Yvan was better-looking than Christopher, but almost certainly did not give that impression, you had to look quite hard to discern the handsome man behind the shambling exterior. I had never thought of him as handsome. And yet as we sat across the table from each other and he inquired, in his very kind manner, as to the facts of my life and how I was doing, it was evident that it was because I found him attractive that I told him, rather abruptly and in confidence, that Christopher and I had separated. He was the first person I told.
This was before Christopher had extracted from me the promise not to tell anyone about the separation. If Yvan was surprised, he didn’t show it, he only said that he was very sorry, that we had always seemed happy together, we had been one of the couples he had enjoyed spending time with. Then he laughed in a self-conscious way, he didn’t mean to speak about himself, regarding a matter that had nothing to do with him—but then, of course, it ended up having everything to do with him, his words presaged the arrangement that would follow, for which he did and would continue to feel guilty, perhaps he had a sense of it even then.
Yvan was a journalist and a friend of Christopher’s first, they had known each other very slightly at university. Christopher—Yvan later told me, Christopher and I had never spoken of Yvan as anything other than a present-day acquaintance, although I was aware that they had been at Cambridge together, I suspected that Christopher had only the vaguest memory of Yvan from those days, he was a born amnesiac—had been charismatic, a prominent figure on campus, one of those students of whom the entire student body is aware.
This was entirely in keeping with what I knew about Christopher, what was then more revealing was the manner in which Yvan described Christopher, as though he were recounting the experience of seeing an actor on a stage, observed not from the audience but from the wings. Yvan was in some ways still the same man, essentially shy, preferring to be on the margins rather than in the center of things. And yet he had been drawn into Christopher’s orbit, Yvan told me that for a time, Christopher had made a concerted effort to befriend him.
He hesitated a little before he told the story, perhaps he thought that it might not be in the best taste, it was early in what was to become our relationship and it was a strange intimacy to assert, a reminder of the fact that the two men had known each other before either had known me, that Yvan would always know this youthful version of Christopher better than I could. Experience accumulated in haphazard places, the wrong bits of knowledge residing with the wrong parties. But I insisted, I was amused and a little intrigued, I hardly needed to be protected from Christopher, whether in his old or current incarnations.
Although by Yvan’s own account he was not a popular student on campus—he did not come from good family, or display unusual wealth, nor was he exceptional in any obvious way, he did not possess charm or style or wit in externalized form—Christopher had pursued his friendship with the intensity that is particular to collegiate relationships, often between men, but also women. Perhaps he did so because he sensed that Yvan naturally possessed the one quality that Christopher respected, but lacked the discipline to truly seek out and embrace: that is, a genuine indifference to his charm.
Gradually, as Yvan described their brief friendship, I grew uncomfortable, disliking the versions of both men that emerged—Christopher’s manic charisma and compulsion to seduce, Yvan’s inexplicable passivity, neither accepting nor rebuffing Christopher’s advances. Yvan felt my discomfort, his suspicions had been correct, the intimacy between the two men was off-putting to me. There was no point to the story, Yvan said abruptly, they didn’t remain close. Christopher had dropped the friendship, as if his original pursuit had only been a cipher for another, more oblique kind of compulsion, although that had not prevented them from renewing their acquaintance when they ran into each other some years later.
That time, I had been there. It had been another chance encounter, not in the street this time but at a party, and had lasted only a few minutes before it was interrupted, the room was crowded with people. At the time Yvan had been just another one of Christopher’s acquaintances, of which there were so many, but I remembered that I had liked him at once: his laconic manner, his slight air of indifference to the parade of his surroundings and still, and in particular, to Christopher’s charm, to which so few seemed immune.