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“Do you really believe I have so little pride?”
“It’s not about pride.” I looked up again, finding my fingers damp. All that worry over Edwin and, as it turned out, I had only made myself cry.
“Marius?” He took a flustered half step towards me. “Are you—”
“See?” I cut him off. “You’re too forgiving. And I love you too much.”
That brought him up short again. “Love?” he repeated furiously. “Don’t you meanloved?”
Turning my head, I wiped my face awkwardly against the sleeve of Leo’s T-shirt. “Like it just goes away.”
“It went away for you.” I’d never heard him sound so cold. “You said it did.”
“I didn’t know how else to explain why I couldn’t be with you. But for fuck’s sake, Edwin”—my whole body ached with tears, fallen and unshed—“surely you know…surely you know…”
“Know what?”
“That I’ll love you until the day I fucking die.”60
He let out a softohlike something long trapped finally released.
“And when my body is worms,” I told him, “they’ll love you too.”
Edwin put a hand over his mouth, muffling something halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You are the most profoundly unromantic man, Marius Chankseliani.”
“And yet”—I did my best to smile—“you put up with me for a decade.”
We both fell silent. The swirl of stars above Edwin’s darkened city gleamed silver in the darkened room.
At last he said, “Couldn’t you have said…well, any of this? I was afraid you hated me.”
I gave him yet another rueful look. “Between the cheating and the hating you, I’m not coming out of this very well, myszko.”
“What was I supposed to think? Especially after your last exhibition.”
Apparently it was my turn to be confused again. “What about my last exhibition?”
“It was—” His hands twisted anxiously in the hem of the pyjama top. “It was horrible.”
“I think you’ll find,” I drawled, instinctively on the defensive, “it was highly critically acclaimed.”
Edwin nodded. “I know. I d-don’t mean it wasn’t good.”
“Apart from the bit where you called it horrible?”
His hands kept twisting. “It was so angry, Marius. And ugly.”
“Art is more than beauty.”
“I know that too.”
A shiver of unease crawled up my spine. There always came a point that my previous work felt like looking through a window at someone I used to be. But with that last collaboration? While I’d been pleased by the response and how quickly the pieces had been swept into collections, it was more like watching a stranger, wondering what he had felt and how. As if the very thread of my being had snapped and then snapped again, leaving no coherent trajectory to guide me from pastto present to future. Was it John Donne who had said no man was an island? I was nothing but islands, floating lost upon an unmapped sea.
“Not everything I do is beautiful,” I said finally, having failed even to convince myself.
“It felt different, though.” Edwin paused, his teeth digging into his lower lip. “Like it was all you could see w-when you used to see so much. When your art used to be so full. I kept w-wondering w-what I’d done to you.”
This was almost worse than our breakup. I’d been too numb, too shattered then for much to reach me. But this, this was a chisel set to already weakened stone. And I was going to shatter all over again. “Jesus, Edwin. You didn’t do anything to me.”
