Free To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara Page B

about who he was and how he had come to live the life he had, and as Edward talked, as naturally and fluently as if he’d been waiting for years for David to come into his life and question him, David found himself aware, even as he listened with interest to Edward’s story, of a kind of new and unpleasant pride in himself—that he was here in this unlikely space, and that he was talking to a strange and beautiful and unlikely man, and that, although he could see that beyond the mist-shrouded window the sky was becoming black and that therefore his grandfather would be sitting down to dinner and wondering where he was, he made no move to make his apologies, no move to leave. It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being.

VI
     
    Over the following weeks, he saw Edward first once, then twice, then three, then four more times. They would meet after Edward’s class or his own. For their second meeting, they maintained the pretense of going to the café first, but thereafter they went directly to Edward’s room, and there they stayed as late as David dared before he had to return to his hansom, waiting for him in front of the school, and hurry home before Grandfather announced himself for dinner—he had been not angry, but curious when David had come in so late after that first encounter, and although David had evaded his questions then, he knew they would soon become more insistent if there were to be a second incident of tardiness, and he was unequipped to answer them.
    Indeed, he was unsure how, if forced, he might characterize his friendship with Edward. At night, after he and Grandfather had had their drinks and talk in the drawing room—“Are you quite all right?” his grandfather asked, after David’s third secret meeting. “You seem unusually…distracted”—he would retire to his study and record in his diary what he had learned of Edward that day, and then sit and reread it as if it were one of those mystery novels Peter liked, and not things that he had actually heard firsthand.
    He was twenty-three, five years younger than David, and had attended, for two years, a conservatory in Worcester, Massachusetts. But although he had had a scholarship, he hadn’t the money to earn his degree, and so had moved to New York four years ago to find work.
    “What did you do?” David had asked him.
    “Oh, a bit of everything,” had been the reply, and this had turned out not to be untrue, or at least not completely: Edward had been, for brief periods, a cook’s assistant (“Ghastly. I can scarcely boil water, as you’ve seen for yourself”), a nanny (“Terrible. I neglected my charges’ education entirely and just let them eat sweets”), a coal-man’s apprentice (“I’m simply not sure why I even thought it might be work for which I’d be the least suited”), and an artist’s model (“Much duller than you’d imagine. One perches in an impossible position until one’s aching and cold while a class of simpering dowagers and leering codgers make attempts to sketch you”). Finally, though (through means which remained unexplained), he found work as a pianist in a small nightclub.
    (“A nightclub!” David was unable to stop himself from exclaiming.
    “Yes, yes, a nightclub! Where else would I have learned all those inappropriate songs that so offend the Bingham ears?” But this last was said teasingly, and they smiled at each other.)
    From the nightclub, he had received an offer to teach at the institute (this too was left unexplained, and David entertained a brief and satisfying fantasy of Matron marching down into a dark room, grabbing Edward by the back of his collar, and yanking him up a flight of stairs, down the street, and into the school); lately, he had been trying to supplement