Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘You have no idea,’ said Dan.

‘Go!’ said Ludo,

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘Stop off in New York on the way.’

Dan did not answer.

He loved Ludo. When did that happen?

Dan liked Ludo. He liked the familiar things they did in bed and he also found Ludo useful. As Ludo found Dan — useful. They made a good couple. Dan could put people together in three or four different towns, he knew how to make things beautiful and easy: everyone upped their game for Dan. So of course Ludo found all this wonderful and enhancing — as he liked to say — to be around.

And Ludo loved Dan, of course he did. From the very beginning Ludo had loved him. Totally. Abjectly.

Dear God I love you .

But that was four or five years ago. These days, Dan did not know if Ludo still loved him, or if Ludo was just nice to him all the time. What was the difference? The difference was the yearning he felt for a man who was within arm’s reach. The difference lay in the fantasies of death and abandonment that happened in hypnagogic flashes as he turned to sleep by his side. If Ludo got sick, he thought, he would lie the length of his hospital bed, like Ryan O’Neal beside Ali MacGraw. Without him he was nothing. With him, everything. Wherever they were, the smell of Ludo’s skin was the smell of home.

This was terrible, of course.

Dan did not believe in romantic love — why should he? — it had never believed in him. After Isabelle, he had pined for various beautiful and unavailable young men, but the word ‘love’, for Dan, was so much wrapped up in the impossible and the ideal, it was a wrench to apply it to the guy who was sitting up in the bed beside him, reading legal briefs in the nude. The half-moon glasses didn’t help.

I love you , he wanted to say, instead of which: ‘My fucking family. You have no idea how they go on at me. You have no idea what I have to put up with over there.’

Ludo said that getting insulted was a full-time job. He said he’d love to do it himself, but he didn’t have a gap in his schedule, he needed his sleep, he loved his sleep, he did not want to spend the delicious hours of the night lying there, hating.

‘It keeps me sharp,’ said Dan. ‘It gives me flair.’

‘You hit forty, my love, these things are no longer attractive,’ said Ludo, looking at him over the rim of his glasses. ‘After forty, it’s give, give, give.’

And the next morning, a FedEx guy called to the door with an envelope that had Dan’s name on it, and inside was a ticket for the front of the plane.

Dan put the envelope on the kitchen table and looked at it while he drank his coffee and planned his day. He did not have a whole lot on. Ludo had stuck him in therapy once a week with Scott, a completely blank Canadian guy with a sweet and open smile. Now Dan talked to Scott in his head about being in love with Ludo, the unbearability of it. Scott seemed to indicate that unbearability was a good thing.

‘Stay with it,’ he said.

In fact he had been, for an anguished, tear-streaked fortnight, in love with Scott. He knew it wasn’t real, of course, but now the damn stuff was out of the bottle, it seemed to be moving around.

Love.

Dan traced it around the house, a sweetness coating everything Ludo possessed, his gee-gaws and tchotchkes, the hideous paintings and the ones that weren’t so bad. Everything full of meaning, throbbing with it: the little sherry glass of toothpicks in the middle of the table, Ludo’s tube of shaving cream for a morning ritual that only stopped at the collar line.

‘You know what this means,’ he said to Scott-in-his-head.

‘Yes?’

‘It means I am going to die.’

And Scott-in-his-head smiled a sweet, Canadian smile.

In the event, Dan was sidetracked, in that week’s session, by the memory of his father in absurd, high-waisted swimming trunks. High also on the leg, they were the exact shape of the pelvic section of a plastic, jointed doll. Black, of course. It must have been on the yellow beach at Fanore. His father would join them there after a day working the land, the only swimming farmer in the County Clare. And one time Dan flung himself at his father’s wet legs as he made his way up the beach and his father shrugged him off. That was all. Dan, who was weeping for some reason, hurled himself at the wet woollen trunks and was pushed back on to the sand. His shoulder was grazed by a rock which is why, perhaps, he remembered it, this utterly usual thing — his father moving past him to reach for a scrap of towel.

‘I’m foundered.’ That is what his father used to say, when he came in from the freezing Atlantic, shrunken, his muscles tight to the bone.

And Dan wept for his father. He could not believe this man was gone and his body — which must have been a beautiful body — destroyed in death. Because his father never felt dead, to Dan, not in all the years: he just felt cold.

Scott sat across from Dan, his careful face flushed with the effort of staying with him in his sorrow, while Dan threw one Kleenex after the other into the wooden wastepaper basket at his feet. He thought about all the discarded tears that ended up in it, from all the people who took their turn to weep, sitting in that chair. Many people, many times a day. The bin was made of pale wood, with a faint and open grain. It was always empty when he arrived. Expectant. The wastepaper basket was far too beautiful. The air inside it was the saddest air.

Dan told Scott about an afternoon in the desert, many years before — it was the first time he’d made a move on a guy, really wanted him, in this amazing place outside Phoenix. The house was built of rammed earth and set flat to the landscape, and there was no pool, just walls of glass in room after room built aslant to the sun and always in shade. Outside, the Sonoran Desert looked just the way it was supposed to look, the saguaro cactus standing with his arms held up, a bird flying in and out of a hole in his neck. The heat of the day was translated into night with a sunset of Kool-Aid orange, giving way, in streaks, to pink and milky blue. And Dan was stilled by the desert light that washed his lover’s body with dusk and turned it into such an untouchable, touchable thing.

‘Yes,’ said Scott — who was, at a guess, straight as the Trans Canada Highway. And he followed the ‘yes’ with a silence that grew very long.

‘It’s just. I don’t know if I am losing all that, with Ludo. I don’t know if I am losing it, or if it’s all, finally, coming good.’

‘I see.’

Scatter cushions and oak dressers — in Toronto, Dan thought. Here we go .

The night before he left for Ireland, Dan told Ludo that he loved him. He told him because it was true and because he thought that, this time, the plane might fall out of the sky. Or he might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983, with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. He would never make it back to Rosedale, Toronto and to this man he had loved for some time.

This was why he had decided to go home, he said. Because he loved Ludo and Ludo was right, it was time to sort out his past, deal with himself. Time to become a fucking human being.

It was a mistake to tell Ludo all this, because Ludo immediately wanted to open the last bottle of Pommery and suck him off and get married. Dan had a flight the next day, but Ludo brought the champagne to bed and marriage would be a blast, he said. He found the sheer legality of it incredibly erotic. And very tax effective. If he worked it right, there was no telling how much they could save.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’ said Ludo.

‘I just.’ He was talking about Ludo’s money.