The Hours Read Free Page B

never occurred to me you’d be around. You and Evan are never in town on the weekends.’’
    Walter says of course he’ll come, and he’ll bring Evan if Evan feels up to it, though Evan, of course, may choose to husband his energies for dancing. Richard will be furious to hear that Walter has been invited, and Sally will certainly side with him. Clarissa understands. Little in the world is less mysterious than the disdain people often feel for Walter Hardy, who’s elected to turn forty-six in baseball caps and Nikes; who makes an obscene amount of money writing romance novels about love and loss among perfectly muscled young men; who can stay out all night dancing to house music, blissful and inexhaustible as a German shepherd retrieving a stick. You see men like Walter all over Chelsea and the Village, men who insist, at thirty or forty or older, that they have always been chipper and
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    confident , powerful of body; that they’ve never been strange children, never taunted or despised. Richard argues that eternally youthful gay men do more harm to the cause than do men who seduce little boys, and yes, it’s true that Walter brings no shadow of adult irony or cynicism, nothing remotely profound, to his interest in fame and fashions, the latest restaurant. Yet it is just this greedy innocence Clarissa appreciates. Don’t we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony? Is it so terrible for a man to want more youth, more pleasure? Besides, Walter is not corrupt; not exactly corrupt. He writes the best books he can—books full of romance and sacrifice, courage in the face of adversity—and surely they must offer real comfort to any number of people. His name appears constantly on invitations to fund-raisers and on letters of protest; he writes embarrassingly lavish blurbs for younger writers. He takes good, faithful care of Evan. These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody’s little display of genius. She refuses to stop enjoying Walter Hardy’s shameless shallowness, even if it drives Sally to distraction and has actually inspired Richard to wonder out loud if she, Clarissa, isn’t more than a little vain and foolish herself.
    ‘‘Good,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘You know where we live, right? Five o’clock.’’
    ‘‘Five o’clock.’’
    ‘‘It needs to be early. The ceremony’s at eight, we’re having the party before instead of after. Richard can’t manage late nights.’’
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    ‘‘Right . Five o’clock. See you then.’’ Walter squeezes Clarissa’s hand and walks on with a swaggering two-step, a demonstration of hefty vitality. It’s a cruel joke, of a sort, inviting Walter to Richard’s party, but Walter, after all, is alive, just as Clarissa is, on a morning in June, and he’ll feel horribly snubbed if he finds out (and he seems to find everything out) Clarissa spoke to him the day of the party and deliberately failed to mention it. Wind worries the leaves, showing the brighter, grayer green of their undersides, and Clarissa wishes, suddenly and with surprising urgency, that Richard were here beside her, right now—not Richard as he’s become but the Richard of ten years ago; Richard the fearless, ceaseless talker; Richard the gadfly. She wants the argument that she and Richard would have had about Walter. Before Richard’s decline, Clarissa always fought with him. Richard actually worried over questions of good and evil, and he never, not in twenty years, fully abandoned the notion that Clarissa’s decision to live with Sally represents, if not some workaday manifestation of deep corruption, at least a weakness on her part that indicts (though Richard would never admit this) women in general, since he seems to have decided early on that Clarissa stands not only for herself but for the gifts and frailties of her