to make a problem. I heard later that Charlie was—oh, God.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s the least important thing about that night.”
Yale scraped the plates while Fiona joined everyone in the living room. If he didn’t do it now, while Charlie was busy entertaining and pretending to understand American football, then Charlie would insist on doing every dish.
When Yale finally walked into the living room, the conversation abruptly stopped. “What?” he said.
Charlie said, “I’ll tell you later.”
“No, what?”
“Cowboys are winning,” Terrence said.
Asher tried to drink from his glass, but his glass was empty.
“Just tell him,” Fiona said.
Charlie patted the couch, bit his lip, stared at the TV. “I thought I saw your mum.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I did see her. She was a nurse, in—it was a Tylenol advert. She said some stuff. Not much.”
Asher said, “We didn’t know your mom was a movie star.”
He felt dizzy. “She’s not.”
This hadn’t happened in a couple of years, this kind of ambush. There was a commercial for Folgers Crystals a while back, in which she was a waitress. She’d been a receptionist for an episode of Simon & Simon. He hated it—which Charlie must have told them, or why were they looking at him like that?—hated, on a gut level, the humiliation of being afforded only the same two-second shots of his mother that the entire rest of the country was given. Hated that he needed to watch, that he couldn’t look away in indifference. Hated that he’d missed seeing her just now, hated that they’d all seen her without him, hated that they were pitying him, hated that he hated it all so much.
When Yale was seven his father had taken him to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and Yale, knowing his mother was an actress, and that actresses disguised themselves for their roles, became convinced that his mother was the one playing Holly Golightly. He wanted her to be the one singing “Moon River,” which seemed like just the sort of song his mother might sing to him if she were still around. He soon outgrew the fantasy, but for years, when he had trouble sleeping, he’d imagine Audrey Hepburn singing to him.
He said, “It’s nice to know she’s alive.”
He grabbed his legal pad from the shelf under the coffee table. He’d been drafting a letter for the Annual Fund that morning. He snatched up a pen and started circling things that didn’t need circling.
Fiona said, “Are you okay?”
He nodded, and as the game came back on, Charlie twisted one of Yale’s curls around his finger. Asher picked up the TV Guide and flipped through it as if they might change the channel at any moment.
And then the door buzzer sounded, thank God.
* * *
—
Teddy was alone. “Julian has as emergency rehearsal, whatever that means,” he said. “He sends his regrets. Oh my god, it smells amazing.” Teddy always talked like he’d just done a speedball, but it was just the way he was.
“So he’s not coming at all?” Charlie said. “What did he say, exactly?”
Terrence said, “I hope this ‘emergency rehearsal’ is smoking hot.”
Teddy acted normally, throwing his coat on the back of the couch, hugging everyone. Well, sure. He didn’t know anything odd had happened the night of the memorial. It was like having a sex dream about someone, then seeing him the next day. You felt like he had to know; he’d been right there in the dream, so how could things ever be the same between you again? But they always were.
Teddy had golden waves cut close to his head. The fact that his skin was always golden-tan, even in the middle of winter, made him look like a bronze statue, or like some drawing of Hermes from a children’s book of myths. There was a scar in the middle of his upper lip from a cleft palate in infancy, a faint line that might have marred his face but instead made him irresistible to just about anyone in the market for a twink. Which Yale never had been. Teddy was built like an adolescent, five foot four at most.
Charlie busied himself serving the trifle he’d made, avoided looking at either Teddy or Yale. He seemed distracted; he miscounted the bowls, and then he left the serving spoon in the kitchen. Yale wanted to stop him, massage his neck, but he didn’t want to draw attention to Charlie’s discomfort. He didn’t even want to point it out to Charlie himself, who swore he understood now, one hundred percent, that