To my relief Earl went nowhere, I relaxed, and we resumed our shared loneliness together. I spent Christmas at my sister’s. I’m not sure what Earl did—I never thought about it. I imagine he had a peaceful day, reading and walking the dogs; I went north. On Memorial Day and Labor Day I waited for the long weekends to be over while the neighbors across the street threw parties whose guests’ cars blocked my driveway. On Thanksgiving I simply cooked the traditional meal and ate it by myself. Halloween I spent in the closet reading by flashlight. Oscar night—which to me was the most festive of all—I had to wait for the results the next morning, since Earl did not observe that one. July Fourth we spent apart. Since the fireworks went up from the public beach, there was no need to get together; we had an equally good view from our own yards.

  When my mother was alive, I’d push her wheelchair across the street to the bluff from which our neighbors’ houses had a better view of what remained of the Big Lake. Pushing a wheelchair through sand was a challenge, but when we got to the neighbor’s lawn we had our reward: everyone came up and made a fuss over her. After she died, I’d go over by myself, but secretly. I’d wait till nine o’clock to leave the house and walk over to the end of the bluff, where it was so dark I could stand unseen by the guests my neighbor had invited over. Like all July Fourth displays, the fireworks began in a tentative fashion—like the deaths of people when you are still young. By the finale, all hell would break loose—the way, in old age, everyone you know or love seems to come down with something at once. These last fireworks would explode on top of one another in a sort of orgasm—and then, when the individual flames had spiraled down to the earth and there was nothing but wisps of smoke rising into the air, the darkness you get only in a small town in the country would return. July Fourth was over. The guests along the bluff would begin to go home, and I’d go back to the house without having spoken to a soul, though I lingered behind the hedge to listen to the sound of their voices receding as they returned to their vehicles. And then, after the slamming of car doors, everyone would drive off … and leave the world to darkness and to me.

  But I have no idea what Earl did on that night. He certainly didn’t read “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” as I did after getting home. Days went by when I did not hear from or speak to him. That’s why I was always glad to come upon Earl on my nightly walk, straining at the leashes on which his dogs were pulling him, like Charlton Heston on his chariot in Ben Hur; and I was always happy when the dogs stopped to greet me while Earl and I exchanged news, though our subjects tended to be confined to the UPS deliveryman, or a sale on ice cream at the grocery store, or a new person who’d moved into the rental cottages down the street.

  One can make a life around almost any set of circumstances, and even though I’d returned to Florida because my mother had been condemned to immobility I found the years when she was alive quite happy—dinner beside her bed on Tuesdays and Thursdays as we watched Jeopardy!, a stop at the Ambush or the boat ramp on my way home, a visit from the priest each Saturday when he came to give Communion, drives around a part of Florida where forests still alternated with pecan groves, blueberry farms, and little lakes, dropping in on Earl on my way back from the post office, when he would inevitably insist I stay for tea. Tea gave Earl a chance to take down from the cabinet two mugs decorated with the figures of Adam and Eve whose private parts were revealed when the hot water caused the ceramic leaves that covered them to move aside, inducing laughter in both host and guest. At such moments I felt completely content; I’d hidden myself away from life and everything that made it brutal.

  Peace and quiet, however, breed their own forms of anxiety. Without a TV I listened to the radio, if only to hear the human voice, which on NPR was always used to recite a litany of what was wrong with the country and the world, so downbeat that I’d get very upset sometimes; but when I raised some of the issues that All Things Considered kept serving up every day—the things that made the future of the planet look so dim—Earl refused to be upset. He’d simply say, “Well, I won’t be around to see it.” It was, in a sense, a shrugging of responsibility, a kind of giving up, but I could not come up with any other solution. If one could not imagine Florida, or the planet, in a hundred years, what comfort was there but that one wouldn’t be around to deal with the mess? Even the race problem in the United States, Earl said, would eventually be solved—“by intermarriage.” After that was settled he pressed the Play button so we could watch Eleanor Powell dance with her dog in Lady Be Good.

  Those were cozy evenings in that pine-paneled library: Earl and his dogs, and, on the TV table in front of our high-backed chairs, a bowl of soup or piece of pie. One would not have wanted to be anywhere else. By the time Barack Obama became president I’d seen more films with Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck than I’d known existed, not to mention vehicles for Marjorie Main, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Ava Gardner, Dame Edith Evans, Greer Garson, and Myrna Loy. Earl had been going to the movies before I was born; he even liked silent films. In fact, the only thing catholic about him was his taste in cinema: I disliked silent movies, but he insisted I see Wings, not to mention westerns and war pictures I’d rather not have watched. He introduced me not only to a series of movies starring Ann Sothern as a character named Maisie but also to the oeuvre of an actress named Joan Leslie, who made—I learned after consulting the encyclopedia Earl left by the chair—The Great Mr. Nobody with Eddie Albert; The Wagons Roll at Night with Humphrey Bogart; The Male Animal with Henry Fonda; The Hard Way with Ida Lupino; The Sky’s the Limit with Fred Astaire; Thank Your Lucky Stars with Eddie Cantor; and Cinderella Jones with Robert Alda, none of which I’d heard of. Of course, we watched the classics too, from The Awful Truth to Roman Holiday, from High Noon to She Done Him Wrong, interspersed with Hitchcock’s Notorious, The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, The Lady Vanishes, To Catch a Thief. Some evenings, before the movie, he’d insist I watch a segment from one of his favorite television programs: Antiques Roadshow, Live from Lincoln Center, Keeping Up Appearances, or Are You Being Served?, whose effeminate British salesman especially tickled him.

  Whether we watched a movie always depended on his health: when he was having one of his periodic attacks of nausea, I did not hear from him; when he got better he’d phone to ask if I wanted to come over, though as he aged, I found myself waiting longer and longer at the kitchen door for him to let me in, watching him walk slowly down the long length of the house with his cane. In fact, sometimes during the movie I would turn to say something and find him sound asleep in the adjacent chair. When that happened I generally got up and left. But although I worried that he’d be embarrassed at nodding off in front of me, when he called the next day there was not a hint of that; he’d just apologize for having taken a nap and ask me down for another movie.

  By the time Earl was in his eighties and I was in my sixties there were evenings when I walked home from the movie wondering if my interest in him was not slightly sadistic: watching what happened when old age gets its claws in you, or at least puts you to sleep in your chair, like a man overcome with carbon monoxide in a closed garage. I was even reading a book at the time called How We Die; its theme was that death is a part of the life cycle whose final act almost always robs us of any dignity, and that all we can control is what we do with our lives—a common philosophy that has never seemed to me to counter what is still an appalling insult. Often when I walked out to the end of my driveway to put the yard trash out on the street for pickup I’d see a couple who lived at the other end of the street coming toward me on one of the twice-daily walks they took around the little park our houses surrounded. The man was a doctor who had just retired from a hospital in Jacksonville; he carried a gadget that counted the number of times he, his wife, and their son circumnavigated the park, which they did till they’d completed fourteen laps, which equaled two miles.

  The doctor looked back on the career to which he’d devoted his life with no more satisfaction than Earl had gotten from teaching. When I asked him if his career had turned out to be what he thought it would be when he studied medicine, he said, “Not at all.” The amount of paperwork, of bureaucratic tedium, had increased to the point that practicing medicine had ceased to be a pleasure; he’d spent more time working on patients’ charts than he had seeing patients. But what he regretted most were the so-called heroic measures taken at the end of life, the resuscitations—pounding on people’s chests, breaking their ribs, shocking them with electricity; there was even a machine that compressed the chest, like something in a factory—measures so repugnant that he’d often asked the families in ICU to come in and witness what the staff was doing at their behest, because almost always the families said, “Stop, no more!” But the most curious thing he told me was that when the corpse was being wheeled down to the morgue after the resuscitation had been called off and the nurses and doctors were joking with one another to relieve the tension, there would almost always be a final emission of gas from the deceased’s body, which they called the Morgue Fart, the doctor told me as we came around the bend one day, putting the final touch on How We Die.

  If the message of How We Die was “Live a good life, because you’re not going to have much control over your ending, which is not likely to be pretty,” that seemed to me like very cold comfort. Even my father, who rarely made observations about anything, had remarked one day, “Old age is hell.” Earl liked to say, with a laugh, “Don’t ever get old!” But that’s what had happened to him—and watching Earl as he sat there in his chair asleep was to feel, as I walked home, grateful that I hadn’t arrived at that point. One knew that at some point one would—and that it would be more difficult if one lived alone. But that was that. My unmarried uncle had been on his way to play golf one day when he stepped outside his apartment in Sarasota and saw a group of women putting his neighbor into a car, and when told they were taking her to an assisted-living place in Bradenton he replied, “I’ve been wondering about that myself,” upon which one of the women said, “Get in.” That he did, and the next day he was moving in himself. In other words, there would come a day when someone would inform you that you could no longer live on your own. At a certain point in life it becomes clear that the restaurant is closing; the oxygen in the coal mine is running out; the ship is about to set sail, and you’d better see the steward about getting a deck chair and a table in the dining room.

  Perhaps that was why the slightest contact with young people had started to give me such pleasure. I was always happiest when I saw my neighbors’ twentysomething son coming down the road with his father and mother. He was part of the generation that had inspired the term “snowflake,” so sensitive that he wore a bandana tied around his nose because even in the street, he claimed, he could smell the smoke from the cigarettes his neighbors puffed in their living rooms. And even though he always walked ahead of us, as if he didn’t want to be part of an age cohort not his own, eventually he’d turn around and make comments mocking the things we’d said. That was the note that cheered me: the senseless confidence, the insolence of youth. There was nothing more fun than the brief exchanges I had with cashiers and bag boys at the grocery store. The reason was simple: they were not afraid. There was no reason to be at their age. But by the time Earl began falling asleep in the middle of movies I was beginning to be obsessed with the fact that the future did not look promising. After my mother died I felt suddenly vulnerable. I was afraid of trees falling down, I was afraid the lawn mower wouldn’t start, I was afraid I’d get sick, I was afraid when the airplane hit turbulence that it was going down, I was afraid to open the mail or check the answering machine. Everything seemed menacing and redolent of death, even the rusted rowboat that had been sitting on the neighbor’s lawn like a dead turtle for forty years, as if someone still might take it out onto the lake.

  “There is no wealth but life,” said Ruskin. But life had become something fragile, unpredictable, and dangerous to me, a series of small things that could blow up in one’s face. Unable to bring myself to have someone cut down the live oaks outside my bathroom window whose roots would surely invade the septic tank, I found it equally impossible to look at my face in the mirror while shaving, because that made clear what I was—a fearful person living alone. Something was out there, stalking me, some accident with disastrous consequences waiting to happen. I was entering a new and unchartered territory, which was why I woke up so often in the dark and began thinking immediately about whatever small thing had triggered my anxiety. Sleep, I’d discovered, is, when you’re young, an express train; when you’re old it’s a local. For no reason I’d wake up when daylight was just coming into the room, as if I had to be up for something important, though I had no obligations whatsoever; and the rest of the day I was so drowsy that simply by lying down to read I would cross the line that divides sleep from waking. In other words, I’d started to take naps. I had reduced the universe to my room, my bed, my books. I could no longer deny what I was: an old man who liked to pee in his flower bed. The town was full of us, living as quietly in our houses as snakes in a hole, waiting to die, although after Earl stopped picking blueberries I still felt I had a margin of safety that Earl did not, if only because of the numbers. Friends of mine who were five, ten years younger seemed rich in a way I wasn’t. They made me think of the only honest birthday card I’ve ever received, which said, on the front, “I’m always happy on your birthday,” and inside, “Because you’re older than me!”

  There were few old people in the films Earl and I watched, although most of the performers were dead, the stars of half a century ago. I’d look them up in the encyclopedia at the base of the chair in which I sat and read their credits. About actors and their roles Earl had firm opinions, though he was never argumentative or insistent; he knew what he thought and did not care if you agreed. There were movies he liked that I did not and vice versa. La Dolce Vita, for instance, held so little interest for him that he let me take it home when we were done watching the DVD. Most of the time I let Earl lead the way. Out of politeness I’d watch a film in which I had no interest but whose pleasures he wished to share, the same way I’d listen to him describe with pride an antique he’d purchased years ago, or the career of a singer whose rendition of a Schubert song he wanted me to hear.

  Earl loved movies even more than I did, and I loved them a lot. He loved movies with dogs and ghosts, movies made from books I had never heard of that had been bestsellers in their day but were now forgotten, movies he had seen growing up. He even liked to watch cartoons. “I’m in my second childhood,” he joked when I discovered him doing this one day, embarrassed enough to blush, though there was no reason to. My father had watched cartoons before he died, which I’d considered a sign he was no longer taking anything seriously, or at least no longer participating in the world’s affairs. Earl’s favorite TV show was something called Martha the Wonder Dog, in which a dog was able to talk after eating a bowl of alphabet soup. He had other, more adolescent enthusiasms: several DVDs of Gunsmoke, all 152 episodes of Robin Hood, the complete Flash Gordon, and the entire run of Hogan’s Heroes. He watched Hogan’s Heroes over and over again, often playing an episode before the movie because he wanted me to see some bit actor he found handsome. He ordered so much through the mail that sometimes while going through the piles of new arrivals he’d realize he had ordered two copies of the same film. But he never regretted the ones he’d chosen, not even when they turned out to be stinkers, and there were, surprisingly, plenty of those.

  I had no idea Hollywood had turned out so much product until I started going down to Earl’s. But then the movie industry was just that: part of the whole manufacturing mania that had transformed the planet into one that was on its way to becoming uninhabitable. And for what? Many of the films he’d ordered were movies in which famous actors had appeared that were simply no good—Stanwyck, say, in The Bride Walks Out. In fact, the more I went there the more astonished I was at how many movies Hollywood had made with big stars that I had never heard of. Some Earl had seen as a young man in a theater in South Florida when they first came out. Others he bought because he liked the cast. Only once did he order by mistake a movie he didn’t want, a film about a boxer who had beaten his opponent to death in a fight in front of the television cameras and a live audience, a famous incident neither one of us had heard of and neither one of us wanted to watch. But that was the only thing he threw out unseen. Eventually the DVDs he meant to watch were stacked so high that he’d added to the original goal of his retirement—to read all the books in his dining room—another burden.

  So there we sat, watching cavalry charges on celluloid while the cockroaches’ corpses piled up in the room behind us, a room we did not have to take account of because one could just shut the door. The bathroom had a shower, a bathtub, two oval sinks, a large counter, a tiled floor, and lights that still worked. It would have been so much simpler for him to use it rather than have to go back to the one off the hallway to his bedroom. But it was, for some reason, like the guest cottage, never even thought of. Only the cockroaches used it, in such numbers that I began to wonder if there was some communication among them that had led them to this room—because I never encountered one anywhere else, though once when Earl had fallen asleep while watching a film the thought did cross my mind that one of the creatures might very well crawl up his arm and he would never know it.