I thought of Clark’s statement, years ago, as we drove off, that Earl was “clinically depressed,” a statement that now seemed to say more about Clark than Earl.

  “Have you really?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I love everything about this place—even the puddles on the patio when it rains. I stood there this morning looking through the back door at that pure, clear rainwater, so clear I could see the moss growing on the bricks beneath it. That moss is so pretty. I love the puddles after a rain in Florida, and the quiet. I’d love to stay here forever—although,” he added, turning to me with a plate of cookies, “I’m not afraid to die.”

  I waited a moment until I could stand it no longer and then I said: “But of course you’re afraid to die! Everyone in his right mind is! You’re afraid to die for the same reason I’m afraid to die—because you love being alive! My brother-in-law said my mother was afraid to die, and I thought: Well, of course! Isn’t everyone?”

  “Was your mother religious?” Earl said.

  “More so when she got old,” I said. “When she was young it was all golf and cocktail parties. Toward the end all she wanted was two things—to see snow again and to come home.”

  “Well, that’s how everyone feels,” he said, “though I could do without the snow. And that’s why I’ve decided to leave this house to John—so I can remain here till they carry me out in a bag—and so Betty will have a place to live after I’m gone.”

  So it’s all about the dog, I thought. It always is down south.

  Part of me realized that making such a bequest was a decent thing to do—the handyman could surely use a house—but the minute Earl said it I realized that I resented the idea. Yes, the handyman had been helpful—but not that helpful, and he had been compensated for everything already. That Earl had decided to leave his house to the handyman could only have one explanation, I thought: he was helpless without him. Ray had already told me that John had made Earl drive over to his broker’s in Palatka so he could transfer more of his money into his checking account. And now the handyman had evidently promised to take care of not just Earl but Earl’s dog.

  My own mother, before she fell, would never even tell my sister and me when she went into the hospital for any reason; she didn’t want to worry us. And then she had no choice. She died with hired help, because when one comes to the end you have to find help where you can—the aide in a nursing home, the man who used to fix your screens. Often that person becomes your heir. When the baby boomers die, something called the Great Wealth Transfer is going to take place; a huge amount of money and things, accumulated during the postwar American boom, is going to change hands. In Earl’s case the heir would be a fat, superannuated hippie of whom we were for some reason slightly afraid.

  The next day, however, the handyman had to go to Jacksonville, so we finally got to watch the German film Anders als de Andern, and as if in celebration of his absence Earl did something he had not in a long time before we began. He had me listen to music—Barbara Bonney singing Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum,” a song that brought tears to Earl’s eyes for the second time.

  The movie was just what I thought it would be—everyone in suits and ties—though the story of the blackmail of a homosexual was still infuriating, not least because we’d waited to watch it on a day when we were sure the handyman would not pop in. But when I told Earl that nothing had changed, that he and I lived like sex offenders, that we had not needed blackmail, exposure, or a trial; we had imprisoned ourselves under a sort of voluntary house arrest, he simply laughed and said: “The police aren’t keeping me here. Old age is! And the older I get the more I want to be home. That’s what happens when you get old. Your bed is best. All I need is a book to read and a pillow to rest my head on—and good old Betty,” he said, reaching down to scratch the dog behind her ear.

  Still, it seemed like a diminution to me that he no longer went to the boat ramp anymore; but then nobody did. People were meeting each other via the Internet. And we were too old to be hooking up with the people I saw on Grindr when Clark visited one day and we looked at all the men one mile, three miles, four miles away, advertising themselves on his iPhone as we sat under the gazebo by the bank. There was, I told Earl that evening, a secret town one could see no other way, a town that seemed to be composed largely of “panty bottoms”—men who liked to wear lace underwear—that existed only in photographs on a smart phone. But Earl was not about to acquire new technology at this point.

  I had no idea whether Earl would make it to the winter—when you get old, the beginning of a new season presents a challenge: Do you want to go through this again?—though one day he remarked, when I told him I was starting to use my hearing aids, that by the time he needed them, he’d be gone. Of course he needed them already, but then the average span of time between a person’s needing hearing aids and getting them, the audiologist had told me, is seven years. One day Earl said he could not remember the word for a group of people singing (chorus) or the place where they shoot things up in the air (Cape Canaveral) and I laughed, but to him I suspect it was anything but funny. Yet he still seemed to me quite sharp. One day I brought him a brochure from the Sackler Gallery in Washington that I’d picked up at an exhibit on Persian miniatures. There was a photograph on the cover of a carved image from Anatolia of Jonah and the Whale—an image, Earl pointed out, that was similar to the illustration of Jonah on the cover of his Bible Dictionary, which he went to his bedroom and fetched for me. Both of them showed Jonah being tossed overboard into the jaws of the whale from a little ship.

  One more metaphor for our inevitable extinction, I thought as I saw the similarity—being tossed into the mouth of the whale, like a fish or insect finding itself in the stomach of a bird. What could that be like? When Earl was diagnosed I’d compared it to a game of musical chairs—when the music stops you have to sit down wherever you are. Now it seemed to me more like exiting a party. It was a case of what the architectural historian I worked for in Washington had said about Henry Adams: wanting to leave the world with as little fuss as possible. At least that was how I felt when I went to Mrs. Hadid’s funeral at the Methodist church. The minister’s remarks alternated among hymns played on the piano, readings from the Gospel, and reminiscences by family members. It was like a talk show. So this is what you get, I thought, after the oxygen tubes finally fall from your nostrils for good, after the hopeless struggle. Old age was like the tray hanging from the neck of a cigarette girl in one of those thirties movies Earl and I liked, I thought, a beautiful blonde who comes to your table in the nightclub, sweeps her arm across the tray, and asks if you’d like cigars or cigarettes—though in this case it was, “Arthritis? Spinal stenosis? Hearing loss? Diabetes? Parkinson’s? Alzheimer’s? Stroke? ALS? Dementia? Breast cancer? Congestive heart failure? Macular degeneration? Or a brain tumor?”

  Soon after that the enormous water oak in Earl’s front yard had to be pronounced dead—with good reason, since it looked like one of the trees on a battlefield in Gone with the Wind: stark, gray, and leafless. But he was not going to have it removed. “Let the person who lives here after I’m gone take care of it,” he said. He had almost completed his will, he informed me as we stood at the screen door looking out on the sun-bleached excuse for a lawn. His niece was coming up in two weeks on a trip with her husband to a classic car convention in North Carolina and he was going to have her take whatever she wanted from the house. But before she got there he wanted me to tell him what I wanted. “But why?” I said.

  “Because I want you to have something that will remind you of me,” he said.

  Ah, I thought, the cemetery of furniture.

  The following day Earl presented me with something that looked like an eyeglass case but contained, I saw when I opened it, two elaborately filigreed silver spoons embossed with a pattern of leaves, tendrils, and acorns. “They were my mother’s,” he said, “and I’m giving them to you to show how much I think of you.”

  I did not know what to say.

  “Your mother’s,” I finally said.

  “My lover’s,” he said. “The one in England.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I misheard you.”

  The reason was not just my hearing loss; it was the unlikelihood of what he had in fact said—the word that sounded so sexual on his lips.

  “The one you used to go to the theater with when you were stationed at the embassy in London?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The spoons seemed to be Edwardian or late Victorian in design: something he’d found in London in the early fifties. Traces of the belle époque must have still remained in those West End theaters, I thought as I stood there looking at my present, when the two of them, young and handsome, went to their matinee. They’d not been able to reveal their relationship to anyone, but it was an affair that Earl had always held in fond regard, and why not? He’d been young, in London, in love. Forty years later, a veteran of dirty movie theaters in South Florida, I’d met him sitting in his car outside a men’s room at the boat ramp in a town in North Central Florida. But at least once, in London, love and sex had been combined in the same person—love, sex, art, and freedom.

  He was giving the spoons away, I suspected, not simply because he thought highly of me but because I was the only person in town with whom he could share their backstory. So I closed the worn brown case on this relic of another age, these spoons whose actual origins reached back even further than the plays by Terence Rattigan he and his lover had watched, and stepped out into the Florida sunshine. The next morning he told me to take a Copenhagen figurine of a boy and a dog—and a small gray cat, which turned out to be, when I looked on the bottom, Royal Doulton. Clark, who was a “picker”—someone who went around to estate sales to find overlooked gems—would always look at the shelves of my mother’s figurines when he dropped by and tell me what was getting a good price now and what was no longer valued, Copenhagen being the first, he said, Royal Doulton the second. But I had no idea what I was getting when Earl gave me two bookends, glass globes with some kind of purple interior in the shape of birds, the next day. I only noticed that he’d stood longer than I’d seen him stand in some time in order to present me with these items. And when I began asking about other objects in the room—tables, lamps, boxes, figurines—he seemed in no hurry to sit down. He wanted to tell me at what auction he’d bought each item. He who despaired when he could not remember the word for a “group of people singing” had total recall in this matter.

  His neighbor when he lived in South Florida, the woman who’d married into an old New England family, the neighbor whose departure for an assisted-living place had triggered his own last flight, had given him several of the tables and chairs in his living room—this room that I always walked through to meet the dog that came out of Earl’s bedroom wagging its arthritic tail. They were authentic Colonial pieces. But I had no interest in them. When Queen Mary used to visit people, Earl told me, they were always afraid she’d admire something, because if she did they must insist she have it, and off it went to the palace; but I had no desire for bequests. I even bridled when Earl asked me if I wanted a tall lamp in the corner with a white fringed shade that looked even more Edwardian than the spoons; it seemed to me too much like something a homosexual of an earlier generation would like. So I said I wasn’t sure. But I could not refuse his other gifts that day and by the time I left, passing the handyman on my way out, all he could say was: “Look at all that loot!”

  A lot less than you’ll be getting, I thought as I drove away.

  Earl was stripping his house of things like the vases, bowls, and figurines that still filled my mother’s house, objects that made the shelves at one end of our living room seem like an altar containing the Ark of the Covenant, because none of her grandchildren, according to my sister, wanted them. Every generation disdains the taste of its predecessor. The lamp with a Wedgwood base that Earl gave me I was not thrilled with, but after thinking its old-fashioned white shade, which looked like a wilted tulip, too Victorian, I put it on the table between my parents’ beds. Now there were three people in that room. The tall lamp with the white fringed shade that I drove back to get the next afternoon seemed at first out of place at the far end of the living room, beside the small red chair that had been in my parents’ bedroom before the flood. It represented some element of Earl’s sensibility that I’d never shared: the part that liked auctions, Edwardian spoons, and Tristan und Isolde. That lamp is Earl’s taste, I told myself.

  Nevertheless, Earl had been metamorphosed, like something in Ovid; he was now a floor lamp. The following Wednesday he gave me a red and gold saucer and bowl, “probably Russian,” that he had found in Meshed, where, he said, the staff had not really needed him the week he was there; he was only waiting to go to Tehran. He gave it to me because, he said, the handyman did not appreciate such things, nor did his wife; he wanted someone to have it who would enjoy it. He was in terrible pain because he had stood up the whole time his niece was visiting the previous day on her way north. The Egyptian doctor had sent Earl some new medicine but, Earl said, he’d stopped it, fearful of becoming addicted. That meant he was going to live with some level of discomfort for the rest of his life—a period of time not even he could predict.

  His niece had taken the gold and white china that he never used, except when Don, his friend from college days, came to visit, when he only used the cups. He remembered a rattlesnake story from childhood—prompted by my telling him I thought I’d seen one on the lake bed, coiled in front of its hole in the ground—but couldn’t remember the word “fang,” which I had to supply.

  There must have been something about this transfer of treasures that affected my subconscious, because that night I had a nightmare in which I knew that I was not alone in my house, so I got out of bed to investigate, walked down the hall, and saw a figure bent over in front of the refrigerator, peering into the lighted interior. The face was obscured by the refrigerator door, and yet I knew immediately even before it stood up that it was me—searching for something to eat—which caused me to waken, sit up in bed, and shudder.

  That morning while walking home from the post office I noticed that the house opposite the library where the previous week a young woman with pierced ears and nose had held a garage sale was now for rent; she had moved out. Since I could think of little more alienating than piercing one’s nose in this town I was glad she’d moved on. But I felt sorry for the house. There were houses that simply could not be lived in; they were too close to the library or main street, the interface between the public and residential. I’d seen them sit empty for long periods, and then turn over several times after someone tried to make a home of them until they finally became a business, a business that usually failed. Hers was one—as if being across the street from the public library constituted a fatal publicity.

  “For Rent” and “For Sale” signs had always seemed to me sad; the first heralded the decline of a neighborhood, the second meant a family’s history was coming to an end, at least in that particular place. I had only recently learned from a neighbor that the street we lived on had been downgraded by local real estate agents because it had three rentals on it. “Nobody wants to stay home anymore,” the man who changed the oil in my car said when I mentioned the houses on my street for rent. “The man used to work, the woman stayed home. Now the woman wants to work. Nobody wants to stay home.” I wanted every house to be permanent—like the one next to Earl’s that had a sign by the sidewalk saying “God Bless the USA,” or the one on the other side, which had a wooden sign on which someone had carved the family’s name in German lettering, though it lost its aura of solidity when I walked by one day and saw that someone was having a garage sale in front of it with the usual junk, cheap glass vases, old chairs, and paintings.

  Earl had now given me the Wedgwood lamp, the Copenhagen figurine of a little boy and a dog, the Royal Doulton figurine of a cat, a pair of filigreed silver spoons, the tall floor lamp with fringed shade, and the red and gold cup and saucer and bowl from Meshed. I told myself I should not accept one more thing but the truth was there was a merry aspect to his giving these objects away—he seemed enlivened by it, the way doing his taxes had perked up my father. And again, like my father, his closet, he said, was full of shirts. Did I want any? Fortunately we were not the same size. But he got up to give me another tour of his antiques after I inquired about two pieces in his bedroom. He told me again about the woman who lived next door to him in the apartment building in South Florida, the woman who’d married into a prominent New England family. He showed me the fancy clock he’d been given by an older man he used to visit in the same apartment building. He told me that he was leaving the house to the handyman. I asked if he thought the handyman would choose to live in or sell it. “Whatever he decides,” he said, putting his hand up to his shoulder in that Roman gesture.

  His hands had become whiter, it seemed to me, the way old men’s skin gets, more slender, more graceful, the skin smooth, shiny, and tight. He rippled his fingers when he talked, and then put them against his cheek and rested his face on the palm of his hand, the way Jack Benny used to—as if his fingers had risen, performed a little dance, and lain back down. And then the handyman arrived with Earl’s arthritis medicine. Ah, I thought, now he’s Earl’s drug dealer—Earl, who refused to even use pain pills for the longest time.

  The next morning NPR broadcast stories about the poor eating choices of inner-city residents, Texas politics, and a scientific study on a gene that made us attracted to certain foods—the culture’s current obsessions: race, politics, and diet. But when I went to see Earl he was reading the Bible. When I went into his bedroom the next afternoon he was lying on his bed with a white T-shirt laid across his forehead, which led me to say, “You look like a Bedouin.” He told me to get a chair, which I brought to the side of the bed, and asked me if I wanted the two speakers in the den. I said no. And then he got up and walked into the living room and gave me two more figurines and a brownie that Ray had left that morning. “You’re making out like a bandit,” the handyman said when I walked out.