Free The Green Road by Anne Enright Page B

painted nothing and was still here. Alive, I mean. I would prefer him to be alive. Even if he was just, you know, serving the wine.’
    ‘You do? I mean, you would?’ Dan seemed genuinely surprised.
    Isabelle, as though used to this slight gap between her boyfriend and the world, reached over and pressed Greg’s hand.
    ‘You are so right,’ she said.
    ‘Is he?’ said Dan, persisting.
    ‘Yes he is,’ she said.
    And Greg turned aside, briefly, to hide his tears.
    It was two days after this encounter that Irish Dan turned up at young Billy’s door – ashamed of himself, clearly. They had sex but didn’t like each other for it, and afterwards Dan went home.
    ‘Everybody dies.’
    This is what he had said in Emily von Raab’s drawing room, after Greg had pinched the tears back with finger and thumb.
    ‘You die of something,’ said Dan. ‘You die young, you die old, it is not the fact that you die that matters. It is what you do that matters. What you make.’
    It was not clear who he was trying to convince.
    ‘I didn’t know you liked his work so much,’ said Isabelle.
    And Greg thought about the corpse, laid out on a trestle table in the studio, in his working overalls and boots, how it looked nothing like Max, because Max was all movement and annoyance. Max was a constant pain in the ass.
    ‘I respect the work,’ said Dan. ‘The work is not beautiful, and I would prefer if it were beautiful. The work is violent and garish and he put everything he had into it, and I respect that.’
    ‘Right,’ Isabelle said.
    ‘Also, you know, the work is of the moment. This moment. I like that. I need that. I think if we don’t have that we are just travelling blind.’
    Dan’s hands were in the air, he was making the big gestures, and there he was again, the priest, offering it all, demanding it all: truth, beauty, everlasting life.
    Or six months on a wall at MOMA, Greg thought, followed by a thousand years in storage, somewhere undisclosed.
    Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what he got. At midnight, he was back out on the street and heading home.
    That was the 5th of November. Eight days later, he came back for more. Then a short two days after that. He managed to stay away for another week. On the 21st of November, Billy picked up the intercom and said, ‘Fuck you, Dan.’ But he buzzed him in anyway. Three nights later, he came down the stairs to the front door, and said, ‘Let’s walk.’
    The streets were wet and the air clear after rain. The boys’ winter coats were both open to the mild night, their long scarves hung down, blue and green. Dan said he was fighting with Isabelle. That was one of the reasons she had gone to Boston, they had been fighting for maybe two years. Also she had met someone up there, a guy, who was, incidentally, as queer as all get out, which was not the outcome he had wanted for Isabelle, but it was her choice, so maybe it had been a terrific waste of time, his feeling guilty all those years.
    ‘Have you told her?’
    ‘Told her what?’ said Dan. ‘I love her. I have always loved her. And I fucked her willingly. And none of that is a lie.’
    They ended up kissing up against a chain link fence, in a deserted lot by the East River, hands sliding in each other’s come, waiting to be knifed by a passer-by.

    So that was it. Dan went home at Christmas a new man and he came back to New York ready for more. He found Billy laid low with a cold and made him a hot whiskey to the Irish recipe with lemon and cloves, and he beefed on about his family, his mother who was the usual nightmare, his sister who was pregnant again and developing a martyred air.
    ‘When do you grow out of it?’ he said. ‘When is all that done ?’
    Billy sat up in a pair of pyjamas with a stripe of powder blue, his blond hair tousled with sweat and a thermometer sticking out of his mouth. He had been over