Even so, I did not say when Patrick returned to our table that the look that came over him every now and then—the eyes of a thousand-year-old mummy—was that of a prelate who’s seen so much disgusting human behavior that he wishes God would send another flood and wipe human beings off the planet. Instead, when Patrick started to talk again about the homeless after his return with a fresh lemon slice, I waited till he’d finished and then I said, “Enough of all that! Let’s talk about sex!”

  The moment Luke learned I planned to stop at the video store on my way home, he made me promise to e-mail him an account of what happened. I told him nothing would happen, though Luke always had sex when he went, even if the last time it was with a man wearing a brassiere.

  “The ironic thing is that I shouldn’t have to go to the video store,” I said, “because there are a lot more homosexuals in my town than I used to think.”

  “What makes you say that?” said Luke.

  “Well, lately I’ve been looking at the sex ads on craigslist. Have you seen these ads on craigslist for ‘panty boys,’ these photographs of big butts in lace underwear with their assholes pushed right up against the camera lens? The ads from my town look like a textbook for proctologists—one asshole after another in close-up. Why does anyone think that’s attractive?”

  “Because they’re narcissists,” said Patrick. “They think their butts are hot.”

  “So what are you doing for Christmas?” I finally said, blurting out what was really bothering me.

  “Staying home,” they said in unison.

  “I wish I could,” I said. “But I have to go to my sister’s. She feels sorry for me because I’m alone and she doesn’t want me to spend Christmas by myself. But I’d love to spend Christmas by myself. It would be so relaxing.”

  “Then tell her you’re not coming,” said Patrick, with that look on his face that he got when proposing an obvious solution people were too stupid to take.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I feel it would mean I was repudiating the family—and she’s all I’ve got. She’s still the person I put on those forms when they ask who to contact in case of emergency. I don’t know what I’ll do when she dies. At least she’ll die with her family. I’m going to die alone. Have you heard of this Japanese term for people who die alone in their apartments and the body is not discovered for several days?”

  “Kodokushi,” said Patrick. “Lonely deaths. Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And not just me—I worry about my friends, who are now scattered around the country. We’re all wondering whether we should move into assisted living now or wait awhile. Whenever my friends don’t answer the phone I assume they’ve croaked. That’s, I guess, why I keep going to my sister’s. She’s family, though the weird thing is, she knows I don’t want to come. But she thinks it would be worse for me if I didn’t.”

  “Christmas triggers women’s territorial imperative,” said Patrick. “They think it’s their responsibility—their turf. My sister wanted me to come to her house at Christmas even after I met George, and I told her no. She said, ‘But you have to come home for Christmas!’ and I said, ‘I am home.’” He laughed, and cocked his head and looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. “It’s very simple,” he said. “Just say no.”

  “You and Nancy Reagan,” I said, hoping he would drop the subject.

  Instead, they both picked up the theme of my being alone and insisted I go to the GFA potluck on Saturday night. They gave me directions to a house on the west side of Gainesville. But I knew I didn’t have the courage to walk into a room full of men my age with a bag of jalapeño potato chips, pretending that we were going to find love or even companionship with one another at this point. Who were we kidding? And so we went inside and paid our bills.

  I was feeling so lonely that when we stood outside the restaurant to say goodbye I wanted to hug both of them, but they were standing there with a posture that deflected such an impulse, so I returned instead to the question that was increasingly on my mind.

  “Skip died at home,” I said, “on his own toilet. But do you ever wonder where you’ll kick the bucket? I mean, you and I, Luke, live alone, so if we have a stroke or heart attack it may very well happen when there’s nobody else around, which means we may lie there on the floor for some time before anybody discovers us, if anybody discovers us. We’ll be kodokushi—which could happen to you too, Patrick, because you spend time down here without George.”

  “I agree,” said Patrick. “In fact, the man who lived in the unit next to mine just died. He was ninety-three, a Dutchman who retired as an engineering professor at the university. They discovered his body when he didn’t show up for physical therapy. His son’s here now. He flew in from Amsterdam, and he told me to take whatever books I wanted from his father’s library.”

  “And what did you take?” I said.

  “The memoirs of Chateaubriand,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to read them—they go from the French Revolution to Napoleon. Napoleon died on St. Helena,” he added, “but they exhumed his corpse and reburied him in Paris in Les Invalides.”

  “And where will you be buried?” Luke asked.

  “In Les Invalides,” said Patrick.

  “You told me you were going to be buried in that ecological cemetery,” I said.

  “What ecological cemetery?” said Luke.

  “The one on Paynes Prairie,” said Patrick. “They don’t bury you in a coffin, they just put you in the ground so you can decay along with all the dead leaves and branches and squirrels and snakes. We’re all biodegradable, you know.”

  He looked at us with a smile.

  “But who’s going to put you in the ecological cemetery?” I said. “I mean, who’s going to find your body? That’s the question.”

  “You mean now that we’re old queens who never had kids so there’s no one to be with us when we kick the bucket?” said Patrick.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You mean the main reason parents are upset when children tell them that they’re gay—that they’ll be all alone when they’re old?’”

  “That’s just a stereotype,” said Luke.

  “I wish,” I said. “I can’t even get an appointment with a gerontologist. Did I tell you that my neighbor the retired doctor goes to a gerontologist he raves about so much I decided to go to him myself—but when I called I was told he’s not taking any new patients.”

  “None of the good ones are,” said Patrick. “That’s the problem—everybody wants the good ones. It was like auditioning at the Met to get my doctor. I had to make friends with the receptionist, I had to write a letter, I had to go down and make a pitch.”

  “Well, what can I do,” I said, “except wait till one of his current patients dies, which presumably will open up a slot. But how do I know when that happens?”

  “Call the receptionist every day,” said Luke, “to see if anyone’s croaked.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I can’t do that. But I have decided to go through all the papers in my house. And rewrite my will, and get rid of the old porn magazines I keep in a garbage bag in my closet—in other words, make everything shipshape so when I die I’m not a burden on my nephew. He’s the executor of my estate. I’ve decided to devote the next two or four years to getting ready for the next event—because it is the next event, and we have to make our deaths as smooth as possible for our survivors, we have to minimize the stress and inconvenience. It’s only polite. I just read a letter an eighty-something woman in San Francisco wrote to The New Yorker. She said the most valuable thing she’s leaving her children is the name of the woman who, when they’ve taken what they want, will get rid of all the rest. There are people who do that, you know, for a fee. Human buzzards.”

  “You should move to the Village,” said Patrick.

  The Village—not to be confused with the Villages, a large retirement community north of Ocala that has not just the highest concentration of old people in the state but also the highest rate of venereal disease—is an adult assisted-living establishment on the west side of Gainesville, a reasonably pleasant collection of dorm-like buildings centered on a body of water that looks more like a chemical retention pond than a lake on which three ducks that the residents like to feed paddle back and forth all day, leaving their feathers floating behind them on the oily water. Patrick had taken me there one day; we visited his sister in her one-bedroom apartment whose balcony view was so charming it softened my antipathy to the idea of moving there—till Patrick told me, in a burst of enthusiasm, that he already knew which pieces of furniture in my house would work in my new place (“You could put the red chair here!”) and the bubble burst. And now, here he was again, urging me to move there. But there was no point in going on with the conversation, it was too depressing, so with no more ado I said goodbye and set off to the video store. As I drove I kept thinking of a line in that song that Streisand sings about a house not being a home when no one’s living there, which is what was waiting for me, and that reminded me of the story about Rudolf Nureyev when he went back to Russia and an old babushka asked him where his home was now and Nureyev said, “What’s home?” and she replied, “Where someone waits for you.” Leave it to a babushka, I thought. Pow! Bang! Right between the eyes!

  The weather was no longer that cold gray mist or the light rain that had made me want to stop at Orange Heights to be touched two days before. I was making the detour this time not for sex but simply to see who might be hanging around. What was hanging around when I arrived were the same egg-shaped men in loose T-shirts, wearing such glum expressions I didn’t stay. There was nothing I could do to stop Christmas from coming, I told myself. Patrick was staying in Gainesville with his partner because he’d had the courage to say “No”—with the same decisiveness that had enabled him to say “Never” to the panhandler’s request for money. Luke had an elderly aunt in town he’d spend the day with. I was doomed. The earth was going to spin; one day was going to succeed the next; I was floating on a river of Time to a dock at which I’d have to get out and deal with the natives. Standing in the video arcade watching the egg-shaped men walk by was not going to stop Christmas. So I left. But that brief quarter hour inside had made me feel, as it always did, “dirty.” So when I got home the first thing I did was wash my hat.

  The Endless Cantaloupe

  Toward the end of their lives my parents ate nothing but ice cream—though my father liked to put peanut butter on top of his. There was no point in remonstrating with them. I felt the way the doctor did when he told the woman who complained that her hospitalized husband’s request for a pastrami sandwich was not very healthful that “at ninety-four, he can eat what he wants!” That was it: my parents had reached the stage where there was no point in worrying about their diet. Let them eat cake, I thought. At a certain point, you learn in a nursing home, they don’t care what kind of food the patient is eating—just that they’re eating something. I was grateful, as I watched my mother consume her little packet of ice cream, that she was getting any nutrition at all.

  But at the same time it worried me, because we grow up with certain nutritional ideals; as children what you’re supposed to eat is a huge matter. You are told to drink milk because it will make your bones strong, to eat spinach or broccoli because it’s good for you. Just about everything said about food in a middle-class house is couched in moral terms. “There are starving people in India who would be glad to have what you’ve left on your plate,” my mother would say to me. And: “Do you know how much this meal would cost in a restaurant?” And: “You are not leaving this table until you’ve finished your peas.”

  When I was seven, I stopped eating altogether; I sat at the dinner table long after the rest of my family had left because I was not allowed to get down off the chair till I’d finished. It got so bad my mother took me to a doctor. But food—like showers—appalled me. I suspect that for many children food is still no pleasure. We have to eat when we are small, and we are supposed to eat certain things and not others, because we are being prepared—for Life.

  But when Life is behind you, you can eat whatever you want because you’re on your way out. My father would fix the most outlandish meals the last year of his life, when he was depressed over my mother’s incarceration in a nursing home: a big bowl of ice cream with two slabs of peanut butter slathered on the top, four fried eggs and a rasher of bacon every morning. In fact my father was a very good cook. He came from a small town in Ohio, where they ate vegetables from their own gardens, and lots of meat. My father never ate with an eye out for cholesterol. I was sure he was risking his life as clearly as a man playing Russian roulette when I’d watch him prepare, every morning, a breakfast that consisted of those four fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, and a rasher of bacon or sausage. I was living then in New York with a copy of Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit by Adelle Davis on my kitchen table, making milkshakes of brewer’s yeast and blackstrap molasses, eating sardines and liver. But I wasn’t about to tell my father what to do. So I watched him digging his own grave in silence as he prepared those feasts of fatty acids, and when he reached his eighties (old enough, I suppose, to prove the breakfasts had had no deleterious effect), I was not about to chastise him if he chose ice cream and peanut butter for dinner. His wife had been taken away from him after she fell and had to be put in a nursing home, a situation that so upset him he could not even bring himself to visit her, or even take much pleasure in the fact that I brought her home on weekends. When she was home it didn’t lift his spirits the way I thought it would, and when she was not there, he sank even further. The only time he came alive after my mother’s fall was when he had to do his taxes; having worked as an accountant most of his life, there must have been something calming about numbers—as opposed to the chaos of life itself. But that was it. One Thanksgiving he prepared his usual splendid feast for the three of us and then, in the middle of it, it dawned on me that he was nowhere in sight, so I went out into the living room and found him sitting in his favorite chair, smoking a cigarette in the dark; and when I asked him why he wasn’t eating with us, he said, “Oh…” and then, after a pause, as if there was no point in searching for better words, “I’m depressed,” a statement to which I had no answer. There was no answer for the situation we were in. So I kept my mouth shut.

  Watching him eat breakfast, however, it was hard to bite my tongue. My father enjoyed his breakfast (which he often ate for dinner as well) so much that when he finished eating he would tilt his plate and lick the remaining egg yolk off it, a sight that made me think of that drawing by Goya of Saturn devouring his children. (Hadn’t he sent me to college so I could make such connections?) It made me wonder what childhood lesson of “waste not, want not,” what Depression-era habits of frugality, were surfacing at this late date in his life. Before licking he would first clean his plate with repeated passes of his fork over the porcelain, pressing it down forcefully so that the tines would pick up every crumb, and then, finally, he’d put his tongue directly on the surface, which at this point could only contain the thinnest smear of egg yolk and bacon. He’d lick and lick the plate, then put it down, as if he had done nothing unusual at all, and look around, like a dog or cat that has finished its meal.

  Yet my father so far as I knew had never been deprived. He came from a family of prosperous German Americans; his father had worked as a bookkeeper for a lumber company and then started a lumber business of his own, though I think its failure induced a sort of nervous breakdown that may have involved a heart condition as well, which put him to bed for a long time, and caused him to withdraw from business altogether. No one in the family ever told me what happened. It seems astonishing to me how much I was not told about my father’s past, as if it was none of my business, or irrelevant to my life. But then that is the fate of children—they are brought onstage in the middle of an opera whose libretto they have never read and whose language they don’t even know. When my grandfather died in his mid-fifties, my father was still an adolescent, but I’m not sure what effect this event had on him, or whether the scarlet fever he had as a child or anything in his past could “explain” him. I learned only later that he had worked on farms as a young man before moving to Chicago, where he studied to be an accountant, because he wanted to earn money, which he did.

  My sister claimed my father was the only person in our family who knew how to spend money. He was so generous, such a good provider, in fact, a man of such quiet authority, that even when he sat there licking the plate at the age of eighty-four, it did not diminish his dignity in the slightest. And it certainly did not indicate mental derangement; all his faculties were intact.

  As were his courtesy and sense of privacy. At a certain point during my mother’s incarceration in the nursing home, my father began getting up in the middle of the night to watch whatever was on TV. I’d return from the baths in Jacksonville at three in the morning and find him sitting in the den, but he never asked where I had been; he assumed I’d gone to a bar or nightclub, I suppose, in order to take my own mind off what was depressing him even more than me. Without my mother, it was alarmingly clear, our home was not a home. The two of us were lost. We simply said hello to each other—like traveling salesmen in a hotel, or soldiers stationed in the same barracks while waiting to be shipped out—and I went to bed, leaving him up in the sepulchral light emanating from the television. It was a measure of his generosity—of letting me do what I wished—that he never even inquired where I had been.