At this point Earl’s face was composed of two elements: a white beard and a big pair of glasses. With his long hair combed back from the forehead and the new eyeglasses, he had never appeared more distinguished. His right hand was always raised so that he could press down on the nerve ends in his neck. But he seemed in good spirits. I was the one who was losing it. I had come to resent NPR so much that I found myself screaming at the radio on the slightest pretext—every time Robert Siegel pronounced “Florida” as if the “o” were an “a,” for example, or every time Michele Norris’s velvet voice was too expressive, too warm, too emotional and empathetic. “You’re not a Playboy bunny!” I’d scream. “This isn’t a massage parlor! It’s the news!” The only solution was to turn the radio off and take a walk on the lake bed.

  When I took my walk at night, through town, there was never anybody out except a biracial couple who jogged in plastic sweat suits tied at the ankle and wrist to make them sweat more, a couple who were using the night for the same thing I was: camouflage. Some evenings I set out at twilight, when the sky was still a pale, pale blue above the dark silhouettes of the trees just after sundown. As the light faded, a sort of mysterious dignity descended on the town, until, when it was completely dark, it assumed another personality altogether. It was so easy to love the town in the dark, the glowing windows of the houses, the streetlight at the end of a dark tunnel of trees, the utter peace and quiet. It was a prosperous town, an example of the fact that since World War Two Americans had been living rather high on the hog. Half the people in town had to park their vehicles on their front lawns because there was no room for them all in the garage. Trucks and campers, swimming pools, sometimes plastic, sometimes real, were strewn through the community along with the ubiquitous basketball hoops nailed to garages. Sometimes children were playing hopscotch under a streetlight. Other times young men appeared at intersections with gigantic dogs, like young princes, before vanishing in the dark. When the mosquitoes were bad, a truck would come through town spraying clouds of insecticide that kids on bicycles would bike through for the fun of it, a sight so alarming that I stopped beside the truck one evening to ask the driver if this wasn’t dangerous; he assured me that the stuff he was spraying was composed almost entirely of marigolds.

  These walks made something else quite clear, especially in summer: that I wasn’t the only person who could not throw things out. On warm nights people would raise their garage doors, grab some folding chairs, and sit outside in their driveways to get the breeze. The veterinarian, who had the biggest house in town, a faux Georgian on three lots, with a tennis court and swimming pool in the back, liked to sit on a folding chair in the middle of his driveway with his back to the street, contemplating the contents of his garage, like a boy transfixed by the wonders of Ali Baba’s cave. Most of the garage interiors looked like hardware stores, or libraries—libraries of tools. The night before garbage pickup the driveways would be lined with all sorts of stuff. Sometimes the objects left out for pickup the next day were sentimental. One night I noticed, while walking past a neighbor’s, the tricycle she had put out beside her garbage bin, a tricycle I’d seen that woman’s son pedal around the park beside his mother when he was three years old. Now he was a handsome, grown-up, weight-lifting policeman who lived in Orlando with a wife and child of his own—but though he’d been gone for decades, only now had his mother been able to surrender the tricycle.

  Was there any point in hanging on to anything? A friend in Washington who worked for the State Department had carried around with him for thirty years, from assignment to assignment, a stuffed puppy that his parents had put in his crib when he was a baby, because each time you’re assigned to a new post the State Department ships your personal effects to you. But as he grew older he came to hate unpacking his things, because they made him look back on his life. So he decided to give the puppy to his sister for her new grandson the next time he was back home in Ohio—even though, he predicted, she would toss it in the garbage the minute his car went around the bend, which was just what happened, he later learned.

  There was a box in a closet I seldom opened that contained, I discovered one day when searching for some Christmas ornaments, photographs of my father, grandfather, and mother—so beautiful when young that I never looked at them again. But I still could not throw them away. But why could I not dispose of the black garbage bag full of old porn magazines that I’d inherited from a friend who’d taken it out of the apartment of a friend of his who’d died of AIDS before his mother could discover it? And what would Earl do with his records and books, much less the paintings of dogs the handyman had brought out of storage and hung in his bedroom, or the carved boxes from India and Iran, or the sets of china he had never used? And what was the veterinarian thinking as he sat in his driveway contemplating his library of tools?

  This demented attachment to things was visible on every street when I took my walk at night, the backyards that looked like a used car dealership, the motorboats, trailers, lawn mowers, gadgets of every kind sitting on the extra lot. Uptown things were more commercial. The inability to surrender possessions gave way to something more impersonal. Across the street from the bank, the Shell station was lighted up like a Broadway stage; people were dropping in at the convenience store, gassing up, using the air hose that intimidated me. But otherwise the main street was empty. The pizza parlor, which closed at eight o’clock, looked like the diner in an Edward Hopper painting. All the other businesses were shuttered save for the little Chinese restaurant that never had any customers. It was so depressing that some nights I’d continue on down the sidewalk to the next town, which was not really a town so much as a gas station, a bar, and the smallest post office I’d ever seen.

  There was something liberating about walking down Highway 40 on a summer night; at least the passing cars and trucks were going somewhere. The sidewalk was so close to the road that when the big trucks went by, they created a vacuum that closed a moment later with a shudder. Between trucks it was utterly quiet. The houses between the sidewalk and the lake were set back so far from the sidewalk one could hardly see them. The last house in town had for unknown reasons a permanent installation of Christmas ornaments that made it look like a hut in the Black Forest even in August. Then came the biker bar in which someone had been beaten to death with pool cues, a bar I would not go near but which Earl had not been afraid to visit when he was feeling well, and then a long stretch of sidewalk so devoid of lights that on most nights you could see the stars, and once a month, most wonderful of all, the full moon floating over a trailer park across the highway from a little store that had once been called Timeless Treasures but was now the Pack Rat.

  The Pack Rat was a monument to the fact that in small towns a person’s death is observed twice—first the funeral, and then the estate sale, which can run the gamut from an auction advertised in the papers to tables outdoors with little price tags on each possession. Otherwise these objects end up in a friend’s or relative’s house. On the round table from Peru in our living room, for instance, a yellow vase with Chinese characters in blue had once belonged to Bess’s sister, a woman with whom my parents liked to play poker, who died of a heart attack not long after they moved here while taking a bath in her house, a little stucco building uptown that was now where people went for physical therapy. There was, in fact, in houses around town, a sort of cemetery of furniture in which people were remembered not by tombstones but by a lamp or painting or bowl. The Pack Rat may have lacked the dignity of a grave marker. But it was a store where all sorts of stuff had ended up for anyone to peruse, even old postcards written by people on their honeymoon—a funeral pyre of mementos.

  The building was always closed when I got there, so there was no one around to see me stopping at the window to look into the dimly lighted interior, its contents covered in dust, if one was to judge by the grimy windowpane. The Pack Rat was full of lamps, figurines, cut glass bowls, teddy bears, paintings, TV tables, chairs, rugs, suitcases, racks of dresses, hats, radios, televisions, fishing poles, dehumidifiers, silverware, glasses, vases, fans, and old typewriters—all the detritus that people leave after they die—such a heap that every time I’d look in I could only think: You are all that stands between your mother’s things and this place, the bottles of perfume on her bureau, the figurines and vases, the tray of butterfly wings from Brazil arranged in a mosaic under glass.

  There are two ways you can dispose of the contents of a house, a friend from New York who came down to Gainesville to dispose of his mother’s effects after she died of lung cancer at eighty-four told me: hold an auction in which the auctioneer takes a cut, or sell everything for a lump sum to someone who will take it away. My friend chose to do it himself. I visited him one day when he was going through his mother’s drawers. Watching the postage stamps and Christmas cards and little name tags that said “Hello, my name is _____” cascade like confetti from the drawer he was emptying in his mother’s bedroom that afternoon, it was obvious that the most considerate thing we can do when we get old is to clean things up so that others don’t have to after we croak. But who knows when he is doing to die? All I knew as I walked home from the Pack Rat while the trucks roared down the highway was that I hadn’t had the fortitude to do what my friend did with his dead mother’s possessions.

  By August the nights were so humid there were aureoles around the streetlights, and the curtains were drawn in all the air-conditioned houses, as if the town was buried in some blizzard. Without a television or book to read there was nothing to do but take a walk. That made the nights when I wasn’t at Earl’s watching a movie a challenge. It was obvious when I walked through town at night that the reason I had every street to myself—except the occasional dog walker—was that everyone was indoors transfixed by a screen whose flickering images I could sometimes see as I passed the houses. The children I imagined at their computers, the parents watching TV, on a screen that was so much bigger than the dead one I had at home, it was almost like going to the movies. But if I didn’t have a good book to read—and sometimes I hit a dry patch—there was nothing to do but walk around town.

  When I could no longer bear the boredom any longer I broke my rule and called Earl to suggest we watch a movie. He’d say that he’d been meaning to call me but had forgotten, but I was certain, in the depths of my paranoia, that the reason Earl no longer called was that the handyman had told him something bad about me. From the evidence that he was now driving Earl’s car it was but a short step to Gaslight or Rebecca—though when I entered the kitchen at five o’clock, all I saw was the handyman preparing the Mexican-tiled tray with Earl’s supper—soup, saltines, and salad—patiently chopping up parsley and carrots, arranging the cucumber slices in a circle of sour cream and yogurt. On movie nights he served me as well.

  It was odd at first, this conversion from handyman to butler—a butler of whom we were somehow afraid. The evening I asked Earl if we could watch a movie he’d just purchased, a classic German film about homosexual blackmail called Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), he said we’d better not, because John might walk in while we were watching it. “But this is a very old German movie,” I said; “I’m sure everyone will be in suits and ties, there’ll be nothing that would look gay.” Nevertheless, Earl suggested we watch it some afternoon when the handyman was not around. “But that’s crazy,” I said, “two men our age worrying about what he thinks!” But that was the case. Either we did not want to embarrass the handyman or we were worried that he would disapprove. And yet, every time I came upon him in the kitchen, his ponytail bobbing as he chopped up ingredients on the sideboard for Earl’s dinner, his enormous ass covered by the absurd Levi’s cutoffs, all I could think of was the maid in La Cage aux Folles.

  I began to wonder if it was not humiliating for the handyman to be preparing our supper trays on the nights when I arrived for the movie. I know the sight embarrassed me as I walked through the kitchen. His ability to fix things lent him a certain superiority, the superiority the mechanically gifted have over those who are not. But the next time I walked in he was standing at one of the antique tables in the living room with a feather duster in hand; the reason the handyman was tidying up, I learned, was that Earl was expecting guests from New Smyrna Beach. The man he’d known since his days at the University of Florida, the one who called frequently and delivered what Earl said was “a monologue I have to sit and listen to,” was vacationing with his partner on the coast and wanted to drive over to have lunch—“which might be,” Earl said, “the last time we see each other, because you never can tell.” The tears that glistened in Earl’s eyes when he said this were the first I’d ever seen there. In the old days, when he’d been informed over the telephone of the death of a friend in California, he’d gone right back to watching a movie. But this was a friend he’d known since college and talked to or exchanged letters with at least once a week for the past thirty years. Indeed, I’d never understood, since the man and his lover had an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan within walking distance of Lincoln Center, why Earl had not gone up to stay with them, if only to go to the opera for a week, but he hadn’t, and now they were coming to visit him.

  The guests ate lunch at a restaurant in Starke, I learned the next day, while Earl, too weak to go, stayed home—and the whole thing, I could see, had brought him down, mainly because of his premonition that they would never meet again. There is nothing as difficult as saying goodbye to someone one is not likely to ever see; nothing reminds us more of the burden, the finality, of mortality. When during the AIDS epidemic a friend called from Los Angeles to say he was dying, I’d had no idea how to end the phone call. How does one say goodbye to someone who’s about to cease to exist—what words are right when you know you’ll never see the person again? You can’t use that old Italian standby: “Have a nice life!” But that’s what Earl and his old friend from school had done, and it was a good thing they had, since his classmate entered the hospital not long after returning to Manhattan, went into a coma, and died.

  The day after learning this I ran into Ray at the post office. He agreed that the death of his classmate had made Earl despondent. “And Earl’s worried about his own salvation now,” he added. “He’s afraid that being gay will prevent him from getting to Heaven. I told him not to be concerned. I don’t even know what I am,” Ray said, “straight, gay, or bisexual—but God’s not going to deny me Heaven because of that.”

  Earl’s birthday, he said, had been the week before. It was characteristic of Earl not to tell me, since that would have been asking for attention. He was eighty-eight, Ray said; older than I’d thought. Ray had brought him his favorite thing: a pineapple upside-down cake. The next day I wished Earl a belated happy birthday and found myself listening to him talk about his days in Iran, which were always interesting, especially since I’d accepted the fact that my traveling days were over because the nameless dread that was taking over my life now included fear of flying. Listening to Earl describe the rose-colored flush on the mountains looming above Tehran when the plane began to descend the first time he went to Iran, I could only feel a sense of relief that I was sitting in a chair.

  As we talked I could not help regretting the fact that the kitchen counter he stood beside, a counter that had always been heaped with papers, catalogs, and books, was now immaculate, as if Earl was getting ready to go somewhere. The mess had been a sign of life. Now I’d open the kitchen door and step into what looked like an empty house until, a moment later, the dog would come out of Earl’s bedroom and start walking toward me with his tail wagging and his hips swaying, like Marilyn Monroe singing “We’re Having a Heat Wave,” though in the dog’s case the reason was arthritis. After walking the length of the living room beside the dog I’d enter the bedroom and find Earl out like a light, head back, mouth open, book on his chest, feet dangling over the end of the bed, in the pose they call the Fish in yoga; and then, a moment later, I’d leave, despite the fact that people in hospitals or nursing homes always say they wish you’d wakened them so they would not have missed your visit.

  One Saturday he apologized for eating cashew brittle while talking on the phone, and then invited me to come watch The Third Man, one of our favorite films; and when I arrived he made tea, and even went out to the cottage in which the handyman had installed a brand-new washer and dryer and put in a few clothes. There was no doubt about it: the handyman was using Earl’s money to improve a house that he expected to inherit, though I could not bring myself to ask Earl if that was the case—if only because the next time I dropped in he was flat on his back, in pain. The beard was gone, which, with his rather stylish glasses, made him look like an advertising executive in New York circa 1955, or a gorgeous dragonfly with a thin carapace, easily crushed. When he stood up after I said I must be going, I could see that he now had to turn his whole body to look at me; he could not move only his head—everything had to go with it. He used his walker to leave the bedroom and go to the kitchen but insisted I stay for tea, so I perched on my favorite stool and watched him take down the two mugs adorned with the figures of Adam and Eve. He was upset that day because he could not remember words. He was grateful when I praised his hydrangeas since, he said, he’d spent two days trying to remember their name. As we waited for the water to boil he stood at the kitchen sink looking out at the distant lake in silence, and then he said, “Where did the twenty-three years go? I’ve been so happy in this house.”