The Green Road by Anne Enright

himself, look especially truthful or sincere. The picture was full of integrity, the boy might be anything at all.
    After the lamb they had figs poached in marsala with a mascarpone mousse. Alex took off his jacket to help with the plates, and he and Massimo moved with such synchronous ease, you knew they loved each other still.
    Greg lit up a cigarette and contemplated Dan through half-closed eyes.
    ‘So. Ireland,’ he said. ‘Are you from, like, a farm ?’
    Dan refused the question with a smile.
    ‘I’m sorry ,’ said Greg. He was flirting now.
    ‘Actually, yes,’ said Dan, relenting. ‘Yes. We have a farm.’
    ‘Billy grew up in Elk County, Pennsylvania but he’s not reciting Whitman. Are you, Billy?’
    ‘Why not?’ said Dan, looking to Billy. ‘Why not?!’
    ‘Just,’ said Billy.
    ‘He’s wonderful.’
    ‘Is he?’
    ‘I sing the body electric,’ said Dan, raising his preacher’s hands, and we looked at them; the square bones of his knuckles, the tiny tremble in his fingertips, held open that moment too long.
    And we looked at Billy, who blushed in the candlelight.
    ‘What’s the next line, Billy?’ said Greg. ‘You see how dumbass the American education system can be? What’s the next line?’
    But Billy was too busy falling in love to think about the next line so Alex quietly filled it in. ‘The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,’ as Massimo set down some glasses for port, and reached to the counter for the platter of cheese.
    Later, Greg wondered, if he had not needled Billy then Billy would not have turned to Dan and to all that Dan offered him, there at the table: the guilt and the glory; the pomp and cruelty of his love. And he wondered also if it could have played out in any other way. They made such a handsome couple. It was meant, we all knew it. Dan and Billy, Billy and Dan. It had to be.
    After cheese, and more cigarettes, and the offer of whiskey, tequila, more wine, Massimo went over to the window to throw down a key, and a whole bunch of people came up on their way out clubbing: Jerry from the Fawbush Gallery, that landscape gardener who did white plantings all over the Hamptons, Estella who was an outrageous queen and this guy in a Weimar-type leather thing – call it a corset – with a German accent no one believed for an instant and considerable quantities of cocaine. Jessie’s archrival Mandy was also in the mix, with her glossy trustafarian hair and mid-Atlantic drawl and, years later when Jessie was truly fat and Mandy still wonderfully slim, they met and remembered that evening which went on till dawn, and all the hard work they put in, years of it, helping, loving, mourning these men.
    A few weeks after this dinner Greg was admitted to St Vincent’s for the first time. It was just a thing, he told Billy, they would blitz him with anti-fungals and let him go. Jessie brought him in a cab, with six pairs of ironed pyjamas and a cotton kimono with beautiful cross-hatchings of indigo blue. Greg had a problem with his mouth and tongue. He also had a haemorrhoid that obsessed him more than it deserved, though Jessie told him her father had a real bunch of grapes hanging out there for a while, and she went off to find ice. She also found a bag of doughnuts to fatten him up, then ate most of them herself, but she sat there for another hour and laughed at every small thing.
    Arthur arrived with champagne and they pretended to drink it. He said when Max was first up here in the sevens, just two rooms down, the staff slid his food tray across the floor, and he had to change his own sheets. He said it was so much better now, thank you Dr Torres – how was he, by the way? And Greg said, ‘I think he’s just exhausted, he’s just working so hard.’
    The drip went in. Billy did not come and, after a while, the visitors went home.
    Three hours later, Greg started shaking. He was cold in places that were new to him, and sweat pooled at the base of his neck. A