Danny focused on his screen and saw the missed messages from Luis, wishing him Happy New Year and telling him he was ready to come home.
Chapter Thirty-FourLuis’s Return
A few days later Danny was at home tidying up when the phone rang. It was Luis. The marriage proposal had been volcanic, as destructive as it was creative. It was time to discover if the lava had hardened into two islands or one. Danny turned the radio off, sat down and answered the call.
‘Hello, Luis.’
Luis was back in London after marking the traditional religious holiday of Día de los Reyes Magos with school friends in Madrid. Danny tried to recall who Luis’s school friends might be as if he were about to be tested and the fate of the wedding would depend upon remembering at least two names. Luis asked, ‘Are you free for dinner?’
It sounded like they were going on a first date, not far from the truth. Danny suppressed the urge to joke aboutchecking his diary. He was no longer sure how his jokes would land. Luis might interpret the comment literally, imagining that he had bought a diary for the first time in his life. Better to be matter of fact, Danny thought, which was a lot of thought to give to the reply, ‘Yes, I’m free.’
Luis suggested that they meet in a restaurant rather than at home. Regretting the question immediately, Danny blurted out, ‘Is it still our home?’
Luis said it would be better if they talked face to face and Danny agreed.
The phone conversation lasted three minutes and thirty-three seconds, a set of numbers so neat and tidy they seemed to have been trimmed with a knife. Recently Danny had developed a habit of muttering uplifting remarks to himself, becoming his own cheerleader. He placed a hand on his heart to steady an irregular beat and declared, ‘Hold it together, pal.’
A short time later he received a text message from Luis suggesting dinner on Friday at a Scandinavian restaurant in Soho. Danny had never heard of the place. Online, he studied the gallery of images. It was a recent opening, with no memories or associations. Neutral ground. The dining space was open with no partitioned booths. Danny concluded that Luis wanted the company of other diners to moderate their emotions, the inverse logic of choosing an engagement location, which made sense if you were intending to undo aproposal. Instead of seclusion, a crowd. Instead of presenting a ring, a ring would be returned.
Danny told no one the news. He didn’t want his mind cluttered with well-meaning opinions. They would meet as equals – two explorers returning from separate adventures. At their first Soho meeting, when Luis had worn smart attire with the keys to a penthouse apartment, Danny had treated him as fully formed, an idealized man who rarely lost control, drank in moderation, never touched drugs, worked to excess – a provider. By contrast, he was the young one who needed improvement. Danny strove to be healthier, sexier, smarter – to read more books and bake better cakes. He had never stopped to wonder whether, in fact, Luis was the more incomplete.
On Thursday evening, the night before the dinner, Danny carefully laid out his outfit, opting for sombre clothes including a white shirt from Reiss, a black sweater and grey trousers, dialling back the eccentricity without trying to present himself as a different man. Except he was different and he was sure Luis would be too. He shaved carefully and slept soundly. Late Friday afternoon he left the hospital and returned home to shower and change. Despite it being bitterly cold, he decided to walk into Soho, as he had done the night they first met. In Chinatown he browsed the set menus, worried he might arrive red-faced. Continuingonwards, he found the small restaurant. He was ten minutes early. Rather than circle the block he walked straight in.
There was an open-plan kitchen with polished steel shelves filled with glass jars of unusual spices and foraged herbs. In the main dining area every table was occupied, each decorated with a single sprig of unfurled forest fern, the only curve in a room of straight edges. Luis was seated at a table by the window, watching the passers-by, strategically placed for the first glimpse of Danny. Except Danny had avoided walking past the windows for exactly this reason. Luis’s hair was longer, a mass of foppish curls. Danny marvelled at the sight of Luis, as if they were a couple who had spent twenty years corresponding and this was their first time meeting in person. His clothes were new – not lawyer sharp or city-chic, no shirts, ties or suits. They were softer, an embroidered patterned cardigan, straw-yellow with winter wool trousers, the fashion of an Alpine farmer. No longer shorthand handsome, Danny thought, but profoundly, deeply so.
Sensing Danny’s arrival Luis turned to him and stood up. Neither man moved for a moment, as if the meeting had been a surprise, and then Danny approached and they hugged, holding on to each other for ten seconds then twenty until it became a minute or more and it seemed that they might never let go. Danny had wondered how they would greet each other, with a handshake or a hug or a nodof the head. In person their bodies knew the answer – to bring themselves as close as possible for as long as possible. In a break with their past Luis seemed oblivious to the spectacle of their public affection and it was Danny who subtly signalled they should end the hug not because he wasn’t enjoying it but because he was desperate to hear what Luis had to say. Though he had imagined a wide variety of emotions at their reunion, mostly he felt relief. This was love, he thought. Not the remnants of it, the embers of a once-bright fire. Whatever else happened tonight, whatever was said or decided, he told himself to hold on to this instinctual reaction. There had been, still was, and always would be, the strongest of bonds between them.
As they sat down Danny was smiling in part because he was happy after the hug but also to reaffirm that he wasn’t here to argue or lay down a litany of grievances. No longer was he bothered about the ‘normal’ process of engagements. He was grateful they were doing this their way, whatever their way might be. Around Luis’s neck hung the small silver crucifix which had once belonged to his grandfather. He had never worn it before, keeping it in his drawer, only occasionally taking it out when he prayed. He was still wearing his engagement ring and the two items of jewellery matched well together.
The waiter approached, a thin man with pale skin and small blue tattoos spotted across his veined forearms. Heasked for their drink order and though Danny had promised himself that he wouldn’t drink alcohol, on a whim he changed his mind. Glancing at the menu his eyes chanced on a Nordic martini served with aquavit and angelica root. With not a clue what these flavours amounted to, he ordered one. Luis stuck to sparkling water. Once the waiter left Luis asked, ‘Should I speak first?’
Danny nodded, of course, it was Luis’s turn to talk, suggesting that they wait for the drink to be delivered so they wouldn’t be interrupted. Making small talk that was as rich with meaning as anything grand they might say, Danny complimented Luis’s cardigan. Luis glanced down at it.
‘There was snow one day in Madrid.’
Danny tried to picture the scene. As a couple they had only visited the city once. It had been the autumn. During that long weekend Danny had been curious at how introverted Luis seemed, avoiding the gay quarter, the bars and the clubs, acting more like a tourist, visiting the galleries and museums, and meeting none of Luis’s friends who, he had explained, were spread across Europe.
The waiter arrived with a chilled glass shaped like an upside-down cathedral bell. He flipped out a small notepad to take their food order. Danny asked for more time, adding that they would signal when they were ready. The waiter looked at them, assessing the encounter. Of course, he said. After he left, Danny took a sip of his martini, noticing thatthe usual olive had been replaced with a cloudberry. How pleasing and pretty it was, the table setting, the forest fern and Luis. He wished he could stay in this moment before anything irreversible was said. How stupid he had been to rush out of their hug. The taste of the martini was inexplicable, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply strong and cold as though he had ordered a chilled shot of fortitude. He put the glass down, placing his palms flat on the table in the manner of a magician midway through a card trick demonstrating that there was nothing in his hands and nothing up his sleeves.
Accepting his cue, Luis began by stating that he had arranged a period of extended leave from work, an unprecedented request in his long career. Since arriving in London Luis’s singular goal was to be made partner at a top law firm. Achieving this position had taken on a mythic significance in his mind. It would prove that coming out hadn’t limited his ambitions – that he had overcome the obstacle of his sexuality. On the threshold of this goal, to take two months off would appear to his colleagues to be the worst of weaknesses – vulnerability and sentimentality. We always knew it about him, they would claim, with a knowing glance. He could only appear to be like one of us, but never truly be one of us. Skimming over the severity of these consequences, Luis explained that he didn’t have a clear plan for his time in Spain beyond reconnecting with his past but, once there,he had set out on a tour of his country, visiting the towns he had always wanted to visit but never found the time, starting at El Escorial, close to Madrid, before travelling by train to Ávila, Salamanca, Zamora, La Coruña, Lugo and León. The list sounded so specific that Danny asked about it and Luis was pleased at the question.
‘Out of nowhere, I remembered an obscure fact about the playwright Federico Lorca. I must have read it at school. How he went on a tour of Spain during his formative years. I decided to follow in Federico’s footsteps, visiting the same sequence of towns. I admit, it is a little late for my formative years, but that is the nature of our story, Danny – we are doing these things out of time?’
There had always been an intrepid quality about Luis. There was a restlessness in his soul that could only be soothed by a constant stream of accomplishments, either professional or personal, even his holidays needed summits, yet this tour seemed different, following in the steps of a gay playwright, someone whose works were encoded as queer, because Lorca could not write openly at the time, using repressed female sexuality as a proxy for his own.
Luis said, ‘I stayed in simple guest houses. I would wake up early, eat a breakfast of bread and cheese, then walk through every square and down every avenue. I visited museums, parks, galleries and markets. At each church I would stop, light a candle and pray. At night I’d find theoldest restaurant in town. I never looked at a menu. I’d ask for whatever the chef considered to be their best dish. For weeks, that was how I lived. A pilgrim in my own country.’
Briefly Danny tried to imagine what it would have been like to go on this trip together before supposing that Luis didn’t want to play the role of a guide. He wasn’t showing off his homeland, he was rediscovering it – searching not for a place on a map but somewhere inside of himself.
Luis observed, ‘My Spanish sounds strange to other native speakers. Stiff. Like I learned it from a dictionary. A few asked where I was born, supposing I was born abroad.’
Luis indicated the Nordic martini.
‘May I?’
As though it were a chess piece, a rook, Danny slid it across the tabletop. Luis took a sip, giving no reaction to the combination of flavours before returning the glass to Danny’s side.
‘I met many interesting people along the way. There was a literature professor at Salamanca University. He had recently been travelling through South America on a sabbatical in much the same way as I was travelling through Spain. He told me a story. And I saw myself in it. You know how it can be with stories? You hear them, and you want to stop, stand up and tell everyone that character is you.’
