The Weekend: A Novel by Peter Cameron Page A

fireplace with an enormous vase crowded with flowers at its center. Spread out around the vase were magazines and a few stacks of books—new books. There were five copies of Lyle’s Neo This, Neo That in their own little pile. Robert opened one and glanced through it. It was inscribed: To Granger and Derek with Love from Lyle. He looked at the photograph of Lyle in the back: Lyle was standing against the stone wall of the house, a shadow of leaves across his face. The credit was Marian Richardson Kerr. Robert put the book down.
    He looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece: there was one of John and Marian as a very beautiful bride and groom, one of John holding an ugly baby Robert assumed was Roland, one of an old lady sitting in an easy chair with two small dogs with jeweled collars poised alertly on her lap, and one of Lyle and Tony standing on a balcony, a city that looked like Paris spread out behind them. Robert took this picture down and studied it. Tony had his arm around Lyle and was looking directly at the camera;
Lyle was looking a little bit up and away. Tony’s bare wrist touched Lyle’s neck, and the cigarette he held looked about to drop its cylinder of ash on Lyle’s shoulder. Tony was very handsome. His beautiful face was muscular and intent, sculpted, and his gaze was direct but not confronting. It was seen as easily as it saw. Both Lyle and Tony were smiling. They looked happy. It was Paris, Robert noticed—a distant silhouette of the Eiffel Tower. He wondered if he would ever travel anywhere with Lyle. And then he reminded himself that was what he was doing. I am traveling with Lyle. I am here with Lyle. He put the picture carefully back on the mantel, trying to refit it to its pattern in the dust.
    I am here with Lyle.
    He climbed the back stairs and walked along the hall. He didn’t realize he was headed in the wrong direction until he passed a room where Marian sat in a rocking chair before an open window nursing Roland. They were both asleep. Roland’s mouth had slipped off Marian’s nipple but he continued to pulse his lips. Marian’s head lolled to one side and her mouth was open. Her face looked different to Robert: as if a veil of tension had been lifted, something you could not notice until it was gone. Robert watched for a moment and then turned around and walked, past the stairs, to the opposite end of the house.
    When he turned into the hall of photographs he saw that the door to the yellow room was closed. It seemed closed in a way that discouraged one from opening or knocking on it: it was the only door closed on a long hall of many doors. Trapezoids of sunlight fell through the open doors onto the wooden floor of the hall. Robert stood for a moment, wondering what to do. He looked at the wall of photographs beside him and noticed a strange thing: a space, in the middle of the wall, where a photograph had been
removed. He knew it was the photograph of Lyle and Tony in Egypt because beside it was the photograph of Lyle dressed as a pirate. Robert looked at the empty space.
    He walked down the hall and opened the door of the yellow room. The afternoon light poured, like weak honeyed tea, through the paper shades. He could hear an insect whirring and whining, batting itself against a screen. Lyle was sleeping naked, facedown, on the bed. His limbs were splayed in a way that suggested he had been dropped from the sky.
    Robert sat on the bed. He looked at Lyle. It was odd how Lyle’s body—large, hairy, white—could flicker in and out of beauty. He had been attracted to Lyle when he first saw him at Skowhegan, in an abstract, unacknowledged way. And the more he got to know Lyle, the more beautiful Lyle’s body seemed to him: this vessel for the contents that were Lyle. Now, stilled on the bed, shaking quietly with breath, it seemed like one of those sculptures smoothed from rock that insist on being touched. Lyle’s back was sweating. Robert resisted the urge to bend over and