1 Chapter 1

From Bill’s point of view, that from the old divan where he was dozing, David’s half of the apartment looked like a mountain cabin. Bill wondered if there was another apartment in Boston’s Bay Village that did. Some buildings had the same bars on the same first-story windows that never opened onto the same noisy, narrow streets. But then, Bay Village, the city’s tiniest neighborhood, was where the workers who’d built Beacon Hill erected their own homes atop crushed oyster shells, so maybe others were as roughly hewn as this. Although a standing Chinese screen destroyed any illusion of rusticity, the knotted wood paneling and the unpainted rafters made Bill think of the place in rural Maine he’d gone as a child with his vacationing parents. There was that smell, too. Whether it came from the wood, which Bill doubted, or the sofa (in which case it was anything but a product of nature), he did not know. The neighborhood was built over what was once a swamp and only euphemistically a “bay.” But he found the smell, the result of many things stewed together over time, comforting. He was back among friends.

Thinking he had a few minutes before David would get back from the A&P, Bill, too tall for the divan, twisted his body a quarter-turn in an attempt to fit better. He buried his face in the pillow he had lifted from David’s bed on the other side of the Chinese screen. A moment later he heard the turn of a key in the front door and his grad school roommate’s unmistakable, lazy shuffle down the hallway into the living-slash-bedroom.

“Miss William? Are you awake? Vigor restored?”

Bill twisted back a quarter-turn. He stretched out his feet over the divan’s armrest. As David bent to put down his groceries, Bill noticed how much the man’s bald spot had grown. David had once looked the youngest of them, or so Bill had thought.

“I’m fine,” he said on a yawn. “That hateful flight already recedes from memory.” Back in Boston less than two hours, and Bill heard his pansy talk return. “What time is it?”

“Six.”

“Which means three my time. Too early for cocktails?”

“There’s no liquor here. Don’t you remember, Jews don’t drink.” This was news to Bill. Had something changed since his last visit? “Yes, of course, it’s already pasttime to begin libations. Let’s just wait for Lulu to come over. She hides a bottle for herself somewhere here. Probably buried under Philip’s mess downstairs, in his half of this dump.”

Bill yawned again as he sat up and peered around the screen to watch David put away the groceries in the small kitchen. His old roommate left out a bag of chips and ripped it open with his teeth.

“When will Philip be home?” Bill asked. “I haven’t seen him in two years. Where was he this time last year when I visited?” Philip lived in the windowless basement.

Since moving to California, Bill had settled into a pattern of visiting his Boston friends most summers. This time, he was joining them in their week-long pilgrimage to Provincetown.

“That one? He was in the mother country.”

“Oh. France? LaFrance. But not this summer?”

“No. He’s got a new boyfriend here. Plus he’s trying to get some writing done. For a change. I mean, Brandeis must expect its French faculty to dosomething vaguely intellectual, I presume. And you, Miz Bill, nothing but play this summer? You, an untenuredprofessor!”

Bill ignored the question and used the remote control perched on the top of the divan to switch on the local news. David never bothered with the academic world after getting his graduate degrees. He ran the local music school.

“Everyone here really does look Irish. Except those who don’t,” Bill commented. A black woman was about to predict the coming weather. It mattered because they would be driving to the Cape in two days.

“You sound like you’ve never been here before.”

The phone rang. David picked it up.

“Yeah, sure, she’s here, Tante. Recovering from her air-oh-plane ride. She says she’s famished.”

Bill had said no such thing. He watched David shove more Fritos into his mouth as he told Lou, a.k.a. Auntie Lulu, a.k.a. Tante, more fibs.

“Come quick. Go to that Chinese place on Commonwealth and get the usual. You know, yeah, that. And beef chow fun, too. And…Miss Bill?”

Bill looked up from the 1970s porn magazine, Inches, he’d found under the divan. “Yaaas?”

“You want beer?”

Bill thought for a second. “Ask him where his bottle is. I want a real drink.”

“Yes, he wants beer,” David said as he raised the phone back to his ear. “And yes, I have money. Though you owe me for last time. Alright, Tante, à bient?t.”

David hung up and disappeared behind the Chinese screen. Bill could hear the shedding of street clothes and the donning of a frayed terrycloth bathrobe. When David re-emerged, Bill noticed his old roommate’s stray chest hairs had turned gray, and the robe, which he remembered from their days as roommates a decade ago, was rattier than ever.