Lord, Stephen's off on one. I don't think he's drawn breath yet. Funny, you forget what good company people can be - or you assume that you've changed, or that they have, and that young-man rapture is a lost land, like the energy and the naïvety and the furnace lust and the late sweet sleeping. You think you're all grown-up now and everything's mediated, everything's contingent, there's no room left for what used to be simple and direct and obvious. Like Stephen.
No, that's not fair. He's as nuanced as the rest of us, he always was. No one even starts out organic, pure soap to the last bubble, the earthy singularity of boy. We're all adulterated. And by the time you've watched a deep friend die - and done more than watch, done better, held his hand and changed his sheets and managed his drips and fed him any pap that he could swallow, two days a week and every week for the year that it took him to let go - then I guess you're as complex as the next man. Which in this case, where Stephen's sitting that would be Gerard, unless it's Micky; but Micky's unravelling, getting simpler by the day, death does that to a man, just the way that life does the other thing. And Gerard had it harder than the rest of us, every day of every week and dealing with it ever since. He's changed what he can, but Quin's pictures are still up here, and Quin's books. That's got to have an impact, living within the compass of a dead man's tastes, his strictures, his credo. Say that Gerard's more complex, then, and Micky is less; you could take an average, the two next men, and still pretty much come out with Stephen. However much he likes to hide it, that index of involvement.
And I still like Stephen, and I had forgotten, or I'd chosen to let it go; and I guess I'm grateful to Gerard for bringing it back to me, as much as I'm grateful to Stephen for rabbiting on like this, if only because it lets me sit here being deep and complex on my own account.