Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

adopted his closed-book way of dealing with the world. Maybe I was subliminally trying to please him – ‘ See, Dad, I can be just like you  . . .’ Or maybe the distance I kept between myself and others was simply a modus vivendi, because it kept so much chaos at bay and because it meant I knew how to guard against intrusion or prying eyes or even a cross-examination by my best friend.
    ‘You are impossible,’ Christy Naylor said.
    ‘So I’ve been told.’
    ‘You know what the big difference between us is?’
    ‘Enlighten me.’
    ‘I reveal everything, you reveal nothing.’
    ‘A secret remains a secret until you tell somebody. From that moment on, it’s in the public domain.’
    ‘If you don’t trust anyone, don’t you end up feeling lonely?’
    Ouch. That was a direct hit – a real right-to-the-jaw. But I tried not to show it and instead said: ‘Everything has a price.’
    But the harboring of secrets also has its virtues. Not a single person ever knew of my involvement with David Henry . . . and we were together for four years. We would have probably been together longer – in fact, I often think that we might still be together right now – had he not died.

Three
    F OUR YEARS with David Henry.
    Considered now, it all seemed to pass in a fast heady rush. That’s the tricky thing about time. When you’re living it on a daily basis, it can seem impossibly slow – the routine grind making you believe that the distance between Monday and the weekend is a vast one, riddled with longueurs. But regarded retrospectively, it always appears hyper-charged. A click of two fingers and you have left childhood and are trying to negotiate adolescence. Click – and you’re in college, pretending to be a grown-up and yet still so wildly unsure of yourself. Click – and you’re doing a doctorate and meeting your professor three afternoons a week to make love in your apartment. Click – and forty-eight months have passed. Click – and David dies. Suddenly, randomly, without premonition. A man of fifty-six, without what is known as ‘medical issues’, goes out for a bike ride and . . .
    As David so often noted, the prosaic always forces its way into everything we do. We fool ourselves into thinking we are extraordinary. Even if we are one of the lucky ones who do extraordinary things, commonplace realities inevitably barge in. ‘And the most commonplace reality,’ David once said, ‘is the one we fear the most: death.’
    Four years. And because we were ‘operating in the arena of the clandestine’ (another of my favorite David quotes), we were able to sidestep so many banalities. When you set up house with somebody you’re bound to find yourself falling into the usual petty disputes about domestic minutiae and personal idiosyncrasies. But when you’re meeting the man you love from four to seven, three times a week – and are denied access to him at all other times – the hours you spend together take on a heightened reality . . . because, of course, they’re so unreal to begin with.
    ‘If we lived together,’ I said to David a few months after it all started, ‘the let-down would be huge.’
    ‘That’s a decidedly unromantic thing to say.’
    ‘Actually, it’s a decidedly romantic thing to say. I don’t have to find out whether or not you floss your teeth, or kick dirty underwear under the bed, or only take out the garbage when cockroaches start to crawl out of—’
    ‘“No” to all of the above.’
    ‘Delighted to know that. Mind you, judging from your near-perfect personal hygiene when you’re over here—’
    ‘Ah, but maybe I’m just on my best behavior during our afternoons together.’
    ‘And if you were with me all the time . . . ?’
    Pause. I could see how that question made him instantly uncomfortable.
    ‘The thing is . . .’ he finally said.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I pine for a life with you.’
    ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’
    ‘But it’s the truth. I