Danny realized he was holding his breath.
Luis explained, ‘These past few months have felt manic. You haven’t been sleeping. You wake at four in the morning to write save-the-date cards. And if even a single letter is crooked, you rip the card up. You spent all your savings on an engagement ring. At the engagement party you were jumping off tables and shouting at strangers in the street. And I’ve been waiting for it to settle down, but it’s only become more intense.’
Danny closed his eyes. He had experienced events like this before – a rip in his reality. Such as the night he realized that he was homeless. Marriage had been a kind of madness. He had done a great deal of talking these past few months. It was time to listen. Luis’s voice began to waver.
‘It doesn’t feel like a celebration of our life together. It feels like a test. Am I as excited as you? Am I laughing as much? Changing as much? I would prefer if you just said – I’m not enough for you anymore.’
Luis put down his book and turned to the window.
‘When you proposed, in the Highlands, the first thought that came into my head was not that you wanted to marry me. But that you were breaking up with me. And because that idea is so painful you couldn’t say it with those words so you said it with the question – will you marry me?’
Danny broke his habit of rushing to speak and took a moment to plan his reply.
‘Luis, I can’t imagine my life without you. This marriage is because I love you.’
Luis stepped close, placing a hand on Danny’s arm, the first moment of contact during their exchange.
‘I know that you love me. There isn’t a day where I doubt it. That’s not what we’re discussing. We’re discussing whether this is the beginning of something. Or the end of it. Is this a marriage? Or a midlife crisis?’
Unsteady on his feet, Danny took a seat in Luis’s reading chair, as if it might better help him understand.
‘I admit that I’ve been a lot to deal with these past few months. Too intense. I don’t know why marriage has become so important to me. I want our relationship to be recognized. I want it to exist in law. I want anniversaries, a photograph on the mantel, honeymoon stories. All the sentimental stuff that I mocked and ridiculed, I want it.’
Luis nodded.
‘Because you feel something is missing. But it’s not ahoneymoon or an engagement ring or even a wedding. In your head you’ve searched for what it might be, and you’ve decided it’s marriage, but what if marriage is a stand-in for something else?’
Danny asked, ‘Like what?’
Luis replied, ‘Whether you want us to be the only love story in your life.’
Danny understood he was being asked to peer deep inside their relationship and tell Luis the truth. He stood up.
‘Luis, part of you is still in the closet. You’ve outsourced being gay to me. You’re still the insider. Without me by your side, who would know? And that’s how you like it. It’s not that you’re not out enough. You’re not us enough. When I asked you to marry me, I was asking you to wear our relationship all the time, not just when we’re together – not just when you clock off. Even when we’re apart.’
As he was trained to do, Luis reduced the marriage to a motive.
‘You were sad in the summer. And out of that sadness came this proposal. You asked a question, but the question was not will I marry you. The question was – will the next twenty years be like the last twenty years. And you’ve already decided that they can’t be the same. You’ve been presenting this marriage as a way to repair the past. Except the truth is – it might be your way of escaping the future.’
Plotting a potential path out, Danny said, ‘Couldn’t thisbe a marriage and a midlife crisis? We both have a breakdown. We pick up the pieces. We build something new.’
But Luis said nothing.
Danny asked, ‘Are you leaving me?’
Luis raised his hands.
‘That’s the question I’ve been asking for months. Are you leaving me?’
Part ThreeWinter
Chapter Twenty-SixLeaving
With only two leather holdalls, Luis had packed enough clothes for ten days. Danny hoped this meant he was coming back soon but Luis couldn’t say for sure. Standing in the hall Luis was ready to leave, except wasn’t marriage supposed to be their next adventure or had separation been their destination all along? For the past week they had spoken frankly but never with the same friction. For Danny, the marriage fever had broken, while Luis seemed lighter, finally able to express himself freely. Well-versed in the rhythms of a closeted life, for Luis their engagement had followed a similar pattern, pretending everything was fine while feeling removed, as if watching the process from behind a pane of glass. Close but never connected. Talking late into the night, Danny accepted that he still clung on to a sense of worthlessness, thatit was possible he found self-loathing comforting, he was so accustomed to it, and that deep down he was still a young unloved man sleeping rough on a park bench. No matter the course of their conversations Luis always returned to the idea of going home. Ironically, Spain was Danny’s suggestion – the trigger for the confrontation. Luis accepted there were matters from his past that he had never addressed. Marriage was the moment to face up to the trauma he had migrated from. Danny had been brave. It was Luis’s turn.
At random moments during trivial tasks Luis seemed close to tears, remarkable for a man who rarely cried. Danny had always sensed the outlines of pain sheltering inside Luis. He remembered him crying at a French movie when, on screen, a kid was given a blue bicycle. Luis couldn’t explain why and afterwards they had laughed about it. Who was this semblance of a successful man broken down and who would he be put back together? From the outset Danny hoped to sail their relationship to an undiscovered country but now that they were at sea, he longed for the familiar shoreline they had left behind. He had been reckless to upend such a good thing, unappreciative of his good fortune in finding any kind of love, gambling it all for what, exactly?
Before leaving for Spain Luis arranged to stay with Emma and John in their Cotswolds cottage for the weekend. Luis wanted to spend some time with John talking honestly about whether coming out placed a ceiling on his career. He hadbeen working obsessively, giving up weekends and evenings, holidaying only once a year, as if trying to compensate for that admission so early in his career. He could have easily brought a woman to their wedding. Would he now be partner if he had? In his weaker moments, Danny couldn’t help but interpret Emma and John’s generosity as a conspiracy to separate them because they never truly believed that he was good enough for Luis. In his darker hours he imagined them whispering critiques of his character and short-listing eligible men. But Danny accepted that these were predictable insecurities – the very anxieties that had driven him to plan a splashy wedding.
