The room I slept in at my sister’s was adjacent to the one in which our mother had tripped on the rug during the night and broken her neck, a spare bedroom where we now stored and wrapped the Christmas presents, and in it was a framed photograph of my parents taken the day the savings and loan in Florida opened, but just the two of them. Sometimes when there was no one upstairs I’d sit down on the bed and talk to the photograph and bring my parents up to date on what had happened to their children and grandchildren since the previous year: breast implants, graduation, things like that. It was slightly eerie but deeply satisfying. In Florida I never spoke to them, perhaps because we had to live together in the same house, but in the spare bedroom, the one in which we wrapped the Christmas presents, I found it perfectly normal for the three of us to have a chat.

  After Christmas I took the bus back to Washington, and then a week later I returned to Florida. One year on the flight back to Jacksonville I sat beside a beautiful young woman with a shaved head who told me she’d just completed cancer treatment; her husband was driving down to Florida and would meet her in the Jacksonville airport. As we talked I kept thinking of the husband, thirty-nine thousand feet beneath us, driving to get to the airport before our plane landed, but when we got to Jacksonville I never saw the reunion. She walked away without even saying goodbye—one of those strange American experiences in which people divulge the most intimate things to perfect strangers and then vanish back into their lives—and though I looked for them in the terminal I never saw them.

  There is no feeling more vacant than walking past the people in an airport who are waiting to see their friends or relatives emerge from the corridor leading to the gates. The loneliness is exquisite. One night we arrived during a storm, and as the plane taxied to the terminal I saw through the little window an enormous passenger jet sitting empty beside the terminal, the rain streaming down its shining silver fuselage, like a beast left out in the rain, its windows all dark. It looked as dead, as forlorn, as I felt landing at that late hour, a feeling that was relieved only when I’d been dropped off at my car in the long-term parking lot, afraid the engine would not start. Then, when it did, I drove to the exit, where the woman who told me how much I owed welcomed me home—with a complimentary bottle of spring water that only reminded me of the scandalous fact that the state of Florida for some reason allows companies like Nestlé to extract from its glorious springs millions of gallons they then sell in plastic bottles that are yet another ecological disaster for the planet. In some way the woman in the booth—the person who welcomed me back to Florida—had become over the years, I sometimes thought, my best friend; though one time on my way home from Washington I walked off the plane and there was Patrick sitting in the departure lounge, reading a novel by Nancy Mitford as he waited to get on the plane I’d just exited so he could fly back to DC, because in those days JetBlue had a direct flight that departed at eight-thirty, though the year after I ran into Patrick in the terminal it dropped that connection—not even airline schedules remain the same.

  When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I’d want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?

  Patrick was converting to Judaism and told me that on Yom Kippur he prayed now to be enlisted in the book of the living for another year—a beautiful way to think of life—but when I told him how neat and clean and comfortable my sister’s house was compared to my own he was more down-to-earth. “The way to clean your house is simple,” he said. “Pretend you’re dead. Pretend you’re your nephew when he walks into your bedroom a week after you die, and looks around at the books and papers and heaps of sweaters and then goes into the closet and finds the cardboard box full of letters from dead friends and the plastic garbage bag with the back issues of Mandate and Honcho. That’s what he’ll have to deal with, if you don’t. So just pretend you’re dead and get rid of everything.”

  But I couldn’t; that would have disturbed the fine patina of memory.

  I never knew what Earl did on Christmas after his cousin died. Perhaps he had the woman who lived next door over for eggnog. But now, because of the handyman, his house looked spic-and-span—whereas I continued to find frogs in the hall and help them hop outside, or when they were trapped in a dust ball—unable to move—carry them out to the back porch, rinse them with a glass of water, pull the wet dust off their bodies, and watch them hop off into the hedge. Or I’d sit on the porch watching the lizards that clung to the porch screens lying in wait for insects I couldn’t see, their red throat sacs ballooning each time they swallowed one. And I continued to go once a week to the nursery to buy more plants that would provide either food for butterflies or leaves on which they could lay their eggs, like Earl ordering more DVDs.

  At least Earl’s leaving a neat house after he dies, I thought when I saw the results of the handyman’s diligence. I was not. When I woke up in the middle of the night, scratching my ankles till they bled because the chiggers I’d picked up in the yard were sucking my blood, I’d think: You are simply going to be surprised one day, as your father was while doing his taxes, by a stroke—a stroke that will let you know that your time is up, like the angel announcing a child to the Blessed Virgin. There will be no time to arrange your affairs or clean up your mess, or get rid of the garbage bag filled with porn magazines in your closet; you’ll simply have to go. But who will take you to the hospital? At this point all I wanted was a driver and I couldn’t even find that. “Why can’t you go to Venice by yourself?” Earl asked when I voiced this fantasy one evening after watching Summertime. “Because,” I said, “no matter how nice your day, there comes that awful moment when you have to go to dinner, when you want someone to talk to about what you saw and did, but instead you’re sitting by yourself at a table in a corner the restaurant uses for people who eat by themselves with your guidebook propped up against the saltshaker. The reason I envy people who are married is that they have someone to travel with.”

  I had entered the stage of life when no one knew where I was, when friends had begun asking me for my sister’s phone number so they could call her if I didn’t answer the phone, though my sister didn’t know where I was either, since I went back and forth when I wanted between Washington and Florida. I had achieved the bliss, the nightmare, of total independence. I hope he collapsed in a public place, was all I could think when Earl told me one evening that an old friend with whom he’d taught school had just died of a heart attack in Arizona. When I went to see Earl I’d open the kitchen door, tiptoe down to the opposite end of the house, and, not seeing him anywhere, conclude that what Henry James may have called “the great, the distinguished thing” had finally happened. And then one afternoon in late July I walked into the bedroom and found what I’d been waiting for all these months—Earl’s corpse. Eyes closed, face gaunt, he looked just like a knight lying on a stone sepulcher in a medieval church I’d visited in Lisbon. An expression of such refined forbearance was on his face that I was sure he had died in pain, at which point his eyes opened, his head turned slightly, and I heard him say, in a perfectly pleasant voice, “Well, how do you do?” And I sat down in the chair beside the bed and learned that he was simply having one of his “bad days” because he hadn’t eaten the gingerroot in time.

  The next day I was even asked down for a movie, and when I walked in, the handyman was in the kitchen preparing two attractive Mexican-tiled trays with tomato soup and crackers so we could eat dinner while we watched, and once I was seated in the music room he walked in with our suppers on the trays, and, like two nine-year-olds whose parent is waiting on them as a treat during a sleepover, we unfolded our napkins and began to watch I Was a Male War Bride.

  Earl had finally stopped making those little drives he once had to visit friends, though Ray still dropped in once a week with a dessert or hot meal; the slice of pecan pie I ate was often courtesy of the Church of the Nazarene. Ray I’d have liked to talk to at length about Earl but our visits rarely coincided. All I saw when I drove through town in the evening after a trip to the grocery store was the handyman standing on the sidewalk reading a folded newspaper under a streetlight, absorbing more evidence for his judgmental views while the dog sniffed the hedges. But Earl was invisible. He was merely the flash of a TV screen in a dark house I passed on my nightly stroll, or the figure in a chair when I walked down the slope and peered in through the front door to see what he was watching.

  The feeling I had when I saw Earl watching television without me—as hurt as a spurned lover—was no more rational than the one I had whenever I saw that his car was missing, as if I should have been informed that he was going somewhere. But there was nothing to do but accept the new status quo: Earl was withdrawing, the way old people do, if they are lucky enough to remain in their own homes rather than in a wheelchair in front of a television in some nursing home. When I complained to Patrick that Earl had stopped calling, stopped going out, stopped asking me over, he fixed me with his enigmatic stare and said, “He’s dying,” as if I were an idiot not to recognize that fundamental fact. But I knew better. By the end of July, however, it was just a movie on Saturday night, if he was feeling well enough, and on those occasions we hardly conversed before or after. I couldn’t think of anything to talk about, and he seemed to have no interest in anything but the movie we were about to see. Nothing seemed to matter to him. One day, when I asked what the best time to visit was, he waved one of his gaunt hands freckled with age spots and said, “Oh, just come whenever you want.”

  But the house was always dark now—or so I thought, till one evening while walking home from the post office I saw through the camellia bushes that the two windows on the east side of the music room were aglow, though the lamp on the hall table was off. He’s hiding from me, I concluded, the way I hid every Halloween when I drew the curtains to make trick-or-treaters think there was nobody home.

  That Earl was happy to watch movies without me felt like rejection. If you’re not going to die, I thought, then you should at least ask me over. But by the end of July, when I thought he must be near death because the house had been dark five nights in a row and I called to ask how he felt, I heard him reply in a voice that sounded perfectly normal that he’d driven to the grocery store that afternoon, where he urged me to go because strawberries were on sale for a dollar ninety-eight. Then, as if reminded of my existence, he asked me over for a movie the next day and served me some rich dessert I’d never have eaten on my own, and when I got there, I saw that he’d let his hair grow long and was combing it straight back from his forehead, so that he looked like a European film director, or George Sanders in All About Eve.

  I’d been imitating George Sanders’s nasal drone as the camera pans around the people at the Sarah Siddons Awards when I trudged through the soaked air and biting flies on the lake bed on my morning walk. Only Sanders saying “Eve, dear Eve…” I was convinced could dispel the heat in which we were trapped. A normal person would simply have gotten a DVD of the movie, but I had come to rely on Earl. Earl, at eighty-six, was the boy I had befriended when I was seven, a boy with a vast collection of comic books I’d read when I went to see him, till one day he accused me of coming by only for his deluxe edition of Peter Pan. But that wasn’t it. I had no desire to watch All About Eve by myself. I had no idea how Earl could watch all the movies he did on his own, unless he was already participating in the afterlife, an afterlife in which everyone would simply be left with a TV and a stack of DVDs.

  There was nobody out in the afternoon; everyone was indoors, in central air-conditioning, or under a ceiling fan—except the man the town was paying to sit in a chair at the entrance to the public beach and collect one dollar from everyone who wished to use it whom I passed on my way to the post office. At night things were more interesting. I was beginning to notice on my walks at night a handsome young man who was always in a hooded sweatshirt sitting outside the pizza restaurant on the main street when I walked back from the post office after the restaurant had closed. He seemed to be waiting for me, like the figure stalking Dirk Bogarde as he walks around the plague-ridden city in Death in Venice. I had no idea what he was doing there. He had a dark beard and looked like Jesus. Then one night as I was walking by he stood up and held out his hand, offering me something. I walked over and asked him what it was. “Candy,” he said.

  “Hard or soft?” I asked.

  “Hard,” he said, at which point I shook my head, thanked him, and walked on.

  He must be damaged in some way, I concluded as I walked home—who else would sit by himself in a hoodie in August outside a shut-up pizza restaurant in a small town in Florida for hours every night, and then offer a piece of candy to a passing stranger? At the same time, I felt I’d rebuffed another solitary person’s friendship. Whatever the reason I let him recede in my wake, rejected and unhelped, like the only other homosexual in town when we first moved here who asked me for places to go in Greenwich Village. A few nights after that I noticed, in the little street between the pizza restaurant and the bank, a tall, bald man hanging around for no apparent reason and wondered what he was doing till the following evening I saw a little car pull up beside him and he got in. Someone ordered drugs, I decided, and came to pick them up. But after Jesus and the bald man disappeared I had the town to myself.

  By day the town was another matter—I went out only for groceries or a book at the library. Sometimes I’d see Earl when I drove by standing just outside his carport letting the dog eat grass. One morning when the handyman had taken his son to the doctor Earl asked me if I would drive him over to see Mrs. Hadid, whom he’d befriended when both of them were going to the Methodist church. I’d been going over there to walk her dog, and when I arrived I usually found her watching movies too. She loved Turner Classic Movies. Wallace Beery, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Veronica Lake were often in her bedroom when I arrived. John Wayne was her favorite. Visiting her was a bit like visiting Earl; one never knew when one approached the house what one would find inside. If the front door was closed I had to walk around the house to peer through the sliding glass doors on the back terrace to see if she was home, since she was too hard of hearing to hear the doorbell. If she was, she’d wave to me from her bed, meaning the front door was open, and I’d go back around to the front. Sometimes I’d find her parked in her wheelchair behind the front door, which was half glass, looking out at the front walk. It was never clear whether she was waiting for someone she knew was coming or simply hoping someone might appear. However I found her, she was glad to have a visitor. First she’d apologize for not having her teeth in, and then we’d go out into the living room, where she’d have me pour each of us a glass of white wine, which she said lessened the pain and improved her hearing and eyesight, which was being compromised by macular degeneration, while the little dog, a Chihuahua she’d adopted the day I drove her over to the county pound, burrowed beneath its blanket on the couch, until I took him for a walk.

  The man in charge of the nursery who hired nothing but handsome young men and made sure Mrs. Hadid’s lawn was perfect told me one day, “That dog has never been walked!” which, if that was true, made me feel glad to liberate the animal. The irony was that Mrs. Hadid was being attended to by gay men: her hairdresser, who took her every year to the Mayor’s Ball out at the town airport; the nursery manager who kept her yard up; her own son, who still worked in Washington and was paying all the bills; and me. Mrs. Hadid held the same opinion of President Obama that Earl did; they listened to the same radio shows. But she was always hospitable and a source of gossip about the town, though the people and places she talked about were all new to me, since, like her little dog, I was living, as far as the actual town was concerned, under a blanket too.

  Like Earl, Mrs. Hadid provided a stark contrast with her dwelling. Her yard was immaculate—not a brown blade of grass, or leaf on a hedge—but she herself was in decline; her hip was so bad she required a walker, her eyesight was shrinking, and congestive heart failure had made it necessary for her to keep a portable oxygen supply beside her. Watching Mrs. Hadid push a laundry basket down the hall to the washing machine in her garage while connected to the oxygen tank made Earl seem in the bloom of health. But she always entertained her guests. She’d put a CD on her portable player and sing along to songs like “You’ll Never Know” and “You Made Me Love You” and “I’ll Be Seeing You,” songs she’d performed at a bar in Jacksonville when she was in her prime; a bar whose name she’d forgotten but called the following day to supply, when her Senior Moment was over. She’d met Earl at the Methodist church. She’d been very active in other organizations before the breast cancer metastasized; she’d gone to the parish hall beside the Catholic church every Tuesday for the fish fry, the American Legion for spaghetti on Thursday, and the Baptist church on Sunday to ring the hand bells. Now, however, during the day, her main company was the dead—Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, and John Wayne.

  The day I drove Earl over she insisted on performing “I’ll Be Seeing You” for us before we left, and when it came time to hit the final note, she stretched her arms out with such vigor that the oxygen tubes in her nostrils fell out. That’s show business, I thought as we drove away.

  Earl was not bothered by all the things in the news that were upsetting Mrs. Hadid—China cheating on its currency, the alleged conspiracies of George Soros, the big Wall Street banks. Earl did tell me one evening that he was glad that Marco Rubio had voted against raising the debt ceiling but that was it. He was sitting on a stool in the kitchen when he said this, doing one of the things he enjoyed as much as Mrs. Hadid did singing old favorites: serving tea in the two ceramic mugs decorated with the figures of Adam and Eve.