said to him that day, “to see what you become.” When he turned twenty, she sent him a check for three thousand dollars. Nothing when he turned thirty. Teresa, on the other hand, had flown into town and taken him to Le Francais, which she couldn’t afford. Teresa would send him clippings from magazines, articles about art or swimming or asthma or the Cubs or anything else that made her think of Yale.
“Tell me all about it,” Teresa said. “You’re wooing the rich folks, is it?”
“Partly. We’re trying to build the collection.”
“You know you have a gift for charm. Mind, I’m not calling you slick. You’re charming like a puppy.”
“Huh,” he said and laughed.
“Oh Yale, learn to take a compliment.”
He managed to keep her on the phone for twenty minutes, telling her about the gallery space, the donors, the university. She told him the rabbits were into her lettuce, or someone was eating her lettuce, and didn’t that sound like a thing the rabbits would do? Yale ran the dust cloth along the television, the picture frames, the antique shaving mirror he kept out here on the bookshelf, the wooden box that housed Charlie’s childhood marble collection.
She said, “This must be costing a fortune. Is Charlie there?”
“He’s out,” Yale said, as cheerfully as he could.
“Well. Tell him his old mum had two sons last she checked, and it’s been weeks since she’s heard from the one she carried.”
He said, “We love you, Teresa.”
* * *
—
It was the absolute middle of the night, Yale could tell without rolling toward the clock, when he heard the door and then the refrigerator, when he saw the hall light through his eyelids. He said, “Charlie?”
There was no answer, so he sat up, swung his feet off the bed. And there was Charlie’s silhouette, leaning against the doorframe. Drunk.
Yale would have shouted if he were more awake, but he could just barely manage to speak. “What the fuck happened?”
“I could ask the same.”
“No, you couldn’t. No, you could not. I go—I go upstairs for five minutes. What the hell time is it?” He grabbed his alarm clock, turned the red numbers toward himself: 3:52 a.m. “What happened to you?”
“I went out after.”
“After what?”
“The raid.”
“There—the cops came?” It was the first thing he’d considered, but he’d dismissed it so quickly.
“What? No. After we went to Nico’s.”
Yale looked around the room, made sure he was awake.
Charlie said, “Look, I don’t know when you vanished, but by the time we went to Nico’s, you were missing. I hope you had a brilliant time. I hope it was splendid.”
Yale said, idiotically, “You went to Nico’s.”
“We raided his apartment.”
“Oh.”
“We went— You know how his parents weren’t going to let Terrence back in. But Terrence had a key, and he was—were you gone by then?” Charlie hadn’t moved from the doorway. It seemed to take him great effort to assemble a sentence, even to form consonants. “He had the key and he showed it to Richard, and Richard said we should all go there straightaway. And we did. And Fiona’s going to cover for us. And we got his stuff. Look.” He started unwrapping something from his own neck. Backlit as Charlie was, Yale could only see the long untwisting of it.
“Is that Nico’s scarf?” He was trying to piece it together. That everyone had abandoned their drinks en masse and walked to Clark to divvy up Nico’s belongings. That they had pillaged, in the best possible way. And he hadn’t been there.
Nico wore that stripy orange scarf everywhere. It was how you’d recognize him from across a winter street.
“What about the servers? The boys with the food?”
“I imagine they took off. We just moved the party. But you were already doing lord knows what.”
“Charlie, I was lying down. For like five minutes, upstairs.” Maybe it had been half an hour, but wasn’t it basically the same?
“I know where you were. It was a great topic of conversation.”
“And no one came to get me?”
“We didn’t want to interrupt you.” Charlie seemed furious—seething, barely holding something in.
“From lying down with an upset stomach?”
“Everyone saw you go up with Teddy.”
“Teddy?” He wanted to laugh but stopped himself. It would sound defensive. “Teddy left. He walked out the front door when the slide show started.”
Charlie was quiet. He might have been processing something, or he might have been about to vomit.
Yale said, “Even if he stayed, what the hell would I be doing with him? Listen. I went upstairs because I needed to be