Read Online The Green Road by Anne Enright - Free Book Online Page B

young man with a cute accent and a terrific eye. By Christmastime, he was dashing over to photo shoots with emergency Manolos, he was bringing boxes to clients in their homes. Some of these clients tried to sleep with him. All of them were rich, and most of them were men.
    The first time it happened, Dan was kneeling at the feet of a sixty-year-old multimillionaire in a penthouse just around the corner on Central Park South. He was lacing up a pair of chocolate brown brogues over his skinny ankles and grey silk socks, when the guy said, ‘Ireland, eh?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Dan, as the multimillionaire settled his crotch an inch or two higher in the large white chair.
    ‘I had a wonderful young friend once who was Irish. Where are you from?’
    ‘I’m from County Clare.’
    ‘Well, that’s where he was from. Isn’t that a coincidence?’
    ‘Yes, that is a coincidence,’ said Dan.
    ‘He was a marvellous young man.’
    The picture windows looked over Central Park and Sixth Avenue. The floor was white, the furniture was white, and the old man’s dick, in the middle of this great panorama, seemed both intriguing and sad. This is the flesh, Dan thought as he pulled the laces tight, in which such money is contained.
    And Dan forgot for a moment that he was a spoilt priest and English literature graduate with plans to go home, after his year abroad, to do a master’s in librarianship. He forgot that he was a shoe salesman, or a barman, or even an immigrant. For a moment Dan was an open space, surrounded by a different future to the one he had brought in through the door.
    He said, ‘I think this is your size. I think this is you.’
    Dan joked with Isabelle about the multimillionaire, but mostly he did not mention the men who caught his eye or gave him things, in the bar or on the street. He told her he was desperate to get out of shoe sales, but he did not tell her he had sensed some new ambition in himself while she trudged on, teaching English as a foreign language, not writing her novel. Isabelle wondered if postgraduate work was the answer to the feeling she had of getting nowhere – not in this town, but with herself. Dan wanted to tell her that herself was not the project any more. This was New York: the answer was all around her, for God’s sake, not inside her head.
    Dan kept his eyes open, now. He noticed people’s desire. He got a job with a fashion photographer, humping gear around Manhattan. He spent his days carting tripods and bags, getting yelled at, getting cold, running for miso soup, running for hard boiled eggs, black coffee, Tabasco, very dry champagne. The pay was less, but you would not think it to look at Dan, who attracted sample size jackets and many invitations by being very open and a little bit wry. Dan was always surprised by things, but never shocked. And he never put out.
    This was the man that Billy fell for, four years later, by which time, Dan was moving into the fine art scene. Billy fell for a man who was discarding his former self before he had found a new one, a man who dabbled in guy sex but who still loved his girlfriend. He fell for a liar and a believer, though what Dan believed in was always hard to say.
    So pale and ethereal when he arrived, by the end of the summer we thought there was something freakish about Dan: this very ascetic head, with proud – savage, almost – cheekbones. He looked liked the wrath of God, Billy told him once, when the light was right. And Dan laughed and said, ‘You have no idea.’
    If Fire Island was an aberration, then it would be his last because Isabelle was about to finish up in Boston, she would be back in New York at the end of July. When the boys came back to the city they had ten days to kiss and part, which should have been enough, because Billy liked to keep moving and Dan wasn’t gay, he was just very visual. In those ten days, they did it all: they found a perfect coffee place off Christopher Street, and a wine bar on