“I know how it sounds,” Jack said.
“Don’t,” Walker said. “Please. Please do not try to justify what you’re doing right now.”
“But if you could see this guy,” Jack said, “you might understand. He’s a complete wreck about having that thing in his house. He needs to get rid of it. I’m doing him a favor.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Walker, he lost his wife when the towers fell.”
“What does that even mean?” Walker was shouting now. “I’m sorry about his wife, but how on earth does that justify what you’re doing? Aiding and abetting a black-market art sale.” Walker was pacing now and he stopped and slammed his fist on the counter. Jack was scared. This was worse than he expected. “When the towers fell? Jesus Christ. What else, Jack, what else? If you don’t help, the terrorists win? These colors don’t run? Never forget? Am I ignoring any other pat jingoistic sentiments that you’ve previously reviled but might now summon to defend your abhorrent greed?”
“It’s not greed. It’s, it’s—”
“It’s what?”
The last thing Jack wanted to do at that moment was confess the home equity scheme, but he didn’t see how he couldn’t. If he waited, it would just be worse. “There’s something else,” he said.
Walker listened to Jack without saying a word. When Jack was finished, Walker walked to their bedroom and closed the door behind him. All their communication since then had been through terse e-mails. Jack learned from Arthur that Walker had put the summer property on the market. He sent Walker a series of imploring e-mails begging to talk, however briefly. They all disappeared into the great abyss of Walker’s fury and silence.
WALKER HAD SURPRISED HIMSELF. It wasn’t like he didn’t know Jack; he did. He knew exactly what Jack was—and was not—capable of. It wasn’t as if Jack hadn’t done dumb things over the years and tried to hide them. (God, where to begin with the dumb shit Jack had done over the years—always failing, always, he was terrible about covering his tracks.) Walker realized that he’d tacitly agreed to subsidize Jack’s failing efforts years ago. He pretended optimism every time Jack had a new trick up his sleeve, quietly paying off lines of credit that never materialized into revenue because that was what you did when you loved someone, when you were building a life together. Your strengths compensated for their weaknesses. You became the grounding leverage to their impulses, ego to their id. You accommodated. And if Walker got impatient, if he sometimes wished things were a little more balanced, he would just imagine his life without Jack and recalibrate, because he couldn’t imagine life without Jack.
But something inside him had snapped the night of Melody’s birthday. He was genuinely horrified when the story came pouring out of Jack about the illegal sale of the Rodin. It was illegal! Whatever stupid things Jack had done over the years, breaking the law was a first (he assumed, he hoped). If he’d gone ahead with the ridiculous scheme and gotten caught, Walker couldn’t even bear to imagine what they’d be facing and not just personally—for him the repercussions would be professional. It was beyond imagining.
As he’d stood in their kitchen that night, watching Jack try to explain himself and toggle between evasive and indignant, Walker’s years of resigned tolerance evaporated. In the coming weeks, he would spend a lot of time trying to unpack that moment, not understanding himself how years of commitment and love and tolerance could just vanish. But they did. As he stood and watched Jack, he realized that for more than twenty years he had parented his partner. And on the heels of that debilitating thought, a brief flash of insight that leveled him: The reason they’d never had a child, something Walker had dearly wanted but had never been able to persuade Jack to want, was because Jack was the child—and Walker had let him be the child, enabled him. His husband was his forty-four-year-old petulant, needy, responsibility-avoiding son, and now it was too late for other children, and with that realization Walker was undone.