Page 26 of Pansies

“Yeah, but you see what I mean? You like it?” There was something about wine—as uncomfortable as he was with his interest in it—that made Alfie anxious about other people’s approval. Their enjoyment was somehow important to his own. He’d snuck off to a fancy wine tasting once, and the wine itself had been some of the best he’d ever tasted, but it had been infinitely less fun without Greg’s wild guesses (“raspberry, no, plum, no, cinnamon, no, motor oil”) and his eventual, giggling capitulation to whatever Alfie said (“Okay, okay, it does have a velvety finish—and you know what else has a velvety finish?”).

“Yes, Alfie, I like it.” There was something a bit soft in Greg’s voice now. “In my clueless way, I can tell this is a good wine you’re wasting on me.”

“One of the best merlots of 2007. And I’m not wasting it, I’m sharing it.”

“God, you’re sweet sometimes.” Greg slanted a smile at him.

Given what had happened earlier that evening, given, for that matter, the way their relationship had ended, amicably but a bit weirdly, Alfie didn’t know how to tell Greg how much he liked this. How much he missed it. Just the simple stuff. Thetalking and the quiet. So he shrugged instead. “I shouldn’t have flipped out.”

“Sometimes I…I worry you mean it.”

“You what?”

“That you”—Greg was paying a lot of attention to his wine, and Alfie didn’t think he was assessing its viscosity—“believe I’m some kind of flighty man-slut.”

There was a long silence.

“Oh God, you do.”

“No, I don’t. I, you know, I admire it.”

Apparently, Greg was not reassured. “Youadmirethat I’m a flighty man-slut?”

“Just,” Alfie explained hastily, “you know what you want and you don’t let what other people think mess with your head. For me, I guess…” He found he was staring into his glass too. The wine was a deep, dark ruby; the light fell into it and drowned. “I guess I feel things should be a certain way.”

“What do you mean?”

The truth was, Alfie didn’t a hundred percent know what he meant. Or rather, he did, but he didn’t know how to put it into words that Greg wouldn’t pull apart like a kitten with a ball of wool. “That life should be a certain way.”

“And you don’t think,” Greg asked predictably, because they’d had this conversation before, and more than once, “part of the reason those kinds of ideas feel so real and important to you is because they’re culturally constructed?”2

“Yeah yeah, I know. I’m a sad victim of perfunctory heteronormativ—what? What are you smirking about?”

“Nothing.” Greg was still smirking.

“What did I say?”

“Nothing. You said it exactly right.”

Leaning forward, Alfie topped up his glass. “Doesn’t change the fact my best mate from school got married last Saturday, and I’m sitting here on a sofa I don’t like getting wankered with my ex-boyfriend.”

“Life isn’t a race to socially significant events.” Greg sounded somewhere between sympathetic and exasperated. But then, a lot of wine had been drunk on this sofa. Usually as a prelude to something more mutually satisfying than Alfie’s whining. “It’s not… Oh, what’s the name of the board game where you’re like in this car and you get little pegs to represent your plastic kids and your, forgive me a heterosexist shudder, plastic wife?”

“The Game of Life, you divvy.”

Now Greg actually shuddered. “God, yes, the most boring game in the universe.”

“What, you mean because you can’t drive off the board to get a blowjob from a trucker?”

“I’ve never had a blowjob from a trucker. Something for the bucket list. But, seriously, that game was the most depressing, normative, banal, reductive pile of crap ever produced.”

“It’s just a game.” Alfie took another drink. He felt a bit fuzzy round the edges. What was that thing of his dad’s? Beer and wine, that’s fine. Wine and beer, oh dear. He’d done it right; heshouldbe fine. Except there wasn’t space in the saying for pink peppercorn cocktails. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything that it only presents a single way to live a worthwhile life? Get an arbitrary job, get an arbitrary wife, produce arbitrary children, accumulate arbitrary possessions.”

This was annoying. Alfie should have been used to it, but somehow he wasn’t. It was easy for Greg to dismiss all this stuff because he’d probably never cared about any of it in the first place. Alfie tried to concentrate on the wine. How much he likedit. The heavy, dark taste of it, black cherries and autumn leaves, sweet and smoky. Fen had been drinking rosé in the pub. Did that mean he liked wine too? And then he found himself imagining the meeting of stained lips.

Which panicked him with its killer combination of being both vivid and inappropriate, so he blurted out in his angry voice, “You do know that for a lot of people those choices aren’t actually arbitrary, right? Like, they’re actually things they want.”

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