Free The Green Road by Anne Enright

Bleecker. They bought Billy a pair of art deco bedside lockers in this beautiful yellow wood that turned out to be English yew. They saw The Double Life of Véronique and The Commitments , they went to the Frick where Dan stood in front of Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap for the first time. And, when they went back to Billy’s place, they had conversations that lasted till dawn. They had bitterness and blame and pointless sex. They had sudden sex. They had sex-while-weeping, and tender sex, and rough sex, and leave-taking sex. And then Isabelle came back to town.
    But it was not Isabelle that did for Billy in the summer of 1991, it was the way he could not reach Dan, no matter how deep he fucked him, as though all the gestures of their love were beautiful and untrue. It was not as if Billy was looking for anything long term, but he was looking for something in that moment. Recognition. The feeling that what they were doing was real to Dan too.
    Oh Danny Boy.
    Of course he was charming. Of course he was beautiful. Of course.
    When Isabelle came back, she and Dan took a flight to California, where some friends were staging a wedding in Big Sur. Billy had another offer for Fire Island, but he could not face Fire Island, and he did not go back on the scene. He did have sex with a guy on Saturday night, but coming made him feel like he was reaching for something that melted in his hands. So he visited with Greg, who would not venture too far from his air-con, and they sat around and did not mention where Billy had been for the past few weeks, while Jessie wiped down the counters in the kitchenette and glared at him, for being too easily forgiven when he arrived – so hunky in his wife-beater vest – at the door.
    Greg had gained some weight. He didn’t do that smacking thing with his mouth any more, as though tasting some residue. He sat in his big lounge chair with a careless leg hooked over the arm, and was enthusiastic now, even about his disease.
    ‘Oh God,’ he said, when Billy told him he looked great. Greg said he was so anxious now, all the time, he was tossing down the Xanax, and there was a drug called Demerol, this opiate they doled out, that made him feel just wonderful. He felt as though we were all connected.
    It was enough, said Greg, to make you want to go back in there, all you had to do was make it into the elevator and then up to Sister Patricia who enfolded you with love, and then there would be the Demerol to fill you up with love on the inside. He said he had switched allegiances, Dr Torres was a prince but Sister Patricia was the person into whose eyes.
    He paused and tried again.
    Into whose eyes.
    Billy leaned in as though to show his own eyes, faithful unto death, but Greg twitched away and said he was thinking about getting some therapy, though – and he chewed down on the words as he quoted Celeste the tranny nurse saying. ‘Nothing makes a girl look more relaxed than a few pints of embalming fluid.’
    ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘She said that?’
    ‘Oh, you got to love Celeste,’ said Greg, and Billy glanced over at Jessie, who forbore.
    Billy’s heart did not start to break until the day he knew that Dan was back in town after the wedding in California, and that he would not be in touch. And Billy’s heart did not break properly for a week or two after that when he realised it was not disappointment he had been feeling, but hope, and that this hope was fading with the turning weather. Soon, soon it would be true. Dan would not have called. Besides, if Dan missed him, then he could just go out and find a guy who looked a bit like Billy, and pull his damn zipper down. And that was supposed to be fine. Because if Dan came out, he would be happy, and every gay man in New York would be happy, and the world would be, by so much authenticity, improved.
    But Billy did not care if Dan was out or in, any more. All he felt was the weight of Dan’s head on his solar plexus, there on the beach,