Why I never told Earl I was seeing the Regular I didn’t know, but there was a peculiar pleasure if Earl mentioned having gone to see Bob when I dropped by for a movie. It gave me, I suppose, a sense of superiority, the one the comparatively young feel over the old. I felt stronger than Earl—still in the midst of life; as Helen Gurley Brown said, it’s having sex that separates the women from the girls. The feeling was especially keen when I went to see a movie at Earl’s after driving back from the Regular’s. Is this not the room of a shut-in, I’d wonder when I entered the music room; isn’t the air stale and way too warm? Is it not creepy the way the vertical blinds at the end of the room are always closed, blocking out the view of the lake; is there not something pathetic about the fact that the lamp is always on, something unhealthy about indoor life—and something obviously obsessive about this constantly growing pile of movies? I never knew how many shows Earl had watched already when I arrived in the evening; sometimes he’d refer to a film he’d seen that afternoon, which he’d liked so much he wanted to run it again for me—the way the Regular would sometimes remark, when I arrived for sex, that he’d already masturbated twice that morning.

  The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going. That was what Bess had meant for me and my mother when we’d gone on Sunday to visit her. Bess was leading, in her eighties, a life so sedentary she might as well have been paralyzed too, though real life makes a mockery of such a simile. But the fact that Bess was always there playing solitaire on her TV table in a muumuu and a wig had been something that gave stability to our lives; one could no more imagine her dying than one could Queen Elizabeth—till she sat up in bed one morning while her maid washed her face, gasped, and at the age of ninety-two gave up the ghost.

  By the time Earl turned eighty-six even his garbage was shrinking, I noticed when I opened the bin outside his kitchen door to toss the litter I’d picked up while walking across the lake bed. The garbage bin contained so little, no matter what day of the week it was, that I had no trouble finding space for the beer cans, beer bottles, Mylar party balloons, and McDonald’s wrappers people had tossed on the ground. When he was feeling well Earl had always spent his mornings seated on one of the kitchen stools going through papers, having tea, and listening to the radio. But since he now had to lie on his bed to relieve the pain, the kitchen was empty when I peered through the glass pane in the Dutch door to the kitchen, and the silence was, you might say, that of the grave. If the door was locked, I’d feel rebuked; if it was open, I’d slip inside and then walk down to his bedroom through that long series of pine-paneled rooms with the olive-green carpet from which chunks were missing, never sure what I was walking to.

  I began hoping the handyman would be working in the carport when I got there, replacing the wooden ceiling with aluminum, or trying out shades of paint on the wall, since Earl had decided to have his house painted as well to make it more attractive when he put it on the market, which was the only way I could make myself have anything repaired: pretend I was fixing the house up for sale. Earl had decided to paint his yellow; a good choice, I thought, till Clark remarked that only a homosexual in a small town would choose that color.

  The desire to remain in one’s house, no matter what the color, made the idea of selling the place a fiction; the only real reason I could think of for the paint job was that Earl needed to keep the handyman occupied so that he would stay with him. Whatever the reason, he had succeeded. He had been able to stay in his own house—a desire so fundamental to living things that whenever I’d find a cockroach I couldn’t kill, and use a broom to push it outside, and watch it scuttle away, I’d think: A moment ago you were an indoor cockroach, you had a home, with all its rooms and protection and familiarity. Now you’re an outdoor cockroach who has to fend for itself.

  Because Earl could no longer drive me to the Gainesville airport, where I could rent a car, and because I felt ridiculous sitting in the back seat of a black town car while someone in uniform drove me to Jacksonville for more than the cost of the plane ticket, I started driving myself to the airport. I’d mention to Earl when the movie was done that I was going up north for a few weeks, he’d wish me a good trip, and the next morning I’d leave town. At the airport I’d leave my car in an outdoor parking lot, where it was waiting for me when I returned, sometimes with a dead battery, once with a snake’s nest in the air-conditioning system, and drive home by retracing the route that I had long ago driven with my father. I never stayed away more than a month, given the fact that the car was sitting outdoors and the mail had to be picked up and the lawn mown. And once I was back I let a few days go by before visiting Earl, in part because I did not want to appear clinging, and in part because I assumed he could not have changed much in four weeks. And indeed, he was still home watching movies. But one evening after returning, I noticed on my nightly walk that the lights in his house had assumed a different pattern. Instead of the glow around the front door, produced by the lamp in the foyer, there was only a strange blue light emanating at a slant from the hallway to his bedroom. At first I thought it must be the screen of some gigantic new TV he’d finally installed in front of his bed, but the next evening when I walked down to peer inside I realized that what I thought was a TV screen was merely a patch of wall illumined by a lamp with, evidently, a blue bulb. The explanation came a few days later when I dropped in and was shown the new coat of paint the handyman had put on his bedroom walls—a pale blue-green that made the room more cheerful. He had even fixed up the little alcove between the bedroom and the sliding glass doors that looked out on the lake, an alcove just big enough for a high-backed chair, table, and lamp, and had hung all the paintings of dogs that Earl had been keeping in a storeroom across the hall. It was something a decorator might do, using the client’s own possessions, bringing his treasures out of storage. The light, Earl explained, came from the lamp in which he’d inserted a blue bulb, the old-fashioned kind, because the new longer-lasting ones, with their twisting white coils, made him dizzy.

  When I walked over to the alcove and looked at the chair and shelves of books, all I could think was: What a perfect place to die, with a book and a dog at your feet! But all I said was: “So this is where you read.”

  “When I can stay awake,” he laughed.

  A nice way to be sent off, I thought, in a cozy alcove of one’s bedroom—to fall asleep on an autumn evening reading with your dog at your feet. But it was sentimental to imagine Earl departing this earth that way, I reflected as I walked home. He might very well die while reading about the Civil War in his high-backed chair with the dog at his feet—and he might not. There was no way of knowing; he was not going to let me in on the process. I had found another version of my father: a man who kept his distance.

  I always let a few days go by without making any contact with Earl after I returned from Washington to maintain the illusion that we had no claim on one another, that there was no reason I should report to him that I was back. Yet he was one of the things that made it possible for me to live in both places: knowing that he’d be there when I returned. In Washington I had friends with whom I could take walks, see movies, and go to restaurants. There were museums and lectures and bike trails and concerts, and other people on the sidewalk. In Florida there was never anybody when I took my walk. One day in a bookstore in DC I found myself in an aisle of travel books, and I took down a Fodor’s guide to Florida to see what it had to say about the town Earl and I lived in. There was no reason to think it would be mentioned at all; the only time the town had ever made the news was the second year after we moved there, when a sinkhole opened up in Lake of the Palms, and that sinkhole had been eclipsed the following week by one in Orlando that swallowed up an entire Mercedes-Benz dealership. But, to my surprise, the town was in Fodor’s, though all it said was that it was in the “lake-and-hill” country of Florida, and the only thing it mentioned under Attractions was the state park six miles out of town.

  That was why I always glanced at Earl’s house when I took my walk at night to reassure myself that he was watching television: had I written the entry in Fodor’s, Earl would have been the main attraction. So it disturbed me, the week I was shown the bedroom the handyman had redecorated, that the people in the films Earl was watching when I walked down to the front door and peered through the vertical panes of glass were all Nazis. Maybe that’s what everybody wants to see when they’re reaching the end, I thought, the collapse of the entire world. Perhaps that’s what death is, as far as the person dying is concerned: a supreme insult to the ego, a narcissistic wound beyond compare—Hitler in his bunker. “If I must die, you’re all coming with me!” must be what young men who shoot up malls, movie theaters, kindergartens, and nightclubs and then turn the gun on themselves think as well. But the next day the Nazis gave way to soldiers in nineteenth-century uniforms and a man I finally realized was Napoleon, and then to Winston Churchill. He was watching great men, the way I devoured biographies, which are, in a way, just long obituaries, to see what people who had done something with their lives had accomplished. And then Churchill was replaced by Hercule Poirot.

  Hercule Poirot had been, like Miss Marple, something Earl had always invited me over to see, but that wasn’t what made me feel left out the evenings I peered through the little panes of glass. It was the stillness of the figure sitting there, the way his body was slumped in the chair, that made me realize Earl was so done in by age and illness that I couldn’t really expect him to call. He exuded even with his back to me a broken-down quality. Earl was collapsing, like a star; he was going to fall silent, like a satellite so far out in space its signals can no longer reach the earth. He was traveling to another planet. And the person communicating with him was not some NASA technician in Houston; it was the handyman. They were the ones making this trip together; their symbiosis was complete. When I ran into Ray one day at the post office he told me that Earl had floated the idea of leaving his house to the handyman, though Ray didn’t think he would. “I think he’s dangling the possibility—the way you hold a treat out to a dog—so John won’t leave him.” Whatever the explanation, it was Earl and the handyman now; I was, no matter how much Earl meant to me, essentially irrelevant.

  And that explained the fact that each day I walked by the house I noticed some new improvement the handyman had made; there was even a new outdoor barbecue grill, something I was sure Earl had never wanted and certainly would never use. It was like the scene in Zorba the Greek when Lila Kedrova dies and all the women in black robes descend on her little house and strip it bare, like vultures. Earl’s house was waxing as he was waning. There could be only one reason: the handyman was improving the house because he expected to inherit it. My own I continued to let deteriorate. The white paint on the exterior was turning green; there was mildew on the garage, and patches on the house itself where shade had enabled algae to grow. The yard was so full of volunteers—ferns, camphor trees, floral Ardisia, grapevines, cherry laurels, Spanish bayonet, cabbage palms—that they were taking over. In the morning I’d sit on the porch and watch the light enter the garden and then walk out into the yard to examine its contents like a nurse checking on her patients. The real chores—the mildew, the leak in the garage roof, the warped screens, the dripping faucets, the windows that did not close—I ignored.

  On one of my sister’s visits she made a remark one day that distinguished between “cleaning” and “deep cleaning”—the latter, I gathered, even in her own experience, was rare, but was the only thing she really respected. As the years passed I assumed she knew what was happening to the house in Florida—but when she and my brother-in-law began wintering near Fort Myers, and would stop by on their drive down because it was difficult to find motels that would accept a dog, she’d refrain from showing her feelings about the place, simply, I sensed, because it was too deep a subject to go into. “Just hire someone,” she said as she got in the car to continue her journey one year, “and pay them two hundred dollars to really clean the place.”

  When I went north at Christmas I entered a house that was so pleasant that after she and her husband went to bed, I’d stay downstairs just to watch the fire burning down beside the Christmas tree, alone with the ghosts of our family. My sister’s house was filled with possessions too, but they were things she’d acquired; the only remnants of the past were a few figurines in the dining room and some Delft plates on the wall above the television—until Christmas Day, when she, her husband, their children and their spouses, a cousin of my brother-in-law who had Tourette’s syndrome, and various other orphans like myself gathered for a dinner that entailed the most revered heirloom of all.

  At some point on the morning of December 24, my sister would say, “Would you do me a favor, please, and get the silver,” whereupon I’d go downstairs into a chilly basement room crowded with the weight-lifting equipment her two sons had used when they were teenagers and pull out, from a stack of luggage, a small red leather carrying case that had once contained my mother’s cosmetics.

  The case, like the suitcases next to it, was still festooned with the luggage tags that the shipping line on which we’d returned every two years from the Caribbean when I was growing up had attached, each one bearing the passenger’s name and cabin number. The luggage tags would plunge me into a vat of depression. Oh for those days, I’d think, when we were traveling by ship to this country of which I’d dreamed from afar! And then, feeling lonely in the chilly room with nothing but nostalgia for company, I’d rouse myself and take the case that now contained twelve place settings by Georg Jensen up the stairs into the dining room, where my sister waited, as she did every year, to examine the silverware nestled in layers separated by pieces of dark brown cloth.

  These were things my sister used but once a year: finger bowls, cheese knives, strange tongs, and little silver saltcellars with filigreed rims and basins of midnight blue. The two of us would sit there examining each piece, mumbling, every now and then, “What do you suppose this is for?” We’re like refugees, I’d think, who’ve had to flee their homes in a time of war, carrying with them only the most precious things, the family treasure that has been handed down from one generation to another; and then I’d set the table.

  When the meal was over on Christmas Day the kids washed the dishes while the grown-ups (though by that time “the kids” were married with children of their own; I should say the elderly) remained at the table finishing the wine and pecan pie, and the next day, when I went downstairs for breakfast, the first thing my sister said to me was always, “We’ve got to count the silver.” The reason was not any criminal proclivity on the part of the guests, but the dishwasher and the garbage disposal the “kids” had used the night before, down which all sorts of things could disappear. And so once more we went through the Georg Jensen in which her children had no interest until each fork, knife, tong, saltcellar, and tiny spoon was laid out and counted, and only then was it all put back into the carrying case and taken downstairs for yet another year. And that was the moment when I bonded most with my sister; survivors of a family, of a place, that no longer existed—because after the refinery for which our father had worked had been sold to another company, the community built to house its workers had literally been torn down.

  After their dog died, my sister and brother-in-law began flying to Florida every January, which meant they stopped spending a night in the town that she always thought had been my parents’ greatest mistake; they flew right over it on their way to a golf course east of Fort Myers, and I became the brother who lived alone in a house with the nagging guilt that lies beneath so many gay men’s psyches over not having continued the family line, even on a planet with eight billion people. My sister, so rebellious when growing up, had been the one to do that, though she too had strayed from the Church, and when she said one day apropos of something I forget that she’d been thinking she would like a Catholic funeral, I said, “Then you’d better pick a parish now, and start going to Mass.”

  Sometimes even when it was very cold I would take a walk around my sister’s neighborhood. She no more knew her neighbors than I did, including the dentist who lived just across a hedge in her backyard all by himself, a man I never saw in all the years I went there. There was a genuine recluse next door who’d inherited the house from his parents, though that was not quite the story—after his mother died, his father had been revealed to have a mistress, and he abandoned the house to his censorious son, who now lived in his old room in the basement, and whom I never saw either. When I took my walk through the cul-de-sac behind her house, lined with houses in various faux styles—Georgian, Colonial, Mount Vernon—most were bright with Christmas lights, though not a soul was to be seen. The ones that were dark belonged to people who were retired, my sister said, their kids long ago moved away; the parents were playing golf in either Florida or Arizona. Down the street in front of my sister’s house was a lovely cemetery set on the slope of a hill from which I could survey the countryside where George Washington had been stationed when Fort Pitt was the western frontier, a landscape of dark hills now sparkling with the lights of shopping malls, outlet stores, and office buildings. How few years, I’d think, it had taken the country to go from the young George Washington to Home Depot and Cinemax, but there it all was, glowing in the night as I walked slowly around the cemetery on a road that circled the gravestones, some of which I’d stop to read, during the day at least, to see the dates they had lived. Often around Christmas relatives and descendants would drive in and leave flowers on the graves, and then, after a few moments of contemplation, drive away. There was even a separate cemetery in the back that I discovered by accident one day composed entirely of Jewish grave markers, taller, more somber, more ancient-looking than the rest, if only because of the different lettering.