: Before I Turn Into Gold
Pairing: Shatnoy, (Pinto)
Rating: PG/PG-13 (GASP!)
Disclaimer: This is not true. NOT TRUE.
Notes/Warnings: They're above, really. My only additional warning for this is that it insisted on being written in the second person, which some people find offputting.
A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes
were smoking out along the open road;
the night was very dark and thick between them,
each man beneath his ordinary load.
"I'd like to tell my story,"
said one of them so young and bold,
"I'd like to tell my story,
before I turn into gold." ~ Leonard Cohen, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes
You kissed him first in a time out of time, the touch of your lips as delicate as spun glass, and as chaste. You remember his eyes on yours in the moment preceding, the French window diminished and reflected in his pupils, making them unreadable. He smelled of chalk and sulphur from the shoot, and your hand drifted up to brush the residue of some powder from his hair, his temple, his cheek. He smiled at you, quirking the corner of his mouth, and turned his face to look at you unguarded.
And then, for a long low moment while the sun poured in, there was nothing but the grip of his hand on the curtain, the line of his arm; the sound of your breathing thickening together and his eyes on yours, his eyes, his eyes.
You felt you could have fallen into eyes like that and never even felt the motion. They were warm for you, golden, amber, copper, green. The light went through them like sun through blown glass, picking out the flaws that made them perfect, made them real. They were liquid, dynamic, temperamental, inclement; eyes that clouded and sparkled and shone as the sky shifted, vast beyond the glass. You always loved his eyes. You would have known them anywhere.
For a long time, they were all that you saw. Dimly, other things made themselves known to you, but quietly, unobtrusively, as if they sensed your need to hold his gaze unchallenged, to fall again endlessly into gold. His breath against your cheek, with its faint tang of whisky, so unlike him; and beneath that, smoke, the smell of Bill and of your father, long ago, when you were young. His fingers on your wrist now, neither questioning nor demanding, but only reassuring, neutral, his. The sun on his wristwatch, glinting.
It was only afterwards that you realised that his hand had been trembling.
He breathed in deep when you kissed him, a gasping breath, incongruous, like a swimmer breaking surface after a long immersion. His eyes closed, lashes bronze against your thumb on his cheek. It was a dry kiss, brief; his face flushed under your fingers and you felt the blood tingling in your lips, barely parted, barely touching. You remember the warmth of him next to you, his body taut with tension.
It was his eyes that drove you to it. The draw of it clenched in your chest and your throat and your groin; it tugged at the back of your jaw, metallic, like tears. If you had opened your mouth to his, you would have lost yourself.
You drew back instead, slowly, and forced yourself to breathe. His eyes were still closed, his face lit golden by a shaft of sunlight, uplifted. You looked at his mouth, so slightly, so sinfully unclosed, and your need for him caught you like a hook to the stomach, twisting. You remember that feeling, the burning in your limbs; the way your joints ached to pull him close, to kiss that mouth that you had touched; to kiss this man, your greatest friend, your more-than-brother.
This man.
He breathed your name in diminutive, Len. You had never heard such a tone in his voice; such sincerity, such awe. The rawness of it sang in the depths of yourself, with an intensity too great for you to handle. It seemed to slip through your fingers like so much water, leaving you numb. Oh, Bill.
You walked away with your back pulled tight with shock and shame, with a strangeness that soured your blood and swelled your heart.
He never had opened his eyes again. Sometimes, you wonder how things might have been, if you had let him look at you.
*
He used to drink black tea, like an Englishman. At first, the concept struck you as deeply discordant with his character, his vibrant ever-motion, the rush-rush-rush dynamism of him that seemed to scream coffee or nothing. At work, he threw back black-brewed battery acid like everyone else, wincing at the brutal strength of it and then grinning, as if to show he was man enough for anything that ever was poured into a forty-cup urn. At home, though, he drank tea, back in the black-and-white days before teabags, when everything had to be steeped and boiled and strained; when you had to debate such questions as milk before, or milk after? and oolong, my dear, or darjeeling?
It all seemed like a lot of deliberation for a man like Bill. You told him so, once, and he laughed and brushed it off, saying, "I am Canadian. You always forget that."
It was only after you kissed him that you understood what tea meant to Bill.
So many little things to draw together into the whole - kettle, tea leaves, teapot, teacups, strainer. You sat stiff-backed at his kitchen table, ankles crossed under your chair, and watched him padding to and fro, adjusting things, tending. You watched the curious angle of his shoulders slowly rectify itself as he worked. When, at length, he set the filled teapot down on the table, he raised his eyes to yours for the first time that afternoon, and they were bright and guileless, unflinching.
"I'm taking the girls to see the ball game on Saturday. You wanna come? Bring your gang and we'll make an afternoon of it."
It might have been any other afternoon. It might have been the previous week, or the previous month, or the month before that. Tea, you realised, was a ritual, for Bill, like gardening, or yoga. It absorbed him, calmed him; it took the fierceness of his feelings and muted them, siphoning them out like steam. You stared up at him, then, with the copper of your kiss still tart in the back of your throat, and he had put it aside, wilfully forgotten it. It was all in the tea, now, steeping steadily on the table, waiting to be drunk. Or poured away.
You couldn't blame him. After all, you had made it fairly clear to him that it had been a mistake.
In those days, Bill drank his tea with six or seven sugar cubes, disgustingly sweet, so saccharine-thick it was barely liquid any longer. You drank yours black and bitter, and, forgetting, swallowed the dregs.
*
When you were four, you slipped on a rock on the way to synagogue and cut your palm on a shard of glass. It bled. You were afraid, in part because when things bled, it meant they were dying; but also because your yamulke had tumbled to the sidewalk when you fell, and when you reached for it, you could not keep it from the blood, although you tried. You remember how afraid you were, of punishment. From your mother? or from God?
You cannot be sure, now. God and your mother were closely akin to each other, in your four-year-old mind.
After the tea, you remember, you went to synagogue. The car seemed to veer in that direction of its own accord, taking you quite by surprise. Still, you let yourself be led, and slipped inside. For an hour, you sat there, fingering the scar on your palm, and thinking of Bill.
Was it him you were afraid of? Was it God? They were both warm presences when you thought of them, turning them over in your mind. You couldn't be sure.
It was some days before you realised that the only person you were ever afraid of, really, was yourself.
*
Years. Strange, the way time seems to move a little more quickly the older you get. How unfair that, when you wanted so fiercely to be eighteen, old enough to strike out for California, two years seemed an eternity; and now that every grain of sand might be the last in the glass, the weeks go by like lightning. You didn't stop wanting him. You looked up one day and were fifty, and realised that you never would.
He was fifty, too. The beautiful thing about Bill is that he keeps up with you like that, inevitably. He will always be four days older than you. It is a constant. So many things about Bill, you think, are constant. Beside him, you feel a chameleon, or a shadow. What are you, in the end, after all?
An actor. A poet, a photographer, a writer, a father, a Jew. A son. A husband.
Sometimes, you wonder how far you can really claim to be any of these things.
When you were fifty, you looked up at Bill and saw him fully for the first time in years. You let yourself look at him, look at him, as if you were strangers. He was handsome, still; dark eyes, dark hair; a little dignity around the eyes and mouth, now. As a stranger, you wanted him. The realisation turned in your stomach, not sharp, any more, but dull, like nausea or love.
It exhausted you, the effort of watching him from across a room as if you did not know him. As if he hadn't been the most important person in your life for fifteen years. Pretending not to know him inside and out, not to feel it when he smiled, was like attempting to force your mind into a place for which it had no reference, and which it could not, therefore, imagine.
Bill is Bill. That's just the way he is.
*
Bill forgets things. Not inadvertently, under the influence of age or carelessness, but studiously, wilfully, obliterating whatever it is he wishes to unknow. In this way, you watched him forget your little half-kiss the day after it happened, the teapot in his hands and a smile on his lips. Sometimes you wonder whether Bill could ever, having willingly forgotten, be induced to willingly remember.
It isn't that you aren't, in a certain way, grateful for this capacity of his, to sublimate, ruthlessly and entirely, whatever might have proved impedimental. You have no doubt that, if he had allowed himself to remain as uncertain and confused and awkward as you felt in his kitchen that day in 1968, you would not be here like this, in another kitchen of Bill's, reading a newspaper that says it is 2009.
You cannot help wondering, though, whether you might have been here in a different way, reading this newspaper in a kitchen that was yours - and his.
This is a foolish thought, an old man's regret. You wish you could put it aside, drown it forever in tea and the continued pleasure of Bill's company.
But you aren't like Bill, and you cannot forget like that.
Somewhere deep inside you, the heir of a pain that drove you once says traitorously that you don't want to.
*
It is an odd thing, to know somebody for forty-three years. When you think about it, the numbers swim in your mind like things untethered, encrypted, seeking some point of reference and finding none. They are too big; because you cannot fully appreciate the enormity of them, you blind yourself to them instead, and believe them to be ordinary.
Forty-three years is a very, very long time to know somebody, anybody. Staring at the ceiling of your bedroom in L.A., you listen to the distant whisper of traffic on the midnight roads outside, your wife breathing. You love her. Your life is with her, now, here. So much has happened in those forty-three years since Bill walked onto the set and you thought he was charming for an hour, and then infuriating for three months. You got divorced. You got married. Your parents died. Everything, everything changed.
Through all of it, the only thing that ever stood unmoving, the touchstone of your existence, was Bill, a point of light around which everything hinged.
Forty-three years is a very, very long time to love somebody.
*
The part of your mind that belongs to an old man says that Zachary is very, very young. He is, it insists, an untried youth from a Byzantine mosaic, his eyes like black silver and his mouth like sin. Zachary is too young to know that love isn't flowers or the smooth tension of a young body, but an ache inside that will not submit to half a packet of ibuprofen, but quietens under the touch of golden eyes. It's knowing he's infuriating and smiling at it afterwards, when the argument has blown over; it's wanting to pull him into your arms whenever you see him, no matter what he looks like, no matter what he's done. It's you and Bill, really. It's you and Bill. He is too young to understand.
And then you look at him through the old man's eyes, the same you that sold newspapers in Boston in the Thirties, that drove taxis in L.A. in the Fifties, that loved and bled and was young. You remember that Zach is thirty-two years old. You remember the way he moved with Chris in tandem, that evening you had dinner together; the silent never-always in their eyes.
He says, "If I was him, I'd want to know."
"Even now, when nothing can come of it?" you hear yourself saying. Your voice is old to your ears, gravelled and throaty and dark. He came from nowhere, this old man. You wonder what Bill thinks of him.
Zachary shrugs. "He'd know," he says. "You'd know. That's not really nothing, is it?"
For a half second, you think to yourself that he is wiser than his years. Then, half-ashamed, you condemn the thought as unworthy, roll it away like a stone. He isn't so young, not really. But he is wise.
*
"Bill," you say. He's beside you on the couch, his elbow brushing yours whenever he moves, which is often: to fiddle with the volume control, to pat a passing Doberman, to rub the nape of his neck in the old, old way. "Bill. Can I tell you something?"
He looks at you sidelong, a dark look, as if he's suspicious, or worried. "Sure, Lenny, anything." He mutes the television. "You're not dying, are you?"
Against your will, you laugh. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but - "
He waves an irritable hand, not to be put off so easily. "Yeah, yeah, I know. I meant imminently."
You shake your head. Something clears behind his eyes, a little twist of gold uncoiling. "What, then?"
"It's gonna sound stupid."
He shrugs. It's a young man's gesture, all angles and twitches, and for a moment you see him by the window again, that day in the trailer when he shone like the sun. "You need to tell me, Len, tell me. I'm sure I've heard dumber things." A quirk of his mouth. "Even from you."
You duck your head, scratching your cheek to hide the smile. You know it isn't working. He's always made you smile, when he isn't making you furious. Sometimes even then. "Well. I mean, I am gonna die. And it's not going to be decades, Billy, even if it's not imminent as such. We both know that."
His eyes are wide, now, lion eyes, amber. You always loved his eyes. You would know those eyes anywhere. "Len, you're scaring me," he says, and you know it's true. In that moment, seeing the dark shadow of concern over his face, you know that if you told him you had weeks to live, he wouldn't know what to do with himself. You know that if you told him you could never see him again, he'd feel as if he wasn't Bill anymore. In that moment you know, with his eyes on yours, that whatever you say, you can't lose him.
"Bill," you say again. You like saying it, always have; the rich warm Billness of it in your mouth, comforting. You think about softening it, wrapping it up in something else, but that would be cheating yourself and him and Zachary, and so you close your eyes and it rises in your throat and you spit it out: "I love you, Billy."
Traffic, thready and faint outside. One of his dogs padding about in the kitchen. The sky doesn't fall. There isn't even a coldness to his quietude. You open your eyes.
He's smiling at you, one corner of his mouth lifted, one hand on your arm. His head is tilted slightly to one side, as if he didn't hear you. Desperation seizes you, the last of the wildness that drove you here in the first place and will not let you fall at this last stumbling block, his misunderstanding. "Bill, I love you," you insist, taking hold of his upper arms, gripping him there. "You know. Love you."
He touches your face. His expression, such as it is, does not change; but his eyes soften perceptibly, the amber swelling forward, his golden gaze. He leans forward, slowly, as if so you can move away if you want to, but you only sit bolt-upright, staring at him, misunderstanding yourself until his lips brush yours in another half-kiss, a second feather-touch. "I know, Len," he says, and smiles at your stunned expression. "Do you think I'm dumb or something? No, wait. Don't answer that."
You stare at him. Your eyes burn, your throat burns; your heart is beating under your sternum, misplaced and swollen and disbelieving. "You know?" You pause. "What do you mean, you know?"
He smiles a little more and runs a hand through your shorn hair, his face as soft as sunset. "I mean I know. Nothing was ever going to happen, was it? I didn't want to mess anything up by dragging it out again to thrash around. It might have spoiled things." He shoots you a look as you open your mouth, suddenly sharp. "And don't say you're sorry. I'm glad you said it."
"He said you would be," you say, quietly.
He tilts his head. "Who did?"
"Zachary."
He smiles. "I'll have to thank him. He's a clever boy."
"Man," you say, fairly. Bill shakes his head and smiles, because he's Bill, and you love him; and you laugh suddenly, because he knows, and you think - you think -
"You know I love you too, right?" Bill puts in, as if it has just occurred to him, as indeed it has just occurred to you, that he had yet to clarify this point. But even as he says it, you realise that you do know; have always known. Love was never the issue between you and Bill.
"May I kiss you?" you say, before you have time to stop yourself, perhaps to rearrange your question into something that sounds less like what you used to say in Boston in the days of bobbysox and Big Band jazz. "It's just that I never did, really."
He doesn't seem to mind being addressed as if he is a girl in a 1940's movie. On the contrary, he smiles at you, and lifts his face, and says, "Go on then," and the sun in his eyelashes is the most perfect thing you could ever hope to see.
So you kiss him, then, gentle and warm and finally, endlessly open-mouthed, and he laughs into your mouth with his young man's laugh and the ache in your stomach bursts out of you like sunbeams, fierce and bright and alive.
"Let's live forever, Len," he says, when you break apart. You only smile, and kiss him again.
**